They performed for a few minutes, and then, as if by clockwork, retreated again to the innards of the house. A church bell began to ring. Frank smirked at me conspiratorially, and I raised my little fist in a victorious gesture. Things were going rather well.
Then Frank reverted to his anonymous identity, walking in the shadow of Mr Whitebait’s hideous hat.
No-one else but me saw a thin hand waving from the tiny attic window, or heard a tubercular cough, or noticed a small swarm of hungry bees hovering above the chimneys on the house.
We marched on towards the museum, which was a ponderous building with closed eyes and a dark mouth. Mr Manners, the curator, was there to meet us, dressed in military regalia with a monocle pressed into his eye socket. He put his hand on our heads as we passed through the dark orifice, as if he was feeling the quality of our skulls.
Inside we were instructed to take out our notepads. The first room was a round foyer with colourful, imperial maps in gilt frames hanging on oak-panelled walls.
An ancient and speckled receptionist laboriously handed us each a ticket, which I instantly began to eat.
We were divided into groups. I was with Melanie and Andrew, who held hands and had black, ironed hair. They looked at the ground, as if history was all beneath their feet. I put my own hands in my pockets. We were sent down a corridor lined with bulky bronze heads. Each one was a famous person, but they all appeared remarkably similar, as if they were cast in bronze against their wishes. We were not supposed to talk.
Andrew and Melanie hung slowly behind me, and before long I was yet again on my own. I slipped through a door into a cavernous municipal room that was full of stuffed birds, and loitered under an albatross, wondering what to do next.
I wrote, ‘Albatross, wing span fifteen foot’, in neat writing under ‘Battle of the Mercenaries’.
I ignored the wide eyes of a frozen barn owl, and tiptoed past an animated woodpecker, nailed heartlessly to the branch of a tree, its beak pounding the bark. A button said PUSH ME and I did. At once the air was loud with hammering and squawking, and several large birds flapped their wings. I escaped from the room, sure that I could hear breaking glass as a vulture threw itself against the confines of its exhibition case.
I lurched headlong into Mr Manners, who had changed into a janitor, and was wearing a brown overall over his uniform, sweeping a corner of the room. It was very quiet. My whole school had disappeared into the recesses of the museum.
Mr Manners said, ‘Are you interested in history?’
His white hair needed oiling, his teeth were rusty, and his nails were too long. The skin around his left eye was dented.
‘Perhaps,’ I said, holding my notepad as if it was a hand grenade.
‘Come with me,’ he rasped, and walked to a door with a notice saying EMPLOYEES ONLY. I hesitated, thinking of Mr Whitebait’s cane and the button that said PUSH ME.
‘It’s all right,’ said Mr Manners.
It seemed to me that Mr Manners belonged in a glass case himself, but still I followed him. It was like walking into a cave. We were in a room that was flanked with pipes and lockers. In the centre of it was a desk that was covered with coins and bones, and asthma inhalers.
Mr Manners removed his brown coat, and put the broom in a cupboard.
‘Sit down,’ he ordered. I clambered onto an uncomfortable swivelling chair.
Mr Manners pulled open a large flat drawer, divided into hundreds of compartments. Each was labelled, and contained a relic – a gnarled root, a butterfly wing, something wet and red, dried leaves, gold dust, bright beads, silver threads. I gasped hungrily and leant towards it. It was a playground of substances. I longed to tell Frank, who could have photographed it with his camera eyes and described the drawer again and again.
‘This is my collection,’ murmured Mr Manners. ‘This is my work.’
I nodded.
He gathered some blue dust in his fingers and sprinkled it onto a metal plate. He struck a match, and suddenly the room was filled with cracking golden triangles, exploding into the air with flamboyant pops.
I yelped with excitement. When the last pop had fizzled away, I felt as if the backs of my eyes were scorched with the memory of them.
‘Would you like to choose something?’ he spread his hairy hands out generously. His knuckles were white conkers and his fingers were long and crooked. ‘Anything you like.’
