Remember Me

by Trezza Azzopardi

  Can I interest you, can I te-empt you, to A Big Ishooo, A Big Ishooo!

  At first you think it’s funny, but it gets on your nerves in no time. He sings all day. I should think there are complaints. It was too early for a song, thank God, so he just leaned in a doorway, smoking and waiting for the city to wake up. He was giving me a funny stare. We were both too early on the street. I kept my distance. I turned the other way. The bite on my face was itching now, making everything look different, large and then small. I knew it was just a trick of the swelling, not my mind doing it. The left eye was a bit closed, that was all, and fuzzy on the inside. I must’ve looked a fright. The wind made the cut sting cold, it made my eyes water. Still too soon for Paradise, but there was nowhere else.

  The girl unlocking the door wasn’t one I knew, but she opened it and let me inside. There’s a lovely smell in clothes shops: the girls’ perfume and spray polish and fabric, and something faint underneath, like machine oil. It’s all neat at the start, with everything in its place. She’d been vacuuming the carpet. The flex ran over the floor and behind the counter. They hadn’t put the music on yet, so it was quiet. Not that cavernous silence you get in a church, but the lovely soft quiet that you find in an airing cupboard or under thick bedclothes. That’s what my angel was doing – putting the music on – bending down behind the counter. I could only see her hand at first, gripping a bunch of keys on a chain. The hand looked like it was off a dummy. That’s what I thought, with my vision going in and out, that it was going to be put back on one of the dummies in the window. I got a shock when the rest of her came up from under the counter, and the music came on loud. She had a shock too, seeing me, and then she did a little bounce on the spot, back down, and turned the music off again.

  Mind this till, Debs, she said to the other girl. Debs’s face was white coming deep pink up her neck. I’d seen that colouring before: it said something was going on, like a fire alarm or a shoplifter getting caught.

  I’ll need those keys, Carol, she said.

  I thought she was going to throw me out. You lose all sense of what it’s like, being touched. But Carol turned on her heel and pushed the door to, then came towards me. Her voice was calm,

  Looks like you need a doctor. C’mon, she said, walking down to the back of the shop, My car’s out the back.

  I wasn’t going to any hospital. The door said PULL. I always get it the wrong way round; it wouldn’t budge. Carol stepped up and stopped me.

  All right, all right – giving her friend at the counter a look – Let’s see if we can sort you out.

  She led me into a cubicle and sat me on a stool. There was a white chiffon scarf hanging off a hook and a box of tissues on a little ledge. Someone must have left them behind.

  I’m just going to get something to clean you up, she said, very carefully, with a voice soft as milk. She pulled the curtain across, like a nurse going off to fetch a doctor. I thought maybe she was going to get a doctor, and I panicked until I saw the rails of blouses through the crack in the curtain. It was still a clothes shop after all. I had to keep reminding myself. Carol was going to clean me up, but Carol had left me there alone in the changing room with a hook and a mirror, where you can leave your old skin hanging on the wall and look at yourself in a new one. They don’t call them changing rooms for nothing. I wouldn’t look in the big mirror, but there were two narrow ones in the corners, and I couldn’t help but see the reflection in strips: a bit of shoulder, a sliver of neck. I tried to think about something else.

  Whatever happened to you! she said, cheery voice this time. She’d brought back a bowl of pink water and began to wipe the side of my face with it, wrinkling her nose and coughing now and then into her fist. She did my eye first, very carefully, with a nest of cotton-wool balls bunched in her hand. She dropped each one into the waste bin behind me. It was TCP I could smell.

  That’s not bad, she said, It’s just a scratch, really. Not too bad. She put her hand on my head, tilting it first one way and then the other.

  How long have you . . . um, how long has it been like this?

  How?

  Your hair. Your head.

  My eyes began to sting. I had to wipe them. I bent over to get one of the left-behind tissues. A blue one came out, an orange one next. I wanted to keep pulling, see how many colours would come. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t seeing things. The trick my father did, a handkerchief swallowed in one fist, opening like a bloom in the other – I had to be sure that here was real, that Carol was real and that I was too: real, and in a clothes shop called Paradise having my head stroked by a lovely scented girl who wasn’t going to rob me.

