Текст книги "Rehearsal"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

Соавторы: Eleanor Catton
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

NINE

Friday

Julia’s cue cards are swollen at the edges from the damp of her hands.

“The girls are like wax models in a living tableau: it’s always the same scene and they’re always in the same configuration,” she is saying. “Whoever is the most sexed-up functions as the snare. The snare is always in the middle. She can’t be too near the edge or she’d be an easy target.”

A crisp spotlight nails Julia flatly to the wall.

“The snare is not necessarily the most beautiful,” she says, “but she is always the most provocative. Sometimes the snare will do things that will shame or embarrass the other figures, mostly by adopting a crass or deliberately scandalous manner. That’s a normal part of her role.

“The most beautiful girl sits to one side of the snare, and she is known as the prize. The prize is characterized by her untouchability. She is often the only figure in the tableau to be in a stable long-term relationship. The objective of this relationship is always to emphasize her untouchability. Typically the prize is clean and successful and unknowable.

“Standing behind the snare and the prize is the manager. The manager orchestrates all movements within the tableau. The manager is often hard to spot: methods of management naturally differ from group to group. Some common methods of covert management include the use of wit or cruelty, or sometimes the adoption of a motherly persona.

“All other figures in the tableau are the aspiring servants of this central trio. They are used as foils, scapegoats or canned laughter.”

Julia has a peculiar flat way of delivering her lines sometimes, as if somebody has forced her to read them and she wants to make clear her private feelings of contempt.

“The depressing fixity of this tableau,” she says in conclusion, “makes it clear to us why girls value reincarnation and reinvention above all things.”

Monday

There are no counseling sessions about Bridget’s death. A flag is retrieved from the sports cupboard, ironed, and hauled to half-mast where it spends a glum week slapping against the rusted flagpole. The girls move around the campus in a vast ghostly drift. They are ashamed that they feel nothing and so respectfully they affect to feel very much. They self-consciously contemplate their own mortality as they watch the raindrops travel down the glass. They sigh and take too long in the toilet cubicle, and say to each other, “I think I need to be alone for a while.”

“It’s the little things,” Julia hears a girl say to her friend while they wait in the line for the tuck shop. “It’s the little things that you remember.”

In assembly the counselor says, “Bridget was a very special person.” He says special in the same way he says important, cupping his lips around the word as if he is trying to suck an acorn and unwittingly conferring its opposite meaning. In the auditorium, girls who never knew Bridget nod their tremulous assent and pluck at the sleeves of their neighbors for support.

In the staffroom the teachers discuss a memorial for Bridget. Somebody suggests a mural. Somebody suggests a commemorative plaque in the music corridor, to honor her commitment to the jazz band. The weeks go by.

In the meantime Isolde’s sister, Victoria, returns to school.

Friday

“You and Julia seem to get on very well,” the saxophone teacher says after Isolde has trundled in and unwrapped her scarf and pulled off her mittens.

“Yeah,” Isolde says. She flaps her arms about. “God, it’s cold!”

“Do you see her much around school?”

“I guess,” Isolde says. “The seventh formers have their own commonroom and their own study lounge and stuff. We’re not allowed in. Hey, I tracked down some of the recordings of that guy we saw—they’ve got a whole bunch at the library.”

“Good,” the saxophone teacher says. “And?”

“Awesome,” Isolde says. “Made me want to start playing with other people, like properly.”

“You could join Julia’s underground band.”

“She’d be way better than me,” Isolde says. “Hasn’t she been learning for ages?”

“She’s sitting her letters this year,” the saxophone teacher says. “I must say I was so pleased you two got on so well. Is she a friend of your sister’s at school?”

“God no,” Isolde says with a snort. “Victoria’s friends are… I was going to say brain-dead. No. They’re just… much more girly.”

“Julia’s not girly?”

“No way.”

“What’s the opposite of girly?” the saxophone teacher asks, thinking to herself that only matters of social hierarchy or branding ever produce this sort of conviction in her students.

Isolde reflects for a moment, twirling her necklace around her finger. “Hard-core,” she says at last, pronouncing the word definitively, as if to deny all other options.

“So Julia is hard-core,” the saxophone teacher says.

“Hey, there was something I was going to ask you about one of the albums I got out,” Isolde says, reaching down to rummage in her bag. “I brought it along.”

