If I Was a Child Again Read online

  “That’s why you called me?” I heard one girl say. “You want me to whistle?”

  “Just do it!” Judy told her, looking over the breakfast table at me in triumph.

  My relationship with Fiona was a bit different. Judy and I were too close in almost every way. But Fiona was five years younger, sweet and agreeable, and she’d believe whatever Judy and I decided to tell her. “We’re going to play hide-and-seek,” we might say, and then go off and watch TV while she waited all afternoon in some dark corner of the attic for us to come and find her. Or there was the time Fiona got a splinter in her thumb and asked Judy what it was. “This means,” my sister informed her gravely, “you have two weeks left to live.” Fiona marched into my room and demanded to know if it was true, and I remember Judy was mad at me for days because I wouldn’t back her up.

  We lived in a quiet little town in the countryside, idyllic for childhood, boring as a daylong detention for teenagers. There were wide streets lined with shady trees and tall wooden houses – I’d spend days running around exploring every corner. In the summer my feet were usually covered in grit and bits of dried lawn. I never bothered with shoes much.

  It was a Saturday morning in late June – I was almost twelve and Judy and Fiona would have been ten and seven – when Judy burst into the kitchen as I was looking for cereal. The screen door yawned and slammed shut behind her.

  “You won’t believe what Fiona’s doing! Get out there!” Judy was overjoyed, glowing – the way she always looked when one of us had made a complete fool of herself.

  So I went outside. The sun was casting jigsaw patterns of light and dark over the front yard. Somewhere a lawnmower growled and thrummed to itself. Where was Fiona? And what was she doing to make Judy so happy?

  Then I saw my sister. She was standing behind a low concrete wall that separated the driveway from the back yard, wearing her summer uniform of a swimsuit with shorts over it, knee socks and red sneakers. Every few seconds she’d flip her hair out of her eyes – she had long bangs and they grew fast. The top of the concrete wall was strewn with a collection of rocks and pebbles.

  I couldn’t figure this out. Finally I asked my sister what she was doing out there.

  “It’s my store. I’m having a rock sale.”

  This was too good. “Rocks? Who do you think is going to buy this stuff?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she stared grimly ahead, her jaw tense and her chin dimpling. The expression of someone trying to tune out a taunting bully. I was instantly ashamed of myself, then angry at her for making me feel this way. I slammed back into the house.

  Judy and I sat at the breakfast table, laughing at our little sister. By then our parents had joined us in the kitchen – just out of bed and trying to navigate the day. Dad was still in pyjamas, his hair a wild nest abandoned by seabirds. The eggs in the frying pan bubbled and snapped at him. Mom was in her nightgown and turquoise terrycloth bathrobe, wrestling cereal bowls into the clawed rack of the dishwasher.

  “You kids stop it,” she said. “I think it’s nice your sister’s trying to do something different.”

  We started talking over each other. It was a dopey idea, we insisted. Fiona would be out there all day embarrassing us, and no one could even see that back wall from the street anyway.

  “You’re just jealous,” she said.

  Judy said she was going to compete and have a dirt sale, or maybe a used toilet-paper sale. Mom told us again to stop it. Dad slid an oily egg onto a plate with a dark round of toast and banged it on the table in front of us.

  “That’s enough,” he said. He left the room, and we could hear the stairs creaking.

  Judy and I looked at each other.

  “It’s not fair,” she said to Mom. “You guys always take her side.” But she didn’t have her usual conviction.

  Dad shuffled back into the kitchen and stood over us for a moment. Then he leaned down, took my wrist and pressed a handful of change into my palm.

  “Go and buy some rocks from your sister.”

  “But Dad! It’s stupid!”

  “Do it anyway.”

  I looked at the coins in my hand. “Can I keep some of this?”

  “No.”

  Okay, fine. I had to buy rocks from Fiona.

  I watched her from the kitchen window. An elderly couple strolled past. “Rocks for sale!” she called, in her thin little voice. They smiled at her but didn’t stop. It’s possible they couldn’t hear much of anything from the sidewalk.