  Carol didn’t ask again about my head, just frowned a bit, turning me this way and that with her fingers on my jaw. Cool hands, rings on them.

  Okay, she said, Be brave.

  She started pulling the clips out, slowly and gently, dropping them into the bowl. I couldn’t see what they were with my head back, but I knew. It felt like having stitches removed.

  They keep the thing on, I said, trying to help, Underneath, you wear a thing, see? To keep your hair down. To hide it.

  I watched her face. I couldn’t tell if she understood me; there was a word missing and I couldn’t find it. I knew it was called something. The head-something? The word had left me. Her eyes were brown as buttons, shiny like Mrs Moon’s. So I told her. I told her lots of things, but all backwards, because my words were clotting up. I told her that I thought her eyes were like buttons, and wasn’t that appropriate what with her working in a dress shop, but I said living in a dress shop by mistake and then I wanted to take all the words back and start again. Except I’d forgotten the word for round things, stitched on the shirt.

  Isn’t that funny, I said.

  She gave me a long look. I told her I was robbed by a girl, bitten by an animal. It was hard to talk. I was out of practice of putting things in the normal order; my mind knew what the normal order was, but my mouth didn’t. I wanted to explain about the mirror and how just when you think there’s one of you, there’s suddenly two and how can the number of human beings get multiplied just by looking? I could’ve said, Why would anyone steal my stuff, what would a girl want with an old woman’s case? But the words refused to come.

  She stole my hair, I said, which wasn’t strictly the truth. It wasn’t my hair, it was a wig, cut from a Russian virgin’s head. It was black and thick and long and shiny and it belonged to Miss Foy and then it belonged to me. So it was my hair, twice removed, and then removed again by a thief in the night. Three times removed. I felt stolen.

  I couldn’t tell her all that, so I told her about staying at Hewitt’s on The Parade and how I’d been robbed all those years ago when I forgot my promise and my father couldn’t hold my mother, and about the two jays in the newspaper I’d found on the bench next to the police station which I’d used to cover my head on the way. That bit must have made sense to her, because she said,

  You’ve been to the police, then?

  I would have said, No, not on your life, but she was stroking my head very gently, as if I were a child. I wanted to tell. I could have told her everything, about my mother, my grandfather, Mr Stadnik and my Aunty Ena, about my father. My handsome father, conjuror, Houdini in his sack, twisting away in front of the whole world. Pretending a thing was both magic and real at the same time. Making things disappear, making them come back. But not my mother.

  I could see Carol looking at my head. She’d removed the pieces that were stuck; she must have been admiring my hair underneath.

  Aren’t I just the princess? I asked, Aren’t I just?

  She stood back from her work.

  Now that’s an improvement, she said, Much better.

  seven

  Yes! Yes! A great improvement!

  Mr Stadnik is holding his arm out in front of him, palm flat against the air. He looks like the traffic policeman on the corner of St Stephen’s. I don’t know whether to believe him. Perhaps he’s tr
ying to be kind. I can’t help thinking that if my father had had his way, I wouldn’t have gone to school in the first place, and then none of this would have happened.

  My new school is called Little Ketts. Big Ketts is round the corner, and next to it is the asylum, called Bethel Street House. There’s only one room to the school, with a bit of yard at the front where we have Playtime. Sometimes we can see the men in Bethel Street garden, leaning on the fence, sharing a cigarette. They all wear the same clothes, all brown. There’s a wall down the middle, with women on the other side. There are girls in there too, ash-faced and glum, wandering about the rose bushes. When I ask my grandfather why the girls are in there, he says they’ve fallen on bad times, and that I should be grateful, having people who care for me.

  Miss Balson is our teacher. She likes a cigarette too, and wears a similar costume to the women in the asylum: baggy brown cardigan, olive-green pinafore, green stockings, wrinkled at the ankles. She looks like a newt shedding its skin. There’s a handbell on her desk, which she clangs when it’s time for us to go into the yard and play. She enjoys the ringing. She puts her fingers round the handle and grips it slowly, her eyes going up like sparks.

