Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  ‘She’s got low self-esteem,’ said Doris. ‘That’s what’s wrong with her.’

  ‘Where did she get that from?’ puzzled Alice, as the two of them laid the table.

  That night Ella woke suddenly and sat up in bed. She thought she heard wolves howling. Then she realised it was screams of laughter coming from her mother and her aunts all in the one bed next door. Through the wall she heard her mother repeating a favourite joke from a comedian she had seen at the Camberwell Palace.

  ‘He came on dressed as a housewife in an apron and said: “Here I am slaving away over a hot stove and there he is in that nice cool sewer.”’

  Ella listened to the howls of laughter ricocheting around the room.

  *

  When Ella won the scholarship to the Royal Ballet School, Alice and Doris went for a walk in Battersea Park to talk it over. They sat on a bench next to a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, at the edge of a pond. The abstract sculpture had an oval hole in it. A brisk wind corrugated the surface of the water.

  ‘I suppose she might as well go. She’s got dancing-mad feet,’ said Alice. ‘She’d have to board.’

  ‘Does she want to go?’

  ‘Oh she’s dead keen as far as anyone can tell. You can’t tell anything with her.’

  ‘What about money?’

  ‘She’d get a grant, apparently. The scholarship pays the fees. If she goes I’ll definitely move down to Kent near you so you’d better start looking out for a place for me.’

  Doris was munching a sandwich and staring with suspicion at the sculpture:

  ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

  ‘It’s a sculpture.’

  ‘I could have done that.’

  ‘No you couldn’t. It’s art.’

  Doris pointed at a brown speckled duck that was paddling towards them across the water:

  ‘Now that’s beautiful. And it works.’

  ‘Yes, Doris. But that’s not art. That’s an animal. What do you reckon, then, about Ella?’ asked Alice.

  ‘I suppose she might as well go.’ Doris threw the bread crusts on the water.

  *

  That September Alice moved to the village of Eythorne near Dover and Ella went to board at the Royal Ballet School in Barons Court.

  Other students found her remote. She hung around on the edge of the group but spoke little. The girls sometimes went shopping en masse to Carnaby Street where they bought Mondrian style minidresses, pill-box hats and patterned tights while Chubby Checker and Beatles music blared out from the shops. Ella went with them to coffee bars, played the juke-boxes, and shopped with them for sexy underwear, camisoles and suspenders. She took part in the fun when they came back and laid out everything on the beds to inspect the haul, or when they pranced around doing the Twist. But the others never felt that they really knew her.

  ‘Where is she from?’ asked one of the other students.

  ‘I don’t know. Someone said Mexico.’

  ‘She’s not Mexican. She’s about as Mexican as Baked Alaska. She’s got a London accent.’

  ‘She’s sort of coffee-coloured though. And those dark eyes.’

  Ella’s progress as a dancer, however, was clear to everybody. She had certain inborn advantages: strong slender ankles and an instep with the strength of steel. She had both stamina and flexibility. Her dancing seemed entirely spontaneous and she had an instinctive use of variety in musical phrasing. It was no surprise to anyone when, at the age of fifteen, she was offered a place in the corps de ballet of the company. She was given special permission to reside at the school until she was sixteen. She settled down at the Royal Ballet to gain in strength and experience. Other dancers in the company also found her difficult to befriend. They put it down to her youth or shyness. There was something hidden about her. No-one could tell when something upset her. She just smiled and lowered her eyelashes.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she would say after a fall or some other setback in class.

