The Story of My Face (5 page)

‘Baked beans,' he tells me, flushing again. He's been standing at the door all this time, looking at his feet.

Outside, Mark watches me take yet another biscuit from the plate perched on top of the toolbox, and another one to hold while I eat it. I'm always hungry. Even if I'm not, I'll eat something nice, something
home-made
, just for the sake of it. I eat fast, in large bites, yet at the same time neatly, hoping to hide my desperation to be full.

‘Can I see inside your house now?' He's too surprised to answer. Besides, I didn't really ask him: Barbara is just behind, touching up a scratch on the caravan. It's her I'm interested in. He's just in the way.

‘Take the chairs in with you when you go,' she says.

‘It's just a kitchen,' he tells me. White tiles, cooker, square red Formica table, bent-ply chairs with red seats, the metal sink with some plates stacked up to dry. ‘There's nothing to see.' I want to look in the cupboards but he says no, and, taking another biscuit, I decide to move on, opening doors for myself. I glance in the dining-room, continue through the hall to the lounge, a large cream-painted room running from front to back of the house. It makes me laugh.

‘Why is this same green carpet everywhere?' I ask him. ‘It's like grass.' I point to the back, where the lawn, just the same shade of green, seems to come right up to the French windows. ‘You could play crazy golf in here!' I tell him.

‘No, it is not
like grass
,' he says, deliberately speaking with great correctness, sounding every part of every syllable.
Who do
you think you are
? I think.

‘There's not very much in this room, Mark.' I turn round on the spot to take it in. ‘There's nothing here, except this carpet-grass. Why?'

‘If you say so –' Mentally, he's enumerating the contents to prove me wrong: two tan sofas, three dark-yellow armchairs, a tiled fireplace, a round wooden coffee-table with a white cloth and a vase of garden flowers upon it; cupboards to either side of the chimney breast, above one of which are shelves of hardback books; above the other a record player and radio. A huge, thriving spider plant in the front window; a hybrid of bag, box and table which his father made for his mother's sewing and knitting things.

‘No photographs,' I say, ‘no knick-knacks, no thingamy-bobs. No pictures. Nothing on your walls at all. Not even wallpaper!'

‘We don't hold with those things,' he replies.

‘What do you mean, “hold”?'

‘Have you finished?'

‘I want to go upstairs.'

‘It's only bedrooms,' he tells me.

‘I want to go, anyway.' He's not used to people who break the rules. I can tell he wants me out of his house, out of his mind too – but I don't think he knows how to do it. He's not used to fighting.

‘No,' he says. ‘You can't.'

‘Who says? Whose bedrooms? I'll ask your Mum.' I'm already through the open door, back in the hall, beginning to climb the stairs.

He catches up with me at the door to his parents' room, grabs my arm at the elbow. He grips it hard. He must know it hurts, but I give no sign of feeling any pain, so he grips even harder: it's a game I could win, but I can't be bothered to.

‘Just look,' he says. ‘You can't go in.'

The room faces to the front of the house, its large windows screened first with plain nets, then with curtains in a creamy white.

The walls are painted a pale blue, with carpet in a darker shade. The woodwork, bedspread and mats at each side of the bed are white. There are two small wooden tables with identical white lamps, and home-built wardrobes either side of the chimney breast. No mirror. The room is bright, but it has a sad feeling to it. Later, I'll find out that once a month Mark's mother spends most of the day in this room, with the curtains closed. She's explained to him that this is due to the early onset of the Change of Life, an event which means he will never now have a brother or a sister, as had been his parents' plan when they chose the house; ideally they would have liked at least one more of each. . . . But for now, I just feel slightly disappointed that I don't like the room more.

‘Okay,' I tell Mark, ‘I've seen it now.' He lets go of my arm and leads me across the landing to a medium-sized room painted a startling, rich yellow, with the window and skirting a bright, bluey green. ‘The Guest Room,' he says. There's a three-quarter-size bed, made up and covered with a green candlewick spread, and a utility chest of drawers.

