'I—I saw it on a noticeboard at school,' I improvised. 'About the penfriends.'
'Did Mrs Broughton give you permission to write to them?'
'No, Mother, I just ... wanted a penfriend.'
'So you
did
give them our address.'
'I s'pose so—yes,' I muttered, choosing what seemed the lesser evil.
'You had no right to do that. Without asking me first. And where did you get the stamp?'
'I bought it with my pocket money.'
'I see ... Gerard'—in her take-no-prisoners voice of command—'I want you to show me that letter.'
I was afraid that if I did, I would never see it again.
'Mother, you've always said that letters are private ... why aren't I allowed to read my own letter?' My voice broke upwards into a squeak on the last word.
Her colour rose; she glared, turned on her heel and walked away.
T
HE LETTER WAS TYPED, BUT IT WAS NOT FROM
M
ISS
Summers.
Dear Gerard,
I hope you don't mind, but Miss Summers sent me your letter to read (she sent lots of others too, but yours was the only one I really liked), and you sounded so much like the penfriend I've been hoping for that I asked her if I could write straight back to you myself. Of course you don't have to answer if you don't like the sound of me!
My name is Alice Jessell, I'll be fourteen this March and like you I'm an only child, except that both my parents are dead, we were in a car crash together. I know maybe I shouldn't write this bit straight away but I want to get it over with. Anyway you might not want to read any more, so it's only fair, as long as you know that I'm definitely not looking for sympathy and I don't ever, ever want you to feel sorry for me, just to be my penfriend if you'd like to. So as I was saying my parents were both killed in the accident, which happened about three years ago. I survived because I was in the back seat, but my spinal cord was damaged so I can't walk. My arms are OK though—I only type because my writing's really hard to read, and already I can type much faster than I could ever write. And because we didn't have any relatives or anything I had to go into a home—I know how awful this must sound and of course it was unbelievably unbearably awful at first. But it's a really lovely place, in the countryside, in Sussex. The insurance money pays for me to be here, I even have my own lessons so I don't have to go to school, and a beautiful upstairs room all to myself, looking out over fields and trees and things.
So now I've said it. I really do mean it, about not wanting sympathy, I want you to think of me if you can—only if you want to be my friend of course—as a normal person who just wants to share normal things. I don't watch TV or listen to pop music I'm afraid but I love reading—it sounds as if you do too and I'd love to have someone my own age to talk about books with. (Most of the other people here are very nice, but much older than me.) And to sort of be part of someone else's life, and be their friend. Anyway that's enough about that.
There's snow on the fields right now, but it's a bright sunny day, there are squirrels running up and down the big oak tree outside my window, and three plump little birds on the windowsill, they're singing so loudly I can hear them over the clatter of the keys! Actually where I am sounds a little bit like the place where your mother grew up—a big red brick house in the countryside with woods and fields around it. Mawson sounds awfully dry and hot! Sorry, that sounds a bit rude, I mean I'm sure its lovely, just so different from here.
Anyway I'd better stop and give this to Matron (she's more like an aunt, really) to send on to Miss Summers, that's because Penfriends International are a sort of charity, they pay the airmail postage. So if you want to, write to me care of Miss Summers, and then every time she sends on one of your letters to me, she'll enclose some reply coupons to post back to you—that way you won't have to buy stamps. Our letters will be completely private.
I really must stop right now. Before I panic and crumple this up for maybe making a complete idiot of myself.
Sincerely,
Alice
P.S. I think Gerard is a really nice name.
I lay on my bed and read Alice's letter over and over again. She sounded incredibly, unbelievably brave, and yet I realised I truly didn't feel sorry for her. Sympathy, yes; but even though being an orphan in a wheelchair did sound unbearably awful, her letter made me feel as if I'd come in out of the dark on a freezing night, not knowing how cold I'd been until I felt the heat of the fire.
Reading other people's letters is a terrible sin.
