Girl A(15)

As a child, she had wanted to become a journalist. She lived with her parents and her little sister in a village surrounded by hills. Theirs was the last house on a terrace; there was a tilt to it, like the tower in Pisa. She committed to interviewing the whole village, and her father bought her a notepad from the newsagent to record her findings. On the first page, in her best handwriting, she wrote: Dispatches from Deborah. Each weekend, and sometimes after school, she trooped from house to house with her pad, investigating. She found that people were happy to tell her their quiet hopes – to win the lottery, perhaps, or to move closer to the ocean; to visit France or North America – and happy, too, to speculate about the relations of the new family in the next street along, who could be a couple, but could also, quite feasibly, be father and daughter. I’ve seen photographs of Mother at this time, and I don’t question her early successes. She had her white-blond hair, and empathetic, adult eyes. You would tell her your secrets.

She hadn’t counted on what she called The Parade. The first incident took place when she was ten years old, and about to take the exam for the grammar school in the next town along. It was the Harvest Festival in the village, and there really was a parade: each tenuous society decorated a float; mothers knitted scarecrows and slumped them throughout the streets; the children dressed up as miscellaneous crops and walked as one dawdling vegetable patch. That year, through a questionable democratic process, Mother had been elected Princess of the Harvest. She walked at the front of the procession, wearing a golden dress (a vast improvement, she concluded, on the potato outfit of the year before), and when the parade passed her house, the privates who were navigating the veteran float let off a round of celebratory gunfire.

From her position at the front of the crowd, Mother didn’t see the accident take place. The rope attaching the Countryside Christian Church to their Morris Marina snapped, just on the crest of Hilly Fields Road. She heard the screams when the float hit her father, but she assumed that the crowd had simply become overexcited, and she waved more enthusiastically. When an organizer tried to bring her to a halt, she smiled politely and walked around him.

For a few days, there were national press in the village. Mother’s father lost a leg in the accident, and a child – a pumpkin, home-stitched – had died. Mother was thrilled. She liked the slick, smart reporters, who had notebooks just like hers. She was royalty in the tragedy, both a victim and an unwilling participant. She offered a series of first-hand accounts, sitting solemnly in her living room beside her mother, with a tissue clutched in her fist. She concluded each interview by stating that – in light of the terrible events – she would very much like to become a journalist herself. She wanted to allow people to tell their own stories. In the back of her pad, she collected a series of names and phone numbers, with the title of each journalist’s publication noted in parentheses. She allocated stars to the national publications, based on their professionalism and the amount of time they had been willing to let her talk; she would know whom to contact, when her time came.

Her other visitors were representatives from the Countryside Christian Church. Three women knocked at the door one evening, so softly that Mother discounted it, and they knocked again. They waited in the rain, a tentative distance from the door, with scarves tied over their hair and their faces shrouded in shadow. The oldest woman was bearing a basket of warm bread covered by a tea towel, and when she held it out, Mother started. She thought, for an inexplicable moment, that the basket concealed a baby.

‘We pray for you every day,’ one of the women said, and another added: ‘And for your father.’

‘Yes – for your father, too. May we see him?’

‘He’s still in the hospital,’ Mother said. ‘My mum’s there now. And my sister.’

‘If you are ever lonely,’ said the oldest woman, ‘you mustn’t hesitate to join us.’

‘It’s important,’ said the next, ‘to welcome children with open arms.’

Her father returned home from the hospital a month later. The press were back in their cities, and the child’s funeral had taken place, following the same route as the Harvest Festival. Her father was quiet and static, propped in front of the television. The left leg of his trousers dangled behind him, like the ghost of a limb. He could no longer clean windows. For the first time, Mother wished that the accident had never happened.

‘And so The Parade began,’ Mother said. The parade of Mother’s misfortunes. ‘Well,’ she would say, when Father lost a job, or a teacher called, concerned, that one of us was not in school, or the first time that Father hit Ethan, ‘what can you do about The Parade?’

When she was no longer known as the Princess of the Harvest, Mother started to care for her father, while her own mother took up extra shifts in the village shop. She had to ensure that he ate breakfast – her mother suspected that he was trying to starve himself – and check the stump for signs of infection. Her father sat in his chair, and Mother knelt on the floor before him. She was proud of her disposition. She touched the smooth, sealed skin, and the purple seam where the wound had been stitched. She thought: perhaps I should become a doctor. They were silent during the inspections. Her father no longer asked her about her latest interviews, and she had nothing to report.

Her other responsibility was her sister, Peggy. Peggy was eight, and a great inconvenience. ‘She isn’t as clever as you,’ their mother said. ‘She needs you, Deb.’ When Mother finished her homework, she sat down to help Peggy with hers, and sighed at the juvenile nature of the tasks. She decided to get a number of questions wrong in order to avoid suspicion, but sometimes these were the simplest questions, and she hoped that Peggy would be called before the class, and asked to explain herself.