Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  Mal was no good at skating. Not as hopeless as Edith, but bad enough. It astounded Nina to find herself doing something better than Mal. There was no chance of their skating arm in arm: he needed both arms to flail and balance himself.

  She skated much more slowly than usual, but tried to look as if she was putting in an effort. Mal was doing better now.

  ‘I used to skate when I was a kid,’ he puffed, coming up to her, and she nodded. Really she had no patience for people who said they used to do things when it was obvious they had only ever done them once or twice, but she let it go for Mal.

  They skated on, until they had passed all the people. The houses thinned away. There was a bus shelter, and then a bunker from the war. Only the tarmac continued doggedly as if whoever planned the town had intended to pave the coast for miles. It was rough and potholed in places now, but you could still skate. The air stung her cheeks. It felt as if it carried grains of ice. Mal had no hat. Perhaps they shouldn’t skate so far, she thought, but she could not stop herself. It was like when she was a child and would skate on long after it was dark, by the light of the street lamps. Even when her mother called for her she would shout that she was coming, but she never would. They had to come out and fetch her. At the thought she skated faster, unconsciously, speeding on until she became aware that Mal had fallen behind. She spun into a turn, and waited.

  ‘Do you want to go back?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you?’ He was panting a little. It was more effort for him than for her.

  ‘Not if you don’t.’

  ‘We’ll go on then.’

  Marram grass grew on their left. The town had faded now; its lights were all behind them. One or two solitary lights showed across the marsh, from distant farms. On their right the sea dragged at the pebbles. The light was already weakening. The path was narrow now, but still tarmacked. It might go on forever, Nina thought, or at least to the next town. She could hear the grass hissing.

  The sky seemed to be coming down all around them. They were specks in it, barely moving. Suddenly she swooped back into herself, her blood tingling, every inch of her alive. The path was widening ahead of them. The tarmac was becoming a pool. It was the end.

  She stopped first, and waited for him. He skated up and put his hands on her shoulders. She turned her toes in to keep balance; very probably he didn’t know how to lock his skates.

  ‘Where’s this place then?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It could be anywhere. Anything might happen here, Nina.’

  His lips curved but she wasn’t sure he was smiling. The sea was behind him, flat and grey, moving to its own tide pattern, she knew that, but seeming to be still. Mal’s face twitched.

  ‘I hate Christmas,’ he said.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Won’t your mum mind? I mean, you coming here.’

  ‘She doesn’t know. Anyway she’ll be pissed by now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah. What is it, three o’clock? She’ll be drunk as a monkey.’

  His hands were tight and heavy on her shoulders. She was always wishing Mal would touch her but now she wanted him to take his hands away. As if he’d heard her thoughts, he lifted his right hand and put it on her neck. Gently, he stroked her. Nina’s whole body went stiff.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said, her lips barely moving.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t like people touching my neck.’

  His hand went still. He frowned and then suddenly his thumb went deeper, pushing into the base of her throat. She gagged, and tears sprang to her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’ he asked, speaking as softly as she had done. Speechlessly, she shook her head. Seconds pounded in her head.

  ‘You don’t think I’m going to hurt you, do you?’

  This time she barely moved. Something deep in her body fired into life. She kept her eyes on his face but she seemed to know, like an animal, everything that was around her. The empty sea. The marshes and the grass making its whisper. The bare path with no one on it. Edith doesn’t know he’s here. His mum doesn’t know he’s here. Mal’s got a temper. They all said that. She had seen it, but only in distant flashes, never close to herself. You must do something now, her body said. If he goes any further he won’t be able to come back. His eyes did not look quite as if they saw her clearly. He was tired and he’d had no food. Perhaps he was on something. You never knew, with Mal.

  ‘You don’t think I’m going to hurt you, do you?’

  She mustn’t answer that. She must take him far away from that question. She half lowered her eyes. The pressure on her neck was steady but not as hard now. She must lift him away from this dark place.

