Creepy and Maud (11 page)

All of this must have worked for Deidre. If the goal of therapy is the appearance of wellness, she must have thought my parents were star pupils. Neither of them was brave enough to be honest (with themselves, each other, her), so their goal became the appearance of honesty. The appearance of normalcy. They were faking it. They both started to look tired from the effort. Fights got shorter and less interesting (for me). Even Dobie Squires got bored. So the more they faked it, the better things appeared. The better things appeared, the greater their reward. Mum’s therapy diary changed focus from Merrill to Deidre. ‘Deidre was very pleased with our progress today.’ ‘Deidre very impressed with our employment of new skills to resolve conflict.’ Fortunately, the pendulum returned to its normal gait soon after Deidre (aka God) was out of their lives. Deidre could cash her cheques with a clear conscience, Mum and Dad could return to honest hostility towards one another, and Dobie Squires could return to bailing Mum up in the garden (and kitchen and lounge and toilet).

So you can see why I am so concerned about Maud.
She is the most honest person I know. All this therapy will change that. At least temporarily. And if she starts to change, even if only for a little while, it will interfere with my efforts to get her to love me back. We have a very delicate situation here. Not helped by closed curtains. So I write to her and, because I don’t know if and when the curtains will open and close, I sticky-tape the note to the window and leave it there:

—Take them off

School is very different without Maud there. I hadn’t realised how much of my day is centred on following her and watching her. I leave a class and automatically head in the direction she would be coming from (I have her timetable memorised). Then I realise she is at home and I feel that therapy fury bubble. I think about taking some time off myself, but part of my whole fly-under-the-radar thing is never drawing attention to myself, and a couple of days off is enough to stimulate the attendance officer into asking questions. Mum and Dad would ask questions, too, and I prefer being ignored.

There isn’t much talk about Maud at school. Her question to Mr Thornton has morphed into something akin to a terrorist threat, but that’s to be expected. Translations of
The Little Prince
resume under the supervision of a PE teacher who speaks German. Some
idiot ties flowers to the railing Stephanie Morcombe was dropped from. Other than that, things return to normal. When events as inane as unauthorised hair colouring usually excite weeks of illicit analysis and debate, it seems odd that Maud has died on the lips so quickly. I have a feeling staff are nipping it in the bud, due to Mr Thornton’s involvement. They’ve closed ranks. Apparently, a drunk French teacher doesn’t even warrant a flyer. Shame about that. I would have kept that flyer.

French is a Romance language. It does not mean romance in the way people think, though: it comes from Vulgar Latin and means to speak in Roman. Vulgar just means popular. When I hear French, I hear earthy words in the mouths of earthy people, open-mouth words, not the
la-di-da-tight-lipped
how to order in a French restaurant and
find-the-toilet-after
stuff they teach us at school. Dad uses the word vulgar a lot, and he is not talking about good, simple people when he says it. He says Creepy’s mum and dad are Vulgar. He thinks he is calling them crude and offensive. He does not know that I am the Vulgar one. Creepy is a good, common, ordinary boy in the Romance language.

Mum and Dad do not like me speaking in French.
Especially now. It is not just because they are afraid I might be using swears at them; it is because it excludes them. I might as well take up Wicca, judging from the look they give me when I answer them in French. Nancy calls my use of a foreign language a device and a contrivance, which annoys me, because I used to think having a facility for languages was a good thing. But I do not tell Nancy this. I am beginning to think that anything I do or say these days will be interpreted as defiance. And I do want to cooperate, very much.

Having a facility. Mum calls toilets ‘facilities’. When we are out, she will ask where the facilities are. So I have a facility and she goes to one, or on one, or in one. She asked after the facilities at Nanna’s funeral, and the man looked at her as if she were asking directions to the crematorium. She tried repeating herself but eventually had to say the word:
toilet.
Except she did not say it; she whispered it. I do not think she is trying to be fancy. I just do not think she likes the word
toilet.
There are a lot of words my mum does not like, and most of them are to do with me. Now she has words in two languages to cringe at.

I found out early that you have to be careful what you say. And what you write. There is no romance to language. No one actually communicates with each other through language. I figured if no one was listening
to me in English, they might as well ignore me in French, as well. I did not know a different language would upset everyone just as much as my silences do. It makes me sad. I am not that powerful. Now all the romance is being slapped out of me, but at least Mum will lose that pinched look. I will go back to school in mittens. I will be the hero of my own life. I will be miserable and that is okay. Misery breeds facility. My hidden romance.

There are hidden romances all over the place. I see the little adventures in other people, even the ones they do not see themselves. Creepy is having a romance with the romance I am having with hair. His mum is romantically involved with the bottle and her husband, although neither of them realise it. My mum and dad are romantically involved with the daughter Nancy has promised to squeeze out of the wreck of me. Secreted, veiled stories we would never show anyone else on purpose, so quiet they become a loud ringing in the ears, like a bride spitting in her dad’s ear at the last minute: ‘I’ve changed my mind!’ Of course, she walks down the aisle anyway because the caterers are already heating up the chicken.

