Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘It’s a family name with us as well,’ I say, a bit sharp.

  Australia. People used to say there was money out there. Not like here, where the money was already spoken for. Nobody ever came back from Australia, once they’d gone.

  ‘My mother’ll be very glad to see these photographs,’ says the young man. Alec.

  I don’t feel very well. That cup of tea was too strong. I’ve got a feeling in my chest.

  ‘Barbara,’ I say, ‘Barbara, why is this young man taking photographs of me? I don’t want him to take photographs of me.’ The feeling in my chest swells up. ‘I need to lie down.’

  The teacup’s out of my hand and Barbara’s holding my arm as I struggle to get up. I’m trying to unpin the gold-paper crown. I don’t want this birthday any more. I want my proper birthday, the one with the iced buns Stuart bought. But the young man’s at my other side, holding me. I want his hands off me, but it’ll upset Barbara, so I let him take my elbow and together with Barbara he shuffles me out of the room and across the hall to the lift.

  They let me down on to the bed and I lie there. I turn my head and look at my new silver photograph frame. Barbara bought it for my birthday. This morning she took the photograph of Stuart out of its old frame. Now the young man’s staring at it.

  ‘My brother,’ I say. I don’t mind him knowing now. Stuart’s in his uniform. It was taken just before his wedding day. He always said I’d be his bridesmaid, but they had to get married quick, because he was being sent out. All she had was a grey costume, and a little bunch of lily of the valley.

  ‘Iris is going to be your sister,’ Stuart said.

  Iris and Ivy. Another comic duo. But she wasn’t my sister for long.

  Not a lot of men would take on a war widow and someone else’s baby, and Iris’s new man, Mr Orme, wanted a fresh start. If he was going to take on the child like his own, he didn’t want Stuart’s family clinging on to it, or Iris clinging on to the thought of Stuart.

  That’s why I’ve got this photograph. Iris gave it to me. Mr Orme said she’d got to leave all that behind her.

  Iris and Mr Orme went to Deal, then we heard they’d gone overseas. She was Iris Orme by then. And the baby took his name as well. Iris cried when they went, and held on to me, but I was like a stone. Iris always used to say the baby came to me like no one else.

  Stuart was gone, and Iris, and little Alice.

  I touch Stuart’s photograph.

  ‘He was twenty-three when this was taken,’ I say to Barbara. She nods. It’s a black-and-white photograph, so you can’t see the colour of Stuart’s eyes.

  They think the whole First World War happened in black and white. Stuart’s eyes were brown, and he had red hair. Not bright red, not the red that gets people calling after you in the streets. Just a soft, reddish-brown colour he had, like this young man here.

  A VIEW FROM THE OBSERVATORY

  I’VE KEPT QUIET about it for a long time, partly because I thought Manjit might get into trouble over the keys, and partly for another reason. But I don’t see how this story could bring her down. Her opening season as director at the Scaffold Theatre blew all the critics away. Everyone sees the glow around Manjit’s name now, but it was always there, even when she was a skinny little girl. Things that I thought were solid, like school and home and growing up, were just shells to Manjit. She was the swan who’d got to hatch out of them. That’s why Manjit got the job at the Observatory. It was all part of her hatching. There was a theatre-directing course that she knew she had to get on.

  ‘It’s the best. It’s the only one, Zahz.’

  Manjit always called me Zahz, right back from the first year at primary, and soon everybody else was calling me that, too. My name is ZsaZsa. My father just liked the sound of it, he said. I’ve sometimes thought that if my name had been Emily, Manjit might never have become my best friend.

  So Manjit had to do this theatre-directing course. It was expensive, and you couldn’t get funding for it. Manjit was back home in Bristol, and she had two jobs, one waitressing in Browns, and the other working at the Observatory, selling tickets for the Camera Obscura and the Caves. I was working in a deli in Clifton, so I saw a lot of Manjit at lunchtimes, up at the Observatory. I’d been to uni, but I didn’t know what to do next and I was back at home getting some money together, like Manjit. When people asked, I said I might go travelling. But I knew, and so did everybody else probably, that I wasn’t the kind of person who goes off travelling on her own.

