Girl With Dove: A Life Built By Books

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.

8

Rocks from the Sky (#ulink_fa2441df-445e-548b-8fd7-fd7fbea28903)

One day, not so long ago, someone called an ambulance to our house. That was the day God sent a plague of rocks down from the sky.

The day my brother Peter knocked his head hard on the paraffin heater; the heater that stands in the corner with sharp metal edges Mum is always telling us to stay away from. That day Peter banged his head and saw the stars. A few weeks later another ambulance came and carried Poor Sue away. We only saw her toes poking out from the back of the van. I caught a glimpse of a small pink hand and a tiny red beak, and I thought that Sue was done for. The black rocks had knocked her unconscious; the black rocks had boxed her ears. Sue had been crushed by the black rocks tumbling from the sky.

But I am mixing Poor Sue and Peter together. Was it Peter and then Sue, or Sue then Peter? There were two ambulances. When David went away we never heard the ambulance. We didn’t see the men in white rushing out. We never saw his body, only Mummy standing by the kitchen door looking like a ghost.

But once upon a time Sue was there and she was lying stretched out in an ambulance with her little toe poking through the gap in the door. Then there was my brother Peter; there was Peter with his broken head and Mummy speaking her Greek and me staring out the kitchen window waiting for the ambulance to come. I look up at the sky and I see dark clouds; I see Mrs Sturgess at the window next door looking down at me. I look up at Mrs Sturgess and I poke out my tongue. Then I feel bad.

So I turn back towards the kitchen table and there is Mummy with her mouth wide open and black rocks falling out.

‘Cummmmingleeeenghaawghulalghulaa, ghulala, ghulala, ghulala, cumingleeeehawghulaghulaghula, cummingleeeinghawwghulaghulaghula.’

Mummy is humming like a bee. Her mouth is writhing like a snake. I am six or seven and Mummy’s mouth is filling up with rocks and the rocks are tumbling onto the floor. I can hear the sharp bang.

‘Mummy, Mummy, are you hurt? Shut your mouth, Mummy, shut your mouth. Mummy, please shut your mouth.’

‘Ghuuullllllllllaaaparrrwarrrrrrbarralllungungungung.’

‘Mummy, Mummy, is he dead? Is he dead? Is Peter dead? Mummy, please bring him back. Bring him back, Mummy, please, please bring him back.’

It was Mrs Sturgess next door who heard the wailing through the walls and made the call. When the ambulance men came in through the back door Mummy was holding Peter tightly, rocking him back and forth and my brother was as still and quiet as a perfectly behaved baby Jesus.

‘Mummy, is Peter coming back to life now? Mummy, has God saved him? Mummy, can he breathe now? Can he breathe?’

‘Yes, darling. Peter has come back to us. We must thank God for his special words. We must remember this special occasion. AH-MEN.’ And then Mummy’s head fell forward and the dark rocks came spilling out.

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One morning, a few months after the boxing of her ears, Jane Eyre is hiding away in the nursery, making shapes from the frost on the window. She sees a small robin, a hungry little robin that came and chirruped on the twigs of the leafless cherry-tree nailed against the wall near the casement. Suddenly Bessie the maid bursts into the room and demands that Jane get herself ready to come downstairs. She is wanted by Aunt Reed, this minute!