by Jo Verity
Her current boyfriend was an extremely tall boy called Geoffrey who was in the Upper Sixth at Lewis’s school. She’d noticed him at the Christmas hop – one of the few occasions when the pupils of girls’ and boys’ grammar schools officially got together – and she was attracted to him because of his height. Having identified her target, Geoffrey didn’t stand a chance.
‘No.’ It hadn’t crossed Tessa’s mind to invite him. ‘He needs three As for Bristol so he’s putting in twelve hours a day. What about Tim?’
‘What about him?’ Pam shrugged and giggled. ‘We’re free agents. Femmes fatales.’
Chairs lined both sides of the hall and, at the far end, there was a low stage with shabby red curtains at either side. Another shabby curtain, dusty black this time, formed a backdrop. A drum kit, white with sparkly blue insets, stood centre stage and power leads snaked across the bare boards. A boy Tessa recognised from somewhere – one of Lewis’s crowd, maybe? – stood in the wings, playing records on a record deck linked to some kind of amplification system. The two girls, arms linked, made a few slow circuits, seeing and being seen as the hall filled up.
The Katz started playing at eight but an hour later there was still no sign of Tony Rundle or Mike Stoddy. Tessa wondered if Diane had misled her and that her brother and his friend weren’t coming to the dance after all.
Another half-hour passed. Pam had gone outside ‘for some fresh air’ with a young man called Chris, who worked at the Co-Op Bank. Tessa had given in and was dancing with a nondescript boy – sweaty hands and reeking of unnecessary aftershave lotion – who had been trailing her all evening. The group wasn’t up to much. They played deafening cover versions but at least it eliminated the need to converse with her partner, and she abandoned herself to the rough and ready beat.
She noticed Tony Rundle in the middle of Blue Suede Shoes, sauntering down the hall with Mike Stoddy, heading towards the stage. She took a few quick steps to her right, dancing into his path, making sure that his arm brushed her hip as he passed. Her mouth dried. She felt stirrings, agreeable yet not quite proper, where she imagined her bladder to be.
It was still warm and his mother had gone into the garden to dead-head the roses and water the plants in the rockery. Lewis couldn’t settle to anything and followed her out. ‘Need a hand, Mum?’
She was concentrating hard, dribbling water from the watering can into the pockets of soil between the huge stones.
‘You can put the deckchairs away, if you like, Lewis.’
One parent – one child. Equilibrium again.
He folded the chairs and took them to the garden shed then gathered the weeds which his mother had spent her afternoon pulling up and now lay, in wilting heaps, along the path. ‘Look, Mum.’ Something dark and fluttery circled the garden. ‘It’s a bat.’
They stood together in silence as it disappeared into the shadows of the sombre laurels to reappear, silhouetted against the evening sky. Round and round it went, gaining then losing height, completing its erratic circuits. Then it was gone.
‘I used to be terrified of bats. I thought they’d get tangled in my hair.’ She shook her head. ‘All the silly things we worry about. And then…’
Lewis put his arms around her thin shoulders and pulled her to him. ‘I love you, Mum.’
She kissed his cheek and he felt her shudder. ‘Brrrr. It’s gone chilly.’
It was gloomy in the kitchen and, when they put the light on, evening instantly became night. His mother made three mugs of cocoa and they took them into the living room where his father was watching the news. Lewis tried to immerse himself in the item on the new Coventry Cathedral but his gaze kept straying to the mantelpiece where the hands of the clock crept towards Tessa’s deadline.
Tessa kept dancing, edging down the dance floor until she was a few feet from the stage, alongside Mike Stoddy. Tony Rundle stood on the far side of him, hands in pockets, concentrating on the music. He was wearing a black leather jacket, a white tee-shirt and tight black trousers. The jacket was scuffed and worn around the cuffs and she was sure, were she to reach out and touch it, it would be warm and pliable. He was several inches taller than Mike and dipped his head now and again to shout something in his friend’s ear.
