by Sharon Maas
She was an Introvert, Daddy had said, and she’d looked it up in the dictionary as she did all new words; after which she would try to use them in a story. She understood right away what ‘Introvert’ meant, and why being one made life so very difficult. And why it would be difficult to use someone like her a story; because Introverts were boring to other people, and so made boring characters. They were quite happy with their own company and could find contentment in things inside themselves, rather than things outside. They never needed to do much – just like her – and their entertainment came from quieter sources: in her case, books and films and the stories that blossomed in her own mind.
It meant that she never went to the events others found exciting, and had no friends of her own; not real ones, at least. No girlfriends, and certainly no boyfriends. People thought her odd, and she supposed she was. She was shy and awkward and never knew what to say, and the more she went her own way, the more they left her out and, she was sure, laughed at her behind her back. She really didn’t like being an Introvert. She wished she were witty and chatty and vivacious. And tall, fair-skinned and beautiful. Popular, beloved by all; most of all, beloved of Ol’ Meanie, who definitely didn’t like Introverts. So it seemed indeed that Novelist or Philosopher were suitable professions for her. And if that didn’t work out, she could always become a nun.
There were two kinds of nuns, Rika had discovered; the ones who were active, like the teachers at St Rose’s, who were quick-witted and sharp-tongued, the ones who wrote those scathing comments in her reports; or like the nurses at the St Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, kind and compassionate and self-sacrificing. But there were also Contemplatives; and that was the kind of nun she could aspire to. But then she read somewhere that Contemplative nuns weren’t allowed to read novels or go to the pictures. Those were the greatest pleasures in Rika’s life and she wasn’t about to give them up. Plus, nuns couldn’t marry and have children; so how would Romance fit in with being a nun? So nun was off the very short list.
She sighed. Why did one have to Be Something in life; why couldn’t one just Be? She supposed it had to do with earning money. You needed money to live. So really, Novelist was best because then you could sell books and get rich. Surely Enid Blyton – whose books she’d devoured when she was younger – was rich. Very well then, that’s what she’d be; but Ol’ Meanie didn’t seem to appreciate it.
She’d confided this plan to Granny, who was more understanding, but Granny wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. ‘I know English is your best subject. You can write,’ she said, ‘But first you must have something to write about. Wait until you’re older and wiser. You need education, Rika. And life experience. You must try harder.’
Granny said that ‘older and wiser’ thing about being a Philosopher as well, all of which made Rika feel she was split in two: half of herself seemed far out of reach, sailing up in the firmaments on silver wings, beyond her grasp, beyond her means; the other half down here, trapped in a thirteen-year old body and endowed with all the wisdom of a slug. Trouble is, this earthbound half felt like the wrong half; it was the other that was real and true – but unattainable. And unrealistic. Being realistic meant peeling your mind away from those exalted flights of fancy and attaching it to boring things like household chores and maths. Rika was definitely a Mary not a Martha.
* * *
Still: she wasn’t completely useless. Once a week Granny took her along to St Ann’s Orphanage on Thomas Road, and it was there that Rika had found a vocation of sorts. It had started three years ago, when Rika was ten. Granny had several Good Causes she contributed to in various ways. She visited the sick, crocheted doilies and made guava jam to sell at fundraisers for the Blind Society; she collected discarded but wearable clothes among her friends and relatives for the destitute old people at The Palms home, and fed and clothed the Poor and Needy. On that day, she had a bundle of children’s clothes for the orphanage.
‘Would you like to come with me? Charlie will be there,’ Granny had asked Rika, and Rika had slammed her book shut and jumped to her feet. Of course she wanted to see Charlie again.
Rika had broken her arm a month ago, and had lain in the Mercy Hospital for a few days. In the bed next to her was a little Amerindian boy, just seven years old, named Charlie. Charlie had polio, and wore callipers on his legs. And he was an orphan.
