THERE HAS BEEN ONE earlier instance of Lace cutting off all her hair in a bout of despair or determination, call it what you will. But that’s an altogether more positive story — at least for onlookers and bystanders — and this is how it goes.
She’s ten years old, and rather busy. It’s the first day of a new year, so she has every excuse for idling like the majority of the population: playing with Christmas presents, watching TV, eating leftovers, sleeping.
Lace doesn’t talk much at the best of times, but today she hasn’t talked at all. The first breakfast of the year was a largely silent affair. Uncle Bill and Aunt Jean were both pale, drinking vast amounts of tomato juice and eating nothing but dry toast. Chummie (who at this point still wears short trousers and is only one class higher than Lace at school) has his head in an illustrated dictionary and only speaks when he wants someone to pass the jam.
‘Got plans for the day, kids?’ asks Uncle Bill. Behind his glasses, his eyelids are collapsing.
Wordlessly, Lace holds out her glass for more juice. Her eyes are scanning the newspaper discarded by Aunt Jean, who is staring blankly at the wall.
‘Can I have some eggs?’ Chummie’s head pops out of his book like a spy from a manhole. ‘Scrambled, not fried? With a bit of parsley on the top but no pepper, please.’ He’s always specific about food preparation, even though he’s only eleven.
Aunt Jean, obliging even when white as a sheet, goes to the fridge. She looks enquiringly at Lace. ‘Eggs?’
But Lace shakes her head. She’s preoccupied with the newspaper. Page 5 yields nothing. Page 6 is useless. Page 7 is a full-page illustrated ad for a New Year’s sale at SportsWorld.
Crack. Crack. The eggs splat out of their shells into a plastic bowl, and suddenly Aunt Jean lets out a groan and runs to the bathroom. ‘Bill, can you take over the egg production?’ asks Chummie. To him, of course, Uncle Bill is simply Bill. As strange as it seems, considering that one has a crashing hangover and pays taxes while the other still takes a teddy bear to bed, they’re brothers. Or half-brothers, to be precise.
It’s not until Lace reaches the fashion section of the paper that she finds what she needs. The relief is so enormous that her head swoops forward into the plate of eggs considerately placed before her by Uncle Bill.
‘Not to worry, sweetheart.’ Uncle Bill helps her out of her breakfast. When the swoops had started happening, he was worried by them and had called a child psychologist friend for advice. But now —
‘Easily done, easily mended,’ he says, shushing Chummie’s exasperated sighs.
Lace’s fringe is clumped with egg and there are specks of parsley in her eyelashes. Normally she’d cry (albeit against her will) but the discovery she’s just made is so momentous — so perfect — that her tear ducts are stopped in their tracks. She accepts a tea towel and wipes herself off. A clean break. This is what it is. A clean start.
‘I wouldn’t eat those eggs, Bill,’ Chummie says as she leaves the kitchen. ‘I don’t think she washed her hair today.’
Now here she is, locked in her room with her books, in a midday as still and grey as a mountain lake. When she’d arrived at her uncle’s house with her life in cartons, she had a hundred and twenty books. ‘So many!’ exclaimed her grandmother, almost disapprovingly. It may seem a lot but Lace knows every one of the books intimately: their covers, pages, pencil markings, turned-down corners. They’re the only things that have stayed the same: words never change, no matter how long you’re out of the room, and she loves them for this.
Altering her name inside a hundred and twenty covers isn’t as big a job as one might think. She’s already put a lot of thought into her identity change. Kneeling at her dolls’ table with a ruler and green pen, she deletes neatly and amends with a swift touch.
‘Grace?’ It’s Aunt Jean, who isn’t truly her aunt, as she and Uncle Bill have never got around to having a wedding. ‘Gracie, are you okay in there? Do you want a sandwich?’
Lace sighs. It’s her own fault that Aunt Jean fusses about food because, when Lace first arrived here, she’d stopped eating for ten whole days. ‘Determined,’ said the children’s doctor. (Was there a smudge of admiration in his voice?) ‘Dangerously determined.’ When she came out of hospital, her legs were so thin that her knees clicked like a goat’s. She looked searchingly into the dazzle of the low sunshine but no one was there. She’d achieved nothing; she’d failed to bring them back. But at least she’d had her personality defined — by a medical professional, no less — which was more than most eight-year-olds could claim.
