Girls' Night In

by Jessica Adams

  Maxine had been trying to pull her bag of crisps away from Martin, who had suddenly let go, with the result that Maxine’s crisps had flown into the air and over the grass, where Martin was now rolling on them and crushing them into salty fragments.

  ‘Stop it!’ called Dorrie.

  ‘Get up this minute!’ shouted Max.

  ‘Why should I, it’s a free country,’ gabbled Martin, rolling back and forth, enjoying the noise and drama.

  ‘My crisps!’ sobbed Maxine. ‘They’re all squashed!’

  ‘What’s your problem?’ said Martin with spiteful pleasure, getting up as his father approached, and brushing yellow crumbs from his shorts. ‘You threw them away, so that means you didn’t want them.’

  ‘I didn’t throw them away!’ screamed Maxine.

  ‘Liar, I saw you,’ goaded Martin. ‘I saw you throw them in the air. Littie liar.’

  Maxine howled, scarlet in the face, struggling with her mother, who was trying to hold her, while Martin ran off out of range, dancing on the spot and fleering and taunting.

  ‘Why is he such a poisonous little tick?’ said Max, though without his usual fury.

  On their way back to the hotel they passed a camp-site, and stopped by the gate to read its painted sign.

  ‘Families and mixed couples only,’ Maxine read aloud. ‘What does that mean, Mum? What are mixed couples? Mum? Mum?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Dorrie. She was reminded of her parents’ description of looking for somewhere to rent when they first came to London, with the signs up in the windows reading ‘No Blacks, No Irish’ and her father with his Dublin accent having to keep quiet for a change and let her mother do the talking.

  ‘Why do you suppose they want mixed couples only?’ she murmured to Max. ‘Why would they worry about gayness?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that,’ said Max. ‘I think it’s more to put off the eighteen–thirty element; you know, bikers and boozing and gangs getting into fights.’

  ‘You twenty years ago,’ said Dorrie.

  ‘Martin in ten years’ time, said Max.

  ‘What’s a couple?’ persisted Maxine. ‘What’s a couple, Dad?’

  ‘A couple here means a man and a woman,’ said Max.

  ‘Oo-a-ooh!’ exclaimed Martin, giving Maxine a lewd nudge in the ribs and rolling his eyes.

  ‘A husband and wife,’ said Dorrie deflatingly.

  ‘So a couple’s like a family,’ said Maxine.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorrie.

  ‘No,’ said Max. ‘A couple is not like a family. That’s far too easy, just two people. It doesn’t qualify.’

  Dorrie was laughing now, and put her arms round his waist, her head on his shoulder. He kissed the top of her head and stroked her hair. The three children stood round looking at them with big smug smiles, beaming with satisfaction.

  ‘Come in for a hug,’ said Dorrie, holding out her arm to them, and they all five stood rocking by the side of the road locked into an untidy squawking clump.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ said Max, gazing at her that evening across the mackerel paté and the bud vase holding the miniature yellow carnations. ‘You’ve caught the sun. It suits you.’

  ‘It was a good walk today,’ said Dorrie, suddenly shy.

  ‘They’re lovely but they’re very tiring,’ said Max, draining his glass of beer. ‘Exhausting. You should be more selfish.’

  How can I, thought Dorrie, until you are less so? It’s a seesaw. But she kept quiet. He went on to talk about the timberyard, how it was doing all right but they couldn’t afford to rest on their laurels with all these small businesses going down all round them.

  ‘We’re a team,’ declared Max, grandiose, pouring another glass for them both.

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Dorrie. ‘But it’s a bit unbalanced, don’t you think, the teamwork, at the moment?’

  ‘Are you saying I don’t work hard enough?’ demanded Max.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Dorrie. ‘You work too hard. Don’t be silly. No, I meant, you do all the work that gets somewhere and gives you something to show for the effort and pulls in money, but the work I do doesn’t seem to get anywhere, it doesn’t show, it somehow doesn’t count even though it needs doing of course.’

  ‘I don’t see what you’re driving at,’ said Max, starting to look less cheerful.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dorrie. ‘At the moment I feel sub. Sub something.’

  ‘Suburban?’ suggested Max.

  ‘Subordinate?’ said Dorrie. ‘No.’

  ‘Submerged, then. How about submerged?’

  ‘That’s nearer. Still not quite … I know! Subdued. Though submerged is growing on me. Submerged is accurate too. That time at Marks, all my twenties, half my thirties, it’s like a dream. I’ve almost forgotten what it used to be like.’

  And she tried to explain to Max her feeling about this encroaching blandness, adaptability, passivity, the need for one of them at least to embrace these qualities, even if this made them shudder, if the family was going to work.

  ‘We all have to knuckle down,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later.’

  ‘It’s just it seems, some of us more than others.’

