To the Devil - a Diva! (4 page)

I was glad she was still alive. That the bombs falling on Manchester hadn't taken her away. That she was still living a quiet, single life in the house that now seemed to me like somewhere I knew from a dream. She listed the streets that had been ruined and the homes that were now just rubble. All the ones with bay windows were gone. That was where our arch-enemies lived. The ones who thought they were better than us. Those girls were homeless now. They'd have to live in the gutter. When I showed this letter to Katy she laughed like a drain.

Nothing ever came from Katy's mam. We'd hear that my
mam had gone round to see her, but she never got much sense out of Mrs MacBride. She was sitting up in her bed and the sheets weren't clean. The room smelt of gin and she had some mangy old cat sitting there with her, and the cat had sores all around its neck. Mam thought Katy's mam was losing her way. You didn't even see gentlemen going round there these days. Katy listened to the news but she kept her lip buttoned. Never made any comment at all.

‘Well my darling I must go now and get on with things,' was how Mam always rounded off her letters. ‘I hope that you are being good and well-behaved for Mr and Mrs Figgis and that you are not showing your old mam up. You stick in with your lessons and learn all your three rs like I never did. You have got to get away from living in places like weve alway had to live in Sally. You arnt to be Sally from the back ally like in the song now arent you love (ha ha). Well enough from me now with everlasting love your mother.'

‘Your mam sounds a bit daft in these letters,' Katy sneered. I'd walked in on her in our room one day. She had them all out on my bed and she'd been reading them, holding them up close to her face. I was really cross. She'd been in the special box where I kept them, all tied up. I'd written ‘private' on the box and Katy had waited till I was busy – out on the mangle in the back yard – before diving and going through all my business. My arms were aching and the front of my dress was soaked with sudsy water and I just saw red. I flew at her and next thing we knew we were rolling about on the bare boards of the attic room. Screeching and spitting and yanking at each other's hair.

‘You fucking little bitch!' Katy kept shouting, right into
my face as she wrenched my hair. ‘They're only letters! They're just letters!'

It was the first time I'd ever fought back. I'd shocked her and I'd shocked myself. She'd bitten her tongue and, when she shouted, she was spitting blood all over my face and panting hot, frightened breaths at me. Soon we were covered in fluff off the floor and each other's blood and sweat. We tired each other out scrapping and no one came running to see what the noise was. Eventually we lay apart, winded and still, trying to breathe.

I said, ‘My mam isn't daft.'

Katy didn't answer. She rolled over and spat blood on the floor. She looked at me murderously from under her fringe.

‘She's been good to you, Katy. And she goes round to see your mam. Keeps an eye out for her.'

Katy grunted. ‘People shouldn't bother.'

‘You shouldn't have gone through my things,' I said.

‘I'll go through what I want.'

Then she stood up, smoothed down her dress, and was gone.

Katy must have felt like she could say what she wanted about my mam and what she had written to me because we were both improving so much in our own schoolwork. Before we'd left Manchester I'd only been OK with my letters and my numbers and Katy could hardly hold a pencil. We'd been in a class of nearly fifty in our old school and so we hadn't had much encouragement. That was just how it was. But here in Kendal, under the care of the Figgises, everything had changed. We were tutored at home by Isla herself, at the dining room table. We both had these exercise books with
smooth creamy pages and thin blue lines drawn in. They looked like they came from the last war, but they were fresh, untouched inside. We wrote with proper pens, dipping them in a bottle of red ink.

That's what I remember most about those peaceful afternoons, learning our letters. The clink and dab of metal nibs in the bottle of ink. The crackle of the fire and that heady scent of woodsmoke. Isla being all teacherly and the sternest we ever saw her: she would hover at our shoulders and check what we were writing.

