Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  Anna was splodging caviar on to smoked salmon blinis.

  ‘Let me help you with that,’ said Maija.

  ‘A girl was supposed to come – I can’t think what’s happened to her.’ But Anna didn’t seem perturbed. The table was covered with food.

  ‘It looks wonderful.’

  ‘It’s simple stuff really.’

  There were sides of salmon, reindeer tongue, bowls of crayfish with lemon mayonnaise, fresh little carrots and new potatoes, salads that looked as if they had just been pulled from the earth.

  ‘Everything’s organic,’ said Anna.

  ‘My father has an organic market garden,’ said Maija.

  ‘Has he? Has he really? That’s amazing. Fredrik wants us to grow all our own veg up here.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Maija, warming a little to Fredrik the bear. ‘Does he like gardening then?’

  Anna scraped the last beads of caviar. ‘I don’t think he’s ever done any.’

  The light changed. A woman was standing in the doorway, surveying them. Not a guest, Maija thought. A maid perhaps? No, she was too unkempt.

  ‘Oh, hello, Birgit,’ said Anna, and for a second she hesitated, as if she didn’t want to introduce her to Maija. She wiped her hands on a cloth, not looking at Birgit. ‘Maija, this is my sister. Are you hungry, Birgit? There’s loads to eat. I don’t know what we’re going to do with all this food.’

  ‘You’ll throw most of it away tomorrow,’ said Birgit. Her voice was harsh, as if she’d had to shout for much of her life to make herself heard. There was dirt under her nails. She came close and Maija recognised her smell. Metabolised alcohol was leaking from her pores. On top of the alcohol smell there was the smell of smoke. Her hands shook finely.

  Maija put down her knife and pressed her own hands flat on the table. Birgit. Everything was different, but the way the hair lay flat to her beautiful skull was the same.

  ‘Birgit,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

  Birgit threw her head up and examined Maija. Anna looked alarmed.

  ‘You are Birgit Lindberg, aren’t you?’

  She could see the words What if I am? trembling on Birgit’s lips.

  ‘Don’t you recognise me? I’m Maija. Maija Koskinen. You moved away when we were nine.’ When your parents got divorced, and your mum dragged you off to Helsinki. We swore we’d always be best friends, but I never saw you again. I wrote you all those letters but you only wrote back twice.

  ‘Maija Koskinen,’ said Birgit slowly, as if these were words in a foreign language.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Of course.’ But it changes nothing, her look said. I am what I am, and you are what you are. How old she looked. Perhaps I look as old as that too, thought Maija. But we are only thirty-five!

  ‘Were you friends at school?’ asks Anna, looking from one to the other. Of course, she was Anna, Birgit’s big sister whose friends teased them when they were round at Birgit’s house. Anna would have been sixteen or seventeen then.

  ‘You look good, Maija,’ said Birgit. ‘Do you work in TV?’

  ‘I’m a nurse. It’s my husband who’s in TV.’

  ‘Or you wouldn’t be here,’ said Birgit. ‘I can’t imagine Fredrik inviting nurses to his big party, can you, Anna?’

  ‘Birgit,’ said Anna.

  ‘But he invited me. Now there’s a surprise,’ said Birgit.

  ‘I invited you. It’s my house too. You are my sister and I love you,’ said Anna, as if this were part of a script she had read over many times.

  ‘Let’s go outside,’ said Birgit to Maija. Maija still didn’t know whether or not Birgit really recognised her, but she followed her outside. There were people everywhere now. Tango was playing from the speakers; there was a tin bath full of ice and beer bottles. How had they managed to get so much ice? She saw Kai in the distance talking to an older woman dressed in black, with sharp-cut silvery hair. Fredrik was in the middle of a crowd around the bonfire, his head flung back.

  ‘This was my father’s summer cottage. Fredrik bought out the rest of the family,’ said Birgit.

  ‘It’s a big place.’

  ‘It wasn’t like this. Fredrik knocked down the original cottage. All this is new. Haven’t you seen the solar panels? There’s a geothermal heat pump too.’

