by John Clanchy
‘Yes,’ Miss Temple says. ‘Terrible stuff, isn’t it.’
‘Or the bottom of a saucepan,’ Toni says.
And it’s lucky it’s only a small class and all girls, because Miss Temple’s much more patient with us here and she encourages us to express ourselves and use our ‘voices’ and not hold back or ‘censor our thoughts’, she calls it, but say the first thing that comes into our heads – even Toni’s – because it is supposed to be creative writing after all.
‘I’m trying,’ Miss Temple says, ‘to move away from reflections as a technique, and onto other categories – do you see what I mean? What other ways are there?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘you could have a letter she comes across – from another character say – where she finds herself described. To a third person.’
‘Good,’ Miss Temple says.
‘Or a photograph,’ someone says.
‘Or a diary.’
‘Excellent, now you’re thinking.’
Which didn’t save us from having to practise the reflections technique anyway. Miss Temple made us describe ourselves, to say what we saw in our faces in a mirror – only Toni, of course, wanted to do hers in a hubcap because she said her face was distorted already and could even have been run over. And she wrote about how her forehead was too narrow for the rest of her face, and her jaw was too heavy, and the funny thing is, all this is right, in one way, her forehead is too narrow – but if you just pick out single features like that, you’ll always find something that’s too big or small or thick or hairy or spotted or moleish or something – and that, apparently, was what we all did.
Half my description was about my mouth, which I hate and which is too big, and I have the fattest lips – I just about need liposuction every morning to fit them back over my teeth, though of course Toni writes that hers are too thin, boys prefer thicker lips, and when I say why, she just says, Why do you think? My hair’s okay, though, it’s very black, more like Asian hair, and I don’t mind that, and Yiayia Irini had a photo once – it was so old – of her grandmother, and she wasn’t Greek at all, or only sort of, she was Cretan, and as soon as Mum saw it, she said, ‘My God, Laura, look at this, it’s you. That’s you,’ she kept saying. ‘I thought you were just a freak, a one in a million freak, but you’re not, you’re a throwback,’ and I was only seven when she said all this and I should have had counselling for the next ten years just to get over being called a freak and a throwback by my own mother.
So my hair’s all right, in the mirror I can stand that, and the overall shape of my face – it’s not too cowlike – and even my brows, if only they stayed over my eyes and didn’t grow down over the rest of my face and threaten to join up with my moustache, and I can see myself in twenty years with a beard like Yiayia Irini’s and having to go to the barber’s more often than my husband who’ll probably have moved out anyway cos he prefers his carpets on the wall or the floor and not in his bed.
And anyway we write these descriptions in class, and hand them in, and it must have looked so stupid to anyone going past in the corridor, fifteen Year 12 girls staring in a mirror and then writing stuff down – only half the time, I notice, people aren’t writing at all, they’re just looking at themselves and going, ‘Oh no,’ or picking their spots or squeezing a blackhead, which you’re not supposed to do because it just spreads any infection, or licking their fingers and making their eyebrows blacker or straighter than they are, or putting the mirror at an angle so they see themselves only in profile, and I see Miss Temple watching this and getting madder and madder, and the next day, instead of handing our descriptions back, she tears them up in front of us, and then chucks a spazz, a total spazz.
‘You girls make me sick. You couldn’t describe a zucchini,’ she says, while we look around for who looks most like a vegetable, ‘without focusing on its broken stem. You’re a cosmetic surgeon’s dream.’
And she’s only warming up, and she explains how we’ve all been conned by advertisers and how we’ve internalized their ideology and imagery, and then makes us listen to her while she reads pages and pages of stuff from Betty Friedan and then Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, and that, and by this time we’ve forgotten all about the first person and even mirrors and hubcaps, and know we’re going to spend the next six years discussing constructions of beauty, beginning with the Greeks. Though none of the ones in my family.
‘Can’t you girls see,’ Miss Temple’s so frustrated she nearly spits, ‘you’re stuffed full of false consciousness.’
