A Tiny Bit Marvellous (6 page)

Dora

Things I hate about me:

Am fat.

FAT face, fat nose, fat neck, fat ears, fat eyes, fat belly, fat arms, fat hips, fat thighs, the fattest knees in the whole sixth form, fat calves, fat feet, fat toes. Only thing not fat is hair, and that’s like the only thing I actually want, is fat hair.

Am ugly.

Eyes not level and far too small. Scar above eyebrow from falling off scooter. Disgusting spots. Dandruff. Teeth uneven and yellow however much I brush them. Eight chins. Neck looks like a foreskin. I think. Haven’t actually ever seen a real one. Arms look like an old fat retired wrestler’s arms. With cellulite all over. Tits too small and face outwards. Nipples not even and look like dried apricots. Could never EVER show them. Torso too long for leg length. Really disgusting middle bit looks like three ugly people’s middles sellotaped together. Could never show. Fanny – like, so revolting. Looks like I bought it off the deli counter. Can’t believe that’s normal. Too many flaps. Could NEVER show anyone. Tree trunk legs with no shape. Shins are weird colour, spotty red and white. Feet are huge and more like flippers than feet. Small toe curls under, hardly there. Hands, fingers, nails – deformed.

Have hair everywhere.

Am like Mexican werewolf-boys. Eyebrows too thick and each hair too long. Hair on sides of face like Mr Darcy. Hair on top lip. Small thin hair under chin. Hair in nostrils. Hair underarms in repulsive clumps. Small hair on arms. Hair on fanny – grows sideways and made of iron. Hair in bum crack! Not much, but there. Oh God I am vile. Not human. Hair on legs, full length. Hair on toes. Like hobbits. All above hair shaved on daily basis with Dad’s sharp razor. Mum says to wax but like can’t wait that long for it to grow. Hair all over me. Made of hair.

Skin.

Dry skin on knees, elbows, scalp, feet.

Oily skin on whole face.

Eczema elbows, knees, back of knees.

Spots – whole face, back.

Scabs – scalp, one on arm, two on legs.

Porridge-cellulite – belly, legs, tops of arms.

Colour – mostly pale grey-ish or bright red. Except fanny – weirdly brown and purple.

Hair on head – normally disgusting brown and curly.

Has blonde highlights but they look shit and can’t afford to get them done as often as I need so roots grow through and look sooooo like chavvy. Have clip-in extensions but they are different colour and get matted and look wrong. Blonde dye has made it go all dry so won’t go right in the straighteners or in the giant rollers. Just sits on head and looks like a long dry disgusting hair hat or something. Can’t even put it up coz then you see brown bits underneath. So completely disgusting that I have to hide it all under a woolly cap. Conclusion – I am a vile disgusting Gollum girl. No wonder I haven’t got a boyfriend. Even I wouldn’t go out with me.

I am hateful.

Hideous.

Ugly.

A Tiny Bit Marvellous

Oscar

Though Mother is a thoroughly good woman, it has lately come to my attention that she may not be best acquainted with a little friend I like to call ‘taste’. She has entirely failed to note the dazzling beauty of the brightest star in all God’s firmament, who just happens to be working in her office. My mother can now be officially registered as aesthetically blind deaf and dumb.

Poor dear wretch. She will miss so much. I fear she will simply be looking the other way whilst life displays its glories to her in all its splendid magnificence. She will die having lived the most tawdry of lives. It is naught but tragedy, especially since her advancing years indicate that she doesn’t have much time left to arrest this lamentable spiral. Her life will have been a series of dull and colourless episodes. One following another, like the chimes of doom. Ding. Ding. Dong.

No matter. I have come up with the most inventive of plans, and poor dear dull Mama has no inkling of my cunning devices. I have offered my services to George, to voluntarily do some ‘filing’. I’m not really sure what this task involves, but I have heard Mama mention the practice. I fancy I’ve heard her refer to various gap-year students in the past being employed thus to do. George was his usual affable self and said I could come in next week after school on Tuesday. Tuesday! Oh, Tuesday. Please be my ‘good news day’. Please bring me into the orbit of my beloved, so that we might circle each other in the same constellation. Let Mother’s office be the galaxy wherein I am the earth and he is the sun.