The group finished the number and announced that they were taking a short break before their final set.
‘Hi, Mike.’ Her heart was hammering.
It was a second or two before recognition settled on Mike Stoddy’s pleasant face. ‘Oh, hi. It’s Tina, isn’t it?’
‘Tessa.’
‘Sorry. Tessa. Of course.’ He nodded towards the stage. ‘What d’you think of them?’
Tony Rundle stood within arm’s reach and this might be her only chance. ‘I think they’re rubbish.’ She raised her voice and leaned forward, directing her remark around Mike and towards him. ‘What do you think?’
Tony Rundle appeared irritated by her intrusion. ‘What do I think about what?’
‘Tessa, here, thinks the group’s rubbish,’ Mike explained.
‘And on what is Tessa here basing her judgement?’ He stared at her, framing the question as though she were incapable of answering it herself.
His gaze scrambled her thoughts. ‘Ummm … I don’t know … just … a feeling, really.’
She saw herself through his eyes – a na•ve schoolgirl, in a home-made green dress, no different from any of the other girls at a stupid teenage hop.
‘Feelings are good,’ he said at last. ‘And I agree. They’re rubbish.’ He nodded towards the drum kit, ‘I’m looking for a drummer for my own group but it won’t be that one.’ He checked his watch and she noticed the nicotine stains on his index and middle fingers, the mat of hair on the back of his hand. ‘We’re off to The Bell. We’ve got time for a pint or two. Coming?’
‘Okay.’ And, as easily as that she was with Tony Rundle.
The seedy pub, near the railway station, was a renowned haunt for hard-drinking men. It had none of the refinements – plush seats or fancy low lighting – of the pubs that Tessa occasionally went to with Geoffrey. In the saloon bar – barely bigger than their living room at home – the air was grey with cigarette smoke and fruity with the smell of beer. She appeared to be the only female in the hot, cramped bar, which she found both thrilling and intimidating.
‘What’ll you have?’ Mike asked.
‘Cider, please.’ Her hand went to her bag. Did she have enough money? All she’d anticipated paying for was a dance ticket, a soft drink and the bus fare home.
‘No. I’ll get them.’ Mike set off, elbowing his way to the bar, leaving her on her own with Tony.
Again, she could think of nothing witty or meaningful to say but Rundle seemed unconcerned by the silence between them, a silence accentuated by the clamour of the inebriated customers. The huge wall clock hanging over the fireplace, its face yellowed by years of seeping cigarette smoke, gave an inescapable warning that she would miss her curfew. God, it was so unfair. Rundle and Mike didn’t have unreasonable fathers, waiting on the doorstep, stopwatch in hand. They had no examination hoops to jump through, no ‘reputation’ to protect. They could go where they liked and stay out all night if they wanted to.
‘How come you know Mike, then?’ Rundle asked. His eyes were khaki-coloured – nearer yellow than green – with thin eyebrows arching above them. It was a cruel face until he smiled.
‘I’m at school with his sister.’ If she didn’t tell him, Mike would.
‘Aaahhh. School.’ He nodded as if that one word told him everything he needed to know about her.
Mike returned with the drinks. She took several gulps, attempting to counter her schoolgirl-ness. The cider smelled of rotting apples and its cloying taste assailed her taste buds. It was nauseating. Disgusting.
In the instant she acknowledged her repulsion, she also lost her nerve. She shoved her glass back into Mike’s hand. ‘Sorry. I’ve got to go.’
If she ran she could get the last bus and be n
o more than ten minutes late.
Chapter 9
When Lewis was thirteen, Uncle Frank had given him a second-hand bicycle for his birthday enabling him to do a morning paper round. In the beginning his parents were dead against it. He could see their point, but Carson’s had been taken over by a local chain of newsagents and, with a change of name and modernised premises, it was almost possible to forget that it had been the scene of the tragedy. The pay was poor, but Lewis was careful with his money, unlike the other boys who bought sweets and crisps, their paltry earnings going straight back into the till. Last year, when he was sixteen, he’d doubled his income by taking on the evening round, too.
