Porky (10 page)

I didn't dare speak to the Indian lady, in case she didn't understand English, so I went to the toilet instead. I needed to, being so tense. I sat there working out words.
We miss you so much. Teddy cries for you each night. Don't be angry with me . . . I'll die if you don't want to come home
. . .

Outside the ladies' I hesitated. I couldn't ask anyone, because they'd direct me back here; they'd think I was mad, asking for
another
ladies' convenience. So I hurried across the hall. Teddy or Dad, or both of them, would soon be waking up. Teddy was safe, in his cot, but I must get back before Dad found out I'd gone.

I found another ladies' and went in, my heart knocking. Looking around, I couldn't see anyone. Then I saw the little room, with its window. Inside was a glimpse of overall. Someone was in there, sitting on a chair.

I walked up and peeped round the door. The person turned round.

‘Something the matter?'

She had red curls, and her eyebrows raised.

I couldn't get the words out.

‘What is it, dear?'

‘Is there another toilets here?' I asked, in a rush.

She paused, her eyes merry. ‘This one not good enough for you?'

I stared, trying to sort out my words. ‘I'm looking for my . . . for a lady. She's called Mrs Mercer.' I paused. ‘She works here.'

‘Here?'

‘At Terminal Two. I know she does.'

‘In the washrooms?'

I nodded. She thought for a moment.

‘Mercer . . . Ah, you must mean Coral.'

‘Yes!'

‘'Fraid you can't get to her.'

‘Why? Where's she gone?'

‘She's not gone, dear. She's here.' She paused. ‘She is here and she isn't, so to speak.'

‘Why?'

‘She's in the toilets, right.' She was still smiling. ‘But the toilets in the Departure Lounge.'

‘How do I get there?'

‘Can't. Not unless you've got a ticket.'

‘Ticket? Where can I get one?'

‘A plane ticket, my love. And you'll be needing a passport too.' She looked at me. When she saw my expression her voice changed, and she explained to me what she meant.

Mum did come home that day. It was long after I'd got back. Dad and I were eating pork pies. I've never seen anyone eat them like he did; he'd nibble off the top first so you saw the grey bumpy insides, like brains. Then he'd spread mustard and pickle on the top and say, ‘Fit for a king.'

Rinty barked, but less wildly than for a stranger, and there she was, giving the door a shove, where it was stuck, like she always did.

‘Must get that fixed,' she said quite calmly. Her hair was newly set, in stiff, spun rolls. That was the only sign that this was an event. She seemed smaller than I remembered.

If I was younger I'd have flung my arms around her, but I knew by now that she didn't like that sort of display.

Dad's voice. ‘How about fetching another cuppa, Heth?'

He took her out later to the pub, which was their only sign that anything unusual had happened. Much later, as I lay in bed, I heard her gasping noises through the wall. I gripped Kanga against my chest; without the bump of Roo, she seemed flabby and in need of holding. I thought I'd forgotten what those noises sounded like, it was so long since I'd heard them. I didn't want to hear them, of course. I was part of that now.

If you press one ear against the mattress, with its lobe folded over, and press the pillow hard on top, against the other ear which is folded flat, you can block out anything. I'll show you how; I'm the expert. If you want to make absolutely sure, you hum as well.

Here endeth my childhood. The next term I went to the big school, where they called me Porky. When I had to pass on a book in class they'd wipe their hands with a shudder, as if they knew.

THIRTEEN YEARS OLD
. Did you stop being friends with your body then? It's betrayed you, hasn't it, sprouting spots and thickening, lumpily, just where you don't want it to thicken. You don't notice your body when you're little: you
are
it. I remember Gwen aged eleven, prancing around and snorting, tossing her brown pigtails like a pony. She
was
a pony. To be exact, she corrected me, a palomino stallion called Caspar, that nobody could tame. I wasn't that keen on ponies myself but I knew what she meant. Your body was what you did things with, what made them possible, like your own soul made elastic. You didn't think of it as separate, except when you scraped your knee or you had a sneezing fit (I had hay fever, being the pink, allergic type). When I was young, as I said, the only way my body let me down was by blushing. I learnt early that I was a blusher; but that was because I'd learnt so early about guilt.

