The Outside Child

by Nina Bawden

  “It isn’t so simple,” Aunt Sophie said. We were through the shopping street now. She turned into a side road by the edge of the school playing fields and stopped Rattlebones with a jerk and a squeal as she put on the handbrake. The silence was lovely.

  Aunt Sophie sat still for a minute. She was still hanging on to the steering wheel—so tight that her knuckles showed white. She said, “Their mother doesn’t want them to see you. And she doesn’t want you to see them. They don’t know about you and she wants to keep it that way. She knows your father loves you just as much as he loves Annabel and George, but she likes to think they are his only children. As I said, it’s hard on your father. But he thought, we all thought, that since that was how Amy felt, it was best you didn’t know anything either. At least, not until you were older.” She took a hand off the steering wheel and let it rest on my knee.

  I said, “But their photograph was there, on his desk. He knows I always go and look at the photographs.” I remembered something. “You said he was careless.”

  Another little puffing sigh. “I suppose he usually tucks it away in a drawer when you’re coming.”

  “And what about my photograph? Does he put that away when they come?”

  “Probably. Turn and turnabout.” She took off her driving glasses and rubbed at the red mark they had left on her nose. “What a silly game!”

  I felt very strange. Annabel and George didn’t know about me, and unless my father—our father, that is!—was “careless” again, they might never know. Nothing had changed for them. But everything had changed for me. The world had grown bigger. It was as if I had found another room in the house that I lived in, a secret locked room, and was looking through a window at the children who played there. Only I couldn’t play with them. I couldn’t even talk to them. They couldn’t hear me. They couldn’t see my face at the window.

  It was as if I had suddenly become an invisible person.

  Chapter Two

  I rang Plato. “Swen,” I said. “Sti tnatropmi. Teem em? Yako?”

  “Gnah tuoba,” he said.

  There was a clatter as he dropped the telephone receiver and a crash as he knocked over something. Then the thud of his feet up the passage and the soapy music as he opened the sitting room door—either the beginning or the end of one of the television serials his mother was hooked on. I hoped it was the beginning and it must have been, because I didn’t have to hang about long. He was back. “Yako. Si ti dab swen?”

  “On. Ton dab swen, tub tnatropmi.” I wanted to say ‘exciting’, or ‘fascinating’, but both those words are impossible to pronounce backwards in a hurry. Or, rather, I couldn’t be bothered. We had to play this childish backspeak game because of Plato’s mother, who had nothing better to do than eavesdrop on other people. We used a substitution code when we wrote to each other, which is more interesting, but difficult for conversation. “Lausu ecalp,” I said. “Yako?”

  “Yako, Enaj.”

  *

  I must tell you how I met Plato. He goes to my school. He is in the year below mine which is embarrassing, sometimes, because most girls have boy friends who are older than they are. Not that Plato is my boy friend. He is a friend who happens to be a boy.

  I got to know him when I had trouble with a girl called Maureen. She lives next door and she is the same age as me, so at one time her mother was always dumping her over the fence into our garden. Nice for Jane to have a little friend, was what she said, meaning that it was convenient for her. I hated Maureen from the beginning. She hid my toys to tease me, and stole my best felt tip pens, and pulled my hair when no one was looking. The worst thing of all was when she found my private notebook and read out my poems in a loud, sniggery voice. I could have killed her for that. I punched her in the face and she fell over backwards and screamed until Aunt Bill came running.

  And, naturally, Aunt Bill blamed me!

  That was ages ago. But Maureen is still a horrible girl, always sneering. She has grown up into a fat, white slug with a wet, sneery mouth. Aunt Bill says she might be pretty one day when she has fined down a bit. Pigs might fly, is my answer to that. And if Aunt Bill knew what Maureen says about her, she wouldn’t be quite so tolerant!

  Maureen is a spy. She watches from her window and when we are in the garden she lurks on the other side of the fence, listening. There is nothing wrong with being a spy, you have to be a spy if you are a child and want to know what is going on, Plato says, and he is a better spy than Maureen could ever be because he is cleverer. But he is not a mean spy, and Maureen is mean. She spies for mean reasons.