  Ella struck up one close friendship outside the company. She met Hetty Moran at the Saturday jazz-dance classes, which she could not resist attending despite being warned that contemporary dance might interfere with her classical training. Once a week she sneaked away to dance to the rhythms of samba and Cuban salsa. Hetty worked as a secretary in the offices of an American pharmaceutical company, Merkel, Sharpe and Dolme. She attended dance classes in the hope that healthy exercise might offset her habit of smoking twenty cigarettes a day. From the beginning Ella admired Hetty. She warmed to Hetty’s wise-cracking humour, her quick grasp of things and penetrating intuition. Hetty was a slim blonde who bubbled with vitality. She was one or two years older than Ella. There was a kind of unreflective outgoing generosity about her; a daring and panache that impressed Ella. To Ella, the American girl felt like a breath of fresh air, bold and liberated compared with the residual stuffy post-war Britishness that clung to the ballet school and the company. She and Hetty fell into the habit of going to a café and drinking iced coffees together after class. One day Hetty asked Ella if she would like to share her flat in Old Compton Street. And Ella moved in.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Welcome home, honey.’ Hetty threw open her arms to indicate the small space which they would be sharing.

  It was only eighteen months since Hetty Moran had quit Omaha, Nebraska for good.

  They say the wind never stops blowing in Nebraska and on the day that Hetty Moran decided to leave the wind was as hot and steady as the blast from a hair-dryer. On that particular day Hetty carried inside her all the restless and chronic impermanence of America. She had gone for a job interview at the new Novotel. The road leading from the Novotel back into town was deserted. The hotel was the only finished building in a new development on the outskirts of town, a monolith that rose up against the blue sky in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by vacant ungroomed lots scattered with builders’ debris and tufts of seeding grass. Wild goldenrod sprouted from surrounding patches of rubble.

  Hetty Moran was all spruced up for her appointment but when she turned into the wide asphalt forecourt of the fifteen storey building she suddenly changed her mind and sat on the low wall outside instead. She bent to light her cigarette. The wind blew a double helix strand of blonde hair over her eyes. Two sharp pincer lines formed a frown on her pretty, featureless face. She scowled and pushed the hair out of her eyes. She drew slowly on her cigarette and squinted up at the building. Balconies jutted out all the way down one side like rough concrete vertebrae with the blue sky showing in between. For nearly half an hour she waited there in the sun smoking first one cigarette and then another until the time for the interview had passed. Then she flicked the butt of the last cigarette away, picked up her shoulder-bag and walked slowly away from the hotel back towards the road.

  Now there was just the kerb and the road and the enormous Nebraska sky. The silence pressed on her ears. A vehicle passed by with a muted hiss on the smooth road making its way from somewhere in the outer suburbs to the shopping mall a mile away. Just once she looked back at the hotel and its ratchet silhouette. She thought half-heartedly about what excuse she might give her mother for not attending the interview. She could say that the interviewer had never turned up or that there had been a road accident on the way there. She would tell her friends something else, perhaps: that she had been offered the job of assistant manageress but turned it down. She concentrated on walking. The sides of the road were no longer paved so she had to tread over dry brown earth and patches of grass. Nobody walked in those parts. If you didn’t drive you didn’t exist. Soon she was covered in a light film of sweat. Her white cotton blouse clung to her chest. She preferred to keep her eyes lowered to the ground. Whenever she looked up, the huge sky and wide open space of the empty plains made her feel fearful and exposed, with nowhere to hide.

  It was a relief when she reached the top of a slope and the familiar outline of the Bass Pro store which had replaced the old grain elevator came into sight on her left. The hot g
usting wind became stronger, and all of a sudden it was blowing all around her like hysteria looking for a victim. She felt the first signs of a panic attack; palpitations kicking in her chest like an unruly foetus. Hetty tried taking deep breaths, gulping in the air, but that only made her heart pound more and made the surrounding emptiness seem to invade and become part of her.

  Now the wind from across the plains was moaning in her ears. She tried not to look at the vast expanse of land around her. It made her disorientated, as though she had lost the boundaries of her body and was made of air. To ground herself and make herself feel real she clenched her fists until her nails dug into the palms. Quickly she sat down at the roadside, welcoming the feel of the gritty earth beneath her, and fished in her bag for a Valium. A few minutes later she took another of the small yellow pills. After a while she became less agitated and decided that she could manage the walk home. She stood up. The silence settled back down over her. All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing and the scrunch of her footsteps. The whole of America might have been a sound-proof chamber through which no sound from the outside world penetrated. ‘Sheeyit.’ She cursed as her ankle turned over on the uneven ground. But she felt calmer now, despite the sensation that she was walking in a mirage, moving forward without making progress.

