Learning to Swim Read online

  ‘Where did you get them?’ he asks. Between sobs I tell him: it’s a cheap chainstore and he is confident that we will be able to find a branch on the way home and replace them. Dorking has them but only in the beige. Reigate doesn’t have my size. We finally run a pair to ground perilously close to home and the relief is immense. The old pair and the packaging from the new are discarded in a litter bin and a vow of secrecy is sworn. Father tries to make light of the deception, while hinting that he would rather it was maintained. ‘We both know Mummy wouldn’t really mind, but there’s no point in making her cross when she’s got a headache,’ he says, somewhat illogically. The excitement at allying myself with father against mother is diminished by a sense of unease. I am inclined by nature to be truthful.

  By the time we return, mother’s headache and bad temper have evaporated and she is downstairs making a chocolate sponge – a great treat and concession, since chocolate is one of her prohibited foods, and therefore her pleasure in it will have to be entirely vicarious. She and father and I greet each other cheerfully, and after stowing the treacherous sandals in my room I am hugged and petted and allowed to lick the cake-mix spoon. In the evening, after tea, instead of retiring to his study to mark schoolbooks, prepare lessons or work on his Project – some monumental and eternally incomplete commentary on Greek drama – father joins mother and me for a game of cards. There is some piano music playing, quietly, in the background, and we have hot milk and cake with our rummy, which we are playing for matches. We are happy, all three of us, in the same place at the same time.

  3

  My father had his own equivalent of the untreatable headache: the unexplained absence. Since mother had never learned to drive, father was Lord of the Vauxhall Viva and would disappear off in it for hours on end, usually on some minor errand, like buying a washer for the tap or paying his library fines. (As Latin master at the local Grammar School, he had unlimited access to its library and was therefore used to protracted lending times.) He never gave any warning about his excursions, but would, apparently absent-mindedly, wander out of the house, and only the revving of the car engine would alert us that once again he was Off. Occasionally he would return with some purchase or other which might legitimise four hours’ absence: an obscure spare part for the car, or a stack of books in a Foyle’s carrier bag. But sometimes he would come back empty-handed. To my mother this behaviour was one of those endearing eccentricities grown hateful over time, but which having gone so long unchallenged could not now be remedied. (Certain rules, like father’s being allowed to smoke his pipe only in his study or in the garden, and the removal of outdoor shoes on the threshold, had been established early on and could therefore be enforced with rigour, and after a dozen years of marriage almost came naturally to him.)

  He used to enact a small-scale version of his truancy within the confines of the house itself, absconding to its furthest reaches just moments before dinner was served or we were due to go out.

  ‘Don’t disappear, I’m dishing up,’ mother would say, inverting a pan of vegetables into a colander in a cloud of steam as father hovered in the doorway. But by the time the food was on the plates he would be gone – ferreting in his desk for some suddenly remembered document, or making a hurried amendment to his Project.

  I caught him out once. It was the Saturday before Easter. Father had slipped off just after lunch; mother was weeding the front garden. I had finished my comic and tidied my room and had decided to cycle to the shops for sweets. Cycling without support was a relatively recent accomplishment of mine, and my reward for this endeavour had been a new, red bicycle with a basket on the front and a saddle-bag on the back, to replace the rusty jumble-sale model on which I had learnt the art. Riding round and round the perimeter of the untouchable green at the end of The Close had become my preferred form of entertainment, and as I flew along the bumpy pavements to the newsagent’s that morning with 10p in my pocket, I felt that sense of complete, unambitious happiness that as an adult I’ve rarely experienced.

  Inside the shop I paused by the freezer cabinet, debating whether I would be able to get an ice cream home before it melted, when I saw father at the counter. I was on the point of accosting him, for there would surely be sweets in it for me, but stopped just in time as I saw the newsagent descend from his step-ladder and hand father a huge Easter egg in purple foil. Instinctively I dropped down behind the rack of magazines, realising that the egg must be for me, and that if I intercepted the secret I would be guilty of something, though I wasn’t sure what. From my squatting position I could hear the rattle of the cash register and father saying thank you, and then to my dismay I saw his shiny black slip-ons come round the corner and advance towards me. I kept my head well down, pretending to be engrossed in a copy of Bunty, holding my breath for the moment of recognition, but it never came.

  ‘Excuse me,’ father said, vacantly, brushing the top of my head as he squeezed past, and was out of the door before I had even looked up.

  The next morning, Easter Sunday, I woke with a vague sense of dissatisfaction and couldn’t remember why. Then it came back to me: no surprise to look forward to. I had quite unwittingly done myself out of that gambler’s delight in confronting a wrapped present: it’s bound to disappoint, but just for a second hope triumphs. When I came down to breakfast, however, I found the parcel next to my cereal bowl was not remotely egg-shaped. I tore off the paper to reveal a chocolate bird’s nest containing several brightly coloured sugar eggs and a marzipan chick. An expression of bewilderment must have clouded my face.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ mother asked, put out by this display of ingratitude.

  ‘Oh yes, it’s lovely,’ I said, remembering myself, and to prove my thorough satisfaction with the gift I began to line up the sugar eggs alongside my plate and make a great fuss of the marzipan chick.