To the other side of the bathroom, a larger, pink-and-pale-green room looks out over gardens to the back. It contains a single bed, a wicker chair and matching small table with a drawer. The iron and ironing board are just visible inside in a corner cupboard, and a sewing machine, attached to its own special table, stands in front of the window. Next to it is a pale-green paraffin stove, currently serving as a plant stand. Besides sewing, the room, with its deep window-sill, is used to over-winter plants. The smell of geraniums, laced with the faint tang of the stove, hangs in the air.

‘This room –' I say after a moment or two. ‘It could be a very nice room. Whose is it?'

‘No one's. You can't go in,' he reminds me.

I will one day
, I think at him.
It's my room
.

‘What's up those stairs?'

‘It's private.'

‘Show
me
, though –' I grab his damp hand in my dry one, pull at him. ‘Up those stairs, it must be –' He has no idea how to stop me. But he's lucky – Barbara comes into the hall below and calls out for us to come down.

It's getting late. ‘Won't your parents be worried?' she wants to know.

‘No. They've gone out,' I say more or less truthfully, adding: ‘to the hospital, to see my Gran –' which is an outright lie.

‘I see,' Barbara says. She smells faintly of paint, and is carrying her overalls in a bundle. She considers a few moments, then makes the invitation: ‘Perhaps you had better have your supper with us, then? Do you need to wash your hands? Show Natalie the bathroom, Mark. Then you can both set the table.'

I keep catching him looking at me. He blushes when I catch him but he doesn't stop. The thing is, I must seem even stranger indoors, close up. There are fine, faintly ginger hairs on my arms and sometimes, when the light catches them, he can see even finer ones all over my face, the very faintest trace of fur, especially just above my eyebrows and on my upper lip. Also there's a slight tremor to my lower lip, as if I were about to cry, yet at the same time, such a thing must seem impossible: I'd kill you first, spring on your back like a tiger. . . . The dress I'm wearing is very dirty. There are stains on the front, as well as the kind of grey dirtiness that comes from not being washed often enough.

I copy the way Mark puts the knives and forks down, place mine absolutely opposite his, watch him fetch the cruet from the sideboard. I've never seen such things before.

The sun is setting as we take our places at the table. His parents are opposite each other and likewise, across a shorter distance, Mark and I. He's avoiding me now, looks instead at his mother, who just now reached forward for the serving spoon, then stopped halfway and sat back, waiting.

‘God –' his father's voice is loud, full, but at the same time intimate, as if talking to someone well known, but temporarily concealed behind a wall or afflicted with slight deafness, ‘God, you who made this world and all that it is, accept thanks from those you have made.' After this is a pause, then with a soft scrape Barbara removes the lid of the dish: macaroni in cheese sauce, topped with tomato slices, to be eaten with bread.

‘Do you have a faith, Natalie?' Mark's father asks just as Barbara is handing my plate across the table.

‘Plenty more later if you want it,' she says.

‘Pardon?' I pick up my fork, start to eat – no one's ever told me to wait for others to be served. If they did, I'd ask them
why?
Mark's glaring at me again.

‘Do you go to church?' the father persists.

‘Oh, yes,' I tell him brightly, a brimming spoonful of macaroni half-way to my mouth.

‘Which one is that?'

‘Saint Someone's. I don't know the name. I only went a few times,' I say. ‘With school.'

‘Do you Know God?' Mark asks me.

‘Let the child eat,' Barbara interrupts. ‘She's hungry.'

‘We do,' Mark says.

'What's he like?' I ask, knowing it's cheeky. I stare straight at him and speak with my mouth full.

‘He is not
like
anything,' Mark's father tells me, stern but good-natured. He puts his cutlery down, presses the tips of his fingers together. ‘He may be compared to any number of mundane things, and in this way we show our desire for union with Him. But in the end, He can only be known as He is, immanent in His creation.' He smiles warmly at me. I put more food in my mouth, look away. God is not what I'm here for.

