‘Jam rags,’ she hisses at me, as I copy words down from the board into my narrow spelling book with the smooth, brick-red cover. My writing sits perfectly on the lines. Pauline carves out the words with her unsharpened pencil lead, tearing the paper; she’s lagging words and words behind me. ‘Ferocious,’ I write.
‘Jam rags,’ she repeats. ‘Your mam sticks jam rags up her.’ I ignore her, carefully erasing an imperfect ‘u’.
‘It’s to do with periods,’ Christina tells me when I mention it. She’s also in Mrs Maclaren’s class but we’re not allowed to sit together because we giggle too much.
‘Oh yeah, that,’ I say, quick to be blasé, although I don’t know much about periods. Something to do with ladies bleeding and boxes kept in the bathroom cupboard, something which will happen to me, and has already happened to a girl called Danuta in my class, who we stare at when we have PE because, apart from actual bosoms, which are surprising enough and in their way enviable, the poor thing has spidery black hair growing over her privates. She isn’t even ten yet. Jam rags. I like the sound of it. I adopt it as my own personal swear word, since it can’t be as bad as the really bad ones, and I’m keen on jam. At breakfast when Mum and Dad aren’t looking (not that Dad would mind) I prise out the strangely stiff strawberries from the pot of Hartleys and eat them off my knife.
A few days after our spelling test, after school, Mum takes me on the bus to her work. This doesn’t happen often. I love visiting the salon and being made a fuss of by the other ladies who work there. I love watching the customers turn into someone else as their hair gets done. As Mum’s quick to tell everyone, I’ve never been any trouble when she’s had to take me into work. I sit with the stack of Woman and Woman’s Own in the waiting area, enjoying the letters pages and the agony aunt and, particularly, the medical column. I also watch the comings and goings through reception. I feel very proud to see my own mum at the centre of this other world, with its unique climate, warm and chemically perfumed.
But that day, even on the bus the atmosphere is different. Mum’s dressed up and nervous, and she’s put orange make-up on her face which stops at her neck. On the way to the salon, she keeps accusing me of holding her up.
‘Gemma, leave that alone – you’re holding me up,’ she says, when I try to retrieve something interesting, possibly a badge, dropped by the bus stop.
‘Gemma, I’m not telling you again,’ when I have to stop and pull my socks back up to my knees. It’s no good just doing one, as I try to tell her, but she yanks me along without listening.
I can see that her blouse is making her sweat, and the sweat is seeping darkly into the nylon beneath her arms. When we do reach the salon, it turns out that we’re not going to stay. Mum is there to meet someone from her work, a man called Ian, and we are going straight out again. I mourn the loss of the Woman’s Owns and their medical secrets. This is not going to be the day when I finally find out what a rupture is.
‘How about the Copper Kettle?’ suggests Ian, and I brighten at the prospect of pancakes. Mum explains that Ian does the accounts for her work, and that they need to sort out something important. I know accounts involve sums, but I’m not really listening because I’m trying to decide between the pancake with banana and the pancake with butterscotch sauce, both equally delicious. Ian suggests a combination of the two, and I enjoy the best of both worlds as he and Mum look at boring sheets of paper which they scribble on with biros.
Ian does more talking than Mum. He’s quite old and fat with froggish eyes, and his breath smells of mints. I’ve taken to him immediately because of his pancake suggestion to the waitress. Mum is still on edge, although the patches under her arms have stopped spreading. She has a frothy coffee, although she never drinks coffee at home. As Ian talks she slides her fingers down her biro to the end, then upends it and starts again, over and over.