by Ruth Thomas
And so she stopped worrying. She was very obedient. Colin’s voice was high, boyish, but his words were unequivocal.
‘So,’ he said, after a moment’s pause. ‘I’ve decided on a Yogopot slogan.’
‘Great.’
Colin smiled and breathed in. ‘There’s a Yogopot at the end of every rainbow.’
She did not think this was the best slogan. She did not think it was a very good slogan at all.
‘It’s the one that sticks in your mind, isn’t it?’ Colin said. ‘And that’s what advertising’s all about.’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyway, that’s bloody Yogopot out of the way. Guess what I’m working on now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t tell a nice girl like you.’
‘What? What do you mean? Go on, Colin, tell –’
‘Condoms.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s great,’ he said. ‘You get all these free packs.’
‘Oh,’ she said again, aware of someone in the flat next door, hoovering their carpet. Bashing the hoover against the skirting board. She wondered if Colin had all those free packs there, at that moment, in his bedroom.
Colin began to laugh. ‘Don’t look so scared,’ he said more kindly. ‘Come here.’ And he walked towards her and put his arms around her, folding her up roughly, like an octopus.
‘You’re nice,’ she said into his armpit.
‘You’re nice too. So. Why don’t we go to bed? It’ll be lovely.’
‘Not yet.’
‘What are you worried about?’
‘Nothing.’
‘So why don’t we?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’ve got to do it some time. Someone’s got to show you. I bet loads of girls at your school have …’
‘I know, but …’
It was late. Nearly ten o’clock. Her parents would be home by now, worrying. She had said she would be home by nine. In the flat next door, the hoover was being pushed around a more distant room.
‘You’ve got to do it some time,’ Colin said again. ‘You’ve got to do it with someone. So it might as well be me.’ He paused. ‘You love me.’
‘I do. I do. But …’
*
When the bus arrived, nearly ten minutes late, Colin gave her an unexpectedly brief, dry kiss, like a Russian politician.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Hope your parents forgive you.’
Then he patted her backside and watched her get on the bus, stumbling a little as she made her way to the back seats. She tried to make her profile look enigmatic and beautiful. But he had already turned and walked away. He had not stayed to smile or wave. She watched him turn down a side street as the bus drew away. A middle-aged woman sitting on the back seat was staring at her in her school uniform, evidently amazed that she was capable of kissing a grown man.
Couching
In our hotel room we sit on a small, red sofa and listen to the quiet tick of some nameless instrument. A thermostat? we wonder. The mini-bar?
We look up at the rose picture on the wall and speculate whether it is a Redouté. We discover two CDs that a former guest lost down the back of the sofa. The Cutter and the Clan. Tubular Bells.
‘Someone will be missing those,’ says Kenneth. ‘Better hand them in to reception.’
‘Hmm.’
The CDs make me feel a little depressed. I put them on the arm of the sofa, get up, walk into the en-suite bathroom and shut the door. It is warm in here and smells of pine. I take off my clothes and drop them on the floor-tiles. I look at the small bottles arranged on the little wooden ledge. Out of Eden Shower Gelée. Out of Eden Shampoo. Out of Eden Moisturising Cream.
In the shower, I unzip my sponge bag and use my own shampoo.
*
‘So. What shall we do this afternoon?’ Kenneth asks when I return, my hair wrapped in a Royal Burgh towel. He is listening to the Tubular Bells CD. There is a drone of notes and the occasional chanted word.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Go to bed?’
I am weary, after too much translating of late – too many complicated sentences about nineteenth-century hand-looms. Weary, too, with the effort of getting here. Hotel rooms always make me feel like this in any case; the sight of the bed makes me want to get straight into a pair of practical pyjamas and hide between the laundered sheets.
‘Let’s have a look at this folder of Interesting Ideas,’ Kenneth suggests, hauling out a large pink file from beneath the coffee table.
‘Nothing that involves a big trek,’ I say, sitting down beside him. I lean my head against the sofa back.
‘So,’ says Kenneth.
‘Glockenspiel!’ intones the CD.
‘Do you really want this on?’
