Sorry Isn’t Good Enough, page 22
When Hilary talks about budding, everyone looks at their own nipples and I look at mine. To my shock, these are beginning to swell a little too. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I realise what it is, I do seem to remember a few aches and pains.
This is bad news. This is terrible. A girl in our class called Jill Cricklewood, who almost has proper breasts already, comes over and confirms Hilary’s diagnosis. Hilary is pleased. Why? I am filled with such a sense of terror that I can barely understand it. This cannot happen. Today has been a good day. I am in ‘B’ team, which means I can swim. But today is also the day that I realise I am changing into a woman, and I can’t stop it, however slowly it happens. And I know that not so long ago I couldn’t wait to be a teenager, so I don’t fully understand this feeling inside me; but I do know that one thing my mother doesn’t want is another woman in our house.
When I get home, I tear upstairs and scour my Famous Five books. I have three. In them, Georgina calls herself George and wears her hair short like a boy. There are pictures. She wears boys’ clothes and does boys’ things, like have opinions and ideas and make important decisions. Anne, who wears girls’ clothes, has no ideas at all. She just goes along for the ride and to provide a sort of boy–girl balance to the stories and to say wimpy things that George can make fun of. Okay, I’m going to be a boy. If George can do it, so can I. I’ll cut my hair really, really short and call myself Steve. I’ve got some shorts. I can borrow my brother’s grey socks. I’ve got a stripy t-shirt. I try it all on and come down to look at myself in the hall mirror. Not bad. I don’t have a gang or a dog, but it’s a start.
At teatime I announce my plan.
‘I’m going to be a tomboy,’ I say. ‘From now on I’d like you all to call me Steve.’
‘Ergh! Like Steven Willis?’ asks Jonathan.
‘No. I’ll be Steve, not Steven.’
‘That’s what his brother calls him.’
‘How about Steffan?’ says Dad, helpfully.
‘Or Steff?’ suggests Mum.
‘That’s what I’m called already: Steff.’
‘Steffan is exotic,’ says Mum.
‘Okay. Steffan. From now on, I’m Steffan.’
When the tea things have been cleared away and I’ve offered to dry the washing-up, I make my request.
‘Will you cut my hair, Mum?’
She goes to fetch her hair scissors from the drawer. ‘I’ll do it now, if you like. I need to clean the kitchen floor anyway.’
Dad hovers in the doorway, looking anxious. ‘You’re not serious are you, Stephanie?’
‘Steffan.’
‘Sorry,’ he half-smiles. ‘Steffan.’
‘Of course. I want it cut like a boy.’
‘Are you sure this is a good idea, Kath?’
Mum clicks her scissors open and shut (with a little too much enthusiasm, perhaps). ‘Whatever madam wants.’
‘But Kath—’
‘If she wants it short, she can have it short. I’m the one who has to get a hairbrush through it every morning. Anyway, hair grows out.’
Even as she says this, she is putting her home-made hairdresser’s shawl on me, which has a drawstring neck and is made out of an old striped sheet. I didn’t like it when she called me ‘madam’, but now I see she was just pretending to be a hairdresser. She divides my hair into four sections, and ties each with an elastic band. Then she says, ‘Sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
She snips off the four bunches of hair and they flop to the floor. She picks them up and lays them flat on the worktop, then she continues to cut my hair with gusto. When she is finished, she brushes my neck with a soft baby brush, just as she does when she cuts Dad’s or Jonathan’s hair.
‘Can I have the razor on it?’ I ask. Mum has an electric razor which she uses on their necks.
Dad shouts from the living room, ‘No! No, Kath. No razors. That’s too much.’
She raises her eyebrows at me, as if to say, ‘The master has spoken’, and shakes out the hair from the shawl. ‘How’s that?’
I go to look in the hall mirror. ‘I like it.’
‘Good.’ She picks up the four long bunches of chestnut hair and holds them over the waste bin. ‘Shall I throw these out? Or do you want to hang onto them?’
She doesn’t want to hang onto them, obviously. I watch her hand hovering, ready to drop them into potato peelings. ‘I’ll keep them,’ I say. ‘They might come in handy for dressing up.’
