Special, p.8
Special, page 8
When she’d opened it in front of the others, Jules had stared at it for a second and then shouted with laughter. ‘God, that’s horrible.’ She plucked the cushion out of Ali’s hands and threw it over to Caz. ‘Caz. Caz. Look. Stand up, stand up for Jesus . . .’
Caz held it out in front of her. ‘Does your mother always give you stuff like that?’
Ali had tried to hold Caz’s gaze and in the silence of that second felt a sadness much deeper than she could understand. She didn’t like the cushion either and when she thought about the words stitched over and over so the linen had buckled underneath, they felt not reassuring but violent. She didn’t want someone watching her all the time, particularly not God. Ruth had probably meant it as a compliment of sorts, albeit a confusing one. It seemed unlikely that she was meant to take religious comfort from it, since Ruth was as fiercely secular as she was fiercely everything else. But there was still some part of Ali that wished . . . well, wished at least that she could have swallowed her gall in private, kept it as something between the cushion and herself.
Now she sat on her bed with her back to the window. She had, she calculated, only about two minutes before the others arrived back upstairs. The parcel from her father had obviously been addressed by one of his assistants in the London office. She pulled the staples apart and gazed in. She could see the sort of wrapping paper favoured by cheap gift shops and a card with a joke she didn’t get on the front.
Howdy! said her father’s writing, I bought this in London when I was last over. I hope you like it. So sorry I didn’t get a chance to see you, but your mother said you were doing exams and I shouldn’t disturb your studying!! How y’all doing, as they say here. Life in NY is fine and Mary-Anne sends her love. You must come over and visit sometime. The apartment is looking great and Mary-Anne has bought a puppy!!! He makes a mess, but we are both very fond ofhim. I hope school is nice. I’m sure you II do well. Love and kisses, your loving Dad xxx.
Ali undid the wrapping. A mobile phone, one of those international ones. What was she supposed to do with that? They weren’t allowed mobiles. Ali jammed the phone under her pillow and considered the parcel from her mother.
Mel walked in and sat heavily on her bed. ‘No post,’ she wailed. ‘No post, no emails, no phone, no parcels, no bloody anything. Bastards.’
‘Expecting something?’
‘Expecting my fucking useless parents and my fucking useless mates to remember that I’m stuck in this dump. Expecting them to bloody write.’
Strange, thought Ali, how right Mel always sounded when she moaned. Her voice was high-pitched and had a steady monotonal scrape to it, as if she’d been specially engineered for complaint. Ali couldn’t remember a single instance of Mel ever sounding pleased about anything. Sometimes Ali found her whine comforting, but at other times—like now—it made her want to run to a faraway place without any voices at all.
‘Let’s see.’ Mel picked up the empty packet.
Ali hesitated. It’s a mobile.’ She pulled it out from under her pillow.
‘Fucking outrageous. One of those international ones. You could ring America or whatever. I want one of those. Fucking parents won’t give me one.’
‘Can’t use it.’
‘Course you can. Just hide it.’
‘So what’s the point in having it if no one can ring it?’
‘God, you sound really ungrateful. My parents are so mean they’d never give me stuff like that. Fuckers.’
Jules and Caz came in. ‘Look at this.’ Mel wheeled round. ‘Ali’s birthday present.’
Jules busied herself by the sink. ‘What’s in the other parcel?’ she said loudly. ‘The one from your mother?’
‘Saving it.’
‘I bet. Bet you’re dying for another Jesus cushion. Maybe you’ll get a prayer book. Or one of those flouncy tissue-box covers with “I Love Baby Jesus” on it . . .’ She turned back to the mirror. ‘I know. A guitar. A guitar for singing “Kum ba yah” on.’
Ali closed her eyes. She thought of the cave and the darkness, and of silence.