‘I haven’t even had my lunch,’ Toni says from behind me, and she keeps up this constant whispering all the time Miss Temple’s spazz lasts.
‘Beauty, for a woman,’ she says, ‘is actually a curse.’
‘You hear that, Laura?’ comes from behind me. ‘You’ve got the curse.’
‘The cult of Beauty,’ Miss Temple says, ‘is crippling. It makes rivals of women, and it falsifies the discourse between men and women.’
‘Why?’ asks Jenny Cosgrove. Who’s a pain. And sucks for marks.
‘Because it forces women to compete for men,’ Miss Temple says. ‘That’s why.’
‘No, not that bit,’ Jenny says. ‘I understand that about the women competing. I meant the men and the women, how it … what did you say?’
‘I said it falsifies their discourse.’
‘Ohhh,’ says Jenny, who obviously has no idea.
‘It means,’ Toni says, ‘they’ll tell you any sort of lies to get into your pants.’
‘It means,’ Miss Temple says, ‘you can’t be certain whether any statement a man makes to a “beautiful woman” – quote, unquote
- isn’t made with an ulterior motive. And so no true communication is actually possible.’
‘Oh,’ says Jenny. ‘I see. Thank you, Miss Temple.’
‘You don’t have to worry, Jenny,’ Toni says, as the siren goes for lunch. ‘No man will ever tell you anything but the truth.’
Which is why I stopped sitting next to Toni in class. And why I now miss her so much.
Sundays, we have dinner early, in the kitchen, just soup and bread or something simple like tomatoes and eggs, and then we all go off to our rooms to get ready for the week, for school. Philip reads through his papers for the morning. We don’t even switch on the TV. But Mum likes us all to be together first – you can’t just grab something and go. She’s not running a take-away shop, she says. And you don’t say anything back to that. She just wants to hear our plans – she means our plans for the week of course, but sometimes, like tonight, it does seem like an opportunity.
‘How would you feel,’ I say casually, as I spread honey on a piece of toast, ‘if I didn’t go to uni next year?’
‘What?’ Katie says. ‘And not be a doctor after all?’
I screw the lid carefully back on the honey jar, knowing Mum and Philip will be looking at one another, their faces conversing.
‘You could still be a nurse,’ Katie says, ‘and mend people.’ She’s thinking of her dolls.
‘That’d be just fine, darling,’ Mum says eventually. ‘In fact,’ she says, and I hear her voice warming as though she’d thought of it herself, ‘I think it’d be marvellous. I think you’re too young anyway, you’re just seventeen. And this year has been so hard.’
And she’s getting so enthusiastic, I’m starting to think it must be a bad idea.
‘And Philip agrees,’ Mum says. ‘Don’t you, darling?’
‘Does that mean she won’t be a nurse?’ Katie’s the one who’s really disappointed.
‘It just means she won’t start next year. She’ll defer for a year. Or so.’ Mum says, and I just catch the tiniest gulp. As she wonders. ‘That is what you mean, isn’t it, darling? You do still want to go to university -?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘Though would it matter …?’ I begin, and she cuts me off.
‘I want you to go. I want you to have that experience.’
‘No, I was going to say, would it
matter if I didn’t do Medicine?’
‘Darling, it wouldn’t matter at all. Whatever you decided to do, I’d support. You know that. I just want you to go, that’s all. Uni offers you so much. New friends …’
‘Just don’t do Law,’ is the only thing Philip’s said so far, and I’m grateful. Philip can be so smart sometimes about when to say things and when not, and he knows this is basically between Mum and me. ‘Just don’t do Law,’ he says a second time, and it’s a joke, but what he’s really saying is, whatever I decide is fine with him too.
‘I think it’s crazy anyway,’ Mum says, ‘the marks you have to get just to get into Medicine.’
‘It’s not the marks. I can get the marks.’
‘But if you’re not going to do it, then you won’t have to kill yourself like you’re doing. You can afford to relax a bit – any other course you’ll get into easily.’