I looked at my body in the bath. I was thirteen, and inspecting it as if I'd never seen it before. At this time my Mum was working at the airport coffee shop, the late shift, so my Dad and I were alone in the evenings. But he was usually down at the pub, so that was when I had my bath. I'd wedge the chair against the door handle, just in case, and fill the room with steam. The one thing that worked in our house was the geyser. Then I'd lie soaking for an hour. Those days baths were the nearest I came to contentment, in our home. I'd lie there, propped, too sluggish to worry or even to think, feeling the badness soak out of me. ‘Open your pores', said
Woman's Realm
, ‘to “breathe out” the hidden grime.'

Radio Luxembourg would be playing, but not too loud, so I could hear if the porch door slammed. The corroded geyser spout hung above my toes. Through the DJ's chatter I'd gaze at my reddening thighs, submerged in the water. I knew, by now, that I was overweight. My tummy went into rubbery creases when I sat up, so I'd lie down again. Being fair, my skin was sensitive to heat and cold and turned blotchy with either extreme; my hands went mottled mauve in the winter, and bright pink in the bath. Pale hairs grew down my arms and legs, and there were light brown, coarser hairs between my thighs. My breasts looked fatty, with big, pale nipples. Once, when I lifted up Teddy, he pressed them and sang,

‘Jellies on a plate, jellies on a plate –'

‘Shut up!' I hissed. My Mum, and, much worse, my Dad, were in the room.

‘Wibble-wobble, wibble-wobble, jellies on a plate!'

But here in the bathroom nobody could see except me. I could look at myself with a horrified interest that dissolved, with the heat, into steamy langour. I carried this body around but it didn't belong to me any more. I rubbed the mist from the mirror and looked at my spots – not many, just two or three crimson blobs on my chin. I narrowed my eyes and my face went swimmy in the glass. I blinked, and opened my eyes wide, and blinked again, tight, telling myself it was all a dream and next time I opened them my face would change. I wouldn't be Heather any more.

I willed it. Then I opened them and there I was, large and pink, with the moisture sliding down the mirror like tears.

I suppose all teenagers feel like this, but I didn't speak to them on the subject. My only friend was Gwen and she did most of the talking. She was the one who told me about my little piggy eyes. I'd developed earlier than her but she was the bossy type; she'd seen me in the cloakroom at school, slipping my package into the bin. I'd hoped nobody had seen, but she grabbed my arm.

‘Porks, you spoilsport! There I was, telling you what my Mum said, about periods,' she glared at me, ‘and you'd started already!'

I willed someone to come in, so she'd stop. But then, knowing Gwen, she might tell them too.

‘You told your Mum?' she asked.

I nodded, truthfully, because I was sure Mum knew, though it hadn't been mentioned. She'd taken me out shopping to buy my two bras, some months before, and had asked me, in the bright embarrassment of the changing room, if they'd told me about feminine hygiene at school. I'd nodded, untruthfully, and that had been that. She must have glimpsed me at home, as furtive as herself, but I knew she wouldn't let on that she'd seen.

‘You lucky thing!' breathed Gwen.

I stared at her. ‘What?'

‘Don't look so superior. Look at little me.' She turned to the mirror and smoothed her cardigan flat. ‘Not a sausage.'

She started bemoaning her fate then, so I began to relax.

Dad was the one who touched my breasts, not me. I looked at myself for hours in the bath, and sideways, standing on my bed, but I never touched that area except when I adjusted my bra. I knew it was dreadfully wrong to fondle yourself, there or below; I knew this one rule and I kept to it, through all my confusions, because it became so important. It was the one thing I could do – rather, refrain from doing – myself.

This soft, pink body that I had to carry around . . . I didn't want to admit it was mine, yet it was. And it was the only one I'd ever have. At primary school we'd chanted a rhyme:

Yet Dad, when he stroked my breasts, he called them ‘bubbies'. They didn't belong to me, then.