‘Natalie, you have such gorgeous hair,' Barbara says. ‘What a colour!'

It's she, I later learn, who does the decorating, who brings home the tins of paint with their image-evoking names – Sunburst Yellow, Eggshell Blue and so on. Mark's father prefers to avoid the use of similes or metaphors –
verbal imagery
– in reference to the mundane.

‘When you're older,' she says of my hair, ‘it'll look wonderful in a knot. Does it come from your mother's or your father's side?' she continues easily. ‘We always say that Mark gets his height from me and his brains from his father.'

‘My Mum's is even redder,' I tell her. ‘She's a real looker, everyone says.'

‘You see, Natalie,' Mark's father cuts across, ‘we are members of the Worldwide Congregation of the Envallist Church of Grace, called to worship the Immanent, and beware of Imitation. Our church was founded in Finland. That's why we have the caravan, so that we can go there every year.'

Caught between irritation and curiosity, I fill my mouth again, almost smile at him.

I help Barbara to wash up while Mark's father spreads a sheet of the
Envallist Times
on the table and cleans the family's shoes. Mark goes upstairs to finish his homework.

When he comes down again Barbara and I are sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. A radio concert of piano music is playing. Clean shoes are in a row on the floor; John is nowhere to be seen. None of the three of us says anything for a moment or two. We just look at each other, sensing, each one of us differently, that something has changed.

The fact is that a few hours ago, before I arrived, the three of them – father, mother and son – were a family group living amongst people who differed from them. The distinctions between them didn't matter much. But from now on, where each of the Herns stands with regard to the other two will be different. Mark will feel separate from his mother, akin to his father because they are the men. Barbara and I are of another kind, unreliable, frightening –

A puff of cooler air, smelling of cut grass, pushes in through the open door. I catch Mark's eye, make him look away.
When
she's gone
, he's thinking,
things will go back to how they were
.

He's got that wrong.

‘You'd better see Natalie home, love,' Barbara says. I am so close; I could reach across the table and touch her hand.

Mark and I walk downhill, the hedges to our left, the road to our right, a progress marked by orange pools of street-lamp light, brighter then dimmer then brighter again. After a while, I ask:

‘Why is it you don't have a TV set? Everyone else does. You rent it. They fix it when it goes wrong or give you a new one.'

‘When television first came,' Mark says, ‘some of our congregation wanted to allow it. You know how television works?' I shake my head. Of course I don't!

‘It's because of a cathode ray tube, which is basically a variable pulse of electrons hurtling though a vacuum, then hitting a screen coated with compounds of phosphorus. It makes a glow where the electrons hit the phosphorus. The point of light moves quickly across the screen in lines – across, then off while it goes back across and down, then across again – like writing, but very fast – so fast that the human eye and brain reads all this
movement
as an
image
. We don't see the point of illumination move, because we can't see fast enough. But if we were flies, which see much faster, then we would not see an image, just the point of light moving across the screen. So, some people said that the image on a television screen does not, in any objective sense, exist –'

It's all Greek to me, but I'm amazed at someone being able to say so much at one time, in whole sentences.

‘They were wrong, of course,' he concludes. ‘The way an image is made isn't important. The function it serves is the thing. Whether or not it stands in for the Actual, is it or is it not a window for –'

‘You mean you don't watch TV, not at all? You'll miss the Americans landing on the moon,' I tell him.

‘I don't want to see it,' he says. ‘I can read about it. I can listen to it on the radio –'

‘I wish I was with them,' I tell him. ‘You wouldn't catch me down here on earth, if I could get that far away. . . . But have you seen what they eat? Dried things in packets. Nothing that makes crumbs, because they float about and you can't pick them up, then they might get in your eyes or your lungs and choke you. They have to pee in bottles –'

I stop, suddenly, on a corner. The estate is not perhaps as remote as the moon, but it's certainly a place Mark hasn't visited much. The pairs of houses are small and low, people don't do their gardens, but use them instead as garages. ‘Don't come any further. It's just up here.'