by Ruth Thomas
‘What happened, Luisa?’ my headmaster Mr Deane asked, pop-eyed, at an ‘emergency debriefing’ session the school laid on every year, for all its failed students.
‘Well: oh dear,’ my father confirmed, standing there in his slippers in our cool hallway when I returned home that day. A lot of people had said things like that, that week. ‘What happened?’ and ‘Oh dear.’ Other words, like ‘university’, ‘student accommodation’ and ‘London’, seemed to have adopted a hollow, clanging quality, like someone wandering around a field ringing a big cracked cow bell.
Stella called round at the end of September, to say goodbye. She was off with her rucksack and her umbrella plant and her CD player, off up to the other side of town, to start her course in veterinary science. And goodbye seemed the right thing to be saying.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ she asked, peering at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
Stella tutted. She seemed strangely cross. My secret trip to the doctor’s the previous February was something that had happened a long long time ago, to someone else; it was something with a beginning, a middle and an end.
‘D’you think you’ll do retakes?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if I was going to do retakes I should’ve signed up for them by now, shouldn’t I? And anyway, there’s no way I’d ever retake geography.’
‘You’ve got decent O-grades, though, haven’t you?’ Stella pointed out, a frown briefly puckering her forehead. ‘You could always do something with them. I mean, it’s not as if you haven’t got maths and English.’ She stared out, across our front lawn. ‘You could do a course at the Open University or something.’
I was silent. The words ‘Open University’ hung in the air between us. Nobody our age studies with the Open University, Stella! I wanted to yell. The Open University happens at two in the morning! It’s for shift workers and posties! It’s for mothers, up in the small hours with their babies!
Stella sighed and yawned.
‘So. Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to go now.’ She paused. ‘Ed’s coming round soon.’
I felt a strange, fizzing kind of heat somewhere inside my head.
‘Ed’s coming round?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Stella replied.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘how very odd. How very odd,’ I said again.
Although Stella had briefly mentioned him, I reflected, the last time we’d seen each other. But only in the amusing context of the way he dressed. Only to berate that awful T-shirt; those scruffy trainers; that weird see-through portfolio, that funny trenchcoat. Now the T-shirt and trainers and portfolio and coat seemed to have become less amusing. The clothes he wore and the things he carried seemed to have become acceptable in some way. ‘It’s not as if you were ever going to get round to anything, is it?’ she snapped now. ‘I mean, nothing ever happened, did it, after the . . . thing that happened at his party?’
I couldn’t think how to reply to this. The words failed to form. But something had already begun to shift, to become slippery, like compacted ice. Nothing seemed quite stable any more.
‘. . . and anyway,’ Stella was going on, ‘how about Craig Dillard?’
I stared at her.
‘What?’
‘I thought he was pretty keen, wasn’t he? You two seemed to be pretty much an item last term! Always sitting together in geography!’
‘An item?’ I said.
I thought of an item of luggage; of a great, heavy, unclaimed suitcase, revolving slowly round an airport carousel. And it struck me how friendship, of any kind, might never be more than two people occupying the same space at the same time. That was all it might ever be about – like the closeness of two people standing side by side in an airport, waiting to reclaim their luggage.
‘Anyway, you were never going to get your act together with Ed, were you? I mean, I’m really sorry about what happened and everything,’ Stella was saying, ‘but that’s just the way it is.’
And she turned and walked towards the gate. She was going to study veterinary science in a week’s time, and it was unclear what I was going to do. She always was pragmatic, though: I remember thinking that as I watched her rounding the corner of the road and disappearing from view. She’d had the ability to grab opportunities when they arose. In netball, for instance, she’d used to leap around scoring goal after goal, while I’d lurked at the side, unsure of my position, wearing a green tabard that said WD or WA. I hadn’t known, for years, what WD and WA even meant.
*
Half a mile or so before my mother and I got home I leaned forward and switched on the car radio. Someone was singing a song.
