droning ‘Tally-ho’.
But I liked the words, the complete set. They had no meaning and yet they were crawling with it. I would have sung them for no money at all.
‘Down in yon cellar there’s an old umberella
And in yonder corner there’s an old pepper box.
Pepper box, pepper box, morning till night:
If you give us nowt we’ll steal nowt
We wish you good-night.’
By the time it came to the 5th of November, the weather was cloudy, damp and unseasonably warm. The Catherine wheels, nailed to coalhouse doors, twirled brokenly as if they were burning under a towel. Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius sputtered and coughed, giving a poor impression of their lethal past, and rockets shot into skies ready to receive and extinguish them. My grandad would always give a good firework display, whatever the prevailing conditions: Karina and I stood side by side in his backyard, two among a small crowd, cramming our mouths with parkin. I whispered, through the crumbs, ‘I’m going to sit for the Holy Redeemer.’
She turned on me, her eyes narrowed. If she had been less greedy she would have spat out her softening mass of oatmeal and treacle; but as it was she chewed vigorously till most of her cake was gone. ‘You - ARE - A - LIAR,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll have to tell it in confession.’
‘I am not a liar,’ I hissed back. ‘Susan Millington passed her scholarship and then she passed her entrance exam. I’m going on two buses, if not three. I’ll be getting a tennis racquet.’
‘If you believe that, you’re even dafter than you look.’
The lethargic bonfire put out its tongues: reaching, dull crimson, into heavy air. It was built nice and high – Joan of Arc, I thought – and I could see figures moving against its light; I could see Karina, as she swung her face away. One plait swayed out from under her pixie hood, like a sucker reaching for food. Envy, I thought. One of the Deadly Sins. We were having them in catechism. Cardinal Virtues: Justice, Fortitude, Temperance . . . My memory failed. There was grey smoke going up my nose. Four Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance. Murder. Sodomy. Oppression of the Poor. Defrauding the Labourer of his Wages.
My grandad gave me a sparkler, from a bunch sparking already in his own hand; he passed one to Karina, saying, ‘There you are, my duck.’ Turning a little to allow room, we wrote our names on the nearest air. My vast final loop threatened to set Karina’s sleeve on fire. As the tip of the sparkler drooped to ash, I wanted to challenge Karina to duel me with what remained, but I knew that duels – swordplay in general – were beyond her poor spirit. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ I was happy, even so; frightened, but getting reconciled to being frightened. I sang out: untuneful, smoke-captive: ‘Pepper box, pepper box, morning till night . . .’
‘STAND BACK,’ my grandad yelled.
On our left, a roman candle began to sputter and start, crackling pink and blue hyphens away from itself and by way of an arch into the ground. Another rocket rose, flipped, shot out a trail of subdued white stars and subsided in stifling mid-heaven.
. . . pepper box, morning till night: / If you give us nowt we’ll steal nowt / We wish you good- night.’
The next thing I clearly remember, it was Christmas Eve. We were having visitors from Leeds, and my mother was neatly forking mixed pickles into her cut-glass dish that had been left her in a will. ‘If I see you messing with that dish,’ she said, ‘it’ll be a good slap and straight off to bed.’
Earlier, when my mother was milder, we had glued an angel to the window. Frail and phosphorescent, gauzy wings edged thinly with tinsel, she glittered out at Curzon Street. Silent night. Holy Night. From the Ladysmith came the sound of breaking glass. ‘Round yon virgin, mother and child . . .’ Karina always sang ‘Round John Virgin’. One of these years I would tell her: gently, of course. Unless next year I no longer knew Karina; but that seemed hardly possible, as whatever happened about the Holy Redeemer she and I would go on living six doors away from each other. I pictured myself, one year from now, wearing a velour hat like Susan Millington’s and gazing out through the angel’s wings at Curzon Street: waiting for snow to fall.
four
Tonbridge Hall: when it came to the night of the roast parsnips, my digestive system rebelled. ‘What’s the matter?’ Lynette said.
‘I just can’t, that’s all. They look like ogres’ penises.’
There was a small ripple of shock from the Sophies at the table.
Karina said, ‘You were always picky about your food.’
‘Not a fault anyone could lay at your door,’ Julianne said mildly.
‘Just leave it on your plate,’ Lynette urged. ‘Here, do you want to get rid of it? Give it to me. I’ll vanish it from your sight.’
It was too late. A kind of stricture had set in, a tightening in my throat, so that I could not eat the stewed beef that came with the parsnips, and would not be able to manage my square piece of sponge adorned with half an apricot. I do not mean to say that the food at Tonbridge Hall was bad – not bad like school dinners – it was just that some of it, for me personally, was impossible. Since we had got our fridge, our vegetables at home had been Bird’s Eye frozen peas; before we got our fridge, our vegetables had been carrots. But these woody things – broccoli – things with great uncooked stems – seemed to me fit only for cattle. The potatoes were hard too, sometimes bullet-hard, doled out sparingly, two per young lady; as if they were bullets indeed, and we were the sheriff’s men, who might easily get out of hand.
Now, I would not want you to think that this is a story about anorexia. There have been too many of those, whole novels about moony girls, spoilt girls, girls who dwindle away to wraiths and then blow up like party balloons. No: and yet partly it is a story about flesh, about the bodies that contained our minds. On the whole, during the years when we were educated, we were persuaded into thinking that bodies were an encumbrance, a necessary evil. At least that was the word put out at the Holy Redeemer, where I would first meet Julianne. But we were not so simple, not so tractable, by the time we were sixteen; we knew we lived in the era of the contraceptive pill, and that we had bodies, and that society expected us to get some use out of them. Let us say then it is a story about appetite: appetite in its many aspects and dimensions, its perversions and falling off, its strange reversals and
