Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  Mary was still trying not to cry. ‘Yeah, goodnight June, see you. Come on, Billy! We’ve got to go now! I need to!’ Billy turned towards June, who shook her head and slipped away. He followed Mary to the bike.

  ‘So, where to?’ he asked, flatly.

  Mary gabbled, ‘Well, not back into the village or we’ll meet them, and not home, so away, Billy, I don’t know, but quick!’ There was another roll of thunder and the first blanching sheet of lightning, in which Billy caught the look on Mary’s face.

  ‘Get on, then.’ He turned the bike on the gravel, revving it noisily and reaching the road just as Clara, Paulie and Daniel emerged from the hall. They had waited for Mary and were looking for her now, but in the wrong direction. Cheers greeted each blast of thunder. They climbed into Paulie’s car and drove slowly away as Mary clutched onto Billy and cried into his back.

  Billy struggled to steer the bike through the web of narrow lanes that spread like capillaries, meeting and diverging, going everywhere you might want to go from Allnorthover, only indirectly. He didn’t decide on a route; that wasn’t the point. He was enjoying the ride, the jumpy lightning and the quickening thunder; he wanted to think. He liked the challenge of the hairpin bends, sudden gradients, abrupt dips and double curves; the humpback bridge which he could meet at just the right speed to propel his bike into the air. There was no one else on the road. It was midnight, so the drivers who fell out of the pubs and into their cars at closing time had had their hour to get home, and they were the only ones who chose the lanes, for the same reasons Billy did.

  Rain fell. A few heavy drops streaked Billy’s visor and he heard Mary shout, and looked back and saw she had raised one arm and felt it too. From those first drops, the rain intensified and came down as suddenly as floodwater bursting through a swollen ceiling. Billy pushed back his visor but the rain still blinded him. Just as he started up the humpback bridge and, out of habit, accelerated, he thought to slow down and confused himself. A fork of lightning struck a nearby field, illuminating the already charred earth. There was a hiss like the flaring of a huge match. The air screamed in Billy’s ears, only it was Mary screaming as the bike flung them sideways and skidded away beneath them.

  The storm was right above them – the rain, thunder and lightning together – so that although Billy and Mary were too drunk and floppy to have been badly hurt, they did not get up, but huddled in the long yellow grass where they had landed. This was where Billy’s father, Morris, found them, after Billy had not come home and someone mentioned him going off on his bike, and he’d met Stella George soaked through, halfway to the hall, looking for her girl.

  ‘Two fledglings drowned in the nest’, was how Morris later described them. Mary didn’t remember screaming, only falling and landing and finding it altogether natural to cling onto Billy, giggle and sleep.

  The rain continued through Sunday and into Sunday night and on Monday morning, the village woke to a world it couldn’t remember. It was too late in the year for the rain to revive anything. Instead, it laid things bare. Leaves that had turned were pelted and blown free. Precarious heavy-headed flowers, chrysanthemums and pansies, became waterlogged and collapsed, snapping their undernourished stems. The Green gave way to mud. All the warmth was washed out of the brick, stone, whitewash, tile, timber and thatch. The rain needled its way in, exposing new leaks and cracks. Gutters babbled and choked while clogged drains belched up ammoniac pools. Damp spored behind the heat-cracked paint of window-frames. The fields had dried out so deeply that even the newly turned earth was too dry to hold much water. Top soil ran off the land in urinous streams.

  People hobbled along slick pavements. Drivers braked late, swerved along the lanes, blinding themselves with the spray of puddles that spread from one hedgerow to the other, like sheets. Dr Clough was kept busy treating flare-ups of rheumatism and arthritis. His morning-round visits to the dying and the newly-born were prolonged.

  Mary George had stayed awake for most of the night, for the pleasure of listening to the rain. By six o’clock she was too tired to sleep, so she got dressed and crept downstairs, planning tea and toast over a book before school. She could hear Stella in the kitchen, though, so continued out through the front door.

  The morning astonished her. The rain had just stopped, and the sun was still a low pink light that suffused the wet houses with a foreign rosiness and made leafless branches shine. Mary strode out along the High Street, sure she would make it at least halfway to school before a bus came. She was wearing her boots and one of her father’s jerseys over flannel trousers. For once, the weather suited her.