  I couldn’t face Fiona yet. I wasn’t sure why. Instead I skulked into the living room and plopped myself in front of the Atari game console, which we’d connected to an old black-and-white TV I’d dragged home from a yard sale. I spent a few vacant minutes shooting at blocky grey aliens descending apathetically towards my spaceship, in no particular hurry to destroy the earth. Dad and Judy were in the kitchen arguing. After a while I switched off the machine and slouched out the front door to go check out this sale.

  But Fiona wasn’t at her post. The rocks were just sitting there. Had she given up? Was it my fault? I stood drilled into place by the morning sun, my shadow falling across the top of the wall. Our neighbour came out of her front door loaded down with gardening equipment and a tray full of purple snapdragons.

  “Is that your rock sale?” she called out.

  “No!”

  I looked closer. Actually, these were pretty good rocks. It looked like she’d gathered them on the beach over the mountain. Some were smooth and egg-shaped, others had stripes fusing two colours together. There were a few craggy ones with tiny snowflakes of quartz pressed into them. I wouldn’t mind setting these on my windowsill.

  I decided on my own price range, chose six or seven I liked, and left piles of quarters and dimes in their place, all the money Dad had given me. We lived in the kind of town where you could do this – leave money on a wall all afternoon. The sun reflected off the little shining circles as I walked away. I took the rocks upstairs to my room and got comfortable with an Asterix book.

  After a while I heard a commotion in the kitchen, the screen door banging open and shut, Fiona shouting for Mom and Dad. My room was right above them and I could hear everything. Was she angry? Maybe I hadn’t left enough change. Or it could be she’d wanted to save the rocks for real customers.

  “Mom! Dad!” Fiona said. “While I was in the bathroom all these people came to the rock sale! Come and look!”

  I angled myself at my window until I could make out the scene below, Fiona showing our parents the small piles of change where her rocks had been. She took her place behind the wall again with what seemed like a renewed sense of purpose, looking forward to another rush of customers. I hid the rocks in the top drawer of my bedside table.

  I was just sliding the drawer shut when Judy arrived. She flopped down on the bed and started flipping through my Asterix book.

  “Why do you like this stuff? All they do is punch each other.” She put the book down and it bumped onto the floor. “And can you believe anybody came to that sale? I bet it was just Mom and Dad.”

  “It totally wasn’t. It was me.”

  She refused to believe it. I opened the drawer and showed her the rocks.

  “Cool.” She sprang up. “I’m gonna go tell her.”

  “No, stop!”

  Judy was out of my room and down the hall in seconds. I chased after my sister, picturing Fiona’s face as she realised her mystery customers were just me, that her sale wasn’t the town-wide success she’d thought it had been. Judy was receding into the distance. I could hear her giggling away as I thundered down the stairs. She lost me on the way to the kitchen – she’d pulled her favourite trick of opening and closing one door to make you think she’d gone through it and then sprinting off in another direction. Never failed.

  By the time I got outside it was too late. She was at Fiona’s shop counter. What were they saying to each other? If I ran, I could smack a hand over her mouth and drag her away
. But that might look kind of obvious. Fiona would demand to know what was going on, and then we’d both have to tell her.

  So I stayed on the porch, waiting for the yelling, the tears, for Fiona to stomp off and leave her rocks sitting forlorn and abandoned on their concrete wall. But wait. My sisters seemed to be chatting, almost pleasantly. Judy turned and left the store and Fiona was smiling after her.

  “Nah, I didn’t bother telling,” Judy said later. “Let her think what she wants. It’s funnier that way.” But I noticed her pockets were bulging with all the rocks she’d bought.

  Had she really been planning on telling Fiona anything? Or did she just feel like driving me crazy? With Judy, you could never be sure.

  That night I heard Fiona counting up the day’s tally. “Mom bought rocks. And Judy. And Mrs Hinxman. And . . . and . . . all those people!”

  Dad told me I’d done well. It felt better than winning an argument, better than being right.