The saxophone teacher scowls. She wants a performance. She wants the lights to change, becoming the red tail-glow of Mr. Saladin’s car, and she wants to see Isolde all lit up red for a second before Mr. Saladin kills the engine and the lights go out and Isolde is sitting in the low half-light of the streetlamp in the darkened car, and she wants to hear Isolde say—

“It’s just the voicing on this particular track,” Isolde says now, unearthing the disc and flipping it over to find the track title. “Do you mind if I play it?”

“Of course not, go ahead,” the saxophone teacher says, sitting down gracefully and watching Isolde stab at the stereo and insert her disc. She masks her disappointment, reaching over for her cooling cup of tea and watching Isolde feel for the power button, sweeping over the dials on the stereo front with light patting fingertips as if she is blind.

Isolde turns the volume knob and the music begins and, as it does, the lights change, the overhead bulb fading to black in time with the upward swell of the saxophone. The two of them are in perfect darkness for a moment, and then the lights come slowly up again. They are now reddish and warm, dim and pocketed as if cast by scattered lamps in booths and tables at a backwater bar. The music is lazy and chromatic and low. The saxophone teacher lets out a little sigh of contentment, and settles back to watch.

“When we walked away from you,” Isolde said, “this is the tune we heard, coming out of one of those little smoky afterward bars in the alleys by the Town Hall. There was a gig somewhere, not the kind of jostling sweaty gig where everyone’s fighting to use their elbows, but just some three-man band jamming away the hours in a quiet bar. Julia turns to me and says, Do you want to get a drink? and I must have nodded because the next thing we’re pushing open this foggy door and walking into a warm late-night café—”

Isolde pushes the volume knob up a little bit and the music swells, as if a door has just been opened—

“—and they’re playing drums and double bass and keyboards, all of them barefoot and happy, and the drummer is leaning over to talk to the man at the bar while he plays.”

The saxophone teacher nods as she pictures the bar in her mind: she knows it very well, the stained diamond pattern of the wallpaper, the dark paneling that ends in an elegant lip at shoulder-height, the reddish brass lamps collared to the wall and bleeding artful fingers of rust in downward rays. It’s Patsy’s favorite place to sit and drink, and the sax teacher has spent hours in that sticky shadowed corner over the years. She can see the ornate plaster frame of the mirror behind the bar, chipped gold and peeling, and the brass plaques on the lavatory doors, spotted gray with age.

“We walk in,” Isolde is saying, “and Julia says sit down. She’ll order drinks for the both of us, so I go and fold myself into a corner booth, peeling off my coat and my scarf and checking my reflection in the dark glass of the window by the door. I watch as she leans over the bar and says something to the barman, and she picks up her change and two glasses, and he waves his half-cut lemon at her and says, Get away from me! and they both laugh. She slips into the booth and says, Sorry, I didn’t even ask, is red okay? And I don’t want to say that mostly what I drink is vodka or rum mixed with fruit syrup to mask the taste, and the only time I’ve had red wine is when we stole a bottle from Nicola’s mum and decanted it into half a bottle of Coke so you wouldn’t be able to tell.”

Isolde’s mouth is dry. She wets her lips.

“I take a sip,” she says, “and it’s foul, fouler than when we mixed it half with Coke and drank it under the bleachers on the rugby field. I ask Julia if she’s turned eighteen yet and she looks a bit annoyed, as if she’d rather talk about something else. She says she has, last week. It was her birthday last week. I say the wine is good. Then we start talking about you, what we think of you, probably because you’re the only real thread of connection between us.”

The music is crooning and uncomplicated. The saxophone teacher can see it: the cheerful aging three-man band, stepping with their bare feet over the yellow extension leads, the double-bass player nodding and smiling over the glossy wooden shoulder of his one-legged woman-shape, the pianist leaning in and out of the light, the drummer dropping down to a one-handed beat for a couple of bars as he reaches over to take a drink from a sweaty beaded glass of beer, golden under the tasseled fringe of a lamp.

“Afterward,” says Isolde, “after we finish our drinks, we’re walking down the street toward her car and I’m a bit light-headed. I’m laughing too much. And then Julia says, Most of the girls at school are afraid of me, a bit. It’s nice that you’re not scared.”

