About a Girl by Joanne Horniman Page B

this book then,’ said Michael, taking it from my fingers and opening it at random. He read aloud: ‘ To sum, borus pew notus pew eurus pew zipher. Ace deuce, tricks, quarts, quims. Mumtiplay of course and carry to their whole number. While on the other hand, traduced by their comedy nominator to the loaferst terms for their aloquent parts, sexes, suppers, oglers, novels and dice .’
    He laughed, and his chest shook with mirth. ‘I like it! I think I’ll take this problem to my mathematics lecturer.’
    I grabbed it back. ‘Get your own copy.’
    â€˜It is! Half, anyway.’
    â€˜Four tenths.’
    â€˜Aha! You can do maths! When you want to. But seriously, do you think everything in life should be traduced to the lowest comedy nominator? Discuss.’
    He was only sixteen, but he was in his first year of university. I was in Year Twelve, and it was the first-term break. Less than two months into his course of study, Michael had gained a new confidence, perhaps because for the first time in his life he wasn’t the smartest person in the class. And with this confidence he had suddenly become beautiful, though I could see that he wasn’t aware of it yet.
    â€˜But what does it all mean ?’ I asked him, as he took the book from me again and started to read it.
    After a while he pronounced, ‘I don’t think it’s meant to mean anything. It’s pure music. I think it’s meant to make you laugh.’
    It was cold on the ground, so we stood up and brushed the leaves from our clothing. I took up my new book and kissed it. Finnegans Wake , by James Joyce. I knew I had found a new, beloved friend, one that promised many hours of happy reading.
    But that day, the one I later thought of as the day of Finnegans Wake , also became the day when everything in my life changed.

Chapter Three
    I F SOMEONE WHO knew us had been asked to describe my family, they might have said, ‘comfortable’. Because isn’t that the way people describe families who have enough money, seemingly enough of everything (though what that everything might be I could not say) not to worry?
    We lived in a lovely house in a pleasant old suburb. It was a house full of paintings and flowers and piano music (my father taught painting at a college, and my mother piano, part-time). There was comfortable clutter; it was a house where books lay in piles next to chairs, or on coffee tables, and shells and seed-pods were arrayed along windowsills. The kitchen seemed always to have a few bowls in the sink, and a cake cooling on the bench, and bowls of fruit made prettier by the addition of a couple of pomegranates from the garden, or a dragon fruit from the greengrocer.
    But ever since I was very young I’d seen myself as a kind of interloper, a stranger who had come from somewhere and inveigled her way into the family. One day, they would have to find out what I was really like.
    That was why meeting Michael had been such a blessing. He was also different in his own little way . Increasingly, home became a sort of stopping-over place for me. My real life was lived inside my own head, or with Michael, while we roamed around the city and suburbs looking at things, or talking, or simply being together.
    On the day that I came home with Finnegans Wake , I had the house to myself. I went to the kitchen and took a stash of home-made biscuits from the tin, and went to my room, where I dipped into the strange, intoxicating world of the new book. I heard my family come home; first my mother with Molly (Mum put her head round my door to check on me – she never knocked!), and then I heard my brother, Josh, pull up on his motorbike, and soon after loud music burst from his room. I rapped on the wall for him to be quiet and he rapped back, but did not turn down the sound. Just before the time we usually had dinner, I heard my mother and father conferring in the hallway.
    And then they called me