The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “I like that story,” he said. “I think we should just ask them that, tell them, ‘Entertain us,’ and see what they do.”

  “They might have heard the story and set something on fire.”

  “No, they won’t,” the Australian said.

  They’d eaten the terrible dinner and, in a great hurry, washed up and returned the kitchen to some state of cleanliness. The sitting room, Jane’s bedroom and the bathroom were clean and tidy, but the Australian’s room had clothes littered all over the floor, its curtains still drawn, the air thick and fetid. “Honestly,” Jane said, and together they picked everything up from the floor and bundled it in a big ball into the wardrobe. They shook out the duvet and laid it over the rumpled and stained bottom sheet; there was nothing much to be done about the pillows, or about the shabby poster, the only thing on the walls, but Jane opened the window to let some air in.

  “The other room’s fine,” Jane said. “I’ve not been in there.”

  They’d arranged for the would-be lodgers to arrive every fifteen minutes—otherwise they’d still be seeing people at midnight—but this proved too little time. The first was the earliest telephoner; it turned out to be a short, cross girl, who started on about how long it had taken her to get here, and that she didn’t know at all. She had what looked like self-cropped hair, a blocky build; you didn’t have to close your eyes to wonder whether she was a boy or a girl still. She poked at everything, stood shaking her head at the view out of the window, asked a lot of questions about the rates and the nearest swimming-pool and the days of rubbish collection, which Jane couldn’t answer. “Well, I suppose it’ll be OK,” she said eventually, sighing, but the Australian explained, on a note of outrage, that they had a few people to see and they’d like a little chat to see if they’d get on, like.

  Jane didn’t have the nerve, but the Australian sat down next to her on the sofa and said to the girl, Lee, “Well, entertain us.”

  She stared at them. They both had little notebooks on their laps, thieved by Jane from work, ring-bound at the top, pens at the ready. “How do you mean?”

  “Come on, entertain us.”

  “I can’t entertain you?” the girl said, outrage rising with her final inflection. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Anything you like,” Jane said.

  “I don’t have any talent?” the girl said. “My sister, she won second prize in a Junior Miss beauty competition? Once when she was eight, when we were on holiday on the Gold Coast? But I never won anything like that?”

  “Do you think beauty is a talent?”

  “Oh, they’ve got to show off their talents in the talent round? It’s not just about beauty, it’s about personality too?”

  “What did your sister do?” the Australian said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “In the Junior Miss beauty competition, what was her talent in the talent round?”

  “I can’t remember,” the girl said.

  The doorbell went. The three of them went on staring at each other.

  “I don’t have a talent like that,” Lee said. “I’m not a performing donkey?”

  “What’s a performing donkey do, when it performs?” the Australian said, when she had gone with instructions to let the next one up.

  “Heaven knows,” Jane said. “She was horrible.”

  The next one was someone the Australian actually knew, who announced himself as Clive. He was immensely fat and breathless, red in the face, mopping himself and his damp hair with fat hands. He took a moment to remember the Australian, but it turned out they’d been at school together when they were nine. Jane was more amazed at this than either of them seemed to be; they took a cursory walk round the flat, then sat down and started reminiscing heavily.

  “And that Mrs. Blewitt, she was a bitch,” Clive said.

  “Oh, yeah, a prize bitch,” the Australian said. “Do you remember that day Carol Walmer pissed herself in class because she kept putting her hand up to be excused and Mrs. Blewitt wouldn’t let her go, kept telling her to put her hand down and wait until break?”

  “I thought she pooed herself.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, she pooed herself. What happened to her?”

  “Carol Walmer? Oh, she’s got herself a good job on a television station, news reporter, and a rich husband and a house in Manly. She doesn’t look like the sort of girl who’d poo herself these days, and I don’t reckon she’d thank you for reminding her of the incident. You’re always seeing her standing on a beach with a microphone talking about the jellyfish.”

  The two of them laughed merrily at the thought.

