The Story of My Face (13 page)

‘You'll go a long way,' he says at last. ‘You've got your mother in you, all right.'

‘Aren't you going to say thank you?' he asks. I want to shake my head, but restrain the impulse, stand there like stone.

‘Don't I even get a goodnight kiss?' When I still say nothing he brings his hands together in a loud clap, so that I jump. Then he smiles, rises smoothly to his feet and goes, leaving the door wide open. I close it, turn the TV straight on, filling the room with the hissing it makes, turning the controls this way and that.

I remember how after I'd heard the nameless man leave, Sandra came downstairs and sat by me. She turned the sound off the TV and explained that what I'd seen, the thing men and women did, felt so good that they'd rather do it than anything else, and besides, it stopped them being at each other's throats.

I can't imagine wanting to do anything like that with any men. I don't like men and I wish they weren't around so much.

Most people are prudes, she told me. But really, the only problem with sex was that it got you bloody pregnant! It was her good mood that I responded to, rather than the meaning of the words, which I didn't really understand. I went to fetch her an ashtray from the kitchen. . . . Fortunately, she continued, there was the pill now, but it made your tits even bigger. Sometimes men gave you a present or even wanted to marry you but that was the end of Free Love, sure as eggs is eggs.

‘Well, there it is, Natty. It'll make sense when it happens. I've told you. Now forget it. Don't tell anyone else. And don't you dare ever come in my room like that again, or you'll feel it after.'

Then she said she'd get us chicken pies from the shop but she couldn't find her right shoes, so I went, and somehow that upset me far more than anything else.
You have these nice ideas!
I thought shrilly at her as I set out. The thoughts were loud as words. Maybe I even said them.

It's lucky, though, that I didn't say more just now downstairs, because whatever I have to do to make it happen, I will be leaving in the morning. I pull open the cupboard and find two jumpers from last year, some other tops, a pair of jeans, and push them into my duffle-bag. I remember the letter Barbara gave me this afternoon. The flap of the envelope is only tucked in at the back. The paper vibrates in my hand, and I'm angry that I can't stop it happening. But I smooth it as much as I can and read, far more easily than I would have done just a few weeks back:

Dear Mrs Baron,
Thank you for your letter. It has been lovely to have Natalie visit us on her way home from school, she has become almost part of the family. You can be sure that we will look after her. It's colder in the north, so she will need warm clothes even though it is summer, and waterproofs. We need to leave very early tomorrow, so will have to call for her at 5 in the morning, I'm afraid. But at least we will finally be able to meet each other, which I'm sure you are as keen to do as I am. . . .

Barbara's other letter is in the shoe-box at the bottom of the wardrobe. I take it out, fold the two of them together with the new one and put them back in the zip pocket of the duffle-bag. Then I sit on the floor, watching the white dazzle of the screen, lean forward, move the hold button a fraction, and, miraculously, the snowstorm gathers itself into a picture of the cabin on Apollo 11. The three astronauts move in their odd, lumbering way around the tiny space. You can tell by their slow voices how very far away they are from everything on earth. Even though they will return, they have broken some kind of connection, I think, and they will never again quite belong with everyone else.

13

I've put on a pair of blue trousers and a checked cheesecloth blouse that Sandra bought too small by mistake, and when they come I'm waiting, wide awake, with my duffle-bag, outside the front gate. The sleek-lined car and its boxy caravan draw to a halt, and I run to meet them before anyone manages to get out. A sweet tang of exhaust fumes hangs in the air.

‘She had to do a late shift,' I say, holding out the twenty-pound note I took from my mother's purse an hour ago, ‘but she said to give you this towards the holiday.' I manage to keep my voice normally loud, although I know that no one came up last night, and can see that the window downstairs is open: they'll all be sound asleep down there, I reassure myself. Barbara, half-way out of the car, stops, glances at her husband.

‘Perhaps your father –' she begins.

‘At the hospital.' I tell them. Still there's a hesitation, an inability amongst everyone, somehow, to take the next step.

‘Isn't the money enough?' I ask. I hold it further out, all but push it in her hand.

‘We don't expect you to bring money, sweetheart,' says Barbara, as she accepts it for safe-keeping, ‘but where are your things?'

‘Here –'

‘You can't have very much in there,' Barbara says. ‘I did tell your mother –'

‘It's all in there!' I insist, shaking the bag at her. ‘It is!'

‘Haven't you got a
coat
?' Barbara asks, ‘an anorak, at least.
Wellingtons
–' At this point, Mr Hern leans towards his wife and puts his hand on her knee.

‘We had better get going,' he says. ‘She can always borrow things –' Finally, Barbara's face breaks into a smile.

‘Open the door,' she tells Mark, who is sitting, stone-like, in the middle of the back seat. One of his eyes has blacked up since yesterday. He reaches over to pull the catch, then moves to the far side.

I pull the door closed with both hands. Their car smells of leather and Nivea cream; the upholstery bears me up.

Mr Hern glances over his shoulder, pulls out.

We drive in silence to the roundabout, then back past my house and out of the estate. We overtake a milk float. Then we join the ring road. I shift around, cling to the back of Barbara's seat and pull myself forwards, thrusting my head into the gap between the front seats.

‘How many miles is it?' I ask. ‘How long will it take us to get there? How often do you have to fill this car up? How many stars does the petrol have in it? Where are we now?' I twist back suddenly to look at Mark. He's sitting with his long legs stretched right out to the base of the driver's seat, his feet tucked under it, a book on his lap. Its pages fan in the wind.

‘What's it about?' I ask, but he keeps on pretending to read.

‘He's keeping silence,' Barbara explains. ‘To prepare himself for Monday. He's going to lead the service. It's a big responsibility.'

