by Guy Burt
She came back from the library while I was kicking my heels and singing quietly to myself. In one hand she had three books: a Winnie the Pooh, a thick hardback entitled Introduction to Human Biology, and a book of comic verse illustrated with colourful cartoon people. She was in a bad mood.
“It’s bloody aggravating,” she said, dumping down the books and struggling through the door-flap.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Look, I lit all the candles.”
“It’s the library that’s the matter,” she said. “Stupid old cow.”
“Who?”
“That woman in charge. They only let me take out three books, and I can’t ever get what I want. I have to take out two kids’ books and pretend they’re for me, and then ask for everything else by name and pretend that they’re for my parents. It’s a bind.”
“Why do you have to do that?”
“Because it would look odd if I went in every week to get my parents books, and if I just picked up the ones I wanted, instead of asking for them, they think I just want to look at pictures of tits and willies. So I have to say, 'Excuse me, but my father asked if I could pick up a copy of something called—I think it was, Boyer and Davison’s Introduction to Human Biology.' And I have to flutter my eyelids. Bloody hell.”
“Can I have this one?” I said, picking up the Winnie the Pooh.
“Yeah. It’s good, you’ll like it. I’ll read you some of it this evening, and the poems as well.”
“We’ve got some Winnie the Pooh at school,” I said. “And a picture on the wall.”
Sophie had her book open, resting it on her knees. I looked over her shoulder, secretly interested by her mention of tits and willies, but the picture on the page she had opened was of a man apparently covered in pieces of meat. Disappointed, I turned back to my own book.
We read for a while and then, taking Winnie the Pooh with us to read before bed, set off for supper. My mother never queried our long absences from the house, as long as we were present for meals; indeed, I’m not sure that she even recognized that we were gone most of the time. She had relatively little to do with us, and Sophie always made sure that I brushed my teeth and was in bed on time. If I woke up with a nightmare, she would as often as not bring me something to drink and soothe me back to sleep. Knowing that her room was only a few yards away was a comfort that I kept myself aware of when the light was out. My mother perhaps thought that all children were as quiet and untroublesome as Sophie and I.
The story that night made me laugh with delight, and Sophie’s variety of voices for the different animals had us both giggling. I went to sleep smiling, and the night was unperturbed by dreams.
He is smiling gently. “The holly bush is growing back again,” he says. “I had a look. I don’t think the main trunk ever died. It doesn’t look the way it used to, though. One of the things that has changed.”
“You can’t stop things changing,” I say.
“I never wanted to. Don’t be stupid.” He frowns. “That was what you wanted to do.”
“I did?”
“All along. I never realized until—later.”
“Are you sure that was how it was?”
“Yes.” He pauses, looking at me curiously. “You wanted to keep everything the same. I didn’t see it at the time. Strange, because you were so clever in one way, it always seemed like you were completely in control. Anything you wanted to happen, happened. You never even thought about it.” He pauses again. “Maybe that’s how you killed Ol' Grady. Anyway. It was like none of the ordinary rules applied to you. And when you couldn’t escape them, you just broke them.”
I wait for him to continue.
“I never understood what you wanted, Sophie. I never shared the way you saw things. Not really.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I was only a kid, for God’s sake! I didn’t see the world the same way that you did, so I couldn’t know what it was like for you.”
“Is that really all?”
The same strange expression passes over his face. “I loved you. I wanted to be a part of—everything that you were. And you wouldn’t let me.”
I take the words and store them inside me, waiting until the time when I can see a way to use them.
My mother’s pregnancy had begun to show a little by that summer: a taut-looking roundness about her abdomen. I remembered what Sophie had said, that Mummy was going to have a baby. To my eyes it looked as if her belly must be packed with something like slowly swelling frog spawn.
The days had swollen, too, becoming warm and stretching out into the evenings. It was around this time that another of the small events surrounding my childhood picture of Sophie, and her own story, took place. It started almost quietly, one morning when we had made our way down the winding road to school, and it was finished that day as well, all of it that mattered. Among the nine-year-olds were two boys who had already gained a strong notoriety for being bullies, and that morning at break there was some sort of a scuffle in the playground from which I came away bruised and crying. I can’t even remember clearly what had happened; probably little more than some pushing around and name-calling. I’m equally unsure as to why they picked me; certainly not as the result of some prior, specific intent or motive. Rather, I think that it was just my turn that day to be noticed. Schoolchildren have an apparently inborn resilience to this sort of thing, apart from those who are singled out from the crowd as being more viable targets and picked on more often, and I’m sure that the incident would have been forgotten by everyone in more normal circumstances. But before the bell for end of break was rung, Sophie had seen me crying and wandered over to find out what the problem was, grinning and joking in a resigned tone with some of the girls from her year.
“What’s happened to you, then?” she said, a bit more concerned now that we were out of earshot of anyone else. “Have you fallen over? Go and see Mrs. Evans.”
With a measure of indignation—I fell over all the time, and didn’t cry about it—I told her what had happened.
“Really?” she said, sounding less than interested. “Who was it?”