+
Dear Jamie, wrote Hen, This place is a dump. It is just as bad as school if not worse. It is a hostel place in the Forest of Dean and we are supposed to be walking or swimming or bicycling all day. We’ve got old Cow Naylor supervising us so no fun ever. Hopefully we will be able to sneek out sometime and get down to the pub. There is nothing like school to make me need a drink!!!
How is stuff at home? How is Dad? Is he still being like an old woman about your music?! I am dying to get out of here and get back home. Send my love to the twins and tell them don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!! Lots of love. Lola xxx.
PS. Are you going to see Mum this holidays? Can we go together? I don’t want to go on my own and it would be cool to hang around London with you.
She put the letter aside and started writing again.
Dear Mum,
Hello. How are you? Things are fine here. We have finished exams and we are now in the Forest of Dean which is very beautiful and senic. We are walking every day which is very good for my mussles. I hope you are well and it is nice weather in London. It will be nice to see you in the holidays but I think Dad wants to keep us in Edinburgh for most ofit.
See you soon, lots of love, Lola xxx.’
She sealed the letters and whacked them down on the bedside chest. As she did so, she glanced at the photograph in its dull metal frame. It had been taken a long time ago when her parents were still together. It showed all of them, her mother and her father, Jamie, herself and her two sisters sitting on a boat at the harbour in Barra. The person who had taken the photograph had been standing on the dockside, and Hen remembered having to twist awkwardly in her seat so she could see his face. She had on an anorak borrowed from her aunt which had been too large for her, and the hood had flapped damply on her face. Her father was looking out towards the horizon, but Hen could still pick out the glow of pleasure in his eyes.
When she looked at the picture now, Hen didn’t feel anything apart from a faint irritation at the dented frame and scratched glass. Two years ago it had seemed much more valuable. Then she had kept lots of photographs. They were visible proof that she wasn’t merely Hen, she was Lola, with another life and a proper history. Now she just had one. People said that cameras didn’t lie, but that was nonsense. Nothing in that photograph was true any more. Her parents were divorced, her father never looked as cheerful as the man in the picture did and it was only with an effort of will that she could remember her mother’s face at all. Her brother had stopped looking like the old Jamie so long ago that she sometimes wondered if the boy in the photograph wasn’t just someone she’d imagined. The image had worn itself clean into anonymity and what Hen saw now was not her family but a family. She could have swapped around all the photographs in the room, Mel’s for Izzy’s, Caz’s for hers, and it would have made no difference. They would all still have been false images and made-up stories.
When Hen had arrived at the school almost three years ago things had been different. Or rather, she had been different. She had come down to England from Edinburgh with long straight hair and a belief in things. She’d assumed that the lessons her father had taught her—that merit will out, that likeable people will get liked, that openness will take you to places that introspection will not—would hold true. They did not.
For a long time she’d just continued being herself. She hadn’t been shy because nothing in life had taught her to be shy. She had been bossy because she was accustomed to bossiness. She wasn’t the oldest child but she was the oldest daughter, and it had stood to reason that she should take a little of the care of her younger sisters upon herself. She didn’t barge through life swinging and yelling like Jules did, she was just open. She was Lola. She told people about Scotland, about her parents, about the possible ways of doing things, because she thought they would like to know. She told Izzy not to play her music too loud because it made sense. She told Mel how best to prepare an assignment because Mel was doing it wrong. She attached herself to Jules and Caz’s group because it was obvious that they were the most important people to know and since she had always been one of the most important people before, it stood to reason that she should be one of them now. She was not naturally cautious or mean-spirited, so she lent people her clothes or gave them her food quite happily, knowing it was the right thing to do.
She remembered explaining the right way to do something—ingratiate yourself with a teacher, wing your way through an essay, steal from the kitchens—and noticing the way people glanced at her and then turned away. She’d be walking along a corridor or sitting in her room and find herself caught on the outside of a murmur. In the past those murmurs had always involved her. She remembered standing in the playground with her shoulders braced against the outside air and her head inclined to catch each warm morsel of spite. She used to be the one standing in the huddle bending and glancing so that the person on the outside should know they were being discussed. Now, abruptly, she had become the excluded. Every time she walked out of the bedroom, she’d hear that same indrawn pause as the latch of the door clicked behind her, and then a rush like the sound of sparrows roosting.
