by Tessa Hadley
–What do you play? Roxanne demanded.
–I dunno. Whatever the others are playing.
–That’s boring. Come on. We’ll think of something else.
The boys’ playground was on the left and the girls’ on the right; they were deep concrete pits between very high stone walls. The girls’ playground extended on one side into a covered area underneath the school building, supported on iron pillars; we called this the shed, and when it rained it was our shelter. Roxanne led the way in here, still hanging on to me, as if she were afraid I might run. It was an eerie, echoing space, almost dark at its far end where the big bins were and the padlocked grey-painted doors into the boiler room and the room where the caretaker kept the broken desks and blackboards. We sat down on the low wall in front of the bins. Everyone outside was still standing around in awkward groups, not sure how to begin yet in the new hierarchy, with a new top class and new Junior Ones arrived from the infant school. Roxanne was inches shorter than me; I was tall, and clumsy with what my mother called puppy fat. I also had two big, white front teeth like spades, which I had hated ever since they intruded their way into my mouth; I tried not to open it and show them. Roxanne’s lithe little brown-skinned body made the boys call her a tomboy, although close up to her I realised that this wasn’t right—she didn’t have the boys’ animal carelessness; she was too intently conscious of herself. Her red cotton dress was skimpy over her barrel chest and I could see her quick breathing. The skin of her face was very thin and fine, drawn tight over the bone beneath, and her head was round and neat as a nut: she was one of those children disconcertingly printed with a set of grown-up features, too finished and expressive. Her dark, silky, curly hair was cropped short.
–What do you want to play? she said, turning on me with intensity. – A pretending game. You can be whatever you like.
I shrugged.
–What do you like best? I’m good at making up these games. If you give me an idea, I’ll make a game.
–Horses, I said, trying to think of something. – I like horses.
I thought she was going to give up on me. I was a very conventional child; I knew I was. I saw a flicker of exasperation. Horses! Horses didn’t mean anything to her. They didn’t really mean much to me either. I had read some pony books; that was all. With an effort that was almost a visible shudder she pulled herself back on track.
–Horses, she said. – All right. We’ll try that.
She closed her eyes. The life of her eyes was extinguished for a moment but through their lids I could still see her thoughts darting. When she opened them again they were full of resolution.
–All right. Pretend we’re horses. Wild ones. Take your hair band off. You have to shake your mane like this. There’s a wicked farmer who’s trying to catch us and sell us. We have to reach the island where we’ll be safe from him, but there’s a dangerous river we have to cross to get to it.
She jumped to her feet then and snickered and tossed her head and stamped her foot. She seemed to me miraculously horselike. I took my hair band off and put it safe in my pocket; then we galloped around the playground, pawing and whinnying, throwing back our heads and shaking our hair; when we spoke we changed our ordinary voices into a kind of breathy neighing. At first I felt like an idiot and I only did it because I didn’t dare disobey Roxanne, who had thought up the game especially for me. I saw my old friends watching, from the sidelines as usual. The others had started playing their own things, which some of the popular Junior Four girls were organising. These popular girls weren’t used to the sight of Roxanne and me together; they stared and whispered, drooping their arms round one another’s necks, which was a thing I hated. I thought they were like witches when they hung together like that, as if they only had one body, all thinking the same thoughts, always disapproving of something. A teacher had read us a story once about some old witches who shared one eye, taking turns to clap it into their foreheads. After a few minutes of the horse game, I began to forget about everybody. I didn’t exactly stop knowing that we were in the real playground, pretending something, but a different life welled up from inside me and took possession of my body, so that I could feel the romance of horse-being overwhelming my prosaic self.
–I don’t think I can go any further, I neighed when we came to the edge of the river (which ran past the door to the girls’ toilet block). – I feel too weak.
–Fear not, young colt, said Roxanne.
She would always surprise me by knowing the right words for whatever we played, like using “mane” and “colt,” even though she wasn’t interested in horses. I had imagined that the children from the Homes, because they had to wear hand-me-down clothes and were looked after by women they called their “Aunties,” would be somehow deprived of these kinds of knowledge. Then she invented an extraordinary movement for horses swimming, holding back her head on her neck, making a nervous big digging movement with her hands, lifting her knees; and it was as if I could see them, the beautiful band of noble beasts giving themselves up courageously to the swift-flowing, treacherous river, holding up their fine heads out of the current. After a hiatus midstream when I was in danger of being swept away—and Roxanne, swimming by my side, saved me, nudged me onward with her nose—we both struggled out on the far bank, shaking ourselves dry, safe at last.
–See-ee-ee? she neighed. – I knew you would be able to do it.
And then the teacher came out ringing the bell for the end of playtime.