  “Do you want to see anyone else?” Jane said miserably, when the fat man left, waving goodbye all the way down the stairs.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s a stroke of luck, having an old friend of yours from school turning up like that.”

  “Clive Franklin? He’s not an old friend of mine, I fucking hate him, fucking gutbucket. We don’t want him living with us. If I never saw him again in my life it’d be too soon.”

  “Entertain you?” the third applicant said; he had a nervous appearance, his thin brown hair parted dead down the centre of his head, falling away lankly to either side. If his face was sallow, the skin underneath his hair was dead white, forming a diagnostic line from his forehead to the crown of his head. He spoke in a whine, too loud for the small room.

  “You don’t sound Australian,” Jane said.

  “I’m not Australian,” the man said, as if acknowledging that there were queues of Australians waiting outside. “Nobody ever thought I was before.”

  “No,” the Australian said. “It was just—well, we thought everyone who came for the flat would be Australian.”

  “Are you only prepared to let to Australians?” the man said. “Because if you are, I can inform you that it’s illegal to discriminate on racial grounds. I’m a law student. I know about these things.”

  “It was only that, you know, the magazine we put the ad in,” the Australian said, “it’s mostly meant for Australians in this country. I didn’t know anyone else read it. We’ll let you know.”

  “Ah,” the man said. “I think we’ve established that your firm intention was to discriminate on racial grounds in the letting of the room in this flat. So if you now let to an Australian then I have very strong grounds for suing you. I don’t believe you have any choice but to let the room to me.”

  “Ah, piss off,” the Australian said.

  “No, I’m Australian all right,” the fourth one said. She was a girl, round-faced, her hair in a black bob, wearing a short skirt and leggings and Doc Martens. “I guess if you advertise there that’s what you get mostly. My dad was born in Greece. He’s a dentist.”

  “Oh, yeah, a Greek dentist from Melbourne,” the Australian said, bafflingly, but they both laughed; it must make sense somewhere. Jane’s Australian stereotypes were limited to people standing on their head on the other side of the world, calling each other “mate” with corks in their hats and eating turkey on the beach on Christmas Day, but there must be more stereotypes to enjoy.

  “I’m a walking cliché,” the girl said. “I’m Sophia, you don’t want to know my last name.”

  “Why? What is it?” Jane said.

  “It’s Papadopolous, you’d never manage it,” the girl said.

  “Papadopolous, that’s not too hard,” Jane said.

  “I’m amazed,” the girl said. “So, what can I tell you? Shall I entertain you or something, make you like me?”

  Jane and the Australian man exchanged a glance; he shrugged, smiled.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You really are—you’re saying to people, ‘Go on, tell us a funny story,’ aren’t you?”

  Jane told the story about the Oxford don and the burning newspaper; it went down quite well.

  “Well, I can juggle,” the girl said, “or I can play the guitar, though I only know three songs. I busked in Mun
ich in the summer and every fifteen minutes ‘Streets Of London’ came round. I was outside a pizza restaurant and after two days the owner came out and paid me forty bucks, no—what?—marks just to go away because he couldn’t stand it any more. I haven’t got my guitar with me, though.”

  “It doesn’t sound that entertaining,” the Australian said.

  “So what happened to the bloke who used to have the room?” the girl said.

  It was a bad thing to say: she couldn’t know.

  “He just went,” the Australian said.

  “Bummer,” the girl said. “I bet he left you with a phone bill and half a month’s rent, too. So, do I pass the test? I like you guys.” She bounced up and down on the sofa. It wasn’t her fault, not really.

  “Listen, we’ve got a couple more people to see,” the Australian said. “Can we call you tomorrow?”

  “OK,” the girl said, puzzled. She hadn’t expected that: she’d always been liked where she wanted to be liked, and she was likeable without doing the popular thing. It wasn’t her fault, not at all.

