Hilary Mantel - An Experiment in Love

Karina said, ‘Don’t talk daft.’

I didn’t at once take my fingers away.

‘At Easter you get eggs.’ She turned her dimpled face towards me, and the fuzzy halo around her hair cast itself into a bobbing disc against the classroom wall. ‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been poorly.’

‘You’re weak,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s your hair. Being that long. All down your back. Your strength goes into it.’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘Where else does it go then?’

I was silent. I thought over what she had said. She swung her head away and one jutting ribboned braid was outlined for a moment against the wall. ‘This is the cow with the crumpled horn…’ Once again my fingers stole out to graze the fluff of her sleeve. Karina brought her hand down and chopped it across my fingers so hard that I felt the equivalent of a mild electric shock: a small pain, but dull, bruising and deep.

There were three reasons why every day I walked to school with Karina. The first, and most simple, was that I hoped that, odd as my outfit would be, Karina would be wearing something odder.

The second was that my mother said I must.

The third was that I wanted to make restitution.

I don’t know if you understand about restitution. I am always aggrieved—though God knows, I’ve not set foot in church since my schooldays—by the assumption that Catholics have easy lives: that they sin as and when and where they like, then pop into the confessional and get it wiped off the slate. I’m afraid it’s not so simple as that. First, you have to be sorry for your sin. Second, you have to do your best not to repeat it. Third, if there is anything you can do to make up for it, you must do it. If you steal money, you must give it back. If you slander a person, you must spend the rest of your life writing sonnets in praise of their good character. If you injure someone’s feelings, you must try to mend the damage.

My tie to Karina had to do with restitution. I had done her a wrong, an injury, and this wrong occurred in the first month after I came to school, when I was four years old.

They say people remember their early years as sunlit. Perhaps this is true for people born in the south, who are richer and have better weather. What I remember largely, is hail and sleet, and the modified excitement when it actually began to snow: neuralgic winds and icicles like stalactites, and poisoned fog in rolling banks of yellow-grey. In one of these climatic exigencies—no doubt in more than one, as they tended to overlap—we were kept in for playtime, and had to work off our baby energies by romping in a cramped and hushed way in our classroom. And there was I, and there Karina was too.

The infants’ classroom is not laid out quite like the others: into which we only peep, being deterred by legends of the frightful beatings given out to our seniors. It smells the same—of coke and dust and nuns—but also of the mild creamy flesh of us babies, our skin and hair and Wellingtons; and when I think of this, I think of the huge letters in our reading books, which are about a brother and sister called Dick and Dora. I think of the French pleat in the hair of the mother of Dick and Dora, the tweed suit worn by the father of Dick and Dora: and into my mouth seeps the taste, oily and sweet, of welfare-state orange juice. Very well: I am four: I am in the classroom and there is a low cupboard that runs right along one wall. Our paintings are pinned above it: at least, those that are more figurative than abstract.

It is ten-thirty, I suppose. I can’t tell the time yet. I know how to chant ‘five past, ten past’, and the rest, but I haven’t realized the relationship between the numbers and the pointing fingers. But let’s agree it’s ten-thirty; it’s raining and dark. I can see the rain hitting the window in discrete splashes then splitting and widening into the Nile delta, though this is a river of whose existence I am not yet informed; I watch the delta become an ocean, a simple roar, a wall of sound. I am sitting on the cupboard swinging my legs. To, fro, to, fro. Fawn socks and lace-up shoes.

Karina comes by. Her pale blue eyes look straight ahead, and her expression is distant but implacable. She has a toy truck, a lorry she is pulling on a string. The lorry is red. In the back of it is crammed a baby doll, a fair, fat, blubbery baby doll, plastic pink and naked. What a game! A baby in a lorry! I think it’s stupid.

Before I have time to think anything else, out shoots my foot. Out shoots my foot from the knee. Up sails the lorry, up into the air. Out flies the plastic baby. And smash! Down on the classroom floor, down on its bald pink head. Dead.

Karina drops the string of her lorry. Slowly turns. Sucks in her lips, which are the same pink as her face, between the big square teeth. Then tears—fat tears—begin to roll silently down her cheeks. I sit with my leg still swinging, as if it is a mechanism over which I have no control. Karina menaces me: she raises her arm from the elbow, in a parody of hitting. She is afraid, I can tell she is. She approaches me; the blow lands on my shoulder, soft as pat-a-cake, and a tear falls on to my hand, scorching me. I rub my hand on my dress, and the tear goes away.

Normally if anybody hits me I hit back. I poke their eyes out. I am four and I am famous as a good fighter. Kick them in the kidneys, Grandad says, they’ll not take much of that. I know kidneys: I have seen them on a plate. I know they come from the butcher, and I imagine my enemies toiling up Bismarck Street with a shopping-bag, and their kidneys inside wrapped in bloody paper. In my mind, my leg shoots high and straight, high up to my ear, and I catch them so, on the very point of my toe; I send their kidneys spinning.

The butcher writes his prices on the paper; he does adding up, the sum wobbling and warping round the parcel. How much are kidneys? I hardly care. I kick them in the shins too; that’s part of their leg. It doesn’t matter what you do, Grandad says, as long as you don’t hesitate; he who hesitates is lost. Strike, strike hard, strike home.

But I let Karina get away because I know what I did was wrong, to boot her baby like that. I wonder, in fact, why she didn’t hit me harder, why she was so plainly afraid; but I think it must have been the mechanical ruthlessness of my foot, swinging and pinging, shooting and booting in its John White’s lace-up infant school shoe.

Where was Julianne? Not there: ten miles away in the country, at her private prep school. I imagine her playing with bright plastic shapes on a magnetic board: fitting and manipulating, while a sweet-faced nun smiles above her, and feeds her dolly-mixtures, and says, ‘dear little Julianne’.

I went home, and said to my mother, ‘Karina hit me.’

My mother sat me on the kitchen table. She taught me a song:

‘Karina’s a funny ’un

She’s a face like a pickled onion

She’s a nose like a squashed tomater

And legs like two sticks.’

‘Will I sing it tomorrow?’ I cried, beside myself with joy.

‘No,’ my mother said. ‘Sing it to yourself. It’s just to help you feel better.’

I understood this perfectly; that if you’ve learnt something really insulting and gross, a lot of the pleasure is in keeping it to yourself. ‘OK,’ I said. Kicked my legs a bit. Oh, I was a bright, happy little soul, in those days.

This was the first and last joke my mother made about Karina. At some time in the next two or three years, my mother and Karina’s mother held some sort of colloquy in the street, after which my mother came home and cried and mentioned cattle-waggons. What that young woman’s life has been, she said, is not to be contemplated, it is not to be contemplated. My father went away and got his model kit out and made a model bomber.