In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  I didn’t see it at the time, of course, but this was the beginning of Christian’s gradual detachment from childhood. His boredom and irritation with home were just natural stages in his preparation to leave it behind and join the adult world, Mum explained. I wasn’t to take it personally. Slowly, inexorably he was starting to cut the threads, so that he would be ready, one day soon, to move on, out, away. I found this idea hard to bear. To me the Old Schoolhouse was still a sufficient world, and the only threat was change. Whenever I thought about our family it was always the same scene that came to mind: the four of us playing table-tennis in the garden on Dad’s knocked-together table made of trestles and two sheets of blistered plywood. The odd thing was we’d probably only played together three or four times in my life, and yet this is what I saw when I closed my eyes and imagined that entity: The Fairchilds.

  ‘I don’t want to grow up if it makes me all moody like Christian,’ I said. ‘I’m going to stay young for ever. Even when I’m old I’ll still like doing all the things I like now.’

  Mum smiled. ‘You sound like Aunty Barbara,’ she said. ‘She could never bear the idea of getting older.’

  This use of the past tense made me suspicious. ‘Is she dead?’ I asked. It was three years since we’d seen her, carried off in an ambulance. There had been nothing since, not even a belated birthday card or a plea for help.

  ‘Oh, no, she’s still alive as far as I know.’

  ‘Why don’t we ever see Donovan any more? I liked him.’

  Mum grew evasive. ‘It’s such a difficult set-up. We’ve rather lost touch.’

  ‘But why?’ I persisted. ‘He used to come and stay for ages.’

  ‘I did try to keep in contact, but . . . it’s a funny thing about human nature. If you’ve helped someone when they’re at their lowest, they don’t want to be reminded.’

  ‘You’d think they’d be grateful,’ I said.

  ‘You would,’ said Mum. ‘But sometimes it’s more complicated than that. Barbara was very ill when she was with us, and needed to go to hospital. But she was too ill to realise she needed to go. So we had to make her go. She probably still resents that.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s better not to help people,’ I decided.

  ‘No, that’s no good either. You have to help people, but don’t expect any thanks.’

  I never did get to meet this Penny. Christian didn’t show the slightest inclination to bring her home, and Mum alluded to it only once. He replied with a cryptic laugh: his usual non-committal response to unwelcome suggestions, and the subject was dropped. Sometimes I couldn’t help regretting Mum and Dad’s policy of tact and tolerance. There were occasions when I felt some robust interference would have served.

  Before I had a chance to accustom myself to this phantom presence it was all over: they had split up and Christian was back amongst us, for a while at least. I didn’t allow myself to be too hopeful: there would be other Pennys, who would be able to tempt him away from us, with whatever mysterious attractions we lacked.

  20

  THE DAY MY eyepatch came off, the world rose up to meet me. Houses and trees sprang to attention like the pages of a pop-up book; the sharpness and solidity of things amazed me and I started to draw again, inspired by this new insight. ‘It’s the artist’s gift to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar,’ Mr Hatch said, and I saw at last what he meant. He had been prompted to this remark by the sketch of my plimsoll. It looked, he said, like something organic – a species of cabbage, perhaps – and he put it up, properly mounted, on the wall outside the head’s office, where all the best pictures went.

  At school, being singled out for academic achievement was an occasion of dread, as peer retribution was usually swift and nasty. For some reason excellence at art or sport did not provoke the same hostility, quite the reverse in fact: most of the real hard-cases were themselves pillars of the various sports teams. It was lucky for me that these were the only two areas in which I had any chance of success. All those years of acting as Christian’s ballboy, outfielder and sparring partner had paid off at last. Once I had lost the eyepatch and modified my accent, my assimilation would be complete. I had noticed that whereas at Turton’s it was the way we looked rather than sounded that let us down, at Underwood the opposite was true. Everyone else there was as scruffy as we were, and we blended in beautifully, but the moment Mum spoke, in her fine-porcelain accent, from which years of elocution lessons had expunged the taint of Norfolk, heads would start to turn.