  It was a hot September day. Really hot, really beautiful. Manjit and I sat on a bench overlooking the bridge, and ate the olives and smoked cheese and flatbread I’d brought from work. There were butterflies on the ripe blackberries that were just out of reach on the other side of the fence. We didn’t climb over to pick them, because the drop is over two hundred feet, sheer to the Portway below. The sun glittered on the cars crossing the bridge.

  ‘It’s a great day for the Camera,’ I said.

  The Camera Obscura always worked best on a clear, bright day. Manjit let me in free. I liked it when there was nobody else there; I liked the echo of my feet as I climbed the staircase that wound its way up the tower. If the door to the Camera chamber was open, that meant nobody was in there and I could take possession. Sometimes Manjit came up with me, and that was all right in a different way, because of the stories she told.

  You go inside, you close the door and wait until your eyes get used to the dark. There in front of you is the wide bowl where the images fall. It’s a circular screen, so big you have to edge your way around it sideways, pulling the wooden handle that alters the Camera’s focus and changes the scene.

  Everyone looks for the bridge first.

  There it is, the bridge!

  Look, you can see the cars going over the Suspension Bridge!

  The Camera makes the bridge look even more fabulous than it does when you’re walking across it. There it is in the bowl, slung over hundreds of feet of emptiness. The cars don’t look important at all, but it’s wonderful when a gull swoops under the bridge. Or even a falcon, sometimes. There’s the mud, shining at low tide, and the river is as narrow as a worm.

  If there are other people in the Camera chamber, you can’t control the view. Somebody gets hold of the wooden handle and the bridge disappears. The view skims over the Cumberland basin, over the city houses and all the way around to the hills of Wales in the far distance. But when I’m on my own, I hardly move the handle at all. I watch the bridge.

  I haven’t looked into the bowl of the Camera for years. Even if I still lived in Bristol I’m not sure I’d ever go there again.

  When Manjit and I went into the Camera together, and she had hold of the wooden handle, she would watch the people and tell stories about them. If a dad was fumbling over his child’s inline skates, Manjit would say, ‘Look, Zahz, he doesn’t know how to fix the skates. It’s an access visit. His wife won’t even let him in the house, she hates him so much. He’s always here with his boy, skating up and down.’

  There was a woman in a blue suit who stared out over the Gorge for a long time and then suddenly, secretively, brought something from a bag and flung it into the deep.

  ‘Her husband’s ashes,’ said Manjit. ‘He hated heights.’

  ‘Maybe it was their favourite place,’ I said, but already the woman looked furtive to me.

  We both liked to watch the trees. There’s virgin forest on the other side of the Gorge. Right bang next to the city, land that’s never been cleared, full of owls and murders and rare orchids. You look at the trees on the Camera and at first they’re like a painted backdrop, then you realise that they’re moving, swaying to the wind that’s shut out from the Camera chamber. In real life I never notice how beautiful it is when trees move.

  On that September day there wasn’t enough time to visit the Camera. I had to get back to work. Manjit ate the last olive, and flicked the stone into the Gorge. We watched it tumble into nothing.

  ‘I�
��m looking after the keys,’ she said.

  ‘What keys?’

  ‘The keys to the Observatory. Just for this week, while Charlie’s away. The keys to the only Camera Obscura in the whole country are in my bag,’ said Manjit.

  ‘It’s not the only one, is it?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You’d better look after them then. You’re always losing stuff.’

  ‘Don’t you see what it means?’

  ‘You get to lock up the Observatory at night, and unlock it in the morning.’

  ‘Zahz. Keep up. Why just at night and in the morning? Why not at other times?’

  ‘You’re joking. You want to have a party there?’

  ‘Not a party,’ said Manjit with a flick of her hand. ‘But listen, Zahz, it’s full moon on Thursday. And the forecast’s good. There’ll be a big bright moon. Can you imagine the Camera by moonlight?’

  ‘It won’t look like anything,’ I said quickly, even though I knew already that Manjit had planned it all and it was going to happen. ‘There won’t be enough light for the contrast.’ Perhaps I was nervous about being on the Downs at night. When you grow up in Bristol you get it drummed into you that the Downs at night is not the place to be.

