Читать книгу Crow Stone - Jenni Mills - Страница 12

Chapter Six

When I woke up the morning after my father hit me, the side of my head was throbbing, and I could see purplish-brown bruising seeping out from my hairline when I pulled my hair back from my face. It was too sore to run the brush through; I gathered it gently into a ponytail, wrapped a ribbon round it, and let the shorter bits at the sides fall forward. Messy, but normal.

By the time I got downstairs he had already gone to work. I poured cereal and milk into a bowl, but when I picked up the spoon I didn’t want to eat. I scraped it into the bin instead.

There was something glinting at the bottom under the soggy cornflakes: smashed glass. The photograph of my mother in its broken frame had gone from my bedside table. My father must have come into my room while I was asleep. I imagined him scooping up the glass quietly so as not to disturb me, listening to my breathing and tenderly slotting back together the splintered pieces of the frame.

Leaving the house, I saw Gary across the road, coming out of the Bennetts’ garden gate. He didn’t close it behind him; he was still trying to get one arm into his denim jacket. Perhaps he’d overslept. For a moment, our eyes met. He gave a brief, embarrassed nod, then set off briskly up the road.

Had he seen me the night before? I remembered his eyes locking on to mine through the binoculars. Maybe the lenses had caught the light and given me away. I followed him along the road. At the end, he turned left towards the bus stop, and I went right, uphill, towards Green Down and school.

In summer I liked to walk, thinking about ammonites to help me up the steep bit. I knew they would be buried deep in the soil under the pavement. Sometimes I wished I could curl up like them and lie hidden for millions of years.

Trish would be toiling up the other side of the hill, from the south. If I’d timed it right we’d see each other at the top and walk through the village together. I was later than usual. I didn’t think she’d wait. Often I’d spot her striding ahead, and have to run to catch up.

There were a dozen or so green blazers coming up the hill, and a few more straggling along the main road towards school, but no sign of Trish with her thick plait of dark hair. As I got closer to St Anne’s, there were more and more green uniforms. It was like looking for graptolites in rock; at first you can’t see any, then you get your eye in and there are zillions of tiny fossilized creatures winking back.

I went through the school gates and tried to look like everyone else.

‘O rose, thou art sick,’ said Mrs Ruthven, the English teacher, her eyes fixed on the beech trees through the classroom window. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Trish jabbing a finger towards her mouth to mime puking. Poppy, all long legs and freckled arms, hunched her shoulders, hiding giggles. Mrs Ruthven shifted her weight–she had one leg shorter than the other, and wore a special shoe with a built-up sole–and continued, oblivious:

‘The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm …’

We were doing the Romantic poets this term, and I thought Wordsworth was dull, sometimes too difficult to understand but mostly just plain wet. But Blake’s short lines stuck inside your head, and throbbed there, even if you weren’t always sure what they meant.

‘… has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.’

Mrs Ruthven swivelled back to the class, pivoting on her platform shoe. ‘What’s this about, Trish Klein?’

She had seen, after all.

‘Sex, Mrs Ruthven.’ Trish was wearing her most innocent expression.

Mrs Ruthven sighed. She was one of the younger teachers, which meant none of us was yet scared of her. She was our form teacher as well, and she was learning fast that it was a mistake to be too pally.

‘Earthly love, yes, but what else?’

Silence. Everybody looked down at their book in case she picked on them.

‘What were we talking about last week?’ She surveyed the rows of blank faces. We were still at the age where we thought poetry was something to learn by heart, not something to discuss. ‘Didn’t I say you couldn’t separate the Romantics from the political and industrial upheavals that were going on around them? You could see the rose as literally sick, poisoned by the industrial revolution. It’s a metaphor that works on many levels. How else do we know Blake was interested in the industrial revolution?’

No one else was going to answer, so I stuck my hand up. ‘“Dark satanic mills”?’

‘Very good, Katie. The poem we looked at last week, the one you know as a hymn. “Jerusalem”. “And did those feet in ancient time …” Blake is harking back to an earlier, more innocent age, before man scarred the landscape. He called his poems “Songs of Innocence and Experience”, didn’t he?’