  I never saw any trace of that shiny purple Easter egg and the incident puzzled me for some time. It was only when I was a little older that it occurred to me as a possibility that father might simply have bought it for himself, since he had a sweet tooth and mother couldn’t eat the stuff. The idea that a grown-up – my father – might nurse the same petty desire as me to hide himself away and gorge on unshared chocolate felt like a shocking discovery.

  4

  It wasn’t until I reached junior school that my status as an only child became an issue. I suppose I must have noticed that other children and characters in books had brothers and sisters, but when you are young you accept your own situation as normal, whatever it may be. It didn’t strike me that I was somehow defective until Sandra Skeet, into whose gang I had failed to ingratiate myself on the first day of term, called me an Only in the playground.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded, blushing under the gaze of six pairs of hostile eight-year-old eyes.

  ‘You’re an only child – you’ve got no brothers and sisters. It means you get spoilt,’ she replied, linking arms with her courtiers to form an unbreachable barrier of blue gingham.

  ‘Sticks and stones –’ I began bravely, reciting the infamous lie that mother peddled whenever I reported some instance of playground name-calling, but Sandra had already finished with me.

  ‘You’ve gone all red,’ was her parting shot as the chequered wall swung round, ready to advance on some other pariah.

  From this time onwards my onliness began to preoccupy me: I was reaching the age where it no longer seemed so important to have my parents all to myself. I wanted someone to play with, to talk to after lights out, to giggle at over the tea table, but most particularly to invoke as a protector and ally in the face of the school bullies.

  There were several of us in the class who had been marked out for treatment by Sandra and her friends. My surname was enough to do for me, and various other children with the misfortune to be fat or feeble, or especially dim or clever, were similarly targeted. I would suddenly become aware that I was being shunned by various sections of the class; the desk next to mine
would remain empty; people who the week before had been my friends would ignore me when I spoke or discuss me with each other as if I wasn’t there. When I walked into the cloakroom the conversation would die and then unnaturally begin again on a new theme. And then, just as suddenly, without any warning, it would all stop, and Sandra would be saving me a seat at lunch, sharing her crisps with me and telling me her secrets, and for a few days life would be sweet again. It’s strange that we victims never thought of getting together and forming a rebellious gang of our own, but the fact was we hated one another. And Sandra’s methods were too subtle to allow for insurrection: only one person at a time was bullied, and when that person wasn’t me I was so grateful that nothing would have induced me to make myself conspicuous by standing up for that week’s scapegoat. In fact I was so spineless, cowardly and demoralised, that on those occasions when Sandra did make overtures of friendship in my direction I would abase myself thoroughly, even to the point of colluding with the treatment being handed out to a fellow sufferer. But those times were less common than the times when I was on the receiving end, or so it seemed; walking down an infinitely long corridor past a column of smirking girls, or sitting alone at my desk daydreaming of the imaginary sister whose loyalty would be absolute. Break times were the worst, as we would all be turfed out of the relative safety of the classroom into the cheerless wastes of the playground, where a solitary teacher with a whistle round her neck was all that stood between me and any number of unimaginable atrocities. Skulking in the loo was out of the question as the Girls’ Toilets were used as a sort of headquarters by Sandra and her gang, and wandering in there would have been regarded as an act of provocation. By denying myself drink at breakfast and lunch I had managed to train myself not to need the loo all day. On occasions when that proved impossible I would ask if I could be excused during lessons – itself a humiliation – which earned me a reputation with the teacher for having an unreliable bladder.

  My parents were powerless in the face of my enduring despair. Every Sunday evening would see me labouring to manifest the symptoms of a new disease which would suffice to keep me at home on Monday.

  ‘Can’t you find some other nice friends?’ mother asked one night as I sat in bed snivelling into my cocoa – a low point, I remember.

  ‘No. There’s no one left. When Sandra starts ignoring me they all do.’

  ‘What about the other girls she picks on? Can’t you pal up with one of those?’

  ‘I don’t want them as friends. I want normal friends,’ I sobbed.

  ‘Doesn’t the teacher put a stop to this sort of thing?’

  ‘She doesn’t notice.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you tell her? This Sandra girl shouldn’t be allowed to make your life a misery. And mine,’ she added.

  But tale-telling, I knew by some instinct, without ever having been told, was the worst crime of all for which Sandra would already have devised the ultimate punishment.

  There was one person however – a girl called Ruth Pike – who was even more unfortunate than I was. As well as being dim, she was also afflicted with terrible eczema, which smothered her hands, face and legs in red, flaky patches, so that there was hardly a thumbnail-sized patch of undamaged skin left. As if this wasn’t bad enough she had serious asthma, which meant she was always wheezing and puffing on a little plastic gadget. Her alarming appearance made her a natural object of ridicule, and she was often to be found hiding behind the coats in the cloakroom, sniffling and trying to make herself invisible. Needless to say, the pity I felt for her didn’t extend to friendship. Try as I might, I couldn’t like her. Because of her various ailments, and probably because of her unhappy experiences at school, she was often absent, and the sight of her navy mack with its mittens still sewn childishly on to the sleeves with tape, hanging on her peg, would fill my cowardly heart with relief at the thought that she and not me might be the day’s sacrifice.

