Her mother has different faces. Sometimes she has a face like a witch. It is on the back of her head, not the front. Alexa sees it when she walks up the stairs behind her.
In the mornings, when Tonie comes into her bedroom, Alexa pretends to be asleep. Often she is asleep. It is the presence in the room that wakes her up: she feels it through her closed eyes, something warm and soft and attentive, though at first she doesn’t remember what it is. She keeps her eyes shut. She lies still. She thinks her mother will love her better that way. She feels beautiful, lying completely still in her nightdress. She is like a doll. She imagines her mother looking at her and loving her. But at the same time she knows she is pretending.
‘Are you awake?’ Tonie whispers.
There is the tiniest smile on Alexa’s lips. Her mouth wants to twitch at the corners, feeling it. But she stays totally still. She wants her mother to think that she is a girl who smiles in her sleep. The bedclothes rustle beside her. The mattress creaks. Her mother’s hair tickles her face. She kisses Alexa’s cheek. Sometimes Alexa will pretend to wake up then, like a princess waking from her enchantment. She will yawn and stretch her arms, and say, ‘You woke me up,’ in a pretend-sleepy voice.
But sometimes she remains still, smiling, with her eyes shut. She wants to bring her idea, her pretence, to perfection. She wants to fool her mother entirely. There is something she senses she will gain if she succeeds. She waits to receive the kiss. It comes out of the infinite blind distances beyond her eyelids. She never knows quite when it will come. Afterwards she hears her mother softly leave the room. She hears the door close.
When she opens the curtains the day is already in motion, alive, waiting for her to get up. She stands at the window in her nightdress. The sun bursts and bursts again against the glass. The wind is tickling the bare branches of the trees, jiggling them up and down, up and down. A dead leaf twirls past, spinning through space. Alexa watches a tiny airplane stitching a white line across the blue sky overhead. She watches a bird springing amidst the waving branches, alighting and then springing again.
Her father walks with her to school. His feet are next to hers, going along the pavement. His shoes have big frowning creases in them. They wink and frown at her as they walk. They are old and angry and brown, with drooping laces.
‘You need new shoes, Daddy,’ she says.
‘Do I?’ He stops and looks down at them. ‘These are all right, aren’t they?’
‘They’re old. And the laces are too long. They’re dirty.’
‘They can still take me where I need to go,’ he says.
She laughs. She imagines the shoes walking all by themselves, all around the world; something you could hitch a ride on, like a bus.
‘You could attach little rockets to them,’ she says. ‘And wheels.’
‘Rocket-powered shoes,’ he says, and she laughs again.
They reach the road, where the cars come like waves out of the horizon, building and rising and breaking, going over with a roar. They cross to the other side.
‘I can go on my own from here,’ she says.
‘Don’t you want me to come?’
She shakes her head. He bends down and there is his face, in front of hers, the lips puckered in a kiss-shape. Close up his face is complicated. His eyes have tiny paths in them, and there are little valleys all around his mouth and hairs like miniature trees, and the skin is bumpy, detailed, like the surface of the globe in Mrs Flack’s classroom. He kisses her. He lays his hand on the top of her head. She has to turn away from her knowledge of him. She takes a few steps and when she looks back he is smaller. She knows his shape but it is less complicated. He is standing on the pavement. He waves.
Mrs Flack has given out their French exercise books. Alexa turns the pages. She sees her own writing. She sees things she has coloured in. The colouring is a bright little memory; the writing is a message from herself. She loves her exercise books. She loves to see what she has done, what she is. But this book, the French book, gives her a slightly sad feeling. It is the words that are sad. She wrote them and yet they are strangers: they seem to bear some hostility towards the words she knows. They are like mistakes. They make the pictures unfriendly, like certain things in dreams.