‘Gracie?’ Aunt Jean sounds closer now, as if she’s crouched by the door, stuffing anxiety through the keyhole like cotton wool.
Lace closes the last cover and dusts her hands on her skirt like a librarian. ‘I’m ready.’ These are her first two words of the year, and they’re certainly appropriate. She’s about to advance, walk boldly and firmly into a new life. ‘I’d like a peanut butter sandwich, please,’ she says, opening the door.
‘Good god!’ Aunt Jean jumps back in a way that, in a thriller, would be predictable. Her hand flies to her mouth in a similar cliché. ‘What on earth have you done to your hair?’
‘I didn’t like it. It looked like a Barbie doll.’ Lace smoothes down her new ragged bob. ‘So I borrowed your sewing scissors to lop it off.’
‘Oh, well. Okay.’ Aunt Jean swallows gamely but her skin looks greenish, hopefully only because of the empty wine bottles stacked by the door rather than because of Lace’s new appearance. ‘How about I take you to Nancy on Thursday when she reopens the salon, just to tidy it up a bit?’ She removes her hand from her mouth. ‘If you’re agreeable to that,’ she adds, being unfailingly polite even to children thrust into her life by a quite literal accident.
‘One more thing.’ Lace places her hand in Aunt Jean’s. ‘I’ve changed my name.’
‘You’ve what?’ Aunt Jean sits down on the nearest object, which happens to be a stack of old encyclopaedias about to be donated to a charity drive. Teetering on her pile of facts, she looks smaller and less secure than Lace.
‘I’m no longer Grace,’ explains Lace, still holding Jean’s hand, which is easier now they’re on the same level. ‘My name is Lace.’
It’s the first time she’s said it out loud so it’s a risky moment — like parachuting from a plane or flying off a ski ramp. ‘Lace,’ she repeats almost wonderingly — and then ‘Lace!’
‘That’s an unusual… an unusually nice name.’ Aunt Jean’s hand is clammy but she doesn’t remove it from Lace’s grasp. In fact she remains a constant support until Lace is seventeen and Chummie is eighteen, old enough to look after themselves, at which point she follows Bill (who’s discovered a sudden passion for colonial history) into a southern Australian haze.
As often happens, once the news is broken, it travels with its own velocity. First through the household, then the neighbourhood and finally the entire world. Was Lace’s name ever changed officially? Later, she remembers a tidy brown office, wood-panelled walls, the sound of a stamp crashing down on paper, and her name pronounced as a query: ‘Lace McDonald?’ But that remembered room might easily have been the principal’s office, the headquarters of an after-school club, or the waiting rooms of a medical practice in Bill and Jean’s suburban neighbourhood.
Uncle Bill finds it particularly hard to adjust. ‘But your father chose your name with such care! He named you after Grace Kelly, you know.’
Yes, Lace does know this. She also knows how Grace Kelly died, and she wonders: was this the reason her parents ended up in a jumble of metal on a lonely road?
‘He nicknamed you Amazing Grace. That doesn’t work with your new name.’ Worry creases Bill’s face so it looks like a used paper plate. He seems to think a guardian’s duties are similar to those of a Vestal Virgin: to keep the flames of the past burning, no matter what.
‘You’re not responsible,’ Lace reassures him. ‘I’ll tell him so myself.’
‘You’ll — tell him?’ Uncle Bill scrabbles in his desk drawer for his cigarettes, even though he and Jean have strict rules about smoking inside.
‘Yes,’ she says in a calm voice. ‘Next time I have The Dream.’ She’s learnt to speak of The Dream as if it can be controlled; it’s the only way she can stop it from burning her alive in her bed.