I suppose, if this had all come about a year or two later, Sophie’s lack of reaction might have sparked some sense of apprehension in me. But, of course, I told her. “Been going on for a long time?” she asked, still indifferent.
“Not to me. To other people.”
She patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it, Mattie. Feeling better?” I sniffed and nodded. “Right, then. Off you go then.” I got up and trotted away, and heard Sophie’s voice as she neared the girls again, “Matthew got the shit kicked out of him by Hollis and Gregory.” There was some nervous giggling. Someone said, “Got the shit kicked out of him, huh?” appreciatively. Another voice said, with more genuine feeling, “Those two bastards.”
That morning Mrs. Jeffries asked us to put away the maths equipment we had been using, settled us down and told us a story. On the wall, the larger-than-life Winnie the Pooh and Tigger beamed down benignly. Hot sunlight had settled in patches across the room, sometimes finding a flare of colour in some plastic boxes or the fiery grain of the walnut-veneered piano. It was a Friday, and my mind drifted to thoughts of the weekend. The summer trees around the quarry had turned a deep, dark green, and the gardener sometimes set out sprinklers on the lawns, hazy and shimmering with gossamer rainbows. Lunchtime came, and lunch break, and just as we were starting to get out workbooks for the afternoon, Mrs. Colley arrived. Her face, which was normally a florid red, was paler than usual; I thought she looked slightly ill.
“Carry on with your work, children,” she said, without breaking stride, and went over to Mrs. Jeffries. There was a long pause during which the two teachers carried on a hushed conversation. I bent back over my workbook, concentration broken.
“Matthew?”
My head jerked up. “Yes?”
“Could you please go with Mrs. Colley now. Leave your work where it is, you can put
it away later.”
Confused, and wondering what I had done wrong, I pushed in my chair and left. Mrs. Colley walked with me along the corridor to her room, which was empty. “Sit down, Matthew.” I took one of the hard plastic chairs and sat. Mrs. Colley looked at me carefully. I must have seemed very nervous, because she added, “Don’t be worried, dear—you’re not in trouble. I just wanted to talk to you.” I was not fooled: Mrs. Colley rarely talked to anyone, and certainly didn’t take them to her classroom. I waited.
“Matthew, I want you to tell me what happened this morning.”
I blinked. “When?”
Mrs. Colley lowered her head a little, as if making clear that the issue was serious. “At playtime. Did anything happen?”
“Oh,” I said, realizing what she was talking about. Sophie must have told someone. “Nothing.”
“You can tell me, dear. It’s really rather important.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Not really.”
“Hmm.” She paused. “Did you cry?”
“No,” I said, defensively. “Only a bit.”
“Right,” Mrs. Colley said, but she was talking to herself. Then to me, “Come on.”
I thought we were going back to class, but instead Mrs. Colley headed towards the senior end of the building, where I hardly ever went. The corridors were deserted, with everyone in lessons, and there was the pervasive, low hum of muted conversation from many rooms. We went to the principal’s office. Outside the door, Mrs. Colley hesitated, and turned to me.
“Your sister’s a tough girl, Matthew.” I nodded. “Well, she’s hurt herself a little bit, but nothing that won’t be all right in a while. OK?”
“Yes,” I said. “What happened?”
Mrs. Colley tried for a smile, but the expression faltered and failed. “Come inside,” she said, opening the door.
In the room were two adults—the headmaster and a woman I didn’t know. Also, sitting on one of the leather chairs, was Sophie. All I noticed was an ugly-looking bruise down the side of her face. Later, I found out that she was bruised elsewhere as well, and had broken a little triangular corner from one tooth. Mr. Fergus had the same, slightly pale expression that I had seen on Mrs. Colley. He glanced at her, and she nodded.
“Hello, Matthew. This is Miss Patrick. As you can no doubt see, Sophie here’s been in the wars, haven’t you?” He also forced a smile. “Miss Patrick is going to drive you home now. I’ve already called your mother to let her know that you’re going to be early.”
He is talking absently, not really giving any sign that he knows I am here. I have got used to this. I sit with my wrists resting on my knees and watch him.
“You were clever. You didn’t say too much—just a little, just enough, with just the right amount of hesitancy. One or two details. Where they’d touched you. What one of them had said. You must have scared the shit out of everybody in that room. Christ, Sophie, the bruises were the least of it! So, when the weekend’s out, everything’s back to normal. There’s a couple of bullies missing from the playground, but that’s about it. And the bruises fade, and it was only a milk tooth anyway. And by now all the teachers know that if Sophie Howard ever acts a little strange, well, it’s perfectly understandable, poor girl.” He gives a small, humourless smile. “Breaking a tooth. That’s pretty thorough. You must have been proud.”