She was a brilliant teacher. Though we were sure we were learning about things they never taught at proper school. This was more exciting stuff. We copied out her recipes for her. We made lists of names and bits of things in what I think was Latin or really old English. And then our tiny aunt would heft down some of Uncle Michael's old books (With him not there! The idea thrilled us both) and she would make us copy out passages that left us baffled. Our favourite was a bestiary, which Isla said meant a book of beasts. We had to write down descriptions of these creatures and instructions on how to tame them, or to kill them or to banish them safely to another land. What I liked doing best was copying out the drawings of them in bloody red ink. I was painstaking. My beasts were the best. Much better than Katy's, who had no patience.

One day Katy asked Isla (we were both drawing a basilisk: some awful serpent thing with goggling eyes): ‘Where did you learn to be a teacher, Aunt Isla? Where did you go to school?'

I looked up then from my own work to study our aunt. The nib dripped red blots on my page, but I didn't notice
that until I looked down again. For the moment I was transfixed – we were both transfixed – by the dreamy look in Isla's eyes.

‘North of here,' she said softly. ‘Not too far. It was an old school, not there anymore. A special place. Our parents wanted Michael and me to have the very best education.'

‘A posh school!' Katy laughed. ‘Like where all the nobs go?'

‘Not posh,' Isla smiled, fluffing out her hair. ‘No money was paid. But not everyone could go. Just certain people's children. It was a sort of secret, really.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it was a bit out of the ordinary and people mightn't have approved,' she said. Katy and I exchanged a quick glance.

‘Did you have to live there, or did you come home each night?'

‘Oh,' smiled Isla. ‘We both lived there all the years of our childhood. From five till we were sixteen.'

We were shocked. ‘And you never saw your mam or dad?'

‘They came sometimes. The school would have a lovely open day twice a year. At the solstices. We would have a fete and a special celebration. It was wonderful.'

We sat quietly, listening to the fire, staring at her.

‘There was acres of fields to play in. We lived in this huge big house. There were no set times or classes. We ran wild, really. Completely wild, and that was the idea, that we would learn most by doing exactly what we wanted. There was a big iron sign at the entrance, at the bottom of the drive, and that's what it said in these huge letters, hammered out of
iron: ‘Do What Thou Wilt Be The Whole of the Law.' Aunt Isla looked at us both. ‘That's a line from William Blake.'

We knew who William Blake was, by now.

‘All schools should be like that,' said Katy. ‘Doing what you want.'

‘People are scared of that,' nodded Isla. ‘They think children should be controlled and told what to think. Michael says that destroys their natural talent, all their natural desires. It makes everybody the same and the passion goes out of them.'

We never really understood. How could we?

‘Michael says that, while we have the care of you two, we must think of it as a blessing, since we have no children of our own. We should teach you the ways we would have brought up our own. We have been lent you. And we have to do right by you.'

‘You have been very good to us,' I said automatically.

Aunt Isla suddenly looked very sad. Suddenly very much older. We were used to her being light, dancing about the place. ‘You will have to go home soon enough. We will lose you. You'll be back in that city.'

We went quiet at that. Any mention of home made us shiver hot and cold. Michael had slipped into the room behind us. For a big man he could really creep about.

‘So we have to make the best of the time,' he said. ‘Train you up to live a proper life and teach you the ways while you're still here. This is a rare chance you've got, girls.'

I looked from him to Isla, to Katy and back again. There was something very strange in the air. It was just like we were waiting for bombs to fall and we sat there suspended. Exactly like in Mam's letters, when she said you can hear
that evil whistling from a long way away. And it gets closer and you pray it won't hit. But she also said that it was worse if you heard nothing at all. That's when the bombshell hit you out of the blue. That's when you bought it and your number was up.

Well, that dining room was silent just then. It was as if an obscure offer had been made. Michael's eyes were wide and his mouth stayed open, a thread of saliva stretched between his lips. Aunt Isla was apprehensive – as, I realised suddenly, she often was in her brother's presence. But Katy was looking very sure of herself, both arms resting on the table across her exercise book, her shoulders squared and resolute.

‘I want to learn,' she said, nodding firmly. ‘I want to learn about it all.'

