The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

I put on some bright red lipstick.

  I wouldn’t have worn it in Hedley Green because everyone would have said, ‘Look at you in your bright red lipstick,’ as if I was still five years old and I’d have felt embarrassed. But presumably here they would see me as a person who wore bright red lipstick.

  Ten past.

  I added another coat of mascara.

  Quarter past.

  Time can be very slow.

  Eventually it was twenty-five past – and I grabbed my coat and key and lurched onto the landing and down the stairs.

  Whilst going down the stairs, a girl came up behind me and said, ‘I’m Laura,’ and then burst out laughing, grabbing my arm and walking with me.

  She had her auburn hair in a high ponytail, rucking up at each side, where she’d arranged a row of metal grips, and she was wearing a velvet dress in pine green. She had perfume on that smelled slightly of toilet freshener.

  It was a relief to walk into the rather sombre room with Laura. There were lots of people in it, but it was extremely quiet. The new students walked about stiffly talking to the academic staff and sipping wine, and we left little trails of crumbling cheese straws behind us.

  After an hour or so, all the lecturers walked out and a very tall boy came in, wearing a red T-shirt saying WELCOME across his chest, holding his left arm across his front and putting his hand under his right bicep so that it bulged outwards. He was surrounded by others in the same red T-shirts saying WELCOME, and he said, ‘Let’s all go to the bar!’

  The red T-shirt people gathered, talking loudly to each other, addressing the barman (also loudly) as Dave or Mate. The non-red-T-shirt people sat in our awkward circle, in our awkward clothes, saying, over and over, ‘What did you do for A level?’ Occasionally, one of the red-T-shirt people came over and said, ‘How’s it going?’ and then went back to their friends and proceeded to get completely off their faces on cheap pints of beer and vodka shots.

  Then a boy arrived wearing a Barbour jacket and a dotty cravat, with blond hair, which flopped over his face at one side.

  ‘Olly Macintosh,’ he said. ‘I missed the drinks thing. How was it?’

  He had a hint of a lisp, which he seemed to know made him cute.

  People murmured, ‘OK.’

  ‘Great to meet you all,’ he said. ‘Who wants a drink?’

  He went up to the bar and returned with exactly what we’d ordered. Then he said, ‘If you were a character in Winnie the Pooh, which would you be?’

  I wasn’t expecting him to say that.

  Everyone looked a bit surprised, and went on sipping their drinks in silence. I was sitting next to him, so close that the wax smell of his jacket was getting up my nose, and I was praying in my head that he would start the questioning to his right, so that I, on his left, could answer last.

  And, please God, not first.

  Because my mind had gone blank and the only character I could remember in Winnie the Pooh was Winnie the Pooh himself – wearing a red T-shirt and nothing else. I remembered the day I went swimming with Barbara Cook and lost my pants. Then I thought about all the fantasy sex I’d had with Javier from Cádiz, and how I was probably the only one here who had never managed to lose their pants in real life. And how from now on I was going to be a total Pachamama.

  A girl with a big beak-ish nose to the right of Olly Macintosh said, ‘I’m Owl. I want to stay on and do a PhD.’

  This seemed quite an odd thing to say when she hadn’t even tried out her first lecture.

  A sporty boy with over-curly hair, who turned out to be called Tom Jones (no relation to the singer) said, ‘Tigger’, and then he felt obliged to be a bit more energetic after that. He started leaping up shaking hands with everyone and offering to buy them drinks.

  Laura, swaying her auburn ponytail and continuing to neigh with laughter, said, ‘I’ll be Tigger too.’

  The question was getting nearer to me, and I realised that I still didn’t have an answer, and anyway I didn’t want to label myself when I’d just got away from ugly, clever and odd in Hedley Green, and had started wearing red lipstick. I suddenly had a rush of characters – Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Rabbit – but couldn’t think of one who would wear red lipstick or cause earthquakes in young men.

  ‘What about you?’ said Olly Macintosh.

  ‘I’m none of them,’ I said.

