tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3190867490208167543.post-7929732926378148145Thu, 29 May 2008 02:55:00 +00002008-05-29T11:55:00.420+09:00The Fat White Woman - Chapter 8, Part 2<strong>GK</strong>: Mummy had Tony light a fire in the sitting room after dinner. She said she thought it would make things cosier for John. There was a television in the room, but no one had the least desire to view anything that evening and so the set was left unplugged. I remember Daddy smoking his customary single cigarette while he read through the evening paper. Harriet occupied the chair at Mummy’s small writing table, working up the notes she had made in the library that day, I suppose. Mummy was busy with a bag of knitting wool. John sat between Tony and myself on the sofa. That was when we fixed up that I should take John into Leicester the following day.<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: So you went into Leicester - and did what?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: I took him to visit a girl I was friendly with at school, Immy Dooley. She was my best friend, in fact, my very best friend. - at that time.<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: Immy?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: Short for Immaculata. The family was Irish and very, very Catholic, or, at least, the mother was. Immy was - Immy was lovely. We met on our first day at school and, well, it was just one of those moments, you know? You meet someone and you just know that you are going to be close. You know it at once and you know it somewhere inside of you that isn’t the brain. Do you follow?<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: I think - I haven’t ever had anyone like that.<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: Then I’m sad for you. But Immy was special.<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: Was?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: She died. An accident, whilst she was bathing -<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: Bathing?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: Swimming. In the sea. It was off one of the beaches here in fact. She had come to visit me and she took herself off one afternoon when I was working and she never came back. It was - well, whatever I might find to say that it was - tragic, terrible, awful - can only undervalue the truth.<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: I’m sorry, but when was this?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: A long time ago. In the 1970s. If you want an exact date, it was April 5th 1975. Another eventful April. The cruellest month, as Mr Eliot so rightly tells us. Forgive me if I don’t say any more.<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: Perhaps we should - you were saying, let me see - yes, that you took John to visit your friend.<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: Immy. Yes, that’s right. We, that is John and I, went in to Leicester on the train and walked from the London Road station. Immy lived in a little side street off East Park Road so we went through the Highfields, along St Peter’s Road. You know it, yes?<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: I know of it but I’ve never - it’s very rough and it has a - well -<br /><br />GK: A reputation? My dear, it was rough in 1958. Coloured immigrants were already living there; I mean coloured as distinct from the Irish, you understand, and the area was filled with cheap lodging houses and flats.<br /><br />I remember walking along with John and wondering what he was making of the place because, you see, in a few minutes we’d passed from one sort of England, all those grand London Road houses, into another. It was only a very little distance we travelled but everything had a look of neglect and dilapidation that simply had not been there before. You know, the streets of terraced housing stretching away on either hand from the main road, the windows of the houses all sealed off from the passing world by what looked to be the same thick dingy net curtaining hanging behind the same panes of glass that were all caked with the same thick dirt.<br /><br />As I said, I wondered what John must be making of it all and then, quite without warning, he told me. “Like the clouded eyes of blind old men,” he said.<br /><br />I asked him what on earth he was talking about and he said it was the windows, the dirty panes of glass, the foggy, raddled bits of net hanging behind them: so many blind eyes. It was the - the poetry of it that surprised as much as anything else. I mean, I simply had not suspected he had that inside him.<br /><br />He wanted to know whether or not I was sure of where we were going, where I was leading him to and I said that I did. And then I remember I told him that I knew everything. Such arrogance! I told him that it was because I knew everything that the family called me Sib at home.”<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: Sib?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: Short for Sibyl.<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: Your second name?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: Nickname. My real second name - and you must promise never, ever to tell another soul, living or dead, because it is so absolutely and irredeemably loathsome - is Doris. Gwendolyn Doris Stewart. Isn't it -?<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: I’m sorry but I don’t follow.<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: No, I’m sure that you don’t. John didn’t either. The sibyls were prophetesses in the ancient world. You know, ancient Greece and Rome. They knew everything there was to know, past, present or future. So, if there was something you weren't sure about you just popped along to the nearest sacred grove, because, you see, the sibyls always worked in a sacred grove rather than just any old grove - and, I suppose you could say - or anyway, my family thought - that I was a bit of a know-it-all, so they call me Sib, short for Sibyl, which actually is a name, a proper English girl's name, or it is if you give it a capital letter. I think Tony began it, the business of calling me Sib, that is.<br /><br />And then John started telling me about the sibyls of his country, or their equivalents at least. I was sceptical, of course, in my pompous English schoolgirl way.<br /><br />Lord, I can just hear his voice, the rise in pitch that would occur whenever he was contradicted over something he knew to be correct! ‘We have such people also - perhaps they are not prophetesses exactly - but persons of either sex who can divine the future and so advise as to the wisdom or otherwise of an intended course of action; who can use their wisdom to untangle present dilemmas; who are great repositories of my people's past.<br /><br />'Then there are the conjurors -’<br /><br /><strong>FJ</strong>: Conjurors? Do you mean -?<br /><br /><strong>GK</strong>: David Nixon? Card tricks? Rabbits out of hats? Precisely what I thought at the time - and I said so. Poor John, he looked so truly offended then that I apologized at once, even though I thought it all so much foolishness. I know better now, of course. <br /><br />To be continued ...<br /><br /><strong></strong><strong></strong><strong></strong>
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