Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

didn’t God finish your nail?’ ‘What do you mean, finish?’ Look, there is a hole.’ ‘What hole? That isn’t a hole!’ The hairs on an adult’s forearm, each golden stalk in its little pit of brown skin. The smells. Biddy had a sour smell, sharp and hurtful to the nose, when she splashed on cologne. My mother’s smell was vigorous and salty. My father’s male and stale and smoky.

      We watched from the edge of the bush my mother showing Biddy how to put bloody rags into a petrol tin to soak, under the thatch of the house at the back. The look of dramatic secrecy on my mother’s face, her lowered dramatic voice. The deliberately languid, irritated movements of Biddy. We knew the ‘boys’ were not supposed to see the contents of this tin. We crept up to the tin when the women had gone and speculated: Biddy had cut her finger or her foot – that must be it. But why didn’t mummy want the boys to know? We were always cutting ourselves, or had bruises, and sometimes the ‘boys’ washed the blood off for us. Why then …?

      The adult world, with its disorder, its lack of sense, its mysteries, two small children trying to get things into their right place, call them by their right names …

      I lie on my bed, reading Walter de la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys. One of the monkey brothers eats an orange, which he thinks is conveniently divided into segments for pulling apart and eating. I cannot make sense of this. The orange segments I am eating as I read are too big for my mouth. Yet I am bigger than the little monkeys we see racing about in the trees just down the hill, and which sometimes come into the house and investigate the rafters before running back into the trees. Did the monkey in the book mean those tiny globules of orange juice, each in its little bag, which I burst on my tongue, flooding my palate with scent and taste? But surely that couldn’t be it: globules aren’t segments. I lie and wonder, read, and think … The Royal Monkeys must be much larger than the little bush babies we know. When they pull the orange skins apart their fur prevents them feeling the showers of sharp juice that come out. The spray lives in the pores of the orange skin. When a visitor comes who has rough-pored skin on her face and neck, I stare secretly at the pores where water is standing. If pulled apart, would that skin send out a spray of …? ‘What is that child staring at?’ ‘Doris, why are you staring? It’s rude.’ I turn away, run off, sit under a bush down the hill, pull a leaf off a bush, look at the veins on the leaf and the pores between them. I pull the leaf apart but there is no strong-smelling spray on my face and hands. On the bush is a chameleon. I watch it creep with its slow rocking motion up a branch. And then suddenly … I rush screaming up the hill to my mother, sitting in her chair, beside my father, looking out over the bush. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ ‘Mummy, Mummy …’ ‘But what is wrong?’ ‘The chameleon,’ I weep, hysterical, terrified, ‘The chameleon …’ ‘What chameleon?’ ‘It was sick and all its insides came out.’ I run back down the hill. Behind me come my mother and my little brother. The chameleon is sitting quietly a little further up the branch, its eyes swivelling about.

      I am in shock, it is like a dream. I saw the chameleon’s insides come out and … it happens again, and I scream. ‘Shhh …’ says my mother, holding me tight. ‘It’s all right. It is catching flies, can’t you see?’ I am shuddering with disgust and fear – but with curiosity too. I stand safe inside her firm grasp. ‘Wait,’ she says. The club-like tongue of the chameleon darts out, a thick fleshy root, and disappears back inside the chameleon. ‘Do you see?’ says my mother. ‘It’s just its way of feeding itself.’ I collapse into sobs, and she carries me back up the hill. But I have acquired adult vision; when I see a chameleon, part of my knowledge of it will be that it darts out its enormous thick tongue, but I won’t really see it, not really, ever again, not as I saw it the first time.

      In 1992 I was standing, a couple of weeks after the first rains, in Banket, near a mafuti tree, a big one. The mafuti is a serious tree, its fronded leaves dark green, its trunk thick and safe. There is nothing frivolous about this tree. But growing at its root was an excrescence, like a sea creature, coral sheaths where protruded the tender and brilliant claws of new leaves, and these were like green velvet. You would never think they had anything in common with the sober leaves above them. And suddenly I remembered how I rushed up to the house, screaming that a monster was attacking the tree, it was a beetle the size of a cat.

      I wake in the night. All round me, above me, is a rustling, creeping noise. I start up on my elbow, peer up through the white of the mosquito net. My heart is beating, but the rustling is louder. The square of the window lightens, once, twice. Wait, is that a car coming up the hill, the headlights … ? No, my parents’ room is dark, they are in bed, too late for a car. It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once, as I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain. Because I understand, everything falls into its proper place about me, the thatch of the roof soaking up its wet from the sky, the frogs sounding as loud as if they are down the hill, but they are a couple of miles off, the soft fall of the rain on the earth and the leaves, and the lightning, still far away. And then, confirming the order of the night, there is a sudden bang of thunder. I lie back, content, under the net, listening, and slowly sink back into a sleep full of the sounds of rain.

      Or it is just after we have been put to bed, and from the end of the house come the sounds of grown-up voices, and my mother playing her piano. I and my little brother talk in low voices, knowing we should be asleep. I continue my mother’s bedtime stories, of the animals in the bush, the mice in the storeroom. Then I try to frighten him with the dragon from St George and the Dragon. I frighten myself. The dragon is spread all over the thatch, fills the sky, claws spread out, fire rushing from its mouth. I know perfectly well there is no dragon, yet I am frightened. Similarly, when I have convinced myself there are wicked fairies in the corners of the room, I know I have invented them. When at last I start yelling for my mother to come, and she does, she says, soothingly, that there is no dragon, no fairies behind the curtains, I feel impatient, because that is not the point. I need to be scolded for preventing my little brother from sleeping, for ‘making things up’. Similarly, by myself at the very bottom of the hill, just where the lands start, I stand by an old gnarled and knotted tree, like the ones in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and imagine fairies so strongly I am not far off seeing them. When I populate the antheap with its curtains of Christmas fern and its spider lilies with fairies and goblins, what I create is an intense listening silence, and I know if I turn my head fast enough, when they don’t expect it, I’ll see them. Which does not mean I actually believe they are there. Just as I believe and do not believe in the tooth fairy. My disbelief in Father Christmas does not stop me from expecting reindeer and explaining to my brother they will come in through the window, since there is no chimney. Long earnest discussions in the hushed voices that go with the turned-low lamp and the shadows in the room, about reindeer and how fast they would have to fly from England to get here in time for Christmas, and if the reindeer would have to descend at intervals to feed, and what would they think of trees and grass, since what they like to eat is moss. When my brother tells my mother I believe reindeer will arrive for Christmas and they will eat musasa and mafuti leaves, it can be seen from her frown that she is working out how to balance reality and useful and necessary fantasy, and I at once hurriedly say that of course I don’t believe in Christmas reindeer.

      My mother decided she had a bad heart. All her life she knew she had a bad heart and might die at any moment. In the end she died at the respectable age of seventy-three, of a stroke. Even as a small girl I understood the psychological advantages of a bad heart, and believed she was inventing it to get sympathy. I believed too that my father was not convinced by this heart.

      Now I understand why she went to bed. In that year she underwent that inner reconstruction which most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you had believed you must have to live at all. Her bed was put into the front room, because of the windows and the view to the hills, under the stern gaze of her father, John William, and his cold dutiful wife. All around her were the signs and symbols of the respectable life she had believed was her right, her future, silver tea trays, English watercolours, Persian rugs, the classics in their red leather editions, the Liberty curtains. But she was living in what amounted to a mud hut, and all she could see from her high bed was the African bush, the