Isolde stops. She’s in a yellow pool of streetlight now, wide eyed and short of breath, with her fingers clasping convulsively at the cuffs of her jersey. The music slips into a new accelerated phase, becoming more insistent and discordant. Isolde stiffens.

“I looked at her and I said, I am a bit. I am a bit scared. But it wouldn’t be worth it if I wasn’t.”

Isolde gives a little cry, a strangled involuntary half-sob that afterward will be the only thing the saxophone teacher can remember.

“And Julia looks at me,” she says, “and then grabs the sleeves of my coat, real fistfuls, grabs the fabric and pulls me toward her really hard. And I think I remember there’s one tiny moment before we come together, it’s like we stalled for a moment just at the last instant, and I could feel her breath on my upper lip, sweet and hot and quickly panting. I could smell the black spice of the wine in the small pocket of space between us, and then she kissed me.”

Isolde isn’t looking at the saxophone teacher; she’s looking out, out over the mossy rooftops and the clustered antennae and the pigeons wheeling and wheeling against the sky.

“Only it wasn’t a kiss how I thought it would be,” she says. “She took my bottom lip between hers, and she bit me. She bit my bottom lip, but not so it hurt, more like she was tearing at it very gently, pulling at it with her teeth. And I guess I kind of pulled my head back and gave this gasp and opened my mouth a bit and she still had my bottom lip in her teeth, not so it hurt, really tenderly, like she’d captured it and she couldn’t bear to let it go.

“And then we were up against the wall,” she says, “and I remember my eyes were closed and my hands were clenched in fists on the wall above my head and Julia presses up against me and her hands are pushing and pushing to find the skin underneath the bottom of my jumper, and then she slides her cold hands up my back and she whispers all salty and hot into my ear, I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe it. I can’t tell if this is my fantasy or yours.”

The lights ease back up again, just as the track on the disc comes to a chordal close. Isolde moves over to the stereo and ejects the disc before the next track has time to begin. The sax teacher wipes her face, pulling her hand down over her chin so the soft skin of her cheeks is drawn downward for a brief moment, like a sad clown.

Tuesday

“I understand that this is something you couldn’t possibly have prepared yourself for,” the saxophone teacher says to Bridget’s mother. “I’m shocked myself. I feel partly it’s because Bridget was so dull. I always imagine that the ones who die are the interesting ones, the wronged ones, the tragic ones, the ones for whom death would come as a terrible, terrible waste. I always imagine it as a tragedy. Bridget’s death doesn’t quite seem to fit.”

Bridget’s mother fiddles with the button on the cushion. She looks gray. There is a jeweled stack of gold on the penultimate finger of her puffy left hand, trapped between two swollen knuckles and sunk into her finger like a tattoo or a brand. She pushes the cushion impatiently off her lap and shakes her head in a despairing way.

“If she’d been more original,” Bridget’s mother says, “it might have been easier. If she’d been more original, you see, then we might have worried that she might commit suicide one day. Then at least we would have thought about her death. We would have prepared ourselves for the possibility just by imagining. But someone as unoriginal as Bridget would never think of suicide. She just wouldn’t be clever enough to consider it an option.”

“Yes,” says the saxophone teacher. “I saw that too. Despair is not something that Bridget would have been clever enough to feel.”

They sit quietly for a while. Down in the courtyard the pigeons are fighting.

“And how do you prepare yourself for an accident?” Bridget’s mother says limply, mostly to herself. “How do you prepare yourself for a car speeding in the dark?”

After a while the saxophone teacher says, “Do you have other children?”

“Oh, a boy,” says Bridget’s mother. “Older. He doesn’t live at home anymore.”

“I suppose you called him on the telephone.”

“Yes,” says Bridget’s mother.

“I suppose he’s coming up for the funeral.”

“Oh, the funeral,” Bridget’s mother says. She lapses into silence again and then she says, “I just didn’t think this was going to happen. I wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready. It’s not fair.”

Friday

“Do you know,” Patsy says in a dreamy voice, swaying at the table with her chin upon her fist, “the moments when I’m the most dishonest with Brian are usually the ones when he believes I’m at my most intimate.”

“What do you mean?” says the saxophone teacher. She is sitting stiffly, with her saxophone held upright on her knees. It is a long time ago. She is still holding the instrument with a careful reverence, gingerly even, with both hands, as if it is a new wife and not yet fingerprinted or commonplace.

