Down the Figure 7

by Trevor Hoyle

  When Margaret did appear he was taken aback by the vision of dark eyes and hair, fresh skin, and by the summer dress she was wearing, gathered in short puffy sleeves that left her arms bare. He could hardly speak, swallowed hard. ‘We can get the bus if you want. Me mam gave me two bob.’

  ‘I’d rather walk it,’ Margaret said, smiling. She must have known how fantastic she looked, and she did, the smile said so. Doreen Hartley couldn’t have smiled like that, and he doubted whether even Betty Wheatcroft could have. She stood for a moment like a bright generous child, with perfect confidence in herself and the afternoon and perhaps also – this he fervently hoped – in him.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go if we’re going.’

  Terry walked beside her, courteously taking the outside of the pavement, and was happy to see that she was wearing delicate white slippers, which meant that he was taller than her by a fraction – enough, at any rate, to inspire in him a measure of the confidence that Margaret exuded like perfume. He found himself smiling too; it was a wonderful day.

  By the time they had walked along Hamer Lane and were crossing the iron bridge over the railway line Terry was engrossed in relating to her the plot of Biggles & Co, which Margaret seemed to find interesting. Thinking he might have been going on a bit, he asked her which books she liked.

  ‘I don’t read much,’ Margaret said. ‘I get School Friend every week; I like the Silent Three.’

  ‘What are you reading at school?’

  ‘We’re not at school.’

  ‘I meant before the holidays,’ Terry said, feeling daft; she was so self-possessed and in control that he felt like a small child, shy and unsure.

  ‘The last one we read was The Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.’

  ‘Was it really?’ Terry was delighted that they should have both read the same book. ‘I’ve read that too,’ he said eagerly, staggered by the coincidence.

  Margaret shrugged her soft round shoulders under the thin covering of gingham. ‘The boys liked it but the girls weren’t all that keen. It’s about these soldiers in Napoleon’s army.’

  They came to the end of a row of semi-detached houses, grey pebble-dash with red-tiled roofs. Ahead of them the lane narrowed to a single track as it disappeared into the gentle folds of the hills: farmhouses of black millstone were placed at irregular intervals over the green landscape and there were cows grazing in the fields. Grassy banks rose on either side so that the track became a deep line carved in the earth, following the contours of the countryside. Insects droned and whirred in the hot sunshine. Terry took Margaret’s hand. After a few moments, he didn’t know why, but he felt compelled to ask:

  ‘You’re not going with Shap, are you?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I just wondered.’ He looked into her green eyes, which he could have sworn were blue, and the breath quivered in his throat. She had very long thick black eyelashes.

  ‘I thought I was going with you.’

  ‘You are,’ Terry said. ‘You are.’ Buggeration, he was making a botch of it, all for no reason.

  ‘You said behind the garages that we were…’

  ‘Yeh,’ Terry said, annoyed by his own stupid clumsiness. ‘Forget it.’

  They walked deeper into the countryside, the rutted track overgrown with weeds and the banks dense and heavy with vegetation. Occasionally a small animal – a rabbit or a hedgehog – would appear for a fleeting moment in the undergrowth and then vanish in a rustle of leaves. The silence afterwards was almost suspicious, as though pairs of tiny unblinking eyes were watching them from secret places.

  As they approached the ruin of Clegg Hall Terry said, ‘There are supposed to be ghosts in that place. Do you want to have a look inside?’

  The main door of the house was hanging by a single rusty hinge. Inside, the crooked stone floors were covered in rubbish, plaster and broken laths that had fallen from the ceiling. It wasn’t all that spooky because the sunlight was everywhere, broad shafts of it filling the rooms and illuminating the dust motes suspended in the warm air. Obsenities were scrawled on the bare plaster and there were explicit drawings of male and female genitals accompanied by explanatory text. In one corner a pile of excrement attracted the flies, and when disturbed they rose up in an angry buzzing cloud. Terry and Margaret came out again into the sunshine.

  ‘I wouldn’t fancy being a ghost in that place,’ Terry said.

  They walked along the track.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Margaret asked, swinging her hand in his.

