The Friendly Ones

by Philip Hensher

  Tresco was coming upstairs: right foot, left foot, right foot, pause. His feet on the stairs were deliberate and threatening. You could not mistake them for anyone else’s. That was what Tresco meant by his tread, the unmistakable approach. It was the opposite of silent tracking. Josh’s eyes remained on the page where they were, fairly striking out from time to time, as if he were swimming under superhuman difficulties. And Tresco was standing in the doorway, staring at him.

  ‘Keeping busy,’ Tresco said. ‘Busy busy busy. You like reading, don’t you? Keep on reading. Go on. What a good little boy.’

  Josh said nothing.

  ‘They’re coming today,’ Tresco said. ‘Aunty Hugh and Uncle Lavinia. They’re all coming and then all the uncles and aunties, they’ll be here. Aunty Hugh and Uncle Lavinia. Do you hear what I call them? You know why I call them that?’

  Josh mouthed no, his eyes still on the page. He knew why Tresco called Uncle Hugh and Aunty Lavinia that. Tresco went on explaining the joke because it was the cleverest thing that he had ever thought up by himself. Disdain and terror mingled in the audience whenever Tresco began to speak.

  ‘I call them Uncle Lavinia and Aunty Hugh,’ Tresco went on, ‘because that suits them. He’s such an old aunty, fussing away, and he’s an actor – he likes putting on make-up and pretending to be brave. And Uncle Lavinia’s coming too. Have you seen her? She’s got a moustache, she looks like a man, she’s got short hair like a man, she’s definitely an uncle –’

  ‘She doesn’t have a moustache,’ Josh said.

  ‘She definitely does,’ Tresco said. ‘She’s like Matron at school, she’s definitely got a moustache. She’s a man, she’s a man, she’s a man.’

  ‘Go away,’ Josh said. ‘I’m trying to read.’

  Tresco stared – you could feel it without even raising your eyes. ‘That’s so out of order. I’ve got as much right to be here as you do. Don’t you …’ Tresco said, but then he had a better idea: he picked up a hardback book from the shelf by the door and flung it, hard, at Josh. Josh leant back; it missed him by miles. The book lay on the floor, torn.

  ‘I’m going to say you did that,’ Tresco said, twisting and raising his arms in an archery shape. ‘I bet you wish you knew what I know.’

  ‘Is it that Uncle Lavinia’s a man and Aunty Hugh’s an old woman? You’ve done that,’ Josh said. There was a fierce exhilaration in him in choosing to speak to Tresco like this.

  ‘It’s not that, you pillock,’ Tresco said. ‘It’s something you really want to know. You know Granny and Grandpa, right? Do you know why we’re here?’

  ‘Have you only just worked that one out? They think Granny’s going to die,’ Josh said. ‘What did you think we were here for?’

  ‘She’s not going to die,’ Tresco said. ‘She’s going to die but not for a while yet. I’m bored of this place, but Mummy says we’ve got to stay. You know why?’

  Josh lowered his eyelids, the nearest he could come to shaking his head.

  ‘Grandpa’s decided he wants to get divorced from Granny,’ Tresco said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Josh said. ‘That’s just making stuff up.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Tresco said. ‘Mummy told me. She thinks he’s gone mental.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Josh said.

  ‘You know what else is true that I bet you don’t know about?’ Tresco said. ‘You’re not going back to that school you go to in Brighton. You’re going to go to my school. Starting in September. I heard Mummy on the phone.’

  ‘That’s not true either,’ Josh said. ‘Mummy couldn’t afford to send me to your school, and even I know you’ve got to take an exam to get let in for nothing. I haven’t taken an exam. So I’m not going. QED.’

  ‘Yes, but what you don’t know is Mummy – my mummy – she’s so fed up of having someone like you in the family, she’s talked Daddy into paying for you to go to a proper school. We’re paying. So you’d better be grateful. What we do to bugs. Ah, yes. First the bugs line up in their rugby kit in front of the fifth-formers. Then there’s confession, when anyone who knows one of the bugs, they come forward and they tell everything they know. That’s going to be me. That happens in the jakes, what they call lavatories at school. You say toilets, I believe. You’ll see. And, oh, what fun it is when we put the bugs through their paces and especially the Confessional Bugs. So QUED.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Josh said. ‘My dad wouldn’t let them do that.’

