by Sonia Paige
‘Yeah,’ said Duane, ‘Afterwards it made me feel that all women are dirty.’
‘Women?’ Alex exploded, ‘Women dirty? Women!! What about the men who set the whole thing up?’
‘They were that type of white class men who decide what goes down,’ said Duane. ‘They have us all on a string. They think because they have a job of a certain sort that they are better than other people. But what’s the use if you cannot make love to your own wife?’
Alex did not reply. Her eyes rested on a noisy group of young men at the next table. She frowned, then looked back at Duane and said: ‘You know something? I don’t believe what you say.’
‘You think them orgies don’t happen?’
‘It’s not that. I don’t believe what you say about yourself. Something Harold Pinter said came back to me. He said speech is a strategy to cover our nakedness. You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything about yourself. On that, you’re silent. You know you were abusing yourself as well as those women in that situation. Why do that stuff? You’re not being honest. I’ve had enough of this. I need another drink.’ She stood up.
Duane stared at his glass. ‘It carried on for a few years. They would happen, you know, every three months or so. But after Ren’s massage I gave it all up.’
Alex sat down again. ‘How come?’
‘It was like the massage planted a seed inside me and that seed grew. Like God held out a hand to me in spite of everything I’d done. He knew I wasn’t perfect. Sometimes I’d do things and tell him about them and he says “Well, I would rather you hadn’t done that.” But he never stopped being my friend, see. And with the massage it was like Ren opened a door and you can picture a big bright light on the other side and a hand reaches in and it takes my hand and it can pull me through to where it is all golden. And I’m a bit heavy, you know, and it’s like there’s a wind blowing in from outside and it’s beating me back all the time, but that hand is helping me slowly one inch by the next inch to get through that door and out into that place outside where there is nothing but light.’
‘Like you could do with a hand to get you out of this pub door to get home for your wife’s birthday.’
‘It would take a miracle to get me off this stool.’
‘Let’s hope for a miracle, then,’ said Alex. ‘Anyway, there’s no big golden glow out there, only a few Christmas lights. And it’s freezing cold.’
They looked at the door which was being held open as a large group of women poured in, taking off hats and gloves. One woman reached into a bag and pulled out a pile of papers and passed them round to the others. Then the women surged forward into the pub handing out small sheets of paper at each table. A young woman with short green hair gave Duane and Alex a copy each. ‘Don’t drink here!’ she said, ‘Do you want to support a place like this?’
After she had gone, they read the leaflet. It was headed, ‘IN THIS PUB THE BARMAN BITES THE BARMAIDS’ BUTTOCKS,’ with a paragraph below saying that a number of women working there had been sexually harassed by management. The small print told the story of how a young woman had been taken on at the pub, and was told by the Manager: ‘If you break three glasses, I’ll bite your bum.’ She thought it was a misplaced attempt at humour and ignored it, but four weeks later after she had broken two wine glasses and a beer glass, she was standing on a stool refilling one of the high bottles when he came up and bit her on the buttock.
‘“Hard enough to hurt,”’ Alex read aloud, adding to Duane, ‘Though even if it didn’t hurt does that make it any better? When she complained he threatened to fire her. What a pig. Come on, this is your cue.’
Duane pushed his stool back slightly but didn’t stand up.
The group of young men at the next table were reading the leaflet and laughing, making comments to the leafletters. ‘Here, Ginger, I’ll bite yours if you like,’ one of them called to a plump fortyish woman with frizzy red hair. ‘That could be difficult with your mouth up your arse,’ she replied. As she swept past she tripped over the leg of Duane’s stool, colliding with the young mens’ table and scattering their drinks on the floor with a sound of breaking glass. As she went down she knocked into a young man in a Gap T-shirt who had his chair balanced on the two back legs. He crashed to the floor beside her. The young men stopped laughing.
‘Good shot,’ said Alex. She and Duane helped the woman to her feet and walked with her out of the pub. ‘You all right?’
