Elmet

by Mozley, Fiona

  When we were small Granny Morley walked us to school, holding one of each of our hands in each of hers. Our school was in the town itself on the other side of an area of parkland where seagulls the size of small dogs pulled scraps from bins. We went through there to school in the mornings in our uniforms. Red sweatshirts, white polo shirts and grey flannel trousers or pleated skirts for Cathy and black leather shoes that we polished every Sunday evening.

  The main part of the school was in an old red-brick Victorian building and there was a bell tower at one end. The bell was too rusty to chime and nobody ever thought to fix it. Instead there were red bells like fire alarms attached to the walls of the classrooms inside and those told us when to go out to play and when to come back inside. Some of the corridors had bright pictures stuck to the wall with tac and some did not. The whole place smelt of OXO cubes and sugar paper.

  I kept myself to myself in the early years. I walked around and around the playground pretending to scale great mountain ranges or horizontal marshlands. In the summer months I sat beneath a sycamore tree on the edge of the school field. I collected insects in my hands only to release them at the end of playtime or lunch hour. Daddy asked me if I wanted an insect collecting set for my birthday or some jars to put them in to and take them home but I said I did not. I liked having them in my hands for that certain amount of time then letting them go off again into the undergrowth, back to their homes and to their lives. I would think about them living those lives while I sat back in my chair in the classroom and gazed blankly at times-tables.

  Cathy organised games and I joined in with those. When I was about six and she was eight she got into a barney with three of the lads in her year. Adam Hardcastle, Callum Gray and Gregory Smowton. Possibly it was the kind of event that only seems important to those involved but even then I wondered whether the others spent as much time thinking on it as I have. Over the years I must have spent whole days with this memory in my mind, closing my eyes and trying to walk into different parts of the scene, trying to gauge where each person was in each moment, trying to hear how fast each of their hearts was beating. I must have spent minutes squinting into the distance of it, trying to see this boy’s face when he knew he could not hold on any more, trying to catch onto the exact words my sister had used when she described the bits I had not seen.

  I wondered if she thought about it too. Or if the boys did. Or if any of the other small people at the far reaches of my recollection spent the time that I had thinking about the bits in which they played a part. It seems to me that so much of everything came from this, and that if anyone thought about moments like this enough, the future would be done before it had even started, and I mean that in a good way.

  She was tall for her age, Cathy, and strong and fit. She had cropped black hair that she tucked behind her ears and blue eyes like Daddy’s. Adam, Callum and Gregory all came from the row of tall terraced houses near the school, with pointed roofs and protruding windows. They wore a new pair of brightly coloured trainers each term. They all supported Manchester United even though we lived in Yorkshire, and they had the team kits to prove it. They always had the widest range of football stickers or pogs and their pretty mothers collected them from the school gates on time every day and dropped them off the next morning with a pack-up of sandwiches, jammy dodgers and sweet cartons of apple juice that got sweeter with the heat from the classroom and the morning sun.

  I suppose it is normal for little boys to tell little girls that they are not allowed to play with them but I suppose most little girls know what the answer will be from the start and do not bother to ask. Cathy, of course, did ask, and was told. She asked again and she was told again. She said it was not fair but was told by Gregory Smowton that it was his ball so he could choose who played and who did not. She tried to play anyway. She placed herself on the field in what seemed like the right position and when the ball came near she ran for it. She got it. But then what happened next was more difficult. She was not on either of the teams and so had no idea which direction to take, to whom to pass, nor which goal to run for. I remember her just standing there with the ball and the boys standing too, not knowing too whether to tackle her or to ask for a pass, and her looking startled then suddenly realising that she did not want it anyway.

  Part of me still wishes that she had run with it somewhere, ducked and dived round all the lads and kicked it straight past the goalie between the rucksack posts. In my mind she would have been a footballing sensation. But in the event nobody ever saw her play. She stood there by the ball then she walked away. Walked away over to the other side of the field. She told me later when I asked her that she knew it would always be their game. Even if she played, and even if she played well, it would always be their game.