Uncle Bill shoves his cigarette back into the packet and closes the drawer on the whole thing. ‘In a dream,’ he nods. ‘Good idea.’ It’s not often that he lapses into the ‘let’s pretend’ voice used by so many adults, but occasionally he disappoints. There is, of course, a vast difference between ‘a dream’ and The Dream, but Uncle Bill seems to have enough to cope with, so Lace leaves the room, white-lying that she’s promised to help prepare the vegetables for dinner (in truth, Aunt Jean has taken to the sofa with a bottle of aspirin, and has promised deep-frozen pizza). Over the following days, whenever Lace’s heart misses her discarded self, her brain commands her to go to her room and look at the sheet of newspaper pinned to the back of her door.
LACE IS FIERCE!
That’s the headline that first caught her eye, and beneath the words are beautiful lace leggings and sumptuous lace bows, racy lacy bodices and rocking lacy gloves. She folds her arms and pouts her mouth in the manner of the smoky-eyed models. Repeat after me: Grace is gone, Lace is strong!
By the time the school term begins, Lace no longer doubts her decision. ‘I’m fierce,’ she tells herself, smoothing her skirt under her thighs and sitting in the centre of the back row. She surveys the mousy heads in front of her: tufted, cow-licked, parted and slicked. Although these girls have previously called her Spacey Gracey, Spazzy Star, Cry Baby, and Orphan Girl, although they’ve looked on, wide-eyed, as her arms fly uncontrollably out from her sides (‘Simply a matter of nerves,’ reassures Uncle Bill’s child-psychologist friend), although they’ve laughed at her weeping before school and her uncontrollable shivering in the afternoon — from this point on they will recognise her as someone different. After this, they’ll call her only by her chosen name.
‘I want Lace!’ they shout, when it comes to picking partners for gym. ‘Lace!’ they cry, voting for class captain, and a school representative for the local radio station. By the time mid-term rolls around —
‘She’s changed beyond recognition!’ her astonished teacher tells Bill and Jean.
Such is the power of a name. Nonetheless, Lace must remain vigilant at all times, so she implements a ‘three strikes and out’ policy. Anyone calling her by her old name once or twice is forgiven; after that, she turns them to stone with a single stare. ‘Love you, Gracie,’ says Uncle Bill occasionally, if he’s been working too hard or has just woken up from a nap. Because Lace loves him back, she lets this go, but it’s her only exception. If her future is to be worth anything at all she has to be strict, every single day.
Soon her arms stay obediently at her sides, her neck remains straight at the breakfast table, and her head is high. The only residue of Grace is the crying — ‘Every single day!’ she exclaims despairingly to Aunt Jean. But even this eventually becomes an acceptable — and later even a desirable — part of her. She’s no longer a cry baby. She’s the Princess of Tears.
And so she strides into her teens with pale cheeks but glittering eyes. Her long determined legs carry her away from early tragedy, her strong determined mind repeats the maxim Mind over matter! She sleeps with her first boyfriend, breaks up with him shortly afterwards, doesn’t suffer. She sleeps with her second boyfriend, and then her third. She discovers that most of the world desires her, but no one is allowed to get close without her permission.
Mind over body, she reminds herself as she takes chances, takes hearts, and escapes from unfamiliar beds. She is tender but direct, never tells lies or give false hopes, and for this reason she rarely makes enemies. She’s indomitable while being soft-hearted: cries only for others, never for herself. She rescued herself at the age of ten, and she’s been keeping herself afloat ever since.
‘Do you remember those nightmares you used to have when we were kids? Made you scream so loud the whole house would wake up?’ Chummie doesn’t usually waste time looking back; this is one thing that he and Lace share. But every now and then, since Bill and Jean left for Australia, he feels he has a legal duty to survey Lace’s past, present and future. ‘You don’t still have those dreams, I hope?’
‘All gone.’ This is Lace’s standard reply and it’s enough to satisfy Chummie, who’s newish to the job of guardian.
‘Good, good,’ he approves — and until now, against some odds, it’s been quite okay. Lace is surviving. Loving but detached, promiscuous but careful, loyal but surprisingly ruthless, particularly when it comes to reminders of her former self. Yet on some days, she glances into a mirror and then hurries from the room. For somewhere deep in her eyes she can still see Grace. Few escapes are so complete that you outrun your nightmares.