Lilian's Story (5 page)

John sat, swinging slowly and folding his earlobes into his ears. His face tried to ignore me, even when I shook him hard and told him I had seen a boa constrictor and had a souvenir. He would not touch the tile, but stared at my face as if at my corpse.
Why do you want to go there?
he complained. I told him,
I am Marco Polo
, in what I thought might be the right accent.
And I have brought back treasure.

You are not Marco Polo or anyone
, he said.
You are just
a
girl.
He pointed at Mother's velvet.
You have torn it
, he said, and the long rip could not be denied.
It cannot be mended
, he said.
Mother will cry
. He was not a cruel boy, but was stating
facts.
Father will kill you
. He was shouting now, and began to fold an earlobe until I slapped his hand away.
She is just some
old witch and you are not Marco Polo.
A fly hovered, fascinated by his nostril. He brushed it away, caught his glasses just in time as they unfolded from his face, began to cry in a jerky way.
Rick says you're loony. I got a loony sister.
I wanted to curl up among the paspalum and wait until everyone ran out of words. If I had thought that the knobs growing on nasturtiums could be eaten, I would have run away into the weeds and lived there for ever.

Wishing Well Enough

It was easy to see that boys had all the fun, even though timorous John behind glass had little fun. I was the biggest girl, as well as the roughest. In the school band I was the only girl who had ever played the drums. While Ursula pinged at her triangle and pale Anne smoothly blew into her recorder, I stood flanked by Rick and Kevin and imagined myself in red, leading Napoleon.

I screeched and shouted the loudest in the playground, and sometimes Rick looked. I hung upside down in trees and practised for hours so that Rick would come across me juggling three oranges, or standing on my hands. Upside down between my quivering wrists in the moment before I fell, I saw his sharp teeth as he sang out,
Look at Lil Singer's
bloomers!
I handled all the small dead things I found in the bush and kept the fish I caught for longer than they could stand, in case Rick came by and saw me in triumph with corpses. Alma washed and scolded, Mother sighed and scolded, John became queasy at the long threads of guts, but Rick was never impressed. At night I rescued him from burning buildings. It was a joy to feel my hair burn off in one crisp frizz. Among waves pounding the shore only I saw the pale weakening hand about to go under for the last time. When everyone else had fainted dead away I alone lanced the puncture marks on his ankle and sucked out the venom.

John admired, too.
You're too little,
I jeered.
You can't be a
mate of his.
John did not argue, but I had no answers when he said,
You're just a girl.
Rick had given John a black eye once by accident, and John had treasured it. I had come across him loving it in the mirror, and
the time Rick gave me
the black eye
had become a measure of the months.

What had Rick ever given me? He had not quite given, but I had a piece of stick he had whittled on a wet day, when lunchtime in the tin shed went on too long and the rain would not stop. George, whose toes and fingers were webbed like a duck's, had collided with Rick's shoulder, spilling his slice of pie, and Rick had dropped his bit of whittled stick and was ready to hit, but saw it was only George, who wet his pants when alarmed. Miss Vine had clattered the big brass bell then and I sat all afternoon holding Rick's stick in the pocket of my pinafore. Under the girls' tree in the playground next day I was the centre of attention, and even pale indifferent Anne, and Ursula who pretended she thought it was dirty, crowded closer to see what Rick had given fat Lil.

With the cricket bat over a shoulder, Rick was my idea of heroism. I could not be a hero myself except in my mind, but I knew what to admire. In the long holidays in summer, when weeks and weeks all looked the same, there were not enough boys for the cricket team. John was allowed to stand out in the middle of the paddock, shading his eyes with the hand that should have been catching the ball, and I watched, feeling ants crawl over my legs, as Rick in white ran up and down the pitch and swung the bat high into the air when everyone screamed,
A century!
At last, in the sticky last days of January, when the choko vine in the tennis court at Miss Gash's was spilling all its pimpled fruit into the lap of the umpire's chair, Kevin was too sick to hide it from anyone.
Kev's
gone and got sick
, Rick shouted in his disgust.
We're a man
short.
John stood very straight, doing his best to be two men, and tossed the ball carefully from one hand to the other.
Or a man too many
, it occurred to Rick. Majestic in his flannels, he walked towards John. But by the time he was ready to say,
We don't need you now, Johnny
, I was there, panting, trying not to pant, breathless at possibility.
Me
, I gasped, and was already tucking my pinafore into my bloomers.
Use me, go on, Rick!
Even deafness would not have saved John from this mortification.
Aw
,
Lil
, he whined.
Aw, shuddup, Lil.
I did not hold it against him that he spoke to me like this in public. We both knew it was I who had stolen the tile with the thumb and watched Miss Gash in her postage stamps.