  ‘If we want to join in at all,’ opined Max. ‘Life. It’s called growing up.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like growing up,’ she muttered from her side of the fence. Rather it felt like being freeze-dried and vacuum-packed. Knuckled down was putting it mildly.

  ‘Well, as I said, whatever you’re feeling like, you’re looking well,’ said Max; and that made them both feel better.

  ‘Lovely, in fact,’ he added, leaning across to touch her face meaningly.

  After dinner, sitting in the Family Room drinking coffee, they found themselves drawn into a quiz game provided by the hotel as the adult equivalent of the children’s conga. The quizmaster was a sparky woman in emerald green jacket and pleats. She split them into groups and bossed them through an unnecessary microphone.

  ‘What’s the other name for kiwifruit?’ she demanded, and echoes bounced off the ceiling. The groups whispered and giggled and scribbled on their scoresheets.

  ‘What flag is all one colour?’ she asked. ‘Here’s a clue, somewhere not very nice. Ooh, I hope no one from there is in this room!’

  ‘Birmingham?’ suggested Max.

  ‘Very funny, the bearded gentleman,’ said the woman. ‘Now we’re out of Miscellaneous and on to the Human Body. Let’s see how much you all know about the body, you jolly well should considering your age. And the one who’s paying for the holiday will certainly be hoping to know a bit more about the human body of the opposite sex or else they’ll have wasted their money, won’t they?’

  Dorrie’s mouth fell open, she nearly dropped her drink, but nobody else batted an eyelid.

  ‘And we’ve quite enough children here thank you very much while we’re on the subject so let’s hope you all know what you’re up to,’ continued the woman, arching a roguish eyebrow. ‘Right. Now. Where are the cervical nerves?’

  ‘And where’s your sense of humour?’ Max whispered into Dorrie’s ear, observing her gape rudely at the woman.

  In bed that night surrounded by their sleeping children, they held each other and started to kiss with increasing warmth. He grabbed shamelessly between her legs, her body answered with an enthusiastic twist, a backward arch, and soon he was inside her. There must be no noise, and she had pulled the sheet up to their necks. Within a couple of minutes they were both almost there, together, when there came a noise from Martin’s bed.

  ‘Mum,’ he said sleepily, and flicked his lamp on. ‘Mum, I’m thirsty.’

  Max froze where he was and dropped his head and swore beneath his breath. Martin got out of bed and padded over towards them.

  ‘Did you hear me, Mum?’ he asked crossly. ‘I want some water. Now.’

  Dorrie was aware of her hot red face looking up from under Max’s, and heard herself say, ‘In a minute, dear. Go back to bed now, there
’s a good boy.’ Martin paused to stare at them, then stumbled over back towards his bed.

  ‘Do you think he’s been traumatized?’ she whispered to Max, mortified, cheated of the concentrated pleasure which had been seconds away, the achievement of it, the being made whole.

  ‘Do I think he’s been traumatized?’ growled Max incredulously, rolling off her.

  ‘Where’s your sense of humour, then?’ she murmured in his ear, but he pulled away and turned his back on her. She didn’t blame him.

  Their third day’s adventure was planned by Max. They were going to cross the strand and explore the hermit’s island. Today the tide was out at a reasonable time of the morning and the sun was up too. They stood and gazed across the shining sands at the exposed island, which was now, for an hour or so only, part of the mainland.

  ‘It’s further than I thought,’ said Dorrie. ‘It looks well over a mile. Maybe two.’

  ‘Half a mile at most,’ said Max heartily. ‘Let’s get going, remember we’re racing the tide. Come on you lot, shoes and socks in the boot.’

  ‘I think they should wear their plastic sandals,’ said Dorrie. ‘I can see stones. Weed.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Max. ‘Lovely sand, skipping across the golden sand. Don’t fuss, don’t spoil it all with fussing.’

  ‘Skippety skip,’ sang Robin.

  ‘I still think …’ said Dorrie.

  ‘Give us a break,’ said Max.

  ‘I’m not wearing my jellies,’ said Martin. ‘No way.’

  ‘No way,’ echoed Maxine.

  When they started walking they were less downright, but by then it was too late. The gleaming silver-pink sand was knotted with wormcasts which made the children shudder, and studded with pebbles, and sharp-edged broken shells, which made them wince and squawk.

  ‘Come on,’ called Max, striding ahead on his prime-of-life leathery soles. ‘We’ve got to keep moving if we’re going to be there and back in time. Or we’ll be cut off.’

  Dorrie helped the children round the weeds, through ankle-deep seawater rivulets blue as the sky above, clucking, and lifting, and choking down irritation at the thought of the plastic sandals back in the boot.

  ‘You were right, Mum,’ groaned Martin mournfully. ‘I wish I’d worn them.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Maxine, picking her way like a cross hen.

  ‘So do I,’ wept Robin, who was walking on tiptoe, as though that might spare his soft pink feet the worm-casts, and slowing them all down considerably.

