by Patrick Gale
‘Well I –’ Sophie began but the doorbell rang.
‘I’m gone,’ Heidi said and left them. Through the half-open door, Sophie saw her let in a tall, unhealthily thin girl with long, lifeless hair half across her face. She led her into another room and shut the door behind them. Apparently the girl wasn’t offered biscuits or coffee.
‘She’s a shrink,’ Lucas explained. ‘Cutters and skellies mainly. Dad’s a QC.’
He might have been talking Urdu but she nodded as though she understood and accepted a top-up of the coffee that was so much more delicious than anything on offer at home, even though it was making her heart race.
Going up to someone’s room was all very well when you were smaller, because you naturally were showed your host’s toys and settled down to play with them. Thirteen and three-quarters was too old for play, however, and nothing mentionable had yet suggested itself as a substitute. Lucas’s room was an odd mixture. There were photographs of animals on the walls, taken from magazines – seals, a hippo, a foal – which surely dated from his childhood. There was a Times wall chart of the night sky and, leaning against the wall on a chest of drawers, a couple of recent David Bowie albums.
‘Do you like him?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said carefully. ‘Some.’
‘Wilf says he’s a poof.’
‘Who’s Wilf?’
‘A friend.’ She shrugged. ‘No one at school.’
Prompted, he set one of the albums playing. Aladdin Sane. So this is what one did instead of toys.
There was a telescope on a stand beside the window.
‘What can you see through that?’ she asked.
‘Everything,’ he said with an odd smile. ‘Every sin so far except murder. Take a look.’
She sat on the end of his very tidy bed to look.
‘You have to shut the other eye,’ he said, ‘or you’ll never focus.’
She looked. It was trained on a house further down the hill, a large, modernist place with a lot of plate glass and very few curtains. Leaning in so close beside her she could smell his Eau Sauvage, he turned a handle which minutely ratcheted up the angle of vision so that she saw first the living room, then a large bedroom above and part of a bathroom.
‘They have sex every Saturday,’ he murmured. ‘After Match of the Day. And their son wanks on the sofa sometimes once they’ve gone to bed.’
‘Do they have a daughter?’ she asked, continuing to stare down the telescope to hide her shock.
‘No. Just the son. But he has a girlfriend. She doesn’t stay over or anything but they kiss for hours and if she has a bit to drink she takes her bra off and lets him feel.’
‘What? Right off? Can you see?’ She giggled.
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Just under her blouse. She sort of reaches in like this and undoes it for him then lies back like a monument while he feels.’ He mimicked the girl to show her, batting his eyelids to make her giggle again.
She wound the handle for herself, taking the view back to the downstairs. The woman had arrived home from shopping and was walking around with plastic bags and cartons. Far more food than a family of three could eat in a week. She seemed so close it was impossible not to start back in alarm when she glanced up, apparently looking straight into Sophie’s eyes.
‘You don’t seem very shocked,’ he said, sounding disappointed.
‘Sorry,’ she said, pleased. ‘Were other people?’
‘You’re the first person I’ve shown. They’ve got no idea.’
He didn’t need to say who he meant.
She sat back on the bed. She couldn’t believe that this morning he didn’t know her and now she was sitting on his bed. He had a continental quilt, which was far more sophisticated than at school or Wakefield House, where sheets and blankets were still the norm and every week they did top-to-bottom-bottom-to-wash.
Lucas sang along with a phrase in a song.
‘It’s no wonder I don’t bring anyone home,’ he said abruptly. ‘The way she carries on. Giving you the third degree like that. Honestly.’
‘She didn’t. Not really. She was just being nice.’
‘Being nice to people is her job. It’s how she draws them out and gets their secrets.’
‘I like her.’
‘You’ll learn.’
‘She looks like Audrey Hepburn.’
‘Do you think so?’ All the scorn left his voice. ‘She can look amazing sometimes. If they really get dressed up for a party. But she’s not very good at dressing down. Did you see how she walked on her toes still, as though she was still in heels? That’s typical.’