  One Monday morning in spring, after a particularly bad week in which I had cried myself to sleep every night and mother had only been dissuaded from complaining to my form teacher by desperate entreaties from me, I arrived at school to find that the weekend had wrought a miraculous transformation and the sunshine of Sandra’s favour was smiling on me once again. She was sitting at the spare desk beside mine, brushing the nap of her furry pencil case and looking up at me from under her fringe. For someone with such power she was oddly harmless in appearance, being small for her age, with very pale, almost albino skin and white blonde hair which she always wore in two thin pigtails to her waist. Her pale blue eyes with their colourless lashes gave her a slightly washed out, unfinished look, like a painting that needs some outlines. Her sister, Julie, who was at the High School, was supposed to be even more dangerous. A rumour was currently running around the class that she had held some girl’s head down the loo and pulled the chain because she hadn’t shown the proper respect – a punishment known as bogwashing. My avoidance of the Girls’ Toilets had never seemed so wise.

  ‘Hello,’ said Sandra. ‘Nicky’s off sick today so I’m going to sit next to you. I’ve got some new pens. Do you want one?’ She shook out the pencil case on to her desk to reveal half a dozen plastic propelling pencils which smelled of fruit.

  ‘Really?’ I said, cautiously, in case it was a trick.

  ‘Yes, go on, have this one. Pineapple’s the nicest.’

  We were in the process of sniffing them all and comparing flavours when Ruth Pike came in and sat down. She had one of the few single desks at the side of the class, occupied by the disruptive or the terminally friendless, and she lifted the lid hastily when she saw Sandra and pretended to be busy sorting books, a strategy familiar to me.

  ‘My mum says if you’ve got what she’s got you can’t wash properly because you’re allergic to soap,’ said Sandra loudly. The shuffling behind Ruth’s desk intensified. I felt myself blushing with pity and shame. Sandra blinked at me with her pale lashes. ‘You can copy me in the spelling test if you want,’ she added, which was really an invitation for me to leave my own paper uncovered: she was a hopeless speller – buisness and Febuary.

  At break time, after a test in which Sandra and I alone of all the class had scored full marks, a result which earned us a good hard stare from Mrs Strevens, Sandra swept into the playground and enthroned herself on the only bench on the site, displacing the previous occupant on the grounds of a full year’s seniority with a cool ‘Off you get, I’m here now’. Her acolytes, including myself, hovered close at hand. The girls were always squeezed out to the edge of the territory by the boys’ football games which dominated the central space. Sometimes there would be as many as seven different matches taking place on one pitch, with seven hard tennis balls ricocheting around at head height. I could see poor Ruth Pike skirting the perimeter fence in a doomed attempt to infiltrate our group and remain invisible at the same time. Every so often she would realise she was observed and tack off again in the opposite direction. She was holding a packet of biscuits. Her mother had probably in desperation recommended this as a way of winning friends, or perhaps offered them as a bribe to get Ruth to school. I recognised that tactic too. As the bell went and we started to straggle back across the courtyard into class I found Ruth at my side. ‘Do you want a biscuit?’ she asked, holding one out between her fingers. It was a proper bought biscuit with pink icing and jam in the middle, a luxury to me, used to mother’s gritty flapjacks, and I had just taken it from her and exchanged smiles when Sandra suddenly appeared, grabbed my other arm and shrieked, ‘Don’t eat that!’

  ‘Why not?’ I stammered, looking from Sandra’s white face to Ruth’s stricken one.

  ‘Because you’ll get what she’s got – eugh!’

  Ruth instinctively put her raw hands behind her back, but said defiantly, ‘No, she won’t. It’s not catching.’

  ‘Drop it,’ Sandra urged me, with real concern in her voice, and – craven heart – I did as she said, and watched her grind it into the concrete
with her heel. As she frog-marched me back into the building, I saw Ruth looking at me with utter disbelief and reproach in her brimming eyes and I felt as small and hateful and despised as the smallest crumb of biscuit under Sandra’s shoe.

  ‘Why haven’t I got any brothers or sisters?’ I asked my parents over supper that evening, as if that was the source of all my troubles.

  Father looked up from his lamb chops nervously, deferring to mother.

  ‘Well,’ she said, uncomfortably, ‘having children isn’t as easy as all that, you know. They don’t just arrive on the doorstep fully formed. Anyway,’ she said, quickly, in case my questioning took an obstetrical turn, ‘you can’t always choose: things don’t necessarily turn out quite as planned.’ And here she gave my father a glance that wasn’t entirely friendly. That was all the explanation I was getting.

  ‘If I had a sister I wouldn’t care about Sandra. We’d just go around together and talk to each other,’ I said.

  ‘You know, sweetie, I think it’s time you stood up to this Sandra,’ said father mildly.

  ‘I think it’s time I went up to see the headmistress,’ said mother with some asperity.

  ‘No, no,’ I insisted, covering my face with my hands. ‘If you do that Sandra will really get me.’

  The truth of this principle was proved some weeks later.