Tenterhooks
Suzannah Dunn
The best book yet from this witty writerIn these ten stories, Suzannah Dunn shows her considerable talent for writing short fictionWonderfully funny, clever observations of womens’ lives: Auntie Fay comes to Spain for the summer, survives on insulin injections, tans to the hue of a blood blister and routinely saves the skins of Renee and her unfortunate family; the sixth form do Pembrokeshire, on a field trip of stale cigarettes, smuggled scotch, and finally, mutiny; a young woman remembers her first real love – for the ghost of her aunt’s boyfriendDunn is poised to win a major prize -Venus Flaring was called in by the Booker judges
SUZANNAH DUNN
Tenterhooks
PRAISE (#ulink_f14e8e0c-38a7-5401-b571-12eaba06c75b)
BLOOD SUGAR
‘Blood Sugar is lit up by images of rare vitality and beauty.’
MAGGIE GEE
‘Suzannah Dunn is that rarity among contemporary novelists: a genuine stylist. Her prose is like truffles – rich, rare, dark, but never cloying.
WENDY PERRIAM
‘Suzannah Dunn is a writer with a brilliant touch.’
MALCOLM BRADBURY
PAST CARING
‘Poignant and believable… Past Caring is a perceptive novel by a writer who skilfully blends the everyday with the fantastic.’
HELEN DUNMORE
‘Suzannah Dunn writes in loaded and knowing prose, like a hip Edna O’Brien or Muriel Spark.
Glasgow Herald
‘Suzannah Dunn is a gifted writer.’
POLLY TOYNBEE, The Times
QUITE CONTRARY
‘The writing is loaded with vibrant, visual images of so strongly evocative, so poetic a quality that they seem about to burst and to yield up a weight of hidden meaning.’
Literary Review
‘A compelling debut novel from a writer steadily gathering critical plaudits for her penetrative eye and unfussy style… a luminous, honest and haunting portrait of a single woman doing a demanding job and trying to stay alive inside as well.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘A brilliant portrayal of a young woman coming to terms with her past and present.’
Company
VENUS FLARING
‘The prose is precise, images bloom like bruises or blood drops… compact worlds are contained in the simplest of descriptions. Dunn is a surgeon of the heart, and her observations are sparky’.
EITHNE FARRY, Time Out
‘A writer with a subversive wit that few of her peers can match.’
JONATHAN COE
‘Venus Flaring treats familiar themes to a witty and original overhaul. Dunn marries plot and themes, to create a haunting, melancholy tone perfectly suited to the sense of loss which afflicts even minor characters.’
ALISON WOODHOUSE, TLS
‘After reading Venus Flaring no other book will strike quite so close to your soul… Dunn time after time stuns the reader. This is a vital, refreshing, terrifyingly brilliant novel that demands to be read’.
SUSANNA GLASER, Finetime
DEDICATION (#ulink_718da6e3-9955-57bf-9bd8-f07693f283d4)
With love and thanks to my editor,
Charlotte Windsor
CONTENTS
Cover (#ueed100a9-5444-5f81-bb8c-d68bb133aeab)
Title Page (#uc6f9a792-cb81-59f3-aa7a-8eb0285a3a54)
Praise (#uaf10f58e-5173-552f-90d7-ecf4253ea126)
Dedication (#u8535e103-2a14-567d-9b4f-8c478dfbb9c7)
1 White Goods (#u91d51da6-2298-56d8-b7c0-dd87ac1a05d6)
2 Sync (#u11652b57-352e-58d0-ac63-3b1ae821a27c)
3 Tie-Breaker (#uce17041b-177b-591a-bb9e-239a67eab8db)
4 Night Flight (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Possibility Of Electricity (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Guts For Garters (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Slipping the Clutch (#litres_trial_promo)
8 A Good Airing (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Stood Up and Thinking of England (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Don’t Touch It, Don’t Ignore It, Stay Calm (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I WHITE GOODS (#ulink_feea5940-8bbc-5a0b-98e8-e679611023fc)
As we walked down the aisle, he murmured, ‘Spinach …’
I stopped, leaned over and looked down onto the frozen vegetables. During the two days since the delivery of our freezer I had had numerous fantasies, but none about spinach. Sara Lee, yes; spinach, no. And now Christie was beginning with spinach? I dipped down into the fizzy chill to scratch my way to greenery; packs of carrots and sweetcorn hissed as they slipped over one another. Spinach? I called up. ‘Are you sure?’ By comparison, the sweetcorn looked glamorous.
Above me, behind me, he laughed, ‘Never been more sure.’
But I tried, ‘Broccoli florets?’ Because florets sounded faintly enticing.
‘Deceptive.’
I surfaced, enquiringly.
‘Thaws to rubber,’ he explained.
‘How do you know?’
He shrugged, more than necessary, both hands off the moving trolley, Look, Mum, no hands. ‘I just do. Cauliflower, too. Anything that’s not spinach.’ A twitch of a smile. ‘Which is why I said spinach.’ Then he said, ‘I noticed the mound of Mars Bars,’ and managed more of the smile.
Those Mars Bars would have been hard to miss: the only contents, so far, of the freezer. ‘A girl needs her luxuries.’
His eyes dropped wider: he is the only person whom I know who has eyes like trap doors. He said, ‘And I was so sure that it was greens that a girl needed.’
I returned to the matter of the frozen spinach, which, I found, existed in two forms: solid blocks, the size of paperback books; or pellets, packed loosely into cushion-sized bags. A block would be slow to thaw, and then would swamp us in spinach: a problem to which there is no solution (spinach sandwiches?). I had never had a freezer, but I knew the rule, I knew never to refreeze: everyone knows that to thaw food is to disturb the undead. I reached down into the freezer. Although they were impractical, I liked the feel of the solid blocks, but they were made of leaf spinach: a leaf which is not in fact a leaf but a length of vivid green silk to make bobbins of our front teeth. I turned my attention to the pellets: chopped spinach, which I recognized as a euphemism for minced. Silently vowing that spinach was the only minced vegetable that I would allow before my ninetieth birthday, I hauled a pack from the icy-fluffy depths.
Three weeks later, three weekly shopping trips later, and our frozen food supply is three feet deep. On several occasions we have filled a saucepan with those frosted pellets of moss, and hey presto … Hey presto, thawed spinach. But Christie thinks of something, he always thinks of something, he saves the day with a curry or a lasagne. By contrast, I am quick to despair. In my hands, thawed spinach remains thawed spinach, becomes nothing better than warm spinach. The freezer has not made a cook of me. But Christie can cook, and now our lives have become like other people’s lives, with proper meals, like clockwork. Our freezer needs feeding, but this is fun: we drive to a hangar of a supermarket, spin a trolley around stacks of food, pick up whatever we fancy and then pay by card, which is not like paying at all. And the freezer more than repays us: a lift of the lid to find the fruits of our labours. I have heard that the hitch is a loss of flavour over time, but I am sure that I can live with that.
But now I have to do something because the food is thawing below me in the kitchen, slowly losing its lifeblood of ice as I float warm here in my bed. A moment ago, opening my eyes, I turned to my clock to find that the digital display was wholly black – hollow. I ran my hand down the wall for the switch for my lamp; the switch snapped down but seemed to fall short – nothing, no power. We are deep into the night: the moon is high, shrunk to a pearl; the silence is as thorough as new, heavy snow. I am softened by sleep and can only wait for my clock to open its green eyes, to show me how the power cut is merely a momentary failure, a flicker, a mistake. But nothing. There is nothing that I can do to fix this. Time for damage limitation: I will have to leave my bed and go downstairs with blankets for the freezer.
Slipping over the mattress, I try to keep the duvet level, to avoid any pull on Christie. As soon as I am clear, I pause to listen hard for him, for his silence. In two minutes’ time, I will be back here and turning back into my own sleep, gathering up the remainder of my sleep to see me through to morning. I do not even bother with my dressing gown. How odd that we close our door although there is no one else in the house to keep us from, to keep from us. The opening door cracks into the hush of our room. But still nothing from Christie. I cannot see his face, only the top of his head, his hair: he is hunched into the duvet. Out there in the hallway the moonshine is pooled on the top few stairs. Pulling hard on the airing cupboard door, I tense for the snap of the plastic nub from its socket in the frame. When I was a child, my parents had special uses for the airing cupboard: a treasure trove for our birthday and Christmas presents, and a nest for the incubation of our slightly mushy Easter eggs. A winter holiday home, too, for my tortoise; the place where, every year, very slowly, he died, sort of, then sort of came alive again.
Nowadays I have friends who are diligent about bulbs: they plant bulbs in bowls, plant the bowls in their airing cupboards, and then they wait, all winter. But I am suspicious of shoots, stiff and pallid; they do not seem natural, somehow, not in an airing cupboard. My own warm shelves, in front of me, are slopped with underwear: straps, frills, bows, mostly washing powder white, nothing flash, because when I was young enough for experiments with underwear, I was too poor, and then, later, when I had money, I had lost my nerve, I had grown up. And I have never caught up: underwear remains a language that I do not speak well, in which I am untidy and tight-lipped. I get by, with a rather teen-bra look.