I take them upstairs and find an old chocolate box I have under the bed. I lay the tresses in it, remembering how Mr Man used to love my hair. My free-raffle-light hair. Who cares now? I put the lid on the box and bury it in my bottom drawer.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Tomboy
With my new tomboy persona, I have given myself a sense of freedom along with a new identity. I’m determined to get this right, to be the sort of tomboy the Famous Five would be proud of, so I need to watch the ways of boys. I start by tagging along with Jonathan when he plays, and as he mostly plays with Paul, Gareth’s brother, I often find myself playing with all of them. Paul isn’t allowed to go to the park or the railway cutting without his older brother. That suits me just fine.
Before I know it, I’m the crucial fourth player in a regular two-aside football game. Jonathan and Paul against me and Gareth. And because Gareth, aged ten like me, is a far better player than the two eight-year-old boys, he doesn’t object to having me as a handicap on his team. Gareth and I nearly always win, unless I score an own goal, or unless Gareth takes pity on them and lets them score. Clearly, football is never going to be a great strength of mine. Even though I can shoot with my left foot, my weak right foot is not a reliable support. I’m so keen to improve that I get Jonathan to be goalie and let me practise shots in the back garden. Over and over until I can make a half-decent kick. He seems happy with my new interest, and shows me how to do press-ups to improve my biceps (and his). If I really want to be a boy, I have to build up my muscles.
I can’t say that Mum shows any obvious signs of loving me more as a boy, but I feel hopeful. She isn’t at all bothered by my new masculinity. She even buys me a pair of canvas lace-ups to knock about in. I do at least feel that I no longer disgust her sometimes. I feel I have found my niche (although I’m not very good at any of the skills required).
Sometimes, when we’re playing football in the park, a dog will come ambling over and cock his leg up on one of our goalposts. As they’re our pullovers, this is not funny. The boys think it’s hilarious, so I have to pretend to as well. Occasionally, Steven Willis joins us, and when that happens, I have to play on the side of the little ones. It’s Gareth and Steven against the rest of us, and of course, despite our side having three players, we always lose. When they score they say, ‘Nice one, Hooper!’ or ‘Nice one, Willis!’ I become known as ‘Townsend’, Jonathan calls himself ‘Solo’ and Paul goes with ‘Best – George Best’.
I try not to notice how hopeless I am, how uncoordinated, how uselessly unfitted to sport. Some small voice inside me tells me I have to make a go of this new role, that everything depends on it. Somehow, my mother seems happier with things now, and I can’t risk losing the possible new ground I have made.
One day, when Steven Willis is playing, we are one–nil down. I keep my hopes up. I’ve practised my dribbling, and Jonathan is pretty good himself. We can afford to have one person in goal, given that there are three of us, and Paul volunteers. He’s good at saving balls, so we stay one–nil for twenty minutes. Then, to my amazement, Jonathan dribbles the ball all the way down the ‘pitch’ and is close enough to their goal to shoot. I don’t know whether out of kindness or stupidity, or simply fear of the ultimate responsibility of failure, but Jonathan takes a notion to pass the ball to me. Tackled by Steven, he misfires and sends the ball into the air. It hits my head – hard – and flies straight into the goal.
‘Nice header, Townsend!’ shouts Gareth.
‘Yeah, nice one, Townsend!’ shout Jonathan and Paul.
I feel myself blush. I want to put my hands in the air and do a lap of honour. I have arrived. I’m one of them. But I smile and shrug. I secretly decide to practise headers from now on. I don’t need two good kicking feet for headers. I just need to be in the right place at the right time.
The other place we go to play is the railway. For some time after Dawn’s disappearance I avoided the cutting. It was a strange experience when I first went back to it, revisiting the exact spot by the Dingle on my own one Saturday. It was full of oddity. I hadn’t expected the trees to have turned orange and gold, hadn’t expected the blank white sky, the lack of birdsong or the pungent smell of fungus and damp earth. But now, going back with Gareth and the boys, it is a magical place all over again.