  ‘I don’t know. There was this story in the Rover about a bloke who kept having these dreams of things that had happened a long time ago, and when all comes out he’d actually been alive then and died and been born again.’

  ‘I saw a picture like that once,’ Margaret said. ‘Only it was about this girl who they hypnotised and she started telling them what it was like in the olden days. She was in a trance and she didn’t know what she’d said after.’

  ‘Do you go to the pictures a lot?’

  ‘Now and then. I go with me mam and dad sometimes – I saw you in the Regal one time.’

  ‘Yeh, you did. And your dad goes with you?’

  Margaret nodded. ‘Why, doesn’t yours?’

  ‘He never goes anywhere. Well, he goes to watch football on Saturdays and to pay his union sometimes on a Thursday night, but he never goes anywhere else. Me mam’s always on at him not to be such a stick-in-the-mud.’

  ‘Do they row a lot?’

  Terry was tempted to say yes (if only to make Margaret feel sorry for poor Terry and his wretched home life) but in all honesty he didn’t suppose they rowed all that much. Anyway, he’d nobody to compare them with; for all he knew other kids’ parents might be ten times worse. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Me mam threw the clock at me dad one time,’ Margaret confided.

  ‘Did it hit him?’

  ‘No. It broke the clock though and knocked the tap off the geyser.’

  The track opened out and the dirt gave way to cobbles where another lane joined it at right-angles. At the junction an old woman sat behind a trestle-table loaded with bottles of lemonade, cream soda, Vimto and Tizer. There were cardboard boxes full of loose sweets, and jars of liquorice twists and sticks of barley sugar. Underneath the table were two square metal tins with labels saying ‘Smith’s Crisps’ in blue letters on a white background.

  ‘I’m parched,’ Terry said. ‘Let’s get a bottle of pop.’ He bought a small bottle of lemonade (twopence deposit on the bottle) and two packets of crisps, which left him with elevenpence out of his two shillings. They walked up the lane until they were out of sight of the old lady and found a fairly flat comfortable spot on the grassy bank. It was now mid-afternoon and the sun was at its strongest.

  Terry allowed Margaret to have the first swig, then took a deep gulping swallow himself, the lemonade warm and slightly flat-tasting. He lay back in the grass and ate the crisps, gazing up at the faultless blue sky. It was very still, with no breeze, and peaceful. A ladybird landed on his shirt and took off again.

  ‘It was stupid, me asking about Shap,’ Terry said. ‘Sorry.’

  Margaret leaned on one elbow, the soft round muscle in her shoulder straining against the gingham, pulling the seam taut. She was looking straight ahead into the field across the lane. From the corner of his eye he could see the line of her profile silhouetted against the blueness. He said:

  ‘I’m glad you’re going with me.’

  ‘So am I,’ Margaret said, not moving.

  ‘You’ll never go with anyone else, will you?’ He turned his head to look at her fully and saw the rhythmic movement of her breast rising and falling, rising and falling.

  ‘No,’ Margaret said, not looking at him.

  She seemed to be breathing quite heavily and Terry was disturbed because he didn’t know why. Was it something he’d said? Was she angry or annoyed about something?

  ‘Is summat wrong?’ he as
ked, almost without thinking placing his hand on her arm. The feel of it was like no other sensation, as though he had touched something warm and soft that tingled under his fingertips. He became aware of the breath expanding inside his chest, of the familiar dull throb rising up as if it might choke him. He looked at her lips, which were nicely shaped – a defined line to them and deep red in colour – not like some girls’ lips which were slack splodges in the area roughly between nose and chin.

  Margaret turned her face, unsmiling, towards him, and Terry felt his senses slide away. She didn’t smile all the time she brought her head nearer to his, her eyes wide and green, and kissed him. The smell of her made him feel faint.

  He had seen himself in the orbs of her eyes, his face getting bigger and bigger, until he had shut his own eyes to darkness and felt the pressure of her lips. It was, and he knew it well enough, the first proper kiss he had ever had in his life. He held her close with both arms pulled tight so that he could feel his chest pressing hard on hers.

