The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  But the house, too, had altered. The distancing had not happened solely in his head, from his change of dwelling and experience. Between the unmoving objects, the treasures chosen and bought and placed with care, the lives had begun to shift. Leo had glimpsed this the night before when, in the pantry, he had understood what happened when his father went up and down the supermarket’s aisles, thinking about nobody but himself and what he might like to eat over the next few days. Now, going through the house, Leo felt that it had lost a quality of crowded possession.

  The telephone in the hallway began to ring. That was what it had always been like – some urgent professional call for his father. Perhaps now it was his father, calling with some important information, but he let it ring and in a while the caller hung up without leaving a message. The telephone ringing in an empty house – a house empty of father and mother and sisters and brother – and Leo cocking his head as if one of them were about to hurry forward to answer it. The Trimphone warble was specific, and now he went from room to room, recognizing what in particular it reminded him of. Those three or four years before he left home to go to Oxford, what his life had mainly been devoted to was cunt.

  He must have fucked a girl in almost every room in the house – even on the polished dining table, wobbly and not as much fun as it had promised. The kitchen table had been more solid – Barbara – and, of course, the armchair where he had begged that Chinese girl with the beautiful smooth skin to sit and part her legs and let him kneel and taste her. ‘Let me taste you,’ he had said – he could almost laugh at it now, and she had certainly stared. Six months later he would have said, ‘Let me taste your cunt.’ She was one of the first he had had. It had been in the sitting room because he hadn’t known how to ask her to come upstairs. Carol, her name was. And in his room, too, the first time had been Jayne, with the y and the untrimmed pubes, the wonderful smell she had blushed to be complimented on, the light floating of hair on arms and legs – she was a nice girl, adorably unkempt, the youngest of four sisters. She had had every make-up tip, every look tried out on her bullied features every day since she was six. And the look of bewildered amusement, the fascination on her face when it had come to it! She had averted her eyes only when she had seen the stupid poster of the tennis girl scratching her bum that had been above his bed for ever. To his astonishment, she had cried afterwards. She had been so tender and happy and even sympathetic towards his gormless gratitude, and when she started crying he’d comforted her and told her he’d always love her. Downstairs the phone had been ringing, and he’d ignored it, gazing into her face with the sincerity of a love with no end. He’d taken the poster down a few days later – he wanted nice girls like Jayne to see the point of him, not just nasty girls who wanted to tell him he was gorgeous, a dreamboat, a hunk in miniature. They couldn’t believe he was only fifteen before taking their bras off and pushing his head down between their tits. Not just them. And Victoria – not Vicky, Victoria – and her red hair and the way she had sneered at him on the walk home from school, and called him ‘little boy’ and said he was like a dog bothering her and all her friends. Look at the little man’s Adidas bag. He thinks he’s really something, look at him! And one day he had said to her, ‘Why not come round and find out how little I am?’ And she had walked on with him disdainfully, like someone carrying out a bet, her friends calling rudely after them. He had sworn she was going to walk with him to the front door and then carry on, not looking back; but she hadn’t. Victoria with her red hair had walked up the drive with him and had come in – with his beating heart he hadn’t believed it until the front door was shut behind her. She led him upstairs and into a bedroom. It had been Blossom’s room. Victoria had looked up at one point and said, ‘You don’t sleep in here, for God’s sake.’ He hadn’t realized before then that her strutting contempt was mounted to hide the fact that she was never quite sure she had understood. A life of being ridiculed by her brothers and father for being slow on the pick-up. It was filled with pictures of ponies, Blossom’s room.

  He remembered all of those girls – after Victoria, they had come round to him, the female half of the species. He’d known, after Victoria, what the secret was – not to beg, not to apologize, just to know with perfect certainty that the girl, the woman you had brought within your orbit and decided to fuck, was going to want to fuck you. They were already persuaded or they were not going to be persuaded. After Victoria he never had to wear anyone down; he did not pester, was always aloof, his gaze moving steadily over the surface of an irresistible girl as if he had hardly registered her. When his parents and his sisters and his brother were out of the house, for three years, his life and the house he lived in were alive with cunt. That was how it was. Once on the stairs, even.

