Girl A(51)

Ethan had his own space, but not enough belongings to fill it. Tired items had been given odd prominence. There was a crowd of plastic disciples on the windowsill. He had hung a poster of the human skeleton, dispensed in Year 6 science, on his wall. Father had already requisitioned a corner of the floor for his sermon notes. ‘I think he hopes that I’ll read them,’ Ethan said, and nudged them away with his toe.

‘Let me show you something really cool,’ I said, and unwrapped the book. ‘Miss Glade got it for me,’ I said, ‘but we can read it together.’

Ethan touched the cover, but didn’t turn it.

‘It’s a children’s book,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to read that?’

I peered at him, waiting for his face to crack. He looked blankly back at me.

‘You like those stories,’ I said. ‘I only know them because of you.’

‘And what good have they ever done for me? I’d throw it out, Lex, if I was you.’

Evie was more impressed. We would need to wait for another month before an additional bed arrived, and so that night, the first in our room together, we lay side by side on a stranger’s mattress and held the book between us. I started at the rhythms of the house: water hammering through the walls; the creaking trees at the back of the garden. The floorboards seesawed beneath new, buoyant weight. ‘In the beginning,’ I read, ‘there was nothing.’

I expected that things might be different in Hollowfield. I had mistaken the fact that nobody yet knew us for the hope that we could be whomever we wanted to be.

Jolly was often in the house, unannounced, wielding a tool, or eating with Father at the kitchen table. The conversations started clandestine; they exchanged glances when we wandered into the room. But in the evenings, voices rose to our bedroom. They used words like opportunity and beginning. Mother played the hostess, bearing delicate plates and topping up the men’s glasses, and picking pastry from beneath her nails. There were some nights when I heard a third voice at the table: softer, less certain. Ethan had started to greet Jolly with a firm handshake, and call him ‘Sir’.

Ethan joined in the tricks which Father and Jolly played on Gabriel, too. They enlisted him to assist them with fictional tasks or secret missions, each of which ended in his confusion. ‘Hold this nail,’ Jolly said, halfway up the stairs. ‘Don’t drop it – that’s keeping your house standing.’ And an hour later Gabriel was still there, clutching the nail determinedly in his fist. In the winter, Ethan sent him into the garden, to search for treasure buried by the last proprietor. He, Father and Jolly gathered in a coven at the kitchen window. ‘Look, Lex,’ Ethan said, and beckoned to me. I ignored him. At dusk, Gabriel returned bone-white and dejected, mud in the cracks on his palms. When they laughed, he laughed too. He laughed like he had been in on it, all along.

When I could avoid Jolly and Father, I did so. I still left for school early, in time to wash, and I took my time packing up my desk at the end of the day. I collected Delilah and Evie and Gabriel, and we ambled home together, stopping at the bookshop and at the watermill, and at the two mangy horses at the bottom of Moor Woods Road, who surveyed us with great suspicion. Mother didn’t come down to the new school; she and Father had been talking of a new child, and she was conserving her energy.

And the days at school weren’t so bad. The most surprising consequence of our move to Hollowfield was that I made a friend – a real one – who had arrived in Hollowfield a few months before, with braces and a southern accent, and who was almost as awkward as I was. Cara liked books and talking about them, and played the violin in assembly, standing timid and nervy at the front of the room right until she picked up the instrument. She played with a sway, which the other children mocked, and when she finished she had the expression of somebody who had just woken up. Cara never tittered when I was speaking, and there was nobody with whom she could share a side-glance. She didn’t seem to mind that I was quiet in the classroom, only responding to the teacher’s direct questions. All the same, I was careful about what I said to her. My parents worked away, I said, and when I described our house on Moor Woods Road, I was vague.

‘I know it!’ she said. ‘The one near the bottom, with the horses?’

I nodded noncommittally. Cara sighed. ‘I’m terrified of horses,’ she said, and I smiled.

I was faring better in Hollowfield than Delilah, who didn’t comprehend why she was no longer one of the most popular girls in her class, and better still than Gabriel. News had reached me from the younger classes that Gabriel was stupid, and easy to fool. The early years learned to read by narrating tins of words, and the majority of Gabriel’s class was on Tin 6, which included DOLPHIN and PENGUIN. Gabriel was stuck with CAT and DOG, in the dull domesticity of Tin 2. When it was time for him to read, he held the paper a few inches from his eyes: there were opportunities to be gleaned from that. You could poke him from a distance, like a bull in the ring, and he might not be able to identify you. You could write something about him on a worksheet, and he wouldn’t be able to read it, even if you waved it in his face.

‘I don’t get it,’ Cara said, surveying him across the playground. He hovered beside one of the dinner ladies, as if he was anticipating an attack. ‘You’re pretty much the smartest girl in the school.’

That, I concluded, was why I couldn’t interfere. In Hollowfield Primary School, I had crafted a precarious rung on the social ladder, tempered with a companion, and the begrudging respect of my classmates. In the evenings, I read to Evie or listened to Ethan, and at the weekends, we assembled in the Lifehouse, to sand the pews, or paint the walls, or pray for success. There was only ever enough time to make myself normal. This reassured me when I saw Gabriel alone at lunchtime, or sitting in the kitchen with that same tin of words, tracing the letters with his finger. Alone in the night, in a stranger’s bedroom, it didn’t reassure me at all.