Pearl by Siân Hughes

Author:Siân Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sian Hughes;Jane Draycott;Pearl;Gawain;Poet;Paganism;Gawain and the Green Knight;Simon Armitage;The Missing;Christina Patterson;New pastoral
Publisher: The Indigo Press
Published: 2023-04-25T12:50:06+00:00

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The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter

Lady, baby, gypsy, queen,

Elephant, monkey, tangerine.

The boys called him AJ but girls had to say his name in full, Arthur Jack. I wanted to make his name last. I liked to trace its progress around my mouth, from the back of my throat to the half-smile it ended on. He wore his black hair half over his face and looked at us sideways from under his fringe.

Nearly every week the tattoo from his shoulder grew further down his arm, a tangle of dragons and snakes and vines and evil spirits peering out from the trees. He was too young for a tattoo, but that didn’t stop him.

When he arrived at the Exclusion Unit in the morning he peeled his sweatshirt over his head, then pulled his T-shirt back over his shoulder and unwrapped whichever part of the tattoo was newest from its antiseptic clingfilm wrapping, and applied creams and oils. If you were the one sitting next to him, you were allowed to join in.

When he had oiled and caressed his impossibly beautiful arm and wrapped it up again and put his clothes back on in agonising slow motion, he would unwrap the arm of whichever of us girls was sitting next to him, and gently rub almond oil on the soft white insides of our arms.

We took it in turns to sit next to him. No one discussed this. We just did. And he never showed any reaction to any one of us, no sign of preference or attempt to communicate with one of us in particular. There was no competition for him. He was unavailable.

He had already been promised to Josie, who also lived on the travellers’ site, and as soon as they both turned sixteen they would be married. She was still fourteen at this point, a round-faced girl with pale ginger plaits and invisible eyelashes, dressed in sequinned jeans and crop top, her little round child’s belly sticking out in the middle.

Josie didn’t go to school, so sometimes she would meet us in the park at lunchtime, or in the shopping arcade. She showed me pictures of the clothes she was wearing to a massive wedding party, and offered to try and do something with my hair. She thought I must have had some terrible accident to have such short hair.

I asked her why she didn’t go to school, and she said she really didn’t need it. And besides, there was so much work to do at home, she didn’t have the time. It was odd, my outrage at this. I had spent all my school years up to this point failing to turn up and deriding it, claiming it was pointless, but faced with someone my age who simply did not attend, I was suddenly passionate about her right to be there.

Josie explained that in secondary school, or so she had heard, girls went with boys, and even had sex sometimes, and if she got into any of that it would break her father’s heart.

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