The Figgises nodded and smiled back at her, Michael first and then – perhaps more tentatively – Aunt Isla.

Of course I was having all sorts of dreams and waking up with the screaming ab-dabs. Hard enough just being away from home, hard enough thinking of Mam in the city, but all this funny stuff going on as well: it played on my mind. Those creatures we drew out of the old bestiary went lumbering and romping through my dreams. It was the basilisk clumping down the cobbles of our street. It was his fiery breath that did for our house. Wheeling and screeching through the smoky dark air came the demons: their leathery hides and vicious wings picked out by the searchlights over Salford.

I'd wake up screaming and, more often than not, Katy would be there to administer her brusque care for me. She whispered fiercely and reminded me where we were. We
were safe. We were in the Figgises' house. I wasn't so sure anymore. I felt there was something in the atmosphere of that place that was seeping and silting into my brain. They were grinding something up, chopping it fine, and sprinkling it into our late night hot milk, our breakfast powdered egg, that bloody beetroot soup of theirs. Bit by bit they were taking us over: the Figgises and whatever worked through them.

‘They'll take us off to hell,' I found myself saying, all breathless and tousled, to Katy one night.

She laughed at me.

Sometimes when I woke and the dark attic room was spinning around – and then it settled and I realised I'd just been ejected from my latest lurid dream – she wasn't there. Her bedclothes had been cast to the floor. The imprint of her body was there on the sheet and the mattress, the shape of her head on the pillow. But no Katy. This happened once or twice every week, I soon realised.

I once stepped outside of the room to see where she had gone. The painted boards were freezing on the soles of my feet. I stood out on the landing and there was nothing to see and nothing to hear but the ticking and clicking of the old house's bones. No sign of Katy. But in the morning, there she'd be again, large and bold as life. Jumping out of bed, dashing across to the jug and the bowl to wash the cobwebs out of her eyes. She'd become cleaner and she'd become more confident. There was a new life in her, a new eagerness. Better behaviour, too.

I'd lie there and watch her, the candlewick bedspread pulled modestly up to my chin. She'd have been sleeping starkers and that surprised me. She stood with her back
to me, scrubbing at her skin with cold water. She was bright pink, flushed with life and blood. Her hair had this marvellous sheen to it. She was growing. When she turned to look at me you could see her breasts were coming. She had no modesty.

Something else I saw, when she went skipping out of bed like that, full of the joys of spring. Her feet were dirty, and all up her shins. She was black with mud from outside.

‘What were you doing outside?' I asked her, more than once. ‘Why were you out there in the middle of the night?'

She laughed again. ‘You don't want to know, Sally,' she said. ‘You said you didn't. So you'll never know, will you?'

And that was an end to it. I thought all of this was just part of the mysteries. The usual kinds of mysteries that seem to be everywhere when you're growing up. One day she hopped out of bed and she had blood on her fingers, and some on her chin. I didn't say anything. I shrieked. I thought she'd started her monthlies. But why on her fingers? Her mouth?

Katy just washed herself. Didn't tell me anything. She cleaned herself meticulously, like a cat, every particle of herself scrubbed clean in the morning. She had suddenly become very proud of who she was. Who she was in the process of turning into.

And I suppose I was feeling very left out.

I knew the city was a wicked place really, but I was still longing to get back. One day, some day soon I would be sent back to Manchester, to Salford, and to my mam. The Figgises would have to release me from their warm, fierce protection and I'd never have to swallow down any more of their curious potions.

Perhaps that bloom of health and clean-living that was so clearly and rosily apparent there in my face – perhaps it would wither and die. I would be a pale slum child all over again. I'd have bad bones, skinny legs, lank hair, the lot. Just as I'd had before. Just like everyone else we knew at home. But at least I would be at home.

The place had taken on mythical proportions for me. I read Mam's sporadic letters like they were fairytales and I dreamt about our back lanes and about helping Mam and the fire wardens, putting out flames in the watches of the night. I'd have my own tin hat and a gas mask. I'd be with people of my own sort.