  ‘How will we know unless we try?’

  ‘What if we get caught?’

  ‘We won’t get caught. Anyway, I’m in charge of the keys. I’ll say I was working overtime.’

  Her face flared into laughter. I knew I wasn’t being offered a choice.

  Manjit borrowed her mum’s car that night, the night she had chosen for us to go. We parked near the Lord Mayor’s House, which meant we had to walk up to the Observatory through the woods. Manjit was right, there was so much moon that we didn’t need our torches. There were one or two people about, even though it was so late, but they weren’t interested in us. I didn’t like it, though. There were always strange sounds in the woods at night; I knew that. It didn’t mean anything, it was just birds and animals and—

  ‘What was that, Manjit?’

  ‘Nothing. Ssh.’

  We crept on, stepping as lightly as we could, along the path that skirts the Gorge and then rises to the Observatory.

  ‘Manjit—’

  ‘Ssh!’

  Her fingers dug into my arm. We stood frozen, listening. A woman’s cry echoed, cut off as if it had been pulled out of her throat.

  ‘It’s OK,’ whispered Manjit, but her voice was thin. ‘You know what this place is like after dark.’

  The daytime face of the Downs was peeled away like a mask. The sunbathers and kite-flyers and joggers and ice-cream vans were gone, and something else was here.

  ‘The keys, Manjit. Have you got the keys?’

  I wanted to get out of the moonlight, out of plain sight. Manjit fumbled the keys and I kept watch. There were shadows all around us. As soon as I turned, they jumped closer.

  ‘Manjit!’

  The key clicked. We were in. Manjit pointed her torch beam down, so no one would see our light. There was her chair, where she sat all day selling tickets. Manjit slipped past it, like the ghost of herself, and I followed.

  I kept my hand on the wall as we climbed the stairs. It felt rough and safe. Manjit was up ahead, and darkness was behind us.

  ‘You did lock the door again, didn’t you?’

  ‘Zahz, relax.’

  The door to the Camera creaked open. Manjit’s torch beam found the wooden handle. We closed the door and bent over the Camera’s bowl.

  I hadn’t believed it could happen. You need bright sun for the Camera. But as we watched, the bridge swung into view.

  ‘The lights are off,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe they switch them off after midnight.’

  Even so, the bridge was darkly brilliant in the moonlight. The trees behind it swayed like seaweed.

  ‘There aren’t any cars,’ said Manjit.

  But there were people. A man and a woman. We could see them clearly now, coming over from the Leigh Woods side of the bridge.

  ‘The fence has gone,’ whispered Manjit.

  ‘Which fence?’

  ‘You know, the one that stops people from jumping.’

  She was right. The high, incurving fence was gone, and there was only the wooden handrail, chest high. The woman was hurrying, almost running, but the man was gaining on her.

  ‘They’ve had a quarrel,’ said Manjit. ‘She told him it was over. He’s desperate, he wants to make it up with her.’

  The woman was really running now. She was more than two-thirds across the bridge.

  ‘There’s always someone in the toll-booth,’ said Manjit. ‘She can go in there if she’s upset.’

  But the booth was dark. There was only the woman, running, and the man close behind her.

  ‘There,’ said Manjit, ‘he’s caught up with her. I told you, it’s a quarrel. They know each other. Look at them.’

  He’d taken her in his arms, lifting her off her feet. They were one body now, vanishing into each other. They swayed awkwardly, dancing but not dancing, him holding her off the ground. The spread of overhanging trees hid them as they came to the piers, and we couldn’t see them any more.

  I let out my breath.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said.

  ‘No, we’ll see them again in a minute. I can’t believe how clear everything is in the moonlight. It’s like a stage-set.’

  A few seconds later a figure came out from the shadows. A man, walking slowly, almost strolling, you could say. Alone. Manjit and I stared into the bowl.

  ‘Move the handle, Manjit. He’s walking out of range. Follow him.’

  But Manjit didn’t touch the handle.

  ‘It’s not the same man,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Maybe she ran across the road, away from him. We wouldn’t have seen her.’