She is sitting at a table with Katie. Usually she sits with Maisie or Francesca, but today she came in late from the playground and there was no empty chair except the one next to Katie. Mrs Flack is handing out worksheets now. She goes all around the classroom, sometimes far away, sometimes close. She has yellow hair and her body is made of balls and circles, like the man in the picture made completely of car tyres. Every part of her is completely round. Her face is bright with make-up. She has a nice smell, and when she is nearby Alexa can hear her clothes whispering and hushing, like there are tiny magic voices in the folds. It takes a long time for Mrs Flack to give out the worksheets. Alexa waits. Finally her turn comes. Mrs Flack’s hand with its painted fingernails appears before her eyes and places the worksheet on the table. Alexa twists round, smiles. She wants Mrs Flack to see how good she is, how patient.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
There is a picture of a girl on the worksheet, drawn with black lines, like a cut-out girl. She is wearing a hat, a triangle-shaped skirt, a pair of shoes. She is beautiful, in a way, in her incompleteness. There are black lines sticking out of her body like arrows. On the other side of the page there is a boy.
‘Look at him,’ Katie says next to her. She jabs her finger at the paper boy. ‘He looks gay.’
Mrs Flack is writing words with her marker on the board. They are meant to be attaching the words to the arrows. There are windows all along one wall of the classroom and for a moment Alexa stares out of them, at the day passing outside. Katie has snagged her attention. She drifts around it, the snag, like a balloon drifting on its string tether. She stares at the day, behind glass. Then she glances at Katie out of the corners of her eyes.
‘You aren’t meant to say that,’ she says.
‘Aren’t I?’
‘No,’ Alexa says. ‘Mr Simpson says you’re not.’
Alexa’s knowledge of Katie is awakening: she remembers that she has sat next to her before. Katie is like a story she has read and then forgotten, the details stored but not often revisited. Now she is unfolding again, her particular shape and atmosphere, her scuffed shoes, her lazy hair pegged back with a clip, her mouth that goes all the way across her face when she grins, her pale, insolent eyes.
‘I like saying it,’ Katie says. ‘I say it all the time. It’s fun.’
‘What’s fun about it?’ Alexa says scornfully.
Katie shrugs, and twists her pencil in her stubby fingers. There is something attractive about her, something magnetising that Alexa feels guilty about. She gives Alexa the feeling that she has forgotten something important. She makes it seem as though it may not have been important after all.
Mrs Flack is calling out the words and people are putting their hands up. On the other side of the room, Maisie and Francesca put their hands up. Alexa would like to put her hand up, but she has not been listening. Because of Katie, she does not know the answers. The French words fall on her ears and die away, uncomprehended. This is Katie’s power, the power of ignorance. For a moment Alexa thinks she likes it, this huge, unspecified freedom that lies darkly all around the fussing, probing point of knowledge. Other people are writing things down. Alexa does not know what she is meant to be writing. She is lost. The drawings and the arrows and the words don’t fit together. It is as though she has lost sight of Mrs Flack and the others; as though one minute she was following them and the next they had turned a corner and disappeared. Mrs Flack turns and writes something on the board. Her round body jiggles as she writes. Katie nudges Alexa in the ribs and Alexa looks. Katie is half-standing in her chair, wobbling like a belly dancer. She is being Mrs Flack, wobbling and writing in the air. Petrified, Alexa pulls her back into her seat.
‘Stop it!’ she says in a whisper.
Katie laughs, a raspberry sound that bursts noisily through her lips and coats them with a sheen of spit. There is spit on the table too. Mrs Flack stops writing. She turns around, cocks her head, scans the silent classroom. Alexa stares straight ahead. Her cheeks are hot. She has forgotten that the lesson will end: she has lost the chain-like sequence of the day, the prospect of morning break and lunch, the light-filled distances of the afternoon. There is only this ever-enlarging present, extending outwards into the darkness of ignorance. Mrs Flack returns her attention to the board. When Alexa looks down at her worksheet, she sees that the paper girl and boy have changed. The girl has a dark scribble of hair in the middle of her skirt and big round bosoms on her shirtfront, and the boy has a carrot-shaped penis drooping obscenely between his legs. For a moment Alexa thinks that she has drawn these things herself. It is as though some shameful desire of her own has been mysteriously enacted. Mrs Flack will collect the worksheets at the end of the lesson. This one has Alexa’s name on it. Alexa is like the paper boy and girl, violated. Katie’s face beside her is white and grinning, her eyes large, her hand with its pencil comically twirling a strand of hair by her ear. At the sight of her face Alexa laughs, a laugh that struggles frantically in her stomach, that convulses her whole body and finally escapes, pealing, from her mouth.
