In the canteen queue, Marion had felt a flush of excitement as Juliet’s warm breath tickled her neck. “Don’t eat everything, Manatee, leave some for the rest of us,” she whispered before ramming her tray into Marion’s plump behind.
It had been during a trip with Mother to Pennington’s department store that Juliet and John crossed paths. Marion was fourteen and John was sixteen. Mother left them in the café eating coffee cake and drinking hot chocolate while she went to search for dust mite–proof pillowcases in the bedding department.
Juliet was sitting at a table across the room with a group of smartly turned-out tennis-club girls. They were snapping open compacts and applying makeup they had just bought from the beauty department when Juliet pointed and shouted out:
“Look, it’s Marion the Manatee!”
As she got up from her seat and approached their table Marion felt sick with dread. Juliet, in a tweed miniskirt, black tights, and shiny pumps, blond hair held back by a velvet Alice band, stood over them like a queen meeting beggars.
“How simply charming. Mr. and Mrs. Manatee all dressed up in their smart winter togs,” she said.
Both Marion and John were wearing heavy overcoats that Mother had just chosen for them in the clothes department. It was warm and steamy in the café, but Mother was worried the new coats might get left behind if they took them off. Marion wriggled uncomfortably in her red gabardine, suddenly hating the garment that she had fallen in love with just an hour earlier.
“How adorable—are all those Christmas presents for the little manatee children?” said Juliet, looking at the parcels that Mother had left for Marion and her brother to keep watch over.
John kept forking cake into his mouth without even looking up at Juliet, but Marion knew that he was furious. And it was her fault for being fat and stupid while attending a school full of sleek, brilliant princesses. It was one thing to be mocked by scallywags from the council estate; but a beautiful rich girl making fun of them in Pennington’s was unbearable.
Three weeks later, a dog walker found Juliet lying unconscious in the frozen mud of Albert Park. She had been struck with a rock while cycling home through a thickly wooded area near the council estate. The mild fracture to her skull healed quickly, but she suffered from severe anxiety afterwards and was forced to take months off school and give up tennis permanently.
A boy from the estate was caught trying to sell her missing bike. When the police questioned him, he said he had found it propped up by his grandmother’s garden gate. There wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges against the youth, so the crime went unsolved. At Ladychapel they had a special assembly during which the headmistress talked to them about Juliet’s attack, and students were warned not to go through the woods alone. Marion made a card for Juliet and took part in prayers for her recovery.
As she lay down in bed one night a few weeks after Juliet’s attack, Marion felt a hard lump behind her head. Reaching underneath the pillow she took out the black Alice band that Juliet always wore. With her thumb she rubbed off a few specks of dried blood sticking to the velvet. Just touching it made her heart beat faster, as if it contained some mysterious essence of Juliet’s spirit. She got out of bed and went over to the mirror, sliding it onto her own turbulent hair. She felt overcome with a strange power, as if she had tried on a crown belonging to a mythical queen. She hadn’t hated Juliet; in fact, she had almost been in love with her and that made what happened all the more significant. How thrilling to have a secret like this! Now she was no longer just a plain fat girl who people felt sorry for. This made her important and interesting, like a dull brown field with a seam of gold hidden deep in the ground beneath it.
DINNER WITH JOHN
Marion was in the kitchen preparing their evening meal when John next came up from the cellar. Without saying a word to her, he went straight into the dining room and switched on the small TV set that was so old, it didn’t even have a remote control.
“The Seven Years War,” he shouted from the next room.
Marion stirred the pan of oxtail soup to stop the gritty lumps from sticking. Mother would have thought it was common to have a TV set in the dining room, but John liked to watch Brain of Champions while they ate. Marion sometimes imagined answering one of the questions correctly herself: “Well done, Mar,” John would say, “that was a tough one, fancy you knowing that.” But this never happened; the pace of the quiz was so quick that she didn’t have time to even think before someone else answered.
And of course most of the subjects were things like science and history that she knew nothing about. Indeed what kind of question might Marion be able to answer? She could never remember the capital cities of countries, or kings and queens of England. If someone asked her to name the prime minister she could manage that, but who, apart from an imbecile, couldn’t?
Sometimes she got cross with herself for not being more knowledgeable, or at least attempting to read interesting books and newspaper articles rather than wasting all her time daydreaming or watching what John called that “American made-for-TV trash” (even watching the same film more than once, if it was one of her favorites, like The Disappearance of Jodie-Lee or A Home for Malcolm). Perhaps if she were a well-read and less ignorant person, then her intellectually minded brother might want to spend more time with her, rather than staying down in that cellar practically every minute of the day. And he wouldn’t get angry and call her dummy for not knowing so many “obvious things.”
During the evenings they might sit together on the sofa, drinking tea and discussing “the history of France” or “space travel.” After hours and hours had passed Marion would look at the clock and say, “Goodness, John, is it two a.m. already? We’ve been talking so much, I didn’t notice the time, but now we really ought to get off to bed.”
And John would reply, “Oh, but can’t we sit and chat for a little while longer—I was having such a good time. How about you make us some toast, then we can discuss famous explorers of the Amazon rainforest?”
“The Prague uprising,” she heard John shout from the next room. “And the answer is—the Prague uprising,” echoed the quiz show presenter.