Every morning when Roxanne came into the classroom I expected her to take her books out of the desk next to mine and move away to sit by someone else, giving no more explanation for leaving than she had when she’d first arrived. I half-wanted her to go: our friendship burdened me, it was too one-sided. I never believed that she had really chosen me for what I was; I felt myself merely tumbled along in the wake of a change that she was arranging in her life. She had been one of the naughty girls and she had made up her mind quite deliberately to become one of the good girls; she saw me as a way of getting into that. I never believed in those days that she would really make it as a good girl. There was too much of her: no matter how hard she tried she was bound to give herself away in the end; she would overdo it. They would see she was only pretending, that she wasn’t the real thing. She concentrated on everything Mrs. Hazlehurst said too intently, she put her hands together too fervently at prayers, raised them up too high in front of her face, eyes squeezed shut (mine weren’t; that’s how I saw her).
I could have ended our friendship any time, I suppose, simply acted so dumb and resistant that Roxanne would have given up and fastened onto someone else. But I didn’t. I couldn’t help being swept along by the idea of someone changing who she was. I knew I wasn’t capable of this, I was just helplessly forever me. And then, I was soon addicted to the heady life of our pretend games. Perhaps it wasn’t quite true that anybody would have done to be Roxanne’s partner in these. What I learned, playing with her, was that I was suggestible, unusually suggestible. Later in life it turned out that I was a perfect subject for hypnotism: the hypnotist only had to wave his hand pretty much once across in front of my eyes and I was gone. I had never played proper pretend games before Roxanne started me off on it, except mothers and babies, halfheartedly, with my old friends, where the “baby” hopped heavily along, crouched double, knees bent, holding hands with the “mother” and saying “ga-ga,” which we knew babies didn’t really say. We had only done it because everyone else did. When Roxanne and I played having babies it was very different. We did childbirth first, moaning and writhing against the iron pillars and throwing our heads from side to side, having our brows wiped (mostly I moaned; Roxanne wiped and presided). Then the imaginary babies were wrapped tenderly in our cardigans and carried about in our arms. We gazed into their tiny faces adoringly; we suckled them secretly in the dark corners of the shed, putting them to where we pretended we had breasts, though not lifting our jumpers of course. I don’t know how Roxanne k
new about childbirth or suckling; certainly I had only had the vaguest idea about either of them. When she came to my house and we played the game there, we did lift our jumpers up; we put my plastic dolls to our nipples on our flat chests. When I fed my own first real child I remembered this, the guilty delicious excitement of it, the sensation of pressing on those hard, cold mouths.
My mother didn’t like my friendship with Roxanne. She didn’t mean to be unkind or prejudiced but she was afraid for me; she felt our mismatch, the inappropriateness of Roxanne’s little, skimpy, gypsy body flashing enthusiastically up and down our familiar wood-panelled staircase, sitting before the hunting-scene placemat at our dining table, pouring from our gravy boat. When Roxanne used our bathroom she would never close the door; she had a funny habit of calling out to me all the time she was using it—“are you still there? are you still there?”—so that I had to stay outside and hear her tinkling, scrunching the toilet paper. The smell she left behind her was alien. I knew that every time one of the Aunties turned up after tea to take Roxanne back to the Homes, my mother had to restrain herself from looking round to see if Roxanne had taken anything, which was awful and made us both ashamed. She also felt guilty that Daddy, who didn’t like to get the car out, wouldn’t give them a lift home, so that they had to wait for the bus. We lived across the Downs, in a street of trees and big detached houses with fake half-timbering, although I didn’t know that it was fake then. When Roxanne was gone my mother would come and stand uneasily in the door of my bedroom, looking vaguely at my Wendy house, my dolls’ cradle, the sewing basket given to me by my godmother, my set of red-bound classics: Westward Ho!, The Cricket on the Hearth, Wuthering Heights, Cranford, East Lynne. If I finished one of these classics my father gave me half a crown, so I ploughed through them one after another. If he questioned me about them I hardly knew what had happened in the one I had just finished, but he gave me the half crown anyway. Probably he had no memory of what had happened in them either, although he claimed that they were all old favourites from his childhood. Roxanne had snatched my books down eagerly when she first came to play, but even she found them too stodgy.
Instead she would sit cross-legged on my bed thinking up games. My younger sister was sometimes allowed to be part of this. I showed Roxanne off to Jean, as if I were showing off a forest wild animal I had tamed, but Jean was sceptical; she never refused to play but she turned her mouth down sullenly and acted as if her body was stiff, her spirit withdrawn from her performance. Roxanne made quite a show out of the difficulty of getting the right story. She sat with her eyes squeezed shut, and sometimes as if that darkness weren’t enough she asked for something to drape over her head: my dressing gown, or the coverlet off the dolls’ cradle. Jean and I had to kneel still and quiet as mice on the bedside rug while Roxanne searched for inspiration. When she pulled her coverings away her eyes would be gleaming, full with her idea. It might be cruel governesses or Mary-Queen-of-Scots or pirates. There were games we played over and over, and games we only played once. Roxanne was always the men and we were the women, even though she was only the same size as Jean. I was often feverish or fainting or debilitated in some way; I kept in the cabin below (the bed), while Roxanne swaggered on the deck above (the floor), boldly fighting for our lives, her sword dangling at her side or slicing the air. We had to imagine that the cue from our miniature billiards was a sword; we didn’t have dressing-up things. Jean and I had to wear our nightdresses, for old-fashioned-days clothes.
