Last Day of Summer
I am twelve and lying near-naked on my belly out on the back lawn in the sun when for the first time I hear her laugh. I don’t know, I don’t move, I just close my eyes. It’s a girl’s laugh, a young woman’s, short and nervous like laughing at nothing funny. I got half my face in the grass I cut an hour before and I can smell the cold soil beneath it. There’s a faint breeze coming off the river, the late afternoon sun stinging my back and that laugh jabbing at me like it’s all one thing, one taste in my head. The laughing stops and all I can hear is the breeze flapping the pages of my comic, Alice crying somewhere upstairs and a kind of summer heaviness all over the garden. Then I hear them walking across the lawn towards me and I sit up so quickly it makes me dizzy, and the colours have gone out of everything. And there’s this fat woman, or girl, walking towards me with my brother. She’s so fat her arms can’t hang right from her shoulders. She’s got rubber tyres round her neck. They’re both looking at me and talking about me, and when they get really close I stand up and she shakes my hand and still looking right at me she makes a kind of yelping noise like a polite horse. It’s the noise I heard just now, her laugh. Her hand is hot and wet and pink like a sponge, with dimples at the base of each finger. My brother introduces her as Jenny. She’s going to take the attic bedroom. She’s got a very large face, round like a red moon, and thick glasses which make her eyes as big as golf balls. When she lets go of my hand I can’t think of one thing to say. But my brother Peter talks on and on, he tells her what vegetables we are growing and what flowers, he makes her stand where she can get a view of the river between the trees and then he leads her back to the house. My brother is exactly twice my age and he’s good at that sort of thing, just talking.
Jenny takes the attic. I’ve been up there a few times looking for things in the old boxes, or watching the river out of the small window. There’s nothing much in the boxes really, just cloth scraps and dressmaking patterns. Perhaps some of them actually belonged to my mother. In one corner there’s a pile of picture frames without pictures. Once I was up there because it was raining outside, and downstairs there was a row going on between Peter and some of the others. I helped José clear out the place ready for a bedroom. José used to be Kate’s boyfriend and then last spring he moved his things out of Kate’s bedroom and moved into the spare room next to mine. We carried the boxes and frames to the garage, we stained the wooden floor black and put down rugs. We took apart the extra bed in my room and carried it up. With that, a table and a chair, a small cupboard and the sloping ceiling, there is just room for two people standing up. All Jenny has for luggage is a small suitcase and a carrier bag. I take them up to her room for her and she follows, breathing harder and harder and stopping half way up the third set of stairs to get a rest. My brother Peter comes up behind and we squeeze in as if we are all going to be living there and we’re seeing it for the first time. I point out the window for her so she can see the river. Jenny sits with her big elbows on the table. Sometimes she dabs at her damp red face with a large white handkerchief while she’s listening to some story of Peter’s. I’m sitting on the bed behind her looking at how immense her back is, and under her chair I can see her thick pink legs, how they taper away and squeeze into tiny shoes at the bottom. Everywhere she’s pink. The smell of her sweat fills the room. It smells like the new cut grass outside, and I get this idea that I mustn’t breathe it in too deeply or I’ll get fat too. We stand up to go so she can get on with her unpacking and she’s saying thank you for everything, and as I go through the door she makes her little yelp, her nervous laugh. Without meaning to I glance back at her through the doorway and she’s looking right at me with her magnified golf-balls eyes.
‘You don’t say much, do you?’ she says. Which sort of makes it even harder to think of something to say. So I just smile at her and carry on down the stairs.
