Clever Girl Read Online Free Page B

some indulgence: in return for the magnitude of what she had undergone, and what she had lost, which could never be restored.

2
    I WAS STAYING OVER AT MY nana’s. I was ten. I woke miraculously early, which was unusual for me. The blankets at Nana’s were meagre, ex-army, in prickly grey wool with an oily smell. They would only stay tucked in if you kept unnaturally still, which I never could – in my sleep I had shifted and burrowed, the blankets had come untucked, and a little slit of freezing air was probing my warm body like a knife. Then I rolled over on to the inflexible hand of my plastic doll. Sometimes if I woke up I turned the bedding around and put the pillow at the foot, and to Nana’s dismay went back to sleep upside down – which was a revelation of a different room, another world order. But the doll’s hand that morning seemed to poke me with a message: ‘Arise!’ (I was reading a lot of books set in the past, which was grander and better.)
    It was Saturday. It was spring – yellow squares of light transformed the unlined curtains at the window, their pattern of purple bars wound with a clinging vine. Usually by the time I came to consciousness Nana was already busy downstairs with her mouse-activity, sweeping and wiping and soaking, smoothing out brown paper bags and saving them, un-knotting scraps of string and winding them into balls. But today I couldn’t hear a sound in the house. I was the first to break the skin of the day, stepping out on to the lino which struck its frozen cold up through the warm soles of my feet. When I parted the curtains and looked out, the familiar scrappy back landscape – trellis and dustbins and old bikes and crazy-paving stepping stones – was glazed in sunshine, gleaming from its dip into the night. Cats were dotted around the vantage points like sentinels; glass windows black with dirt were a shed’s eye pits. Nana’s lilies of the valley set out on a forced march down the cracks between the pavings.
    If I got dressed, I thought, I could walk out into this – what could stop me? Because no one had ever thought of it, I’d never been forbidden to go out before anyone else was up. My latchkeys were warm on their ribbon against my chest, under my vest – though I wasn’t supposed to sleep in them in case I strangled myself. I could go home by myself without telling Nana, and surprise my mother. Gleefully I imagined the reversal of our roles: Mum’s tousled head raised, blinking and sleepy and astonished, from the pillow at the end of her sofa pulled into its night-position; my own bright wakefulness, airy and full of implications from its journey through the outdoors. For once, I would have the advantage of her. Pulling on my knickers and socks and slacks, buttoning my check shirt, diving into the V-neck of the jumper Nana had knitted in rust-brown stocking stitch, I was light-headed with sensations of freedom and power. All the time I was listening out for mouse-noises from Nana. Now I had started, I couldn’t bear to be prevented. I had worried sometimes about making the transition into being grown-up – how did you know when to begin? Now I understood that you stepped out into it, as simply as into a day.
     
    People forget that in 1966 there were still bomb sites: it took a long time to stitch back together that fabric of our cities ripped open by the war – or rather, not to stitch it back at all, but to tear the fabric out and throw it away and put something different in its place. Every time I made my way home from Nana’s I walked across an open area where bombs had fallen: you could still make out different wallpapers on the high standing walls, distinguishing the squares of vanished rooms, washed by the rain to faint ghosts of their former patterns. Traces of staircases climbed in zigzag patterns; doors opened on to nothing. Whatever desolation there must once have been was softened and naturalised after two decades; overgrown with buddleia and