  “I hate that fucking song,” the Australian said, at the end of the evening. They’d been too ambitious, and the interviews had stretched out, the last of the Australians coming in and saying they’d have to be quick, it wasn’t long till the last tube. They’d had a glass of wine with each of them, and they’d grown laconic and precise towards the end, framing their questions in their mouths before trying to bring them out. Not much towards the end had made a lot of sense, and the marks on the notebooks had grown big and bold and unreadable. On the last page, Jane had written in firm, sloping letters, Her Name Was Lola. The whole idea of living with someone who didn’t know what they knew, about the way the previous occupant had quit his tenancy, had grown more and more horrible. She wondered why she hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “I hate, just hate, that fucking song,” the Australian said, stumbling off. “‘Streets of London.’”

  “I didn’t know,” Jane said, “what you meant.”

  “I hate it,” the Australian said, and went into his room, shutting the door behind him. The decision seemed to have been made.

  On Sunday, she met Francis at Putney station. It was a beautiful day, and he was waiting at the entrance with a newspaper under his arm. The sun was shining through his thinning hair as she came through the barrier, a glowing halo about his pink head. It was eleven, but not many people were about; they’d both had breakfast, and went down Putney High Street towards the river. She’d brought an A–Z, not quite sure of London still, but he seemed to know where he was going.

  “I can’t remember what you do,” Jane said. “I’m sure your mother’s told my mother, but I don’t know if she ever told me.”

  “It’s very boring,” Francis said. “I went to Leeds University, but I didn’t like it, and I left after two terms, so I had to get a job. I work for the Civil Service, in the Department of Energy, but it’s not very exciting, I mostly do filing and book rooms for meetings, and photocopying.”

  “That’s, what, mining and power stations and that sort of thing?”

  “That sort of thing. It’s very boring. It’s not what I want to end up doing.”

  Jane told him what she did.

  “That sounds fun,” he said.

  “It’s not that exciting,” Jane said. “It’s not as if we’re allowed to play with the toys all day long.”

  “I think I had a train set made by them,” Francis said.

  “Everyone did,” Jane said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

  “Not really,” Francis said. “I wasn’t really a train-set sort of small boy. It took a long time to set up, and then I didn’t know what to do with it. It just went round and round. In the end I was making up stories about the people who might be sitting in the train carriage. It didn’t really have anything to do with toy trains as such.”

  They stopped and watched a rowing team go by, their movements as smooth and satisfied in the glossy river as an expert chef stirring the last stages of a complex soup.

  “Do you live on your own?” Jane said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m renting a room in a house with a couple of others. They’re all right—I didn’t know them before. I just found the room in an advert in the paper. I wouldn’t have them as my best friends otherwise. You can’t ask anyone back ever, the house is always such a tip. I’m the only one who ever does any tidying up.”

  “Everyone always says that,” Jane said. “No one ever says, ‘I’m the one everyone has to tidy up after.’”

  “Maybe,” Francis said. “But actually it’s true. I do do the tidying up in the house. I’d really like to live with someone a bit nicer. What about you?”

  “I’m sharing with an Australian,” Jane said. “But it’s the same, I just found him through an advert. There used to be another one but—”

  “What happened to the other one?”

  Jane paused. “Look at that,” she said. “Is that a heron?”

  They looked. It was, fastidiously picking its feet through the dense mud, peering down at the water like a treasure-hunter. “I thought the river was supposed to be filthy,” Jane said. “I thought nothing was supposed to be able to live in it.”

  “It’s getting cleaner, supposedly,” Francis said. “I read in the Evening Standard that someone caught a salmon at Battersea—or was it a trout? I can’t remember. We’re quite a long way up the river here, too.”

  “Look at it,” Jane said, and in a moment another heron emerged, walking precisely about the first one but somehow ignoring it, as if waiting for a proper introduction. All at once, the first heron plunged its beak into the water, and emerged; in its beak something glittered, writhed with a spasm of muscle. “Do you know, I think it’s got a fish—” and the heron lifted its neck, straightening itself, the white streak down its front against the dark sleek river like an exclamation mark, and exultantly swallowed. It seemed to pout, and then from its beak shot a long pure jet of water, exactly like an ornamental fountain. In its throat, the fish went on bucking and wriggling, like an Adam’s apple going down. The heron seemed to blink, hugely, and froze, starting to look for another fish; the second heron, bored, stalked away.