Mrs Flack snaps round, outraged.
‘Alexa Bradshaw!’
Her voice is shrill and angry. Alexa sees the glaring face, the body briefly lit up with fury, the transformation of Mrs Flack from one thing into another. It is Alexa who has transformed her. The class is silent.
‘Alexa Bradshaw, will you be quiet!’
The sound of her own name is a kind of death. Then, unexpectedly, Mrs Flack is herself again. She picks up her marker; she returns to the lesson. She does not appear surprised, or disappointed. She does not say that Alexa has let her down. She does not comment on Alexa’s violated goodness, on the white record of her conduct that has now been stained. It is Mrs Flack, in a way, who has stained it. She has treated Alexa as she treats everyone. She does not love Alexa; she has never, Alexa sees, loved her. Yet Alexa feels guilty, as though Mrs Flack’s indifference, too, were her own fault.
She sits rigid and silent until the bell goes. She does not hand in her worksheet. Instead she folds it up tightly and puts it in her pocket. It has become possible to deceive Mrs Flack. The stain has made it possible. At break time she tears it into pieces and hides them under the rubbish in the bin.
On Saturday her mother is taking her to the city museum. Alexa stands in the kitchen in her coat while her mother puts things into her handbag.
Her father says, ‘Shall I come along and keep you company?’
There is a little underwater silence, a kind of blank.
Tonie says, ‘Don’t you have stuff you need to do?’
‘Not really.’
Alexa listens. The way her parents speak has changed. Their conversations used to travel towards agreement, the way in snap the cards keep turning until two identical ones come up. But now it is the differences Alexa notices. It is as though their talks stop before the end: the identical card is never found. They walk away unresolved, two people who don’t match.
‘I thought it would be nice to go together, that’s all,’ her father says.
Tonie purses her lips, forages about in her bag.
‘Really, I’m happy to take her,’ she says. ‘I’ve hardly seen her this week.’
Alexa doesn’t hear the end of that conversation, if it had an end. The scene in the kitchen has a ragged edge. The next thing she knows, she’s out on the pavement with her mother, walking downhill. She is holding her mother’s hand. They are flying over the cracks between the paving stones, over the dead leaves and empty sweet wrappers, flying away from the house, where her father remains.
‘Isn’t Daddy coming?’ she says.
‘No.’ Her mother sounds surprised. ‘Did you want him to come?’
She doesn’t know the answer to that question. Her mother squeezes her fingers.
‘I wanted it to be just us,’ she says.
‘Me too,’ says Alexa. Instantly she feels unhappy. She touches a lamp-post, for luck. ‘Can we have hot chocolate in the café?’
‘If you want.’
‘Can we have it first? Before we go in?’
Her mother is silent. They pass a lady standing on the pavement. She is talking on her phone, laughing. She is wearing a black coat. She is laughing and laughing, standing there.
‘Can we?’
‘No. We’ll have it afterwards.’
‘Why can’t we have it before?’
‘Because I say so.’
‘But why?’
‘Hey. Stop asking for things.’
Her mother has stopped and is looking around, to right and left. For a moment Alexa thinks she is looking for someone to tell, about Alexa’s behaviour. But they are only crossing the road.
‘Stop asking for things,’ she repeats, when they reach the other side. ‘We’ve only just left the house and you’re already asking for things.’
‘Sorry,’ Alexa says.
Her mother halts again. She bends down and puts her arms around Alexa, so that the street disappears and Alexa is lost in her hair and the folds of her clothes.
‘No, I’m the one who’s sorry,’ she says, into her ear. ‘I’m just tired. I need to get used to you again.’
Alexa wonders what this means. It gives her the feeling that she is in some way extraordinary. She wonders whether it means they will have hot chocolate first. They reach the main road and wait at the bus stop. Her mother seems smaller here, in the noise and the traffic. She is wearing a red jacket.
‘Where’s the bus?’ Tonie says. ‘Can you see it? Your eyes are better than mine.’
