A clock struck, and as I had no watchI travelled without such normal equipmentI counted the strokes. I sat down on the bed nearest the window. It would be mine, and so would the bigger of the two desks, the better lit. It was more natural to me, and perhaps easier, to take the worse desk and bed, but I knew that Julianne would despise me for any show of self-sacrifice.
So, I sat on the bed. My fingers stroked the rough striped cover. The sheets beneath were starched and crackling like paper: tucked strap-tight into the beds frame, as if to harness a lunatic. There seemed to be no traffic in the street below. A lightbulb burned in its plain paper shade. A silence gathered. Time seemed to have stopped. I sat, and looked at my feet. Certain lines of verse began to run through my head. Then we let off paper crackers, each of which contained a motto / And she listened while I read them, till her mother told her not to. I could hear my breath going about its usual business, in and out. I was eighteen years old, plus one month. I wondered, would I ever get any older: or just go on sitting in this room. But after a time, the clock struck again. And dark as winter was the flow / Of Iser, rolling rapidly. I got up, and began to put my clothes into the drawers, and my books on the shelves.
I grew up in a small town, the only child of elderly parents. Our town, a cotton town, had fallen into decay by the time I was born; cheap textiles from the Far East were beginning to flood the markets and those mills that remained struggled on with antiquated machinery, which it was not worth the cost of replacing; the workers too were ageing, and by the time of my middle childhood were like a parody of themselves, a southerners idea of the north. Under the factory walls of plum-coloured brick, stained black from the smoke and daily rain, plodded thick-set men in bib and brace, with shorn hair and flat caps: and angry-looking women in checked head-scarves, with elastic stockings and shoes like boats. Beyond the mill chimneys, you could see the line of hills.
The streets of our town were lined with brick-built terraces, interrupted by corner shops which gave no credit: by public houses in which people would declare they never set foot: by sooty Nonconformist churches, whose attendance dwindled as the 1960s drew on. There was a time when each of these churches had outside it a wooden board, and pinned to the board a discreet notice in fading type, announcing the times of services and Sunday schools and the names of visiting preachers. But a day came when these notices were replaced by posters, splashed in screaming colours: CHRISTIANITY HASNT FAILED, ITS JUST NEVER BEEN TRIED. The towns cinema shut down, and was turned into a supermarket of eccentric design; the Mechanics Institute closed its doors, had its windows smashed, decayed for eighteen months, and then reopened as a tyre salesroom.
My mother, made redundant from her job in the weaving shed, went out cleaning houses. A change took place in our own form of worship; the priest, now turned around to face the people, spoke a debased lingo that they could all understand. Opera manuum ejus Veritas et judicium. The works of His hands are truth and judgement.
My father was a clerk; I knew this from quite early in life, because of my mothers habit of saying, Your fathers not just a clerk, you know. Each evening he completed a crossword puzzle. Sometimes my mother read her library books or looked at magazines, which she also called books, but more often she knitted or sewed, her head bowed under the standard lamp. Her work was exquisite: her tapestry, her drawn-thread work. Our pillowcases were embroidered, white on white, with rambling roses and trailing stems, with posies in plaited baskets, with ribbons in garlands and graceful knots. My father had a different cable-knit cardigan for every day of the week, should he choose to wear it. All my petticoats, cut out and sewn by her, had rows of lace at the hem andalso by the hem on the lefthand sidesome motif representing innocence: a buttercup, for example, or a kitten.
I can see that my mother was, in herself, not exquisite. She had a firm jaw, and a loud carrying voice. Her hair was greying and wild and held back with springing kirby grips. When she frowned, a cloud passed over the street. When she raised her eyebrowsas she often did, amazed each hour by what God expected her to endurea small towns tram system sprang up on her forehead. She was quarrelsome, dogmatic and shrewd; her speech was alarmingly forthright, or else bewilderingly circumlocutory. Her eyes were large and alert, green like green glass, with no yellow or hazel in them; with none of the compromises people have when it comes to green eyes. When she laughed I seldom knew why, and when she cried I was no wiser. Her hands were large and knuckly and calloused, made to hold a rifle not a needle.
My father and myself were fair, lean, quiet people, our features minimal and smooth; our eyes changed colour in different lights. I was a little Englishwoman, my mother said: cool. This struck a chill in me, a deepening chill; I wanted to believe I belonged to another country. My mother and father had both left Ireland in their mothers wombs, and their workaday north country accents were as flat as mine. My father looked entirely like an Englishman; he could have passed for an earl, or an earls flunkey. His narrow body bent itself in strange places, as if hinged and jointed differently from other peoples. His legs were long and seemed extendable, and his feet were narrow and restless; when he came into a room he seemed to hover and trail about it, like a harmless insect, daddy longlegs.
It was my parents habit, at intervals, to shut themselves in their bedroom; then my mother would mention, loudly and contentiously, the names of strange towns. Colchester was mentioned, so at another time was Stroud, and so was a place my mother pronounced lengthily as KingstonuponHull. Later I realized that these were places to which we might have gone to live, if my father had taken up an offer of promotion. But for one reason or another he never did. When I was in my teens they would take me into rooms separately, and hiss between their teethfalse, in both casesabout who had wanted to go and who hadnt, who had wrecked whose chances. It was beyond me to make any sense of this: to trap them in a room together and get them to have it out, spit out the truth of the situation. Perhaps I already suspected there was no truth to be had; their fictions were interwoven, depending one on the other.
In summer, when I was a small girl, we would take a bus to the outskirts of the town, and walk in the hills, rambling along the bridle paths in clear green air. We were above the line of the mill chimneys; like angels, we skimmed their frail tops.
Once you have begun rememberingisnt this so?one image springs another; they run through your head in all directions, scampering animals flushed from coverts. Memorys not a reel, not a film you can run backwards and forwards at will: its that flash of startled fur, the slither of silk between the fingers, the duplicated texture of hair or bone. Its an image blurring, caught on the move: as if in one of my family snapshots, taken before cameras got so foolproof that any fool could capture the moment.
I remember this.
I am six years old, and I have been ill. After this illness I am returning to school. It is a spring morning, water gurgling in the gutters, a keen wind. I am still shaky, unused to going out, and I have to hold tight to my mothers hand as she leads me through the school gate. Perhaps I dont want to go; I dont know. There is one tree in our school playground, and the scud and dapple of sun across its leaves is like the feeling in my limbs, now heavy, now light. Everything is new to me. My eyes are clear and cold, as if they have been rinsed in ice water.
Inside the classroom the air is hot and fusty. It smells of damp and wool and of our playtime milk cooking in its bottles beside the radiator pipes, growing glutinous and clotted. Perhaps in summer, when we have our holidays, this smell goes away? In detail: chalk smells of peaches, or I think the word chalk is like the word peaches, because of the texture both sounds share, the plushness and the grain. Rulers smell of their wood, of their varnish, and of the salt and flesh of the hand which has warmed them: as you draw them beneath your nose you feel each dividing notch, so that each fraction of an inch has its measured segment of scent. My teacher will snarlher eyes popping at methat in all the time Ive been off sick she thinks I might have learnt to draw a straight line. But thats later; for this morning theres an element of sweetness, and this shivering light. It is as if my teacher has forgotten who I am, and that when she last saw me she threatened to hit me for singing. My renaissance has called out of her a vague good-will. Let me see, she says, looking around the classroom. Where would you like to sit?
The luxury of choice. My fingers curl into my palms like snails. I know what I would like: to sit next to someone who has a certificate to show that there are no insects in their hair. Eggs, my mother says, eggs are what you find, but I cannot imagine eggs unless they are hens eggs. While she scrapes my scalp with the steel comb she always emphasizes that lice are democratic, that they visit the rich as well as the poorthough we dont, I think, know anyone who is richand that they like, they positively prefer, clean heads over dirty ones. I come into the category of clean heads, and she tells me this so that I will not look down on the insects victims, or taunt them in the playground, or chant at them.
I look around the room. Under their pulloverswhich might be maroon, or a mottled greythe boys wear grey shirts, their collars springing upwards, twisted and wrung as though theyve tucked down their chins and chewed them. They wear striped elastic belts with buckles like two snakes in a headlock. Their hair is either chopped straight across their foreheads or it is shorn off to stubble. When they go home, in bad weatherwhich is to say, in most weatherthey wear knitted balaclava helmets, and one boy has an even more terrible item, a leather helmet, thin black leather like a saurian skin, tight to his skull and fastening under his chin with a tarnished buckle. When I look at the boys I see bristles and snouts, rubber faces always contorting and meemowing. They are always lolling their tongues and wriggling their ears, or polishing their noses with the flats of their palms, working the cartilage violently round and round. Their not-yet-hairy limbs are pliable as ruddy clay, as a doll I have called a Bendy Toy; I can almost smell the rubber and feel the boneless twist I give its legs. I think I will not sit next to a boy.
I look at the girls and the girls look back at me, various expressions of dullness or spite on their faces. Their hair is braided tightly into stubby plaits, or chopped short below their ears; if the latter, it is parted at one side, and pinned off their faces with a great black grip. They have an assortment of navy cardigans, some of them washed out and shrunken, with the buttons through the wrong holes. Some have pleated skirts, or gym-slips like blue-black cardboard, like solid ink; some have cotton frocks under their cardigans, frocks that are limp and soft and pastel. I think, as the lesser evil, I will sit next to a girl.
But there are two difficulties here. One is that I have been away so long that I do not have a friend. The other is that my mother has embroidered a gambolling lamb and a frieze of spring flowers right over the skirt of my blue cotton dress. It is a sky-blue dress, and otherwise plain; I see them looking into my sky. They both want and dont want it. I can expect no mercy.
I sway on the spot. The hem of the dress brushes the tender skin at the back of my knees.
Wellmake up your mind, my teacher says.
Miss Whittaker, who teaches the next class, is said to make a speciality of hitting pupils on the backs of their knees. Knuckle-rapping has gone quite out of style.
I look around, and see Karina. There is a chair empty next to her. She lifts her broad face to the light, and gives me a benevolent smile. She is wearing a yellow cardigan, yellow and fluffy, the colour of a new chicken in a picture book. Her plaits are fat and bound with white ribbons looped into flamboyant bows. From the braids and all around her head tiny threads or wires of hair stand out, white-blonde, quivering. Her face is like the sun.
There, please, I say.
Complacently, Karina begins to rearrange her possessions on the table: square up her ruler, her pencil, the cardboard box in which (at this tender age) we keep our lined paper for writing, and our squared paper for sums.
Next day when Julianne arrived, I was lying on my bed smoking a cigarette. My God! she said, shrieking inside the doorway. Your hair! My God!
I sat up, smiling solemnly. My hair, which had been down to my waist at the end of the school term, was now clipped close to my head, scarcely an inch long all over. Glimpsing myself in shop windows this last week, I had whirled around to confront the stranger who seemed always at my shoulder; it was myself. My head felt light and full of possibilities, like a dandelion clock.
Julianne crossed the room, picked up my packet of cigarettes, and fitted one into her full red mouth. Why did you do it? Did you have nits, or is it a symbol? She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Put up a large hand to touch her own hair, silky hanks the colour of butterscotch. This mirror is useless, she grumbled.
Duck.
She bent her knees. Useless. Its not the top of my head I need to see, its the rest of me.
Perhaps we might rehang it.
And knock a lump out of the bloody wall.
There was an oblong coffee-table in the middle of the room, centred on the striped cotton rug that was centred on the polished floor. Julianne tested the table with her hand and then stepped up on it. A piece of her came into view through the mirror: her knees, coloured tights, the swish of her short skirt. The table groaned. Careful! I said. She stretched out a hand, palm forth, like an orator. We were stuffed with education, replete with it: Make a speech, I suggested.
Gaul is divided into three parts, she proffered, in Latin.
That isnt a speech.
Carthage must be destroyed. She studied her reflection. Not bad. She stepped down, glowing.
Your case, I asked. Where is it?
I left it for the porter.
Lawdy me! I thought of my dislocated limb. Now he will carry it up for you, and youll have to give him a tip. That will be embarrassing for you.
You dont have to tip this kind She broke off. She smirked. She saw how it was going to be. We were free now, to enjoy each others company; free and equal, to be as silly and as sharp as we liked. I smelt soup, she said.
Im afraid you did.
Christ. She said it with a volume of disgust.
Do you remember at school, when Laura took that message over to the kitchens, and they were putting the cabbage on at half-past nine?
A further blank distaste fell into Juliannes eyes. Well not discuss our academy, she said. But I must say for it, that at least at the end of the day they let us go to our own homes to eat and have baths.