Something Beginning With

Doors

Apparently, it is impossible to have an advertisement in Britain that features a shut door. This is because so many children were locked in their bedrooms as a punishment and now, even as adults, they automatically start to panic when the door isn’t open. Even just an inch makes things better.

There were times when my mother used to tell me to stay in my bedroom. It wasn’t cruel, she just wanted a break from looking after me. I’d have as many books as I wanted, treats to eat. I’d make myself a nest up there.

I’d keep the door shut then. Close out the rest of the world. Keep it all safe.

See Houses, Noddy, Property, Velvet, Yellow

Dreams

Sally once went out with a man who liked to record her dreams in a diary. She had to break off with him because she got too exhausted. She’d be awake all night trying to think of interesting things for him to write about.

See Codes, Mistaken Identity, Utopia

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Ears

I like to stick cotton-wool buds in my ears and turn them round, pushing harder and harder. I crave the satisfaction it brings. Sometimes even when I have friends round, all I can think of is that round plastic jar of baby buds until I have to go into my bedroom and clean my ears. It’s like an itch. Once I twisted too hard and my head filled with a howling pain. I vowed then never to do it again. Until the next time.

There was a boy at school called Stewart Simmons. One day he was swinging on his chair during Geography when the teacher called him to attention. He was taken by surprise, and as he fell, the compass he was holding pierced right through his eardrum. He screamed.

Three years later, when I joined the class, the other children were still talking about the loudness of that scream. When we were fifteen, I went out with Stewart Simmons and felt the reflected glory from his fame. He would still scream in the playground for money.

The trouble was that Stewart was boring when he wasn’t making a noise. He wanted to be a lorry driver and sometimes when we were lying together on his bed, he’d be able to name the type of lorry that went past the window just from the sound of its tyres. He seemed to feel this was particularly clever as he was still deaf in one ear from the compass incident.

See Captains, The Fens, Sounds

Elephant’s Egg

When we went to London Zoo for my eighth birthday, I fell in love with the elephants. I wanted to move in with them and be the little elephant who never strayed from her mother’s side. I wanted people to say how sweet I was, and take pictures of me, and have my father wrap his trunk around me, swishing the flies off or sprinkling water over me to wash my back.

The following year, the day before my birthday, I asked to go and see the elephants again. My mother got cross and said money didn’t grow on trees, but when I got back from school that afternoon, there was a message from the Zoo. Apparently the elephant at London Zoo had laid an egg especially for me and my family to eat. It was going to come on my birthday.

The only trouble was that the zookeeper left it on our doorstep during the only two minutes in the day that I stopped watching for him. I took it into the kitchen where my mother was waiting to cook it. She was cross with me for not keeping a proper look-out because it meant she couldn’t thank the keeper for bringing it all that way.

This happened every year until I was fifteen. I never managed to catch the zookeeper. My mother never managed to thank him.

An elephant’s egg is not like an ordinary egg. The white tastes like mashed potato, and the yolk is never runny, being a bit like a large round sausage. I’ve had sausage and mashed potatoes many times since, but never anything as good as those elephant’s eggs.

See The Queen, The Queen II

Endings

Ever since the Australian incident, I have been spending more time in my flat. My best treat is to pop into a bookshop and pick up a book to read. Then I curl up on the sofa with a bottle of wine and read myself into a trance.

The sort of books I like best are those in which I can completely lose myself. At first, I sit with the unopened book on my lap waiting to meet the main character with that sense of anticipation I always get on blind dates. Is this person going to be my new best friend? And then there’s a moment – normally just over half-way through – when my heart grows until it’s too big for my body because all these dreadful things are happening in the book and there’s nothing I can do to stop them. I can’t even tell the character they’re making all the wrong decisions. I’ve just got to keep on reading. But then I get to the last words and I can’t believe it, I keep my fingers on the end sentence because it can’t all finish there. It’s as if they’ve shut the door and left me on the other side, unwanted. And I cared so much. And there’s no way to make the characters see how much I cared.

