by Sally Bayley
In Jamaica, at least, Mr Rochester could open the window to clear out the smell and release the heat. But in Colwood you could not. In Jamaica you opened windows to let in the storm. Opening windows relieves tension: atmosphere, scudding clouds, whipping rain, bad dreams. But open windows were forbidden at Colwood; so the only way to relieve tension was to shout and scream, and my dream at least made me scream.
To England, then, I conveyed her: a fearful voyage I had with such a monster in the vessel. Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield, and saw her safely lodged in that third story room, of whose secret inner cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild beast’s den – a goblin’s cell.
(Jane Eyre)
I am starting to sound like an adult. This is what happens when you have adults watching over you all day and all night, adults looking down on you, even in your sleep. At Colwood, Mr Murdstone was constantly peering at me from the corner of the room as I went about my business; Mr Brocklehurst was staring at me from the front of the schoolroom with his tall purple hat, Mr Brocklehurst wrapped in a cloud of silvery plumage; Mr Murdstone with his furious visage glaring at me from across the room. I could have done very well without the Murdstones, says David Copperfield, but the influence of the Murdstones upon me was like the fascination of two snakes on a wretched young bird.
And whatever Bertha Mason must have felt under the calm, cool gaze of Grace Poole, I felt too. Because at Colwood we were all beasts of one kind or another: goblins and fairy folk, witches and elves. But I’m only going to tell you about one of these strange things, because Tracy White, or Trace as we called her, was one of the strangest of all.
Trace was usually seen with socks around her ankles. No one had ever told her about nylons. When I met her, I knew that Trace was one of Miss Marple’s poor things. She was the adenoidal type – Gladys Martin speaking through her nose – and I felt sorry for her. Mum says you shouldn’t feel sorry for people. Well, I didn’t only feel sorry for Trace. I liked her too, because she was funny and plain-spoken. She knew what she liked; she knew what she loved. And isn’t that the main thing?
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When Inspector Neele goes to inspect Gladys Martin’s room at Yewtree Lodge he finds an untidy and slovenly space. ‘Slovenly’ is his word for it. Gladys Martin, he decides, may have been trained well as a maid, but in her personal life her habits were chaotic and slovenly.
‘Slovenly’ is a cruel word to use for Gladys. Slovenly suggests ‘sluttish’. Gladys, the inspector suggests, might be found with her nylons down. When he goes through her things he finds cheap knick-knacks: a small collection of shells bound inside a soiled handkerchief and a Polaroid shot of Gladys beaming with two other girls dressed in waitresses’ uniforms behind a countertop. Girls like Tracy White.
Trace was fifteen or sixteen, and the first thing you noticed about her was that she had large breasts. You noticed partly because she was short, but also because she wore tight white T-shirts. On her bottom half she wore flared skirts, the sort of skirts I wore to school, skirts that puffed up behind like a balloon.
No one knew why Trace was at Colwood. Perhaps she had refused to go to school; she did tell me once that she had been told she had to wash more and that people had complained about her clothes. But Trace wasn’t one of the self-harming girls. No, Trace was always cheerful. Trace wanted to be a pop star. She was practising for Top of the Pops.
‘There’s a bit in me head,’ she said to me one morning. ‘There’s a bit stuck in me head. Sal, I can’t get it out. It’s crawlin’ round me head. Madonna. It’s all ’er fault. I can’t get her outta me head.’
‘Who, Tracy? Who’s stuck in your head?’
‘Bleedin’ Madonna.’
And suddenly Trace began whirling round and round on the shiny floor with her arms wide open like a little girl twirling a hula hoop on the beach, a little girl catching at her ball, a little girl who had never been to school and couldn’t read, a little girl who knew only some of the words to pop songs.
Spinning round and round,
She’s in trouble …
You’d better say a prayer
For the girl in trouble,
The girl in lots of trouble.
Years later, I found Trace inside another book, a book by a man called John Fowles. One of the characters in that book is the spit of Trace, so close in fact that when I read it after all those years I couldn’t stop crying. I shook and shook because I knew I’d found her, Trace that is, and this is her story.
