An Experiment in Love

‘Yes, yes, come on, we are overslept today,’ Karina’s mother said. Her English came in a rush, the consonants rustling and complex. I thought of when you turn the tap on and put your finger underneath to trap the water; it wobbles like a ball-bearing, and then gushes out in a torrent when you take your finger away.

Karina and her mother were standing in the kitchen. Karina was already belted into her gabardine overcoat, a checked wool scarf tied under her chin. Her mother was not yet dressed to go out but she was wearing thick woollen stockings and a buttoned-up cardigan, with a shawl draped over it. I had never seen a shawl, except in books; you got them in fairy-tales. Karina’s mother hadn’t a witch face, more the face of a godmother: dough-coloured, unformed, not definitely anything at all. Her eyes were like black grapes, which are not black of course: a dull mobile sheen, purplish, in soft folds of flesh. My mother called Karina’s mother ‘Mary’ when she met her in the street, but I did not think this could possibly be her name.

Karina’s mother had both hands full. In her right hand she had a ham sandwich made with thick white bread; she was holding it out to her daughter. Karina’s hands were wrapped around her mother’s hand, and she was gnawing at the bread, her head dipping with each bite, and her jaw moving like some greedy animal’s: chewing away, while the scarf’s bunchy knot bobbed up and down under her chin. In her other hand, Karina’s mother held a banana. It was already half-peeled, ready for immediate use. As Karina took the last gulp of ham sandwich she transferred it swiftly to her right hand. Karina closed her own hands again around her mother’s, holding the fruit steady; the banana seemed to vanish in three big bites.

Karina straightened up and wiped her hands on her coat. Her mother said something to her in another language. Karina didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at her mother, acknowledge that she had spoken. Her mother picked up a fat parcel from the kitchen cabinet, wrapped in greaseproof paper. She thrust it into Karina’s school-bag. Carefully, she fastened Karina’s coat right up to the neck and twitched her head-scarf forward so that it jutted out, protecting her daughter’s flushed cheeks; then she held up Karina’s mittens for her to plunge her hands inside. She patted her, on the shoulders, chest, arms, patted her as if she wanted to make sure she was solid all through. Then Karina was ready to seize the day.

I had watched her mother’s face while she fed her. She looked hungry, and as if all the food in the world could never be enough.

At eight years old, I wear my hair in ringlets, fat tubes that you can put your finger into. Each night at seven o’clock my mother brushes my hair and then combs it and then rakes it again with the steel comb, in case insects have bred since the night before. If I am free from vermin she gets out the curl rags. These are white ropes of cloth. She unrolls and separates them, then picks up the comb again and divides my hair into strands. At the top of each strand she knots a rope. Then round and round we go, tighter and tighter wrapping, myself delirious with pain and rage and she with set face, mummifying my hair. I cry out that I want my hair cut off, short like other people’s and pinned back with a big black kirby grip or a pink plastic slide, and she utters from between her teeth that I don’t know what I want. When she has wrapped to the bottom of a rope she ties another big knot, like a fist, like a knuckle bone. When she has finished my whole head, the bound hair springs away from my skull, stiff and white in its casing, as if I had grown legs out of my head: as if I were an alien from the planet Zog, with these swaying white skeleton limbs, knobbled and rickety and shining in the dusk.

When I climb into bed I pray my night prayers. When I put my head on the pillow one set of knots digs into my skull and the other set of knots rolls under my ribs and spine. I toss and turn and come to rest face down, breathing wetly into the sheets. Perhaps Karina is right, perhaps my hair is stealing my strength. I sleep and have dreams.

Next morning the ropes are unknotted and my hair explodes around me. I slide my fingers into the ringlets and pretend I have grown hair on my digits and that I am a werewolf.

One day I see Karina standing alone on the corner of Eliza Street, her eyes vacant and her mouth moving around what looks like a cold sausage. I cross over to the other side of the street. I hope she doesn’t see me, but she does.