But it hadn't stopped me from trying to open that drawer again. I looked around my room for a hiding-place. Under my mattress? On top of my wardrobe? Behind the books in my bookcase? Nowhere was safe. I thought again about how brave Alice must be, and felt suddenly ashamed of being thirteen and a half, starting second year high school and still too scared to tell my mother that yes, I did have a penfriend, and no, I wasn't going to show her my letter.
But facing the full blast of my mother's disapproval at dinner that night, I also had to face, for the thousandth time, the fact that I really
was
a coward.
'Mother I want to, I mean please may I—write to my um...'
'You will not be writing to
anyone,
Gerard. I'm still waiting for you to give me that letter.'
'Mother, you've always told me it's wrong to read other people's...' Again my voice betrayed me. My mother was visibly swelling. Sensing imminent meltdown, my father concentrated on his chop-bone.
'
I
am going to read that letter, because
you
are going to give it to me. Who is this penfriend, anyway?'
'She's—she's a—'
'A
girl?
You won't be writing to any girl, Gerard, not until I've seen that letter and written to her mother myself.'
'She doesn't
have
a mother,' I blurted. 'She's an orphan—in a home.' It felt like betraying Alice, but I saw where my only chance lay.
'And where is this home?'
'In—in the countryside.'
'That letter came from London,' she snapped.
'They send them on—Penfriends International—and pay the postage—for children who—children like Alice who don't have parents.'
'You mean it's a
charity?
'
I nodded eagerly. My mother was silent for a moment. She looked faintly uncomfortable.
'Oh. Well of course I'll have to write to them first ... but I suppose ... yes, go and get that letter please. And then we'll see.'
Just when I thought I'd wriggled off the hook.
'Mother—' I began hopelessly.
'It's his letter, Phyllis.'
My mother could not have looked more astonished if the fruit bowl had spoken on my behalf. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. My father looked equally startled.
'I'll go and get the address,' I said in an inspired moment, knowing she would never let up until she had at least written to Juliet Summers.
My mother nodded dumbly, and I left them staring at each other in utter bewilderment.
After I'd dried the dishes I went out to the garage and asked my father if I could have a box with a lock 'to keep some of my stuff in'. He seemed determined to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but he gave me a stout metal toolbox and a shiny new padlock and key, and we spent the rest of the evening playing trains. I felt sure he knew what I was really thanking him for.
I
STARTED MY FIRST LETTER TO ALICE THAT SAME NIGHT AND
continued most of the weekend, pages and pages written straight down as if I were talking to her, everything about my confrontation with my mother, about school and its miseries, all of my likes and dislikes, and much more about Staplefield, how much it meant to me and how my mother had refused to talk about it after I found the photograph in her room. I wrote compulsively, as if from dictation, knowing I mustn't re-read what I'd said, or let myself think about what I was doing. And spent the next fortnight in a torment of hope and fear, until her answer arrived and I knew for certain it would be all right.
M
Y MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME WHETHER SHE'D WRITTEN TO
Juliet Summers. She acted as if the letters I would find waiting on my desk when I got home from school had materialised without her knowledge. Part of me longed to win back her approval, but I also knew that if I once spoke of Alice, I would never be able to stop until every last detail had been dragged out for inspection on the kitchen table.
So our silence over Staplefield came to include Alice. But now I had Alice to write to, and she never tired of hearing about Staplefield. Or, it seemed, anything to do with my life. It was almost as if she was writing
from
Staplefield, for the view from her window reminded me constantly of the landscape my mother used to describe: the formal garden below, with tall trees rising up to her window, then the patchwork of green fields, leading to steep wooded hills in the near distance.
Of course I wanted to know exactly where she was, so I could look it up in the atlas. But from the beginning Alice laid down certain rules.
Gerard I need you to understand why I don't want to talk about my life before the accident. I love my parents, I think about them all the time. Often I feel they're very close, watching over me, corny though that sounds. But to survive I had to let go of everything before the accident. My friends, all my stuff, everything. The only thing I brought with me was my favourite photo of my parents, it's here on my desk as I'm writing this. As if—this is going to sound awfully weird I know—as if I died with them and went on to a sort of after-life, only still here on earth, like a reincarnation only different. I knew if I tried to hide under a blanket of pity I'd smother. And to throw off the blanket I had to throw off everything.
