Free Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson Page A

that she is a tiny bit homesick.
    It doesn’t work that way.
    ‘Antibiotics,’ her mother tells her, sounding distracted. ‘It’s her age . . . they want to be sure.’
    ‘Poor Ildi.’
    ‘She is eighty-two, sweetheart. They’ll keep an eye on her.’
    ‘What if it’s more serious?’ asks Marina. Ali Strewer canters past her in full lacrosse kit. Marina steps aside to let her pass, bangs her elbow on the pay phone and gasps, but she will not cry. Last night, with chemistry homework to finish, she had not enough sleep and too much coffee and now, despite never having been to a funeral, she can see clear as day Ildi’s coffin, half open like a pope’s; a sad dark chapel. A sob catches in her throat. The relatives are too vulnerable without her, yet nothing makes them happier than knowing that she is here.
    ‘Are you positive everything’s all right?’ she asks her mother.
    ‘Definitely. Why not?’
    ‘I just thought— Never mind. I’d better go,’ she says. ‘I’m very busy. By the way, I’ve lost another lens. The left. No, the right. Hang on—’
    ‘Oh, my love. Can’t you be more careful? The insurance won’t keep paying. I mean, it’s fine. But just try, please?’
    Now Marina feels even worse. Her problems are manifold. For a start, she isn’t in love with Guy, although he is quite nice to her, so perhaps she is incapable of passion like a psychopath. It’s not even because he’s younger, though obviously that adds to her self-disgust. She is pining so badly for home that she can hardly sleep, but she can’t worry her relatives, and Urs would gloat and say again she was wrong to leave, and there is no one else she can imagine telling. Among the many other incidents she will not think about, buried in a pit of fear and shame, is the time she rang the Samaritans last term from the pay phone out by the petrol station, and then, on their advice, went to see the school counsellor: Ma Gilbray, the chaplain’s perpetually smiling wife, with her pearly lipstick and Lady Diana hair. Sitting on a patchwork cushion in the Gilbray family study, Marina remembered a story about the last Combe chaplain, who tape-recorded confessions and played them for laughs in the staffroom, and found it hard to confide.
    The idea of admitting how she feels is unbearable. It is too big, too easily ripped open. Every time she thinks of Cambridge she feels as if she will burst with desire and desperation, and the fear that something will happen to upset the celestial balance, that she will fail to do the one safeguarding thing, makes her sick with fright. She has also become a tiny bit obsessed with washing her hands. So now as well as asthma, or whatever is causing this feeling that she can’t take enough oxygen in, she has given herself eczema. She is the only girl in the Lowers with no idea how to make small talk or flirt; she remains unnicknamed. Doc Ventner won’t let her answer a single question in biology, only the boys in his house and, whenever she asks Doc Steven how long her English essay should be, he says ‘as long as a miniskirt’, which is not helpful. She has never fainted or ridden a bicycle; she doubts that she could climb a tree. She is afraid to swim in case boys see her in her costume. There is no Poetry Society. She is irrelevant.
    Then Guy makes a suggestion.
    It is eight o’clock. Laura and her in-laws have had an early dinner (mushroom palacsinta , cabbage with caraway, which is kukorica , or is that something else? Ladybirds?). And now Rozsi, Zsuzsi and Ildi, over Danish butter biscuits and kavitchka , which definitely means coffee, and a performance of Mozart’s Requiem on Radio Three, are discussing their acquaintances, laughing until they weep. It is happiness, of a sort. ‘ Buto ,’ they say, ‘ chunyo ,’ and Laura smiles weakly; these are words she should know by now. The in-laws take her failure to learn Hungarian very well, like a small physiological malformation. Marina has