Rika had struck up a friendship with him. The only person who came to visit Charlie was a big jolly nun called Sister Maria. Charlie didn’t have a Granny to bring him home-made biscuits and fruit, so Rika shared hers with him. He didn’t have a Daddy who took him to the cinema most weekends. In fact, he had never even been to the cinema in his whole life.
So Rika asked Daddy if he could take Charlie with them next time, and he had, and it was a Jerry Lewis film at the Metropole, and Charlie had laughed his head off all the way through. Rika thought they should now always invite Charlie to the pictures, but the orphanage nuns had said no – there could be no continuing special favours for just one child. She hadn’t seen Charlie again; so this was a wonderful opportunity.
‘Why don’t you take some of your old books for the children?’ Granny asked, and Rika filled her satchel with books she was too old for.
They entered the orphanage gate only to be almost run over by the stampede – if you could call this slow-paced advance a ‘stampede’. Children of all ages came shambling up, hobbling on crutches, some of them even crawling, all of them laughing. They all had callipers on their legs, like Charlie. Suddenly Rika felt shy. She hadn’t properly realised what it meant to live in an orphanage; she hadn’t realised it was an orphanage for children with polio. She felt guilty, somehow, because she had healthy legs, and they didn’t.
And yet! They didn’t seem to care; they weren’t ashamed or unhappy about their plight, it seemed, because the joy simply spilled out of their eyes and into their laughter; they knew Granny already and swarmed around her, letting go of their crutches to grasp the hands she held out, and giggled and shouted in unmitigated glee. And then they all turned to her, Rika; all those shining joyful faces, among them Charlie’s. As she reached out to shake one little hand after the other Rika felt at once small and humble yet filled with that same joy, as if she were the wounded one and they had brought healing.
A moment later a smiling Sister Maria came bustling out, arms spread open in welcome. She ushered them inside and established calm, keeping the children at bay while Granny distributed the clothes one by one. Then it was Rika’s turn; she emptied her bag of books on the dining room table. ‘Ooooh!’ the children sighed, and it was all Sister Maria could do to keep them from rushing forward. Delight swelled in Rika as she placed one book after the other in the eagerly outstretched hands; she smiled and laughed and she longed to bend down and gather those frail little bodies with their callipered legs into her arms.
‘Why not read for them?’ Granny had suggested, and Rika nodded in excitement. She chose The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton. Sister Maria arranged a circle of chairs for the children and helped settle them, and Rika read and drew the children into the enchanted world enclosed in those pages. And since then that was how Rika spent her Wednesday afternoons, and to this day it was the highlight of her week.
But Reader for Orphaned Children with Polio wasn’t something that impressed Ol’ Meanie. It wasn’t something you could choose as a career. True, it did momentarily revive her ambition to be a nun, but Granny said an orphanage nun meant more than reading books to children all day; it required a calling, the sense of a vocation, the need to give one’s life to God in service: a need Rika most definitely did not feel. So that was her position today: no ambition, no direction, a dreamer of big dreams and a story expert, but useless at the things that really mattered.
And every day she vowed to revise maths, learn her History dates, and apply herself as everyone wanted, but every day she got distracted with some other more exciting task, like developing the love story of Isabella and Rafaello
. Her mind was a fickle, fleeting thing; it needed only the tiniest prod to set it flying off in the wrong direction, if not to the Great Questions of God and und the Universe, then to the half-way house of Imagination. Stories fell into her lap at the slightest hint of mystery, such as being watched by a lady with binoculars. She used to think that everyone was like that, making up stories all the time, till Granny said it wasn’t so. Other people thought about practical things like sewing up a loose hem or whether the sheets needed changing or whether there was enough rice for the weekend. And maths homework.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RIKA: THE SIXTIES
Rika was not an outsider by choice, and hadn’t been always such a loner, such an outsider. The few girls she’d played with as a child had drifted off over the last few years, formed new bonds and entered a world in which Rika was an alien. Jennifer Goveia, for instance; she and Jen had been thick as thieves when they were children, tumbling around in their respective backyards, collecting caterpillars and tadpoles, racing along the beach with their homemade kites at Easter. Rika was not the kind of child who ran in groups. As a child she was almost normal; shy, yes, and quiet, never speaking unless spoken to; one close friend was enough for her, and Jen was that.
