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Jodie: Have you actually even seen a clitoris?

Boy [pretending to be winging it]: Erm…it’s not out here yet, but I’ve heard it’s a great movie?

She laughs.

Boy: What?

Jodie: You’re funny.

Boy: No, I do know what it is, it was just I was told it was…well…you know.

Jodie: No, I don’t know. What were you told?

Boy: I was told it was irrelevant.

Jodie [playing along]: Oh really? Irrelevant?

Boy : No? What’s it for then? I’m sure the Reverend Iball told us it was irrelevant.

Jodie [incredulous] : Who?! The Reverend who?!!

He looked at Jodie’s astonished face, which was a picture.

Boy: The Reverend Iball. Our biology teacher. He taught us about…ya know [pretending to be coy and British about it, then going up to her and whispering, breathing the very word very gently into her ear] …sex. [Then standing back and proclaiming reassuringly, with confidence] Everything you experience on this date with me Angel, was taught to me by a bona fide representative of the Church of England. That’s what you’ve got to look forward to.

Jodie: OK. Well, in some respects, I feel greatly comforted by that. [After a brief pause] So you were taught Sex Ed at Latymer Upper School by a vicar?!

Boy: Human Reproduction and by the school chaplain, yes.

Jodie [turning her head and murmuring in disbelief] Jesus Christ.

Boy: He made no appearance but I think he was floating around in the back of the Reverend’s mind a lot during those lessons.

Jodie: And your Reverend told you a clitoris is irrelevant, hunh?

Boy: Well, he said not to worry about it “for now.”

Jodie: How long did he mean by “for now?”

Boy: I don’t know. I understood it to mean until the end of double chemistry the following day. I thought until a phone call on my 16th birthday (which is a good six months away) was unlikely to be what he meant anyway.

Jodie [snorted with laughter] Why the end of double chemistry?

Boy: Because after double chemistry was the next biology lesson.

Jodie: OK. I see.

Boy: But I’m definitely worrying still, ok? Whenever he meant “for now” to end. The longer I look at you, the more worried I’m getting to be honest.

Jodie [pausing and smiling at the flirtation. Then pursuing this amusing line of chat]: So he never explained its function at all after double chemistry? In the end?

Boy: No. He sort of said the same thing again in that lesson. He said at this stage it was something we should not worry ourselves about.

Jodie: Oh.

Boy: Boyd put up his hand and asked at what stage he should worry about the clitoris – which I think was just Boyd wanting to say the word clitoris out loud.

Jodie: Good for Boyd. And what was the good Reverend’s reply to Boyd?

Boy: Inaudible. Salama answered Boyd immediately by saying, “when your boyfriend’s penis falls off.” [He paused] We’re not very advanced over here about that kind of thing. Sorry. [He appeared to be genuinely apologetic about this kind of humour.] Salama got a detention though which, I guess, represents a degree of progress since…I don’t know…Chaucer.

Jodie [was stifling a laugh. She could barely bring herself to ask.] : Anything else?

The Boy continued: Miller then put up his hand and claimed his grandmother also wanted to know what the clitoris was. She wanted him to phone her from a phone box and tell her on the way home from school. You know the kind of thing…

Jodie: He got a detention for that one?

Boy: After one helluva laugh, yes.

Jodie: They made fun of him, the Chaplain.

He smiled at her.

Boy: Well…

Jodie: You do know, right?

Boy: What? Oh that…well, vaguely. [He looked genuinely sheepish.] Well, to be honest not really. [And then the boy looked genuinely sad.] Iball did say two things in that last lesson on Human Reproduction though, which I think were really important.

Jodie: What were they?

Boy: First, he said it was “interesting” that it was so easy to catch STDs, as if the Lord wanted to discourage or punish promiscuity. We all knew he meant that – that it was God’s intention expressed in virulence. Second, he said it was significant that procreation could occur independent of the female orgasm. If we wanted to bother with the clitoris and all that, and he wouldn’t recommend it, he had some books he could give us. He’d just need to take our names and then he peered at us over his glasses.

Jodie: Any takers?

Boy: Miller said his grandmother would call him.

They had stopped outside Nimes for lunch.  The plan had been not to drink at all at the restaurant, have a very light lunch and then to drive in to the town, park and have a look at the astonishingly well-preserved, ancient Roman temple there, La Maison Carree.  Jodie had scheduled departure for 4 pm so they could reach a small, three star hotel just before Montpelier which Jodie had picked herself out of the Guide Michelin.  It had a much lauded terrasse avec une belle vue, the guide enticingly proclaimed. 