  The rocks stayed in the top drawer of my bedside table for years – with my secrets and contraband, diaries and letters, a pack of cigarettes I’d stolen from Dad. Long past the time Fiona would have recognised them. When I finally told her what had happened we were both in our twenties.

  “I just thought there were a lot of people in the neighbourhood who wanted to buy rocks.” She was laughing. “That was nice of you, Jan.”

  I wish I’d been nice more often. I didn’t know how quickly that childhood time would pass, or how much I’d miss my sisters when I left home. We spent so much of our time together fighting and competing. Such a waste. There should have been more moments like that – the day I decided to keep the secret of the rock sale. If I could be a child again, I hope I’d remember this.

  Janet E Cameron is a Canadian writer and teacher living in Ireland. She grew up in a small town in Nova Scotia and since then has lived in Halifax, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Tokyo, and Dublin. In 2012 she graduated with distinction from Trinity College Dublin with a Master’s in Philosophy in Creative Writing. Her thesis was an excerpt from a novel which became Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World, the story of a restless kid growing up in rural Nova Scotia in the late 1980s, whose world comes to an end when he discovers that he’s in love with his best friend Mark. Cinnamon Toast was one of the winners at the Irish Writers’ Centre’s inaugural Novel Fair in 2012, and was published to critical acclaim in Ireland and Canada by Hachette in early 2013. Janet is currently teaching at Dublin Business School and working on a second novel.

  Story 8: Miss Angel and Other Bad Influences

  Anna Carey

  I have always been the sort of person who would read the back of a shampoo bottle rather than be left alone with my own thoughts for more than two minutes, so it’s not surprising that I read an awful lot as a child. I devoured the works of everyone from E Nesbit to Judy Blume, from Richmal Crompton to Roald Dahl, but I also had an appetite for less literary fare. Every single Wednesday throughout my childhood, my dad would bring home the latest comics to me and my three sisters. Each of us started out at a very early age with Twinkle, before moving on to the Beano and, most significantly, Mandy, Judy and Bunty.

  Girls’ comics were a big part of my childhood. Not only did we get all three of the aforementioned comics every week, as well as the odd issue of Tammy or Tracy, but my grandparents ran a newsagent’s shop in Kells, and when I was about ten we found a large stack of consecutive old issues of Mandy and Judy in the shop’s storeroom. Reading our way through the piles became a high point of our Kells visits, until the dark day when we arrived to discover that our much-younger cousins had ripped them all up (I’m still a bit annoyed about that). But what exactly were we reading about?

  When people reminisce about girls’ comics, they tend to mention the likes of the Four Marys – good-natured romps about intrepid boarding-school girls. What they fail to mention is that the relatively ordinary Marys were not entirely typical of the medium. In fact, many, if not most, of the stories in girls’ comics were either completely insane, completely terrifying, completely messed up, or all three. This is a medium in which a story about a girl who flies around the universe in a sentient space ship which is also a large rabbit is completely normal (the story was called “The Flights of Flopear”, by the way). It’s also a medium in which the vast majority of stories involved terrible things happening to relatively innocent girls.

  Orphans were particularly popular in girls’ comics. In fact, looking back, it feels like hardly any of the subjects lived with their biological parents. While some of the orphans lived in the present day (like Bella the gymnast, a beloved Tammy character who lived with her scheming aunt and uncle), comics readers generally preferred their orphans to be Victorian. And no one gathered together Victorian orphans like Miss Angel from Mandy. Angela Hamilton was a rich young lady in Victorian London who discovered she was dying of an unspecified but vaguely tubercular illness so, in order to spare her parents the pain of watching her die slowly, decided to fake her own death and go off and run a sort of orphanage in a stable, which became known as the Stable House, where the waifs called her Miss Angel.

  No, the whole death-faking thing didn’t make much sense. In fact, even as a small child, I could see the many faults in Angel’s plan. If she was going to die anyway, surely it was better to let her parents spend as much time with her as possible? Also, and more crucially, if Angel had stayed in her giant comfortable mansion with her incredibly rich parents, she could have used the family’s money to run a proper children’s home with decent facilities rather than scrabbling around looking for pennies to keep her “waifs” in a manky old stable.

