Learning to Talk

by Hilary Mantel

  Straight is the line of duty;

  Curved is the line of beauty.

  Follow the straight line; thou shalt see

  The curved line ever follow thee.

  At five o’clock, a shout roused me from my dreams. I went downstairs in my blue spotted pyjamas to wash in hot water from the kettle, and I saw the outline of my face, puffy, in the light like grey linen tacked to the summer window. I had never been so far from home; even my mother had never, she said, been so far. I was excited and excitement made me sneeze. My mother stood in the kitchen in the first uncertain shaft of sun, making sandwiches with cold bacon and wrapping them silently, sacramentally, in greaseproof paper.

  We were going in Jack’s car, which stood the whole night, these last few months, at the kerb outside our house. It was a small grey car, like a jelly mould, out of which a giant might turn a foul jelly of profanity and grease. The car’s character was idle, vicious and sneaky. If it had been a pony you would have shot it. Its engine spat and steamed, its underparts rattled; it wanted brake shoes and new exhausts. It jibbed at hills and sputtered to a halt on bends. It ate oil, and when it wanted a new tyre there were rows about having no money, and there was slamming the door so hard that the glass of the kitchen cupboard rattled in its grooves.

  The car brought out the worst in everybody who saw it. It was one of the first cars on the street, and the neighbours, in their mistaken way, envied it. Already sneerers and ill-wishers of ours, they were driven to further spite when they saw us trooping out to the kerb carrying all the rugs and kettles and camping stoves and raincoats and Wellington boots that we took with us for a day at the seaside or the zoo.

  There were five of us, now. Me and my mother; two biting, snarling, pinching little boys; Jack. My father did not go on our trips. Though he still slept in the house – the room down the corridor, the one with the ghost – he kept to his own timetables and routines, his Friday jazz club, and his solitary sessions of syncopation, picking at the piano, late weekend afternoons, with a remote gaze. This had not always been his way of life. He had once taken me to the library. He had taken me out with my fishing net. He had taught me card games and how to read a racecard; it might not have been a suitable accomplishment for an eight-year-old, but any skill at all was a grace in our dumb old world.

  But those days were now lost to me. Jack had come to stay with us. At first he was just a visitor and then without transition he seemed to be always there. He never carried in a bag, or unpacked clothes; he just came complete as he was. After his day’s work he would drive up in the evil car, and when he came up the steps and through the front door, my father would melt away to his shadowy evening pursuits. Jack had a brown skin and muscles beneath his shirt. He was your definition of a man, if a man was what caused alarm and shattered the peace.

  To amuse me, while my mother combed the tangles out of my hair, he told me the story of David and Goliath. It was not a success. He tried his hardest – as I tried also – to batten down my shrieks. As he spoke his voice slid in and out of the London intonations with which he had been born; his brown eyes flickered, caramel and small, the whites jaundiced. He made the voice of Goliath, but – to my mind – he was lacking in the David department.

  After a long half-hour, the combing was over. My vast weight of hair studded to my skull with steel clips, I pitched exhausted from the kitchen chair. Jack stood up, equally exhausted, I suppose; he would not have known how often this needed to happen. He liked children, or imagined he did. But (owing to recent events and my cast of mind) I was not exactly a child, and he himself was a very young man, too inexperienced to navigate through the situation in which he had placed himself, and he was always on the edge, under pressure, chippy and excitable and quick to take offence. I was afraid of his flaring temper and his irrationality: he argued with brute objects, kicked out at iron and wood, cursed the fire when it wouldn’t light. I flinched at the sound of his voice, but I tried to keep the flinch inwards.

  When I look back now I find in myself – in so far as I can name what I find – a faint stir of fellow feeling that is on the way to pity.

  It was Jack’s quickness of temper, and his passion for the underdog, that was the cause of our trip to Birmingham. We were going to see a friend of his, who was from Africa. You will remember that we have barely reached the year 1962, and I had never seen anyone from Africa, except in photographs, but the prospect in itself was less amazing to me than the knowledge that Jack had a friend. I thought friends were for children. My mother seemed to think that you grew out of them. Adults did not have friends. They had relatives. Only relatives came to your house. Neighbours might come, of course. But not to our house. My mother was now the subject of scandal and did not go out. We were all the subject of scandal, but some of us had to. I had to go to school, for instance. It was the law.

