by Guy Burt
To my relief, he appears to consider the question seriously. “Back then? I think so.” He hesitates, then continues. “Perhaps not afterwards.”
“After—I went away?”
“After you went away,” he agrees gravely.
“How did you feel after that?”
He shakes his head, almost irritably. “I don’t know. Confused. Angry. Scared.”
“OK, OK,” I say. He stops, looks at me, and then slumps a little where he sits.
“Let’s get it over with,” he says.
Next summer, Sophie was twelve and I was ten. Over that year, few things changed in our town: the buildings of the farm showed the marks of the past winter in fallen slates and loosened window boards, but otherwise the time hardly showed. The quarry was as immutable as ever, while the landscape that surrounded us adapted from season to season without hesitation. Between the two of us, however, there were some changes. Sophie was growing up; it was suddenly evident that she stood noticeably taller than me, where before the difference was marginal. Her face had altered subtly, a change large enough for me to have noticed but at the same time not large enough to be easily described. Her manner of speech had altered as well, and she was more likely to use in the company of adults or other children those same speech patterns that she had used with me, in private, for years. She became suddenly more conscientious about locking the bathroom door after her. Some of these changes I found amusing, and some exasperating, but as a whole they worried me secretly. I saw them as evidence that Sophie was getting ready to move on, make a break from childhood. I was afraid of being left behind.
It didn’t work out quite like that, though. In Sophie’s final year at our school, the subject of exams came up once again. It was decided that Sophie should try for an academic scholarship to a private school some fifty miles away. I remember the visit we made to look at the school, which left me with an impression of great scale, with many buildings and many pupils. And without the uniform to distinguish them, the pupils would have been women; they looked far too old to be still at school. Sophie looked about her with evident interest, and I could see her mentally filing her observations for scrutiny later. She was quiet most of the time we were being shown around; her eyes were busy, picking out people and classrooms and teachers as if photographing them. She was quiet on the way home, too, but I thought I could sense that she was feeling positive. She sat in the back of the car with her arms folded, looking thoughtful but comfortable, as if she had had confirmation of her preconceptions.
When the time came for the exam, she worked for it very seriously, very carefully. She noted down the different subjects she would have to take papers in, and set aside an hour or so of each evening for revision. Once in a while she would spend this hour in the kitchen, with her books and notes spread out on the larger table there, as if she was reminding my mother and me that she was working hard. And it was at about this time that I came across the eight or so Test Your Own IQ paperbacks, with their scores filled in and tabulated. Sophie didn’t talk much to me about the exam, as if she was determined to face this goal alone. For my part, I was quite content to let her: I didn’t understand the schoolwork she was revising, and knew that I would have found it boring if I had. But more than this, I was convinced—although I said nothing—that Sophie’s intentions were different to the expectations of her teachers, and that something was going to happen to surprise them. Secretly, I hoped that she was planning to fail her exams, so that she wouldn’t be able to go away. The concept was nebulous in my mind, and I failed to examine it closely, but I was sure that Sophie was capable of engineering things so that she wouldn’t have to move to a school that was, to my mind, so distant.
With the same precision by which she guaranteed herself an IQ of 125, Sophie failed the scholarship exam. She must have been among the highest-scoring of the “failures,” however, because the school offered her a place without the need to take any further tests. Apart from some confused disappointment among her teachers, there was no real fuss made. Perhaps they had overestimated her somewhat. Perhaps she had just had a bad day. Sophie, smiling slightly, remained quiet, although she, too, was just disappointed enough to make people sympathetic. She was bright, but not quite that bright. And the one or two teachers who had maybe noticed anomalies in Sophie’s progress over the years—occasional flashes of brilliance, remarks that were precociously incisive for a child of her age—were reassured by this yardstick of her actual ability.
I knew well enough that her score in the exam had been deliberate, and I asked her about it.
“I don’t want to be too conspicuous; it doesn’t do. Besides, I got in, didn’t I? It’s only crummy prestige they were aiming for in any case. We don’t need a scholarship.”
“I s’pose so,” I said. “Do you think you’ll enjoy it?”
“Probably.” She sounded distant.
“Will you come home at the weekends?”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not deserting you. You’ll be OK. You will, won’t you? Not going to get lonely on me?”
“I’ll try not to,” I said.
“Good. 'Cos that wouldn’t do, either.” She sounded confident, and there was a strength in her voice that I hadn’t really noticed before—or at least, not to this degree.
“Right,” I said, and felt a bit better.
“And we’ve still got the summer,” she added. “Lots of time there. It’s not really a good-bye, after all.”
It was difficult to see in those terms. I looked forward to the summer as a time of ending; and when I look back, it still feels the same way.
