Free Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

came from there smelled of wee and wore one another’s clothes. They didn’t have real mothers, only aunties.
    This knowledge I had of Gerry lodged in me like a stone. It didn’t make me like him any better. It seemed an extra twist to how arbitrarily he and I were fastened together: I had to bear the burden of his childhood sorrows too. He had done heroically well, working his way up at the Board Mill, overcoming the handicap of his beginnings (his mother hadn’t been ‘able to look after him’). I was determined not to care. My own selfishness seemed to eat me up; I worked at being oblivious of all my advantages. I ran away from home and went to Nana’s. (‘Your mother’s been out of her mind with worry.’) Out at the stumps with Madeleine, I smoked cigarettes and threw up. I told my mother I was only happy at the stables. Madeleine came riding with me, bouncing unconvincingly on Boy, her smile uneasy, double chin squeezed in the too-tight strap of the brand-new hard hat Pam had bought her. She held her nose and pretended to retch when the ponies dropped their dung.
    I hated the High School. Madeleine and I hated it together, though differently. Her face, wiped clear of guile, goaded one or two of the more savage teachers who mistook her blankness for insolence. At first it seemed that I had the gift of invisibility. I sank back into the middle of the range of achievement. I kept my mouth shut in class and out of it. I absorbed obsessively the intricate system of their prohibitions, so as not to attract attention by transgressing – no fewer than five lace-holes in our outdoor shoes, no green ink, all textbooks to be covered in brown paper, girls not to use the toilet in twos (in junior school we had often crowded three or four into the little cubicles, to gossip). By the end of the first week I knew that I’d found my way, through some terrible error, into enemy territory where I must as a matter of life or death keep my true self concealed. The school was a mill whose purpose was to grind you into its product. Every subject shrank to fit inside its exam questions; even – especially – the books we read in English lessons. We were supposed to be grateful, having been selected for this grinding; and most of the girls were grateful. Madeleine and I didn’t fit in. Our tree cult revived and garnered new passionate power through being driven into opposition – with our bark fragments in our pockets we were like Catholic recusants fingering hidden rosaries, and we had a code of words and signs to communicate our refusal and our mockery.
     
    Meanwhile my mother began wearing looser dresses. It wasn’t the fashion for parents to explain themselves to their children. Mum never told me she was pregnant; only hinted at a significant change coming. I was slow to the point of stupidity in picking up her suggestions. Why was she putting her feet up every evening after supper, while Gerry and I did the dishes in competitive silence? Some conspiracy surrounded her, which I recoiled from as if I guessed it had humiliation in it for me. One Saturday morning, watching from my bedroom window while she hung out washing on the metal clothes tree in the garden (turfed at least by this time, if not yet the little paradise of planting it later became under Gerry’s green-fingered stewardship), I saw what I had not allowed myself to see: the wet sheets billowed like fat sails filled with the wind, and she billowed too. Ducking out of sight behind my window, so that she wouldn’t know I knew, I crouched around my discovery in the tight space between the bed leg and the dolls’ cot, with my back to the pink-sprigged wallpaper I had chosen and Gerry had cut and pasted and put up. (I picked at the edges of this paper sometimes, where he wouldn’t notice it, when I was in bed at night; sometimes I spat into the gap beside the bed and let my saliva trickle down the wall.)
    My mother had betrayed herself, pretending to be complete