Lilian's Story (12 page)

Back under the plumbago, John was still watching the snails crawl across the dirt.
Why'd you give them away, Lil?
he asked. I had not wondered about this before and it stopped me. I made a small cairn of pebbles beside me before I thought of an answer.
It is a gift
, I said at last.
Just
a gift.
John snickered so loudly that his glasses suddenly steamed up and he took them off to rub them on his sleeve. Without them, his face looked blind and happy. When he put them back on he stared at me for a long time and I could see that he was planning large action. He leaned over and hit me once, quite hard, on the fleshy part of my shoulder so that I rocked off balance.
Like
that is a gift?
he asked. The punch made my shoulder tingle and I knew I would carry a yellow and purple bruise there for a week.
That is a gift, too, if that is what you are giving
, I said. His eyes were large with tears about to fall as he squirmed out from under the bush, but his glasses made it hard to be sure, and I could not think of anything more to say.

The Power of Words

The biggest blackberries were all in the middle of the bushes and I was stuck on thorns again and again, and became hopelessly tangled in pinafore and brambles. My billycan of blackberries spilled and I had to crouch among thorns and pick them from the ground under the bush
where all the snakes are
, Rick said casually, and Ursula, balancing neatly on the board he had laid for her across the thorns, giggled and popped a berry into her mouth.
You look funny
, she said without smiling,
with all blackberry on
your face, Lil.
Then Rick, in a voice bursting with something, said,
You're all caught up at the back, fat-face,
and I discovered the hated pinafore was caught up in itself and was exposing the backs of my dimpled thighs and my green bloomers.

Miss Gash took us all by surprise, standing there suddenly in her postage stamps with a saucepan of berries in her hand.
Oh
, she said under the green hat, and I tried to become invisible or make her forget, but I saw her teeth in the shadow of the hat, and there was no denying that it was me she was looking at, smiling and saying
Hello, Lilian
, as if it was normal. I felt Ursula staring with a berry on its way to her mouth, and saw Rick straighten up from the bushes and stare first at Miss Gash, then at me. It seemed they would never stop staring, and waiting for me to do whatever I was going to do.
Catching many?
Miss Gash asked, and lifted her dented saucepan at me. I heard a snort from Ursula that was her holding in a snigger, and I knew that I could not escape, but had to decide. Rick was standing now with his hands on his hips and they were all waiting, and would go on waiting until I turned on shameful Miss Gash who was being so familiar with me. I thought at last that she would realise I was not going to answer her, but she went on standing and shaking the saucepan at me, and the stamps and the rips of the dress fluttered at me, and I felt Ursula forming the story of how Lil Singer was best friends with loony Miss Gash, and I saw Rick wink at Kevin. I could hear the taunts in the playground, if they knew that I did not hate and fear Miss Gash, but had spoken to her like an ordinary person. I could see, too, how John's face had gone blank, and how he was trying to blind himself with a web of thorns.

If Miss Gash had gone away I would not have had to say anything, but she stood, and took a step closer as if to make sure it was me, and smiled again, and was about to say more, when my mouth opened and I heard myself shrieking.
You're a silly old loony old maid, you got a face like a prune,
go away.
There was a long shocked silence in which we could all hear something slithering in the depths of the bushes, but finally Miss Gash went away with her sad saucepan.

I turned to Ursula, ready to join her snigger now, but she rattled her billycan and said,
I got plenty, I'm going
home now.
Rick would not meet my eye either, but heaved up the plank onto his shoulder with more grunting than necessary, and I was left alone in a great silence. Even John had vanished. I took a step forward, following Ursula and Rick, or perhaps to go after Miss Gash, but stopped with my shoes purple with the blood of my spilled blackberries. I wished I could be like John, blind, or deaf, but the best I could do was to see the bushes and the sky shake and break into rainbow-edged fragments that swam in front of my eyes and threatened to drown me.

Sickening Escape

When Father became insistent over the lamb and asked us all question after question, John could no longer believe in the god of his deafness.
Lilian, what is the longest river in Britain?
Father asked, and when I said,
The Darling
, stuttering on the word, his laugh shook the lamp.
Darling! Whose darling
will you ever be?
he shouted, so that his long white teeth showed.