‘I think it’s kind of soothing. So … there’s the Tron Kirk. There’s the castle. There’s the museum. Or the botanic gardens.’
‘Yes, but they’ll all be closed and it’s freezing anyway.’
‘We could go out for lunch. Or we could eat here, where we will be offered “a superb dining experience in sumptuous surroundings”.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Just some sandwiches then? Room service?’
‘That sounds not too exerting.’
Kenneth looks at me. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You look sad.’
He thinks I’m thinking about Joe. But I’m not.
I’m actually remembering a ten-minute bus journey undertaken one Sunday in East Grinstead in 1979. A journey I made in order to meet my friend Sally Tuttle. It had been a number 18 bus, and I had been sitting on it with a Tubular Bells album in a plastic bag by my feet.
Colin Rafferty had got on the bus. That is why I still remember the occasion: he had suddenly been there, at the top of the bus steps, buying a ticket. And I had looked up and felt alarmed.
Colin had not acknowledged me straight away; he had just come and sat down in the seat in front of me, and the bus had roared on, down London Road. I continued to stare, pink-faced, through the window. Look nonchalant, look nonchalant. I clutched the handles of my plastic bag and tried to think of the homework I was supposed to do: an 800-word Chemistry essay. Then, apropos of nothing, Colin Rafferty had suddenly turned, leaned one arm casually over the back of his seat and said, ‘Hello, Sally’s friend.’
I flicked a quick glance in his direction.
‘Hello,’ I replied, bunching both hands into fists around the plastic-bag handles.
Colin smiled and I noticed his teeth.
‘So. Where are you going?’
‘To see a friend.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘Just a friend.’
‘Wouldn’t be someone I know, then?’
‘Maybe.’
And then he said it: the thing that stays in my memory. ‘Do you know, Sally’s friend,’ he said, ‘you have the most beautiful eyes.’
And he smiled again, and turned back in his seat.
I sat rigidly and regarded the back of his head. The bus droned and clanked on. My head throbbed. I felt oddly paralysed. I wished, more than anything, that Colin Rafferty would get off the bus.
Then, after a couple of stops, he did. Without looking back at me or even acknowledging my continuing existence, he stood up, walked down the aisle and descended the steps. He turned the corner of a street and disappeared.
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in Sally’s bedroom, not telling her what had happened.
‘I’m really not sure about this,’ I remember Sally saying, picking up the sleeve of my Tubular Bells album to look at the notes. ‘I really don’t like the way he says Glockenspiel and stuff. It’s a bit bloody peculiar.’
‘Hmm?’
‘I mean: Glock-un-shpeel! What’s that all about? It’s a bit bloody airy-fairy isn’t it? You ought to listen to the Clash.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Anything wrong? You’ve gone al
l mopy.’
‘Just tired, Sal.’
*
After our wine (white, slightly sour) and sandwiches (ham, tuna mayonnaise), Kenneth and I leave our room to go in search of the hotel’s embroidery exhibition. We walk along carpeted corridors, down hushed staircases, past vases of flowers, pewter bowls of pine cones and brass plaques indicating room numbers. We walk into a room marked Function Suite and then into another marked Conference Hall. A lone man in a T-shirt that says I’m with her is staple-gunning pieces of paper to the walls.
‘Is this where the embroidery exhibition is meant to be?’ Kenneth asks.
‘We’re behind schedule, pal,’ says the man with the staple-gun. ‘I can’t see me getting this on the walls before the back of midnight.’
‘You’re not staple-gunning the embroideries are you?’ I ask, alarmed.
The man looks at me. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll not be staple-gunning the actual artwork.’
At his feet is a box of photocopied pictures. Beside him is a wooden frame supporting a large embroidered canvas. It is turned the wrong way round, the stitches neatly finished off in reds, greens and blues. I can make out the shape of a face, clothing, the soft glitter of sequins.
‘Could we take a look at the embroideries?’ Kenneth asks.
‘Best not, if you don’t mind,’ the man says. ‘I don’t really want to touch them, pal, with my butterfingers. Best if you come and see them tomorrow.’
And we walk away, back up to our room.