What to wear? I need to appear casually dashing. Elegant, without the slightest apparent effort. I can’t believe that at our first encounter he witnessed me in school uniform. It is so dreadfully unflattering and appallingly dull. The school rules prevent me from personalizing it too much, although I occasionally slip a jaunty pochette in my blazer top pocket and if I spy a fresh bloom that matches en route to school (I carry miniature shears for that very purpose), all the better. Thus far I haven’t been reprimanded for my attempt at élan but I was thrust into ‘uniform detention’ for the seemingly heinous crime of wearing a mauve shirt and a braided waistcoat on speech day. I was helpless to resist it. The thought of going up on the stage to collect my ‘best reader’ certificate and book voucher attired in nothing but the mandatory, dreary grey slacks, white shirt and green blazer of the indescribably unimaginative uniform, filled me with dread. What would people think? That I am some kind of automaton, a drone who falls in line? On such an auspicious occasion? An occasion that begs to be honoured with colour and flair. Those are my two mistresses, along, of course, with the great master – style. There isn’t a single authority at school who would deter me from these, my true teachers, my gurus.

I think I will choose my white linen shirt with the ruffles on the front, and my yellow check slacks. The ensemble will appear casual but, at the same time, mischievous. He will be compelled to notice me but he won’t quite know why. All kick pleats, French cuffs, bustles, trains and tiaras can bide a while in my box of tricks. For use later, when the fly is on the web. For now, subtlety must be my keyword, as I journey ever on, ever closer to my North Star. My Noel.

Speaking of dressing, and how to do it appropriately, today heralded a new low in Dirty Dora’s panoply of distasteful attire. The floozy cretin came into the drawing room sporting a clinging pink T-shirt, intended by all accounts for a four-year-old child. The shape of it was entirely artless, grabbing viciously at her bosoms, and displaying her mass of wobbling stomach flesh. Across her chest was emblazoned the startling fluorescent logo, announcing her to be a ‘Porn Star’. Charming. Not only is it sordid, it’s supremely inaccurate. Dippy Dora could out-virgin Mary.

A Tiny Bit Marvellous

Mo

Parents’ Evening at Dora’s school was on Monday. Same at Oscar’s (still finding it hard to call him that) school on Wednesday. The two experiences were polar opposites as always.

It becomes increasingly apparent to me that the education we offer our kids is a game with unfair rules. If you play by the unfair rules, you are a success like Oscar, but if you are a person for whom the rules are not only unfair but impenetrable, like Dora, you are a failure. There doesn’t seem to be a system which measures personal growth or personal achievement. Uniform, standard measurements are all. You pass or you fail each exam. If you were previously ‘failing’ spectacularly but now you are ‘failing’ by only a little bit, it doesn’t matter. You are failing. That’s all. The exam system doesn’t commend you for improving. I have been apoplectic with rage after every one of Dora’s Parents’ Evenings for seven years now. I can identify and attribute individual indelible furrows on my brow to each year. I’m waiting to watch the seventh rut appear … like a branding, which is code for ‘frustrated parent’.

Dora’s school, Brook’s Meadow, is a supposedly friendly, arty, sporty school. The reason we chose to move her there for the sixth form at ENORMOUS bloody expense, was because Dora was in hell at her previous school. We know Dora isn’t an academic kid, but actually I believe she is more intellectually gifted than she or the school gives her credit for. She learned very early on that if you plod through the school process a little slower than your peers, if you are a tub gurnard, a bottom feeder, eventually teachers tire and you are left behind. This system can provide a haven for the idle as well as the unclever.

I think Dora is more of the former than the latter because on occasion, when truly motivated and interested, she has made the elementary blunder of opening the curtain around her brain treasure, allowing us to peek inside momentarily, and see just how much shiny stuff she’s got stored there. It’s quite a stash, actually. If you are ignorant, you don’t ever have the ability to let your treasure glitter, but if you are hidden, like her, it’s there all along. It is the duty, and should surely be the pleasure, of her teachers to locate it and help her display it.