  It lasted a long time – long enough for him to register the clicking sounds of insects close by in the grass, the aimless drone of flying creatures over the hedgerows – then felt her arms tauten as she raised herself above him.

  ‘Jesus Nora,’ Terry said in a hoarse whisper. ‘You can’t half kiss.’

  Margaret smiled, her eyes looking into his, and he would have done anything for her. To think that this wonderful beautiful girl was actually going with him: that she was his sweetheart: it was incredible.

  And when an insect flew into her hair and was caught struggling amongst the strands he laughed out loud, involuntarily, from sheer joy.

  ‘What’s up?’ Margaret said, and he untangled the creature and set it free.

  Even then it seemed to Terry that he would remember that afternoon, the walk to the Lake with Margaret Parry, that first real kiss, for the rest of his life. He knew that he would remember it because everything he saw, every sound and smell, was sharp and alive and vibrant to his senses. The springy undergrowth beneath his head was like a cushion and he closed his eyes as a great luxurious calm overwhelmed him. The sun beat hotly on his face, its intense light glimmering behind his eyelids.

  ‘Do you like kissing?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘Yeh’, Terry said, smiling with his eyes shut. He opened one eye. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ She rested her forearm on his chest and propped her chin on it.

  ‘Why did you ask if I like kissing?’

  Margaret thought what to answer and wrinkled her nose. ‘You imagine lads would think kissing stupid and – you know, sloppy. When you go to the Ceylon on Saturday afternoons all the lads start groaning and booing if there’s a girl being kissed in it.’

  ‘Them are kids,’ Terry said. ‘Kids are like that. Young ‘uns of seven or eight.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nearly twelve.’

  ‘When’s your birthday?’

  ‘February.’

  ‘You’re not nearly twelve, you’ve just gone eleven.’

  ‘Eleven-and-half.’

  ‘Nearly eleven-and-half.’

  ‘Yeh, all right, nearly.’ He didn’t feel any inclination to argue; life was too good. He said, ‘You can have what’s left of the lemonade if you like.’

  Margaret shifted position slightly to make herself more comfortable. ‘You’re two months older than me,’ she said. ‘My birthday’s on the fourth of April.’

  ‘You just missed being an April Fool.’ Terry opened his eyes and looked at the sky. He said, ‘Will you still go with me when I’m at the High School?’

  ‘How d’you know you’ve passed?’

  ‘Well… I don’t,’ Terry said, caught out. ‘I think I have. You don’t want to stay at Howarth Cross, do you? Wouldn’t you rather go to the Girls’ High School?’

  ‘Depends if I’ve passed or not.’

  ‘Can your mother afford to buy you a uniform?’

  Margaret shrugged. ‘If I had to have one.’

  Terry put his hand on the gathered blue-and-white gingham just below her shoulder. ‘Will you? Still go with me?’

  ‘If you want to.’

  ‘I’m asking you if you want to.’

  The two perfect green eyes were looking into his, the curling black lashes surrounding them like a burst of dark spiky rays around the sun. His heart turned over: her beauty was just too perfect.

  ‘I’d like us always to be together,’ Margaret said.

  Terry felt the urge to rashly confess: ‘You’re the first girl I’ve ever gone with. I mean – you know – properly.’ It seemed right, somehow, to unburden himself in this way. He was so unsure of her, deeply frightened that her affection was only fleeting. He knew that by this act of confession he was, in a sense, throwing himself upon her mercy, believing, perhaps foolishly, that it would rob her of the right to reject him. If he could make her see how vulnerable he was she wouldn’t have the heart to betray him. That’s what he reasoned.

  Margaret too felt the need for confession. She said, ‘Shap did ask me to go with him once.’

  Terry didn’t say anything. This was his blackest fear come to haunt him, and in the broad light of day. He wanted to know everything and yet be told nothing.

  ‘He asked me but I said I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ Terry said, torturing himself. He was struggling inside with a stupid uncomprehending rage because Shap lived nearer to Margaret than he did. Why couldn’t she live next door to him on Cayley Street instead of Doreen Hartley? Then he would know she was close by, protected, safe from temptation. ‘You held his thingy though, didn’t you,’ Terry said. ‘His dick,’ finding a perverse satisfaction in saying it so crudely to her face.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Margaret said, rather too quietly.