On the pavement the woman was shaking beer and cigarette ash off her coat. ‘This always has to happen to me,’ she told Alex.
‘Break a few glasses. Serve them right,’ said Alex. ‘At least you shut those blokes up.’
Duane gave Alex a soft peck on the cheek, ‘You know, I appreciate meeting you.’ To the woman with red hair he said ‘What you did in there saved my life. You are an angel sent by God.’ Then he turned and walked off down the street with a swagger.
The woman looked at Alex blankly.
Alex shrugged: ‘It’s a long story.’ She flashed her smile and crossed the road.
The plump woman stood for a minute on her own, then walked off in the other direction, a few last peanuts falling off her coat. She took a left turn. She handed in one of her carrier bags at a dry cleaners, then went into a newsagents; she came out holding a bar of Kit-Kat and a copy of The Independent. She dropped the Kit-Kat and picked it up again. Then she turned down a side street and stopped at a neat terraced house with a pampas grass in the front garden. The stripped pine door had a bell marked ‘Natural Health Centre’. A voice came over the speaker, ‘Hi, Anthea, push the door.’
Coming from the second floor landing into the small room in her glittery socks, Anthea edged past the dark aspidistra leaves, took off her coat, dropped it on the floor, and settled herself into the wicker armchair. ‘Thank you for giving me a session again so soon. And an extra long one, too.’ She paused then burst out: ‘A man just called me an angel from heaven!’
Ren pressed the button to start the tape-recorder and smiled at her from the other wicker chair. ‘You sound surprised.’
‘I am! I was! I’d never set eyes on him before. I fell over his chair in the pub. I sent a whole table of glasses flying. It was embarrassing. An accident.’ She leant forward excitedly across the red and purple striped cotton rug. ‘Do you think chance words from strangers are important? Some people do. Something like this happened to me before. Have you heard of Kledonas?’
‘Kledonas?’ Ren shook her head.
‘It’s a custom from ancient Greece. Chance words. They used it for divination. They would formulate a question and go out into the street. The first words they heard spoken by a passing stranger, that was the answer to the question. The numinousness of the random. They still do a variation of it in Greece, in some places. On the Feast of St. John, near the summer solstice.
‘I did it once, ages ago. Here in England. I didn’t mean to. But it was what started everything: the archaeology, the tombs, the bones…. ’ She fell silent and slumped in her chair as if she had run out of steam.
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
Anthea sat up alert again. ‘I should, shouldn’t I? Now I think about it, that was one of the first weird experiences. That made me wonder whether things were going on under the surface. It was in 1971. When I was trying to get over Tel.’
‘Nearly twenty years ago. Tel?’
‘He was my first boyfriend. My first love. My first hope, and in a way my last hope. Things went wrong with him, and things have never gone right for me since.’
Anthea looked out of the window as if she might find some sign of hope outside. She looked down at her feet as if they might provide some answers. She looked at the purple candle burning on the table between them. She looked up at Ren, but avoided her eyes.
‘I’d better start at the beginning, hadn’t I?’
Ren sat silent, waiting.
‘OK. Like I said, I’d left school at 18 with A-Levels, but my family d
idn’t think in terms of university. So I got what my Mum thought was a “good job.” At that time there weren’t loads of banks in Maidstone like there are now.’
‘Soon after I joined the bank, a young man started there called Terry, known as Tel. He was a bit younger than me but very nice. Brown curly hair, fresh-faced, skinny. He was the only one in the bank who said “Good Morning” as if he really wanted you to have a good morning. I was shy so it took a while to get to know him. Anyway, I thought he had a girlfriend.
‘But then there was a retirement party. The manager was leaving. They held the do in the offices out the back. The usual cheap wine, but we didn’t know the difference. I was standing by the table when they were doing toasts, so my glass kept getting filled. I wasn’t used to alcohol and I didn’t realize I was getting tipsy. Soon, even the bank started to look sparkly and all my fellow workers took on a shine. For about half an hour I thought my life was on the right track.
