How to Build a Girl

  ‘I don’t deal with bullshitters, kidder,’ my father said, authoritatively, pulling the dressing gown over his balls, and taking another drag on his cigarette.

  We find out later – through Uncle Aled, who knows a man who knows a man – that Rock Perry is, indeed, a man called Ian, who is not a record company talent scout at all, but in fact a cutlery salesman, from Sheffield, and the only ‘deal’ he would ever be able to sort out for us is an eighty-eight-piece canteen of electroplated cutlery, £59, with an APR of 14.5 per cent.

  And so that’s why I’m lying in bed, next to Lupin, having this tiny, quiet wank. Half from stress, half from pleasure. For I am, as I have recorded in my diary, ‘a hopeless romantic’. If I can’t go on a date with a boy – I am fourteen, I have never gone on a date with a boy – then at least I can go on a date with me. A bed-date, ie: a wank.

  I come – thinking of the character Herbert Viola in Moonlighting, who I think has a kind face – pull my nightie back down, kiss the sleeping Lupin, and go to sleep.

  TWO

  Thursday. I wake up to find Lupin’s huge, blue eyes staring at me. Lupin’s eyes are massive. They take up half the room. When I love him, I tell him that his eyes are like two blue planets spinning in the galaxy of his skull, and that I can see satellites, and rockets, sailing past his pupils.

  ‘There’s one! And another one! I can see Neil Armstrong! He’s carrying a flag! God bless America!’

  When I hate him, I tell him he has a thyroid condition, and looks like a mad frog.

  Because Lupin is quite nervy, we spend a lot of time together. He has bad dreams, and he often leaves the bunk bed he shares with Krissi to come into my bed, because I have a double bed now. The circumstances of me getting a big divan were mixed, emotionally.

  ‘Your nan’s dead – and you’re getting her bed,’ Dad had said, last April.

  ‘Nan’s dead!’ I wailed. ‘Nan’s DEAD!’

  ‘Yeah – but you’re getting her bed,’ Dad said again, patiently.

  There is a huge dent in the middle of the mattress, where Nan lay and, latterly, died.

  ‘We lie in the shallow depression her ghost left behind,’ I sometimes think, in my more maudlin moments. ‘I am born into a nest of death.’

  I read a lot of nineteenth-century literature. I once asked my mother what my trousseau would be, upon someone taking my hand in marriage. She laughed hysterically.

  ‘There’s a pair of curtains in a bin bag in the loft you’re welcome to,’ she said, wiping the tears from her eyes.

  But that was when I was younger. I wouldn’t do that now. I’m more aware of our financial ‘situation’.

  Me and Lupin go downstairs, in our pyjamas. It’s 11am and a day off from school. Krissi is already up. He’s watching The Sound of Music. Liesl is in the thunderstorm, getting it on with Rolf, the Nazi post-boy.

  I feel a bit restless, so I stand in front of the television for a minute, blocking his view.

  ‘Get out of the way, Johanna. MOVE IT!’

  This is Krissi. I want to describe Krissi, because he is my big brother, and my favourite person in the world.

  Unfortunately, I think I am his least-favourite person – our relationship often reminds me of a birthday card I once saw that showed a big St Bernard with its paw on the face of a small, yappy puppy, with the caption, ‘Out of my way, small fry.’

  Krissi is a big dog. At fifteen, he’s already six foot: a massive, soft tank of a boy, with big, soft hands, and an incongruous blond afro that always gets commented on at family gatherings.

  ‘Oh here he comes – “little” Michael Jackson!’ Aunty Lauren will say, as Krissi comes into the room – hunched over, trying to make himself look smaller.

  Neither Krissi’s personality nor features suit being a six-foot boy. He’s pale, with pale blue eyes and pale hair – taking after my mother, he barely has any pigment at all. His mouth and nose are very delicate – like that of silent movie siren Clara Bow. I once tried to open this topic up for debate with Krissi, but it garnered very bad results.

  ‘It’s funny, because you’ve got a big old face – but then a really bitchy-looking nose and mouth,’ I told him. I thought these were the kind of conversations we could have.

  But it turned out that this was the kind of conversation we could not have. He said, ‘Get bent, Grotbags,’ and left the room.

