‘Must get that fixed,’ she said quite calmly. Her hair was newly set, in stiff, spun rolls. That was the only sign that this was an event. She seemed smaller than I remembered.
If I was younger I’d have flung my arms around her, but I knew by now that she didn’t like that sort of display.
Dad’s voice. ‘How about fetching another cuppa, Heth?’
He took her out later to the pub, which was their only sign that anything unusual had happened. Much later, as I lay in bed, I heard her gasping noises through the wall. I gripped Kanga against my chest; without the bump of Roo, she seemed flabby and in need of holding. I thought I’d forgotten what those noises sounded like, it was so long since I’d heard them. I didn’t want to hear them, of course. I was part of that now.
If you press one ear against the mattress, with its lobe folded over, and press the pillow hard on top, against the other ear which is folded flat, you can block out anything. I’ll show you how; I’m the expert. If you want to make absolutely sure, you hum as well.
Here endeth my childhood. The next term I went to the big school, where they called me Porky. When I had to pass on a book in class they’d wipe their hands with a shudder, as if they knew.
Part Two
Chapter Six
THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. Did you stop being friends with your body then? It’s betrayed you, hasn’t it, sprouting spots and thickening, lumpily, just where you don’t want it to thicken. You don’t notice your body when you’re little: you are it. I remember Gwen aged eleven, prancing around and snorting, tossing her brown pigtails like a pony. She was a pony. To be exact, she corrected me, a palomino stallion called Caspar, that nobody could tame. I wasn’t that keen on ponies myself but I knew what she meant. Your body was what you did things with, what made them possible, like your own soul made elastic. You didn’t think of it as separate, except when you scraped your knee or you had a sneezing fit (I had hay fever, being the pink, allergic type). When I was young, as I said, the only way my body let me down was by blushing. I learnt early that I was a blusher; but that was because I’d learnt so early about guilt.
I looked at my body in the bath. I was thirteen, and inspecting it as if I’d never seen it before. At this time my Mum was working at the airport coffee shop, the late shift, so my Dad and I were alone in the evenings. But he was usually down at the pub, so that was when I had my bath. I’d wedge the chair against the door handle, just in case, and fill the room with steam. The one thing that worked in our house was the geyser. Then I’d lie soaking for an hour. Those days baths were the nearest I came to contentment, in our home. I’d lie there, propped, too sluggish to worry or even to think, feeling the badness soak out of me. ‘Open your pores’, said Woman’s Realm, ‘to “breathe out” the hidden grime.’
Radio Luxembourg would be playing, but not too loud, so I could hear if the porch door slammed. The corroded geyser spout hung above my toes. Through the DJ’s chatter I’d gaze at my reddening thighs, submerged in the water. I knew, by now, that I was overweight. My tummy went into rubbery creases when I sat up, so I’d lie down again. Being fair, my skin was sensitive to heat and cold and turned blotchy with either extreme; my hands went mottled mauve in the winter, and bright pink in the bath. Pale hairs grew down my arms and legs, and there were light brown, coarser hairs between my thighs. My breasts looked fatty, with big, pale nipples. Once, when I lifted up Teddy, he pressed them and sang,
‘Jellies on a plate, jellies on a plate –’
‘Shut up!’ I hissed. My Mum, and, much worse, my Dad, were in the room.
‘Wibble-wobble, wibble-wobble, jellies on a plate!’
But here in the bathroom nobody could see except me. I could look at myself with a horrified interest that dissolved, with the heat, into steamy langour. I carried this body around but it didn’t belong to me any more. I rubbed the mist from the mirror and looked at my spots – not many, just two or three crimson blobs on my chin. I narrowed my eyes and my face went swimmy in the glass. I blinked, and opened my eyes wide, and blinked again, tight, telling myself it was all a dream and next time I opened them my face would change. I wouldn’t be Heather any more.
I willed it. Then I opened them and there I was, large and pink, with the moisture sliding down the mirror like tears.
I suppose all teenagers feel like this, but I didn’t speak to them on the subject. My only friend was Gwen and she did most of the talking. She was the one who told me about my little piggy eyes. I’d developed earlier than her but she was the bossy type; she’d seen me in the cloakroom at school, slipping my package into the bin. I’d hoped nobody had seen, but she grabbed my arm.
