Each morning they would walk to Saint Winifred’s bundled up in thick coats and heavy brogues that had been made to order for their exceptionally wide feet. On their way, they often came across troops of rough kids from Northport’s council estate. They would call out names like fatty and snob and sometimes even threw stones. But the stones never hit either of the siblings; they just landed near enough to make them jump, which seemed to satisfy the scallywags, making them screech like heartless monkeys. John told his sister to ignore them, these kids were worthless trash. When they grew up, they would trade glue sniffing and cat torture for burgling houses and wife beating.
Even at Saint Winifred’s Marion found schoolwork difficult. Fractions especially troubled her; the number on top wobbling on its little tightrope with the cruel number underneath waiting to slice it up into pieces. John tried to help her understand them by taking a packet of Mr. Kipling lemon curd tarts from the kitchen and cutting them into pieces.
“See, Marion,” he said, grinding his teeth as he explained it for the umpteenth time. “I’ve cut one cake down the middle. Those are two halves. Now, can you cut it into quarters?”
But Marion learned nothing, and they ended up with a pile of sticky yellow crumbs, which they would stuff into their mouths before Mrs. Morrison realized they had taken the cakes without permission.
At eleven John started Golding’s Grammar School for boys. Two years later when Marion took the entrance exam for Golding’s sister school, Ladychapel High, she failed miserably. So she went to Turner House Comprehensive instead until one day she came home with her coat ripped and FATSO knifed into her leather briefcase (none of the other kids had briefcases; instead they carried nylon kit bags with Bowie Rules or Bay City Rollers Forever written in Biro all over them).
Mother refused to let her daughter go back to Turner House, and in return for a substantial donation from Zetland’s Fine Fabrics towards Ladychapel’s new swimming pool, a place was found for Marion.
Ladychapel girls were high achievers; they excelled at both sports and academic subjects; they were graceful and at ease with themselves in social situations. Marion was none of these things. At the new school, she felt like a zoo animal that had strayed into the wrong enclosure: a bear trying to blend in with flamingos. Every other girl had slim ankles, a tiny waist, long hair, and a delicate neck. There were a few plain girls, but at least they were brilliant at schoolwork. Marion stuck out because she was stupid and plain and had hair that looked like the aftermath of a bushfire. While other girls plotted out their futures as doctors or businesswomen, her only dream was to be allowed to stay at home and eat buttered toast in front of the TV all day long.
The nickname Manatee was given to her by Juliet Greenhalgh. In biology class, they had learned that a manatee was a pale and bloated river-dwelling beast with female breasts. During a swimming lesson one afternoon, in the very same pool her dad helped to pay for, the other girls slipped one by one into the water, while Marion stood with her thick legs stuck to the tiled floor.
Her slim shoulders bobbing in and out of the rippling pool, Juliet shouted out, “Come on, Marion, why don’t you want to swim? Manatees are supposed to love water.” Then the teacher, Miss Oberlin, had said, “Yes, thank you for your comments, Miss Greenhalgh, we all have better things to do than wait for Manatee—I mean Marion—to dive.” Whether Miss Oberlin had called her the name on purpose or not, Marion would never know, but the slip triggered giggles from the other students that echoed around the tiled room.
Running out of patience, Miss Oberlin gave Marion’s lower back a hard shove, sending her headfirst into the pool. Strange shapes swirled before her eyes, and chlorinated water gushed up her nose as she sank with the inevitability of a tombstone pushed into deep water. She had been quite prepared to drown when Miss Oberlin’s callused hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the surface.
At Ladychapel the teachers seemed to accept that Marion was stupid and therefore any attempt to help her achieve better grades was a waste of precious time and resources. They never asked her questions in class or even bothered to comment if she did badly on test papers or gave in poor homework. They would wordlessly return her work, red ink covering the paper like scratches on skin, while other girls were kept after class for scoring Cs or even B-minuses.
For Marion, trying to follow the logic of mathematics or science was as dizzying as being trapped in the fun house on Northport Pleasure Beach, surrounded by crazy mirrors and twisted hallways. She was so far behind the other students, she sometimes feared being made to join the sleepy-eyed special kids that flapped their hands (in what could have been excitement or panic) as they were herded onto the bus to the Elizabeth Simon Institute each morning.
John was the only person who seemed the least bothered about her education. He tried to help with her homework, but by the time she had got to secondary school, even he grew frustrated with her lumbering brain.
“You see, it is red because that symbolizes death, Marion.”
“But in the other poem black meant death. I don’t see how I am supposed to know which one it will be every time.”
Perhaps her schoolwork would have improved if she could have studied alone, but just sitting in a classroom surrounded by sharp-minded girls, their expensive fountain pens racing across the page, turned her brains to mush. She spent entire lessons worrying that she might break wind, make gurgly tummy noises, or sneeze in a weird way. The time she had tripped in Geography, smacking her nose against the teacher’s desk, then trying to pretend she wasn’t hurt, only to have the other girls point at her laughing because blood was pouring from her nose, still haunted her. Something so embarrassing would never happen to Juliet Greenhalgh.