  “I’ve never seen that,” Jane said. “I’ve never seen a heron eat a fish before.”

  “Did you see—”

  “The way it sort of spat out the river water—”

  “And you could actually see the fish—”

  “Sort of going down its neck, still alive, the way it was wriggling—”

  “I’ve never seen that, either. You were saying about the other Australian,” Francis said. “The one who left.”

  “Actually,” Jane said, “it’s not a nice story. He killed himself about six weeks ago.”

  “Christ,” Francis said. “Where?”

  “In his room,” Jane said. “I found him.” It hadn’t, oddly enough, occurred to her until she said this that she might be the object of concern in this situation; the ugly scene, which kept presenting itself as a vivid image, wasn’t, by conventional judgement, her problem at all. She was there by chance, an onlooker, and yet it had been mainly horrible for her.

  “Jesus,” Francis said. “Did you have any idea that he might be, you know …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know—depressed …”

  “Oh,” Jane said, seeing that she was going to have to explain the whole thing. “No, he wasn’t depressed, we couldn’t have known. Are you sure you want to know this? It’s not very nice, I said it wasn’t a nice story. He didn’t mean to kill himself, he was just—ah—sorry, he was masturbating, and for some reason he was hanging himself from a belt at the same time.”

  “That’s shocking,” Francis said.

  “You would have thought,” Jane said, “that anyone could have seen in advance that that really isn’t a very sensible thing to do, tie a belt round your neck.”

  “What a way to go,” Francis said.

&nb
sp; A little later, Jane said, “You know, you’re not very much like I remember you.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said. “I remember you as being sort of shy.”

  “Yes, I was shy,” Francis said; he seemed amused.

  “But you don’t seem shy now,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  They walked a little further—Francis told her to mind out, and helped her over a deep hole in the rubble-strewn path. To the right, there were two bicycles on the grass, as if they had fallen drunkenly and stayed there, on the slope down to the river; their riders were at the water’s edge, two teenage boys with their trousers rolled up and their knees to their chests, mirroring each other’s posture, looking out to the river as if it were going to take them somewhere, as if it were some road. It was a strange place for anyone to pause: from the landward side, a strong odour of rotting tomato soup came, the smell of a brewery at a particular point in its cycle. It was a smell Jane knew—there was a brewery at the west end of the town centre in Sheffield, and some days, if the wind was in the right direction, the smell would drift up the Moor.

  “I know about the shyness,” Francis said. “It was the weirdest thing. I was going to Leeds in October, to university, and at the beginning of the summer holidays I decided to sort myself out. Because they’d always been six weeks, but then it would be an extra four, ten weeks. It was something my mother said. I’d always eaten with my knife and my fork the wrong way round, my fork in my right hand—because you do more with your fork, it just seemed more sensible. You could always tell when I’d set the table, everything the wrong way round. My mum said one day, after I’d got the letter from Leeds, she said at dinner, ‘You’re going to have to start eating properly. You can’t go to dinner and eat with your fork in your right hand, people will think you’re an idiot. It’s starting from now.’ So I put the knife and fork the other way round—it was really difficult at first—and persevered until I’d got the hang of it.

  “And then I started thinking about anything else that maybe I could do something about. Everyone else in my year who was going to Leeds was doing a different subject, so I probably wouldn’t be seeing much of them. I thought, It doesn’t matter what I’ve been like, I can start being a different sort of person and no one would ever know. Well, I didn’t think exactly that at the start. It was more like, well, I ought to start wearing proper shoes with laces, and not just slip-ons, because I never liked doing up laces. I know it sounds stupid. And I made myself try different food and tried to get used to red wine, and I even had a go at whisky, though I still don’t like that. Just little things, making me seem a bit more grown-up because if you’re as tall as I am and you eat like a child, people do think you’re an idiot, there’s no way round it.