Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
Mummy and Adam run behind, with Adam grumbling, ‘We’re going to miss the bell!’ over and over. You get told off if you miss the bell. At playgroup there is no bell and you can just go in when you want to and no one tells you off. Once you’ve said goodbye to your mummy, you go to the cloakroom and must hang your coat on the silver hook with your name written on a white self-adhesive label above it. I love seeing my name, S-a-r-a-h written in big, curly, teacher writing. It confirms who I am, and my right to be there.
The summer I graduate to big school we go to a village fête being held in same the hall where playgroup is held. It’s been only a few weeks since I was last there, but I am a big girl now and I’m feeling nostalgic. I break away from Mummy and Daddy and excitedly make my way to the cloakroom, my see-through jelly shoes sticking to the linoleum with each step. The cloakroom looks different. There are no coats, of course, and no pink and blue lunch boxes cluttering up the floor. But there’s something else. It takes me a few seconds to register but then it clicks. The names have gone. Crudely torn from the wall. Remnants of the labels remain, but not so you can read them. A faded a-r is still visible, but the rest of rest of my name is gone. Ripped away to make way for a new child with a new name. I stand and stare at the spot above my hook for so long that Mum sends Daddy to come and look for me. I am lured back into the main hall with the promise of a beaker of Coca-Cola and a slice of Victoria sponge.
At our house, Mummy does the cooking and Daddy drives off in the morning and comes back home in the dark. I know he is my daddy because he is married to my mummy and he eats a bacon sandwich and drinks a bitter black coffee for breakfast every morning. He also sleeps in a daddy’s bedroom. I think this is normal.
Some of my favourite things are scrambled eggs, riding on Daddy’s shoulders, the waxy feel of his bald head and the smell of his scalp, the smell of maleness. I also love watching cartoons after church on Sunday while Mummy cooks roast dinner, being allowed to answer the telephone (‘Tandridge 4718, hello!’) and Granny reading Peter Rabbit to me. This part of life is simple. I wish everyday meant scrambled eggs and cartoons. Things I don’t like are getting my hair brushed (we all have to sing the ‘Ouch-ouch’ song just to get me through it), driving in Grandpa’s car (which makes me feel sick), Adam hitting me, and Daddy getting home late.
We live in a house that looks normal from the outside – bricks, roof, front door, garden – but which inside is odd, topsy-turvy. It has a downstairs kitchen and a bedroom on the second of three floors, a bedroom that doesn’t quite fit and seems like it must have been a mistake. My family is a bit like our house; looks normal from the outside: a mummy, a daddy, a brother and a sister, but when you look closer you realise it doesn’t quite match. The children don’t look like they fit; they look like they must have been a mistake. My put-together family was assembled by chance, the outcome of a barren womb, a drunken fuck and forbidden love, but to me everything about our family is normal, normal, normal. I can’t explain what love is, but I know what ‘safe’ is and I feel it. Mostly, anyway.
Back at the party and I am sitting in the ‘Pass the parcel’ circle. My absolute favourite party game. I am among the youngest of my little group, so I have already played the game several times before at the birthday celebrations of my toddler clique. Usually it is the ‘big’ boys and girls who win the final prize, but I am plucky and also, since it is my birthday, feel entitled to all the good stuff. The music plays, probably some infantile nursery-rhyme soundtrack stamped onto a vinyl and played on the not-to-be-touched record player. Grandpa is at the controls and every so often, as the parcel is tossed, thrown, and more often, reluctantly delivered on around the circle, he lifts the needle from the record. There is a nanosecond of silence, and then a cacophony of high-pitched squeals. On one of the goes around, the music stops while I am holding the parcel. I frantically rip off a layer of newspaper; it is a tense moment, I want to win, to find out what’s underneath all this wrapping. I am disappointed because I haven’t won the main, proper prize, but because Grandpa is the best, and because he knows how vital it is to keep the energy in pass the parcel, a raspberry-flavoured boiled sweet has fallen out of the paper as a consolation prize. Second best. I can live with that. For now. The music starts again and the magic parcel is once again taken and passed on, taken and passed on. This is my earliest memory. Turning two.
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