Poppy and Trish were passing notes to each other now under their desks. Poppy’s parents had got back last night from Scotland: they’d promised Poppy she could ask some friends round at the weekend. Of course Poppy had invited me; but I wasn’t the one she consulted over the rest of the guest list.

‘Blake lived in London, but what would he have found if he had come to Green Down? Because we live, remember, on top of one of the first great industrial landscapes of the eighteenth century.’ Mrs Ruthven was struggling. The mascara had run under her eyes. Her sentences kept going up at the end, as if she was afraid we would argue with her. ‘The underground quarries, remember?’

The bell went, stranding her in mid-sentence. There was the usual banging of desk lids as everyone scrambled to get out of the classroom and down to lunch to bag the best tables.

‘Katie,’ said Mrs Ruthven, as I got to my feet. ‘A word.’

I could see Poppy and Trish already among the crowd at the doorway, pushing and shoving. They didn’t even glance back to check where I was.

‘Yes, Mrs Ruthven?’

She looked out of the window again, waiting until the last straggler made it through the door and we were alone. The platform shoe tapped sternly on the parquet.

‘Things aren’t going too well this term, are they, Katie?’

I felt heat flame my neck and cheeks. ‘Mrs Ruthven?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. You’re one of the best pupils in the year, but no one would know that from your marks lately.’

‘Sorry, Mrs Ruthven.’

‘As your form teacher, I’m concerned when other teachers start talking about you as a pupil who’s–well, not failing, but failing to live up to her promise. Maths in particular, and you’ll need that if you want to study sciences … Are you finding it harder? Is there something you don’t understand?’

‘No.’ I wouldn’t have dared confess even if there had been. ‘Really. I understand it all.’

‘So what’s your explanation? Have you found it hard to catch up after being ill last term?’

I looked at my feet. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is everything all right at home?’

‘Fine.’ I glanced desperately towards the door, trying to think of something else to say. ‘Really, everything’s fine.’

‘Well, I expect better. Maybe I should have a word with your father.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll try harder. Really.’

Mrs Ruthven set her lips like the line under a sum, and looked sorrowfully at me. I thought she was going to say something else, but instead she picked up her briefcase and limped out of the door.

I hadn’t lied. I did understand the maths. And things were as they always had been at home. But there didn’t seem to be much time for homework, these lighter evenings. Trish and Poppy were in no hurry to get home after school. But Trish always sailed through everything, and if she didn’t, no one seemed to be bothered, the way my dad would be.

The wood-panelled dining-hall, with its reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, was as noisy as an aviary. Girls perched on every bench, giggling, shrieking and clattering cutlery. There were no spaces left at the table where Trish and Poppy were sitting.

‘Couldn’t you have saved me a place?’

‘Sorry,’ said Poppy. ‘Pauline Jagger made us move up when her friends got here.’

I could see a space on a table at the other end of the room, under Rossetti’s The Beloved. It was full of girls from the year above, none of whom I knew. I squeezed on to the end of the bench, feeling miserable. Resentfully the older girls shuffled along to make room. Across the hall, Poppy and Trish were laughing about something, their heads together.

I bent my head to my plate.

At break-times we were allowed on to the sports field, if we kept to the edge and didn’t scar the turf. I caught up with Trish and Poppy on their way there. We usually made for a spot near the tennis courts where there was a grassy bank under the trees. We’d come to think of it as ours.

‘Piss off,’ said Trish, to a group of nine-year-olds, who were playing some sort of Queen of the Castle game. They scattered, trying to pretend that that was the next stage of the game anyway.

It was a hot, heavy afternoon, threatening rain. The horse-chestnuts round the sports field were in flower, and their white candles glowed against the dark grey sky. There was a distant buzz, the saws at the stone quarry down the hill.

Trish was picking daisies. She started to lace them into Poppy’s hair. Poppy sighed a little, and pretended to collapse back into Trish’s lap. A worm of envy turned in my gut.

‘I found a copy of Lady Chatterley in the back of my mother’s knitting cupboard,’ said Trish to Poppy, ‘and you’ll never guess where the gamekeeper put the daisies.’

My heart was in my throat. It pushed the words out from where they usually hid. ‘My dad hit me last night.’

There. Now I had their attention.