‘Never trust a butterfingers with a staple-gun,’ Kenneth observes in the lift.
I don’t reply. I am thinking of the art of embroidery: the innocent pull of thread through cloth.
Chain Twisted, Detached
21 OCTOBER 1979
Chemistry
Physical and Chemical Changes
A physical change is a change in a substance which does not result in the formation of a substance with a different chemical composition.
A chemical change is a change in one or more substances which results in the production of one or more substances of different chemical composition from the original substances.
You could have put this more succinctly, Sally!
Where are your experiment results? Conclusion?
Everyone worked in pairs and they were always a pair, Sally and Rowena, hunched over the gentle heat of the Bunsen burner. At their experiments bench they peered at the copper sulphate crystal they were supposed to grow. It was not nearly as symmetrical as everyone else’s. It was wonky, and made them laugh. Chemistry was always funny. There was some mixture, some chemical composition that Miss Haugh kept talking about. Fehlings. Pronounced failings. That made them laugh too.
‘So. He’s quite witty, isn’t he?’ Rowena said, mid-morning, and Sally froze.
‘So. When are you going to tell your mum and dad about him?’
‘I’m not.’
Rowena twiddled the gold stud in her earlobe. She peered at Sally through her plastic goggles. Her eyeliner had run. She looked pale: off-colour, weighed-down.
‘They’d wig out, Ro,’ Sally said. ‘They’d think he was too old. They’d probably ban me from seeing him or something.’
Rowena shrugged, stuck a piece of Sellotape on to their badly-formed crystal, and placed it into their ‘Experiments’ folder. A couple of weeks earlier, as she had threatened, she’d had her hair permed. She’d had it done at Hairizons, the trendiest hairdresser’s in town. The curls had smelt slightly of ammonia and looked solid, almost as if they had been carved out of wood. Sally was a little unsure about whether it worked.
‘Do you think he thinks I’m too young?’ she asked.
Rowena sighed. ‘It’s what you think that matters,’ she said. ‘It’s just, I …’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter.’
And for a while they didn’t say any more. They peered at their copper sulphate crystal and tried to think of ways to describe it.
Then Sally broke the silence. She wanted to say something nice, because it was frightening her, this misunderstanding, this veering off the track.
‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Your hair’s so thick it just stays put. If I had mine permed it would just go all limp, like Rhian-anon’s.’
‘You should get something done to it, though,’ Rowena snapped. ‘You’ve had it long all your life.’
‘No I haven’t. You haven’t known me all my life,’ Sally retorted, flicking the end of her plait. Something was altering, definitely; something was fading away.
‘A perm would give it more volume,’ Rowena said.
‘It doesn’t need more volume. I’d end up looking like Kevin Keegan.’
‘Well, if you don’t watch it, Sally, you’ll end up looking like Colin’s daughter.’
And Rowena turned back to her chemistry book.
Sally sat, her plait heavy and childish against her back. She felt a strange kind of pain appear and expand beneath her ribcage. She thought of the two sea lions she and Colin had seen at the zoo; the way one of them had just seemed to get bored with the other and suddenly flopped its great hulking body off the concrete ledge and into the water.
She looked down at the copper sulphate crystal, at its chipped, bright blue edges. Then she reached into her school bag, got out a Black Jack, unwrapped it and crammed it into her mouth.
‘Anyway. You should be careful, Sal,’ Rowena said, her head bowed over her book. ‘Y’know, if you … You’d have to make sure he wore a thingummy.’
Sally chewed and chewed, aware of a blush advancing up her neck, over her cheeks, across her forehead.
Rowena stopped talking and looked up. ‘Blimey, Sal,’ she said, ‘you’ve gone really red.’
‘Well, wouldn’t you? If someone started talking about your love life in the middle of Chemistry?’
Rowena glanced at Miss Haugh, pensive, woolly-haired Miss Haugh, struggling with a malfunctioning Bunsen burner.
‘What love life?’ she said. ‘I don’t have a love life.’
They worked in silence for a while, eyeing the clock while Miss Haugh intoned sadly about chemical reactions. In ten minutes they would be in different classrooms, considering, respectively, the use of symbolism in Madame Bovary and irrigation in the Nile Valley.
