Island (3 page)
By the end he was practically stroking me; of course I could stay on, he personally would speak to my social worker about getting me into a home locally; he would keep a special eye on me.
I was a good girl then; worked hard, stayed after school, did all my homework. After O levels I did my A levels, my life was going swimmingly. I developed a crush on the geography teacher who fucked me in the science prep room every Thursday at 4.30 (while his wife was doing yoga) but that wasn’t particularly clever because I thought he liked me. I found he was doing it with Tessa Watson on Tuesdays (while his wife was swimming) so I told him I was going to tell the head. He gave me £234 altogether over the rest of the year, to keep me quiet.
I moved to a new set of foster parents in my lower sixth. They did their best to knock me off balance but even they didn’t manage. They were full of bullshit
about freedom and responsibility. Gave me a doorkey and told me to name my own coming in time – fine, no big deal, why should I get excited about being able to walk in a door at 2 a.m. instead of sliding open the window at the kids’ home and climbing over the ledge? But they told me my room was private. They told me no one would go in it. And I was naive enough to believe them.
Their house had more lights than a theatre: ceiling lights and wall lights and table lamps and night lights and security lights. That family was permanently on stage acting free and responsible and adult. Nowhere to hide. My room was white and beige. ‘Light and airy, spick and span!’ said Jill the latest social worker who dumped me there and ran.
After a week the woman left the vacuum outside my door. ‘Your room, you clean it when you like. Candice and Zoe do theirs once a week.’
At first I did. Plugged the vacuum in under the bed, hoovered the beige carpet, sucked the dust off white windowsills and skirting boards with the little brush attachment. Then I started dumping stuff on the floor. Clothes, schoolbooks, papers. They were still there when I came back at night. Dirty knickers under my PE kit under my history books; magazines and tights and apple-cores and even coins I dropped, lying in the same place day after day. God, I began to love that room. I wrote my name in the dust on the windowsill. I had such a pile of clothes on the end of my bed it was a weight to slide my feet under, I wrote notes and lists of groups I liked, clothes I wanted, letters to people I hated, poems about sex and death, I nicked a ton of library books, and they were on the chair and chest of drawers and windowsill and floor. She never came in. Only once she knocked on
the door and asked for a bath towel back, it was on the floor sopping wet and I told her I’d put it in the wash. She didn’t say anything. I knew exactly where everything was, I could put my hand on it with my eyes closed. You could do major surgery on the floor anywhere else in that house, it was so squeaky clean, and my room was encrusted and complicated and not like them. I asked if I could put stuff on the walls and she gave me Blu-tack. I put up pictures from magazines and things I drew and beer mats, I filled the walls completely so there were no gaps, no white, no beige. I had skulls and mushroom clouds and bands and bits of faces, one whole wall was lips and eyes and nipples and strips of black. When they were out I took food up, biscuits, apples, crisps – so I wouldn’t have to go down if I needed a snack. I had a rubbish heap in one corner. I kept my fag ends and ash in a big screw-top jamjar so they wouldn’t smell it, under my bed, and some vodka and a few things I’d nicked, perfume and jewellery, in a cardboard box of second-hand clothes I’d started buying off the market to sell on to girls at school. When I went in the door and shut it and just turned on the little bedside lamp (I put blue tissue over the shade) the room was dim and mysterious and cluttered and runkled and smelt of itself. It was mine, completely mine.
I went on the school trip to France. A week. When I came back my room was clean. The floor was clear, the surfaces were empty. The dirty clothes were washed and put away in the drawers. The empty walls had been repainted cruddy magnolia. All the papers and books were on the shelves. The cardboard boxes had gone and the nicked perfume and jewellery was arranged on the dressing table like it was mine. The vodka and fags were gone. She’d wiped me out. I suppose she did it after every girl that stayed there. Every un-house-trained creature.
Mucked out the room, washed the surfaces, sprayed it with air-freshener.
