Red Sky in the Morning. Elizabeth Laird
They’re quite easygoing at my school really, but at the end of the summer term every year the whole place suddenly goes berserk. They load work onto us, and make us completely neurotic. I think it’s sadistic, really, to have exams in June, when we get the only decent weather we’re likely to have for the whole year. I mean, what’s wrong with November, when no one’s got anything better to do? I blame the teachers. I’m sure they make us do exams in June so they can have an easy time invigilating, and dreaming about the holidays they’re going to have in Scarborough, or the Bahamas, or somewhere. It’s all right for some.
I don’t know why I mind so much about exams. They scare me stiff. I think it’s dreading the moment when she reads the grades out, and everyone knows whether you’re one of the worst or one of the best. And the trouble with being so scared is that it stops me learning anything. My mind goes numb. I mean, how can you do brilliantly with a numb mind? And some of the exams are completely pointless. What’s the idea of an art exam? You’re either a genius or you aren’t. And to find out which you are, they might just as well look at the last creation you did in class. I suppose they’ve got what Dad calls the bureaucratic mentality.
Anyway, I worked very hard that summer, and didn’t do too badly. Debbie was top in History as usual, and nearly top in Geography, but I beat her in French and English. Très bien pour moi.
Partly because of exams, and partly because of Debbie going off with Emma, I didn’t have much social life that summer. I suppose though, if I’m honest with myself, the real reason was Ben. I told Mom I wanted to have him all to myself, and I didn’t see why I should have to share him with anyone else, but I know that it was really because I didn’t want them to see him. I think Mom realized. She didn’t push me into asking anyone over anyway, not even on my birthday. Actually, she wasn’t seeing some of her old friends much. I noticed she kept to the house quite a lot, and didn’t go out very often. Perhaps it was just having a small baby. But I don’t think it was only that.
It was quite obvious to everyone after a few months that Ben was very badly disabled. His head was twice as big as it should have been. “Hydrocephalus,” the doctor called it. He said they’d be able to operate later, to take some of the fluid out of his head, so that it would be smaller, but it wouldn’t make any difference to the handicap. We must never hope he’d grow up normal.
“Severe mental and physical disability,” it said on a letter Mom got from the hospital. You don’t have to be a medical genius to know that means bad news. Somehow it didn’t make me love Ben any less. It made me love him more. It made me want to shield him from anyone who didn’t understand, who might laugh at him, or be embarrassed by him, or look down on him.
Three
For the next two years I lived what they call a double life. It sounds romantic when you put it like that, but it was really an awful worry. Home and school were completely separated, or as separated as I could make them. If I ever become an actress, I shall owe my talent to the training of those years. I used to shut the front door every morning playing the part of Dad’s Hosanna, and the light of Ben’s life, and somewhere between the gate and the bus stop, I’d become pimply Anna Peacock (Pee-wit the Pea-brain), the dummy of the eighth grade.
For a long time I didn’t mind too much about school. I lived in a dream world, divorced from the realities of everyday life. The awful truth is that I was madly in love with Miss Winter. She had a whiplash body, and short curly hair, and when she slammed the ball over the net in tennis lessons, her shorts sort of flipped up and settled down again on her iron-hard thighs, and I used to feel a dreadful yearning to be saved from a man-eating shark by her. Too embarrassing to remember, really. Having a crush on Miss Winter didn’t do me any good, either. I went all numb, and I just let myself in for unnecessary suffering. I still wince at the memory of her shouting at me.
“Run, Anna! Where are your arms? For heaven’s sake, girl! Hit the ball! Harder! Are you paralyzed or something?”
It would have been much more sensible to fall in love with Miss Penny, because English is my best subject, and she liked me as well. But there you are. Love is blind. And it’s hard to take a person seriously when their nickname is Spenda. Spenda Penny. Geddit? Anyway, all that kind of thing is far behind me now, I’m thankful to say. I grew out of it months ago.
At home, I was a different person. I belonged to Ben. By the time he was two, he had grown quite big, and his head, of course, was enormous. I knew he wasn’t developing in the way that most babies do. I mean, he didn’t learn to sit up till he was nearly a year old, and he was only just crawling on his second birthday. I could remember Katy, when she was two, posting shapes into a plastic letter box thing, and stacking up a tower of plastic pots. Mom hadn’t even got them out for Ben. I went up to the attic, and fetched them down one day. I didn’t see why he shouldn’t have normal toys, same as any other kid. Mom looked a bit funny when she saw them.
“Look, Anna,” she said, in the voice of one trying hard to be patient but finding it rather difficult, “You’ve got to accept facts. Benny’s not like other babies. He’s not going to be able to pile up those pots. He can’t even pick things up and hold them properly. And it’s no good wishing that he could.”
I was really annoyed with Mom when she said that. Of course I knew Ben was different. What did she take me for? And what did she take Ben for, too? Even if he wasn’t normal, he could learn to do some things. He might even get some fun out of it.
“I know, Mom,” I said, in the voice of one trying hard to be polite but finding it rather difficult, “but I don’t see why he can’t just look at them, and chew them a bit if he wants to.”
I picked Ben up and he snuggled his great big head down onto my shoulder. He couldn’t talk or anything like that, but at long last he’d learned to kiss. I’d spent ages teaching him. You wouldn’t believe that learning a little thing like kissing would be so difficult. It took nearly a week getting him to purse his lips, then another week to put them against my cheek, then two to make the actual kiss. One month of solid hard work. But when he did it for the first time, I felt so proud and happy it was like stars exploding inside my head. And Ben went mad with joy. He knew he’d been clever. He laughed and laughed, and beat his weak little arms up and down in the air. Dr. Randall had been right about one thing, the night that Ben was born. Laughing was no problem. He could laugh all right.
Mind you, I had second thoughts about teaching Ben to kiss. I began to wish I’d taught him something else. The problem was that once he’d learned how to do it, he wouldn’t stop. He never seemed to get bored with it. And no one else, except Mom and sometimes Dad, seemed quite so keen to be kissed by Ben. Even I had to admit that his mouth was wetter than most people’s.
“I think it’s disgusting,” Katy used to say, looking all prissy, and stuck-up. “I don’t know how you can stand it, getting dribbled all over like that.”
A few weeks earlier, I’d have pinched Katy good and hard for saying that, but I was growing too big for childish squabbles. Anyway, I’d realized that the poor child was suffering from the pangs of jealousy. They were no stranger to me. I knew how it felt to see one’s best friend go off with a snotty little sycophant. That was one of my best descriptions of Emma. I’d thought up lots of them, especially last thing at night, but “snotty sycophant” combined, I thought, strict truthfulness and a neat elegance of phrasing. It was exquisitely crushing. I’d never dared say it to her face, but I was holding it in reserve. One day, I knew, my time for annihilating Emma would come.
I’d realized that Katy was jealous the day she shrieked at me.
“You never play with me like you do with Ben. What have I got to do? Get myself handicapped or something?”
I was just about to tear her limb from limb when I suddenly understood, and a calm feeling of superiority came over me. I felt about fifty years old. So I smiled at her, and said very kindly,
“Now now, Katy, don’t be jealous. Of course I’m really very fond of you.”
But the wretched child just got madder than ever. After that I tried