The bell rang, and there was an instant, alarming surge of chairs being pushed back, of noisy conversations drowning out Miss Haugh, of flat-footed trudging to the classroom door.
‘See you, then,’ Rowena said, swinging her bag over her shoulder.
And Sally watched her disappear through the doors and up the stairs. The burden of maintaining her oldest friendship made her feel tired, world-weary, like the parent of a difficult child.
*
24 OCTOBER 1979
French
O-level Prep Essay Title
‘Madame Bovary is fundamentally selfish. Discuss.’
She saw her again at lunchtime on Monday, through the glass pane of the Needlework room door.
‘Hi, Ro,’ she said, guardedly, and Rowena looked up. She was definitely, Sally thought, looking a little run-down. Sickening for something. Pale, with dark circles beneath her eyes. She was sitting beside a plate of sandwiches that Miss Button had arranged mysteriously and rather ineptly beside one of the Bernini sewing machines.
‘How was Geography?’ Sally asked.
‘Stuff about gum trees.’
‘Oh well. It’s over for another week.’
Sally looked down at the sandwiches. A row of white triangles and a row of brown triangles.
‘What are these doing here? Are we supposed to eat them?’ she asked, and Rowena frowned and didn’t reply. She looked, for some reason, as if she might cry.
‘I think they’re left over from some sixth-form session,’ she said eventually.
‘What?’
‘The sandwiches. Miss Button said we could help ourselves. They make me feel a bit sick, actually.’
‘Do they
?’
‘Yes, I –’ she began, and then stopped talking.
‘Well, they look pretty grim,’ Sally said impatiently, looking at the way the sandwich fillings oozed out a little over the edges. Sandwich spread: some awful, unrecognisable yellow paste. She thought of the jokes Colin might have made about it. But she could never think up jokes like that. She could only ever remember the one about the koala bear falling out of a tree.
Rowena suddenly put her hand up to her mouth. ‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ she said.
‘Really? Are you OK?’
‘No.’
‘Eat up, girls,’ said Miss Button, perky, contemptuous Miss Button, suddenly appearing at their side. Because, as far as she could tell, they were just loitering in the Needlework Room for no real reason. They were, really, Sally supposed.
‘Not for me thanks,’ said Rowena, her face ashen. Sally glanced at her with alarm.
‘We were just trying to work out what was in them. The sandwiches,’ she said.
Miss Button looked at her and then at Rowena. She frowned, and Sally thought of the word moue, which they had just learned in French.
‘The school cooks spent a long time preparing those sandwiches, Rowena Cresswell,’ Miss Button said. ‘For your delight and delectation. You should make the most of it. There’s not usually such a thing as a free lunch.’ And she sashayed back across the room in her little soft, practical shoes.
Sally looked at Rowena. Rowena looked at Sally.
‘I’m OK, I think,’ Rowena said, ‘Just came over a bit funny. So …’
But she suddenly put one hand up over her mouth, her other over her stomach, and sat there, her eyes closed.
‘You all right? Would a Black Jack help?’
‘Shut up,’ Rowena replied, through her fingers. She sat silently for a moment. Then she looked up. ‘Sorry, Sal,’ she said. ‘I’ll be OK.’
They moved away from the sandwiches to stand by an open window, through which the desolate cries of breaktime could be heard. Tentatively, Sally put her hand on Rowena’s arm and glanced around at their other schoolmates. They all seemed to be having a cheerful time. They had all, Sally realised, suddenly found their own place – over the past few weeks, while she was not watching. They had all sorted themselves out and now presented a kind of united front. They had found their own best friends. Nuala Odette, a very pretty black girl with dozens of braids, had joined up with Alison Smith, who was small and pastry-white; troubled Natalie Craven had a confidante in motherly Emily Banks. Even Rhiannon Clark had, in recent months, transformed herself from being slightly weird to unaccountably popular. People no longer called her Rhian-anon. Her chosen friend was Wendy, a shy girl who had now grown bolder, like a hyacinth blooming on a sunny window sill.