I waited for the chance to dazzle Rick with my tile and courage, but stood watching his deciding face and felt that this was not the right time. We watched Rick fingering the bottom of his bat where it was stained green, watching his fingers as if we could see through the skin to golden bone.
All right, Lil. Let's give you a try-out.
My bloomers were full of pinafore, my cheeks purple with blood.

I ran after every ball, leaped up and fell back even for those that sailed far over my head, and at the end of the day Rick said,
Tomorrow then, Lil, but not if Kev's better.

John was proud.
You were not bad, Lil
, he said. The hem of my pinafore was pleated around my knees from so many hot hours in my bloomers, and a shoe buckle had not been able to take the strain of a sudden spring at a fly ball.
Rick thought I was great,
I boasted.
He didn't!
John shouted, and punched me on the arm.
He didn't think you
were great.
I had let him hold the whittled stick from time to time, but I never let him forget it was mine.
He didn't
think you were great.
Reckless at the thought of what Alma would say of the green stain on my pinafore where I had slid after a low one, I said,
You said I was not bad
, and John threw a stone at a cat and hit a letter box.
Not bad for a girl,
I meant.

Men of Destiny

In the end, Ursula was the best I could do.
We are a gang
, I told her.
You are my gang, like Rick has a gang.
Ursula sucked the end of her plait where the brown hair was pale and brittle.
Girls don't have gangs
, she said and squeezed a drop of spittle from the plait.
You can't have a gang.

Ursula's white collar lay neatly on the grey pinafore. Where mine buckled on one side or looped around under itself, Ursula's lay like a small tame animal round her neck. Ursula was a tidy smiler and did not show too much tooth. She could go on smiling tidily for as long as it took the photographer to arrange us, the tallest at the back and the prettiest in the middle, and disappear under his black cloth. She smiled tirelessly out of photograph after photograph.

In those photographs, someone is always caught blurrily waving away a fly, and I am the one looking cross. We had to pack together, shoulder behind shoulder, and smelled each other's hair in the sun. No one wanted to be next to shy Gwen, whose hair was always in her eyes and who glanced away at the moment the shutter clicked so that she was caught for ever as a shy blur. Pale Anne in the strong sunlight of those class photographs was an angel, the same white as the sunlight.
You're an old witch with white hair
, we taunted her, and Ursula tossed her brown plait.
Witchy,
witchy.
Knowing that soon she would be a tall pale beauty, sought after by good prospects, Anne stared back at the fat girl who led the taunts and said nothing, just shaded her face from the sun until we lost interest.

It was Ursula who was chosen to give the bouquet to Lady Goodwin when she visited the school. The band blared dozens of notes at once, Mr Pinnock carefully fitted a chair under Lady Goodwin's big taffeta bottom, and Ursula curtsied. My palms were sweating. She was my friend, and if it had been me I would have tripped on my curtsy and dropped the flowers. But Ursula, who had been excused history to practise the curtsy, could be relied on. Lady Goodwin smiled down at us, and although I tried to catch her eye, her glance slid away from the fat girl in the front row whose plait was coming undone. Miss Vine was flushed, but patriotism kept her smiling. While we all stood stiffly and sang “God Save the King”, Lady Goodwin did not sing, but stood very straight and stared into the distance, perhaps at the Union Jack nailed to the back wall. The anthem might have been sung in her particular honour, as she was the nearest thing to royalty we had with us that day.
She said,
“Thank you
,” Ursula reported to us all later.
She said, “Thank you
very much”. And smiled.
I was proud that she was my friend. My friend had curtsied to something close to royalty.