  I didn’t answer. Moonlight lay in the bowl, washing the bridge into glory as it hung suspended over more than two hundred feet of nothing. Manjit’s fingers dug into my wrist as we watched until the man had disappeared.

  ‘Manjit—’

  I heard Manjit’s breath sigh out of her. She turned to me and her eyes shone.

  I laid my hand on the screen and trees rippled over it. I could touch the trees, but they couldn’t touch me. If I went out of the Camera chamber and opened the windows of the tower, I might hear something. Maybe footsteps, hurrying. Maybe a cry, suddenly cut off as if it had been pulled out of a woman’s throat. But I didn’t move.

  We never talked about it, did we, Manjit? We never said another word about what we saw that night when the safety fence melted away, and the moonlit bridge printed itself on to the Camera’s bowl.

  COUNT FROM THE SPLASH

  ‘YOU MUST MEET Lucie. We’re all very excited about the new series.’

  Fredrik had his arm around Kai’s shoulder, like a bear. They were good mates, great mates, although Fredrik was the chief bear who could place the paw of success on Kai’s shoulder, or not. As he chose, thought Maija. He chose to have us here and so we are here.

  ‘You’ll know pretty much everyone,’ said Fredrik. Kai nodded casually, but he couldn’t help it – his eagerness showed through. He wanted to know everyone. This invitation to Fredrik and Anna’s Midsummer party was a first.

  ‘But, Kai, it’s Midsummer!’ Maija had said.

  They always went to their summer cottage for Midsummer. They had a bonfire, they cooked crayfish, and Liisa and Matti were allowed champagne. It was a family party, just the four of them. She and Kai sat up late, late, as the fire sank and the sun grew strong. They slept for an hour or two, and then swam in the lake and went to the sauna. The next day, you knew that it had begun: the slow shortening of the days, the lopping of minutes that took you back into winter.

  ‘I don’t care if we don’t go to the cottage,’ said Liisa. ‘It’s boring, just us. Everybody else has parties.’

  ‘We’re always going there anyway,’ said Matti. ‘W
hy can’t we ever just stay in Helsinki at weekends? There’s nothing to do at the cottage.’

  Nothing to do.

  Sitting for hours on the smooth flat rocks of the lakeshore with Matti, while he fished. Teaching Liisa to dive.

  Was that better, Mum? Were my legs straight?

  Walking to the farm for milk. Deciding that the children were old enough to fetch the milk themselves. Hunting for mushrooms on mornings that already held a tang of autumn.

  ‘You guys will love Fredrik’s place,’ said Kai. ‘He has a home cinema.’

  ‘A home cinema in a summer cottage!’ said Maija.

  Then Kai told Maija to ask the kids what they’d like to do. They betrayed her, of course they did. A home cinema and a house party – ‘Fredrik’s kids are teenagers; there’ll be a load of their friends there.’

  Liisa and Matti had gone off with the others as soon as they arrived. They were all sleeping out in the woods. They were having their own bonfire and their own music.

  ‘Light beers, nothing too alcoholic,’ said Fredrik with a grin. ‘We know what kids are like.’

  A tall dark boy with hair over his face loped down the path ahead of Liisa, carrying iPod speakers. They were gone.

  ‘And what do you do, Maija?’ asked Fredrik.

  ‘I work in a rehabilitation centre. I’m a nurse,’ said Maija. Sometimes it could be awkward to reveal her profession among film and TV people. They wondered if they had already met her, in another life. ‘I work mostly with young people,’ she added, and Fredrik nodded quickly.

  ‘Oh, right, good. Well, Kai, let me introduce you to Lucie. Harry Vikstrøm’s coming along later; I really want you to meet him. Julia’s Skirt is in post-production now …’

  They were gone. Kai didn’t look at her. But she wanted him to meet people, of course she did. Even now, with their children teenagers, Kai was younger than most of these people. ‘You’ve got kids? How old? You must have been still at school when you had them!’

  She was holding her bag too tightly. She must relax. Anna seemed a nice woman, and not in TV or films or anything. She’d go and chat to Anna. People always need help in the kitchen at parties.