Mostly the other pupils at Ladychapel didn’t bully or tease Marion; she wasn’t important enough to attract their valuable attention. Instead they behaved as if she were invisible as she stumbled down long, airy corridors and beneath classical porticos, from one elegantly high-ceilinged classroom to another.
Juliet Greenhalgh played tennis for the county, and her parents owned a chain of restaurants called Café de Cuckoo. Her mother was a former actress-model and had appeared in a commercial for a popular brand of kitchen roll. Juliet was so pretty and popular, Marion was almost flattered to be mocked by her.
In the canteen queue, Marion had felt a flush of excitement as Juliet’s warm breath tickled her neck. “Don’t eat everything, Manatee, leave some for the rest of us,” she whispered before ramming her tray into Marion’s plump behind.
It had been during a trip with Mother to Pennington’s department store that Juliet and John crossed paths. Marion was fourteen and John was sixteen. Mother left them in the café eating coffee cake and drinking hot chocolate while she went to search for dust mite–proof pillowcases in the bedding department.
Juliet was sitting at a table across the room with a group of smartly turned-out tennis-club girls. They were snapping open compacts and applying makeup they had just bought from the beauty department when Juliet pointed and shouted out:
“Look, it’s Marion the Manatee!”
As she got up from her seat and approached their table Marion felt sick with dread. Juliet, in a tweed miniskirt, black tights, and shiny pumps, blond hair held back by a velvet Alice band, stood over them like a queen meeting beggars.
“How simply charming. Mr. and Mrs. Manatee all dressed up in their smart winter togs,” she said.
Both Marion and John were wearing heavy overcoats that Mother had just chosen for them in the clothes department. It was warm and steamy in the café, but Mother was worried the new coats might get left behind if they took them off. Marion wriggled uncomfortably in her red gabardine, suddenly hating the garment that she had fallen in love with just an hour earlier.
“How adorable—are all those Christmas presents for the little manatee children?” said Juliet, looking at the parcels that Mother had left for Marion and her brother to keep watch over.
John
kept forking cake into his mouth without even looking up at Juliet, but Marion knew that he was furious. And it was her fault for being fat and stupid while attending a school full of sleek, brilliant princesses. It was one thing to be mocked by scallywags from the council estate; but a beautiful rich girl making fun of them in Pennington’s was unbearable.
Three weeks later, a dog walker found Juliet lying unconscious in the frozen mud of Albert Park. She had been struck with a rock while cycling home through a thickly wooded area near the council estate. The mild fracture to her skull healed quickly, but she suffered from severe anxiety afterwards and was forced to take months off school and give up tennis permanently.
A boy from the estate was caught trying to sell her missing bike. When the police questioned him, he said he had found it propped up by his grandmother’s garden gate. There wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges against the youth, so the crime went unsolved. At Ladychapel they had a special assembly during which the headmistress talked to them about Juliet’s attack, and students were warned not to go through the woods alone. Marion made a card for Juliet and took part in prayers for her recovery.
As she lay down in bed one night a few weeks after Juliet’s attack, Marion felt a hard lump behind her head. Reaching underneath the pillow she took out the black Alice band that Juliet always wore. With her thumb she rubbed off a few specks of dried blood sticking to the velvet. Just touching it made her heart beat faster, as if it contained some mysterious essence of Juliet’s spirit. She got out of bed and went over to the mirror, sliding it onto her own turbulent hair. She felt overcome with a strange power, as if she had tried on a crown belonging to a mythical queen. She hadn’t hated Juliet; in fact, she had almost been in love with her and that made what happened all the more significant. How thrilling to have a secret like this! Now she was no longer just a plain fat girl who people felt sorry for. This made her important and interesting, like a dull brown field with a seam of gold hidden deep in the ground beneath it.
DINNER WITH JOHN
Marion was in the kitchen preparing their evening meal when John next came up from the cellar. Without saying a word to her, he went straight into the dining room and switched on the small TV set that was so old, it didn’t even have a remote control.
“The Seven Years War,” he shouted from the next room.
Marion stirred the pan of oxtail soup to stop the gritty lumps from sticking. Mother would have thought it was common to have a TV set in the dining room, but John liked to watch Brain of Champions while they ate. Marion sometimes imagined answering one of the questions correctly herself: “Well done, Mar,” John would say, “that was a tough one, fancy you knowing that.” But this never happened; the pace of the quiz was so quick that she didn’t have time to even think before someone else answered.
And of course most of the subjects were things like science and history that she knew nothing about. Indeed what kind of question might Marion be able to answer? She could never remember the capital cities of countries, or kings and queens of England. If someone asked her to name the prime minister she could manage that, but who, apart from an imbecile, couldn’t?
Sometimes she got cross with herself for not being more knowledgeable, or at least attempting to read interesting books and newspaper articles rather than wasting all her time daydreaming or watching what John called that “American made-for-TV trash” (even watching the same film more than once, if it was one of her favorites, like The Disappearance of Jodie-Lee or A Home for Malcolm). Perhaps if she were a well-read and less ignorant person, then her intellectually minded brother might want to spend more time with her, rather than staying down in that cellar practically every minute of the day. And he wouldn’t get angry and call her dummy for not knowing so many “obvious things.”