  *

  Aunt Bill is mad about growing things, as I’ve told you. One spring night, about a year ago, she woke me up to look at the cherry tree in the garden. We crept downstairs silently, because Aunt Sophie was sleeping, and out the back door.

  There was a full moon and the white blossom was out and the tree was beautiful, like a pale dancer. “Oh, the darling,” Aunt Bill said, and went galumphing up the garden, looking twice as large as usual in her loose cotton nightie, to fling her arms round the tree. When I reached her, she was embracing the trunk, her eyes closed, smiling blissfully, and the blossom stirred gently above her, almost as if the tree had been lonely before and was glad someone had come to love and admire it. “There, my sweet beauty,” Aunt Bill murmured. She smiled at me and took my hand, and the moonlight glinted in the tears on her cheek.

  “Come on in, you’ll catch cold,” she said. “Better not tell Sophie about this silly caper.”

  Aunt Sophie never knew. But someone else did. When I left for school the next day, Maureen was waiting for me. She said, “Did the moon wake you up last night? It woke me, it was full on my face. I looked out of the window and saw everything as if our gardens were floodlit.”

  “I keep my curtains drawn at night,” I said.

  But I knew that she had seen Aunt Bill and me. It was just a matter of waiting.

  She said nothing all morning. She watched me from the other side of the classroom, and when she saw me looking she put her hand over her mouth and pretended to be hiding a smile. She whispered to the girl next to her and then looked at me to make sure I had noticed.

  I wished I had a charm that could make me vanish. Or that she would drop dead. But neither of these useful things happened and at lunch time I was pinned against a wall in the playground by a tight mass of giggling girls. There were one or two boys of the sillier sort among them, the kind that hang around girls when there is a bit of spiteful fun to be had, but they don’t count for much. If I had noticed Plato, which I hadn’t, because he was sitting on the wall behind me, I would have thought he was one of them.

  “You should have seen her,” Maureen said. “Jane Tucker, dancing in the moonlight with her great, fat aunt …”

  “You can’t talk about fat, you uneducated slob,” I said, and Maureen’s nasty little eyes grew even smaller and angrier.

  “Oh, you think you’re smart, don’t you, Jane Tucker? I’ll tell you something! I may not be Einstein, but at least I’m not barmy!”

  “Who do you think Einstein is? A pop singer?”

  She looked shifty. “He’s someone who’s got more brains than you, anyway. No one with any brains would prance about in their garden at night stiff stark naked.”

  “We weren’t naked,” I bellowed, and she grinned evilly.

  Several people laughed. Someone said, “What were you wearing, then?”

  “We were wearing our night things. We just went for a walk in the garden.”

  Howls of laughter. I said, “I don’t see what’s funny.”

  Maureen said in a conversational tone, “She lives with these potty old women. One’s not so bad, just a bit scatty. The other one really is bonkers. Talks to herself all the time, my mum and I crease up laughing, other side of the fence.”

  “You shouldn’t listen,” I said. “It’s bad manners. And Aunt Bill doesn’t talk to herself. She talks to the plants to get them to grow. It’s
quite usual.”

  “My mum talks to her plants sometimes,” a girl said. She had a timid voice. I tried to see who it was but all I could see were unfriendly, sly faces.

  “Bet that’s all she does, though!” Maureen flung this over her shoulder. Then looked at me. “Jane Tucker’s fat auntie does a lot more. She makes love to trees, puts her arms round them and kisses them.” She pulled her horrible mouth into a disgusted grimace. “Ugh. She’s a pervert.”

  “She is not! You’re perverted, up all night, spying on people. That’s what perverts do. Peeping Toms …”

  That was no good, I could see. I said, “She didn’t kiss the tree, just put her arms round it.” But that didn’t help either. Putting your arms round a tree was enough to get you certified raving at our comprehensive. Everyone started laughing.