Then they turned thirteen and Jen changed. Or was it she who had changed? Rika wasn’t sure; maybe they had both changed, but the problem was: Jen was pretty, and she wasn’t. Jen seemed to know how to make herself prettier yet, and she, Rika, didn’t. Jen had drifted off to form friendships with girls who knew such things. Girls cared about dresses and fashion and went to fetes; she didn’t. Girls hung around in clumps on the corridors of St Rose’s until the nuns came and chased them away; they giggled and squealed about arcane matters, and they knew about flirting and wiggling their hips and batting their eyelashes and flicking their hair (if they could). She didn’t. The black girls didn’t flick their hair, of course, but they were good at wiggling their hips and their tongues were sharp. And the East Indian girls kept to themselves, mostly, and seemed to be all superior and clever and too good for boys, so she didn’t fit in with them either.
Rika was lost and tongue-tied in this world of teenage girls blooming into womanhood; a misfit, an outsider. They – at least the ones she admired, like Jen – were charming and elegant and quick-tongued. She was awkward and bumbling and never knew what to say; words always came out wrong and stuttering. She knew they laughed at her behind her back, and joked about her.
I’m not normal, she thought, and curled up into an inner ball. Nobody loves me, she feared, and the ball grew tighter. Not even Mummy. And that was worst of all. Daddy did; she knew that; but Daddy loved his Postage Stamps more than anything or anyone and besides saying a kind word now and then and patting her absent-mindedly on the head, he hardly ever took notice of her, or talked to her about things that mattered. It seemed, almost, that Uncle Matt noticed her more than Daddy did.
Uncle Matt was Daddy’s friend from way back before Rika was born, and Rika’s godfather. His real name was Dr Matthew Surtees and he was an American, from Chicago. Daddy and Uncle Matt were both passionate about stamp collecting, which, in Rika’s eyes, was a strange thing to be passionate about because stamps were, actually, just little bits of paper. But, she supposed, you could be passionate about anything you wanted to be passionate about. Apparently the two of them had met at some International Philatelic Congress in London many years ago, before Rika was even born, and they’d been friends ever since; at first they were pen-pals exchanging news and stamps, and then more. Now Uncle Matt came to visit almost every year and sometimes he brought his wife, Aunt Judy, and when he came, he and Daddy pored over stamps the entire time.
Apart from the stamp thing, she liked Uncle Matt. As her godfather, he took a special interest in her. And though she had several real uncles – real meaning, brothers of Daddy – Uncle Matt was the only one who seemed to know she was even alive. Whenever he came from America – which was practically every year – he brought a whole suitcase of books for her, all of which she devoured in a matter of weeks. She had already read almost all the novels in the Public Free Library, and she couldn’t afford to buy the new books at Bookers and Fogarty’s. So she would write Uncle Matt telling him which books she especially wanted, and he would bring those and some others as well, ones she hadn’t even heard of: when she was younger, the Bobbsey Twins, now Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Daddy said it was OK to ask Uncle Matt for books; he was a millionaire and was happy to oblige. Uncle Matt was almost family.
She was close to Marion, but Marion was three years younger, just a child. As for her brothers, the Terrible Twins: how could you be close to little devils who trapped flies under the wire-mesh food-covers, sprayed them with Flit to make them comatose, and then pulled off their wings and laughed their head off at the joke? And taunted you when you tried to rescue the flies?
Of course there was Granny, who had played the mother role all her life; but Granny had a horde of other grandchildren and loved them all equally. And Granny was a close relative; she had to love her. It wasn’t a choice (though it was strange that her real mother had chosen not to love her). And the children at St Ann’s, of course, who loved her because she was there to love, theirs to love – they, too, had no choice, if for a different reason: they would love anyone who came to read to them. Rika yearned most of all to be loved by someone who did have a choice – someone who chose to love her for herself; someone for whom she was special, unique.