  It didn’t take me long to perfect the Underwood argot. It was simply a case of slurring words together, omitting consonants and slackening vowel sounds. It was easy to do, just as slouching comes more naturally than sitting bolt upright, but I sometimes felt the strain of switching between accents for home and school.

  Friendship was another important area where unexpected improvement had occurred. Ever since the brawl with Dawn Clubb had been resolved by our dads’ eccentric brand of doorstep diplomacy, she had been almost overpoweringly friendly, saving me a seat on the bus, offering me sweets and roaring at my jokes. I don’t know why she should have been drawn to someone whose only recommendation was the ability to throw a punch, but in later years it would certainly inform her choice of boyfriend. It’s hard to resist someone who is bent on befriending you, and, as I soon discovered, Dawn did have some useful qualities: she was widely feared, almost feudally loyal, and had experienced a side of life not much discussed at the Old Schoolhouse.

  One day in spring she asked me to come back to her house after school. I knew where she lived because the bus passed the end of her road each day on its slow, meandering route through the council estate before it reached the semi-rural outposts of the borough. She issued this invitation just as we reached her stop, so there wasn’t much time for deliberation. To help me make my mind up she seized my school bag and flung it through the double doors, so I was obliged to follow. The bus shuddered off, leaving us standing on the pavement, laughing, amid the diamond crusting of broken glass that formed the hinterland of most of the bus stops on the estate. I wasn’t cross – I had been intending to accept anyway, as I knew the offer was a rare privilege. We didn’t have people back much in case they were electrocuted by the faulty wiring, or beheaded by the sash windows, or made disparaging remarks about the mess.

  Dawn didn’t have people back much on account of the Old Bastard, as her father was known by the women of the house. He worked nights as a packer in Fleet Street, and days as a scaffolder, currently on the new supermarket complex at the mouth of the estate. He slept as and when he could, mostly in front of the TV, between shifts, and was irascible if disturbed, forcing his wife and daughters to tiptoe around him. He was not keen on strangers. Since I had already been exposed to his charms, I would be immune from attack, went Dawn’s reasoning.

  Her house was a tiny end-of-terrace of grey pebbledash, like fossilised porridge. The front garden had been paved to accommodate the carcass of an MG Midget whose innards were mysteriously absent. My overriding impression of the interior of the house was of plastic – a substance distrusted by Mum as modern, and therefore corrupt. There was a pimpled plastic runner across the middle of the living room carpet from front door to kitchen, and the sofa, on which the Old Bastard lay snoring, was still swagged in polythene. Across the back door was a curtain made entirely of multicoloured plastic ribbons, which clattered and flapped in the breeze. I spent hours communing with that curtain. I loved its brazen colours, its soothing rustle, and the ecstasy of its silky embrace. The kitchen itself was a shrine to hygiene, with white, wipe-clean surfaces and laminated mats on top of laminated tablecloths. Even the drink of squash Dawn’s mum offered me contained what looked like two floating plastic golf balls. I didn’t know what they were – disinfectant, perhaps – but Dawn seemed unperturbed, and swished them around the beaker, so I did the same.

  Everything was so clean: there wasn’t so much as a crumb, a footprint or a hair to be seen. At our p
lace great bales of dust and fluff blew through the rooms like tumbleweed, and it was not unknown to find dog hairs in the butter, even though we’d never owned a dog. It was four years since Aunty Barbara had visited, and I was still coming across her discarded fag ends. It was one of those uncomfortable, ground-shifting moments when you realise that your own way of life, fondly assumed to be thoroughly mainstream, is exceptional and very possibly deviant.

  On my first visit I was introduced to what became my principal motivation for all future visits: proper food. Dawn’s mum, when not taking on invisible dirt with a spray gun and cloth, spent her time preparing meals for such members of the family as were awake and receptive at any given moment.

