by Graham Swift
The group of four, less than thirty yards away, that Sean and Andy were eyeing consisted of Karen, her mother (it was her mother), her father and some chattering friend, of the parents’ age, who’d intercepted them and was preventing them looking round, back towards the church. Sean was rather glad of this.
Karen wore nothing that wasn’t in theory appropriate—it couldn’t be faulted on its colour—but what she was actually got up in was a pair of black ankle boots, dark tights, with a seam up the back, a tight shiny-black waist-length jacket, a black nonsense of a hat with some black gauze attached to it, and a short flouncy charcoal skirt with which the wind was now playing mischievously.
The extraordinary thing was that the mother was wearing an outfit that was almost identical—the boots, the seamed tights, the short skirt and flimsy headpiece. Her top was a little different, but if anything more tarty.
It was hard not to conclude that they’d conspired over it, even gone shopping together. If not, who had started the competition, who had copied whom? There might have been something fetching about it, if it had worked. But the big difference between them was that while the daughter got away with it—it was fancy dress, but she had the looks anyway—the mother, the other side of forty, was a sight. The daughter’s hair was dark and glossy, the wind toying pleasingly with it too. The mother’s hair was a brownish frizz, the face rounded, puffy and fairly smothered in make-up.
Strangely, neither woman at this moment seemed aware of the effect. They were both laughing at something the fourth person was saying. They now and then with exactly the same action curled their knuckles cutely round the hems of their skirts. They might have been two happy perky twin sisters.
The father was something else altogether. Beside the two women, he was an unredeemed scruff. No tie, not even a white shirt. His excuse might have been a blunt, ‘I don’t dress up for funerals.’ Or, on this occasion, ‘He wasn’t my headmaster.’ But his face, never mind the clothes, was a mess. It was podgy and red, the sun struck it harshly.
But he too was now laughing, as if experiencing some rush of joy or of cocky pride in his womenfolk. It was the face—both Sean and Andy could spot this even at a distance—of a man who’d been drunk when he arrived and who did his best to be drunk as often as he could.
‘She looks a right old baggage,’ Andy said.
Sean didn’t answer this at first. Then he chose to agree. ‘You can say that again.’
‘And is that her dad?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘He looks shit-faced.’
In any case the main attraction was Karen. Sean looked at her without voicing any opinion. Tart’s clothes or not, the only right word was lovely. She’d been lovely at Holmgate too, in the last couple of years, though ‘lovely’ wasn’t in the vocabulary then. It wasn’t in the vocabulary now, not with Andy Sykes around, but it was the right word.
And he was wishing Karen had worn something plainer—to curb her mum. He was also wishing that fourth person would stay there with them, so he and Andy (though Andy was clearly getting other ideas) could just slip away. They’d decided to turn up, for whatever mad reason. For a laugh? To do their duty by Daffy? What had he done for them? They’d come anyway, and now they could just clear off.
He’d tried it on, of course, with Karen at Holmgate. He wasn’t the only one. How many had succeeded? Depending, of course, on what was meant by success. But he wasn’t the only one to try. It seemed an age ago now, being fifteen or sixteen. It hadn’t helped that he hadn’t lost it yet, or not in the true sense, the big V. He didn’t know if she had, for all the tease. The more she teased, in fact, the more he thought she hadn’t. Then he’d think what would be better, for his chances? If she had, but he hadn’t? If he had (theoretically), but she hadn’t? If they both had? If they both hadn’t?
He remembered it now, standing outside St Luke’s, all those possibilities running through his head. Had old Daffy been aware of it all—all going on like a sizzling pan under his nose?
One day he’d gone to Karen Shield’s house in Derwent Road, carrying the school bag she’d left on the bus. It wasn’t until he’d got up to get off himself, two stops later, that he’d noticed the bag lying on the seat up ahead. Otherwise, when she’d brushed past him (and she liked to brush) with Cheryl Hudson and Amina Khan he’d have grabbed her wrist and when she tugged back, said, ‘You’ve forgotten something.’