  *

  Where Hetty Moran lived was on the south side of Omaha, in a sprawling wasteland of cinder-block houses behind the old meatpacking factories. It was Nebraska in the sixties. The stores had broken fluorescent lighting and the diners served greasy food on faded Formica tables. Omaha was known for its granaries and for producing Malcolm X. Hetty did not care much about either. She lived with her mother in an apartment over a pet food shop on Grenadine Street. When she finally reached home, instead of going through the front door next to the store entrance, she climbed the iron fire-escape at the back of the house and let herself in that way.

  Her mother was sitting, legs apart, watching TV on the old battered settee, lank brown hair done up like a child’s in two side-bunches. Without taking her eyes off the TV she fumbled under her bulky backside and pulled out a bunch of letters which she waved at her daughter.

  ‘What’s all this crap? You writin’ to people sayin’ you engaged to a Japanese pilot who’s crazy about you and waitin’ till you’re twenty to marry you and take you back to Tokyo?’ She gave a derisive snort and chucked the letters on the floor. Hetty grabbed at the letters pale with anger. Her voice slid upwards:

  ‘You been in my room again?’

  ‘If you call that pigsty a room, yeah.’

  ‘You are so much of a fucking cow it’s not true.’

  ‘Raised on a Nebraska dairy farm, honey. At least cows are honest. You don’ open your mouth ’cept to give birth to a big lie out of it. You should sleep well you lie so easy.’

  Ma Moran’s podgy hand dived into a packet of popcorn and she leaned forward to gaze intensely at the screen. After a couple of minutes she raised a face round and pasty as uncooked pizza dough and looked at her daughter with dislike:

  ‘What happened with the job?’

  ‘They cancelled the interview. The woman didn’t turn up.’

  Ma Moran blew a disbelieving hiss out of her mouth.

  Hetty crossed her arms and stared fixedly at her mother.

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that with a mother like you I might just kill myself?’

  ‘Sure. Go get a noose and get the chair ready.’ Her mother chuckled.

  Hetty’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Your ass is so big and bulky it looks like you’re still wearing diapers. You smell like it too.’ She slammed out of the room. Still staring at the TV Ma Moran yelled after her:

  ‘You better pull yourself together and get a job, young lady. This is real life, you know. This ain’t no dress rehearsal.’

  Hetty flounced into her own room and changed her clothes. She sat on her bed and laced up the trainers. It was at that moment she decided to leave Omaha for good. She pulled her hair back with both hands and twisted it deftly into a pony tail, placing her sunglasses so that they perched like a black butterfly on top of her head.

  In the kitchen the yellowing old box freezer rattled and whirred. Hetty lifted the lid and took a quick slug from the frosted bottle of vodka that her mother always kept there. The vodka hit the back of her throat like iced gasoline. Grasping the letters, she slipped into her mother’s bedroom. The windows were open. Cheap curtains that hung on wire over the window were blowing in the breeze. She ripped up the offending letters and tossed them on her mother’s bed. Her heart thumped with that particular shame which comes from having your camouflage spotted. Then she opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and took out her mother’s fifteen welfare books, each one laboriously forged with a different name. These she stuffed into a large brown envelope which she put in her shoulder bag. A minute later she had gone, banging the back door behind her.

  The neighbourhood baked in the afternoon sun and the asphalt road surface turned soft in the heat. This was the dead-end of town. The blind eyes of the boarded-up shops depressed Hetty Moran as she walked towards the Welfare Office. It was housed in a three-storey brick building the colour of dried ox-blood which had once served as a grain depot. Hetty went up the front steps and pushed open the doors. Inside there was no air-conditioning. Sitting behind a counter in the main hall was the receptionist, a gingerish dry-skinned woman in her forties with hair set square and firm like a loaf of bread. Hetty approached her with an exaggerated demeanour of respect. In her hand she held the brown envelope stuffed with her mother’s forged welfare books. She opened her eyes wide.

