by Tim Pears
I escaped to go swim in the quarry pool. I stopped on the way for sherbet fizzes at the village shop, where old Elsie Sims too was nursing the worst hangover of her long life. She let out a groan as I entered, and refused to open her eyes behind her pebble specs, instead groping blindly amongst the boxes on a shelf behind her and trying to give me melting chocolate bars and the ancient cigars that only grandfather ever bought, two at a time every Christmas, all of which I refused until she eventually unearthed three packets of incorruptible sherbet fizzes, with their stalks of brittle liquorice.
I swam around for a while and then sat by the edge of the pool with my feet in the water, sucking liquorice dipped in sherbet, waiting. The sun was making its slow climb through the sky, barely perceptible but still the only sign of life. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for. I hoped Johnathan would show up – of course he hadn’t come to the barn dance – but there was no sign of him.
Life had come to a standstill and everyone else seemed happy to let it. Maybe I was just different but I couldn’t stand it, this feeling of being in limbo, waiting for time to get going again, waiting for my life to start.
Then everything went dark and a voice said: ‘Guess who.’
I grabbed his hands from my eyes and bent his little fingers back.
‘Ow!’ he yelled. ‘Really, Alison, there’s no need to hurt. I was only playing.’
We swam for a while and then lay on the rock and shared the rest of my sherbet. Drops of water made it sizzle on our palms.
‘You’re right, you know,’ Johnathan agreed with me. ‘Life has stopped and no-one’s noticed. They’re all turning into Oblomovs. But we shouldn’t really complain, actually.’
‘Why the hell not?’ I asked.
‘Well, my mother says that Ethiopia’s a real drought, and we should count our blessings.’
I was going to argue but he suddenly jumped up and said: ‘Gosh, it’s late, I’ve got to get back for, um, elevenses.’ He grabbed his towel and said: ‘What are you doing later?’ But before I could answer he was scurrying away.
I couldn’t hear a thing, but sure enough a minute later figures appeared by the beech tree, their voices bounced around the rocks, and they came scrambling down to the pool. I wished I’d brought a book with me so I could ignore them and read it. Chris Howard challenged me to a race across the pool: he wouldn’t accept I was a faster swimmer, he pestered me for a rematch every chance he got. This time I slowed up at the end just enough to ensure a dead heat, ’cos I couldn’t be bothered with him going on at me afterwards; but the little squirt, coughing water and spluttering for breath, claimed he’d touched the rock a fraction before me and was waving his arms in victory like he’d just scored a goal. Luckily just then Jane, who’d been sunbathing with Susan aloof from the water, spotted some men clambering down the dry bed of the village stream, and yelled: ‘Look! Who’s that?’
As they got closer their bodies stopped shimmering and became recognizable: it was Corporal Alcock and Mike Howard, Chris’s older brother. They ignored us: they opened the boxes they were carrying and set up a tripod by the pool like the school photographer’s. The boys started showing off their backward somersault dives and Jane’s fat little brother did his bomb jumps, but although Corporal Alcock looked through the sights it didn’t have a camera, only a yo-yo underneath which he didn’t bother with. He looked through the sights and scribbled in a tiny black notebook while Mike Howard walked around the pool with a striped pole. Then they went back up the slope, constantly stopping and marking new patterns together, as if they were calculating the choreography of some new strip-the-willow dance.
I went over to Jane and Susan, who were lying in their bikinis on stripy towels. ‘Do you want to do something?’ I asked.
Jane squinted at me and closed her eyes again. ‘What?’ she enquired flatly.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, ‘anything.’
‘Steve and Rod are comin’ down soon, we’re waiting for them.’ She sat up. ‘God, is it hot? Look at that,’ she said, peeling her bikini pants away an inch or two and revealing the dazzling contrast between white skin and the deep chocolate brown of her suntan. ‘Not bad, eh?’
She poured coconut oil into her palm and spread it over her legs. ‘Do my shoulders, Ali,’ she asked, ‘and you takes some if you want. God, when’s you going to get rid of that one-piece?’