  ‘Why did he buy it, if he only wanted to knock it down? He could have built elsewhere.’

  ‘The lake is so beautiful. People kept on telling him that. Shall we go down there, Maija?’

  ‘Birgit, do you remember me?’

  ‘Of course I remember you. I remember everything,’ said Birgit. ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘Two, a boy and a girl. They’re already older than we were back then.’

  ‘Mine are too.’

  Birgit looked as if she might say more, but they walked on in silence, threading through the partygoers as if they were ghosts. There was a path down to the water.

  ‘We won’t bathe here,’ said Birgit, ‘it’s too near the house. We’ll walk around the lake.’

  Maija remembered the tone – imperious, and coaxing too, leading Maija into trouble. They were picking their way among rows of early peas, snapping off the crisp sweet pods. They were ducking into the fruit cages. They were screaming along forest paths, Birgit the leader, bold and wild. They were swimming naked and draping themselves with waterweed, ‘like mermaids’. It was always Birgit’s wildness that drew them on. Her singularity; her difference.

  She was quiet now. They walked past the little beach of grey sand and took the path that skirts the lakeshore. Birgit walked slowly.

  ‘How old are your children?’ asked Maija.

  ‘I have one, a daughter. She’s twelve. She lives in England,’ said Birgit, turning to look Maija full in the face.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Jessica. Her father’s English.’

  They walked on. Maija could hear Birgit’s breathing.

  ‘Let’s stop for a minute.’ Birgit leaned against a tree and closed her eyes.

  ‘You’ve been ill.’

  ‘Yes.’ Birgit’s face was leathery, as if she’d spent years living outdoors. That was all they wanted to do when they were eight years old. They were going to build a house in the forest and live there forever and ever.

  ‘I got an infection. I didn’t see a doctor; you know how sometimes you can’t be bothered. That’s why I’m staying at Anna’s in Helsinki for a while. Fredrik doesn’t like it, but he gets a bit of street cred out of it. We’re giving Birgit support, she’s been in and out of rehab. “Rehab”, as he says it.’

  Birgit caught the bear’s voice, just as she had caught every voice of their childhood.

  They were at the jetty.

  ‘We’ll take the boat out,’ said Birgit. ‘Can you row?’

  ‘You know I can, and so can you.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  The boat moved out clumsily, as if it wasn’t used to the weight of people. Maija dug the oars too deep, caught a crab, then caught her rhythm. It was neither dark nor light. The summer gloaming hung over the still water and from the distance they heard the cries and music of the party. Maija thought of her children, deep in the forest, drinking beer with strangers, but for once she wasn’t afraid.

  ‘Let’s swim,’ said Birgit.

  Maija didn’t reply. She watched the water, the dark trees, the light behind Birgit’s head, shaping it.

  ‘I can still swim,’ Birgit insisted.

  ‘Maybe it’s not such a good idea,’ said Maija in the mild voice of work, but she stopped rowing and shipped her oars. Birgit stood up and the boat rocked wildly as she tore off her shirt, her jeans, her pants, T-shirt and bra, and stood naked. Her poor body was seamed with scars. It looked as if someone had sharpened a knife on her, but over many years Maija had learned not to show surprise, still less revulsion, still less fear. Maija remembered how Birgit used to dive. The lake surface would open for her with barely a ripple, as if
Birgit herself was made of water.

  ‘I was in an accident,’ said Birgit.

  ‘I thought you must have been.’

  An accident that had gone on for decades.

  Birgit raised her arms, preparing to dive.

  ‘I can’t stop you,’ said Maija.

  ‘I know that. Close your eyes. Count how long it takes me to swim to shore.’

  ‘But how will I know when you dive, if my eyes are shut?’

  ‘Oh Maija, that’s pimps! Count from the splash!’

  There she is, laughing. She leans forward but she hasn’t launched herself yet. It’s easy-squeezy, Maija! Come on, Maija, it’s pimps! Maija … Maija … Maija …

  The circles widen, going out, going back. Maija counts from the splash.