During the evenings they might sit together on the sofa, drinking tea and discussing “the history of France” or “space travel.” After hours and hours had passed Marion would look at the clock and say, “Goodness, John, is it two a.m. already? We’ve been talking so much, I didn’t notice the time, but now we really ought to get off to bed.”
And John would reply, “Oh, but can’t we sit and chat for a little while longer—I was having such a good time. How about you make us some toast, then we can discuss famous explorers of the Amazon rainforest?”
“The Prague uprising,” she heard John shout from the next room. “And the answer is—the Prague uprising,” echoed the quiz show presenter.
Marion carried the tray of food from the kitchen to the dining room and placed John’s bowl of soup on the place mat before him. The place mats belonged to a set that had been used by the family for years, and the picture on it was of a Scottish mountain called Ben Lomond, which had been close to an area they often visited as children with their parents. The name had such a lovely sad sound to it. Marion imagined herself as a young peasant girl climbing that mournful mount, carrying a basket of eggs to a sickly relative. She would have to pull her shawl tightly around her long black hair to keep off the driving rain. How glad the relative would be to see those eggs, and even gladder to have some company while he ate them!
Marion sat down at her own place mat: Loch Lomond, a lake at dawn and an old man fishing at the edge. She always felt sad for the old man. Did he have anyone to look after him, or did he live alone in some stone croft, worrying about the day when he would be too weak to go down to the lake and catch a fish for his supper? In the background you could see a boat sailing across the waters.
“Do you remember that year you ran away on The Maid of the Mist?” asked Marion.
“What?”
“We were on holiday in Scotland; I was thirteen; you must have been about fifteen. You had an argument with Dad and then stowed away on the ferry that took tourists on trips around the loch.”
John shook his head dismissively.
“No idea what you are talking about, woman.”
How typical of him, thought Marion, he never remembers things. Memories, however, were everywhere for her, firmly glued to each object in the house. The Royal Crown Derby dinner service they ate from evoked childhood meals when the china, now covered with hairline cracks, was creamy and unblemished as the skin of a young girl.
She took a mouthful of brown soup, savoring the familiar dark meaty taste. Almost everything they ate was reheated from either a tin or a packet. For breakfast they had toast with margarine and tea. Lunch was sandwiches or perhaps a pork pie. Evening meal would be something like soup, spaghetti hoops on toast, cheese on toast, or tinned stew with packet mashed potatoes. Sunday dinner was always sliced beef from the supermarket deli with instant gravy. If either of them was hungry between meals, they filled up on biscuits or Mr. Kipling cakes. Marion liked the Bakewell tarts; John preferred the lemon curd pies.
John, of course, prepared food for the visitors himself; she had nothing to do with that, though sometimes he asked her to buy special items from the supermarket, foreign things that she presumed were for them; jars of pickled gherkins, goat’s cheese, and a funny type of spiced sausage called Kolbasa.
“I went over to lunch at Judith’s today,” said Marion, trying to remove a little speck of something floating in her glass of orange cordial with her finger.
“I know, you told me already.” He sighed as if weary at having to bear twice the weight of worthless information.
“Lydia has changed from fashion to film studies.”
John dipped his slice of white bread in the soup and bit off a soggy brown chunk.
“Fashion and film studies, what kind of rubbish is that?”
“Well, I don’t know. I suppose these things must be important if the university goes to the trouble of teaching them.”
“University should be for proper academic subjects like science and maths. Good luck to her trying to get any kind of job, that’s all I can say.”
The speck refused to be caught, so Marion gave up and drank it down instead. As John reached for the salt, the
round scar on his wrist caught her eye and she noticed it was made up of several little red lines, were those teeth marks? Had one of them bitten him? What terrible circumstances might have led to such a thing happening? A picture of John down in the cellar with them flashed into her head, but she refused to let it stay for more than a second. No, I’m being silly, it’s just his eczema flaring up again, I must get him some cream, she told herself.
“Judith wants us to cut the tree down. The sycamore.”
“What?”
John’s face went dark with anger. Dad used to get exactly the same expression: “Don’t upset him,” Mother would say, “he’s got that look like he’s ready to murder someone.”
“She says it’s diseased,” said Marion timidly.
“You tell her that tree is on our property and it’s nothing to do with her. You know that I don’t like people interfering with our business, Marion.”
“I’m sorry, love—it’s just I didn’t know what to say to her—so I told her I would ask you about it—”
“Well, the next time she asks, tell her to fuck off.”
Marion flinched as if he had thrown a rock at her. She hated it when John used that kind of language, it didn’t seem right coming from an educated person like him. Then he got up from the table and switched off the TV.
“You know that program you like is on tonight, love—the comedy show,” she said, trying to soften the atmosphere.
John kept his back turned to her.
“The one with the tall skinny woman who makes you laugh.” She felt a sudden need not to spend the evening with only the television for company. Even John in a mood was better than no one at all.
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