How It Was

by Janet Ellis

  She’d called two days ago. ‘It’s awfully late notice, Maz, but could I come and see you? Don’t cook anything, we can go to a pub.’

  Sitting in the daylight gloom of the Swan with a plate of long, coiled sausages and gravy like lava didn’t appeal to me. ‘No, no, come here,’ I’d said. ‘That would be lovely. Which train are you getting?’

  ‘That’ll be nice.’ Michael turned the last lamp off and plunged us into what was still surprising darkness. Only a sliver of illuminated hallway showed where the door was. ‘You go on upstairs,’ he said, as he always did. He’d have a cigarette before he came up, standing by the back door, keeping it open with one foot, just space enough to breath smoke into the night air.

  Lying next to Michael later, hearing his regular breathing and not wanting to make him stir, I shifted on to my side, turned away from him. I slid my free hand over my upturned hip, feeling the dip at my waistline, the rise of my haunches. I imagined someone else’s hand stroking there. Michael stretched and sighed. He smelled of toothpaste and tobacco and soap. I moved closer to him, slipping my arm under his shoulder to his chest, and gathered the folds of his pyjama top tightly in my hand.

  There was a soft click from the door to Sarah’s room. I heard her pad to the bathroom. Her body seemed to take up too much space in the house now. Last weekend, she’d sat down beside me on the settee and our thighs had touched. I’d almost cried out. It was a reaction of instant revulsion, like handling raw meat or discovering a dead insect in a cup. I’d got up quickly and moved away. She had a little laundry basket in her room, from which I collected her clothes. But recently I did it with greater care, putting only the tips of my fingers to the clothes, transferring everything into the twin tub as quickly as I could. Once, I could feel a stiff, dried ridge of fabric where she’d tried to wash a smear of blood from her knickers. I found even the things she’d worn and shed distasteful. She wasn’t so much becoming a woman as bursting into adult life like a great pupa. The sheer, swelling physicality of her made me grit my teeth.

  Chapter 29

  ‘This one,’ I say to Michael. ‘It’s from Bridget. Do you remember Bridget?’ The letter is a scrappy thing. The edges of the page are bordered with flowers. The children used to write their thank you letters on stationery like this. By the time they’d expressed gratitude for whatever they’d been given, there was no room for any more information, which suited them fine. This handwriting is small and cramped, the writer is well aware of the need to condense their message. I read it aloud.

  May 1990

  Dear Maz,

  Thank you for a wonderful weekend. I know you’ll think it odd I’m saying that, as you stayed with us, but it was so nice of you to come after all this time. Trevor and I really enjoyed ourselves (a bit too much sherry taken though, he says!) and are delighted to see you looking happier. You’re an inspiration to both of us in how well you’ve coped. You can’t beat a long friendship, can you? The offer of a puppy still stands, by the way.

  ‘Do you want to spend the night?’ the nurse says, coming in with the bustle of her timetable. ‘We can make up a bed.’

  I’ve avoided the little fold-away they produce for visitors till now. Hospital nights aren’t like the real thing, are they, there’s too much noise and there’s always someone checking on the patient, putting the lights on and speaking in a loud, sing-song voice, whatever time it is. I’d be no use to him, anyway, I’d be getting in the way just to lie beside him. ‘I don’t live very far away,’ I say. I realise that I’ve made myself sound singular. ‘I can get back here very quickly, if . . .’

  The nurse adjusts his pillows and mask. She doesn’t need the rest of my sentence. She is small and dark. Younger than Sarah, by the look of her. I lean over Michael and put my mouth to his forehead. It is scarcely a kiss, but it is one thing I can do that she cannot. I am no more important to him here than the people who tend to him. Life outside these walls is meaningless, absent, irrelevant to them, beyond my owning up to being his next of kin.

  ‘See you in the morning,’ I say.

  The nurse turns round. ‘Oh, I might not be here,’ she says. ‘I’m off shift at seven thirty.’

  I catch Michael’s eye. I mouth I was talking to you. He smiles the faintest of smiles, but it’s so direct and intended for me that I feel rewarded.

