Joanna Glen - The Other Half of Augusta Hope

Except Pierre walked off in the middle.

I understood.

Freedom didn’t seem to be coming at all.

The more the years passed, the less free we felt.

I noticed that the older you got, the more careful you had to be about things you said. In Reception, you could let anything blurt out of your mouth. But by secondary school, you weighed things up before you spoke.

For example, we couldn’t say gardening aloud in Year 8, and for a few years after that. Robin Fox had introduced the class to double-entendre , and frankly one hardly dared open one’s mouth at school. Girls in our class were starting to grow hair in awkward places, and Robin Fox would take a look at our fuzzy legs and the hairs appearing in our armpits and say, ‘A bit of gardening at the weekend, maybe, for you?’

What could we do but use our pocket money on Bic razors or depilating cream or wax strips that didn’t work? And looking back, what power he wielded.

Robin Fox had four older brothers, and he knew how to turn ordinary sentences sexual by raising one eyebrow. For the whole of our lives, we’d been able to say, ‘Are you coming?’ without even thinking about it. But not now. Now we would have Robin Fox’s one raised eyebrow, and, if there was enough of an audience, we would have the full fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally , with Robin Fox thrashing about moaning and gasping at the dining table.

I remember a spring day when we were heading for thirteen. My father was mowing the lawn with not a hint of double entendre in his clean and ordered mind; my mother was cutting the edges into perfect curves (ditto); and Julia was weeding (relieved from the burden of Robin Fox’s raised eyebrow).

I wasn’t thinking of Robin Fox either. Part of the joy of the school holidays was getting away from him.

No, I was thinking of Lola Alvárez saying, ‘Your weeds are my flowers.’

The weeds, which looked exactly like flowers to me, were lying with their pretty blue petals, ready to be piled into thick green sacks where they would suffocate in polythene on their way to the dump to die in a yellow metal skip.

I was suffocating too, on purpose, hiding in my bedroom to avoid the tedium of the gardening. I was also watching Pally’s dove, which lived in a cream dovecote Fermín had made in their garden. It liked to fly down and flit among the luscious creamy petals of the magnolia tree, which my father had planted dead in the centre of our front lawn. Sometimes he would do the measurements all over again for the pleasure of knowing that he’d got it just right.

Today the dove had flown over the top of our house to the three lacy cherry blossom trees which stood at the back. It flitted from tree to tree, before flying off to the Cooks’ garden and landing on Graham Cook’s swing-set, which had been there for years, but to which I’d paid little attention.

I’d watched Barbara Cook pushing Graham in his enormous cage of a swing in the rain, and I’d watched Jim Cook with his shirt off and his big balloon tummy, shouting, ‘Hey ho and up she rises.’

That day, it struck me, as I stared out of my bedroom window, that nobody had ever sat next to Graham Cook on the spare normal swing. Nobody ever in his entire life.

So I crept downstairs out of the front door, up our little grey paved drive, and I went next door and asked Barbara Cook if Graham would like me to come and swing with him on the swing-set.

Graham was in his baby pen, rocking back and forward, and he sounded almost like a vacuum cleaner going up and down the carpet.

Barbara Cook talked to him, and she guided him into the garden, holding his arm. It was quite an effort getting him into the swing, but once he was in with his red bus, and swinging, he stopped making the hoover noises.

Barbara Cook pushed Graham, and I started to swing, back and forth in time with him. I went higher higher higher, and I could see my mother digging, my father digging, Julia digging.

Back down.

Up again – they were still digging.

Back down.

Up again – so odd to watch my family being my family without me.

Digging.

Very intently.

My father turned around.

Back down.

I loved it that they didn’t know I was watching them.

It made me feel powerful.

It also made me feel odd watching them.

I sang, ‘Hey ho and up she rises,’ like Jim Cook, and Graham and I made laughing noises together.

Up I went – my family remained oblivious.

I breathed in the smell of mown grass.

Barbara Cook went inside for a moment, and I heard her shouting at Jim, ‘You’re drunk again!’

When she came out, she was carrying a camera. She shouted, ‘Cheese!’ and she stood in front of the swing-set, laughing and laughing, as if she couldn’t stop, as if she’d been storing this laughter somewhere deep down for a long time, and, while she went on laughing, she kept taking photos of the same thing – Graham Cook and me swinging on the swing-set.

She gave Graham a push and went inside again. She came out with a flowered cushion, and she sat on her white plastic garden chair and she put her cup of tea on her white plastic garden table, and she sighed very loudly and she dipped in a digestive biscuit so that its edges went soft. When she lifted her head, I saw that she was crying, in the same way that she’d been laughing, as if she’d never stop.

Graham’s swing had come to rest, and he was moaning and twisting, and Barbara Cook was crying tears from deep inside of her, and I pictured all of our stomachs full of bubbles, which would turn acid-red for crying, or alkaline-blue for laughing, like litmus paper. I supposed that we all had an endless supply of these bubbles, and I didn’t know whether my life would be a laughing kind of life, mainly blue, or a crying kind of life, mainly red. None of us knows.

No, none of us knows.

Barbara Cook went on crying, and Graham and I went on swinging, and after a while, I thanked Barbara for having me and I crept through the double garage and sped through the back door and up to my room, where I bumped into my mother, on the landing.

‘We’ve been calling,’ she said. ‘Where on earth were you?’

‘In the toilet,’ I said.

‘We’re all going to the dump,’ she said.

‘Thrilling,’ I said, which was not the right answer.

Julia and I sat strapped into the back of the car.

‘What on earth have you been doing all this time?’ said my mother.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

When I went round to the Cooks a week later, there was a large photo of Graham and me swinging on the swing-set framed on the wall of the hall, above the shelf.

As I came in, Barbara Cook called out to Graham, ‘Your girlfriend’s here.’

That made me feel really strange inside, and I hoped that I could be a nice person without having to be Graham Cook’s girlfriend. Then I realised that Graham Cook would never ever in his entire life have a girlfriend.

The real problem came when my father went to visit the Cooks and saw the photo on the hall wall, and when Barbara Cook called out to Graham, ‘It’s your girlfriend’s dad.’

My father told Barbara Cook not to say that. Then he came home and told me I was not to visit Graham Cook’s house, and nor was Julia, that Graham Cook was not a suitable friend for me. What was I thinking, going and swinging with him as if, as if … he spluttered to a stop.

My mother looked shocked and wrung her apron in her hands, and mentioned all Barbara Cook’s good qualities.

‘I like swinging with Graham Cook,’ I said to my father. ‘I like being his friend.’

My father’s neck went red and his fingers started shaking.