The Race

by Nina Allan

  Dangerous for an old man, I thought. Perhaps if they’d put in better lighting he could have stayed here longer. Derek unlocked the door to the flat and we went inside. There was a strange smell, a musky, sweetish odour that Derek said was mothballs.

  The flat was stuffed with things. Some of them were in boxes already, but most of what remained still had to be packed. A job this size would take most of a day but it would pay good money. The main room was at the front. It was filled with light, the sea-green, liquid light of the water below. The floorboards were bare and dusty. There was a big cloth-covered sofa, an enormous glass-fronted cabinet crammed full of ornaments, so many of them that the cabinet doors wouldn’t close properly. The things inside were pretty: porcelain egg cups shaped like baskets, blue Wedgwood beakers and china horses, stuff like that.

  “See that?” Derek said. He opened the doors of the cabinet, easing them gently apart so that nothing fell out. “That’s Capodimonte.” He reached inside and drew out a porcelain ballerina, one leg flung delicately outwards and raised at the knee. Her skin was a bluish, translucent white. Her costume, her tutu, was a soft violet colour.

  Her hair was yellow like Mum’s, and like Derek’s.

  Derek rested the ornament on the palm of his hand. His fingers gripped the base, very lightly, just to steady it.

  “That’s worth a good couple of quid, that is,” he said. He tapped the porcelain with his thumbnail, making it ring. “There’s other stuff here, too. Good stuff.” He put the ballet dancer down on the sofa. “If you see something you like, let me know.”

  He wanted to give me something. We hadn’t exchanged presents at all that Christmas, none of us had. I thought this was probably Derek’s way of trying to make up for that.

  I liked the little dancer’s purple tutu. I thought Derek would probably give her to me if I asked him to, even though she was valuable. Derek was like that sometimes. I left him taking more ornaments out of the cupboard and walked away to explore the rest of the flat.

  Beyond the main room there were many smaller rooms, a labyrinth of corridors and storage closets and oddly shaped lobby areas. The place gave me the creeps, just a little bit, and I could see why Derek hadn’t been too keen on coming here alone. Some of the rooms were empty, others were piled high with old furniture. I realised this was what happened when a world got dismantled: the actual space remained the same, but its meaning became altered. Whole lives were erased.

  Most of my mother’s things were still at Laton Road. We edged cautiously around them, pretending they was invisible, or that if we left them alone for long enough our mother’s possessions would go away by themselves.

  I ended up in a room that had once been a bedroom. As well as the bed there was a desk and a wardrobe, a heavy-looking oval mirror in a dark wood frame. The single window was narrow and pointed, too high up the wall to see out of unless you stood on a stool. On the floor underneath the desk was a box of books. I bent down to examine them, old novels by John Wyndham and C. S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, all writers I had heard of but not yet read. The books were in hardback, all with their original dust jackets. There was something about them I liked – the smell probably, musty and time-soaked, like old library books – and I thought I might perhaps ask Derek if I could have them. They were more interesting than the china ballerina, at any rate. I stood up, and as I turned around to face the door I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Looking into it was like staring into a pool of murky water. I saw my own neat figure, my own dark, rather wispy hair and wire-framed glasses. I knew the girl in the glass was me, yet at the same time she seemed not to be me. Indeed I knew she was not, that although she looked just like me she was someone else.

  She gazed back at me from out of the glass, and in the moment when our eyes met I understood that she knew it, too.

  I felt cold all over, then hot. I stretched my hand out towards the glass, reaching for the other girl’s fingers. It seemed suddenly very important that we should touch. If we touch, I thought, then we will swap places. I will be where she is, and she will be here.

  The idea was scary but it was also exciting. There’s a whole other world out there, I thought. Let’s do it. I stepped forward to touch the glass, but in the instant before I could do so I heard Derek’s voice.