Three (#ulink_71960e58-0beb-55d0-9e54-ae77c4fbc676)

I would like to press on now, to tell you how Karina and I came to meet Julianne Lipcott: to explain how our lives became knotted up beyond hope of severance. But if I hurry I will lose the thread; or the narrative will be like knitting done in a bad temper. The tension goes wrong; you come back later, measure your work, and find that it hasn’t grown as you imagined. Then you must unravel it, row by row, resenting each slick twist and pull that undoes, so easily, what you laboured over; and when you work again you must do it with the used wool, every kink in it reminding you of your failure.

Our autobiographies are similar, I think; I mean the unwritten volumes, the stories for an audience of one. This account we give to ourselves of our life—the shape changes moment by moment. We pick up the thread and we use it once, then we use it again, in a more complex form, in a more useful garment, one that conforms more to fashion and our current shape. I wasn’t much of a knitter, early in my life. I was perpetually doing a kettle-holder. What is a kettle-holder? you’ll ask. It is a kind name for any chewed-looking half-ravelled object of rough oblong shape, knotted up by a day-dreaming nine-year-old on the biggest size of wooden needles: made in an unlikely shade like lavender or bottle-green, in wool left over from some adult’s abandoned project: or perhaps from a garment worn and picked apart, so that the secondhand yarn snakes under your fingertips, fighting to get back to the pattern that it’s already learnt.

Karina was a good steady knitter. You would see her with her elbows pumping, hunched over a massive clotted greyness; it was as if a crusader had come by and thrown his chain-mail in her lap. I never knew whether she finished her garments or whether her mother and father wore them. All their clothes looked alike; winter and summer they were wadded in their layers, blanketed, swaying heavy and unspeaking along Curzon Street.

When Karina got home her parents were usually at work or asleep, depending which shift they were on. She had her own key, and before she took off her coat she used to put on the kettle and build up the fire and poke it, which I was not allowed to do: but I was allowed to watch her. When the kettle whistled she would swing it up—without benefit of holder—and slosh water into the vast brown teapot. I did not like tea; I did not think children liked it. Karina had a big white cup with blue hoops on it. She drank three cupfuls of tea, each with three heaped teaspoons of sugar.

Once the first cup was inside her she would take out the bread knife, which was something else that, at home, I was not allowed to touch. Karina would saw off four slices of bread and toast them in front of the fire, eating while she worked, slithering on to each slice a raft of margarine. One day she gave me a slice, but the fish smell of the margarine made my first bite come back up into my mouth and stick there. I coughed it back into my handkerchief, and asked permission to put it on the fire. Karina said, ‘You’ll never gain strength if you don’t eat.’ She ruminated a while, then said, ‘I’m going to have my tonsils out.’

I gaped at her. ‘Why?’

‘Because our doctor says.’ Her tone was virtuous, sage and elderly.

‘Why does he say?’

‘Because he’s our doctor and he knows.’

‘How do they get them out?’

‘With an operating machine.’

‘Do they put you inside it?’

She nodded. ‘I reckon.’

I imagined the operating machine. The doctor would help you through a black hatch and you would emerge into a pleasant apartment: a sitting-room with armchairs and a semi-circular rug before the fire, pink carnations in a vase, a standard lamp and a television in the corner. There would be a bedroom and a bathroom; I could not see them, but they would be equally airy and well-appointed. The lights would be on all day, because of course there would be no windows; you would put up with that for the short time of your stay.

Panic fluttered in my throat: a dull bird, a sparrow. I put a hand against it and felt the wings beat. If I had to have my tonsils out I would be put in the operating machine by myself, and I did not know how to live in a house alone. Karina said, ‘You get jelly and ice-cream, after it.’

When she had finished her toast she would take her plate into the kitchen, me trailing behind, and roll up her sleeves to peel a sinkful of potatoes. She would tell me what she was going to do later. ‘I have to make a potato pie. I have to roast a piece of meat.’

