does not look into the triangle of shadow behind the door. She knows a dead person might be there.
She hears a
There is a noise that might be crockery smashing, and a chair being knocked over. A door in her mind opens, and at first, once again, no one enters. She waits, holding her breath. It might be Keef, or it might be Morris Warren, or it might be their mate MacArthur, who always winks at her when he sees her.
But it’s her mum who staggers in, rights herself with some difficulty. “Whoops!” she says. “Must be my new pills. Blue, they is. That’s unusual, ain’t it. Blue? I says to him at the chemist, are you sure these are right? He says, lovely shade, he says, not blue, you’d not call that blue. It’s more heliotrope.”
She says, “Mum, did Donnie Aitkenside leave you any wages when he went off this morning? Because you know that magic shilling, that we have to put in the gas meter? He took it with him.”
Her mum says, “Donnie? Gone?”
“Yes,” she says, “he was creeping downstairs with his shoes in his hand, and he took our shilling for the gas. I thought maybe it was his change.”
“What in the Lord’s name is the girl talking about now, Gloria?”
“If we don’t have that shilling we need real money for the meter. It’s cold out and I haven’t had my breakfast.”
Her mother repeats, “Donnie? Gone?”
“And if he’s not paid you, we’ve no money for my school dinner.”
“And who gave you permission to call him Donnie, you stuck-up little madam? If a child such as you talked back in my day there’d be bloody blue murder.”
She says, there is anyway, innit? It’s bloody blue murder every day here. Her mum says, there you go again, if he takes his belt off to you I’ll not be surprised, I’ll not be the one holding him back, I’ll tell you: and there, thumping her fist on the wooden draining board, her mum is saying what they’ll do, what they’ll do and what they won’t, how they’re going to thrash her till she’s the texture of a jellyfish and she has to crawl to school on her belly, till she begins to wail and cry and say, but what can I eat for my breakfast? and her mum says, cornflakes if there’s no gas, and she says, but there’s no milk, and her mum says, so am I black and white, am I stood in the fucking meadow, and if not, what leads you to believe I am a fucking cow?
And that concludes it. It has to. Emmie falls over, knocked out by the force of her own sentence. Alison goes to school on an empty stomach. The lesson is scripture and she is thrown out to stand in the corridor. She is just standing there, doing no wrong. The headmaster sees her. “You again!” he bellows. She draws down the secret flaps, the membranes that cover her ears, and watches him gesticulating at her, his forehead creasing with fury. At playtime Tehera buys her a bag of crisps. She hopes they will give her a school dinner on credit but she doesn’t have a token so she is turned away. She says, the dogs have eaten my token, but they laugh. She gets half of a quarter of a marmite sandwich from Lee. On her way home she keeps her eyes down, searching the pavement for a magic shilling: or any money really, or a pin to pick up. She just thinks she sees a pin when wham! she walks straight into MacArthur. Hello, Mr. MacArthur, she says. All the day you’ll have good luck. He stares at her, suspicious. He says to her, your mam says you need a lesson. He puts out his hand, grabs her right nipple and twists it. She cries out. There’s one, he says, do you want me to do the other side? He winks at her.
Daylight has come to Admiral Drive. Dare she pull back a curtain? She is stiff and cold, except for her feet, which are burning. She limps into the kitchen. For a moment she stands paralyzed before the gas rings, thinking, how will I light them, when Aitkenside has taken our shilling? Then she depresses the ignition switch and the blue flame leaps up. She pours milk into a pan and sets it on the flame.
The telephone rings. It will be Colette, she thinks, wanting to come back. The cooker’s digital clock glows green, lighting the kitchen tiles with their frieze of fishes, lighting their slippery scales. Don’t be silly, she says to herself, she’ll barely be arrived in Whitton yet. She had thought a much longer time had elapsed: years. She stands with her cold hands stretched over the pan, and lets the machine take the call. Her message plays: there is a click. She thinks, it is the neighbours, trying to trick me into picking up; they want to know if I’m here.
Tentatively, she pulls up the kitchen blind. The clouds are charcoal and thick and grey, like the smoke from burning buildings. The full moon burrows into them and is immersed, swallowed. There is a tension headache at the back of her neck and, at the auditory rim, a faint high-pitched singing, like nocturnal wildlife in an equatorial forest, or God’s fingernail scraped against glass. The sound is continuous, but not steady; it pulses. There is a feeling that something—a string, a wire—is being stretched to its limit. She lowers the blind again, inch by inch, and with each inch the years fall away, she is in the kitchen at Aldershot, she is twelve, thirteen, but if anyone asks, she is sixteen of course.
“Mum,” she says, “did you run away with a circus?”
“Oh, circus, that was a laugh!” Her mum is merry from three strong lagers. “Your Uncle Morris was in that circus, he did sawing the lady in half. He wanted me to be sawed but I said, Morris, on your bike.”
“What about Gloria?”
“Oh yes, they sawed Gloria. Anybody could saw her. She was that sort of girl.”
“I don’t know what that sort would be. The sort of girl who lets herself be sawed in half.”
“Yes, you do,” her mum says, as if she is prompting her to remember. “They was always practicing on you. Morris, he liked to keep his hand in. Used to say, you never know when the old tricks will come in useful, you might have to turn your hand to it again. Many’s the time I seen your top half in the scullery and your bottom half in the front room. I seen your left half out the back in the shed and your right half God knows where. I says to Morris, I hope you know what you’re doing, I want her stuck together before you leave here tonight.”
Mum takes a pull on her can. She sits back. “You got any ciggies?” she says, and Al says, “Yes, I got some here somewhere, I nicked ’em for you.” Her mum says, “That’s nice: it’s thoughtful. I mean, some kids, they only go nicking sweeties, just thinking about themselves. You’re a good kid, Ali, we have our ups and downs, but that’s in the nature of mother and daughter. We’re alike, you see. That’s why we don’t always see eye to eye. When I say alike, I mean, not to look at obviously, plus we’re not in the same class when it comes to brains, you see I was always quick when I was at school, and as for weight I was about half the weight of a whippet, whereas you, I mean, you’re not the sharpest knife out of the drawer, you can’t help that, love, and as for your size it’s no secret some men like that type, MacArthur, for instance. When I took his deposit on you, he says, Emmie, it’s a good thing you’re not selling her by the pound.”
She asks, “Did MacArthur say that?”
Her mum sighs; her eyelids flutter. “Al,” she says, “get me one of my new blue pills. The helicopter ones. Would you?”
What year is this? Al runs a hand over her body. Has she breasts now, or just the promise of them? There is no point, when it comes to your own flesh, trying to knead it into precision; flesh doesn’t yield that kind of answer. She pours the hot milk onto a spoonful of instant coffee. Then she is too weak to do any more, and she sits down.
“They used to disappear you,” Emmie says. “For a laugh. Sometimes you’d be gone half an hour. I’d say, here, Morris, where’s Alison? That’s my only daughter you’ve disappeared. If she don’t come back I’ll sue you.”
“And did I?” she says. “Come back?”
“Oh yes. Else I really would. I’d have seen him in court. And Morris knew it. There was all sorts of money tied up in you. Trouble is with me I couldn’t keep me books straight.”
“You didn’t have books. You had a vase.”
“I couldn’t keep me vase straight. Bob Fox was always dipping in it. And then the boys fell to quarrelling about who was to go first at you. MacArthur put down his deposit, but oops! You see, I had borrowed money off Morris Warren. Morris said money owed counts for more than money down. And he wouldn’t leave it alone, I’m owed this, I’m owed that.”
Al says, “He’s still the same.”