“I’ll be sitting there and thinking how much he is irritating me,” Patsy says, “maybe if he’s sniffing when he reads, sniffing and sniffing, every half page. And then he’ll look up and smile at me and I’ll feel compelled to say something, in case what I was thinking was in some way visible to him. So I’ll panic and in my guilt I’ll say, It’s so lovely that we can sit here in silence and read like this. It’s so peaceful. I love doing this with you. Which is virtually the opposite of what I really mean. It happens so much. I’ll be thinking how he really is getting rather fat, and then I’ll feel guilty for thinking such an ungenerous thought, so I’ll panic and blurt out, I love you. I’m always motivated by the oddest things.”

“But you do love Brian,” the saxophone teacher says, mostly because she feels it ought to be said. She has only met Brian once so far, at a recital in the old university chapel. He shook her hand and praised her performance and spoke in a booming voice about the renovations to the tapestry and paneling, twinkling down at her from his great height as if enjoying her lack of interest very much. Patsy flitted in and out and slapped at him and said, again and again, “Come on, Bear, she doesn’t want to hear about that.”

“Oh, God yes, I love him,” Patsy says now. “Nearly all the time. A good percentage, anyway. My best percentage yet.”

She laughs and shrugs her shoulders lightly, inviting the saxophone teacher to join in and laugh as well at her foolishness, and the foolishness of all duplicitous women who say the reverse of what they mean. The saxophone teacher gives her a tight-lipped smile and watches Patsy’s laughter dwindle to a head-shake and a sigh. She wants to kiss her mouth. She wants to feel the other woman pull back minutely in surprise, to almost recoil at how strange and forbidden it feels, but then, all in an instant, to respond—even against her will. Especially against her will.

If there was no Brian—the saxophone teacher’s thoughts often begin in this way. If there was no Brian, what then? Is Brian just one man, just one circumstantial, incidental man, or does Brian stand for all men? Is he a symbol for a general preference, a general tendency, and if there was no Brian would there be another, maybe a Mickey or a Hamish or a Bob? She sometimes fears that Brian’s solidity and physical presence has transformed Patsy’s very shape over the years, bowed her and crooked her until she is simply a negative space that parcels the man up, each defining the other. She fears that Patsy will always exist in this way now, Brian or no Brian, curved to define herself around a man, always a man: a yin that reaches out for its counterpointed yang with one arm always curled and one arm always arched, forever.

Patsy shakes her head again, as if she can’t believe her own folly, and reaches the heels of her hands up to her temples to smooth the hair away from her aging face. Her wrists are delicate. The saxophone teacher follows the movement with her eyes.

Wednesday

“I heard she’s on Prozac,” everyone is saying by the second week, or, “I heard they had to put her on Ritalin after she was found out, she was that out of control.” Victoria is now marked, doomed to accept one of the polar fates that diverge before her. “Either she’ll end up being totally promiscuous for the rest of her life, and her body will become this weapon she depends on but she’s not really sure how to wield,” the girls whisper, “or she’ll end up this emotional shell, hollowed out and listless and blank. It’s one or the other. You’ll see. She’s screwed up now. It’s one or the other.” They watch her greedily to see which road she will take, craning forward when she comes into a room, and deflating with disappointment and relief when she leaves again.

Victoria shows no signs of taking either path. She is downcast and polite with all her teachers, and in the schoolyard she tries with limited success to patch up the friendships that have been so damaged by her betrayal. The girls look askance at her, especially the ones who were once Victoria’s closest, with whom she should have shared her secret but did not. She asks polite things about the months she has missed, and the girls respond truthfully, but all the while looking at Victoria as if from a long way away, caught between pity and disgust.

“Did your parents ever meet Mr. Saladin?” one of the girls asks one lunchtime. “I mean after you left school. Was there like a meeting or something?”

“Yeah,” Victoria says. “All four of us together.”

There is a sudden fascinated hush. All the girls pause and look at her.

“He’s still way younger than my dad,” Victoria says, “so it was still kind of us against them.” She doesn’t say anything more. She finishes her apple and wanders off across the quad to drop the core in the rubbish bin. When she comes back the bell has rung and the girls are dispersing, looking longingly up at her as they fish for their bags and stow their lunch wrappers away.

“You realize the only way you can make up for this betrayal,” the girls want to say, “is by telling us everything, sparing no detail.”

