Right in my ear

Mary Farquharson

It was already dark when we turned off the main road and into a driveway with a large house at the end. As I got out of the car, little stones crunched under my feet. “Helen,” my mother was pointing towards the metal trunk that was lying in the back of the car like a coffin. We struggled to lift it onto the gravel where I'd hoped it would stay. “Come on,” said my father, “you two at the front, I’ll take the back.” My mother and I held the leather handle between us and the trunk rocked towards an open door and a bright light that reminded me of a hospital.

Inside, there were girls dressed exactly like me: grey tweed coats and boaters with a red ribbon; grey flannel gloves and polished black shoes. They were small -- some of them looked about nine or ten – and most of them were smiling. The group didn’t excite me, as my mother had promised it would; in fact I felt like a package that had been wrapped up carefully and then delivered to the wrong address.

The house was cold and there were no pictures or anything bright, except for the strip lighting that made the girls’ faces look as grey as their coats. In the hallway were the trunks, each one inscribed with a very English name: Rose Simons; Sally Roberts; Charlotte Evans. By placing my trunk alongside theirs, my parents were confirming I belonged here. But I didn’t. This place wasn’t my style at all. I was tall, skinny and precocious, with a sunburned face and pierced ears. I loved American music and Chinese food and I’d thought that Britain meant Carnaby Street and driving around in a Mini.

I sat on my trunk and stared at a small room under the stairs, with a sign outside that said ‘Telephone’. I could call the police and tell them I’d been kidnapped by a couple dressed up as my parents who were holding me here against my will. I could announce a fire or a hurricane like the one that bent the palm trees and smashed through our windows when I was six. That was bravery: my father pushing his body against a wooden door to protect us from drowning; this was not bravery, it was just the dull pain that comes when something’s wrong and no-one’s doing anything about it.

Boarding school in England had been sold to me as something exciting, but I didn’t need anything more exciting than taking the waves just at the point when they broke and zooming forward on their inexplicable energy, churning round in salty water, crashing against the sand and grazing my hip until it bled, then running out of the water towards a picnic and sitting on the beach contemplating the majesty of the sea.

It was down at the beach that my mother had said to me: “Helen, you can’t stay here forever,” but I wasn’t convinced. I had my friends and my dog, the waves and my small collection of records borrowed from my father. I loved his music but, more than anything, the way he responded to it: he would croon to Nat King Cole and then, when only I was looking, he’d dance around to Elvis Presley, lifting one leg-- a bit like a dog-- and shaking.

When the move to England had become inevitable, I started to change things around in my mind, to create a space that would allow me to leave what I had and face what was coming. It wasn’t easy but I would try. In England I would become sophisticated and grown up. With that promise to myself, I left behind my father’s musical heroes and looked for some bright young British singer with a style that would speak about me. Everyone would love me if I looked like Lulu, that was my plan, but now, sitting here in knee-length socks and this stupid straw hat, I realised I was entering a world that wasn’t geared up for my kind of pleasure.

I stared at the floor because I couldn’t look at anybody, not even at my parents. I felt confused and very weak. After a few minutes, a woman in lace-up shoes approached us and asked my name. She found me on a list and gave it a tick, telling me the number of a dormitory. “Second floor,” she said, leaning over to check my trunk. She smelled of hospitals and had a moustache. A badge on her breast said: ‘house parent’; My mother saw me looking at it and smiled weakly. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go and find the room.”

We dragged the trunk up two flights of stairs and then along a narrow corridor. I don’t know why it was so heavy; all I had inside was the regulation clothing: the exact number of grey socks, bloomers, shirts, ties and everything else the school list had required. There were just a few ‘home clothes’ including my favourite red, wet look boots that I now planned to hide somewhere or disown.

The corridor was covered in linoleum so there was a gentle squeak as we carried the trunk towards the room. I thought about the hundreds of tiny dents in the parquet floor at home and pictured my mother and her friends in their stiletto heels and beehive hairdos. I tried to remember the smell of my parents’ parties and the sound of everyone speaking at once, but the memories crashed against the real smell of industrial cleaner and the creepy silence of our steps.

We opened the door of number eleven. Inside there were six metal beds in a row and, in front, a straight line of cupboards, followed by three stained washbasins and a small mirror. The walls were bare and shiny, painted in the same thick beige colour as the pipes that ran round the room and which came together in a large ribbed radiator under the window. There were heavy brown curtains, nearly as dark as the night. My mother began fussing with the sheet on the bed nearest the door.

