The Lie by Helen Dunmore Page A

say the word, and not before. She stood beside us, wearing her Sunday blouse, which we had never seen in school before. ‘ Now, children! ’
    We froze. We didn’t move or breathe or smile. There we are, rows of unsmiling children, looking straight ahead as instructed, the girls’ hair plaited and be-ribboned, their pinafores as white as bleach and sunlight could make them. We boys are wearing our Sunday jackets and collars, if we possess them, and our hair is darkly plastered to our skulls.
    When the photograph envelopes were given out we bore them home as if they were breakable as eggs. There was no larking about that day. Those who didn’t have an envelope pretended not to care. I gave mine into my mother’s hand, and stood beside her while she opened it. She looked at the photograph for a long moment, but said nothing, until I wondered if I had done something wrong. But I hadn’t moved a muscle. There was no India rubber blur where my face ought to have been. It was clear as clear. I pointed to it, to show her.
    ‘Look, that’s me,’ I said.
    ‘It’s very like,’ said my mother. She was far away. I feared her in this mood, because I couldn’t reach her, even if I was standing beside her. The photograph slipped into her lap, as if her hands were too tired to hold it.
    The photograph was never framed. I thought my mother had lost it, when I thought of it at all, but soon I forgot that it had ever been taken. We had only one framed photograph, kept on a shelf of the kitchen dresser. It showed my mother, my father and me as a baby, with a waterfall thundering behind us and a rustic bridge to one side. For a long time I believed that I remembered the rush of that water, and the creaky sound of the bridge as the three of us walked across it, and then my mother explained that the photograph had been taken in a studio in Simonstown. My father looked proudly ahead. He was very handsome, I thought, and both my parents wore wonderful clothes. My baby self was swaddled in a shawl that fell like a second waterfall, halfway down my mother’s dress.
    But she had kept the school photograph all the time, and must have put it inside her Bible before she died. I know it wasn’t there before, because the pages of that Bible were turned each Sunday. Its rhythms were as familiar to me as my own voice.
Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
    The children in the photograph are not changed. I look at us, and all at once, for the first time, I realise why she never put it on display. I was not one of the boys in a Sunday jacket and collar. I was one of half a dozen who wore mended jerseys, and showed no collars below their scrubbed and shining faces. It must have cut her to the quick. Not because we were poor; we were most of us poor. We had been less poor once, when my father was alive, and we would do better again once I was older and able to work. Meanwhile my mother cleaned and mended, made broth with butcher’s bones, worked all day in other people’s houses and on spring and summer evenings dug and weeded in her vegetable plot at the top of the town until the light went. It was how we were and it said nothing about us, beyond that we had little. That photograph said too much. It said that this was how I was, a child who had no jacket or Sunday collar, and would never have one, as far as the photograph was concerned. It fixed what we believed was temporary, and made it the fact of our existence. But she hadn’t destroyed it. I could not imagine my mother tearing up any photograph which contained my face.
    We shall all be changed.
    How those words used to run through me like fire. Whether or not I believed them didn’t matter. They promised that the world was greater than I knew.
    How many books had Mr Dennis in his library?