Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

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      Both of them believed, and for years, that a change of luck would bring them success. She might not have seen at once that her crippled husband would not be able to dominate the bush, and that they would never make the fortunes promised by the Exhibition, but she did see that the life of dinner parties, musical evenings, tea parties, picnics was gone. That meant she felt checked in a deep part of her. Going to Persia she had taken all the necessities for a middle-class life. Coming to Africa, she had clothes for making calls and for ‘entertaining’, visiting cards, gloves, scarves, hats and feather fans. Her evening dresses were much more elegant than anything likely to be worn even to Government House then. She probably thought that was where she would be invited. She might have defied her father to be that common thing, a nurse, but she never had any intention of giving up the family’s status as middle-class. Her children would fulfil her ambitions and do even better. So in that first year, when she took a good look at her circumstances and her neighbours, she only postponed her ambitions. The farm would shortly be successful, and then she could go home to England, put her children into good schools, and real life would begin.

      Meanwhile, she could not have made more efficient, ingenious, energetic use of what she found around her in the bush, on the farm.

      And now I come to the difficulty of reconciling child time and adult time. There was a stage of my life – I was already in England, and trying hard to make sense of my life through a strict use of memory – when I understood that a whole tract of time had disappeared. There was a gulf, a black hole. Years and years of it – so it seemed. And yet the record of outward events is clear. In January 1925, the family was in Lilfordia. Between January and June 1927, I was at Mrs Scott’s. Yet I had already been at school for a whole term at Rumbavu Park. All these hazy, interminable memories had to be fitted into one year and nine months. Impossible. I simply gave up. But later had to come back, and back … and was forced to concede that between my stamping around in the mud and water that would make the plaster of our house, and my going to school, was – less than two years. And even now I feel incredulous, it can’t be so. But it was so. Between January 1925 and September 1926, the following things happened.

      All of us, the whole family, had malaria twice, badly. The new lands of the farm were stumped, the farm furnished with its necessities, the house built, and we moved into it. Biddy O’Halloran left, good riddance on both sides. My mother had a breakdown and was in bed for months. Mrs Mitchell and her cruel twelve-year-old son came and then left. I learned to read and triumphantly entered the world of information through print on cigarette packets, grocery packaging, the big words on top of newspapers, the Army—Navy catalogue, words written under pictures … and then, books themselves. My brother and I did lessons from the correspondence courses organized for farmers’ children by the government.

      That was the pattern of events, and it has little to do with what I remember, the chronicle in child time.

      Biddy O’Halloran is leaning on my father’s shooting stick, and we are in the big field, below the hill, grasshoppers and butterflies everywhere. She has had her appendix out, and she is telling my little brother that if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut a grasshopper will jump down into his appendix and claw its way out through his stomach. He is crying with terror. ‘Of course it’s not true,’ cries my mother later, at bedtime, while my brother sobs. But years later my brother told me he had an irrational fear of grasshoppers; I was able to tell him why. ‘Do you mean to say that’s all it was?’ he demanded, trying to laugh, but shocked that what had so influenced him and for so long had been so insignificant.

      Biddy O’Halloran had fair skin, and in the ‘vee’ of her cotton dress it was flushed a gentle red. A child’s close stare revealed it was a mottle of scarlet and cream. Two small children gravely discuss how red jelly and cream got under Biddy’s skin. ‘It was poured into a hole and then it spread.’ We made excuses to get close, were rebuked for staring, came away to tell each other there wasn’t a hole. So she must have spread the jelly on, and it got through the skin. ‘Mummy, how did the red jelly and cream get under Biddy’s skin?’ ‘What red jelly? What nonsense!’ The mystery was discussed gravely, scientifically, as we sat together under the eaves of the thatch, the cats and dogs in attendance. ‘But perhaps it isn’t jelly, it’s blood from the roast beef!’ ‘But what are the white bits then?’

      Or long, thoughtful stares at an adult’s fingernails, where there is a pale blob in the pink of a nail. ‘Mummy, why didn’t God finish your nail?’ ‘What do you mean, finish?’ Look, there is a hole.’ ‘What hole? That isn’t a hole!’ The hairs on an adult’s forearm, each golden stalk in its little pit of brown skin. The smells. Biddy had a sour smell, sharp and hurtful to the nose, when she splashed on cologne. My mother’s smell was vigorous and salty. My father’s male and stale and smoky.

      We watched from the edge of the bush my mother showing Biddy how to put bloody rags into a petrol tin to soak, under the thatch of the house at the back. The look of dramatic secrecy on my mother’s face, her lowered dramatic voice. The deliberately languid, irritated movements of Biddy. We knew the ‘boys’ were not supposed to see the contents of this tin. We crept up to the tin when the women had gone and speculated: Biddy had cut her finger or her foot – that must be it. But why didn’t mummy want the boys to know? We were always cutting ourselves, or had bruises, and sometimes the ‘boys’ washed the blood off for us. Why then …?

      The adult world, with its disorder, its lack of sense, its mysteries, two small children trying to get things into their right place, call them by their right names …

      I lie on my bed, reading Walter de la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys. One of the monkey brothers eats an orange, which he thinks is conveniently divided into segments for pulling apart and eating. I cannot make sense of this. The orange segments I am eating as I read are too big for my mouth. Yet I am bigger than the little monkeys we see racing about in the trees just down the hill, and which sometimes come into the house and investigate the rafters before running back into the trees. Did the monkey in the book mean those tiny globules of orange juice, each in its little bag, which I burst on my tongue, flooding my palate with scent and taste? But surely that couldn’t be it: globules aren’t segments. I lie and wonder, read, and think … The Royal Monkeys must be much larger than the little bush babies we know. When they pull the orange skins apart their fur prevents them feeling the showers of sharp juice that come out. The spray lives in the pores of the orange skin. When a visitor comes who has rough-pored skin on her face and neck, I stare secretly at the pores where water is standing. If pulled apart, would that skin send out a spray of …? ‘What is that child staring at?’ ‘Doris, why are you staring? It’s rude.’ I turn away, run off, sit under a bush down the hill, pull a leaf off a bush, look at the veins on the leaf and the pores between them. I pull the leaf apart but there is no strong-smelling spray on my face and hands. On the bush is a chameleon. I watch it creep with its slow rocking motion up a branch. And then suddenly … I rush screaming up the hill to my mother, sitting in her chair, beside my father, looking out over the bush. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ ‘Mummy, Mummy …’ ‘But what is wrong?’ ‘The chameleon,’ I weep, hysterical, terrified, ‘The chameleon …’ ‘What chameleon?’ ‘It was sick and all its insides came out.’ I run back down the hill. Behind me come my mother and my little brother. The chameleon is sitting quietly a little further up the branch, its eyes swivelling about.

      I am in shock, it is like a dream. I saw the chameleon’s insides come out and … it happens again, and I scream. ‘Shhh …’ says my mother, holding me tight. ‘It’s all right. It is catching flies, can’t you see?’ I am shuddering with disgust and fear – but with curiosity too. I stand safe inside her firm grasp. ‘Wait,’ she says. The club-like tongue of the chameleon darts out, a thick fleshy root, and disappears back inside the chameleon. ‘Do you see?’ says my mother. ‘It’s just its way of feeding itself.’ I collapse into sobs, and she carries me back up the hill. But I have acquired adult vision; when I see a chameleon, part of my knowledge СКАЧАТЬ