“You would be a celebrity among us,” the girls want to say, “if you only gave us everything, told us everything, let us in.”

The girls want to say, “It’s unfair that you should have this advantage over us. You are selfish to keep such valuable and dangerous knowledge for yourself.”

The weeks go by.

Monday

“I enjoyed your performance last week,” the saxophone teacher says when Julia arrives. “Your performance of the ride home after the concert, both of you in the car together. What you were feeling. What you saw. I enjoyed it.”

“Thanks,” Julia says.

“Did you practice?” the saxophone teacher says eagerly. “Like I asked?”

“Some,” Julia says.

“What have you been focusing on?”

“I guess big-picture,” Julia says. “How one girl comes to seduce another.”

“Let’s start big-picture then,” the saxophone teacher says, and gestures with her palm for Julia to begin.

“I’ve been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting,” Julia says, “like biting your lip and looking away just a second too late, and laughing a lot and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that emphasize and punctuate the laughter. I’ve been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted signal I can think of to make you see. Now it means, Both of us know the implications of my biting my lip and what I am trying to say. We are speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering. We are speaking someone else’s lines. It’s a comfort.”

Julia’s saxophone is lying sideways across the lap of the cream armchair, the mouthpiece resting lightly on the arm, and the curve of the bell tucked in against the seam where the seat-cushion meets the steep upholstered curve of the flank. The posture of the instrument makes the saxophone teacher think of a girl curled up with her knees to her chest and her head upon the arm, watching television alone in the dark.

“I don’t know how to seduce her,” Julia says. Her eyes are on the saxophone too, traveling up and down its length. “Sometimes I think that it would be like trying to bewitch her with a spell of her own invention if I tried to smile at her and bite my lip and cast my eyes down, if I tried to look vulnerable and coy. Would it even work? Even the thought makes me feel disarmed and sweaty and undone. But what’s the alternative? Should I behave like a boy, play the part of a boy, do things she might want a boy to do?

“Is that how it works?” Julia says, rhetorical and musing now. She is still looking at the saxophone, lying on its side upon the chair. “Like a big game of let’s-pretend? Like a play-act? It feels like there’s this duologue about a girl and a boy who fall in love with each other. And maybe the actors are both girls but there’s only these two parts in this play, only two, so one of them has to dress up: one of them has to be mustached and breast-strapped and wide-legged and broad to play the boy.

“If you’re just looking at the costumes and the script and the curtains and the lights, all the machinery of it, then you’ll just see a boy and a girl having a love affair. But if you look at the actors underneath, if you choose not to be deceived by the spectacle of the thing, then you’ll see that it’s actually two girls. Maybe that’s what it has to be like whenever two girls get together: one of the girls always plays the part of the boy, but it’s both of them that are pretending.”

“Oh, but why can’t the two girls just perform a duologue about themselves?” the saxophone teacher says, enjoying herself. “A play written for two girls.”

“There aren’t any,” Julia says. “There aren’t any plays about two girls. There aren’t any roles like that. That’s why you have to pretend.”

“Surely you’re mistaken, Julia,” the saxophone teacher says. “Surely that isn’t right.”

Julia shrugs and looks away into the sheen of the piano and her own blurry image reflected back. She says, “There is one thing going for me, despite all this. Danger. There’s a seduction in that. That’s the card I’ll have to play, I suppose. I’ll have to amplify how forbidden it is, how unscripted and unprecedented, the danger of it.

“The element of danger is what will turn any happy-flutter in her chest into a powerful and thudding fear. That’s what I have going for me: the force of her feeling, the massive release of her trepidation, when at last she surrenders and responds. If she surrenders. Whatever she ends up feeling, at least it won’t be ambivalent. It will be either the terror-struck forbidden heave of her desire, massive and explosive like the breaking of a dam, or it will be the massive repelling force of her revulsion, her opposition, her denying me. Either way, I’ve made her feel something. She’ll have to feel something. Whatever happens next.”

Friday

The girls at Abbey Grange are forever defining each other, tenderly and savagely and sometimes out of spite. It is a skill that will be sharpened to a blade by the finish of their fifth and final year. It is the darkest and deadliest of their arts, that each girl might construct or destroy the image of any of the rest.

