The Importance of Music to Girls by Lavinia Greenlaw

Author:Lavinia Greenlaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571326174
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-06-01T04:30:00+00:00

29

An exuberance

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind …

JANE AUSTEN, Emma

It was still early 1977 and I was still fourteen but I had stopped singing in the streets. I didn’t cry in the lavatories or drink till I was sick, and I was no longer interested in lovebites or dance routines. The girls with whom I had shared mirrors, loitered at bus stops and danced in line with were strangers. Our separation was subtle, mutual and absolute; one day we met and simply did not recognise each other.

Tina passed me in the school corridor one afternoon. She came towards me looking like herself but as she went by, I saw her differently. The tough bright shell she used to attract or deflect now seemed constricting. She carried herself like someone with nothing to hide, but her expression was becoming that of her mother, a hurt sneer that said many things but above all, ‘What are you looking at? There’s nothing wrong with me.’ I had hoped to learn from Tina how to be a girl, how to grow up, how to bring my life to life, but now there seemed nothing lively about her.

Her feet wobbled on platform-wedge shoes and her pencil skirt reduced her strut to the trot of an overwound toy. Had our dancing been so full of anger? It now strikes me as despair. The clever ones like Tina were among the brightest girls in the year but they were careful not to show it. None of them talked about going to university or even about leaving home, and no one suggested such things to them either.

If Tina had taken any notice of me, she would have seen a skinny girl in big boots and a torn army jacket covered in scribbled quotations. My hair was a mess, my face undefined. Tina would have thought me scruffy and pretentious, and she’d have been right. I knew that I had let her down, not by defecting so much as by never having measured up in the first place. My father recently told me that he had come across a photo of me at fourteen and had thought to send it to my daughter but something in my face made him decide not to. I know what it was – the desperation and failure showed. It was as if some kid had been given a Teenage Girl kit with a picture of Tina on the box, and I was the botched result.

What happened? There was no revelation, no decision. I had stopped dancing, and would not do so again on a disco floor with a group of girls, all trying to look and move alike. There would be no more giggling and shrieking, and things would cease to be mostly either mortifying or hilarious. It was as if some electrified self had been unplugged along with the disco lights.

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