But there it was, and he knew it was hers because it was a plastic imitation leopard-skin. How could anyone forget such a bag?
He never would.
So he’d got off at Thorpe Avenue, his stop, carrying two bags. Then everything had happened. It was all a gift. It was a gift that she’d left her bag. It was a gift that he’d been sitting on his own on the bus and not sitting with handy-Andy here. He hadn’t known, yet, what kind of gift.
He could still see himself walking down Thorpe Avenue, coming to a decision, with two bags, one a somewhat embarrassing pretend leopard-skin. He could still see the October sun coming out from behind the clouds and smiling at him.
The proper thing would have been to phone Karen up and say, ‘I’ve got your bag. I can bring it round if you like.’ It would have earned him points and might have led to something. But it was just a bit too goody-goody and he didn’t have her number. Though that might be in the bag. As might her phone !
Or: he might have taken the bag with him to school the next morning and said coolly, ‘Here’s your bag.’ And then perhaps said, ‘I had a good look inside.’ He decided that this option had less going for it.
Though he did look inside, right there in Thorpe Avenue. Or rather he opened the flap and saw a label underneath saying ‘Karen Shield, Holmgate School’. Then her home address. Well he’d known it was Derwent Road, on the Braithwaite Estate, and now he knew the number. But something about the label made him not delve any further. An odd primness came over him. It was like the label for some little girl much younger than and quite different from Karen Shield, and he didn’t want to know about her.
His feet made the decision for him anyway. He turned and walked in the direction of the Braithwaite Estate. Two stops on the bus, but not so far on foot if you cut through the back streets.
Points from Karen, he calculated, and points from her mother, if she was there. If Karen’s mother was there, then Karen couldn’t be anything but nice and grateful to him, her mother would ensure it. But perhaps he was only thinking of Karen’s mother being there to control his excitement about the possibility he really hoped for, of Karen being there all by herself, worrying about the bag she must have stupidly left on the bus.
He rang the bell at number fifteen and, after a pause, Karen’s mother stood before him, blinking at him. Perhaps his disappointment was written on his face. But he had to go ahead.
‘Mrs Shield? I’ve got Karen’s bag.’ He held it up like a piece of evidence. ‘She left it on the bus.’
He noticed how she blinked and he noticed her red fingernails on the edge of the half-opened door. She stopped blinking and looked at him sternly.
‘Who are you?’ she said slowly, as if she might have just woken up.
‘I’m a friend of Karen’s. At Holmgate. Is Karen here?’
He’d peered in, towards a tiny hallway and the foot of a staircase. There was no sign or sound of anyone else.
But Karen’s mother was undoubtedly Karen’s mother. She was like a bigger version of Karen. She was wearing a smoky-coloured dress of a close-fitting but fluffy material. It went somehow with the red nails. The dress wasn’t very long, and what he mostly noticed, as he tried to look beyond her, was her hip. As she stood holding the door one hip was hidden, but the other was pushed out. It was oddly alert. The idea of a hip, even the word hip, seemed new to him. Strangely, it had never entered his mind when he thought of Karen.
‘She’s not here,’ Mrs Shield said, still looking at him sternly. ‘Karen’s not here.’ She said it so deliberately it almost sounded lik
e a lie, but he felt sure himself now that Mrs Shield was alone.
Karen had got off the bus less than half an hour ago, to go home. It was a mystery. And he was somehow now under suspicion, for his good deed.
‘She goes round to Cheryl Hudson’s most afternoons before she comes home,’ Mrs Shield said. ‘God knows what they do there.’
She looked at him as if this were something he should have known already, as if he should have gone himself to Cheryl Hudson’s. (What went on there?) He felt put on the spot. It was like being called out to the front by a teacher. But Mrs Shield didn’t look like a teacher. And, though she was Karen’s mother, she didn’t really look like a mother.
‘Have you got a name?’
‘Sean.’
‘Sean who?’
‘Sean Wheatley.’
‘And that’s Karen’s bag?’