Alexa looks down the milling grey stretch. She looks for the form of the bus. She knows what she is looking for, yet she is anxious. It seems possible that she might not recognise the bus, or that it might not come. She looks at the shapes of cars and vans and lorries, wondering each time whether they are the bus.
‘I think I see it,’ she says. There is something big and blue in the distance. Are buses blue? She thinks they might be.
Tonie peers. ‘That’s not a bus,’ she says, laughing.
Alexa frowns, looks at her shoes. She looks at the grimy pavement.
‘Here it is,’ Tonie says. ‘This is it.’
The bus is coming towards them, a double-decker, dark red and cream. Alexa recognises it, the cartoon face with round headlight eyes, the tall flat front winking in the sun, the people looking out of the dusty upper-storey windows. It surges out of nothingness, all colourful and alive. She feels relieved. It comes in its certainty, its reality, and her doubt disappears.
‘Can we sit at the top?’ she says.
There is a man up there with a little dog. The dog sits on the man’s lap, looking at Alexa. Alexa looks back through the gap in the seats. It has a twitching little nose and funny brown eyes. She looks at the man and then back at the dog.
‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘She won’t hurt you.’
‘What’s she called?’ Alexa says.
‘She’s called Jill,’ says the man.
Alexa puts her hand through the gap and strokes Jill’s coarse little head. The head moves eagerly beneath her fingers. The stubby tail wags. The brown eyes are willing.
‘She likes that,’ the man says.
Alexa turns to her mother.
‘Look, she likes me,’ she says.
‘I can see that,’ her mother says. She is smiling. Alexa imagines her feeling glad, that the dog likes Alexa. Yet her eyes are not as willing as Jill’s. Her smile has something secret in it, something private and sealed.
‘Can we get a dog?’ Alexa says. ‘Can we?’
Her mother’s face closes shut. She turns and looks out of the window.
The museum is big inside, like a church. It glimmers brownly, as detailed as a forest, little scenes everywhere behind glass. People’s footsteps echo when they walk. They go upstairs, to Alexa’s favourite room. The room is full of gemstones, crystals, rocks, all lying on their black plinths. Each one is lit up. The light is white and limited, precious in the surrounding blackness. It glitters like frost on the crystals and the rubies, the aconite, the amethyst. The crystals are strange, slightly frightening. They seem to have a mind and purpose of their own. They look like things that could take over the world, with their startling thrust-like growths. Alexa imagines a crystal world, growing and advancing out of the dark earth, obliterating language. Her favourite stone is the purple amethyst. It is like a flower. Its ladylike colour pleases her.
‘These are so weird,’ Tonie says, moving along the glass cases.
‘Which one do you like?’ Alexa asks her. She wants her to like something.
‘I like that one. The opal.’
She points. The opal is pale and milky. It is not a colour. It is vague, like a cloud. Alexa looks at it. She waits for it to tell her something, but it seems to lie beyond her comprehension. It is secretive. She wonders why her mother likes it. She wonders why she doesn’t choose the flowerlike amethyst.
‘Look at that,’ Tonie says, pointing at a spiked hunk of black quartz, flecked with light. ‘That’s like something out of a horror film.’
Alexa laughs. She imagines the black rock, rampaging through outer space. She makes her fingers into spikes and growls like a monster. Tonie smiles.
‘Let’s keep going,’ she says.
They walk through silent rooms filled with animals. Tonie seems to like these rooms. She stops and looks and reads the names of things aloud from the little cards. The animals are all dead. Alexa wonders whether Tonie is being respectful, stopping at each one and reading out its name; whether she feels sorry for the animal, having to die. There is a polecat crouched on a fake branch, looking at Alexa with yellow eyes. Suddenly she is afraid. She wishes she hadn’t noticed its eyes. Now, all the animals seem to be looking at her, the fierce eyes of exotic birds, the strange hooded downward glance of a bear standing on its hind legs, the narrowed eyes of things that are baring their teeth: they are all motionless yet poised, as though awaiting their opportunity. But she knows they are dead.
‘Who does that remind you of?’ Tonie says, pointing at the porcupine, with its fussy little face and extravagant rigid plumage of quills.