Even on icy mornings or gloomy afternoons, he enjoyed the job. He liked the camaraderie as the lads gathered in the shop, waiting whilst the manager, Mr Fisher, and his wife sorted the papers and magazines into rounds, pencilling house numbers and abbreviated street names in the top margins before loading them in the canvas satchels. He loved the smell of newsprint and the dramas captured in the day’s bold headlines; the morning calm and the teatime bustle in the streets. He took pride in ensuring that the papers and periodicals went to the correct address, something the customers appreciated and expressed by giving him a generous tip at Christmas. ‘We’re going to miss you when you leave us, lad,’ Mr Fisher muttered regularly.
A new address appeared on his evening delivery list. Wellington House, Wellington Gardens. The detached house – solid and gracious – was set back from the road. He leaned his bike against the low redbrick wall and pulled out the Evening Post then walked down the path, rolling the paper ready to post it through the black iron letterbox. Before he had chance to do that, a girl appeared from the rear of the house and, involuntarily, he raised his hand to his chest.
‘Sorry. Did I scare you?’ she apologised.
‘No. Yes.’ He shook his head. ‘At least you’re not a dog.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Well spotted.’
He blushed. ‘What I mean is, dogs can be a bit of a problem. They don’t only bite postmen, you know.’
The girl was dressed in khaki shorts and a yellow Aertex shirt, fair hair dragged back in an untidy ponytail, hands streaked with what appeared to be oil. Smudges of the same stuff covered her clothes.
‘Are you any good with bicycles? I’m trying to fix my chain but I think I may need to take a link out.’
Lewis pushed the paper through the letterbox. ‘I’ll have a look, if you like.’ How could someone wearing what seemed to be boy’s clothes look so attractive?
‘Thanks. I’m Kirsty by the way.’ She trilled the ‘r’ enchantingly.
‘Lewis,’ he said, then, as if his parents’ choice of name needed excusing, added, ‘as in Carroll.’
He followed her into the back garden where a bicycle, reduced to its component parts, lay strewn across an extensive area of paving. She grinned, holding her hands out, palms up, as if she had performed a complex conjuring trick. ‘See. I’m good at taking things to bits.’
Seeing that it might take some time to reassemble the machine, he promised to return once he had completed his round.
*
The evening paper round became the high spot of Lewis’s day. Once he’d collected the papers, he rearranged them in his satchel so that Wellington Gardens came at the end of his route. If he started on time, and pushed on hard, he could spend fifteen minutes with Kirsty before he needed to head home for the evening meal.
Lewis learned that the Ross family were from Scotland but they had lived all over the country. ‘Pa works for a bank. If you want to get on in banking, you have to go wherever they send you,’ Kirsty explained.
‘What about school? It can’t be much fun, making friends then moving on and having to do it all again.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘It doesn’t bother me. I rather like my own company.’
‘But what about school work?’
‘I’m quite clever,’ she said, without a trace of arrogance. ‘Pythagoras is the same everywhere. And Shakespeare. And the kings and queens of England.’
She was right. Facts were facts wherever you lived. He’d never thought of that. Neither had he ever met anyone who admitted to being ‘quite clever’ and he found it enchanting. Within one week – just five, fifteen-minute encounters – he established that Kirsty Ross was a few months older than he and went to the private school in the centre of the town. She had two brothers – hence the hand-me-down shorts and shirt. One was studying medicine in Edinburgh and the other – a Civil Servant – worked in London. Her A Level subjects were economics, history and maths and she hoped to study law.
Lewis said nothing to Tessa about Kirsty Ross. He wanted time to see how his new friendship would pan out. Although it felt like a betrayal, he persuaded himself that his sister already had enough on her mind and that it should wait until she’d finished her exams. In truth, he was quite concerned about her. Each time she returned from an exam, he asked her what she’d thought of it; if the ‘right’ topics had come up; whether it was a fair paper. He expected her to enthuse or rant but her response was always a non-committal, ‘not too bad’ or ‘okay’. His parents seemed happy to accept Tessa’s new-found self-possession but to him it didn’t ring true.