Of course if I had brothers and sisters and relatives I'd have no choice. But then I'd be the family cripple, and I don't think I'd want to go on living. This way I'm just a girl who happens to need a wheelchair to get around. Not a cripple or a paraplegic or a disabled person, just me. I'm really mobile, I do everything for myself. And the people here are wonderful, apart from physiotherapy and stuff like that they treat you as completely normal.
But I have been very lonely and your letters make all the difference. They light up my life.
Now for the difficult part. I don't want to tell you exactly where I am, because...(there's been a really long pause here, I've watched a girl and boy, they look about our age, walking across the fields with their arms round each other, all the way from the footpath outside our garden wall to the edge of the forest, wondering how to say this the way I mean it) well for the same reason I don't want to send you a photo of me. (For a start I don't have any, but that's not why of course.) And it's not because I'm hideously disfigured or anything, I don't actually have any scars at all.
No it's because a picture would have to be a picture of me in my chair, or anyway of me not able to walk, and I don't want you to see me that way. I'm afraid you'll feel sorry for me. I do hope you'll understand, even though—this really is unfair, I know—I'd love to have a picture of you (and of your parents, and the house where you live, only if you'd like to of course). In exchange I'll try to honestly answer anything you ask me about how I look.
If by some miracle I get to walk again, then I'll send you a picture. But until then I want to be
your invisible friend
love AlicePS This is really vain I know. But I just realised you might think I'm sixteen stone and covered in acne or something like that. In fact I'm only just seven stone and—well not totally hideous anyway.
PPS If I'm honest that's not the only reason—about not sending my photo I mean. I don't want to
be fixed
by a picture. However you want to think of me, that's the way I'd like you to.
I had been avoiding the subject of photographs, because the thought of Alice seeing my sticking-out ears and banded teeth was too humiliating to bear. So I assured her I did understand (which was only half true); and that I was sensitive about my bands, so could we both stick to word-pictures (hoping as I wrote this that she wouldn't ask any searching questions about ears, hair, spots, freckles, knees, teeth or indeed anything much to do with my physical appearance).
Far from pitying her, I often caught myself forgetting all about the wheelchair and the loss of her parents, contrasting the beauty of her surroundings with the drab suburban desolation of mine, wishing, passionately, that I could be there with her wherever exactly 'there' in Sussex might be. After those early letters, she wrote, for most of the time, as if her injury didn't exist, as if she were a young heiress living alone in a mansion, with her own private tutors, taking herself for outings, as she called them, whenever the weather was fine. They certainly had a wonderful library at the home, because no matter what book I mentioned, if she hadn't already read it she would have by the time her next letter arrived. Besides, our situations were, in many respects, remarkably similar. My parents had never had a television, didn't read magazines, and bought the local paper only on Saturdays, for the advertisements. They took no interest in politics, or news beyond the boundaries of Mawson. Occasionally, my mother would listen to classical music on the radio. But mostly she and I just read, in silence.
Which was exactly how Alice spent her days, when she wasn't having lessons or out in the garden: reading, and gazing out of her window. Even at fourteen, she seemed to have outgrown all the usual teenage interests, whereas I hadn't even started on them. Just before we met—the word she always preferred—I had been trying to develop an interest in rock music. But as soon as I learned that Alice didn't like any kind of pop music—she said anything with a beat made her feel as if she'd drunk too much coffee—I gave up the pretence. I stopped trying to fit in with anyone. Instead of trailing miserably round the schoolyard, trying to avoid being beaten up, I stayed in the library every lunch hour, doing my homework, so that I could spend the evenings in my room writing to Alice. Gradually, I became aware that I wasn't being picked on nearly as often; and despite the amount of time I spent writing to, and dreaming about, Alice, my grades actually improved.