For the rest of the day, Trish couldn’t leave the subject alone. ‘How often does he hit you?’

‘Not often.’

We were on our way to the science labs for double biology. Rumour had it the rabbit’s reproductive system was the only spark of sauciness we were going to get this term; we would now move on to the sheep’s lung. Poppy had talked to one of the girls in the year above, who warned her that the specimen was none too well preserved.

‘Exactly how many times not often?’ Trish persisted. Our shoes squeaked on the polished floor as we turned the corner towards the stairs. Two pairs of shoes: the third pair, Poppy’s, was a way down the corridor, trying to catch up.

‘Maybe … once every three or four weeks.’

‘The last time Dad hit me I was seven and I’d stolen from Mummy’s purse. He spanked my hand with a ruler.’

‘Daddy’s never hit me,’ chirped Poppy, breathlessly, from behind, having run most of the way down the corridor, at risk of detention. Trish ignored her.

‘I mean, it’s not like you’d done anything wrong.’

‘It’s when something happens to upset him,’ I explained. ‘He just gets mad and flips. Then it’s OK again. He doesn’t really mean it.’

Trish chewed her lip. ‘But how did we upset him? We weren’t doing anything.’

No, unless you counted spying on the house across the road through binoculars in the hope of seeing Gary Bennett’s willy.

‘He doesn’t like anyone going into that room.’

‘But it’s your spare room. It’s not like he sleeps in there.’

‘No.’ I couldn’t explain. Trish’s family was easy and friendly. They were in and out of each other’s rooms whenever they felt like it.

We started climbing the stairs, Poppy panting behind us. She stumbled as we went round the turn and dropped her books, but Trish didn’t stop to help her pick them up.

‘It’s an awful bruise.’

‘It’s not much.’ My legs ached with going so fast up the stairs. I regretted telling them now.

‘He could have fractured your skull.’

‘It wasn’t that hard.’

We reached the biology lab. I sighed with relief.

Half-way through biology, Miss Millichip divided us into pairs to do an experiment on breathing. The sheep’s lung had yet to make an appearance, although there was a whiff of something clinging to Miss Millichip’s lab coat that suggested it wasn’t far away. I hated doing experiments in pairs, because there was always a chance Poppy would beat me to it and team up with Trish, and I would be left on my own. But I needn’t have worried. Trish swiftly claimed me.

‘So what’s the worst thing he did to you?’

‘Really, not much more than the odd bruise. Honestly. Blow into this.’

Trish blew a long puff of air into the bell jar. ‘What are we supposed to do with this now? Hasn’t he ever hit you where it shows?’

‘We have to measure how far the water level’s dropped. Once he did knock my shoulder out. But he did medical training in his national service and he knew how to put it back into its socket.’

‘One point four inches. Did it hurt?’

I winced. ‘Like … hell.’ The words felt strange in my mouth. I couldn’t really remember how it had felt.

‘You ought to tell someone.’

‘No.’

Trish shrugged. ‘Well, it’s your fault, then, if it keeps on happening. Your turn to blow.’

I blew into the flask as hard as if I wanted to burst it.

Miss Millichip wore a gold cross round her neck, and what Mrs Owen would have called ‘sensible’ skirts with concertina pleats. You could see them peeping out under her white lab coat. When we had finished the breathing experiment, she called us to gather round the big desk at the front.

Trish elbowed her way into the front row. I followed, then wished I hadn’t. On the desk lay something pinkish-grey, wrinkled like hands that have been in water too long, a pouch with a macaroni tube poking out of one end. It smelt foul, coppery, sickly. No, more than sickly–dead, and for a long time too.

Miss Millichip pointed to the diagram behind her on the blackboard. She could draw beautifully, and she’d chalked a picture of the lungs in three different colours, labelled with neat capitals.

‘As you can see, this is one of a pair. The tube at the top–what’s it called, Trish Klein?’

Trish squinted at the blackboard. ‘The bronch… bronchius?’

