by Patrick Gale
‘Did they beat you?’ Zacky asked with a disturbing kind of relish.
‘Sometimes,’ Kieran said uneasily. ‘I used my psalter to count off the days.’
‘How was that?’ Sophie asked.
‘We worked our way through it day after day, night after night. In Latin, mind you, which I never really understood. A psalm for morning and a psalm for evening, sometimes more than one, sometimes just bits if it was very long. Every day. So I worked out how many weeks till I’d be sixteen and allowed to leave and how many times we’d sing each psalm till then and I started counting them off. I made a tiny dot in the back of the psalter each time we finished Psalm 150 again.’
It was one of those occasions – their birthdays and wedding anniversary were the others – when Sophie received a strong sense of the degree to which Kieran and Margaret had sacrificed themselves. Or if not themselves then the things which constituted a life for so many people: home, family, friendships, travel. They had a home within Wakefield House – a bedroom, sitting room and bathroom that were off-limits – but they were rarely in them. They had no family of their own. They seemed to have few friends who were not ex-residents of the home. They never took holidays. Because one of them was always required to cover for the other, they never had simultaneous days off and when either was taking time off they seemed invariably to gravitate back to the kitchen to see if the other needed help or company.
Kieran had been married to someone else before he met Margaret and it hadn’t worked out. Perhaps he was sterile? Sophie could not imagine asking him and she had never dared enquire of Margaret. Given that she spent so little time in private, Margaret had a necessarily fierce sense of privacy. She had a knack for sharing her character but not her life and Kieran was much the same. Revelations like this one about his miserable childhood were rare and Sophie even thought she saw something flash between them as though Margaret were warning him to change the subject. She wondered idly what would happen if society did not regularly throw up these childless, patient people, monks, nuns, Margarets and Kierans, to take on surplus children.
She felt Wilf’s eyes on her. She glanced down at her plate then looked back and he gazed back, hard and unsmiling, so she knew to expect him later.
The meal seemed to go on for hours, although they could not have been at the table for more than two, even allowing for Margaret’s inevitable reminiscences of the bad things and good which Wilf had got up to in his ten years under their roof.
There was the usual sense of anticlimax as the celebration supper segued into the social diminuendo that ended every ordinary day: television, ping-pong, embattled bathtimes and dolings-out of medication. Sophie started watching Sapphire and Steel with the rest but she could not focus her mind on it so slipped upstairs. She found the normality of it all upsetting, the realization that Wilf’s leaving meant almost nothing to most of the other residents.
Taught by boarding school, she had grabbed a shower earlier in the afternoon, when hot water was plentiful and there was no one about. So now she simply brushed her teeth, washed her face extra carefully, scrubbing at her nose with TCP the way Lucas had taught her, and went to bed. She did not try to sleep because Charlie had opened her eyes to the risk of waking up with bad breath. Instead she banked up her pillows and sat up against her rickety headboard and revised her physics.
Work equals force times distance, she read in handwriting that no longer matched the way she was writing now. Or joules equal Newtons times metres.
Someone came up the stairs but carried on past her door.
Power equals work done divided by time taken, she read on. Or Watts equal joules over seconds. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy can be converted into different forms but total E always stays same. Law of Conservation of Energy.
She put the book upside-down and, as she had been doing since she was eleven or so, pictured the page she had just been looking at and read aloud the information on it. But she got something wrong. She was checking what it was when an ultra-quiet version of two shorts and two longs sounded on her door.
‘Hi,’ she said softly and he came in.
‘You awake?’ he asked.
‘Course.’
She slid her physics notebook onto the lino as he came over and sat on her bed. She reached up and touched his broken nose, feeling the slight bump in the bone. He kissed her hand. Then she touched the side of his face and drew his head down so they could kiss.
‘Is this okay?’ he asked after a while.
‘Course,’ she said, mentally explaining to Kimiko, Margaret, Dr Liphook and the Christian Union that she knew what she was doing and she was ready. Quite ready. ‘Are you going to get in properly?’
‘Okay.’
They kissed some more and he was still outside the bedding.
‘Maybe if you locked the door …?’ she murmured.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Maybe,’ and he went to lock it.
As he was coming back, she sat up and switched off the bedside light so they had only the wash of streetlamp across the window and could see shapes but not expressions. He kicked off his shoes and started to unbutton his shirt – it was his best one, she had noted – but she said, ‘No. Let me.’ She slipped out of bed to stand before him and took off his clothes one by one, releasing small, warm wafts of diesel, Dettol and hot boy skin and noticing how he always kept one hand on her as she worked, on her face, or breast or back of her head. They laughed as she tweaked off his socks, which made it easier to manoeuvre off his underwear and draw him back into bed with her.
He kissed her differently once he was naked. He grew impatient with the boy’s pyjamas she slept in and didn’t apologize when one of the buttons clattered off as he tugged the jacket over her head. The rest happened rather fast and for a few minutes she was in bed with a quite different version of him from the one she knew.
