The Outside Child

I am an outside child. That is what Plato Jones calls me.

Plato is my best friend in the world, even though I am a bit ashamed to be seen with him sometimes. He is a year younger than I am, only twelve, and small and thin for his age. He wears braces on his teeth that make him spit when he talks, and huge, goggly glasses, and he can’t run or play games because of his asthma. He says, “Only another outside child would put up with me.” He says we are both like the Bisto Kids—raggedy kids in an old advertisement, standing out in the cold and peering in through a window at a warm kitchen where someone’s mother is cooking.

My mother is dead. She died just after I was born, and because my father is a marine engineer, away at sea most of the time, Aunt Sophie and Aunt Bill (whose name is Wilhemina) looked after me. They are my father’s second cousins and their mothers were twin sisters who died on the same day. In our family, the mothers die early.

This sounds as if it could be a sad story. But I am not a sad person, though sometimes people think that I ought to be. Like the smiling lady who came from the court when I was adopted. She asked lots of questions and she smiled as she asked them and smiled as I answered. She was trying to find out if I really wanted to be adopted by Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie.

She said, “Wouldn’t you like to live in a proper family, Jane? A family with a Mummy and Daddy?”

I was seven years old. I thought it was silly for her to say
Mummy
and
Daddy
as if I were still a baby. I said, “I can’t, can I? My mother is dead and my father is busy.”

“I know that, Jane dear,” she said. She had stopped smiling and was looking so serious that I wanted to giggle.

I knew that I mustn’t. I stared at her, making my eyes go out of focus so that her face became blurry. I said, “I’m quite happy as I am, thank you.”

“Child’s not a fool,” Aunt Bill said, and laughed the loud, barking laugh that meant she was nervous. She has a round, flat face like a dinner plate and it was suddenly shiny and damp as if it had been dipped into water. She had changed out of her jeans and her old fisherman’s smock for this visit, and put on a pretty skirt with purple flowers on it, and a clean, cotton shirt, but she still looked wild as a gipsy, with her thick, curly hair standing up stiff as the garden broom and her bare, knobbly feet a bit dirty.

I saw the adoption lady glance at them—a quick look, not long enough to be rude, but long enough to make me wish Aunt Bill had put a pair of shoes on. Then she said, “Well, you do seem to know your own mind Miss Jane Tucker!”

And although she had started smiling again, I knew she was sorry for me because I wanted to stay with these two funny old ladies.

Aunt Bill is an artist. She paints bright, splashy pictures of fruit and flowers—of all the things, even the weeds, that grow in our garden. Aunt Sophie teaches the piano, and plays the drums in a band. She is very little, shorter than me by the time I was ten: Aunt Bill says she must be the world’s smallest drummer. But she is very fierce and quick; when she is rushing around cooking or cleaning Aunt Bill takes care to keep out of her way. Aunt Sophie won’t let Aunt Bill do a thing in the house because she is so clumsy and slow,
and Aunt Bill won’t let Aunt Sophie touch a single growing thing in the garden. “Too impatient,” she says. “If a plant isn’t doing well, Sophie will grub it up to see why. She’d never think of encouraging it to do better, the way she would a young human creature, a child at the piano.”

Aunt Bill encourages her plants. “There, little darling,” she says as she pricks out a seedling. “Push out your roots and make yourself comfy.”

If Aunt Sophie hears her, she purses her mouth and rolls her eyes up to Heaven. But she doesn’t often hear what other people say unless she is actually having a conversation with them: most of the time she is too busy listening to the music playing inside her head. Like someone with an invisible Walkman.

Writing this down makes them both seem pretty weird. But I’ve always lived with them, and they seem normal to me. And lots of people are adopted. There’s nothing odd about that. Nothing to put you
outside.
Or not on its own, Plato says.

*

Just after my thirteenth birthday, Aunt Sophie took me to the docks to meet my father’s ship. He is Chief Engineer on a big passenger liner that once went on real voyages to Australia and back again, but since everyone flies nowadays because it is quicker and cheaper, the ship takes people on holiday cruises instead. “A bit of a come-down,” Aunt Bill calls it. “It’s no way to treat a great ship, to turn it into a floating fun palace. Undignified. Rather as if you took a proud and stately old woman and made her caper about in a short frilly dress and a silly hat.”