  ‘Do you want to see me do something?’ she asked him. She saw a spark of reaction. It wasn’t what he’d expected.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Something on my skates. This place is perfect for it.’

  ‘Like a trick?’

  ‘No. Just something I learned when I was little.’

  She felt him take a deep breath, almost a gulp. The twitch came again, clinching his eye and then releasing it. The hold on her throat was easing, easing. She smiled, putting all her innocence into it.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and he let go of her. She stood quite still for a moment, in case the idea of her escaping should enter his mind, and then, very slowly, she skated backwards a little way.

  ‘You’ll need to give me room,’ she said, preparing herself, and, like a member of an audience told to take a different seat, he skated to the edge of the tarmac.

  She needed to build up speed first. Round and round she went on the circle of tarmac, until Mal’s face blurred. But she was still not fast enough. She was low down, racing. Suddenly it came, the moment, and she balanced herself, jumped, came down on her left skate, lifted her right and made a perfect line of arms, body, leg, skate. It lasted only a few seconds and she was out of tarmac, turning, gaining speed again. She couldn’t help herself: she laughed aloud, all of her blazing and triumphant, before she swerved on to the path and, picking up speed, began to race for the town.

  She could out-skate him easily, but it wasn’t until she reached the lights of the town and the promenade with its lingering crowds of Christmas walkers that she slackened speed. Dusk was coming down. She looked back through the graininess of it and far behind she saw the speck that was Mal, labouring along the path. She slowed further. An old couple went by, leaning over a little girl on a bike with stabilisers. The grandma looked up at Nina as she skated by and gave her a creaking smile. There were people all around her, tired of their houses and eager for the cold air. They were offering smiles now, and Christmas greetings, as if they were all survivors of a wreck and had been hauled up on to the same raft.

  She would go into the house, lock the door and break up the crust of the fire in the sitting room until the flames leaped. She would stoke the stove and cook herself a meal. Mal had meant nothing; she was sure of it. He had only wanted to frighten her. He would bang on the door and she would keep it shut against him until he went away in Tony’s van, back to the city. He was finished for her; he had given her that. She would carry a shovelful of burning coals up to her room and light a fire in the iron grate, and while she fell asleep she would see flames reflected on the white walls.

  Tomorrow she would oil the skates, so that they’d go even faster.

  THE PRESENT

  TAKEN IN SHADOWS

  BEAUTIFUL JOHN DONNE. Who wouldn’t want you? You lean slightly forward, arms folded over your body as if to protect it from all the women who might otherwise tear off your clothes.

  And yet, now that I look closely – and I do look very, very closely, John – there’s a teasing touch of something I can only call … readiness … in the way you’re sitting for your portrait.

  Take your eyes. They are clear hazel, brooding on something that is beyond me and a
little to my right. What has caught your gaze? How many generations of women – and men too, I’m sure, men too – must have longed to make you turn to them. But your gaze has never shifted. Not once, in over four centuries.

  Your mouth is red. The shadow of your moustache – so dandyish, so eloquently shaved into points! – serves to emphasise the perfect cut of your upper lip. Your lower lip is full, sensuous. Red lips, hazel eyes, arched dark eyebrows. Your jaw is a line of perfection. The shadow of your broad-brimmed hat can’t hide the modelling of your temples. Your long fingers rest on your sleeve’s rich satin. You gleam in light from a source which is forever invisible, outside the frame. And then there’s the fall of your collar, the exquisiteness of lace thrown over darkness.

  You’re in your glory. From where you sit inside your portrait, it’s the present day. The present moment, even, and you’re caught in it. Your right ankle itches, but you suppress the urge to scratch. Your heart throbs with its own quick life. Soon the sitting will be over, but you don’t mind the time you spend here. The artist is anonymous to me, but not to you. You know him well. This portrait is important to you and you’ll keep it with you all your life.

  The moment I look away, you smile, stand up and stretch like a cat. The artist, of course, has taken careful note of your pose before it dissolves.

  ‘Until next time,’ he says, wiping a brush.