The blankets are on the top shelf, so my hands flutter over the underwear and then scale several shelves of towels. Warm, even smelling warm, these towels have a very thin crust, they are slightly dried and hardened from laundering. They came in batches as house-warming presents from relatives, who, I suspect, had asked the advice of my parents; and here they are, in the centre of my house, still warm, still warming. When they came, I took my old towels to a charity shop. My old towels had been very old. But then these new towels began to unnerve me. They had come in kindness, a kind of kindness, because my family knew that I had always had to make do, but I worried that they were a conspiracy to turn me normal, to turn my head and make me houseproud. I remember my dad saying, All I want is to see you married. My mum is the only person whom I know to use the word slattern. Once, she referred to a local girl who had lived with and then left her boyfriend as soiled goods. My bed linen is my own because my relatives were unsure whether they should buy anything for the bed of two unmarried people. I was happy to buy my own: I caught up on bed linen in a big way, in my belief that bed linen should be linen. No cotton/polyester mixes. Why was I so serious about this, when my underwear remains the equivalent of flannelette fitted sheets?
The blankets drop one by one from the shelf, their folds wriggling from my arms. I strain behind my bundle to kick the cupboard door shut, then waddle to the stairs. The towels, fattening and breathing their fragrance into my airing cupboard, those house-warming towels makes me think of my sister. Belinda was married, but I do not know what she is now: single, divorced, separated, or simply sulking? She was married for nine months and has now been back home for six. Like a character from a book or a film, a character from the Deep South. Except that she wears Snoopy slippers, and has never lived anywhere but Hatfield. I was told that the marriage didn’t work, as if it was a dud among the many electrical appliances that had come gift-wrapped to the wedding reception. Mum says that Belinda doesn’t-want-to-talk-about-it. If I was Belinda, I would not even want to think about it: Freddie was her first boyfriend, when she was fourteen, and she stuck with him for twelve years. He was a nice boy, he must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but for twelve years?
Mum had only one comment for me: Belinda and Freddie had been more like brother and sister – she did not say than lovers – and then, when they married, he wasn’t quite what she had expected. Which could mean anything. They had not lived together before they married, and their relationship was the only one that I have ever known for which going out together was an accurate description. Whenever they saw each other, they went to the cinema or to restaurants, or sometimes further afield on holidays. I was around, on and off, for seven of their twelve years, and I am not quite sure that I ever saw them together without their coats; I am not too sure that they ever saw each other without their coats. They were forever turning through the front door, a huge and unbalanced version of one of those weather vanes which shows a man or a woman for rain or shine. In their case, always rain: from my room at the top of the stairs I would sense how the hallway flickered with their red-tipped noses and shook with the clapping of cold from their mitts. Belinda has always been the same: my little sister, she was older than her years by my two; but whenever she moved forward with me (finding a boyfriend, gaining an allowance, drinking Snowballs), she stuck. With make-up, even: she began young and daring, choosing eyeshadows which reminded me of the underside of leaves, but then she stuck with them. Her eyelids are still like leaves switched and splayed in the wind when she settles for the evening with a TV dinner in her lap.
Sometimes I have to go home for some reason or other, and when I was last there, I took a detour from the bathroom to peep into her bedroom. I was shocked by what I saw: gonks, a colony on her windowsill. I was shocked, even, that I knew what they were, that I knew the name for them. Listening for her heavy tread on the stairs, I crossed the room in a few quick paces and peered down onto their forced smiles, the smiles that had been forced into the plastic to make their faces. I did not fondle their hair, which was nylon, lurid, and frayed, although I was fairly sure that part of the point of gonks was to fondle their hair. I had had a gonk or two when I was a child, when everyone had had a few, so I knew that the main point of them was to bring luck. During exams, our gonks stood on guard by the obsolete inkwells of our old desks. But in exams they failed Belinda badly, her teachers failed her badly, her reports were jagged with Es and Fs. Not that this caused trouble for her, because Mum and Dad would tell her that what mattered was happiness. Now Belinda’s gonks have another use: they occupy the void on the sill which, for twelve years, had displayed the faces of the happy couple in frames. The grinning gonks manage fair impressions of the two missing faces and even of Belinda’s yellow hair which has sometimes been only faintly real.
Because she had had Freddie for twelve years, she seemed to have lost track of her childhood friends, and made no new ones. A neighbour’s child played the role of bridesmaid. Because Dad had died, Belinda arranged for Freddie’s father to give her away, which made less than no sense. I wonder if he gave her back, I wonder if he drove her home when the marriage was over, because how else did she cross town with her belongings? She and Freddie had no car, and Mum has never learned to drive. Back home, there is a portable television in her bedroom; this is the extent of her independence, now. Which she never seems to use. Because Mum likes her company. Belinda likes home comforts and Mum likes company: this is how the situation works. The only change in their relationship happened ten years ago, when Belinda started work: the allowance switched, no longer paid by Mum and Dad to Belinda but by Belinda to Mum and Dad. Belinda has had the same job for ten years: receptionist at the local leisure centre. Leisure is ironic: even the entrance hall is hard work, with the machine-gun fire of the turnstiles, the echoes of pot shots from the squash courts, and the chemical warfare of chlorine. Presumably she earns very little, but apart from Mum’s allowance to cover food and bills, she has no expenses: no house, no car. So, she has always had money for the pictures, for pizzas, for presents, for exactly the expenses which I have always found a strain. Sufficient for holidays, even: her talk was always of booking holidays, my talk has always been of saving for holidays.
Here in the kitchen are several unpaid bills, dumped in the fruit bowl until they turn red. In this darkness, they are as luminous as the moon. Christie and I share the bills, but he covers our other expenses: everything for the house and the car, meals in restaurants, drinks with friends, the eventual holidays. He paid for this freezer. I can survive, I have managed to keep my business running through the recession when the trade in old clocks, antique clocks, has been slow – a trade which took years to learn, a business which took years to build, and which my parents considered as an odd choice for a woman because, in their opinion, the only clock which should concern a woman is the biological one. But there is no way that I could afford to live alone, or not to live like this. None of my friends lives alone, now. And lately most of them have married. Even my best friend Sarah has a shrine on her mantelpiece: three framed photos, close-ups of bride and groom on backdrops of Rolls-Royce and cake. She took a year to plan the details of her wedding, down to her underwear. To his underwear, too, probably. The low point was the fuss over the colour of the napkins, but she told me that, ‘Napkins have to be a colour, a decision has to be made, someone has to make the decision, and I’m determined that the someone should be me.’ Her three photos are talismans and whenever I go around to see her, to try to talk to her, I see those photos and I am cowed.
My problem seems so simple. Why is there no simple solution? The problem is that whenever I see Christie, nothing happens to me. And, once upon a time, something would have happened. Something has stopped. I have a memory from school, from a chemistry or biology lesson, something biochemical and messy and unlike my beloved physics: a diagram on the blackboard, a row of molecules or cells or something, made of heads on stems; and the heads switched towards water, they strained towards water. The teacher told us that they were hydrophilous: ‘Hydro, water; philous, loving.’ I know that I am no longer drawn to Christie, I have stopped being moved by him, I am no longer in love with him. What I do not know is if this matters: is love a luxury? Can I stay, loveless like this? Faint-hearted? Or should I leave? But if I leave, I lose him, he loses me, we lose the life that we live so well together. But if I stay, is this a life? Am I living a lie? Am I lying to him?
An old, old story: I have everything, but something is missing. What is missing in me is tenderness: the heads of my cells have stopped turning on their stems, but still, there should be tenderness; a little give in those stems, a wry incline of those heads. A sway to echo the punch-drunkenness of that initial passion. How ironic: the illicit lovers, more like brother and sister. Sometimes when I am alone, I wind my way around this house, from room to room finding furniture, appliances, ornaments for which we planned, or which we tried to deny ourselves, or saved hard to afford; and those that were impulses, or argued over, or mistakes. These memories pinch, surprise me sometimes to tears, but they fail to move me. There seems to be no way forward, and I know that there is no going back.
Now I hear the kisses of Christie’s soles on the tiles behind me. They stop, and the blankets seem to limbo up from the floor where I had laid them, one of them nestling around my shoulders. He turns me around to him, into the warmth of him, and with him, back into darkness, back to bed. Presumably he thinks that I am sleepwalking, as I have done on several occasions now. Jokingly, he has referred to my nocturnal restlessness as failing to sleep off your late, louche lunches. Sometimes I wish that I could sleep off my whole life. As he leads me away from the thawing freezer, I want to tell him, but I am so very tired and no words come.
2 SYNC (#ulink_d295eb8f-d3d1-5c1d-9613-234f8291fa4d)
For Katy Rensten
For hours, the moon has been rolling around the windows of this minibus like a pin-ball. And now we are passing roofs which are slick with moonshine. These roofs are new to our journey: for hours we were on a motorway, in the middle of nowhere, overtaken by vehicles with unblinking yellow eyes and snappy indicators. In the headlamp-splashed darkness, my friends’ faces were dilated to pitch and catch conversation over the noise of the engine, the rolling tide of tyres. For a while, now, though, everyone has been quiet; even Mr Stanford, whose busy eyes, in his high narrow mirror, have become smaller and more level. The only other open eyes are those of the only other boy on this field trip, Lawrence; the view from one of the windows licks through the shiny surface of them. With the appearance of the roofs, I realize that we are nearly there, and my heart sinks. What is it that they say, in planes? We are commencing our descent.