She had never heard anyone talk like that about his mother. But then she had few intimates with a family life. ‘You’re very lucky being a dayboy.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not like getting back in time for Blue Peter and a glass of milk. I’m never back before ten and I go straight to bed.’
‘To look through this.’
He grinned. ‘Sometimes.’
‘Who do you like watching best?’ she asked. ‘The parents or the son?’
‘The son. But only because it’s so risky. It’s like TV. Someone might interrupt him any second. I worry for him and …’ He broke off and fiddled with the pile of books on his bedside table, aligning their spines.
‘What?’ she prompted him.
‘Because he’s on his own, I don’t feel so bad watching. It’s as if he needs an audience.’
‘Maybe he knows,’ she suggested. ‘That you’re watching.’
‘How could he? He can’t see.’
‘I could put a note in there telling him.’
‘Then I’d have to kill you.’
‘But you’d never know. He’d come and kill you, maybe.’
Lucas did not seem to mind the idea. There was a sort of buzz in the air between them. He sang along to the song again which started to embarrass her.
‘Don’t you see many people in the holidays, then?’ she asked.
‘Not really. I’m the only dayboy in my house. Actually,’ he confessed, ‘I don’t see anyone.’
‘How about people from your last school? You must have had friends there.’
‘It wasn’t near here. I boarded.’
‘Weird. Why?’
‘Simon – that’s my father – thought it would be good for me. To spend more time with boys.’
‘Where was it?’
‘Sussex. Near the sea. It was okay.’ He scowled.
‘You hated it.’
‘Yeah.’
He had a fancy electric clock with a radio inside and numbers that flicked over with a sound like fingernails softly tapping on paper. It was getting late. She had missed lunch and Margaret would be worried.
‘I should go,’ she said. ‘They’ll be expecting me. Big day tomorrow and I’ve got to pack.’
‘Okay,’ he said, not moving. ‘Do you want to see Carmel’s room?’
‘Who’s she?’
‘My sister. She doesn’t live here any more but there’s still a room full of her stuff. I’m not allowed in. Come and see.’
Carmel’s room was next door. There was a sign on the door saying ‘Keep Out’ and a poster of a woman dressed in black cowboy gear and pointing a gun but they went in anyway. The room was the same shape as Lucas’s but dramatically different. The ceiling and walls, even the windows, were hidden by Indian bedspreads. There were candles and ashtrays and heavy scents of dust and joss sticks.
‘Carmel’s much older than me,’ he explained. ‘She lives with her boyfriend in Clifton. They’re not married or even engaged. Heidi likes to be thought of as cool but she finds it really hard to talk about. She’s terrified Carmel’s going to get pregnant and come back to have it up here or something.’
They giggled.
It was a shock to find a space in the immaculate house that felt not quite clean. The bed was neatly made, the books tidy on the shelves, evidence of a visit from Heidi, perhaps, but everything spoke o
f unresolved conflict, not just the anti-war posters and the Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix pin-ups but the way both the idyllic view and the house itself had been smothered with gaudy, musky cotton. Very rarely Sophie had been admitted to one of the older girls’ rooms at Wakefield House and had struggled to affect nonchalance at their blatant flouting of house rules against alcohol and cigarettes, but they had never felt like this, so compellingly sticky with genuine sin.
Lucas opened the walk-in wardrobe and held things out for Sophie to see – white zip-up boots, a floppy black hat, a long ash-blonde wig, a cigarette-rolling device, a green all-in-one swimming costume with impressively stiffened cups – in such a way that it was unclear whether he asked her to join him in admiration or disgust. Perhaps it was enough for her merely to bear silent witness for before long he folded away the last relic and led her back to the landing.
‘Do you like school, then?’ he asked, lingering at the top of the stairs.
‘Can you keep a secret?’
He nodded.
‘I love it.’ She laughed.