The end of the school year hit us with an end of term show, presented outside and at the mercy of the weather, was a great success. The evening was fine, and the parents took their places on the rows of plastic seats while the action unfolded on a stage set up against the outside wall of the assembly hall. We both had parts—I as a spear-bearing soldier, Sophie as a lady. She had some lines, and delivered them clearly and with a touch of humour that lifted the scene she was in. At the end of the play, when the cast came together for a final scene in front of the cardboard battlements of the castle, the applause was loud and we were all tired. We cleaned off our makeup in the school bathrooms and waited for our mother to drive us home.
The last day was as mindlessly chaotic as usual. I met Sophie in the corridor, both of us hurrying on separate errands, and she smiled and raised her eyebrows at me.
“Everyone’s running around like chickens,” she said. “Half my class is hysterical. All the girls are crying.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s always like that.”
When the doors opened at four o’clock, the sudden exodus flooded the playground and the road outside until it was hardly possible to leave the school if you were in a car. Sophie surveyed the scene from the main steps.
“We’d do better going out the side gate,” she said. “Come on.”
It was a longer route, normally, but we avoided the crush and made it to our road without being stopped by anyone. The day was warm, and there was the anticipation of summer everywhere. I kicked a stone along the tarmac in front of me as we walked.
“Do you feel nervous?”
“No. It’s going to be fine. Let’s not talk about it, hey? We’ll just have a bloody good time for a couple of months. OK?”
“OK,” I said, and smiled. “That sounds good.”
Several things happened that summer, the summer before Sophie went away. The first part of the holiday was quiet; there was nothing to hint at what was to come. We both had our birthdays, and I was amused by the thought of Sophie being a teenager.
“What’s it feel like, being thirteen?”
“Same as being twelve,” she said. “Not any different. What’s it feel like being eleven?”
I grinned. “It’s OK.”
“I’m going down to town this afternoon. You want to come with me?”
“Where are you going?”
“Just shopp
ing and other stuff. Maybe buy some clothes.”
“You have a uniform,” I pointed out.
She looked blank for a moment. “Oh. That’s for next year,” she said. “I meant for now.”
“I think I’ll stay here,” I said.
“Suit yourself. I’ll be back around five.”
My mother was quiet that summer, I remember. Like Sophie, I had learned how best to avoid her, how best to sustain the suggestion that there were no children in the house at all. We saw her at meals, when we ate at home, and I would sometimes pass her in the hall or if I was coming out of the kitchen. She almost never came upstairs. I can’t think of a time, after the baby died, that I saw her on the first floor of the house. And mostly, of course, she remained in her dry drawing room, filtering the daylight through heavy curtains and sitting, or walking, whichever fitted best with her moods.
She was not a mystery to me then; she had none of the romance of a mystery. She was just a part of life, one that was as much a background to my childhood as the wallpaper of the corridor or the smell of a classroom at school. The shadow she cast across us was never properly visible to me. When she died, I suppose I thought about her more in five days than, previously, I might have thought in five years. The mysteries that conspired to create my mother were never handed down to me; if they had been, I would have a clearer and more complete picture of my life, and of Sophie's, than I have. And so my mother, who in life had seemed to impinge upon my existence only in the most tenuous ways, attained a mystery in death, when I finally realized that the questions she raised would never be answered. She had married late, had children late, and my grandmother was dead before I was born. I have no knowledge of her whatsoever. Perhaps Ol' Grady evolved from some early precursor of which I know nothing; perhaps he had survived, in spirit, for generations before Sophie broke the chain and killed him. It is unreasonable to set limits or boundaries to a story when that story is, in essence, the lives of people. The only limits are those imposed by our ignorance.
It was at about this time that the real change in Sophie began to become evident. She had already found that clothes, and manner, could affect the image she created in the minds of others. This was something she was able to control, and she studied it as intensively as she could. But the chance combinations that go to make up physical beauty—the fluke that delineates between attractiveness and unattractiveness—was never accessible to her. And so she ignored them, and perhaps she, too, was surprised at what had been happening, gradually, over the past three years or so. Where Sophie had been unremarkable, neither noticeably plain nor noticeably pretty, she had begun to change. At first she simply crossed the line from unremarkable to pretty. There was a lengthening in her face and jaw that made sophistication of her childish pensiveness, and some unqualifiable alteration in the lines of her cheeks that left her with a striking maturity. She was never conspicuous, but a second glance at her was more than enough to establish her as pretty; and if you looked longer, you could see the first indications that she would turn into a beautiful young woman.
I noticed much of this for one good reason, I think. It was that, ever since she had dressed up in jeans and a shirt in her bedroom and made me believe for a moment that she was somebody else, I had been attuned to the way she looked. In this respect I was probably the best placed observer, having seen her every day throughout our childhood together, and having her face firm in my memory.
I always remember it as the summer that Sophie went away. In reality, though, it was more complex than that; I would have done better to call it the summer that Sophie moved on—moved on into something new, and out of what she left behind. I think she saw it this way as well, no matter what she said to me; it must have been impossible for her not to. The summer days we spent playing were the end of something that had started with my birth and lasted for eleven years. That the turning of a calendar page could tear it all apart so easily was difficult to believe, and I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted her there for longer. Until I was ready, I told myself; I wasn’t ready for this just yet. But there was another part of me—a silent, secret part—that was waiting without fear or pain, and with something like hope. The weeks of the holiday passed both slowly and quickly, and I no longer knew what I felt, nor what I wanted to feel.