Since finishing her food, the little sweetheart [sorry – from the author] had been reading the newspaper.  It was not that hot beneath the wisteria canopy and she found she could very effectively practice her French comprehension. 

Brandy had ordered another glass of house white wine after the meal: her second after finishing the bottle.  Helena had ordered a second plate of langoustines. After devouring her cheese.

“They’re still going on about this enfant sauvage,” said Jodie, studying the blurry photograph next to the column she was reading. 

“’S’orseshit!!” said Helena cryptically, without looking up from the crustacean she was devouring.  Brandy, seated next to Jodie, snorted into her glass of white wine, possibly signalling her agreement with Helena’s view, although possibly she was just drunk again and would laugh at anything. Brandy added no words to elaborate on her involuntary noise.

“How do you know?” said Jodie, ignoring her mother and lowering the French newspaper she had been reading into her lap and looking at Helena who was seated opposite her.  Jodie’s intelligent, blue, 12-year old eyes were arrested by what she saw: Helena’s face, temporarily animated by her ungainly, fat-fingered but contented attempt to extract the meat of a langoustine from its protective orange shell.  Jodie watched this process advance with a mixture of visible disgust and hidden envy.

“Gotcha,” announced Helena with provocative triumph at its inevitable end; she waggled the unshelled corpse in the air, then popped into her mouth and began chewing noisily.  Brandy began to giggle.  Lunch was now a war between the 35 year old carnivore and the pre-teen vegetarian.

“It’s dead Helena,” said Jodie, matter-of-factly. “It’s been boiled to death.  That’s why it’s turned orange.  Telling it you’ve “got it”, as you put it, is somewhat beside the point.  It can’t hear you and even if it could it would not wish to participate in your little celebration of its own…”  She shook her head in disgust at the spectacle and added under her breath, “…mutilation.”

“Did you enjoy your goats’ cheese salad, again, Jodie?” responded Helena smirking and provocatively picking up the animal’s dismembered claw, she rotated it between her face and Jodie’s.  Jodie frowned and looked away from temptation.

Helena was on to her, she knew.  Jodie had not enjoyed the salad and now wished that she had not converted to vegetarianism a month or so ago.   Of the three new things that she had changed about herself, in response to the bullying at her old school — the Christianity, the patriotism and the vegetarianism— it was the latter she was least sure of.  Maybe I’ve overdone this “respect for living things” thing she sometimes thought, wearily and unhappily.  It was becoming harder to chide herself with the accusation that she was being weak every morning.  She wasn’t so sure of her moral footing any longer.

On the other hand, if she wavered, there was the prospect of humiliation by Helena.  And, there was always Helena to look at during mealtimes.  There was something about Helena’s unselfconscious, gruesome meat eating habits that helped Jodie’s vegetarian resolve stiffen.  And Helena had noticed Jodie’s response and had begun overdoing it for effect.  She watched Helena at her distasteful inelegant chewing of the prawn’s corpse.  With a mixture of awed disgust and amused bewilderment, the newspaper unmoving in her lap, she watched her mother’s lover reach for the slimed shell crackers in order to disinvest the little boiled creature’s arm of its armour, which was proving no evolutionary match for womankind that day.

“Good God,” said Jodie, aloud and pretty much involuntarily in response to the dismemberment occurring before her.

“Do you want a bib with that?” she asked.  Helena’s face and t-shirt were besmirched with her lunch.

The claw shell broke stubbornly and with a not insubstantial merciless CRACK! under the weight of Helena’s muscular butchery converted into more effective force by mankind’s cunning application of Newtonian principles. “God help us,” sighed Jodie sadly in response to the devastation and slowly shook her head.

“He did Jodie.  Look!” Helena raised the broken claw to her mouth and began to eat the contents of it.

“He gave us seafood, darling!” she continued.

Brandy laughed into her glass of white wine, but then remembered her parental duty and laid her hand sympathetically and kindly on her daughter’s back and rubbed it up and down.  Jodie appreciated the sympathy and looked at her mother, who then burst into laughter again, at her daughter’s expression.  But the expression her mother returned also had love in it. And pity.

“You’re animals, you two, you know that?” said Jodie, somewhat for comic effect.