I rubbed the oil into Jane’s back and shoulders, while she and Susan made some joke about Gordon Honeywill, who was ostentatiously diving backwards off the heron’s rock.
‘I’m so bored,’ I said. ‘Don’t you two want to do nothing?’
‘Why don’t you go practise holding your breath underwater with they mature young men over there?’ said Susan, and Jane giggled along with her. I ignored them and walked away and picked up my stuff.
It would have been all right but Jane had to go one better. ‘Or you could take your Dad to the swings,’ she called after me, and the two of them collapsed into giggles again.
I snatched up a tiny pebble, turned and threw it at Jane, just to make her shut up. Even as it left my hand I realized the pebble was much bigger than I’d thought. It didn’t go anywhere near Jane but flew away from me almost at right angles and struck Gordon’s brother Robert smack on the forehead. The world stopped. People became silent, astonished statues. Then bright red blood came oozing out of Robert’s head and he started screaming. Gordon looked at me and then his brother and then at me again, not knowing whether he should look after Robert or beat me up. While everyone else stood still Robert had already turned round and, a bloody hand clutching his forehead, was running back to the path home. I turned and ran in the opposite direction.
I reached the Lodge without realizing I was going there. I sat leaning against the front door, sweating, getting my breath back. I could hear voices inside; well, not voices exactly but dim, disconnected drones of people talking. My breathing returned to normal and I stood up. I raised my hand to knock on the door when suddenly my heart thumped and my brain blew a fuse: I recognized one of the voices inside: it was mother.
It was crazy, all upside down. What on earth was mother doing at my secret friend’s house, the Viscount Teignmouth’s house? None of our family had anything to do with them. My brain was scrambled but it was fizzing with streaks of energy, trying to make sense of things.
And in the midst of weird ideas and strange, dark images skating across my mind I forced some kind of sense. The truth was I knew mother was as unhappy as me in her own, quite different way. I knew that she needed someone to talk to, and there wasn’t anyone in the village. And Johnathan’s mother helped people with their problems. I wasn’t stupid. I could see what was going through her mind.
We all need someone to talk to, and now I was eager with curiosity to hear what I knew I should hear, that ‘he’s my strength, that boy, I tried to get him to go away to college, to escape, but if he had I’d have died, he holds it all together and yet he worries me, I never know what he’s thinking. What help does he get from grandfather, who goes around muttering to himself because he gave Ian control of the farm and Ian took it? Or Tom, for that matter? He’s a bit soft but he’s a good boy but what’s he gone and done but fallen for one of the newcomer girls hardly older than his own little sister? Pamela I never know where she is, she goes her own way, no help to me nor no-one else, like grandmother, who’s getting to be a hindrance now, I can’t trust her to cook a meal without mixing up the salt and the sugar or forgetting a joint in the hot oven to bake dry. And you can imagine what it’s like having a child for a husband. You can imagine all what that’s like.’
That was what I would hear. Mother could unburden herself at last. I crept along the wall to an open window, where I could hear her clearly:
‘Why do we set so much store by our children? They’s bound to disappoint us, we wants too much for them: happiness, success, wealth, everything.’ So I was right; except her voice was calm and friendly.
�
��Us wants them to stay, and us wants them to leave,’ she continued. ‘The cord’s cut, and the trouble begins.’
Then another voice spoke. But it wasn’t a woman’s at all; it was Johnathan’s father’s. ‘Have another glass of ginger wine,’ he said. ‘One wants a hot drink in this heat, Deborah,’ he remarked. I heard him pouring them, and then sitting down with a heavy sigh.
‘And how’s young Alison?’ he asked. ‘I couldn’t believe how big Georgie’s little baby had grown, even though I knew she was almost the same age as my boy.’
I couldn’t take in much more. My eyes grew bigger, and I held my breath.