We play there all through the seasons, watching the snowdrops poke through the woodland floor, then the dog’s mercury and the primroses and the garlic flowers and the bluebells. On the railway bank itself we hide behind bushes of wild lilac, gorse and hawthorn. We stride through the willowherb, scattering butterflies, looking out for badgers and foxes and watching slow-worms wriggle carefully out of their old skins, leaving behind what look like the crinkled cellophane wrappers from sticks of rock.
Gareth and I join in the games of cowboys and Indians that Jonathan and Paul want to play, pretending we’re humouring them in a grown-up sort of way. In fact, these games are brilliant. For one thing, the younger boys always want to be the Indians, and this involves making wigwams and tying up their enemies: me and Gareth. They have an old piece of washing line, which they use regularly to bind me to a young hazel sapling. Sometimes, we pretend to tie each other to the train track itself, and although this is more dramatic, involving the potential flattening of a body by an imaginary train, it isn’t as much fun since we can’t easily secure the rope to anything. Little Paul, in particular, enjoys a good roping to a tree. He goes to Cub Scouts (Jonathan isn’t allowed because it is a bourgeois invasion of the Anglican church) and can tie really convincing knots. They enjoy watching me struggle (I have to make a big show of the struggling) as they dance around me doing a war cry.
The best thing about being tied up is being rescued by Gareth. He ducks and dives behind the bushes, holding an imaginary gun, and eventually, when the Indians are having a break, he will untie me. Even when he gets the knot sorted, there follows a serious unravelling (the rope is the length of a washing line), and while he’s unravelling me, Gareth will say, in character, ‘It’s okay, Townsend, I’ve got you,’ and I will say, ‘Thanks, Hooper. I owe you one.’
If I turn my head, I can smell his hair and the warm skin on his neck. When my hands are free, I imagine reaching out and touching his neck, or his sun-warmed arms or the veins in his wrists.
Obviously, we have to tie them up sometimes, but nothing is as much fun as being unravelled by Gareth. Sometimes, in bed at night, I rejig the scene. I’ll be lying tied up somewhere – behind a curtain of ivy, perhaps – and Gareth will whisper in my ear, ‘It’s okay, Townsend. I’ve got you!’
It has well and truly replaced the Sunday school conveyor belt dream with Steven Willis and others. That is all dead to me now.
There are three occasions that make me uncomfortable about being a boy. The first is playing kiss-tag in the school playground. It’s the last year of primary school and the girls gather in great groups, provoking the boys to kiss them. The boys themselves form a great gang, ready to oblige as forcefully as they can. The girls mean business, and so do the boys. In this strange and potent mix of boy–girl longings, I find myself – as usual – in the boys’ gang. This is where I have grown to belong. But however hard I try, I cannot make myself feel part of it now. There are talks of tactics. I can’t tell if the boys are leaving me out of this, or if, in fact, I am distancing myself from it. There’s a thought I try to ignore, but it keeps popping back into my head: I want to be with my friends, Hilary and Lorna; I don’t want to chase the girls and kiss them. I want to be chased, and be kissed. By the boys. By Gareth.
It’s all far too complicated. I can’t lose my male status. So I gallop limply around the playground, half-heartedly pretending to take part in the chase, but I don’t catch anyone. And of course, no one catches me. At least I have an excuse. I can just imagine what Dawn would have said if she were here and I was the only girl not to be kissed. But she isn’t. And anyway, maybe if I were in the girls’ team now, I would be kissed. Maybe.
The second occasion is when I’m playing with the boys on the hill. Right on the top, past the sheep grazing on the slopes, is a piece of land flat enough for the local golf course. Sometimes in the summer months we go up there and play in the sandy bunkers. Usually, we’re told to clear off when we’re caught, and we don’t mind because the man who shouts at us says ‘Clear orf!’ just like the men in the Famous Five tales, and it makes us splutter with laughter.
On this particular day, we are having a right old laugh, hiding when we see him coming.
‘Hey, you lads! Clear orf! This is a golf course for private use. I’ve told you lads before, clear orf!’
