An Experiment in Love: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

someone’s feelings, you must try to mend the damage.
    My tie to Karina had to do with restitution. I had done her a wrong, an injury, and this wrong occurred in the first month after I came to school, when I was four years old.
    They say people remember their early years as sunlit. Perhaps this is true for people born in the south, who are richer and have better weather. What I remember largely, is hail and sleet, and the modified excitement when it actually began to snow: neuralgic winds and icicles like stalactites, and poisoned fog in rolling banks of yellow-grey. In one of these climatic exigencies – no doubt in more than one, as they tended to overlap – we were kept in for playtime, and had to work off our baby energies by romping in a cramped and hushed way in our classroom. And there was I, and there Karina was too.
    The infants’ classroom is not laid out quite like the others: into which we only peep, being deterred by legends of the frightful beatings given out to our seniors. It smells the same – of coke and dust and nuns – but also of the mild creamy flesh of us babies, our skin and hair and wellingtons; and when I think of this, I think of the huge letters in our reading books, which are about a brother and sister called Dick and Dora. I think of the French pleat in the hair of the mother of Dick and Dora, the tweed suit worn by the father of Dick and Dora: and into my mouth seeps the taste, oily and sweet, of welfare-state orange juice. Very well: I am four: I am in the classroom and there is a low cupboard that runs right along one wall. Our paintings are pinned above it: at least, those that are more figurative than abstract.
    It is ten-thirty, I suppose. I can’t tell the time yet. I know how to chant ‘five past, ten past’, and the rest, but I haven’t realized the relationship between the numbersand the pointing fingers. But let’s agree it’s ten-thirty; it’s raining and dark. I can see the rain hitting the window in discrete splashes, then splitting and widening into the Nile delta, though this is a river of whose existence I am not yet informed; I watch the delta become an ocean, a simple roar, a wall of sound. I am sitting on the cupboard swinging my legs. To, fro, to, fro. Fawn socks and lace-up shoes.
    Karina comes by. Her pale blue eyes look straight ahead, and her expression is distant but implacable. She has a toy truck, a lorry she is pulling on a string. The lorry is red. In the back of it is crammed a baby doll, a fair, fat, blubbery baby doll, plastic pink and naked. What a game! A baby in a lorry! I think it’s stupid.
    Before I have time to think anything else, out shoots my foot. Out shoots my foot from the knee. Up sails the lorry, up into the air. Out flies the plastic baby. And smash! Down on the classroom floor, down on its bald pink head. Dead.
    Karina drops the string of her lorry. Slowly turns. Sucks in her lips, which are the same pink as her face, between the big square teeth. Then tears – fat tears – begin to roll silently down her cheeks. I sit with my leg still swinging, as if it is a mechanism over which I have no control. Karina menaces me: she raises her arm from the elbow, in a parody of hitting. She is afraid, I can tell she is. She approaches me; the blow lands on my shoulder, soft as pat-a-cake, and a tear falls on to my hand, scorching me. I rub my hand on my dress, and the tear goes away.
    Normally if anybody hits me I hit back. I poke theireyes out. I am four and I am famous as a good fighter. Kick them in the kidneys, Grandad says, they’ll not take much of that. I know kidneys: I have seen them on a plate. I know they come from the butcher, and I imagine my enemies toiling up Bismarck Street with a shopping-bag, and their kidneys inside wrapped in bloody paper. In my mind, my leg shoots high and straight, high up to my ear, and I catch them
so
, on the very point of my toe; I send their kidneys spinning.
    The butcher writes his prices on the