  She had caught their attention though. She had riled them. For the rest of that term they sought her when she was alone. They took her aside and punched and kicked her and sometimes strangled her and she ran away or resisted quietly. She pushed their hands off or blocked their blows when they came at her. But she did nothing decisive. Nothing that would end it. And because the boys had no ultimate reason to stop, and because it was fun and made them feel better, they continued. Several weeks passed and they would still chase her behind the bins and beat her or find her in the park between the school and our house or sometimes down at the beach where she and I would wade about in the rock-pools.

  There was a trigger though. Something shifted in her mind. I do not know whether it was the particular action or whether it was that I was involved, but it was something.

  It was a Friday. It was the Friday before Good Friday. School had broken up for the Easter holidays the day before. The first day we had to ourselves was dry but there was such a strong wind coming in off the North Sea that the air was wet with salty water. It whipped our faces so that they were near red raw and the salt combed our hair and dug under our fingernails.

  We went down to the beach to look for hermit crabs. We picked up shells and tried to see if there was one inside. When there was we looked for a moment and placed it back then looked again, creating a map in our minds so as not to disturb the same creature twice.

  We both saw the boys coming from a long way off. They made no attempt to disguise themselves. They stretched out their bodies and swung their arms as they walked. I could tell Gregory from his red hat. One of the others had a football. He kicked it hard and the ball scuffed over the sand and stopped twenty metres away for him to lazily walk after it and meet it. It splashed through shallow saltwater puddles and tossed dark wet sand this way and that.

  Cathy saw them too but she did not stop. She picked out a beautiful little shell and asked me with a steady voice if I had seen it before. I told her that I had not and she turned it over to look inside. There was nothing there. The animal that had grown the shell was long dead and no little crab had crawled into its grave. She bent down and placed it back amongst the seaweed.

  The salty gusts were hitting hard from over the North Sea. Cathy’s hair, black as Whitby jet, whipped about her as she stood up to face the boys. The toggles of her coat beat against each other, sounding the sweet wooden pulse of a marimba being struck by the wind. I watched her the whole time. I could not take my eyes off her. I was ever her witness.

  Adam Hardcastle ran in and knocked her to the wet sand. She put her arms back to break her fall but did not make to get up and he soon had her held down. Callum and Gregory walked over, casually.

  None of them seemed to notice me though I had been standing right beside my sister. I was younger and small for my age so I knew I could not have done anything except get help. I turned and started running across the sands. Daddy was not in town but I could tell Granny Morley and she could get word to him or else to other people she knew, other people who were a bit like Daddy.

  I had not gone twenty metres before Callum caught on to the neck of my sweatshirt and pulled me back. Gregory had begun slapping my sister gently across the face. He then
reached down to the bottom of her polo shirt and pulled it up and placed his left hand on the right side of her chest, on her nipple. She was just a girl and there was nothing there but bone and muscle but perhaps he thought this would bother her. He held his hand there and she just stared at him. There was no reason to her why this was worse or different from what had gone on before. She had no idea that Gregory was acting out a kind of play, taking his cues from things he had either seen or heard, doing something that he thought would be worse for her – the worst thing of all. But she did not know. She had not been told yet. She was not in on the game. All she felt was a cold wet hand on her skin that was no worse than a kick in the teeth.

  Gregory challenged her on it. ‘Aren’t you bothered?’ He could not understand why she remained unmoved. ‘Slut,’ he said. She stared at him. ‘You should be bothered by me touching you here,’ he said.

  It was not working. He turned to me. I was hanging limply in Callum’s arms.

  ‘Dunk his head in that pond,’ said Gregory. Callum laughed cruelly and dragged me over to a rock pool.

  The first time he pushed my head into the cold water I saw a single sea anemone clinging desperately to the side of the jagged crevice, infringed upon on each side by a colony of chipped barnacles.

