And then I saw the cat again, poor skinny creature. It ran through the grass as if chased and disappeared through a small hole at the base of the hedge. I knelt down and looked where it had gone. Through the dense scratchiness I could see a bright patch of sunlight on concrete. The ground where I knelt was also concrete, an overgrown path. I pushed my hand in a little way. A thorn snagged the arm of my blouse and I snatched it free. And then I pushed my arm into the hedge, but it was too thick. I could not reach through to the other side. I lay on my stomach and I wriggled my way into the hedge. The buttons of my blouse scraped on the ground and I knew I would be filthy and that Mama would scold. For a second I thought I was stuck, the weight of the hedge pressed on my back and I panicked because nobody in the world knew where I was. But I could not go back, I could only go forward, so I forced myself on, screwing up my eyes against the batting leaves. A caterpillar, dislodged by my wriggling, fell in front of me. It was a strange colour, a sort of turquoise, a colour I had never seen in nature before. It reared itself up and seemed to look at me. We looked at each other for a moment and it seemed to satisfy its curiosity first and inched off in such a disdainful way that I almost laughed. Once it was out of the way so that I was sure I wouldn’t squash it, I eased myself through and stood up and looked around me.
I blinked in the brightness of the space, a triangular space, absolutely light and hot. It must have been midday, for I recall no stretching of shadows. There were swings, one swing, rather, and four dangling chains, the ground hollowed between them where many feet had scuffed. There was a roundabout, old and splintery, traces of red paint still visible. There was a climbing frame, peaked like a witch’s hat. The seesaw was just an iron stump.
There was no way in, other than the way I’d forced. The hedge of briars around me was high and thick. The air buzzed. I was in, but nobody else could come. The space under the hedge seemed to have healed behind me. The ground reflected the sun’s white glare and beat its hotness onto my head.
The cat wasn’t there. It must have squeezed its way out again as I struggled in after it. I don’t know why I followed the cat. Because I wanted it, I suppose.
I put my foot on the roundabout and pushed. It would not give at first, not until I pushed with all my might and then it gave with a terrible harsh cry like a donkey’s bray, and I could hear the pattering of stuff falling underneath, flakes of rusting iron, perhaps, or splinters. It moved only a little, then creaked to a stop.
I sat on the swing and held the warm chains. I swung backwards and forwards, just a little to begin with, shy of the emptiness. But, despite myself, my legs bent backwards and forwards more and more eagerly until I was swinging high, high enough to jolt the frame. I cut a cool slice through the air and my pigtails hung down behind me, grazing the ground with their ends as I rushed forward, my head back, squinting through my lashes at the sun.
‘Never look straight at the sun,’ Bob had often advised, ‘or you’ll go blind.’ Also, ‘Never go out in the midday sun, not without a shady hat. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. It addles the brain.’ And he would know, I supposed, having been a desert rat.
But still, despite his advice, I swung in the midday sun and I trailed my hair in the dust and I dared to let the brightness into my eyes, so that when I stopped and stood up I felt myself stagger and my eyes dazzle with fuzzy coloured images. Addled.
You never knew with Bob whether what he said was nonsense. When I was a tiny girl I took it all in, sucked it all in like a sponge, truth and lies and the in-between things, because it isn’t all black and white.
I squeezed my way back and my hair caught on a thorn, and I knelt on something sharp and hurt my knee. I looked round the graves once more but there was no sign of the cat. My hands were scratched and beaded with blood from the catching thorns. I licked the blood away as I hurried home, afraid, making up excuses for my absence. I didn’t know how long I’d been gone but it felt like ages and ages. I was sure that I’d missed lunch, that they would have discovered my escape, that would be the end of the game.
And I was right about the hole. Bob greeted me flushed and filthy, in a great state about the disappearance of half the garden.
‘Subsidence,’ he said grimly. ‘That’s all it is.’ He had been mixing concrete, and he was so troubled by the subsidence that he didn’t think to ask where I’d been. And neither did Mama. Apart from tutting at the state of my clothes, she said nothing. She was just washing the lettuce when I arrived in the kitchen. It seemed that less time had elapsed than I’d thought. ‘Lay the table, dear,’ she said, as if everything was perfectly ordinary, ‘but for goodness sake, wash your hands first.’
