Читать книгу Girl With Dove - Sally Bayley - Страница 15

7

Poor Sue

They were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main subject discussed.

(Jane Eyre)

If you listen carefully, you can work out things that adults don’t tell you. You can hear small scraps, words floating through windows on a hazy summer day. If you sit outside the kitchen window downstairs you can hear Mum and Maze whispering. You can hear bits and pieces of Poor Sue coming your way on the breeze.

Poor Sue was married to a man. His name was David, like my brother. Sue and David were married for a while and then something interrupted it, the being married I mean. I strain my ears but I can’t tell you any more than that because the wind keeps scooping up the words. The words never get any further than the washing line before the line strangles the words.

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Mum speaks Greek but she doesn’t like me listening because she says it’s personal and private. Greek is a special gift from God. But I don’t see how that can be in our house. Nothing is private here.

Private is for someone with a big house with a wooden gate and crunchy gravel stones. Private is for the people who live on Maltravers Drive. Private is for the girls who go to Rose Mead School in the middle of town. Private is a place with pretty flintstone walls around it to keep out the tramps and alcoholics. We could never ever live anywhere private.

Still, I know there are private things going on all around me, but I don’t know what they are. They aren’t the things people usually mean when they say something is private. ‘Private’ in my house means secrets. ‘Private’ means Poor Sue.

Of all the ghosts, Sue is the one who has survived. After she went missing, people still mentioned her name. Sue’s name never went away, not even after all these years.

‘Gone off the rails,’ said my aunt wearily. ‘She has only herself to blame for the way she went … Sue was a poor little thing … No real guidance, that was her trouble … Married the first man she met. She had nobody to show her a way through.’

Through what, I wondered? Back through the white door upstairs, back to that front room in 1969, the one I see in my dream.

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And the dream is always the same.

It is 1969 and a striking, dark-haired woman sits in the front room of a terraced house marrying herself off to Jesus. Her altarpiece is a brocade-covered television. Her nave is an orange and brown carpet. Across her face a white mantilla veil rises and falls. White lace touches the edge of her tongue. She kisses it softly. She is a young bride marrying her lover. Tonight she will dance with her Lord. Tonight her kingdom will come.

‘Lift your eyes unto the Lord, unto the Lord!’ And the cross-legged people look up towards the ceiling; the cross-legged people lift their hands in prayer.

‘Christ is near, oh Christ is near, Christ, He is near. Oh Christ we hear you, oh Christ you are near. Draw near!’

Her head rocks and her eyes close into tight black buds. Her mouth falls open. What comes out is neither English nor human. It is the sound of women in long-forgotten temples, women with their tongues cut out. It is the sound of madness, of the moon caught between the trees, howling.

The lights go out. A woman screams. Someone tears a nail.

The dark-haired woman begins to rise and fall. Her tongue flicks in and out; her head falls backwards.

Suddenly, hot rocks fly across the room. A window smashes.

‘Gooolagoooolagoooolagah. Gooolagooooolagooooolaha.’ Glass begins to fly.

My aunt has caught the sound of God in the back of her throat and is wailing with all her might.

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But I had started to tell you about Poor Sue. Sue wasn’t exactly real any more because she had disappeared, but once upon a time Sue really was there. She was there in the garden, by the back door; there in the blue and white kitchen drinking tea with the people wearing coloured clothes; the people who sang songs about Zion and Babylon; the people who came in and out through the back door with long hair; the people who lifted their faces up to the Lord. Sue was there too, lifting her hands to the Lord, and it is Sue who reminds me of Jane Eyre, or Jane Eyre who reminds me of Sue, who Charlotte Brontë says is a small brown bird.

Years later, someone told me that Sue had been an orphan too, like Jane. I think it was Someone’s Mother. Sue had no mother, she said, no people of her own, so the people of Babylon, the people I see in my dreams, scooped her up and took her to a tower where they gave her a room overlooking the sea.

Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,

Boils round the naked, melancholy isles

Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge

Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.

(Jane Eyre)

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The first thing I remember about Sue is that she was small and plain. If you say someone is small and plain it probably means you’re not very fond of them. If you say, instead, that someone is slight and shy then you are probably trying to redeem them. Maze says you should always focus on the redeeming features. I wouldn’t say that Sue was small and plain, but someone else might, someone who didn’t like her very much.

Sue wore brown, and brown is hard to hold on to. Brown blurs in with everything else: with the horse chestnut at the bottom of our garden; with the conkers on the ground we gathered up and baked in the oven; with the grass that very hot summer when the water ran out; with the shade of my brother’s skin; with the colour of the picnic blanket my grandmother put down to protect us from the heat; with the back of my grandmother’s hand after she’d been peeling potatoes and digging up the beans. Brown is the colour of small creatures that lie close to the ground. Brown is the colour of worms and small birds.

To say that Sue was small and brown is to say nothing at all. It is to say that she resembled a sparrow, and sparrows are very common.

‘In England, sparrows are the most common form of bird,’ says Maze, who knows everything about birds and beans. Jane Eyre is a sparrow. She is Jane who takes to the air, Jane with no perch, Jane with no family. But once upon a time, Jane Eyre did have family. Jane’s uncle was a nice man called Mr Reed, but unfortunately for Jane he is dead. Only his awful wife remains. Mrs Reed has adopted Jane, but Mrs Reed doesn’t really want her. Jane knows that her aunt hates her and her aunt knows that she knows this, and so it goes on: the hating and the concealing and then the seeing.

‘What would Uncle Reed say to you if he were alive?’ Jane screams at her aunt one morning. But once she’s begun, Jane can’t stop herself. Mrs Reed is furious and lashes out; she boxes Jane’s ears. She can’t believe her insolence!

‘They are not fit to associate with me!’ screams Jane Eyre.

Mrs Reed was rather a stout woman; but on hearing this strange and audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stairs, swept me like a whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me on the edge of my crib, dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place, or utter one syllable during the remainder of the day … she boxed both my ears, and then left me without a word.

I’m not quite sure what ‘boxing ears’ means, but I think it means slapping someone very hard around the side of the head so that they are knocked unconscious. The white stars soon arrive. An ambulance has to be called.

Mrs Reed locks Jane in the Red Room and leaves her there for days. Her only wish now is to get her out of her sight; and so Jane is sent to Lowood School, where she is starved and beaten and frozen almost to death.