I knew she was exaggerating, if not lying altogether. No child would be allowed to do these things. I wished they were. But when I went into the kitchen at home I said, ‘Please, Mum, please, Mum, can I make a cake?’ and she’d say, ‘Stop messing there. Get from under my feet.’ Yet somehow, mysteriously, one had to absorb the domestic arts. There are lessons to be learnt early and learnt well. At the table men are served first, with the best of what’s going. It is the woman’s part to take the fatty piece of meat and the egg that broke as it slid into the pan.

It was some time around this year—the year I was nine—that I became conscious of a falsity surrounding Karina, a disjunction. My mother—other mothers too—would dote on her and hold her up as an example. Such a clean girl, always looks lovely. She helps her mother. Doesn’t have a soft life, both of them at work, had to learn to look after herself and stand on her own two feet. Fetches the potatoes uphill from the market for her mother. Not like you, young lady—everything done for you.

‘Don’t I help?’ I would bellow. ‘Don’t I dry the pots every night, every single night? Don’t I do shopping? Don’t I iron—every week, all the straight things?’

‘Karina never gives cheek.’

I tried to explain to my mother once, when I was in a reasoning mood and thought she might listen.

‘Karina, you see, she’s this way and then she’s that. She’s nice to your face, but horrible. She says horrible things to you. She envies you.’

‘I’m not surprised if she envies you. You, with everything provided for you, and nothing to do but get yourself to school and back.’

‘No, but the things you’ve got. Your library book. You think it’s nice. Karina says, I wouldn’t be reading that muck. Then you used to like it but you don’t like it any more.’

My mother looked at me stonily. She did not understand. Soon she would say something about cattle-waggons, as if I were part of the reason for them. I knew it was a waste of time trying to talk to adults; they seemed to miss three-quarters of what was going on in the world. I thought of dogs who smell and hear and never look, cats who just eat and stare at people and creep around till they fall asleep in the sun. Something vital’s left out: but with people, something vital seeps out as they age.

The next time Sister Basil asked me a stupid question, I didn’t answer her. I just folded my arms and I looked back sadly. She was a small nun, old, who looked as if a cobweb had been draped over her face. ‘Come on, come on,’ she said. ‘Either you know or you don’t know, which is it?’ I passed my eyes over her. Suddenly she came to life, spitting and dancing like a cat. Two red spots grew on her grey cheeks. She propped up the lid of her desk with one arm while with the other hand she rummaged around for her cane. She stood over me and shouted that I would be caned for dumb insolence. I looked back, sadder. There was really no chance of her caning me because I would not hold out my hand when she asked me; I had made a decision on this. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Karina watching me. Her big pink face had turned white.

I don’t really remember what happened next—only that Sister Basil backed off, backed down, found a pretext—and I walked out unmolested at the end of the afternoon, everyone silent around me, and Karina shadowing me with her slapping, rolling, puppy’s walk, not offering to link me until she saw which way the wind was blowing. Sister Basil’s question was this: Who invented the telephone? I was sure she had the answer at the back of her book. Why didn’t she ask questions to which she didn’t know the answers? Then she might learn something to her advantage.

I tore a piece of paper out of my rough book. I wrote on it in vast capitals:

ALEXANDER

GRAHAM

BELL

At the end of the day I left it on Sister Basil’s desk. So I knew: and she knew I knew.

Karina arrived at Tonbridge Hall two days after Julianne, and was billeted as arranged in Room C21, with a girl called Lynette Segal, who was a third-year student at the School of East European Studies. We met Lynette just after Karina’s installation, when she tapped at our door after dinner.

I liked her even before she spoke: she was pale, neat and delicate, with a brunette’s glitter and many gold rings. Her eyes were the colour of blackberries. They fell first on the skull on our bookshelf. She said simply, ‘I admire.’

Julianne, sprawled on her bed, looked up. ‘Oh, we do have taste.’

Lynette stood uncertainly, poised almost on her toes. ‘My room-mate says she knows you.’

I nodded.

‘So I said I’d ask you round for coffee.’

‘And petits fours?’ Julianne asked.

Lynette rose a little, as if poised for a balletic spring. ‘Bendicks Bittermints,’ she offered.