A man finds a young girl in a cinema and takes her back to his flat. She is dressed in an old man’s duffle coat, a dirty grey sweater and some baggy jeans. The girl snuffles all the time and she has dirty fingernails. The girl, whose name is something like Janey or Janine, but let’s call her Sue, pretends to be twenty-four, but really she’s seventeen, and she’s never slept with a man before. But she’d like to.
But the man, let’s call him David, or Dave, doesn’t want to sleep with her, so they agree to be friends. They muddle along for a while, some nights sharing the same bed. Dave is slightly annoyed at Sue’s snuffling about and her filthy fingernails and her running off to attend strange meetings about the Holy Spirit. But he feels something for her nonetheless. It’s hard not to feel something for Poor Sue.
Then one day Dave finds his bed empty. Sue has gone. He looks all over London for her but he can’t find her in any of her usual haunts: the Red Cross charity shop near Marylebone, the café where they sell chips for 20p, the church hall where she goes on Saturday mornings early to get all the bargains, the Save the Children shop off Notting Hill High Street. No matter where he looks he can’t find the girl who slurps her tea and squeezes chips with her filthy fingernails, the girl whose hair is always in her face and whose duffle coat carries bits of mud and leaves around the hem (she sometimes sleeps in Kensington Gardens). That girl, Sue, who has a thick Glaswegian accent and chipmunk cheeks, David tells the police, goes missing one day from his bed. He knows she’s been there because he can smell the damp outside on his sheets. He can see the shape of her furry hood. That girl, who he never sees again.
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The girl I knew, the girl called Trace, was spotty and dumpy round the middle. She was short and untidy. That’s what I’d tell the police anyway, because to say anything else wouldn’t be truthful. Her clothes never fitted or matched, so things were always spilling out: bits of blouse, bits of belly, bits of saggy underwear. And because Trace wore charity-shop clothes, clothes she never washed, she always smelled bad.
‘Urgh, Trace, you fucking stinking old woman … gross … get away. You smell like a pig, you fat stinking pig. Go and have a bath!’
Poor Trace. All she ever wanted was for the boys to notice her, so whenever she could get out of Colwood she went to the charity shops to find more clothes to make herself look nice.
Trace loved charity shops. They were her passion. She went to charity shops with plastic bags stuffed inside her dress. But she could only afford the things she found on the sale rail. The sale rail was her favourite thing. She dreamed of that rail. She dreamed of it day and night.
‘Sal, I found a gorgeous blouse for 50p, nipped in round the breasts. Look, it holds me in nice and tight … shows off my best part … Look, Sal, look!’
Trace was always making me look. I had to look and look and then make nice comments about her breasts and bum. Nothing else. Always her breasts and bum.
‘Do you think this blouse goes with my jeans? I’m not very good in jeans. I need to be nice and thin like you … Mind you, you’re too thin. You don’t have any boobs. At least I’ve got those. You need to get a pair, you know. It’s what boys like. Then, when you get them, when you get a bit of weight on yer – you do need a bit of weight on yer, you know – yer need to show them off as much as possible. I can get yer something if you like, from the sale rail. Yer need to think about what will make you look nice and sexy, Sal, because b
oys like yer to look sexy … But you’ve got to grow a pair first. You can’t go out looking like that!’
Trace was always talking about going out looking like that. She spent most of her time thinking about this. Going out looking like something was the most important thing to her, and whenever she could she practised her Madonna routines in her dorm, because she believed Madonna was the sexiest woman in the world and if she could only twist and turn and writhe like Madonna then the boys would come running. So she sang Madonna songs at the top of her lungs and drove all of us crazy.
‘Bloody hell, shut up won’t you, Trace? Stop that fucking racket! What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re not bloody Madonna, all right? You’re not even close. Not even close, Trace. Quit that fucking racket and wake up!’ Sharon Pointer. It was always Sharon Pointer.