“So are you,” Helena responded sharply and cackled.  Jodie hadn’t seen that one coming.  Brandy snorted again, spilled her wine onto her dress and quietly exclaimed – “shit!”- in response to the accident, but carried on laughing. 

“OK. Very funny.” said Jodie, but not so unhappily.  She liked it when the two women enjoyed themselves.  She paused whilst they laughed. Helena openly, Brandy trying to hide it— because of the love she had for Jodie—but not succeeding.  Rapidly, it became a giggle-frenzy.  The two women looked at each other and at the sight of each other’s laughing faces they burst into further, stronger laughter.

Serious conversation about the enfant sauvage phenomenon, real or not, was now pointless.

“Are you two gonna get drunk every time we stop for lunch?” said Jodie, genuinely a little exasperated by the two of them. “God help us.  I wanna get to Omaha Beach for D-Day, you know that?  We’re behind the schedule I drew up.”

There was more insensitive cackling from the two women in response to this reprimand about the schedule.  Their red-haired waitress came up to their table, smiling and asked if everything was OK.

“Oui, cava bien.  Merci beaucoup,” said Jodie smilingly and reassuringly.  No one was laughing at the food.  The waitress retreated bemused.

“You’re regressing you two.  You are attracting attention now as well.”  This made things worse.  The two ladies found the implications of childishness and conspicuous disreputability even funnier.  Jodie persisted.  She had a serious point to make.

“I wanna get there for D-Day, you both know that.  It’s important to me,” she said. “If you get smashed every time…”

“You missed it… D-Day…” Brandy gasped for breath intermittently, gripped by hysterical laughter, “by 31 years,” she squeaked.

“And you wouldn’t have enjoyed it either,” added Helena, almost unable to speak. “People got killed.”

 “Nazi soldiers for example,” she continued, unable to stop herself.

“OK, Helena. Stop now,” Brandy said, a parental nerve twitching, but she continued to laugh.

“Oops,” said Helena into her cupped hand.

“Oh, that’s funny, is it?” said Jodie.

“Honey, come on we’re just fooling around a little OK?  Don’t get upset” pleaded Brandy, in a conciliatory tone.

“Yes, about Nazis anyway,” said Helena.

“Helena, enough, OK.” said Brandy, more crossly, trying to prevent another eruption.

“I can handle this,” said Jodie to her mother. She continued,

“Some of those Nazis were just young and misled, you know that?  And they had sisters and nieces and cousins…”

“Misled?” said Helena, mockingly. “Oh no, that might have given the good guys an edge.  Maybe that’s why we won?  Shit! Poor Nazis!”

“Helena, stop! She didn’t mean misled that way,” said Brandy, more sharply now.

“And American soldiers, Jodie.  They didn’t have sisters, or nieces.”  They started to talk over each other now.

“The good guys, Helena?  Is it ever as simple as that?” said Jodie “Was World War II a goddamn Disney movie, the kind you think I should keep making for the rest of my childhood? The good guys?  OK, let me see, the British, the snobby imperialists, who you hate…”

“Oh Christ,…” said Helena, wearily. “Not this again.  Listen, if you’re smart you’ll stay a Disney girl as long as you can.  People like that shit.”

”Fine, but shit is the word because it is not exactly art, is it Helena?”

“OK,” said Helena, a little confusedly.  “But nor is war.”  The volume at the table had fallen now.  They were relapsing into discussion.

“No Helena, war is not art, but it does have something in common with it?”

“Oh really,” said Helena, now looking down at her unfinished platter without smiling.

“Yes.  It’s generally more complex than a damn Disney movie.” 

Helena did not respond at first, then spoke.

“Not that one, Jodie.  Not that one.” She said shaking her head, looking down at her plate.

“God, you two…” moaned Brandy in exasperation.  Jodie trembled a little, but to her mother’s surprise she then spoke, quite steadily.

“Have you ever heard of the 12^th SS Panzer Division?” asked Jodie.  Helena raised her eyebrows.

“No, Jodie, I have not.  But they sound fascinating.  I’ll be sure to look them up when I’m next at the library,” said Helena, with an attempt at sarcastic boredom but unnerved by the specificity.

“No need.  I’ll tell you about them.  OK?” replied Jodie.