‘Porks, you spoilsport! There I was, telling you what my Mum said, about periods,’ she glared at me, ‘and you’d started already!’
I willed someone to come in, so she’d stop. But then, knowing Gwen, she might tell them too.
‘You told your Mum?’ she asked.
I nodded, truthfully, because I was sure Mum knew, though it hadn’t been mentioned. She’d taken me out shopping to buy my two bras, some months before, and had asked me, in the bright embarrassment of the changing room, if they’d told me about feminine hygiene at school. I’d nodded, untruthfully, and that had been that. She must have glimpsed me at home, as furtive as herself, but I knew she wouldn’t let on that she’d seen.
‘You lucky thing!’ breathed Gwen.
I stared at her. ‘What?’
‘Don’t look so superior. Look at little me.’ She turned to the mirror and smoothed her cardigan flat. ‘Not a sausage.’
She started bemoaning her fate then, so I began to relax.
Dad was the one who touched my breasts, not me. I looked at myself for hours in the bath, and sideways, standing on my bed, but I never touched that area except when I adjusted my bra. I knew it was dreadfully wrong to fondle yourself, there or below; I knew this one rule and I kept to it, through all my confusions, because it became so important. It was the one thing I could do – rather, refrain from doing – myself.
This soft, pink body that I had to carry around . . . I didn’t want to admit it was mine, yet it was. And it was the only one I’d ever have. At primary school we’d chanted a rhyme:
It’s a strange, strange thing, as strange as can be,
Everything Miss T eats, it becomes Miss T.
Yet Dad, when he stroked my breasts, he called them ‘bubbies’. They didn’t belong to me, then.
‘How’s them little bubbies?’ he’d murmur in that shaky voice. ‘They’re liking it, see? They’re liking it when I do this . . .’
They weren’t mine. I never called them that; I never ever would. But I’d lock the muscle in my head, and let him. I didn’t stop him . . . I knew I wouldn’t.
Then sometimes when I was alone, sitting in my bra and knickers, I’d wonder if the other girls felt just a bit like I did about my body. The trouble was, I’d gone too far now ever to find out. What I was doing was so deeply wrong that I’d never know; I’d lost track of Gwen and Co. One of the many casualties of all that happened was that I never knew how a teenager was supposed to feel.
But then teenagers were meant to be mixed-up, weren’t they? My magazines said so. Perhaps I was getting confused about something that was quite normal. Looking back to when I was eleven and I’d slept with Dad those nights, I knew I’d felt anxious. But I’d also felt that surely there wasn’t anything to worry about, because he was my Dad and so he must know the right thing to do. If I couldn’t trust him, who on earth could I trust? It was all my fault that I was muddled. And later on, during the next couple of years, when things had become much worse, I still wondered if I wasn’t making a fuss about nothing. I still felt he must know.
By then I’d visited Gwen’s home and seen how different it was to mine – I’ve told you about that, and how upsetting it was. But there were a lot of girls who might not be like Gwen – that was the point of school, wasn’t it, to meet all these different people when you’d
never met any at home? Perhaps at Janet’s place, or Margot’s, I would glimpse some clue that would make me feel better.
But I never did – I looked, all right, you can be sure of that. I never did, and I never knew them well enough to ask.
I said before that realizing something’s wrong doesn’t come at the expected moment – when you’re doing the wrong thing, or even thereabouts. In my experience, anyway, it doesn’t. It happens during some humdrum moment; it might be days or months later. My first inkling had been when I’d lied to the flower-lady; something had shifted inside me, then.
The second stage was more complicated, and gradual. It wasn’t until I was thirteen, and Dad and I had been having sexual intercourse for a year, that I let myself begin to realize what was happening. Pretty stupid, you might think. It may seem odd, not to dare for so many months, but it didn’t seem odd at the time. It seemed the only way I could manage to walk down the drive each morning to catch the bus, and sit just like a normal pupil in class, and mooch around the playground, one of a huddle, just like the others, and help my Mum just like an ordinary daughter without a care on her mind, trotting down to the phone box to call up the electricity, sucking my Biro over the shopping list and even chiding my Dad, oh yes, quite jauntily, when he trod mud across the lounge. And loving Teddy, who kept me sane. Slapping him, and getting maddened, but loving him all the time.