  “What are you doing in here?” he said. He’d crept up on me without my hearing him, and as I span around to face him the other girl slipped away. I felt her go, disappearing silently into the deeper, greyer spaces of the huge apartment that l now knew lay somewhere on the other side of the mirror glass.

  I understood at once that our moment had passed. A chance had been offered to me and I had missed it. I still don’t know if I regretted the girl’s departure, or if I was relieved.

  “Just looking,” I said to Derek. “Can I have these?” I gestured towards the box of books under the desk.

  “Okay,” Derek said. “Are you sure that’s all you want?” He spoke absently, his attention already elsewhere. The books he barely glanced at. “Christ,” he said. It was the desk he was looking at, one of those dinky little slant-topped bureaux with candy-twist legs. “I think that’s a Sheraton.”

  “It’s nice,” I said, not caring. “Is it worth anything?”

  He gave me a look. “Only twenty thousand quid,” he said. “If I’m right, that is.” He ran his fingers reverently over the surface of the polished wood then turned sharply away, making it look as if he’d lost interest, although I knew he had not. I picked up the box of books with their musty scent, like the newspapers we had at home only stronger.

  I could feel the girl in the mirror watching me leave. I knew if I turned around right then I would catch sight of her, but I did not dare.

  I thought about the incident afterwards, from time to time, but mostly I just accepted it as something peculiar that had happened but that was over now.

  I did sometimes wonder though, how it would have been if I’d had a sister instead of a brother.

  ~*~

  It was Derek’s girlfriend Monica who helped me fill in my application form for college.

  Derek had girlfriends before Monica, but Monica was the first one he really cared about. She had slightly slanted eyes and very fair hair. Not yellow hair like Derek’s – Monica’s hair was the colour of hay at the height of summer. She lived in a tiny two-room flat on the top floor of one of the crummier-looking terraces on Braybrooke Road. The ground- and basement-floor maisonette was the home of a retired policeman. When he sold up and moved to somewhere smaller he hired Derek and Dad to clear away all the stuff he no longer had room for. Derek met Monica when she came home on her lunch break. He asked if she’d go for a drink with him when she finished work and she said yes.

  Monica worked in a flower shop down in the Old Town, and not long after she started going out with Derek she fixed me up with a Saturday job there. I liked the job because it meant I had some money to spend. Also I enjoyed the work. I liked fixing up the window displays, and helping customers choose the right flowers. The shop’s owner, Diane, did all the more complicated stuff, the wedding floristry and so on, but she taught me how to create simple bouquets and sometimes she let me cash up the till.

  Diane was seriously obese and often found trouble breathing when she went upstairs. She was always carefully dressed, though. She liked soft colours – rose pinks and primrose yellows, the same colours as her flowers. She had a thing about gloves. She owned dozens of pairs of them, maybe hundreds – I don’t think I ever saw her wear the same pair twice, although I suppose she must have done, it was just that I only ever saw her once or twice a week. She wore gloves winter and summer, and when she came into work in the morning the first thing she’d do would be to take them off and lay them down on the counter, one neatly across the other in an ‘x’ shape. It was like a ritual with her, a way of settling herself for the day ahead. Diane’s gloves fascinated me, not just because they were beautiful – many of them were hand-made – but because of the way they
made you stop thinking about Diane’s large body and concentrate instead on her dainty hands. It was almost like a magic trick, an act of vanishment, something I suppose she’d learned to do long ago and that was now so much a part of her she no longer thought about it.

  In spite of her fatness, Diane was graceful and pretty. And unlike my mother Marcia she was naturally kind.

  “You have a real gift for floristry, Christy,” she said to me not long after I started working for her. “I’d take you on full time if I could afford to.”

  “That’s really nice of you but I want to go to college,” I said. Diane was the first person I dared to tell about this ambition. I was seventeen then, my brother Derek was almost twenty. I’d been hoping Diane might help me fill in the forms, but when I asked her she shook her head and said she couldn’t possibly.