A glass bead glittered from one of the compartments.
That.’ I pointed to it, and it glowed even brighter.
‘You shall have it,’ whispered Mr Manners, scooping it out of its cavern. ‘It has some qualities. Early Egyptian. Don’t swallow it, will you?’ I held the bead in my palm. It changed colour, turning a deep azure blue. I put it into my pocket. Then Mr Manners clasped his big hands around mine and smiled.
‘I’d better go,’ I squeaked.
‘Not yet,’ he grunted. Then he was rubbing the ball of our hands against his trousers, and there was something stiff under there; a piece of wood or a bone. His face was red and drops of sweat were gathering in the bags under his eyes and in the pores of his nose. I was perplexed. He let go of my hands and started to scrabble with the buttons of his trousers, reaching in and waggling the thing wildly. I just sat there, redundant, watching on until he stopped and sighed to himself, closing his eyes and hastily zipping up his fly. He seemed to suddenly realize I was there.
‘Sorry about that,’ he apologized. ‘No harm meant.’
I nodded, confused.
Would you mind letting me have some of your hair?’
Mr Manners quickly flashed a fine pair of scissors around my head, snipped off a lock of my dark, childish hair, and placed it in the empty compartment where the bead once was. I noticed there were several similar locks of hair kept in the great drawer.
I shivered. It was as if a beetle was walking over my scalp.
Mr Manners laughed conspiratorially.
‘Can I go now?’ I asked politely.
‘Carry on!’ he boomed, closing the drawer with an abrupt movement. I slid from my chair and ran out of the room.
I was suddenly surrounded by Rogers, Melanies and Andrews, and Mr Whitebait was telling us the contents of the Roman arsenal in alphabetical order. I fingered the bead in my gabardine pocket.
Afterwards we ate our sandwiches on a grassy hillock, above a mass burial ground of plague victims.
I was curious to know the contents of the others’ Tupperware boxes, but happy enough with Jean’s efforts, which were pleasantly ordinary. A wedge of ham, a melted chocolate finger, a sliver of cucumber and a robust tomato.
After lunch we ran about, and I threw the bead at Roger, who said I had nearly blinded him and cried all the way home.
I wonder if all Head Curators are wankers?
Harry
‘I’ll tell you something’, said Harry, as we queued up patiently in Jimmy’s corner shop, ‘that you may not realize.’
I waited. Harry had dramatic timing and didn’t like to be interrupted.
‘I have personal links with someone you know.’
I felt my usual sense of dread.
‘Someone dead,’ he went on.
‘I see.’
‘Aren’t you going to guess?’
‘No.’
‘You see them every day.’
What was he talking about? I had enough to deal with without listening to the deluded ramblings of a hospital caretaker.
‘Very dead.’
‘How long?’ As we were stuck in the queue there was no option but to participate in Harry’s game.
‘Thousands of years.’
‘Well?’
‘Female. A princess.’
‘The mummy at the museum?’
‘That’s right. My grandfather was one of the people who helped to ransack the tomb. He always felt very guilty about it afterwards. Said it was like walking into a woman’s bedroom with a torch, getting mud on the carpet.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘I thought you’d be interested. Personal links,’ he mused proudly, buying twenty Silk Cut and four bars of Galaxy.
‘How nice,’ I said politely.
Swimming
You see, all my life I lived with danger. Danger emerged in the most innocent of pastimes. It’s amazing that I am still alive to tell you all this.
At some point during this period I went swimming. On the way to the baths a rag and bone man passed in a horse-drawn cart. He looked out of place in a traffic jam of buses, as if he had just ridden out of sequence, from another time altogether. I thought about him as I entered the municipal baths, wondering if people saw me like that, as a person who doesn’t match their surroundings, an antique surrounded by modernity.