–Don’t you have a dressing-up box? Roxanne was surprised, triumphant. – We have them at the Homes.
What happened in our lives when we grew up, Roxanne’s and mine, is not at all what I expected in those days. I expected Roxanne to be glamorously and terribly destroyed, and for me to survive safely and dully, achieving all the things my parents expected of me. Then actually it was me who made a mess of growing up, although it’s been better recently. I had a breakdown in my first year of university, and for a long time after that I couldn’t work; I had to live back at home with my parents. I did get married but that didn’t last, although at least I have my kids, who are grown-up now. And the other day I heard of Roxanne, through someone I work with who’d been at school with her, not that junior school but her secondary one. I work in an insurance office; it’s not very exciting but I cope with it fairly well. I haven’t seen Roxanne since we were about seventeen. Apparently these days she’s an administrator in the Child Health Directorate in a big hospital in the north. The person who told me about her said she was “a real high-flyer.” While he was telling me all this I did wonder whether we could really be talking about the same person, but surely with that name he couldn’t have mixed her up with anybody else; he couldn’t be mistaken.
I remember very exactly the last time I saw her. Roxanne and I went to different secondary schools. I did get into one of the grammar schools, although I didn’t get a free place. Roxanne was never even put in for the entrance exam; I don’t think any of the children from the Homes were. For a while we saw each other sometimes at weekends; it was during this time, I think, that she invented our religious cult. We used to leave offerings at a particular rock in a little woody copse on the Downs, and prick our fingers to make marks on it with blood. The offerings only started with pennies and flowers, but by the end—after I had stopped seeing Roxanne—I was offering all kinds of stuff, not only silly amounts of money but quite precious things, my bronze medal from swimming, my dead grandmother’s ring. When I went back to the rock the offerings had always gone, and although of course I knew really that someone had simply taken them, I couldn’t be absolutely sure, and so I had to leave even more next time. When I heard that Roxanne had become ill, that she was starving herself and only weighed six stone, I couldn’t help thinking that this was something the rock had exacted from her. Anorexia was just starting to be talked about a lot. I knew she was taken into hospital, and then came out again, and was supposed to be better.
When I was seventeen I had almost forgotten all about her, or at least I had stopped expecting to bump into her wherever I went. I had a Saturday job in Blue, a jeans shop on Park Street. I couldn’t quite believe my luck that I’d got to work with the girls in such a fashionable place. We painted our eyelids and outlined our eyes with kohl; we shook our long hair across our faces. We wore dangly Indian silver earrings, although actually my earrings in those days were still clip-ons; I wasn’t allowed to have my ears pierced. My father put on a show of jocular astonishment whenever he met me at home dressed up to go out, claiming he didn’t recognise me as his own daughter. The craze at that time was to buy jeans that fitted so tightly you had to do them up by lying on your back on the floor and pulling up the zip with string; I wasn’t as pudgy as I had been once but I would rather have died than test myself doing this in front of the others. We went in fear of the full-time girls, who were disdainful, dangerous, enviably skinny. One had a boyfriend who rode a motorbike and came into the shop in his fringed leather jacket. He touched her on the waist, and as they stood murmuring together we saw him nudge his knee between hers, hinting something, reminding her of something; she gave him money from the till. We knew that he sold drugs. All this was darkly intoxicating to us; these girls’ lives seemed more truly adult to us than our parents’ ever had.
One Saturday in Blue while I was folding a pile of cord trousers Roxanne came in the shop door: I recognised her instantly although she was very changed. She looked impressive; she had exactly the air of initiated mysterious suffering that we were all aiming for. Her hair was hennaed a startling orange-red, not long but longer than I remembered ever seeing it, curling on her neck. Around her eyes and mouth her face was marked, as if it were bruised or strained. But this didn’t make her ugly; it was somehow beautiful. She had grown into the painful expressivity of her features, which had been too much on a child. Her loose white cheesecloth dress was cinched around her tiny waist with a thick belt, pulling the cloth taut across her breasts, which w
eren’t much bigger than when we’d fed our dolls together. Without looking at any of us she pulled a selection of size 8 jeans from the shelves and took them into one of the changing cubicles. I stood around wondering whether to say anything to her. I thought she hadn’t recognised me, perhaps because she was high on something: her eyes were very wide open and she lifted her feet as if she was pulling them up from something sticky on the floor. Or perhaps she had just moved away into such a different life that she had blanked all memory of our friendship from her awareness.
After a long time she came out again from the cubicle, and it was obvious to me at once that she was wearing a couple of the pairs of jeans under her dress. She walked without any special haste straight to the shop door. Probably even if I hadn’t known her I wouldn’t have dared say anything: I was too shy to undergo the awful exposure of accusing anyone, incurring their contempt. Then as Roxanne walked out of the door she gave me one quick, straight look, boldly into my face, and flashed her smile at me, like a flare of light illuminating the whole place, melting me. And I thought: I will always be the tame one, watching while she risks everything.
I believed then that this meant I would be safe, at least.