‘I’ll sit behind you in div,’ he said, ‘and you can pass me back the answers.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘You’re far brainier. You’ve been in that div for a term already.’
Their conversation retreated to a safer, more mundane level.
She had fantasized about them kissing – nothing wilder than that – but felt far more rewarded by his showing her the secrets of the house. She liked the way he let her out like a grown-up, without involving his mother again.
‘In term-time,’ he said, ‘this place is off-limits but maybe they’d let me ask you back for lunch one Sunday.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Maybe. That would be nice.’
That evening, after supper, Wilf came to sit in her room while she packed. There was a sudden sense that she had not spoken to him enough during the holidays and had missed her chance, which was strange since he was a boy of few words. And yet the bond between them ran very deep without ever having been discussed.
‘You’ve got more stuff than when you arrived,’ he said, tugging off his desert boots with a thump so he could pull his feet up on to her bed. ‘I’ll never forget that. You only had that big blue book and your bear and you had to have them with you all the time or you cried. You didn’t speak to anyone for a week. Then that picture showed up.’
If prompted, he would rehearse the whole familiar story, how he had looked after her, how he had been the first one she spoke to, introducing him to the bear and the picture, offering to read from the book. She gave him no encouragement. Surprised by a wave of homesickness, the last thing she needed was nostalgia.
She glanced up at the bear dismissively. She had discovered too late that it was unnatural of her not to have named him; he was called simply Bear. She had outgrown him but could no more have given him up than thrown away the battered blue book Wilf had mentioned, a copy of Our Island Story. They remained on the top shelf of the rickety bookcase Wilf had found her in a skip. Like the Puffin editions of Cynthia Hartnett and Rosemary Sutcliff stacked beside them, she could not imagine reaching for them again now she was a teenager yet did not feel ready to throw them out or give them away. Reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a small girl she had suffered nightmares, not about the death of Aslan or the silky temptations of the White Witch, but at the thought of passing through a wardrobe into an enchanted world then being unable to find the route back to her bed. These childhood remnants were a means of groping back to innocent normality, perhaps, fixed there should she ever need them.
‘Seems like we’ve hardly seen you,’ Wilf added because she had fallen quiet.
‘I know,’ she sighed. ‘Sorry. It’s this fucking Greek.’ She always swore when she was alone with him. She feared going to Tatham’s would change her speech, iron out her accent. The least she could do was continue to swear. It was one of the things she and Wilf had always done together, one of the things he had taught her, along with riding a bike, sitting around and appreciating the finer points of The Trigan Empire and Marvel comics.
She stopped packing and flopped on the bed beside him, tossing her Greek grammar onto the bedspread. ‘I’ve got two more terms to catch up or they’ll make me switch to German!’
Wilf flicked through the book, frowning at the alien alphabet.
‘Why can’t you use English letters?’ he asked.
‘God knows. It’s not as though there are any extra sounds. Here. Look. That’s how you write Sophie. She pointed to where she had practised at the back of the book. ‘It’s Greek for “wise”.’
He laughed, a little sadly, so she showed him how to write Wilf, or rather ‘Ouilph’ but his mind wasn’t in it and he was disappointed that it meant nothing.
‘I met that boy with the Jew’s Canoe and the turntable today,’ she said. ‘And his mum.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. We’re in the same div, I mean class, this term.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Okay. A bit posh. He’s called Lucas.’
‘Like the headlamps.’
‘Yeah.’
Their laughter was interrupted by an outburst. A new girl, Elaine, had arrived only days after Christmas and was having trouble fitting in. Nobody liked her yet and there was a tacit agreement to drive her out. She had a record of running away. Wilf had found out about her already in one of his raids on the office filing cabinet.
‘Elaine the Pain,’ he said.
‘She fancies you.’
‘She does not.’
‘She does. She watches you when you’re not looking and whenever you say something, she does this with her hair.’ Sophie mimicked Elaine’s way of twisting her hair round a forefinger while staring through her fringe.