Jonathan and Paul and Gareth are giggling, and I try to as well, but inside I feel a sinking, a folding in of myself. A few months ago, I would have been thrilled to hear myself called a ‘lad’, to be mistaken for one. It would’ve made George in the Famous Five leap with glee. But something isn’t right about it. It’s almost as though I’m disappointed by my own success, but I can’t face what that actually means just yet.
And then the oddest incident of all.
Chapter Fifty
Excluded
It’s nearly a year later. I’m at secondary school, but still friends with Lorna and Hilary, who are both in my class. One day, when the three of us are on the way home from school, I invite them round on Saturday afternoon. Hilary says she can’t come. I don’t ask why not, but she looks so awkward that it makes me curious.
‘Maybe Sunday, then. Or next Saturday?’ We always get together at some point over the weekend, either at mine or at hers or Lorna’s. But Hilary shakes her head.
‘Sorry, Steph, I can’t.’
I catch a glance she shoots at Lorna, and I feel a sharp shock of exclusion.
‘Look,’ says Hilary, hugging her satchel close, ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you this, but I don’t really know how.’
I freeze. I look sideways at her and then down at the pavement. I try to prepare myself with a deep breath, but it comes in shallow. They both know something, and they haven’t told me.
‘The thing is, my dad has forbidden me from seeing you.’ (It’s been nearly two years since Mr Gibson advised Hilary against playing with me during the aftermath of what happened, and that was only for a few weeks while the police and press were sniffing around Napier Road.) ‘He says I should mix with different girls. I’m really sorry.’
A woman passes us slowly on a bicycle. Her brown brogues push laboriously at the pedals, and we can hear her breathing. I want to run after her and jump on the handlebars. I want her to take me anywhere but here, right now.
‘But … why doesn’t he like me?’
‘It’s not that he doesn’t like you. He thinks it’s … unhealthy for me to spend so much time with you, that’s all.’
‘Unhealthy?’ I look down at my droopy foot. I hear a fuzzy sound in my ears, like a television that’s lost its signal. ‘It’s not catching. Does he know that? I had polio when I was little. Tell him you can’t catch it from me now.’ Even as I say this, I’m so horrified that Mr Gibson has thought to forbid friendship with me, that I’m not sure I want him told; I’m not sure I can ever look him in the face again and feel the same.
I knew it was too good to be true. All this time I’ve had two friends who like me and respect me without making me perform tasks for them, but I’ve always known I was unworthy of this sort of friendship somehow. I’ve always felt a bit like an imposter, and that at some point they would see it. I should never have imagined it could be this easy. I should’ve stayed away. Who did I think I was?
‘Tell you what,’ says Lorna. ‘Let’s meet at mine. You can both come over on Saturday. I’ve found some amazing old magazines in one of the sheds, and you’ve got to see them.’ Hilary seems keen. I agree tentatively, and she doesn’t change her mind. ‘We can always meet at mine, if you like. Then your dad doesn’t need to know.’
This appears to solve the problem for Hilary and Lorna, but it doesn’t resolve anything real for me. I know the Gibsons cooled off a bit after Dawn’s death and all the gossip, but they’ve never stopped us seeing each other since. I wonder if this is Hilary’s way of seeing less of me. Or perhaps she and Lorna are sharing some secret information about me. When Saturday comes round, I rush to change after lunch and head round to Lorna’s before Hilary gets there. I need to know the truth.
We are sitting on Lorna’s bed listening to Radio Luxembourg 208. ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ is playing; we can hardly believe the words, they’re so exciting. But I mustn’t get distracted.
‘Why doesn’t Mr Gibson want me playing with Hilary now, all of a sudden? He never used to mind my gammy leg.’
She traces a rose on her bedspread with her finger. ‘It’s not your illness, Stephanie. It’s got nothing to do with your leg.’
I swallow. I may be about to hear a horrible truth. I may not want to hear it. It may be a rejection, an ending of something, a pushing away.
‘What, then?’
The lyrics from the radio are heady and dangerous and fill me with a wild sense that things are about to change; and I’m amazed that the person who is most likely going to bring about this change is me.
