The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (11 page)

I was downstairs by six-thirty. The day was fine. I was hollow at my center, and in a vicious temper. The door stood open, and a wash of light ran over the carpet like sun-warmed margarine.

My taxi—prebooked, as always, for a quick getaway—was at the curb. I looked around, cautious, for Mr. Webley. Already a haze was beginning to overlay Eccles House. Smokers’ coughs rattled down the passages, and the sound of hawking, and the flushing of lavatories.

Something touched my elbow. Louise had arrived beside me, noiseless. She wrested the bag from my hand. “You came down by yourself,” she whispered. Her face was amazed. “You should have called me. I’d have come. Are you not having your breakfast?”

She sounded shocked, that anyone should refuse food. Did Webley feed her, or did she scavenge? She raised her eyes to my face, then cast them down. “If I hadn’t just come now,” she said, “you’d have gone. And never said bye-bye.”

We stood at the curb together. The air was mild. The driver was reading his
Star
. He didn’t look up.

“Might you come back?” Louise whispered.

“I don’t think so.”

“I mean, one of these days?”

I never doubted this: if I told her to get into the taxi, she would do it. Away we’d go: me rattled, afraid of the future; her trusting and yellow, her mad eyes shining into mine. But what then? I asked myself. What would we do then? And have I the right? She is an adult, however short. She has a family somewhere. I stared down at her. Her face, in full daylight, was patchily jaundiced as if dyed with cold tea; her broad smooth forehead was mottled with deeper blotches, the size and color of old copper coins. I could have wept. Instead, I took my purse out of my bag, peered inside it, took out a twenty-pound note, and squeezed it into her hand. “Louise, will you buy yourself something nice?”

I didn’t look into her face. I just got into the taxi. My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash. I was nauseated, by inanition and my own moral vacuity. But by the time the cab crawled up to the station approach, I was getting a bit satirical,
faute de mieux
, and thinking, well, for sure A. S. Byatt would have managed it better: only I can’t quite think how.

When I got to the station, and paid the driver, I found I had only £1.50 left. The cash machine was out of order. Of course, I had a credit card, and if there had been a dining service I could have paid for my breakfast on board. But there was, the announcement said, “a buffet car, situated toward the rear of the train,” and five minutes after we pulled out a boy came to sit beside me on my right: one of the sons of the town, eating from a cardboard box a grayish pad of meat which shined his fingers with fat.

*   *   *

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED
home, I threw my bag into a corner as if I hated it, and standing in the kitchen—last night’s washing up not done, and two wineglasses, I noticed—I ate a single cheese cracker dry out of the tin. Back to work, I thought. Sit down and type. Or you might just die of a surfeit.

In the next few weeks, my biography took some unexpected turns. Aunt Virginie and the Mexican got into the text quite a lot. I began to make versions in which Aunt Virginie and the Mexican ran off together, and in which (therefore) my subject had never been born. I could see them speeding across Europe on an adulterous spree, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass: drinking spa towns dry of champagne and breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. I made up that the Mexican went home with the proceeds and led a successful revolution, with Aunt Virginie featuring in it as a sort of La Pasionaria figure: but with dancing, as if Isadora Duncan had got into it somehow. It was all very different from my previous work.

*   *   *

I
N THE EARLY
autumn of that year, three months after my trip east, I was at Waterloo Station, on my way to give a talk at a branch library in Hampshire. I had no opinion, now, of the catering anywhere in England. As I turned from the sandwich counter, balancing a baguette I meant to carry carefully to Alton, a tall young man bumped into me and knocked my purse flying from my hand.

It was a full purse, bulging with change, and the coins went wheeling and flying among the feet of fellow travelers, spinning and scattering over the slippery floor. My luck was in, because the people streaming through from Eurostar began laughing and chasing my small fortune, making it a sport to chase every penny and trap it: perhaps they thought it was converse begging, or some sort of London custom, like Pearly Kings. The young man himself bobbed and weaved among the European feet, and eventually it was he who emptied a handful of change back into my purse, with a wide white smile, and, just for a second, pressed my hand to reassure me. Amazed, I gazed up into his face: he had large blue eyes, a shy yet confident set to him; he was six foot and lightly bronzed, strong but softly polite, his jacket of indigo linen artfully crumpled, his shirt a dazzling white; he was, in all, so clean, so sweet, so golden, that I backed off, afraid he must be American and about to convert me to some cult.