The playground was all mine. Not many children have one all to themselves, a real playground with a swing and a roundabout and a climbing frame. There was a fluted green street lamp that poked its head incongruously up through the top of the hedge like some almost-smothered creature. I visited the playground whenever I could, whenever it was fine. Now that there was no hole to drop through, I went round the corner to enter the secret network of pathways. I pilfered Bob’s secateurs and clipped myself a passage through the briars, only a narrow space, not wide enough for anyone to see. I liked to clamber up the climbing frame and peer over the top of the hedge where there were, across a stretch of waste ground of perhaps ten yards, the backs of some houses – part of a new estate. They had small gardens, the beginnings of gardens, sparse newly seeded lawns, small shrubs, spindly trees, nothing established. The houses were pale brick, with pastel wooden panels, yellow and blue, bright in the sun. Sometimes I saw people going in and out of the houses. Two of the houses, next door to each other, had families with children. The women would stand in the gardens chatting over the fence, or throwing remarks over their shoulders as they pegged out washing on their revolving umbrella affairs. The woman from the blue house was the one I saw most. She had two boys, very little, always dressed in identical clothes, who followed her in and out of the house like ducklings. It gave me a funny feeling, watching like that when they couldn’t see me. Powerful. Sometimes the boys strayed off the path onto the grass and she slapped their legs and made them squeal. They were nothing to do with me and I didn’t care about them, but I liked to watch.
Mama and Bob never missed me. Or they never said. I was always back in time for dinner or tea. It was always like the first time, that summer. However long I felt I’d been away I always got home at the right time. Bob was pleased with me for spending so much time in the fresh air, but he never kept track of me. He had converted part of the vanished garden into a pond and he spent long hours beside it, lying flat on his face, watching the golden fishes glide through the stroking fronds of weed.
Perhaps they knew I was wandering off and thought it was all right. Perhaps it was all right. After all, I wasn’t a baby. Perhaps they trusted me. Perhaps they knew the secret way I went, threading through the pathways, but if they did they never said. But then they never said lots of things, things they should have said, omissions that amounted to lies.
PART TWO
4
Things changed, as things do. First the roses died. Fat vermilion hips took their place, reminding me of the sticky syrup Bob used to force down me every morning. The leaves began to fade and then to yellow and fall. I didn’t like it. Each time I visited the playground it seemed less secret, less secure. Through the gaps I began to glimpse the gravestones: the dove, the chalice and the shape of the angel amongst the other blunt stubs. The hedge was still thick enough to hide me more or less. Only a determined observer could have seen me, and there was never anyone in the cemetery. All the dead were long forgotten. But still, I took care and wore my dull green school gabardine mac and hid my crimson beret and gloves in my pocket.
Yellow leaves rotted squelchily on the concrete. It was a wet autumn. It rained every morning and turned still and misty each short afternoon. The seat of the swing was damp, the chains cold in my hands. They left a sickly iro
n smell, a brownness on my palms. It was strange to swing in the dusky after-school afternoons. I didn’t swing so high, not high enough to churn the frame in the ground and cause the noisy jolting. Sad speckled thrushes sang in the hedge. Seagulls blown inland for the winter drifted above, grey as puffs of spume. The climbing frame was slippery, but I didn’t need to climb so high to watch the people in the houses.
Mama and Bob never asked me where I went in the afternoons, but one day I came in quietly, not exactly planning to eavesdrop, but still, closing the door gently, taking off my wet shoes and pausing in the hall for a moment before I went to join them in the sitting room.
‘Where does she get to?’ I heard Bob asking Mama. There was no reply. I could picture Mama’s face. She would be pressing her lips into a narrow line and frowning as she pinched folded paper into a crease. That was her origami time. She wouldn’t answer until she’d finished the bit she was on. ‘Are you going to tell her today?’ Bob said and his voice was unusually urgent. ‘Don’t tell her, Lilian. There’s no need to tell her, let things lie, that’d be best.’