‘But I was prone to migraine even then, and after a while I started to get ill. Feeling sick. I didn’t want to cause a scene so I slipped out into the yard at the back of the building. We used to go there sometimes to eat our sandwiches. I needed some air and let the alcohol wear off a bit before I went home.
‘When I got there I found Tel against a wall. He had tears in his eyes. I leant on the wall next to him and asked him what was the matter. He told me that his girlfriend had taken up with an old boyfriend. The bloke had started coming round to the flat she and Tel shared. “She says they’re only good friends, but I can tell it’s over between us,” he said. “She doesn’t look at me in the way she used to. She has nothing to do with me. She’s only got eyes for him. She treats me like a lodger. Or worse.”
‘He said he didn’t feel comfortable there any more, but he couldn’t move back home because his mother had disowned him. She wouldn’t let him back in the house. “If I was a proper man I’d do something about that bloke,” he said. He was a bit drunk. He talked and talked. My nausea had passed off, I just stood and listened. Then it started raining, a soft spring rain. The yard glistened in the lights from the kitchen. My best dress got wet; when he realized he was very apologetic. Also because I’d missed the party. The first we knew about it, one of the other counter clerks had been sent to lock up and found us standing out in the dark.
‘A few days later Tel asked if he could take me out for a drink in the pub, and that was how we began to get to know each other. He was always sweet to me, though on the first date he didn’t turn up because of some problem with his ex-girlfriend. Some other times he turned up late, very apologetic. He talked a lot about her, he was still having a hard time. He asked me about my life too, though he never really understood my interest in history: “That’s all dead and gone, Ant, you want to think about now.” When we went out, he always took me home afterwards on the bus up the Tonbridge Road. The council estate where I lived was on the outskirts of Maidstone.
‘Once as we were saying goodnight outside my parents’ front gate, he kissed me. He seemed as taken aback as I was.
‘My mother saw it from the window. “Who’s that?” she said when I came in.
‘“Just a friend from work,” I said.
‘“Up to no good,” she said.
‘“What do you mean, Mum?”
‘“Why would a good-looking boy like that be interested in you for the right reasons? The size you are.” She was always reminding me I was fat.
‘The next time Tel and I went out, he seemed a bit awkward with me in the pub and he left sharply the minute we reached my house. But the next time, he paused at the gate and reached out to pull me closer. This time it was serious kissing. I’d never had French kisses before, and I wobbled afterwards as I walked up the path to my parents’ front door. Next day when I saw him at work I didn’t know where to put my eyes.
‘Our courtship developed from there. We went to the pictures a couple of times. He liked action movies, we went to Lawman. He was always kind and he was good company. He used to tease me about being brainy and reading too much. He even borrowed a couple of books from me, some Mary Renault historical novels about ancient Greece. He said he enjoyed them, but I noticed he kept them at work and read them in the lunch hour. He didn’t take them home. One night we went to the flicks and saw Get Carter. There was a sexy bit in it that was embarrassing. Britt Eckland feeling her breasts on the phone to Michael Caine. We sat there next to each other trying not to touch. The next time we went out, he took me straight to the back seat of the cinema and dived in. I can’t remember the film, only his tongue in my throat, and his hands going for my bra. I could tell he was more experienced than me.
‘I knew he was still sharing the place with his ex-girlfriend, but because of all the problems they weren’t living as a couple any more. She sometimes came into the bank to speak to him, I tried to keep out of sight. She was so glamorous, she seemed to fill the whole place with her rustling skirts and her jingling jewellery, and she had a kind of husky voice as if everything she said was a secret that was breaking her heart.
‘But I was the one whose heart got broken.
‘In the cinema his hands started to climb over my body more insistently. My flesh was untried and hungry. It wanted to feel his hands wandering everywhere, in every plump corner and secret cranny. But I knew I shouldn’t. It became a struggle to keep my bra on. A struggle with him, and a struggle with myself. I always stopped him. Then went home with a flushed face and lay in bed listening to the radio very quiet so my mum couldn’t hear, imagining what would have happened if I hadn’t.
