Newton's Third Law of Motion

“To every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” I am pushing a rock up a hill. It is not a very big rock, but the exertion is enough to make me sweat. My feet skid about against the scree. I have to brace myself. It is heavy. I am trying to shove it forwards and it is bearing down on me.

I was safely installed in my new school. Mother walked me there every morning. I was never late. She liked to take the scenic route, along Westfield Avenue, past the big, old houses. A famous tennis player lived in one. Anne some-body-or-other. The driveways were long and boasted posh cars. There was a Scimitar. I called it a Skip-ta-mar. I had not heard of the sword.

Sophie lived on Westfield Avenue. She had blonde hair and blue eyes. She always looked clean. Her skin was smooth and flawless. She wore a blue, velvet dress. She looked like an expensive, porcelain faced doll. I was grubby. My cheeks were permanently rosy. I did not like my grey eyes, they appeared sullen. Rebecca Griggs was pretty, even though she had freckles. All the boys wanted to catch her when they played kiss chase. I did hopscotch. On my own.

The toilets in school seemed small. Despite the fact I had short legs I still needed to crumple down to rest my bottom. There was an entrance and an exit, with corridors running down either side. The boys would bang the doors open and push each other in. It was a dare. Rebecca and Sophie laughed. I wiped myself and washed my hands and went back to the library. I spent all my time there.

I loved the smell of books. The new ones that flashed their proud covers smelt of printing ink and rash promises. They seemed smug, in their PVC jackets, all shiny and just-out-of-the-wrapper fresh. Then there were the books that had been around for a while. They were slightly faded and apologetic. They had once been grand, like those new kids on the block, but now they were dog eared around the edges. They smelt like the words inside them. Read. My favourite books were the old ones. The ones whose paper was becoming ever browner, like leaves on a tree, moving into a supple autumn. I used to sniff those pages, inhaling the dry, must of a thousand turns. That is what a story smells like, something with history.

Clare Lefevre found the class hamster in a pot of yellow paint. It was as stiff as a board and very yellow. She screamed and Miss went running straight into the stock room. A minute later she emerged, looking very solemn, carrying 'Little Timmy' on a green, disposable, hand towel. We buried him in the school garden and planted marigolds on top. I thought that was weird, because the last thing Little Timmy would want to see was more bright yellow.

Our school was built on the site of an old factory and there were disused railway lines running along behind it. We used to go up there in the summer, on mini field trips. Every time the teachers said the same things:-
“Can anybody tell me what those flowers are?”
Foxgloves.
“And what are these?”
Pond skaters.
“Does anyone know how to tell the difference between a rabbit and a hare?”
Ear size, habitation, body shape. The teachers never believed that some of us had listened to them in the first place.

I sat next to Robin and opposite Jonathan. Robin was good fun. His mum and dad were divorced, and he lived with his dad. He was really into Status Quo and he knew all the words to their songs. He liked to play air guitar in the playground. He had long hair and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut out. If his face had not been so round and squidgy he might possibly have looked quite hard. Jonathan was handsome. He had that sort of blonde hair that is run through by brown streaks. He was very athletic and won practically every race and event on school sports day. He supported Manchester United and went mad if they beat any other team. I liked his teeth. They were white and sticky out, but just at the right angle, so they seemed sexy rather than goofy. He also had cancer. One day he stopped coming to school. They never told us what happened to him.

In assembly they told us stories that were meant to galvanise us into being good people. It was as if they were picking up where Jesus had left off. One in particular, that they used to regale us with over and over again, was the parable of the long chopsticks:- A dead man goes to this awful place. Everyone is starving and gnashing their teeth, but on the table is a rich feast. He goes to another place, where there is the same feast, but instead of hunger everyone is satisfied. “Why is there such a difference?” he asks his guide.
“In order to eat each man must feed and be fed by his brother.”
Only the good people had worked out how to use the mighty chopsticks. I did ask “Please Miss, why didn't they just use their hands?”
“Because they didn't?”
“But why not? If they were starving and everything then they must have thought of it.”
“Well they didn't.”
“I would, if I was starving and there was a table of food right in front of me.”
“That's enough of this disruption. Go and look up the word 'allegory' in the dictionary, A, double L, E, G, O, R, Y.”
“Yes Miss.”

She did not like me. I frequently found myself standing outside the headmasters office, and he did not like me either. He would pop his head round the door and beckon me in. He had a big chair behind his big desk and I was motioned to sit in the small, orange, plastic chair. He would say things. I watched his beard and moustache move about. His lips looked strange poking out, cherry red, from between the hair. It fascinated and repelled me at the same time.