  ‘Until next time,’ you agree.

  You’ve given me the slip again, John. You’re back in your own world. It’s 1595, a date which I know well. I’ve studied your period, and I dress you in my rags of knowledge. I can analyse your social status in the light of your lace collar. You are history, John. You wouldn’t like that, I know. The fact that I can speak and you cannot would seem quite wrong to you, given the relative values of what we have to say.

  You know 1595 from the inside, by the touch of satin, the warmth of a spring day, the gamey smell of your own body, the bite of a flea at the nape of your neck. For you, the door is about to open into a stream of May sunshine that will make you blink. For me, it has closed forever.

  The Elizabethan age has eight more years to run. The old Queen has kept the show on the road so much longer and more brilliantly than anyone had a right to expect. She has united the country. Those who are not united are dead, imprisoned, exiled, silenced or lying very low indeed.

  You’re in your glory, but also in those shadows that wrap themselves around you like a cloak. Your mother has gone into exile, and your brother died in Newgate two years ago, because he harboured a priest. Your fellow Catholics are food for the scaffold. That is what hanging, drawing and quartering is all about. It does so much more than kill: it turns a protesting soul into blood-slimed joints of meat, laid on the block for the public appetite.

  You don’t yet know for sure that England will not return to the faith, not soon, not ever, but I should say that you’ve already made an educated guess. You have, as we know, a great deal of imagination. You will do nothing which will allow your body to be seized, racked, beaten, imprisoned, to die in its own shit and blood and vomit on the clammy ground. You will not be carted to Tyburn to be pelted with the crowd’s insults, spittle and rotten fruit before you are lynched. Nor are you willing to endure the long, dismal martyrdom of being jobless, without influence, friends or position, bled dry by penal taxes. You are already preparing to leave the home of your soul, and find another if you can.

  I look at your long, slender fingers. Perhaps you played upon the lute as well as upon the emotions of a hundred women. Beautiful, beautiful John Donne. How were you to know that there’d be generations snuffling greedily over your portrait? How could you estimate the wolfish hunger of a public not yet born? You couldn’t guess, any more than Sylvia Plath guessed what would happen to her image after the lens clicked, her radiant smile faded and she got up from where she’d been sitting on a bank of daffodils with her infant son in her arms.

  You and Sylvia are the kind we really love. You make us feel that we can climb right inside your lives. The only frustrating thing is that you keep looking at things we cannot see. You will never meet our eyes.

  Listen, John, I can tell you what’s going to happen to you after you take off that lace collar. You’re going to screw up on a royal scale. You’ll fall in love with the wrong girl, miscalculate about her father coming round to your secret marriage (he won’t, not for years). You’ll find yourself in a cottage full of children, most of whom have coughs or colds or sweating sickness or some other early-seventeenth-century malady for much of the time. Life will become an everlasting winter, smelling of herbs, baby shit, sour milk and dirty clothes.

  John Donne

  Anne Donne

  Undone

  I wonder what your wife thought when she read that little epigram? Some of your children will die, or be born dead. With any luck, you won’t feel it as we do these days. Poor little rabbits, you’ll be sorry enough for them while they’re alive, screaming their heads off, wanting all the things that nobody’s able to give them, such as antibiotics, central heating and a trip to Legoland.

  I expect your wife will have to sell that lace collar to pay for one of her confinements. You’ll lose your job. Everyone who owes you a grudge will take the chance to kick you now that you’re down. You’ll be out of favour for years. For all the effort you’ve put into avoiding martyrdom, you’ll achieve your own not very glorious exile in a borrowed cottage in Mitcham.

  But none of this has happened yet.

  ‘Come and look,’ says the artist, and you saunter round to his side of the easel. Next week he will begin to paint your hands. It has already been decided that you will wear no rings. You don’t need to trumpet your status or your prospects, and besides, the artist prefers not to mar the effect of your long, elegant fingers.

