Dark Dance (29 page)

‘Like what exactly?’

It was play-time, and I saw a huddle of children near the sheds. I left it a while but they didn’t break up, so I went over to see what was going on. There was a ring of children, they were giggling, but some of them looked a bit frightened. Sitting on the ground was Terry Porter who’d apparently fallen over and cut his knee quite badly. Instead of coming up for medical attention he was just sitting there, looking white, and Ruth was sitting next to him. As I got there she put her hand on the cut and actually squeezed it, so the blood ran out quite violently, all down his leg. She said, ‘Make it bleed again, Terry’.’

Rachaela felt a strange delayed horror, moving so deep in her she scarcely knew what it was. She said nothing.

Miss Barrett, having waited for her, said, ‘Has Ruth ever done anything like that at home?’

‘No,’ said Rachaela.

‘Perhaps it’s never come up. Ruth’s had the usual odd spills and scrapes herself, but never anything very bloody. Sometimes children do get fascinated by blood.’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe you should have a word. Or perhaps you’ve been telling her about when her periods will be due. Sometimes that sparks it off.’

‘No.’

‘Well it is a bit early.’

‘What happened?’ asked Rachaela. ‘I mean with the boy?’

‘Oh, Terry. Well, I just told Ruth not to be a silly girl and got him off to Nurse. Ruth is sometimes a bit, well, a bit unusual. The things she draws. And if we ask them to tell stories or act out little plays, Ruth’s are always rather gruesome. I sometimes wonder where she gets her ideas from.’ Miss Barrett looked at Rachaela with keen glasses.

‘I don’t censor her reading,’ said Rachaela.

‘No. Well, maybe you should be a little more strict. We’re very careful what we let them have.’

Rachaela remembered a drawing pinned up in Emma’s flat.

‘But you tell them about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.’

‘Well of course. That’s Religious Knowledge.’

‘It’s also a very grim subject and Ruth painted it.’

‘Well I have to admit,’ said Miss Barrett, trying not to look at Denise’s tights, ‘I know they’re all fairly bloodthirsty little savages. They go on and on about the nails.’ She cheered up, having reassured herself. ‘That’s all it was, really. I thought you should know and keep an eye on her.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Miss Barrett.

Typical woman,’ said Jonquil disapprovingly, when Miss Barrett had gone.

Ruth was drawing behind her screen when Rachaela came in.

Rachaela took off her coat, and washed her hands, and began to arrange Ruth’s tea automatically.

‘How did it go today at school?’ Rachaela asked.

A pause, perhaps of astonishment.

‘It was all right.’

‘What about yesterday?’

‘That was all right too.’

Rachaela thought of her mother, so many lectures over the table. Meals should not be interrogations.

She turned the steaks slowly.

Tonight they would eat together. Steak for both; mashed potatoes, tomatoes and peas for Ruth; lettuce and avocado for Rachaela.

When the food was ready she called Ruth to the table. They ate in silence, the drawing dividing them, to which, between mouthfuls, Ruth added a stroke or two. Upside-down, the drawing looked ominous, some bleak landscape under a cloudy sky, some beast coming from a lair.

‘What would you like now, pie or ice-cream?’

‘Both, please.’

Ruth was always polite. She was also a greedy child. Even when Emma had gone her appetite had not slackened, She stayed wand-slim, yet, in past weeks, Rachaela had begun to note the points of little breasts. She was only nine. Everything would need buying again, including a tiny bra. Would Ruth be embarrassed? Rachaela never saw her in the bath.

When the meal was finished, Rachaela washed up and made coffee, and Ruth retired behind her screen.

‘Do you have any homework tonight?’

Again the perhaps-astonished pause.

‘No.’

‘Will you come out, Ruth, for a minute, I want to talk to you about something.’

What would Emma have done? Emma, with all her experience, might not have cared. ‘It’s a phase they all go through. Don’t you remember it in yourself? Don’t draw attention to it. She’ll work it out.’

Ruth emerged, with her drawing. She sat down again at the table and worked on steadily.