  ‘Nobody’s asking your dad,’ Tresco said. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet? Before she was ill, Granny decided everything. Now it’s my mum. No one asks your dad what he thinks. They’d ask Grandpa what he thinks first, and they wouldn’t pay any attention to him either. No, you’re going to school where I go. What fun we’ll have.’

  ‘They wouldn’t send me to a school like that. And it’s QED, not QUED, you moron.’

  ‘You wait and see,’ Tresco said, his voice thickened and muddled with excitement. All this time, all through his bestial explanation, he had been roaming around the room, picking things up and throwing them at Josh – a cushion, a wooden bowl, three or four books, a carved stone apple. There had been an ominous crack when the stone apple hit the headboard of the bed, though Josh wouldn’t investigate until Tresco was gone. ‘You didn’t think Mummy was going to put up with having a cousin of ours come to stay who went to some pit in Brighton? It’s amazing that you can read and write. What’s that crap you’re reading? Janet and John. Enid fucking Blyton. Give a fairy story to the kiddies and run a fucking mile, that’s what your school does.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Josh said. ‘Daddy would have told me.’

  ‘I told you – it’s nothing to do with Uncle Leo. This is the school my father went to we’re talking about, and Granddaddy too. We’re not talking about the school your father went to, any of that. So get it straight, get it into your head. Number one. Granny and Grandpa are getting divorced. Number two, from September, you’re in my school and you’re two years under me, a bug.’

  Perhaps now was the moment for Josh to produce the Unspeakable Word. He looked at Tresco. He said it.

  ‘But you’re not going to be there,’ he said.

  ‘Ha-ha,’ Tresco said. ‘The possibility of me not being there – zero.’

  ‘They had to write to Aunt Blossom about a regrettable incident, didn’t they?’ Josh said. ‘It was on Monday, the second of April, when the usual inspection of dorm rooms takes place. On this occasion, we found a bottle of Southern Comfort imperfectly concealed in Tresco’s bedside locker and, still more worryingly, a small quantity of an illegal drug. That’s what they wrote. With great regret they were obliged to ask your mother and father to collect you without delay. With a view to the welfare of the other boys in their care, they regretted that it would be impossible to accept Tresco, that’s you, back for the summer term. Fees paid or due are not remissible. So I don’t think they’re going to take you back, Tresco, and I don’t think they’re going to send me there anyway. You’re full’ – Josh spoke confidently, and it was the first time he had used the expression, heard from Tamara and Tresco – ‘of shit.’

  ‘You’re full of shit,’ Tresco said. ‘You’re – The fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘I saw the letter,’ Josh said. ‘It was on Aunt Blossom’s desk. I read it.’

  ‘Little sneak,’ Tresco said. ‘Going round sneaking. I’m going to –’

  ‘But I read it,’ Josh said calmly. ‘You’re not going back to that school. I’m still here because Daddy phoned my school and told them that he wanted me here because of Granny. If anyone told your school that, they’d probably say you needed to be a man or something and they wanted you in gym by two p.m. They would.’ Tresco didn’t even try to deny this. ‘You’ve been expelled. I bet Uncle Stephen’s hard at work at this exact moment finding a school to send you to in September. Borstal.’

  Underneath, in the driveway of Granny and Grandpa’s house, there was a s
plash of gravel, a grey car drawing up. He didn’t recognize it. It was Uncle Lavinia who stepped out, and then, on the other side, Aunty Hugh in a bright white shirt, the car keys in his hand. Uncle Lavinia said something to Aunty Hugh. They looked up at the window where Josh was looking down, and waved. He forced himself not to duck back inside.

