lamb.
I belong.
The Fanta yo-yo.
Admire me.
The jade pendant.
Beauty fades.
The Abba badge.
You don’t touch me.
The brown coin.
I fear nothing.
The dainty wristwatch.
I am more than you see.
Each object is as important as every other, but this last is the most daring, Plum can hardly bear to touch it — sometimes the mere sight of the watch makes the hair prickle up on her neck. Sometimes, to calm herself, Plum will fix her mind on a single item — usually the glass lamb, which is like staring through ice. Now, however, she plucks up the one thing that doesn’t belong among the others, and was never destined to remain. She closes the briefcase, fastens the latches and shoves the case under her bed. Then she crosses the room to the window and lifts the heavy sash.
Warm air wraps her as she forces the window higher; and birdsong, and the smell of mown grass, and the rusty calls of cicadas. Plum notices none of these. She has not opened the window with the aim of appreciating the summer evening, but so that she might lean a little closer, yearn a little more actively, toward the view that the high window allows. Spread out before her are rooftops in their scaly thousands; and church steeples, telephone poles, shopping centers, parkland. Beyond these, distance blurs suburbia into a fawn-and-green smudge; behind the smudge rises the purple backbone of a modest mountain range. Plum once visited these mountains with her Sunday-driving grandmother: they’d had Devonshire tea and walked through a rhododendron garden, and Plum had bought a leather bookmark in the shape of a flattened hound. A niceday, but recently she’s tried to blot from her memory the gingham curtains and crumbly scones and the innumerable mustard pots for sale in a streetful of arts and crafts, and pretends that the mountains are an unexplored shadowland, mysterious and promising. And there’s something mysterious, promising and deeply satisfying about leaning on a windowsill, baying for the hills.
She unwraps the MARS Bar with her practiced teeth, her head lodged against the window frame. The hot weather has softened the fudge so it’s bendy in her hand, the caramel bleeding lanky strings from the severed end. Plum should not be eating a MARS Bar, nor anything that will contribute to the clumpiness of her body and the festeriness of her face. Every bite is making her life more intolerable, and she should have the will to resist, the discipline to
improve
herself . . . yet she feeds the chocolate into her mouth dutifully, obeying an impulse as irresistible as a hypnotist’s command. Tears seep down her cheeks as she eats, and slip past her chocolated lips; she is making a dull, unbroken, grief-encouraging noise, “Brr, brr, brr.” The view of the ranges is blurred by her woe, which is a witch-brew of frustration and self-hate. Plum suspects she is special, and that she has a grand destiny: yet all her life she’s suffered more cruelly than others seem to do. She has always been more mocked, more misunderstood, more sidelined. Presumably it is her fate, to be persecuted until something — something foretold on parchments lying undiscovered in a cave, something that will occur whenthree dark stars align — makes her rise and spread her awesome wings; and then the whole world, gulping, will understand.
“Her, her, her,” she bawls, chewing heroically.
Her eyes are pinched closed, but when she hears her name spoken they flip open with surprise. The evening sky is marlin-blue and pink, extraordinarily beautiful; the breeze that fiddles in her hair is as jestful as a sprite. Her name flutters around her like the skeleton of a leaf —
Plum, Plum, Plum —
uttered in the hushed but unswerving voice of the Underworld. Plum is so startled that she stops both chewing and howling, the chocolate turning to clay in her mouth. For all she has daydreamed, she’s never believed, but suddenly she’s rigid with what’s true. There are no angels, but