  And then when he had come back from Oxford after that disastrous four months. He had had to try it out. The outrageous line had failed in Oxford. Even the level gaze had failed in Oxford. It had been greeted, once or twice, by its challenging partner, a level gaze in return. He could not understand it. It was as if they all knew what it was he had said. And soon it was his gaze that shyly dropped, in a college bar facing a girl who knew that, two years before, she wouldn’t have been let in here, across a table in a seminar room, in the faculty library. The women had scented blood and, instead of going after him, had laughed and turned and gone elsewhere. The way Oxford had misread him, and that last night in January with that man Tom Dick outside his room with half a dozen drunk cronies, hammering on the door at three a.m. and shouting, ‘Shy boy! Shy boy!’ Had he ever been a success with women? He had returned to Sheffield in failure and misery at the beginning of February. It had been a month before he had raised his gaze in a bar, and made sure it did not quail, waited for his gaze to stay level and draw a woman to him. It had worked again, as it had not worked in Oxford. He had brought the woman home; she had stayed the night. She was called Lynne. It was a month after that that he had met Catherine. That had been a triumph, too. Framed by a life of accustomed triumph, by the ability to get whatever he wanted, however, there were those four months in Oxford.

  He was at the foot of the stairs. He ought to phone Lavinia – no, Hugh, no, Lavinia – and find out whether their mad father had said anything to either of them about divorcing Mummy. Lavinia would be in the office; Hugh would be at home, and quite possibly still asleep. He thought. This was always the dark part of the house, the wood panelling and the lack of windows seeing to that, but also, outside the front door, the heavy growth of wisteria casting a shade over the porch. There was a figure outside in the gloom. It might be peering in, or just deciding whether to ring the doorbell. Leo came to his senses. He opened the door.

  ‘I think it must be your father,’ the small person said.

  ‘I mean,’ she went on. ‘I came round to say thank you – it must be your father I was going to thank.

  ‘It is your father – I mean, you’re his son, aren’t you?’ she said. She was very young, her tiny hands fluttering a little as she talked. She had known that it would be him answering the door and not his father. She had started talking, unprepared, as soon as Leo had opened the door, her eyelids half closing defensively, and had begun to explain things starting with the wrong end.

  ‘Yes, that’s my dad,’ Leo said. ‘Did you want him? He’s down at the hospital with my mum.’

  ‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘Only to –’ She flapped, not knowing what else to do.

  Leo hung on to the side of the front door. She had given some thought about what to wear: the grey skirt and paler grey sweater were new, and the burst of orange in a little silver and plastic brooch her only concession to a colour she had been told she ought to wear more of. It was the brooch that made Leo decide he ought to help her out. ‘You live next door, don’t you?’ he said.

  Perhaps she thought she had already explained, had ventured into detailed conversation. ‘I’m Aisha,’ she said. ‘I’m not living next door – I’m just visiting for the weekend and a day o
r two more.’

  ‘Come in,’ Leo said. ‘I can do you a cup of tea and perhaps a biscuit, but more than that – anyway, come in. It’s nice to meet you. You’re in the –’

  ‘Everyone says it’s the Tillotsons’ house,’ the girl said. ‘I never met the Tillotsons. I expect they’re sitting somewhere everyone describes them as the new family living in the Smiths’ house.’

  They were in the kitchen now.

  ‘Your dad is astonishing – a genius. Yesterday. He was straight over the fence and putting Raja right in no time at all. My brother, Raja. Mummy hardly had time to scream, even. Your dad was as cool as a cucumber. Raja’s back home now, with nothing to show for it but a gauze bandage round his neck. His brother keeps on at him to take the bandage off but he only wants to see the hole in his neck.’

