Loe raamatut: «The Other Half of Augusta Hope»

Augusta

My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that – except the boy who died, who isn’t saying anything. He carried his story with him off the edges of the earth, like the others who died along the way.

This story, my story, belongs to them too.

My story starts, like all stories do, with a mother and a father, and here they are – Stanley and Jilly Hope.

Stanley, tall, and stooping to apologise for this, liked to wear a dark wool suit, which, when he sat down, would rise to reveal two white and entirely hairless shins. Jilly was well below his eyeline, squashy as marshmallow and keen on aprons. She had pale curly hair, cut to just above the shoulder, which she patted, to little effect.

My parents put down a deposit on the house in Willow Crescent, in Hedley Green, before there was a house there at all. The riskiest thing they ever did. Empty out their bank account for a pile of mud.

From then on, no more risks to be taken. Life best lived within the crescent, which was circular, and round and round they went with their lives, contented, with no desire for exit.

I, as soon as I was out of my mother’s womb, looked to be out of anywhere I was put in, striving, with some success, to exit the cot, the playpen or the pram.

My first exit (out of my mother) was fraught. I’d turned the wrong way up and wrapped the umbilical cord around my neck, whilst Julia slid serenely into the world shortly before midnight on 31 July. I didn’t appear until some minutes later, by which time it was August, and we were twins with different birthdays.

My sister, born in July, was named Julia; I, born in August, would be Augusta. A thematic and paired approach, as advised by the library of books on naming babies which my mother had stacked on her bedside table throughout the long months of our gestation. Our double exit was complete. Exit was a word I liked, ex meaning out in Latin, and x meaning anything at all in maths, and exit signs in green and white everywhere at school, but with limited opportunities to do so.

Stanley and Jilly Hope were much more inclined towards the in than the out, the staying than the going. They were the first to move into the crescent, and they wore this like a badge amongst the neighbours. We live at number 1. As if this made them winners.

But the thought crept into my mind quite early on that they were losers.

‘Go away!’ I said to the thought, but it didn’t.

I never told anyone about it, even Julia, though I know it showed in the expression on my face, and this made her sad – and I am truly sorry about that now, sorrier than you know.

She and I were Snow White and Rose Red: Julia, fair, quiet and contained, happy inside herself, inside the house, humming; and me, quite the opposite, straining to leave, dark, outspoken, walking in the wind, railing. Railing, from the Latin, to bray like a donkey (ragulare) and railing meaning barrier or fence from straight stick (regula), which is how I looked, skinny as a ruler.

Our fifth birthday, one year of school done, and my legs and arms narrowing as I rose an inch above Julia’s head. We were given tricycles, mine, yellow, and Julia’s, pink. Julia drew chalk lines on the drive and spent the day reversing into parking spaces. I rode out of the drive, turned left, curved around to number 13, at the top of the crescent, twelve o’clock, crossed the road precariously to the roundabout and drove my trike into the fishpond singing ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’.

At school, in Year 4, 1998, when I was seven years old, and we were doing an underwater project (remaining, ourselves, disappointingly, on land), Miss April told us that marinus meant of the sea in Latin, and sub meant under, hence submarine. But when I put up my hand and told her, excuse me, Miss April, but your pen has rolled sub your desk, she told me not to be a show-off, Augusta.

I’ve always loved words like other people love sweets or ice cream or puddings, words made of letters so that sounds turn into things, actual things. And miraculously we remember which sounds match which things, hundreds and thousands of sound-combinations – because that’s language. It mesmerised me as a child, and I would hang about, spellbound, whenever I heard people speaking Spanish or French or Gujarati.

I realised with some pride that I must sound as clever to foreigners when I spoke English, rattling off the words like a total pro, as we all do – well most of us, not Graham Cook, who lived next door, whose mouth didn’t manage to make any words at all.

‘You pity the Cooks,’ said my father, lightly, with no sign of pity on his face. ‘It could happen to anyone.’

I liked to pop next door and talk to Jim Cook when he was out washing his car in the drive, because he always had new dreams up his sleeve. But the truth was that none of them ever seemed to slip out of his sleeve into real life.