It’s a wonderful object, the mind. What you can stop it doing. For months I did manage to keep myself separate – just – from what was happening. I was still innocent, you see, somewhere deep inside. It wasn’t so bad, in the beginning. During my first year at the big school he sometimes kissed me, in that hot, uncomfortable way, and fondled me as he had in his bed. It didn’t happen often; not even once a week. He didn’t have that many opportunities because those months Mum was working early and she was home by four. And I’d also got to know the signs. I’d be in the hen-house, for instance. The hens were my job. I’d be crouched down, searching for the eggs, when darkness fell. He was behind me, standing in the doorway and blocking the light.
‘What we’d do without our Heth,’ he’d say. ‘You’re a good girl, know that? What would your Dad do without you?’
Then he’d come in, all affectionate.
So I stayed away from the hens. Now I was in the big school, in Class One, I had homework to do, so I stayed indoors in the lounge. Mr Talbot was ever so pleased with my progress. He said,
‘Heather’s an example to you all.’
Another thing I did was to use the toilet at the garage. As I said, our bathroom door didn’t lock. Dad wouldn’t come in, I was nearly sure of that, but I never felt quite safe. I could get down to the petrol station without being seen, by wriggling through the hedge and trotting down the depot road; it ran alongside our drive but it was hidden by the hedge.
The toilets were out of sight of the booth; nobody seemed to use them, and the attendant had to stay at the pumps. A few years later the garage was modernized into a self-serve. This struck me as appropriate; after all, I’d been doing it for years.
Sometimes I’d wander into the forecourt, all insouciante, and look at the bags of sweets on the swivel stands. There was a shop, with plush Snoopies in it and car deodorants on golden chains. The walls were covered with that plastic panelling I told you about, which Dad had nicked for Kanga’s house. The attendant I remember best was the Indian one. He didn’t seem to mind me wandering around; he was just right – not too aloof and not too familiar. In fact, he once gave me a packet of Polos. I felt relaxed at the garage. Nothing was demanded of me. I was reassured by that big public road.
I wasn’t exactly escaping. You must remember that in those days, when I was only twelve, I still loved my Dad and felt I shouldn’t be avoiding him. That’s why I did it on the sly. If he knew, then he might turn cold on me and I couldn’t bear that. I still adored him being pleased with me and taking me on his knee. I kept my wariness well hidden and I soon learned to distinguish the times when this was safe – in company, or when he was being vague and ordinary, sort of breezy and known – and the times when it wasn’t.
I want to get on to when I was thirteen, a teenager. I don’t want to talk about the first time it happened. By it, I mean the sexual intercourse. I want to tell you when I began to change in myself, which was later. Still, if you want to know the facts, it happened first – only partially – when I was twelve, and four more times that year. I don’t want to remember when, or where. If you were a psychiatrist you’d be stopping me here, I bet. You’d be asking me questions and pulling me back. That’s why I refused to see one. With you, it’s easier. If you’re still there, listening, you’ll only hear what I can tell you, and if it’s too painful for me, then I’ll stop.
It wasn’t hard to pretend nothing happened, because half an hour later everything was back to normal, just like that. Another thing I must say: I was never forced to do anything. I didn’t have to be, because he was my Dad.
I do remember the exact moment when I lay soaking in the bath, aged thirteen, and realized how wrong it was. Not just wrong of me – I was used to that feeling – but wrong of him. I’d suspected it, of course, for ages, but I’d never dared admit it. Can you understand why? If you can, you’ll know why I lay there without moving. And why I didn’t move as the bathroom grew dusky, and the bath water grew cooler and cooler until it was quite cold.