  ‘You’d have to ask my father,’ Leo said, smiling, ‘but I don’t think he should do that. Probably.’

  ‘I haven’t been in here before,’ Aisha said. She looked around her at the kitchen. She might have been observing it with the weight of evidence and experience, comparing it as Leo had to the kitchen he had known, groaning under the weight of six adults or near-adults with bellies to fill. ‘I haven’t been in any of the neighbours’ houses – well, only as far as the hallway of one. I’m Aisha – I’m so sorry I didn’t introduce myself.’

  ‘Aisha,’ Leo said. He had got it the first time. Then he realized what she meant, and said, ‘I’m Leo Spinster. I don’t live here either.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ Aisha said. She almost glowed. She might have prepared all this, and at the last, when it came to getting it out, found that there was something on her tongue that was keeping her from saying it in the right order. ‘Your kitchen’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s so nice to come somewhere just next door where, you know, that oven’s been there for ever, and the kettle and the toaster.’

  ‘The toaster doesn’t work,’ Leo said. ‘It wasn’t working at Christmas and it still isn’t working.’

  ‘You should see our house,’ Aisha said. ‘Mummy’s gone mental. Every single thing is new – well, not quite everything, but she said she’s not going into a new house with all the old things. She’s got a fridge that opens the wrong way because of where she wanted to put it in the kitchen. She’s got her own money, the houses in Wincobank she lets out, and she’s spending like a Rothschild on new stuff just now.’

  Leo’s face must have responded somehow to this; he had, he understood, been wandering about the house touching things in wonderment and alarming fulfilment, picking up objects that had always been there: a piece of rock crystal on a shelf, not seen through years of dull observation, had possessed the deep shock of a truth recognized immediately, as if for the first time. He had picked up object after object, turning them round and inspecting them in the familiar light of the empty house, letting them lead to the memory of one fuck after another.

  ‘Not even the bloody clock’s telling the time,’ Leo said. ‘Nothing works in this house.’

  Aisha looked up at the Swiss railway clock that hung over the stripped-pine door to the hallway. She flicked her wrist upwards for Leo to see; she wore a man’s heavy watch. Now Leo looked at the clock, he didn’t know why he’d thought it had stopped: it was ticking solidly, reliably, just as it ever had. It was twenty to two.

  ‘What time is it?’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t put my watch on this morning.’

  ‘Twenty to two,’ Aisha said. ‘Have you got to be somewhere?’

  ‘I thought it was about ten o’clock,’ Leo said. ‘I’m supposed to be at the hospital. Oh, God, I was supposed to book a taxi and everything.’

  ‘Which hospital? I can take you. Mummy’s not using her car. Don’t you drive?’

  5.

  Aisha told him to wait there, just at the end of the drive, and dashed off – scampered, you could almost say. Leo could meet them all another day, she called over her shoulder. Mummy’s car was a red Fiat, a little run-around for town. Aisha briefly opened her front door, shouted something, and slammed it without waiting for an answer. She jumped into the car and, with a reckless burst of speed, reversed through the gates and onto the street. She rolled down the window. ‘Hop in,’ she said. ‘Other side. Come on, quick.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ Leo said. With the act of driving, Aisha had taken on an air of capacity and system; the sense that she was doing things out of order, of staring and nearly giggling and not knowing what came next had quite gone. He got in. ‘Where have your parents come from?’

  ‘Bangladesh,’ Aisha said. ‘Or do you mean just now? Hillsborough. They’ve moved from Hillsborough. Which one did you mean?’

  ‘Did you go to school there?’

  ‘In Hillsborough? Yes, mostly, but then I got taken out and I did my A levels at the high school. My mum wanted me to go to Oxford. It’s all right, you can ask where my family come from, being brown and all that.’

  Leo had, in fact, retreated in an embarrassed way at the thought that he had been asking an English girl where her family came from. He gave a shy grunt.

