Cat's eye

I n the mornings the milk is frozen, the cream risen in icy, granular columns out of the bottle necks. Miss Lumley bends over my desk, her invisible navy-blue bloomers casting their desolating aura around her. On either side of her nose the skin hangs down, like the jowls of a bulldog; there’s a trace of dried spit in the corner of her mouth. “Your handwriting is deteriorating,” she says. I look at my page in dismay. She’s right: the letters are no longer round and beautiful, but spidery, frantic, and disfigured with blots of black rusty ink where I’ve pressed down too hard on the steel nib. “You must try harder.” I curl my fingers under. I think she’s looking at the ragged edges of skin. Everything she says, everything I do, is heard and seen by Carol and will be reported later.

Cordelia is in a play and we go to watch her. This is my first play and I ought to be excited. Instead I am filled with dread, because I know nothing of the etiquette of play-going and I’m sure I’ll do something wrong. The play is at the Eaton’s Auditorium; the stage has blue curtains with black velvet horizontal stripes on them. The curtains part to reveal The Wind in the Willows. All the actors are children. Cordelia is a weasel, but since she’s in a weasel costume with a weasel head, it’s impossible to tell her apart from all the other weasels. I sit in the plush theater seat, biting my fingers, craning my neck, looking for her. Knowing she’s there but not knowing where is the worst thing. She could be anywhere. The radio fills with sugary music: “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which we have to sing in school, standing beside our desks with Miss Lumley tooting on her pitch pipe to give the note and keeping time with her wooden ruler, the same one she whacks the boys’

hands with when they fidget. Rudolph bothers me, because there’s something wrong with him; but at the same time he gives me hope, because he ended up beloved. My father says he is a nauseating commercial neologism. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” he says. We make red bells out of construction paper, folding the paper in half before cutting out the shape. We make snowmen the same way. It’s Miss Lumley’s recipe for symmetry: everything has to be folded, everything has two halves, a left and a right, identical.

I go through these festive tasks like a sleepwalker. I take no interest in bells or snowmen or for that matter in Santa Claus, in whom I’ve ceased to believe, since Cordelia has told me it’s really just your parents. There’s a class Christmas party, which consists of cookies brought from home and eaten silently at our desks, and different-colored jelly beans provided by Miss Lumley, five for each child. Miss Lumley knows what the conventions are and pays her own rigid tributes to them. For Christmas I get a Barbara Ann Scott doll, which I’ve said I wanted. I had to say I wanted something and I did in a way want this doll. I haven’t had any girl-shaped dolls before. Barbara Ann Scott is a famous figure skater, a very famous one. She has won prizes. I’ve studied the pictures of her in the newspaper.

The doll of her has little leatherette skates and a fur-trimmed costume, pink with white fur, and fringed eyes that open and close, but it looks nothing at all like the real Barbara Ann Scott. According to the pictures she’s muscular, with big thighs, but the doll is a slender stick. Barbara is a woman, the doll is a girl. It has the worrying power of effigies, a lifeless life that fills me with creeping horror. I put it back into its cardboard box and tuck the tissue paper around it, over the face. I say I’m doing this to keep it safe, but in fact I don’t want it watching me.

Over our chesterfield there’s a badminton net, festooned across the wall. In the squares of this net my parents have hung their Christmas cards. No one else I know has a badminton net like this on their wall. Cordelia’s Christmas tree is not like others: it’s covered in gauzy angel hair, and all the lights and decorations on it are blue. But she can get away with such differences, I can’t. I know I’ll be made to pay for the badminton net, sooner or later.