Hours and hours of engine vibration have drummed my thighs into the wooden slats of the bench, but I am further pinned down by Rachel, who is slumped asleep on me. A hairsprayed sprig of her hair lisps into my ear with every bump and turn of the minibus. One of her hands has dropped between her thigh and mine, and lies on both, open. On the tops of her upwardly-curled fingers, the thin crescent moons of her nails are oddly shadowed: she has painted them, because we are away from school, where nail polish is forbidden. Mr Stanford brakes, pauses behind a badly-parked car for a chain of oncoming traffic to pass; Rachel presses harder onto my shoulder, sinks further. There has been a lot of this, the stopping and sinking, like a drunken dance, since we turned from the motorway into these towns of crowded chip shops and dark banks, towns so much smaller than our own. An empty can growls again on the floor. I cannot reach with my feet to stop it. Lawrence’s eyes peel from the window and follow the can, they are wide with worry, but he makes no move, his hands in prayer between his thighs.
Susie’s head looks like a sculpture in butter: no shadows, and her hair, face, eyebrows and eyelashes the same colour. On her wedding-ring finger is the ring that Nathan Harper gave her: a staying-together ring, in her words. Next to her, Trina and Avril are propping up each other’s dozes – very different dozes: Trina’s face is hard, all chin and frown; Avril’s has slipped into a smile. This is all of us: me and Rachel, Susie, Trina, Avril, and Lawrence. And Mr Stanford, of course, unfortunately; in his opinion, he is one of us. There are so few of us because this field trip is for biology and hardly anyone wants to do biology in the sixth form. Suddenly, I see that Mr Stanford’s eyes have been looking for mine.
‘Nearly there,’ he says to me, via the mirror, then laughs. ‘I’m desperate for a pint.’
One-of-the-boys. I shut my eyes, to shut him up.
The only place in the world that I dread more than nearly there is there. Rachel and I tried everything to avoid this trip: marine biology for five days of our half term holiday, five days in February on a peninsula in South Wales.
We began by knocking politely on the door marked BiologyHead and then explaining to Mr Bennett that we wanted to go with our English class to Stratford. Which was true if only because King Lear is not quite five days long. Both trips take place during the same half term holiday each year, because there has never before been an overlap between biology and English. Mr Bennett’s view was that the field trip was necessary for our biology, but that Stratford was an optional extra for English. Which is not quite what our English teachers said but – being English teachers – they were too liberal to cause a fuss. So then Rachel and I had to come up with another hitch.
We decided that we could not miss any of The Crucible rehearsals, two of which were scheduled for this week. This was too much for Mr Bennett, who sent us to Mr Dene, the Headmaster. Mr Dene said that all we had to do in our roles was scream. We informed him that there was much more to our roles than simple screams – that we had to scream at the correct moments and with the correct intensity. In our defence we called one of the English teachers, who was directing the play, and she did her best, but Mr Dene – being Mr Dene – refused to listen to her.
So then Rachel marched into his office and did not stop until she was in the middle, where she hooked her hair behind her ears to show that she meant business and said to him, ‘Look,’ I’ll be straight with you, ‘we just don’t want to go, okay?’
This okay was her mistake, because from behind his desk he bellowed, ‘No, it is not okay,’ and went on, ‘if you refuse to go on this field trip, then you will be unprepared for your exams and I will refuse to allow you to take them.’
I stepped forward from the doorway to join Rachel, and explained calmly, ‘Mr Dene, marine biology is one of our options; in the exam, we have to write essays on four of six options. So, we can easily avoid marine biology.’ I had done my homework.
But my mistake was to have mentioned options, and ease. Why did I do this? I know very well that Mr Dene’s whole life is about the destruction of our options and ease. I think that I may even have smiled, slightly, which, if I did, was even more stupid of me.
Mr Dene addressed Rachel, which people usually do: parents and teachers, they all direct their arguments to Rachel, often looking at the four earrings that she has in both ears, as if this justifies their shouting, as if the earrings are blocking her ears. ‘You will go,’ he yelled, leaning over his desk, ‘because I say so.’
Rachel muttered, ‘Wonderful philosophy of education,’ but stepped backwards to the door. I could not believe that she was giving in so readily. But I followed her, I had to follow her; if I had not followed, I would have been left behind. At the door, though, she turned our defeat into a threat: ‘We’ll go,’ she told him, and cocked a cold smile onto her face, ‘but, believe me, we don’t have to like it.’
And so here we are, not liking it: I did not choose biology so that I could study whelks; I chose biology because I was interested in people. I wanted to follow the intense and precise activities beneath our skin. I love the logic of biology: in bodies, everything has a time and place. This is why biology is so easy to learn, for all the intricacies. Because I only have to think, as long as I think very carefully: what is needed, here, and what happens next, what has to happen next? Unlike those other favourite subjects of mine, literature and history, which are made of people’s schemes, mistakes, runnings amok. But the logic of bodies is different from the meaningless logic of maths or of the other school sciences, chemistry and physics. Biology makes sense: I can hold the bits in my hands, if I want, if I need, and they are the means to an end, an end which is real, which is life. In the chemistry labs, the plastic models of molecules look like starships given away in packets of breakfast cereal. And physics: I remember one lesson, on inertia, and I suppose that inertia is real in a sense, but not really real; physics was a lot of ticker tape.
But my biology has to be human; or, at a push, mammalian, and then only because of the similarity of their little bodies to ours, their skulls and spines. I have no interest in animals which drag shells or lay eggs, and I have even less interest in plants, those stacks of starchy cells which soak up whatever is dropped on them. There are whole textbooks that I never open: The Plant World, The World of Invertebrates. Unfortunately, marine biology is made from the very worst of both worlds, animal and plant: animals that are no more than plants, and plants that are more like animals. All of them are bits of slime that stick to and hide in rocks.
Three days ago, I despaired and took matters into my own hands: I went to the doctor and lied that I was ill. She asked questions about my appetite, kneaded my neck with her fingertips, pressed her cold stethoscope to my bared chest, found nothing and diagnosed a virus.
I explained, ‘But I’m going to a peninsula for a biology field trip in three days’ time.’
She reassured me, ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine.’
I hurried, ‘But what if I’m not?’
She frowned, smiled, told me to come back if I did not improve. So, I did, yesterday, to tell her that I was worse. She pulled down my lower eyelids, looked into my mouth, frowned into my face and asked me, ‘Do you have anything on your mind, at the moment?’
‘Yes, the biology field trip.’
She smiled. ‘Fresh air and exercise: you’ll be fine.’
‘But what if I’m not?’ I urged.
She soothed, ‘Don’t worry.’
We seemed to be at cross purposes.
Then she laughed, genuinely happily. ‘You’ll survive.’
Survival: I love the perfection of human biology but also, and perhaps more so, the flaws; I love the possibility of flaws, which cannot exist in the other sciences where everything either is or is not. I love the ways that bodies can overcome their problems. I love the mysteries, too, the unmapped depths of bodies. There is a brain injury that causes people to try to have sex with anyone or anything. Which means that there is a biological basis for inhibition, that even self-control is biological.
We have survived the first full day of field work. The schedule pinned to our dormitory door tells us that, now, having had our Dinner, we are Free until Lights Out at eleven o’clock. This seems expertly cruel: we are free, but there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Before we came here, Mr Stanford told us that he would drive us to local pubs, and we decided that an evening with him was better than nothing. But arriving here yesterday, parking in the courtyard, in the darkness, he hit something and tore off the back bumper. So now the minibus is awaiting the attentions of the local garage man, who is due sometime much later in the week. When we whined to Mr Stanford, this evening, over dinner, that we had nothing to do, he laughed and suggested that we take advantage of the library. This mention of the library was to flatter Jim, the Course Leader, who was sitting with him – this morning, during our Briefing (09.05, Briefing, Prefab no. 2), Jim had fantasized long and loud over the library. He had told us that the library was excellent, rare, renowned, so that people came from all over the country.
Rachel whispered in my ear, ‘Yeah, my mum is always nipping down here.’
Jim must have heard, because he looked at her earrings and stressed, ‘Marine biologists.’
He is a marine biologist, which, for some reason, seems to impress Mr Stanford. Not us, though: one day here and we have discovered that marine biologists are the lowest form of life. At lunch time, Mr Stanford owned up that he would have liked to have become a marine biologist. We think that he would like to be Jim, climbing over rocks with the wind in his hair. We think that Mr Stanford has been tampering with his hair today so that he looks like Jim. He is happy here, and has made no effort to hide this from us. He has a drinking buddy in Jim, which we know because Avril overheard Jim’s promise of a hot toddy or two tonight in my room. And, more importantly for him, he has found someone to fancy, someone called Janet who is here to research for a Ph.D. in algae. And she looks as if she is here to research for a Ph.D. in algae. Avril saw Mr Stanford turn from Jim to Janet, heard him ask her, ‘Janet? A hot toddy or two, later?’ He has plans, now; he cares even less about us, he makes no pretence, now.
