The Glass Rhinoceros
I haven’t been here in Hazelton for over forty years, and it’s been a bit of a shock. I’d half expected to hear the voices of my friends calling out to me as I passed the green, “Hilly Hamster, come and play with us.” And I confess that I did search the faces of a few closely-gathered women near the bus stop for a spark of mischief in their eyes, or for the horizontal swirl of a new cotton dress; but their faces were downturned, locked in thick black scarves; and their heavy coats, just like mine, tightly buttoned them into the vertical. Even the men who stared from the pub’s bowed windows had eyes long dulled with the mist of spindrift dreams, as if they’d never been short-trousered boys who’d once climbed a hill.
I was only three when I was first sent here to stay with my great aunt, whilst my parents re-knotted themselves in their gaffer-taped marriage.
“Hildegard Berkhampstead!”
She used my full name whenever I did anything wrong, which was often, using it like a spell to halt my steps with a spinster’s thread, pinning me like a butterfly to the card, and leaving me to sit upon the edge of an appointed chair whilst a clock ticked away long seconds, and dust motes floated in a scrap of air.
I became a silent thing to avoid my name, creeping through the weft and warp of her once ordered life. It was her bedroom I feared the most, for even when empty she lingered within its staleness, as if her cupboards were stuffed with the bodies of dead mice.
One day, with trepidation, I entered this sepulchered room, shadowed by its half-drawn curtains. The bedcovers were in disarray; the mattress sagging as if a hippopotamus had just shifted from its hole. I sat upon a green cushioned chair. There were no lipsticks here to smear upon my mouth, nor soft powder-puffs to flounce upon a floozy’s cheeks; but two round mirrors which, when angled aright, reflected me into an infinity: the vanishing point I yearned to be.
Close by were ornaments, tiny animals with white glass necks, delightful for a child’s acquisitive fingers; but fear had made me gentle with such fragility; though hatred prompted me to steal the one I liked the best.
Over the years, on every final day, I stole one of those treasures; as I grew into my name.
It was the glass rhinoceros I liked the best. The one that first I stole. It was sturdier than the rest. Its grey glass ribbed about the sagging of its knees, and yet still it stood. The only one to survive my packing-case marriage, the children, and then the divorce.
And it is, should all I love be alive and well, the only thing I’d rush back to save from fire, hurricane or flood.