  Everybody stared at me and a serious pale boy who crossed his legs like a girl, which might be offensive to both sexes, said, ‘Every possible human character is said to be represented in those books.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘The world has 6.7 billion people in it.’

  ‘But not 6.7 billion character types,’ said the pale boy, who never smiled, and who had the straightest parting I’d ever seen.

  ‘I shall be a Heffalump,’ I said.

  ‘And why is that?’ said Olly Macintosh.

  ‘Because I like blurry edges,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be typecast, and perhaps I don’t know exactly who I am yet. I can’t yet conceive of myself.’

  Tom and Laura laughed – in time with each other.

  The pale boy sighed.

  I knew I was weird, but it was a weird I was starting to like now I had black-framed glasses and a blunt fringe and red lipstick and written-on Converse trainers with a mysterious blotchy green rectangle on the left-hand shoe.

  Olly Macintosh took off his Barbour in a big waft of wax, and the questioning was over. Then he took off his dotty cravat and gave it to me, saying, ‘Winning answer’ rather seriously.

  I had somehow arrived. It was going to be OK at Durham University. I felt pretty – now I wasn’t the ugly one. I held the dotty cravat limply in my hand and didn’t know at all what to do with it. In a burst of confidence, I tied it around my wrist. Then I wondered if that looked absurd, or as if I was in love with Olly Macintosh, which I wasn’t yet, and I took it off again, and I held it in my left hand, a little away from me, and drank a glass of wine with my right.

  When I got back to my room, it was quite a relief to be reunited with my dictionary – dionysiac, relating to the sensual, spontaneous and emotional aspects of human nature, which were the aspects of myself I needed to develop.

  I leafed through D and went on to E, recovering from the shock of being surrounded by so many new people. The words had stopped lurching though I was possibly lurching a bit from all the drink.

  It was very quiet in my single room.

  But I felt calm.

  Expansive even.

  Expectant.

  Experimental.

  Explosive.

  Then I must have fallen asleep.

  A few weeks later, I had sex with Olly Macintosh when we went camping for the weekend.

  He had a strange kind of tent with a transparent rectangle in the roof, and when it happened, I was looking at the stars. He made love to me and I made love to him and the voice that always narrated inside my head, commenting, criticising, wondering, finding words, asking questions, that voice which never stopped, stopped.

  It was like I was properly in the present, for the first time ever – and the minute it was over, I wanted to do it again, and again.

  You see, it turned out that I was Pachamama. It shocked me to find that I, the child who wouldn’t be touched, just couldn’t get enough of it. It was like feeling thirsty all the time. I tried not to think about it. It made me feel odd.

  Soon after we had sex, Olly and I began to read the dictionary together, and it wasn’t long after that that we started keeping our underwear in each other’s drawers, mixed up together, for convenience on overnight stays. My mother was right: some of that underwear she would not have recognised, or indeed recommended.

  I watched the leaves fall into the River Wear, saw the towered cathedral rise out of burnished trees and I walked, hand in hand with Olly Macintosh over the cobbles, wrapped in scarves and coats – and desire.

  Olly started to call me Dragonfly – because my mind flitted about in so
many directions, he told me.

  Every time he said it, I felt warm.

  I did think of Julia in Hedley Green.

  But not enough.

  I assumed I’d go home for the holidays and everything would be the same.

  I texted her.

  But not enough.

  I phoned her.

  But not enough.

  Olly Macintosh and I bought sparklers and wrote messages on the air to each other. I was now more obsessed than ever with the poetry of Federico García Lorca, and on Hallowe’en, we sat in a candlelit bath together drinking champagne, and I read Poeta en Nueva York to him in a ghostly voice.

  ‘I realised that I’d been murdered.

  They made their way through cafés and graveyards and churches …

  Still they didn’t find me.

  They didn’t find me?

  No.

  They never found me.’

  November froze our breath, and we puffed words at each other, Olly Macintosh and I, always talking, forever talking and touching, we couldn’t get enough of each other, we were a bottomless pit.