  Guess what time it is, girls? she says, and we’re supposed to shout Playtime! as if we’ve been waiting for playtime all our lives. Miss Balson sends us outside whenever she wants to have a smoke; she clangs the bell about five times a day.

  On the first playtime, the other girls stood in a semi-circle, round-eyed, silent, looking at me. The tallest one broke away from the rest and came up close. She put her jaw so far out I could see the birthmark under her chin.

  We want to know, she said – swivelling her head left then right to include the others – Why you’re wearing that hat.

  It’s not a hat, I said, It’s a beret.

  I pronounced it the way my grandfather did when he put it on my head – ‘berrett’. I’d never seen one before. He tucked all my hair up inside it, every single strand. My neck felt exposed in the air. He said I was to wear my beret all the time, and that he’d spoken to Miss Balson and she agreed it would be a good thing. All the other girls wore plaits. They were so alike, you couldn’t slide a straw between them, except for the tall one with the birthmark and the jaw looking like it was made for a punch.

  Well, Clever, we want to know why you’re wearing that . . . berrett, she said.

  I didn’t know why, except that my grandfather told me I must. It wasn’t a written rule, it was a spoken one. He often tells me to do things I don’t understand.

  You’ve got Telltale hair, Lillian, he said, So we’ll put it away and then there won’t be any tales to tell, will there?

  I knew I couldn’t say that to the girl, so I kept quiet. But she wouldn’t let up.

  What’re you hiding under there? she asked, stepping round me.

  Nothing.

  Let’s see nothing then, she said, catching the beret at the back of my head and whipping it off.

  Pikey hair! she said, clapping, and straight away the other girls took it up.

  Pikey pikey pikey!

  Until Miss Balson saved me, clanging us in for Scripture. But her second cigarette break brought more of the same. It was Birthmark again.

  We can skip prials, she said, Bet you can’t.

  I didn’t know whether I could or not. I didn’t know what sort of thing prials could be, and I’d never had a skipping rope, because my father said the whooshing noise would give my mother a fright. The Moon children had one, but it was mostly used for tying up the bulldog in the yard.

  I don’t think I can, I said, not liking the sound of it.

  I preferred other games, ones where you ran and got chased, but this hoop of girls wanted to do tight things, complicated manoeuvres; steps and rhymes and spiteful jabs. Birthmark was their leader; they called her Alice. While she organized the games and made up the rules, I sat on my own. I had no one to talk to except Gloria, who came everywhere with me, in my pocket. Until Alice noticed.

  What’s her name? she asked, creeping along the fence.

  Gloria, I said.

  That’s a stupid name. I’ve got a doll too. Her name’s Charlotte. That’s a proper name. And she’s got real hair.

  She inched closer, pretending not to be interested, looking back at the other girls to see if they were watching.

  I know, we’ll do a swap, she demanded, holding out her hand, You have Charlotte and I’ll have her.

  I shook my head. Even if it meant being Alice’s friend, even if Charlotte had real hair, I wouldn’t swap Gloria for the world: she kept the ghosts away, she watched over me while I slept. She was Mr Stadnik’s gift.

  I’ll bring Charlotte in tomorrow, Alice said, wheedling, You can have her, I promise. She’s pretty.

  She was stroking Gloria now, tickling her with the tip of her finger,

  Go on, go on.

  And suddenly,

  Give!

  Snatching her away, laughing, waving Gloria on her hand,

  Bye Bye, Dirty Pikey, I’m going to a new home with my new mummy!

  She ignored me after that. When I asked for Gloria back, she said I was a dirty Pikey liar, she said there was no Gloria and that I made the whole thing up. And when Miss Balson questioned her, Alice stood up and lied to the whole room, her voice clear and calm, her eyes wide with innocence. Gloria was gone forever.

  Things got worse without Gloria to help me. The girls were free with their name-calling, poking me and then sniffing their fingers with a disgusted face, or pretending to be friendly and then turning their backs and smirking at each other when I tried to join in. Alice had invented a new game: Adam and Eve and Pinch Lil, she called it. I never did get to the bottom of it. I never learned not to trust them. By the end of the week, my arms were sprinkled with neat blue bruises.

