somersault, narrowly missing two elderly ladies. She didn’t usually see Dave much, but as she watched him in his shed, she was struck by his incredibly neat array of tools and spare parts. She had seen that sort of order in Billy’s room, and tried unsuccessfully to emulate it in her own bedroom. Everything in Dave’s shed was labelled, organised, packaged and tinned.
Dave was kind to her, put a plaster on her knee, and even laughed and made a humorous comment. She wondered vaguely why Billy’s father made himself out to be so grumpy and hid himself away, when Billy was the opposite. It occurred to her that people were more complicated than she had thought, and felt a sudden shift in her brain which was strangely satisfying.
On one of her visits, Billy was actually in. He greeted her fondly, pulled her ringlets, and asked her about her year in Australia, being particularly interested in her father’s television role. But a generation gap had sprung up between them in little more than twelve months. She noticed he was irritable and snarky with his mother and sister, he smelled of cigarette smoke, his beard had gathered bristly momentum in the year she had been away and he seemed to have grown about six inches. This wasn’t her Billy; he had turned into a stranger while she wasn’t looking. Or, to be more precise, he had turned into a young man, and she was still a child. She didn’t like it at all, being left behind so absolutely.
“Billy’s changed,” Eliza commented to his mother.
“Oh, yes,” said Lauren, bitterly, “and not a change for the better.” Eliza looked up at her curiously, waiting for clarification. Lauren found herself explaining to an eleven year old. “He’s never home, he’s moody, he’s rude, he drinks and smokes, and he gets into fights,” she said, like a thesaurus under pressure. His mother also implied that his friends were of dubious parentage. “Somebody broke his nose for him, and he won’t say who. It’ll never be quite the same. I think you’d better stay away from him, love. I found a nasty knife in his school bag the other week. He’s not a nice young man at the moment. But you come and visit me whenever you want, okay?”
So Eliza visited whenever she thought Billy wouldn’t be at home, as she didn’t like him much anymore. She liked Lauren’s kitchen and the homey smells in it, and Lauren was one of the few women she felt she could rely on, but she was growing up, and in time her visits just came to a natural end. She sometimes missed her Prince, but she knew he was living on another planet, so being a practical child she didn’t grieve overmuch.
It hadn’t occurred to either family that the sudden departure of Richard and Eliza for a year would have caused any void in Billy’s life. Or that the sudden withdrawal of his mentor and role model would leave him at a junction, scratching his head and staring at a road sign with Continue as previously or Go straight to the devil being the two options.
Eliza continued to apply herself to the violin, the works of the classical composers being interspersed with jigs and reels as the mood took her. Her irreverence toward this worthy instrument enraged her teacher, but there was no doubt that Eliza had a formidable talent and practised more than even her teacher thought she should. In fact, Eliza wasn’t practising. She was as joined to her violin as she was to her arms or legs, and it was natural to carry it around with her and be continually learning new pieces, even while sitting on the loo and waiting for nature to take its course. Occasionally, the pieces she learned were the ones that her teacher had asked her to learn.
One would assume that with such a musical focus, Eliza’s destiny would be a foregone conclusion, but somewhere at about the twelve-years-old mark she decided she was going to be a clinical psychologist, so she began to read everything she could on the subject. It makes sense when you come to think about it. How many counsellors and psychologists take up the study in order to figure out why they are so screwed up? What better way to resolve one’s family of origin issues than to do your own therapy while studying the Craft?
* * *
She was twelve when puberty struck. In fact it not only struck, it knocked her off her feet and sent her rolling down an embankment into a ditch. And, from time to time, she lay there in the ditch, contemplating the two soft, rounded protuberances growing at an alarming rate on her chest. They were topped with little pink knobs which were easily irritated, often tingled annoyingly, and popped out against the fabric of her school blouse. Eliza, while in the ditch, also considered other strange phenomena with which her new body presented her. Bleeding every month was bad enough. And hair, where previously she had been as smooth as a hard-boiled egg.
“Dad, what does ‘horny’ mean, exactly?”
Children rarely advise their parents in writing when they are planning to ask an awkward question and so Richard took a moment to catch up. “I assume you’re not talking about the rhinoceros?” he said, to buy himself some time.
“No, father, and I don’t mean the timbre of the brass section,” said Eliza tersely. She was not disposed to be amused.
He consulted his own version of the Concise Oxford, the one he kept stored in his cranium. “In the U.K. it means a person whom one considers to be sexually attractive.”
She looked puzzled.
“And in the U.S. and Australia,” he continued, “it means a feeling of lust or sexual arousal.”
“Ah,” she said, at last. “Confusing,” she added, and wandered off without explaining.
Definition #2 seemed the most appropriate. She had heard it on American TV shows and from older girls when she was in Australia. By the time Eliza was thirteen, “horny” was what she apparently was, most of the time. It was far, far worse than the other changes she was going through. Being a task-oriented child, she found it extremely inconvenient, as there was still schoolwork, and music, and keeping an eye on the running of the household. It made her irritable and argumentative with anyone who made demands, or expressed themselves fatuously.
Although it is written that all teenage girls must be easily embarrassed and blush like crazy whenever a pretty boy walks by, Eliza felt relieved that she was attending a girls’ school. At that age boys had little to recommend themselves to her, being skinny, spotty, awkward, boring and usually smelly. They behaved like performing baboons whenever she passed, and her tolerance, not high at the best of times, was at an all-time low. She had an adder’s tongue, she was not afraid to use it, and the boys learned to give her a wide berth.
Richard emerged from his self-preoccupied state long enough to take note of his daughter’s developmental stage, and her bad temper. He also noted that her body appeared to have passed adolescence, collected its two hundred quid, and gone straight to Mayfair and a 32C cup. Because he did not wish her to instruct herself with the aid of a spotty adolescent boy, he took her education in hand at this point and he did not mince words.
“Victoria, do you know what an orgasm is?” Victoria being the form of address which usually preceded a serious talk. Some people would struggle with multiple appellations, but Eliza found them useful in a predictive sense.
She considered the question. “I’ve looked it up in the dictionary, and I’ve listened to my friends giggling about it, but even so I can’t say I actually know what it is.” No doubt she would have Googled it, too, had that been an option at the time. She had a precise way of expressing herself, due to having read a lot of old books and theatre scripts. She also tended, disconcertingly at times, to answer the question and only the question, so coyness, hints and passive aggression were largely wasted on her.
“I thought not,” he said, turning to the one of the bookshelves in his study, where they were busy reorganising a huge literary collection together. Richard had amassed all kinds of books containing explicit drawings and