‘Alison? Oh, ’er’s all right. You know what they’re like at that age. Sleeps every chance you let ’er or hides ’erself away in some book, or else she gets in the way all day with energy that drives you mad, a proper little ragrowster. I’ll be glad when the damn school gets started, that’s for sure.’
Chapter Sixteen
Fire in the Wilderness
Neither Johnathan nor I could work out how our parents knew each other, so we gave up talking about it, dismissing it as one of those infuriating adult mysteries that’ll drive you scatty if you let them.
Now I decided it was time to show Johnathan where I lived, partly to share it with him, and partly because it made for another game. At breakfast on Monday, the first day of October, mother declared that she was going shopping at the hypermarket in Newton that morning, if anyone had any special requests.
‘Some of they chocolate desserts, mother,’ said Tom.
We’d worked out a system of signs, and I signalled to Johnathan to meet me at the pool. Once Fred had brought us back from the road, I changed out of my school clothes and ran all the way to the quarry pool to wait for Johnathan. I was streaming with sweat, my tee-shirt and shorts were drenched, and my hair was sticky. Brown-haired people had been bleached blond by the sun, but my raven’s hair had just become still more black and shiny. The heat seemed to make it grow quicker, too; it reached half-way down my back.
In my impatience to get down to the pool I’d forgotten to pick up my swimmers, but now I needed to get myself into the water. If I’d jumped in with my clothes on they would have dried out by the time Johnathan was likely to turn up, but I felt so uncomfortable in them that on the spur of the moment I peeled them off and jumped in naked, for the first time since I was a little kid.
The Sunday before, after I’d helped the Rector home from church with his stuff, instead of taking off his dog-collar and relaxing he’d gulped down a mug of coffee and dashed straight out, obsessed by his efforts to cure the world of superstition.
Alone in the rectory, I found myself in the drawing-room, empty save for the great gilded mirror above the mantelpiece. It was almost the middle of the day, and the stillness of the hour was accentuated in that bare house. It seemed that furniture must absorb not only light but even air as well, for without any the walls became less solid, membraneous almost, the rooms like chambers of a heart filled not with blood but with air, gently palpitating in the heat of noon. I could feel my own heart beating, as I stood before the mirror.
There were none in our house because Daddy had broken them all, except for the one grandmother had brought in her dowry. It hung in the hallway by the front door, and Daddy had overlooked it in his tirade of destruction. Mother had lacked the courage to replace them, so we’d got into the habit of using hand-mirrors and hiding them from Daddy, Pamela a compact for making-up and the boys a double-sided magnifying mirror for shaving.
I stood in front of the Rector’s antique mirror: its gold-leafed frame was so grand and ornate that it overshadowed the mirror itself: it was more like the overwrought frame of some magical doorway, which it pulled you towards. The effect was to bring you, in fact, to the glass, but with curiosity, far more than if you had simply glanced in a bare-framed mirror to check your hair.
The glass itself was backed not with silver but gold, which softened what it reflected, and it was flecked with bubbles. I imagined the uncontrolled breath of some apprentice glass-blower much the same age as me, not yet a master of his craft, creeping into the red-hot liquid glass and preserved there in tiny bubbles on the surface of the mirror, like a drowning boy’s, centuries after he had exhaled his last breath.
Alone in the rectory I stared at my reflection. A stranger stared back. I pulled my tee-shirt over my head, and stepped out of my shorts and pants. In the silence of noon, through fragile air in which could be felt the slow beat of invisible wings, my reflection fluctuated in the glass.
‘How can you tell the difference between self-knowledge and vanity?’ I once asked the Rector.
‘That depends upon whether or not you like what you see,’ he replied, taking a puff on his cigarette.
I thought about this dispiriting reply. ‘We’re supposed to hate ourselves, aren’t we?’
He blew the smoke quickly out of the side of his mouth, impatient to answer: ‘Not at all, Alison. Don’t you believe all that nonsense; truth is more complicated. We’re made in God’s image. We might tarnish it, but the potential remains, unspoilt, unspoilable. To know oneself is to discern that potential, or God, within us; but it’s also to see our own weaknesses, which have to be overcome; it’s to hate not ourselves, but our insufficiency.’