When I go back to school, they are putting me in a remedial class for reading. That is pretty romantic. Shame it will not be a bit more hidden, but I did agree
to it, so you could say my chicken is being heated. They would have put me in there whether I agreed to it or not, but my falling in line pleased everyone because it was seen as personal progress. I expect to learn nothing. The class is being run by an English teacher who once called me lazy and foggy. She did not just call me that, she wrote it in my report. I said it over and over to myself: la-zy-and-fo-ggy. Mum and Dad said it over and over, too. Her name is Ms Tryst and she wrote: ‘Has potential she refuses to access. Less laziness and fogginess would be beneficial.’ I thought that was rude. Once she wrote a poem on the board and asked us to assess critically the literary references used therein. Used therein: that is how she talks. She wanted us to deconstruct it. It was a piece by John Donne. I could not understand it. I mean, I could read the words, but they spun off inside me and just disappeared somewhere, so I spent the time drawing a picture of Ms Tryst instead. I got detention for that. And I got la-zy-and-fo-ggy said to me out loud in front of everyone. And then said out loud in my report. When I got home that day, there was a note waiting for me in the window. It said:

—No man is an island

I pressed my palm against the window and felt sad.

I’d rather have detention than remedial reading. Remedial class will be just like detention, only with
humiliation thrown in. Just as well humiliation is an essential component of romance. That drawing I did of Ms Tryst was a good one. She was very angry about it, though. Remedial class will be during school hours. I am to miss one session of PE to attend remedial reading, which is fine with me because I am always looking for a reason to miss PE. I suppose they cannot make it after school in case it starts interfering with my detention. But for now I am suspended, stranded, adrift. An island.

No man is an island: romantic but untrue. Even when islands bump into each other, they only grind and groan before lumbering away from each other again. If they do get stuck together for a bit, it only serves to shove stress on the fissure between them. There is no crossing over into someone else’s country. Not even for a visit. We just yell across the divides. The thing is to pretend otherwise at all times.

I pretend with Nancy so she can pretend she is not pretending when she gives status reports to Mum and Dad. Mum and Dad pretend to be encouraged. School pretends to be interested and promises to take me back if the pretending sticks. The whole situation is one big remedial class. I always thought what you said to a doctor or a priest was private. That must only be on the telly. Psychiatrist, chaplain, teacher, parent. Island.

A few hours later, I put my own note in the window.
It said:

—I AM AN ISLAND

Creepy looked at it for a long time, his elbows resting on his desk, his long fingers sunny and lithe. I did not wait for him to respond. I closed my curtains and turned away and went to get a drink out of the doll’s house.

I wonder how things might have been different if it had been me who went over the balcony. It occurs to me that no one would have shown much interest. I watched from inside my head that day: I could see people’s faces contorting, their mouths all square and wet, and I heard voices as if from a long way away, distorted growly vowels pulled and pulled the distance of miles until they snapped back with a bang. Mr Thornton was comforted, Stephanie was comforted, people just passing by were comforted—and I was treated like a Gorgon. People would not even look at me.

He wants me to take my mittens off again. I have not taken them off since they suspended me. It will be a new intimacy.

Coda: Our secret, veiled stories in fragments but whole at the same time.

The Victorians never really covered the legs of their chairs and tables in deference to modesty. I was disappointed to find this out. I like the idea. All that dark sensuous wood carved in voluptuous vines and florals curling into corporeal little openings in fretwork as pretty as body hair. Stained and oiled to a gleaming sweat-shine. Quite dirty, really. No wonder convention required the dressing of these things. Except it didn’t. It’s a myth. But as I wish I didn’t know that, I’m going
with the myth. How much nicer to think that if you lifted the hem of a table skirt, you’d be like as not to tremble with the expectation of fingering a little varnish. It’s the same reason nuns wear habits and Muslims wear burqas and Brethren wear scarves and my school has a sock length policy. To cover up the naughty bits.

I read that Catherine the Great had a room full of dirty furniture she didn’t bother to dress. Nothing ambiguous about her coffee table—she had the naughty bits carved right on there. I guess she wasn’t into the slow reveal.

Maud takes her mittens off for me today. She is sitting at that little table in front of her window and pulls them off, one at a time, slowly, and yes I feel like I’m peeking under a table skirt. I know she is doing it for me. She pulls them off from the top so the cuff slips uneasily over the heel of her hand, first revealing that knobbly little bone on the inside of her wrist, then that fat pad of taut muscle at the base of her thumb. The mittens slither over the rest of her hand fast. They aren’t those big woollen mittens you see people wearing when it’s really cold. They are made of thin grey cotton—the sort of material they use to make the gloves people in library archives wear. They probably make a breathy sound as she removes them. Like a shhhh. I’ve worn those library archive gloves and they feel quite nice. And
they do breathe a bit when you slide them off.

When the mittens are off, she flutters her fingers a bit. Then she quickly ties her hair into a ponytail. I’ve never seen her hair tied up before and I am disappointed. It’s not even as if she’s used a brush to smooth the hair back; she’s just bunched it at the nape of her neck and snapped a lacky band around it. It’s lumpy as cornrows against her scalp, and a couple of large bald spots are clearly visible. For some reason, I feel thwarted. We’ve been off to such a fine start and then this ponytail comes into play. It’s like I can’t see her anymore. Or, more likely, she isn’t allowing me to see her anymore.

I think she is writing me a note, but when nothing appears in the window I realise she must be drawing. So the drawing materials are back, are they? Reward for mittens and ponytails? The drawing is a bit irritating, too. I’ve been pretty fucking supportive so far and feel like I should be getting some sort of reward for mittens and ponytails myself. I want to ask her when she’ll be back at school. I want to ask her to pull.