  The second time I saw two distinct types of seaweed and what I thought was a razor clam.

  I remember these things. These were the things I promised myself I would remember.

  The third time my head did not reach the water. Behind me, my sister had risen up from the sand kicking and screaming my name and their names and her name. She had fought them all and won and they were now legging it back to town with their football left behind. She pulled me up and told me to run all the way home. She told me to run home and stay there and to tell Granny Morley that she would not be long but that it might be a good idea to get Daddy. She wanted Daddy. She left me there and ran off behind the boys. She chased them down and I knew she would catch them all. Her legs were longer and stronger than theirs in those days. I turned and ran home and did what she said.

  The boys were fine. After she was finished with them they were bruised and tender but they were not seriously hurt. She did not know how to cause too much damage to a human body and their wounds healed quickly. In school for the weeks that followed they kept themselves away from Cathy and for some time they kept away from everybody. When the new term came they were more or less as they had been before, in the way they walked and the way they spoke to people. If there was any more humility than before or any more regard for other people, it was hidden.

  In the immediate aftermath of the fight one of the boys told his mother about what had happened. Or part of what had happened. He told his mother that he and Adam and Gregory had been set upon by that feral girl with the strange, absent father. His mother had gone into the school to tell the headmistress.

  The following day, Daddy was summoned to go in and speak with the headmistress. He had come back within two hours of Granny Morley’s call and sat me on his knee as we waited for Cathy. Granny Morley asked him if he was going to go out looking for her but he said that he had already seen her out on the beach. He said she was sitting on her own and would come home when she was ready.

  Cathy was ready at around six o’clock in the evening. She had been out on the beach all night and all day. Her hands and forearms were covered in a thin layer of sand and there was a small amount of blood on her knuckles. The sand together with the blood looked like the thin lines of grimy oil that wash up on North Sea beaches and mark the high tide.

  Daddy got up and took hold of one of her hands. He led Cathy to the seat next to his. He asked her what happened.

  She looked at him and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. They were hardly there at all, having not yet pooled into salty droplets, but I could tell the difference. Like the difference between lit and unlit black or between a dead thing and an alive thing.

  At first she did not respond. She sat in silence. We all did. Daddy did not ask her again and neither did Granny Morley nor I say anything.

  After almost a minute her chest began to convulse. I thought that she was hiccoughing but the heaving became more rapid and then the tone changed and she let the tears come all at once. A deluge.

  She sobbed. Her breathing was like waves building up then dropping suddenly over a sea wall. She exhaled as if through an harmonica.

  As she cried she spoke: ‘I felt so helpless, Daddy. I felt as if there wandt owt I could do that would change them. Or hurt them. Not really hurt them like they were hurting me. I could hit them all I liked but it woundt change a thing. They were so nasty to me, Daddy. Not the pain, Daddy, I dindt mind that, but the way they made me feel inside. No matter what I do, I can never win.’

  ‘You did though. You fought them and beat them. You protected your little brother. What more could you do?’

  Daddy ran his hands through his hair and then his beard as if searching for an answer there.

  ‘I mean it doendt matter, does it? I mean that things will always be as they are now. I mean that there will always be more fights and it will just get harder and harder. I feel like I’ll never just be left alone.’

  Daddy continued to stroke his hair. He looked more concerned than I had ever seen him. ‘Did you think to tell the teacher?’ he asked. ‘Did you think to tell teacher what these boys were doing?’

  ‘I did,’ Cathy replied, ‘but she told me they were nice boys.’

  It was because of this, I think, that Daddy took us all into the headmistress’s office together. He led Cathy and I by our hands through the narrow corridors of our school. The ceilings were low and lit by halogen strip bulbs that flickered and shone the same colour as the magnolia paint on the walls, making it appear as if the light were emanating from the plaster. The only windows were long and thin and tucked just beneath the ceiling, well above the heads of the children who walked up and down these corridors so that when they looked up and out into the world beyond all they could see was the sky. On that day the sky was a mesh of criss-crossed grey and white cords being ripped and tugged and frayed by colliding winds.