  Not knowing what kind of conversation we can have is one of the reasons I am Krissi’s least-favourite person. I am always saying the wrong thing to him. Mind you, to be fair, Krissi just doesn’t like people, full stop. At school, he has no friends – his soft hands, freaky hair and sheer size, plus a visceral hatred of sport, mean that David Phelps and Robbie Knowsley often snare him around the back of the big bins, like two terriers hassling a moose, and call him ‘gaylord’.

  ‘But you’re not a gaylord!’ I would say, indignantly, when Krissi told me this. Krissi would look at me, oddly. Krissi looks at me oddly a lot.

  Right now, he’s looking at me oddly whilst throwing a baby doll at me, which strikes me in the face, with quite some force. For a boy who hates all sports – preferring, instead, to read George Orwell – he has quite the bowling arm. I clutch my face – then lie on the floor, and pretend to be dead.

  I used to pretend to be dead a lot, when I was younger – ten, or eleven. I don’t do it so much now. This is because 1) I am becoming more mature. And 2) fewer and fewer people are believing I am dead any more.

  The last time it actually worked. I lay at the bottom of the stairs pretending I’d fallen down and broken my neck, and my mum found me and absolutely freaked out.

  ‘PAT!’ she wailed – the note high and full of fear. The fear made me happy, and calm. Even when my dad looked at me and went, ‘She’s smirking, Angie. Corpses don’t smirk. Fuck knows I’ve seen enough to know. Corpses are terrifying. I’ve seen dead men that would freeze your innards so badly, you’d shit snow.’

  I liked them both looking at me, and talking about me. It made me feel safe. I was just checking they loved me.

  Today, Mum does not sound concerned when she finds me on the floor, pretending to be dead.

  ‘Johanna, you’re raising my blood pressure. GET UP.’

  I open one eye.

  ‘Stop being such a prat and make Lupin’s breakfast,’ she says, leaving the room. The twins are crying.

  I reluctantly stand up. Lupin still gets a bit scared when I pretend to die. He is on the sofa, wide-eyed.

  ‘Jojo got better,’ I say to him, bravely, going over and getting hugs. I put Lupin on my knee and he clings to me, slightly traumatised. It’s a good, tight hug. The more scared children are, the tighter they hug you.

  After my restorative hug, I go to the kitchen, get the massive box of Rice Pops, the four-litre carton of milk, the sugar bag, three bowls and three spoons, and bring them back into the front room – milk awkwardly under my arm.

  I lay all the bowls out on the floor, in a row, and slop out cereal and milk. Behind me, on the TV, Maria is towelling down sexy wet Liesl.

  ‘Feeding TIME!’ I shout, cheerfully.

  ‘Move yer HEAD,’ Krissi says, gesturing wildly for me to move out of the way of the television.

  Lupin is methodically putting spoon after spoon of sugar on his cereal. When the bowl is full of sugar, he keels over sideways, and pretends to be dead.

  ‘I’m dead!’ he says.

  ‘Don’t be a such a prat,’ I say, briskly. ‘Eat yer breakfast.’

  Twenty minutes later, I was bored of The Sound of Music. The bit after Maria and the Captain get married goes on a bit, although I could relate to it on some levels: for instance, coming from a similarly large family, I totally appreciated that it took the driving force of an impending Nazi anschluss for Maria to get all those kids’ shoes on, then go for a walk up a mountain.

  I went into the kitchen and started preparing dinner instead. Today it was shepherd’s pie. This would require a huge pan of potatoes. We ate a
lot of potatoes. We were basically potatarian.

  The old man was sitting on the back doorstep, with his hangover, in my pink dressing gown that showed his knackers. Of course he had a hangover. Last night, he’d drunk enough to steal a concrete fox.

  When he’d finished his cigarette on the back step, he came into the house – cock and balls still hanging out of the dressing gown.

  ‘Pat mit coffee,’ he said, making a gummy Nescafé. Sometimes he spoke in German. His old band had toured there in the 1960s – the stories he told always petered out with ‘… and then we met some, er, nice ladies, who were very friendly,’ and my mother would look at him with an odd expression that was half-disapproving, and half, I realised much later, turned on.

  ‘Angie!’ he yelled. ‘Where are my trousers?’

  My mother shouted from the bedroom: ‘You haven’t got any!’

  ‘I must have!’ my father shouted back.

  My mother stayed silent. He was going to have to work this one out for himself.