When he laughed and told us to spend the evening in the library, I was only amazed that anyone could laugh anywhere in the vicinity of that meal. We had been called to dinner by an electric bell, like a fire alarm, which jangled the courtyard where we were trying to remove our waterproofs. We had come back late from what Jim called the field; he had kept us too long in the field and then taken us, in our waterproofs, into Prefab no. 2 for a late Debriefing. When the alarm rang, Mr Stanford announced, cheerfully, ‘Dinner.’
Avril complained, ‘That noise! Can’t we have a gong or something?’
Mr Stanford said, ‘No.’
In the dining-room, we had to queue with various staff and researchers for food, which was served in individual portions on metal trays. According to one of the cooks, the stew was lamb and the vegetable was swede. I asked her, ‘Is there any vegetarian?’
She said, ‘None in Pembrokeshire that I know of.’
I walked carefully to Mr Stanford with my runny portion and said, ‘But I’m vegetarian.’
He said, ‘No you’re not.’
I told him, ‘Yes I am.’
He laughed. ‘No you’re not: humans are omnivorous.’
I ignored this. ‘I’m vegetarian.’
Suddenly humourless again, he said, ‘But if you were vegetarian, you would have thought about this, you would have told me before we came away.’
I had to think quickly. ‘I’ve converted. There has to be a moment of conversion, and mine is now, with this lamb.’
‘Scrag end,’ corrected Trina, coming over, grimly cheerful, with her own tray.
Mr Stanford said, ‘Tough.’
Trina agreed, ‘You can say that again,’ and demonstrated, poking a piece with her knife.
I told him, ‘I’m not touching this, or anything like this; and if I starve, you’re responsible.’
He fizzled into exasperation, hissed to the ceiling, ‘Why are girls so fussy?’ Then he shouted through the hatch, ‘Is there any vegetarian?’
And a voice came back, ‘There’s a banana.’
So I had swede and banana, which I mashed together.
And now we are in our room for the evening; we have all crowded into the room which belongs to me, Rachel, and Susie. Even Lawrence, who was found in the corridor by Trina when she was coming from the room which she shares with Avril. According to her, he was pretending to read the bulletin board which is pinned with local maps and posters of seaweed. She told us this after pulling him into our room and announcing, ‘Look who I’ve found: Loz.’ She always calls him Loz.
We had temporarily overlooked Lawrence, in our self-pity. We apologized profusely and offered him a toddy; we have our own, a toddy but not hot, a quarter bottle of Scotch which Rachel was clever enough to buy from the supermarket on her way to school yesterday. We passed the bottle to Lawrence and he swigged, but appeared not to swallow and has declined all further offers. He is sitting on the end of the bed next to the door, which is mine. His knees are prominent.
Susie left the room ten minutes ago to phone Nathan. We can hear her on the pay phone at the end of our corridor, but her murmurs make no sense to us, they are little question marks to hook and hold his attention. On her pillow is an unfinished letter to him. Rachel, lounging on the floor, has been lying in wait for my gaze which she snares now in a conspiratorial smile.
‘What?’ I ask, wary, my hand pausing in the box of breakfast crunch, which is our only treat because we have already eaten our week’s supply of chocolate.
Holding my gaze, she reclines, suddenly switches her attention to the top sheet of Susie’s letter.
‘Don’t,’ I am serious but I laugh, I am so serious that I have to laugh.
But without taking her eyes from the letter, she raises her eyebrows. ‘Is it folded carefully away, or is it here on her pillow for everyone to see?’ As her eyes move over the words, her teeth come slowly onto her lower lip to hold down a smile.
So that now she has me: ‘What?’ I have to know, to coax her, ‘What does she say?’
The eyes widen to confront me. ‘I’m not breaking Susie’s confidence,’ she complains, mock-indignant.
I tut her away, but then the letter hovers in front of me in Rachel’s hand.
I shake my head.
So she places the letter back onto the pillow and tells me the truth. ‘She says nothing; We arrived here … that kind of stuff.’ And hums a laugh, ‘Or so far, because I stopped before the juicy bits.’
Avril peeps over her crossword puzzle book, ‘Are there juicy bits?’
Rachel turns on her. ‘Don’t you tell her that I read this.’
The door opens, slightly increasing the volume but not the sense of Susie’s words, and Trina hurries into the room. ‘There’s a notice in there,’ she wails, ‘Do not flush away sanitary dressings.’ Looking around us, she emphasizes, ‘Sanitary dressings.’
I wonder, ‘Any relation to salad dressings?’
Her gaze catches momentarily on Lawrence, ‘Oh, sorry, Loz.’
Rachel complains, ‘Shut the door, it’s freezing.’
It is not freezing in here, but our bodies bear the memory of a long cold day on the shore and now shiver in response to the mere opening of doors. If anything, it is too warm in here. The block of dormitories is new, and seems to be built from static.
Shutting the door, Trina complains, ‘It’s so cold that I can’t even face going for a fag.’ We have to go outside to smoke; the building is fitted with smoke detectors. She stomps across the room and thumps the window. ‘Has anyone managed to open this yet?’
Avril says, ‘I don’t think it’s supposed to open, it’s like a porthole. Because of all the water around here.’
We all turn to her. And I check, ‘You think the water comes up to here?’
‘Well, possibly.’
For a moment we listen, and hear something like a tube train far below us.
‘Anyway,’ I tell Trina, ‘those cigarettes are off.’
No one disputes this. The cigarettes are stale. I have never had a stale cigarette before. I have never had very many cigarettes at all; I smoke only when I am under stress and there are no other options, no sugar, no alcohol, no music, no Mike or Jamie, and no laughs from Rachel. The stale cigarettes came from Rachel, who disappeared from the courtyard during the confusion of waterproofs removal. She returned twenty minutes late for dinner. Sliding next to me on the bench, with a wild wrinkle of her nose in the direction of my mashed meal, she nudged my attention to her hidden hands: beneath the table, three packets of cigarettes, sixty; I swallowed a wave of nausea. And interrogated her, ‘Where have you been?’
To keep Mr Stanford’s attention at bay, she faked interest in my plate while she whispered, ‘The local sort of corner shop.’
Local? So there was hope, there was a locality.
‘Where?’
She inclined her head, slightly, ‘About a mile in that direction,’ then laughed briefly, ‘the direction of inland.’
‘So,’ I urged, ‘there’s a village or something?’
‘No, nothing.’ She was wriggling to slot the packets into her pockets. I kept watch on Mr Stanford for her. Which was a mistake: he was carefully in conversation with Janet the Algae, their heads low and close, but when this composure exploded with a laugh, his gaze came quickly to mine. I smiled beautifully, and he looked away.
I returned my attention to Rachel. ‘But you said corner shop.’
‘I said sort of corner shop. It would be a corner shop if there was a corner.’ She winced her apologies, ‘It’s just a shop, Jenny.’
I thrashed my meal with my fork. ‘And you’ve missed dinner.’
She frowned down into the sticky mess, then looked up into my despondent face and widened her eyes to make her point.
Reluctantly, I smiled. ‘Yes, but you’ll starve.’
She shrugged this off, ‘We have that box of crunchy mix.’
I did not say, Why no chocolate? Why sixty cigarettes and no Aero? Because she was right, she did the right thing: the final disastrous touch to the week would be a few extra inches on our hips.
Now Trina is crashing back across our brittle, smoke-free room. ‘Well, if the ciggies are off …’ Her boots crunch our spillages of cereal. She leaves the door open as she hurries into her own room. Returning, she asks, ‘Want one?’ but immediately turns away to close our door very firmly. There is a plain brown envelope in one hand, a few pinhead pills slipping down over the flap into the palm of her other hand. They line up like beads of mercury in the main crease, the main channel of her palm.
I want to know, ‘What are they?’
She extracts one in a pincer of index finger and thumb, and pushes it between her lips. ‘Anti-depressants,’ the reply comes slightly sticky, ‘my mum’s.’
Rachel sits taller. ‘What do they do?’
The pills slam back down onto one another in the envelope, and Tina heads for Susie’s vacant bed. ‘Cure depression, I suppose.’ Reclining, she holds the envelope high, keeping open the offer.
Avril doubts, ‘One of them will cure depression?’
Lawrence looks exactly how he looks in class: interested, but in facts rather than fun.
‘Well, no,’ Trina wails her irritation with Avril. ‘But they can’t make me feel worse than how I feel now.’
Rachel stretches to the volume control on the tape recorder because the tape has reached ‘Changes’, her favourite track. ‘So why do you have them?’ she shouts over David Bowie, her voice further strained by her stretch.
Trina’s eyes slot towards her. ‘I nicked them, of course.’
Rachel dismisses this with a shake of her head. ‘No, I mean, won’t she notice?’
Trina gives up, chucks the envelope on to the floor. ‘My mum notices nothing,’ she tells the ceiling.
Rachel’s eyes slide to me on a smile. ‘Wouldn’t I love to have that kind of mum.’
I tell her, ‘Do you know that Jamie has tried some heroin?’
Apparently too weary to speak, she widens her eyes, Really?
‘Sniffed,’ I inform her, ‘not injected.’ And therefore not addictive, or so he told me. ‘Says it was like lying in a warm bath.’
‘A warm bath,’ she repeats, and seems to breathe in as she speaks, her eyes misting.
Avril says, ‘The showers on Mr Stanford’s corridor are better than ours: I went to explore. No mould on his wall.’