  “I’m useless at forms,” she said. She didn’t want to get involved for some reason, that was obvious. “Can’t you ask one of your teachers?”

  “I suppose,” I said. The problem with asking a teacher was that there was always the risk they would start pestering me with questions about my mother. Also I was afraid of looking an idiot. I still wasn’t certain which courses I should apply for. I liked History best but I was afraid I wasn’t clever enough to make a success of it. Derek always insisted that all that stuff about kings and queens was boring, but I was mad for it. I used to take books out of the library – books about Queen Matilda of England and Queen Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn – because I was addicted to the stories they told, stories that reminded me of fairy tales, only with more danger in them, more blood and revolution, more death by fire. I knew all the dates and battles by heart, but when it came to writing anything down I would lose my nerve. When I was asked a question in class my mind went blank.

  “Perhaps I’m just stupid or something,” I said to Monica. Monica was round at our house two or three evenings a week by then. Sometimes she’d go to the pub with Derek, but mostly she’d stay behind with me and we’d sit in watching the game shows on the kitchen portable. Monica knew about Mum leaving but we never talked about it. We bitched about the flower shop customers instead, or chat show hosts, or other things we’d seen or liked to make fun of. Having Monica around made life easier generally, because Derek made more of an effort not to be an arsehole. More than that though, I just liked being with her. She was fun and she stuck up for me. No one had ever done that before, or bothered much about what I did, one way or the other.

  “Of course you’re not stupid,” Monica said. “Don’t talk like that. You’re so bright it’s scary. Anyway, it’ll do you good to get out of this place, spread your wings a bit.”

  “I suppose,” I said again. I still wasn’t sure, about anything. I found it hard to recognise the person she was describing. “Why didn’t you go to college?”

  “I wasn’t ready. Not like you.” Monica shrugged. “I’ll get around to it later, probably.”

  She helped me fill in the forms, then showed me how to prepare a Personal Statement. I got my father to sign the consent form when Derek was out. When I finally received my offer from South Bank University, Monica insisted on taking me out for a drink to celebrate.

  “I haven’t got in yet,” I said. The offer still depended on me passing my ‘A’ Levels.

  “I know. But you will.” She hugged me and kissed my hair as she sometimes did. Both of Monica’s parents were dead – they’d been killed in an air crash.

  When Monica’s birthday came around, Derek gave her an antique pendant made from silver and Venetian glass that was called Murano.

  ~*~

  In the summer of the year after our mother left, my brother raped me. It was a boiling hot day in August. I was sixteen.

  I’d spent most of the day by myself up in Castle Meadow, reading a book called Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing. It had been lent to me by Miss Wisbech, who’d come up to me in the corridor just before the summer holidays started and put the book right into my hands.

  “I hope you’ll find time to read this, Christy,” she said. “I think it’s the kind of story you might enjoy.”

  I had no idea what I’d done that would make her think that – I wondered if she’d been secretly spying on me in the library. I said thank you and then walked away before she found the chance to add anything else. I expect my behaviour must have seemed rude to her, but I was surprised and a bit embarrassed. I’d never heard of Doris Lessing, and I was afraid the book might be boring, or that I might not even understand what it was about. But when I actually started reading it I found it was okay, quite exciting really, and no more difficult to follow than the John Wyndham stories that had been in the box of books Derek had given me from Charlotte House. Memoirs of a Survivor was set in an unnamed city that was probably London, only as in The Day of the Triffids everything had descended into chaos. There were gangs of kids in the streets who kept setting fire to things. A lot of the ordinary people were trying to escape from the city into places like Wales.

  In spite of the terrible things that were happening, the woman telling the story set down her thoughts in a calm, almost cold way. She was supposed to be taking care of a girl called Emily, but really it seemed to be Emily who was in charge.

  Emily had been abandoned by her mother.

  I liked the way Doris Lessing just wrote what happened and didn’t much add to it. Most of all I liked the way she had managed to transform London into an imaginary city. It was an idea that had never occurred to me, that you could write about a real place, a place you knew well, and that just by changing or adding small details you could turn it into somewhere quite different. A place where good things happened, or bad things did.