‘Laura will kill herself and get the marks,’ Philip says, and he can surprise you sometimes, because Mum’s the mind reader, and you never think of Philip that way. ‘And then she’ll decide not to do it. Not before.’
‘Oh,’ says Mum, and looks at him, and then at me. ‘Oh.’
‘Just …’ he says, and gets up to fetch more coffee from the bench, ‘as you would have done.’
‘You could still be a nurse,’ Katie says. ‘You don’t need high marks for that.’
‘What will you do?’ Mum says, and her enthusiasm suddenly sounds like worry, or even fear. ‘Instead?’
‘I’ll work for a while, I suppose,’ I say. Anything. ‘To earn some money. And maybe travel.’
‘Of course,’ Mum says.
‘What, go overseas?’ Katie says.
‘Half your luck,’ Philip says, bringing the coffee pot back to the table. ‘Wish I’d done that at seventeen, instead of going from one lot of books, one classroom, to the next.’
‘But you wouldn’t go straightaway?’ Mum says. ‘Not straight after school finishes?’
‘Can I come in?’ Mum says. And is in.
I don’t think Mum and I have ever not said goodnight, even after we’ve argued and hated one another. Not since I can remember. The only difference these days is she respects my privacy and says, ‘Can I come in?’ though usually about two hours after she’s already plonked herself on my bed. I can see from her face she’s come to ask me something, but just for one moment she’s distracted.
‘What’s that?’ she asks, nodding at a large jar on my desk. The jar’s new, it has a hole cut in the lid, and there’s just three lonely-looking twenty cent coins on the bottom of it.
‘It’s a swear jar.’
‘But you hardly ever swear.’
‘I do sometimes.’ We both look at the silver coins together.
‘And you’ve decided to stop?’ Mum sounds disbelieving. ‘You’re not going religious or anything?’
‘Like Grandma Vera?’ We both laugh then. Because Grandma Vera swore more and more the older, and more frustrated, she got. ‘No,’ I say, and we both sit for a moment with our separate thoughts.
In fact the jar’s not for swearing at all. But I’ve decided it’s time I learned to talk properly and stopped saying and that and but and or something on the end of every sentence, I don’t know why. And so I have to put twenty cents in the jar every time I say one of them. But I don’t want Mum to know because she’ll say nothing but be secretly delighted and even start sneaking coins into it herself just to encourage me.
‘When did you start it?’
‘Today.’
‘Oh,’ she says, and I can see her already calculating. ‘And what’s it for? When it’s full, I mean.’
‘I don’t know,’ I shrug. ‘Maybe if I do go on a trip next year …’
And I know that this is what she came about in the first place.
‘You’re not thinking of leaving home, are you?’ she asks. ‘I don’t mean for a trip. I mean, moving out?’
‘No,’ I say, and I’m just as shocked as she is. ‘No.’
‘Thank Christ. I had this sudden, awful –’
‘Mum, no. It’s okay.’
‘I’m just not ready for that. I’ll need plenty of warning.’
‘I’ll count to ten,’ I say. And we both sort of smile at that.
No wonder I find it hard to get to sleep some nights – not just tonight with everybody talking about Toni and uni and ‘plans’ and Mum having a breakdown about me leaving home, when I’ve hardly just got here, and I haven’t heard her asking Katie or Thomas or Philip about when they’re leaving home, but all the numbers as well that are left chasing one another round and round in my head because somehow I always seem to leave Maths and Physics till last. Normally I play music, and somehow by midnight that sorts them out. But tonight it doesn’t work. The numbers have gone, but the voices haven’t.
When you saw her, how did she look?
Pretty.
Happy?
Yes.
And how did that make you feel?
And I find I can’t answer that because my feelings are so mixed.
‘You were happy for her, weren’t you?’ Mum had asked me that day we went to the pool.
‘Ye-ss,’ I’d said. ‘But –’
‘But what?’ she said, trying to do her mind-reading thing. ‘A bit envious as well?’
‘Envious?’
‘Of her freedom. Her experience?’
‘A little.’
‘Nothing else?’