  But logic was never the strong point of girls’-comic melodramas. And so every week we would read how Miss Angel encountered yet another orphan (or two, if the first orphan had a sibling) with a picturesque back story and took them into the Stable House. Angel’s adventures were so popular that she popped up in Mandy every few years, her stories usually introduced by a modern-day character who discovered Angel’s diary and became entranced by her, much like the comic’s readers themselves. In fact, we couldn’t get enough Victorian misery. After reading the Bunty story “Workhouse Wendy” (in which a rich young girl goes undercover in the workhouse owned by her parents while they go on holiday and ends up stuck there when they’re lost at sea), my sister Jenny and I went through a phase of drinking soup and pretending it was gruel.

  Of course, as few ten-year-old girls were going to fake their own deaths and then run secret stable-based orphanages, or go undercover in a workhouse, there was little danger of readers being influenced by Miss Angel and Wendy. Some of the other stories, however, gave out more worrying messages. Countless comics stories involved characters being bullied or manipulated in some way, by classmates or siblings or wicked aunts or step-parents. Many of these stories involved characters being unfairly blamed for something they hadn’t done, which was particularly painful to read.

  Perhaps the greatest of these stories was “The Honourable S.J.” which appeared in Judy. The eponymous S.J. was a girl with the brilliantly Dickensian name of Sarah-Jane Cheetwell. Her main victim was a girl called Ann, whose father worked for S.J.’s father. When Ann arrived as a scholarship girl at the boarding school where the sneaky, constantly sneering S.J. was inexplicably head girl, S.J. began blackmailing her to do her bidding, saying that Ann’s father would lose his job if his daughter defied the all-powerful S.J..

  S.J., however, proved such a popular villain that even though she was expelled from the school after her first adventure, she had to return to the pages of Judy. What baffled me as a child was that, despite having been expelled for blackmail and bullying, S.J. would inevitably end up in a position of authority at the next school she attended. Didn’t anyone ask why she’d left her previous school? How come she would always be made head girl or at least prefect as soon as she arrived at a new place? Anyway, S.J. always found a few more victims to torment but she and Ann kept bumping into each o
ther, even when they both ended up at an Alpine finishing school. I like to think that if the comics had continued, they’d have been facing each other across a boardroom somewhere.

  Ann may have been blackmailed, but most of the bullying victims in comics simply chose not to speak out. “What’s the point?” they’d say. “Nobody will ever believe me!” Sometimes they would decide that their parents or siblings would just be too upset if they knew how bad the bullying was. In the comics world, the only way your bully would get her comeuppance would be if other people overheard her making a terrible threat, ideally over a microphone that the bully foolishly believed had been switched off. That was the thing about girls’ comics – their characters simply had to suffer, even if – especially if – the suffering was avoidable.

  In fact, one of the most unsettling trends in girls’ comics was the sheer amount of stories in which the heroine suffers horribly but voluntarily, supposedly to help others. The most ludicrously dreadful example of this was “Hard Hearted Harriet”, in which the eponymous orphan heroine discovered she was dying and so tried to make her younger siblings hate her, so that they wouldn’t mind so much when she eventually died. The thought that maybe it might be more traumatic in the long run for the kids to be cruelly rejected by their beloved sister didn’t seem to cross her mind. Comics were full of stories in which girls masochistically made themselves into hate figures, supposedly for the greater good. It was as if the readers, and the writers, couldn’t get enough of pointless suffering.

  Of course, at least the sufferings of Harriet et al weren’t of the supernatural variety. I still maintain that the “spooky” stories in girls’ comics are the most deeply disturbing things I’ve ever read. Some of the supernatural stories were harmless – like “Valda, Girl of Mystery” from Mandy. Valda was always turning up in jungles or snowy mountain ranges wearing nothing but a green minidress. She was basically immortal as long as she kept her energy topped up with her magic crystal (“The crystal of life is death to all but me!” she’d cry whenever anyone tried to steal it, and she was right).