Pullinger - A Little Stranger

A
LITTLE
STRANGER

A
LITTLE
STRANGER

KATE PULLINGER

McArthur & Company
Toronto

First published in Canada in 2004
By McArthur & Company
322 King St. West, Suite 402
Toronto, Ontario
M5V 1J2
www.mcarthur-co.com

Copyright 2004 Kate Pullinger

All rights reserved

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pullinger, Kate
A little stranger / Kate Pullinger.

ISBN 1-55278-460-6

I. Title.

PR6066.U45L58 2004 C813'.54 C2004-904189-4

eISBN 978-1-77087-108-3

A.A. Milnes poem Disobedience is taken from When We Were Very Young published by Penguin Group (USA). Every attempt has been made to secure permission for all material used, and if there are errors or omissions, these are wholly unintentional and the Publisher will be grateful to learn of them.

Composition and Design by Tania Craan

The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing activities. We also acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation Ontario Book Initiative.

For my own mother
who is nothing like
Fran or Ireni

CONTENTS

James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother,

Though he was only three.

James James

Said to his Mother,

Mother, he said, said he:

You must never go down to the end of the town,

If you dont go down with me.

From Disobedience by A.A. Milne

A woman stands on her own beside the baggage carousel. All around her there is noise: people talking, bored and tired after their long flights, the tannoy announcing delays, departures, arrivals, lost passengers, lost bags, the machinery of the long metal conveyer belt starting up and then shutting down again, the soft clunk and slide as yet another bag emerges, people wrestling with their baggage trolleys; if she listened hard enough she would hear, outside the terminal building, the sound of airplanes overhead, their great wings straining, tires meeting the tarmac with short sharp screeches, she would hear the motorized luggage carriers, she would hear the catering trucks, the fuel lorries, she would hear the flight controllers up in their tower talking about what they watched on TV last night. But she hears nothing. She stands alone, in blessed silence. She has no bags to collect, all she carries is her small, well-made leather handbag, but she stays beside the carousel locked into some kind of unthinking repeat behaviour pattern, a race memory of air travel, of all the air journeys she has made in her life. There is no one meeting her, there is no one speaking to her, no one tugging at her dress. She is in a silent room, a white room, a room devoid of clutter; there is a vase of flowers, sunshine, white linen bed sheets everything clear, everything clean. It is a longed-for space, a dream room, a place where she can be by herself. She is there now. She is free.

The thing is, Im just not up to it. Im not capable. I thought I was, of course I did. Everyone does it. Well, most people do it, most women, at least. Its natural, some people say its a fundamental right; how hard can it be? My own mother did it and did it well, at least initially, until I was eight or so, and those eight years set me up for life. All around me people do it, in conditions far worse than mine: single parents theres a woman I see in the park who has four kids and shes on her own and they look happy, healthy. Refugees. People who are disabled; people whose kids are disabled; people who have cancer; people who have no jobs and no money and live on benefits in bad housing: they all do it and most of them do it pretty well.

And then theres me.

So Ive resolved to do something about it. Im not sure what, havent got to that yet. Im trying to think it through but my powers of independent thought arent what they used to be. Its got to happen though; things must change. Before something awful happens. Before I can no longer remember how to be happy.

Fran was lying in bed, trying to read a novel.

She couldnt clear her head of what had happened earlier in the day. Shed taken Louis to the shops. Theyd gone into the organic supermarket to buy bread. Fran thought she should buy organic it was better for Louis, it was better for all of them. But they couldnt afford it. Everything cost twice as much as it did elsewhere. And the produce, flown in from the world over tiny bright orange mangoes from Sri Lanka, dripping papaya from Gambia, fat runner beans from Madagascar tended to go off if it wasnt eaten right away. This made her wonder about the fruit and vegetables she bought in the ordinary supermarket, lettuce that didnt wilt, tomatoes that lasted forever were preservatives injected on the vine?

She was buying bread; it was expensive but, Fran thought, superior enough to justify the price. At the organic supermarket, as in any other supermarket, they kept the sweets organic sweets near the till. Louis spotted his favourite, strips of dried fruit that were like candied leather. For ages Fran had thought these were good treats to give to Louis, they were made of fruit after all, completely natural; then one day her dentist told her they were worse than chocolates and crisps because of their tendency to adhere to the teeth. So no more fruit strips for Louis. He got up out of his pushchair the shop was full of stairs that shed had to lug Louis, the pushchair, and the shopping up and down, in relays and marched over to the shelf. He pointed, smiled, and said Please. Fran was counting her coins. She had enough money for the bread, nothing else. She couldnt believe Louis had said please. She was tempted to put the bread back and buy him the sweet instead. But they needed the bread. She needed the bread. So, she said no, there wasnt enough money, and told him to get into the pushchair.

There was a brief lull. Fran paid for the bread and put it in her bag. She turned to face Louis.

He threw himself on the floor and started to wail.

Fran stood absolutely still. She couldnt move; Louis was nothing but movement. He kicked his arms and feet out, suddenly looking surprisingly large. Other customers stepped over him, around him, glancing at Fran, telegraphing disapproval, distaste. One woman actually made that tutting noise. Fran looked away. Louis tantrums filled her with wonder the impossible fury of it all. Louis? she said. He screamed more loudly. Louis, she tried whispering, maybe whispering would stun him into submission. He kicked harder, more wildly.

And then she herself was filled with fury, a fury that felt as sudden, and large, as Louis Why me? Why now? I cant stand another minute of this. She wrenched the empty pushchair away from where it was parked and walked out of the shop.

The door closed behind her. She could no longer hear Louis. She pushed the chair along the street, past the clothes shops and cafs, down to the newsagent. She parked the pushchair, applied the brake, went inside, and looked at the tidy stacks of newspapers. She looked at the magazines, all those magazines she used to read every month in Celines, those magazines that used to help her decide who she was, what she looked like, who she might be. Well, she wasnt glossy anymore. She no longer shopped for clothes, she no longer worked with clothes, and she no longer met up with her girlfriends to talk about these things.