Rachel coughs a laugh. ‘He’d love some mould, Av, it’s biology.’
Trina tells us, ‘H is for losers.’
Avril’s incomprehension tightens into a frown, which she tries to feel her way through, begins by mouthing, ‘H …’
Rachel flips back the top of the cigarette packet, and muses, ‘You hang around with the wrong kind of people, Jennifer Jordan.’
‘So do you.’
‘I’m older.’ This is our joke, because she is twenty-two days older than me. ‘And one day you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble,’ which is another joke of ours because it is our teachers’ and parents’ favourite declaration. A declaration that is intended for Rachel, primarily, but which seems to reach me by osmosis.
I indicate the packet in her hands: ‘Not in here,’ I remind her, ‘the smoke alarm.’
‘I’m only sniffing.’ She draws the cigarette along the length of her smile, and lingers on the tip, where she inhales dramatically.
Then we both join in with Bowie for, ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes …’
When we have finished this, our favourite line, there is silence; this is a hard line to follow, and anyway there is nothing new to say.
After a while, I ask around the room, ‘Do any of us need to do marine biology?’
Trina mutters, ‘Like fuck.’
Avril agrees, ‘Never ever.’
Rachel adds, ‘And I think that we can speak for Susie, too.’
Susie is taking biology because she wants to be a nurse. Trina wants to be a physio: manhandling rugby players, she tells us and we do not know if she is serious. No one knows what Avril wants to do. Rachel’s reasons for biology are the same as mine. We became friends through biology, on the back bench in O level, from where we would counter Mr Bennett’s descriptions of flawless function with questions about diseases and their cures.
Suddenly phlegm whinnies in Lawrence’s throat. ‘Well …’ his voice, in our room, sounds odd; seems to sound odd to him, too, because he blinks convulsively, his eyes like moths, and his mouth thins but falls short of a smile. He tries again, rushes, ‘I want to be a vet, so I have to study animals, but not …’ and he fades.
‘Not whelks,’ Rachel says for him, turning to him.
‘No.’ His eyes fix on her, seem to implore.
‘Of course not whelks,’ she reassures him, before returning to the rest of us to announce, ‘so, the Nobel Prize for marine biology is awarded to Trina.’
Trina struggles up onto her elbows and whines a quizzical, ‘My arse.’
Rachel explains, ‘Nautical Night’: Trina’s favourite club, once a month on a boat on the Thames.
Day Three, and Jim has finished our Briefing, has told us what we have to do today: we have to mark square metres on a rock face and note the distribution of barnacles within this grid. He did not apologize; on the contrary, he seemed to think that his little exercise would appeal to us, that this would seem like a good way to spend a day. Yesterday, when we were supposed to be probing rock pools, I wandered and came across Lawrence. He was crouched behind a boulder, lighting a new cigarette from the previous one. When he was dabbing the old stub onto a barnacle, he saw me. His mouth was so busy with the second cigarette that he could only manage to hoist his eyebrows in greeting. I was so shocked that I could think of nothing to say but a sympathetic, ‘They’re stale.’
He exhaled, sighed smokily, ‘They’re better than nothing.’
I bumped and tottered back over the rocks to Rachel and asked her, ‘Did you give Lawrence some of those horrid cigarettes?’
She looked up from her rock pool, and raked through her wind-whipped and salt-stiffened hair. ‘Yes, a few, although he tried to say no.’ Her frown meshed with the streaks of her hair. ‘Why?’ Breathless with the sea breeze, I laughed helplessly as I informed her, ‘He’s behaving appallingly, up there: smoking, and burning barnacles.’
She stood up, grinned slowly, and reached into her mouth for a limpet of chewing gum which she dropped into the rock pool before she murmured appreciatively, ‘Loz unleashed.’
Now Jim is slamming through the swing door into the courtyard, keen to lead us down to the shore for another day of excitement. But every day we are allowed a few minutes before we leave, in which to zip and Velcro ourselves into our layers and to fetch anything that we have forgotten. Then Jim will bark, ‘Notebooks?’ Because according to him, the notebook is the indispensable tool of the marine biologist: a pocket stiff notebook, in his words. A pocket stiff, in ours. As we leave the bench to follow him, my pocket stiff falls open onto the floor. Bending down, I scan the displayed page, the words which, on our first day, we had been told to copy from Jim’s blackboard: Supplementary fauna key: Limpets; if no groove, look into shell mouth; if mother-of-pearl, then top-shell, if no mother-of-pearl, then winkle. Beneath this I had scrawled, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, Trina’s favourite Bowie track, which she sang for hours in the minibus. I pick up the book by the cover and the pages spin to today’s copied words, the chart on which we are supposed to record the distribution of barnacles: on bare rock, on weeded rock, in rock pools, in crevices, on pebbles, under boulders, on plants, on animals. Across the top of this chart I have written ‘Suffragette City’, which is my own favourite.
I am going to check on Rachel. When I came into the Briefing and told Mr Stanford that she was too ill to leave her bed, he turned from me without a word and hurried across the courtyard to our dormitory block. That was five minutes ago, and he has not yet returned. During the night, I woke twice, briefly, barely, to see Rachel away from her bed. The first time, she was standing by the window, stooped over something in her hands. She was pearly in the overspill of floodlight from the courtyard. Her T-shirt, the hem flopped on the tops of her thighs, turned her into a child’s drawing of a girl in a dress: the triangular dress and long lines for legs. But no colour: all of her was pearly, even her eyes. And the earrings: the show of earrings reduced to nothing, to polite pearls. She was drooping, and then came the sound that told me what she was doing: the smash of a pill through a membrane of silver foil.
I asked, ‘You okay?’
She seemed unsurprised to hear me, but this apparent calm could have been simply the careful slowness of her turn towards me. A small sound came despite her closed mouth; not quite a groan. Then she made an effort to elaborate: ‘I’m having a baby.’
Period pain. In reply, I made a similar sound, but lower and heavier: the appropriate show of sympathy. Then sleep must have washed up over me again and pulled me away.
The second time I opened my eyes, she was coming into the room; and behind her, the corridor buzzed with the far away roar of water into a toilet bowl.
‘You okay?’ I checked again.
But by now she was more resigned, throwing me an almost tuneful, ‘Uh-huh,’ as she crossed the room to her bed. I heard the rasp of drawn bedclothes, then the wince of bedsprings beneath her.
This morning she lay in bed while we moved around her. She moved only her eyes, which were no longer pearls but dry pink petals. I was followed by them as I rushed around the room, finding my clothes and throwing back questions. ‘So what do I tell Mr Stanford?’
‘That I’m ill.’
‘Yes, but do I say with what?’
‘Up to you.’
‘Have you had any painkillers this morning?’
‘Three.’
‘Will you be okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
Mr Stanford had not seemed to want to know the details, had said nothing before he turned and hurried away. But now, as I come through the door to the dormitory block, the corridor is full of his voice, a voice which washes over the walls, ‘Well, I simply do not believe that an aspirin or two won’t fix you.’
Rachel’s voice burns into his. ‘How would you know? And I’ve had an-aspirin-or-two, in fact I’ve had three.’
Turning the corner, I see them in the doorway to my room: they mirror each other across the threshold, propping up the doorframe, arms folded hard. There are squeaks from Mr Stanford’s buttercup-yellow waterproofs. Rachel has draped a cardigan over the T-shirt which emphasizes the knot of her arms.
Mr Stanford creaks taller, ready to move away. ‘Fresh air will help.’
Rachel bends fiercely into the fold of her arms: ‘I can’t, okay?’ she bellows after him, even though he has moved no more than half an inch, has swayed rather than moved. ‘I can’t go clambering over rocks all day with a swollen endometrium.’
Endometrium is impressive; I wish that I could see Mr Stanford’s appreciation. The tone of his reply, however, is studiously bland: ‘I can’t have you lounging around here all day. So I’ll expect you to join us in five minutes.’
I am close to his shiny back, now, but he does not know that I am here, nor, apparently, does Rachel, because her eyes do not move from his face. Behind me, I can hear someone bumping through the door.
I try to appeal, ‘Mr Stanford …’
But Rachel finishes, ‘You’re a pathetic wanker,’ and flops away.
Mr Stanford swings deep into the room, silver eddies on his waterproofs, to yell, ‘I’ll have you for that, no one speaks like that to staff, you’ll be in a lot of trouble when we go back to school.’
‘Oh yes?’ her voice comes weary and muffled from the depths. ‘And who’ll believe you?’
His hands rise, then slap back onto the doorframe: dismay, then emphasis, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But I see the nervous flutter of his glue-yellow fingernails on the white-painted wood. ‘In any case,’ he swells, ‘I have witnesses.’ And his face slides around to me.
I have to stand my ground, to tell him, ‘I don’t think that you do.’
So his eyes widen to latch onto Lawrence. I know that it is Lawrence who has come up behind me because I can hear him wheeze, the rhythmic twang of his bronchioles. I turn and see the splayed hands of the shrug with which he places himself beyond Mr Stanford’s reach, Sorry, mate, I heard nothing. Three pairs of eyes bob behind Lawrence: Susie, Trina and Avril have arrived. Trina says, ‘In fact, none of us is feeling too good, all of us are having our periods.’