  Chapter 30

  28 September

  I hit Top C in choir today. Lizzie H must have heard me, because the altos have to stand next to the sopranos. I think it put her off because she came in very late for the chorus. The sound seemed to come out of the top of my head as well as from my mouth. Mrs W says you have to go higher than the note in your mind then swoop down on it from above, then you can sing it easily. She says we should think of it like climbing on to a diving board. I don’t think I could reach it if I had to sing anything solo, so I didn’t put my hand up when she asked who wanted to try out. Bobbie didn’t volunteer either. She caught my eye and made a sign of sticking her fingers in her mouth and pretending to retch.

  Because we rehearse in the hall, everyone who did get up to audition on their own sounded small and weak, the sound hardly reaching over the sheet music they were holding. It must have been hard to read the words anyway, their hands shook so much. That’s probably why their voices trembled. Mrs W looked sad. I’m sure she hoped all that stuff about the glory of God would be heard in heaven, not just reach the level of the noticeboards.

  When I tell Mum I’ve joined the choir, she’s going to think it’s because she wanted me to. She always cries in the carol concert; she cried even when I was an Upper Third and we only sang ‘The Cowboy Carol’. I would have thought twenty of us yoi-yippee’ing about riding the trail would have made her laugh, not weep. She sang ‘And the Glory of the Lord’ to me in the kitchen when we got home. She made me hot chocolate and warmed my dressing gown on the radiator. She could get the high notes really easily. She said that all flesh shall see it together, so I ought to go and put my pyjamas on. I remember I laughed till I squeaked.

  In biology we had to look at our own blood under a microscope. We put elastic bands around our thumbs, squeezed them till they swelled, then pricked them with a sterilised needle and smeared the red dot on to a glass slide. I didn’t think I could do it but when it came to it, I wanted to. I wanted to see inside myself. All my billions of cells jostling together in that one tiny drop. It made me feel fizzy and tingling, I could feel my blood moving about in me as if it were charged with energy, making my veins swell as it flowed. I wished Bobbie was there. I would have suggested we mix our blood and make a pact.

  Mrs D says your blood can reveal a lot about you. It can prove your father isn’t who you think he is, for a start. Or who he thinks he is, more like. She says since the war there’ll be a lot of people only really half belonging to their parents. Molly put her hand up and said can blood tell what sex someone is, but that’s only because she got dared to say sex out loud.

  Lynne said seeing her own blood coming out made her feel queasy. But as she told me at break yesterday that she has a boyfriend and that she’s done it with him, I think she’s just a liar. Her hair is so greasy that it needs washing by the end of every day. No boy is ever going to fancy her, let alone do that. Unless he’s got as many spots as her, I suppose. Mum is always telling me there’s someone for everyone. I suppose that must mean even for a greabo like Lynne.

  We got our school photos back today. Helen snatched mine away from me. She said you look like a virgin and what does a virgin have for breakfast? I said I thought I’d known the answer to that once, but I couldn’t remember it now. I meant I’d forgotten the punchline, but she went on and on about me claiming I’d already lost my virginity. She is a real slag, so she was probably just trying to deflect attention from herself. My photos are awful, I look like a swot and a prig. I’d tried to make a proper photo face, but it didn’t work.

  I wanted to wait and see if Bobbie was walking to the bus stop, but her class comes o
ut later than ours on a Tuesday and Miss M was doing a hem check on the way out of the cloakroom, so I had to leave straight away. Otherwise I’d have hung around pretending I needed to be there until I heard her speaking. I undid my skirt in the lavvy and tugged it down a bit lower, so I could pass the test. Once, they actually used a ruler to measure everyone’s skirt length, but it took so long and the cloakroom was so crowded that Isobel Huff fainted. Now they do it by sight alone. Miss M looked over her glasses at me and said fine. She seemed tired. The queue behind me was quite long, so she’d be there for a while, staring at girls’ knees.

  Tom Spencer was hanging around by the post office when I got off the bus. I once told him that if I thought he was following me, I’d scream, and it’s funny to watch him trying to stare at me now without getting caught. He looks as if he’s trying to go through everything he knows, all at once. What he wants to say is in there somewhere, I suppose.

