Lilian's Story (9 page)

She was always at a distance after that, even though I spent whole lunchtimes following her. She was always at a distance, and skipped with Anne and Judith, and moved to another spot, as if she had not seen me coming, until my feet were tired on the hot bitumen. Rick was taller and more distant than ever and the white of his shirt in the sun brought tears to my eyes.
Fatso fibber
, he called, and the playground was not big enough to hold so much laughing.

In the full blast of sun, I sat under the palm tree in the sea of bitumen and cried without hoping they would relent. Ursula walked in the shade with pale Anne as if things had always been like this, and Anne did not bother even to glance back to the fat girl who sat awkwardly on the knob of a palm while tears dripped from her nose. The heat was dark in my face as my hands gripped the trunk, shiny from so many years of backs and lunchtime fingers.

In those distant groups, John was briefly the centre of attention. They fingered the plaster on his wrist until it was grey, and one or two wrote their names on it and the date.
Does it hurt?
they kept asking, but John shook his head, and became tongue-tied when they wanted to know what it felt like when it broke against the billycart wheel, and they lost interest again. Nothing had ever been different for John, and he climbed as he had always done into the fork of the worn monkey-puzzle tree and watched everything from above. It would have been easy for him to join all those who called out after me, but behind his thick glasses John was still brave. He did not join, nor did he not join, but took off his glasses and cleaned them and when he could not postpone any longer the moment of seeing again, said,
What? What?
so many times that even shouting Rick lost interest in the end.

Father in Bed

Mother sighed over junket and said,
It is just as well your father
does not have to know.
John hung his head when she said,
No
one in our family has ever broken a bone before.
A spoonful or two later, she laughed so suddenly that Alma nearly dropped the cream jug.
Think of yourself as a pioneer, John, and now I
remember your Uncle Harry was thrown by his gelding and broke an
ankle.
John stared at his junket but did not eat, and Mother leaned down the table towards him.
It is manly, John, there is
no need to be ashamed of protecting your sister.
The sound of her spoon in the dish as she finished and pushed it all away was like a sad bell.
Your father would be proud
, she decided, and bowed her head as if praying, but I could see her examining her lace for stains.

Father's nightcap appeared to have shrunk, or perhaps it was his head growing like a gourd. His eyes moved sideways in his face as Mother poked John until he was standing beside the bed. I hung back but Father's eyes slid around slowly until they found me.
He is vastly
improved
, Mother said loudly as if everyone was deaf.
Is
that not true, Albion?
But her shadow, as she thrust the curtains back from the window, lay like a weight across the bedcover. I watched Father blink several times and heard him hiss:
Sssssss
, he said, although I did not see his lips move.

Mother explained laboriously about the
bullies
and how John had
showed a lot of pluck.
Father did not show any sign of hearing and did not even blink, but when Mother had said it all he whispered hoarsely,
Well done, John
, and fumbled among the bedclothes towards John's hand. Mother filled the silence in which John edged away from the bed and her voice ushered both of us out of the room. We avoided each other's eyes later, and John practised being deaf when I spoke to him, and I could not persuade him to do anything.

Brothers Are Others, Too

John no longer mentioned Miss Gash and never responded if I tried to interest him in her. He hid her away with all the other secret things he knew. There was a notice on his door jamb now that said “Keep Out, Please”, and he had moved the furniture in his room so he could hide in a corner. He was beginning to be someone I did not know. Everything I told him disappeared into the space behind his earth-coloured eyes.

He had become a collector. Under his bed, in the only corner of the room not visible from the doorway, was a growing pile of exercise books in which he collected hands and feet. The pages were pocked and warped with the thick collages of hands and feet of all sizes and kinds, page after page: hands in gloves from Mother's fashion journals, hands on ploughs from the farming pages, feet standing on platforms, hands demonstrating telescopes. Some were in pairs, some were single. There were puny ones, badly drawn, smudged photographs on cheap paper. One was huge, a pointing hand from a poster, too big for the page of the exercise book. The thick paste had lumped under them so that the books bulged with limbs.
No one
will take them from me
, John explained when I asked.
I am the
only one who wants them.
His face was enthusiastic behind the thick glasses.

