An Experiment in Love: A Novel Read Free Page A

down on the insects’ victims, or taunt them in the playground, or chant at them.
    I look around the room. Under their pullovers – which might be maroon, or a mottled grey – the boys wear grey shirts, their collars springing upwards, twisted and wrung as though they’ve tucked down their chins and chewed them. They wear striped elastic belts with buckles like two snakes in a headlock. Their hair is either chopped straight across their foreheads or it is shorn off to stubble. When they go home, in bad weather – which is to say, in most weather – they wear knitted balaclava helmets, and one boy has an even more terrible item, a leather helmet, thin black leather like a saurian skin, tight to his skull and fastening under his chin with a tarnished buckle. When I look at the boys I see bristles and snouts, rubber faces always contorting and meemowing. They are always lolling their tongues and wriggling their ears, or polishing their noses with the flats of their palms, working the cartilage violently round and round. Their not-yet-hairy limbs are pliable as ruddy clay, as a doll I have called a Bendy Toy; I can almost smellthe rubber and feel the boneless twist I give its legs. I think I will not sit next to a boy.
    I look at the girls and the girls look back at me, various expressions of dullness or spite on their faces. Their hair is braided tightly into stubby plaits, or chopped short below their ears; if the latter, it is parted at one side, and pinned off their faces with a great black grip. They have an assortment of navy cardigans, some of them washed out and shrunken, with the buttons through the wrong holes. Some have pleated skirts, or gym-slips like blue-black cardboard, like solid ink; some have cotton frocks under their cardigans, frocks that are limp and soft and pastel. I think, as the lesser evil, I will sit next to a girl.
    But there are two difficulties here. One is that I have been away so long that I do not have a friend. The other is that my mother has embroidered a gambolling lamb and a frieze of spring flowers right over the skirt of my blue cotton dress. It is a sky-blue dress, and otherwise plain; I see them looking into my sky. They both want and don’t want it. I can expect no mercy.
    I sway on the spot. The hem of the dress brushes the tender skin at the back of my knees.
    ‘Well . . . make up your mind,’ my teacher says.
    Miss Whittaker, who teaches the next class, is said to make a speciality of hitting pupils on the backs of their knees. Knuckle-rapping has gone quite out of style.
    I look around, and see Karina. There is a chair empty next to her. She lifts her broad face to the light, and gives me a benevolent smile. She is wearing a yellow cardigan, yellow and fluffy, the colour of a new chickenin a picture book. Her plaits are fat and bound with white ribbons looped into flamboyant bows. From the braids and all around her head tiny threads or wires of hair stand out, white-blonde, quivering. Her face is like the sun.
    ‘There, please,’ I say.
    Complacently, Karina begins to rearrange her possessions on the table: square up her ruler, her pencil, the cardboard box in which (at this tender age) we keep our lined paper for writing, and our squared paper for sums.
    Next day when Julianne arrived, I was lying on my bed smoking a cigarette. ‘My God!’ she said, shrieking inside the doorway. ‘Your hair! My God!’
    I sat up, smiling solemnly. My hair, which had been down to my waist at the end of the school term, was now clipped close to my head, scarcely an inch long all over. Glimpsing myself in shop windows this last week, I had whirled around to confront the stranger who seemed always at my shoulder; it was myself. My head felt light and full of possibilities, like a dandelion clock.
    Julianne crossed the room, picked up my packet of cigarettes, and fitted one into her full red mouth. ‘Why did you do it? Did you have nits, or is it a symbol?’ She caught sight of herself in