I had played my last card. I trudged along Curzon Street and knocked at Karina’s door. Her mother called, ‘Yes, yes, it is open, it is open.’
I pushed the door and went inside. I had been there many times before and I knew that their house was like our house, with a sideboard and a big black poker for working the fire and a picture of the Pope pinned up on the wall.
‘Yes, yes, come on, we are overslept today,’ Karina’s mother said. Her English came in a rush, the consonants rustling and complex. I thought of when you turn the tap on and put your finger underneath to trap the water; it wobbles like a ball-bearing, and then gushes out in a torrent when you take your finger away.
Karina and her mother were standing in the kitchen. Karina was already belted into her gabardine overcoat, a checked wool scarf tied under her chin. Her mother was not yet dressed to go out but she was wearing thick woollen stockings and a buttoned-up cardigan, with a shawl draped over it. I had never seen a shawl, except in books; you got them in fairy-tales. Karina’s mother hadn’t a witch face, more the face of a godmother: dough-coloured, unformed, not definitely anything at all. Her eyes were like black grapes, which are not black of course: a dull mobile sheen, purplish, in soft folds of flesh. My mother called Karina’s mother ‘Mary’ when she met her in the street, but I did not think this could possibly be her name.
Karina’s mother had both hands full. In her right hand she had a ham sandwich made with thick white bread; she was holding it out to her daughter. Karina’s hands were wrapped around her mother’s hand, and she was gnawing at the bread, her head dipping with each bite, and her jaw moving like some greedy animal’s: chewing away, while the scarf’s bunchy knot bobbed up and down under her chin. In her other hand, Karina’s mother held a banana. It was already half-peeled, ready for immediate use. As Karina took the last gulp of ham sandwich she transferred it swiftly to her right hand. Karina closed her own hands again around her mother’s, holding the fruit steady; the banana seemed to vanish in three big bites.
Karina straightened up and wiped her hands on her coat. Her mother said something to her in another language. Karina didn’t answer. She didn’t even look at her mother, acknowledge that she had spoken. Her mother picked up a fat parcel from the kitchen cabinet, wrapped in greaseproof paper. She thrust it into Karina’s school-bag. Carefully, she fastened Karina’s coat right up to the neck and twitched her head-scarf forward so that it jutted out, protecting her daughter’s flushed cheeks; then she held up Karina’s mittens for her to plunge her hands inside. She patted her, on the shoulders, chest, arms, patted her as if she wanted to make sure she was solid all through. Then Karina was ready to seize the day.
I had watched her mother’s face while she fed her. She looked hungry, and as if all the food in the world could never be enough.
At eight years old, I wear my hair in ringlets, fat tubes that you can put your finger into. Each night at seven o’clock my mother brushes my hair and then combs it and then rakes it again with the steel comb, in case insects have bred since the night before. If I am free from vermin she gets out the curl rags. These are white ropes of cloth. She unrolls and separates them, then picks up the comb again and divides my hair into strands. At the top of each strand she knots a rope. Then round and round we go, tighter and tighter wrapping, myself delirious with pain and rage and she with set face, mummifying my hair. I cry out that I want my hair cut off, short like other people’s and pinned back with a big black kirby grip or a pink plastic slide, and she utters from between her teeth that I don’t know what I want. When she has wrapped to the bottom of a rope she ties another big knot, like a fist, like a knuckle bone. When she has finished my whole head, the bound hair springs away from my skull, stiff and white in its casing, as if I had grown legs out of my head: as if I were an alien from the planet Zog, with these swaying white skeleton limbs, knobbled and rickety and shining in the dusk.
When I climb into bed I pray my night prayers. When I put my head on the pillow one set of knots digs into my skull and the other set of knots rolls under my ribs and spine. I toss and turn and come to rest face down, breathing wetly into the sheets. Perhaps Karina is right, perhaps my hair is stealing my strength. I sleep and have dreams.
Next morning the ropes are unknotted and my hair explodes around me. I slide my fingers into the ringlets and pretend I have grown hair on my digits and that I am a werewolf.
One day I see Karina standing alone on the corner of Eliza Street, her eyes vacant and her mouth moving around what looks like a cold sausage. I cross over to the other side of the street. I hope she doesn’t see me, but she does.
I would like to press on now, to tell you how Karina and I came to meet Julianne Lipcott: to explain how our lives became knotted up beyond hope of severance. But if I hurry I will lose the thread; or the narrative will be like knitting done in a bad temper. The tension goes wrong; you come back later, measure your work, and find that it hasn’t grown as you imagined. Then you must unravel it, row by row, resenting each slick twist and pull that undoes, so easily, what you laboured over; and when you work again you must do it with the used wool, every kink in it reminding you of your failure.
Our autobiographies are similar, I think; I mean the unwritten volumes, the stories for an audience of one. This account we give to ourselves of our life—the shape changes moment by moment. We pick up the thread and we use it once, then we use it again, in a more complex form, in a more useful garment, one that conforms more to fashion and our current shape. I wasn’t much of a knitter, early in my life. I was perpetually doing a kettle-holder. What is a kettle-holder? you’ll ask. It is a kind name for any chewed-looking half-ravelled object of rough oblong shape, knotted up by a day-dreaming nine-year-old on the biggest size of wooden needles: made in an unlikely shade like lavender or bottle-green, in wool left over from some adult’s abandoned project: or perhaps from a garment worn and picked apart, so that the secondhand yarn snakes under your fingertips, fighting to get back to the pattern that it’s already learnt.
Karina was a good steady knitter. You would see her with her elbows pumping, hunched over a massive clotted greyness; it was as if a crusader had come by and thrown his chain-mail in her lap. I never knew whether she finished her garments or whether her mother and father wore them. All their clothes looked alike; winter and summer they were wadded in their layers, blanketed, swaying heavy and unspeaking along Curzon Street.
When Karina got home her parents were usually at work or asleep, depending which shift they were on. She had her own key, and before she took off her coat she used to put on the kettle and build up the fire and poke it, which I was not allowed to do: but I was allowed to watch her. When the kettle whistled she would swing it up—without benefit of holder—and slosh water into the vast brown teapot. I did not like tea; I did not think children liked it. Karina had a big white cup with blue hoops on it. She drank three cupfuls of tea, each with three heaped teaspoons of sugar.
Once the first cup was inside her she would take out the bread knife, which was something else that, at home, I was not allowed to touch. Karina would saw off four slices of bread and toast them in front of the fire, eating while she worked, slithering on to each slice a raft of margarine. One day she gave me a slice, but the fish smell of the margarine made my first bite come back up into my mouth and stick there. I coughed it back into my handkerchief, and asked permission to put it on the fire. Karina said, ‘You’ll never gain strength if you don’t eat.’ She ruminated a while, then said, ‘I’m going to have my tonsils out.’
I gaped at her. ‘Why?’
‘Because our doctor says.’ Her tone was virtuous, sage and elderly.
‘Why does he say?’
‘Because he’s our doctor and he knows.’
‘How do they get them out?’
‘With an operating machine.’
‘Do they put you inside it?’