  One girl said, “Oh, come to my bosom, my lovely oak tree,” holding out her arms in a circle, closing her eyes and making vile sucking noises. And another girl started to sing a song, or a couple of lines of a song, using a dirty word to rhyme with my surname.

  I was afraid I was going to cry. I knew I was going to cry.

  Then someone said, “What Maureen saw was a secret religious rite. And that’s a dangerous thing to see. If I were you, Maureen, I would lock my bedroom door tonight. Not that it will help much. The spirits will get you if they want to. And they will want to. They don’t care to be spied on!”

  I turned around and saw Plato for the first time. Of course, I didn’t know his name then; he was just a skinny boy, sitting on the wall. He took his spectacles off and blinked.

  “What religion?” Maureen said.

  “The old religion. Much older than church or chapel.” He had a deep impressive voice—a huge voice, for his size.

  “Do you mean Druids?” That was the timid girl again, and this time I thought I saw her: a small, dark girl in the middle of the crowd. Then she vanished.

  “Older than that,” the skinny boy said. “It’s so old that only a very few special people know about it. Aristocrats mostly. The Queen, almost certainly. A few really old families.”

  “Who are you kidding?” Maureen said. But she was looking uneasy.

  “I’m not kidding anyone,” the boy said. “I was just telling you. I felt sorry for you, carrying on like that, not knowing what you were getting into. The old religion has its Protectors, you see, and they are more sinister than Jane Tucker’s aunt. Rouse them up and you’ll be in dead trouble. Dark forces all round you.”

  He drew in a sharp, whistling breath as if he were nervous, and put his glasses back on. Maureen was frowning at him and I saw her throat move as she swallowed. She more than half believed him. I knew he was talking rubbish, but Maureen was addicted to horror videos, especially those with a whiff of Satan about them.

  He said, shaking his head solemnly, “When you sup with the Underworld, it’s as well to use a long spoon.”

  I laughed. Several other people laughed too, but it was me Maureen looked at. She said, “I shouldn’t laugh if I were you. If that’s the sort of thing your aunt is doing, I should watch out for yourself, too.”

  “Oh, the Devil looks after his own,” the skinny boy said.

  The bell rang at that moment and Maureen and her crew melted away. “Thanks,” I said.

  “That’s okay.” He hesitated before he slid off the wall. He was shorter than I was, and I guessed he was self-conscious about it. He stretched his neck and squared his shoulders. “I liked the sound of your aunt. And I hate bullies,” he said.

  He was waiting for me after school. I saw him outside the gate on his bike. He caught up with me as I turned the corner and scooted in the gutter beside me, standing up on the pedals to make himself taller. He said, “Hallo, Jane Tucker. My name is Plato Jones. Jones, because my father is Welsh, although he lives in America, and Plato because my mother is Greek, although she lives here. My sister’s name is Aliki and she lives with our father and I live with our mother.” He looked at me nervously, as if he was afraid I might laugh. If Maureen had been around I might have done, but she wasn’t. So even though I was surprised to be given all this information, I just smiled encouragingly.

  He looked relieved and said, “That’s okay, then. Mind if I come with you?”

  “It’s a free country,” I said.

  It was several weeks before I found out that he lived in a block of flats at the other end of the town, in quite the opposite direction.

  *

  That was the beginning. But it was summer now. The fruit had ripened on Aunt Bill’s cherry tree, and the stream at the bottom of the school field had dwindled to a damp, smelly ditch. First Formers played there at lunch times, making camps in the shelter of the old willow trees, but out of school hours it was deserted, and a good place to meet; midway between us, and private.

  Although I don’t have a bike, I was there that afternoon before Plato. And when he did arrive, he was too winded to speak. He sat down on the bank and puffed away with his inhaler. At least it gave me a chance to tell him what had happened with my father. If he hadn’t had asthma, it would have been difficult to get a word in with Plato!

  “Srehtompets,” he wheezed, when I had finished.

  “Srehtom—oh, stepmothers. Give over, Plato, no one’s listening.”