  ‘You poor idiot,’ Tresco said. ‘This is life. It’s not fair. Wilkinson was caught selling that stuff in Study – selling it, not just smoking it – and they expelled him but his people offered to pay for a new swimming-pool and they took him back. It’s only an extra year or two’s fees and Wilkinson said it’s all tax deductible. Your uncle Stephen’s on the phone at this exact moment, offering to pay for a new cricket pavilion. By the time I’m done with that place I’ll be selling spliffs to the deputy headmaster.’

  ‘Who’s the deputy headmaster?’

  ‘A johnny called Wiesel,’ Tresco said.

  6.

  All the rest of the journey, Lavinia and Hugh had talked with conscious safety about unreal possibilities. In the small cabin of the car Hugh had bought, they talked brightly. When Lavinia was older, she would go out and live in a mansion in a poor country, a teak mansion guarded against termites with a special paint only the locals knew about; and with such little money she would manage to live with servants, under fans, in loose cool silk robes, eating the local river fish and rice, with servants, such devoted servants … and Hugh in his Georgian house in a market town, square and white and a cat in the window, they had gone over that. They had been on the road for ten hours, including breaks, or nearly – Hugh said he could not understand it when people said it was only two or three hours on the M1 from London to Sheffield. They had delved into or entirely consumed the Monster Munch, the Caramac, the glowing fizzy drink only Abdul stocked, the Space Raiders and Roses and Quality Street; they felt terrible, in urgent need of an apple and some water. It had been nice.

  But something was being fended away here, and Lavinia understood what it was, in the driveway of her parents’ house. She looked up at her nephews in the window upstairs and waved brightly. She would not think of it. Arriving home was like the end of a happy book, the beginning of Christmas, the world shut out and you in the grip of everyone who had always known you. Daddy talking and Mummy telling you that you didn’t have to listen. Hugh had hurried into the house; Lavinia stood and waved. Tresco, up there in the window, said something to his cousin. It was something funny, she could see that, and she enjoyed the cousins and relations making each other laugh.

  One day Lavinia was going to marry, but it didn’t matter if she didn’t. She was quite good now at meeting people, new people. Not as good as Hugh had always been, walking forward already laughing, his hand held out, but good enough. One day – she hoped not soon – Mummy was going to die, but there would always be new nephews and nieces and in time, even great-nephews and great-nieces. Maybe some children of her own, ones that would look just like Hugh, perhaps. Her sister would always be there to give good advice, and her father to try to talk to them like he had talked to his patients. And her elder brother would always be there to tease her gently, and she would never love anyone as much as she loved her brother Hugh. She knew that. Hugh was always going to come first in her life and she was always going to come first in his. They would grow old in tandem, not together, but in parallel, inseparably. There would always, as long as they lived, be days when they sat together in a car and talked and ate Monster Munch, like children, and made their way together across the bare signposted surface of the earth, trickling and crawling, like a pair of cockroaches, living on crumbs without complaint or hope of anything better.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said brightly.

  ‘That was always the intention,’ Hugh said, hurrying towards the front door. His suitcase was still in the boot. Someone else could deal with it.

  MUMMY’S TIME WITH HUGH

  This would have been in 1979, 1980 something like that – Hugh ought to know the exact year. It was such a hot summer. Or was it a hot summer? Hugh couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he was confusing it with other hot summers. It was that summer when he was hanging out with Alex Dimitriou and Albert Wheatstaff – he wasn’t really called Albert, but that was what he was calling himself that summer – and Madge Stace. That was the summer they all knew they were the cool kids. There were other kids in the year who thought they were cool – there was that terrible girl called Debbie who had been going out with boys five years older than her since she was thirteen and was now, at sixteen, having a relationship with Mr Currie the physics teacher, the gingery-bearded one. There were the smokers, there were the kids who were in the Sheffield running squad. But anyone could see that Albert and Madge and Hugh and Alex Dimitriou were the cool kids. Madge even said that it must be the naffest thing ever to want to be cool; she was really happy that they were such a bunch of outcasts and weirdos and that was that. Debbie Kilton, snogging with a thirty-year-old physics teacher from a mournful provincial town, letting a child molester (Madge said) finger her: that was what was cool, so they weren’t going to be cool.

