Praxis by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online Page B

up.’
    ‘Nevertheless you wrote it, and to write such unhealthy nonsense shows a very sick little mind. I’m not surprised your mother’s so upset. Louise assures me she’s never spoken to you in her life. Is that right, Louise?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Louise, to her fingertips.
    ‘I believe you, Louise. I have great faith in the honour and decency of my prefects.’
    ‘I don’t believe her,’ said Lucy. ‘I believe what’s written there. There are horrible, filthy things going on in this school. Patricia’s corrupt and perverted. She’s the devil’s spawn. I’ve seen it in her eyes.’
    The head-mistress sent Louise and Patricia back to their classes.
    ‘What did you want to go and write all that for?’ asked Louise, outside in the corridor. She had a soft and slightly nasal speaking voice. Eleven words.
    ‘I don’t know,’ mumbled Patricia. Louise looked once or twice down the corridor, then lifted Patricia’s face with her forefinger and kissed her lightly on the lips.
    ‘Now it’s not a lie,’ she said, ‘so you can stop looking so miserable.’
    Patricia went back to the classroom. She searched into her heart for love: for her mother, for Hilda, for Elaine, for Louise, but could find nothing now but indifference and a vague embarrassment. All events seemed much of a muchness. She pressed the pen-nib hard into her hand, but it did not hurt. She was not surprised.
    After school she found Hilda waiting for her. Hilda usually went on ahead.
    ‘They’ve taken mother to hospital,’ she said.
    ‘What’s the matter with her?’
    ‘Nothing much.’
    ‘How long for?’
    ‘Until she’s better.’
    ‘What sort of hospital?’
    ‘Just a hospital.’
    ‘She’s mad, isn’t she.’
    Hilda turned and looked at Patricia as lately her mother had looked at her, with cold hating eyes.
    ‘Don’t ever say that, ever.’
    ‘What about us?’ asked Patricia, once they were home.
    ‘I’m nearly eighteen; you’re fifteen. They’re sending the child officer round about you. In the meantime we stay where we are. I told them I could manage. I’m in charge.’
    Hot coals had been flung around the kitchen. Burn marks on the linoleum were to remain for years in remembrance of that particular day. Was there not a time, Patricia wondered, some other world, some other place, when she had been happy? In her mother’s bedroom she found the early photograph of herself on the beach, torn up, and in wretched pieces on the floor. No. It had never been.
    The house seemed very quiet, and the night frightening.

8
    T HERE, THAT’S DONE. LIVED through, yet once again. Are we what our childhoods make us? I was thirty before I could even think about my past. Yes, I would say, to all enquiries, I had a happy childhood, and if pressed would give an account of pre-war Brighton, with its clean pebbly beach, and long summer days in the sun, complete with candy-floss. A photographic account. Or pressed still further, forced to remember the photograph torn and on the floor, turn the whole thing into a bad joke.
    Yes, I am a bastard, and a Jewess at that. My father abandoned me and my mother went mad and I was a lesbian for a time.
    Ha-ha.
    Laugh gaily. Gayly, even.
    All enquiries, I say. There were few of them. I must have carried the past with me, as an almost visible load. Why would anyone want to help me with it? They wanted me to help with theirs.
    In the middle portion of my life, when I gave dinner parties by night and wrote advertisements by day, I was prepared to believe, how I wanted to believe, that I had to cure myself to cure the world. Now I believe I have to cure the world to cure myself. It is an impossible task. I am bowed down by it.
    The world is ungrateful. See how I am left alone, unable to hobble to the stove? Or perhaps I just abuse the world, as my mother abused me. Call it the names I should call myself. Indifferent, ungrateful, callous.
    Bastard, Jewess, slut.
    I did better than my mother, or my sister. I