An Experiment in Love: A Novel by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online Page B

chin. In her other hand, Karina’s mother held a banana. It was already half-peeled, ready for immediate use. As Karina took the last gulp of ham sandwich she transferred it swiftly to her right hand. Karina closed her own hands again around her mother’s, holding the fruit steady; the banana seemed to vanish in three big bites.
    Karina straightened up and wiped her hands on her coat. Her mother said something to her in another language. Karina didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at her mother, acknowledge that she had spoken. Her mother picked up a fat parcel from the kitchen cabinet, wrapped in greaseproof paper. She thrust it into Karina’s schoolbag. Carefully, she fastened Karina’s coat right up to the neck and twitched her head-scarf forward so that it jutted out, protecting her daughter’s flushed cheeks; then she held up Karina’s mittens for her to plunge her hands inside. She patted her, on the shoulders, chest, arms, patted her as if she wanted to make sure she was solid all through. Then Karina was ready to seize the day.
    I had watched her mother’s face while she fed her. She looked hungry, and as if all the food in the world could never be enough.
    At eight years old, I wear my hair in ringlets, fat tubes that you can put your finger into. Each night at seveno’clock my mother brushes my hair and then combs it and then rakes it again with the steel comb, in case insects have bred since the night before. If I am free from vermin she gets out the curl rags. These are white ropes of cloth. She unrolls and separates them, then picks up the comb again and divides my hair into strands. At the top of each strand she knots a rope. Then round and round we go, tighter and tighter wrapping, myself delirious with pain and rage and she with set face, mummifying my hair. I cry out that I want my hair cut off, short like other people’s and pinned back with a big black kirby grip or a pink plastic slide, and she utters from between her teeth that I don’t know what I want. When she has wrapped to the bottom of a rope she ties another big knot, like a fist, like a knuckle bone. When she has finished my whole head, the bound hair springs away from my skull, stiff and white in its casing, as if I had grown legs out of my head: as if I were an alien from the planet Zog, with these swaying white skeleton limbs, knobbled and rickety and shining in the dusk.
    When I climb into bed I pray my night prayers. When I put my head on the pillow one set of knots digs into my skull and the other set of knots rolls under my ribs and spine. I toss and turn and come to rest face down, breathing wetly into the sheets. Perhaps Karina is right, perhaps my hair is stealing my strength. I sleep and have dreams.
    Next morning the ropes are unknotted and my hair explodes around me. I slide my fingers into the ringlets and pretend I have grown hair on my digits and that I am a werewolf.

    One day I see Karina standing alone on the corner of Eliza Street, her eyes vacant and her mouth moving around what looks like a cold sausage. I cross over to the other side of the street. I hope she doesn’t see me, but she does.

three

    I would like to press on now, to tell you how Karina and I came to meet Julianne Lipcott: to explain how our lives became knotted up beyond hope of severance. But if I hurry I will lose the thread; or the narrative will be like knitting done in a bad temper. The tension goes wrong; you come back later, measure your work, and find that it hasn’t grown as you imagined. Then you must unravel it, row by row, resenting each slick twist and pull that undoes, so easily, what you laboured over; and when you work again you must do it with the used wool, every kink in it reminding you of your failure.
    Our autobiographies are similar, I think; I mean the unwritten volumes, the stories for an audience of one. This account we give to ourselves of our life – the shape changes moment by moment. We pick up the thread and we use