  Hugh had never been cool. He’d been the short kid, that funny-looking kid, whose dad was the doctor, who never got the point of anything in physics or chemistry. ‘But surely …’ the science masters used to say, exasperated with Hugh’s timidly proffered, blotched and crossed-out homework.

  The funniest day was when Madge said, ‘Let’s have a debauched sex orgy on the crags,’ and they went round to her house and got dressed up as participants in a debauched sex orgy before going out. It was such a scream. Madge had arrived at school six months earlier; she’d moved from Newcastle with her dad who was a lawyer of some sort. She had a neat appearance; she didn’t seem cool; she seemed like the sort of girl mothers approved of. But she made teachers uneasy, with her neat hair and her perfect uniform, unnerving in someone of nearly sixteen. The perfection of her blazer and hair and the neat little knot of the tie, her skirt and dark stockings and polished shoes: it had the air of satire about it as, strangely, her precisely correct but not excessive answers to questions had. ‘Call me Madge,’ she said briskly, with the sideways glance that Alex Dimitriou said drove him slightly crazy. Alex and Hugh and Albert had known each other, had been pretty good friends, but not unified in a pack like they became that summer. Madge had said, ‘Call me Madge,’ and a week or two later, to Albert, who then was just called David, ‘You don’t look like a David to me. No David has what you’ve got, simply perfect cheekbones and the skin of a milkmaid. David. No.’

  That summer of 1979, there was something awful about having a mother called Margaret. Years later, Hugh wondered whether Madge had been Margaret, too, right up to the moment of her arrival in Sheffield. It was not impossible.

  ‘What do you want to call me?’ Albert, then David, had said. They were in the quiet study room in the school library; it had been years since anyone had tried to enforce the quiet rule in there.

  ‘I think you’re more of … an Albert,’ Madge said. And then she was Madge and he was Albert. ‘That is irresistible to the imagination.’

  ‘And what am I?’ Alex Dimitriou said, his eyes dark and longing, his hand resting, blue-ink-stained, on his open history O-level textbook. They were supposed to be revising the Factory Acts or, as Madge had ruefully remarked, in her case vising them.

  ‘Oh, you’re who you are,’ Madge said. ‘Some people! I can’t rechristen everyone. You’re Alex! Everyone knows you’re Alex! Who else could you possibly be?’

  And then at some point in the summer it was Madge who had said they should be cool like Debbie Kilton, and have a sex orgy on the crags. It was brilliant. They went round to Madge’s place, a pleasant square stone house with a mental dog called Josephine hurling herself at the front door at the first ring of the bell. Madge had stolen all sorts of old clothes from the jumble-sale bag, stuff from her granny and her mum and her dad, Margaret and Ronald. She said the thing about a debauched sex orgy was that you had to dress
up for it. The dressing up is the really sexy stuff, she said, and disappeared with the instruction that Alex Dimitriou was going to have to indulge his feminine side: she really felt like going lesbian this morning with a girl in a dress and a beginning moustache.

  Hugh would never forget Madge in a weird floral raincoat and headscarf and orange tights, striking poses on an outcrop of rock, a mascaraed beauty spot by her mouth, shrieking, ‘Fuck me, Rosalind.’ (Rosalind was what Alex was allowed to call himself once he was in Madge’s grandmother’s sage-green ball-gown with a white lace neckline.) There were some brilliant photographs lying around in a shoebox somewhere.

  So it must have been later that year, when the summer was over and they were back at school in the lower sixth that they decided they would all go in for drama. ‘Go in for drama’ was how Hugh put it years later; ‘put on a play’ was how they described it then, like a serious endeavour. It was Madge’s idea, but it also emerged from one of those long, fabulous Wednesday afternoons – they were supposed to be doing sports. They ran enthusiastically to the corner of the road, then walked in a calm and conversational way to Madge’s house, where they sat and had cups of tea all afternoon. ‘We should perform Macbeth,’ she said, ‘not just read it scene by scene in English class.’