This week's challenge was to choose an opening line from a novel and take it somewhere else. I chose 'Not long after I met her, I gave away all of my clothes. (A.L Kennedy, ‘The administration of Justice’)
Not long after I met her, I gave away all of my clothes. The two weren’t actually linked, I mean she didn’t actually tell me to do that – I just remember one because of the other, although I suppose it’s true to say she had an influence on what I did next.
Of course, at that time it wasn’t as if I had that many clothes to begin with so it wasn’t such a dramatic gesture as it sounds. It’s just that what clothes I had didn’t reflect the type of person I wanted to be – wanted to become – they’d been just what I was wearing, what I’d put on that morning. Because every single item then had been bought for me, not by me. For me, for once, because I was the tallest there so had finally out grown all the hand-me-downs, all the not-too-worn-out things that others had worn before I go to be this size. And not bought by me for the very simple reason that I had no money. And that’s not strictly true either – I did have money, just couldn’t get my hands on it until I was eighteen. And that was the point, that was where she came in. Because I hadn’t known all this – hadn’t known that I had money, hadn’t known that once I reached eighteen everything would change.
‘Institutionalised’ is one way to describe it, not that I knew that at the time – knew the word or that I was. Not really surprising really, because you always accept what you are as normal when you’re growing up, don’t you? Rich kids think the posh sort of life they lead – flowers on the table, someone else doing cleaning and cooking and such – is ‘normal’ same as poor kids think it’s odd to have a live-in Dad. Me, growing up where I did, I thought the whole idea of Dads and Mums was – well not abnormal, obviously, because it’s what all the kids in books have, but certainly something I hadn’t experienced, knew nothing about.
Funny really, because although I couldn’t really remember arriving there I know I’d been just a kid then, but I the longer I was there – and the older I got, obviously – the more smaller kids latched onto me as a sort of Dad figure – stupid really because I didn’t have much of an idea of how to be one, just knew (again from books) that I had to be kind and teach them things and such. Course, it depended which books you read, which ones you believed, because some of them had really nasty Dads in them.
Anyway, the point is, that once this lawyer person – solicitor – came and told me that I’d got this money, told me that I’d been left it by my Dad – a Dad I’d never known I had (I’d known there had to be a biological one, obviously, but had assumed I’d been abandoned, father unknown) I was off. After all I was now eighteen and two days, and needed to be wearing my own clothes.
