“Oh, good,” said her mum. “Because my daughter’s as good as gold. So if you had any complaint, it’d be up to you to get it sorted. Otherwise I’d have to get you sorted, wouldn’t I?”
“I’m not sure you quite grasp, Mrs. Cheetham—”
“I dare say,” Al’s mum said. “We know where your sort get off, smacking little girls’ bottoms, I mean you wouldn’t do it otherwise, it’s not a man’s job, is it?”
“Nothing of that kind—” the headmaster began.
Alison began to cry loudly.
“Shut it,” her mother said casually. “So I’m just telling you, I don’t like people writing to me. I don’t like stuff coming through my door. Any more of it, and you’ll be picking your teeth out of your typewriter.” She took one last draw on her cigarette and dropped the stub on the carpet tiles. “I’m only saying.”
By the time Al was in Mrs. Clerides’s class, she’d rather not put pen to paper because of the risk that someone else would master the pen and write gibberish in her exercise book. “Gibberish” was what Mrs. Clerides called it, when she got her up to the front of the class and asked her if she were subnormal.
Mrs. Clerides read out Al’s diary in a disgusted tone.
“Slurp, slurp, yum yum,” said Harry. “Give us some,” said Blighto.
“No,” said Harry. “Today it is all for me.”
“It’s a dog writing,” Al explained. “It’s Serene. She’s the witness. She tells how Harry polished his bowl. When he’d done you could see your face in it.”
“I don’t believe I asked you to keep the diary of your pet,” said Mrs. C.
“She’s not a pet,” Al said. “Bloody hell, Mrs. Clerides, she pays her way, we all have to pay. If you don’t work you don’t eat.” Then she had gone quiet, thinking, the dogs’ work is fighting, but what is the men’s? They go about in vans. They say, what game am I in? I am in the entertainment game.
Mrs. Clerides slapped her legs. She made her write out something or other, fifty times, maybe a hundred. She couldn’t remember what it was. Even when she was writing it she couldn’t remember. She had to keep on reminding herself by looking back at the line before.
After that, if she’d got a few words down safely, she preferred to go over them with her blue ballpoint, branding the letters well into the paper: then drawing daisy petals around the “o”s and giving the “g”s little fishy faces. This was dull but it was better to be bored than to risk letting the gibberish in by an unguarded stroke, branching out into white space. It made her look occupied, and as long as she looked occupied she got left alone at the back with the mongols, the dummies, and the spastics.
The men said, the bloody little bitch. Is she sorry for what she’s done? Because she don’t look sorry, stuffing her face wiv sweets like that!
I am, I am, she said; but she couldn’t remember what she ought to be sorry for. It had gone woolly in her mind, the way things do when they happen in the night.
The men said, she don’t look sorry, Em! It’s a wonder nobody’s dead. We’re going to take her down the back, and teach her a lesson she won’t forget.
They didn’t say what the lesson was. So after that she always wondered, have I had it? Or is it still to come?
By the time Al was ten, she had begun sleepwalking. She walked in on her mum, rolling on the sofa with a squaddie. The soldier raised his shaven head and roared. Her mother roared too, and her thin legs, blotched with fake tan, stood straight up into the air.
Next day her mum got the squaddie to fix a bolt on the outside of Al’s bedroom door. He did it gladly, humming as he worked. You’re the first man was ever handy around here, her mum said, is that right, Gloria?
Alison stood behind her bedroom door. She heard the bolt shunt into its bracket, with a small tight thud. The squaddie hummed, happy in his work. “I wish I was in Dixie, hooray, hooray”—
A few nights later she woke suddenly. It was very dark outside, as if they had been able to shut off the streetlamp. A number of ill-formed greasy faces were looking down on her. One of them seemed to be in Dixie, but she couldn’t be sure. She closed her eyes. She felt herself lifted up. Then there was nothing, nothing that she remembers.
ALISON: So what puzzles me, and the only thing that makes me think it might have been a dream, was that darkness—because how did they switch the streetlamp off?
COLETTE: You slept in the front, did you?
ALISON: Initially in the back, because the front was the bigger bedroom so Mum had it, but then she swapped me, must have been after the dog bite, probably after Keef, I get the impression she didn’t want me getting up in the night and looking out over the waste ground, which is possible because—
COLETTE: Al, face up to it. You didn’t dream it. She had you molested. Probably sold tickets. God knows.
ALISON: I think I’d already been—that. What you say. Molested.
COLETTE: Do you?
ALISON: Just not in a group situation.
COLETTE: Alison, you ought to go to the police.
ALISON: It’s years—
COLETTE: But some of those men could still be at large!
ALISON: It all gets mixed up in my mind. What happened. How old I was. Whether things happened once or whether they just went on happening—so they all rolled into one, you know.
COLETTE: So did you never tell anybody? Here. Blow your nose.
ALISON: No … . You see, you don’t tell anybody because there’s nobody to tell. You try and write it down, you write My Diary, but you get your legs slapped. Honestly … . It doesn’t matter now, I don’t think about it, it’s only once in a while I think about it. I might have dreamed it, I used to dream I was flying. You see, you wipe out in the day what happens in the night. You have to. It’s not as if it changed my life. I mean I’ve never gone in for sex much. Look at me, who’d want me, it’d need an army. So it’s not as if I feel … it’s not as if I remember … .
