by Bruno Noble
‘I think it’s time for us to go,’ said Dad, and extended one hand to his adversary for a handshake and then the other to me to pull me up. Mum managed to stand up gracefully unassisted. Dad concluded, ‘Thank you, Mrs Baxter. You did well to call us in. And not a moment too soon. You have given us a lot to think about and we have a lot to talk about. The three of us,’ Dad emphasised. ‘And what you need from us is a reply to the question of Sharon’s further education; that’s been noted.’
We stood in the dark car park in between Mum’s and Dad’s cars, all three of us uncertain as to how to conclude this unexpected reunion. Dad looked better in the dark, an imposing shape the shabbiness of which was obscured; Mum’s vaguely luminescent features looked elfin beside his blunter shadowed ones.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You’re sorry?’ said Dad. ‘How do you think I feel?’ He looked at Mum. ‘I need some time to take this in. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Can I come over on Sunday morning?’
I had thought that Dad had meant that he was sorry for being the parent he had been, whether the absent dad or the bolshy dad, that he was apologising to me in his own fumbling way. And maybe he had been at the time but, when I saw him two days later, it occurred to me that he might have been sorry, too, to have learnt that his daughter had decided to exchange learning for sex.
Dad came around after Mum had returned from church and, for the umpteenth time, I wondered, as I made my parents a cup of coffee, what must it be like to be a guest in one’s own home. While, ten years ago, the mildest of misdemeanours would have earned me a slap, today, my graver offences carried with them their own punishment – guilt, shame and, worst of all, a sense of having disappointed my parents. But no telling off. My parents were, I had to admit, more understanding than I would have given them credit for; at least, that was what I preferred to think – that they were sympathetic and caring rather than merely indifferent to me.
We blew on our hot mugs at the sun-lit kitchen table. Seamus had yet to return from a sleepover and Sherah was at college in Brighton where she was studying sports science, so it was just the three of us for the first time in as long as I could remember. Mrs Baxter’s words came back to me. The idea that I had somehow, at some subconscious level, engineered this parental, familial reunion intrigued me. I considered it mistaken, but interesting. Still, I couldn’t help but feel happy – contented had been Mrs Baxter’s choice of word but smug might have been a more fitting one – that I had, if not actually manipulated Mum and Dad, been the reason for their sitting across the breakfast table with me in between them for the first time in forever. They had gone to the school because of me and they were here because of me.
Mum said, ‘About your school work,’ and we talked about that for a while, with neither Mum nor Dad seeming particularly upset. Mum said, ‘Given that you’re set on leaving school at the end of this academic year, on the condition that you work as hard as you can for your O levels, we’ll pay for a year’s secretarial college starting in September. If that’s what you want.’
I said that I would and that it was and so, calmly and straightforwardly, the end of my school career, my life of formal learning, was decided on.
‘Now, about the other thing,’ began Dad, fidgeting and evidently uncomfortable at the prospect of a discussion about sex with his teenage daughter. ‘Mum’s going to have a bit to say to you after me but I just want to say something before I leave you two to it. It’s one thing being liked but you have to be liked for the right reasons. Being liked for being… Well. You know. Easy. That’s not being liked. Being liked is being… It’s being respected. It’s the same thing, almost, anyway. You can’t be liked if you don’t like yourself and you can’t be respected if you don’t respect yourself. I mean, it’s all about self-respect. You’ve got to show that you have it, that you respect yourself and that means not giving away so much of yourself.’
I looked down into a mug as empty as me. How could I respect myself if I couldn’t locate the self to respect? If there were none? How could I tell Dad that?
Dad patted my hand. ‘Trust me, I know,’ he said. ‘I used to be a boy once and I know how boys think.’ He gave my hand a squeeze and, looking knowingly at Mum, said, ‘Right then. I’m off,’ but he didn’t move until, stepping suddenly towards me, he grasped me by the shoulders and said very seriously, ‘You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube.’
