The Story of My Face (12 page)

‘The fact is,' she says, ‘I thought it would happen straight away, but it didn't. We'd given up waiting and then one morning my stomach turned at the smell of the grill I'd lit for toast. A bit of chop from the day before was stuck to it and burning. A really tiny bit, and Mr Hern wasn't bothered at all, you see, and that's how I knew for sure that I was expecting –'

Later on, she felt the baby moving round and round inside her, later still she could press with her hands and work out where its back, bottom, elbows and feet were. At first she laughs, as if it is the most amazing thing in the world. Then she takes off her glasses and wipes her eyes on her arm, but flour gets in them and she has to wash her face at the sink.

When I imagine having a back, bottom, elbows and feet inside me, I'm scared.

‘It only happens gradually,' she says, as she inspects the dough. She reaches for a knife and cuts it into halves.

‘Does it sometimes happen when you're not wanting it to?'

‘I suppose it must.'

‘Did you want a boy, or a girl?' I ask, and for a moment it is as if I am not there at all, as if something has suddenly frozen her. I know that I mustn't persist, or ask anything more. I sit, she stands, opposite each other. Then, when she comes back to herself we each tear our bit of dough into palm-sized pieces, and I copy how she rolls them on the table and coils them up.

So Mark was born, and Mr Hern brought daffodils to the hospital. The baby was eight pounds, with absolutely no hair.

Hot air gushes from the oven, loses itself in the general warmth of summer-time. Barbara's glasses mist over. She removes her oven gloves, fumbles open a kitchen drawer. It's full of pieces of old sheet, washed, torn into squares, ironed, folded. You can use them for all sorts of things, she says, for dusters, as bandages, paint rags, face flannels. We don't have them at home, and I'm almost angry as I watch her pick one of the softest pieces and rub her lenses dry, absorbed, away from me for a few moments. And yes, her eyes bulge and look in two directions at once, don't connect properly with what she is doing. It looks all wrong, it looks stupid – but at the same time it is as if she sees something wonderful when she looks back at me.

‘There,' she says, ‘that's better.'

I'm going to go away with Barbara tomorrow! It makes me so happy that my chest hurts, my throat stretches and my lips go soft – but also, I'm terrified.

There is a conspiracy between us. I can sometimes make things happen, but I'm not always in control. Neither of us understands. We obey the thing that is passing through us.

While the buns cool on wire racks, we drink the bubbleless lemonade under the awning at the back. Then, at about five, Mark comes back with blood on his shirt, saying he was in a fight. I watch, jealously, while she fussses over him, and I have to be more or less told to go home.

‘Get to bed early tonight and sleep well. We'll call for you early,' she reminds me at the gate. ‘Regards to your mother. Don't forget the note. Hurry now –'

Of course, I don't go home. Where the Avenue meets the terraced road that leads into the Meadows estate, I turn right, then descend through smaller streets until I reach the allotments at the bottom of the hill. The sun is on its way down now and midge-clouds hang in the air. I push through the gate onto the main path, then turn off and make my way via the small borders between plots. Here and there people are still working. They've seen me often before and take no notice. I reach a plot with a green painted shed. I sit down on the bench underneath its window, tip the bag of buns onto my lap, six of them, coiled, dusted with sugar, all slightly different sizes. To begin with I unravel them, then I just bite straight in. I eat four, enjoying the way they turn heavy and sticky in my mouth. The two I can't manage I roll up in the bag and leave on the bench for the two soft-voiced men whose plot this is.

The third tomato plant in the row is mine. I inspect its spiky yellow flowers, which the larger man of the pair told me would turn into small green berries, then bright red tomatoes. Things in the garden take so long. I pinch out side shoots, as I've been shown. I do their other plants too, not quite so thoroughly. The tomato leaves give off a volatile, bitter scent which is almost animal.

I like it here, but I won't be coming back. The two men only talk about plants. However much I ask, they won't allow me to go home with them, won't even say where it is or what they are called. They tell me different names, stupid ones like Bill and Ben, each time I ask. They laugh between themselves at things I can't understand. Well, I don't need them any more.

