The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(7)

I was startled. “I don’t think so. We’re about middle. Are you rich?”

She pondered. She smiled at me as if we were comrades now. “We’re about middle too.”

Poverty meant upturned blue eyes and a begging bowl. A charity child. You’d have colored patches sewn on your clothes. In a fairy-tale picture book you live in the forest under the dripping gables, your roof is thatch. You have a basket with a patchwork cover with which you venture out to your grandma. Your house is made of cake.

* * *

WHEN I WENT to my grandma’s it was empty handed, and I was sent just to be company for her. I didn’t know what this meant. Sometimes I stared at the wall till she let me go home again. Sometimes she let me pod peas. Sometimes she made me hold her wool while she wound it. She snapped at me to call me to attention if I let my wrists droop. When I said I was weary, she said I didn’t know the meaning of the word. She’d show me weary, she said. She carried on muttering: weary, I’ll show her who’s weary, I’ll weary her with a good slap.

When my wrists drooped and my attention faltered it was because I was thinking of Mary Joplin. I knew not to mention her name and the pressure of not mentioning her made her, in my imagination, beaten thin and flat, attenuated, starved away, a shadow of herself, so I was no longer sure whether she existed when I was not with her. But then next day in the morning’s first dazzle, when I stood on our doorstep, I would see Mary leaning against the house opposite, smirking, scratching herself under her frock, and she would stick her tongue out at me until it was stretched to the root.

If my mother looked out she would see her too; or maybe not.

* * *

ON THOSE AFTERNOONS, buzzing, sleepy, our wandering had a veiled purpose and we drew closer and closer to the Hathaways’ house. I did not call it that then, and until that summer I hadn’t known it existed; it seemed it had materialized during my middle childhood, as our boundaries pushed out, as we strayed further from the village’s core. Mary had found it before I did. It stood on its own, no other house built onto it, and we knew without debate that it was the house of the rich; stone-built, with one lofty round tower, it stood in its gardens bounded by a wall, but not too high a wall for us to climb: to drop softly, between the bushes on the other side. From there we saw that in the beds of this garden the roses were already scorched into heavy brown blebs on the stalk. The lawns were parched. Long windows glinted, and around the house, on the side from which we approached, there ran a veranda or loggia or terrace; I did not have a word for it, and no use asking Mary.

She said cheerily, as we wandered cross-country, “Me dad says, you’re bloody daft, Mary, do you know that? He says, when they turned you out, love, they broke the bloody mold. He says, Mary, you don’t know arseholes from Tuesday.”

On that first day at the Hathaways’ house, sheltered in the depth of the bushes, we waited for the rich to come out of the glinting windows that were also doors; we waited to see what actions they would perform. Mary Joplin whispered to me, “Your mam dun’t know where you are.”

“Well, your mam neither.”

As the afternoon wore on, Mary made herself a hollow or nest. She settled comfortably under a bush. “If I’d known it was this boring,” I said, “I’d have brought my library book.”

Mary twiddled grass stalks, sometimes hummed. “My dad says, buck yourself up, Mary, or you’ll have to go to reform school.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s where they smack you every day.”

“What’ve you done?”

“Nothing, they just do it.”

I shrugged. It sounded only too likely. “Do they smack you on weekends or only school days?”

I felt sleepy. I hardly cared about the answer. “You stand in a queue,” Mary said. “When it’s your turn…” Mary had a little stick which she was digging into the ground, grinding it round and round into the soil. “When it’s your turn, Kitty, they have a big club and they beat the holy living daylights out of you. They knock you on the head till your brains squirt out.”

Our conversation dried up: lack of interest on my part. In time my legs, folded under me, began to ache and cramp. I shifted irritably, nodded toward the house. “How long do we have to wait?”

Mary hummed. Dug with her stick.

“Put your legs together, Mary,” I said. “It’s rude to sit like that.”

“Listen,” she said, “I’ve been up here when a kid like you is in bed. I’ve seen what they’ve got in that house.”

I was awake now. “What have they?”

“Something you couldn’t put a name to,” Mary Joplin said.

“What sort of a thing?”

“Wrapped in a blanket.”

“Is it an animal?”

Mary jeered. “An animal, she says. An animal, what’s wrapped in a blanket?”

“You could wrap a dog in a blanket. If it were poorly.”

I felt the truth of this; I wanted to insist; my face grew hot. “It’s not a dog, no, no, no.” Mary’s voice dawdled, keeping her secret from me. “For it’s got arms.”

“Then it’s human.”

“But it’s not a human shape.”

I felt desperate. “What shape is it?”