‘There!’ Mama said. She darted a look at Bob as I opened the door. ‘Look, Jenny.’ She held up a paper frog. ‘And watch.’ She did something to it that made its paper legs flex as if it was hopping. She laughed and then sighed and put it down.
‘Eh?’ said Bob, looking at Mama.
‘Bob wants to know where you’ve been,’ Mama said. ‘Not that we mind you going out.’
‘I’ve just been walking,’ I replied. I wanted to ask, Tell her what? but I couldn’t. There was a nervous creeping feeling inside me. I did and I didn’t want to know.
‘She just walks,’ Mama relayed to Bob.
‘Alone?’ Bob asked her.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Christmas angels,’ Mama announced. ‘In silver and gold paper. A flock of them.’
‘Herd, surely,’ Bob said.
‘Host,’ I corrected.
‘Whatever. Don’t you think that would be lovely? Different anyway, for Christmas. Nearly tea time,’ she said, when we didn’t reply.
I went upstairs and put on my slippers and washed my hands. There were tiny flecks of paint from the climbing frame between my fingers. I unplaited my hair and brushed the separate wriggling worms together. My hair had never been cut. It reached my thighs and was another thing that made me feel different at school. Nobody else had hair that went past her waist, and lots of them had it short. The popular girls had all had theirs cut short recently. Mine wasn’t pretty hair, not a special colour or thick or curly, just thin and pale and straight. Not cutting it was another of Bob’s foibles. Mama wasn’t allowed to cut hers either, although she had it bobbed as a girl. Mine had fine tapering ends like baby hair and was a terrible business to wash.
Before meals we always had to pause for a minute. It was a compromise. Because Bob didn’t believe in God, we didn’t say grace. At school we mumbled for what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful Amen as fast as we could and then tucked in, but at home we just left a gap where grace would have been. I grew up with it so it didn’t strike me as strange until I was quite old. When I asked Mama the reason why, she said it was good manners not to pounce on the food like wild animals. And if there was a God he would see that although we didn’t actually believe, at least we didn’t take our food for granted. That’s what she thought Bob thought. She couldn’t remember properly. And even now I don’t pounce on my food.
Once we’d started eating, there was a lot of unusual and nervous eye contact between Mama and Bob. And then Mama cleared her throat.
‘It’s your birthday next week,’ she said. We were eating bloaters. I stopped mid-chew, my mouth clogged with the salty flesh.
‘But …’
‘I know.’
‘But my birthday’s in June!’
‘You’ll be thirteen on Thursday. Do shut your mouth when you’re eating.’ I swallowed painfully. Mama and Bob were both concentrating on their plates, extracting the hair-like bones from their fish.
‘But Mama! My birthday’s in June, it’s not till June. Tell her, Bob!’ Bob’s eyes swivelled everywhere but at me. He dabbed at his mouth with his serviette. There were breadcrumbs caught in the fuzz on his chest.
‘Another cup, I think, Lilian,’ he said to Mama, pushing his cup and saucer towards her. As Mama poured the tea, I noticed that her hand was trembling.
‘Ready for a top up, Jennifer?’ she said.
‘Is she all right?’ I asked Bob. ‘Has she gone mad?’ I held onto the sides of my chair to keep me from toppling.
‘There are things that you don’t know. Many things.’ Mama’s voice was solemn and her forehead was stamped with a frown. She kept looking at Bob for support but he would not look back.
‘Things best let lie if you ask me,’ Bob mumbled.
‘What things?’ I demanded. ‘That my birthday’s in November?’
‘I just wanted to prepare you. We’ll say no more for now. Your birthday’s next Thursday. Not another word till then. Get on with your bloater. Or a nice slice of malt loaf?’ She held a plate of withered brown slices towards me.
I got up and stumbled from the room. My chair tipped over but I didn’t go back and pick it up. I had the strange sensation as I lurched upstairs that the earth was tilting beneath me, a pole or an axis or something shifting, leaving me all askew, unsure of my bearings. A November girl. An autumn girl. And almost thirteen. That wasn’t me, didn’t feel like me. And why? From my bedroom I could hear them murmuring downstairs and I hated them. I hated them with their bloaters and their malt loaf and their secrets.
