The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(8)

Mary thought. “A comma,” she said slowly. “A comma, you know, what you see in a book?”

After this she would not be drawn. “You’ll just have to wait,” she said, “if you want to see it, and if you truly do you’ll wait, and if you truly don’t you can bugger off and you can miss it, and I can see it all to myself.”

After a while I said, “I can’t stop here all night waiting for a comma. I’ve missed my tea.”

“They’ll be none bothered,” Mary said.

* * *

SHE WAS RIGHT. I crept back late and nothing was said. It was a summer that, by the end of July, had bleached adults of their purpose. When my mother saw me her eyes glazed over, as if I represented extra effort. You spilled blackcurrant juice on yourself and you kept the sticky patches. Feet grimy and face stained you lived in underbrush and long grass, and each day a sun like a child’s painted sun burned in a sky made white with heat. Laundry hung like flags of surrender from washing lines. The light stretched far into the evening, ending in a fall of dew and a bare dusk. When you were called in at last you sat under the electric light and pulled off your sunburnt skin in frills and strips. There was a dull roasting sensation deep inside your limbs, but no sensation as you peeled yourself like a vegetable. You were sent to bed when you were sleepy, but as the heat of bedclothes fretted your skin you woke again. You lay awake, wheeling fingernails over your insect bites. There was something that bit in the long grass as you crouched, waiting for the right moment to go over the wall; there was something else that stung, perhaps as you waited, spying, in the bushes. Your heart beat with excitement all the short night. Only at first light was there a chill, the air clear like water.

And in this clear morning light you sauntered into the kitchen, you said, casual, “You know there’s a house, it’s up past the cemetery, where there’s rich people live? It’s got greenhouses.”

My aunt was in the kitchen just then. She was pouring cornflakes into a dish and as she looked up some flakes spilled. She glanced at my mother, and some secret passed between them, in the flick of an eyelid, a twist at the corner of the mouth. “She means the Hathaways’,” my mother said. “Don’t talk about that.” She sounded almost coaxing. “It’s bad enough without little girls talking.”

“What’s bad…” I was asking, when my mother flared up like a gas jet: “Is that where you’ve been? I hope you’ve not been up there with Mary Joplin. Because if I see you playing with Mary Joplin, I’ll skin you alive. I’m telling you now, and my word is my bond.”

“I’m not up there with Mary,” I lied fluently and fast. “Mary’s poorly.”

“What with?”

I said the first thing that came into my head. “Ringworm.”

My aunt snorted with laughter.

“Scabies. Nits. Lice. Fleas.” There was pleasure in this sweet embroidery.

“None of that would surprise me one bit,” my aunt said. “The only thing would surprise me was if Sheila Joplin kept the little trollop at home a single day of her life. I tell you, they live like animals. They’ve no bedding, do you know?”

“At least animals leave home,” my mam said. “The Joplins never go. There just gets more and more of them living in a heap and scrapping like pigs.”

“Do pigs fight?” I said. But they ignored me. They were rehearsing a famous incident before I was born. A woman out of pity took Mrs. Joplin a pan of stew and Mrs. Joplin, instead of a civil no-thank-you, spat in it.

My aunt, her face flushed, reenacted the pain of the woman with the stew; the story was fresh as if she had never told it before. My mother chimed in, intoning, on a dying fall, the words that ended the tale: “And so she ruined it for the poor soul who had made it, and for any poor soul who might want to eat it after.”

Amen. At this coda, I slid away. Mary, as if turned on by the flick of a switch, stood on the pavement, scanning the sky, waiting for me.

“Have you had your breakfast?” she asked.

“No.”

No point asking after Mary’s. “I’ve got money for toffees,” I said.

If it weren’t for the persistence of this story about Sheila Joplin and the stew, I would have thought, in later life, that I had dreamed Mary. But they still tell it in the village and laugh about it; it’s become unfastened from the original disgust. What a good thing, that time does that for us. Sprinkles us with mercies like fairy dust.

I had turned, before scooting out that morning, framed in the kitchen door. “Mary’s got fly-strike,” I’d said. “She’s got maggots.”

My aunt screamed with laughter.

* * *

AUGUST CAME AND I remember the grates standing empty, the tar boiling on the road, and fly strips, a glazed yellow studded plump with prey, hanging limp in the window of the corner shop. Each afternoon thunder in the distance, and my mother saying “It’ll break tomorrow,” as if the summer were a cracked bowl and we were under it. But it never did break. Heat-struck pigeons scuffled down the street. My mother and my aunt claimed, “Tea cools you down,” which was obviously not true, but they swigged it by the gallon in their hopeless belief. “It’s my only pleasure,” my mother said. They sprawled in deck chairs, their white legs stuck out. They held their cigarettes tucked back in their fists like men, and smoke leaked between their fingers. People didn’t notice when you came or went. You didn’t need food; you got an iced lolly from the shop: the freezer’s motor whined.