She said cheerily, as we wandered cross-country, ‘Me dad says, you’re bloody daft, Mary, do you know that? He says, when they turned you out, love, they broke the bloody mould. He says, Mary, you don’t know arseholes from Tuesday.’
On that first day at the Hathaways’ house, sheltered in the depth of the bushes, we waited for the rich to come out of the glinting windows that were also doors; we waited to see what actions they would perform. Mary Joplin whispered to me, ‘Your mam dun’t know where you are.’
‘Well, your mam neither.’
As the afternoon wore on, Mary made herself a hollow or nest. She settled comfortably under a bush. ‘If I’d known it was this boring,’ I said, ‘I’d have brought my library book.’
Mary twiddled grass stalks, sometimes hummed. ‘My dad says, buck yourself up, Mary, or you’ll have to go to reform school.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s where they smack you every day.’
‘What’ve you done?’
‘Nothing, they just do it.’
I shrugged. It sounded only too likely. ‘Do they smack you on weekends or only school days?’
I felt sleepy. I hardly cared about the answer. ‘You stand in a queue,’ Mary said. ‘When it’s your turn …’ Mary had a little stick which she was digging into the ground, grinding it round and round into the soil. ‘When it’s your turn, Kitty, they have a big club and they beat the holy living daylights out of you. They knock you on the head till your brains squirt out.’
Our conversation dried up: lack of interest on my part. In time my legs, folded under me, began to ache and cramp. I shifted irritably, nodded towards the house. ‘How long do we have to wait?’
Mary hummed. Dug with her stick.
‘Put your legs together, Mary,’ I said. ‘It’s rude to sit like that.’
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’ve been up here when a kid like you is in bed. I’ve seen what they’ve got in that house.’
I was awake now. ‘What have they?’
‘Something you couldn’t put a name to,’ Mary Joplin said.
‘What sort of a thing?’
‘Wrapped in a blanket.’
‘Is it an animal?’
Mary jeered. ‘An animal, she says. An animal, what’s wrapped in a blanket?’
‘You could wrap a dog in a blanket. If it were poorly.’
I felt the truth of this; I wanted to insist; my face grew hot. ‘It’s not a dog, no, no, no.’ Mary’s voice dawdled, keeping her secret from me. ‘For it’s got arms.’
‘Then it’s human.’
‘But it’s not a human shape.’
I felt desperate. ‘What shape is it?’
Mary thought. ‘A comma,’ she said slowly. ‘A comma, you know, what you see in a book?’
After this she would not be drawn. ‘You’ll just have to wait,’ she said, ‘if you want to see it, and if you truly do you’ll wait, and if you truly don’t you can bugger off and you can miss it, and I can see it all to myself.’
After a while I said, ‘I can’t stop here all night waiting for a comma. I’ve missed my tea.’
‘They’ll be none bothered,’ Mary said.
She was right. I crept back late and nothing was said. It was a summer that, by the end of July, had bleached adults of their purpose. When my mother saw me her eyes glazed over, as if I represented extra effort. You spilled blackcurrant juice on yourself and you kept the sticky patches. Feet grimy and face stained you lived in underbrush and long grass, and each day a sun like a child’s painted sun burned in a sky made white with heat. Laundry hung like flags of surrender from washing lines. The light stretched far into the evening, ending in a fall of dew and a bare dusk. When you were called in at last you sat under the electric light and pulled off your sunburnt skin in frills and strips. There was a dull roasting sensation deep inside your limbs, but no sensation as you peeled yourself like a vegetable. You were sent to bed when you were sleepy, but as the heat of bed-clothes fretted your skin you woke again. You lay awake, wheeling fingernails over your insect bites. There was something that bit in the long grass as you crouched, waiting for the right moment to go over the wall; there was something else that stung, perhaps as you waited, spying, in the bushes. Your heart beat with excitement all the short night. Only at first light was there a chill, the air clear like water.
And in this clear morning light you sauntered into the kitchen, you said, casual, ‘You know there’s a house, it’s up past the cemetery, where there’s rich people live? It’s got greenhouses.’
My aunt was in the kitchen just then. She was pouring cornflakes into a dish and as she looked up some flakes spilled. She glanced at my mother, and some secret passed between them, in the flick of an eyelid, a twist at the corner of the mouth. ‘She means the Hathaways’,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t talk about that.’ She sounded almost coaxing. ‘It’s bad enough without little girls talking.’
‘What’s bad …’ I was asking, when my mother flared up like a gas-jet: ‘Is that where you’ve been? I hope you’ve not been up there with Mary Joplin. Because if I see you playing with Mary Joplin, I’ll skin you alive. I’m telling you now, and my word is my bond.’
‘I’m not up there with Mary,’ I lied fluently and fast. ‘Mary’s poorly.’
‘What with?’
I said the first thing that came into my head. ‘Ringworm.’
My aunt snorted with laughter.
‘Scabies. Nits. Lice. Fleas.’ There was pleasure in this sweet embroidery.
‘None of that would surprise me one bit,’ my aunt said. ‘The only thing would surprise me was if Sheila Joplin kept the little trollop at home a single day of her life. I tell you, they live like animals. They’ve no bedding, do you know?’
‘At least animals leave home,’ my mam said. ‘The Joplins never go. There just gets more and more of them living in a heap and scrapping like pigs.’
‘Do pigs fight?’ I said. But they ignored me. They were rehearsing a famous incident before I was born. A woman out of pity took Mrs Joplin a pan of stew and Mrs Joplin, instead of a civil no-thank-you, spat in it.
My aunt, her face flushed, re-enacted the pain of the woman with the stew; the story was fresh as if she had never told it before. My mother chimed in, intoning, on a dying fall, the words that ended the tale: ‘And so she ruined it for the poor soul who had made it, and for any poor soul who might want to eat it after.’
Amen. At this coda, I slid away. Mary, as if turned on by the flick of a switch, stood on the pavement, scanning the sky, waiting for me.
‘Have you had your breakfast?’ she asked.
‘No.’
No point asking after Mary’s. ‘I’ve got money for toffees,’ I said.
If it weren’t for the persistence of this story about Sheila Joplin and the stew, I would have thought, in later life, that