When I arrived at the library, an ambitious number of chairs—fifteen, at first count—were drawn up in a semicircle. Most were filled: a quiet triumph, no? I did my act on autopilot, except that when it came to my influences I went a bit wild and invented a Portuguese writer who I said knocked Pessoa into a cocked hat. The golden young man kept invading my mind, and I thought I’d quite like to go to bed with someone of that ilk, by way of a change. Wasn’t everybody due a change? But he was a different order of being from me: a person on another plane. As the evening wore on, I began to feel chilly, and exposed, as if a wind were whistling through my bones.

*   *   *

I
SAT UP
for a while, in a good enough bed in a clean enough room, reading
The Right Side of Midnight
, making marginal annotations, and wondering why I’d ever thought the public might like it. My cheek burned on a lumpy pillow, and the usual images of failure invaded me; but then, about three o’clock I must have slept.

I woke refreshed, from no dreams: in a cider-apple dawn, a fizz and sharpness in the air. Out of bed, I rejoiced to see that someone had scrubbed the shower. I could bear to step into it, and did. Cold soft water ran over my scalp. My eyes stretched wide open. What was this? A turning point?

I was on the crowded train for eight, my fingers already twitching for my notebook. We had scarcely pulled out of the station when a grinning young steward bounced a laden trolley down the aisle. Seeing his Ginormous Harvest Cookies, his Golden Toastie Crunches in cellophane wrap, the men around me flapped their copies of the
Financial Times
at him, and began to jab their fingers, chattering excitedly. “Tea?” the steward exclaimed. “My pleasure, sir! Small or large?”

I noticed Large was just Small with more water, but I was swept away, infused by the general bonhomie. I took out my purse, and when I opened it I saw with surprise that the Queen’s heads were tidily stacked, pointing upward. And was there one more head than I’d expected? I frowned. My fingers flicked the edges of the notes. I’d left home with eighty pounds. It seemed I was coming back with a round hundred. I was puzzled (as the steward handed me my Large Tea); but only for a moment. I remembered the young man with his broad white smile and his ashen hair streaked with gold; the basted perfection of his firm flesh, and the grace of his hand clasping mine. I slotted the notes back inside, slid my purse away, and wondered: which of my defects did he notice first?

THE HEART FAILS WITHOUT WARNING

September: When she began to lose weight at first, her sister had said, I don’t mind; the less of her the better, she said. It was only when Morna grew hair—fine down on her face, in the hollow curve of her back—that Lola began to complain. I draw the line at hair, she said. This is a girls’ bedroom, not a dog kennel.

Lola’s grievance was this: Morna was born before she was, already she had used up three years’ worth of air, and taken space in the world that Lola could have occupied. She believed she was birthed into her sister’s squalling, her incessant
I-want I-want
, her
give-me give-me
.

Now Morna was shrinking, as if her sister had put a spell on her to vanish. She said, if Morna hadn’t always been so greedy before, she wouldn’t be like this now. She wanted everything.

Their mother said, “You don’t know anything about it, Lola. Morna was not greedy. She was always picky about her food.”

“Picky?” Lola made a face. If Morna didn’t like something she would make her feelings known by vomiting it up in a weak acid dribble.

It’s because of the school catchment area they have to live in a too-small house and share a bedroom. “It’s bunk beds or GCSEs!” their mother said. She stopped, confused by herself. Often what she said meant something else entirely, but they were used to it; early menopause, Morna said. “You know what I mean,” she urged them. “We live in this house for the sake of your futures. It’s a sacrifice now for all of us, but it will pay off. There’s no point in getting up every morning in a lovely room of your own and going to a sink school where girls get raped in the toilets.”

“Does that happen?” Lola said. “I didn’t know that happened.”

“She exaggerates,” their father said. He seldom said anything, so it made Lola jump, him speaking like that.