“No, but anyway,” Helena’s confidence was knocked now by the steadiness in Jodie’s voice. She was looking down at her empty langoustines shells and then she decided to look up, but not into Jodie’s face.  She’d finished the last langoustine, which she had eaten merely to annoy Jodie.  She felt trapped like something was coming but she had nothing to do but listen.  She had come back from the restroom fairly recently and couldn’t pretend to go again. 

“OK?” repeated Jodie.

Helena sighed, shook her head wearily and looked around at the dappled wisteria-shaded patio.  The only noise that of fellow diners, mostly French.  Another American table was audible.  There was birdsong.  Cutlery and crockery, chattered, entwined with the sounds of conversation.  She looked back at Jodie, who said in the midst of all that enjoyable peacetime eating—

“About 65% of the 12^th SS Panzer Division were 16 or 17 year old children.” 

There was a silence then at the table. A silence Helena did not want, but it was powerful and for a moment it reigned over the three females as if demanding to be heard.

After a few moments, the school girl continued, “They were boys Helena.  They were teenagers. German boys. Our army even found 12 year old girls operating an anti-aircraft gun.”

Helena just stared at her plate.  Then Jodie’s mother asked quietly,

 “Is that true?”

“Yes,” said Jodie.  She learned forward, to as far as the point where Helena had sardonically twirled the claw between them. Jodie Foster spoke at her downcast face.

“They were just kids.  Adolescents. ” she said.  “And guess where they fought Helena?”

Brandy was silent observing her daughter.

“Was this that summer project, honey?  That’s how you know this?”  Then she realised something and put her hand to her forehead.  “Oh God, this is what they booed you in class…Oh my God… sweetheart.  This is what you wouldn’t show me?”

Jodie continued, looking at Helena’s face. Helena looked down at her plate and exhaled, but she could find no words of rebuttal. Her love for the girl opposite stopped her.

“Where did they fight Helena?”

Helena shook her head, and said weakly, trying to maintain her previous vein of sarcastic humour, “I’ve honestly no idea, but…”

Jodie’s eyes were tearing up now.

“Normandy, Helena.  They fought in Normandy.  D-Day.  They incurred 60% casualties there.” The little girl’s voice broke then.

“Boys.  We – the good guys, I mean – killed a lot of them. Children. ” She paused then said, angrily,

“Now funny THAT Helena! Disney THAT!”

The complex girl then stood up, pushed her chair in, folded her napkin, dropped it on the table and said quietly, with a tear-stained face,

“I’m going for a walk.  Excuse me.”

There was noticeable hush in the restaurant from the tables nearby, because of Jodie’s intensity, rather than any voices raised in anger.  The argument had been noticed by those close by. Helena, head down, eyeing the spent shells, could hear Jodie’s retreating footfall.  Exasperated, she raised her head, then she stood, knocking over her chair and shouted loudly and drunkenly but protectively, after the girl she loved so much,

“Your heart’s too fat, kid, you know that?! It is NOT the smart move in this life!”

Immediately, the terrace fell quiet.  Brandy blushed, put her glass down, caught the waitress’s eye and signalled for the check. 

But the young child did not flinch at the proffered strategic correction that had been shouted after her and instead kept walking without turning around.  In fact, in her pink t-shirt, white shorts and snapping pale blue flip-flops, which could be heard above the hush along with her footfall, the rather ordinary looking girl appeared unusually impervious to the wisdom she had just been offered and on reaching the steps, descended them confidently, determinedly, her head defiantly but unpretentiously raised and moreover, as far as the other diners looking after her retreating figure could tell, with the dimensions of her heart, wholly unchanged.

Jodie Foster and the Super 8

“To be honest, the only sense of mystery about it, is why people find these detective novels interesting at all, honey.  They really are predictable, in a way, you know?  You know the murderer will get caught every time. It’s like reading something on railway tracks…” pleaded Brandy.

“Ha ha…No pun intended,” said Jodie, drily. 

Brandy had been reading Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (in French) on Jodie’s instructions, in order to “improve herself.”  Brandy had struggled her way to the end of chapter nine last night and had finally decided she’d had enough.  She decided, after finishing chapter nine, that she had to say something tomorrow.  So about an hour ago, while she was driving the VW van they had hired, on the way to Brittany from the Cannes festival, Brandy had started to test the water, to see how Jodie would respond.  But her twelve-year old daughter was soon peeved because she knew where the moaning was headed.  Then horribly, after making her little joke, the girl had what clearly she thought was a brilliant idea.

“But why not read it for that reason?” Jodie said, brightly.  