Rachaela said, ‘Tell me about Terry Porter.’

Silence.

Eventually Ruth said, ‘I don’t like him.’

‘Why not?’

‘He shouts things at me.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘That I didn’t have a dad. That I came out of an egg.’

‘Of course you had a father. He doesn’t live with us, that’s all. Emma told you about that.’

Emma’s name was ignored.

How nastily inventive of Terry Porter to say Ruth came from an egg. Perhaps he had heard mention of the reproductive cycle.

‘So you were glad,’ said Rachaela, ‘when Terry Porter cut himself.’ Ruth said nothing. ‘Why did you make the cut worse? To scare him?’ Ruth drew on. The landscape, like all deserts, had a familiar look. ‘Please say something, Ruth.’

Ruth said, ‘It bled.’

‘Is that what interested you?’

‘It was very red.’

‘You’ve seen blood before,’ said Rachaela. Had she? She must have done, she had been born in it.

‘It was very red blood.’

Was there relish in the statement? Was there, more to the point, thirst and incipient sexuality?

Ruth shaded in an area of her beast.

‘Why doesn’t my dad live with us?’

‘He didn’t want to.’

‘I don’t have a nanny or a grandpa, either.’

‘No. I’m sorry. There’s just us.’

‘Didn’t they want me too?’ The inquiry was not plaintive. It was brutally matter-of-fact.

I didn’t want you. Don’t want you. You are a little animal, muddling up my life, that expects to be fed and clothed, that has to have schools and presents. That has to be thought about. Not loveable, like a cat. Skin and hair and voice.

But the Scarabae
had
wanted Ruth.
Oh
yes.

Lie about it now? She tried not to lie to the child, as
she
had been lied to.

‘I expect they did want you, but it wasn’t their choice.’

‘Do I have a nanny?’

‘Maybe.’ Had Anna been Adamus’s mother, as Rachaela suspected? ‘But they’re a long way away.’

‘Like Emma,’ said Ruth, surprisingly.

‘Much further than Emma.’

‘They don’t write to me.’

‘No.’

‘I don’t expect they want me,’ said Ruth.

She had successfully sidetracked Rachaela from the subject of the blood.

Rachaela said, ‘About Terry Porter. You mustn’t do anything like that again.’ Ruth did not ask why. ‘You understand that, don’t you? You must be careful not to give people bad ideas about you. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t give yourself away. Try to behave like other people.’

Ruth nibbled at her coloured pencil.

Impelled by instinct, Rachaela took the drawing up and stared at it.

Ruth had drawn the heath, the Scarabae heath, the dragon parts, and the dragon coming forth to kill its knight. On a slope was a weirdly shaped rock—the standing stone?

‘What gave you the notion for this?’ Rachaela said.

‘Don’t know.’

Ruth was looking at her at last with sharp, bright black eyes. Her unlined milk-white face was ancient.

‘It’s a very good drawing.’

‘Thank you.’

Rachaela handed back the heath and the dragon. Through that place she had walked, Ruth a thing coiled inside her. How else had the child seen?

‘Mummy,’ said Ruth, ‘can we have a cat?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry, but there’s no garden and we’re out all day.’

She did not want Ruth to have a cat. She did not know why. Surely Ruth would not hurt the cat, for she stroked them on walls. Rachaela had seen her. It was something else.

Ruth did not whine or try to get her way.

She took the heath and went back behind her screen.

A storm raged over the house.

Rachaela dreamed of Adamus bending over her, his hair a black cowl. The lightning caught him, faded.

She opened her eyes. Ruth was seated at a window watching the storm.

A blue flash like an incendiary, the child did not start, but leaned closer to the pane.

Ruth had watched storms since she was three or four.

The thunder bombarded the capital.

Rachaela got up, and in the light of the street lamps through the uncurtained windows, padded into the kitchen.

‘Do you want a drink? Milk? Coffee?’

‘No thank you.’