Downstairs it’s my turn to help Kate cook the supper. Kate is tall and slim and sad. Really the opposite of Jenny. When I have girl friends I’m going to have them like Kate. She’s very pale, though, even at this time in the summer. She has strange-coloured hair. Once I heard Sam say it was the colour of a brown envelope. Sam is one of Peter’s friends who also lives here and who wanted to move his things into Kate’s bedroom when José moved his out. But Kate is sort of haughty and she doesn’t like Sam because he’s too noisy. If Sam moved into Kate’s room he’d always be waking up Alice, Kate’s little girl. When Kate and José are in the same room I always watch them to see if they ever look at each other, and they never do. Last April I went into Kate’s room one afternoon to borrow something and she and José were in bed asleep. José’s parents come from Spain and his skin is very dark. Kate was lying on her back with one arm stretched out, and José was lying on her arm, snuggling up to her side. They didn’t have pyjamas on, and the sheet came up to their waists. They were so black and so white. I stood at the foot of the bed a long time, watching them. It was like some secret I’d found out. Then Kate opened her eyes and saw me there and told me very softly to get out. It seems pretty strange to me that they were lying there like that and now they don’t even look at each other. That wouldn’t happen with me if I was lying on some girl’s arm. Kate doesn’t like cooking. She has to spend a lot of time making sure Alice doesn’t put knives in her mouth or pull boiling pots off the stove. Kate prefers dressing-up and going out, or talking for hours on the telephone, which is what I would rather do if I was a girl. Once she stayed out late and my brother Peter had to put Alice to bed. Kate always looks sad when she speaks to Alice, when she’s telling her what to do she speaks very softly as if she doesn’t really want to be speaking to Alice at all. And it’s the same when she talks to me, as if it’s not really talking at all. When she sees my back in the kitchen she takes me through to the downstairs bathroom and dabs calamine lotion over me with a piece of cotton wool. I can see her in the mirror, she doesn’t seem to have any particular expression on her face. She makes a sound between her teeth, half a whistle and half a sigh, and when she wants a different part of my back towards the light she pushes or pulls me about by my arm. She asks me quickly and quietly what the girl upstairs is like, and when I tell her, ‘She’s very fat and she’s got a funny laugh,’ she doesn’t make any reply. I cut up vegetables for Kate and lay the table. Then I walk down to the river to look at my boat. I bought it with some money I got when my parents died. By the time I get to the jetty it’s past sunset and the river is black with scraps of red like the cloth scraps that used to be in the attic. Tonight the river is slow and the air is warm and smooth. I don’t untie the boat, my back is too sore from the sun to row. Instead I climb in and sit with the quiet rise and fall of the river, watching the red cloth sink in the black water and wondering if I breathed in too much of Jenny’s smell.
When I get back they are about to start eating. Jenny is sitting next to Peter and when I come in she doesn’t look up from her plate, even when I sit down on the other side of her. She’s so big beside me, and yet so bowed down over her plate, looking as if she doesn’t really want to exist, that I feel sorry for her in a way and I want to speak to her. But I can’t think of anything to say. In fact no one has anything to say this meal, they’re all just pushing their knives and forks backwards and forwards over their plates, and now and then someone murmurs for something to be passed. It doesn’t usually happen like this when we’re eating, there’s usually something going on. But Jenny’s here, more silent than any of us, and bigger, too, and not looking up from her plate. Sam clears his throat and looks down our end of the table at Jenny, and everyone else looks up too, except for her, waiting for something. Sam clears his throat again and says,
‘Where were you living before, Jenny?’ Because no one’s been speaking it comes out flat, as if Sam’s in an office filling in a form for her. And Jenny, still looking down at her plate, says,
‘Manchester.’ Then she looks at Sam. ‘In a flat.’ And she gives a little yelp of a
laugh, probably because we’re all listening and looking at her, and then she sinks back into her plate while Sam’s saying something like, ‘Ah, I see,’ and thinking of the next thing to say. Upstairs, Alice starts crying so Kate goes and brings her down and lets her sit on her lap. When she stops crying she points at each one of us in turn and shouts, ‘UH, UH, UH,’ and so on right round the table while we all sit there eating and not speaking. It’s like she’s telling us off for not thinking of things to say. Kate tells her to be quiet in the sad way she always has when she’s with Alice. Sometimes I think she’s like that because Alice doesn’t have a father. She doesn’t look at all like Kate, she has very fair hair and ears that are too large for her head. A year or two ago when Alice was very little I used to think that José was her father. But his hair is black, and he never pays much attention to Alice. When everybody’s finished the first course and I’m helping Kate collect the dishes, Jenny offers to have Alice on her lap. Alice is still shouting and pointing at different things in the room, but once she’s on Jenny’s lap she goes very quiet. Probably because it’s the biggest lap she’s ever seen. Kate and I bring in fruit and tea, and when we are peeling oranges and bananas, eating the apples from our tree in the garden, pouring tea and passing cups with milk and sugar round, everyone starts talking and laughing like they usually do, like there never was anything holding them back. And Jenny is giving Alice a really good time on her lap, making her knees gallop like a horse, making her hand swoop down like a bird on to Alice’s belly, showing her tricks with her fingers, so that all the time Alice is shouting for more. It’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh like that. And then Jenny glances down the table at Kate who’s been watching them play with the same kind of look she might have on her face if she was watching the telly. Jenny carries Alice to her mother like she’s suddenly feeling guilty about having Alice on her lap for such a long time and having so much fun. Alice is shouting, ‘More, more, more,’ when she’s back at the other end of the table, and she’s still shouting it five minutes later when her mother carries her up to bed.