I sat in it breathing in the new paint and carpet shampoo until I knew they’d all gone to sleep then I pissed on the bed and put on my uniform and took my suitcase to school. I sat on the steps for the night and after the caretaker the head was the first person there. I told him I couldn’t ever go back to that house and I would never talk to anyone about what had happened to me there. All I wanted was to work hard for my exams and better myself. He got me back into the kids’ home that night.
I got two Bs and a C at A level and a university place in Sheffield.
I was a clever girl, I could do all the stuff those mummied and dad-died kids could do. I did my essays, went to lectures, got my spending money nicking books and selling them on to other students – I nicked my room-mate’s boyfriend and then I nicked her CD player and camera (redistribution of wealth). She shouldn’t have left the door unlocked anyway, it’s lucky for her that more didn’t go. I was OK, I was good, I was good for quite a while, I was coasting along nicely until I suddenly lost it.
This seems to be the pattern. I know it from before. I swoop I glide I fly
I fall.
Never at the right time or in the right place (what would be?) and once I’m down it’s harder and harder to get up. Like one of those seagulls with tar on its wings. People pretend to be your friend but when you go down no one really wants to know. My room-mate moved out which just goes to show how right I’d been to nick her stuff; the boyfriend went back to her. I was left to the mercies of the student counsellor. She kept
me going for a couple of months before she lost interest too. Once things start to go down they go and go. I stopped turning up for my barmaiding at the Crown. I didn’t get it together to nick any books. I didn’t go to lectures. I ran out of money. You go through the holes in the net. I had nowhere to stay in the vacation, I hadn’t latched on to anyone, I hadn’t …
It happens over and over again. In different ways. When I had the job at the housing association and a nearly normal life and even friends; I stopped sleeping so I lost the job. I stopped earning so I couldn’t pay the rent. I lost the flat so I went to live with friends and lost my friends. This is what I mean. The whole house of cards collapses …
You have no control over up or down or when it’s going to change. It’s tedious.
The pigeonYou think I’m tough, eh.
I
think I’m tough. Yeah. But I
have – I have a–
A tendency to slip. Slip slide slurrup slam headlong down into – OK. How to describe it? It’s another state. It’s crap. I can’t describe it to you but I have to tell this story.
Do I have to tell you?
Yes, obviously. Well sometimes I’m afraid.
Will that do?
Afraid. You understand? Frightened. Fearful. Got the message? Sometimes I get – Fear.
Like this. I feel it coming on. Like you see the shadow of a big building slanting across the street in front of you and you keep walking and you step from sunlight into the shadow and you think it’s OK, I’m still
on the pavement, same ground beneath my feet same sky above my head same traffic roaring past – but–
it’s not the same.
It’s not the same. You’re entering the shadow and you feel the chill – I feel the chill, I feel the way the earth is turning I feel ordinary comfort sliding away over the rim I feel abandoned – I feel – Fear.
It comes on. I can’t tell you why. A typical instance of it coming on: the day I saw the pigeon. I took a short cut across the park and I saw a pigeon trapped. It was nothing – insignificant, utterly and completely insignificant.
But it’s how the shadow falls.
There was a pigeon trapped, in the park. They put thread like fishing line across the flowerbeds. Its feet were tangled in it. When I saw it it was standing very still, then it flapped, hard. When it stopped it looked at me with its glittering eyes.
I was on the path. I stopped. They’d been working in the park, I suppose because it was spring. Dug up the flowerbeds, put in some ugly little polyanths. And this line, crisscrossing above the soil, staked. It must be to keep the birds off, I never saw it before. There was a tractor turning on the football pitch, dragging something over the muddy grass. A cloud of birds following it. Pigeons and seagulls everywhere. But this one was trapped.
I watched to see if it would flap itself free. No. It was making things worse. The line was tight around its scrawny leg, cutting in. You can amputate a finger like that. Tie a line around it tight. Wait for the end to drop off, kids used to play it at school.