And she told them about Scotland because they seemed to know so little about it. She remembered conversations at night, the kind of questions they would ask. ‘Do Scottish people have telephones?’ ‘Do they have videos/mobiles/cars/computers/TV in Scotland?’ ‘Don’t you have to show your passport at the border?’ ‘Don’t Scottish people fuck sheep?’ When she found that each of the questions would be accompanied by that hushed twittering laugh, she just assumed that her classmates were shy of their ignorance. So she explained, patiently and with a sense of benign superiority, that not all Scots had beards, that most of them had phones, and that only very rarely—to her knowledge anyway—did they ever interfere with livestock. It became a regular thing once or twice a week for Hen to hold a kind of question-and-answer session about Scottish habits and practices. How reeling worked, what the weather was really like, why Glasgow was different from Edinburgh, who was permitted to wear tartan, the definition and pronunciation of certain words. They asked, so she told them.
It took a long time for Hen to understand. For months she went on believing that Jules and Caz turned their backs on her when she approached them not because they were hostile, but because they hadn’t seen her. She believed that people asked about Scotland because they were interested. She believed that Mel’s fat scowl was just because Mel was a bit slow to catch on. She believed that the pictures and books that she’d brought down from Edinburgh and which people seemed so interested in seeing must have been defaced through carelessness or accident. She believed that, though Mina’s stepbrother came from Udaipur and Caz’s father came from Singapore and Vicky had some sort of connection to Jamaica, they all found Scotland much more intriguing than any of these places.
It wasn’t until one night near the end of the first term that she finally understood. They’d been asking her questions again—or rather, Hen had been offering to tell them things. She’d been talking about the west coast, about how beautitul it could be, the excitement of sailing and the thrill of pulling up lobster pots, like writing messages in bottles and finding their replies. She’d been caught up in her own explanation, remembering the trip to Barra, the five days of perfect weather, the last time her father and mother had looked at each other in that particular way they used to have before things went weird. Halfway through her explanation, Mel had interrupted.
‘D’you get jet lag?’
Hen stopped mid-story. ‘What?’
‘D’you get jet lag?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, when people fly to Scotland they must get jet lag. It’s so far away from England; they must get tired.’
Hen remembered thinking that she ought to be patient with Mel. Mel wasn’t particularly bright, so it probably wasn’t her fault if she couldn’t tell the difference between 400 miles and 4,000. So she’d begun explaining. No, she said, there was no jet lag. It was less distance from London to Edinburgh than it was from Edinburgh to Orkney.
She had been confused at first by the laughter. Not the usual whispery rush, but full-on naked laughter this time. And not just Mel either. The whole room, all of them, even Izzy, sitting up in their beds, looking over at her and laughing. Her explanation faltered and then stopped. She saw Jules’s mouth open wide, her shoulders twitching. They went on and on forever, looking at her, showing their teeth.
Caz wiped her eyes. ‘We know. We were just taking the piss. We know what Scotland’s like. We know it’s just up the road. Most of us have been there.’
‘Wh . . . why did you ask me?’
‘Because you wouldn’t shut up about it,’ said Mel. ‘Because you were always talking about it. Because you always think Scotland is the best thing ever invented.’
‘I thought . . .’ said Hen, but couldn’t finish. She felt herself scalding and freezing at the same time, feverish with humiliation. The room ebbed and turned and she wondered if she fainted whether oblivion would be better than this. What had taken so long to become apparent now thundered into place. The stifled exchanges, the oblique turn of a shoulder as she entered the room, the silence as she left it, the things gone missing, the clothes returned damaged, the advances rebuffed. She felt shame. She felt small and stupid. Worse than that, for the first time in her life, she felt wrong.