  He grinned, showing the braces on his teeth and the remains of the last meal he had eaten; green cress and white cheese by the look of it. He said hoarsely, “Seems like you’ve got a wicked one.”

  “You mean my father’s wife?”

  “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  “But she’s no kind of mother. She doesn’t even know me!”

  “Sure of that?”

  “Of course! I would have remembered!”

  “Not if you were a baby at the time. Work it out, pea brain! If Annabel is ten now, and you’re thirteen, then your father must have married her mother when you were about two. If he seemed to think you knew he was married, he must have had a reason for thinking that, mustn’t he? It’s not because he told you, because it’s not the sort of thing a person of two could understand just by hearing the words. So you must have met your stepmother.”

  “Stop calling her that!” I don’t know why it made me angry, but it did. I said, “Her name’s Amy.”

  “Okay. Amy.” Though his voice was still raspy, talking seemed to have deepened and oiled it. “You went to the wedding. Or he took you home. And she didn’t like you.”

  “You only say that because your stepmother doesn’t like you and you don’t like her, and you want someone else to be in the same boat.”

  “Maybe,” he said calmly. “But it seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Your aunts wouldn’t have adopted you if your father could have looked after you in his own family.”

  “I don’t know.” I thought, I don’t want to know, either! I said, “If I’d lived with them, with my father and HER, then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be someone quite different.”

  I felt different already. Less solid somehow. I said, “Okay. If you’re right about HER, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m glad if she didn’t like me. Because if she had, I’d have missed Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie.”

  “And this way you miss out on your brother and sister.”

  “They might be horrid.” They hadn’t looked horrid. I said, “I don’t want to see HER, I never want to see HER. But I’d like to see them!”

  Plato sucked his teeth. Making a second meal, I thought sourly. He peered over his glasses. “Why not? Find out where they live, that’s the first thing.”

  “SHE doesn’t want me to see them. I told you! And it’s no good asking Aunt Bill or Aunt Sophie for their address. They’d be scared I’d write and make trouble.”

  “I didn’t tell you to ask your aunts, did I? I said find out. Use your initiative!”

  He was grinning away to himself. “Kids like us have to keep their ears and eyes open. Haven’t I always told you?”

  He had told me, over and over, and I hadn’t believe
d him. Or, rather, I had thought that what might be true for Plato was not true for me. Plato’s parents never seemed to tell him what was happening; whether he was going to America for the summer holidays, or to Greece with his mother, or to Wales to stay with his Uncle Emlyn. He had to listen on the extension when his mother was talking to his father in New York, and steam open her letters. He said, “More reliable than just asking. You can’t trust grown-ups not to lie. It’s their nature to keep things from kids if they can.”

  I had been quite sure Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie were different, but I had been wrong, I saw now. All grown-ups were the same; all equally bad when it came to cheating on children.

  Chapter Three

  I gave the Aunts one more chance.

  Aunt Bill was painting the thistles on the rubbish heap at the end of the garden, a lovely, fuzzy, goldeny picture that was nearly finished. Aunt Sophie stood beside her with her arms folded. I was in the bathroom. When I had pulled the plug, I stood at the open window.

  Aunt Bill’s voice carried clearly on the still evening air. “What gets my goat is that he left it to you to tell her. Isn’t that typical? Edward all over.”

  “We are responsible for Jane,” Aunt Sophie said. “And Edward is a sensitive man.”

  “Sensitive! Ha!” Aunt Bill tossed her head, like a horse. “Weak, I’d say. Can’t stand up to that silly girl. Never could, from the beginning.”

  I wondered if she meant me but it seemed that she didn’t. “Amy’s young,” Aunt Sophie said. “A man marries a young wife, he feels he has to indulge her.”

  “Not to this extent. Not to turn his back on his motherless daughter.”

  “He never did that, Bill,” Aunt Sophie said. “You know how he tried. It wasn’t his fault.”

  “Nothing is ever Edward’s fault, in your view,” Aunt Bill said, and tossed her head again.