  It was six in the morning when we bundled into the car, the two little boys dropped sleep-stunned beside me on to the red leather of the back seat. In those days it took a very long time to get anywhere. There were no motorways to speak of. Fingerposts were still employed, and we did not seem to have the use of a map. Because my mother did not know left from right, she would cry ‘That way, that way!’ whenever she saw a sign and happened to read it. The car would swerve off in any old direction and Jack would start cursing and she would shout back. Our journeys usually found us bogged in the sand at Southport, or broken down by the drystone wall of some Derbyshire beauty spot, the lid of the vile spitting engine propped open, my mother giving advice from the wound-down window: fearful advice, which went on till Jack danced with rage on the roadway or on the uncertain sand, his voice piping in imitation of a female shriek; and she, heaving up the last rags of self-control, heaving them into her arms like some dying diva’s bouquet, would drop her voice an octave and claim, ‘I don’t talk like that.’

  But on this particular day, when we were going to Birmingham, we didn’t get lost at all. It seemed a miracle. At the blossoming hour of ten o’clock, the weather still fine, we ate our sandwiches, and I remember that first sustaining bite of salted fat, sealing itself in a plug to the hard palate: the sip of Nescafe to wash it down, poured steaming from the flask. In some town we stopped for petrol. That too passed without incident.

  I rehearsed, in my mind, the reason behind the visit. The man from Africa, the friend, was not now but had once been a workmate of Jack. And they had spoken. And his name was Jacob. My mother had told me, don’t say ‘Jacob is black’, say ‘Jacob is coloured’.

  What, coloured? I said. What, striped? Like the towel which, at that very moment, was hanging to dry before the fire? I stared at it; the stripes had run together to a patchy violet-grey. I felt it; the fibres were stiff as dried grass. Black, my mother said, is not the term polite people use. And stop mauling that towel!

  So now, the friend, Jacob. He had been, at one time, living in Manchester, working with Jack. He had married a white girl. They had gone to get lodgings. At every door they had been turned away. No room at the inn. Though Eva was expecting. Especially because she was expecting. Even the stable door was bolted, it was barred against them, NO COLOUREDS, the signs said.

  Oh, merrie England! At least people could spell in those days. They didn’t write NO COLOURED’S or ‘NO’ COLOUREDS. That’s about all you can say for it.

  So: Jacob unfolded to Jack this predicament of his: no house, the insulting notices, the pregnant Eva. Jack, quickly taking fire, wrote a letter to a tabloid newspaper. The newspaper, quick to spot a cause, took fire also. There was naming and shaming; there was a campaign. Letters were written and questions were asked. The next thing you knew, Jacob had moved to Birmingham, to a new job. There was a house now, and a baby, indeed two. Better days were here. But Jacob would never forget how Jack had taken up the cudgels. That, my mother said, was the phrase he had used.

  David and Goliath, I thought. My scalp prickled, and I felt steel pins cold against it. Last night had been too busy for the
combing. My hair fell smoothly down my back, but hidden above the nape of my neck there was a secret pad of fuzziness which, if slept on for a second night, would require a howling hour to unknot.

  The house of Jacob was built of brick in a quiet colour of brown, with a white-painted gate and a tree in a tub outside. One huge window stared out at a grass verge, with a sapling; and the road curved away, lined with similar houses, each in their own square of garden. We stepped out of the heat of the car and stood jelly-legged on the verge. Behind the plate glass was a stir of movement, and Jacob opened the front door to us, his face breaking into a smile. He was a tall slender man, and I liked the contrast of his white shirt with the soft sheen of his skin. I tried hard not to say, even to think, the term that is not the one polite people use. Jacob, I said to myself, is quite a dark lavender, verging on purple on an overcast day.

  Eva came out from behind him. She had a compensatory pallor, and when she reached out, vaguely patting at my little brothers, she did it with fingers like rolled dough. Well, well, the adults said. And, this is all very nice. Lovely, Eva. And fitted carpets. Yes, said Eva. And would you like to go and spend a penny? I didn’t know this phrase. Wash your hands, my mother said. Eva said, run upstairs, poppet.