John, then, was locked in his own world now, with his own passions and secrets. I became choked by such silence at school and by John's blankness at home, and I grew desperate.
I will be an aviator when I grow up
, I said, and had to shout at John's shining unlistening glasses.
I will be an
aviator, or invent something important, or win the Victoria Cross.
I watched John sway in the blast of my voice, but he was not impressed by anything I could think of to tell him.
Girls
cannot be aviators
, he said at last.
Or get the Victoria Cross.

John was becoming convinced that he had no sister and was finding it easier to believe from day to day. His silences were magnificent, even when I shook him so hard his glasses hung lopsided from one ear, but he did not care, and could escape from me easily, when I was panting at last and discouraged, and he could go then and join the gang in Rick's cave.

At such times, I went away and threw stones at Miss Gash's tabby to comfort myself, but it was too quick for me and could make itself invisible in shadows, while I had to continue to inhabit heavy perspiring flesh.

When they took the plaster off John's wrist, a change had taken place there. The hair under the plaster had grown thick and black in that private darkness and I found it hard to look at, as frightening as a man's hairy leg.

Heroes

The lattice of the summer-house was peeling away from the beams in a hopeless disintegrating way and the floor had collapsed, but I stood on one of the remaining bearers and looked out over the dish of weeds that was the tennis court. I smelled salad and saw egg-shaped tomatoes growing under me where there had once been a flower bed. The plants sprawled over each other, tangled with paspalum and nasturtiums. I had only seen tomatoes cut into quarters, lying in a dish, and these were alarming, hanging secretively among leaves. Among these plants was a warped and string-less tennis racquet, and I toyed with the idea of giving it a history. The leather grip was as brittle as cardboard but the name OATES was still clear on the handle in gold, and gave me ideas.
He was a hero who died of frostbite
, I would tell them and the dark heat of the schoolyard would make us shiver as I described snow, crevasses, the way feet fell off with frostbite.
In the waters of the Antarctic a man dies in less than thirty seconds
, I could tell them, remembering one of Father's favourite facts, and I would watch Rick shudder. I would only let them look at the racquet, not touch it, and I would tell them it was an heirloom.
Heroism is in our family
, I would say in a casual way, and John would not deny it.

I thought of John's face, twisted like a shoe caught under a door, and the terrible silence of his grey lips when I had been released to run down Bent Lane to him, and in my anger I needed to make a large and violent gesture. With the white chalk from school I began to be rude on the walls of Miss Gash's summerhouse. DEVIL, I wrote, then DAMN. The chalk became sticky in my fingers as I appalled myself at the thought of more words. Finally I reminded myself of the way John had whimpered like one of Aunt Kitty's pups, and wrote over and over till the chalk fell apart in my hand: HELL HELL HELL.

In the light of such rudeness, the warped tennis racquet was no longer impressive enough. Rick would sneer and pretend it was diseased.
Dirty old rubbish
, he would say, and hardly glance, and I would be left under the palm tree holding a racquet that had not belonged to anyone but a person called OATES, who was probably not a hero, but a bank manager by now.

Miss Gash's verandah gaped at the sun, and honeysuckle circled slowly around the railings, looking for a way to climb higher. From behind a bush, I watched Miss Gash digging for potatoes where they grew spindly out of compost. When she turned and looked at the bush I was crouching behind, I could see how the white powder had settled into the furrows in her cheeks, but I was sure that in spite of my bulk I was invisible. I needed something to bring gasps to those mulish faces in the playground, and waited, feeling ants crawl on my calves, trying to outstare that knowing tabby when it left Miss Gash to investigate me. Its nose was cold against my leg and its eyes were wide with disdain. I did not blame it, but had to wait behind my bush for something I could boast about, and sweated awkwardly from so much crouching.

Dirt clung to the ragged hem of the postage stamps when Miss Gash straightened up from her spade and stared into the sky with a fist in her back, but she did not notice it, even when she bent to gather up the potatoes in her hands. On her way to the verandah she dropped several that bounced and lay, and spoke to them—
Trying to
get away?—
but left them where they were. On the verandah she dropped her handfuls and sat on the top step, her feet wide apart in burst slippers. When she reached into a basket on the step and brought out one of those egg-shaped tomatoes I was not surprised, but felt my palms moisten at the thought of her seeing my rudeness next time she went for tomatoes. She sat eating in the sun, and her laugh when the tomato burst red down her postage stamps was as shrill as a rusted hinge.

