Human Croquet Read Free Page B

truffling pig. ‘No, you’re imagining it,’ he says and turns away quickly to hide his suddenly sad-dog face.
    Poor Charles, he is two years older than me but I’m already six inches taller than him. I am nearly two yards high in my bare feet. A gigantic English oak ( quercus robustus ). My body a trunk, my feet taproots, my toes probing like pale little moles through the dark soil. My head a crown of leaves growing towards the light. What if this keeps up? I’ll shoot up through the troposphere, the stratosphere and up into the vastness of space where I’ll be able to wear a coronet made from the Pleiades, a shawl spun out of the Milky Way. Dearie, dearie me, as Mrs Baxter (Audrey’s mother) would say.
    I’m already five foot ten, growing at more than an inch a year – if this does keep up then by the time I’m twenty I’ll be over six foot. ‘By the time I’m forty,’ I count on my fingers, ‘I’ll be nearly eight feet tall.’
    ‘Dearie me,’ Mrs Baxter says, frowning as she tries to imagine this.
    ‘By the time I’m seventy,’ I calculate darkly, ‘I’ll be over eleven feet high. I’ll be a fairground attraction.’ The Giant Girl of Glebelands. ‘You’re a real woman now,’ Mrs Baxter says, surveying my skyscraper statistics. But as opposed to what? An unreal woman? My mother (Eliza) is an unreal woman, gone and almost forgotten, slipping the bonds of reality the day she walked off into a wood and never came back.
    ‘You’re a big girl,’ Mr Rice (the lodger) ogles me nastily as we squeeze past each other in the dining-room door. Mr Rice is a travelling salesman and we must hope that some day soon he will wake up and find that he’s been transformed into a giant insect.
    It’s a shame that Charles has stuck at such an unheroic height. He claims that he used to be five foot five but that the last time he measured himself, which he does frequently, he was only five foot four. ‘I’m shrinking,’ he reports miserably. Perhaps he is shrinking, while I keep on growing (there’s no stopping me). Perhaps we’re bound together by some weird law of sibling physics, the two ends of a linear elastic universe where one must shrink as the other expands. ‘He’s a real short-arse,’ Vinny (our aunt) says, more succinctly.
    Charles is as ugly as a storybook dwarf. His arms are too long for his barrel-shaped body, his neck too short for his big head, an overgrown homunculus. Sadly, his (once lovely) copper curls have turned red and wiry and his freckled face is now as pocked and cratered as a lifeless planet, while his big Adam’s apple bobs up and down like a Cox’s Orange Pippin at Hallowe’en. It’s a shame I can’t transplant some of my inches, I have far more than I need, after all.
    Girls are not attracted to Charles and so far he hasn’t managed to persuade a single one to go out with him. ‘I’ll probably die a virgin,’ he says mournfully. Poor Charles, he too has never been kissed. One solution, I suppose, would be for us to kiss each other, but the idea of incest – though quite attractive in Jacobean tragedy – is less so on the home front. ‘I mean, incest,’ I say to Audrey, ‘it’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?’
    ‘Is it?’ she says, her sad doves’ eyes staring at some point in space so that she looks like a saint about to be martyred. She is also one of the unkissed – her father, Mr Baxter (the local primary school headmaster), won’t let a boy anywhere near Audrey. Mr Baxter, despite Mrs Baxter’s protestations, has decided that Audrey isn’t ever going to grow up. If Audrey does develop womanly curves and wiles then Mr Baxter will probably lock her at the top of a very high tower. And if boys ever start noticing those womanly curves and wiles then it’s a fair bet that Mr Baxter will kill them, picking them off one by one as they attempt to scale the heights of Sithean’s privet and shin up the long golden-red rope of Audrey’s beautiful