It's about half past nine, the sky almost dark, the shadows gone, though I can still see well enough to find some small snails, gathered in the damp under the plants. I press them one by one between finger and thumb, and listen to the thin shells collapse with a wet gasp.

When I turn into Margaret Close the sky beyond the orange streetlights is black and distant. I can see straight away that there's a light on in the front of the house, even though it's Friday, when normally they go out and sometimes don't come back. Once I reach the gate, I hear music. It's a disappointment since I don't have an alarm clock and have been intending to stay awake by watching the astronauts on TV, which is downstairs, where they are – they'll probably want it and they might be up all night.

I extract the key from my sock, slip into the hall and wait for my eyes to get used to the dark. A crack of light is coming from under the lounge door. I begin to feel my way up the stairs, aware suddenly of my hands being uncomfortably sticky, of grit in my shoes, the duffle-bag cutting into my shoulder.

‘Natty?' Sandra calls when the stair creaks. So I go down again, push open the lounge door. She is enthroned on the sofa. Her hair, brushed until it shines like metal, is piled on top of her head, making her look even taller than she is. A few strands stray about her face. The pink of her wide mouth is deepened with lipstick, her skin whitened with make-up, her eyes outlined with kohl. She's wearing a filmy blouse, a short skirt. Her feet are bare, the nails on her toes picked out in a pearly pink that matches her lips, her fingernails likewise. She's particularly beautiful like this, and terrifying at the same time. Doing herself up, she calls it. It makes her bolder, even less predictable.

Luke's next to her, one of his arms around her waist, the other holding a tumbler and a cigarette. Sitting with his knees flung apart, the way men do. Another man, drinking beer from a can, sits on the floor with his back against one of the armchairs. A friend of Luke's from the base: I can tell by the hair, and the build of him, and the way he sprawls, as if he didn't usually live in rooms. He stares fixedly ahead, his forehead tight.

There's just one lamp on, by the mantelpiece. The place doesn't look so bad at night. You don't really see the spills and burns on the carpet, the scuffs and dents on the walls. In the glow of the lamp, you can't see that the glass on the pictures is thick with dust; I myself never saw these things until I started visiting the Herns. It was just our house and I was oblivious to the smell of nicotine and the sound of my shoe soles sticking and unsticking themselves to the vinyl tiles on the kitchen floor. I used not to mind the sink being always full of cups and glasses. But now I do. It makes me feel sad. And you can't see out properly; the windows haven't been cleaned since before we moved in. ‘You're welcome to have a go,' Sandra says. She's not one to bother what others think.

‘Come over, then,' she calls out now, loud because of the music. Luke bought the hi-fi, after he stood her up once. I do what I'm told, stand in front of them. There's dough stuck under my fingernails, making a slight, half-pleasant, half-irritating pressure at my fingertips. I push one fingernail under the other, rake it out and slip the tiny pellet into my mouth. ‘You don't have to stay out, you know, Natty!' she says, reaching out to give me a quick squeeze of the arm. I feel like a ghost of myself, but force a smile. ‘Just know when to keep to yourself. Sit here, now. I'll do your hair. You look a sight.‘ Her fingers tug at the fastening of the plait, pulling at the roots. ‘Did you get some tea?' I nod, thinking:
What's it to you?
She sometimes puts on a show like this when other people are here.

‘Shouldn't be out so late,' Luke chips in, ‘at her age.' He's never minded before.

‘So where were you, then?' he asks me. He's got no right to. He is nothing to do with me, so I don't answer. Something makes me glance over at the other man.

‘Mike,' he says, catching me look. I go on looking as if I hadn't heard. They're all the same, men. I know what they're like under their clothes, between their legs. Just after we moved in here I saw, by accident, when I was sent home for still not having any games kit. I never talked to the man, never even knew his name, but I saw everything about him. His backside was hairy, white with dark hairs, carrying on up from the legs and so was his back, though there was a stripe above the hips where it must have been rubbed off by his belt. He was in Sandra's bedroom, on the bed, with her blue-white calves flung over his shoulders. I saw his cock coming out of more messy hair when he pulled it out of her – and more hair there too, on her, looking as if it had probably come from him, rubbed off somehow, though I know better than that, now that it's started to grow on me.