Brandy felt speechless bewilderment descend upon her.  “What reason?” she said, in a panic.

Jodie looked at her, enthusiastically.  “To solve that mystery?”  

There was a pause, at a quick glance away from the road Brandy could see the brilliance and importance of the idea spreading slowly across her daughter’s face.  It was like a nightmare, but she had no idea what was coming next.

“Why do, actually, so many people read and love detective novels when they are, as you put it, so predictable?  It’s one of the best of ‘em and one of the best of hers, they say.  What better example to choose than Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie?” 

Her daughter clearly thought something self-evident had been said.  But Brandy was lost for words.  Reading the ghastly thing was becoming a curious obsession of her daughter’s now, (the girl was worried about her mother’s general lack of discipline) and it was beginning to spoil Brandy’s holiday.  

“Because I don’t want to solve that mystery, honey.  I want a beach book I enjoy,” she said, pathetically.

“OK, so you wanna give up?  I geddit,” said Jodie, “You’re throwing in the towel.”  Brandy wasn’t having this.  

“I do not just wanna “give up” young lady, as you so disparagingly put it.  I have my reasons for doing so.”  Don’t get defensive.  Or pompous, she thought, hurriedly.

“What are they?  Let’s hear your reasons for abandoning the most popular novelist that ever lived,” mumbled Jodie, dejectedly.  Brandy realised urgently, she needed to rescue the situation.  She wasn’t going to go down this way.

“It is not a novel that deserves a reader, OK?”  Immediately, she realised that this was far too contentious a start, given what Jodie had just said about the bitch’s popularity.  It would provoke the girl.  Also, it was the conclusion of an argument not the beginning of one.  She had to remain very logical.  Not her strength, she knew.

“What?!” responded Jodie, inevitably.  “What does that even fucking mean? She’s the most widely translated novelist on the entire planet.  The world is full of readers reading a book that doesn’t deserve to be read?!! I don’t believe it.   There must be a reason for overwhelming popularity other than bad taste or stupidity.  It’s patronising and arrogant to think like that.  You know what?  That’s a fucking crime:  the crime of laziness and arrogance.”   Brandy was lost for words in the face of this patronising, naive and irritatingly beautiful defeat.  In response, she lunged with a weapon, so obvious, she couldn’t believe she had overlooked it so far.

“You haven’t even read the fucking book yet!” she shouted.   Keeping her cool, was not a strength of Brandy’s either. “How can I lose an argument about a book you haven’t even read? And I am not carrying out your private fucking investigation about why a formula I find boring is popular for God’s sake.  I’m on holiday and I’m trying to enjoy myself.”

“You said it was my holiday, because Alice got to Cannes.  And stop swearing.”

“Oh just… She mumbled the next two words: “fuck off!” 

Jodie laughed.  Then after a pause, continued in an infuriatingly measured tone,

“I want to hear your reasons, not just moaning, OK?”

“Please stop,” groaned Helena, who was clearly not asleep in the back.  

“Shut up, Helena. And secondly, saying a novel doesn’t deserve a reader is an opinion not an argument.”

“Oh for Chris’sakes, Jodie,” whined Brandy.  The bitch was now clearly enjoying her victory.  Jodie continued, with an annoying smile on her face, as she began to hammer the nails in.

“I just wanna hear your reasons for abandoning, what is widely regarded as one of the best novels by the most successful female – I would like to remind you, because it’s something that we all care about, right?”   The two women groaned loudly in response to the girl’s feminism.  “ – novelist on this planet, a book which has just been made into a Hollywood film with an all-star cast, which will almost certainly play in movie theatres all over the world.” 

The girl paused for thought then continued:  “Aaannnd, which will almost certainly not be abandoned by people after half an hour complaining it was boring.”

“Christ, I hate you!” said Brandy, emphatically.

“I hate both of you,” moaned Helena.

“Hating me is not a reason for quitting on Christie.  Shut up Helena,” Jodie, who thought she wasn’t very bright, nevertheless loved winning arguments (she often did) and was clearly happy about her mother’s entrapment.

Brandy pulled over suddenly, at the mouth of a farm entrance and turned to her daughter.

“Jodie, the woman is a snob, OK?  It is an offensive book.  I don’t give a damn how clever she was, or how fucking popular she was, she was a snob.  And I hate snobbery, and so do you.”

