Karina comes by. Her pale blue eyes look straight ahead, and her expression is distant but implacable. She has a toy truck, a lorry she is pulling on a string. The lorry is red. In the back of it is crammed a baby doll, a fair, fat, blubbery baby doll, plastic pink and naked. What a game! A baby in a lorry! I think it’s stupid.
Before I have time to think anything else, out shoots my foot. Out shoots my foot from the knee. Up sails the lorry, up into the air. Out flies the plastic baby. And smash! Down on the classroom floor, down on its bald pink head. Dead.
Karina drops the string of her lorry. Slowly turns. Sucks in her lips, which are the same pink as her face, between the big square teeth. Then tears – fat tears – begin to roll silently down her cheeks. I sit with my leg still swinging, as if it is a mechanism over which I have no control. Karina menaces me: she raises her arm from the elbow, in a parody of hitting. She is afraid, I can tell she is. She approaches me; the blow lands on my shoulder, soft as pat-a-cake, and a tear falls on to my hand, scorching me. I rub my hand on my dress, and the tear goes away.
Normally if anybody hits me I hit back. I poke their eyes out. I am four and I am famous as a good fighter. Kick them in the kidneys, Grandad says, they’ll not take much of that. I know kidneys: I have seen them on a plate. I know they come from the butcher, and I imagine my enemies toiling up Bismarck Street with a shopping-bag, and their kidneys inside wrapped in bloody paper. In my mind, my leg shoots high and straight, high up to my ear, and I catch them
The butcher writes his prices on the paper; he does adding up, the sum wobbling and warping round the parcel. How much are kidneys? I hardly care. I kick them in the shins too; that’s part of their leg. It doesn’t matter what you do, Grandad says, as long as you don’t hesitate; he who hesitates is lost. Strike, strike hard, strike home.
But I let Karina get away because I know what I did was wrong, to boot her baby like that. I wonder, in fact, why she didn’t hit me harder, why she was so plainly afraid; but I think it must have been the mechanical ruthlessness of my foot, swinging and pinging, shooting and booting in its John White’s lace-up infant school shoe.
Where was Julianne? Not there: ten miles away in the country, at her private prep school. I imagine her playing with bright plastic shapes on a magnetic board: fitting and manipulating, while a sweet-faced nun smiles above her, and feeds her dolly-mixtures, and says, ‘dear little Julianne’.
I went home, and said to my mother, ‘Karina hit me.’
My mother sat me on the kitchen table. She taught me a song:
‘Karina’s a funny ‘un
She’s a face like a pickled onion
She’s a nose like a squashed tomater
And legs like two sticks.’
‘Will I sing it tomorrow?’ I cried, beside myself with joy.
‘No,’ my mother said. ‘Sing it to yourself. It’s just to help you feel better.’
I understood this perfectly; that if you’ve learnt something really insulting and gross, a lot of the pleasure is in keeping it to yourself. ‘OK,’ I said. Kicked my legs a bit. Oh, I was a bright, happy little soul, in those days.
This was the first and last joke my mother made about Karina. At some time in the next two or three years, my mother and Karina’s mother held some sort of colloquy in the street, after which my mother came home and cried and mentioned cattle-waggons. What that young woman’s life has been, she said, is not to be contemplated, it is not to be contemplated. My father went away and got his model kit out and made a model bomber.
When these grey aeroplanes were done, he would slot them for display on to a Perspex stand, clear thin plastic which was meant to look not there and make you think the planes were flying.
My mother said, ‘Now, when you’re off to school, you will always call for Karina, won’t you?’
Most days, Karina was there already on Curzon Street, waiting and watching for me. Her arm slid through mine, doing what we called linking. I’ll link ye, a woman would say to another, slipping an arm though an arm. It was the way for women to get along the street. Nowadays, you would be presumed to be lesbians, I suppose.
Nowadays. Oh, nowadays.
Twenty-four hours after Julianne’s arrival in London, I was putting papers into ring-binders and she was lying on her bed, reading the
‘
A voice said, ‘Oh, may we?’
Two bright faces, one spotty, appeared around the door.
‘You may come in entirely,’ Jule said. ‘The invitation is for more than your heads.’
So in they came: Claire, a large solid-bosomed girl from Bournemouth, and a little sparrow called Sue, who sounded deeply southern but didn’t say where she was from. They wore, the both of them, jolly jumpers; beneath, Claire wore a baggy skirt, and Sue wore decent slacks of a polyester type, the kind of thing people’s mothers buy.
It was Claire who had the spots. We ran our eyes over them, in that pitiless way girls have at eighteen: to see if there was any battle to be fought. But Jule signalled to me with her big white hand, as if to indicate truce. They were in no case to take our men from us; and there was no man they could possibly attract, that we would care to take from them.
They stood on the cotton rug, their shins brushing the coffee table; they smiled tolerantly at our bookshelves, at our Marx and Leonard Cohen and Hermann Hesse, and tolerantly at Jule’s ashtray, and tolerantly at my long thin legs below my tiny skirt. ‘I’m at King’s,’ Claire said. ‘And Sue here, she’s at Bedford. You’re medical, aren’t you, Miss Lipcott?’
‘Mm,’ Julianne said. ‘But not dissected anything yet.’
‘I say.’ Claire laughed. ‘Got all that to come, eh?’ She shifted her feet; almost her spots seemed to redden, as if she were going to come now to something delicate, possibly embarrassing. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we’ve been going