  You stare thoughtfully at your unfinished portrait. You do not know that it will wreak havoc for generations, that painted face, that cohorts of fifteen-year-old girls will fall for you and feel for you, as you struggle in the swamp of domesticity. His wife had a baby a year, isn’t that gross? She must of been pregnant, like, all the time.

  But your true lovers are more sensitive. We know the inside story. You were undone indeed, you and Anne. A piece of her soul went awry when she married you, and a piece of your soul left your body to meet it. You were never intact again. You tried to write with the noise of your little ones ringing in your ears. You went upstairs, you went downstairs, you went up to town and down to the country, you went to my lady’s chamber but there they still were, babbling, squabbling, screaming and squawking, catching quinsies and spotted fevers and scarlet fevers and marsh fevers.

  You had no money and each child cost so much. Months of sickness and weariness for Anne, heavy clambering of the stairs, dull aches that heralded the rack of labour. The children’s voices floated, skirling. George fought with John, Constance bossed little Mary.

  Mary died. Baby Nicholas died. The stillborn unnamed baby died. They floated off, little vagrant souls who had found flesh, but not for quite long enough. They were turned out of their bodies like tenants who hadn’t paid the rent. They left fragments of themselves: their blind, eager sucking, the drum of their feet inside the womb. Mary’s first words drifted around your house like feathers.

  I was one of those fifteen-year-old girls, of course, and head over heels in love with you. You were so unhappy. With what brave grace you wrote of your ‘hospital at Mitcham’ where the children grew and the poems shrank. You were kept busy writing begging letters. You had to have patrons, even though so many had turned their backs. No one wants to be contaminated by social failure. You’d stepped out so boldly and now you had to fight for a foothold somewhere, anywhere.

  I would have done anything for you, when I was fifteen. I even made friends with your wife. Yes, in that hasty, obsequious way of a very determined girl when she pits herself against a grown woman and a mother. I could babysit for Anne perhaps. Surely she would like to have a nice sit dow
n? I shepherd little Constance and John and George and Mary into the other room, sing sweetly to them, give them their dinner and wash their bare, rosy feet. A curl of green snot crawls in and out of Mary’s nostril as she breathes. I find a rag and wipe it away tenderly.

  There is silence from the bedroom. Anne must be sleeping, I think, and no wonder. Her pregnancy looks like a growth on her skinny body. Her skin is blue-white. She wears a married woman’s cap and the hair that escapes from it is thin and lustreless.

  I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

  Did till we loved?

  Let Anne sleep for a while, poor thing. I don’t want the children to wake her, so I hoist Mary on to my knee and begin to tell a story. She twists round in my lap and presses my lips together with her fingers. The others pinch and poke and whinge. I can’t even come up with a nursery rhyme. It is time to wake Anne up again.

  I tiptoe to the door of her bedroom. Your bedroom too, but I prefer not to think about that. I hear something I didn’t expect: laughter. A slash of dread goes through me. You’ve got in there somehow. You are laughing with her, privately. But no. I peep through the gap in the door and there she is, quite alone, sitting up in bed and reading. She laughs again, and looks up with vague shining eyes as if she is expecting someone. She doesn’t see me, of course.

  I put a stop to all that sort of thing. I’m not fifteen any more. The past is the past and it’s better, much better for everyone, if it doesn’t come alive. I don’t want to see your beautiful face grow old. I don’t want to see your wife’s plain, worn features light up when she thinks I might be you, ready to share her laughter. I went too far that time, but I’ve pulled myself back and I’m in command again. You are history, John. You’ve written all your poems. Your tongue is still. I refuse to be coerced into seeing things your way.

  You’re back inside the portrait frame, beautiful and contained. Your red lips. Your high cheekbones and the pure almond cut of your eyelids. It’s no surprise that you liked this portrait so much. What a blend of sexual magnetism and intellectual glamour. But I’ve just noticed something else that I’ve never seen before. There’s a glint of humour in your eyes, as if you’re wondering how many more centuries of devastation you’ll be capable of before your painted magic fades.