“This is your bed.” My mother meant well but it was the worst thing she could have said. Why couldn’t she say that it was ‘the’ bed or ‘a’ bed? I didn’t want to claim it, lie on it, get inside the crisp white sheets and make it mine. My bed was on the other side of the world, on the eighth floor of a building that looked out over a harbour full of Chinese junks with salmon pink sails.

“Dad…”

“Yes?”

“Is it true that the families who live on the boats – back home I mean – drown their daughters because they’re not boys?”

“Helen!”

My father looked uncomfortable. He was usually so good at cheering me up but tonight his eyes were sad and his mouth twitched when he tried to smile.

My mother changed the subject: “That’s nice, Helen! You’re in a room with five other girls. You must write and tell me all about them. I wonder who’ll be your special friend.”

Friends? Would there be anyone else here like me? What would I say to all these girls? I caught my image briefly in the mirror above the basin: my hair was too short and my ears stuck out from under the boater. My Buddy Holly glasses – the ones I loved because they reminded me of him – looked too heavy and stupid. Suddenly I hated them.

What if no one invited me home on a Saturday? I’d be stuck here alone while the English girls rode their horses and ate chocolate cake at tea time. I wanted chow fan and slices of apple boiled in toffee. I wanted my bike and my dog; to be outside in the sunlight, as far away as possible from these muck brown pipes that rattled along cold, shiny walls.

Two girls had come into the room and were sitting on the bed by the window, with their backs to me. They hadn’t said ‘hello’. My father put his hand on my shoulder. It felt nice but when I looked into his face I saw that he was begging me not to cry. I was much too tall to cry so I put my hand in the pocket of my coat and pinched my thigh till it hurt.

“Oh, look at this, Helen,” my father had picked up an envelope on the table by my bed. It was addressed to me. “What is it?” he asked me. I took it quickly from him. I wanted to put it in my pocket for later but he was watching me, so I couldn’t.

“Love letters already?” my father had found his usual voice again, thank God for that.

“Shhhh, dad, someone will hear you.” My father loved to tease me and I liked it; as long as we were on our own.
“Open it,” he said, “I want to see.”

He leaned over to have a better look at the envelope. My mother began to quietly unpack my trunk and store away my uniform in the cupboard. “You two!” she said, relieved that we both seemed happier.

The letter was addressed in my writing and I knew what it was. I took out five sheets of paper and a photograph.

Dear Helen, it said. Congratulations! You’ve been accepted as a member of Lulu’s fan club! Here’s your membership card, this month’s fan letter and … wait for it … a signed photo of Lulu herself. Welcome to the club!

I was delighted although at the same time embarrassed to reveal my survival strategy, even to my father. I was terrified that he’d ask me: ‘why Lulu?’ and I wouldn’t be able to answer him.

I fingered the photograph and carefully touched her signature to check it was real. She had a huge smile and was looking straight at me with an expression that said it didn’t matter where you come from or if your glasses are too big.

My father was saying something to my mother and I looked up from the photo, curious to hear their conversation. His words were blocked by a bell that rang ferociously through the house. The other girls rushed past my bed and out of the door. “They look very nice,” my mother said.

I searched around helplessly. Did the bell mean suppertime or was it the order for my parents to leave? Was I supposed to keep this stupid hat on all night? Would the girls see me in my underpants and would they laugh because I hardly had any breasts?

“Do I have to stay?” It was a pathetic question and I only asked it to myself. I wouldn’t let my parents hear me. They were sacrificing so much to send me to this school: I knew it was expensive, although looking around at the chipped basin and the hairy blankets, I wasn’t sure why it cost a lot of money.

They wanted to give me a chance in life, “so you can hold your head up high,” my mother had said the day we’d bought my uniform. But I was already taller and ganglier than anyone else my age, so I didn’t understand what she meant. “So you can get somewhere,” she’d explained, but I was already somewhere: sitting on the eighth floor of an apartment block with my friends, spinning bottles to the sound of my father’s rock and roll.

“Only three weeks and I’ll come and take you out,” my mother was saying to me now. “We’ll go to that smart hotel that we passed tonight and you can ask for roast beef served by a waiter in white gloves.”

“Thanks.”

It would be just my mother and me. My father would have returned to the island but I’d see him next summer and, “hey, what’s a year between friends?” Forever, I thought, but I smiled because he needed me to be strong.

