Growing Up

A story by Christina Nordlander

Miss Clarissa's ballet school was in a flat in town. It was night outside when Jeanette came out of the ballroom. She waited in the cloakroom while Dad put his coat on. The cloakroom was narrow and had a wallpaper with old-fashioned dark red flowers. There was a window in the short side opposite the door to the landing. She leant forward, hands on the cold window-sill. Almost everything outside was black sky, but on the other side of the window, low lit domes stuck out of the ground. They were about as wide as the window and made of thick glass that looked scratchy, so that you couldn't see anything through them except for the yellow of the light.

“What's down there?” she asked Dad.

“It's apartments,” he said. “You know, people who live there.”

Did they live under ground so they didn't have any other windows than those domes? It looked like something from the black-and-white pictures in Momo, where the people in the city lived in high-rise blocks that were made just to store as many people as possible. Could they get out?

In the staircase it felt dark, like all the stone in the building lay on her, even though the light was on. The staircase was made of shining grey stone with white fossils in some places. Dad had told her that the small ones were called trilobites and the long thin ones orthoceratites. It was a circular staircase, not a straight one like at home, so the steps were narrow closest to the middle and wide on the outside. When they walked downstairs she climbed on the narrowest side to make it exciting.

“Be careful, Nettie,” Dad said.

He always did. They got down to the ground and Dad pushed the door open into the black. She was already freezing when they got to the car.

The town was always eerie at night when it was just lampposts and windows without any light inside. She didn't look out until they were almost home, so she wouldn't see anything that she was going to think about in the dark while trying to sleep.

* * *

Mum had pea soup ready and asked if ballet had been fun. When they'd eaten and cleared up she went to the stove and cooked gruel for Jeanette.

When the gruel was done, Mum went upstairs to tuck Jennifer in, then sat down with Dad in the living-room to watch TV. Jeanette stayed at the table, the warm gruel mug between her hands on the wax tablecloth. It had a lid and handles in white plastic. It was shiny and new, they'd given it to her when the spout cracked on the old brown one.

Maybe she ought to stop drinking gruel. Jennifer didn't any more, and she was just five. Mum might be getting tired of making it for her every night. Was she going to keep drinking gruel until she grew up and went to college?

She bit down on the little spout and sucked up the drink, and it was grainy and a bit strong and even tasted warm. “It lies like an angel cloud in the belly,” Mum used to say. If she stopped, maybe Mum would be sad, as if Jeanette had said that she didn't need her.

Beautiful music started playing from the TV in the living-room, the kind that swelled up until you could almost guess how it would continue from there. She would never be able to stop if it was this beautiful. When she'd drunk up the last bit, she sat down in the couch between Mum and Dad and waited for the children's show. At eight o'clock she would have to go to bed because she had school tomorrow. It felt like she was sick but it hadn't reached her body.

THE END