  By the time she passed the Chapel, the sun had risen but had not dried anything yet, so the world just glittered more brightly. Mary was walking round a flooded corner glazed in white light when she met Tom Hepple. He leant delicately on his stick. ‘Good morning,’ he murmured. He was dressed in wool and tweed, all of which looked damp.

  Mary nodded, then added, ‘I mean, good morning.’

  ‘It’s a fine light.’

  ‘It is.’ It occurred to Mary that they could have been any two villagers and they would have had the same conversation, and she smiled. Tom said nothing but smiled back. She wondered. He looked fine, just frail as Billy said Valerie had said.

  Mary felt grown up. ‘I was sorry to hear about the – your – accident.’

  Tom shook his head, as anyone would. If he could just keep the girl here, persuade her, take her. Her pale skin glowed so that he wanted to reach out and touch her, knowing his fingers would go right through her because at moments like this she wasn’t the silly girl everyone said she was but his angel, all light. His hand began to reach out but a sleepless night, no food and all those pretty capsules restrained him.

  His head dropped. ‘It’s only my leg and it’ll … mend but … Kevin Lacey’s still in there being put together with metal … pins and as for … the Hotchkiss boy, a terrible … waste.’ His broken phrases were charming. Mary made herself smile widely and said a firm goodbye before setting back off for school. A tiny thought, that she was safe because he couldn’t chase her with that leg, flitted through her mind. The clean adult feeling of a moment ago collapsed and Mary started to argue with herself in an effort to shore it up. By the time she reached Temple Grove, she had Tom Hepple back as just needy, not very well and practically a relative.

  Dorothy Spence from the scrapyard was at the Temple Park bus stop, wearing a see-through raincoat and hat, the kind that folded away into your bag. She had a blue overall on over her dress and Mary deduced that she must now have a cleaning job in Camptown. Mary was curious but said nothing. Mrs Spence did not appear to recognise her. The summer was over and people had other things to talk about now.

  By the time Tom reached the Chapel, he was trembling. The morning’s observations were scribbled on bits of paper he’d stuffed into his pockets. Each detail and statistic Tom had noted had a glint of significance that he knew, from experience, could evaporate. He had to transfer the information to his book right away or things would not connect and the whole thing would slip through his fingers. He fumbled the red ledger open and began to write. This book had fallen out of the broken filing cabinet. Tom had torn out the few pages that had been used and had adapted the double-entry columns to his system of ‘Submergence’ and ‘Disturbance’. Among the scraps from which he was now copying, he found the smashed glasses that he’d picked up at the end of the Clock House drive. They had been lying like a broken bird with one wing adrift and the other folded. The crazed lenses were almost intact. He put them up on the shelf, next to the torn photo and the puddle of wax.

  Tom had been at the reservoir for an hour before sunrise, finding it easier to try and make sense of things in the cool half-dark before the water took on reflections. He was sure it was rising already, after just two days’ rain, and so his calculations would have to be revised. He had limped the two miles home, his head bubbling with numbers. Meeting the girl like that had been a piece
of luck. She was still nervous but he’d managed not to upset her, mostly because he was tired and muzzy. She’d been trying so hard to disguise herself, to look like any other daffy young girl, clutching the sleeves of her jersey as they swallowed her hands. Only he’d heard about her and Billy Eyre, and how she’d come off his bike in the storm and landed without a scratch. She was so light.

  Tom lay down on his back and tried to sleep. His leg ached. He had thought too much about the girl and had lost some of his ideas. He warmed himself with the memory of afternoons in Sophie’s airtight living room: the unintended scent that seeped from beneath her arms as she reached out to raise him; and the intended scent of peach and vanilla that he caught from the burnt and feathering skin just above and between her breasts. Tom pushed his hand into his trousers, shut his eyes and tried to think of Valerie Eyre’s cropped head and rosy mouth but what came to mind was peach, and then vanilla, then burst buttons on a tight white dress, wet with a new stain.

