Mouthing the Words (3 page)

Although it was Heroin I talked to, it was Ginniger who just was. We never had to talk because we would only say exactly the same thing. There were either two mes—Thelma and Ginniger—or one me in two bodies, but either way we were inseparable and indistinguishable to others except by name. Only I seemed to know who was talking.

“We like to play office,” I confided in Auntie Esme.

“And how do we play office?” she asked with interest.

“Well, Daddy is the boss and we are the secretaries,” I told her. “And we do this,” I said, pretending to type, to make the tickety-tackety noise of fingers moving
across
keys. “And we answer the phone and make cups of tea.”

“Well, you must make a decent living,” said Auntie Esme approvingly.

“Uh huh,” I nodded. “And when we do a good job, the boss says, Well that’s a job well done Miss so-and-so. Here’s a little present for my helpful little secretary, and he gives us a new pen or some perfume and we thank him by giving him a big kiss.”

“What kind of kiss?” asked Auntie Esme.

“Like this,” I said. And I closed my eyes and opened my mouth like a goldfish, just like Daddy had taught me.

“Oh, that kind of kiss,” Auntie Esme said knowingly. “But what happens if you don’t do a good job?” she asked.

“Well, sometimes he says, Miss so-and-so, I think you’ve made an error in typing this correspondence. I think you’ll have to lie down while I discipline you.”

“And then what happens?” she whispered, her eyes widening encouragingly.

“I do what the boss says because that’s my job.”

“What’s your job?” she prodded.

“Like I told you. Just typing and answering the phone and stuff like that.”

“And lying down?” she persisted.

“Only when I’ve made an error. I do sometimes because like Daddy says, to err is human. And even
secretaries
are human. Even good ones are naughty sometimes.”

“And what happens after you lie down?” she asked.

“Then I fall asleep and have a dream.”

“And what’s your dream about?” she asked gravely.

“About a flying insect,” I said, sweeping my arm from the floor to the ceiling. “A dragonfly with a skinny skinny twig of a body. I am an insect floating up in the room and I stick up here,” (indicating) “on the wall above my pillow and just look down. I feel very high up because I am only a tiny insect and I am afraid of being so high and my bed and the room look so big. And when the noise gets too loud I just suck in my breath really hard and my eyes turn inside my head and all I see is big red.”

—

I felt very nervous after telling Auntie Esme. I knew I’d done a bad thing because the secretaries, like Peter, were supposed to be a secret. And now I knew what happened when secrets were broken. Mum threw plates at Dad in the kitchen and then she threw a chair and he said, “I think you’ve broken my bloody thumb!”

And she screamed, “How could you do this, Douglas! You’re sick—do you know that—you’re positively sick!”

“I’m sick?” he shouted. “What is sick is your prying little sister. What is sick is being dependent upon your arrogant bastard of a father—living here in this insipid little village pretending to be a couple of wealthy
dilettantes
when everybody knows I am just a slave earning a pittance in a dead-end job and you are just a spoiled bitch! No wonder she invents things—she hasn’t got a bloody friend in the world to play with. Just her neurotic mother for company. What kind of life does she have? How can you make those kind of accusations? I can see where she gets her imagination—for Christ’s sake, she even invents her friends!”

And then Mum was crying in her high-pitched wailing kind of way and Dad was quieting her, saying, “Pet. It’s OK. It’s OK. The best thing we can do for ourselves is get away from this place. Make a life for ourselves somewhere. Away from your family. Try to get a hold of yourself, darling.”

I whispered to Janawee throughout this because she was crying and shaking in my armpit. “It’s OK, little girl. It’s OK. Thelma and Ginniger are here. We won’t leave you. And Heroin will take care of us.”

And then I was dreaming again. Dreaming a dream of a mouth that was trying to inhale the world. A bloody mouth in the dark ripping through the stitches that were trying to bind it closed. I was poised at its edge, holding hard onto Janawee with all my strength, trying to make sure we were not sucked in by the terrible undertow that sounded as loud as thunder. The sky was cracking with the noise. And I was holding on so hard that all my limbs got sucked into me so that I was a twig, a stick insect, catapulted up to the roof of the sky. Pinned to the underside of a heavy dark cloud.
Safe
there, rigid and tight and looking down on the immense world below.