Barbara Cook used to take Julia and me swimming when she had respite care days for Graham because, my mother told me, the poor woman liked the chance to do normal things and do them normally, without a palaver. I tried to make swimming the best possible time for Barbara Cook, although she wasn’t a person who said much about how she was feeling.

One day, after swimming, I couldn’t find my skirt or my pants, and I had to walk into Barbara’s changing cubicle wearing a red T-shirt and nothing else – but all she said was, ‘Augusta, you look the living image of Winnie the Pooh!’

She laughed until her eyes were streaming tears, she wrapped my wet towel around my waist, and I had to waddle into the car park like that, my face on fire with the shame of it.

I wanted to like Barbara Cook, and I did like Barbara Cook, I might even have loved her, so I tried not to mind that she laughed at me when I already felt ashamed. I also learnt a valuable lesson: that the people we like, and might even love, will still disappoint us – in the same way, I suppose, as we disappoint them.

‘Why do you think Barbara laughed at me?’ I said to Julia later.

Julia shrugged and went on making some kind of woollen knitted rope which came out of the head of a painted wooden doll. I hated that thing. I had one too. Of course. Still sealed. Suffocating in her box. Like the rest of us.

My mother, inexplicably, tied Julia’s woollen rope onto the pull-on pull-off light string in the bathroom, to join the gallery of miscellany hung around the house. There were crêpe butterflies, paper mobiles on coat-hangers, doilies taped to windows and paintings magnetised to the fridge – a kind of shrine to us, the twins, their girls.

No more children followed.

‘When you have two perfect children,’ said my father, ‘why ask for trouble?’

‘Perfect, are we?’ said Julia, smiling, and stretching on the sofa like a cat, with that lovely aura of contentment she had, a kind of giant body-shaped halo.

‘No complications, I mean,’ said my father, nodding towards number 2, and reaching out his small pale hand to Julia’s shoulder. ‘All there. Not – you know.’

My father drew spirals out of his right temple.

My mother patted the front of her apron as if she’d baked us, and we’d risen just right.

‘Graham Cook is all there,’ I said, and I was off. ‘Why do you think it’s OK to make mental spiral signs with your fingers? And how do you think that would that make the Cooks feel? And what on earth does perfect mean anyway, because sometimes the people you think are so perfect in fact end up doing the worst—’

‘Can you slow down, Augusta? I can’t think straight,’ said my father.

‘—things in the world?’

I kept going because I loved the sound of my own voice even though I was scarcely seven years old, and I could only imagine how clever I would sound if someone foreign was listening. Someone from one of the many countries in the world that was not our boring country, afloat on a grey ocean, when other countries got turquoise and aquamarine and azure blue as the colour of their sea.

As you see, I never had that gold halo of contentment around me. I don’t know why that was. I guess it’s the way we were made, Julia and I.

The way I was made was wanting to write a book. From as far back as I can remember.

But first I wanted to memorise as many words as I could, so that I could write it with precision and a bit of pzazz – which is the only word in the dictionary starting with pz, acronyms excepted.

I liked to open the dictionary at the first and tiniest word, a (which has thirty-seven entries), and to work my way through all the letters of the alphabet, exclaiming and memorising, until I ended up at zyzzogeton (a genus of large South American leafhopper), and then I’d try out the words I’d found in new and unlikely combinations. Then I’d go back to the beginning and start at a again.

People typically use 5,000 words in their speech, and twice as many in their writing, but an educated person might use 80,000, and the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary has full entries for 171,476 words in current use, 47,156 obsolete words, with 9,500 derivatives as sub-entries.

When I was at Hedley Green library for the morning, I decided to try to find my favourite name for a country, going on sounds, without knowing anything about the place.

I was supposed to be doing a puppet workshop, but I crept away and let Julia make two stripy sock snakes with plastic eyes and felt tongues, which weren’t completely my cup of tea.

I crept past Jean, the librarian, who had a habit of ripping her own hair out, and I sat quietly in the shadows of the bookshelves. I went through all the countries, starting at A and ending at Z, in the index of the atlas, and I came to the conclusion that the best country name in the world was Burundi.

Burundi Burundi Burundi. I said it so many times it stopped meaning anything. It was like the sea lapping against my mind.

