The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “I thought you said he was your father’s brother.”

  “No, my mother’s, he’s my mother’s brother.” And he, Daniel, he’d gone to stroke the dog, just put his hand down in an ordinary friendly sort of way, to pat his head, the dog’s head. A sort of mongrel, a funny-looking dog, it made you want to laugh almost just looking at it, and his name’s, his name is—

  “Are you sure about this story?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I just can’t remember what the dog’s name was, not that it’s of vital importance.”

  So he, Daniel, just put his hand down to stroke the dog, as anyone might, and the dog, instead of letting him stroke his head, coming up to be stroked, he just pulls back, he whines and he goes and buries himself in a corner. That’s strange, Daniel thought, and he asked his uncle Ian about this dog who runs and hides if you go to stroke him, and according to Uncle Ian he’s from a home, and the previous owners, or someone, they’ve only raised their hands to him to hit him. So now he doesn’t recognize it if you try to be friendly. He either runs away or, if you’re unlucky, he goes to bite you, only he’s getting better now. The thing is—

  “This was last Sunday, was it?” Sandra said.

  “That’s it,” Daniel said. “I remember because I missed most of the chart countdown, it was half over by the time we got home.”

  “Because actually,” Sandra said, drawing out her London word, “actually, all of last Sunday you were at home, and the car was in the driveway all day, and around four o’clock you changed your shirt, and about five o’clock a girl came round and you and her were snogging in your room without closing the curtains. So that’s all a lot of complete rubbish.”

  Daniel looked at her with appreciation and, all at once, burst into laughter.

  “You must think—” Sandra said, laughing too, not unkindly. “Do you know what all that sounded like? It sounded like the sort of rubbish you have to listen to in Assembly, that sort of story, and at the end of it they explain what it’s all about. So I’m a little dog, who someone’s supposed to have been beating, and you, you’re—”

  “All right,” Daniel said. “But, you know—”

  “Yes,” Sandra said. “I suppose I do know.”

  He hadn’t fancied her, not at all; anyway, she was two years beneath him, and everything about her until that moment had given off a sense of what he didn’t like, the prospect of gratitude. Until the day before yesterday, he’d never bothered to notice her, and until that exact moment he hadn’t understood why he was making any effort to speak to her. He didn’t need what most people needed, confirmation of what he was best at through the tribute of grateful inferiors, and he wouldn’t, unlike Ben and the others, stoop to fingering any girl to be rewarded with panegyrics, ecstatic descriptions of the person he was hoping to become one day. Barbara’s speeches on the subject had, as they grew more and more exuberantly tearful, sickened him a bit by the end. He hadn’t known why he was taking the trouble with this girl, but she’d laughed at him and it was a little clearer. She wouldn’t, after all, be grateful for anything, and if there was still no possibility of sex between them, there was something newer, stranger, the spectacle of someone who gave the impression of being quite a lot like him.

  “I hate this place,” she said, as they were coming up to their houses, hers facing his.

  “Give it a chance,” he said, and broke into a run, down their drive. It was a strange thing for her to say. It was a nice clear day; you could feel the sweetness in the air off the moors, and see it, too. Between the houses, a complicated or an ordinary garden, but then, on that side of the road, you could still see the way the trees stopped and then there was just the moor, rolling off into purple and green hills, sunshine, sky. It wasn’t to be hated, this place. He didn’t mind the houses, the way they were sort of alike but all made slightly different. It was a bit ridiculous, he could see that. They all had the same porch, white-painted and glazed in, which most people left unlocked, and they all had an up-and-over garage—in the morning, you could hear the same creaking and hollow bang up and down the street as people set off—though everyone had painted their door a different colour, making sure they didn’t have the same colour as the next house. Some had net curtains up and down, some only upstairs, one or two not at all, and mostly you could see the same thing, in the front bedroom, against the window, the unfinished back of a dressing-table. He supposed it was best to put it there, for the light, when the mothers put their makeup on. His mother, too.

  He fumbled in his pocket for his key, putting the moment off. For some reason, talking to the girl over the road, thinking about the estate, he’d managed to lose his family in an idea of a family, an idea of how every family up and down the road was more or less the same, and more or less nothing in particular. He’d felt quite happy about that. It was only at the thought of his mother in particular, and her particular dressing-table, that it came back to him. After all, you did have to go back to your own family, your mum and your dad and your sister and your brother, those particular people. He let himself in. Sandra, over the road, turned and watched the door shut behind him.

  Sandra had made a mistake, almost her first day: she’d chosen the wrong girls, chosen them for the wrong reason. She’d chosen the ones brushing their hair. The first day she’d been assigned a place, staring boldly back at the kids, and the fat girl she’d been put next to, she’d answered her questions coldly and shortly. Yes, she came from London. No, it didn’t seem that strange. She looked round the class for the people on her sort of level. She thought she identified them.

  At the lunch break, the three girls she’d spotted stayed in, clustered at the back, got out their hairbrushes, started to talk. Sandra stuffed her books into her bag, wandered over casually.

  “I’m not going again,” one said.