Animal Kingdom

“YOUR FATHER HAS
gone to Canada,” my mother told me.

Was that like going to the office, or to Gloucester or London, I wondered. It was, apparently, only further.

“Remember the sea?” she asked me. “Well, the sea goes on for miles and miles and at the other side is another country like England, only it’s called Canada,” she explained.

I asked Heroin about Canada. Heroin consulted the World Almanac and told me Canada was the next biggest country after Russia, and that it had bears but it also had the Queen.

“Are we going to Canada?” I asked my mother.

“Eventually, Thelma,” she sighed. “Your father’s got to find a job before we can emigrate.”

“Does Willy have to come?” I asked.

“Yes, of course he does, Thelma,” she scoffed. “Don’t be so stupid! We’re a family.”

“Can Janawee and Heroin come too?” I asked her with obvious concern.

“I was rather hoping we could leave them behind,” she said. “You’re getting a little too old for imaginary friends. In Canada we’ll find you some real friends.”

But I didn’t want any real friends. I’d tried real friends recently. After Daddy went away, the two roly-poly girls, Bubble and Pink, started to come running up the drive to take me with them in the red Volvo to Creative Movement Class. Their mother, Mrs. Toddie, was round, with a big face like a treacle tart, and although I liked her, I didn’t like being squashed between her pink fat daughters eating squashed-fly biscuits in the back of the vomit-smelling Volvo.

And I really didn’t like Creative Movement. We were supposed to run around in circles in our slippers in the church basement, beating tambourines, or trailing burgundy ribbons while Mrs. Victor plinketty-plonketted on the brown upright. I preferred to sit under the piano, sucking my thumb and watching her feet push down on the pedals. I was afraid of these little girls, all their gleeful energy spinning them in circles round and round like Tasmanian devils.

On our way home in the car Mrs. Toddie would ask cheerfully, “So what was it today, girls? A little dancing around the mulberry bush?”

And Bubble and Pink would pipe in joyous unison, “Hula hooping!”

“And Thelma, did you enjoy hooping your hula? Or
should
that be, hulaing your hoop?” Mrs. Toddie chuckled.

I said nothing and Porky Pink piped, “She’s a wet blanket. She never does anything except suck her thumb and hide under the piano.”

“Now that’s not very nice, is it, Pinky-Pops,” her mother gently chastised. “Thelma’s just a little shyer than you girls. She’ll come into her own. She’ll probably surprise us all and grow up to be a famous ballerina,” she said, turning round and smiling at me affectionately.

“Maybe she’s retarded,” mocked Pink.

“Yeah, maybe she’s retarded,” echoed Bubble.

“Girls!” shrieked Mrs. Toddie. “Now that is not at all nice. What do you say to Thelma?”

At this point I spoke for the first time, shocking everybody by staring Pink boldly in the face and saying, “Maybe you’re a bloody bitch.”

“I don’t know where she gets this kind of language,” Mrs. Toddie said to my mother with grave concern. “But I won’t have my Bubble and Pink hearing those kind of words. She’s obviously one very troubled little girl.”

To this my mother graciously replied, “I don’t really give a toss what you think. We’re moving to Canada anyway, so you can just take your fat little cherubs and push off.”

—

We got to Canada via some kind of drug-induced
sleep
. We took a plane and half a Mogadon each, which for our little bodies induced a coma lasting about ten hours. We were carried groggily off the plane and into the arms of some man with a beard who we didn’t recognize. When I started bawling in the face of this stranger I heard my mother say, “It’s OK, Thelma. It’s only your father.” All I could think in my hazy atrophy was, Who’s that? It had been over a year since we’d seen our father—a fifth of my little life, and this “our father” had a face that was completely unfamiliar. Perhaps it was the smile.

I woke up in a bed with a panda bear and my brother Willy. This was Canada. A bed and a panda bear and my parents somewhere nearby, going “blahdy blahdy blahdy blah” in a happy sounding way. “Yes, I am surprised, Douglas,” I heard my mother say. “I thought it was all going to be skyscrapers and motorways. Yes, it’s very pretty, and even a little garden … A fresh start …”

And scattered fragments from my father. “… the car. A perk of the job … A great country … anything possible … No one gives a toss here …”

There was a garden full of dandelions which it was my job to weed while Mum planted rose bushes and Dad worked on insulating our little wooden house. There was something called Kentucky Fried Chicken for supper on a blanket in the garden, where none of us were wearing shoes. I was listening to the voices of
little
girls echoing forth from the little wooden playhouse in the garden next door.

