Below is the first Literature of the Girl fiction I want to share with you. It’s from my first ms, Kilea, an early draft of which formed a large part of my Creative Writing thesis. I think it will go nicely with tomorrow’s fiction by Kristen Stone – I know! A departure already from the plan! But they are both on girlhood sexuality, each taking a very different tack. Stone’s work is from her wonderful Domestication Handbook (which you might remember from the reading list on Tuesday).
Some background to this excerpt first. Kilea is about thirteen or so here. She lives on an island off the North West coast of Scotland, having been brought there as a child by her cold and physically abusive father the local minister. The ‘see-throughs’ she refers to are the ghosts she sees at times, though whether these are actual spirits or created in her own mind is ambiguous. Her ‘second sight’ is very much a part of Highlands and Islands folkloric history, but it’s her teenage awkwardness which concerns us now.
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Lesson
Complete disarray. The lesson would wait until everyone was ready. Sex education is an extremely serious matter. Laughter jittered round the room. Kilea eyed the blackboard that was still marked with notes from the last lesson. The functions of the cell. She put her elbows flat on the bench-top, tracing the distant chalk marks with one raised fingertip. Her gaze wandered over to the windows. They faced a flank of mackerel sky, and below that, the dark green periphery of the forestry land, the path to the Millpond Hill. She knew the form of the scene so well that if it were to suddenly vanish, a negative would remain in its place.
A few weeks before, the biology class had been set loose. Granted an expedition to the pond on the hill. Newtlets and tadpoles they had collected – all grown now and living in the tanks lining the back of the room, they kicked and wriggled behind the cloudy glass, through muck and the fronds of watergreens. The pond had leeches also, black and pin-striped beasties that squirmed in nets and buckets until thrown back. She would like it if they had been taken in, for monitoring, the whole system kept together. Later on she could always go out by herself, take a sample, but that would mean wading knee-deep into water, sinking down with each step from shore, alone.
Teacher coughed, shambled through his papers. Kilea keeked over at the others on her bench, the high-mark students, all girls. She knew who they were, of course, their names. Their eyes turned to the front with their expression set unreadable. Passive school faces. The redhead, sitting closest, had her hair in a bob with two longer, lighter strands hanging by her ears. Kilea had never spoken to her except once, to ask to borrow a pen. The answer had been no, politely. Something in that softness of refusal had hurt; the deliberate, pointed meekness of it. Kilea made a point of never asking for anything again.
Quiet had descended over the room, muddy and expectant. Teacher coughed again, erasing the cell as he instructed the class to turn their text books to page fourteen. The sound of these pages turning all at once reminded her of the Kirk. A shuffle of damp air, a hesitation before the psalm was taken up. The new section was greeted with a suppressed hishh of breath. Too unsettling, even for laughter; colourless torsos, half-man and half-woman, their insides on display. Pouches of glands, loops, ducts. Blank paper was handed down along the rows. After they had copied both reproductive sets in full, teacher said, they would watch a video.
Kilea’s row went quietly to work, but there was a muttering at the back of the classroom. She knew who it was; the slowest, leering boys. They would be sniggering, probably, over their crude doodles, trying to choose a face for each from the girls in the class. She heard her name, a stifled snort.
What were the good girls up to? Sitting, tranquil and receptive. The middle girl was being helped with her spelling. On completion of a label, the other two murmured their encouragement. Perfect handwriting, all of them. Small, smooth, joined-up lettering. She looked at her own. It was bad; oversized, twiggy, more and more like runes scratched into stone. Kilea sighed. The girls stopped, gave each other a look, saying nothing.
They weren’t meek and good at all times, she thought, outside the classrooms they would swing their hands, chatter fox-eyed in their corners. And when she went down the corridors they would move aside, every time. Didn’t want her to touch them with an accidental brushing hand. Why, why? The want was an ache, and made tears rise, and her mouth turn prim. Instead there was her sketch in front of her. She held, looked at it intently – judged it rough, but fit for the exercise – and began annotating.