  ‘Are you girls hungry?’ she said, at four o’clock, and when we nodded, she offered to ‘rustle something up’ – an expression that accurately described the sound of pillow-sized bags of oven chips and diced mixed veg being dragged from the chest freezer in the living room. The joy of those meals: meat cooked all the way through; vegetables which arrived on the plate hot, and yielded without exceptional force to pressure from cutlery and teeth; chips, fat, thin or crinkle-cut; gravy without clods of flour. Mrs Clubb had never before had anyone praise her cooking so warmly and sincerely. The Old Bastard wasn’t given to compliments, Dawn just shovelled the food in, oblivious, and her older sister, Pam, was trying to get down to a size twelve for her wedding and ate nothing but yoghurt and apples. My groans of pleasure and eye-rolling delighted Mrs Clubb so much that I was guaranteed a man-sized meal every time I appeared. Her speciality was batter – crisp, knobbly, honey-coloured explosions of grease – and she battered practically everything. Fish, sausages, spam, pineapple rings, bananas, cheddar: there was almost nothing outside her range.

  Dawn’s bedroom was about seven feet square and contained a bed, a chest of drawers and a beanbag. Its pink sandtex walls were decorated with pin-ups of the Hunk of the Month from My Guy and Blue Jeans, boys with shiny hair, perfect skin and straight white teeth – immaculate creatures who bore no resemblance to the scrofulous oiks at Underwood. Dawn’s most precious possession was a radio cassette player, which she used to tape the Top Forty every Sunday. She had a chart on the wall on which to mark the weekly fluctuations: the new entries, the highest climbers and the non-movers were all meticulously recorded and colour-coded. When this was done she set about learning the words to all the songs by playing them over and over, at a low volume, naturally, so as not to rouse the Old Bastard from his slumber. Sometimes, having committed the lyrics of a song to memory, we would rehearse a dance routine, our movements somewhat inhibited by lack of space, and then perform it in front of Pam, who would offer encouragement and advice.

  When not coaching us, Pam was generally occupied in one of three pursuits: going out with her fiancé Andy, getting herself ready to go out with Andy, or planning her wedding to Andy. Of these, the second was much the most arduous and time-consuming. Watching her preparations put me in mind of our former lodger, Cindy, with her arsenal of coloured potions. As well as mortifying her flesh with the apple and yoghurt diet, Pam was bent on denaturing her straight blonde hair with a succession of cruel electrical gadgets. She had a box of heated rollers, an electric red-hot poker, and a set of crimping irons. These last came to grief one day when Dawn and I borrowed them to heat up a crumpet and ruined the hotplates. Pam would spend hours in front of her mirror, curling, teasing and backcombing to achieve the vital extra volume, before fixing it all in place with a burst of lacquer. Gravity and damp weather were her sworn enemies. ‘Oh no, it’s gone all flat!’ was a regular lament from the bedroom.

  Sometimes Dawn would be summoned to help Pam on with her jeans, which were a skintight fit from waist to ankle. When they came out of the wash, stiff as bark, she would have to put them on lying on her back, with Dawn tugging the two halves of the fly together while Pam yanked on the zip.

  If Andy was unavailable, Pam would stay in with flat hair and baggy track pants and read Bride magazine, making notes in the margin.

  There were always stacks of magazines lying around at the Clubbs’. The Old Bastard picked them up from the depots in Fleet Street, whole bales of them. He kept a pile for himself in the toilet under the crocheted ballerina loo-roll holder. I picked one up once and put it back pretty quickly. It had a topless woman on the front with her hands stuffed down her knickers. Someone had drawn smiley faces around the nipples. When I flicked through there were more breasts inside, all with biro faces. One Hundred Genuine Married Tits and Clits, the cover promised. I gave Mr Clubb a wide berth after that.

  As well as teen magazines, which were full of photo-stories about the perils of love, and hints on how to get and keep a ‘fella’, Dawn had squirrelled away a collection of American imports with titles like True Confession! These were terrifyingly lurid first person accounts of rape and molestation, interspersed with advertisements for sex aids and kinky underwear. Dawn and I, bloated with batter and chips, and worn out from disco practice, would lie on her bed, side by side, poring over the pages together, trying to make sense of it all. Of course I knew about the facts of life: Mum had sat me down and explained them in unflinching detail, and I can’t say I was impressed. It may well have been ‘perfectly natural’ as she insisted, but she made the whole business sound about as appealing as surgery without anaesthetic, which was no doubt her intention.