Mum and I listened for the clap of our front door and sat in silence for a while, Mum, I thought, embarrassed as much as me by Dad’s cliché until I realised she was so focused on the original source of her embarrassment that she hadn’t even heard what Dad had said. I counted the tiles on the kitchen floor and the motes of dust in the air. I closed my left and right eyes in turn to better align the sash window’s frames with the drainpipe and other verticals of the house we backed onto.
‘What on earth are you pulling those faces for?’ asked Mum. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing. Sorry,’ I said, and stopped.
‘I can’t do this,’ said Mum and looked at her mug. Then she lifted her eyes to me. ‘I’m not happy, Sharon. All this business. It’s unthinkable. Thank God you’re leaving the school.’
‘Sorry, Mum,’ I said in a small voice.
‘What am I supposed to tell you? What was I meant to have told you? What can I tell you that you don’t know?’ Mum’s hands were white against the porcelain of her mug.
‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I said, afraid that she or I might cry. ‘What did Dad and you agree that you’d tell me?’
Mum waved her hand. ‘So you’re on the pill?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you never thought of telling me?’
‘I wanted to but, you know… And you’re not around that much.’
‘Finally!’ exclaimed Mum. ‘Finally! I thought we’d get here! So it’s all my fault? My daughter is the village bike and it’s her mum’s fault!’
‘The school bike, Mum, the school bike.’
We stared at each other, surprised by the fervour with which I had corrected her.
Mie
I only learnt later, when I had spent more time with Margaret ahead of my university entrance exams to study English, that she had been able to speak Japanese all along. To amuse her, I would make English sentences using gairaigo, Japanese words that had their origin in English, much as, as I would learn later, the English borrowed words from the French. The entrepreneur had a rendezvous with the chef in the abattoir where they had an apéritif and hors d’oeuvres. The kameraman, looking sumāto in his new janpa and torēningupantsu, wiped the spilt jusu and miruku with his hankachi and some kitchinpēpā.
One afternoon found me sitting at a table in the sixth form room with Ursula and Margaret. Successive classes had not yet taught Ursula that love only follows respect and that a need to be loved only brings contempt. She looked gloomy, as only a friendless person who needs to be loved could be, and what I had to say made her shoulders sag all the more.
‘Ursula-san, Maggie-san, I have reached a conclusion: I shall study English at university.’ I fiddled with the hem of my green school skirt. Ursula’s reaction made it clear that she considered this a victory for her rival. I felt the need to explain and tried to do so in a way that would impress and endear me to Margaret and not offend Ursula. ‘I long to get away,’ I said. ‘To go somewhere really different, really foreign, and German seems closer in so many respects to Japanese than English does.’
At this, Ursula guffawed and her ponytails shook. ‘My God! You think Japan is like Germany and not so much like England?’ She adjusted her position to face both Margaret and me and slapped a hand on each trousered knee. ‘You both drive on the left and you both have an unelected head of state, to start with. You are both island nations and’ – here Ursula floundered – ‘and you both eat a lot of fish!’ She resumed her anxious, sorry expression and adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose.
I had never he
ard or seen Ursula so confrontational. Margaret appeared disinvested from the discussion and disinclined to come to my assistance. The distinction between sashimi and fish in batter served in newspaper was clearly not one she thought worth making.
‘The thing is,’ I began, in what I hoped to be a moderator’s tone and with a forced smile as I noticed the decrease in the volume of the room’s hubbub after Ursula’s brief explosion, ‘that I wish to escape not so much this country, that I love in so many ways, but its formalities, the many ways in which I feel that I, me, the individual, am subjugated.’ I took inspiration from an essay I had scored high marks in. ‘Both countries wear the yoke of failed military expansionism heavily and have withdrawn into, if not quite collectivism and socialism, a state in which the merits of the individual, that pure expression of selfhood, are somehow subjugated.’