‘Maybe his ex-girlfriend sensed something was changing, I don’t know. Anyway, next time we were having a drink in the Ship Inn, she walked in through the door. She came and joined us, very friendly, as if she’d been invited. She talked a lot, about herself and her work at art college and a project she was doing about comic book heroes.
‘“Tel and I have that in common,” she said. “Crazy about Dan Dare, he is. Have you seen his collection?” No, I hadn’t. I sat quiet and listened to her talking. Her voice was very musical, it kind of put a spell on you and I retreated more and more into myself.
‘After a while Tel said “I’m going to take Anthea home now.”
‘Francine stood up, “I’ll come too.”’
‘Francine?’ Ren looked up. ‘Was that her name?’
Anthea sniffed and took a tissue out of the box on the table. ‘Yes. Francine. On the bus Tel sat next to me and she was on the seat in front, turning round and leaning on the rail, talking about how promising the tutors thought her work was. She was so charming, and I kept thinking how boring Tel must find me. At my front gate I said goodbye to them both and there was no kiss.
‘The next day at work Tel said, “I hope you didn’t mind Francine turning up. She wanted to meet you. She really likes you, by the way.” I wondered why, because I’d hardly spoken. For our next date he suggested meeting at the Duke of Marlborough instead.
‘We were both half way through our barley wine. We never spent much – though he was earning, he never seemed to have any money. Then Francine walked in again, and greeted us, “Oh, you’re drinking our drink. We’ve always both adored barley wine, haven’t we, lover?” She took some money from his top pocket and went to get herself one. Then she squeezed in between us and sat down.
‘She started talking to me about films. “Tell me about yourself, Ant. What kind of films do you like? Did you see Claire’s Knee?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I saw it up the West End. The French do boredom so much better than anyone else. Ennui. They’ve even got a better word for it.”
“I missed it.”
“What did you think of Performance?”
That, at least, I’d seen, but I had to admit: “I couldn’t really understand it.”
“Don’t be put off by all the fancy montage. That’s what he uses to make you question reality. I mean, what is real? Is it what’s on the surface or what�
�s underneath?”
‘I noticed her arm was resting against his. She had bought some cigarettes at the bar; she lit one up, and after a few puffs passed it to him in an easy way as if they shared everything. He drew on it a couple of times then passed it back to her. He didn’t usually smoke. I was starting to feel uncomfortable. She laughed. “You can’t talk to Tel about films. His favourites are things like Patton, lots of shooting and banging. Go on lover, tell Ant about that film you tried to walk out of, Death in Venice – he hated it! “Too much hanging about,” he said, but he liked the sex bit, didn’t you lover, don’t try to deny it, I know you better than that… We had such a laugh.”
‘And so it went on. Again they both took me home. This time she sat next to him on the bus and lent her head against his shoulder. I felt surplus to requirements. Next day at work Tel said, “Francine really enjoyed coming out last night. You didn’t mind, did you? She’s needing a lot of support at the moment.”
‘Next time we went for a drink he suggested the Hare and Hounds. He was sitting there explaining to me about Rommel’s North Africa campaign when Francine rushed in and went up to him. “It’s there!” she said in an urgent whisper. “It’s happened again! I’m scared to go back there on my own!” She turned and looked at me with eyes that could drill a hole in my head. “Do you believe in psychic phenomena? I have a gift but that makes me a target. I was there on my own and that’s fatal. Tel’s the only person who can help me. I need him at the flat for protection.”
‘Tel looked at me helplessly. “Francine has a problem with… with… ”
“’You promised you wouldn’t tell people,” Francine interrupted, lowering her voice and turning her back on me as if this was for Tel’s ears only, although I could hear every word. “What will Ant think of me? She probably thinks I’m crazy as it is. Everyone wants to put me down. It’s the same at college…”
‘I tried to apologise, although I wasn’t sure what I had done to upset her.
‘Francine ignored me. “There’s no-one to help me! I knew this would happen. You promised…”