But through the walls Trace was twisting and turning; she was saying her pop prayers.
In your prayers, I will take you there, say your prayers, and I will take you there …
‘In your dreams, Trace, in your dreams. Now shut the fuck up!’
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The truth is, no one wanted Trace. They’d want her even less if they knew a thing or two. For one thing, her mother lay in a creaky bed in a bedsit in Hastings on Sea and pointed at whatever she wanted, because her mother couldn’t speak. She could only point with her fat greasy fingers, fingers she filled with greasy chips, chips she sucked on like sweets, Trace told me. And when you have a mother like that, a mother who doesn’t notice you, a mother who can’t notice you, and a father who was never known, a father who might as well have been a piece of square yellow Lego for all Trace cared, a Lego man with no clothes, a Lego man she couldn’t bleedin’ find in the heap of sticky plastic cubes she sifted through at the back of the charity shop.
Trace was always looking for men. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said every morning before breakfast about the man in uniform serving up cold baked beans in metal trays, the man who didn’t once look back at her, the man who never once smiled. ‘He’s bleedin’ gorgeous!’
Trace was the first girl I knew to use that word about a man. Gorgeous, I mean. I don’t know where she got it from, that word for men.
How were men gorgeous, exactly? Gorgeous was for lovely sea views, for scones and cream, for Victoria sponge cake, for Mum’s favourite lacy white dress, maybe for Princess Di. Gorgeous was for my mother before she had had children. Gorgeous was for the floral fabric she’d spied in Bentalls department store in Worthing, the rose-covered fabric she was hoping would come on sale soon, the fabric she took a sample of and kept in her bedroom drawer. Gorgeous was never for men.
Of course I knew Trace was looking for a life with something gorgeous in it, because so far she hadn’t got much to go on.
‘Mum stays in bed all day,’ she told me one morning at breakfast. ‘She can’t get up. Her ankles are too fat. I have to make the beans all the time.’
‘Make the beans?’
‘Baked beans. Bleedin’ baked beans. What do you fink?’
Trace would only eat baked beans on toast or toast and nothing else. On the days when beans weren’t served she threw a fit.
‘Beans, mate! Where are the bloody beans?’ she yelled to the canteen staff.
‘None today, Trace. We’ll bring them up tomorrow.’
‘I’m not eating peas. It looks like sick. You’ve puked all over ’em. I’m not touchin’ em. I’m not! I’m not! I’m not eating disgusting puke!’
Trace turned her small, shaking body towards the plastic swing doors of the dining hall and banged right through them. ‘Bloody owwww. Bloody hell. Owwww! Owwww!’
The next day she was locked in a side room and I didn’t see her for days. Maybe weeks.
32
The Story of Sue
(ANOTHER SHORT CHAPTER)
Only time will heal, people say. Only time will heal the bad things, bring the ivy back over the wall. Because ivy provides good cover, for garden blemishes and broken bricks, for holes in the wall. Ivy can cover a multitude of sins, says Mum, but you need to keep an eye on it, it’ll soon take over. Ivy is strong as an ox at the roots … it needs a good strong wall.
I’ve spent several years inside walls – two years inside Colwood and more elsewhere – so I’ve thought a lot about walls and what they do to people, and what people do with walls.
The garden was a wide inclosure, surrounded with walls so high as to exclude every glimpse of prospect.
(Jane Eyre)
Mum loved the old brick wall that ran along the edge of our garden, between the Greens’ house on one side and the Sturgesses’ on the other. For years she ran her roses along that crumbling red brick: Clementine and Josephine, Dorothy and Matilda, Valerie and Natalie. Year in and year out her beloved girls came back to report on the weather, the conditions of the soil, the difficulty of that hot summer. Much later, when she had to leave her beloved garden behind, those girls caused her a great deal of trouble.
Quite an operation, she told Maze. The roots are so deep, so stubborn, I had to draw them out with pliers and wire. In the end I had to borrow a drill from the council.
