Queen of the States by Josephine Saxton

Author:Josephine Saxton [SAXTON, JOSEPHINE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575118621
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

23

They had tucked her in too tightly with their paddy paws but she had been too sleepy to protest, not connected, not quite in her body. Nobody cared what she thought back home; here they cared but sometimes misconstrued. Understandably. She felt like an unread book in a forgotten corner of a library. As a child she had been able to become larger or smaller at will during childhood illnesses. Measles had enabled her to contract from being a normal six-year-old girl right back to being a baby. Could she do it now? The sheets would not be tight then. She recalled you began with your hands, feeling them very small. The technique of controlling your dreams began with seeing your own hands and recognising them while dreaming, too.

Her hands were tiny, plump and soft, rehearsing effective action, wiggling like sea anemones. Her arms were weak. She could just raise her head from the pillow for a moment before it fell back, not supported by her infant neck. Alice in Wonderland would have understood the feeling. She kicked and squirmed and found there was plenty of room to raise her knees. That was lovely. She managed to bring one rubbery little foot into her hands and then pull it up to her mouth so she could have a good chew at her big toe. A bit like the yoga classes but without the inane voice of the teacher prattling on. The foot liked being chewed by toothless gums. Life was quite good.

The bars around the cot cast shadows on the horrible brown wallpaper. The light moved slowly through a parchment lampshade sewn with thongs to spotty wire and the fly shit on the bulb made clouds on the ceiling. If only her mother had kept that lamp it would be worth money now, with its naked female fascist being taken a walk by a police dog, all gilded. Neither dog nor woman had primary sexual characteristics; Magdalen could see through the folds and the fur to the nothings. The dog was dragging the woman off to a dark forest to rape her; they both desired it but it would remain fantasy. Magdalen moved on, two years old now. The foot chewing had been replaced by exploring between her legs for catalogue. The word ‘catalogue’ always made Magdalen blush; she had been smacked when they had discovered what she did, and told her that she was quite wrong: catalogue was a sort of book and not the nice smelling stuff you found between your legs. Her teddy bear had liked it too, he had snuggled down there, rubbing to cause pleasure. Sometimes the bear fell onto the floor, slipped through the bars of the cot, where earlier she had thrown her bottle when she had finished the milk. Her mother had been so proud that at only six months Magdalen had fed herself at night from a propped up bottle and ‘threw away the empties’, a thump on the floor heard from downstairs where they were also drinking.

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