Southern Ruby Read Free Page B

today because she’s got a nose like a dolphin!’
    â€˜Hey, beanpole, what’s the weather like up there?’
    The hair colour was reverse psychology: Here, I’ll give you something to really talk about . . .
    I put the magazine down and turned my CD player on full volume. Sarah Vaughan singing ‘Misty’ filled the room.
    A copy of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire lay in a hiding spot under my bed and I retrieved it to read it for the fifth time. I’d underlined the parts that described New Orleans. People found it hard to imagine that I might miss what I’d never had, but I did. I often fantasised about what it would have been like to be brought up by young parents and live in the lush, tropical atmosphere of New Orleans. I felt more affinity with Rice’s descriptions of that languid and dark arts city than I did with Roseville and its neat houses and English-style hedged gardens. Sometimes I dreamed of a white house with a turret and a balcony that overlooked a garden scented with gardenias and verdant with palms and banana trees, but I didn’t know if the picture was a memory or something that had come out of my imagination.
    As a child, I’d wished that I could make Mother’s and Father’s Day gifts at school for my actual parents, like the other kids, as well as for Nan. My mother was visible around our house in the photographs on the piano and her sports trophies in the spare room, but my father was a taboo subject with Nan. ‘A devil who drove drunk with his wife and young child in thecar and ruined our lives!’ It was obvious that my brunette looks and tall stature hadn’t come from Nan or my mother with their petite figures and fair Anglo-Saxon features, which meant I must have inherited them from my father. He was half of me, and until someone told me at least one good thing about him, I’d feel despicable too.
    Why couldn’t I know something as simple as what he looked like or what he had done for a living? For the past year I’d been imagining that perhaps my father might have been an aristocratic vampire, like Louis de Pointe du Lac, and that was the real reason Nan wouldn’t talk about him.
    I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming the floors. In the afternoon, I lay on my bed with my stack of Cosmopolitans and read an article on rhinoplasty. Nan’s friend Janet said with my height and striking features I should be a model, but the girls at school called me ‘a freak’. My nose was horrible in every way: long, dorsal-humped, with a boxy tip. Corinne Doulton tormented me at least once a week by sketching it and then passing around her artwork for the other girls’ amusement.
    â€˜It’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa.’
    â€˜No, it’s the Eiffel Tower after a lightning strike.’
    â€˜Ha haa!’
    As I read the magazine article, it occurred to me that plastic surgery might change my life. I closed my eyes and pictured returning to school after the holidays with a pert ski-slope of a nose, no longer an ugly duckling but a beautiful swan. The younger girls would carry my books, and the boys from other schools would fall at my feet.
    I was lost in this vision when something occurred to me. What if I’d inherited this nose from my father along with my colouring and long limbs? If that was the case, how could I ever change it? It would be like destroying the last vestige of him. But how could I find out?
    I hovered at the door to Nan’s chintz and rosewood bedroom with indoctrination and curiosity warring against each other inside me. I was a serial ‘dresser up’ as a child and after one incident, where I’d used up an entire tube of Nan’s pricey Christian Dior lipstick to paint my face, I was banned from her room unless she was present. Even now I was fifteen she kept that rule. But I’d seen her pack away documents in archive boxes at