The swimming baths were very old, and smelt of feet. Getting undressed was cold and difficult. I couldn’t unlock the lockers and when I took my trousers off, they fell into a puddle of dirty water. When I emerged in my black regulation swimming costume the cobalt pool was completely empty apart from one old woman with an artificial leg that she had abandoned at the side of the pool. She surged up and down the blue water with enthusiasm, while I delicately lowered myself into the shallow end and splashed about feebly.
I started swimming laps in awkward high-school breast stroke, with my head held up and out of the water. I passed the old lady. She was wearing a pink bathing hat and had no teeth. We saluted, then swam on.
I swam twenty lengths then staggered out of the heavy water, exhausted. As I was about to leave a flock of goose-pimpled schoolgirls flew into the baths and hurled themselves suicidally into the water. Their screeching laughter made me feel old. One child was left behind on the pool’s edge. She was about eight with terrified eyes and unstylish hair.
‘Get on with it Hermione!’ yelled a teacher with a thyroid neck.
The child shook her head. The other girls jeered and splashed her.
‘What on earth is the matter now?’ sighed the teacher, as if Hermione was always behaving this way.
The child pointed at the water with wide fearful eyes.
Then the teacher blew her whistle, so loudly that it made waves in the water.
To our horror, we all suddenly noticed that the old lady was no longer swimming, but floating, face down below the surface. The girls all quietened into a still, cold ripple, and the teacher leapt into the water fully clothed, along with an army of attendants who had all been skiving around the coffee machine, instead of doing their jobs.
The old lady was lying on a towel now, surrounded by young, muscly men in shorts. They were giving her the kiss of life. I shuddered; what a bizarre awakening. Then her toe twitched and her fingers uncurled and we were suddenly aware that for a moment we had all stopped breathing, and swallowed great gasps of air.
She sat up grinning, holding tightly onto the hand of an attendant who looked like Hercules.
‘She always does this,’ he said to no-one in particular. ‘Every Saturday. It’s a syndrome.’
‘OK everyone, to the side!’ yelled the soaking teacher, oblivious to Hermione who slunk into the pool, still pale. She could have thanked her. Hermione should have got a medal I thought. I smiled at her as she shivered in the pool. There’s another one, I thought, who’ll end up working in a quiet place, trying to be invisible. Afraid of everything.
Other Rivers
By the time I was eight years old, Hermione’s age, I had already been haunted, nearly eaten by a crocodile, maimed my mother, murdered an au pair girl, and all the other things that you already know. No wonder I was a nervous type. You might think that was quite enough for one childhood, but there is more calamity to endure, and I don’t see why I should let you off the hook.
In the time when Jean and George were pretending to be in love I decided to have swimming lessons, which was a skill that Frank flatly refused to learn. I spent Saturdays immersed in water, and my skin was covered with scales. I went to Mr Valentine’s River Club. It was in a fenced-in part of the river, enclosed by trees, so that when I was there it seemed like a separate country. It had damp pastel bathing huts, and a diving board soggy with wet coconut matting. Mr Valentine was a dappled trout, who was once a champion swimmer, but who lost his little finger in a bar brawl, which affected his strokes. He kept the finger in a pickling jar in his office, and showed it to us mournfully. It looked like a prawn. This experience made him dry-skinned and melancholic, and when he was not teaching swimming he drank gin flavoured with Angostura bitters, and slumped in a deck-chair under a shadowy straw hat by the side of the pool.
At first I thought Mr Valentine must live in a bathing hut, as he never changed his clothes, and he never went home. At eight o’clock he blew his whistle and ushered the last breathless child out of the wooden door.
Once Jean forgot to collect me, and I peeked through a dry crack in the fence to see him dive gracefully into the empty meridian water, and disappear into the murky depths, leaving only stray bubbles rippling on the surface. I believed, then, that he lived on the river bed. His hair was mossy and green, like the slime that grew on the surface of the diving board. His skin was covered in splashes of a muddy colour. Mr Valentine was amphibian.
By day the pool was filled with shivering eight and nine-year-old boys whose parents wanted a quiet Saturday. Every week they would line up at the side of the pool with hunched shoulders and white fingers waiting for instructions. Although we had never heard Mr Valentine shout, we all obeyed him as if he might one day explode and drown us all.