Towards the end of the summer, preparations had to be made for Sophie’s move to her new school. My mother returned one day with a trunk she had bought in the town, and Sophie and I carried it upstairs to her room. Her face was thoughtful, almost sad, when we had set it down on her bed. It was large, a dark blue colour, with brass corner pieces and a brass lock. Sophie opened it, and the inside was lined with tartan paper. It smelled strange, unfamiliar.
“There’s too much room in here for my stuff,” she said. “It’ll all slop about.”
We stared at the trunk together, and didn’t know what else to say.
There was still a fortnight or so left to us, however; the countryside was ours to use, and we spent hardly any time indoors, unless it was in the barn. There, safely enclosed in our hidden room, we sat for hours, reading or talking, with Sophie telling me what she imagined her new school would be like, the things she might do there. I listened with a strangely potent mixture of envy and sadness, seeing her on the brink of another world, about to move off into it and leave me behind.
“You sure you won’t get bored with me?” I said. “When you’re at your big school.”
She blinked, and a curious expression came over her face that I didn’t remember having seen before.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Of course I won’t. You know I love you, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to meet her eyes.
“Well, I do,” she said, fiercely. “And don’t you forget it, OK?”
“OK,” I said, and managed to smile.
“I’ll always be around. You’ll get bored with me, if you’re not careful.”
“No I won’t.”
“Then I won’t, either. Do we have a deal on that?”
I grinned reluctantly. “I s’pose so.”
“All right. So stop moping.”
“OK,” I said.
We walked the lanes and tracks that spider-webbed across the hills around our house, and we gathered flowers and sang songs. Once or twice we sat and watched the sun go down over the trees to the west, and we climbed to peer into birds’ nests and threw stones into the middle of the stickleback lake. Sophie read to me from Alice and we made daisy chains, looping them over the branches of a rowan tree that grew by the path when we had done with them. In the evenings, if we were sitting across from one another at the supper table with my mother looking on coldly, we would exchange knowing glances, sharing the knowledge of what we had done—things that she would never know about, and in all likelihood would never have understood.
In this manner time passed quickly. But each night, before I was overtaken by sleep, I would think that the day past had narrowed the distance to the beginning of the next school year. I would be in a new class, enjoying some of the prestige associated with being in the lower of the two senior year groups, but not yet faced with the pressures and expectations of the final exam year. Also, though, I would have to walk home after school on my own, and there would be no one there to suggest a visit to the quarry or the holly bush. For the first time in my life, I realized, I would actually be alone.
“How long is it now?”
She looked at her watch, checking the date. “Another eight days. Stop counting the minutes, will you? Like I said, it’s not the end of the world.” But she sounded sad when she said it.
No, I thought to myself; but it will be the beginning of a different world, for me as well as for you. It was a complicated thought, although it had surfaced in my mind neatly packaged, as though it had rested there for some time, gathering itself. I turned it around and looked it over, and knew that it was true. I sighed.
“I guess not,” I said.
thi
rteen
“Mattie?”
I looked up from where I had been staring into the stream. “Yeah?”
“Want to go for a walk? There are some—there are one or two things I want to do.”
“OK,” I agreed readily. It was evening, about five o’clock, and tomorrow my mother would take Sophie to the station, put her on a train, and watch her disappear towards a place she had only seen once before. “Where are we going?”
“Places,” Sophie said vaguely. “All the normal places. OK?”
“OK,” I said again, and got up to follow her. I had noticed something odd about her speech, a hesitancy that was unusual for Sophie. She sounded as if she was uncertain of something, which was so unlike her as to be disturbing. We went back to the house, and I found my anorak. “Are we going to be gone for long?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Probably. Wait a minute.” She stopped in the downstairs hallway, head on one side, thinking for a moment. Then she said to herself, “Yes, that’s all.” She looked at me and grinned. “Sorry. Just sorting things out. Tomorrow’s the big day, after all.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, come on, then.” We left by the front door, and immediately turned to pass the house and head up the hill towards the quarry. The late afternoon sunlight was still warm on the side of my face as we climbed the hill, and there was the familiar sound of birds calling in the wood. As we made our way up, Sophie hummed a tune to herself, something that I recognized from a long time before.
“What’s that?”
“Hmm? What?”
“The song.”
“Oh, right. Don’t you remember? 'The Raggle Taggle Gypsies.' “
“You sang that to me before,” I said, doubtfully.
“That’s right. When you were little. Must have been—what, five or six years ago. You’re getting grown up.”
“You are,” I said.
“Doesn’t mean I forget things, though,” she said seriously.
As we neared the crest of the hill, I said, “Sophie?”