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I’d only been paying attention to what I needed to do to keep up with her.
I’d only been paying attention tomyself.
Chapter 5
Necessary Beauty
Theodora
Thefirstsummerbackfrom Spearcrest, my mother and grandmother look at me, exchange a glance, and then my mother says, “Does your school not serve healthy food?”
I know immediately what she means and lower my head in shame.
“They do, Mummy.”
“Perhaps you are eating a little more than you should,” my mother observes in a light tone.
If my father is the owner of the object that is me—the doll that is Theodora Dorokhova—then my mother is the maker. She is the one who ensures that every time my father sees me, he is satisfied with what she is presenting. She’s the one who ensures that I look small and endearing, that my hair is long and combed to a high shine, that my dresses are clean and pleasing to the eye.
Perhaps it’s because my father blames her for giving him a girl, and now my mother must atone for this betrayal.
Or perhaps it’s because, when she was growing up, her own mother would stop her from cutting her hair, and carefully measure out her portions, and admonish her when her posture was not straight.
“I’ll be more careful,” I tell her. “I promise.”
“We’ll have to come up with a little diet plan for you.” My mother’s tone is cheerful, and she gives my cheek a little squeeze. “Nothing too strict, of course. I don’t want you to have an unhealthy relationship with food.”
It is the magical sentence she always speaks, like a spell to ward off eating disorders. My mother is deathly afraid of me looking anything less than perfect, but she’s also deathly afraid of being accused by some British tabloid of giving me an eating disorder.
So I nod and agree and do what she says. That summer, she takes me shopping, flitting from one designer store to the next so that I should have the perfect bags, the perfect shoes, the perfect clothes. She takes me to her aesthetician to have my eyelashes tinted because they are too light, to have the fine fuzz of pale hair removed from my upper lip, my arms, my legs.
In my mirror, my reflection changes day by day, becoming more smooth and shiny and pretty.
And more doll-like than ever.
InYear8,Idiscover poetry.
I don’t mean I study it for the first time. I learned about poems in primary school; we even wrote haikus in Year 5. We studied poems in Spearcrest in Year 7 too, a half-term spent looking at war poems from different times and cultures.
But I discover poetry when I’m in Year 8.
Poetry is like an object I’d seen before but never truly looked at. And one day, I just saw its true form, the vast and almost breathtaking beauty of it. I discovered poetry, and it filled my heart with an unspeakable feeling.
Waiting for my English lessons became torturous. I was too impatient. I wanted to read it all the time, to fill my brain with it. I would go into the Spearcrest library, my favourite place on campus. The poetry section there took up almost an entire floor of its own—which seemed fitting.
I discover John Keats near the end of Year 8, and one day, I open the first page of hisEndymion. It’s a poem long enough to be a book, and I know it’s going to be special.
The first lines stop me in my tracks.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness—”
I read those lines over and over again, my heart in my mouth.
Beautiful things do not pass into nothingness. This is a truth that hits me hard because it’s a truth my mother has been trying to inculcate in me for a long time.