  IN CHINA THIS WOULD NOT HAPPEN

  IT’S THAT TIME of the year again. Students stand moonstruck in the roaring streets, clutching maps of the city. They enter banks in herds, to open accounts and find out what an overdraft is. All the time they talk loudly about what happened last night, what’s happening tonight and what will happen at the weekend. There are poster sales, houseplant sales, pizza company freebies and Christian Union leaflets all over the grass. The held breath of bars, clubs and cafés, which have been half-empty since June, begins to exhale.

  The girls are so lovely. There are the glossy ones and the nervous ones; hockey girls with their big rolled socks on a Wednesday afternoon; girls who know the difference between a wok and a frying pan; girls who spill over the pavement edges after too many drinks or teeter half-naked, holding on to each other; girls who smile suddenly, sweetly, at middle-aged women who remind them of their mums. Because they are homesick, of course. Everybody’s homesick, as well as beside themselves with excitement to be away from home. That’s what all the noise is about.

  I’m not jaundiced at all, even though I’ve been working most of my life in what is now known as Student Recruitment. Join the student army, and see the world …

  I go to China a lot. That’s the way things are these days. We were caught out in one of those Sunday newspaper exposés a few years ago. You know the kind of thing: popular university course already full and no further offers being made; journalist poses as overseas student; qualifications not quite up to mark (to put it mildly); lots of chat about ‘flexibility’ and ‘equivalence’; offer of place more or less made on the spot. Standard approach, in fact. Our Guidelines for Telephone Procedure have altered considerably since then.

  Do you believe that I am who I say I am? Fortyish, reasonably kindly, observant (as you have to be in my job) and a little world-weary? Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’ve noticed already that there’s something which doesn’t quite fit. Fortunately, texts are infinitely correctable these days. I am just about old enough to remember what it was like to fossick about with Tipp-Ex, and I thoroughly appreciate the way words, paragraphs – whole histories – can be made to melt away without trace, and re-form according to the author’s desire.

  I even have a parking space with my name on it. Or rather, my role. We call our jobs ‘roles’ these days, even in an institution as conservative as this one, as if to suggest that we are all highly trained actors who can slip in and out of character as required. My allocated parking space is in a courtyard by the rear entrance, which means that I don’t need to carry an umbrella. Female members of staff prefer to park in the main car park, which is properly lit and patrolled by security. But you can’t have everything.

  It’s 7th October. Freshers’ Week is over, and the students are wanly settling down to the routine of their lives. If such it can be called. Soon some of them will be suffering from ‘stress’ and traipsing to the University Counselling Service. Others will be in their glory. Successfully auditioning for the Drama Department’s new production of Phaedra’s Love; running PoSoc and LitSoc; quirkily passionate about breakdance or Black Crane Kung Fu; blogging about Syria on the student website; staying up all night to present the folk/punk hour on Whizz Radio …

  The girls are so lovely, and they don’t know it. I stand at my office window and watch the wind blowing them along the street. I have my phone to my ear, and if anyone looks up I’m gazing into the distance, deep in an important call to Zhengzhou or Qingdao. (It is necessary to trawl well beyond the great conurbations of China these days, given the competition.) The autumn leaves fly, and the girls’ hair streams behind them as they run. They always seem late for something. I don’t suppose they eat breakfast. I’d like to sit them down in front of a plate of eggs and bacon and watch their eyes widen with pleasure as they squeeze the sauce bottle.

  If I had my time again …

  When I was eighteen, I worried about whether other people in my kitchen were helping themselves from my tin of Marvel. I joined Chess Soc and Orienteering. I was never overdrawn. My girlfriend from home came up every weekend, tidied my room, tried to put up a Kylie Minogue poster and made coffee for everyone I even vaguely knew, as if her life depended on it. It was the end of the second year before she realised that she didn’t love me, by which time it was too late for all those other girls. My girlfriend never squeezed the sauce bottle. Fried breakfasts weren’t her thing.