When he came he said her name as though his life depended on her and he clutched her tight against him, a hand on either buttock, as though anxious she catch every drop. ‘God,’ he sighed, returning to himself. ‘Jesus, Soph!’ and she heard the usual Wilf come back to her. ‘Was that okay? Did it hurt?’ He pulled away as though straining to focus on her in the dark. She saw his eyes glitter.
‘Not much,’ she lied. ‘It was nice.’ She drew him to her again, shifting his weight between her legs and wondering if it was normal to begin to feel pleasure afterwards rather than during. ‘I wanted it to be you,’ she added truthfully.
He was very gentle with her then, kissed her, kissed each breast in turn. Then he fetched a handkerchief from his jeans and used it to form a kind of pad between her legs.
‘Dead hamster,’ she chuckled.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Hold me.’
‘You’re not on the pill, are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m fifteen, Wilf. I’m still at school.’
‘Some blokes say you never get pregnant your first time.’
‘Yeah, well, half the kids in here are living proof of what balls that is.’
They fell asleep together. It was only a single bed, of course, so they had to lie close. Several times in the night she turned over and felt him turning and settling too, warm against her. She liked it best when she was facing away from him but holding one of his arms about her, his hand pressed under hers, his bracelet marking the skin beneath her breasts.
She had no sense of his leaving, only a sudden awareness, after dawn, that when she rolled there was no more resistance, no more answering warmth.
Because she had only slept fitfully so long as he was with her, she fell into deep slumber once she was alone and overslept by hours. She could hear Kieran mowing the grass when she next opened her eyes. When she finally dressed and came down, Wilf had left for his new life. His belongings were all gone and the room at the front that had been his for as long as she could remember, had already been claimed by Zacky.
Sad but also a little reassured because she d
id not trust Wilf not to betray by some word or gesture how they had passed the night, she was drawn to the kitchen and Margaret. She ate two bowls of Shreddies at one end of the table watching Margaret make a steak and kidney pie then an apple crumble at the other. There was something deeply comforting about nibbling a flour-dusty chunk of cooking apple and watching her at work.
‘You missed seeing his mum,’ Margaret told her. ‘She came by in a friend’s car to pick him up so they could arrive at the new flat together.’
‘What’s she like?’
Margaret concentrated on spreading crumble mixture over a dish of apple chunks without spilling it. ‘He looks just like her,’ she said at last. ‘Only she’s blonde. Out of a bottle, mind. She wanted to meet me and see where he’d been living while she was … away.’
‘In prison.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she really kill someone?’
Margaret shrugged and turned to slide the crumble into the oven. ‘I don’t think she planned to. She was desperate for money. She thought Wilf was going to be taken away from her if she couldn’t provide for him properly. She’d stolen before but only in a small way. Then she got involved in this robbery that went wrong. She shot a policeman, I think. Or a store detective. Tragic really, losing him by trying to keep him. It was great seeing them together again.’
‘Was he pleased?’
‘Oh, you know Wilf. Never likes to let much show. But he obviously loves her. She’s got herself quite a son. Are you okay, Soph? You look worn out.’ She felt Sophie’s forehead briskly.
‘I’m fine,’ Sophie said. ‘Slept badly, that’s all.’
‘You’ve been working too hard. Have a day off.’
‘Can’t. Physics today.’
‘Just a day though?’
‘I’d get behind. Why did my mother give me up, then?’
Margaret sighed, brushed the flour off her hands with a tea towel and came over to sit by her. ‘I wish I could tell you,’ she started.
‘Why do I have to wait? It’s not as though I’m going to turn up on her doorstep. Not after all this time.’
‘It’s not fair, is it?’
‘No it fucking isn’t.’
Margaret tutted and gave her a warm, floury hug. She gave her the scant comfort of the explanation she had offered so often before, that girls often got pregnant when they were too young to cope, by boys too young to bear responsibility or by men not free to marry them. ‘Whoever she was, whoever she is,’ Margaret assured her, ‘she won’t have given you up lightly, anymore than Wilf’s mother wanted to give up him.’
There was an outburst from the dayroom, where a fight had broken out over the ping-pong table. Sophie took advantage of Margaret being called away to steal a few squares from the block of cooking chocolate in the temporarily unlocked larder before she returned to her room and the day’s portion of revision.
An envelope had been pushed under her door but had slid under the lino instead of above it so she hadn’t noticed it earlier. There were some tightly folded photocopies inside and a little note from Wilf, with oily fingerprints on it.
Thought I’d copy these for you before I moved out. Didn’t see you getting round to doing it for yourself. I didn’t read them and the originals are back under lock and key in M&K’s office. Be good littlun. William xx
He had crossed out two attempts to spell original. She noted the way he signed himself. Only his mother still called him William.
The papers represented the slim contents of her personal file. They gave her name, date of admission and the brief reports made after her annual review by the social workers. Settling in well. No wish expressed to be considered for adoption or family fostering. Enjoying school. Et cetera.
Sophie curled up on her bed reading them closely.
Just one paper stood out from the others. It was far earlier, dating from when she was not quite two and recorded an application to foster her, pending their hoped-for adoption of her, by a married couple. Their names and address were given. Mr and Mrs Adrian Pickett, The Old Vicarage, in a village just outside the city boundaries. His profession was listed as civil servant, hers as cello teacher.