I look down at my hands. The knuckles are clenched white against my knees.
three
The summer made our garden glorious in its heat. The evenings, when Sophie and I would sometimes sit under one of the trees and tell stories, were full of the sweet, heady smell of night-scented stock, and the sky would turn a deep duck-egg turquoise as night crept in from the east. Sophie would read to me from books, or tell me old favourites from memory, or—less often, but no less enjoyably—we would just talk between the two of us. My father was still away, of course, leading whatever kind of life it was that he led between his infrequent visits to our house. I had some idea that he travelled a lot. I also realized, in a rare moment of insight, that it must have been on one of those occasional visits that the whole business with the baby had been begun. My mother, tight in her summer dresses, seemed to have settled in her drawing room like someone waiting to die. The drawing room smelled of warm wood and dusty upholstery, and although there was never any dust to be seen, the smell grew oddly stronger as the summer progressed. We avoided her there. Neither Sophie nor I cared that we had been deserted by our parents; Mummy was a shadowy figure in any case, and my father’s transience was as much a part of him as Mrs. Jeffries’s brightly coloured beads were a part of her. In many ways, we were unusually happy.
My father I thought I understood, to some limited degree. Mummy was an enduring paradox, walled away in her room, and even years later I never got a satisfactory picture of her; her ways were nothing like our ways, and she defied analysis, or even examination. The drawing room itself, mouldering quietly at the back of the house, was where she lived: in it, she was invisible. I preferred her that way. When she was evident in the rest of the house, her presence there was strangely irritating, and, more than that, disquieting. Everything beyond the drawing room was ours, and she had no place there. Much later, when I started trying to work out at what point Mummy had been forced back into her drawing room, I realized just how little I ever knew her. She was a complete stranger to me, utterly alien. When we wanted to spend a day out, it was always Sophie who advanced the petition—and sometimes, of course, she didn’t even bother to do that. When I was with Sophie, Mummy seemed very far away.
We talked about the baby a lot. Memories of tadpoles transforming gradually into frogs linked tentatively in my mind with the pictures Sophie drew for me of sperm and ova—tadpoles and frog spawn. By now Sophie’s understanding of babies and their habits was as comprehensive as she appeared to want, and her trips to the library had tapered off. I was pleased that she seemed as interested in my views as she was in demonstrating her own knowledge.
“What would you like it to be?” she asked. “A boy or a girl?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A boy, I think.”
“OK,” Sophie said. “That would be a brother for you.” But there was nothing in my mind that was prepared to make the association between the new baby and Sophie and me; nothing that understood the concept that our world was about to be expanded by the introduction of another person.
“Sophie?”
“Yeah?”
I hesitated. “What’re breasts for?”
“Feeding the baby. Like on a cow,” she added. “They have milk in them.”
The image was striking, and vaguely repulsive. I shivered.
“You cold?”
“No.” I thought for a while. “Is that all, then?”
Sophie looked at me, a little curiously. “Well, not quite. Men like them as well.”
“Why? Because of the milk?”
She laughed. “No. Just because of the way they are, I suppose.” I couldn’t tell, from her voice, whether she was talking about the breasts or the men. She went on, “It’s all really strange. And it’s something that the biology books don’t really talk about, either. But I think I’m beginning to understand. Parts of it, anyway.” She smiled to herself.
“I think you know a lot,” I said, loyally.
“Yeah.”
I looked at her. She was wearing a blue and white dress and white ankle socks, her hair tied back in a ponytail. She was staring at the sky, just where it joined the treetops. The chest of the dress was braided with white.
“Sophie?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you have breasts?”
“I’m too young. They come when you’re older. Your body changes a lot, later on.”
“Could we have a baby?”
There was a sudden glint of something in her expression, hastily erased. “No. We’re too young, Mattie. You have to be much older to have a baby. Why?”
“I don’t know,
” I said. The conversation had moved away from its original direction, and I had forgotten rather what we had been talking about. “Will you read to me?”
A flicker of annoyance shifted her features for a second. Then she sighed. “Sure. What do you want?”
“I want . . . I want . . .” I drummed my heels happily on the turf. “The Frog Prince.”
“Again?”
“Again,” I said.
He looks at me steadily. “You have stayed the same, you know,” he says.
“What? The same as a seven-year-old?”
“No. Of course not. I told you that some things change. But inside, that’s where the real things are.” He gave that small smile again. “I know you think I can’t see inside you, but that’s not entirely true anymore. I know you too well.”
I think about that, and the more I think, the less sure I am that he is right.
He says, “Those were good times. Don’t you think so?”
Carefully, I reply, “Doesn’t that depend on whose viewpoint you see them from?”
He nods, pleased. “Yes. Good from yours and my point of view. Not so good, perhaps, from Hollis and Gregory's.” He smiles slightly. “Or from Mummy's, come to that.” It is not what I meant. He continues, “All that didn’t seem so important, though. I didn’t notice it, really.”
“You were only a kid,” I say.
“Yes.”
The holly bush had thickened in the heat, so that despite the late lightness of the evenings, the leaves and Sophie’s canvas lining filtered out the dying sun. I crept inside and lit the candles, striking matches from the large, stolen box that was just inside the door. Hot candle-wax and the stinging smell of freshly struck matches tingled in my nostrils. Across the floor of the holly bush were scattered books and pieces of paper, colouring crayons, some Biros belonging to Sophie, some toys of mine. I settled myself against the tree-trunk and cast about for something to do.