The Darkness that Divides Us. Renate Dorrestein
in the sky had lit up, twinkling as bright as can be.
‘What about me?’ Lucy suddenly cried. ‘Where am I?’
Thomas started reading off the rest of the list.
‘No, don’t help her,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘It doesn’t really matter if you know how to read or write your own name yet. It’s just to give me some idea.’
‘Lucy isn’t even up there,’ said Thomas.
Lucy squealed, ‘You see!’
‘Oh, child,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Of course you are.’ And she pointed.
Thomas’s lips moved. ‘That says Lucky.’ After a moment he added thoughtfully, ‘There’s no one here called Lucky.’
‘Aha,’ said Miss Joyce. Her face lit up, just like one of God’s stars up in the sky. Beaming, she went on and on about why the ‘why’ sometimes sounds like ‘ee’ and about how the ‘see’ in the ceiling looks like half a circle, or you’d have ‘keel’ and her own name would be ‘Joyk.’ It really made no sense at all. Letters, she said, could be tricky; they had a will of their own—one time they might sound like this and next thing they’d sound like that. But we could count ourselves lucky we weren’t in China: we had only twenty-six of them—letters, that is—and you hardly ever needed the q or the x; you could live to a ripe old age and never need to use x or q. ‘There’s nothing to it, really there isn’t,’ she promised, smiling at us somewhat damply.
It was true. One moment we were still ignorant know-nothings fidgeting in our hard seats, longing for some distraction, and the next we were reading about See and Spot, Spot and Dot, Spot and Dick. How did we do it? Had Miss Joyce unlocked a little shutter in our minds to release some fairy dust that magically gave us the power to decipher the letters, letters that, when strung together, formed whole words, even? Has she used some secret formula that made us—we, who never missed a trick—forget everything else around us? We no longer saw the worn floorboards or the faded walls of our classroom; we no longer even noticed the dead-carrion smell in the corridor.
‘Mmmmmmoon,’ went Miss Joyce at the blackboard, on which she’d drawn a gaily smiling moon.
‘Mmmmmmoon,’ we all hummed after her, intrigued.
‘And what if I took away the mmmmmm and put in an essss instead?’ Her arm, in the sleeveless checked blouse, came up. She erased the M. But we’d never forget it, never, that M. Coming from the mouth of Miss Joyce, that M just made you want to do your very best.
‘Sssoon!’ she said. ‘See?’
‘Sssoon!’ we agreed, in chorus.
We were her very first class because she’d only just finished her studies. That was why we had to be her little helpers, she said. Because everything was new to her. The chalk, the notebooks, the bell. And when she said that, she laughed, exposing her teeth—she was a bit buck-toothed, though, to her credit, she didn’t seem to mind. She went and sat down at her desk at the front of the classroom and looked at us hopefully. ‘Open your books,’ she said.
The Safe Way to Read was the method we followed.
The Safe Way Reader started you off on the word I. What a concept, using I as the foundation for learning to read, said Miss Joyce, all excited—wasn’t it a neat idea? And that little word I would lead you to all the other words! As soon as you could read I you had practically all the words in the whole entire world at your fingertips!
The Safe Way sometimes liked to have a little fun, too. For example, you’d get a picture of children armed with fishing rods pulling white bits of paper out of a pond. The balloons filled with letters coming out of the kids’ mouths showed which words were supposed to go on which scrap of paper. I fish hat. I fish rat. I fish sock. I fish fish.
I fish fish—that was a good one! Even the little boy in the picture thought it was funny. He had a mop of thick blond hair, just like Thomas’s. The girl fishing next to him was the spitting image of Lucy, with plaits and freckles. She wore a bright yellow jacket trimmed in purple, just the sort of thing the real Lucy always wore. The other children didn’t look like anyone we knew.
Miss Joyce had noticed the resemblance too. ‘What did Thomas fish?’ she asked.
‘Fish!’ we yelled at the top of our lungs.
‘And what did Lucy fish?’
‘Sock!’ we howled in chorus.
Clearly, immediately upon hearing of Thomas’s and Lucy’s engagement, the Queen had ordered all the old primers shredded and new ones printed with the right illustrations.
Every afternoon the lights in the classroom came on a little earlier, and when we walked home from school the leaves crunched beneath our feet. Long-forgotten scarves, mittens, and hats were dug out of hall closets. The bakery smelled of cinnamon and allspice, and Mr De Vries sold pumpkins and gourds, which our mothers displayed in the window in nice antique baskets. At night the temperature sometimes dipped below zero, and then the next morning the roofs were sprinkled with sugary frost, like gingerbread houses. On other mornings the fog was so thick on the way to school that if we hadn’t been holding on to the tips of one another’s woolly mufflers we’d have got lost in the fog. You had every reason to hold on tight, because if you were unlucky enough to disappear into the fog, you’d melt and dissolve right down to your last toenail, until a puddle was all that was left of you; everyone knew that. Every remaining drop of you would quickly have to be collected in a brass bucket and saved until an old crone who knew what to do about it came along, or else you were a goner, forget about it.
Every day, as we walked past the rectory, we saw that Lucy’s mother’s bedroom curtains were still drawn. She was in bed, said Lucy, because she had the flu. On the one hand that was good news, because that meant she wasn’t in any imminent danger. But the flu was such a commonplace thing that we really couldn’t get too worked up about it.
What made this flu unusual, however, was that it just went on and on. Weeks went by—in our reader we were already at ‘Dan in his Hut’—and still her fever hadn’t gone down. Our mothers would have been happy to go see how the patient was doing, but as long as there was still the possibility of contagion, Lucy’s mother didn’t want any visitors. Happily, talking on the phone was permitted, so our mothers were still able to find out what the cards had in store for them. Whispering, the receiver pressed to their ears, they protested—what about the well-disposed Page of Wands, or the generous King of Pentacles? But once they’d hung up, they would sit back, disappointed, and sigh that still, it was different, wasn’t it, to see the cards with your own two eyes, and besides, in some respects it was easy for Lucy’s mother to say, being a single woman with no husband and all.
Then, crushed yet still hopeful, they’d look up their horoscope, and as they leafed through their magazines we saw no end of words flip by which we hadn’t yet learned in our Safe Way Reader. It was hard sometimes not to lose heart. But Miss Joyce assured us on a daily basis that we were making great strides. Such a great job we were doing on ‘Dan in his Hut’! She was awfully proud of us.
‘Dan is at the gate.’
‘Dan picks up sticks.’
‘Dan carries sticks to the hut.’
‘Excellent,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Okay, Lucy, your turn.’
Lucy followed the words with her finger. The tip of her tongue protruded from her mouth. ‘To. The. Nut,’ she grunted.
‘The Hu-Hut!’ we cried, irritated. We were dying to find out how the story ended, and if there were any Red Indians in it. That Dan was such a slowcoach anyway; with Lucy and her bungling we’d never get there.
‘Hut?’ she repeated, perplexed.
Whereas we could see the words jumping off the page like brightly coloured marbles, each with its own meaning, Lucy had made no progress at all since the very first day of school; she could only tell what a word meant if there was