  I could hear Mum talking to someone downstairs but I didn’t recognise the man’s voice. He sounded smooth, like someone on the wireless. She sounded nervous, her voice was all high and bright. I was going to wait until whoever it was had gone, but I was hungry and anyway I was halfway down the stairs by the time I’d thought about turning round. When I saw him, I wished I wasn’t wearing my slippers. He was very tall. He was wearing the sort of shirt that needs cufflinks, but he hadn’t done the sleeves up. The edges were all frayed, even though he sounded like the sort of person who could easily afford new clothes. He had hair below his collar, and he ran his hands through it quite a lot. I think it was because he liked the way he looked when he did it; he made his hair fall through his fingers and flop over his forehead. He looked comfortable in our house. He spread himself out, so that we’d have had to climb around him to get anywhere.

  He asked me which school I go to, but I could tell he already knew because of my uniform. When I answered, he smiled, as if he had won a prize. He asked if I knew Bobbie Cavanagh. It was weird hearing someone saying her name aloud. I say it silently to myself all the time. I acted very calm and kind of pretended I didn’t really, or only a little anyway, but my tummy was flipping, and my heart raced.

  The bread and jam looked like baby food. She emptied a whole packet of biscuits on to a plate in front of him, as though that’s what she always does. Eddie couldn’t believe his luck – she wasn’t even counting how many he ate. The man came and stood behind me. He was so close that I could smell a mixture of incense and tobacco, like a room after a party. He held my hair up to make it seem short and he said it made me look like Mum and he wanted to paint us together. But as he was standing there and saying stuff, he stroked his fingers against my neck. I could feel his soft hands there all the time. He kept talking to her as if there were nothing going on and he wasn’t touching my skin. He sat back down at our table as if we were lucky to have him there. Mum actually told him that he could park his car outside the gate whenever he likes, which is ridiculous after the fuss she’s made about anyone else doing it. If me or one of my friends was as full-on about fancying a bloke as she was being, we’d just laugh at them. She’s almost forty – she ought to pull herself together. I watched her standing in the road for ages after he’d driven away, as if he was going off to war or something.

  She made a disgusting supper, watery mashed potatoes and vile tinned mince. I bet Daddy had to force it down. No one said anything of course, because we’d have got her usual martyred look if we had. She didn’t even notice that I hadn’t really eaten anything at tea, so I said I wasn’t hungry as if I’d wolfed down bread and jam like Eddie did.

  I am determined to lose seven pounds by the end of next week. Helen told me that if you eat toothpaste last thing at night, it fills you up all the next day. After everyone had gone to bed I sneaked into the bathroom and squeezed some Colgate into my mouth, but it was really hard to swallow very much of it. I got back to my room before the cistern finished emptying, anyway, so tomorrow should be a lucky day.

  Bobbie once said that she thinks that people are meant to meet. We were looking across the playground, watching some Upper Thirds. They were playing Buzz, chasing each other from the benches to the netball posts and the fence and then yelling when they reached home. I said I can’t believe that was me three years ago – they look like babies. Bobbie said this is our slice of the world and whatever happened before, even on this very spot, is nothing to do with us. And what’s happening anywhere else doesn’t matter, either. Just this moment, in this place. I tried to imagine our house with Mum in it but I couldn’t. I have no idea what she does all day.

  28 September

  The thing is, he came back. He came back into the kitchen and asked if he’d left his scarf and told Eddie to go into the hall and find it. I started to look, too, but he said it’s not here, I came back for you. He said he wanted to paint me, could he pick me up from school sometimes? I had this sensation of growing taller, my spine tingled. I looked straight at him. I said yes, he could. He said he’d be in touch. He went out to where she was waiting.

  Chapter 31

  I’d slept heavily that night and woken in a panic. For a moment I didn’t know why I was alone in the bed. Where was Michael? I could hear the clink of china bowls and the growl of the radio; they were already downstairs in the kitchen. I watched from the doorway as they chattered and circled.

  ‘Mummy!’ Eddie sat in front of a bowl ringed with a sticky mixture of cornflakes and milk.