A teacher at school told us that fairy stories always end with the prince and princess living happily ever after because what the writers were really saying, but couldn’t, was that they would die eventually. Apparently it’s a way of helping children to understand life and death. It was raining when he was telling us this.

Anyway, what he told us, very sternly, was that no one could expect to live happily ever after. It just didn’t happen. There are no happy endings, he said. I’ll never forget the sound of the rain falling on the flat roof of the classroom. Somehow it always rained when he read us stories that year.

See Breasts, Stepmothers, True Romance, Yellow, Zzzz

Engagement Ring

Colin has given Sally a ring. It isn’t an engagement ring, but that’s the finger she wears it on even though I tell her it’s bad luck.

She won’t let me try it on or even touch it. She says she remembers me telling her about how I posted my mother’s engagement ring into my piggy bank when I was six.

It’s true my mother cried in secret for days after the ring first went missing. The strange thing was that she didn’t tell anyone. Not even my father. I’m sure about this because I think if she had, he’d have started one of those inquisitions he was so fond of. Instead, she was quieter than normal. I’d come across her in odd rooms, frantically searching through cupboards, drawers, pockets, piles of things. Sometimes her eyes looked white and strained as if she was forcing herself not to weep.

Sally still can’t understand why I never told my mother what I had done, but it was one of those china piggy banks you had to break to open and I loved the spotty smoothness of my pig. And then, of course, I left it too late. I wouldn’t have been able to put the ring back on the dressing table and pretend it hadn’t happened because Mum had moved the table to the other side of the room. I guess now she’d been taking up the carpet to check the ring hadn’t fallen down there.

Dad went mad when he eventually found my mother had lost her ring, but it was such a long time afterwards that I couldn’t feel guilty any more. If my mother had really cared she’d have made a fuss at the time. She was always losing things.

See Daisies, Mistaken Identity, True Romance, Voices

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Fashion

My favourite book when I was growing up was called The Little White Horse. There were two things about it I remember particularly. One was the sugary biscuits that were left in a silver tin in the heroine’s tower bedroom. Some even had little pastel flowers iced on them. The other was the heroine’s journey to the castle to stay with her unknown uncle. She was nervous, but still able to get pleasure from her beautiful laced-up boots tucked away under her long skirts. Even though no one else could see them, she knew they were there, and that was enough.

It gave me a thrill of recognition. It probably shaped my life. Made me see the strength you could get from having the right kind of secrets.

I spend a lot of time shopping. I search out clothes which have special things about them only I will know. I hug these to me. A certain colour that makes me want to eat it; a lining of soft plum silk; the Liberty print trim to a denim pocket; a perfectly shaped pleat which kicks up the edge of a skirt.

Coco Chanel knew all about this. She used to sew a gold chain invisibly into the hems of her jackets so they would be ideally weighted around the bottom.

I think if I could have a jacket like that I would die happy. I would be buried in it.

See Codes, Underwear, Women’s Laughter

Fat Women

I am the last person to judge anyone else based on appearances alone, but I wonder if anyone else notices how difficult it is to see a fat woman and a small thin man together and not think of them having violent, needy and possibly perverted sex?

See Indecent Exposure, Sex, Toys, Voyeur, Weight, Wrists

The Fens

Every time I tell people I come from the Fens, the only thing they can think of to say is, ‘Well, there’s certainly a lot of sky there.’ But here are three other things to know about the Fens:

1. A lot of the children I went to school with had webbed feet. In the Fens, this is quite usual. They weren’t heavy like duck feet, but just a sliver of thin skin, so transparent as to be like silver, between each toe and the next.When these children flexed their toes, it was the most beautiful sight I could imagine, especially after swimming when the drops of water would glisten and sparkle.

2. The roads in the Fens are long and straight and run alongside treacherous dykes. They look even straighter because the houses on either side are slipping lower and lower back into the soil. If I was quiet, I could almost hear it sucking at me. Anyway, because it gets so dark at night – all that sky – a lot of people have accidents and drive into the ditches and die. Often when we were driving in the Fens during the daylight, we would see bouquets of flowers by the side of the road from the night before.