I went to the left-hand corner of the library where they had a huge globe on wheels, and I found Burundi, land-locked in Africa between Tanzania and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I turned the globe slowly, staring at all the countries and trying to memorise every name and every location and where they joined, and the shapes they made up against the sea, up against each other, and then I spun the globe round and round really fast, letting it turn into a greeny-blue blur, and I imagined myself at Hedley Green library, a tiny pin-prick in the South of England, rotating, and I tried to work out why we didn’t all fall off the earth – me, Julia, the puppet lady and all the stripy socks.

When I looked up Burundi in the encyclopaedias and information books at Hedley Green library, I found out that the Tutsis looked down their noses at the Hutus, who arrived there first – even though they all spoke the same Bantu language called Kirundi, and had the same colour skin and the same Christian religion. European men called by in ships, and they said that the Hutus should look after the Tutsis’ cows. To cut a very long story short, this in the end made them want to kill each other. I was struck by how sad and unnecessary this was – and then by how many other sad and unnecessary things human beings make happen on this earth. I decided to turn my attention to the sky.

When I started my research into the sky, a cloud seemed a simple thing to me – a puff of floating water-vapour, and that was that. But the more I researched, the more cloud meant. The five letters were elastic, and they stretched through the years, as I realised that someone somewhere was probably doing their PhD on clouds, or on one tiny aspect of clouds, and maybe that would take up half their brain for their whole life.

It made me feel dizzy when I realised everything the simple word cloud carried around inside it. It made me feel dizzy when I realised that this was true of every word there is. It made me feel both dizzy and small – and, in my dizziness and smallness, I watched the clouds go by, and they looked like speech bubbles. As I grew older and started to spend more time inside the row of dictionaries lined up on the reference shelves of the library, I put words inside them, words I loved, in alphabetical order A–Z. Acanthus, admiral, aeronaut, beanstalk, bergamot, chrysanthemum, calabash, cicada. I thought about the size of different words – or should I say the depth, or the space they take up? I wasn’t referring to the number of letters they had but to what manner of thing or things were held within those letters.

I thought of hundreds and thousands of words all meaning hundreds and thousands of things, and it made me realise that, in the course of my own life, I would end up knowing almost nothing. But the almost nothing I ended up knowing would, I supposed, be different from the almost nothing other people would end up knowing, and between us all, I thought we would know a bit more than almost nothing. And, of course, death would come along, and everything we’d found out would be buried with us. Which seemed a terrible waste. Shouldn’t we first be tipped upside down to let all our knowledge out – like when you empty a piggy bank of its coins?

For days, I went around chewing Burundi like you might chew gum. Burundi, I discovered, was a big, capacious word, and it stretched, stretched, stretched. Because Burundi meant a million things.

It was made up of 27,816 square kilometres, much of it hilly and mountainous, and 10 per cent of it water, mainly the huge Lake Tanganyika which contained 250 species of cichlid fish, rainbow-striped and dazzling.

There were about ten and a half million people living in Burundi – Hutu (85 per cent), Tutsi (14 per cent) and Twa (1 per cent) – and most of them were sad. Their land was running out of soil, their forests were running out of trees and the ones who hadn’t been killed by each other were dying of AIDs.

Only the other day, when they did one of those world happiness surveys, Burundi turned out to be the world’s least happy nation in 2016.

Burundi was my first unlikely choice before I realised how much I like unlikely choices – and, once I’d picked it, I couldn’t let it go. I tried to imagine how different my life would have been if I’d been born there and not here. And I did my best to keep up with what was going on there through the years, including writing letters to each one of its American ambassadors.

The American ambassadors never so much as replied to me, so I turned my attention back to words, which seemed more readily available.

The word Asda was created in 1965, when the Asquith brothers approached Associated Dairies to run the butchery departments in their chain of shops.

If you made a similar combination out of Julia and Augusta, I worked out that you could call us Justa – and we would be one. Like we were, we really were – back in 1999 when we were both nine years old and wearing matching pleated skirts, modelled on Jane in the interminable Peter and Jane series, from my mother’s second-hand Ladybird book collection.

Justa, I would later discover, is the feminine of justus, a Latin adjective meaning just and fair and proper and reasonable and a load of other things besides.

