Joanna Glen - The Other Half of Augusta Hope

‘There is to be no more swinging,’ he said.

Then I said something very rude. I said some double-entendre I’d learnt at school, which my father did not appreciate.

I said, ‘I heard at school that there has been plenty of swinging in Willow Crescent. That is, amongst the adults.’

My mother and father went very quiet, and then my father told Julia and me to please go to our bedroom.

Straight away.

Now.

NOW.

‘NOW,’ screamed my father.

Julia asked me why he was so cross about me swinging with Graham Cook.

‘Because he’s stupid enough to think …’ I began.

‘Please don’t say that,’ said Julia.

‘… that I would want to be Graham’s girlfriend, when it’s perfectly obvious that I want to be Diego’s!’

‘Me too,’ said Julia.

‘We can’t both have Diego,’ I said. ‘We can’t exactly share him. We might be twins but that would be taking things too far.’

‘But how will he choose?’ said Julia. ‘Surely it’s got to be one of us. We’ve fancied him for years.’

‘It will be quite easy for him to choose,’ I said. ‘We’re really not very alike. Especially for twins.’

As I said it, I knew exactly who he would choose.

‘People say our faces are quite similar,’ said Julia. ‘It’s only the colour of our hair and the shape of our bodies which have turned out a bit different.’

I looked down at my skinny legs with dark hairs on them.

‘Well, he’ll just have to choose the hair and body he likes best, I suppose,’ said Julia.

‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to fall in love with someone’s personality. Not the shape of their body. It’s very sexist to think of women as bodies, Jules.’

‘I still don’t get why Dad has stopped you visiting Graham Cook.’

‘He doesn’t want me with a spastic,’ I said.

‘Stop it,’ said Julia.

‘That’s what he said to me at the first Craft Fair,’ I said. ‘That if I sat with Graham, I’d look spasticated too. And he nearly pulled my arm out of my socket to force me to get up.’

‘I still don’t get why he’s sent us to bed,’ said Julia, who never liked to criticise our parents.

‘Because I did the double-entendre .’

‘The what?’

‘Robin Fox told me that swinging is what adults do when they swap husbands and wives, and he said there was a lot of it going on in places like Willow Crescent.’

‘But Dad’s Neighbourhood Watch,’ said Julia. ‘Wouldn’t he stop it?’

‘It happens inside people’s houses,’ I said. ‘Apparently, they all throw their keys on the floor and then see where they end up.’

‘What? Do they deliberately go to the wrong house?’ said Julia.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘To have sex.’

‘What? People like Helen Dunnett and Janice Brown?’ said Julia, with a massive frown wrinkling up her forehead.

‘Robin Fox said it’s typical of the suburbs, but I didn’t know what he was on about.’

‘Do you really mean that Mum and Dad would do this too?’ said Julia again. ‘Like, would Dad have had sex with Helen Dunnett or Janice Brown?’

I nodded very seriously, and then I said, ‘Come to think of it, nobody else would put up with Dad’s pants!’

That set Julia off, thinking of his grey Y-fronts with little slits at the front to put his thingie through. (We knew masses of words for his thingie these days, but neither of us could quite bring ourselves to use any of them – the whole idea of it appalled us. Not to mention the necessity of his thingie in our very own creation. With our very own mother!)

My father came raging up the stairs because, instead of being contrite and ashamed of the rudeness of my double-entendre, he’d heard me laughing again. When he came in, shaking and bursting a blood vessel in his neck, we put our hands over our mouths because seeing him there screaming at us and knowing he was wearing those slitty grey Y-fronts underneath his grey trousers made us squirt laughter between our fingers in big gasps and splurts. This sent him totally round the bend.

Then our mother came in, smelling of talcum powder, from her bath, and we could see her big stretchy pants because she’d got her nightie on which was a bit see-through, and we could also see the tyre of fat around her middle, like a ring doughnut.

‘If you go on laughing like this,’ said my mother, ‘you will give your father a heart attack.’

At the mention of the word heart attack, and I don’t know why this was, a big squelch of laughter burst out of my mouth through my fingers – and that set Julia off.

My mother turned bright red in the face.

She looked at Julia and said, ‘I expected more of you.’

And I realised that she didn’t expect more of me.

I couldn’t decide whether to try and be good like Julia or whether to pay her back by being extremely bad.

When my mind clogged up with stuff, I used to go down to the lake, and I’d let the water wash it clean as I swam deep, like a dolphin, remembering that I was Parfait Nduwimana, and I was in God’s hands .

‘Come on then,’ I said to the rest of them. ‘Who wants to learn to swim? It’s a beautiful day.’

‘There are crocodiles in the lake!’ said Gloria. ‘You must be mad!’

‘Not in the part where I go,’ I said.

‘We’ll all get bilharzia,’ said Douce.

‘Or leeches on our legs,’ said Pierre.

‘How about if we come and watch you?’ said Gloria. ‘Come on, Wilfred, you can come too.’

Wilfred stared back at her, with no words.

‘Pierre?’

‘Maybe,’ he said, his brow creased up as if he had a war going on inside him, as usual.

‘Zion?’

‘If Parfait’s going, I’m going.’

It was quite a walk down the hill, but the lake was shimmering, and there were butterflies about, and we almost felt like a family again, walking along together in a line in the sunshine.

Gloria and Douce linked arms, but they didn’t sing together like they used to; Wilfred ambled along with the rope still round his ankle; Zion was wearing the red-and-white nylon football top that he liked to believe had once belonged to David Beckham; and Pierre walked some distance behind.

‘This is what it would be like if we walked to Spain,’ I said to them. ‘Except when we arrived, we’d be swimming in the turquoise sea. In the actual Atlantic Ocean. And we’d be getting out onto the yellow sandy beach and having a picnic together. Possibly with a bottle of Spanish wine.’

‘I’m not sure we’d make it all that way up Africa,’ said Douce. ‘Or I’m not sure I would.’

‘We could go a little at a time,’ I said. ‘I’d make sure you all had time to rest, I promise you. And if you were tired, we’d wait a day before moving on.’

‘We don’t need to decide now,’ said Gloria.

‘We have to go,’ said Zion with that determined look on his face. ‘I can’t believe you don’t want to. We can go to Europe and build a new life, with our own house on the beach, all of us together. And we can drink Spanish wine and go to festivals together. What on earth is stopping you? I just don’t understand.’

‘We don’t know what Europe’s like,’ said Douce quietly. ‘It could be worse than here.’

‘Nothing could be worse than here,’ said Zion. ‘And I’m going with Parfait for sure. If you don’t want to, don’t bother.’

‘It’s such a long journey,’ said Gloria.

‘God gave us legs,’ said Zion. ‘What do you suppose they’re for? Except walking.’

I put my arm around Zion and squeezed him.

‘Give them time, Little Bro,’ I said.