He had a long pole with a harness attached to the end, and dragged me up and down the pool. Through him I learnt the crawl and the butterfly, breast stroke and back stroke.
One day he said that I didn’t need the harness and told me to dive into the cold eely water and swim.
‘Trust me,’ said Mr Valentine, waggling his stump of a finger.
I jumped in.
I cascaded down into the deep unknown territory of the pool; down to the muddy bed with its river worms and sharp stones. I re-emerged like a jumping fish. I found that I could move through the water by merely flapping the ends of my toes and the tips of my fingers.
After that I soused myself in the river. I was not afraid of it. It ran through my bed at night, and all my dreams were underwater. I knew its character; its fast places, and its slow pools.
Suddenly the River Club was confining and cramped. I swam a length in a couple of seconds. Mr Valentine watched me as I flashed around the pool like a large goldfish in a small bowl.
One day he said casually, as I stood dripping, watching a large girl lolloping about in the shallow end, ‘You need a bigger sea,’ and I knew that he was right.
So instead of paying to swim in Mr Valentine’s guarded waters, I found other places where the river deepened and whirled. When Jean left me at the River Club on Saturday mornings I waved goodbye, then switched from human to fish, sneaking away to the wide waters beyond the swimming pool. She had no idea what dangers I explored. I swam through underground pipes. I jumped off wooden bridges. I curled up under waterfalls.
I would return to the River Club at the end of the day, to be collected by Jean, scratched and clammy, webbed and silent. My hair was so wet it didn’t dry until Monday, and I left mud and water everywhere I went. Jean thought it was nice that I had a hobby, although she wrinkled up her nose when I walked into a room.
I never liked swans; the slit of their eyes, the dirty down of their wings, the crack of their beaks or the snake of their necks. The town was filled with them. They gathered at every sluice.
Swans were the self-appointed guards of the river. They supervised the river banks like secret police.
Although I didn’t realize it, they had been watching me for a long time, waiting for their moment.
One day I was swimming in a broad quiet place in the river. The banks were high with buttercups. The air scraped with crickets.
I imagined that I was swimming the Channel. I swam sl
owly, conserving my energy. I sank into the silky green water. I turned over on my back and blew softly at the clouds. I was invisible, a trout that was so still it couldn’t be seen. I didn’t notice the nasty throng of swans that gossiped together by the bank, hissing quietly to each other, treading the calm water, thinking they would teach me a lesson.
The first thing I felt was the ugly scrape of a swan’s leg. They surrounded me. I didn’t move at first. I heard their harsh hearts beating under the soft feathers. I prayed to the Queen, gliding through her palace, while soldiers marched below her window.
That’s when they attacked. I couldn’t see anything, just wings, and waves of swans, pythons of swans, awakened lions of swans, pecking at me. I struggled in the water, turned and dived beneath them. Friendlier ducks were screaming and calling the police. I thought of the headline in the local newspaper ‘Swansong for Gertrude Hardcastle!’ One swan twisted me into a knot, the other spread its enormous wings and lunged at my throat. I writhed in the dangerous water. I grasped some reeds and started pulling myself up the muddy bank. The swans were cackling. They struck at my blue ankles; they wanted to kill me.
Then Frank was there, holding a long branch. He was insulting the swans in a language I had never heard. He slapped one about the face with his bare hand. He dragged me out of the river. We ran, Frank cursing the swans. I was covered with blood and marks like snake bites.
When we got home I said to Frank, ‘How did you know where to find me?’ and he looked sideways and confided, ‘You know I can hear what you’re thinking. I always know where you are.’
Jean and George were unaware of this incident. They were meeting a princess at a civic dinner. Jean was wearing an eggshell hat and George was drunk and talking much too loud. Much too loud. The princess noticed him and shuddered, then fanned her elderly royal face with a fan made of white swan’s feathers.
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