Ursula looked at me incredulously; Margaret watched me impassively.
‘I mean, in Germany, you have retained the formal way of speaking to people, you still have sie. England hasn’t. England is less formal, it’s more relaxed, it’s cool.’ Margaret had taught me not to say groovy. ‘I mean,’ I added desperately, ‘look at punk rock.’
‘Look at Berlin,’ said Ursula, but without conviction and now quite deflated.
Margaret placed her hand on my knee, leant forward and said quietly, ‘You are so wrong, you know. It’s arguable that the English, following your line of reasoning, are more formal than the Germans – and the French. How to put it? You know the French vous and toi, their equivalent of the German sie and du?’
I nodded.
‘Well, vous and sie are ‘you’ and tu and du are ‘thou’ – do you notice the similarities? It’s we, we English, who are the formal ones – we dropped the informal thou, thee, thy and thine from the English language years ago and retained only the formal mode of speech.’ She patted my knee. ‘There. Now you know. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.’ She sat back and fixed me with a look that suggested that she hoped it had.
I was speechless with that discovery and had to make a mental readjustment. To my surprise, Ursula’s morose expression remained unchanged. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Who am I to talk?’ She addressed Margaret directly. ‘I am leaving at the end of this year, too, and, yes, I am going to go to England or America and, anyway, not back to Germany; so who am I to tell Mie-san where to go?’ I realised that my hand was raised to my mouth just as Margaret’s was to hers; her eyes were wide open. ‘If I am honest, I have not made a success of my time here. The pupils don’t like me, the teachers have never accepted or even supported me, and Japanese men are terrified of me.’ She waved Margaret’s protestations away. ‘No. I know. Anyway, I have applied for jobs as a German teaching assistant at universities where I assume that university-age students who want to learn will be more forgiving of my weaknesses than schoolchildren whose interest in a foreign language goes only so far as singing along to Beatles songs.’ Ursula smiled at me and leant forward conspiratorially. ‘Who knows, we might even meet in England one day!’
For the first time, my heart went out to her. I saw her as a person and not as a foreign national. I felt ashamed to have contributed, no matter how little and how indirectly, to her unhappiness in my country. Her failure had been ours. We had turned the virtue of niceness into a liability.
Sharon
Was it that I was unfeeling or that I didn’t dare to feel? Sorrow, shame, rejection were like so many clothes discarded in a heap at my feet for want of hangers in between scene changes. The theatre lighting technician swings a spotlight despairingly across a bare stage in search of its non-existent target. There’s nobody there. Just stage boards and cross-shaped duct tape marking yet another place at which I don’t exist.
At some point between the end of my last school term and the start of secretarial college, it had been decided that I would go and live with Aunt Wanda. As far as she was concerned, it was all going to be great fun; we two girls would have a laugh, I’d be the sister to her that her elder boring sister never had been and, she said conspiringly, we would spend the rent my parents were going to pay her on takeaway food we would scoff while watching wildlife documentaries. Besides, she made me see, it made sense: Sherah had left home, my mother’s commitments meant her being away a lot, Seamus could move in with Dad who spent all his time ferrying him from home to school, training session, match and back again, the house could be let and I would have a shorter commute to secretarial college in the West End.
Aunt Wanda hugged me in welcome at her front door, a suitcase either side of me. My mother stood in her running gear on the short garden path, sheepish and embarrassed to be declining coffee and a chat with her sister and her daughter as she pleaded other commitments. I clung to Wanda, my nose pressed into her neck and into her fresh, rosemary-scented hair, who reciprocated with a gentle squeeze and talked to her sister over my shoulder and that’s how I said goodbye to my mother: through Wanda, vicariously, hugging my mother through Wanda and Wanda knowing this and never minding.
Wanda helped me carry my suitcases up to the second bedroom that was to be mine. My mother, when she came to stay in between marathons and work commitments, would sleep on the futon in the attic. Having unpacked, I stood by the window, one foot in shadow, the other in sunlight, attempting to seize the buzzing sensations around me.
