thrushes’ eggs. Very pale greeny-blue with a sprinkle of black spots. She liked to draw them. Filled page after page of a sketchbook with them.
I told Sha I was afraid my plan for going to see David would never work. The small white lies I’d told my mother were already getting bigger and grayer. I had written the story I’d told my mum so far in my diary and put it in the hiding place under my bed so I could keep track of all the fibs. The thought of my mother finding out that I was going to a pop concert was as painful as the thought of not going with the others to the White City.
Sharon said everything would be okay, she and her mum would cover for me. That was one advantage to my mother refusing to mix with any women in the town because they were all common and went out to the fish van in slippers with curlers in their hair. At least she couldn’t compare notes with the other mums.
I loved it down there by the pier. My mother claimed the sea was depressing. Ach, always coming in and out, reminding you that it had been going in and out before you were born and would be going in and out centuries after you’d died. The sea was indifferent to human suffering, my mother said. But I found comfort in the things she hated. The sucking of the sea as it drew breath to come in and then the roar as it pulled back, dragging the pebbles with it. Nature’s lullaby, like a mother saying hush forever to a crying baby.
Shhuuussssh. Shhooooossh
. If you laid your head right back and molded your arms and legs into the pebbles, you could feel yourself disappearing. That was a good feeling; not being there anymore. I liked to do it in the summer when the warmth of the stones got into your bones.
Every time we went down to the beach the sunset was different. Sometimes the clouds were so beautiful and crazy that if you painted them like they really looked, people would have said you were making it up. That evening, the sun was like a lozenge that had been sucked until it was so thin it was about to break.
“Look,” I said to Sharon, “a Strepsils sunset.”
I told my mother we were going to see Handel’s
Messiah
.
I knew she’d approve. She liked high culture. In fact, she approved of altitude in general. High heels, high opera, highball glasses that she got from the Green Shield Stamps catalog and filled with lime andCinzano Bianco and loads of crushed ice. “The poor woman’s cocktail,” she called it. Tall men in high places would have been my mother’s ideal.
It wasn’t a complete lie about the
Messiah
. There would be singing and worship of a kind and we would need to take a train and money for something to eat. I had found the concert in the Forthcoming Events section of the
South Wales Echo
. Same night as David’s White City concert, May 26, only it was in Cardiff, not London. So it was perfect, really.
Except this was the first big lie I’d told her in my life and I was scared from the start. If I hadn’t wanted to go so badly, I’d never have dared. My heart felt like a fish flubbing around in a net that was gradually being pulled tighter and tighter.
“Handel is sublime,” my mother had said when I told her. “What is the choir, Petra?”
“The Cwmbran Orpheus,” I said.
“Not bad. Really not of the highest, but not szo bad,” she said, removing a leather glove and raking a hand through her wavy blond hair. “I am glad you make this effort, Petra. Your friends are nice girls, really I hope, good families and so on?”
“Yes.” I tried to think of my mother meeting Sharon’s family, but my mind blanked at the prospect.
We were standing in the narrow, stepped bit of land at the back of the house that my dad had turned into a fruit and vegetable patch. It was a garden to feed us. The only concession to decoration was a row of sweet peas along the brick wall that divided us from Mr. and Mrs. Hughes next door. (Even after seventeen years my parents were still not on first-name terms with their
I told Sha I was afraid my plan for going to see David would never work. The small white lies I’d told my mother were already getting bigger and grayer. I had written the story I’d told my mum so far in my diary and put it in the hiding place under my bed so I could keep track of all the fibs. The thought of my mother finding out that I was going to a pop concert was as painful as the thought of not going with the others to the White City.
Sharon said everything would be okay, she and her mum would cover for me. That was one advantage to my mother refusing to mix with any women in the town because they were all common and went out to the fish van in slippers with curlers in their hair. At least she couldn’t compare notes with the other mums.
I loved it down there by the pier. My mother claimed the sea was depressing. Ach, always coming in and out, reminding you that it had been going in and out before you were born and would be going in and out centuries after you’d died. The sea was indifferent to human suffering, my mother said. But I found comfort in the things she hated. The sucking of the sea as it drew breath to come in and then the roar as it pulled back, dragging the pebbles with it. Nature’s lullaby, like a mother saying hush forever to a crying baby.
Shhuuussssh. Shhooooossh
. If you laid your head right back and molded your arms and legs into the pebbles, you could feel yourself disappearing. That was a good feeling; not being there anymore. I liked to do it in the summer when the warmth of the stones got into your bones.
Every time we went down to the beach the sunset was different. Sometimes the clouds were so beautiful and crazy that if you painted them like they really looked, people would have said you were making it up. That evening, the sun was like a lozenge that had been sucked until it was so thin it was about to break.
“Look,” I said to Sharon, “a Strepsils sunset.”
I told my mother we were going to see Handel’s
Messiah
.
I knew she’d approve. She liked high culture. In fact, she approved of altitude in general. High heels, high opera, highball glasses that she got from the Green Shield Stamps catalog and filled with lime andCinzano Bianco and loads of crushed ice. “The poor woman’s cocktail,” she called it. Tall men in high places would have been my mother’s ideal.
It wasn’t a complete lie about the
Messiah
. There would be singing and worship of a kind and we would need to take a train and money for something to eat. I had found the concert in the Forthcoming Events section of the
South Wales Echo
. Same night as David’s White City concert, May 26, only it was in Cardiff, not London. So it was perfect, really.
Except this was the first big lie I’d told her in my life and I was scared from the start. If I hadn’t wanted to go so badly, I’d never have dared. My heart felt like a fish flubbing around in a net that was gradually being pulled tighter and tighter.
“Handel is sublime,” my mother had said when I told her. “What is the choir, Petra?”
“The Cwmbran Orpheus,” I said.
“Not bad. Really not of the highest, but not szo bad,” she said, removing a leather glove and raking a hand through her wavy blond hair. “I am glad you make this effort, Petra. Your friends are nice girls, really I hope, good families and so on?”
“Yes.” I tried to think of my mother meeting Sharon’s family, but my mind blanked at the prospect.
We were standing in the narrow, stepped bit of land at the back of the house that my dad had turned into a fruit and vegetable patch. It was a garden to feed us. The only concession to decoration was a row of sweet peas along the brick wall that divided us from Mr. and Mrs. Hughes next door. (Even after seventeen years my parents were still not on first-name terms with their
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