  Stella caught her hip on the corner of the table, making herself lurch and sending Lucas’s toast sliding from the plate. She knelt down and scrabbled it up in her apron. ‘I’ll make fresh.’ She shook her head at Lucas’s protest. She came back and snatched the egg as he took it from his pocket, but he didn’t quite let go in time and they smashed it between them. Mary was shocked to see her mother tearful and frantic. Stella ran to find a cloth and began to dab at Lucas’s filthy coat while he tried to calm her. ‘Mrs G, it’s just an egg.’

  ‘We’ve got half a dozen in the fridge, Mum. I’ll put another one on. An egg’s not going to do any harm.’

  ‘Eggs used to be used in paint, to make it shine. My coat’ll shine!’ Lucas mumbled through his toast. ‘And my Mum used to paint egg white on the little one’s bottom if it got sore. Kept the you-know-what out. So my coat’s going to be waterproof too!’ Stella gave up wiping. She hurried back into the kitchen and Mary followed.

  ‘Mum,’ she began, feeling irritated and responsible. ‘Like he said, it’s just an egg. Who cares?’

  Stella swung round and Mary flinched as she saw a tremor run through her face, a knot that caught in her forehead, creased her eyes and dragged at her mouth. Mary stepped back as her mother reached out, but all she did was stroke Mary’s cheek. Mary wanted to tell her to get off but wasn’t brave enough, so she made sounds instead of words and shook her away. When Morris had delivered her home in the storm after the disco, Stella had been standing out in the rain on the Green and had held out her arms, but Mary slipped through them and went upstairs to run a hot bath. Since their conversation about the letters, Mary had not wanted to hear her mother say another word.

  Now, Stella was gulping and snivelling. ‘Mary, love, you know it wasn’t me. I’d never, however desperate, have done something like that.’ She looked so pitiful that Mary was appalled. Then in a different, more familiar voice, ‘Your father has a tendency to, what do they say, displace …’

  ‘Fuck it!’ The words shot out of Mary’s mouth. ‘Fuck your jargon and fuck you!’

  ‘As I was saying –’ Stella tried to continue.

  Mary turned in the doorway. ‘And fuck Dad too, fuck the reservoir and the house and fuck those fucking letters!’ She barged past Lucas. ‘And you, always playing the wise old fucking fool, fuck you too!’ She slammed the front door so hard, a bowl jumped from the sideboard and shattered on the floor. Lucas shook his head admiringly and settled down to his tea.

  ‘Do you want to do something on Sunday?’ The line fizzed and buzzed.

  ‘Sunday? Yes, alright, fine, I’d love to.’ He’d rung. Mary bit her lip to stop herself spoiling it.

  ‘Anything you’d like to see?’

  ‘The sea? Why not?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Like you said, the sea.’

  ‘I said the sea?’

  ‘I thought. Oh, never mind.’

  ‘But would you like that?’

  Mary couldn’t bear to ask Daniel what he meant so she said ‘Yes’, and arranged to meet him at midday at Camptown Station. When she put the phone down, the buzz was still in her ear.

  He was wearing his big raincoat and a tall felt hat that he referred to as ‘my grandpa’s Homburg’. Mary had never known a boy to have so many accessories. As well as the hat, Daniel had a silk scarf, leather gloves, sunglasses, a fob watch in his waistcoat pocket and a flat pewter flask of whisky inside his coat. When she remarked on any of these things, Daniel explained that the object in question had belonged to his grandfather or had been found in a junk shop or flea market, and that it was ‘Thirties’. Even the oval tortoiseshell sunglasses were Thirties.

  Camptown Station was built on a viaduct and there was a long climb up to either platform. Mary headed for the ticket office but Daniel caught her arm and steered her past the station master who was standing in the dim hallway at the foot of the stairs. ‘No need to pay.’

  The station master touched his cap. ‘Good morning!’

  Daniel replied so charmingly, adding ‘And which side for the sea?’ that the station master called him ‘Sir’, and gave a small bow as he gestured through the foot tunnel to the other staircase.

  You could go straight through to Lodenum or change onto the other line at Procklewell for Crouchness or Thende. Mary wanted to ask where they were going to, but her anticipation of going anywhere alone with Daniel made her so happy and anxious that she held her breath.

  They got on the first train that came in, which was only going as far as Procklewell. There, they caught a stopping train to Thende. They were getting into a closed carriage when Mary missed her footing on the worn wooden step and slipped, grazing her shin. Daniel picked her up and lifted her into the carriage while she blushed and muttered something about being able to manage.

