Naomi has dragging pains in her belly. She sits in the spoon-back armchair unconscious of the passing hours. Some days are eked out for a year. On others, Owen leaves for the market, and in a blink he is back. He fusses, asks questions, makes her eat and drink. He doesn’t realize what she is concealing, though. Fantastic colours, mixed up in the palette deep inside her, are seeping through her flesh, dyeing her skin. Blues, purples, greys, yellows, greens and . . . black, chimney-sweep black. Oh, she is saturated in black. No one notices except The Blind Ones. And they won’t tell, not ever. No reason to.
Miss Elstob was precise with her punches, only landing them where the light didn’t shine. When she arrived at Fulwood Cottage Homes, Naomi was five. By the time she ran away she was fifteen. In the reception room they stole her clothes and gave her new ones, so that she looked like everyone else. And they stole her name too. Father Peter bent down and peered into her strange eyes.
‘And she said unto them, “Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”’ He put his hands on her head and twirled strands of her silky black hair between his thick fingers, as he spoke these words. Then, ‘I christen you, Mara,’ he said. ‘This is your new home. And Mara is your new name.’ She wanted to tell him that she didn’t like the name, that she preferred Naomi. They said she had nits. But she knew that already. She liked to pop them between her finger-tips. They took her to the assembly hall and chopped off all her hair. Then they rubbed something that smelled oily and fiery into it. There were lots of stone houses that all looked identical, and a patch of grass, with more stone houses the other side of it. They brought her to one, cottage number 3, full of children. They told her she would be sharing a bedroom with five other girls. There was another bedroom full of boys, and a room where the house mother, Miss Elstob, slept. She was just like the old woman who lived in a shoe, and who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
When she wet the bed, the Mother made her wrap the sodden sheet about her, then shoved her in a corner, shoved her so hard that her head banged against the wall. The others came and jeered, and held their noses, and pulled ugly faces. They sent her to lots of different schools. She hadn’t been to school before. She didn’t like it there either. They called her one of them fresh air kids, and spat at her in the playground. The teachers smacked her with rulers, and reading and sums were so difficult that her brain fizzed. She had to travel to and fro on buses, and they gave her tokens to pay for the tickets. All day her tummy rumbled, and sometimes in the night as well, because it was continuously empty. They made her do sewing and knitting. She pricked her fingers so often that they bled into the material, and she kept dropping stitches, and pulling the tension of the wool too tight. Miss clipped her round the ears for that, and chided her for being so clumsy. Then she made her stand on a chair. She was still there long after The Blind Ones had gone to bed. Eventually she became so tired that she fell off, and only then was she permitted to crawl upstairs to sleep.
She had to attend chapel too. Father Peter was there and he made her skin creep. He had a shaggy beard and moustache, so you couldn’t see his face properly, and his nose was large and red and sore looking. The things she liked were the snow, when it was deep and smooth and it made everything clean. And sledging down the steep pasture next to Blackbrook Road. She liked playing on the slide and the swing. And when she was flying high up in the air, she could see all across the Mayfield Valley. She liked picking blackberries from the hedgerows, and bilberries on the moors, and eating them until her stomach ached, and her lips and tongue turned dark purple. She liked it when the bus drivers overtook each other on the Redmires Road, and all the children screamed with excitement. And she liked seeing the films in the big hall, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, The Keystone Kops, and sitting round the Yorkshire range, listening to music on the radio, singing along. She liked taking her token to buy sweets from the stores, as a Friday treat. Sometimes she was sent to the office to collect ice cream for pudding. When she spooned it into her mouth it felt so good, the cold creamy sweetness, that she tingled all over.
But there were more of the things she hated, much more. She hated cleaning the dirt off the wet shoes when they got back from school, and polishing them until she could see her face in them, and making all the beds that she’d stripped in the mornings. She hated scrubbing the floors with red carbolic soap, until her hands stung. She hated how her head throbbed when Miss Elstob whacked it too hard, and she hated the baby coming and being put in a cot beside her bed. It squeaked like chalk on a blackboard and then began to cry, and when she put her finger to Baby’s mouth and shushed it, it only yelled louder. She hated having her ears and neck inspected, and the smack she got if they were grubby. She hated her legs being chapped with the cold, and having chilblains on her hands and feet. She hated when she was struck with the broom handle, and she hated being locked in the coal cupboard, so that it felt like she was nailed in a coffin and would die there.
What she learnt was that you can hate something so terribly that it put a fire in your chest, and made you want to pull your toes and fingers back into your body. And at the very same time you could love it, love it so that your heart became a giant’s heart and you kept floating up in the air, having to concentrate to keep yourself on the ground. The hate was what she felt when Father Peter’s face loomed up in her dreams, and he peeled her from her bunk bed. He took her off to the small room at the far end of the hut, and then peeled more layers off her. And it was as though he wanted to eat her up, poking himself into her, and sucking his fingers ravenously. And the love was what she felt when she stumbled onto the beach, and the sea sighed at the sight of her, and stretched out its salty arms to pull her in. Marske-By-The-Sea, the wooden huts, slipping out of her body and watching what Father Peter was doing to her from the ceiling, the need to wash, the dew-damp grass, the steep cliff path, the sea, the astringent sea.
