Psyche (12 page)

Mag, watching her expressive face, felt satisfied that ‘honesty is the best policy' had been planted in fertile soil. Her eyes misting with easy, sentimental tears, she felt that her old man would have been proud of her. What she did not realize then, or ever, was that she had already, as her father had done, taught her lessons by example, and that she was wasting her breath by continually cautioning Psyche, “Always tell the truth, kid,” and “Don't ever forget to be a good girl.” The difference between good girls and bad girls, and the facts of life which had to be understood before this difference could be fully comprehended, were hurdles she crossed while Psyche was still a small child. Again, she had no idea that the steady, protective affection she and Butch had for one another was to have a far more lasting effect on Psyche's future reactions and behaviour than any of the lurid tales she told her about Girls Who Went Wrong. Syphilis, and starvation in gutters, meant nothing to Psyche. To be ‘loved, honoured and kept' on the other hand meant a great deal to her, for she was increasingly aware of the fact that she did not really belong anywhere. Butch and Mag's obvious dependence on each other, though it became part of an unrecognized ideal, yet served to emphasize her own lack of any true identification with them. Unconsciously compensating for this lack, she began to identify herself with her unknown beginnings rather than with the shack, and to think more
and more often of the ‘Outside' as a source to which she must inevitably return.

At night, when she lay in bed, her eyes fixed on the storeroom's one tiny window, watching the single star it framed too briefly, she would try to picture the family to which she might once have belonged. A fair-haired mother and a dark-haired father became constant, but she eventually gave up attempting to fill in brothers and sisters who never seemed to stay the same age and sex from one night to another, and who—drawn, though she did not know it, from a variety of catalogues—insisted on turning up in clothing which made it quite impossible for them to be living in either the same place or the same season of the year.

Thinking of her parents, she would tell herself fiercely that they must be nice. But if so—then how had she come here? It was an unequal equation with which she would struggle until the tears came, and it was necessary to bury her head under rough blankets so that Butch and Mag, on the other side of the thin partition, might not hear her choked breathing. Steadfastly refusing to discard her original hypothesis that her parents, solely because they were her parents, must be good in all ways, she fabricated solution after solution to account for their apparent desertion of her, no one of which she could find wholly convincing. If she could have thought of them as dead, it would have been easier to exonerate them of all blame. She could not bear to do this.

Naturally enough, it did not occur to her then to search in herself for clues to the heritage which had come to mean so much to her. She was eleven years old before she ever objectified herself at all.

It was late in November of that year that heavy rains during the night, combined with a sudden, sharp frost in the early hours of the morning, together produced the illusion of another ice age. When the sun rose, its rays struck a blue-white ice crust from which they glanced off in rainbow colours. To Psyche it was a glimpse into fairyland, a fairyland into which she sallied forth immediately breakfast was over. Skating without skates, floating between vividly blue sky and a world caught fast beneath a
prison of glass, she turned her back on the shack and felt as if she were suspended, bodiless, between heaven and earth.

Would this, she wondered, be the way she would feel if she were dead? If she were nothing more than a soul on its way up to heaven? Would she still be herself? And what, after all, was herself? Was it bright hair, straight nose, and thin arms and legs, or was it something more than that? Suddenly she had to find out. Whirling around, keeping a slippery balance with difficulty, she made her way back to the shack as fast as she could. Once inside, she went straight to the clouded mirror above Mag's untidy bureau. Disregarding dusty red hair combings, spilled face powder, and a pin-tray full of cigarette stubs, she stood on tip-toe and leaned as close to the mirror as possible.

Carefully she took stock of her features, one by one, in search of something elusive which they might betray if she stared at herself long enough and hard enough. But, as she stared, her face became gradually that of a stranger, frighteningly unfamiliar. The eyes—which could not be her eyes—seemed to be getting larger, the pupils wide and black within a thin banding of blue iris; opaque, unfocussed, those eyes not only gave her back nothing of herself, but seemed to threaten her very identity as a person.

With a real effort of will, she wrenched herself free. As she moved back, the edge of the bed caught her behind the knees, and she sat down with unexpected suddenness. She felt, though more keenly, as she had on the night when she had tried to see how long she could hold her breath. She had experienced on that occasion the same floating vagueness, the same feeling of being a long way off from anything known, and had had the same awful fear that she might not be able to come back into herself again.

Now, glad to be sitting down, she tried to think out what she had discovered about herself. At first, it seemed to her that the answer to this was nothing. And then the very fact that she had learned nothing became an answer of sorts in itself. Her face, it seemed, was a mask which not only hid her real self from herself but also, probably, from other people. From this she moved on to the realization that no matter what she thought, no one need know her thoughts if she did not want them known. There could,
it would seem, be no trespassing on a ‘self without the owner's consent. Why she should be so pleased, and even comforted by this quite remarkable but, as far as she could see, not very useful discovery, she could not make out. It was, of course, nice to know that you belonged to yourself in rather a special way, but it would be much more helpful to know exactly what it was you belonged to. Probably this was something you could learn only if you watched yourself for a long time; watched what you did when you did it, and thought about what you thought. And if you shouldn't like what you finally saw as your real self, would it be possible to change it in any way, or did you just have to stay the same always whether you were satisfied with that or not? Then again, if you could change, would you still be able to feel that you were you?

Finding this all very confusing, she decided to see if Mag could be of any help to her.

Mag, her sleeves rolled up, was baking a pie. On the corner of the table nearest the stove.
Fanny Farmer's Boston Cook Book
lay open at the correct page. Mag neither looked at it nor needed it. It was simply a badge of office, a reminder that when she had first walked out with a heavy-set young policeman she had been not only a cook but a good one. Her pies, usually apple, were now her single exercise in this proficiency.