I know ships are alive to Aunt Bill, just like plants; all the same, I think she is sometimes a bit over-fanciful. It seemed to me, standing on the dock with Aunt Sophie, that my father’s ship was still fine and beautiful as it came slowly in, and the passengers, hanging over the side and waving to their families and friends who had come to meet them,
looked healthy and happy. I said to Aunt Sophie, “I don’t think the ship looks like an old woman, do you?”

“No more than this old woman looks like a ship.” Aunt Sophie tapped her skinny chest with her knuckles. “Turn Bill’s nonsense around and you’ll see it for what it is.” She sniffed. “Arty farty sentimentality. Don’t you let yourself be taken in by it, Jane. Things are just
things.
Nothing like
people.
”

I said, “My father says ships are like women. They like their own way. He calls his ship
she.
”

I was teasing her. Aunt Sophie thinks my father is wonderful. She blushed; her forehead and cheeks and little owlish hooked nose, all went the same sunset pink. She said, “That’s quite different. Your father’s a sailor.”

*

I suppose I think my father is wonderful, too, though I try to hide it. And perhaps now I am older I don’t think he is quite as wonderful as I thought he was that Saturday morning, standing on the dockside with Aunt Sophie and looking for him on the deck.

I couldn’t see him at first and I began to feel dreadfully shaky; my heart banging about and my knees going rubbery. Aunt Sophie took my hand and squeezed it a couple of times without saying anything and that helped a bit. But when I did see him I was too shy to wave. I screwed up my eyes and pretended I couldn’t see very clearly. Aunt Sophie jabbed my ribs with her sharp elbow, “If you’re going blind we’d better go straight to the hospital.”

“I had something in my eye,” I said. “I can feel it’s gone now.”

I felt everyone watching me as I went up the gangway. Aunt Sophie was in front of me and a sliver of petticoat was drooping under her skirt. I worried about that, about whether I should tell her or if it would be more comfortable for her not to know. Then she was at the top, and calling out, “Edward, how
nice
,”
and I heard him laugh as he
swung her up, and set her down on the deck. He was still laughing as he turned to me, but I didn’t want the tail-end of a laugh meant for someone else, so I didn’t smile.

He said, “Why, it’s my favourite daughter!” raising his eyebrows and pretending to be astonished to see me, and I couldn’t help smiling then. He hugged me and kissed me, a bit of a bristly kiss, and held me away, and looked at me carefully; and I looked back at him. He was very brown except for the white lines around his blue eyes where he crinkled them against the sun, and he looked very smart in his gold-braided uniform. I said, “I believe you’ve grown,” which was a joke we had between us from when I was small and thought this was the polite thing to say when you met someone you hadn’t seen for a while, because it was what grown-ups always seemed to be saying to me. He gave me another hug and said that I hadn’t exactly shrunk, but that the only way he was likely to grow at his age, was sideways.

We went to his cabin. The ship had been cruising down the African coast and he had brought us African presents: necklaces and belts and little dolls made of beads; a big blue and white cloth to use as a bedspread or to hang on a wall, and a small African drum made of animal skin. Because he had just missed my birthday he had brought me an especially beautiful present: a pair of delicate storks, each carved out of an antelope horn.

He poured drinks for us—a pink gin for himself, sherry for Aunt Sophie, and a Coke for me. I had never been allowed Coke at home because of my teeth, and I had grown out of liking or wanting it, but he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him.

He and Aunt Sophie started to talk about African music. Aunt Bill says I developed an allergy to music when I was a baby and Aunt Sophie used to take me to gigs with her and keep me beside her in my carry-cot while she thumped away at the drums and percussion. Whatever the cause, African music is not a subject of great interest to me, and so I
went on a tour of inspection around the cabin to see if there was anything new since I had last been there.

