The Story of My Face (15 page)

Just inside the gate several men strode up to welcome us, gesticulating towards the far corner, where trees offered some shade. We lumbered across the rough ground, Green and Thwaite from Humberside, Mr Thorn from Suffolk following, and others gathering in the wake. Last of all came a gaggle of ball-playing children and a thin, somehow lopsided boy, Ian McAllister, who had to put his viola on the ground and find his glasses before he could follow the rest.

The Herns and I stood together in the slanting oblong of shade the caravan made. Grasping both of each person's hands and holding them a moment, the Herns greeted each and every person, adult and child. . . . Another family arrived in the middle of this and did the same thing, so it was some time before Barbara could inform the congregation about Mark's silence and announce that I, Natalie, came from a different background but very much wanted to be with them –

‘Good,' said the man called Thwaite, not really listening. ‘Everyone is coming, but unfortunately Paul Leverson has been delayed –'

‘Who's he?' I whispered in Mark's ear, the words coming out of nowhere so that he drew breath and almost answered them by mistake. Thwaite gestured around the field, pointing out blue chemical toilets, for men at the far top side of the field, for women at the far lower; the two taps by the gate, the space at the top of the neighbouring field where tomorrow we would erect a communal food tent, the place below it for meetings. Food would be ready in an hour or so. Was there anything else anyone wanted to know?

‘Can I listen to the radio in the car?' I asked him.

‘Well, I expect so,' he said, bewildered, seeing me properly this time: the hair, the too-small clothes, the eyes – very green now, in the company of so much grass, fixed somewhere, almost tangible, between his own eyes and hairline – ‘I can't see why not.'

‘There's a transistor,' Barbara said as Mark and his father went to settle the caravan. ‘I'll fetch it. We can sit somewhere quiet while I make you look human again.'

I held the radio in my lap, its aerial pointing down the valley, and bent over it, elbows on knees, loose-shouldered. Apollo 11 was beyond the reach of communications, on the dark side of the moon. The men left behind on earth, waiting for news, talked on and on, of degrees and accuracy, timing, computer predictions, gravitational field, velocity –

She squatted on her heels behind me and took my hair in both her hands, buried them in it, squeezed, felt the weight, the damp warmth at the roots, then let go. The hair was tangled and knotted, springy, wilful, matted where it had been slept upon. She separated small sections with her fingers, held them above the first knot with one hand, while she pulled the comb down until it bit. Then it was a matter of ease and tug, ease and tug, small movements with rests in between.

‘It doesn't hurt,' I told her.

She leaned in closer. The men on the radio droned on.

‘Tell me something,' I said. Barbara reached underneath the hair to where the soft, fine down grew in the warm climate of the nape, combed upwards from there, then carefully down the sides of the head, behind the ears.

‘What kind of thing do you mean?' she asked. I leaned further forwards to make the combing easier.

‘Something interesting –' Barbara divided my hair for the plait, combing each third over again. Now that the knots were out, and the strands lay next to each other in one mass, the colour of the hair grew deeper, complicated itself.

‘Something I don't know,' I told her.

‘I expect there's an awful lot you don't know.' She let a smile spread across her face then, knowing I wouldn't see it and feel mocked. The hair slipped between her fingers, fluid, warm, like nothing else but itself.

‘I know more than you think,' I said. It was the first time I had made a statement of this kind, a contradiction, and I said it clearly, but very quietly. ‘I even know how babies are made,' I told her, ‘unless you take the pills. The egg and the worm; I know all that.'

‘That –' she said. ‘That is a lot to know.' I kept my eyes closed, concentrated on the gentle pulling at the roots of my hair.

‘When the baby comes out,' I told her, ‘it really hurts.'
Like
fuck
was what Sandra said.

‘Yes –' she said, simply. In the quiet that followed, was she remembering the labour she had with Ruth? How it was unexpectedly harder than the first, how, in the middle of the worst of it she thought,
You, I am doing everything I can. Don't
you give up; I shan't
– How the pair of them were there, just the two of them, in the universe of their joined but wrestling flesh, and the doctor and nurses, despite the things they did, could only be outside, while mother and child tried to separate themselves so that they could see each other, smile, begin to learn to talk with words – a process as hard to describe as being behind the moon, on its dark side, unable to talk to home. . . .

In any case, the plait grew steadily and neither of us spoke for quite a while.

‘Afterwards,' she said eventually, ‘that pain is like something that happened in another country years ago. You can tell the story of it, but it is gone. . . . Children are God's gift,' she added.

‘So why –'

‘Mmm?'

‘I mean –' I said, carefully, in a way that seemed to make what I said a question, but not too much of one, more an invitation: ‘I mean – you've only got one.' She slipped an elastic band over the end of my plait, and I turned to look at her, fighting those lenses to see what was behind, to be as close as possible, then, and now, still –

‘Surely,' she's thinking, ‘there is nothing wrong with explaining; the girl is of an age to know that such things take place, though not, of course, the details. . . .'

‘I did have a little girl after Mark,' she says, ‘but she only lived for a few months.'