‘Well I don’t fancy her,’ Wilf insisted. ‘She’s got junkie arms.’
‘How’d you mean?’
‘Too thin and all bruisey and veiny.’
‘What are skellies and cutters, Wilf?’
‘Search me.’
‘So who do you fancy?’
‘No one.’ He gave her a shove.
‘No, come on. Who’d you fancy at school? You must have someone by now.’
He smirked. ‘Safety in numbers.’
‘So have you …?’
‘What?’
‘You know. Kissed anyone?’
‘Course. Look.’
He tugged down the Christmas polo neck Margaret and Kieran had given him to reveal a livid purple love bite.
‘That doesn’t count,’ she said, hot with envy. ‘Who gave you that, anyway? I bet it was only Jo Cross. She gives those to anyone who buys her a Caramac.’
‘It was Jane Bursley,’ he muttered. ‘At the party the other night.’
‘But she’s a fucking slag.’
‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘She … No. I shouldn’t.’
‘What?’
‘No … Well …’
‘What, Wilf?’
He was obviously bursting to tell. He seemed to have grown while Sophie was away. His lanky frame was filling out and she saw black hair on his leg where his jeans were too short. He was wearing Brut, too. He never used to wear anything like that.
‘You won’t tell anyone?’ he asked, frowning.
‘Who am I going to tell? I don’t know anyone who knows Jane fucking Bursley apart from you.’
He picked at the bedspread with stubby fingers. ‘She can pick up a wine cork off the pavement without her hands … using just her … you know.’
Sophie pictured Jane Bursley, whom she remembered from St Bonnie’s as a bully and a loudmouth, crouched on the pavement outside Timothy Whites in an admiring circle. ‘No she can’t!’
‘She can.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘No, but …’
‘Wilf, trust me. I’m a girl. It’s not physically possible.’
‘Oh.’
He seemed crestfallen and Sophie suf
fered a moment of uncertainty. For a girl she was, after all, completely inexperienced. But she had felt a momentary imperative to defend all girls against such a grotesque misunderstanding.
‘So does she fancy you?’ she asked.
‘I reckon.’ He grinned.
‘But she’s a slag.’
‘So?’ He lay back against the wall with his hands behind his head. ‘She’s a good kisser. She’s had practice.’
‘Are you seeing her again?’
‘Doubt it.’
She prodded him with her Greek grammar so that he wriggled.
‘Maybe,’ he admitted.
‘So were you standing up or lying down?’
‘Sort of half-sitting. We were on the stairs.’
‘Tongues and everything?’
He just smiled a big, fat, slag-snogging smile.
‘Was it good?’
‘It was all right.’
‘Show me.’
‘How?’ He stopped smiling.
‘Show me how she kissed.’
‘Soph! I can’t!’
‘Why not? It’s just a lesson.’
‘But it’s you.’ He sat up, perturbed now.
‘Exactly. You don’t want me to make a fool of myself when my turn comes.’
‘But you’re only a kid.’
‘I’m fourteen in a couple of weeks.’
‘Shit. You are too. Why haven’t you got tits yet?’
‘Shut up,’ she said.
‘Fourteen,’ he said, marvelling.
‘Come on,’ she told him, shutting her eyes. ‘We can both shut our eyes and you can pretend I’m not me. Please, Wilf. It can be my birthday present.’
‘Well, okay.’
She was used to his body. They’d played Batman and Robin and The Tomorrow People and Trigan Empire plenty of times. They’d seen each other in swimming gear times without number. So just sitting on her bed, fully clothed, and kissing with their eyes shut need not have felt so odd.
But Wilf had grown. And after the first tentative mouths-shut-no-tongues kiss he felt the need to hold her and suddenly he seemed really big, more like a man. His tongue slipped in and seemed to fill her mouth. She could taste shepherd’s pie and the bitterness of his last illicit cigarette. She tried to imagine it was Lucas pressing into her and making the bed squeak but sensed he would taste and feel entirely different.