‘Maybe she’ll do something with children,’ Chris said.
‘Yes. Have them,’ I answered.
‘Well — why not? There’s nothing wrong with having children. Once she’s grown up, I mean. Most women want children.’
I didn’t pursue that one. I didn’t like to be reminded that Christopher once wanted to have children with me.
— We had enough problems with the two he’d got. I did try with Susy, honestly. My feminism made me want to help her. I tried to tell her about feminism, too. She wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t an outdated extremist movement which hated men. That was what all her schoolfriends thought, if what they did could be dignified as thinking. They thought it meant not shaving their legs. She pointed out that I shaved mine. A terrible boredom sometimes overcame me when the children tried to discuss things with me.
In the end I gave up on feminism, but I occasionally tried to make her think. I didn’t want her to sleep-walk into the world, eyes half-shut, half-naked, like the helpless girl in all the fairy-tales… Cinderella, Gretel in the woods, Little Red Riding Hood… I was a stepmother, OK, but I was never wicked.
Sleeping Beauty. How she loved sleep. Perhaps that was her passion. On school-days I had to drag her out of bed ten minutes before she was due to leave the house. She looked so happy, sprawled on the pillow. Hauled back to life she seemed bruised and lost, catatonic for the first few hours of waking.
We’ve come back to where we started. She was, or seemed, inveterately lazy. She was labelled ‘lazy’ by her father, her teachers, me every morning, even her boyfriends, who from time to time could be heard attempting to take her for a walk or an outing… But if she were forced to go outside, she preferred to lie in the middle of our lawn on a blue chaise longue, a dusty blue which made her look even more golden, entirely ripe to be swallowed whole as she swam in the shade of the monkey-puzzle tree, like a great soft peach sliding down into the darkness.
‘Stop,’ I wanted to shout at her. ‘Wake up! This is the only life you’ve got!’
But maybe we were all just stupid. Maybe I somehow missed the point. Whenever I try to think about Susy I feel her slipping softly away.
I talked about her to my friend Drusilla, a psychotherapist, and terribly bright. She bridled at the word ‘lazy’.
‘There’s no such thing as lazy, really.’ She sifted me through the fine mesh of her gaze. ‘People are “lazy” for a reason. They’re unhappy, or unconfident, or unable to decide what they want to do. People go to sleep when they want to escape.’
She made me feel it was all our fault.
And it probably was. If not then, perhaps later. After all, there were hardly any problems to speak of in the period I am talking about, compared with the nightmares that followed, the awfulness after we went away.
But Drusilla would have said it’s an illusion that life can be chopped into different parts. Our ends are in our beginnings, she said.
— More terrible when you know those ends.
I was not sentimental about the children, yet I could never bear to think of them dying. So maybe I loved them more than I thought. Or maybe everyone feels the same wrench, imagining the death of a younger generation.
Nothing they do should be irrevocable. They should be given more time, at least. Time to do things better than us. Time to realise some of their dreams.
That was what I used to think, when I knew that one or other of them was going out driving with another teenager, when the clapped-out sports car screamed to a halt outside our door, and off they went. Please God no, not tonight. Give them time to leave home and be happy.
Unbearable to recall it now, five years after the millennium.
Isaac dreamed of being a painter. He always… never mind.
Did Susy have dreams? I can’t imagine. I think she slept too much to have dreams. That peculiar mist rises up and blinds and deafens me when I try to remember.
Yes, I suppose there was something, though hardly what one could call an ambition. Very long ago. A lifetime ago.
There was one thing she used to say, the only plan I can ever recall, though she wasn’t much more than five when she said it, a round-faced child of five or six. They don’t know what they’re saying then. It couldn’t have been serious.
I didn’t let her have dolls. I’m not a hard-line feminist, but I think there’s something disgusting about them. Little dead babies in female clothing, stillborns waiting to be looked after. I didn’t want dolls in the house with us. We had just moved into the place in Islington and there seemed quite enough dependents without them.
So I threw all Susy’s dolls away. They were scruffy things, in any case. I gave her farm animals, and lots of books, and encouraged her to be strong and active.
We played on the climbing-frame every day. I played; she sat on the grass and stared.
She said it as a prayer at bedtime, praying loudly when she knew I could hear her, and sometimes I couldn’t get out of earshot. Sometimes I had to suffer it.
Please God let me go and live with my mummy again and we’ll have another baby, a sister. I want to go back and live with my mummy.
Benjy is snoring fitfully, and mumbling a little, not happy. I don’t seem to make people very happy. And I don’t always notice when they’re not happy…
Today we were walking down the main street, looking for someone who sold chancho sandwiches, although it was suffocatingly hot I was starving for the tenderness of hot fried pork, and when I’m hungry I have to eat — and a mud-splashed truck drove past us with bananas and a dark-skinned chola woman on top. It was going fast, and I almost felt that the driver was trying to frighten us, but in fact it was the woman who lurched to one side, her heavy skirts and bright apron flapping, and her bowler hat suddenly went skidding sideways and bounced across the dust towards us. Benjamin saw, ran like a sprinter, scooped up the hat, dusted it down on his trouser leg and as the woman wailed and the lorry slowed he tossed it back, briefly black against the sun, she caught it, smiled, waved the hat at him. He stood there until they disappeared, in the middle of the road, panting a little, and the sweat ran down his enormous smile as he watched the woman getting smaller and smaller.
When I saw his smile I realised it was rare. When I saw him run, suddenly charged with energy, I realised how hangdog his walk had been.
Too bad. The young are so easily depressed, I’m sure I was never depressed at his age.
All the same, I’m not happy he’s not happy. Tomorrow I might try to cheer him up. After all, he’s my travelling companion. Sometimes I think he’s my only friend. And we’re still in this together. Because I haven’t given up, I shan’t give up till we’ve tried every town in this shitty continent. I wouldn’t stand a chance of a child with no husband. To be strictly practical, I still need Benjamin.
Maybe in other ways too. He did look — sweet, as he threw that hat. Gallant, as he used to be to me before I got impatient with his gallantry. And his smile, so warm, with such white teeth…
Bodies get cold in the early hours, as if the night’s draining away their life. We’re covered with the lightest manta which seemed unsufferably hot when we went to bed but does nothing to protect me now. My hands are cold, my heart is cold, my teeth begin to ache with cold…
Reluctantly and then gratefully I crawl over to Benjy and cuddle up next to him, burrowing under the blanket so I can fit my knees under the curve of his knees and press my belly against his warm buttocks. My face touches his back; from habit, from affection, I kiss it, very lightly so he doesn’t wake up. I sneak my cold feet between his calves and my fingers inch under his elbows, stealing the warmth from his sides.