‘All we are is dust in the wind . . .’ they were singing, ‘. . . dust in the wind . . .’
‘Cheerful,’ my mother said.
And I switched the radio off again.
We drove the rest of the way behind a magnolia-coloured ice-cream van. It kept stopping abruptly. It had a drawing on the back, of a huge flattened palm.
Mind That Child!
it said, above the hand.
‘I remember when you used to run out for the ice-cream van,’ my mother said.
‘Yes.’
‘What tune was it, it used to play?’
‘“Greensleeves”.’
‘Yes. Not a very ice-creamy tune,’ she said, turning the car up the hill and onto our street.
‘What is an ice-creamy tune?’ I asked.
We often spoke like that, that summer. It was like someone yelling something at you across a huge field: you could hear their voice, but you couldn’t make out what they were saying.
*
Our house was a bungalow with an upstairs. Technically, it wasn’t a bungalow at all; it was, as I’d once written in a school essay, an anomaly. It had retained its essential bungalow nature, though. It was low, and the windows were wider than they were high. In my childhood drawings, our house was the slightly mad, square building that small children often draw of their home. Only, in my case, the off-centre windows and the precipitous roof and the out-of-scale flowers were pretty accurate. My drawings had certainly captured something, my parents’ friends used to say politely, peering at my work over my shoulder. There had been something about them: yes, there was definitely something about the down-on-its-hinges gate and the oddly asymmetrical little willow tree. Unlike some people’s houses, our house did not have room for artful display. There was a lot of clutter and not much space to put it in. Even the introduction of quite a small bowl on the kitchen table would have taken up valuable inches. The people who’d lived there before us had put the staircase in some time in the 70s; they were also the people who’d given the house its name: it had once been plain old 37 Salisbury Crags Rise, but they’d decided to call it ‘Pumzika’, which meant ‘tranquillity’ in Swahili, apparently. As none of us spoke Swahili, though, I suppose it could have meant anything. It could just have meant ‘bungalow on a hill’ for all we knew.
Ed McRae came here, I thought, as we pulled up into the drive. And I thought of a visit he had made – one, solitary visit – in the innocent interlude between our terrible Bellamy’s veal pie conversation and the New Year’s Eve party.
‘Your bungalow has an upstairs,’ he’d commented, as we plodded in through the front door.
‘Well, ten out of ten for observation!’ I should have retorted. But I hadn’t, of course. I’d never said anything to Ed McRae that I should have said. And I tried now, as my mother turned off the car engine, not to think of the awful, silent ascent Ed and I had made up the stairs; or of the childish, cat-print bean bag he’d sat on in my bedroom; or of the sombre discussion we’d had about a film we’d both recently seen – some story about a Russian rock band who’d all sported quiffs and winkle-pickers. Or how, in the middle of this conversation, Ed had suddenly started to sneeze, having developed an allergy to something in my room – to the carpet, maybe, or th
e bean bag, or maybe to me. I couldn’t actually remember much else about the afternoon at all. I suppose I’d blanked it out.
I pulled the door handle and got out of the car. Some sparrows were perched high up in our little cherry tree, making their summer, suburban sound, but they all ceased, as if they had been switched off, when we slammed our car doors shut. ‘Home sweet home,’ my mother said. She had said this for so many years that it had become a truism rather than fondly ironic, which was what I think she intended.
We took the shopping bags out of the boot and plodded with it all up the front path. Then my mother unlocked the door, and we stepped in. The hallway smelt, as it always did, of the washing drying on the pulley and of honey and fried onions. It was home. And I loved it and I hated it. It was like a poem by Catullus that I’d learned once at school, ‘Odi et amo’:
‘I hate and I love. You ask how this can be . . . I do not know – I just know – and it tortures me . . .’
I had to keep the hate part of it to myself, though. There was no one I could talk to about that.
‘So,’ my mother said, ‘let’s unpack and get tea organised.’