“She was British.  Of course, she was a snob.  They’re all snobs,” said Helena.  “It goes with the territory. Why have we stopped?”

“That must be a misperception.  Why would lots of readers love reading something snobbish?  Most people are not rich and therefore cannot be snobs.  And Helena, fucking shut up about the British,” said Jodie. “Your attitude is basically a form of racism, which is a prejudice, which means it is on a par with snobbery, which is simply another form of prejudice.  So, calling the British all snobs, is just as bad a being one.”

“A Brit?”

“No, a snob, you moron.”

“It’s the same thing.  Being British is being a snob.”

“Well then you’re fucking British, Helena.  So stop knocking them,” snapped Jodie angrily.

“Oh my God.  She’s told me I’m British,” said Helena, simply.  “I wanna get out. I’ve had enough.  I can’t deal with this any more.”

“No! No one is getting out!” said Jodie, seriously.  “We are not leaving this mystery unsolved – Why was, sorry is, Agatha Christie so popular? That is now the objective of this holiday.”

“On a par with? Objective? Am I now gonna pay for the private education of this major fucking pain in the ass?  It’s a holiday for Chris’ sakes.  I do not want a fucking OBJECTIVE other than my own pleasure!” 

“We all make mistakes when we educate our children sweet heart. They get vicious. I still love you,” said Helena, consolingly.

“Educating a girl can never be a mistake.  That is sexism.”   Jodie paused and said wonderingly, as if she had just made a discovery or was admiring a flower,

“Another form of prejudice.”

Brandy turned round to Helena,

“Listen to evidence-to-the-fucking-contrary-already over here?”   She turned around and looked at her daughter again.

“I don’t like the goddamned book, OK?” said Brandy.

“No, not OK.  A,”

“A?!!! Fuck off Jodie!” said Helena.  “This van is not your fucking university on wheels.”

“Stop swearing.  A,” she persisted,

“God help me,” said Brandy.

“He doesn’t exist,” said Helena.

“Ayyyyyyy,” drawled Jodie, more loudly and assertively.

“Ayyyyyyy,” mocked Helena.

“You have no tits yet, you know that?” said Brandy, somewhat desperately.

“That is a stupid remark and it does not hurt me at all because it is so childish.  You sound like a child when you talk like that, not me,” responded Jodie smartly and in the tone of a parent reprimanding a child.   She had had this thrown at her before.

“And from my own mother too!” she scolded, to ensure the guilt was well and truly embedded.

“I apologise,” said Brandy, dutifully and only a little sarcastically.

“Brandy, fuck this, just resort to violence,” said Helena,  “If God did exist, he would forgive you.  In fact, if he did exist, Jodie wouldn’t exist, because he’d fucking hate her too, so he’d kill her.   God cannot exist, because Jodie does.  Therefore,” said Helena, sitting up, and continuing logically, more her strength at times, than Brandy’s “since there is no God, the only question is how do we kill Jodie, cover our tracks and dispose of her body now that we are safe from divine fucking retribution?”   Despite the humour, she was getting genuinely annoyed.

“Stop!!” said Jodie, looking round at Helena genuinely hurt, apparently, although there was always the possibility, her mother knew, that they were both being played like a fiddle by the actress.  She could do that. “Neither of you will ever dare to hurt me physically and that is a mean thing to say,” said Jodie. There was a sulky, embarrassed silence from both parents.  

“Sorry,” said Helena, meaning it.  “Fuuuckiiiin Aaaaa,” she said, resignedly, after a deep breath.

“And,” said Jodie, excitedly, a fresh idea dawning on her, which she just had to share, “what got you so excited there were some of the fundamental and entertaining puzzles of  whodunnit stories, I imagine.   How DO you dispose of the body?” said Jodie, sincerely delighted now and looking in turn at each of her two mothers.  She was surprised, then disappointed that her delight was not reciprocated on the faces of her victims, who exchanged blank glances with each other. 

“Helena?  I have a theory.  God does actually exist, he hates us and we are actually in hell,” said Brandy.

“It’s an interesting theory.  I’ll give it some thought.”

“Listen! A, ok?” Jodie paused for a while, searching her mind. “Shit! I’ve forgotten what fucking A was!”

“I was wrong Brandy, there is a God,” said Helena.

“Why is he fucking torturing us, like this?” asked Brandy, helplessly, raising and then slapping her two hands down onto the steering wheel.