  ‘Are you ill?’ Michael said. ‘You didn’t wake, I thought I’d better leave you.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I just went back to sleep by mistake.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re coming down with something.’ Michael looked solicitous. ‘That would explain it.’ He had his shirt on, but no tie yet. It made him look unqualified to give any sort of opinion.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘does an extra ten minutes upstairs need this much analysis?’

  Sarah was catching her hair into a ponytail, unlooping an elastic band from her wrist and securing it in three deft twists. ‘I’m going to be a bit late home,’ she said.

  ‘How late?’ I said. Sarah rolled her eyes. She often did. She has the luxury, I thought, of openly finding me ridiculous.

  ‘I dunno. Seven?’

  ‘I don’t know, not “dunno”. I’ll keep your supper warming.’

  ‘Don’t bother, if it’s anything like last night’s.’

  I registered the warning shot but decided against retaliatory action.

  Sarah pushed back her chair with her behind as she stood up. ‘Did you choose a photo?’ she said. She swung her open satchel on to one shoulder. The books moved against each other without falling out.

  ‘Not yet. I haven’t had a chance to look at them properly. Eddie. Hands. Teeth. Wash. Now.’

  ‘Mum!’ Sarah stood at the door. ‘Do you want to know why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why I’m going to be late. I’ve signed up for choir. We’ve got a rehearsal in the church, after school.’ The choir always processed up the darkened aisle at the beginning of the Christmas concert. They held lighted candles. Their hands shook with the intensity of their task. All you could see of the girls were their faces, solemn and full of concentration in the quivering lights. A parade of virgins. Mostly.

  I watched them leave, Eddie half walking, half skipping, six paces to Sarah’s one. Whenever I imagined a telephone call, the voice at the other end breathy with horror, it was always Eddie whose fate I feared. I saw myself opening the door in the middle of the day to someone with terrible news to impart about Eddie. Only Eddie lay immobile, in front of the too-late-to-brake car. It was Eddie whose description I gave to the policeman charged with finding him. When did you last see your son, Mrs Deacon? What was he wearing? In my mind’s eye, he constantly fell from unknown heights or drowned in unspecified water and I rehearsed over and over again my distraught, unknowable reaction to the news. Beside Eddie, Sarah was an Amazon, striding through her day in fu
ll armour. I suspected that if anything did happen to Sarah, the worst thing about it would be having to tell Eddie.

  I slid open the drawer of my dressing table and checked the contents, running my hands over the old letters and cards, lipsticks, safety pins and a copy of The Naked Ape that I’d hidden, in case Sarah found it. I retrieved Philip’s little sketch of me from between its pages and unfolded it. ‘Philip,’ I said aloud and looked at myself in the mirror. My dressing gown was ruched at the waist and made me look pregnant. I tucked the drawing away again. It was impossible to imagine being with him, it was like trying to remember the light, long days of summer when it snows.

  Reading Sarah’s diary had become habitual. I should stop, I told myself. But it was too late, I was opening her bedside locker every day, moving her things aside to pull it free, as deftly as a dancer performing remembered moves. The book was like a living thing. I half expected it to be warm.

  He didn’t go back for his scarf, he went back for her. I gasped aloud. He said he’d be in touch. I went downstairs and washed up with vigour and too much noise, but I couldn’t escape what I’d read. I put the wireless on and tried to distract myself. Her words throbbed in my head, as painful and inescapable as toothache.

  The more I thought about it – and I could think of nothing else – the more I became convinced that her interpretation of events was wrong. Twisted, even. Young girls don’t tell the truth all the time, do they, not even to themselves. She would only have wanted to believe he came back to speak to her, that he’d even noticed her. I remembered his studied carelessness, his unbothered shrug as he walked towards me. ‘No, my scarf wasn’t there. I must have left it in the car.’ He was genuinely seeking a lost item of clothing. He was distracted, and she’d said Paint me, emboldened by my absence. It wouldn’t have been his idea. She had sensed our quicksilver, subliminal attraction to each other and it had woken something in her. She was like a Sleeping Beauty opening her eyes, too soon, to see the wrong prince.