John stared at a carrot as if he wanted to become one, but it was not enough.
Euclid's second theorem?
Father asked silkily, and continued asking until John shook his head.
Euclid
, Father bellowed.
You clod, you clod!
John's nervous grab at the carrot might have been to give himself a weapon.
You will answer
, Father said. His neck was engorging like an angry cobra's and his eyes were becoming small.
What is
your name?
he asked, and John put down his carrot in defeat.
John Singer,
he whispered. Father became as outraged as if he had said
Talleyrand
or
Robert Louis Stevenson.
He asked again.
What is your name?
and John tried once more:
John Thomas
Singer, sir.
Father rose half out of his chair so that it fell backwards on the polished floor with a silly clatter.
What
is your name?
he roared, and we heard Cook in the depths of the kitchen drop something. John was the colour of raw pancake. A muscle in Father's cheek was jumping and making his mouth wink.
My name is John Singer
, said poor John, and Father lost interest suddenly, and picked the last chop out of the dish and stood at his place at the end of the table, ripping the meat off the bone with his teeth.

On the patch of bare earth beside the swing, John began spinning in a circle until he was suddenly sick. When he stopped retching he began spinning again. When he had started, I had asked,
What are you doing?
but he had not replied. I sat on the stone and watched until he had been sick three times and had fallen into the dust and lay curled there. When I turned him over so that he lay on his back, he stared up into my face and smiled. He was in bliss.
I cannot hear you
, he said.
I am deaf.
I did not tell him I had not said anything.

Some bird flew in and perched on the branch over our heads, blinking at us out of one eye, then the other. When the sun had slid behind the roof of Miss Gash's house and the sky began to turn pink, the bird flew away with a twitter and insects began to croak. Out of a lantana bush Miss Gash's tabby crept, stared at us with a paw raised, and crept on. John lay in his vomit and I watched pink dusk die into grey. Somewhere, streets away, someone was practising the bugle, sending sad, random notes into that shallow pink sky like something lost.

2

A Young Lady

Lawn Lovelies

At the tennis parties for the young folk on the serene lawns and courts of Kissing Point Road, I was the fat girl who looked like coconut ice when she blushed. I had not been kissed at any point. Some boys, gallant by nature perhaps, or attracted by Father's rumoured money, or most likely doing it for a dare, attempted conversation. No one attempted tennis. There was one with hair the colour of autumn who held my hand and told me I was gorgeous. When I watched him later, laughing with a girl whose tan was as smooth as a leaf, I wished I could hide, but there was no place to hide in those sunny gardens.

In the shade, under the jacaranda where no profane kookaburra ever perched and cackled, white-clothed tables were spread with food and there I could at least console myself with another slice of cream pie. I surreptitiously eased the satin sash choking my waist and stood legs astride to feel the cool air between my thighs. The hated pinafores had long since become dusters, but now I had to prickle and sweat in layers of silk, and white stockings that did their best to suffocate me, and I had not accustomed myself to a handbag, and the gloves Mother insisted on.

I had never seen myself smile. There was nothing in the mirror, when I stood in front of it, to make me smile. Others smiled, I saw them out of the corner of my eye, smiling.

But I was a person of brains, and still hoped for the best.
She is bright, of course
, I heard the mothers tell each other as they fanned themselves under the jacarandas.
She is ever so
clever.
I gulped down the last of my cream pie and filled my mouth with noisy ginger beer but nothing could stop me from hearing.
It is just as well
, some mothers said languidly, and loudly enough to carry.
Is she feeding those brains of hers, do
you think?
The tinkling of so many titters, and their faces all turned towards me behind their fans, drove me like a thwarted cow back out of the shade and onto the terrible sunlit stage of the lawn.