My form hovered in the glass. I couldn’t see who I was any more. Or what I was going to be. I was trapped in the glass, trapped in time, in this very moment. I was caught within it. It was like the moment making strawberry jam when it stops bubbling and starts to roll, streaming in from the sides of the pan towards the middle, as if into a whirlpool of its own making: after a while you start testing teaspoonfuls to see whether or not it’s set, and finally you get a dab that crinkles when you prod it. Somehow, while it was rolling around, the jam was changing its substance, but you couldn’t tell it was going to come out right, it was just a molten lava of strawberries churning over. I put my hands over my breasts, palms cupping the two slight mounds. Between my fingers I felt my nipples, no longer dots on my chest but small brown teats, ringed by brown. I tried to imagine a baby sucking milk from them; I imagined a tongue, licking.
I’d already asked mother for a bra. ‘Don’t be stupid, maid,’ she said. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry. You’ll have the rest of your life for them things.’
I ran my hands slowly down my torso, over my navel, across my belly. I was still stringy, and strong as wire, like Ian. I was impatient to become a woman, as Pam was, but I’d decided I didn’t want her wide hips, her broad bottom, and her soft, protruding belly. I loved being able to run, climb, and dive in the water with the boys, twisting and somersaulting in the air.
I ran my fingers down, into the sparsely tufted mound below. When Pamela persuaded me to share a shower with her, to save water, and saw the first wispy curls, she hugged me under the jet, splashing water even more than usual across the bathroom floor.
‘Remember that a woman’s body’s the most beautiful thing in the world,’ she told me. She gave me her make-up mirror and a book about women’s bodies, so that I could see for myself the wonderful things she said were going on inside me. She explained about periods, and made me promise to tell her when I found blood on my knickers. ‘’Tis the second big moment in a woman’s life,’ she said, ‘after the first of being born, and before the third, which I’ll tell you about later on.’ She washed my hair, massaging the shampoo into my scalp, and she dried me with a towel afterwards, not like a brusque mother with her child but as someone admitting a friend to a secret society. I’d never felt closer to her, and felt a warmth of relief and comfort, knowing she’d be there to guide me into womanhood; I wouldn’t have to ask mother anything. I hid one or two tears of gratitude into the towel as Pamela rubbed my hair, little suspecting that when the time came she’d be gone, forgetting me, and I’d have to face it alone.
There I stood, naked in front of the largest mirror in the whole village, fingers searching the shape of what I was becoming. I cl
osed my eyes. Images flowed through my mind, without order or reason: Pamela in the shower, soap slipping down her body; Johnathan’s back, trembling as he prepared to dive into the quarry pool; his limbs brushing against mine under the dark water. The warm point of pleasure became the centre, from which it spread outwards. Susanna’s pony galloping, as if on fire, through muddy pasture; Douglas Westcott’s big barrel body, standing in amongst his cows, shimmering through the heat haze; and then suddenly, panicky, the throaty sound of the Rector’s Triumph Vitesse.
I opened my eyes. The car was roaring down the drive and round to the front of the house. I pulled on my clothes, before I heard him opening the front door of the rectory.
Now I was swimming naked in the quarry pool, and felt a part of the water, as if this was where I was meant to live, not walking around on the earth. It seemed an elementary error of evolution that we’d ever come out of the water, as grandfather maintained we once did. I wanted to return, and fell prey to the illusion that here I was at home, safe and free. Rolling over and slipping under now and then, I swam out into the middle of the pool. The sun had risen above the rockface beneath the beech tree, turning the pool into a sheet of glass which reverted to liquid where I swam, but solidified again behind me.
I lay on my back with my arms outstretched, keeping myself afloat with my feet, propelling myself slowly along. I could lie like this all day, I thought; soon I won’t even have to make an effort to stay afloat, I’ll be able to stretch my legs out too, and float like a human star, held by the water as if on its solicitous palm.