My parents were having a quiet disagreement; I wished they’d shout and my father would grab me by the arm and we’d storm out of this house together. But it wasn’t their style. My mother was shaking her head quietly and my father kept on trying to convince her about something. I read Lulu’s letter for the tenth time. She was telling me what it had felt like to act in a film with Sidney Poitier and how she’d recorded ‘To Sir With Love’ in a studio in North London. She had a new release and she was taking it to the Eurovision Song Contest. She asked me to wish her luck. I did.

My father seemed to have won the debate with my mother. He came over to me with a guilty smile on his face. “Helen, this is for you. But don’t let anyone find it; keep it hidden under your pillow, will you?”

I took the small transistor radio from his hand and nodded. I didn’t want to look at his face. From the end of the bed I could hear my mother say: “it’s not allowed, Helen, remember that.” I nodded again, without looking at her either. I fingered the wire attached to the radio; it had an earphone on the other end.

Without looking up, I said: “You can go now if you want to.”

My father was trying to make a joke about being pushed out by Lulu, but my mother took his arm. When she kissed me goodbye, I smelled the French perfume she always used. My father gave me a hug and then held me at arm’s length so he could look into my face.

“Friends?” he asked. I nodded but it was very difficult. I wanted to ask him if he loved me but we didn’t use that word so the question stayed in my stomach and wouldn’t come out.

“I’ll call you on Saturday,” my mother said.

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“Between six and seven.”

“Yes.”

There was silence. They were moving very slowly towards the door.

“I think that bell meant supper,” my mother was saying.

“I’m not really very hungry.”

My father looked old for the first time. It was strange seeing him in all these winter clothes. I liked him better in swimming trunks, dive-bombing off the top of a fishing boat or drinking beer and laughing with his friends. He wasn’t suited to this climate but he’d be better once he got home.

“Helen, I think, maybe, it’d be a good idea to go down … with the others...” he sounded nervous; like the day he heard his father was dead.

“O.k., in just a minute.”

They left quietly and I was alone in the room. It was very cold. I looked under the bed, hoping to find a corpse or anything that might replace this wretched melancholy. But there was only dust and a broken spring.

As I was about to get to my feet, a large splinter entered my knee from a wooden floor board. It really hurt when I pulled it out and that made me feel a little better. I squeezed my knee but it didn’t bleed.

I walked over to the window and pulled back one of the heavy brown curtains. The garden was dark and silent. I took off my hat and rested my forehead against the cold window. It was freezing, like the ice-stick that a doctor uses to burn off a wart. I banged my head several times, trying to slow down the rhythm that was beating in my chest. It didn’t work so I moved away from the window.

It was only September and I’d never felt so cold.

I walked down the central staircase, following the sound of people banging plates and laughing. The woman with the moustache was sitting at one end of the table and thirty girls looked up as I walked in. “This is Helen,” she said above the noise, “She comes from Hong Kong.”

Why did she have to say that? I was English, that’s why I was here, wasn’t it? I sat down in the only space left and then the woman said Grace.

“Helen,” it was the woman again: “you take your gloves off when you eat.” There was laughter around the table and I heard one girl whisper: Chinky Chonky China girl.”

The sausages were brown and thick on the outside and white on the inside. I put a piece of sausage in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone or tell them why I’d kept my gloves on.

I changed in the bathroom along the corridor and walked quickly back to the dormitory in my pyjamas. I heard a girl sniggering but didn’t know why. It would be better once the lights were out and I could pretend I was alone. “Go to sleep now girls,” it was the voice of the house parent, who stuck her head round the door and, without smiling, turned off the light. I lay in the bed trying to think of anything except what was happening.

Once the other girls started chatting, I felt under the pillow for my transistor radio. I fitted the tiny speaker into my ear and looked for Radio One. After about twenty minutes I heard what I’d been waiting for: Lulu’s voice – throaty and fun. She was shorter than me but her voice was deep and strong. She always sounded so up-beat, like she knew that everything would turn out fine and that there’s no point in crying over something you can’t change. I wanted to have red cheeks like her and a big smile and strawberry blonde hair, puffed up at the back. I wanted to know how to wink and to wear high heels.

My heart goes boom bang a bang...

It was her new release; the one she hoped would take her to the top of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Boom bang a bang, boom bang a bang
Right in my ear
It’s such a lovely feeling
When you are near
Boom bang a bang bang in my ear.

I lay under the cold white sheet, looking up at the ceiling and I mouthed the words to the song, without making a sound. When it had finished, I took out the earplug and turned over onto my side. Then I heard a muffled sound coming from the bed next door. A girl was crying but she didn’t want anyone to know. I touched the blanket above her shoulder, feeling for her hand. I passed her my transistor radio. “Here,” I said, “listen to this; it’s really wild.”