  “You say that,” another said. “You always go, you. You love disco.”

  “It’s always same,” the third said. “You get off wi’ another lad every Friday, every Monday it’s ‘I’m not going, I’m not showing my face down there again.’ You love that disco, you, it’s only because of you—”

  She broke off, and they examined Sandra, up and down, still brushing their hair, back from their face.

  “Is there a disco?” Sandra said.

  “I weren’t talking to you,” one said.

  “I know,” Sandra said. “I overheard, though. I love going to discos.”

  The girls laughed.

  “You come from London,” one said.

  “Yes, I do,” Sandra said. This seemed a little less unfriendly; and it hit upon what Sandra thought of as one of her main points.

  “There’ll be discos there and all,” a girl said.

  “Right posh ones,” the main girl said.

  “I suppose some of them are,” Sandra said.

  But this seemed incredibly funny to the three girls. “I suppose,” one said, putting on a voice, a really awful voice. It was nothing like Sandra’s. Sandra didn’t walk away; she just stayed there, waiting. The classroom smelt of sour milk, of babies; it was the dusty black curtains, like black-out curtains. This was a room for German, and all around it were posters, their corners peeling away from the adhesive like the ears of animals. They showed all sorts of things in sunshine: cathedrals, rivers, a pointy castle made out of white icing like the tower of a beleaguered German virgin, and on each a few words in German. Die, one of them began to advise.

  They did German here. They hadn’t in London. Sandra expected she’d catch up, learn how to speak it in time. It was on Thursday afternoons, for only an hour.

  “What else,” one of the girls said, “do you suppose?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sandra said. “I’ve only just got here. When’s the disco?”

  “It’s on Fridays.”

  “It’s at the youth centre.”

  They looked at her. There seemed to be nothing more, and not really an invitation. Sandra’s prepared account of herself lay there,
uselessly. She’d wanted to say some London things; she’d wanted to introduce herself as someone who had been used to going to the West End on a Saturday, to buy a new outfit, once or twice a month; she’d wanted to impress, and had heard herself, in advance, telling the whole class about the time she’d actually seen—who?—in Selfridges once. There were London discos, of course there were. The reality, the trip on the train up to London once a year and, once, tea in Selfridges where they’d seen and marvelled at Thora Hird, would have done to improve upon. She’d have offered it on the slightest invitation.

  “Right,” she said. “I can’t wait.” She walked away and out of the classroom. It was better than nothing.

  “You’ve really got everything sorted out,” her mother said, at home, passing the door of Sandra’s room. It was true. One of the things that drove Sandra mad about the rest of them was the way they left their stuff as it was. They’d unpacked the removal boxes, most of which were standing about uselessly in the room behind the dining room, as if they’d ever find any kind of use for them ever again. It was amazing to her that they’d ever managed to unpack everything they needed to live in this house. It was a perfect outrage, the way this family lived. When she grew up, she would do something about it; meanwhile, she wouldn’t live the way this family lived.

  Objectively, it was a perfect outrage, too, that only two days after signing on at this glass-fronted boutique of hatred, she was going to be asked to change into stupid clothes and run about for a whole afternoon, less one initial half-hour. There it was on the timetable she’d copied down from her unwilling neighbour. Wednesday afternoon, periods 6–8, Games. Games! Pretentious name. At least when it was called PE, as it had been in London, the stupidity of it had been obvious from the start in a name that was childish rather than ambitious. She’d always hated PE—hated rounders, hated running, hated netball, hated fucking hockey with the clunk-clunk-whack of the bully-off, hated that more than anything. If she’d ever been likely to be any good at it, she’d meticulously trained herself out of it with a slouching derision. Objectively, it was, after all, much more mature not to be keen on games, to run about in a field like a sheep to the directions of a whistle. This attitude, more than one games mistress had remarked in exasperation, spread easily to the other girls until all a class could provide in the way of a hockey team was two keen-as-mustard morons up at the front, and then (they said afterwards, their voices rising) that Sandra Sellers’s cronies imitating her standing round the goal mouth, resting on the blades of their hockey-sticks as if they were shooting-sticks, folding their arms and comparing bosoms, nattering on as if they were in a cocktail bar with a cigarette-holder each. Which was where they’d end up, sure as eggs is eggs.

  Well, that was the general view. It amused but slightly disturbed Sandra, since the memory of the games mistress in a fury tended to bring up the reminder of what she didn’t now have, a set of cronies. Nevertheless, even the lack of that wouldn’t change her attitude to games—she didn’t need cronies to shore it up, she’d recruited half a class to her initially solitary stance.