  I watched the fireworks explode over the cathedral towers and hardly thought once of Tattershall Common. The shop windows filled with Christmas. We huddled under rugs drinking mugs of hot chocolate outside; we woke together, legs entwined, in Olly’s bed, to see the morning dawn frosted white; we studied together, two at a desk.

  I had re-twinned myself – and I felt as if I was tearing in two when Olly and I said goodbye on the tarmac outside our halls with my father’s engine still running.

  ‘Any news in Hedley Green?’ I asked my father, sitting in the passenger seat, driving down the A1, just he and I.

  ‘A flock of blinking parrots,’ said my father. ‘Causing total havoc. Foreign birds. Over-running the native species. Like grey squirrels.’

  ‘Any other news?’

  ‘Same old same old,’ said my father.

  ‘I hate that expression,’ I said.

  I noticed that my father was blushing, and I looked at his white hands, with the steering wheel running through them, making clock times, face set forward.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘I find it hard to drive and talk,’ he said. ‘I can’t concentrate.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  And we drove in silence.

  We stopped off at a service station, which had gold Christmas decorations in drooping loops along the corridor, and he got out the two Tupperware boxes we’d always had. My whole life. With the white lids. And our surname.

  HOPE.

  That’s what it said across each lid.

  HOPE HOPE.

  ‘Cheese or ham?’ said my father.

  I don’t know why, but I felt like getting up and holding him in my arms, up close, chest to chest.

  I didn’t.

  The truth was that I couldn’t, I didn’t know how.

  I never had.

  I never have.

  When we walked into the house, there were carols playing on the radio, and my mother came out in her apron, looking shy. She moved forward, and I moved forward. She put her lips – briefly – against my cheek, and they felt soft and velvety, and then she ran off to the kitchen and brought back a tray of iced cupcakes, which spelt out WELCOME HOME in a line.

  ‘Did Dad tell you about the birds?’ said my mother. ‘They’re called rose-ringed parakeets. Green things. Make a terrible racket.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where’s Julia?’

  ‘Her term doesn’t end for another week,’ she said.

  I texted Ali.

  No reply.

  I texted Ian.

  No reply.

  I texted Moira.

  ‘I’m in Devon,’ she replied.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Selling incense.’

  ‘Cool.’

  Julia came home.

  ‘Justa!’ I said.

  She held me in her arms, and I held her in my arms.

  ‘You smell different,’ she said.

  We all slightly over-laughed.

  As I was getting undressed that evening, she stared at me.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You’re wearing a thong,’ she said. ‘You never used to wear a thong. Is it weird to have something up your bum?’

  ‘You tell me,’ I said.

  And I laughed.

  And she said, ‘Aug, that’s disgusting.’

  And I panicked.

  Had I become disgusting at university?

  Would she still like me?

  The next day I woke up and found that the house was empty and so quiet it made a hum of silence.

  I walked into every room and stared at it.

  Every room looked smaller, and I felt bigger.

  It was a doll’s house with a tiny orange wooden dresser, and a circular fake-mahogany table, a piano, a fireplace made of crazy paving with a gas fire stuck on the wall with fake glowing wood, with stairs carpeted the colour of olives, taking you upstairs to a cramped landing, lined with photos of us, in date order, so that you could almost watch time chub out our faces, thin them down, grow our teeth too big for our mouths, grow our faces the right size for our teeth, oil our spotty skin, smooth it out, and on, and on, to now.

  I walked into my mother and father’s bedroom.

  I stared at their double bed with the shiny green quilted bedspread with matching cushions, the cream plasticky bedside tables with nothing on them but my father’s alarm clock, ticking loudly.

  Tick tick tick.

  The white washbasin in the corner, with the neatly folded towel on the rail, pale green, with a satin oyster shell.

  I picked up the towel.

  I smelled it.

  It smelled of Bold washing powder, lavender fragrance.

  Like we all smelled, my mother, my father, Julia and I.