Teddy used to break things. He snapped all his crayons in two, and he smashed the shed windows. He’d go into the field and pull up the cabbages. I wasn’t like that. Nothing showed, with me. When I was young I was an open little girl, I trusted everyone, but I’d long since lost that. Even if they were the noticing kind, which they weren’t, nobody in our house could tell that I was changed that evening and afterwards.
I didn’t behave differently; I just felt different, through and through, because I’d realized: it’s his fault too. I didn’t dare repeat it to myself in those words. But as I climbed out of the bath, those words were spreading and settling inside me.
The next day, Saturday, I had a dentist’s appointment. The surgery was in Staines. I went there early, on the bus, because I wanted to do some window-shopping. But there wasn’t a bus back so my Dad said he’d pick me up.
I was terrified of the dentist. Nobody likes going, of course, but I didn’t know if my fear was normal. As I said, I couldn’t tell if I felt like everybody else. I was nervous of the pain, oh yes, but the terror came from the dentist finding something out. I felt this with anyone official who examined me. The doctor, for instance, and even our games teacher, who’d discovered a verruca on my foot.
My mouth, surely, could give no clues – logically it couldn’t. But the pitiless, antiseptic smell, and the white coats, and that probing light inside my throat, and the way he paused, with his pointed instrument in my teeth, and frowned, and looked closer . . . Then the way he turned to his assistant, who was standing right near me, and said something in code which she wrote down in a file. Perhaps you can understand that when it came to rinsing out, the assistant had to hold the glass against my lips because my hand was too trembly to do it myself. Pink water splashed out of my mouth.
‘All shipshape.’ Mr Downes smiled. I’d had an injection, and a filling. He laid his hand on my shoulder. ‘All over now, Heather. Okey-dokey?’
I nodded.
‘Never as bad as we’d expected, is it? You’re a brave girl – just one hole, but a biggy.’
I was given my coat.
‘Anyone picking you up?’ he asked.
‘My Dad.’
‘Ah . . . the elusive Mr Mercer. Janice, you’ve sent him a reminder, haven’t you?’
‘Two.’
Dad always threw them away; he was like a child about the dentist.
Then my heart stopped. What if they gave him gas and he started talking? People said things, under gas; he’d told me so. All your little secrets, he’d said, all pouring out.
‘Janice can pop down w
ith you. Is he downstairs?’
‘No!’ I lied. ‘He’s waiting miles away!’
‘Miles?’
But I was clattering down the stairs.
Dad was sitting beside the reception booth. ‘What’s the hurry?’ he said. ‘After you with his drill?’
I was outside now. I ran to the truck. Wrenching open the door, I caught my breath at last.
We drove away. For the first time, out in the open, I thought: it’s not just my fault that I can’t look Mr Downes in the eye. It’s not just my fault that I’ve behaved so oddly. It’s yours too. Why did you let me get like this, when you’re my Dad?
On the way back he had to stop to see a mate of his about a dog – Rinty had been run over the week before. Perhaps that’s another reason for my behaviour; I’d loved Rinty.
I stayed sitting in the van. The sun was setting and the sky was streaked yellow. I should feel peaceful, now the dentist was over. The road was a cul-de-sac; there were bungalows down one side. The other side was a field, clumpy with gorse, and beyond it the raised bank of the reservoir. There was no real countryside around us, I realized: just forgotten fields like ours, scruffy and neglected.
The sunset was so beautiful; it seemed a waste that I was feeling this way. Farther down the field someone was trotting round and round on a pony. Behind them stood the electricity sub-station; a brick block with wires criss-crossed above it. It was all spoiled, our countryside, with its ugly buildings. I wound down the window to clear the fug. Near my face the hedge was cobwebby with old man’s beard, draped around the branches; on the black twigs the berries looked like beads of blood.
‘Up, down, up, down . . .’
A woman was shouting at the girl, I could hear them now. I recognized the girl on the pony: it was Sandra, from my class.
‘Toes up! Heels down!’ The voice carried on the autumn air.
Girls at school had pets, I realized – Gwen with her guinea pigs and tortoise – and I just had animals. I was different. Another thought struck me. Perhaps the dentist thought Dad couldn’t read – that’s why he wanted to remind him about an appointment. You see, my thoughts were clear and unwelcome that evening.