  At the top of the stairs there was a bathroom, not an arrangement I had reason to take for granted. Eva ushered me into it, smiling, and clicked the door behind her. Standing at the basin and watching myself in the mirror, I washed my hands carefully with Camay soap. Maybe I was dehydrated from the journey, for I didn’t seem to need to do anything else. I hummed to myself, ‘You’ll look a little lovelier…each day…with fabulous Camay.’ I didn’t look around much. Already I could hear them on the stairs, shouting that it was their turn. I dried carefully between my fingers with the towel behind the door. There was a bolt on this door and I thought for a moment of bolting myself in. But a familiar pounding began, a head-butting, a thudding and a giggling, and I opened the door so that my brothers fell in at it and I went downstairs to do the rest of the day.

  Everything had been fine, till the last hour of the journey. ‘Not long to go,’ my mother had said, and suddenly swivelled in her seat. She watched us, silent, her neck craning. Then she said, ‘When we are visiting Jacob, don’t say “Jack”. It’s not suitable. I want you to say,’ and here she began to struggle with words, ‘ “Daddy…Daddy Jack”.’

  Her head, once more, faced front. Studying the line of her cheek, I thought she looked sick. It had been a most unconvincing performance. I was almost embarrassed for her. ‘Is this just for today?’ I asked. My voice came out cold. She didn’t answer.

  When I got back into the downstairs room they were parading Eva’s children, a toddler and a baby, and remarking that it was funny how it came out, so you had one butter-coloured and one bluish, and Jacob was saying, too, that it was funny how it came out and you couldn’t ever tell, really, it was probably beyond the scope of science as we know it today. The sound of a pan rocking on the gas jet came from the kitchen, and there was a burst of wet steam, and some clanking; Eva said, carrots, can’t take your eye off them. Wiping her hands on her apron, she made for the door and melted into the steam. My eyes followed her. Jacob smiled and said, so how is the man who took up the cudgels?

  We children ate in the kitchen – my family, that is, because the two babies sat in their own high chairs by Eva and sucked gloop from a spoon. There was a little red table with a hinged flap, and Eva propped the back door open so that the sunlight from the garden came in. We had vast pale slices of roast pork, and gravy that was beige and so thick it kept the shape of the knife. Probably if I am honest about what I remember, I think it is the fudge texture of this gravy that stays in my mind, better even than the afternoon’s choking panic, the tears and prayers that were now only an hour or so away.

  After our dinner Tabby came. She was not a cat but a girl, and the niece of Jacob. Enquiries were made of me: did I like to draw? Tabby had brought a large bag with her, and from it she withdrew sheets of rough coloured paper and a whole set of coloured pencils, double-ended. She gave me a quick, modest smile, and a flicker of her eyes. We settled down in a corner, and began to make each other’s portrait.

  Out in the garden the little boys grubbed up worms, shrieked, rolled the lawn with each other and laid about with their fists. I thought that the two coloured babies, now snorting in milky sleep, would be doing the same thing before long. When one of the boys fetched the other a harder clout than usual, the victim would howl, ‘Jack! Jack!’

  My mother stood looking over the garden. ‘That’s a lovely shrub, Eva,’ she said. I could see her through the angle made by the open door of the kitchen; her high-heeled sandals planted squarely on the lino. She was smaller than I had thought, when I saw her beside the floury bulk of Eva, and her eyes were resting on something further than the shrub: on the day when she would leave the moorland village behind her, and have a shrub of her own. I bent my head over the paper and attempted the blurred line of Tabby’s cheek, the angle of neck to chin. The curve of flesh, its soft bloom, eluded me; I lolled my pencil point softly against the paper, feeling I wanted to roll it in cream, or in something vegetable-soft but tensile, like the fallen petal of a rose. I had already noticed, with interest, that Tabby’s crayons were sharpened down in a similar pattern to the ones I had at home. She had little use for gravy colour and still less for bl***k. Almost as unpopular was the double-ended crayon in morbid mauve/dark pink. Most popular with her was gold/green: as with me. On those days when I was tired of crayoning, and started to play that the crayons were soldiers, I had to imagine that gold/green was a drummer boy, so short was he.