  To get to Mrs Randell’s office we walked to the end of the corridor and up a flight of stairs. They were the only stairs in the single-storey school and opened onto a landing holding doors to her office, the staffroom and the administrative office where we collected our lunch tokens each week and handed in consent forms for us to go on school trips.

  Daddy knocked. It was a heavy fire door painted dark blue with a small, square window made from thick glass with a network of thin, black wires running through it to hold the shards together in case of breakage. His fat knuckles made a dull thump against the wood, a sound that was echoed by Mrs Randell’s dampened voice from inside the room, instructing us to enter.

  Her voice or the instructions she issued sharpened as Daddy opened the door and she told us to sit down. She sat in a high-backed chair behind a large pine veneer desk and there were three chairs set opposite her, made from moulded plastic with a thin, course cushion glued to each seat. I sat on the right, Cathy sat on the left and Daddy was in the middle.

  Mrs Randell looked comfortable. She looked as if she led a comfortable life. She wore a peach linen suit and her hair was both blonde and brown. Or blonde overlaid onto brown. It descended just below her ears and flicked out to the sides.

  She seemed good enough (as good as could be expected) but she had only known comfort. And she looked troubled by us. Perhaps she would have preferred it if Cathy had never beaten those boys or if Callum’s mother had not told her about it so she would not have to be sitting there on a Friday afternoon having a conversation about violence.

  It was cool outside but her office was hot. The central heating was on and the windows shut. There were piles of heavily typed documents on her desk and the sideboard and walls bore the varied compositions of sundry children in oversized scrawls and motley hues. There was a row of rubber stamps staine
d with carmine ink. Each sported a slogan of adulation and acclaim.

  ‘I hope you know that your daughter’s behaviour was unacceptable. The attack was unprovoked. Those poor boys just wanted to play football on the beach and they asked Cathy if she and Daniel wanted to join in. I mean, I know Daniel and Cathy might not have had quite the same opportunities in life as Gregory, Adam and Callum but that’s no excuse for behaviour such as hers. Gregory had bruises all up his legs and Callum’s mother said the boys had even been kicked in their private parts. She must be told that it’s not acceptable to kick little boys there.’

  Mrs Randell went on like this and Daddy said nothing much in response. Neither did Cathy. A viscous silence had settled on Daddy and Cathy and me and although Mrs Randell spoke in fluid phrases that rippled against and sporadically punctured the gummed ambience, drab quiet was the primary mood and her dry utterances did little to refine that mood. Later, Daddy told us that after he had heard the teacher’s comments on the conduct of the boys he saw that there would be no real use in responding with his true thoughts. Mrs Randell’s assessment was simply the way people saw things, he told us. It was the way the world was and we just had to find methods of our own to work against it and to strengthen ourselves however we could.

  Outwardly, Daddy agreed with Mrs Randell’s recommendations and offered an apology on behalf of his daughter. He proffered assurances that it would not happen again. He insisted that discipline would be enforced at home and that Cathy would find a way to appease the boys.

  Daddy walked us back home through the darkening suburbs to Granny Morley’s house. He told us that he would be staying for at least a month and that we should come home from school on time every day so that we could all spend time together. He told Cathy that she had done everything correctly. He only wished she had acted sooner.

  Granny Morley died on a Tuesday afternoon. Cathy found her in her usual chair in the sitting room and closed all the curtains and all the doors and forbade my entrance. We had no way of contacting Daddy so we just kept that room shut and the curtains closed and lived upstairs in near-silent vigil. Cathy snuck down for food from the cupboards. We lived off biscuits and bananas and crisps until Daddy happened to come home a week and a half later and we ran to him and wept for the first time and he told us that he would never, not ever, leave us again.