“We’re gay,” said Helena contemptuously, in response to her lover’s stupidity.  “Jodie is our punishment.  Your theory does actually make sense. We are in hell.”

“That God must be a genius,” said Brandy, turning around to Helena.  “I can’t actually think of a worse punishment for being gay than our daughter, can you?”

“Will you shut up the pair of you?!!!  God, if it exists, by the way,” Jodie retorted angrily, before continuing, “and it maaaaay,” 

The two confirmed atheists groaned unsympathetically, both at their daughter’s unique use of the subject pronoun “it” and the possibility of a deity.  But their daughter’s nascent faith was irritatingly, not fragile at all in the face of cynicism, which she stubbornly refused to submit to.

“ …would be non-gendered and not a bigot of any kind.”

“Well then IT didn’t make Agatha fucking Christie darling, OK?  The woman is a bigot and a snob,” said Brandy.  Helena started laughing cruelly in response to this retort. 

There was a silence. “Says who?”  said Jodie unhappily, without much logic, in the face of the gale of laughter emanating from Helena.  She was somewhat nonplussed by the storm of cruel laughter, which reminded her of the school she had left behind.

“Says I, Jodie, the suffering reader of her shitty little book!”

Jodie suddenly erupted and then Brandy realised there was a whole other dimension to what had been going on.

“The world is NOT full of bigots!  Or hate! Or evil!” she screamed.  “That is not what people love about her.  That is NOT why she was popular!  Hate cannot EVER make a writer popular!  People are not evil,” shouted Jodie, at the top of her voice. 

“I hear Mein Kampf was actually pretty popular Jodie,” said Helena, trying to help the girl out of her naivety.  Brandy winced at the dangerous lack of tact.  Helena was always the last to get things, though she herself had been slow this time, she realised.  Too late.  I spotted this too late, she thought. The girl was going to go off like a bomb now.  

“SHUT UUUUUUUUUP!” screamed Jodie loudly, quivering with passion.  The volume the untrained actress could reach was astonishing.  A long silence inside the van ensued, but it was punctuated by loud sobs from the girl.

The erosion of her self-belief and her belief in others, which she nonetheless would not openly admit to, had started at school.  She had been called things, the really obvious names – dyke etc., as had Brandy and Helena when they were young.  Despite being warned by both women, not to tell pupils she had two mothers, she had done so.  

As the bullying had progressed with completely ordinary inevitability, as if it were on railway tracks, Jodie’s solution to it had become ever more unrealistic.  She insisted that “people just needed time” to see how “silly” they were being, to see how much the two women loved her and each other, to see how there was nothing ridiculous or “perverted” going on.  Finally, in the face of Jodie’s absurdly optimistic and stubborn protestations, Brandy had removed her from the public school she was attending.  

The new Lycee in the city was private, expensive, very good and liberal, but still an unknown.  Her daughter had had so much “faith in people, given some time” that she wanted to stay at her school, despite the treatment some boys had been giving her.  They had done real and substantial damage to her youngest.  Her incredibly smart daughter, who had taught herself to read by the time she was three years old, had started to suspect, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that she was stupid.  The main reason for the bullying was of course, her and Helena but also to some degree, envy about Jodie’s TV and film success. 

The girl had struggled to understand the dark and viral nature of bullying.  Her deepest doubts were hidden from her mother, out of love, but Brandy knew they were eating away at her daughter like cancer.  All the time Jodie had spent acting and making money for the family, had helped to make her a target, because she had begun to lag behind at school.  Moreover, because of the pressures of work, she was sometimes tired or distracted in class. She started to get answers wrong in class, making her more of a target.  Her instinct was not to hide.  Her heart- breaking faith in humanity led her to keep trying, refusing to shrink into a safer obscurity.  She continued to put her hand up a lot, despite her gradually failing confidence.  Soon she did so, even when she knew her answer was probably wrong.  Her answer to blatant social rejection was simply to persist, blindly believing that people around her would just change. Soon she was not only the daughter of a dyke and a dyke herself, she was a dumb dyke too.  Her grades fell off a cliff.  