Because my brother asks me to, I take coffee up to Jenny’s room early next morning. When I go in she’s already up, sitting at her table putting stamps on letters. She looks smaller than she did last night. She has her window wide open and her room is full of morning air, it feels like she’s been up for a long time. Out of her window I can see the river stretching between the trees, light and quiet in the sun. I want to get outside, I want to see my boat before breakfast. But Jenny wants to talk. She makes me sit on her bed and tell her about myself. She doesn’t ask me any questions and since I’m not sure how to start off telling someone about myself I sit there and watch while she writes addresses on her letters and sips her coffee. But I don’t mind, it’s all right in Jenny’s room. She’s put two pictures on the wall. One is a framed photograph taken in a zoo of a monkey walking upside down along a branch with its baby hanging on to its stomach. You can tell it is a zoo because in the bottom corner there’s a zoo-keeper’s cap and part of his face. The other is a colour picture taken out of a magazine of two children running along the sea shore holding hands. The sun is setting and everything in the picture is deep red, even the children. It’s a very good picture. She finishes with her letters and asks me where I go to school. I tell her about the new school I’m going to when the holidays are over, the big comprehensive in Reading. But I haven’t been there yet, so there isn’t much I can tell her about it. She sees me looking out the window again.
‘Are you going down to the river?’
‘Yes, I have to see my boat.’
‘Can I come with you? Will you show me the river?’ I wait for her by the door, watching her squeeze her round, pink feet into small, flat shoes and brush her very short hair with a brush which has a mirror on the back. We walk across the lawn to the kissing gate at the bottom of the garden and along the path through the high ferns. Half way down I stop to listen to a yellow-hammer, and she tells me that she doesn’t know the song of one bird. Most grown-up people will never tell you that they don’t know things. So farther on down the path just before it opens out on to the jetty we stop under an old oak tree so she can hear a blackbird. I know there’s one up there, it’s always up there singing this time in the morning. Just as we get there it stops and we have to wait quietly for it to begin again. Standing by that half-dead old trunk I can hear other birds in other trees and the river just round the corner washing under the jetty. But our bird is taking a rest. Something about waiting in silence makes Jenny nervous and she pinches her nose tight to stop her yelp of a laugh getting out. I want her to hear the blackbird so much I put my hand on her arm, and when I do that she takes her hand away from her nose and smiles. Just a few seconds after that the blackbird sets out on its long complicated song. It was waiting all the time for us to get settled. We walk out on to the jetty and I show her my boat tied up at the end. It’s a rowing boat, green on the outside and red on the inside like a fruit. I’ve been down here every day all this summer to row it, paint it, wipe it down, and sometimes just to look at it. Once I rowed it seven miles upstream and spent the rest of the day drifting back down. We sit on the edge of the jetty looking at my boat, the river and the trees on the other side. Then Jenny looks downstream and says,
‘London’s down there.’ London is a terrible secret I try to keep from the river. It doesn’t know about it yet while it’s flowing past our house. So I just nod and say nothing. Jenny asks me if she can sit in the boat. It worries me at first that she’s going to be too heavy. But of course I cannot tell her that. I lean over the jetty and hold the painter rope for her to climb in. She does it with a lot of grunting and rocking around. And since the boat doesn’t look any lower now than it usually does, I get in too and we watch the river from this new level where you can see how strong and old it really is. We sit talking for a long time. First I tell her about how my parents died two years ago in a car crash and how my brother had ideas for turning the house into a kind of commune. At first he was going to have over twenty people living here. But now I think he wants to keep it down to about eight. Then Jenny tells me about the time she was a teacher in a big school in Manchester where all the children were always laughing at her because she was fat. She doesn’t seem to mind talking about it, though. She has some funny stories of her time there. When she’s telling me of the time when the children locked her in a book cupboard we both laugh so much the boat rocks from side to side and pushes small waves out into the river. This time Jenny’s laugh is easy and kind of rhythmic, not hard and yelping like before. On the way back she recognizes two blackbirds by their songs, and when we’re crossing the lawn she points out another. I just nod. It’s a song-thrush really, but I’m too hungry to tell her the difference.
