The Story of My Face (4 page)

So Tuomas put up some rough shelves. He fixed a rail to hang his clothes from. He unpacked his possessions from their boxes and bags, considering carefully where each thing should best be placed. He had good writing equipment, and his books included not only theological texts, but also works of scientific speculation, poetry, history – but relative to what he'd have as a pastor today, or to what I've brought for a few weeks or months, his other personal possessions were few: two recorders, treble and descant; a silver watch; his pre-ordination clothes – well made in good fabrics. A tiny woollen hat, unworn, knitted in a cream-and-red pattern, made for him, so his Aunt Eeva had said, before his birth, by his real mother. This he hung from one of the four wooden pegs by the door, where I now keep my selection of weather-proof coats.

The disintegrating leather bag which he unpacked last of all yielded the contents of the bottom drawer of his closet at home: unused stationery, old notebooks and a wooden box – a forgotten, boyhood thing containing six cracked pans of watercolour paint, the blue, black and the green much used. Later, in his
Confession
, he would describe this box as if it were Pandora's: ‘It was to take me as far away from God as I have ever been,' he wrote; ‘it was my Apple, and no sooner was it in my hand than I began to devour it; I was in the desert not even fourteen days, and I acquiesced –

But I imagine that at the time, it was with a gentle kind of pleasure, half surprise, half
déjà vu,
, that he opened the wooden box, then felt again inside the leather bag that contained it and discovered there also the small sable brush that exactly fitted the groove cut between the two rows of paints. . . .

What I think is that if Tuomas had a real mother and father – or just one parent, or even a brother or sister – then, once he had realised that the Pastor of Elojoki did not want him, he would have simply stayed the night and left in the morning. But as things were, the way that Elojoki refused him, and the way that he survived it, were to change Tuomas utterly. And maybe, without knowing it, that's what he wanted and what he came here for.

As for me, according to my proposal, I am to write a scholarly biography of the founder of one of the least known but most interesting post-Lutheran Finnish Protestant sects, the kind of book that about ten other academics will read but which will get me a few trips abroad and just possibly, one day, a slightly better job.

But perhaps what I am
really
doing, and have been doing ever since the accident happened, is telling the story of my face, in which Tuomas Envall plays a part. Ever since that time I have been putting the story together and taking it apart again, casting and recasting it in a way that is, when you think of it, oddly appropriate to the subject. I've been pulling small details out of memory and finding others attached to them. I've imagined what I cannot know, I've read, adjusted my imaginings, thought events through from other people's point of view (though clearly, I missed Christina out!). And of course, the story of my face is bound together with other stories: the story of a marriage, of a mother and her son; of the birth of a dream; of the archaeology of an accident. It is also a love story of sorts.

I have to tell it and I don't yet know where it ends. But I do know that my part of it begins on a spring afternoon over thirty years ago, when a red-haired girl with a face that was perhaps already extraordinary, but in a quite ordinary way –
when I
– first saw Barbara Hern.

4

I'm thirteen. I'm wearing my school uniform and I carry a green duffle-bag, first properly, with the cord across my chest, then in my hand, grazing the ground, then clasped with both arms to my midriff. It's a spring afternoon and I'm walking in the Avenues, where bright green borders of grass separate the pavements and the roads. I'm walking and I'm noticing things – such as whether or not each house has a garage, and, if the doors are open, what make and year of vehicle is inside.

If someone were to ask me what my name is, I'd lie: ‘Mary', ‘Elizabeth', ‘Jane'. If they asked, ‘What are you doing, wandering like this?' I'd say, ‘I've taken a short-cut and got lost' or ‘I've accidentally dropped my key down a drain so I'm waiting for my mother to get back from work.' Depending on what I thought of the person asking me, I might just say, ‘I'm only looking round,' and that would be the closest to the truth. But the ‘looking round' is far too serious a thing to be dismissed with ‘
only
', and in any case, it is not so much looking round, or even looking for, as
waiting
.

I've been waiting for a long time, though I've forgotten that I'm doing it. I only ever knew for a brief, burning moment. I'm waiting for the right person and the right place. When those come together, fit like a key into a lock, then the other person will know it too.

I walk past carefully maintained gardens, their lawns glowing, their flowers heavy from last month's rain. The houses are detached or semi-detached and stand well back from the road. It's hard to make much out. Here and there I glimpse the dark shapes of furniture, a picture picked out by a patch of falling light, a vase of flowers, a figure bustling from one room to the next. I fill in what I can't see with imaginings and memories. I enumerate, as yet with a kind of detachment, the many ways in which this well-tended place is different from home. Sandra, my mother, is not one for chores, so long as her clothes and sheets and the bathroom basin are clean.

I hear voices and follow them across the road to a corner house. The front door is ajar. The garage doors are also open, and likewise that of a caravan parked in the driveway next to a Hillman Minx, quite new, dark green, with glittering chrome. Beside the vehicles, a bespectacled woman with long brown hair pulled back into a thick pony-tail crouches on her haunches, trying to pick up something small from the gravelled driveway.

Standing, she reveals herself suddenly as very tall. She is wearing, unconventionally for the times, men's blue dungarees over a pale short-sleeved blouse, but even so, the curves of the body underneath show through. A short, bearded man stands close by, cutting a length of wood into sections.