‘How's them little bubbies?' he'd murmur in that shaky voice. ‘They're liking it, see? They're liking it when I do this . . .'

They weren't mine. I never called them that; I never ever would. But I'd lock the muscle in my head, and let him. I didn't stop him . . . I knew I wouldn't.

Then sometimes when I was alone, sitting in my bra and knickers, I'd wonder if the other girls felt just a bit like I did about my body. The trouble was, I'd gone too far now ever to find out. What I was doing was so deeply wrong that I'd never know; I'd lost track of Gwen and Co. One of the many casualties of all that happened was that I never knew how a teenager was supposed to feel.

But then teenagers were meant to be mixed-up, weren't they? My magazines said so. Perhaps I was getting confused about something that was quite normal. Looking back to when I was eleven and I'd slept with Dad those nights, I knew I'd felt anxious. But I'd also felt that surely there wasn't anything to worry about, because he was my Dad and so he must know the right thing to do. If I couldn't trust him, who on earth could I trust? It was all my fault that I was muddled. And later on, during the next couple of years, when things had become much worse, I still wondered if I wasn't making a fuss about nothing. I still felt he must know.

By then I'd visited Gwen's home and seen how different it was to mine – I've told you about that, and how upsetting it was. But there were a lot of girls who might not be like Gwen – that was the point of school, wasn't it, to meet all these different people when you'd never met any at home? Perhaps at Janet's place, or Margot's, I would glimpse some clue that would make me feel better.

But I never did – I looked, all right, you can be sure of that. I never did, and I never knew them well enough to ask.

I said before that realizing something's wrong doesn't come at the expected moment – when you're doing the wrong thing, or even thereabouts. In my experience, anyway, it doesn't. It happens during some humdrum moment; it might be days or months later. My first inkling had been when I'd lied to the flower-lady; something had shifted inside me, then.

The second stage was more complicated, and gradual. It wasn't until I was thirteen, and Dad and I had been having sexual intercourse for a year, that I let myself begin to realize what was happening. Pretty stupid, you might think. It may seem odd, not to dare for so many months, but it didn't seem odd at the time. It seemed the only way I could manage to walk down the drive each morning to catch the bus, and sit just like a normal pupil in class, and mooch around the playground, one of a huddle, just like the others, and help my Mum just like an ordinary daughter without a care on her mind, trotting down to the phone box to call up the electricity, sucking my Biro over the shopping list and even chiding my Dad, oh yes, quite jauntily, when he trod mud across the lounge. And loving Teddy, who kept me sane. Slapping him, and getting maddened, but loving him all the time.

It's a wonderful object, the mind. What you can stop it doing. For months I did manage to keep myself separate – just – from what was happening. I was still innocent, you see, somewhere deep inside. It wasn't so bad, in the beginning. During my first year at the big school he sometimes kissed me, in that hot, uncomfortable way, and fondled me as he had in his bed. It didn't happen often; not even once a week. He didn't have that many opportunities because those months Mum was working early and she was home by four. And I'd also got to know the signs. I'd be in the hen-house, for instance. The hens were my job. I'd be crouched down, searching for the eggs, when darkness fell. He was behind me, standing in the doorway and blocking the light.

‘What we'd do without our Heth,' he'd say. ‘You're a good girl, know that? What would your Dad do without you?'

Then he'd come in, all affectionate.

So I stayed away from the hens. Now I was in the big school, in Class One, I had homework to do, so I stayed indoors in the lounge. Mr Talbot was ever so pleased with my progress. He said,

‘Heather's an example to you all.'

Another thing I did was to use the toilet at the garage. As I said, our bathroom door didn't lock. Dad wouldn't come in, I was nearly sure of that, but I never felt quite safe. I could get down to the petrol station without being seen, by wriggling through the hedge and trotting down the depot road; it ran alongside our drive but it was hidden by the hedge.

The toilets were out of sight of the booth; nobody seemed to use them, and the attendant had to stay at the pumps. A few years later the garage was modernized into a self-serve. This struck me as appropriate; after all, I'd been doing it for years.