Blanche visits September's every Monday morning, around 10.30am, for a bit of a treat before her lunchtime art class at Northbridge Community Centre. If possible, she loves to sit in her favourite place – the faded red velvet armchair by the window. Snuggled safe within its ample dimensions, Blanche enjoys her latte from a tall, elegant glass mug, which she always requests. It is small decadences like these that she secretly revels in: unremarkable to anyone other than herself, but important nevertheless. This morning, however, her thoughts are elsewhere as she gazes out of the window…
Nobody ever expected Blanche Maurice to amount to much, least of all her stern Jamaican mother, Sophia. But it didn’t matter. The second eldest of five children, Blanche was always a dreamer – happy in her own company and seemingly unaffected by the cacophonous chaos of her childhood home. With her mother, two sisters, two brothers, her octogenarian maternal grandparents, two elderly maiden great-aunts and the charismatic Uncle Eddie (whose precise relationship to the family was delightfully tenuous) all living together in a cramped three-bedroom Edwardian terrace house, life in the Maurice home was never uneventful or quiet. But Blanche was always contented, lost in her very own Hollywood dream.
From the moment Auntie Ezola took her to the Majestic Cinema in Etherton to watch The Great Race on her seventh birthday, Blanche dreamed of being a beautiful film star like Natalie Wood. All day long, as she did her chores around the house, she would imagine arriving at Hollywood film premieres dressed from top to toe in expensive clothes and dripping with diamonds. As she polished Uncle Eddie’s shoes, or ran errands for Grandma Tya, Blanche pretended she was acting in a movie, practising her expressions and crying technique - which, coincidentally, also came in useful when David or Lionel, her troublesome twin brothers, accused her of stealing their toys, as they did with monotonous regularity.
Hollywood was going to be Blanche’s Great Escape from the world around her; from the cruel taunts of the white kids in the school playground, making fun of her wildly untamed afro hair and milk chocolate-hued skin; and more importantly, from the unstintingly disapproving eyes of her mother.
But it was not to be.
Her siblings married and started families of their own; her beloved grandparents died; Auntie Ezola and Aunt Isobel moved to a retirement home, passing away within two weeks of each other in Blanche’s thirtieth year; and Uncle Eddie ran away with his twenty-five-year-old probation officer, never to return. When Sophia was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, there was nobody left to care for her but Blanche.
With each passing year, the daily battle over every single task with a mother increasingly slipping into depression and sleepless paranoia, ground Blanche’s starry dreams further into the ground.
‘What you tellin’ me dis for, useless girl?’ her mother would bark as Blanche tried to show her how to wash herself or use her knife and fork, ‘You are nuttin’ to me, hear me? Nuttin’ but a bag o’ disappointment. You are jus’ like your Fadder was – useless, good-for-nuttin’ waste o’ my time.’
And so it continued. Until, quite unexpectedly, Sophia passed away. Dr Smith said it was probably pneumonia, or maybe her heart had just had enough. Whatever the cause, Blanche found herself suddenly, at the age of 49, with a life of her very own.
On a whim, she joined the art class at the Community Centre – having always harboured a desire to paint – and discovered a new group of like-minded friends. She became particularly close to Cynthia Watson, a recently widowed lady whose bank manager husband had done everything for her - so much so that she didn’t even know how to change a light bulb – and the two ladies jokingly christened themselves The Hopeless Cases, making a pact to learn as many new skills and experience as many new things as possible.
So followed a dizzying array of new ventures: Wednesday evening salsa classes with Mick, a seventy-year-old former ballroom champion, and Vernon, the only male class member, who took a worryingly ardent pleasure in throwing each unfortunate new partner violently around the room; days out with the Northbridge ‘Crafty Ladies’ craft group, most of which involved a lot of tearooms interspersed with toilet stops and the odd bit of sightseeing here and there; and Sunday afternoons spent in Cynthia’s palatial summerhouse in the garden of her riverside home, watching DVDs of old Hollywood movies and reminiscing about times gone by.
It was Cynthia who suggested Blanche should meet her friend, Eric. At first, Blanche dismissed the idea outright; she hadn’t had a date in over thirty years and the prospect filled her with dread. But as time went on and Blanche’s confidence grew, she began to warm to the suggestion.
So, last Sunday afternoon in Cynthia’s summerhouse, in the middle of watching Funny Face, Blanche found herself agreeing to meet Eric for dinner.
Dinner. With Eric. Tonight. Staring out at the passers-by struggling with umbrellas against the torrential rain, Blanche feels her heart flutter with anxiety for the thousandth time this morning. At the age of fifty, she never expected to be planning a first date – or to be beset by chronic apprehension, like a timid teenager. Surely she should have grown out of this type of behaviour years ago? Taking a long sip from her latte glass, Blanche grapples hold of her wayward thoughts. Tonight, I will be Natalie Wood, she tells herself, cool, calm and in control.
After all, how scary can one fifty-something garden centre manager be?
© Miranda Dickinson 2008