‘Hello,' the woman calls out to me. Her voice is breathy, almost over-enthusiastic, playful and solemn at the same time. She holds me in her gaze and walks over to the driveway gates: wrought iron painted a pale blue that matches the doors on the garage and the porch. Close up, I can see that she's not wearing any make-up and that the skin on her face is dryish and faintly lined; she's older than I thought at first, and while her eyebrows arch gracefully over the thick lenses of her glasses, her eyes, each differently magnified, swim rather sickeningly beneath them. Yet her mouth is wide, and as if it had taken over from the eyes, it is involved from moment to moment in a series of subtle evaluating and expressive movements. She is not beautiful, like Sandra, but then again, she is not plain like Aunt Sue. She is somewhere in between, or something else entirely.

‘Look,' the woman says, holding out the soft inner side of her arm. A ladybird toils up the pale slope of skin. When it reaches the joint, she takes it on to the finger of the other hand. ‘My first this year,' she says. ‘Do you like them?' I've never thought of liking ladybirds or not.

She collects the insect on her finger again, and puts it this time on my arm. To begin with, there's nothing, but by the time it's halfway up, I'm sure that I can feel it walk, each footfall separate.

‘What are you going to do with it?' My throat's tight. My voice comes out with an exaggerated rise at the end; the ladybird takes to the air in a heavy blur of wings.

‘How long have you been standing there?' she asks in turn. ‘What's your name?' Her voice is smooth; it fills you up, like milk.

‘Natalie,' I tell her: the truth. I hold the word up like an empty cup.

‘I'm Barbara.' She unlatches the gate, opens it.

‘Do come in and see –'

Just before I step into their garden, I look quickly away from Barbara, across at the man, who has stopped working on his bit of wood and is looking right back at me, then I glance up at the house beyond. There is a small round window, right under the roof. The rows of tiles lift up and over it, like the skin of an eyelid, and someone else is up there, I'm sure, watching us.

‘John, this is Natalie.' The bearded man puts the sanding block in his pocket, offers his right hand.

‘How old are you, Natalie?' He uses an awkward, over-solemn tone clearly reserved for strangers.

‘Thirteen,' I tell him. The three of us stand there for a few seconds, facing each other.

‘What are you making?' I point at the strip of wood. Almost everything I say at this age is a question. Once I have an answer, I'm ready with another one. ‘Are you going on holiday, then? What's it like inside the caravan? Where are you going? Is it far? How fast can the car go? What do you
do
when you go on holiday? '

‘I'll fetch Mark,' his mother says, when she can get a word in.

‘Who's he?' I ask, glancing up at the window again.

5

He hangs back, glowering at me; a big, tall boy with a slightly plump face and brown, curly hair, surprised-looking eyebrows that don't quite match. He's wearing grey trousers, a white shirt and, pulled loose, a blue-and-yellow tie: St Joseph's. I can see him taking in how I'm growing out of my green-and-white striped dress, my scuffed shoes, the duffle-bag. I can see how life stretches ahead of him, a huge expanse of calm water, grey-green under a blue sky (what's beginning now will change it, though not quite so much as it will change things for me).

‘Manners, Mark!' Barbara says. So he holds out his hand, then, when I'm slow on the uptake, puts it back in his pocket.

‘I'm doing my homework,' he says to her, not me.

‘You weren't when I came in,' she tells him. ‘Can you help me bring some chairs outside? Will it be all right for you to stay a little?'

‘Oh, yes,' I say.

She brings a jug of orangeade, a plate of biscuits. ‘Homemade,' she explains. ‘Take a few.' John wipes his hands on his overalls and we all sit down. Mark stares and stares, half hostile, half something else I don't quite understand. He's looking at my skin. Until now, people's skins have just been there, have existed in various shades of pale or dark, smooth and creased. But this thirteen-year-old skin of mine seems to strike him as utterly extraordinary, a different kind of thing entirely. It's as near to white as healthy flesh gets, but not at all translucent, a kind of thick white. My nose and cheeks are dappled with light, gingerish freckles – it's the same on my arms and in the V of my dress – and these seem to be suspended to varying degrees under the surface of the skin, adding to the sense of its opacity. Here and there is a single, much darker mark, right beneath the surface. I look out from inside this covering as if from something I'm wearing, head to toe – not really part of me. As if, I guess Mark thinks, I'm not human, but pretending to be –

He's afraid of me: I'm pretty sure of it.

‘What school do you go to?' he asks, colouring up.

‘St Anne's,' I grin quickly, as if at some private joke. My green eyes come close to meeting his but don't actually do it – like the questions, this is a habit of mine. I bite into my shortbread, catching crumbs with my spare hand, and look from him to Barbara and back again, completely ignoring Mark's father – I can't see the point of him.

‘Mark's at the boys' Grammar,' Barbara prompts.

‘What's your favourite subject?' Mark asks. I chew, swallow, brush at my dress.

‘Cooking,' I say eventually, to Barbara. ‘Can I see inside the caravan, please?'

‘Show her, then, Mark.'

I like the caravan straight away: the fold-down table, which his father is mending, the tiny cooker under its lid. I want to know where they each sleep, and why there is an extra bunk, and where things are put and kept. I tug at the maroon velvet curtains on their plastic rails, laugh, open them all again. I've been following the moon mission and the caravan reminds me of a spaceship. ‘What do you do when you're away in the caravan?' I ask him. ‘Where is the toilet? What sort of things do you eat?'