Before I can laugh, Mr Stanford roars at us, ‘Stop it,’ the command spurting from a faceful of loathing.
Suddenly Rachel is in the doorway again, hands high on the frame, tiny wings of cotton in her armpits. ‘It happens,’ she says to his back, and when he turns, her head inclines to one side, ‘or didn’t you know? Happens in girls’ boarding schools and nunneries, or wherever women live together in close confines; we fall into sync, our hormones mix in the air or something.’
‘True,’ adds Trina, who would not have known; she knows very little biology.
Mr Stanford flings his reply around all of us, ‘Of course I know that,’ but his puffing face is squashed by a frown.
Susie announces, ‘Mine is so bad that I need to lie down,’ and swishes on his waterproof on her way into our room. She trails her own waterproof, which whispers from the floor.
I cannot believe that this will work.
Mr Stanford’s gaze hops around us, from face to face, sharp, looking for a weak link; but in the meantime, he tries to seem to move towards conciliation, ‘Oh come on, girls.’
Rachel unwinds her mouth, but this is not quite a smile. ‘Looks like you’re five girls short of an expedition.’
He coughs up a laugh, forces himself one step further from conciliation to good humour. ‘Girls, don’t be silly.’
‘Oh, but we are silly, because of those silly hormones of ours,’ Rachel lowers her head so far that it comes close to her shoulder, ‘but of course, it’s part of our charm.’
‘Avril?’ he asks, suddenly; he has decided that she is the weak link.
She shivers to attention. ‘What?’
He bullies her, ‘You can’t tell me that you and all your friends here are indisposed?’
She manages a faint echo, ‘Indisposed.’ How much of this has she missed? Someone elbows her, and with a wobble she adds, ‘Oh, yes, I’m always indisposed.’
Trina whoops, ‘Never a truer word!’
Rachel folds down from the doorframe, slowly, calmly, and says to Mr Stanford, ‘You’re always telling us that the only truth is science, that truth is proof and proof is science. You’re always telling us to believe nothing unless we have proof. Now you have a hypothesis, that we don’t all have our periods today. So, where’s your proof?’
Faced with this challenge, Mr Stanford stamps away down the corridor and slams the door. The sound wave crashes into our silence.
Trina whispers, ‘Temper, temper,’ and we scurry into our room.
Rachel is sitting on her bed with her pillow held hard to her stomach. Suddenly she is struck, ‘Lawrence.’
Trina echoes with, ‘Loz.’
We turn to see him drowning in the darkness of the corridor, flapping away our concern. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’
I am horrified, ‘It is not okay.’ We overlooked him because everything happened so quickly.
Susie appeals to him, ‘Come in here, for God’s sake.’
Trina calls, ‘You can say that you have prostate trouble.’ She seems serious.
He stops.
Rachel worries her lower lip with a sharp tooth. ‘We could try saying that we need you here to look after us.’
Avril wants to know, ‘But what is wrong with us?’
Trina despairs, ‘I’d like to know what is wrong with you.’
But suddenly we are knocked back into silence by the thump of the far door.
Frozen, we listen to the approach of Mr Stanford’s steps, but they stop short of our doorway.
‘Why don’t you walk around down on the shore,’ he says, presumably to Lawrence, ‘see what you can find in the rock pools, do much the same as you did yesterday.’ His voice is low, is a display of kindness and a play for conspiracy: he is wary of Lawrence, now, but has to try to win him over. The implication of this plan for Lawrence is that he can go alone to the shore, which means that he will not have to go, or not for very long.
Suddenly there are two more steps and Mr Stanford looms close to our doorway, but remains in the corridor, from where he addresses us en masse: ‘You lot have a bug,’ these words spat and orchestrated by jabs of his index finger. And now he is gone.
When the far door crashes, Rachel flops sideways onto her bed and whines into her pillow, ‘A bug, that’s pathetic, he’s pathetic.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ I tell her, ‘this could cause trouble for those caterers.’
The end of Day Four, which is the end of the trip: Day Five requires us only to Depart.
We have had dinner and now we are in the library. This is our first visit to the library, which was discovered half an hour ago by Trina who had decided to wander around the building rather than face a dish of shepherd’s pie, which she had nicknamed sheep worrier’s pie. We stayed, but as we trooped from the canteen, she called to us from the top of a short flight of stairs. When we reached her, she enthused, ‘Get a load of this!’ then lunged to open one of the doors with a fanfare, ‘Da da!’
We hurried inside to claim one of the long tables and six of the chairs which are almost armchairs. No one else came in here after dinner, and now the old stone building holds a deep hush crumpled only slightly and rarely by cymbals in the kitchens below. We are sprawled, heads on arms, our talk sliding over the shiny surface. The table is warmed by an avenue of lamps with jade shades. The wax is cooking, smells to me like a mixture of butter and honey. Which mixes in turn with the trace of soap dried into the crook of my arm. I feel warm and clean for the first time in five days. The wood of this table could have been made from chestnuts hammered smooth; occasionally I feel that I am slipping on the surface, even though I am as low as I can go. From here, the rain sounds dry, like the hiss of seeds in a shaken pod, and looks wonderful, the luminous streamers and their stray raindrops clean and intricately linked on our black windows.
Yesterday we had our day off, but today we had to work much harder than usual. Jim and Mr Stanford goaded us, yelling through the fizzy spray for us to Take it easy but ensuring that this was impossible. They chose a particularly steep and exposed stretch of shore for the belated barnacle head count. Then we were allowed twenty minutes for lunch, rather than forty: Lots to do. And at the end of the day we were not allowed to leave the shore until three quarters of an hour later than usual.
Our day off had been like a Sunday but better, with gossip and tapes, face packs and make-up. Lawrence had dawdled on the beach for a while, luminous in his waterproofs, shrunk to a toddler far below our window. We saw him throwing sticks and stones across the water. No one else ventured from our room, until we had to go to dinner because we had finished our own supplies. In the canteen, Mr Stanford had tittered, ‘Hello, girls, are you better?’ as if there was a joke which he was in on. Then he said nothing more to us until he came to our main door unnecessarily early this morning, sometime before seven o’clock, to scream, ‘Wakey wakey, wakey wakey!’
I sparked awake to see Rachel, to see her wake. Her face lagged behind her, filled with sleep. Disgusted, she muttered, ‘Wanky wanky, in his case.’
Now, in the library, the muscles in my back and legs are hot and heavy from the long, hard day. For the last half an hour, we have talked of nothing else but the injustice of this week, our exile to this peninsula, this enforced biology. All of us except Lawrence, but his eyes follow the conversation, rippling his sagged brow like a dog’s. One of us is kicking a table leg, has been doing so for quite a while; a slack kick, but these aimless prods have been knocking through our tender bones and building up in our bloodstream. Slumped here, in one another’s warmth, our faces are droopy and darkening.
‘We’ve lost a week of our lives,’ Rachel moans into the blurred reflection of her lips.
‘I wish that we had lost it,’ Susie sighs through a stray strand of hair. ‘It’s been the worst week of my life.’
‘Worst and utterly pointless,’ I remind her.
Trina snarls, ‘This place should be burned down. With Jim inside.’
‘And Mr Stanford,’ adds Rachel.
‘Well of course Mr Stanford.’
Rachel hauls her eyes to Trina’s face, then smiles. ‘He’s the kindling.’
Trina looks worried, ‘Sounds too nice, for him,’ and turns on one of her pockets. ‘We could burn it down,’ she chucks the box of matches high above us, the little yellow and black box a big square bee which drops dead into the palm of her hand. All the matches click simultaneously on the bottom of the box. It is hard to know if she is serious.
Avril chips in, ‘Or at least smash it up a bit.’
I see four heads jerk, and in the corner of my eye I detect one smile, Lawrence’s smile, so secret that even he lowers his own eyes.
Rachel laughs, ‘Well, don’t let us stop you, Av, if you feel so strongly,’ but suddenly she is serious: ‘I do think that we should do something; I do think that something should be done.’ She stops to look around us, to check that she is speaking for all of us.
I have to point out, ‘Not something that will put us in a similar correctional institution, but for a lot longer than a week.’
She slots her hair down behind her ears, a decisive movement, the opposite of a shrug, to imply that she had already thought of this; and pointedly says nothing, Goes without saying.
I stand up and take a few paces to stretch my legs, to uncoil the blood that is sunk deep in them. The blood moves so slowly that it feels granular. I stroll down a wall of books. The spines are slotted so tightly together that I cannot imagine how any of them are ever taken away from the others. Many of them are ringed with combinations of various leathers, coloured from yellow to mahogany, and finished with a chain of gold letters. But, oddly, I am drawn to the pamphlets which are placed here and there in the impressive display. Their spines are too thin for the labels of their catalogue numbers, which are wrapped around regardless like tatty and useless plasters. I start with one of these pamphlets, reach and hook a finger over the top of one of the furry cardboard spines and beckon it down to me. It falls easily from two swollen hoary spines and drops into my hands like a dead butterfly. I walk across the room, the blood purring now in my calves, and push my pamphlet between two bulky books.