  My grandfather inspected them, holding me by the elbow and turning my wrist under the lamp. He said it was always going to be difficult, what with me being so different, but I had to learn to mix in. That night, he showed the bruises to Mr Stadnik.

  Look at this, Henry, he said, Spiteful little buggers!

  It’s that beret, Mr Stadnik said, It sets her apart. And I know how it feels, to be set apart.

  He winked at me.

  It isn’t always necessary.

  My grandfather said nothing to this, unfolding his newspaper and pretending to read it. I thought they might have one of their discussions, which started off with them calling each other Henry and Albert, and ended in a slamming door. But this time they just sat facing each other, both of them breathing heavily through their noses. Without warning, Mr Stadnik sprang from his seat and bent his head down close to mine.

  A fine head of hair, don’t you think?

  It smelt of goose fat, but apart from that, it seemed normal. I said I thought it was very nice.

  Us two, he said, waggling his finger at my grandfather and then at himself, We could be the exact same age! I didn’t know what to say to that.

  But look how young I am.

  My grandfather snorted. But he pushed his glasses further up his nose and held them in place with a yellow fingertip. He frowned at Mr Stadnik’s head.

  Is it some sort of dye you use there, Henry?

  I would call it Enhancement, he said, his lips spreading tight over his teeth.

  Now, Henry, it’s all right for you, but our Lillian’s so fair-skinned. I don’t want her looking foreign.

  Mr Stadnik made no reply, but he raised an eyebrow. He put a hand on top of my head.

  Black is not the only colour, he said.

  And turned to me with one of his winks.

  A princess may be many colours. You, Princess, may be anything you like!

  ~

  Mr Stadnik has dressed up for the occasion in a long white butcher’s apron, fed crossways round the back and tied with a bow at the front. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He wears a leather cuff on his left arm, secured with a lace. I’ve never seen this before
, but as I’ve never seen Mr Stadnik’s brown, hairy arms before, I think it’s all part of the costume. My grandfather has not dressed up; he’s spent the last hour boiling something on the stove in the scullery, now and then butting his head into the doorway to ask Mr Stadnik for advice. The windows are steamed white; the whole house reeks of jam.

  When Mr Stadnik says it’s ready, we follow him into the yard where he’s taken the tin bath from its hook. He pours some water in, produces a slim white bottle out of his apron pocket, and adds a thimbleful, swishing it round with a wooden spoon.

  Secret ingredient, he whispers, pushing the stopper back. I kneel on the mat in front of the bath and stare into the water. Sunlight glints back at me; and through it I see the girl again, floating below me like a ghost under water. I shut my eyes tight. There’s a smell of heat and steam, and the school outhouse in the morning. It’s bleach. My grandfather stands on the doorstep with a bowl of something mashed, having second thoughts.

  What about this, Henry, he says, holding up a dripping spoon, It looks . . . very blue.

  It’s perfect, says Mr Stadnik, Trust me.

  I hover over the bath as my grandfather pours jug after jug of water over my head. The girl is drowned beneath it. As it gets wet, the colour of my hair goes from gold to rust, trailing in my eyes like smelter.

  Eyes shut! Keep still! shouts Mr Stadnik, retreating. He’s standing well back, as if I’m a firework about to go off. The last thing I see before I close my eyes, through the steam and the water and the running red, is Mr Stadnik’s boots: he’s already halfway up the path.

  My grandfather starts in with the mash, pasting it on my head, then rubbing it with his fingers and making noises of disgust.

  Keep still now, it will burn! Mr Stadnik yells. He’s confusing me with Billy the dog: when he gets wet, he shakes off the water in a frenzy. I will do as I’m told, and keep still. Mr Stadnik is giving the orders. He’s so pleased with himself, he can’t help shouting, even though I’m not far away.

  You must leave it set, he says. He comes back down the path, and, bending over the edge of the bath, says it again. His face is black against the sun.