Alexa doesn’t know who it reminds her of. She wonders if Tonie is saying that it reminds her of Alexa.
‘Daddy?’ she says.
Tonie laughs. ‘Not Daddy. Grandma.’
‘Why is it like Grandma?’
Tonie laughs again. It seems she doesn’t feel sorry for the animals after all. They remind her of things that are alive. Alexa thinks it is dangerous, to connect the living with the dead. She worries that her mother is endangering people.
‘Oh, no reason really,’ Tonie says.
‘Can we go and see Grandma?’
‘Not right now we can’t.’
‘When can we see her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tonie says. ‘I don’t know the answer to that.’
She stares into the glass case with the porcupine.
‘Can we go to the shell room now?’ Alexa says.
‘If you want. Don’t you like the animals?’
‘I don’t like their eyes,’ she says, reluctantly. She thinks her mother ought to know about their eyes. She thinks she should know, to be more careful.
They go back out into the main hall, with its dim commotion, its underwater light and strange echoing sounds. Alexa can’t remember where the shell room is. They look around, peering into rooms full of old pots and china plates, rooms bristling with swords and lances, rooms with plaster people in old-fashioned clothes. Today Alexa doesn’t want to look at human things. They seem dowdy and sad, compared with the spangled eternal crystals, the miniature perfection of shells. But she cannot remember how to find the shells.
‘Maybe there isn’t a shell room,’ her mother says.
‘There is. I remember it.’
‘Are you sure? Maybe you remember it from a different museum.’
‘I remember the one here,’ Alexa says, though her mother’s words have unnerved her. This can happen, she knows it can. You can remember something, and you can fail to ever find it again, no matter how hard you look. The perfect shells, so pink and miraculous, so blank and yet so intricate, might never again be found.
‘Well,’ Tonie says, ‘I’m pretty sure it isn’t here now.’
‘It is!’ Alexa cries. ‘It is here!’
Her mother stops, looks at her. Then she says,
‘I’ll go and ask at the information desk.’
She leaves Alexa on a bench in the hall. When she returns her face is different. She holds out her hand.
‘They’ve moved them,’ she says. ‘They’re in Coasts and Rivers. It’s all changed since the last time I was here.’
‘So I wasn’t wrong,’ Alexa says.
‘You weren’t wrong. You were right. We were both right.’
Coasts and Rivers is new. It is dark and glamorous around the lit-up displays. There are recorded voices speaking, and buttons you can push that turn on little chains of lights. Alexa finds the shells, but they are not as she remembered them. They are different. The display is full of sand, and there are dirty-looking nets with plastic starfish in the tangles. The shells lie on the sand carelessly, as though someone just dropped them there. Somehow, they have become ordinary. She turns away, goes to find her mother. She walks through the darkness and the voices, through the unfamiliar carpeted spaces. At last she sees her, at the far end of the room. She is standing in a labyrinth of shadows. She is looking through glass, a greenish light on her face. Alexa approaches and stands beside her. In front of her is a river scene, with jewelled dragonflies in the reeds and a plaster swan sitting on the painted blue water. This is what her mother is looking at. The river twists and turns between its green banks, meanders away amid trees into painted distances. There is a kingfisher, and little animals on the banks, and a duck with her ducklings. There are flowers, and a bird’s nest full of tiny eggs. But it is the swan that is beautiful, central, in its splendour of white. Alexa stands beside her mother at the glass. She has never seen something so lovely as this place. She wishes she could walk into it, sit on the enchanted banks beside the river and feed the swan, walk and walk among the trees until she was out of sight. She aches to enter its reality. She feels it, the ecstasy of the imaginary becoming real.
‘Look at the ducklings,’ she says to her mother. ‘Look at the little eggs in the nest.’
Her mother is silent. She is staring at the river, at the swan. She stares and stares.
‘Look at the dragonfly,’ Alexa says.
The dragonfly hovers, blue and glinting. The bulrushes are tall and straight, perfectly brown and rounded at their ends. The kingfisher plunges. The swan curves her white neck like a ballerina. The painted river sparkles.