A Dark Nativity

by her. It had originally been Cruse; her grandfather had changed the spelling as a refugee in England to make it easy to say, but also because so many of his family had been shipped out of northern Italy by the Nazis to die. They had been from the Savoie border regions of Italy and France. The name was probably a corruption of Crose from the Italian word croce, which means cross. Crozier is probably another corruption.

The awful implication was that forebears of the Jewish Cruse family had probably been baptised French Christians, before reconverting to Judaism in Italy.

I told her that I’d longed to be called Sarah Curse. And we laughed, rather ruefully given the darkness of Sarah’s family history.

But also because my name is Natalie Cross.

And this is my story, not hers. I’m telling it because it keeps me alive. That’s literally true, as you’ll see. This is not just an act of therapy, it’s my life assurance, as a dear lover in Lebanon once told me. A record of crimes against my humanity. Names changed to protect the guilty, but they can and will be named if I come to any more harm and they know that. So that’s why I’m telling this story: it’s my security. So long as it’s told and heard, I’m safe. A testimony, really.

1

So come with me through the places that make me who I am. From the executioner’s block to the dhobi-room, where I try to scrub out the bloody stain on my priestly alb. But it keeps coming back. I offer it all up and sometimes, for a heady, transcendent moment, I am healed, and yet the gash returns, like an ill-sewn seam bursting open, like Lancelot’s ever-wounded side, bleeding for Guinevere, that can’t be healed this side of his king’s forgiveness. And, God knows, I’m the wrong side of forgiveness.

At school, Sarah came into her own. And her own received her not. We were at our comp in a vapid little suburb to the south of London. We thought she’d had something like polio, I reckon, or some sort of congenital muscular-wasting disease. Later, she told me it was Perthes’ disease, a hip-joint thing she’d had surgery for, but was getting better all the time, though she’d get arthritis later in life.

We never asked about it when we were young. We were never told not to talk about her condition, but it was implicit in the form teacher’s introductory injunctions when she joined the class in the middle of the academic year.

“Sarah uses aids to walk and sometimes will spend time in a wheelchair when she needs surgery,” she said, as Sarah sat in the front row, displacing someone to the square window alcove. “So she needs our support. Let’s all make her very welcome.”

I wondered at the time whether that entreaty was a play on words. She had crutches, this girl, but she needed our support too. We were to make her welcome despite that. I wondered even then whether we should have made her welcome because of that. The boys, amounting to around a third of our class, generally did, but they were nicer than us.

Sarah used to form a bulwark in the corridor as girls leaned against the walls, learning to fold our legs and doing the jabby push that accompanied shrieks of faux outrage at the mildest social observation. We had our roles in this girl-gang: the happy frump, the lippy, the hippy, the thoughtful and the dykey, the tarty, the outré and the nerd.

I was the quiet one. Not really shy, not, I think, insecure, but remote and I was comfortable with that. I was looking in on their play. I was the audience to their performance. So I watched the drama unfold.

The young girls at the primary through the fence played a hybrid form of hopscotch and their improvised sing-song carried through windows flung open to expunge the stench of school-dinner vegetables. It was the soundtrack to that time.

I met my boyfriend at the sweetie shop, he bought me ice cream, he bought me cake, he brought me home with a bellyache . . .

Sarah would lean on her crutches, white forearms braced in the horseshoe rings. Her upper body pitched forward like an awkward mannequin. One winter half-term in the sixth form there was a ski-trip – I was the only one other than Sarah who didn’t go, and we were knocking around together a bit by then – and I saw photos of the grown-ups leaning like that on their sticks at the top of the slopes and I wondered why, if they wanted to look athletic, they should also want to look like Sarah.

It was difficult to spot when the mood changed in the girls’ corridor. The microclimate of a gang of girls shifts with imperceptible signals. It’s like the distant curl of a cloud that a mariner might spot, or a fresh breeze to the face, the first indications that a storm is on the way. These are gentle and apparently harmless signs, not seeking to draw attention to themselves, sinister only to those who know what they portend. The dark twist on the horizon was a conversational shift.

I couldn’t have attributed the initiative to any one girl in the pack.

Maybe Tarty said “spaz”. Maybe Outré said something about it “really getting on my tits”. Perhaps it was Sulky: “All she wants is pity.”

But then someone said: “If you bent two of her forward, you’d have a pantomime horse.”

And the troupe came together in a spontaneous caterwaul that was like energy expanding, noxious fumes filling the corridor as if there had been a gas explosion in the science lab and a wall of ignited fuel was rolling towards the fire doors. They howled and rocked as they struck pantomime poses against a torrent of released vocabulary – cripple and hunchback and legless.

Mummy, Mummy, I feel sick, call the doctor, quick, quick, quick.

I watched the smile on Sarah’s