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 … .
COLETTE: Your mother should have protected you. If she were my mum I’d kill her. Don’t you sometimes think about it, going over to Aldershot and killing her?
ALISON: She lives in Bracknell now.
COLETTE: Wherever. Why does she live in Bracknell?
ALISON: She went off with a man who had a council house over there, but it never lasted, anyway, he went over into Spirit and somehow or other she ended up with the tenancy. She wasn’t so bad. Isn’t. I mean, you have to feel sorry for her. She’s the size of a sparrow. In her looks, she’s more like your mother than mine. I walked past her once in the street and didn’t recognize her. She was always dyeing her hair. It was a different colour every week.
COLETTE: That’s no excuse.
ALISON: And it never came out what she intended. Champagne Hi-Life, and she’d end up ginger. Chocolate Mousse, and she’d end up ginger. Same with her pills. She used to swap other people’s prescriptions. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I wondered how she kept going.
COLETTE: These men—could you still identify them, do you think?
ALISON: Some of them. Maybe. If I saw them in a good light. But they can’t arrest them after they’re passed.
COLETTE: If they’re dead I’m not worried. If they’re dead they can’t do any more damage.
When Al was twelve or so, she got cheeky. She said to her mum, “That one last night, what was
Her mum tried to slap her around the head but she overbalanced and fell on the floor. Al helped her up.
“Thank you, you’re a good girl, Al,” her mum said, and Al’s cheeks burned, because she had never heard that before.
“What you on, Mum?” she asked. “What you taking?”
Her mum took a lot of Librium and a lot of Bacardi, which does make you fall over. Every week, though, she gave something else a try; it usually worked out, like the hair dye, to have a result she had not foreseen but should have.
Al had to go to the chemist for her mum’s prescriptions. “Are you here again?” said the man behind the counter, and because she was going through her brusque phase she would say, it’s me or somebody else, what’s your opinion? “My God,” he said. “I can’t believe she gets through this. Is she selling it on? Come on, you’re a bright girl, you must know.”
“She swallows it all,” she said. “I swear it.”
The man sniggered. “Swallows, does she? You don’t say.”
This remark mocked her; but still, when she left the pharmacy she felt ten feet tall. You’re a bright girl, she said to herself. She stared at herself in the next shop window: which was Ash Vale Motor Sport. The window was crammed with all the stuff you need for hacking across country with crappy old cars: sump guards, fog lamps, snow chains, and the latest model in a hi-lift jack. Swimming above this equipment was her own face, the face of a bright girl—a good girl, too—swimming in the oily glass.
By this time she had spent years pretending she was normal. She was never able to judge what other people knew and what they didn’t know. Take Gloria: Gloria had been clear enough to her mother, but not to her. Yet her mother hadn’t seen Mrs. McGibbet, and she’d almost skated across the attic, putting her foot on one of Brendan’s toy cars. And then one day—was it after Keith got mashed, was it after she got her scissors, was it before Harry cleaned his bowl?—one day she’d caught a glimpse of a red-haired lady with false eyelashes, standing at the foot of the stairs. Gloria, she thought, at last; she said, “Hi, are you all right?” but the woman didn’t reply. Another day, as she was coming in at the front door, she had glanced down into the bath, and didn’t she see the red-haired lady looking up at her, with her eyelashes half pulled off, and no body attached to her neck?
But that was not possible. They wouldn’t just leave a head on full view for passersby. You kept things under wraps; wasn’t that the rule?
What else was the rule? Was she, Alison, seeing more or less than she ought? Should she mention it, when she heard a woman sobbing in the wall? When should you shout up and when should you shut up? Was she stupid, or was that other people? And what would she do when she left school?
Tahera was going to do social studies. She didn’t know what that was. She and Tahera went shopping on Saturdays, if her mother let her out. Tahera shopped while she watched. Tahera was size six. She was four foot ten, brown, and quite spotty. Al herself was not much taller than that, but she was size eighteen. Tahera said, “You would be welcome to my castoffs, but—you know.” She looked Alison up and down, and her tiny nostrils