Mie
Takahiro Imamura-san had never stood out from the boys at my school until Margaret introduced us to one another in our final year.
Margaret had chaperoned a group of final-year pupils who had signed up to see a kabuki performance of Macbeth, which we were studying. At Margaret’s invitation, I joined her in the front row of the bus. As the other pupils piled in, she indicated one of them with a nod and asked, ‘Do you know him?’ Takahiro moved down the aisle, a slightly long- and floppy-haired adolescent of medium height and build who wore a pleasant, open expression. He had a good complexion by the standards of a generation that was discovering milkshakes and hamburgers.
‘Only by name. I’ve seen him around. He’s neither a swot nor one of the cool guys, you know, who hang around in gangs and act tough and ask you out all the time.’
‘He’s your only competition,’ smiled Margaret, reclining her seat so that I had to turn my whole body around to look her in the eyes.
‘Competition? For what?’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Margaret. ‘You know.’
I really didn’t know.
‘You and he are the school’s top English-language pupils. It’s you two by a mile. No one else comes close. The pupils know it. And all the teachers say so.’
The bus moved off and out of the school gates to join the slow-moving evening traffic. Men and women in black suits under black umbrellas lined bus stops in anticipation of buses stuck behind fleets of black cars. Windscreen wipers were set to work intermittently. Streetlights seemed only to add to the gloom that I perceived only objectively, in a complete reversal of the pathetic fallacy we had studied in Macbeth.
Margaret’s comments were a revelation, a not unpleasant shock. I had never thought in such terms, never thought that, as I walked home from school or lunched in the school canteen, teachers, somewhere, as they readied themselves for home or opened their bento boxes, had said good things about me to each other, had lauded me and referred to me as a top pupil – me and Takahiro. I felt a strange kinship with him that warmed me before it discomfited me – doubly so, given that we’d never even spoken. Margaret’s comments stimulated me: if I was considered to have competition, I had to ensure I would win. In the space of seconds, I had gone from not thinking in terms of a competition to being determined to triumph. I would have to get to know my adversary. I would have to meet Takahiro.
‘I’ll introduce you to him, if you’d like,’ said Margaret.
Margaret made the introductions at the interval, by ensuring that all five pupils who had congregated around her, soft drink in hand, knew each other; which we did, if only by name. I
immediately saw the group for what it was: three pupils with poor English in awe of their English language assistant and of two pupils with excellent English. Takahiro must have sensed this, too, for he replied readily, in order to save the others’ blushes, to Margaret’s question as to what we thought of the production; as though knowing that the others – and maybe I, too – would be too shy to say a word.
‘Maggie-san, I would be very interested to know if, in your opinion, I am completely wrong in my analysis and beg you to tell me if so; anyway, it is this.’ I was impressed and jealous of Takahiro’s easy familiarity in calling Margaret Maggie. ‘While I am enjoying the performance on, I must admit, a rather superficial level, I feel that the kabuki style of theatre is not suited to this particular play. I mean, Macbeth is interesting – a masterpiece – for its great psychological subtlety, and this kabuki performance, well, it renders everything one-dimensional.’ Takahiro received nods and grunts of assent from us all, save from Margaret, who merely raised her eyebrows in encouragement. ‘I mean, take Banquo’s ghost. The scene of his appearance is played like a comedy. “Oh! Help! I’ve seen a ghost!” The actions are exaggerated and stylised such that there is no room for ambiguity. Such is the nature of kabuki.’ Takahiro clutched his paper cup with both hands and shook his head, then continued, ‘There’s something else. The colour scheme is all wrong. When I read the play, the colour that dominated was red, all I saw was red; there’s so much killing, and blood is mentioned so frequently. Here, all we see is white, the white kabuki faces, the white-sheeted ghost.’