On the lawn, all the young folk were at ease with their futures. The girls were fragrant, slim, good enough to eat in their pale silks and their sashes of pink and yellow. Their feet were small, their shins straight in their white stockings, their hands inconspicuous. Boys did their best to fill their striped blazers and live up to the joviality of their straw boaters. Laughter and a sense of a tidy future lay over everything here, where everyone was graceful, leaning on a croquet mallet or swinging a tennis racquet. They were not troubled by much, these confident people, and most troubles could be washed out in soap and water, or laughed away.

Ursula had the prettiest laugh of them all and the most winsome way with her croquet mallet. Boys watched for the dimple in her cheek, and the pink shell of her ear that showed if she tossed her hair a certain way. They watched, and would try anything to make that dimple appear. At these parties it was hard to get close to Ursula through the group of boys around her, and scones were no longer of much interest to her small pink mouth. But there were times when she saw the fat girl unhappy on the edge of the group, holding a mallet like a weapon, or a ball as if she wanted to crush the life out of it. Ursula would put her hand on my shoulder and smile up at some hero in a boater.
Lilian and I were at school together
, she would say, and become adorably dreamy.

Rick was so tall now it made my eyes water to look at him.
Such a manly jaw,
I had heard some mother say, watching Rick pile Ursula's plate with cakes so that she protested and laughed prettily. His jaw was square, with prominences under his ears that gave him the look of someone who knew what he wanted, even when what he wanted was just another scone. He tried to be kind because it seemed clear that he would get what he wanted, and although Ursula protested at all those cakes, she did not refuse them.
Well,
Lil
, he would say, and stand clenching his jaw, thinking, and finally add,
Life moves us all along, doesn't it?
and smile at me. His flannels were crisp and dazzling, his blazer was from the approved tailor, the boater shaded a brown muscular face and those pebble-coloured eyes. No one was going to know that Rick had fought among dunnies and cauliflower stalks, or that his father had made his pile from rubber.
On the manufacturing side
, Rick might admit if pressed, but never
in rubber.
His mother, fluttering vastly in a rather loud blue, had sat under the jacarandas once or twice. But the other mothers had seemed not to hear her comfortable advice about tea leaves on the ailing azaleas or the best way to deal with bird droppings on flagstone. She had stopped coming, and Rick lost his congested look.

I had not been allowed to stop coming. Mother's distress when I said each time,
Mother, I do not want to go
, was too much for me to deal with. And Father had decided it was time I readied myself for my position.
The daughter of a
gentleman,
he said. A
young lady.
In the end it seemed easier to buckle the tight shoes on, hook up one of the dresses, and avoid my eyes in the mirror.
You look very nice, Lilian
, Mother would say when I stood ready to go. She was a kind woman, and always hopeful of a miracle.

Lilian, your future is in your hands
, Father had said more than once, and looked at his shoes. You
will have to marry
money.
So John and I set out every Sunday for one of the lawns where we would suffer for a few hours. John, being young still, was not expected to be suave or to deal skilfully with the yellow voiles, the pink muslins. With a spare mallet or a broken hockey stick, or whatever he could find in the games room, he spent his afternoons playing some private and solitary game in which a bush was the nearest thing to an opponent.
He is a bit shy
, the mothers agreed, watching from the shade, but they could find no excuse for me.

Although I had tried every colour and every kind of laugh, nothing eased the lawn parties for me. Yellow made me look bilious and my laugh always showed too many teeth for prettiness. In white I was sallow, and pink made me look as if I was trying too hard. I heard a mother defend my choice of something with spots that made me look aswarm with insects:
But she is trying
, this charitable mother said,
you must grant her that, Olive.
Olive shrieked and said:
Oh, I will grant you that she is trying
, and could not resist adding,
very trying.

Proud Mama

Mother was a kind woman, and always hopeful of a miracle, but she had become a person of important preoccupations. She had begun to rise earlier and earlier each morning until she was sitting in her scarlet dressing gown at dawn, waiting for the newspaper to sail over the privet. Newspapers were still concealed from Father. The doctors had been unanimous about that, even after he was better.
No newspapers
, they all agreed.
Newspapers may bring on a relapse.
So Mother arose at dawn each day and crept downstairs and out onto the porch, and when the newspaper arrived she folded each page separately until it was small enough to be slipped under a plate or the embroidered parrot.