As I turn around, Susie stands so abruptly that it is as if a line has been cut and she has bobbed to the surface. Her walk, though, is purposeful. I am not sure that I have ever seen her like this, and certainly not this week, when her only freely-chosen movement has been her stumble down the corridor to the phone. Now she selects a big book, the weight of which seems to surprise her, but to which she rises. She carries this book in a firm fold of arms which is further clamped by a frown of concentration. On the other side of the room, she swaps the book for another, which she swaps for yet another to cover her tracks.
With Trina, it is different. She stands with a slap of the table, skips to the wall to snatch a slimmer book which she moves to the shelf below, and runs with the newly-displaced volume to other shelves where she shuffles books. Whenever she pushes a book into place, she delivers an extra slap to the spine. Rachel has been watching us, levered high on her arms: her gaze scans us and in a few seconds she has seen the implications. Suddenly she is up, and busy with books. She zigzags the room more than we do, seems to cut deeper into the order of the shelves. Avril moves one pamphlet, but when she returns to her chair, her face is transformed, full and vivid with a smile. Lawrence pauses to decide where to put his book but in the end fails to manage anything worse than a clean swap, which is better than nothing.
After a minute or two, we clunk back into our chairs, on to our table. The library is no longer fully functional, but looks no different from before, remains beautiful. The damage is invisible, and beyond repair. There are too few misplaced books to raise suspicion: if a book is missing from its place on the shelf, then it is on loan, or it is a unique loss; if a book is found in an inappropriate place, then this is a simple mistake, a small carelessness. No one will ever know what we have done. The return of books to their proper places will be haphazard and piecemeal. Eventually some books will wash up, but never all of them; some will stay sunk on these shelves forever.
3 TIE-BREAKER (#ulink_adc6a523-0943-597f-bead-e3fb62f10583)
I kick open the kitchen door, my hands full of my colouring book and pens.
Inside, Mum is telling Dad, ‘She should have a proper meal.’
I slide onto a chair, sit up at the table.
Mum says to me, ‘Can’t you go in there?’ and her head jerks towards the door, the living-room.
‘I need a surface.’
Noisily clearing too much space for my book and pens, she continues, ‘I don’t want her to go back again without having had some proper food.’
She means Alison.
‘Well,’ Dad says cheerily to his newspaper, ‘she said she’d have salad.’
‘But when she says salad, she means salad cream. She pushes the salad around her plate then mops up the salad cream with bread; haven’t you seen her do that?’
‘Her grandmother is a greengrocer, remember; I’m sure that she has plenty of greens.’
‘Her grandmother works too hard, her grandmother is too old and tired to play mum. I wouldn’t be surprised if the last thing that she wants to see at the end of the day is a green; I wouldn’t blame her if she nips two doors down to Giuseppe for chips.’
Whenever Mum takes us into the shop, Alison’s grandma gives each of us an apple: this means three apples now that Michaela has teeth. Eliza and I say Thanks-Mrs-Mortimer, Michaela’s version is Ta-Mi-Moma. None of us are keen on apples, but we pretend. Mum tells Dad that the apples are embarrassing, that they make us look like scroungers; but when he says that she can always go somewhere else, her answer is I’ve shopped there since the day I was married and I suppose I’ll shop there until the day I drop.
Dad says, ‘I think that Mrs Mortimer and Tim are coping very well.’
Mum’s hands are propped on her hips, they look like claws. ‘Coping. They’ll need to do more than cope. You think she’s coming back, don’t you. You’re a fool, like Tim.’
Uncle Tim, Alison’s dad, has a gold tooth in the corner of his smile. I love that tooth, it must have a story to it, like a locket or a scar. Mum says, That tooth always surprises me, you’d never think that he was the type. I could try a gold tooth for the face I am drawing in my book; but of the pens that I have, the closest to gold is yellow. And yellow is not quite the same. A yellow tooth would be quite different.
Across the table from me, Dad warns, ‘Shhh,’ and cocks his head towards the door.
‘Oh, she knows,’ Mum says. ‘It’s you men who won’t believe that her mother has abandoned you.’
Another, ‘Shhh,’ but this nod is for me.
‘Oh, Madam’s oblivious when she’s drawing.’
I hardly even remember what Alison’s mum looked like; she went away so long ago. She was not around for Christmas last year, or even the summer holidays. Of course I remember her hair, the colour of her hair: close to the colour of Uncle Tim’s tooth. One of the tricks of the trade, was Mum’s joke, because Auntie Anne had been a hairdresser. Perhaps she is a hairdresser, in her new life – Mum told me that she has a new life. She was supposed to have given up when she married Uncle Tim but she never quite did, because sometimes we were put on a high stool in the middle of her kitchen so that she could trim our hair. When she was trimming my hair, I could smell her perfume, handcream, and washing powder, I would close my eyes and listen to her special scissors, her sleeve on her arm, her high heels whenever she took one of her definite steps to one side or the other. Sometimes a cold blade would brush my forehead, the tip of my ear. Feathers of hair would fall and settle on my shoulders, then eventually topple and fall onto the tiles in a circle around me. My fallen hair was darker than Eliza’s: we dropped trails of hair that did not mix. And then, not wanting to leave her out, Auntie Anne would graze Michaela’s baby fluff with her blades.
Dad leans harder over his newspaper but says sideways to Mum, ‘You worry too much, Alison’s hardly tubby.’
‘Oh, I know that; that’s my point: she’s a scrap, she’s looking poorly.’ Mum has come to the table and picked up my black pen, she is tapping the tabletop with the white lidded tip.
Dad says, ‘She’s missing her mum.’
‘Aren’t we all, but we have to keep going.’ The pen returns to the others, is slotted into line.
‘Her brother seems better.’
‘Oh, that bruiser. I’m glad we never had a boy.’
‘But, he’s older, he has friends.’
And today he is with those friends, playing football somewhere, leaving us in peace. The boy in my picture is wearing shorts which are too long to be football shorts. His knees are chubby, like the girl’s cheeks; I am going to have to use a lot of pink.
When Mum went to have Michaela in hospital, Eliza and I had to stay with Auntie Anne whenever Dad was at work. Just like Alison and Jason, now, staying sometimes with Mrs Mortimer. Mum had problems with Michaela, she was in hospital for weeks before Michaela was born. So for weeks I stayed in Auntie Anne’s kitchen while she cooked, washed up, tidied, ironed. And this was what I wanted: I did not want her to worry over me, I wanted to colour in the pictures in my books while she hummed and turned between the sink, the cooker, the cupboards. I wondered about Mum: where she was, what she was doing, and what if she never came back. While I was colouring, I liked to listen to Eliza playing with Jason and Alison in the garden, their laughs sliding into the kitchen on the sunshine, over the blue and white tiles. I liked to hear Auntie Anne’s laugh, too, when she was on the phone in the hallway: there was something in this laugh of hers which told me that she had forgotten that I was there.
During the summer, I moved from the kitchen down the hallway to the living-room, to try to draw some of Uncle Tim’s tropical fish: drawing from life, Auntie Anne called this. I drew and coloured a whole book of fish. The day when Mum came to fetch us, she took brand new Michaela into the kitchen and stayed for a while. I could hear her laughing and complaining that Michaela had been born early, a few weeks before Auntie Anne’s birthday, because otherwise they could have shared the same birthday. Whenever I looked up, I could see her and Auntie Anne through the serving hatch. They were both sitting on those high stools. Auntie Anne’s legs were crossed, but so closely that her bare feet were side by side on the same rung; her legs looked like a long silvery tail. I called through to ask Auntie Anne how old she was going to be. Her quick laugh could have been a cough. ‘Rox!’
Mum said, ‘Twenty-one,’ and smiled without moving her mouth.
Then Auntie Anne told the truth: ‘Twenty-one years older than you, I’m going to be twenty-seven.’
‘I’m six.’ I was thinking aloud, although not very loudly.
‘I know you are,’ she said, more quietly.
And now I am eight. Like Alison. Alison and I are the same. Our mums were the same, too.
Now Mum leans back on the twin-tub and complains about Alison: ‘What’s she doing in there? She watches too much telly. And much too close to the screen. Kids – why do they do that? What do they think they’re going to miss?’ Her voice sweeps towards me. ‘Why do you kids do that?’
I look up at her as I have been told to do when she talks to me, but I keep my pen moving and, below me, blue felt-tip is turning a piece of my picture into water.
And she is already telling Dad, ‘I’ll call her in here to choose what she wants for her salad, then perhaps we won’t have to suffer that painful pushing of stuff around her plate.’
But Dad says, ‘I don’t think she’s watching telly, I think she’s listening for the phone.’
And I know why.
‘Phone? Why? Who’s ringing her? I told Mrs Mortimer that I’d take her home, around seven. In fact, I told her twice, because I know that she never listens; and, yes, I do know that she tries hard, but the fact is that she never listens.’
Dad says, ‘She thinks there’ll be a call for her when they’ve drawn the raffle.’
‘You bought her a ticket? And she thinks she’s going to win?’ Mum’s eyes look harder than normal.
‘That’s why you enter a raffle, isn’t it? To win?’
‘That’s why you enter a raffle, perhaps. That’s why dreamers enter raffles.’ A quick, deep breath. ‘Why did you buy her a ticket? You know what she’s like, you know what she was like with the Win-a-Pony competition. Why did you raise her hopes like this?’
‘There’s no harm in hoping.’ Dad frowns over his newspaper.