  Our smell.

  I bought the same stuff in Durham.

  I wondered if I would buy it forever.

  Or if I’d make a break.

  The towel had not been used.

  I wondered if it was ever used.

  Or if it was for display.

  To nobody.

  You could see the creases from the iron.

  It had been ironed so that the satin oyster shell fell right in the centre.

  I can’t be here, I said to the air.

  I went to the library. I headed for the ornithology section, where I’d never been, and looked up rose-ringed parakeets – large, long-tailed, lime green, faces ringed in pink and black, wild parrots, for goodness sake, in Hedley Green!

  ‘Guess where the rose-ringed parakeets came from!’ I said over supper that night, my father sitting, pale and grey, with trembling hands because the bell above the door hadn’t rung once, not once, all day.

  ‘The first pair might have escaped from the set of The African Queen in 1951,’ I said, trying to fill our quiet kitchen with happy stories. ‘It was filmed in Burundi. Around Lake Tanganyika.’

  Nobody spoke.

  ‘Has anyone seen that film?’ I said.

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Welcome home,’ said my mother, lifting her glass of water.

  We all stared at my father’s fingers.

  ‘Or perhaps,’ I said, making a little drum roll on the table. ‘Perhaps you remember the hurricane in 1987?’

  ‘A year before I opened the shop,’ said my father, and his voice sounded shaky. ‘I was still working at John Lewis.’

  ‘Well, the first two birds might have escaped from an aviary in the hurricane in 1987,’ I said. ‘Or possibly Jimi Hendrix released a pair in Carnaby Street in the 1960s.’

  ‘When we were children,’ said my mother, glancing at my father. ‘Happy times, the 1960s.’

  ‘England was England in the 1960s,’ said my father. ‘You never heard a foreign voice.’

  ‘Apparently, in Angela Dunnett’s class, half the children don’t understand
English,’ said my mother.

  ‘Peter Dunnett says he’s got half a mind to go and shoot them himself,’ said my father.

  ‘The birds or the children?’ I said.

  ‘Crumble?’ said my mother.

  And I thought my father is crumbling.

  ‘Would anyone like to come on a bird-watching trip with me?’ I said, in an unusually cheerful voice, because somebody had to lift the mood, and also I’d become quite engrossed in the ornithology section of Hedley Green library, and also I couldn’t stand the thought of being here all through the Easter Holidays as well. ‘I’m thinking of a weekend in Norfolk – maybe in April.’

  ‘Oh, it’s very cold on that east coast,’ said my mother, ‘and anyway we don’t go away in the spring, do we, Stan?’

  ‘Just a weekend,’ I said.

  ‘Your father has never had a weekend,’ said my mother. ‘Not since he opened the shop.’

  ‘Julia?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll talk to Diego,’ she said.

  ‘We can only go away in August,’ said my mother. ‘Because of the shop.’

  ‘We may not be able to go away in August this year,’ said my father, and his voice broke on year, splitting into a strange kind of sob.

  A shadow passed over my mother’s face.

  ‘I think it’s time I told you all,’ said my father, in an awful broken cracking voice, and sweat was forming above his lip and on his cheekbones, and he undid the buttons on the cuffs of his white shirt, and he rolled up his sleeves, showing his pale arms, with little clumps of wiry grey hairs on them. Like a wolf.

  Lupine, I thought, to distract myself from what was happening to my father’s face, from lupus, wolf. The only thing lupine would really rhyme with is supine, I thought, meaning lying with your face turned upwards, like you do, I suppose, when you’re dead.

  My father’s face was shiny with sweat, and I could see the hairline crack again, the one that came the night the Greens’ house was pulled down. The face crack was waiting for the stroke, which hadn’t happened yet, the way the conker shell swells towards its fracture.

  He was swelling towards his fracture: he was starting the process of coming undone.

  My father started to cry.

  We’d never seen my father cry.

  Julia and I looked down.

  We all let the apple crumble fall off our spoons.

  Then we looked up.