On one occasion I ate a sachet of shampoo will I stood there, outside his office. It was peach coloured and, although it smelled of soft oranges and vanilla, it tasted revolting. After five minutes or so I was sick. It came down my nose. I was shifted from punishment duty into the medical room. Mother came to collect me. She took me home and let me lie on the sofa. Who says crime does not pay?

We survived pretty well in our little apartment. Mrs Richards upstairs kept mother busy, with her cancerous requests for help. Mother had been a nurse, one of those dyed in the wool types. She was very efficient, but with little, in fact no, bedside manner. I remember her pulling plasters off my arms and legs, dragging all my body hair out with the adhesive. “Oh don't make such a fuss,” she said, as I lost five layers of skin.

Then there was Priscilla and Noel, the couple on the top floor. “They're not married,” mother said in conspiratorial tones. It was the end of the 70s. Marriage was still a well respected institution. I think they got away with it because of their sports car, a rather natty red MG. That, and they kept telling mother they intended to marry. She admired their taste and commitment. In the end Priscilla went off with someone else. Noel sold the car.

On Saturdays we went to Harborne. Mother liked to call it “A village,” but being as it was totally within the Birmingham conurbation it was difficult to imagine it as a village. It had been once, apparently, before the city spread its linear tentacles. Harborne was “Quite lovely”. All the rich people lived there. Well, they were not as rich as us, because they did not live in Edgbaston, but they were still better off than most.

We would have lunch at Michelle's, a rather nice French restaurant. Mother liked to go every fortnight. She got to know the owner. We became regulars and were treated with all the respect such an investment earned. I liked to order the meals that we had to cook at the table ourselves. The waiter brought a shiny, chrome thing, on top of which rested a small frying pan. I pushed the thinly stripped beef around absent mindedly while studying the pictures on the walls. Rosie would join us quite often. She had managed to completely invert 'there's no such thing as a free lunch'.

When we were not at Michelle's we were at Valentinos, an Italian restaurant at the end of the High Street, that happened to be next to mother's favourite dress shop. “Will you have the veal?” mother said.
“No thank you.”
“But you've never tried the veal.”
“I don't want to.” It bothered me. It was very pale, the exact same colour as a baby's naked bottom.
“Why not?”
“It's a baby cow.” I could see its big, brown eyes and thick lashes blinking at me.
“Oh don't be so silly. The young of any animal is always more tender. What do you think lamb is?”
Thank you mother. I had never considered that before. Mind you, I had never seen a lamb, not in real life. I thought maybe I might quite like to be a vegetarian.
“And where is that going to stop? Are you going to refuse to eat eggs because they're chicken abortions?”
I hated that word, 'abortion'. The waiter arrived with my pizza. I could barely swallow. I wondered if my eggs were that size.

I had to write to father, once a week, on Fridays. I liked the thin, blue, airmail paper, with its feint grey lines. I tried very hard to keep all my letters even and straight so that my words looked beautiful. I wrote joined up, mother had taught me. She prided herself on certain aspects of etiquette, one of which was decent handwriting. Shoes was another of her fascinations. And well manicured nails. She certainly took her job of bringing me up very seriously. She pointed out other children and sneered that they had been “Dragged up”. She wanted to regurgitate me perfectly formed, into a young lady. She despised the term “Woman”. She spat it out with a secret vengence that I did not entirely understand. “A lady never smokes in the street,” she reliably informed me.

The pen in our household was a very precious object. It had belonged to my grandfather, her father, or rather the man she referred to as “William” - more spitting. It was black, with a gold nib. The outside of it was textured with some feather pattern. It did not take cartridges, instead, there was a rigid, rubber reservoir that was filled by dipping the nib in an ink pot and squeezing and releasing. We always used blue ink, that one with tones of black, not the garish peacock blue. I got through dozens of sheets of blotting paper.

And so I would sit, at father's desk, hunched over like a studious, little leper. As I formed the letters my tongue came out of my mouth and traced careful determination over my lips. I wanted him to be proud of my writing. Mother ensured this. Each missive was corrected and returned to me for amendments. Sometimes it took three or four attempts to achieve an acceptable standard. By which time, I was so bored of what I was saying that it hardly seemed worth repeating.

Once the task was completed my letter was folded away in its own little envelope and mother would write the address. It pleased me to see it finished and on its way. There is a type of closure associated with licking a flap and sealing it down. Letters are the ultimate in self publishing. You know you are going to be read, at least by one person, or you assume you will be.

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