‘Yeah. I’m just going up to my room for a bit,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and help in a minute.’
And I sprang upstairs.
*
My room was full of things I had outgrown. The bean bag Ed McRae had once sat on was slumped in a slightly abject way in one corner of the room, and my old flowery duvet was flopped across my bed. Standing on my pine bookshelves was a half-empty bottle of moisturising cream I’d bought when I was sixteen, and the Mr Men tin I’d had since I was nine, and a sea urchin Sondrine had given me the day I left Moonchild. ‘No hard feelings, Luisa,’ she’d said, handing me this hard crustacean shell. Which I’d thought was quite funny. The sea urchin stood now on top of a little plastic bag which contained a small amount of fine soil and had a label on it saying, Congratulations: You Now Own a Piece of Texas. Stella had given it to me after she’d been on holiday there once. It was the sort of thing Stella had used to give people.
The clutter on my bookshelves had begun to resemble a kind of archaeological dig, it occurred to me. It had historical layers. I walked over and peered at a black-and-white photograph that was perched at the back, behind my alarm clock. It was of me as a baby, the print framed within narrow white borders. Sometimes, looking at that picture, I would try to remember how I had once been, how I had once viewed the world. But it was impossible. I was just a puzzled, pale-faced infant peering out from my mother’s arms. Baby Luisa, June 1976, it said on the back, in her handwriting. My mother occasionally mentioned how nice it would have been if other children had come along; if siblings had turned up, she used to say, as if siblings were people invited to a party. But I was my parents’ only child: that was just the way it was.
On the wall beside my bookshelf there was a cork noticeboard, on which was pinned a letter my old German penfriend Beate Groschler had once sent me. She’d sent it more than a year earlier – before I’d even started working at Moonchild. I’d only ever met Beate twice: once when she’d come to see me in Scotland, and once on a return trip to Germany. But she’d always seemed to be leading a calm, beatific life in Frankfurt, and in the photos she sent her face was always settled and kind. When she was younger, she’d used to send me recipes for cinnamon biscuits and plum dumplings, but in this last letter she’d mentioned a new boyfriend whose name was Frank and who was going to be studying law in Mainz.
I could still remember opening it, the day I came home from my emergency meeting with Mr Deane. I’d read it standing in the porch, my mother’s spider plants drooping sympathetically from pots over my shoulders.
‘Hello, Luisa!’ Beate had written, her greeting encircled in a little heart. ‘How are you? I hope good. We are cracking up on Friday. When do you crack up?’
And I had started to laugh. Which might, in a way, have answered her question. And then I’d gone upstairs and pinned the letter onto my noticeboard, and it had stayed there ever since.
One of the few concessions in my room to my St Luke’s job was something John Singer had made for me a few weeks earlier. This was a figure created from green cartridge paper. It had crescent-moon-shaped stickers dotted all over it and it consisted of six circles – head, body, four limbs – all secured by split pins. There was a drawing of a face on the biggest circle at the top: two misaligned eyes and a mad, lopsided smile. Written along one arm, in green felt-tip pen, it said:
missmckenze
I quite liked it: it was a sweet gift. Also it was a truer likeness, I couldn’t help thinking sometimes, than my own reflection in the dressing-table mirror. Because I couldn’t quite see myself any more – I couldn’t see what other people might be able to see. I couldn’t even tell if I was pretty or plain. The best I could make out, through half-closed eyes, was what the French called jolie laide. My face was pale and quite thin. My hair, illuminated by the sunlight coming in through the Velux window, had recently turned Ribena pink. It was what my old physics teacher would have called magenta. ‘You mix magenta with yellow to get red,’ I could remember him saying to us once, ‘and with cyan to get blue: disco colours!’ But it was clear that dyeing your hair did not alter anything: it did not cause the world to open out before you like a dance floor.
I hung around upstairs for a while and listened to the sound of my mother unpacking the shopping. I’d got into the habit that summer of skulking upstairs while my mother was in the kitchen being practical.
