fragment 5 (milk, hair, bones, blood)

At school, the boys sang songs.

“Milk, lemonade, chocolate! Milk, lemonade, chocolate!”

As they sang, they pointed to parts of their anatomy.

“Milk!” they shouted, and pointed to their chests.

“Lemonade!” they pointed to their groins.

“Chocolate!” they pointed to their bums.

I understood the lemonade and the chocolate, but the milk I did not understand at all. How did they keep milk in their chests?

I saw a woman with a very small baby sitting in a car. She had her blouse open and the baby was attached to her right breast. I could see the mouth of the child moving. I stared until the woman must have felt me looking at her, and she smiled.

“Susan! It’s very rude to stare like that,” my mother said to me, pulling on my arm.

I turned to look back. The woman had the baby over her shoulder, and was gently, ever so gently, patting his or her back.

“Mummy, what was that lady doing?”

“Feeding her baby.”

“How?”

“I can’t explain it to you now. Wait until we get home.”

“But you’ll forget. Please tell me now.”

“I haven’t got time now. Stop pestering. I’m in a hurry.”

When we got home, I pestered her more.

“How did that lady feed her baby, Mummy?”

“She has milk in her breasts. The baby sucks the milk out.”

“Where did the milk come from?”

“The baby’s mother makes it.”

“How?”

My mother sighed. “Why don’t you look it up in your encyclopedia?”

“Did you feed me like that?” I asked the two mounds under my mother’s jumper.

“No, I didn’t. Not every mother does.”

“Why not?”

“Some ladies can’t, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it hurts too much, or they get sick, or the baby’s sick.”

“Why didn’t you feed me like that, Mummy? Did you get sick?”

She paused for a breath. “Yes. I was sick, dear.” She didn’t look at me.

For many years my parents’ bedroom contained a double bed, a dressing table with mirror, a wardrobe and two bedside tables. And a chair in front of the dressing table for Mum to sit on to do her hair. She would put it in curlers after she had washed it, and walk around the house with a headscarf on. She was always horrified to see women outside, in public, with curlers in their hair.

“Look at her!” she would say. “She looks like a fishwife with those frightful things on her head. She could at least stay indoors. What’s the point in doing your hair at all if you’re going to go around looking like that?”

She had fixed ideas about these things. Hair was one, but dress was another. Men looked best in a suit and tie, and women in something tailored, or a dress. A fitted dress like the Queen wore. I’m not being facetious. She really did like what the Queen wore, but then my Mum liked the Queen, full stop.

My father didn’t have much hair left, even then, so he didn’t need to sit in front of the mirror. He was handsome, my Dad, even in old age, and other women would ‘make eyes at him’. This amused my mother no end.

“Look at her, making eyes at your father! She should try living with him,” she would say in a whisper.

When I was going through my religious phase, just before puberty, I used to pray that the hair under my armpits would disappear. I tried to keep my arms attached to the sides of my body at all times, but that meant the teachers would wonder aloud why I never put my hand up to answer questions in class.

And doing jazz ballet was excrutiating, because the boys would watch and I could hear them saying to each other Look she’s got hairy armpits!

I remember when I was six, at night I used to look at my wardrobe and it would loom out at me, become suddenly huge and threatening, and then everything in the room would do the same, and I would be surrounded by these enormous everyday objects turned into monsters. Or one of my hands would feel bigger than normal, and I would wiggle the fingers and clench my hand into a fist, but it felt like it had turned into a potato or a big sponge mitt.

The other extreme would be that a piece of furniture would disappear into the distance, become tiny and insignificant, but everything else would remain the same.

There I would be, lying in bed, with my furniture turning against me, warping and weaving before my eyes in the dim light coming through the window, unable to do anything except hide underneath the bedclothes and close my eyes.

Then the skeletons would come. Jaws agape, laughing at my fear, chasing me through the house until I resorted to diving under the bed in a futile attempt to escape their clanking forms. The dreams always seemed to end with me cowering with the dust balls, looking at a laughing skull as bony fingers delicately held up the bedspread to peer at me. Nothing else happened. Fear was the main character in these dreams, but I didn’t know that then.

I came home one day from school and there was blood on my bicycle seat. I looked at my thighs and there was more blood, and then I noticed my underpants were blossoming a red rose.

My mother took me aside. I was eleven, and she was shocked.

“I was seventeen when I got my first period! It must be this hot climate. Brings girls on earlier.”

She showed me how to dress up in this pad and chastity belt, and I wondered what exactly was happening to me every month.

“Don’t wash your hair or have a shower while you have your period, Susan. You might get a chill,” was the first advice from my mother. “Sex can be quite exciting,” was the second.

I was not sure what sex had to do with this messy uncomfortable thing that embarrassed me so regularly, but now I realise how much I owe my mother for telling me even that small gem.