Occasionally, very rarely, I have been able to creep in, and she has allowed me to momentarily witness her collection. It’s at these times I am overwhelmed with pride. Not so much at what she has there, but at her courage to show it, even to me. Because she knows through experience that what she’s got probably won’t be enough. That’s what has happened again and again, so she chooses the route of light-hiding and bushel. It is comfortable and familiar there, and strangely offers her, as a bonus, a place of higher social status. The position of outsider, the supposedly dangerous and fearless rebel. It is cool to be in either the anorexics’ tribe or the couldn’t care lesses’.

How she accomplished ANY GCSEs at all at her old school I don’t know, and actually that is testament to how fundamentally clever she is. I don’t think anyone at that school appreciated what strength it took for her to even turn up on the exam days. She was entering the firing range as far as she saw it, as the target, confronting exams which had a steady aim. But she went, and each morning when I dropped her at the school on exam days, her inner conflict was evident: attend and fail? Or abscond and fail? Absconding carried more credibility and came with the added bonuses of assumed control and power. Attending meant losing face by admitting that you do, after all, care about the outcome.

And look at the outcome! She passed four of them. Yes, C grades, but passes – and she goes and manages an A star for her art! Utterly incredible. Thank goodness in that particular instance, for her observant and sympathetic art teacher, Ray, who noticed that she was attempting to sabotage her grade by refusing to hand in her coursework, a project about fathers containing a beautiful pop art portrait of Husband. She had worked so hard on it, yet she felt it had little or no merit. She predicted failure. Even of something so obviously good.

So, this was the Dora we took along to Brook’s Meadow. We told them she was seriously melting down to the point of vanishing, and they convinced us that this was ‘exactly the kind of kid they welcomed’. The Head assured her that this was her opportunity to reinvent herself, to show herself and to participate fully, should she choose. I know she was excited at the prospect of becoming this whole new, motivated ‘achiever’, and we had to get behind her positivity, but I also knew in my heart it would be difficult to pull it off overnight. She would have to shake off the habits of a lifetime. A short lifetime, but an entire lifetime nevertheless.

We stood helplessly by as she fought them all for her first year, retreating into the same old patterns of behaviour, hell bent on self-destruction. She was endlessly in detention. Detentions she refused to turn up for, eliciting further detentions. Which she didn’t turn up for … and on … and on. The teachers were pulling their hair out and called us to various excruciating meetings to discuss it. Husband was my saviour at these. He steered me through, nice and steady, whenever I was prepared to rant, defend, overexplain, or just cry at the sadness and the hopelessness of it all. At one point, I felt his calming hand on my arm when Mr King asked if we thought Dora could ‘even achieve the lowest levels we accept at our school?’ There was the rub, right there – ‘our school’. Not Dora’s school, their school. Where Dora wasn’t that welcome, perhaps? Didn’t really belong? Didn’t fit?

Husband would constantly remind me that this was just school, that Dora didn’t legally even have to be there any more, that in the end what mattered was her happiness. He kept repeating ‘she is fit and healthy. She is not a drug addict. She is not an alcoholic. She is not pregnant. She is beautiful. You are beautiful. Everything’s beautiful. Shut up.’ He was, unusually, right.

And in any case, these past few months I’ve been heartened to spot real changes in Dora. She goes to school willingly every day. Unheard of. How can I explain to them that in Dora world, a Herculean attempt is in progress, that she is really trying, in her own reluctant, grumpy way, to take part in life. To invite herself in from the cold. To include herself. From our point of view, this is a seismic shift and we are hanging out the bunting to celebrate. In fact, I decided to make some bunting myself and send it to the rather sardonic Mr King, her Head of Year, to encourage him to also celebrate her astonishingly few attendances rather than admonish her for her failure-fuelled withdrawals.

So finally here we are, in her last year, and Dora has given up the fighting and is much more engaged. Better late than never. I sort of wish she could start again at Year 7 and this time believe that school isn’t a hell where demons perpetually prod you with hot irons called SATs. Or exams. Or coursework. Coursework has replaced leggings at number two in my list entitled ‘Things that are unnecessary, evil and plain wrong’.

