What helped my case was the news that Susan Millington had accepted a place at London University. ‘She’s going to read law,’ my mother said ‘She’s going to be a barrister, like you see on the television.’
As I became more acceptable to Julianne and her friends, I grew away from Karina. We still travelled together, and sometimes in a burst of irritability she would confide in me: it was always when she was angry or jealous or otherwise caught up with strong emotion that her language would seem to slip sideways and you would remember that she was not English, for all her insistence. Her mother infuriated her these days, she said, by talking about her long-dead, her missing relatives. ‘I say the past is over and done with, forget it. Why does she keep harking on about it?’
Karina had changed a lot over the last couple of years – to look at, anyway. At twelve she was one of those matronly little girls, who remind you of the well-upholstered women of sixty who stand at bus-stops with baskets on wheels. Her girdle – in house-colour – would ride up over her non-existent waist, giving her tunic an Empire line; but despite this she was still a handsome child, her blonde hair shining, her cheeks still dimpled and pinkly scrubbed. Adults still smiled on her; ‘None of that slimming nonsense with Karina,’ they would say.
But by the time she was seventeen, she had become a dark, forceful presence, strong and sulky. Her hair had dimmed to a nondescript brown, her skin thickened and become muddy. Her long disapproval of the world had become overt, and stamped a frown-line between her eyes. Her strength seemed ridiculously disproportionate to the day-to-day demands our schoolgirl life placed on it; she might have been a formidable games player, except that she despised games of any kind. When she followed me on to the bus in the mornings, I felt as if my conscience were coming after me, ready to fell me with one blow. ‘Karina runs that house single-handed,’ my mother would say. Just as when we were children, she always had money in her purse.
One day in my fifth year, when I was coming home along Curzon Street – late, because I’d stayed behind at school to audition for a part in a play – I saw my mother hammering on the door of Karina’s house. ‘Mary! Mary! Come down, love, and let me in.’
I turned around, shrugged my satchel on to my shoulder, and went straight back down to the town to meet Niall. It was always easier to meet him without telling my mother where I was going. Of course, there would be a row when I got home; but that was preferable to two rows, one when I got home and one before I went.
It turned out that someone had told my mother that Mary had been taken poorly. An ambulance carried her off, but then returned her a day or two later. Karina’s father wouldn’t let anybody in the house. I said, ‘I’m sure Karina will cope. She’s always so capable, isn’t she?’
My mother looked at me reproachfully. ‘She’s got her exams coming up, same as you.’
‘Exams? Oh, exams are nothing, to somebody as capable as Karina.’
Rehearsals for the play kept me back at school; in the mornings, Karina yawned her way through our journey, and sometimes sunk her head into a textbook. One day she said grudgingly, ‘She’s got a wasting disease.’
‘A what?’ I was looking for something more precise, a scientific label. Karina only repeated what she’d said.
‘And what’s the prognosis?’
‘What do you reckon?’
‘Doesn’t your father want help?’
‘I help him.’
‘Don’t you want help?’
‘Are you offering?’
‘Would you take the offer?’
No reply.
Academically, Karina was not the kind of girl who shone; you could not accuse her of that. Sometimes we looked at each other’s homework; her answers were like an expanded set of notes covering all the important points, just the kind of answers your teachers urge you to give. She used short words which followed each other in the expected order and in the accepted cadence. Her paragraphs were two sentences long, like those in tabloid newspapers. At sixteen her writing was as clear and legible as that of a neat ten-year-old. She never read a book she didn’t have to read. I had the impression that she never forgot anything.
Well . . . these schematic virtues must have commended themselves to the examiners. Despite her problems at home, she passed eight O-levels and went into the sixth form on the science side. One gusty day in March, in our final year at school, Julianne came bowling into the common room, seeming propelled by the wind outside. Her face, normally so placid, was aglow with affront. ‘You’ll never guess what SHE – what SHE has done now.’
‘I will never guess,’ I said, looking up from my work. In those days Karina was not a topic between us; but from the violence of Julianne’s tone I knew exactly who she was talking about.
‘She’s only gone and got an offer from London.’
Julianne and I had already applied for a place in a hall of residence. She had said, We could share a room: why not, you won’t be in my way.
‘Has she? Which college?’ I said.
Julianne snorted. ‘Somewhere in the East End.’
I said, ‘Perhaps she won’t get the grades.’
‘Oh, HER,’ Julianne said. ‘She’ll get ’em.’
‘Perhaps she’ll go and live somewhere else. There are other halls.’
‘Oh no,’ Julianne said. ‘She will come and live in our hall. She will come and live in our room. In our wardrobe. We’ll find her bacon rind in our shoes and her toast crumbs in our beds, and cold chips in our textbooks and Cornish pasties stuck to our mirror, and she’ll use our nail scissors to trim pork chops and she’ll steal our lipsticks and suck the ends and then they’ll taste of suet.’
Later that day I stopped Karina in the corridor. ‘I hear you’ve some good news.’
Karina was wearing a white lab coat. She squeezed the cardboard file under her arm. ‘It’ll be good news when I’ve got the grades.’