  ‘Excuse me ma’am. I’m sorry to trouble you, but I found these in the street outside and I thought I should bring them in. Think they might belong here.’

  ‘Well, thank you, dear.’ The woman’s frown deepened as she looked through the contents and saw the forged welfare books, all in different names, clearly faked and all with the same address in Grenadine Street. She reached for the telephone. Outside, Hetty skipped down the steps.

  She looked back at the converted grain depot, certain that she belonged somewhere altogether more glamorous than Omaha, Nebraska. Houston appealed to her. She had seen Houston on TV, a huge insectivorous city, with its giant gelatinous buildings and corporate sky-line; a city of glacial ice-lollies in the desert. She went to the bus station and checked the timetables. Not until it was dark did Hetty creep back into her own home.

  Nembutal snores issued from her mother’s bedroom like the creaking of a door. Straight away Hetty began packing. She put her favourite clothes into a suitcase. She went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and emptied it of first-aid kit: bottles of Valium, Librium, Diazepam, Ritalin, Nembutal, Benzedrine, Mogadon and anything else that she could find. She tip-toed into the kitchen and found her mother’s handbag and chequebooks, which she transferred into her own purse.

  At the bus station she used one of the cheques to buy her ticket. The Greyhound bus pulled out of Omaha bus station headed for Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Dallas and Houston. Hetty watched each identikit neon-lit pod town as it came and went by; an endless sequence of interconnected shopping centres linked by a mesh of highways, billboards, motels and fast-food outlets. Her heart was set on Houston.

  *

  Hetty liked her uniform as a hospital cleaner in the private maternity home on the outskirts of Houston. It consisted of a small white cap and a blue and white overall. She was full of enthusiasm and eager to do well. It was her job to hoover the thin blue carpeting in the corridors. She also had to wipe down the tubular legs of the beds with disinfectant and clean the telephones by the patients’ beds.

  She was glad she was not one of these new mothers. They looked big, milky-breasted and misshapen from the waist up, and reported that they felt uncomfortable and sore from the waist down. She cleaned around them as they drank their required tumbler of water or slept humped up in the bed.

  Each patient occup
ied a private room. There were ten such rooms on every corridor with a nursery at the end where the babies were put. Hetty let herself in to the nursery quietly in order not to wake the babies. A soft smell of disinfectant and baby-powder clung to the shiny pastel walls. There were ten cots but only six were occupied. All of the babies were asleep. She stood looking at them. The clock said ten past twelve. Then the clock said fifteen minutes past twelve and suddenly she was leaning over one of the cradles. Hetty pinched the baby’s nostrils together in a firm grip. The baby lay still for a few moments and then squirmed. Hetty looked towards the door and put her other hand over its mouth. She watched with interest as the baby’s back arched and its arms swung out from beneath the light covering sheet. She held on to the baby’s nose, gripping it with casual indifference and regarding the infant with curiosity. Then, noticing that her fingers were becoming covered in the baby’s dribble, she took her hand away in disgust and wiped it on her overall. The baby gasped and screamed.

  At that moment the doors swished open and a nurse came in. Hester experienced the sort of thrill that comes with a near miss. She smiled at the nurse. She had neither smothered the child nor been caught. It was like a game of grandmother’s footsteps. She had not been detected. She was innocent.

  The nurse smiled back and lifted the wailing infant from his cot.

  ‘I wasn’t sure what to do when he started crying,’ said Hetty, smoothing the baby’s soft cheek gently with her forefinger. ‘I didn’t know if I was supposed to lift him out.’

  ‘Oh no. You’re not supposed to touch them.’

  ‘Goodness. Just as well I didn’t. Poor little mite.’ Hetty put her head on one side and smiled at the shrieking baby. ‘Oh what’s the matter?’ She shrugged with helplessness and looking directly into the eyes of the nurse said: ‘Don’t you just feel for them?’