Mara is sitting on her hands now, plumped on a chair in the kitchen. Can’t talk. Mustn’t talk. If she talks, Miss says she’ll cut out her tongue. ‘Snip, snap,’ she says, making her hands into scissors, opening and closing her lumpy fingers. And Mara knows she’s not lying. The big sewing scissors are in the drawer, sharp and ready. So she sits on her fingers, and her hands feel all numb. The Blind Ones do the same. Listening to the radio, squashing their fingers under their bottoms.
Miss is smoking, huffing and puffing and coughing and hacking. Mara pretends that her own lips are pasted together. ’Cos that way she can keep the words tied up. The evenings are slow-slow time, sat there on her hands. But she doesn’t want to go to bed. When Miss Elstob turns the light off, that’s when the baby starts up her caterwauling, howling and yowling, so that she can’t stand to listen, so that she has to stick her fingers in her ears. But still the screaming comes, like pins, hundreds of red-hot pins pushed in her pincushion eardrums, pop, pop, pop. The Blind Ones pull the sheets over their heads and shrink, until they are far away, out of earshot. She can’t do that. She’s tried. But the baby’s noise slides in, no matter what.
She told The Blind Ones. But they only laughed at her. ‘Don’t be daft, Mara,’ they said. ‘The baby’s dead. Don’t you remember? They came and took it to the sick bay. It had a fever.’ And then they said, ‘You shouldn’t have put it in the cold bath. Miss said that’s what did it, what’s gone and killed her. The cot’s empty, see.’ And they showed her the cot with the stained mattress and the dents in it, said it was proof, and that she was a loony. ‘The baby don’t make no noise now, ’cos it’s dead.’ And some of them followed her about and whispered that she was a murderer, with her funny eyes and her heavy blink. They did it for weeks.
And then one day the black tide rolled up from her toes, and she wheeled about and ran after them. She caught one of them. And by then the blackness was gushing out of her, so that she couldn’t stop punching and slapping and kicking, like Miss did to her. And they all came and gathered round. The superintendent hemmed and hawed, and Miss Elstob screeched and hopped about like a chicken, and the children whooped and jeered. And their faces stretched, and their mouths fell open. But she carried on. She couldn’t have stopped if she’d wanted to. So they had to pull her off. Even then she fought the air, pounding at it. And they dragged her by her collar and hurled her in the cupboard again. Only this time it wasn’t hot, it was cold, and the coal was like black ice. Her fingers were numb when she wrote the name they had given her, the same as when she sat on them. She got a big splinter under her nail, but she didn’t feel it, so she left it there till they let her out.
After that The Blind Ones were frightened of her. They mumbled and jerked their heads in her direction. But if she stared them down, they soon scurried off. Miss Elstob pulled her lips off her stained brown teeth, and told her that she was a very bad girl. She said that her real mother had lived in Sheffield, that she’d sold sex for money, and had come to a bad end. She said that was why Mara had been brought here, to Fulwood Cottage Homes, ’cos her mother was dead and she didn’t have a father.
When she ran into the sea in the grey sludge of dawn, she expected to drown. By then she didn’t mind. It was worth it to be washed clean, to have the sea draw the blackness from her, like pus from an infected wound. But as the icy weight of it closed in, her body began to move, to swim. Her fingers closed into paddles. Her arms circled. Her legs kicked. The salt water lifted her up. She could swim! Shadow memories jostled in her head. Days at the beach. Her mother, head thrown back, a throaty giggle. Sunglasses, a dark-pink bathing costume, long black hair tussled by the salty wind. Perfume that smelt of pear drops. Shiny red nails. Lipstick on the tips of her two front teeth. And ice cream cones from the kiosk on the promenade. Someone holding her up in the water while she thrashed her limbs. The tickle of sand. The abrasive kiss of the surf.
She was not afraid of the vortex she was in. She did not resist. She let it toy with her, carry her, pull and push her, tease and comfort her. It ransacked her for hurts, chilled and purified. She took a breath, held it, pushed down, and although it stung, forced open her eyes. She gathered handfuls of sand and waved them about her, so that she was engulfed in a sparkling cloud. She found pebbles, small as boiled sweets, and ground them together in her clenched fists. She listened to the chords of the brine, high and low, let them peal through her. And the sea leached the black coal dust out of her, diluted it so that it was no more than a droplet in the wide, wide ocean. And when she clambered out, teeth chattering, briskly rubbing her shivering body, she was no longer Mara, but Naomi once again.
Miss Elstob said that if she was lucky, when she left she would get a job in service in one of the nice houses in Ranmoor or Sheffield. And failing that, there was always the factories, ever on the lookout for reliable girls, for Fulwood girls. But she didn’t want to be in service, or to toil on a production line listening to Workers’ Playtime, half-sick for the sea. She thought that she would like her liberty, then she could journey from town to town. She thought she might enjoy travelling. When she escaped she reverted to her former self, Naomi. She gazed out of bus and train windows and saw England flash by. If she had looked to her left she would have spotted Mara sitting beside her, and Baby too, the dead baby who wouldn’t stop crying.