When she had finished she flung the stem as far as she could towards the bush I was behind, bending her elbow and throwing from the shoulder in the businesslike way I had seen Rick do and that I had tried to copy. He had told me, though, that girls were missing a bone and could not throw properly. We both watched the stem lying on the grass as if it might move, then Miss Gash felt among the folds of her postage stamps, brought out a pipe, and began to smoke. The blue smoke hung around her head, trapped under the green hat, and diffused slowly in the air. That nosy tabby sniffed the tobacco tin as gingerly as if it was hot, investigated a potato with a paw, then sat neatly beside Miss Gash until she had finished her pipe, knocked it out on the verandah post like any comfortable gentleman, and disappeared into the house. I could have thought I had imagined it all, but the thick fruity smell of her smoke drifted over to my bush, and I did not think I could invent that smell. I would have liked something tangible to take away with me, though, and knew already that no one would believe in Miss Gash's pipe.

There was a long silence when I finished telling John about how I, his fat sister, had seen Miss Gash smoking her pipe and wearing trousers like a man. The ropes of the swing creaked as John scuffed at a piece of dirt. His silence was full of doubt at my story,
Rick says you are loony
, he said finally.
Says I got a loony sister, and she makes stuff up
. The glance he gave me was swollen with painful feeling.
They
all laugh at you, Lil, for being loony.
His kick at a tuft of grass might have been at my shin.
And it is not my fault you are my
sister.
A butterfly the size of a bird suddenly appeared in the space between us and was interested in John's chin, then his shoulder, then was gone. John took off his glasses and began to polish them on his sleeve.
Lil
, he whined suddenly,
what's loony, exactly?

The Consolations of Art

I was huge with secret now, in the sunlight of the playground, in the heat that smelled of hot serge and everyone's lunch. My secret was what kept me from minding when Ursula walked to and fro in front of me with an arm around Anne's waist, or even plaited that white witch hair for her when it came loose down her back. When Rick hooted something I refused to hear and Kevin made a rubber noise of disgust with wet lips, I reminded myself that I had my secret of Miss Gash, that I knew where the rest of the picture was, that I had seen a woman smoking a pipe. I had now almost convinced myself about the trousers and pictured them dark and faintly striped, like those Father had worn before he took to bed. There would come a day when I would be able to use it all. They had stopped wanting to know where the tiles had come from, had stopped wanting to know anything at all, but the time would come when they would want to talk to me again, when Ursula would offer me her date slices. I waited for that day, huge with my secret.

Miss Vine considered herself well in advance of her time, with her daring French roll and her waists. It was so progressive to give girls metal to work with rather than silks and watercolours that she was flushed the day she distributed the lengths of copper wire.
You see, children
, she said, deftly twisting her piece of wire.
Look.
The shape she held up was recognisably a duck in silhouette. The class gasped and even Gwen cleared a little hair away to get a better look.

My clumsy fingers failed at my construction, but for once Miss Vine spoke to me.
What is it, Lilian?
she asked kindly, holding my snarled wire up to the window.
It is
a woman, Miss Vine
, I explained, so eagerly I felt my nose beginning to run.
Wearing trousers
, I added from behind my handkerchief.
Pardon?
Miss Vine said. She was willing to believe she had misheard.
A woman, Miss Vine, wearing trousers.
I repeated it so loudly that everyone stared. Miss Vine's voice was thin with dislike as she said,
That is nasty, Lilian,
and not at all amusing.
She did not quite toss my wire at me but it bounced off the desk and slithered into my lap.
Lilian,
such ideas are not appealing.
I knew the wet pellet of paper that hit my neck came from Rick's desk. I also knew that everyone was laughing behind me at the red patch on my neck and probably at the way my ears were standing out in shame. With my head lowered over the desk, I spent the rest of the lesson writing in my exercise book,
I have a secret.
I will not tell. But I have a secret. They would wish they knew what
I know if they knew my secret. I have a wonderful secret.
If Miss Vine had made me show her what I was writing, I would have been heroic in my refusal to tell my secret, but although I scribbled in an ostentatious way and she stared at me, she did not ask.