‘. . . some of that nice peppery ham we had a couple of weeks ago . . .’ I heard her saying to my father, and then the kitchen door closed.
I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. A small breeze trickled through the open window and across my face. I was aware of a cloud floating past, darkening the room for a few moments. There was the sound of two children on the pavement outside, shouting something about the correct way to throw a ball.
*
When I went downstairs, it had turned five. The kitchen seemed squarer than normal for some reason and was full of a bright, wavering sunlight, like the light in a swimming pool or an aquarium. From the fruit bowl in the middle of the table rose the smell of cantaloupe melon. There was half a Dundee cake on a melamine plate. Outside, swifts were calling, dipping and diving in the huge blue sky.
My mother had unpacked all the shopping, I noticed, with shame. She had stashed it away in the cupboards, while I’d been hanging around upstairs like Greta Garbo.
‘You were quick,’ I said.
‘You were slow,’ retorted my father, who was sitting at the table.
And there was a moment’s lull, as if the room was drawing breath. I leaned against the message board on the wall, against the Family Organiser that my mother had pinned there the previous January. It had illustrations on every page depicting happy families through the seasons. The green and blue squares relating to my parents’ lives were full of event (Dinner with Sue and Malcolm; to cinema; book tickets for Skye...) The orange squares relating to mine were a series of blanks.
‘Hungry, sweetheart?’ my mother asked, the way she always did.
‘Not really,’ I replied, my voice emerging small and stuck from my throat.
My mother looked at me.
‘Have you got hay fever?’ she asked, sympathetically.
And I moved away from the wall, causing the Family Organiser to swing on its hook and dislodging a postcard. Having a great break, I read, as I stooped to pick it up. Weather not bad. Food quite good. Went to the Maspalomas dunes today. Love, Wendy and Ron.
But why had Wendy and Ron bothered to write and tell my parents that? What were the Maspalomas dunes, anyway? My mother always pinned up the cards their friends sent – an organised trait I’d not inherited. I always just lost them. Or kept them, then threw them away at the wrong time. I’d discarded nearly all the letters Beate Groschler had sent me, for instance, keeping only the first couple, in which she’d told me she playe
d the piano and had blue eyes and liked swimming; and the last one, when she’d enquired when I would be cracking up.
‘Maybe you could set the table,’ my mother said. ‘We’ll need forks. Because there’s going to be coleslaw.’
‘Right.’
And I paper-clipped Wendy Williams’ postcard back up and began to plod about the room. I went over to the cutlery drawer, clattered out the knives and forks and crashed them down on the table. I placed plates into the spaces between.
*
‘So, we met an old schoolfriend of Luisa’s in Safeways this afternoon,’ my mother reported brightly to my father, once we were all sitting down at the table, contemplating tea. ‘Do you remember Stella?’ she continued. ‘Friend of Luisa’s? She used to come round quite a lot a couple of years back, when . . . before . . .’
And her voice adopted a sudden note of regret, and she stopped talking.
‘Stella?’ my father queried vaguely, picking up his fork and pronging a slice of ham with it. ‘D’you mean the one who got all the As?’
I looked across the room and out through the window. My heart felt curled up, unyielding, like a walnut in a shell. My mother glanced across at me and lowered her voice slightly. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘she’s studying to be a vet now . . .’
‘Is she?’
‘Yes: and she seems to be having quite a time, doesn’t she, Luisa?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s obviously very . . . busy with things, anyway. Has quite a busy . . . schedule . . .’
I am sitting in the same chair I sat in when I was five, I thought. I am sitting opposite the same picture on the wall. I’d painted that picture for my mother when I was small: it was a kind of explosion of flowers with the words Happy Days Are Coming written underneath. My mother had liked it circa 1982, and put it in the frame, and there it had stayed. And ever since, Happy Days Are Coming had been in my head when I sat in the kitchen, like a kind of truth you don’t question.