  She’d made all that clear to her mother, on that awful day when they’d traipsed round the shops of Sheffield, list in hand, trying on the strictly defined items of uniform. A blazer with a badge, two blue skirts, pale blue blouses (the specifications of the list grew almost hysterical at this point), thick black tights, a tie, and even new black shoes. The shoes were the only thing that could have been carried over from her last, London, school uniform to this one. But whether through absent-mindedness or the misplaced generosity that had been bribing her and Francis for weeks with all sorts of unlikely or undesirable purchases, her mother had decided to buy her new ones. The shoes could have been carried over; everything else from the London uniform was purple, and couldn’t be reused. (That was probably the reasoning behind the purple in the first place.) So they trailed joylessly round the department store—Cole Brothers, wasn’t it?—radiating respectable necessity rather than any sense of fun. Her mother kept saying, “Well, that’s really quite OK,” and, objectively, the overall tone of this uniform was less ghastly than the old mad-girls’ purple. Finally, they’d crossed everything off List A. They’d half a dozen plastic bags, full of clothes. It could have been the best shopping trip ever. List B was next, and together, by the foot of the second-floor escalators, as people pushed past them, they examined it doubtfully. List B was sportswear. “Excuse me,” her mother said, to a passing man in a white shirt and a tie, a green enamel badge at his left nipple, “can you tell me where girls’ sportswear is?” Girls’ sportswear was, it seemed, over the road in a different building. “Laces must be black and 12” in length;” at the turn of the escalators, her mother and she looked at the list and, with a consideration that could only be called mature, concluded that they’d done enough by obeying the crazy force of the instructions in List A. As for List B, sportswear—“PALE BLUE hockey shirt to match school colours,” whatever they were, her mother and she were of the same mind, apparently.

  “You know,” her mother had said, “I don’t see what’s wrong with the sportswear you’ve already got. I mean, most of it isn’t more than six months old and, let’s face it, you’ve hardly worn it.”

  “I’ve worn it from time to time,” Sandra said, and her mother laughed.

  “That’s about the sum of it,” she said. “What colour is it? This says everything’s got to be pale blue, but what the point of that is when it’ll be covered in mud in ten minutes …”

  “Mine wouldn’t be,” Sandra said. “I can’t remember the colour. I think it might be a sort of navy.”

  “Not purple,” her mother said.

  “No, it’s definitely not purple,” Sandra said.

  “Thank heaven for that,” her mother said. “No point in looking any more absurd than you would in any case.”

  “Yes,” Sandra said sycophantically, now that she’d got her mother on her side, “you do look an idiot, objectively speaking.”

  “Well, blue’s blue,” her mother said. “I can’t face sportswear just now. You’ll just have to tell them that your stuff’s nearly new, that you’ll buy the proper colours when it wears out.”

  “Never, I hope,” Sandra said.

  “And that your parents aren’t made of money. No, don’t say that. Shall we go and get a cup of tea? It looked quite nice on the fourth floor.”

  “Did you like games when you were my age?” Sandra said, when they were settled over tea and two scones, one cheese, one sultana. She put it naïvely, wanting mostly to know.

  “No, of course I didn’t,” her mother said. “I hated it. I used to long to be grown-up, because, you know, when I was thirteen, the main point of growing up wasn’t boys, or having a house of your own, or a job or any of that. I always thought that the best thing about growing up was that you wouldn’t have to go out in the cold and run around in a stupid way once a week. It was Thursday afternoons. I can still remember, I used to dread it. Of course, that was after the war, and there wasn’t the equipment to be had. There were only enough hockey-sticks for one match at a time, at my school, so you only got to play that once every four weeks. Not that that was much to be looked forward to. And a bomb had dropped on the tennis courts, which in the winter were supposed to be netball courts, so that was out too. It was three weeks out of four we went cross-country running, as it was called.”

  “I hate cross-country running,” Sandra said. “They’ve started calling it orienteering.”

  “What’s the difference?” her mother said.

  “Well, they’re supposed to give you a compass,” Sandra said. “But they don’t really need to. It was only past the parade and then down the Wandle for a mile, you’d have to be an idiot to get lost.”

  “Yes, I hated that,” her mother said. “It was only running through the woods and being shouted at if you came last, or got a stitch and walked for a bit.”

  “Are you done there?” a table cleaner said, fat, blonde and
permed, hovering over them.

  “Not quite,” her mother said, pouring out a drop more tea from the bottom of the pot. “I always thought I could never marry a man who had the least interest in sport. But fortunately I met your father, who I don’t think has ever run five paces in his life, so the question didn’t arise.”

  It was true; you absolutely couldn’t imagine her father taking part in any kind of organized sport. If the television, switched on, should come up with a green field and a cluster of figures, a round object or objects, whether it was football or snooker or bowls, her father would give a prompt yelp and be up and kneeling, stabbing at the channel controls on the mock-teak front of the “box.” The only other thing that had exactly that effect was any kind of opera, which didn’t come up so often. Sandra tried to shrink him in her mind, gave him a fresh face—the glasses and the quizzical look could stay—as he was in the photos with Grandma Sellers and Uncle Henry, then tried to send the little chap off on a cross-country run. It was no good. He hadn’t gone five paces in her mind before he was shinning up a conveniently appearing apple tree, settling among the branches and starting to scrump. That was the sort of thing he could be seen doing.

  “I think we’d better go,” her mother said crisply, “since they’re so keen to have their table back”—this last directed at the permed fat blonde who had returned and was flicking with a dirty tea-towel at imaginary flies. “I tell you what, we’ve done enough for one day, shall we take a taxi home?”