  I like China. I feel at home there. It’s an odd thing, because I don’t speak the language and I stick out like a sore thumb, especially in the smaller cities where Westerners are rare. I remember a lecture I went to years ago, when our mission to attract Chinese students was just beginning. It was on ‘The Concept and Function of Face in Chinese Society’. A big subject for a single lecture, you might think, but it intrigued me. I was struck immediately by a sense that the Chinese had got it right. They had found a way of negotiating around the infinite possibilities for humiliation that human life offers to us all. I felt sure that if I had been born Chinese, I would have fitted in and understood what to do and what not to do, from the very beginning.

  I like to have a chat with our students from China, a week or so after their arrival, when they have begun to orientate themselves but are still eager for advice. I tell them to be themselves. I do have to mention the fact that their essays may be run through plagiarism software these days, but they appear to be more grateful for this information than offended by it.

  I want them to get good degrees. I want them to be rewarded for what they have done. It’s not easy – none of this is easy. I’m sorry. I’m losing the thread again. You may have noticed another small clue in the preceding paragraphs.

  Our society is so disorderly. Outside my office, on the other side of the road, there is a row of cafés with Italian names, packed with young people talking and laughing or studying Facebook on their laptops. Boys leaning across tables to speak to beautiful girls. The hubbub is so joyous that you could close your eyes and imagine that you were at a children’s Christmas party.

  In between two of the cafés there is an alley, and there sits a man so shrunken by addiction that I doubt if he would be more than five foot tall if he stood up. He has been there for years. He told me his name once, although I hadn’t asked: he said he was called Trevor. He holds a paper cup and into it these tall, stooping students, from time to time, drop cash. I see them straighten up afterwards and the look on their faces is warm, as if they have felt the glow of a fire.

  He may not be an addict at all. We are all too quick to jump to conclusions about other people. But he has lost face. I have the feeling that in China this would not happen. Not opposite the administrative buildings of a prestigious university, at least.

  My girlfriend from home got married, not long after finding out that she didn’t love me. Her name was Anthea, and she never liked it. When we were together, she once said she would give her children plain English names. As she said it, she glanced at my face. I’ve had other relationships, of course, but never anything that looked like becoming permanent.

  It is 4th December. Apparently the intense cold we’ve had these past few winters has something to do with the sun. Low solar activity. You can
hardly see the girls’ faces, they are so swathed in scarves and hats. Just a strip of rosy skin, and their eyes. They stamp their feet in fleecy boots. Term finishes this weekend.

  Last night I worked late and then went for a long walk, towards the Common. The snow has lain since last weekend and it’s frozen hard. There was a moon. I had my walking boots on, and so the ice was no problem. It was very quiet. The roads and pavements were ridged with ice; the council doesn’t seem to clear them. There were only a few students about. By this stage of term they’ve spent most of their money and are frantically finishing off their final essays. It felt as if the city belonged to me. I walked away from the street lights, where the Common lay dark. I went over snow that no one else had touched, through trees and then out into the open. I stared up into the hard, black sky where stars flashed, and tried to identify the constellations. But I didn’t know what to look for, and the cold was working its way into me, so I turned and walked back again, all the way back into the city centre.

  Soon I was standing opposite the admin building. I said in my head, in the humorously self-deprecating voice one might use to a colleague: Can’t keep away from the place! Trevor’s nest of dirty blankets was empty, and he’d taken his sleeping bag. He must have gone into a hostel, for fear of freezing to death.

  I was very, very tired. I went into my office and sat at my desk, but I didn’t do any work. I keep getting these flashy headaches. It’s a worry, because it makes it difficult to focus. I thought: I can’t. I can’t.

  I’m feeling a lot better today. No headache, and the cold was quite invigorating as I walked into work. I had to prepare for the interviews I’d arranged. It’s perfectly clear to me now that the reason I’m getting these headaches is that I need an eye test. My prescription will have to be changed. In China, 80 per cent of college students are myopic.

  Trevor is back at his post, inside his sleeping bag, huddled against the wall. I break all my own rules, go into the café and order a large latte. I put in three sugars. As I lean down to give Trevor the coffee I catch the stench of him. He wraps his hands around the paper cup and folds himself over the hot drink as if there’s nothing else in the world. I cross the road, back to my office.