  It was like having a room to themselves. There was no corridor; the carriage itself was like a short corridor, with two facing banquettes that would seat four or five people each, and a door at either end. Daniel sprawled on one of the seats and Mary lay down on the other.

  ‘What do you feel?’ he asked as the train waddled and swung out of the station.

  Mary wondered if this was a test or just a game. ‘With my hands, the cloth on the seat, like bristles.’ She dragged her fingers across it, against the nap, and there was a small explosion of dust that made her sneeze. ‘Under my back, the springs, spirals I think, and clumps of stuffing. Horsehair?’

  ‘Princess!’ Daniel teased but Mary frowned. He reached over and stroked her shin, circling the graze. ‘So pale …’ Her coat was open and her blue dress rucked up round her knees. She raised herself and looked down at the shocking white gap in the torn black tights that made her skinny legs look even thinner as they disappeared into her big boots. Daniel pushed his finger under the hole, tracing broader and broader circles. ‘What do you feel now?’

  The train pulled into a station. ‘I hope no one –’

  ‘Shhh …’ Then Daniel was lying on top of her and putting a finger to her mouth. ‘Be quiet. People will think this carriage is empty and then they won’t get in.’

  ‘Don’t you mean they’ll get in because it looks empty?’ She felt his belt buckle press hard into her hip. ‘Ssshhhh …’ His mouth made a full round ‘O’ as he hushed and kissed her.

  The last time Mary had been to Thende was with Julie, when they were fourteen. They had gone to the Roller Disco in the dilapidated dance hall on the front. They were both good at skating and circled the rink at some speed, chatting and giggling. The rink was an old wooden dancefloor, still dotted with slim columns that had once held extravagant arrangements of flowers. Mary and Julie had invented a game of hooking an arm round these columns and spinning off in the opposite direction, against the general flow. They annoyed the best skaters who were practising their fancy steps and turns in the centre; and alarmed the beginners teetering round in twos and threes with their arms linked, which meant that if one of them wavered, they all fell down. For some reason, the rest of Julie’
s gang hadn’t come on this trip. Mary couldn’t remember any other occasion when they had done something alone together. They had had a good time but they never did it again.

  It was Mary who knew how to get from the station to the sea. A strong wind had taken hold of the town and caught them as she led Daniel over the footbridge. Mary’s fringe was flattened over her eyes, and Daniel’s Homburg was lifted in a gust and thrown down on the tracks, where it rolled under a departing train. He hurried off down the steps and waited till the train had gone in order to retrieve it, but the hat had disappeared. He came back up onto the bridge, his face screwed up against the wind, his shoulders hunched and his collar turned up. Mary was about to make a joke of it (Julie would have been squawking with laughter) but saw his irritation and hesitated. They made their way down the ramp that curved round the multi-storey car park and through the shopping precinct. Here the wind had concentrated and channelled itself into walls of air that came slamming through the wide walkways, ripping off more hats and tossing, rattling and loosening anything it could get in its grip – signs, posters, tiles, sweet wrappers, squashed cans, plastic bags.

  Daniel and Mary continued across the hotel car park and the dual carriageway, through the municipal gardens and into the fun fair. The seafront was closing down for the winter. The lights were out. There was one man in charge of the three rides that remained open. He was huddled in a booth, smoking and reading a paper, and came out when he saw them, scowling expectantly and half-heartedly jingling the change in the sack bag that hung from his waist. (Julie would have flirted with him and got them a free ride and made the whole thing fun.) He had a thin, sunken face over which hung a lank crest of greased curls. Twenty years ago he would have been king of the waltzer boys, astounding the girls as he posed casually on the rippling floor of the ride, spinning their carriages as they shrieked and clung together and tried to keep singing along to ‘Runaround Sue’. When he found the girl he wanted, he would lean in close, whisper, and catch her, a different one every night. The posh ones had been particularly easy. He met them at closing time and took them down under the pier, rain or shine. They lay on his chest afterwards, captivated by the pattering of his heart, which he let them think was due to them and not to the long lines of sulphate he snorted just before cranking up the waltzer each night.