A pig in a poke

“Graham’s lurking,” said Vida when she saw me at the university.  We got into a lift.  In a lift, there is no escape.  She asked me why I had bare feet on such a cold day.  I said the library was stuffy. 

“You have bare feet because the library is stuffy.  I always knew students were backward.” 

If you aren’t direct, people might not understand.  With me, the only time that Vida wasn’t direct, I didn’t understand.  It was very hot.  You know the Australian summer.  She said the boy who was staying with her had two showers a day.  I only worked it out a week ago, after thirty years.

I won a scholarship to study in Greece.  I told Vida straightaway.  

“It sounds like a pig in a poke to me.”  

I didn’t know what that meant, but it wasn’t anything very good.  I thought she was strange.  People I hardly knew were hugging me, saying it was the best thing that could happen.  I looked the phrase up last week too.  She was right.  It was a pig in a poke.    

I was a boy, and boys need to learn.  They talk too much, or too little.  She thought a library job would suit me.  She did, of course, love libraries, but I sensed a kind of disappointment.  She didn’t say it, but she wanted me to make more noise, to give opinions, or at least to have them, although she knew a boy’s opinions could be wrong, would be wrong, normally. 

Dinner with some friends of ours.  Vida was holding forth again.  I was being quiet again.  She stopped.

“What do you think, Graham?”

I moved my head a little, as if she’d woken me, and grunted, like a question.  She didn’t laugh, but I could tell that she was pleased.  Sometimes, it was the only way you could score a point off Vida, by saying nothing. 

Woe betide the person who said something stupid.  I was going to England.  She told me she had some pounds.  She was generous.  I thought she was being generous again.

“I couldn’t take that.” 

“I’m not going to give them to you, ducky!”

I mightn’t understand, but I try to look clever.  She was cross once, and said I hammed it up.  I don’t remember what it was.  I thought she didn’t understand.  I was a teenage boy for longer than most.  

Another hot day.  I was doing some gardening for her.  She picked a persimmon and gave it to me.  It was fragile and warm.  I said it felt like a little animal.

“You’re a very strange person,” she replied. 

When other people hammed it up, she didn’t always mind.  We were driving in Adelaide.  The car in front stopped.  A woman got out, lifted her dress above her head, and wiggled her hips at us like a striptease dancer, a stocky one.  I burst out laughing.  Vida looked at me as if she wondered why.  She knew the road.  Perhaps it happened all the time. 

She could ham it up herself.  In Adelaide, there used to be a Greek takeaway, the Orange Crockpot.  One day, talking to Margaret, she called it the Purple Crockpot.  I hadn’t heard her do that sort of thing.  I corrected her.  She turned to me quite savagely, “You know, Graham, that’s just par for the course!”  

I remember Margaret’s eyes, sad and sympathetic.

Sometimes, I understood.  To make a point, I forget which, Vida told me an anecdote.  She was seventeen, I think.  A woman suggested she go to the local dance.  Vida said she had no one to go with.

“That’s why you go to the bleedin’ dance!” the woman replied, quite savagely.

Vida laughed when she repeated it.  She was a teenager too.

Go to your dance, then, ducky.  I’ll lurk here a while.