Psyche hitched herself up on to the table, and, picking up a small piece of dough, absently kneaded it into a grimy ball between her fingers. “Mag, if you was changed—I mean, if you wasn't yourself exactly, what would you be?”

“Tight,” said Mag.

“No—no. I mean if you was changed on purpose, sort of?”

“I dunno, kid. I ain't never wanted to be nothin' that I ain't.”

Getting down from the table, Psyche went slowly over to the window. The ice on the crests of the slag hills was already melting: as impossible now to recapture its sharp, clear, many-coloured beauty, as to feel again the inner excitement it had engendered.

“I am me,” Psyche said experimentally under her breath. It did not seem to mean much any more.

“You want to cut up them apples, kid?”

Small rivulets of water were tracing dark veins down the sides of the slopes and gathering in shallow pools which reflected a sky blurred by the return of a haze rarely absent for long.

With an oddly fatalistic shrug, unconscious period to a broken spell, Psyche said, “Sure, if you like, but I can't never find the damn knife.”

“Try dumpin' the box out on the table,” Mag advised.

Falling in with this suggestion, Psyche happily fetched the cardboard cutlery box and allowed its heterogeneous contents to rain out upon the table with all the clatter possible. Neither she nor Mag ever objected to a noise.

In what was essentially a silent comer of the universe, sounds of any kind had a real significance. When a thick cloud ceiling pressed close against the slag, the passing of cars on the highway could be heard, and Psyche, scarcely knowing she did it, would count the number that went by in a morning or an afternoon. In the spring and fall, when wild ducks called as they steered a course high above the shack, their migrations would be remarked upon and referred to again and again in the days that followed. The strident reveille of the old alarm clock, ringing at odd hours during the night and day, was greeted as a pleasantly familiar, rather than an irritating, punctuation to sleep or conversation. And when storms broke in a tumult of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, around the tiny house, its inmates enjoyed the disturbance of a peace at times oppressive in its tranquillity.

Neither Butch nor Mag, however, began to comprehend the extent of Psyche's loss when the old gramophone broke down, perhaps because music was of no importance to them, and perhaps because, as Psyche had been forced to play it, it had been inaudible to them.

Resurrected from amongst a stack of equally useless articles in the storeroom, it had been set up on an orange crate beside her bed, and had become overnight a possession that ranked second only to Feather Duster. The lid of the imitation-leather case was gone; the few records that remained were worn and scratched; and since there were neither needles nor tone arm, it could only
be operated with a pin held in a hand, both mobile and steady, that learned how to follow a revolving, threadlike course without independent wavering. But this was enough. Leaning close against the machine, listening with absorbed concentration, Psyche was able to capture ghostly music that had the remote perfection of a scene looked at through the wrong end of a telescope; music, stripped of all mechanical impurities, which was the thin skeleton of a past which became for her an enthralling present. “After the Ball”, “Moonlight and Roses”, “Alexander's Ragtime Band”—she smiled, and grew sad, felt a queer restlessness, and smiled again.

The night when Butch came home to find Mag alone in the main room of the shack, and only two places laid for the evening meal, his broad face became creased with immediate, dumb anxiety.

“Where's the kid? She sick?”

Mag shook her head. “No, she ain't sick. She just don't want nothin' to eat.” “Wassa matter with her?”

“The phono's gone on the bum,” Mag told him laconically.

Butch scratched his head as he always did when thought of any kind was demanded of him. “She set great store by that old thing, didn't she?”

“Yeah, but we ain't got the money to go gettin' another, so don't go athinkin' of anythin' stoopid like that,” said Mag, revealing that she had already thought of it herself.

“Mebbe there might be somethin' else?” Butch asked hopefully. He had a great respect for Mag's ability to cope with any crisis needing more than brute strength, the single contribution he himself was ever in a position to make. That this would, on a future occasion, be all that was required of him in one of the most awful crises of the kid's life, he could not foresee, and so he was humble in his reliance on a judgement he knew to be superior to his own.

Mag, in both their opinions, was equal to the occasion. “We'll give her one of them mouth organs. I already wrote the letter.”

Psyche treasured the mouth organ, when it came, because it was shiny, new, and hers, but as a gateway to music it was a
complete failure. Although moved by, and responsive to music of any kind, she had no inherent creative talent for it, and the discordant noises which were all she was able to extract from her new toy were actually offensive to her. They tended, if anything, to thrust farther away, rather than to bring back, her lost puppet world where tiny figures laughed and wept and danced to rhythmic harmonies now dissolved like smoke in a rising wind.

With no one to call her a baby, Psyche still took Feather Duster with her wherever she went. His once bright face was grey with age, and his plumed head was balding in spots, but his value as a companion was as great as it had ever been. She was growing like an exotic young weed, and her shapeless pullovers and denim trousers were always too small for her; but even with this and Feather Duster thrown in, she was already essentially too beautiful to be found laughable by any but others of her own age, and as yet she had had none of these to deal with. When they went into the town, a place more depressing than the slag surrounding it, and as devoid of growth, it was to find a world of adults, for they always went in the evenings when the children were in bed. And the social life of the shack itself was limited to Saturday nights, when three miners, who worked the same shift as Butch, came in to play poker with him.

It was Butch, in closer contact with civilization than Mag, who one day uneasily broached the subject of “schoolin' for the kid”.

Mag disposed of this radical idea. “I ain't never had no proper schoolin', an' I done all right, ain't I?”

“I went to school,” Butch reminded her with no little pride.

“An' you can't read nor write no better than me,” Mag told him tartly. “I've teached the kid how to make her letters and how to read some. Anyway, girls is different.”

After some consideration, Butch conceded that, in certain respects at least, girls were different. There, for the time being, the matter was dropped, and Psyche was left to her own devices for another year.