The school did nothing.  The principal – a racist, conservative bigot – was deliberately unhelpful and rolled her eyeballs at Brandy when she broke down in her office.   She told Brandy, shaking her head, “I’m sorry Mrs Foster, you’re just going to have to get used to the fact that some people don’t fit in anywhere and your daughter really isn’t as bright as you want to think she is.”  Within the false, half-sympathetic smile,lurked the woman’s hatred and pleasure.  Brandy knew instantly that the bitch had been anticipating delivering this judgement, with unfeeling relish.  Jodie had sat next to her, passively, whilst her mother pleaded her daughter’s intelligence and her right to be better protected, with the principal.  Brandy had choked back her tears, grabbed the girl’s hand and marched out of the door.

But to Brandy’s shame, she had herself wavered after the humiliating meeting.  Believing she could put things right, she had nervously and desperately put her daughter through an IQ test with a psychologist.  On the day itself, Jodie had broken her heart.  Her extraordinary girl had never sounded more like an ordinary child, broken by bullies, than when she had said to Brandy in the psychologist’s crowded, claustrophobic waiting room, as the psychologist was opening the door to her office:

“Why are we doing this, when we know already I’m stupid?”

The result was a little above average, so the school’s final view (that Jodie was “merely average”) had horribly, not been proved sufficiently wrong to restore her daughter’s confidence in herself.   Or privately, her own mother’s.  Jodie had of course refused to do the test unless she was told the result, which she “knew” would be bad.  The Lycee agreed to take her, but it was a close thing, in the end.  It had been impossible to hide this from Jodie, which had hurt her even more.  The Lycee said they could be flexible about her acting career and without explicitly saying so, it was clear that they liked the fact that they had a TV actress enrolled.  Jodie knew her career (which she had yet to fall fully in love with), Brandy’s desperation and the kindness of the principal in response to that desperation had been the decisive factors.  The mediocre result of the IQ test had simply not been disappointing enough to outweigh these other things.  Brandy thought of all this, all they had been through while her girl wept.  Jodie started trying to stifle her sobs, so she could talk.

“And I know what you’re both thinking about and I did not need…moving,” she mumbled the last word.  “I just needed time…they just needed time, to get used to the idea…”  She paused, and then added, hesitantly, “of us…together.”

Brandy looked out the passenger window.  Helena was silent.  The sight of that fragile desperation now exposed in the little girl who still had a faith in people they would never deserve, completely floored Helena.  Like nothing else.  Brandy knew that Jodie was the only person who could knock Helena down.  And she knew from the silence, without looking, that she had just done so.  Helena was defenceless before such hopeful, pathetic and childlike decency. She lowered her head and shook it slowly at the floor of the van.

Jodie sniffed, as she tried to regain her composure.

“So, let’s take it from the top,…together,” said Jodie with endearing, but brittle composure, as if it mattered.  As if it would change the way the world was.  As if the truth about humanity was at stake and her own faith in life.  “Why,…”  the girl quivered slightly but carried on, carefully and protectively, as if walking hope before her like an unfaithful and wayward child, along a narrow plank spanning an awful precipice of profound, black disenchantment.  “… do you” she continued, “NOT… understand… why Agatha Christie is popular… That is the question we all must answer.   And because she was a boring snob who couldn’t, it turns out, write…is not an answer I,…or anyone else in this van…should accept.”  She had picked up some speed and self-assuredness at the end.

She paused.  There was a silence in the van now.  Then, with deep feeling, despite the naivety, she said, “so let’s not give up.  Let’s not be quitters.  We’re Americans, OK?”

Brandy winced and put her hand to her face. Tears poured from her eyes at the naïve, sweet patriotism, another phase, along with the muddled Christianity her daughter was flirting with.  There was a longer, more painful silence.  Hope had vanished, into the precipice.

“OK, darling,” said Brandy quite broken, looking tearfully out of the driver’s side window.  But turning back again to look at her daughter, she said as bravely as she could, but without inner conviction,

“OK.  I’ll stick at it and I’ll try to explain to you why I didn’t want to.”  Brandy looked through the windscreen and shrugged.  

“It’ll be good for you, you know that?  You need to stick at things,” said Jodie, dejectedly but still lovingly.

Brandy sighed.  One of the girl’s extraordinary strengths was alloyed with one of her weaknesses.  She never quit, but she never knew when to give up on people and walk away, just to protect herself.

The disappointingly grey, dull sky was beginning to darken. 

“You know, it’s beginning to get dark honey and I don’t want to spend another night in this van, so we need to combine this artistic discussion with a little navigation, OK?  We haven’t looked at the map for the last ten minutes and now, I’m afraid…” She looked at Jodie, “we’re lost.”