Three days later I hear Jenny singing. I’m in the back yard trying to put together a bicycle out of bits and pieces and I hear her through the open kitchen window. She’s in there cooking lunch and looking after Alice while Kate visits friends. It’s a song she doesn’t know the words for, half way between happy and sad, and she’s singing like an old croaky Negress to Alice. New morning man la-la, la-la-la-, l’la, new morning man la-la-la, la-la, l’la, new morning man take me ‘way from here. That afternoon I row her out on the river and she has another song with the same kind of tune, but this time with no words at all. Ya-la-la, ya-laaa, ya-eeeee. She spreads her hands out and rolls her big magnified eyes around like it’s a serenade especially for me. A week later Jenny’s songs are all over the house, sometimes with a line or two if she can remember it, most often with no words at all. She spends a lot of her time in the kitchen and that’s where she does most of her singing. Somehow she makes more space in there. She scrapes paint off the north window to let in more light. No one can think why it was painted over in the first place. She carries out an old table, and when it’s out everyone realizes that it was always in the way. One afternoon she paints the whole of one wall white to make the kitchen look
bigger, and she arranges the pots and plates so that you always know where they are and even I can reach them. She makes it into the kind of kitchen you can sit around in when you’ve got nothing else to do. Jenny makes her own bread and bakes cakes, things we usually go to the shop for. On the third day she’s here I find clean sheets on my bed. She takes the sheets I’ve been using all summer and most of my clothes away for washing. She spends all of one afternoon making a curry, and that night I eat the best meal in two years. When the others tell her how good they think it is Jenny gets nervous and does her yelping laugh. I can see the others are still bothered when she does it, they sort of look away as if it is something disgusting that would be rude to look at. But it doesn’t worry me at all when she does that laugh, I don’t even hear it except when the others are there at the table looking away. Most afternoons we go out on the river together and I try to teach her to row, and listen to her stories of when she was teaching, and when she was working in a supermarket, how she used to watch old people come in each day to shoplift bacon and butter. I teach her some more birdsongs, but the only one she can really remember is the first one, the blackbird. In her room she shows me pictures of her parents and her brother and she says,
‘I’m the only fat one.’ I show her some pictures of my parents, too. One of them was taken a month before they died, and in it they are walking down some steps holding hands and laughing at something outside the picture. They were laughing at my brother who was fooling around to make them laugh for the picture I was taking. I had just got the camera for my tenth birthday and that was one of the first pictures I took with it. Jenny looks at it for a long time and says something about her looking like a very nice woman, and suddenly I see my mother as just a woman in a picture, it could be any woman, and for the first time she’s far off, not in my head looking out, but outside my head being looked at by me, Jenny or anyone who picks up the photo. Jenny takes it out of my hand and puts it away with the others in the shoe box. As we go downstairs she starts off on a long story about a friend of hers who was producing a play which ended strangely and quietly. The friend wanted Jenny to start off the clapping at the end but Jenny got it all wrong somehow and started everyone clapping fifteen minutes before the end during a quiet bit so that the last part of the play was lost and the clapping was all the louder because no one knew what the play was about. All this, I suppose, is to make me stop thinking about my mother, which it does.