Free Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam Page B

fair and wore a blue coat for chemistry, a green one for biology, and thrilling twin sets for assembly. She had quite a front and was said to have had a fiancé who was lost in the Western Isles, so now she was dedicated to science. I did quite good imitations of Miss Lindsay saying, ‘If the surface of the Earth was six inches deep in sand, the number of grains would not yet equal the number of molecules of matter constituting a milk bottle.’ Atoms came in the next form up. Was that, I wonder now, so only the girls who were ready for it would learn of the divisibility even of the atom?
    ‘Don’t look now,’ said Anne, nudging me, and rolling her eyes up. Starting from the shiny tiles, I saw two pairs of feet, one hairy, one smooth. Looking further up, I saw the flat modesty apron of an older lady’s bathing costume, pulled over wide hips. I was above looking at the parallel part of her companion, so up I looked. Miss Lindsay! She was arm in arm with a man, a man about as old as my father, well, old, anyhow. She was staring into his face and some red hair was coming out of her hat.
    ‘How rude,’ said Anne and I’d to agree. We stared as hard as we could and felt horribly let down. They slipped into the water at 6’, separating to do so. It was three o’clock and time for the new waves, our last of this afternoon. We weren’t that thrilled any more. So, Miss Lindsay was not dedicated to science. We watched her and the man. This man would never be lost in the Western Isles, he was too noisy and hairy for that. His head burst out of the top of each wave like a dog’s, hers beside it, pink and laughing. We were glad that we would never be interested in men, being committed to a life of seeking something very important, separating it from its baser element, like Madame Curie with the pitch-blende. We bobbed and floated, but I, for one, was above all this now.
    There was a furious yell, and all four lifeguards rushed to the deep end, white clothed and muscly on morticians’ feet. ‘Here, yous, that’ll do, ye can git oot if there’s ony mair o’ that, d’ye hear me the noo?’
    Miss Lindsay and the man were very red in the face. He patted her and said, ‘There, there.’ She ducked her face into his neck as though she were a child waiting to be carried to bed, and gave him a great smile, her face shining. She looked more naked than the girl in the earrings had done. She did not look a bit rude.
    I’d lost my taste for getting rescued by now.
    ‘When these waves are over, shall we get the bus?’ said Anne.
    ‘Uh huh,’ I said, a noise my mother said was as Scots as ‘Em’ for ‘Um’.
    When we’d had the compulsory shower and I’d wrung out my pigtails, we rolled our costumes in our towels like Swiss rolls and went off to wait at the bus stop by the shingle. There was a drunk old woman crying on the sea wall; she had a Shetland collie at her side, all nerves and petticoats. Mandy was a Sheltie, so Anne stroked the dog, though our mothers frequently told us not to touch strange dogs.
    ‘Oh look at the two of yes, a lifetime to go, two wee girruls and a’ they years tae love.’ She smelt. Her hair was in a red and yellow Paisley scarf in the bitter wind. The white sunshine showed her blue cheeks and the scum on her teeth. ‘Pain and grief and the vale of tears and it’s no go the merry-go-round and ma gude man dead in his chair with his pipe in his teeth and the teeth sae clampit they’ tae cut it oot Oh Christ and whaur’s the sense two wee girruls tell me that and I’ll gie yes the bus ride aye and the moon and stars an’ a.’
    Anne was all right, because she could look very hard at the dog. She gentled its allsort nose in her hand and looked out to the grey sea with its real waves. Her hair was drying back to white. The wind smelt of salt and the bleach from the baths, the old woman of pee and dirt and drink. My mother said the crones in the Canongate drank a mixture of meths and Brasso,