  A place of your own that you could escape to whenever you wanted. It made me wonder whether it might be possible to change Hastings into a place where weird things happened, the same as Doris Lessing had done with London only even stranger.

  At around four o’clock I left the meadow and began walking home. My books were in my gym bag, and I was carrying my sandals. In summer I often went barefoot, even in town. The pavements were hot. If I stood still for too long in one place I could feel the soles of my feet burning.

  When I was halfway down St Mary’s Terrace there was a cloudburst. It happened suddenly and without warning, a clap of thunder so huge and so terrifying that for a moment I thought a bomb must have gone off. Then the sky seemed to split open. Rain poured down, so heavily and so fast it was like a single sheet of water.

  I flung my arms above my head and screamed. I waved my sandals in the air, then flung them down like flatfish on the streaming pavement. I felt a massive energy coursing through me, as if my blood had been replaced by lightning, and for one endless, joyous moment it felt as if the world I knew really had ended, and another, more surprising world had taken its place. A world like the one Doris Lessing had written about perhaps, in Memoirs of a Survivor.

  I ran through the streets, slipping and sliding on the jet black asphalt, my arms flung out to either side to keep me from falling. I remember I couldn’t stop laughing, that my laughter seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, a laughter-demon. The gutters coursed with thick brown water, like angry rivers. People cowered wetly in doorways or hurried indoors.

  I burst into the hallway of Laton Road and stood there, dripping. I was expecting to find the house empty – Dad and Derek had a big job on, something in Tonbridge or Tunbridge Wells. Dad had said they wouldn’t be back until six at least, which was part of the reason I’d decided to come home early.

  As it turned out, they finished sooner than they’d expected. It’s strange, how many of the things that help decide how your life goes seem to happen by chance.

  Derek appeared at the top of the stairs. The happy madness that had been filling me up, that feeling of being energized, disappeared as soon as I saw him, just like that. It was as if I’d been unplugged from the mains or something.

  “You look like a drowned rat,” Derek said.
He was wearing jeans but his top half was naked. I could tell from the way his hair was spiking out that he’d just had a shower.

  “It’s raining,” I said. “You’re home early?”

  “Jake was free after all, wasn’t he?” Jake Hom was a half-Chinese kid who Dad sometimes hired to help with the loading. He was skinny, like Derek, but very strong. “Dad’s down the pub. Get that wet shit off – you’ll catch pneumonia.”

  I looked down at myself and saw that my T-shirt had become transparent. The flesh of my arms and belly gleamed pinkly through the soaked cloth. My nipples, a darker pink, like the hearts of roses, were clearly visible.

  A small pool of water was beginning to gather about my feet.

  Derek came slowly down the stairs to where I was standing. He hoisted me up, seizing me with both arms the way he used to do when we were younger, pressing me against his chest then slinging me over one shoulder in a clumsy fireman’s lift.

  “You’re soaked to the skin,” he said. “Slippy as a newt, you are.”

  “You beast,” I cried, kicking out at him. “Put me down, Del.” I didn’t know yet if I was joking or if I really meant it. I was afraid of Derek. I hated to admit it, even to myself, because admitting I was afraid of anything was a source of shame to me. But I had reason to be scared of Derek, because I knew he was dangerous, or at least that he could be, the kind of person that didn’t give a damn for the feelings of others and so might do anything. He might hurt someone just because he wanted to, or because he wanted to find out what it felt like to harm them.

  It was almost as if he was mad. As if he’d been made with something missing, I don’t know.

  The worst thing about it was that you never knew when he was going to do something awful. A lot of the time he acted pretty much the same as everyone else.

  I knew he knew I was scared, but he never let on. It was a game we played, a game of dare, like when he threw the plastic bags of stinking water at me and I’d pretend it was funny.