It seemed a strange question, and even before he could answer she said, ‘I can see it’s Karen’s bag.’
She looked at him searchingly. Her hands were still holding or rather fingering the edge of the door.
‘Tell me something, Sean Wheatley. Did you come round here now to hand over Karen’s bag, or did you come round here because you were really hoping to see Karen?’
It was a big question and he knew there was no ducking it. He knew that Mrs Shield would have spotted a false answer better than any teacher.
‘Both, Mrs Shield. Mainly to see Karen.’
She looked at him again for a long while.
‘Well, you’d better come in and wait for her.’
This was confusing. If Karen was round at Cheryl Hudson’s, then how long was he going to have to wait? Did he want to wait? But he also somehow knew that just to have handed over the bag and left would have been a big mistake.
She shut the door behind him. There was the vague smell of what he thought of as ‘other people’s house’. It was different in every house and you could never work out exactly what it was made of. Part of it must be Mrs Shield. Part of it must be Karen.
But, now the door was shut, Karen seemed suddenly far away, even though he was for the first time inside her home and he was holding her leopard-skin bag.
‘Through here,’ Mrs Shield said.
There was a small cluttered living room, like any living room, with a glass coffee table. He knew that quite often in other people’s houses (sometimes in his own) there’d be a bottle of something, opened, on the coffee table, even in the afternoon. But he couldn’t see any bottle. The telly was on with the sound down. She must have turned it down when she answered the door. The picture on the telly was weak because of the sunshine now streaming through the window. Outside, the clouds had completely dispersed.
He stood by the coffee table, politeness enveloping him, along with dazzling sunshine. He knew that you weren’t supposed to sit in other people’s houses till they asked you to.
‘So, Sean—’ she said, taking a breath. Then she stopped. ‘God, it’s blinding in here, isn’t it?’
She turned. It was the first time she’d moved suddenly and spontaneously, almost girlishly. She drew the curtains. They were a pale yellow and still let through a buttery glow. To close them, she put one knee on the sofa and reached up behind it. He saw an exposed heel and again, dominantly, her hips. Both this time.
As she turned back there was a flustered smile on her face at her own agility. It made her look younger and even less like a mother, certainly not the thirty-five or more she must have been.
She came right up close to where he still stood compliantly. The scent and breath of Mrs Shield were suddenly all over him. There was no trace of drink that he could detect.
‘So, Sean, how long have you been friends with Karen? I mean, friends, not just at school with her?’
But once again she didn’t wait for him to answer. With one hand she pulled down his fly zip, then slipped the other hand inside, like a pickpocket stealing a wallet.
‘Have you got an erection, Sean? Do you have one all the time?’
Then he was, in all senses, in her hands.
Silent seconds passed. There was the technical consideration: suppose Karen were to come home any moment now. But that seemed somehow irrelevant, or dealt with. Mrs Shield plainly knew what she was doing, even as she deferentially asked him, ‘So what do you think we should do now, Sean? What do you think we should do? Perhaps you should put those bags down.’
She kept her hand where it was while he did what she suggested.
‘I think we should do the whole thing, don’t you? The whole thing. Can you hang on?’
Hang on!
She took her hand away and, as nimbly as she’d managed the curtains, she left the room, then returned with a large white bath towel. She spread it on the sofa.
It was all done quickly. How could it not have been? Hang on!
But afterwards she’d had the goodness—if that was the right word—just to lie with him for a while, her arms round him, or perhaps it was more that his were round her. He’d felt his own slightness and her bigness—if that too was the right word. She was a fully formed complete woman, like no schoolgirl could ever be. He’d wanted to tell her this, but didn’t know how, or if it would be wise. He’d wanted to thank her, to praise her, to express all his grateful amazement, but hadn’t a clue how to do it. What he should have said—he knew it now, standing outside St Luke’s—was that she was lovely.
In the glow from the window he tried absurdly to work out his bearings. Which was east, which was west? Which way did the window face? Where was Craig Road, where he lived? Where was Holmgate School, the Town Hall, Tesco’s, Skelby Moor? Minutes ago he’d been standing on a front doorstep, holding a leopard-skin bag. Less than an hour ago he’d been sitting on a number six bus.