‘Hard ch. Like a k. Bron-kus. No i. The bronchus here …’ Miss Millichip poked the floppy macaroni with a blunt, unvarnished fingernail ‘… is one of a pair of tubes leading from the windpipe into the top of the lungs. When the diaphragm–where’s your diaphragm, Pauline Jagger?’ Pauline pointed vaguely to her abdomen. ‘Not bad, but up a bit. Here …’ Miss Millichip poked Pauline with the same finger she’d used on the macaroni tube. ‘When the diaphragm flattens out, it creates a space for the lungs to expand and air is pulled down the bronchus, inflating the lung–so …’ She inserted a bright yellow drinking straw into the macaroni tube, then bent forward and blew hard down it. The wrinkled grey pouch filled like a sad old balloon. A fetid smell, ammoniac and somehow familiar, wafted across the desk. It suddenly seemed very warm in the room. There were beads of sweat behind my ears.

‘The oxygen molecules pass through the walls of the tiny tubes inside the lungs–the what, Katie Carter?’

‘Bronchioles, Miss Millichip.’ My voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far outside me.

‘– and into the bloodstream, where they are exchanged for carbon dioxide, which passes back through into the bronchioles. The abdominal muscles contract to push the diaphragm back into a dome shape, the intercostal muscles collapse the ribcage, and the air is pushed out of the lungs–so!’ She pressed down with the heel of her hand on the horrid smelly thing and a puff of foul air shot out of the macaroni tube straight into my nostrils. Sweat burst out of every pore and someone sprinkled black confetti in front of my eyes.

I came to on the floor. Miss Millichip was fanning my face with a set of notes about the eyeball–I could see something like a small fat pink squid flashing backwards and forwards–while the rest of the class clustered behind her, staring at me open-mouthed. They all looked disappointed that I’d regained consciousness.

‘Groo,’ I said, or something like it. My tongue seemed to have got stuck to my bottom teeth.

Miss Millichip’s face was very red, and radiating alarm. ‘Bryony, would you go and fetch the nurse? How are you feeling, dear?’

‘Unk. Ouughar. Arghright.’ I tried to sit up.

‘Lie back, dear. The nurse is coming. You fainted. Best be still for a bit.’ She drew a hand tenderly across my forehead. My hair flopped back off the side of my face. ‘That’s a nasty bruise. How on earth did you get it?’

The nurse was concerned about the bruise too. She thought it might have had some connection with me fainting.

‘No. I must have done it when I went down. Hit my head on something, I expect.’

‘Don’t be silly. A bruise doesn’t come out that quickly.’

‘Well, maybe it happened when I bumped my head in the bath last night. I was rinsing my hair underwater and when I came up I banged against the hot tap. I didn’t know it had bruised, though. Is it really bad?’ I opened my eyes as wide as I could. ‘Have you got a mirror? Can I look?’

She was almost convinced. ‘I think we should get you X-rayed.’

‘Oh, no. Feel. It’s fine. No hole in the head.’

‘You might have concussion.’

‘Honestly. I’d know. I’m fine.’

‘Have you got a headache? Did you have one last night or earlier today?’

‘Absolutely nothing. But …’ I allowed myself to look guilty ‘… I didn’t have any lunch today. It was stew, and I hate that. And I’ve got my period.’

‘Ah.’ The nurse thought for a bit. I could tell she didn’t much want to take me down to the hospital on the other side of town. She stared hard into my eyes. I stared back, praying they weren’t crossing.

‘OK, then. But I’m going to drive you home, and have a word with your mum. If you feel dizzy again she’s to take you straight to Casualty.’

‘There’s just my dad. He wouldn’t want you to worry. I can walk home on my own, really.’

But I wasn’t going to get away with that. The nurse bundled me into her Morris Minor and drove me down the hill. Of course my father wasn’t going to be in. He wouldn’t be back for ages, but I didn’t tell her that. I said I’d go straight round to Mrs Owen’s as soon as I’d unloaded my books and made myself a jam sandwich, and I promised faithfully I’d pass on the message to my dad about taking me to Casualty if I had another dizzy turn.

She drove away up the hill, probably glad to get the weekend started early. I watched her go, then went into the house. Jesus looked down at me with his big, sad eyes from the living-room wall. Now he was unhappy I was such a good liar. I hadn’t even started my periods yet.

When my father came home at six o’clock, he brought with him a big brick of Wall’s ice-cream: coffee, my favourite. He pushed it tentatively across the table towards me. Our eyes met.