  ‘He told me,’ Terry said with sadistic pleasure. (Oh why was he saying this? Why?)

  Margaret stood up and brushed bits of grass from her dress. There were spots of red in her cheeks. She said, ‘If you’d rather believe him than me.’

  ‘Well didn’t you?’ Terry said hopelessly. ‘In’t it true?’

  (What was the matter with him? Did he want to deliberately spoil everything on this perfect day?)

  ‘You won’t believe me whatever I say.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘In’t it true then?’ Terry said, when really what he he was saying was Please make me believe it isn’t true. Please.

  She stepped down off the bank into the lane. He had made a right bloody cods of everything. Pain twisted somewhere inside him, so acute and physically real that he felt sick; unshed tears pricked behind his eyelids. The insects in the grass around him suddenly irritated him with their mindless whirring and ticking; their disinterested activity was like an insult.

  He jumped up and stamped on the grass in childish fury.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said savagely. ‘Nowt.’

  They walked apart to the Lake and spent what was left of the afternoon miserably. The sun sparkling on the water, the little white yachts with their neat triangular sails, the pleasure boat with its striped canvas awning – everything that was delightful to the eye now seemed to Terry pointless and hateful. The afternoon, that had begun so magically, had ended up as a bitter, repugnant taste in his mouth, as unpleasant as copper pennies.

  Margaret remained withdrawn and uncommunicative, only responding once when he offered to buy her some candy floss, or, if she preferred, a bag of fried potatoes. She said no thank you, very politely with a perfectly calm face, and in that instant he wanted to grab hold of her, in anger and remorse, and shake her until she fell into his arms. Her green eyes refused now to look into his, instead gazing across the water to the little yachts or looking intently (so it seemed to Terry) into the faces of the boys who passed in groups of three or four. He knew that she was only waiting for the flimsiest excuse to leave him, waiting impatiently for a friend to
show up, and then without a word or a backward glance she’d be off, and that would be the end of that. The last he would see of her would be the flouncing of the gingham dress, the dainty white slippers walking away, the head of dark curls gradually becoming lost in the summertime crowd.

  This didn’t happen: they went home together on the bus with Terry’s last fourpence, sitting on the back seat upstairs with a precise distance between them that never altered despite the jolting on Smithy Bridge Road as the bus went over the level-crossing. They got off at Heybrook corner and walked along Entwisle Road. It seemed to last for hours, this walk, in dead silence, until they came to the Post Office where Terry had looked at himself in the window, and where he finally mustered the nerve to say, ‘Margaret—’

  But she turned into Gowers Street without breaking her stride, in cool possessive control of her movements and emotions. With her, it seemed to Terry, went a complete world of soft sweet kisses and tender young breasts: a lost world in which he had lived for a single day, amongst the dry grass and mad clicking insects.

  King Kong

  TERRY SAT ON THE LAVATORY ROOF NEXT TO the pigeon-cote. He had taken to studying cloud formations, watching them come sweeping over Denby, lofty pinnacles of cumulus moving slowly and gracefully from the south-west like galleons under full sail. He forgot himself in the majesty of the clouds, became a mere speck of nothingness, as if he was up there sailing along with them. It never failed to stagger him, how puny and insignificant he was in relation to the whole vast universe.

  He thought about it but never seriously considered for a moment wheeling his Raleigh Sport out of the gate and cycling over to Gowers Street. He could never summon the nerve to admit to Margaret Parry’s face that he had behaved foolishly and said stupid things which he now regretted.

  From his perch on the lavatory roof he agreed to go with Spenner and Alec Bland to the matinee at the Regal, scrounged ninepence off his mam, and the three of them set off for town. Spenner led the way up the slope to the rear of the cinema on Baillie Street and managed to prise open a large metal door with FIRE EXIT stencilled on it; they sneaked down a flight of stone steps into the Gents, and after a suitable pause came out one at a time into the auditorium, the rendezvous being the ninth row from the front, a dozen seats in from the right-hand aisle.