Finally, as if a timer had registered the appropriate interval, she moved, loosened their mutual grip, kissed him, just a peck, on the cheek and made it clear they should tidy themselves up.
Had she done this before? Was she in the habit of doing it? It was certain that she knew he’d never done anything like it before, just as it was certain that he’d never do, at least in one sense, anything like it again.
‘Now,’ she said before he left, her stern face back again, ‘you don’t breathe a word of this.’ And while he gravely nodded and she looked into his depths, she added, ‘More than your life’s worth if you do.’
Then she said, ‘Don’t forget your bag. The name’s Deborah, by the way. Since you ask.’
He realised later that she’d effectively vetoed his going any further with Karen. She’d simultaneously equipped and unequipped him. He looked at Karen now with something like pity.
The sun shone on the wet driveway. That fourth person, whoever he was, seemed to be moving on. The remaining three now turned to look around and a hand suddenly went to cover the daughter’s mouth in a show of recognition and surprise. Her eyes widened. She took away the hand and, at that distance, they half heard, half lip-read her words.
‘Well, well, look who’s here!’
She was making such a thing of it that he didn’t notice the look on the mother’s face. Or he didn’t want to look at the mother’s face, daubed with all that slap. Or at the father’s. Karen’s face was the only one you wanted to look at.
The mother. He knew her name.
And now all three of them were walking directly towards them and Andy was saying, flicking at his cigarette, ‘Well, I don’t like yours much.’
He didn’t want to look at her, but he wished there were some secret sign he might nonetheless make, without the need to catch her eye, to indicate that he’d never told anyone, not at Holmgate, not at Wainwright’s. Other blokes might have done, sooner or later. ‘I banged her mother.’ He’d never breathed a word. Least of all to his best mate Andy Sykes here, goggling like a prat.
Some sign. So at least she wouldn’t feel humiliated on that score. Only on the score of looking a mess—a dressed-up, painted-over mess, which made it worse. But
maybe she really didn’t know that. Maybe she thought she looked the image of her daughter.
He wasn’t sure at all how he was going to manage this. It was cowardice not to look at her. Were they going to have to do all that hand-shaking stuff, the hugging and kissing, the strange grown-up but childish lovey-dovey stuff that was going on all around them?
‘She looks a right dog, doesn’t she?’
‘Shut up, Andy, they’ll hear.’ Just for a moment he hated Andy.
‘Where-as!’ Andy was preening himself, wriggling his shoulders. ‘And she’s not with anyone, is she?’
He looked at the father. He can’t ever have known, or he’d have known, himself, big-time. And Karen can’t ever have known, he was sure of that. Or she wouldn’t be acting so full-on now.
Just for a moment, as she drew close, he hated Karen Shield too. Intensely. For looking fantastic and making a fool of her mum.
‘Ooo-ooo!’ Andy was saying, clearly about Karen. Then he said, ‘Is that really her mother?’
‘Yes,’ he replied with an authority he didn’t like. He dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. ‘So, Andy boy,’ he said, ‘let it be a lesson to you.’
He had to say it quickly, under his breath, with no time to explain what he meant—if he knew what he meant. Though he thought, rapidly and cruelly, of what he might have gone on to say.
Karen was upon them, in her silly irresistible hat.
‘Sean Wheatley and Andy Sykes! Still together after all these years!’
He’d always been a jump or two ahead of Andy; now he felt he might be twice Andy’s age. He almost felt he might be like old Daffy, up there on the stage at morning assembly, telling them all what was good for them, telling them what the future held.
‘Have you got an erection, Sean?’ He’d hear those words on his dying day.
Karen was opening her arms as if she meant to enfold them both like lost sons.
‘You run after them, Andy boy’—this is what he might have said—‘you get the hots for them and you have your wicked way with them and then you end up marrying them. And then years down the road, look what you get. So—let it be a lesson to you.’