  I carried on peeling potatoes. I love this peeling knife. It fits so snugly in my hand. Together, we must have peeled tonnes of potatoes. We are a good team. It is my Excalibur.

  ‘It’s a big day today. I’ve got to have trousers,’ the old man said, sipping his coffee. ‘I’m re-auditioning for the role of “Pat Morrigan, Abject Cripple”. My greatest part.’

  He put his coffee down, and started practising his limp across the kitchen.

  ‘What do you think of that one?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s great limping, Dad!’ I said, loyally.

  He tried another limp – dragging his foot a bit behind him.

  ‘That’s my Richard III,’ he said.

  He carried on doing his Practise Limp.

  ‘I think your trousers are in the wash,’ I said.

  ‘Should I do some sound effects?’ he asked. ‘Some of my best groaning?’

  My dad loved the theatre of a medical assessment. The yearly appointment was a real treat for him.

  ‘I was thinking of working in some back pain, too,’ he said, conversationally. ‘My back would be gone by now if I’d been limping like that for twenty years. Just the start of a hunch. Nothing too dramatic.’

  The front doorbell rang.

  ‘That’ll be my nurse!’ Mum called, from upstairs.

  Three weeks ago, Mum had the Unexpected Twins. All autumn, she’d complained about getting fat, and stepped up her already demented running regime – going from five miles a day, to seven, then up to ten. Through slanting sleet she pounded the streets around our estate – a tall, white ghost, as pale as Krissi, with an oddly bloated belly that would not diminish, however fast she ran.

  Then, at Christmas, she’d found she was pregnant with twins – ‘Santa’s got a fucking rich sense of humour,’ she said, coming back from the family planning clinic on Christmas Eve. She spent the rest of the evening lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Her sighs were so hard, and despairing, that they made the tinsel on the Christmas tree shimmer.

  Currently, she has post-natal depression – but we don’t know this yet. Dadda keeps blaming her ‘moodiness’ on her distant Hebridean ancestors – ‘It’s your puffin-strangling DNA, love. They all veer towards suicide – no offence’ – which makes her, obviously, even more moody.

  All we know is that, two days ago, when she found out we’d run out of cheese, she cried for an hour, onto one of the twins.

  ‘That’s not how you wet the baby’s head!’ Dad had tried to jolly her along.

  When she carried on crying, he went to the corner-shop and bought her a whole box of Milk Tray, and wrote ‘I LOVE YOU’ on the bit where it’s a pretend gift tag that says ‘From’ and ‘To’, and she ate all of them whilst sniffing, and watching Dynasty.

  Before Mum had the Unexpected Twins, she was a very jolly mother – she used to make big pans of soup, and play Monopoly, and have three drinks and put her hair up in two buns and pretend to be Princess Leia in Star Wars (‘Get me another drink, Pat. You’re my only hope.’)

  But since she had the twins her mouth is always in a thin line, and her hair is unbrushed, and the only things she says are either very sarcastic, or the sentence, ‘I’m so tired.’ That’s why the Unexpected Twins don’t have names yet. That’s why Lupin cries a lot, and why I spend a lot of the time I should be spending reading nineteenth-century novels, or masturbating, peeling potatoes, instead. Just now we don’t have a mother. Just a space where one once was.

  ‘I’m too tired to think of people’s names,’ she says, every time we ask her what she’s going to name the twins. ‘I made them. Isn’t that enough?’

  In the interim, me and Krissi and Lupin have started calling the twins ‘David’ and ‘Mavid’.

  ‘Let’s put these knackers away,’ Dad said, now, pulling his dressing gown around him, and avoiding the front door. ‘I don’t want a free ball inspection.’

  One of the twins – Mavid – was crying in the double-buggy in the hall. I picked him up on the way to the front door.

  The health visitor was standing on the front doorstep. She was a new one. Mavid continued wailing. I jiggled him a bit.

  ‘It’s all go around here!’ I said, cheerfully.

  ‘Good morning,’ the health visitor said.

  ‘Would you like to come into the front room?’ I asked, mindful of my manners. I am going to show her these babies are looked after, by the whole family – even though their mother is just currently a ghost.

  We entered the front room – Lupin and Krissi’s blue eyes looked up, resentfully, at the intruder. Krissi held up the remote, and made a great play of effortfully pressing ‘Pause’. The Von Trapps’ Edelweiss stopped mid ‘Bloom and grow’.