They say, Who do you think is most likely to marry first? and Who do you think will get with the most boys? and Who is most likely to cheat? and Who will be best in bed? and then, inevitably, Who is most likely to be a lesbian, out of all the girls in our form?

The last question is always met with shrieks and slaps and a swift intake of merry breath. In their minds they weigh up the girls with the least conquests, the girls currently not in their favor, the girls that are marginally less attractive than the rest. Unpopularity, silence, bookish introversion, any disinclination to follow in the footsteps of the flock—all these are symptoms, the girls agree, as they huddle round to diagnose. They shout out names and laugh and laugh like a coven of giddy witches casting a terrible fate.

If Julia’s name is mentioned, however, the girls will frown and flap their hands and say, “Yes, but apart from Julia.” Julia is no fun to diagnose. She somehow does not exist in this breathy, shrieking realm of social and sexual investiture where girls are named without their knowledge, convicted, and condemned. The girls cannot alter Julia’s fate by saying, I reckon Julia’s most likely to be gay. Their power has no meaning for her. She is like a loaded gun cast into their toy-box and half-buried among the plastic rifles, the plastic revolvers, the toy cannons, the caps. They fear the glint of her.

A few of them have kissed each other for the satisfaction of the St. Sylvester boys, perhaps to earn a ride around the block in a low-seated car, or in exchange for a stolen bottle or a crate of beer. A few of them have kissed each other at parties in their mates’ front rooms while their friends are outside being sick into flowerpots. Not passionately—that is their defense—but casually, and experimentally, and with no eye for affection or the promise of a sequel or a trend. These are not romances, but selfish tallies that they will later use as a mark of their own liberalism, their own worldly free-spiritedness: the kiss is an insurance, a proof for the later remark, Yeah course, I’ve kissed a girl.

By not speaking of Julia, the girls have the subtle advantage: they reduce the threat to almost nothing. When they pass her in the hall, they turn their heads and simply walk on by.

Monday

There is a message waiting on the saxophone teacher’s answer machine after Julia’s lesson. The speaker swiftly and gracefully identifies herself as one of the uninspired mothers, one of the cloying snatching mothers who would rather smother their daughters in the fold of their bosom, clasp their daughters’ faces tight to their chests and let them be stifled and choked than lengthen the ribbon of their leash and see them walk away.

The saxophone teacher pauses the machine with the edge of her fingernail, and stands a moment with her finger on the dial.

“The mothers always imagine that my allegiance lies with them,” she says aloud, “that our mutual adulthood functions to bind us together against the daughter, the child. They imagine that the daughter is simply the pursuit that draws us together, the activity we both enjoy, the monthly book club, the tennis game. The daughter is simply a medium for our friendship, an opportunity for our togetherness, a shared interest that allows us to explore and reflect upon our adult selves.

“The mothers imagine that I am their ally against the daughter, and that they are mine: they imagine that I have to work as hard as they do in order to forge a connection with the girl, and they roll their eyes at me and shake their heads and laugh like the daughter is impossible, and the both of us know it. They invite me to be tender toward the girl, frustrated with her, even despairing of her, but above all to treat her as an object, as the mere occasion for this reciprocal connection, adult with adult, like with like.”

She comes to a halt now and then stabs the machine again, bringing the voice back to life, bringing the woman back into the room.

“So I look forward to hearing from you,” the recorded woman continues. “Stella’s fourteen, been studying the clarinet for almost three years now, and before that nearly six years piano. She’s really very interested in moving on to the sax. There’s just something so dowdy and unfashionable about the clarinet, as you know, and I think she’s looking to make the move on to something a bit sexier. Something with a bit more bite, that gives her a bit more appeal. It’s a welcome move, in actual fact. We were worried for a time that she wasn’t interested enough in that sort of thing, just didn’t care enough. About boys and nice clothes and all the rest of it. We were worried for a time, I don’t mind telling you that. Not that she had trouble making friends—it was almost the opposite, really, that the friendships were just so close. You couldn’t prize them apart. Whoever it was, the current favorite. Always one after another, there was always a favorite, right the way through. I’d ferry them around, to and from the cinema and all that, and they’d always sit together in the back seat with an old rug thrown right over their heads so they could talk quietly and I couldn’t see. I’d watch in the rear-view, this shrouded tartan thing with their two heads together and both of them whispering away. Looked like they were kissing, even. It unnerved me. I don’t mind telling you that.