When I heard Mum speak of her stubborn girls I thought of Betsey Trotwood and her beloved piece of turf. Betsey would never ever budge; she would always be on the edge of that chalky cliff, peering out of the window at her precious bit of green; because people go mad for their little bit of turf. The thought of losing it nearly sends them over the edge; because inside that small patch of grass are stored all the hopes and dreams of the never-forgotten past and the forever-hoped-for future. Janet, Donkeys! Janet! Donkeys! Always and forever!
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Old stories are stubborn. You can nip and prune and cut back a bit, but you can’t easily shift their roots. The story of Sue is very stubborn. It runs deep.
But sometimes, if you’re listening for it, unexpected information comes your way. Quite out of the blue, someone will tell you something you didn’t know, and suddenly it dawns on you that the noises in the attic come from a living person, not a ghost.
Once upon a time and quite out of the blue I learned that Sue was a real person too. Years later, quite unexpectedly, I was reminded of this by Someone’s Mother. Such things usually come from aunts or mothers, new information that is, a quick reversal in fortune.
Look at Aunt Reed. Just before she dies she summons Jane Eyre to her. It turns out that Mrs Reed of Gateshead House, Jane’s aunt, has been concealing a very important fact:
‘Go to my dressing-case, open it, and take out a letter you will see there.’
I obeyed her directions. ‘Read the letter,’ she said.
It was short and thus conceived: –
‘Madam, – will you have the goodness to send me the address of my niece, Jane Eyre, and tell me how she is? It is my intention to write shortly and desire her to come to Madeira. Providence has blessed my endeavours to secure a competency; and as I am unmarried and childless, I wish to adopt her during my life, and bequeath her at my death whatever I may have to leave. – I am, Madam, &c.’.,
(JOHN EYRE, Madeira)
What this means is that Jane Eyre is no longer an orphan; she will no longer be kept below stairs. Instead, she will wear satin dresses and put ribbons in her hair. Some mornings she will lie late in bed and look out at the sun. She will dangle her toes over the edge of the bed and smile.
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Sue was an orphan too. Someone’s Mother told me this. They’d been friends at school. When they were young women, they trained together to be midwives. Sometime in the 1960s, in Angmering on Sea, Sue was pulling babies from bellies with Someone’s Mother. But then Someone’s Mother went off to marry and Sue was left behind pulling babies and praying to God in a dingy front room in Sussex. That’s when Sue met the woman in the white veil and the black rocks began flying.
There are still gaps in the story, several missing bricks, but I do know th
at Sue was taken away. She was kept in an attic room; she was locked in a side room, all white and covered in sheets. And that’s when Sue began screaming, yelling like a banshee. Soon after, the black rocks began to fly.
33
Crossing the Meadow
When Jane returns to Thornfield Hall she finds a blackened ruin. It is a winter’s evening and the clouds are drawing in. The weathermen speak of gales. There is frost on the church porch.
‘My first view of it shall be in front,’ Jane says to herself as she crosses the fields and meadows, as she passes through the woods, as she spies the village church, as she sees the dark hulk of Thornfield Hall looming in the distance. ‘It looks best from the front, its bold battlements strike the eye … I shall be filled with wonder.’
But what comes is not wonder, only black shadows and ruin. The battlements have crumbled. Crows are building their nests among the grey stone. Jane looks up, and instead of tall towers and proud crests, sees only fallen men. Thornfield is burned to the ground.
Jane’s first life is over. This is the beginning of her second. She sits down on the mossy ground and looks around. In the cold morning air she takes a deep breath and turns back towards the black battlements.
Starting a second life is hard. Fairy godmothers can be a big help, but at some point you have to face facts, the long gap between leaving and returning. Nothing will ever be the same again.
But then, one day, you find yourself walking through an English village, the village you once called home, when something quite familiar meets your eye. It is the lineaments of a face, the character of a landscape you once knew, and you know you are near your bourne.
Once more on the road to Thornfield … I felt like the messenger-pigeon flying home … Yes, I knew the character of this landscape: I was sure we were near my bourne.