‘There’s every harm in hoping,’ Mum continues to the top of his head, ‘because she’s going to lose, and don’t you think that she’s had to face enough disappointments?’
Dad dares to peek up at her. ‘Perhaps she will win.’
But Mum folds her arms and crashes them on to her tummy. ‘Reality is where you keep a holiday home: one ticket? Swilling around in that bin with all those hundreds?’
‘Five tickets,’ I have to tell her. Alison stands a much better chance than us because Dad bought a whole book of tickets for her, but the usual one ticket each for Eliza and me, and none for Michaela because she is too young and, anyway, she was on the other side of the field with Mum. Every year, the prize is the same, and every year this day is more important to me than Christmas, but I know that we have to be nice to Alison because her mum has a new life.
‘Five tickets?’ Mum’s eyes flash the ceiling, several flashes, as if she is searching for more words.
Dad gives up on his paper, huffs back in his chair. ‘Alison’s in bad need of some fun.’
‘And I’m in bad need of some housekeeping. Whatever made you think that we could afford five tickets?’
‘Oh come on, Gina, this was a one-off.’
‘A one-off here, a one-off there. Are we going to be doing these endless one-offs for the next ten years? The kid needs bringing up, not showering with presents.’
Dad’s hands open in front of him. ‘Five little raffle tickets –’
‘We have to put this behind us, now; we have to continue our lives as normal.’ But suddenly she has turned away, and mutters to the window, ‘Six months and no word from her mother.’
Quietly, Dad answers back, ‘She has written to Mrs M.’
‘Yes, and what exactly did she tell poor old Mrs Mortimer?’ Turning around, Mum’s face is as white as the sunny window. ‘That she has gone away to think.’ Now she is near to Dad, leaning over him, and I hear the rattle of her earrings in her hair. ‘Think.’
Now her eyes switch to mine. ‘What’s up?’
This has made me jump: nothing is up.
She bashes her hair behind one ear. ‘You’re not going to make a fuss about salad, are you? Because I’m not in the mood for one of your fusses.’
Have I ever made a fuss about salad? Tomato is my fourth favourite food, cucumber my sixth. But as she has asked, I decided to try my luck: ‘No lettuce?’
‘No lettuce,’ this is amazingly quick, but she adds, ‘although I don’t know why, because don’t you want healthy bones?’
What would unhealthy bones be like? Do I have them already? Would I know if I had them?
Her eyes have turned back to Dad. ‘Perhaps we should talk to Tim about a pet for Alison. Surely he could manage a cat.’
‘I did talk to Tim.’
‘You did?’
‘And he says that she isn’t interested.’
‘In a cat?’
Mum always says that Animals are trouble, but cats are the best of a bad bunch.
‘In anything.’
She takes several steps nowhere in particular, but bumps into the corner of the table, rattling my row of pens. ‘But these competitions! That ridiculous business of the Win-a-Pony, and now this!’
‘I know, I know,’ Dad’s hands rise but stay, hovering an inch above the tabletop, ‘but she seems to want to win one.’
‘But that’s silly,’ Mum hisses. ‘Why do kids do this? Why do they have to be so impossible about everything?’
His hands are back on the table. ‘This seems to be something that she wants to do on her own.’
‘Well, fine: she could save up. She has pocket money, you know; Roxanne tells me that she has two shillings every week from Tim, and Mrs Mortimer seems to slip her more than the odd sixpence. Isn’t that right, Rox?’
I look up from the blank bucket which I have topped with blue water, look from Mum to Dad, and nod. And now will Dad realize that I am badly off for pocket money, compared to everyone else?
He looks but does not seem to see me. He tells Mum, ‘Tim says that she’s more than happy to save for the food and everything, she has saved, but she refuses to spend this money on buying the animal: she wants to win one.’
‘Well, this is silly.’ Mum joins us, drops into a chair, drops her elbows onto the table and her chin into her hands.
The corners of Dad’s mouth fold in and down, they press dimples into his cheeks.
I wish that I could draw dimples, but whenever I try, they look like boils.
He says, ‘She wants to be lucky, I suppose.’
‘Well, I’m afraid that I hope that she’s unlucky with this one. Because what would she do with a racing greyhound?’
I put down my pen. I have to explain this to Mum every year on the day of the kennel fête: ‘You don’t have to do anything with the greyhound, Mum. If you win him, then you’re his owner, you make up his name, you can go and see him whenever you want, but he lives in the kennels and they feed him, train him, race him.’ The ideal dog, surely, in her opinion. The only dog, I suspect, that she would ever allow us to have. Because she says that They’re worse than kids; they’re always under your feet or mating with your leg; they’re noisy and smelly and they have to be taken everywhere; they eat that foul food and they poo everywhere.
Dad says they do not poo everywhere if they have been trained. And he knows, because his family had lots of them when he was little. He seems to remember them by how they died: Bruno as a puppy from a virus, Jake in old age from diabetes, Slipper by mistake from rat poison.
Across the table, Mum shuts her eyes hard, then opens them hard: a sign that she refuses to say a word.
Once, I pointed out to her that Grandma’s poodle, Rebel, has never mated with our legs, but she said, ‘That yapping perm is incapable of mating with anything.’
And so we have Leo: for my fifth birthday, I was allowed to choose from the box of kittens and I chose him because he looked sad and trodden on, but this is how he has behaved ever since, he has never grown happy or clever. We hardly ever see him: the only evidence that he lives here is his two bowls on our kitchen floor.
One of Mum’s arms flops down onto the table; her head stays in her other hand. ‘But how on earth would Tim find the time to keep running Alison up to the kennels? He’s forever ferrying her from home to school to Mrs Mortimer.’
‘She was fine when she failed to win that pony,’ Dad sounds worried. ‘She seemed to accept the situation.’
‘And how do you know?’ Mum squeaks. Her other arm thuds onto the table. The thud jogs me, jogs my pen so that the red bucket seems to have grown an extra handle. ‘When are you ever here to see how she is? You men, off to work every day. Who stays around to pick up the pieces? What else was she going to do, other than accept the situation? But how do any of us know what she was going through? That obsession, those books … she was coming here with what must have been the library’s entire collection of books on ponies. And then she spent her birthday money on more pony books. All for four or five questions, four or five little questions on that entry form. And she was ringing up local farmers, you know; did you know that? Asking questions. About feeding and forelocks and whatever. Mrs Mortimer found her on the phone, a couple of times, asking questions about hooves and hay, whatever. And that notebook full of tie-breakers! She was working on her tie-breaker for months, lots of clever little lines.’ Mum has to stop for breath. ‘Apparently she’d always wanted a pony, but never this badly. And do you know what she said to me when she knew that she hadn’t won? There’s always next year. Just like that: There’salways next year. Sometimes, I have to say, she gives me the creeps.’
‘Gina, please,’ Dad whispers, his head turning towards the door.
I keep all my wishes for a pony; I wish on every first star that I see, on every birthday candle that I blow. And I tell no one, because if I told, those wishes would be wiped away. I have had so many wishes by now that eventually one of them will come true. But in the meantime I would love to win the greyhound.
‘She’s so like Tim, in some ways; wouldn’t you say?’ Mum is quieter, now. ‘Sitting by the phone, but firm in her belief that there’s-always-next-year. And in other ways she’s the opposite: so much hope and determination. Tim could do with some of that; we might have had Anne back by now if he had made an effort to find her, if he had gone after her.’
Should I chance this red pen on the girl’s cheeks? Does anyone really have red cheeks? Even someone with cheeks as chunky as these?
‘But you said that we should let her go.’
‘Yes, now. But if Tim had had more get up and go, she might never have got up and gone.’
How did she go? On a bus?
‘That’s unfair.’ Dad sounds tired. ‘Tim’s a lovely bloke.’
‘I know he’s a lovely bloke.’ Mum, too: very tired. ‘Perhaps that was the problem.’
‘What do you mean?’
I know a good word for this girl: apple-cheeked. The apples that we are given by Mrs Mortimer have red on them, she has to find the three most beautiful apples in the box. Mum walks around behind her, saying, Anything will do, really, honestly; but Mrs Mortimer laughs and says, No, no, looks are important.
‘Well, you know, not everyone wants a lovely bloke, or not all the time.’
‘They don’t?’
Mum breathes down her nose. ‘You wouldn’t understand. This place …’
‘There are worse places.’ Dad seems to be checking through his newspaper for something; the turning pages fan me, fluffing my hair.
‘Well, yes, of course, but what are the two main excitements, here, every year?’ Mum leaves us and crosses to the window. ‘The kennel fête,’ she says to the window, ‘and the point-to-point: fund-raising for greyhounds, and betting on horses.’
I love the point-to-point, I love to walk over the fields which are usually only a boring view from our bedroom windows, fields which look flat from our bedroom windows but which, when we walk on them, are clumps of grass. I love to walk to the hedges that have been built for the horses to jump: higher than real hedges, impossibly high. Then there are the marquees, massive, with tatty flaps for doorways. Everyone from around here comes to the races, but there are hundreds of other people and I have no idea where they come from. Nor do I have any idea where the horses and jockeys come from; but they are proper horses and jockeys, they look like the horses and jockeys that I have seen on the telly. Lots of people have picnics: paper plates and sausage rolls.
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