She cursed Wilf for the snippet of information, however kindly meant. She had never wanted it, or not much, but now that she had it her mind had difficulty focusing for long on anything else. Through the Henry V choruses, the Reform Act, the sexual organs of flowers and the scandal of Alcibiades and the herms, she kept imagining the house, the woman, the man. Adrian Pickett was an older husband by ten or even fifteen years, who worshipped his young wife and did all he could not to make her feel too bad about her failure to produce children. He had bought her a lapdog or a greyhound as compensation. Yes, a greyhound was best; she had met one on the street recently and it was the first large dog that had not scared her. The decision to adopt had been the wife’s, she decided, instantly, lovingly supported by him. His only condition being that they adopt a girl first and that it be named after his late grandmother.
At last she could bear it no longer and, lent courage by a ninety-five per cent score on a physics self-testing, she wrote a letter.
Dear Mr and Mrs Pickett,
You won’t remember my name, I expect, but we have met at least once, when I was a baby. I have discovered that you applied to foster me but that your application was then cancelled. Either that or you did foster me then gave me up again. Don’t feel bad. All I can remember are your bookcases. I still love reading. But naturally I am wondering why. Perhaps you could let me know. I have so little information about my origins that every small detail is precious.
She only realized the truth of this as she wrote it. Damn Wilf! Damn him!
As you can see from my address, no-one else adopted me.
She crossed out the last line, rejecting it as too crudely pathetic, then decided to reinstate it. Then the letter looked too messy so she copied it out again perfectly, just as Kimiko would have done.
No reply came but the writing of the letter stilled the curiosity Wilf’s research had aroused. Perhaps they no longer lived at the same address? Perhaps they were dead? Perhaps her letter had been daintily chewed up by the imaginary greyhound on arrival?
The summer term was starting and Sophie left her vulnerable, no longer virginal self at home to resume her carefully constructed school persona. All that mattered for the next ten weeks was exams.
CLOISTER TIME
(fifteen years, five months)
At a sign from the umpire all the players began to leave their places around the cricket pitch. For a brief, lovely moment Sophie thought the match was over then she realized the fielders were not leaving the field but transferring to their mirror positions in relation to the facing batsman.
‘End of an over,’ Lucas interpreted for her, reading her mind.
As he changed positions, Charlie looked across at where she and Lucas were slumped in deckchairs beneath a mulberry tree. He inclined his head slightly and pulled the subtly disapproving face that was a standing joke between them; one eyebrow raised, mouth a thin line, superhumanly impervious to all answering smiles or laughter. He had been pulling it in exams and had twice succeeded in earning Lucas an invigilator’s shush for snorting.
Sophie and Lucas raised hands in gleefully uncool waves just before he had to turn his back on them, then they subsided, oppressed by the heat. A series of balls followed, each neatly chipped to the grass by the batsman in a way that scored him no runs but couldn’t be caught.
‘Do you understand cricket?’ Sophie asked.
‘Not really.’
‘But you used to have to play it, you said.’
‘That’s one of the mysteries of the game – that you can be made to play every summer from seven to thirteen and still be a little hazy about the rules. You just go where you’re told and try not to be upset when people get cross with you.’ He yawned. ‘It hurts like hell if you make the mistake of trying to catch the ball – that I do remember.’
‘But is Charlie any good?’
‘Not really. Keen, though.’
She had a sheet of Latin revision on her lap, carefully folded several times so it would look like no more than scrap paper and she would not be thought a swot.
‘Test me,’ she asked and Lucas took the sheet and stared at it a moment.
‘Which way round?’ he asked.
‘English into Latin’s hardest.’
‘Okay … Buffoon.’
‘Scurror.’
‘Dandy, jester or parasite.’
‘Scurra.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘It’s not!’
‘No. The Latin for rubbish.’
‘Oh. Sorry. Scruta.’
‘To examine or find out.’
‘Scutor. No. Scrutor.’
As he ran through the vocab list, she took care to flunk several words she knew perfectly well so that he wouldn’t know she knew them all. The school was founded on the perfectibility of mind and body and yet it was only feats of the body that were countenanced as a source of pride. It was a kind of good manners, she reflected, to bluff and fumble like this until faced with an exam paper, rather than revealing too much knowledge, but also a kind of guerrilla warfare.
‘You’ll do,’ he said eventually and flicked the list back onto her lap with a touch of peevishness.
Anyone who claimed to have lost count of how many papers were still to be sat was lying. There were just six to go, including the Latin prose and French dictation, the hardest exams to prepare for since revision for them had to take in everything knowable in either subject. Lucas had been trying to make her speak French earlier but she had rebelled because her accent made him giggle.
The country was suffering a heatwave and a hosepipe ban. Charlie did not know it but half the reason for watching him in this match was the honourable excuse it gave to leave the airless library for the refreshment of sitting in shade and looking on grass that had not cooked to yellowness. The cricket pitches were the only green grass left in the city. They were watered by a Victorian pump system running from the nearby river. Legend had it that small dried-out fish could sometimes be found on their sacrosanct turf.