  ‘Do you think Pam and Andy have had it?’ I asked one day, when we were puzzling over an advert for Chinese Love Balls, £4.99 plus p+p. ‘All the pleasure you can stand!’ the promise went. Above the P.O. box number was a picture of a non-Chinese woman in a pair of black camiknickers, with a foxy expression on her face.

  ‘I know they have,’ Dawn replied. ‘She told me. They got carried away.’

  ‘Did she say what it was like?’ It was hard to imagine Pam getting carried away in those jeans of hers. You’d have thought it would take nothing less than grim determination.

  ‘She said it’s not like on telly, where the woman starts moaning and groaning the minute a bloke kisses her neck.’

  ‘But was it nice?’

  ‘She said it’s all right if you love the person,’ Dawn replied, chewing her lip with the effort of recalling these pearls. ‘Andy enjoyed it, anyway.’

  We both pulled a face at the notion of Andy’s enjoyment. He was pale and lanky with spots and a slack mouth. I’d only ever heard him say one word: awright, which served as both question and answer in any exchange of views.

  ‘What about Christian?’ Dawn asked, blushing a deeper shade than usual. ‘Do you think he’s had it?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said hurriedly. ‘No way.’ The thought of Christian having urges made me feel slightly queasy.

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, he’s only seventeen,’ I replied – a thoughtless error of tact: Pam was not yet eighteen. ‘And anyway,’ I hurried on, ‘he hasn’t got a girlfriend.’

  ‘Hasn’t he?’ said Dawn, wistfully. ‘You’d think he would, being so good-looking.’

  It had occurred to me some while ago that Dawn’s effort to befriend me might not have been on my own account. She brought Christian’s name into conversation on the flimsiest of pretexts, and on the few occasions she had come round to the Old Schoolhouse she had become fidgety and awkward in his presence.

  ‘I suppose you don’t notice his looks, being his sister,’ she said. ‘He probably looks like nothing to you.’

  ‘No,’ I reassured her. ‘I notice.’

  ‘By the time I’m old enough to be his girlfriend he’ll have met someone else,’ she sighed. ‘Anyway, he’d never look at me that way, because I’m just your friend.’

  I gave her a sympathetic smile. Privately I thought the matter of my friendship was not likely to be the chief obstacle, but I thought I’d check with Christian to make sure.

  ‘What do you think of dawn?’ I asked, managing to catch him in the larder one day between absences. ‘Do you think she’s pretty?’


  Christian withdrew, carrying a packet of Ryvita and a slab of Cheshire cheese. ‘Why are you talking in that stupid voice?’ he enquired. ‘Are you trying to sound thick?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, reverting to home-speak. The mention of Dawn’s name had confused me into selecting the wrong accent. ‘Forgot where I was for a moment.’ I watched him build a tower of sandwiches, layer by crumbling layer. ‘Well, do you?’

  He looked at me incredulously. ‘You mean that fat girl with the red face and metal teeth?’

  I nodded slowly. ‘Well, I guess that answers my question,’ I said, and we both burst into noisy laughter, united for once, in a moment of clannish superiority.

  21

  A NEW PENNY arrived in the spring, along with warmer weather, light evenings and Asian flu.

  Christian was the only one of us to succumb, losing the use of his legs for three weeks as the virus ravaged his muscles. For a while it was feared he had something more serious. Terrible words like leukaemia were whispered behind closed doors and drifted through keyholes like wraiths. It was as if we were holding our breath for the five days he was in hospital having tests. One of the lifers at the prison said a special prayer for Christian’s recovery at the Sunday morning Eucharist, an experience which moved Dad almost to tears. I couldn’t help wondering how much clout the prayers of a convicted murderer were likely to have with God, but then I remembered the bit about there being more rejoicing in heaven over prodigal sons than stay-at-home sons, and decided it might be just the intercession we needed. Dad was reassuring on that point, alluding also to the significance of lost sheep and coins.