  ‘Look at that woman,’ Aisha said. ‘She’s really going for it, isn’t she, with the Cornish pasty? Go on – go on – can you get it all in in one go? Can you? My God, the things you see in Broomhill on a Monday afternoon.’

  ‘I think I was at school with that woman,’ Leo said.

  ‘Surely not,’ Aisha said. ‘You were asking – I was born here, but then they went back to Bangladesh. That’s where we come from. Daddy was doing a PhD in Sheffield, in engineering, and he was married to Mummy and she came over and I was born here. All I can remember is the blue door we had by the side of a shop and the Alsatian that sat in the shop downstairs. When he finished his PhD we all went back. I don’t know why he didn’t stay – it was a terrible time over there. And then after 1971 Daddy said there was a duty. He had to stay and work at the university in Dhaka, the university needed him and, really, the country was going to need people like him. He says it now and it’s like a big joke that anyone would ever need someone like him, but Mummy says that that’s what people used to say, back in 1971. Duty – they used to sing songs about it, probably.’

  ‘What happened in 1971?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Aisha said, concentrating on the road. ‘I forget not everyone talks about it all the time over breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bangladesh happened – there was a war of independence. It was part of Pakistan and then there was a war and it became independent but very poor, which is how it’s stayed since. Lots of people were killed, you know. I had an uncle who was killed. I just about remember him. We talk about 1971 like you’d talk about 1066 if it happened twenty years ago.’

  ‘I don’t really know anything about it at all,’ Leo said. ‘I went to India once with my wife, before we got married. I thought it would be romantic.’

  ‘It’s sometimes quite romantic, I believe,’ Aisha said. In the little rectangle of mirror, he caught her eye; it flicked away. ‘I’ve not been, apart from once to Calcutta where we were changing planes and Daddy thought we’d stop over for two or three days to see things. Where did you go?’

  ‘Rajasthan. Temples and palaces. There was a night in a really expensive hotel, a palace on a lake, but apart from that it was terrible backpacker hostels. My wife got awful food poisoning – she thought she was going to die or have to be shipped out.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘Well, she was fine in the end, no harm done.’

  ‘No, I meant …’

  ‘Oh – we’re divorced. Is that what you meant? Her food poisoning and some camels and the traffic – that’s what I remember about India. I must go to Calcutta,’ he said, in a rush.

  ‘That wasn’t romantic, I don’t think,’ Aisha said. ‘I remember little bits about Bangladesh when I was little, but it’s all confused now. We’ve only been back once since Mummy and Daddy left definitively. They came over in 1975 ‒ they said enough was enough. The twins were born here.
They were born in the Northern General, actually – I remember going through the snow to visit Mummy with some flowers and seeing the pair of them for the first time. It was really the snow more than the twins I was excited about.’

  ‘Your family’s all here, then,’ Leo said.

  ‘Yes, they all came over in dribs and drabs,’ Aisha said. ‘Most of them after ’seventy-five, though Mummy and Daddy were the first. No, I tell a lie. Aunty Sadia and Uncle Mahfouz came over here before then. Do you have any war criminals in your family? I’ve hardly met Aunty Sadia or Uncle Mahfouz, apart from maybe when I was about two years old and had no judgement.’

  ‘How glamorous, having war criminals in your family,’ Leo said.

  ‘Well, I don’t really know what they’re supposed to have done,’ Aisha said, ‘but we’re never allowed to meet them and Daddy always says that if everyone got what they deserved Uncle Mahfouz would have been shot by a firing squad years ago, or hanged, or put in the electric chair. Everyone, I mean the aunts, they all say that nothing could ever bring them to have Mahfouz or Sadia in the house again, which is unusual. They never agree with Daddy about anything. Here we are, the Northern General Hospital. How are you going to get back?’

  ‘You’ve been very kind,’ Leo said. ‘I hope you didn’t have anything important to do.’