“But you know what I’m saying,” her mother said. “I see them dragging home at two in the afternoon, they can’t keep them in school. They’ve got piercings. There’s drugs. There’s internet bullying.”

“We have that at our school,” Lola said.

“It’s everywhere,” their father said. “Which is another reason to keep off the internet. Lola, are you listening to what I’m telling you?”

The sisters were no longer allowed a computer in their room because of the sites Morna liked to look at. They had pictures of girls with their arms stretched wide over their heads in a posture of crucifixion. Their ribs were spaced wide apart like the bars of oven shelves. These sites advised Morna how to be hungry, how not to be gross. Any food like bread, butter, an egg, is gross. A green apple or a green leaf, you may have one a day. The apple must be poison green. The leaf must be bitter.

“To me it is simple,” their father said. “Calories in, calories out. All she has to do is open her mouth and put the food in, then swallow. Don’t tell me she can’t. It’s a question of won’t.”

Lola picked up an eggy spoon from the draining board. She held it under her father’s nose as if it were a microphone. “Yes, and have you anything you want to add to that?”

He said, “You’ll never get a boyfriend if you look like a needle.” When Morna said she didn’t want a boyfriend, he shouted, “Tell me that again when you’re seventeen.”

I never will be, Morna said. Seventeen.

*   *   *

S
EPTEMBER:
L
OLA ASKED
for the carpet to be replaced in their room. “Maybe we could have a wood floor? Easier to clean up after her?”

Their mother said, “Don’t be silly. She’s sick in the loo. Isn’t she? Mostly? Though not,” she said hurriedly, “like she used to be.” It’s what they had to believe: that Morna was getting better. In the night, you could hear them telling each other, droning on behind their closed bedroom door; Lola lay awake listening.

Lola said, “If I can’t have a new carpet, if I can’t have a wood floor, what can I have? Can I have a dog?”

“You are so selfish, Lola,” their mother shouted. “How can we take on a pet at a time like this?”

Morna said, “If I die, I want a woodland burial. You can plant a tree and when it grows you can visit it.”

“Yeah. Right. I’ll bring my dog,” Lola said.

*   *   *

S
EPTEMBER:
L
OLA SAID,
“The only thing is, now she’s gone so small I can’t steal her clothes. This was my main way of annoying her and now I have to find another.”

All year round Morna wore wool to protect her shoulders, elbows, hips, from the blows of the furniture, and also to look respectably fat so that people didn’t point her out on the street; also, because even in July she was cold. But the winter came early for her, and though the sun shone outside she was getting into her underlayers. When she stepped on the scale for scrutiny she appeared to be wearing normal clothes, but actually she had provided herself with extra weight. She would wear one pair of tights over another; every gram counts, she told Lola. She had to be weighed every day. Their mother did it. She would try surprising Morna with spot checks, but Morna would always know when she was getting into a weighing mood.

Lola watched as their mother pulled at her sister’s cardigan, trying to get it off her before she stepped onto the scales. They tussled like two little kids in a playground; Lola screamed with laughter. Their mother hauled at the sleeve and Morna shouted, “Ow, ow!” as if it were her skin being stretched. Her skin was loose, Lola saw. Like last year’s school uniform, it was too big for her. It didn’t matter, because the school had made it clear they didn’t want to see her this term. Not until she’s turned the corner, they said, on her way back to a normal weight. Because the school has such a competitive ethos. And it could lead to mass fatalities if the girls decided to compete with Morna.

When the weighing was over, Morna would come into their bedroom and start peeling off her layers, while Lola watched her, crouched on her bottom bunk. Morna would stand sideways to the mirror with her ribs arched. You can count them, she said. After the weighing she needed reassurance. Their mother bought them the long mirror because she thought Morna would be ashamed when she saw herself. The opposite was true.

*   *   *

O
CTOBER:
I
N THE
morning paper there was a picture of a skeleton. “Oh look,” Lola said, “a relative of yours.” She pushed it across the breakfast table to where Morna sat poking a Shredded Wheat with her spoon, urging it toward disintegration. “Look, Mum! They’ve dug up an original woman.”