Anyway, enough bile. Dora’s Parents’ Evening was the usual joyless standing about, waiting your turn to be slightly patronized by a series of various Gorgons and dragons. Of course, for me in particular, there is always an added pressure. I am a kid-shrink. They teach kids. It goes one of two ways:

Their utter delight and schadenfreude about the fact that I have an imperfect kid. A kid I can’t ‘save’ or ‘treat’. They savour that. That’s a lovely chewy treat.

OR

They feel threatened by my analysis of the way they misunderstand my kid. In other words, they think I can psychobabble my way up my own arse. They believe I overthink my kid and her problems.

Probably a bit of both is quite accurate, but a lot is NOT. When it comes to Dora and Parents’ Evenings, I am just her mum, and that’s what renders me helpless with emotion. I can’t bear for her to be attacked. I definitely take it too personally, because I see the effect their careless undermining has, and I feel it for her.

It wasn’t as bad as it’s been before. The usual lemon lips and rather pitying tone from most, but they had to acknowledge that she was putting in more effort than before to the A levels. The labyrinthine complicatedness of deciding which subject to do only ’til AS level, and which to continue on with totally baffles me, as it does every other parent.

Eventually Husband and I were both repeating the simple phrase ‘I see’ just to make them stop explaining. We don’t ‘see’ at all. Dora and the teachers will have to make those decisions. As long as she keeps up her art and gets the grades she needs to get into the uni she fancies, I don’t mind. Currently she is thinking of going to Manchester Metropolitan to do Food Tech. That’s fine by me. Cooking. Yes please. At home, she has only ever made one omelette – with an unfortunate anchovy filling – but if she thinks this is her destiny, so be it.

The five-minute window we had with her music teacher was revealing.

‘Hi there, Mr and Mrs …’

He looked down at his list, scanning furiously:

‘Battle. Ah yes, the lovely Dora. What a friendly, very musically talented girl.’

Husband chipped in with, ‘Yes. We think so.’

I shot him a do-shut-up glance, which worked.

‘This term, Dora’s set have been asked to compose an original song. Dora was slightly late with hers but she did do it. So let’s not forget a big hurray for that. Hurray!’

We were transfixed by the sheer optimism of the chap.

‘Admittedly the song is a tiny bit … how should I put it folks? … erm … bland. Yes, a bit, generic, with lots of “ooo baby’s” in it, like they do, ha ha, erm, but it certainly shows promise, so a big whoa for that. Whoa! Yes, bags of promise, that is, until verses two and three, which go as follows:

Sweet dreams are made of this

Who are we to disagree?

Travel the world and the seven seas

Everybody’s looking for something.

Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to get used by you

Some of them want to abuse you

Some of them want to be abused.’

He wondered whether we thought it sounded at all familiar? Just a bit, we agreed. He then pointed out that, even as an exercise in plagiarism it was pretty shabby. She had only bothered to change the words ‘am I’ to ‘are we’ in the second line. I’m guessing that she will have probably been distracted by Cash in the Attic on the telly and not really bothered.

Husband and I had a large drink in the pub afterwards and couldn’t help laughing all the way home. Oh Dora. How we love you in all your splendid naivety.

Oscar’s Parents’ Evening at St Thomas’s couldn’t have been more different. He has had a few detentions, mainly for abusing the school uniform rules, or being a bit too precocious and cocky in his handling of some of the lesser-experienced teachers. His choices are spot-on though; he always successfully identifies the tossers as wankers. We had to agree on that. His judgement is sharp and accurate. He can sniff out anyone disingenuous or pretentious. He confounds them really. He is a true eccentric and as such he is unique, so the system doesn’t have a comfortable place for him. They would love to be rid of him really, he is a bit of an eyesore, an embarrassment, but they can cope with that, because he’s clever. He is on target for all A stars and he is their champion chess boy, public-speaking hero and quiz king. They can’t afford to lose him. Their stats wouldn’t look so good. So he is forgiven everything, whilst Dora is forgiven nothing. Repulsive.

A Tiny Bit Marvellous