So I can talk even more. What's that thing over there in the field? I ask. What's the car's top speed? What time is it now? Is driving easy to learn?

On flat ground somewhere between Bury and Peterborough, I fall asleep and Mark feels the absence of my voice wash cleanly through his flesh, leaving it his own again. . . . When he turns, he'll find me with my hands loose in my lap, my head pulling towards my shoulder and, just visible behind the swaying mass of hair, my mouth open. Later, my head will change sides. Later still, I've slipped against the window and turned my face towards it as if I too were looking out, though my body, melted into the corner, still points more or less forwards.

As we pull north of Newark and the first set of four fat chimneys comes into view to our right, I heave myself upright, open my eyes briefly, rub my face. Then I knead the seat like an animal making its bed, and collapse the upper half of my body onto it, face down, one arm under my head, the other reaching to the floor.

Mark gives up on the book, surrenders to the journey and the opening out of the landscape. In moments when the wind about his ears is less, maybe he can hear my breathing: a faint but insistent wet catch at the end of each exhalation.

‘Are you OK?' Barbara asks him. ‘Are you hungry or thirsty yet?' He shakes his head, even though he is hungry, because he wants to keep things like this for as long as possible: the bright sky, the shade in the back of the car, the wind about his ears and his silence, wrapped tightly around him, invisible, but strong.

Yesterday, Stokes had asked him: had he ever seen a woman's tits? They were on the field, at lunchtime. Had he seen the slit between her legs? Had he seen
fucking
? Stokes gestured with his hands, his own eyes squinting tight shut for a moment, before opening very wide in a parody of curiosity. There was laughter from his hangers-on. Minutes earlier, Mark had been practising high jump with Wright and Walker, but now they were gone.

‘No,' he told Stokes. He believed it was a thing to do rather than watch. Nor did he wish to see a picture of it either, thanks.

There was a blur of print, then, as Stokes got his magazine out. Mark looked this way and that, to avoid the images, not succeeding entirely. Finally, when it was utterly impossible, he closed his eyes. Running would have offended his dignity, and if they caught him the result would be the same in any case. So he stood there. For a few moments there was nothing but a smell of his own sweat and the banging of his heart inside him. Then someone hit him, a couple of blows to the stomach which knocked air out but were quite easy to withstand. To begin with they seemed to find it hard to hit someone who wasn't looking at them and didn't respond. But as the minutes passed, they became accustomed to it, and began to make comments and give each other instructions: ‘Who does he think he is? Jesus Christ? Give him one. Get him by the ear.'

Spit landed on his face. He felt it run down his cheek towards the corner of his mouth. Before he could wipe it away, someone went for his chin, jerking his head back. For a moment, he saw the sky, and even as he closed his eyes again, he knew it could not be for long. Someone stamped on his toe. A kick at the groin just missed. Then Stokes – he knew it was Stokes from the breathing, the way he smelled, everything – had him by the ears, head-butted him, kneed him. He began to struggle, pushed Stokes away, hit back. During the course of this, his eyes opened, though he saw very little, just the bits of Stokes that he was aiming for. Once started, he went on. He didn't feel Stokes hitting him any more, not until afterwards.

‘Got it?' he said to Stokes, the tang of blood on his tongue. He wiped his face on his sleeve, startling himself with the colour. Both of them had nose-bleeds but Stokes' lip was split too, and while Mark could have gone on, Stokes, breathing heavily, was looking around for one of his lot to lean on. But in the midst of the fight, the bell for final assembly had gone, and the few people still outside besides themselves were distant figures converging on the main building. They were standing, Mark realised, amidst a flurry of torn pages. Most of the bodies were unrecognisable now, but he looked quickly away.
Seeing
was not the same as
looking
, but it could be the beginning of it.

They had better go inside, he told Stokes, and then realised that he would have to help him. Together, not speaking, they laboured up the steep rise that separated the fields from the school.

At the top of the steps leading into the main building, he pushed through the double doors, protecting Stokes as they swung back behind. He sat Stokes on a basin in the toilets, filled another with cold water and wiped his face clean with wads of wet toilet paper, taking particular care of the swelling around the split upper lip.

‘You're crazy,' Stokes said, wearily.

‘I won't have to put up with this for ever,' Mark said, smiling. He felt as if he were only a little heavier than air, and some slight alteration in the atmospheric pressure would allow him to float upwards.

‘I think what will happen is that we'll buy an Island,' he explained. ‘That's the way things are going. Then this sort of thing' – he gestured at the wire bin full of bloodied paper – ‘won't happen. It'll have its own teachers, school and so on. Believe me.'

It was later, after talking to his father about what had happened, that the idea of the silence came to him. And now, wrapped in it, he smiles to himself, remembering Stokes' incredulous, bloodied face.

He tries to imagine what's to come. It's hard, because the memory of the Finnish congregations is so vivid. He knows there will be no village right by, and no river, no bridge, no birch trees, no red-painted wooden houses interspersed among the newer ones, no plaques where Tuomas Envall lived and died, no church, no orderly graveyard with just the names and the dates on granite stones, Matti Hirn's father and mother among them. There will of course be fields but larger ones, and no white nights; it will be thoroughly dark by ten o'clock.

This time he won't be running around with the village children, being shown their houses and animals, pointing at things, saying their names in Finnish. There'll be no cows to milk first thing and late afternoon, no games of hide and seek in the shady summer barns where some of the older girls sleep on the upper floors, no unsalted butter pressed into bowls or jars of berry jam, no rubbery, sweet-tasting cheese. This time they are not carrying with them rolls of cloth, pots and pans, cooking knives – gifts to compensate for their keep. There will be far fewer people of course, gathering in only the one group instead of several. All this is different.