Asda is a word which sums up the life I was born into, a life in which Asda was news. And the news was that there was going to be a massive new Asda as part of the massive new shopping centre in Hedley Green, out on the main road. This was massive news in our house, in Willow Crescent, in the school playground, in Hedley Green high street – in 1999.

This new Asda would be the biggest Asda in Hertfordshire, or the South of England, or the whole world, depending who you were listening to. It was going to be huge and white and made of curved glass – like a great big UFO. Everyone was excited. Except me. They saw Asda as a big word, but I saw it as small. Size had nothing to do with it.

‘I can’t think of anything less exciting than the new Asda,’ I said to my mother and Julia. Because I liked to be dramatic and difficult, my mother would say. And oppositional, I would say, because I like finding new words.

‘Don’t be such an old grump, Augusta,’ said my mother, icing cupcakes in pastel colours, at breakfast, to eat at tea, like fashion houses show their autumn collections in the spring. She liked to be at least one meal ahead, sometimes more, which makes you feel breathless, if you think about it too hard. She rarely sat down.

Despite what I said, I quickly thought of about twenty-five things that were less exciting than the new Asda. Lard and washing up liquid and fingernail clippings and trowels and the hymn that begins ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights’ which we had to sing at school.

Although everyone called the new development Asda, there was going to be (eventually if all went to plan) a Homebase, a Next, a Mothercare and, rumour had it – because rumour has a lot of things – a cinema complex, possibly, and even a bowling alley. The cinema and bowling alley never came, as I might have predicted. (Think what a huge word rumour is, positively bulging with stuff, like a massive delusional warehouse.)

When I was a child and I told people my name, they said back at me, ‘Augusta?’ They said it with as big a question mark in their voice as you can imagine. Like they thought I’d got my own name wrong.

I replied, ‘Yes, Augusta.’

They said, ‘Oh, I see.’

Some people said, ‘And what are you actually called?’

I said, again, ‘Augusta.’

They said, ‘I haven’t heard that name before.’

But I soon grew to like my name.

It fits with my unusual choices.

Augusta, feminine version of Augustus – majestic, grand, venerable – a name originally given to the female relatives of Roman emperors.

Just saying.

Antsy Augusta, my mother used to call me.

‘Ants in your pants, can you please sit still and stop talking all the time?’

My mother kept saying over and over again how much she wished the Mothercare had come when we were little. I couldn’t see the point of saying this even once.

Julia reminded me that having twins was my mother’s idea of heaven: pastel-coloured Babygros, pin-tucked girls’ dresses and gingham bloomers.

I wondered what my heaven would be full of. But then I thought that I probably wouldn’t get a choice, bearing in mind the communal aspect of the project.

I prefer the word paradise to heaven, a word which joins us all the way from the Greek paradeisos, giving us one of my favourite ever adjectives – paradisiacal – a word which nobody actually uses.

My grandmother Nellie (who gave me her middle name, and her straight dark hair and skinny limbs) said that in heaven we’d be in white, wearing crowns and waiting around, like in the carol. I knew I didn’t want to wear a crown and I hated waiting around. So I hoped she was wrong. I still have no idea how it works, and I’d like to find out. Like we all would, I guess.

Julia said that heaven would be full of roses and waterfalls and flocks of white doves, which were three of her favourite things.

‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest,’ said my grandmother, who liked to talk in bible verses, set off by a word or a thought or a curse on somebody she didn’t like. She particularly liked to divide people into sheep and goats, popping my goat grandfather into the jaws of hell at every possible opportunity because he had gone off with his secretary soon after my mother was born.

My grandmother would sit in the corner of the lounge on Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons, commenting on our lives like a one-woman Greek chorus, whilst also playing with the silver crucifix which she wore around her neck. It had a little Jesus Christ on it, permanently dying. It bothered me.

To make room for the magical Asda Development, the terraced houses on the main road were being taken down, with the residents compensated, very generously, everybody said. The way they did it looked like slicing a rectangular block of Wall’s ice cream, one oblong at a time, and I thought that this was one of my best similes (bearing in mind the name of the brand of ice cream), though nobody else in the family appreciated my brilliance.

