‘I don’t want to play it,’ Karina said.
‘Why not?’
‘He has got a moustache.’
‘We can pretend that.’
‘What must I do then?’
‘It’s easy. You just talk. You say grown-up words.’
Karina had a bag with her, a string bag stretched out with three large loaves. They were stacked one on top of the other, each with its crackling U-shaped top and its fragments splitting through the tissue paper like broken slate. She carried this bag slung over her shoulder, and it made her sway from side to side on the pavement, so that she would move a half-step towards me, a half-step away. ‘Pneumonia,’ I offered. I didn’t mind giving her a word to get her going.
Karina looked sideways at me. ‘I am the Prince of Connaught. I have pneumonia.’
I almost thumped her. ‘You’re not doing it proper.’ You have to be that person, I wanted to say to her, put their skin on your back. Grown-up words came bubbling into my mouth: rouge, piano stool, niece. I felt my face blossoming out, round as the full moon, and I smelt the fragrance of pink face powder: I had become Lady Smith. ‘I returned home last night,’ I enunciated carefully, ‘to find my favourite niece seated on the piano stool.’
‘Did she have pneumonia?’ Karina asked. Her voice was nothing like the Prince of Connaught’s: she wasn’t even trying. I thought, if I had scissors I could cut her string bag, and her loaves would tumble out and slide down the hill and then she’d catch it from her mother. But this was not the sort of thing I did to Karina, more the sort of thing she did to me. ‘Dumb insolence,’ she would sometimes say. ‘That’s bad. Very bad.’ It was a whole year since my run-in with Sister Basil; but Karina had appointed herself my spiritual guardian. ‘Did you say your morning prayers?’ she would ask me, when we met in the street at half-past eight. ‘What did you pray for?’
I pictured the loaves picking up speed, losing their tissue paper and collecting dry leaves and bubble-gum wrappers, rolling in at the shop doorway and bouncing back on to the shelves.
‘Your father and me have been talking,’ my mother said.
That woke me up. I’d never heard them talking. Not in months.
My mother had just come in. She’d been out cleaning. Other cleaning women might come and go in an old coat and a turban, but my mother wore a coat that was no more than medium-old, and a proper scarf, and she put lipstick on, Tan Fantasy. Once when she was in a good mood she let me try it. People take you at your own valuation, she said. Always remember that.
‘Can I have a biscuit?’ I asked. I thought it might be better not to know what they had been talking about.
‘All right, but one, mind, or you’ll spoil your tea.’ For a moment she was diverted; then, unknotting her scarf, she said, ‘We’ve decided we’ll let you sit for the Holy Redeemer.’
I had heard of the Holy Redeemer. It was an academy that Sister Basil often referred to, with a pious, grieving note in her voice, as if it were her land of lost content; though I am sure, now, that she had never set foot inside its portals. I said, ‘Sister Basil says the likes of us would never be fit for it in a thousand years.’
My mother snorted. ‘Sister Basil? That old nanny goat? What does she know? If you can pass your scholarship you can go. Why shouldn’t you? But you have to take their entrance exam as well.’
‘Is that harder than my scholarship?’
‘Not so hard that you won’t manage it, if you apply yourself.’
This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon.
‘Will I have a uniform like Susan Millington?’
‘Certainly you will.’
Susan Millington was a big girl who lived near the park in a detached house. She was the only person I had ever seen who went to the Holy Redeemer. She had passed her scholarship and then she had passed the entrance exam, I said to myself; that was how it was done.
The scholarship was the Eleven Plus. Almost everybody didn’t pass it. If boys failed, they sank below my horizon for a few years, then cropped up in a wedding photo, suit sleeves hiding any tattoos; oh, it’s a pity, my mother would say, he was a bright little lad, and now look at that trollop he’s landed with. If girls failed, they went to St Theresa’s up Pennyworth Brow, where they wore navy berets and laddered nylons. Sister Monica, who was in charge of us in the top class, was already priming us for it. ‘You will find there is first-rate equipment for domestic science,’ she said. ‘Electrical sewing-machines. A fully equipped laundry with steam-presses, and a model kitchen fitted out with a range of electrical cooking ranges. In point of fact, everything the heart could desire.’
A thought occurred to me: ‘If I go to the Holy Redeemer, I’ll have to go on the bus.’ A needle of anxiety probed my ribs; a bus, I thought, could get a child lost.
‘Two buses, at least,’ my mother said. ‘Three, if you’d like to save a long walk.’ She sounded proud, as if I had already been exalted. ‘It’ll be worth it, mark my words. Make no mistake about it. An honour and a privilege.’
I wanted to run and put my hand over her mouth. I didn’t know why she was saying such things.
It was nearly Bonfire Night. The evenings were dry and cold, and smelt of the fires to come. If you’re a Catholic you don’t burn Guy Fawkes; the Pope says you mustn’t.
We went from house to house, cob-coaling.
‘We come a cob-coaling for Bonfire Night,
Tally-ho, tally-ho . . .’
Some children hoped that after two lines the person would come out with money in their hand ready, because they didn’t know any more words. If the householder was slow they had to stand there just shuffling their feet and