I pulled the net curtain back from my window and looked out at the dark massed bushes in the garden. There were blurred orange street-lamps in the distance, but no stars or moon. My breath misted the glass and I ran my finger through it, leaving a dripping trail. I watched the drips chasing each other down and gathering in a pool on the sill. I didn’t belong, that was obvious. I wasn’t who I thought I was. I’d always felt different, that’s why I didn’t have any proper friends. That’s why I never got invited to a birthday party, or to watch television after school. That’s why I hardly ever answered questions at school.
Miss Clarke asked a question and I knew the answer and nobody else did but I couldn’t put up my hand. I couldn’t single myself out. I would sit feeling dizzy, the answer leaping against my pursed lips, my hands heavy as cricket bats. Before I could force one into the air she’d tell us and I’d know that I’d been right and then everyone would learn the answer. But nobody would know that I’d known first.
Maybe the teachers knew what it was that was odd about me. Maybe everybody knew. I drew a miserable face on the window and tears rolled out of its eyes.
I got into bed with my clothes on and pulled the blankets over my head. I didn’t sleep. It was too early and there was an awful gnawing inside me, a mixture of hatred and anxiety and curiosity – and a terrible taste of bloater in my mouth. Later, Mama knocked on my door. ‘Are you all right, dear?’ she asked. ‘Would you like some cocoa?’ I didn’t answer. I heard her open the door a little and sigh into my room before closing it as gently as if I was ill.
5
I went to school the following morning without speaking to them again. I did the daily dozen sullenly, my eyes on the floor. I ate only a piece of toast for breakfast despite Bob’s insistence on protein first thing. Breakfast was all heavy sighs and avoided eyes.
I slammed out of the house without a word. I looked back at the door and knew that behind it stood Mama, her hand outstretched, her goodbye frozen on her lips. I spoke to no one in the playground, but that wasn’t unusual, all the popular girls giggled and skipped and linked arms and whispered secrets. I hung around by the door, twizzling the end of my long pigtail in my coat pocket, wishing the bell would go, wishing I hadn’t come to school, that I’d dared to play truant instead. I could have gone to my playground and been properly alone. It was public so
litude I detested. When, at last, the bell went and we filed in and sat at our desks, I saw that there was a new girl standing by Miss Clarke’s desk. She was bigger than anyone else, with frizzy dark hair and a full-sized bosom.
‘This is Bronwyn Broom,’ Miss Clarke said when the fidgeting and rustling had ceased. ‘She’s joining us as from today. I want you all to be considerate and help her settle in, show her the ropes. Now. Let me see …’ She eyed us all speculatively, skipping over the popular girls and letting her eyes rest on me and the empty half of the double desk that was mine. ‘Yes, of course, Jennifer Maybee,’ she said. ‘I’ll put Bronwyn next to you and you can help her find her way around. Sit down, Bronwyn.’
Bronwyn came and sat beside me. I managed a sort of smile but she just looked awkward and lumpish. She had olive skin, and thick black eyebrows like a man’s.
‘Jennifer will share her books with you for today,’ Miss Clarke said. She was our form teacher and also took us for English and history. ‘Now, where were we?’ She opened her own book. We were reading a dreadfully long and tedious poem by William Wordsworth called The Prelude. We were going round the class reading aloud, and some girls mumbled and some stumbled and the rest of us yawned. And when we’d read some of it we had to write a paraphrase. It had been going on for weeks.
I opened the book and pushed it into the middle of the desk. Bronwyn leant towards me and her hair tickled my cheek. She smelt faintly of sweat, but also of bacon, and I began to feel hungry. Bronwyn didn’t look at me once for the whole double lesson. When it was her turn to read out loud, she faltered so badly, and made so many mistakes that Miss Clarke let her off for the day, putting it down to nerves. I saw Bronwyn sneak a peppermint into her mouth, and then, to my surprise, she pushed one along the desk to me. It was warm from her pocket. I sucked it furtively as I wrote my paraphrase. When I’d finished my work, I looked at Bronwyn’s exercise book and saw that she’d hardly started, that her writing was babyish and hardly even joined up and her spelling was hopeless.
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