Mrs Venditti, who was married to the ice cream-van man, cried as number 3 was sliced, and my mother explained that this was because her baby had died inside that house of cot death. I’d heard this was to do with lying babies on their front, and I asked my mother if Mrs Venditti had done this, by mistake, but my mother said, ‘Can we change the subject?’

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Because I don’t like thinking about dead babies,’ she said.

My father added, ‘Mrs Venditti is also Italian.’

I said, ‘What do you mean?’

He said, ‘Stop asking questions all the time.’

A driver in an old Renault 5 crashed into a minibus of school children because he was watching number 8 fall down, but nobody was badly hurt. A sign went up saying, ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ except you had to take your eyes off the road to look at the sign. Sometimes, I thought, adults just don’t think things through.

My mother let me wait on the main road in the evenings to meet our father on his way home from work. It made her feel that everything about our life was utterly perfect. Like the families in her second-hand Ladybird books, which continued to proliferate along the shelves of the somewhat over-varnished pine dresser.

The Greens’ house was the last to come down, and all six Greens stood on the opposite pavement watching, as I waited for my father, who soon came walking past, whistling, on his way back from Stanley Hope Uniforms.

‘This must be a very sad day for you,’ he said to Mr Green cheerfully, as if the thought of Mr Green’s sadness made him feel safer inside his own happiness.

‘It’s only bricks and mortar,’ said Mr Green, with his hands in his pockets.

‘It’s a home,’ said my father.

‘That’s sentimental, Stanley,’ said Mr Green.

My father didn’t seem to be able to find an answer for that.

‘Aren’t you worried?’ said Mr Green to my father as his old house crashed to the ground.

‘Why would I be worried?’ said my father.

‘Too much worry, Jilly,’ my father would say when my mother suggested owning a dog, or going on an aeroplane, or having another baby, which was her favourite suggestion through the years.

‘School uniform!’ shouted Mr Green over the noise of the crashing bricks, jerking his head at the place behind the hoarding where the biggest Asda in the whole universe would be.

‘School uniform?’ shouted my father back.

Then the crashing stopped for a moment.

‘Asda sells school uniform,’ said Mr Green very slowly and very loudly as if my father had special needs. ‘Lots of it. And cheap. The whole shaboodle.’

I watched my father’s face, and I saw, for a tiny fragment of a second, a crack run across it, a hairline fracture, like on a china pot. I looked down at the pavement. I didn’t like to see my father’s face break like that. When I looked up, the hairline crack was gone. But my father’s face was covered in a layer of sweat like see-through Uhu glue, which I hoped might mend the crack, although I knew the truth, that cracks grow and split rather than shrink or mend. I had a premonition of my father’s face splitting in two.

‘Better be on our way then,’ said my father to Mr Green, and he shot his arm up in a wave to Mrs Green and the four bored children.

‘What’s a shaboodle?’ I said, thinking I had a new word to add to my S page.

My father didn’t answer Mr Green, and he didn’t answer me. He practically ran home, whereas normally we walked along together, talking about how my day had been at school. His fingers were trembling, and I could tell he wanted to see my mother really badly.

‘Peas in a pod,’ says my mother – still, despite, or maybe because of, everything. ‘That’s what marriage is. For better. For worse. In sickness. And in health.’

‘I need to talk to you, Jilly,’ said my father, with his key still in the door, and I noticed he was panting with worry. I took up my position underneath the serving hatch (an arched hole in the wall) on the lounge side, which enabled me to listen to all their kitchen conversations.

‘Oh, darling,’ said my mother, laughing. ‘Asda can’t compete with Stanley Hope Uniforms!’

‘Really?’ said my father. ‘Really?’

‘It’s the personal service,’ said my mother. ‘Who’s going to measure the kids up at Asda? Who’s going to sew initials onto their shoe bags at Asda?’

‘Really?’ said my father again. ‘So nothing to worry about?’

And he walked into the hall saying under his breath, ‘Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about.’

‘Were the Greens sad to see their home come crashing down?’ said my mother when we were eating supper.

‘Mr Green said it was only bricks and mortar,’ I said.

‘How heartless,’ said my mother. ‘It’s where they brought up their children.’

‘Mr Green told Dad he was being sentimental,’ I said.