Girl A(40)

Father developed strange fixations. They came like fevers, although some of them never left him. He decided that we were wasting water; it was a necessity, he said, and not a plaything, and he drew up a careful schedule of our weekly showers. When dinner was ready, he liked to serve it, and he did so with great deliberation. Our plates would be exactly equal, provided that one of us hadn’t misbehaved or challenged him that day, in which case the guilty party would have a little less. He reread Corinthians and decided that we should better glorify God with our bodies, and we spent our evenings marching up and down the stairs, trying not to laugh. He was bored. He presided over the living room, planning his illustrious future: he would establish a website to present the truth of the Bible to children across the globe; he would become a pastor himself, and usurp David at the Gatehouse; he and Jolly would travel to America, to speak to the vast congregations there.

He spent a lot of time with Jolly in the kitchen of our house, with the liquor between them on the table, and meats sweating on their plates. He drove to Blackpool for Jolly’s Sunday sermons, and in the evenings he required us to sit in the lounge, attentive, while he repeated the lessons. Mother nodded to his inflections and held out her cracked palms in supplication. At her side, Delilah smiled. On the longer nights, I would try to catch Ethan’s eye, but he watched Father, his jaw clenched and harder than it had been a year before, and he didn’t notice me.

Ethan had left the primary school. There were no more travel artefacts, or Facts of the Day. He attended the high school in between our town and the next, where there were eight classes to a year, crunched across five concrete blocks. There had been some problem in buying his school uniform, so that he and Mother arrived home separately, not speaking. I watched him leave on his first day, while Delilah, Evie and I were still eating breakfast. ‘Why doesn’t Ethan’s blazer have a crest?’ Delilah asked, as he left the kitchen. The front door slammed behind him.

He would lose things: his English Literature texts; his gym shorts; and, in late November, the blazer. ‘You’ll have to do without, then,’ Father said, enthroned on the sofa with a tangle of wires and an amber glass.

‘That’s not really an option, though, is it,’ Ethan said. ‘You have to have one. You have to have one to go.’

‘You’re the one who lost it. Don’t come crying to us.’

‘Is there a second-hand bin?’ Mother said. ‘That kind of thing?’

That night, before bed, I thought of the teenagers who had watched us sit down to dinner at Dustin’s, and the expression they had shared. The image returned to me often, and whenever it did, it made my stomach ache. I wondered if there had been other looks, that I might have missed. ‘Was school good?’ I asked Evie, to think about something else.

‘Yep,’ she said. Gabriel occupied her old cot, now, his limbs long enough to bump against the bars, and she was in my bed. It was a good sleeping arrangement for winter, when I couldn’t feel much past my knees. ‘We’re doing animals from different countries.’

‘Which was your favourite animal?’ I asked. She was falling asleep, but I didn’t want to return to Dustin’s. I wanted to stay here, with her.

‘The walruses,’ she said. ‘From the North Pole.’

‘Why the walruses?’

She was quiet. I nudged her in the ribs, and she huffed.

‘Lex.’

She was the first person to call me that. She had needed to ask for me before four syllables fit in her mouth. The name stuck. It was easier on the school register, and lighter for my parents to throw up the stairs. Besides, even my family wasn’t entirely without sentimentality.

‘Can’t we talk about the walruses tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow? Well. OK.’

My stomach panged, again. I rolled away from Evie and tiptoed down the hallway. The bathroom door was locked, and through it I could hear the intermittent gasps of somebody trying not to cry.

‘Ethan?’ I whispered.

I cradled my stomach, knocked.

‘Ethan? Ethan, I need to go.’

He opened the door and pushed past me, one hand across his face. ‘Fuck off, Lex,’ he said.

I sat on the toilet in the cold little room, examining the strips of mould along the bathtub, the clotted soap bars, the bathmat askew and still printed with the dirt of barefooted summer days. The teenagers in Dustin’s had been right. We were odd and unclean. We were a spectacle. It made you uncomfortable just to look at us.

I tried to mitigate the dirt. I left for school a few minutes before Delilah and Evie, and went straight to the disabled toilet, which was set apart from the other bathrooms, just past the staffroom. I locked the door and removed my school jumper and my polo shirt. I leaned over the sink. I splashed cold water under my armpits and around my neck, and luminous pink hand wash after that. I unravelled a handful of toilet roll and dried myself, carefully, to stop any crumbs of paper from sticking to my skin. There was a pocked mirror above the basin, and I tried to avoid catching my own eye. There were a few mornings when the Year 5 teacher, Miss Glade, saw me opening the toilet door. She was always the last to leave the staffroom, lumbered with exercise books and a coffee and a leopard-print handbag. ‘Are you feeling particularly disabled this morning, Miss Gracie?’ she asked, or: ‘Do you have your disabled parking card to hand?’ But she never reported me, and when I provided my excuse – that the other girls’ toilets were occupied, or that I had felt unwell – she always smiled, and waved me away.