She keeps her gaze steady. She doesn't cry. On the contrary, her lips curl upwards ever so softly and her face softens. It's as if, in the blink of an eye (‘In the blink of an eye,' Envall writes, ‘a lifetime's faith can be lost, and might take another lifetime to find'), she has grown younger inside, as if something better than ordinary blood flows in her veins and arteries, as if she were breathing oxygen, not air – ‘Could I tell
anyone
how I feel right now?' she's thinking. ‘I've sat here half an hour with Mrs Baron's daughter lent to me for a week, my hands sunk into her double-fine-grade red-gold-wool hair, saying this and saying that, listening, then telling her –'

Behind the glasses, Barbara's eyes are bright. She feels alive and open. She can even begin to understand those men hurtling through space, the bluntest of talkers, men in whom the impulse to reach out to others with words seems so reluctant (the earth ‘green' and ‘brown', the view ‘magnificent') or to be somehow lost between heart and throat. Just as their bodies are wrapped in huge insulating suits which she has heard about but can't really imagine, so their hearts and souls are swaddled inside the experience of being astronauts; they are quite simply at a point where words fail, and they can only hope to communicate with each other.

She takes me by the shoulders and presses her face down on top of my head, breathing in the perfume of the hair and the pale scalp beneath, that intimate, animal incense. Then the radio says, abrupt, but trying to sound calm:

‘– there is contact but there are transmission problems. . . . There are transmission problems,' it repeats. We pull apart. For a minute or so there is absolute silence on the airwaves. Then a new voice says:

‘Houston,' (you can tell it's from miles and miles away) ‘we are in lunar orbit. We had an almost perfect burn back there. . . .'

‘There!' I shout at her. ‘They're going to make it!'

A few minutes later, when the radio goes boring again, I reach for the end of my new plait, put it experimentally in my mouth.

‘Was it a secret that you just told me?' I ask.

‘No,' she says, ‘just something I don't talk about much.' She stands and lashes out at a cloud of midges that has gathered over us.

‘It's time you forgot all these things you say you know about, and went and ran around with the rest of them.'

‘I like it here,' I say. I don't move.

She pulls up the corners of the rug, tumbles me onto the grass, then falls on me, working her fingers deliciously between my ribs so that I squeal with laughter. She chases me up the slope.

‘Maskelyne . . . Boot Hill . . . Sidewinder . . . Mount Marilyn. . . . I can see the crater of Aristarchus . . . there's a slight amount of fluorescence, a kind of brightness. . . .' Behind us, the ghost of Armstrong's voice streams out from the radio, which lies forgotten in the grass.

On site, other radios whispered the same and different things. One group of children were borrowing Ian McAllister's viola, another, including Mark, were playing a brisk game of five-aside football in the meeting-field beyond the hedge: good for him to let off steam, Barbara said. Girls of differing heights waited for their turn to skip a rope turned by two older girls. ‘One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four,' they sing, ‘five o'clock, six o'clock, seven o'clock, more. . . .' Barbara waited while I ran into the field, hesitated, and took my place at the back of the skipping line, a girl with a plait, just like the rest. But also different. I looked back and waved.

‘What are you called?' the girl in front of me asked, blinking in the sunlight. She was plump and short, wore her dark hair in a short, thick pony-tail with a fringe as well, which made her face seem even plumper than it was.

‘Natalie,' I told her.

‘That's a weird name,' she said, angrily, as if it mattered a lot.

‘No,' I told her, ‘it's French,' and decided not to ask hers – though it was, of course, Christina. Instead, I looked over the top of her head at the girl jumping in the rope. I hadn't done it more than a few times and those a long time ago. It looked hard and for some reason – for Barbara, I think – I wanted to do well.

If the weather held
, Barbara thought,
the child would need to borrow
a sun hat.
She walked over to the Thorns' camper, and found Edith setting out to carry a groundsheet and two big bowls of potato salad back down to the river end of the lower field, where supper was to be. The veins on the backs of her hands and thin arms stood out like string, and although she would not hand the task over completely, she was glad of help.

Mr Thorn had not been very well these past two weeks, she explained, as Barbara arranged the groundsheet and set out the food under cloths. There were pains in his stomach, he just couldn't get up and go – but the doctor found nothing, so it was in the hands of the Lord. . . .

They set off back for more.

How was Mark? Mrs Thorn asked, seeing as one couldn't ask him himself right now. Such a thoughtful boy. So tall now!

‘And then,' she said, ‘there's this child you have brought along with you, this Nadine –'

‘Natalie,' Barbara corrected, glancing quickly across.

‘Yes –' They reached the top of the incline, and the older woman, breathing hard, put her hand on Barbara's shoulder, stopping them both.

‘Yes, I do wonder,' Edith began, ‘whether you and John should have consulted a little, before bringing her?'

‘Why?' Something in Barbara's voice made Edith's eyes widen, startled.

‘I do think you should be very careful,' she said.

‘Of course, Edith,' Barbara said.

But the more careful I am
, she thought, as Edith took her by the hands, squeezing them hard, patting at them, running her thumbs over the palms, as if she could feel what was within and stroke it out,
the more careful I am, in proportion to the amount
I refrain and restrain myself, the more perfectly this thing seems to fall
out according to my heart's desire. . . .

When she'd addressed God on this matter, asked what it meant, He was silent. Edith would say that the problem lay in the way in which she approached her prayers. But she did not tell Edith and she would not, and for the first time since she had fought her parents over marrying John Hern, Barbara felt something fierce inside her turn and kick, half terrifying, half delicious.

At supper that evening, over fifty of us sat on blankets on the grass in a rough circle to begin with, then spreading out into smaller groups once Grace had been spoken. Thirty or so more were expected by the end of the next day. The sky darkened to a violet grey, slightly hazy, and then, while we ate, the first shy stars came out, grew bolder, multiplied and drove the haze away. Ian McAllister, standing up with his eyes squeezed shut, played something new that he had been practising, a modern work, full of silent spaces and sudden torrents of notes, and I held Barbara's hand.

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