“Because I said so. Because it’s good for you. Because I’m bigger than you,” one voice pleaded with another.

My mother watched me listening intently to the conversation next door and said, “Maybe they’ll be able to be your real friends.” I hadn’t told her that I still had Ginniger, Janawee and Heroin with me, because that would have made her mad. The three of them had fit quite nicely into my little round white suitcase.

The girls Binbecka and Vellaine were having difficulty deciding who would be mother. Vellaine was winning because she was bigger and, as she reasoned, “The mother can’t say things like, But I don’t like it, it’s yucky—can she, silly? So I’m the mother because you think it’s yucky.”

Mum went round to the neighbours the next day to say something like, “Can my little girl play with your little girls?” She knocked on the screen door and when she got no reply, called out, “Hello. Is anybody home?”

“Come on in,” a woman’s voice called out from the back of the house.

Mother tiptoed through, wrinkling her nose at the smell of patchouli, calling out, “I’m your new neighbour” as she made her way toward the sunroom in the back. “I’m your new neighbour,” she repeated as she stared at the big bear of a man lying naked on his
stomach
on the linoleum floor – a tiny woman grinding her toes into his back.

“Releases the vitality of the chakra,” she explained, working the knuckle of her big toe into the spaces between her husband’s vertebrae. “You know—the life force,” she said helpfully. “I’m Anika,” she added. “And this is my husband Claudio.” The man on the floor let out a groan of acknowledgement.

These were the first proper Canadians my mother had met and she was quite amazed. She introduced herself, explaining that she and her husband and their two children had just immigrated from England.

Another groan from the prostrate Claudio. “Can I get you some juice, or a cup of coffee or something:” Anika asked Corinna.

“No, really, I’m fine, thank you,” she said, and was about to continue when in burst the two girls with their long tangled hair and their perfect white teeth.

“Binbecka and Vellaine,” Anika pointed. “Girls, this is our new neighbour.” She nodded at Corinna.

“Nice to meet you,” Vellaine said out of breath. “We would shake your hand but we can’t at the moment because we’re horses and we only have hooves,” she said, shrugging apologetically.

“Corinna has a daughter just about the same age as you two,” Anika encouraged.

“Cool, mom,” Binbecka said. “But we’re just in the final stages of the show jumping competition,” she
said
, cantering off to the kitchen sink to lap up some water with her tongue.

“Does your daughter have a riding helmet?” Vellaine turned around to ask Corinna. When Corinna shook her head, Binbecka said, “That’s OK, she can borrow one of ours,” before cantering out the back door.

“What lovely girls,” my mother commented.

Claudio, who had by this time rolled over onto his back to reveal, without any self-consciousness, what my mother later referred to as a “plentiful fruit basket,” said in a thick Italian accent, “Yes. Lovely girls. Lovely horses, lovely mermaids, lovely leprechauns and even occasionally lovely pirates.”

Corinna tried her best to look neutral and maintain eye contact, but she was, I’m afraid, terribly terribly English. She and Douglas wore more clothes to bed than Claudio and Anika appeared to wear in the middle of the afternoon. She and Douglas slept in separate beds, because, as I later once heard my father explain to a colleague, “women smell.” What a brave new world, my mother thought as she suggested bringing Thelma round to meet Binbecka and Vellaine.

—

I spied on the girls who were going to be my real friends through the slats in the fence. They were cantering over a series of chairs and skipping ropes that had been arranged in a circle around the back yard. At the end of each round they would scribble a number into the earth—ten points, less one for each jump they missed.

“And today, we have an appreciative international audience,” Vellaine called backwards to Binbecka in mid-flight in her grown-up commentator’s voice.

“We’d like to welcome our foreign visitor to the equestrian world’s finest event,” she went on, and then startled me by running straight up to the fence, pressing her face against the wooden board, and meeting my eye. “Perhaps you would care to come out of hiding and join us,” she suggested in a whisper.