And there is something else, of course, but it’s too black and hateful to say, but I hate her for seeing Mr Prescott like that and all that time, and maybe even after that morning at the Rock, I’m beginning to suspect, all those days when they were pretending not to speak to one another, and she was cutting him dead at school, maybe they were still meeting then, behind my back, and discussing how smart they were and even laughing, with him saying, ‘But surely Laura must know, she must suspect?’ and Toni saying, ‘Laura? She wouldn’t have a clue, she’s so dumb about some things and has no experience, and has only ever had one boyfriend, and he dumped her.’
And I hate her for that, and can’t even tell Mum. So she keeps worrying and worrying about the wrong thing, about me leaving home, for instance, and going to live in a flat, and maybe with a married man, like Toni – though she doesn’t know about that -or even going to live with Toni herself, and she doesn’t realize that’s the last thing I’d ever do, and I don’t care if I never see Toni again in my life.
Though I do.
And all this is weird, because I must fall asleep then, and I haven’t even turned my light off, and I come awake again with a gasp – or maybe it’s the other way round and it’s my gasp that wakes me – and I’m sweating and it’s not even hot, and I know I’ve only been asleep for a few minutes, but in my dream I was back in the street again, in Glebe, and Toni was on the step and the blue door was closing behind her and one second it was her face and it was cold and hating me, and the next it was the baby’s at the pool, screaming with terror, and then smiling, just seconds later, and then Toni’s again, but her face had changed utterly, or not her face but its expression, and it was no longer cold and hateful but warm and pleading.
‘Don’t judge me, Lolly,’ it said. ‘Don’t hate me. Please -?’
18
‘Can I come in?’ a voice says, and my doorway’s getting to be like the Arc de Triomphe or the Gateway to India or something, the number of people wanting to make speeches in front of it. Only normally they come in and make the rest of their speech from my bed – if it’s Mum – or from the well of my beanbag with Yogi curled on her stomach if it’s Katie. But Toni doesn’t. She stands in the corridor, waiting, as if she’s afraid the whole thing might collapse on top of her, or a door slam itself blank, shut, in her face.
‘How did you get in?’ is all I can think to say.
‘Down the chimney. Where do you think all these ashes come from?’
‘But I didn’t even hear the bell.’
<
br /> ‘I knocked.’
‘And Mum let you in?’
‘Miriam, yes. Your mother. Have you met Miriam?’ she says, with her head on one side, and I still can’t get over how assured and grown-up she is. ‘Miriam’s the woman who opens the door downstairs, and if she recognizes the people standing there –’
‘But why didn’t you phone first? To let me know?’
And for the first time her face is serious, and doubtful, and the way I’ve always known her. ‘Because I was afraid you mightn’t see me. You might just make up some excuse, and say you were out, or too busy.’
‘On a Monday night? With Physics all Tuesday? Likely.’
And we continue to look.
‘Can I come in?’ she says again.
‘Yes, yes,’ I say. And I leap up from my desk and I’m even clearing a space on my bed, and next thing I’ll be dusting or washing the windows – for Toni? – and we’re both nervous and polite with one another, now the first visual shock’s passed over. And, before she sits on the bed, Toni actually says:
‘I’m not disturbing you?’
‘Not my homework,’ I say.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s just some Maths. Probability and that.’ I look in my bag for twenty cents which falls, plonk, into the jar. While Toni watches.
‘What was that for?’
‘I just … owed it.’
‘Who to?’
‘Myself. I just remembered.’
‘Oh,’ she says, and finally sits. ‘I was never any good at Maths. You could do anything though.’
Which only leaves me strangely embarrassed.
‘Maths is just a trick,’ I tell her. ‘A trick of the mind, that’s all. And some people have it, and some don’t. Mum and Philip …’ I say – and I find I could talk about this for hours, in the circumstances … ‘they can hardly add up. And yet they’re so smart.’ And I’m about to say: ‘It must come from my Dad, from my Greek side,’ and I can even talk about the Greeks and Geometry and Maths, but I find, instead, I’ve said: