Slights (11 page)

  My brother ruined his reputation by trying to boss me. It was my third week of school. That was a memorable week; I was finally allowed to have my own clay. I was the last child in class to receive mine, because you had to pass a test, and I had no memory for these things. You had to recite where you lived, your telephone number, and "I must not talk to strangers."

  "What's a stranger?" Lisa Sargeant asked. She was the kid in class who asked questions. She was nudged throughout the day to ask when playtime was, could we do work outside today. I did not keep track of any of my school companions, because they meant so little to me, but I think if she had become a journalist I would have heard.

  "A stranger is someone you don't know, don't love, aren't married to," the teacher said. I pinched Lisa Sargeant. "Ask her if she's married. Go on."

  "Are you married?" Lisa said. The class tittered.

  "Are you?" said the teacher. The whole class laughed at the idea of any of them being married. When Greg Something went to a wedding a few weeks later, he took up the whole show-and-tell to describe the event.

  "And my sister was called the bride and everyone thought I was so little and they smiled at me and said you were a late present and I said we gave our presents at home. I gave a card with shells on it. They said No we meant oh it doesn't matter. And Robin call me Rob was called the groom he had to wear a suit and a SCARF around his tummy."

  Greg had brought wedding cake for us to look at and pass around. He didn't care what happened to it. He hated fruit cake. The pigs in class plucked candied fruit out and sucked on it. Whoever passed the cake to Lisa Sargeant said, "Here y'are, bride," and that remained her name throughout childhood.

  The teacher told us a stranger was someone whose name you didn't know. I never forgot this. As a child I asked people their names when they offered me lifts. Later in life I always introduced myself, and enjoyed seeing faces open up as if I was a friend now.

  That's what should have happened.

  When Peter came to find me in the playground, not long after I had told the teacher where I lived and received my clay, I was very happy. I had clay to mould and play with, I had streaks on my clothes and face.

  I was eating my play lunch (a very nice homemade lemon biscuit. I can still conjure its fresh taste, feel the crumbs on my tongue) with clay fingers. Peter came from behind and knocked my biscuit away.

  "Filthy girl," he said, "eating with dirty hands." Luckily no one heard him call me a girl. I was not ready to be one just yet.

  He dragged me to the taps, where he forced my hands, then my face under. As I spluttered, I heard voices, and knew half the school was watching.

  I didn't know what death was. I was so well protected from grief. Our ginger cat Muffy had gone to visit its mother in a cave in our backyard and not returned, guinea pigs stiffly rested in their cages, fish were drinking from the top of the tank.

  So when I coughed and spluttered, I felt no fear. I didn't know I could die. I didn't know such a thing existed. There was a weird smell though. Not the playground or the school room. Not quite the toilets.

  I was uncomfortable, and I couldn't breath. I saw blackness, and stars. I still had my carton of milk. Most kids didn't drink it; the crates of milk were left in the sun for an hour before distribution, so they were warm and smelled faintly of sick. If I didn't drink the milk I saved it in my desk. The day the teacher found it all there I got in trouble because she thought I had stolen the milk. She said, "We better share your loot around."

  The milk smelt terrible when everyone opened the cartons.

  I was famous throughout school for that one. Brenda Green was sick in the hallway and they had to get the sawdust out and everyone had to go a different way to class. That's what she became famous for; we called her Brenda Green Face.

  Cry Bobby cried because he wanted to drink his milk, and Neil got milk all over him as well. Belinda got a headache and had to go home.

  I raised my arm over my shoulder and crushed my milk carton against Peter's head.

  He let me go. The children laughed at him, beaten by a kid in kindergarten. His eyes were squeezed tight; I think there was milk in the corners.

  "Aw, Steve," he said. He sounded weak, like he was not the boss any more. So I pushed him into the scary bush, where the spitfires sat and waited for victims.

  Peter's best friend, a boy shorter than me, came to his aid and was splashed with the milk and pushed in the bush as well.

  "Oh, Steve," he said.

  "Oh, Darren," I said. By the end of the day they both stunk of milk.

  Darren was one of those kids who never took their jumpers off. Why was that? He wasn't a particularly dirty child; even then I knew there was a difference between arriving dirty and getting dirty. Your mum didn't clean right if you were dirty to begin with.

  He would kick a ball around with the other kids, they'd slough off jumpers, undo shirts. He just kept running, redder and redder. He always reminded me of milk; he was pale and skinny. He looked like milk in a short glass; like Dad's favourite glass.

  When Darren got hot he looked like strawberry milk.

  Darren got in trouble at home that night – Peter told me. He got it for getting his jumper dirty. No big deal. Just wear your spare.

  "I would if I had one, stupid," Darren said when I made my suggestion.

  "Ooh, stir," I said, my arms miming the stirring of an enormous pot.

  Peter dobbed when we got home, and got in trouble for not looking after me. "She started it," Peter said.

  "I thought you were going to look after your little sister."

  "She won't let me," he said, and that's always been the truth. I don't want his lectures, his hospitality, though a bit of his money wouldn't hurt. "I was trying to get her to wash her hands and stuff. That's all."

  They called Peter the Milky Bar Kid after that, even though none of us could afford chocolate. We knew the ad, though.

  So I recognised the sensation of dying, without understanding it, two years later. I barely remember anything about being seven years old; I mostly remember just being eight one day, not seven any more, and people saying, "You're a grown-up now."

  This I remember; I couldn't breathe, I was in pain, but still I wasn't scared. I still wasn't up on death.

  All I knew about my illness was what the adults had told me; consequently my memory of it is adult.

  When I felt pain in my side, I ignored it. I told no one. I invented chants to keep my mind off it and waited for it to go away.

  Then I was in agony and I couldn't hide it. Mrs Sammett moved slowly, unused to emergencies. She assumed I was playing around. The other kids told me later she nudged me with her toe as I lay writhing on the floor.

  "Get up, Steve," she said. The other kids said I drooled and wet my pants. They said I shit my pants and showed everyone what I had under there. The stories got more and more extreme until I said, "I remember exactly what happened."

  I didn't, though; it was frustrating. The other kids never knew that, and they looked so guilty I wondered what they had done to my prone body.

  No one would ever tell me. The teacher nearly confessed once, when she said, "I'm sorry for my part in it." The fact that I had seen most of them in a strange room when I was in hospital made me feel stronger than them. Mrs Sammett never believed a word I said. She tuned out. My favourite song was "What a fat we have in Jesus," or any other where I could say fat. Because she was fat. Talcum powder got stuck in her folds. I got the feeling the class was mad at me for making them feel guilty.

  This was the first of my special experiences. I didn't recognise it as such, then. I wasn't even aware I had almost died. My mother told me I had been asleep, that I had visited a lovely place. The place I visited wasn't lovely, though. It scared me; it remains the only thing I am scared of.

  I was taken to hospital with a burst appendix, and I almost died. I did die for a while.

  I heard clicking and smelt mothballs and these people leaned over me and I was only seven and I screamed.

I knew the room was very strange, because it was cold, and not well-lit. I was uncomfortable, something I still associate with death. I cannot bear discomfort. I never wear tight, revealing clothes or confining underwear. My hair is cut short so it doesn't itch or become heavy. I have one large, perfect armchair in my home. I pay for central heating because I do not like to be cold, and I do not store my clothes. If I am not going to wear them for a while, I throw them out.

  I have no recollection of the fuss getting to the hospital, mother's tears, father's commanding voice, brother's white silence. These things I imagine easily.

  When I woke up I was in the room.

  I was naked and uncomfortable and cold. Peter was there and he stared at me. I tried to cover my parts but found my limbs sluggish and unwilling to follow orders.

  The room smelt a bit like Granny's cupboards. It was mothballs; poison. They look like Kool Mints, a forbidden delight, a similarity my mother identified before I could taste the difference.

  "This is poison. It kills moths and silverfish, so imagine what it can do to you. Even smelling it is dangerous, so you mustn't hide in Granny's cupboards."

  And here I was, surrounded by the smell. I tried not to breathe, but felt my lungs filling. I began to choke; I did not want to be poisoned.

  I heard a clicking noise and saw movement. Peter was not the only one in the room; there was a crowd of them moving to surround my bed.

  Mum and Dad weren't there, or any of my friends except Lisa Sargeant. Some of the other kids from school were there, though. Cry Bobby and Belinda Green and Neil and that Darren. There were little girls there; Melissa, that terrified, weak next door neighbour, and some red-haired girl with pink ribbons and a nurse with a very big nose. I recognised her uniform; I had been comforted by her sort before. I reached my arm out; stroke stroke. The hairs on it rose like there was a slight breeze but the air was so still I couldn't breathe.

   "Get off," I said, but my mouth moved slowly, a dull roar, geroff, I said, like a cat learning to talk.

  They let me sit up. All these faces. I saw my own face, but it was cracked, there were forty of me, all reflected in a huge, broken mirror, a doll's mirror grown up.

  Glenn Guest was there, and Mrs Sammett, and the whole class, I was back at school in a play, where everyone had to be mean to me to teach me a lesson, but there was no toilet because they all pooed their pants, poo poo and I laughed but vomit came out.

  "Little Savage," I heard, and Granny Searle was there, her hand on my cousin Nate's shoulder.

  "Granny," I said, but she wasn't loving me. She scared me as she stepped closer, clicking, stepping, and there was something wrong with their mouths and I forced my limbs to work, curled into a ball to escape them.

  The movement made me warmer. Then someone was stroking my hair and I screamed again but it was my mother and I was in a hospital room. It was warm and smelled clean, and, although people surrounded my bed I knew them all and they had normal mouths. When Granny Searle came I screamed and my voice wasn't a cat's. She had scared me the most in the room. Her eyes. Her hands, so cold. She held me down and her hands were warm, dry, familiar.

  "Why did you poo your pants, Granny?" I said, and all my visitors laughed.

  Peter told me I had nearly died of my appendix. He said it with pure delight, and he told everyone at school. He thought it would make them hate me, but it turned me into a hero. Everyone wanted to know what it was like.

  Peter denied all knowledge of the other room and I began to believe I had dreamt it. I asked Lisa Sargeant, too, and she scratched her arm and said no. I didn't ask anyone else. I decided I must have dreamt it.

  I knew about dreams. They summoned Mum if they were bad and made you feel nice if they were good.

  I stayed home from school for quite a while. Mum was exhausted. "You'll have to look after us all, Alex," she said to my Dad.

  I was allowed to sleep during the day since my appendix. I used up my days off, though. Mum was much stricter after that. I had one or two; the last one I remember was the day Dad died.

  Mum came and got me up after Peter left for school one day.

  "Come on, sleepy head. Lots to do." The day with Mum was nice. She was bright and lively, wanting to prove what a good life she had, I think.

  She sat on my bed when I didn't leap up. She touched my forehead and smiled.

  "Not too sick to help me with some baking?"

  "Not really." She pulled back my covers.

  "Mum! I can get myself up."

  "Well, don't be long. These things are a matter of split-second timing."

  We made biscuits, three different sorts out of one dough. I enjoyed it, because we sang and she told me stories about her and Dad. She made golden syrup dumplings.

  Mum always made me pay in company when she let me stay home from school. Dad envied Mum this quiet time with us. He never got to do nothing with us. It was always something.

  Mum liked to do girl things with me and I hated every minute of it. Cooking I still hate, though I'll do it in order to eat. That much makes sense. Sewing, knitting, all that, cleaning, anything where you have to potter about achieving nothing you couldn't buy in the shops, or something you'll have to do again anyway. Peter's the one who's a good cook. His stove is set in grey marble in the centre of his small cream marble kitchen, and he stands there like a magician, performing even if there's no one to watch. I still spy on him to find out those sorts of things; people are so different when they're alone.