  After a small, resentful pause, Krissi and Lupin sighingly shuffled up on the sofa, and the midwife sat in the space, smoothing her skirt over her knees.

  ‘And so – how is Mummy?’ she asked.

  ‘Okay … physically,’ I replied. Mum did seem to be okay. Apart from her blood pressure. But that had been my fault, for pretending to be dead. So I wasn’t going to mention that.

  ‘Babies sleeping okay?’

  ‘Yeah. They wake up a couple of times in the night, but, you know. That is the ineffable nature of the young!’ I said. This woman was bound to be impressed by what an engaged big sister I was. Also, my vocabulary.

  ‘And is Mummy sleeping well?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess. Not bad. Up when the babies are up, then back off.’

  ‘And how are … Mummy’s stitches?’

  This, I was slightly thrown by. I knew my mother had had forty-two stitches after the birth, and that she was washing the stitches every day with warm salty water – because she made me go and get the warm salty water – but my mother hadn’t passed on much more information about her vagina than that. I knew from Spiritual Midwifery (Ina May Gaskin, Book Pub. Co., 1977) that post-partum women were often loath to share the details of their births with the virgins of the tribe, so I wasn’t unduly concerned about it. Still, I did have some info, and I was going to share it.

  ‘Washing every day with salty water!’ I said, with the same cheerfulness.

  ‘And are the stitches hurting at all?’ the nurse persisted. ‘Bleeding, or weeping?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Would Mummy prefer not to talk about it in front of the children?’

  We both looked at my siblings, racked along the sofa. Their eyes were round.

  ‘Children, could you give Mummy and the nurse a bit of “private time”, please?’ the midwife said.

  The horror dawned on me like … nuclear.

  ‘Ohmygod this is amazing,’ Krissi said. ‘This is actually a new era.’

  ‘I haven’t had a baby!’ I said, in a panic. Did she think I’d had five children? Oh, this was fucking rich.

  ‘These aren’t my babies!’ I looked down at tiny red-faced Mavid. His fingers were caught up in the incongruous pink cellular blanket wrapped roun
d him.

  ‘Aren’t you Angie Morrigan?’ the nurse asked, looking at her paperwork, panicked.

  ‘No – I am Johanna Morrigan – her fourteen-year-old daughter,’ I said, with as much dignity as I could muster.

  My mother finally appeared in the doorway, walking slightly gingerly from those stitches that she has, in her vagina – and not me, in mine.

  ‘Mrs Morrigan, I’m so sorry – there was a slight misunderstanding,’ the nurse said, standing up, panicked.

  All my siblings were sliding out of the doors, like butter across a hot pan. I handed Mum Mavid – ‘I have taken good care of my infant brother,’ I said, pointedly – and bolted after them.

  We went into the garden, climbed over the broken fence at the bottom, and ran into the field.

  Krissi had been saying ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah’ all the way there. When we sat down, in a circle, hidden in the long grass, he finally ended this with ‘… aaaaaaaaaaah you’re our MUM.’

  They were all howling laughing. Lupin started crying from the noise. I lay face down and shouted, ‘GAH!’

  This is all because I am fat. If you’re going to be a fat teenage girl, it becomes hard for people to guess how old you are. By the time you’re in a 38DD bra, people are just going to presume you’re sexually active, and have been having rough, regular procreative sex with alpha males on some wasteland. Chance would be a fine thing. I haven’t even been kissed yet. I want to be kissed so much. I am angry I haven’t been kissed. I think I would be really good at it. When I start kissing, the world is going to know about it. My kissing is going to change everything. I’m going to be the Beatles of kissing.

  In the meantime, kiss-less, I am now presumed to be the holy virgin mother of five children. I’m actually four better than Mary. Look at me, with all my squabbling Jesuses, laughing at me.

  ‘Mum, can I have NUMMY MILK?’ Lupin is saying, pretending he wants to breastfeed from me. Oh, this would never have happened if I was thin, like my cousin Meg. Meg has been fingered five times. She told me this on the Badger Bus to Brewood. I’m not quite sure what ‘fingered’ is. I’m worried it might happen to your arse. Meg wears dungarees. How would he ever even have got access up there?