It was hard, being so odd in the midst of such a huge family. Being a BG Quint meant you were just one out of what seemed like millions, and easily overlooked. Apart from her parents and siblings only Granny lived with them, but Granny had had eight sons, of whom two had died, but the others – all except one – had married and produced children. And since Granny was the real hub of the family, and since the Lamaha Street house was the family base, the house often swarmed with Quints, large and small. Granny always had a Quint baby or two to mind, or a few children to keep an eye on; the backyard tumbled with rambunctious boys and girls; there were birthday parties and fetes for teenage Quints, as well as the usual festivities.
At Christmastime the house bulged and bounced with Quints; uncles, aunts and cousins. Granny would take all the children window shopping, and they’d squeal and point at the wonderful things in the lit-up windows of Bookers and Fogarty’s. And after dark Daddy would drive them around town and they’d count the Christmas trees in the windows of houses, all bright and sparkling with fairy lights. On Christmas Day, Granny produced a Christmas Breakfast to die for; Pepperpot and Garlic Pork, washed down with Mauby. On Easter Sunday, Granny and Daddy and a few other aunts and uncles would walk the whole horde – anything up to twenty little Quints – to the Sea Wall, and they’d fly their kites along with every other Georgetowner under the age of fifteen. The sky dazzled with a thousand gaudy home-made kites bobbing and swaying together, each one a symbol of the Risen Christ, and the beach itself was crowded with families; fathers teaching their children the art of kite-flying, mothers comforting children whose kites had plunged and crashed.
And somewhere in the midst of all this festivity was Rika, trying her best to keep up. She went to all the Beach Party films with her female cousins, and the James Bond films with the boys. But she was never, really, a part of them all.
It was possible to feel alone in the middle of a crowd. Rika had learned that as a very young child. Not lonely, but alone; not the same thing. She learned that as she grew older, entering her teens. Alone: the times when that sense of awkwardness and bumbling ineptitude dropped from her like an old skin. Alone left room for solitude, and solitude she loved. She could be perfectly happy up there in the Cupola with people of her own imagination.
And yet … someone of her own, someone who knew her, inside out. Was it too much to ask? Just one person.
She dreamed of falling in love, the way heroines did in the books she read. And because there were no heroes around, she fell i
n love with George Harrison. It was safe to love George, as he would never know what an ugly lumbering loner she was; George would never look down on her. She cut his picture from magazines and hung them on her wall. She went to see A Hard Day’s Night at the Strand de Luxe, like every other girl in the country. But while they all sat together giggling in the cinema she went alone and sat alone and dreamed alone. So much love to give, but no one to give it to! She gave it to George, who did not know of her existence and could not love her back. But oh, to be loved by a real boy, one of flesh and blood!
Boys! What a strange phenomenon. She didn’t know a single one. She knew her Quint cousins of course; a few were around her age, but again, they were family so that didn’t count. But the Queen’s College boys, who rode past her house on their way to school in the mornings and on the way back in the afternoons, in their khaki pants and yellow striped ties; the Saint Stanislaus boys she’d see in town, in their blue-grey uniform – they were alien beings.
* * *
Boys didn’t like her. She had the proof. Once she’d gone to Bookers’ Store after school and there they were, a little clump of Saints boys just outside the building, and there, right in front of her, was Jen and her friends walking in with a sort of swagger, their skirts hiked up two inches above the knee (if the nuns saw that they’d get two weeks of daily detention). The girls ignored the boys and the boys stared at the girls and one of them whistled and Jen and her friends just looked away in disdain. Rika, a few yards behind, followed them in, but nobody stared at her and certainly nobody whistled. So by the time she turned sixteen, Rika knew that her lot in life was to be a spinster. Which was not what she wanted for herself at all, but she just wasn’t the kind of girl who could catch a boy, and she forced herself to resign to that fact.