Teacher struggled with the video player. The screen warbled black into a central white dot, swung into blue waves. He pushed the buttons, one after the other, progressively harder, then through a sequence, as if there was a code that would make it work. She felt as though there must be someone else who noticed these small failures, who took them in, like a burden. For every failure in the world, a set of eyes to see.
The video was on at last. The first part was only for the girls; the boys were sent out to another place. Teacher pressed play and followed them. Once the tape had run, they would come back. This he delivered like a warning.
Synthesisers blorted cheerily. An illustrated female torso. Tubes with arrows flowing down them. A melodious woman’s voice addressed them, speaking philosophically about cycles and normal ranges. The picture drew outwards and then down. The half-woman became the view down an endoscope. The girls were squealing, ehhhh, disgusting. Kilea felt nothing about it.
The screen cut back to the illustration. More arrows, this time pointing into the uterus. Then at a giant, see-through zygote, dividing and re-dividing. The miracle of life from a single cell…she sounded sure of herself, the woman. Kilea let her eyes unfocus so that there were only blurs and the gentle noises of the watching room. In ancient times they believed the woman was merely the vessel for the child, but in fact it takes two full sets of chromosomes…that cell is only a haunting of the body, Kilea thought. You could think of it that way, as a see-through created at conception, held in the womb like a voice in a wall, a fallen tree. From the video, the thud of a heart beat, from inside. In the seventh week, the heart begins its rhythm. Alongside the stronger pulse of the mother. Up to that point, it had no heart, no presence. Unliving, indistinct thing. And after; without real life until it knows what it is, is told what it is. The good girls, giggling now, shifted in their seats. And she was Kilea Grieve, of the manse, of the minister. The cold, untalking man he had become. Of the minister’s wife, who was dead. A daughter. She knew her placing in the world.
The girl looked away, out of the window again, at the hill, the dark forest. On the other side of them, the lochans, moors and their lonely houses, lesser hills, empty land. Tracks and brown grass trampled under many feet. Generations of sneering sons and primfaced daughters, hands carrying baskets of fruits and stale bread, knives strapped below the knee, the engraving of the family name on the hilt, and the motto, unto death, aye after. And further, down to ruined valleys, stone-circlet graveyards, then cliffs, above the Atlantic breakers that never stop. And birds, too large for cormorants, pitched and slicing the currents of air; alighting on the rocks to dry unfolded wings. Souls they might be, or animal, or nothing. Her own mind, her thoughts haunting an island shaped like a wing in flight. A quiet, failing beat.
The video was over. Teacher and the boys quietly filed back in. They had seen their own version. As they bumped by her desk, she felt a prickling, a cold blush in the air. A current passed along the parade of bodies, as though the last boy was carrying a Van der Graaff generator. Time for the second part. Pause, rewind, copy down the new words, shade the corresponding organ. Kilea had two felt-tip pens, the nibs flattened under pressure, discoloured into sludge green and mustard. She laid them aside. They rolled, clinkered onto the floor by redhead’s feet. Kilea nudged her, gestured to them. The girl tucked her hair behind her ears and looked away, back to her drawing. A mild, vacant smile.
Kilea watched the girl for a moment, then got up and went to the teacher’s supply box. Fresh lavenders and lily-pinks. She held them tightly, and looked at the class. The long benches colonised by students, each with a pencil case, a notebook, a textbook and their drawing. The light was crisp. In twenty minutes class would pack up, depart, and the room would still be there with its gas taps and glass froglet tanks and ‘tree of life’ posters, corners peeling. Life was at once dazzling and stark. Teacher, speaking gently, was suggesting she go back to her seat. Kilea turned to him, but there was not anything tangible in his expression, and nothing kind.
She went back to her portion of the bench and coloured the diagram; adding, to fill the remaining time, further notes from pages ahead.