  On the rough paper, my pencil snagged; at once, my reverie was interrupted. I took in a breath. I bit my lip. I felt my heart begin to beat: an obscure insult, trailing like the smell of old vegetable water, seemed to hang in the air. This paper is for kids, I thought; it’s for babies who don’t know how to draw. My fingers gripped the crayon. I held it like a dagger. My hand clenched around it. At my toppest speed, I began to execute cartoon men, with straight jointless limbs, and brown ‘O’s for heads, with wide grinning mouths, jug ears; petty Goliaths with slatted mouths, with five fingerbones splaying from their wrists.

  Tabby looked up. Shh, shh…she said; as if soothing me.

  I drew children rolling in the grass, children made of two circles with a third ‘O’ for their bawling mouths.

  Jacob came in, laughing, talking to Jack over his shoulder, ‘…so I tell him, if you want a trained draughtsman for £6 a week, man, you can whistle for him!’

  I thought, I won’t call Jack anything, I won’t give him a name. I’ll nod my head in his direction so they’ll know who I mean. I’ll even point to him, though polite people don’t point. Daddy Jack! Daddy Jack! They can whistle for him!

  Jacob stood over us, smiling softly. The crisp turn of his collar, the top button released, disclosed his velvet, quite dark-coloured throat. Two nice girls,’ he said. ‘What have we here?’ He picked up my paper. ‘Talent!’ he said. ‘Did you do this, honey, by yourself?’ He was looking at the cartoon men, not my portrait of Tabby, those tentative strokes in the corner of the page; not at the tilt of her jaw, like a note in music. ‘Hey, Jack,’ he said, ‘now this is good, I can’t believe it at her young age.’ I whispered, ‘I am nine,’ as if I wanted to alert him to the true state of affairs. Jacob waved the paper around, delighted. ‘I could well say this is a prodigy,’ he said. I turned my face away. It seemed indecent to look at him. In that one moment it seemed to me that the world was blighted, and that every adult throat bubbled, like a garbage pail in August, with the syrup of rotting lies.

  I see them, now, from the car window, children any day, on any road; children going somewhere, disconnected from the routes of adult intent. You see them in twos or threes, in unlikely combinations, sometimes a pair with a little one tagging along, sometimes a boy with two girls. They carry, it might be, a plastic bag with something se
cret inside, or a stick or box, but no obvious plaything; sometimes a ratty dog processes behind them. Their faces are intent and their missions hidden from adult eyes; they have a geography of their own, urban or rural, that has nothing to do with the milestones and markers that adults use. The country through which they move is older, more intimate than ours. They have their private knowledge of it. You do not expect this knowledge to fail.

  There was no need to ask if we were best friends, me and Tabby, as we walked the narrow muddy path by the water. Perhaps it was a canal, but a canal was not a thing I’d seen, and it seemed to me more like a placid inland stream, silver-grey in colour, tideless though not motionless, fringed by sedge and tall grasses. My fingers were safely held in the pad of Tabby’s palm, and there was a curve of light on the narrow, coffee-coloured back of her hand. She was a head taller than me, willowy, cool to the touch, even at the hot end of this hot afternoon. She was ten and a quarter years old, she said; lightly, almost as if it were something to shrug away. In her free hand she held a paper bag, and in this bag – which she had taken from her satchel, her eyes modestly downcast – were ripe plums.

  They were – in their perfect dumpling under my fingertips, in their cold purple blush – so fleshy that to notch your teeth against their skin seemed like becoming a teatime cannibal, a vampire for a day. I carried my plum in my palm, caressing it, rolling it like a dispossessed eye, and feeling it grow warm from the heat of my skin. We strolled, so, abstinent; till Tabby pulled at my hand, stopped me, and turned me towards her, as if she wanted a witness. She clenched her hand. She rolled the dark fruit in her fist, her eyes on mine. She raised her fist to her sepia mouth. Her small teeth plunged into ripe flesh. Juice ran down her chin. Casually, she wiped it. She turned her face full to mine, and for the first time I saw her frank smile, her lips parted, the gap between her front teeth. She flipped my wrist lightly, with the back of her fingers; I felt the sting of her nails. ‘Let’s go on the wrecks,’ she said.