The Hen who rose the next morning was not the Hen of the previous day. After a sleepless night—she hadn’t cried much, just lain there paralysed—she had taken everything she owned that had anything to do with Scotland and thrown it away: all the books her father had sent down from Edinburgh, the Hibs strip her brother had lent her, a T-shirt with the Festival logo, the warm Arran blanket, two jerseys she’d bought in Glasgow, most of her family photographs, and the collection of seashells and pebbles she’d gathered on Barra. The only things she kept were the little gold celtic cross she wore around her neck and the photograph of the boat trip.
When the others came back in and saw the spaces where her posters used to be, they said nothing. Something in Hen’s downturned head and evasive gestures warned them not to. Mel made a couple of snippy comments until she was silenced by Caz, and then everyone got on with their lives. Hen stopped talking so much—every time she opened her mouth now she heard her own origins and felt ashamed—and she no longer tried to be part of other people’s groups. When she thought of approaching Jules and Caz, she felt sick.
The worst thing of all was the whispering. Every time she left the room it would start up, every time she came back in it would stop. On and on, so often that the sound of doors opening and closing became the sound of fear. The most difficult bit was knowing that they knew she could hear, that the way they whispered was designed to be heard. She’d sit on her bed, paralysed, knowing that over in the corner Mel and Mina were absorbed in some elaborate new mockery, unable to leave, unable to move, unable to bear the shiver of release as the door clicked shut behind her.
Two weeks later, just before the end of term, she was called to Miss Naylor’s office. ‘Your father,’ she said, holding out the telephone receiver. Hen took it but did not lift it to her ear immediately.
Down the line, her father coughed, small and unhappy. ‘Lola . . . I thought I ought to tell you before you came home. Your mother . . . your mother and me, we’re not together any more.’
Hen didn’t say anything.
‘I’m sorry. I’m very very sorry. Can we talk about it in the holidays?’
No reply.
‘Lola? Are you there?’
‘Right. Fine. Bye.’ She handed the receiver back to Miss Naylor.
‘Bad news?’
‘Can I go now?’
‘Lola. It’s OK. We want to help.’ Miss Naylor’s voice was unexpectedly soft. For a wild moment, Hen thought of staying here, curling up in the warmth and allowing Miss Naylor to watch over her. It occurred to her that if she stayed much longer she would cry. She did not want Miss Naylor to see her cry.
‘Can I go now?’
‘Please . . . If you need . . .’
Hen flinched.
‘Go, then.’
She didn’t tell anyone about the phone call. There was no one she could have told. She had no allies, and besides, her father, her mother, her home, her brother and her sisters were irrevocably associated with Scotland and therefore with shame. She wanted no reminders of them and no associations. In fact, her father’s phone call made it easier. Here—as if she needed it—was final proof that everything she had trusted was flawed. Her parent’s marriage was an illusion, her family was an illusion, kindness and merit and honesty were illusions. By splitting the family apart, her father finished off the process her own stupidity had begun.
For a full year, Hen retreated. She stopped talking much. When she did speak she took care to mind the way it sounded. She hammered her vowels flat, shifted the rhythms, clipped away at her Os and Es, bullied her Rs into submission. The result wasn’t much of a voice at all. At school she concentrated on being as unobtrustive as possible. At home she stayed in her room. No one talked much of divorce in that first holidays, although it was obvious that it was going to happen. They pretended that everything was as it should be. Her mother managed a vicious kind of gaiety, and her father worked more than usual. When she went back to school at the beginning of January, her mother was still in Edinburgh. When she returned home a few weeks later at half-term, her mother had gone.
And so Hen divided herself. One part of her was still—however reluctantly—bound up with Edinburgh and home. The other part crept through the school corridors, burrowed under the duvet at night, learned necessary adaptations. At the end of the process, she found she had become two different people. Each one spoke differently, dressed differently, ate different things, laughed at different jokes, had different interests. If one had met the other, they probably wouldn’t have liked each other.