Rachaela did not turn on the light. She filled the kettle and set it to boil. The saffron-azure of the gas flame starred the orange dark. The lightning came again.

As she drank the coffee something made her walk about the room. The child ignored her. Reaching Ruth’s area, she saw the beads and bells, clock and paintings, sear in another flash. So much that glimmered. And there the mirror she had given Ruth. The mirror had changed.

Not entering, Rachaela craned to see.

‘What have you done to your mirror?’

‘I painted it.’

Another blast of blue. All the glass was covered, fields and meadows, flowers and clouds, and distant mountains in a mist.

She had bought the bathroom mirror soon after moving into the flat. It hung the length of the wall. As the bath ran, a fog of steam began to cling to its surface. Rachaela wiped it away. Through the frosted window blazed the cold light of winter morning; sidelight, the most harsh. Rachaela examined her face and body.

She was forty. She did not look it. She looked the same as when she had been twenty-nine, before the birth of the child. Even that had not touched her. No stretch marks, no cellulite, the belly and thighs firm and white and smooth, the breasts full and yet high, the nipples small and rosy. The neck was unlined, the face unlined, the brow and cheeks. The chin was firm. No pouches about the mouth or under the eyes. The face and body of a young, young woman. And in the black hair, the black hair of the groin, not a single silver coil.

It did not please her. She tried not to let it unnerve her. She was used to it, saw it every day. She accepted such remarks as Jonquil’s, ‘But you’re only a kid.’ Even Denise had aged a little, got heavy and puffy in her thirties, from the big cooked dinners she made for hungry Keith. Jonquil had not herself changed very much, her skin had only grown harder and more obdurate, she had swapped the steel earring for an earring of bone, and all her hair was grey.

Probably I’ll age suddenly
.

That might happen. It happened in books.

People did not notice youngness when they saw you constantly, the same as the alteration into age went largely unobserved, only picked out in sudden revelations.

‘What are you, you must be about twenty-eight now,’ Jonquil had said last year, not bothering with an answer.

The child had changed, of course.

Ruth grew out of all her clothes with punctilious regularity. She had breasts and two small brassieres that must be hand-washed.

Rachaela had explained to Ruth about her periods, sitting at the table with her while Ruth drew, asking if she understood. Rachaela’s mother had not told her anything but had given her a rather serious book. The blood had come in the middle of the night and she had still been appalled. She had had to wake her mother up to ask for sanitary pads, and her mother had grumbled, Rachaela put pads into Ruth’s drawer, among her underclothes, in front of her.

Ruth showed no resentment, no excitement. ‘I heard about it at school.’

‘From the teachers?’

‘From a girl.’

‘Tell me when you start,’ Rachaela felt bound to say.

‘All right.’

What did Ruth look like, unclothed? Rachaela never saw her. She would go nightly into the bathroom in her skirt and blouse and come out in a cotton nightshirt.

Rachaela slept in a nightshirt, too. Ruth’s decorum had somehow imposed it on her.

The bath was full.

Rachaela let the mirror veil itself in steam and stepped into the water.

‘Hi, you’re late,’ said Jonquil airily as Rachaela entered the shop. ‘That kid of yours mess you up? Is she at her secondary yet?’

‘Next year, when she’s eleven.’

‘I suppose you’ve got that all mapped out.’

‘It will depend on some test,’ said Rachaela vaguely. She was used to answering occasional questions about the child, who perhaps Jonquil did not really think existed after all.

‘I see,’ said Jonquil. ‘Used to be the old eleven-plus, but that’s all different now. You wouldn’t remember.’

Rachaela made coffee, and tea for Jonquil with one of her herbal tea bags. Jonquil fussed round her. When they sat down, Jonquil stood up again.

‘You’ve been here a long while, haven’t you, Raech? What is it—five years?’

‘A little longer.’

‘Denise too. Poor old Denise. That bloody awful feller she’s with. I hoped he’d leave her in peace but he knows when he’s on to a good thing.’ Jonquil drank some tea and sighed gustily. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to shut up shop.’