13

 

 

 

 

13

 

 

There’s nothing wrong with keeping some things to yourself. I know. But my mother holds details back like they’re black secrets with teeth, or monsters hovering in hidden places. Vicious things that can only come out when you look them in the eye. She leaves a lot of blanks for me to stare at. It’s not only about Auntie Clem—all those versions I’ve been told about how we got to stay with her, and later why we left.

I don’t know the name of the place where I was born. I don’t know where we were when I took my first steps. I don’t know where we lived when I spoke my first word. I’m not even exactly sure how old I am. My mother lies about her age all the time. And if she won’t say hers, then I can’t know mine.

I know who I am, but I don’t always know what. I’m a child. I’m a daughter. I’m both. I’m neither.

Usually Mom says I’m twelve, maybe thirteen. People sometimes guess my age at sixteen, but only with the makeup and the clothes. When I wash my face clean late at night, before I crawl into whichever bed I’ll get to call mine for the next few hours, I stare at my reflection in whatever bathroom mirror I happen to be standing in front of, and I see skin that’s smooth and firm and peach-perfect. I see wide eyes, soft and naked without any hard black lines. I see a nude mouth, and curved cheeks I hope will hollow down at some point. And I ask myself, How old are you? I could easily be twelve. Or fifteen. Puberty hit me early and slow, like it was in a hurry to get started but unsure about what exactly it wanted to change. Locking me in a kind of half-state. It’s only my face that might betray the truth about how young or how old I truly am.

Make your age work for you, my mother says. What she really means is: Just lie.

I’m thirteen. Or I’m fourteen. Some days I look like I’m fifteen, or sixteen. When I’m made-up, I can push for eighteen. But my life is my mother’s life and hers is mine, and everything that happens to one of us happens to the other. Life experience doubled up, crushed into moments and gasps of time that would be too big for either of us on our own.

I’m a kid. I’m a teen. I’m neither. I’m both. Sometimes in my head, I’m at least fifty years old.

***

Back in Carris with Auntie Clem, I was as close to a kid as I ever got to be. I didn’t know about staying in strangers’ homes, how each place has its own smell, its own feel. Some secret, precise blend of detergents and skin cells oiled into the tile, rubbed into the wood. I didn’t know about motel rooms, how they always smell like whoever was there before you, even if the carpets are clean and there’s no dust on the TV or the windowsills. Even if the sheets are white-bright and fresh and there are no dark marks pressed into them. Cigarette smoke and sweat and dried urine lurk in the corners, catching the edges of the air. Bleach and lemon-scented air freshener barely cover the taint of spilled booze and stomach bile. Back in Carris, I didn’t know about highways and bridges that go over the roads, or the way gas stations light up the night, getting brighter and warmer as you walk toward them on aching feet. I didn’t know about parks, and the people who go to them.

Some of this is sad, but not all of it.

This is why if anyone asks me outright, I tell them I grew up on a smallholding. I tell them I was home-schooled. I tell them I lived for a while in a different world to most—that I stayed young and got old both at the same time, from being so sheltered, from being so independent, both at once.

It’s true the way you can make anything true if you say it the right way.