The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

“I dursn’t,” she said.

So it was I who, from the safety of the bushes, yapped like a dog. I saw the pendant head turn, but I could not see a face; and at the next moment, the shadows on the terrace wavered, and from between the ferns in their great china pots stepped the lady in the flowered dress, and shaded her eyes, and looked straight at us, but did not see. She bent low over the bundle, the long cocoon, and spoke; she glanced up as if assessing the angle of the dying sun; she stepped back, setting her hands on the handles of the chaise, and with a delicate rocking motion she maneuvered it, swayed back and angled it, setting it to rest so that the comma’s face was raised to the last warmth; at the same time, bending again and whispering, she drew back the shawl.

And we saw—nothing; we saw something not yet become; we saw something, not a face but perhaps, I thought, when I thought about it later, perhaps a negotiating position for a face, perhaps a loosely imagined notion of a face, like God’s when he was trying to form us; we saw a blank, we saw a sphere, it was without feature, it was without meaning, and its flesh seemed to run from the bone. I put my hand over my mouth and cowered, shrinking, to my knees. “Quiet, you.” Mary’s fist lashed out at me. She caught me painfully. Mechanical tears, jerked out by the blow, sprang into my eyes.

But when I had rubbed them away I rose up, curiosity like a fishhook through my gut, and saw the comma was alone on the terrace. The lady had stepped back into the house. I whispered to Mary, “Can it talk?” I understood, I fully understood now, what my mother had meant when she said at the house of the rich it was bad enough. To harbor a creature like that! To be kind to the comma, to wrap it in blankets … Mary said, “I’m going to throw a stone at it, then we’ll see can it talk.”

She slid her hand into her pocket, and what she slid out again was a large, smooth pebble, as if fresh from the seashore, the strand. She didn’t find that here, so she must have come prepared. I like to think I put a hand on her wrist, that I said, “Mary…” But perhaps not. She rose from her hiding place, gave a single whoop, and loosed the pebble. Her aim was good, almost good. We heard the pebble ping from the frame of the chair, and at once a low cry, not like a human voice, like something else.

“I bloody got it,” Mary said. For a moment she stood tall and glowing. Then she ducked, she plummeted, rustling, beside me. The evening shapes of the terrace, serene, then fractured and split. With a rapid step the lady came, snapping through the tall arched shadows thrown back by the garden against the house, the shadow of gates and trellises, the rose arbors with their ruined roses. Now the dark flowers on her frock had blown their petals and bled out into the night. She ran the few steps toward the wheeled chair, paused for a split second, her hand fluttering over the comma’s head; then she flicked her head back to the house and bawled, her voice harsh, “Fetch a torch!” That harshness shocked me, from a throat I had thought would coo like a dove, like a pigeon; but then she turned again, and the last thing I saw before we ran was how she bent over the comma, and wrapped the shawl, so tender, about the lamenting skull.

* * *

IN SEPTEMBER MARY was not at school. I expected to be in her class now, because I had gone up and although she was ten it was known that Mary never went up, just stuck where she was. I didn’t ask about her at home, because now that the sun was in for the winter and I was securely sealed in my skin I knew it would hurt to have it pulled off, and my mother, as she had said, was a woman of her word. If your skin is off, I thought, at least they look after you. They lull you in blankets on a terrace and speak softly to you and turn you to the light. I remembered the greed on Mary’s face, and I partly understood it, but only partly. If you spent your time trying to understand what happened when you were eight and Mary Joplin was ten, you’d waste your productive years in plaiting barbed wire.

A big girl told me, that autumn, “She went to another school.”

“Reform?”

“What?”

“Is it a reform school?”

“Nah, she’s gone to daft school.” The girl slobbered her tongue out, lolled it slowly from side to side. “You know?”

“Do they slap them every day?”

The big girl grinned. “If they can be bothered. I expect they shaved her head. Her head was crawling.”

I put my hand to my own hair, felt the lack of it, the chill, and in my ear a whisper, like the whisper of wool; a shawl around my head, a softness like lamb’s wool: a forgetting.