One evening, when she was washing her hair, he slipped into her bedroom. There had to be a clue or a sign, something to explain her uncharacteristically reasonable behaviour. He stood in the centre of the room. In the bathroom, Tessa was singing, her voice echo-y and sweet. ‘Every day, it’s a-getting closer…’ The tap was running and he pictured her leaning over the sink, rinsing the shampoo from her hair. Up in the roof the cold water tank hissed as it refilled. He pulled the bedside table drawer open a few inches, looping his index finger through the dull metal handle, as if employing a single finger was less deceitful than using a whole hand. Jewellery and cosmetics lay jumbled together at the front of the drawer. He eased it open a few more inches. Towards the back of the drawer, he could see the red leather cover of a fat diary. He took it out and – resolved to read no more than was necessary – he flicked through the year until he reached June.
Blessed with an excellent memory, having once learned something, Tessa retained it. Two years earlier, before she had recognised how pointless exams were, she had worked flat out for her O Levels, preparing reams of revision notes, then précising those notes into memory-jogging points. She’d chanted rhymes and mnemonics, made essay plans, memorised columns of irregular verbs. Her exam technique had been polished to perfection and now, seated again at the rickety exam desk in the school gymnasium, it was hard to shake off the years of training and subdue the impulse to succeed. This wasn’t made any easier when, despite having done no revision at all during the previous three months, she was able to complete most of the French translation paper. Consoling herself that the other exams would be harder, she struggled to make convincing errors. Performing badly wasn’t going to be as straightforward as she’d assumed.
Tessa had often felt let down by her mother’s detachment from what was going on around her but in the current circumstances it was to her advantage. When she could no longer bear the tedium of her room, she read or wrote in the garden, confident that her mother would fail to work out that Dennis Wheatly was unlikely to feature on the A Level syllabus and that Chapter Seven of The Woman Who Loved Too Much had nothing to do with the Reform Bill of 1831. In contrast, her father was extremely observant, a skill honed, she imagined, by his years at the Post Office, where every stamp and paper clip had to be accounted for. On one occasion, he was two hours late coming home from work because a consignment of manilla envelopes had gone missing. Thus, when he was around, it was safer to keep well out of range of his eagle eye.
Although he hadn’t mentioned anything, she suspected that Lewis was on to her. He stared at her when she was eating or doing her hair; he appeared in her room for no particular reason as if wanting to catch her out. He kept asking how her revision was going; what the
exams were like. She felt rotten about deceiving him. Lewis had always been her truest friend and they’d never had secrets from each other. They’d pricked fingers and mingled blood; they’d sworn on bibles and drunk each other’s spittle, making pact after pact that nothing would come between them. They’d clung to each other when her mother was too ill, their father too preoccupied, to bother with them. Lewis was loyal and funny and clever. He’d been the first to know, in an abridged version, when she’d started her periods and he’d confessed to her when he experienced his first wet dream. But it was too much to ask him to help her fail her exams; too embarrassing to explain how Tony Rundle made the intimate parts of her body ache and tingle.
Tessa feared that she had ruined her chances with Rundle but, a few days later, the phone rang. Her mother answered, half covering the mouthpiece with her hand as she shouted, ‘Tessa. Someone for you. It doesn’t sound like Geoffrey.’
‘Who’s this Geoffrey?’ Rundle asked when she came to the phone.
‘Oh. No one in particular.’
‘Good. I was wondering what you were doing on Friday.’
She glanced towards the kitchen, checking that her mother wasn’t listening. ‘Why?’
‘I’ll be in The Bell from about eight o’clock on, if you fancy a drink.’
‘Okay.’
‘What’s on tonight, then?’ her father asked as they were eating their evening meal. Tessa smiled, aware that Lewis, who was sitting opposite, was watching her face.