He let her down onto the bed and turned around to face me with it pointing at me. Stupid thing. The front of him was hairy as a doormat too, hairs all swirling like iron filings around his navel, and two tiny pink nipples, then on and up to the base of his neck, where it went in a sudden rush upwards like grass along the side of a fence. The neck itself and the face were shaved. They didn't seem to belong to the body.

‘What are you staring at! Get out!' I lived there, not him, so he had no right to tell me to get out, and so I stayed. Then Sandra laughed and he shouted at her too.

‘You'd better go,' she said, and I did, then.

You hairy-cock
, I think at Luke.

‘So where were you, missy?' he repeats. I decide to tell him, even though I don't have to, so as to save trouble:

‘At the allotments.' I suck my finger, taste sugar again.

‘She does go there,' Sandra tells him.

‘What's she doing at the allotments? That's the point,' says Mike, the man on the floor. He's grinning mirthlessly. The pupils of his pale-blue eyes are tiny dots, the wrinkles around the eyes lighter than the rest of his skin. ‘One day she won't come back,' he adds, matter-of-fact. ‘That's the way it goes.'

‘She helps out,' Sandra tells them both, ‘don't you?' She's just pretending that she's bothered, pretending that she knows. But at the same time, she rakes her fingers through my hair, and each time they go through it I lean into her a bit more. Then she rubs the scalp where it pulled. ‘Better?' she asks. I put my face on her chest; the skin smells of cocoa butter and patchouli and she puts her hand on my back. Her heartbeat, a thing more like touch than sound, passes into me; I close my eyes and the day's tiredness rushes into me, overwhelming and delicious. For a moment, I almost forget the stalemate that's between us.

‘Suppose I didn't come back?' I whisper into her skin.

‘What?' There's Martini on her breath.

‘Suppose I didn't come back one night?' There's a pause, a moment in which anything could happen. She might hug me so tight it hurts. ‘Don't you even think about it, Natty,' she might say. Then a tremor passes through both of us, the first quakes of the unstoppable laughter which comes out of her at moments which have the similarity of never being funny for the other person. The laugh flings her head suddenly back to allow itself out – the sudden whelp, the downwards swoop, the arpeggios that follow. It jolts me upright and awake. One side of my face is damp, the ear on that side stuck to my head. Sandra's eyes are brimming with the liquid that laughing produces, but underneath that they smoulder, as if they need their wetness to stop them from burning right up, as if that was what the laughing is for. Suddenly, I feel sick. Those buns, I think.

‘I'd think myself lucky!' Sandra says, as the laugh leaves her, her face stretched by its passing into a broad smile, her voice hollowed out and rough at the sides. ‘When are you off, then?'

Luke's smiling too. But the man on the floor isn't. He's been looking at me, in quick glances like sips of a drink, ever since we started talking about where I'd been.

‘What's your problem?' Sandra presses her finger into my chest. ‘I gave you a decent name, didn't I? And my hair. Looks like you'll get my physique as well. I could do with a comb here.'

‘You borrowed it,' I tell her, ‘this morning.' She reaches for her bag and roots half-heartedly through the contents.

‘We'll do it tomorrow.' She sinks back on to Luke. Hairs are growing through the snake tattoo on his arm. His hand cups Sandra's breast and seeing it makes me angry and bewildered.

‘Say goodnight now and go up to bed.'

‘Let her stay,' says the man on the floor.

‘No,' Sandra tells him. ‘She's only thirteen. And she needs her beauty sleep.'

‘Can't I take the telly up?' I ask. ‘I'm not tired yet.'

‘All right,' she says, ‘if it keeps you quiet.'

The man on the floor, Mike, wrestles the thing up the stairs, cursing our lack of lights. He's sweating hard by the time he puts it down near the door where the socket is. He stays crouching next to it.

‘Where's your aerial?' he says. ‘It won't work without a proper aerial.' I like him even less now and I don't answer. I fight the look he's giving me, give it back as much as I can.

I move my eyes from one bit of his face to the other: the brows, tensed; the pale eyes, set in shadowy sockets; his ears, exposed, too big. The line of his nose, not quite straight. The shadows of hairs under the skin of his jaw, dark even though the short hair on his head is fair. I stare him out.