There is not much room for change in a cabin because most of the furniture is fixed to the floor so it won’t roll about in a storm. This makes for tidiness, too, and my father’s cabin was always very neat—the dark wood and all the brass fittings polished and gleaming. The bunk bed was made up with clean sheets and a thick, scarlet blanket, the table had a ledge all around it to stop things sliding off, and there were brass clips fixed to the walls to hold the doors still when they were open. My father’s desk was covered with leather that had a wavy band of gold round the edge.

I liked to close my eyes and run my finger along it to feel the shape of the pattern. There were inkwells with brass tops and a brass tray for his pens, and photographs in silver frames. Apart from Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie—Aunt Sophie at her piano, and Aunt Bill on her knees by a flower bed, and squinting up into the camera and laughing—I didn’t know the people in these pictures because most of my father’s family had emigrated years ago, to America, and Australia. But I knew them from their photographs. There were my father’s parents: his mother very pretty and young, with dark hair pulled back, sitting down and holding a fat baby, who was my father; her husband, a tall man with a black moustache, standing beside her and looking down at them both. There was my father’s Uncle Willy, who had been killed in the last war and whose picture had been taken in his army uniform, and his Aunt Alba, Uncle Willy’s sister, who had married an American soldier and gone to live in South Carolina and who had two sons and three daughters. I liked Aunt Alba best of them all. She was plump and jolly-looking and she seemed to be smiling straight at me.

I always said hallo to all these people when I came to see my father—not aloud, just silently, in my head—and
although it sounds stupid, I imagined they knew I was there and that I was one of their family.

Today, there was a new picture. It was of a girl and a smaller boy, both of them younger than I was. Their picture had not been there before—I was sure of that—and yet, somehow, I felt that I knew them. The girl had long, curly hair, and her eyes were screwed up as if she were nervous of having her photograph taken. The boy was laughing straight at the camera, very bold and sweet. One of his front teeth was missing.

I picked up the picture and said, “Who are they?”

My father and Aunt Sophie turned in the same moment. And they both seemed to freeze—as if I had held a frame in a video.

Then my father made a funny sound, half a sneeze, half a cough.

Aunt Sophie said, “Oh, Edward, how careless!”

He looked very bright-eyed; a bit sly and embarrassed. He said, “Sorry …”

Aunt Sophie said, “You’d better explain to her, Edward.”

She looked at him, waiting. But he didn’t speak, only sighed. She said, “Oh, all right!” She turned to me and said in a funny, flat voice, “Their names are Annabel and George. Annabel is your father’s other daughter and George is his son. So they are your half brother and sister.”

*

It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. One minute I was an only child, the next I was a big sister. Of course,
that
was why I had felt that I knew them! Since we were relations we must look a bit alike! Even though my hair wasn’t curly like Annabel’s I knew that I screwed my eyes up sometimes, just as she had done for this picture. And the way George was laughing, his mouth stretched so wide that it pushed up little fat pads on his cheekbones, reminded me of my father.

Perhaps it is strange that I didn’t ask why I hadn’t been told about them before. But I didn’t even wonder about it—or not at that moment. All I wanted just then was to find out all about them; how old they were, and what sort of people, and what they liked doing. My father was slow to answer. He seemed nervous, almost shy of me, suddenly. But after a little he went to his desk and took a photograph album out of a drawer.

Annabel was ten years old, and George was seven. “A young rapscallion,” my father said. “If there’s hot water anywhere, he’ll be the first in it. Leap first and look second, that’s George! Annabel’s more the cautious type. Dreamier. She reads a lot, well ahead of her age in that department her teacher says, but her chief talent is music. She’s doing remarkably well with the French horn.”

He sounded proud, Aunt Sophie looked interested, and I was jealous. Then I remembered that my father had called me his ‘favourite’ daughter. As I had thought that I was the only one, it had just seemed one of his jokes. Now I thought perhaps he had meant it! But I wasn’t sure that I wanted him to like me better than Annabel. I loved her more and more as I looked at her photographs and she looked back at me with her funny, worried smile that she had had ever since she was a round, dimply baby.

I loved George, too. No one could help it. He looked so cheeky and always as if he were just about to do something naughty.
Catch
me
if
you
can,
was what he seemed to be saying in most of his pictures.