I looked for other people. Two briefcases
going to the office. They didn’t see me, never mind the pigeon. A bleary-faced woman in a blue cleaner’s overall. People going to work. What would you say? ‘Please can you rescue this pigeon?’ ‘Rescue it yourself you silly bitch. If it matters to you.’
What’s one pigeon the less? They’re vermin. Carry diseases. Deface city buildings. The council poisons them, they have to. That’s why they put the line. To stop pigeons eating the seedlings. Trap them, make an example. There were no other pigeons near this flowerbed. Leave one and it scares off the others. Scarecrow. Scarepigeon.
It flapped dementedly, its wings beat up small lumps of soil, it heaved its body upwards. The foot could have just sliced off. I wished it would. So the pigeon would be gone.
To rescue it I would have to step over the little green hooped railings, step carefully between the crisscrossing lines of thread, bend down in the middle of the garden and touch the pigeon. It stared hatefully. Its beak was sharp for pecking. I think they carry rabies, I’ve heard that. I hadn’t got any gloves.
My face was red and my heart was beating, I could feel it shaking my ribcage. A woman came by with a baby in a pushchair and a young kid in uniform. I turned away so she wouldn’t see my face. The kid said, ‘Mum!’ and I knew he’d seen the pigeon but she was telling him off and didn’t stop.
I decided to find a park keeper. A gardener. With proper thick gloves, with gauntlets. He could free the pigeon, it was his job. I went on along the path and part of me thought I won’t come back then I won’t have to see it flapping and heaving again, or sitting still and staring. Once I get to the gate it won’t be important.
There weren’t any gardeners. Only the tractor
down on the football pitch, across a wasteland of boggy lawns. When I got close I’d be shouting over the noise of the tractor, at last he’d turn the engine off in exasperation and lean out. ‘
What?
’
‘A pigeon,’ I’d say. ‘I’m sorry but it’s trapped–’
‘A fucking pigeon?’ He’d stare at me then turn his engine on again.
I went back along the path. If I’d had some scissors. Or a penknife. I could have cut the thread. I wouldn’t have had to touch it.
Perhaps it was dead. It would die quite quickly of exhaustion. I hoped it was dead already.
But there was a man crouching in the muddy flowerbed. He glanced up at me. He had the pigeon in one hand, his fingers grasped around its body and folded wings. With the other he was untangling the line from its foot. The bird stared. It did not move its head or peck him. The line was around a wing as well; the man cursed quietly as he turned the bird over and tried to free it. I was embarrassed, ashamed to stand and watch him. I moved back the way I came. When I looked over my shoulder at last he was standing on the path again. He was holding out his arm and letting the bird go, it flapped at shoulder height like it had forgotten how to move through the air. Then it was rising. Flying up.
That’s it. It slips. An incident like that and I feel the whole thing slipping, I am in the picture but there’s a dotted line around me. Cut around the dotted line. I am cut out.
Night-time is worst of course. I’m exhausted. Raw, jangled, wanting only to curl up and close my eyes. Wanting nothing so much as the warm enclosed
huddle, peaceful black oblivion. Check the windows, lock the door, switch off the lights, pretend the flat is safe. But as soon as I close my eyes I hear noises. A hedge, a thicket, a forest of noises springs up around me. And I’m listening, watchful and alert, for the thing behind them. Straining after the one noise I can’t quite hear. I lie still for a long time, while the noises become more and more deafening. There’s no way out of this, I don’t sleep, I won’t sleep, whatever I do won’t make any difference but still there comes a point when I can’t lie passively any more being assaulted by the racket around me while my inner ears strain to aching after a hidden sound – I have to heave myself up in my bed (heavy; the body is heavy and dull, the legs stiff, they ache when I try to bend them. The body weighs me down, it has a hollow sensation around its middle as if food might comfort it. I know it won’t.)