Ursula loved Rosecroft's slice of the harbour, and the old boat with the heavy oars we could hardly hold, and she loved Alma's pumpkin scones. Her own neat house, with its clipped privet and bricks the colour of lamb's fry, was not called anything but 7 Allambie Crescent.
But what's its
name?
I asked, and she answered as if it was a matter for pride,
It's got no name. My dad says, who needs a name for a house?

In my own mind, as I forced reluctant Ursula up another rise in the headland—We
are Sir Walter Raleigh and
his men,
I said,
looking for Spaniards—
I was as much a hero as Rick. I ate the raw fish that was the initiation, gagging on the cold slippery taste, but when Ursula put her hands in her pockets and gave me an ultimatum:
If I'm going to be your
gang I'm not eating any horrible fish
, I had to think again.
You
will collect fifty of these shells
, I pronounced, and she was happy to search the beaches on our headland for her pile of gold shells. She swam tidily off the public beach, where Rick bombed the water and I showed him the soles of my feet, standing on my hands under water, and she glanced for approval at the adults on their towels and rugs.
Not too rough,
dear
, someone would call out as I straddled Ursula and held her under.
Not too rough.
Ursula often went home crying, but always came back for the boat, and those scones.

Portrait in Brown

I was never anything but plain.
John got the looks
, Father said.
And who got the brains?
He was a disappointed man.
It
is the cross I have to bear
, he said when he was unhappy, and looked at his children.
Children are terrible crosses.
But I had also heard him telling Mother,
My ideas are a terrible burden.
I carry a weight of ideas that must be set down.
But however many slices of newspaper were cut out, however many headlines riffled through, there was never the squeak of a nib over paper when I crept up to listen.
I am lying fallow
, Father shouted when I asked over the leg of lamb.
Fallow, Lilian,
you will never understand.
Mother shook her head without meaning
Yes
or
No
, and left the table before Alma brought the pudding.

John got the looks
, Father said, but I could not see that John's pale face and thin hair were
looks.
I myself was brown from so much scrambling among rocks and by the beach. My hands and knees were scarred from oyster cuts, and grazed where a rock had been too slippery or a branch too thin. I was fat and brown, my plait thin—
A rat's tail
, Father said, fingering it and letting it drop—and was a tomboy, they all agreed.
A grubby little tomboy
, the lady with the big bust called me now.
You must learn elegance
, Mother said,
and
beauty
, but lay too fatigued on her sofa to say more. She was now a mother of cold compresses, Dr. Benn's Pastilles, camphor on red flannel.
It is my chest
, she might sigh, or,
My
head, Lilian, think of my head
, and I would tiptoe away.
You are
grime and filth!
Aunt Kitty exclaimed.
Norah, what a ragamuffin!
but still offered me barley water and pups and tweaked at my straggling plait in an amused way.

John, moon-faced in glasses, afraid of loud noises and the way pups made for your nose, seldom smiled, but when he did every lady commented on his dimples. No winsome dimples ever appeared on my cheeks, only another fold of flesh creasing out around my face, and my bony knees were embarrassing to everyone. Even after I was fat, my knees were as uncompromising as rocks under my pinafore.

Flourishing in Foreign Soil

From the domed centre of the plumbago bush we could watch most things and not be seen.
This is our place
, I told John.
It is a secret
, and he nodded and blinked. From here we could watch Peg, who came to wash, poking at the clothes drowning in the copper and crouching red-faced over the fire underneath. We could see Mother slowly
taking a
turn around the house
, or if we parted the blue flowers on the other side, we could see the bay lapping at our rocks. The light under our plumbago was green and hot. I had hoped that when it rained the thick canopy of leaves would be a roof, but heavy drops fell through the bush and down our necks.
Told you it wouldn't work
, John said as we ran back to the house.
Nothing venture nothing gain
, I said, all in one word as Miss Vine did.
Only the brave deserve the fair.
It was easy to feel brave saying such things and thinking of men in armour on big horses, or the crossbow men drawn in the book, bombarding a fortress with arrows.