  ‘Come on,’ yelled Max, a couple of hundred yards ahead.

  ‘We can’t,’ yelled Dorrie, who was by now carrying Robin across her front. It felt desperate, like the retreat from Moscow or something. Trust Max to engineer a stressful seaside event, trust Max to inject a penitential flavour into the day. They were by now half a mile out; it would be mad to go on and dismal to turn back. The sun was strong but muffled by haze, and the sky glared with the blanched fluorescence of a shaving light.

  ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ said Max, having unwillingly rejoined them.

  ‘I think we’ll have to turn back,’ said Dorrie. ‘Look at the time. Even if we make it to the island we won’t be able to explore, we’ll have to turn round and come straight back and even then we’d be cutting it fine. Why don’t you go alone, darling, you’re quicker on your own.’

  ‘You always have to spoil it, don’t you,’ said Max, furious as a child. ‘You never want anything I plan to work.’

  ‘Their feet hurt,’ pleaded Dorrie. ‘Don’t let’s quarrel in front of them.’

  ‘Robin, you’ll come with me, won’t you,’ said Max, squatting down beside his son. ‘I’ll give you a piggyback.’

  ‘Max,’ said Dorrie, ‘it’s nearly midday, it’s not safe. Why don’t you go ahead with the camera and take photos so we’ll all be able to see the hermit’s house when the film’s developed.’

  ‘Robin?’ said Max.

  ‘I don’t know what to choose,’ said Robin, looking from his father to his mother and back again. He was out of his depth.

  Dorrie felt anger bulge up as big as a whale surfacing, but breathed it down and said again, ‘Take the camera, darling, that way we’ll all see the secret island,’ and hung the camera round his neck. She made herself kiss him on the cheek. He looked at her suspiciously. The children brightened. She forced herself to hug him. The children cheered.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last, and set off across the wet sand, running simple and free as a Red Indian.

  ‘I didn’t know what to say, Mum,’ said Robin, spreading his hands helplessly. ‘Daddy said go on go with me not Mummy. You said no. I felt splitted in half.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Dorrie. ‘Now everybody’s happy. Look at that seagull.’

  Above them, floating on a thermal, was a big, white, cruel-beaked bird. Seagulls were always larger than you expected, and had a chilly fierce look to them, without gaiety. She could barely speak for rage, but did not assign it much importance, so used was she by now to this business of ebb and flow. Who else, she wondered, could be living at such a pitch of passion as she in the midst of this crew; so uncontrolled, so undefended?

  Having poked around the hermit’s mossy cell and raced the tide back, white-toothed wavelets snapping at his heels, Max was in a good mood for the rest of the day, and they all benefited. He felt he had achieved something. He had achieved something. He had conquered the island, he had patterned it with his footprints, he had written his name on the sandy floor of the hermit’s very cell with his big toe. Next week he would show them the photographs to prove it.

  When the sun was low in the sky and the children were asleep, Max suggested to Dorrie that she should go for a walk on her own, just down to the beach below the hotel.

  ‘It’ll do you good,’ he said.

  He was going to sit by the bedroom’s picture window in the half-dark with a beer, and would probably be able to make out her figure if the light didn’t go too fast.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ she said.

  ‘Go on,’ he snorted. ‘Before I change my mind.’

  She walked down barefoot through the hotel gardens, across trim tough seaside turf bordered by white-painted palisades and recently watered fuchsia bushes. Then she turned on to the low cliff path which zigzagged down to the beach and felt the longer grass brush against her legs, spiky marram grass softly spangled in the dusk with pale flowers, sea pinks and thrift and white sea campion.

  Robin had had trouble getting to sleep that evening. Stay here, he had demanded tearfully, his hand on her arm; don’t go. I won’t go, she had said; close your eyes. She had stroked his temple with the side of her little finger. Gradually he had allowed himself to be lowered down, a rung at a time, towards the dark surface of sleep. He had given a tiny groan as she moved to get up, but he was too far gone to climb back. She had sat by him for a little longer, creaking with fatigue, looking at his quiet face, his still hand on her arm, savouring the deep romance and boredom of it.

  There were no buildings now between her and the beach except for this last snug cottage to her left shedding light from its windows. She paused to look up at it. It must surely house an ideal family, sheltered and enclosed but with a view of the bay too. The father was reading his children a story, perhaps, while the mother brushed their hair. Where did this cosy picture come from? Certainly not from her own childhood. She turned away and carried on down to the beach.

  It was lovely to stand barefoot, bare-legged indeed, invisible in the deep dusk, a great generous moon in the sky and her feet at the edge of the Atlantic. She looked out over the broad bosom of the sea and it was like an old engraving, beautiful and melancholy, and the noise it made was a sighing, a rhythmic sighing.

  As sailors’ ghosts looked back on their drowned selves, dismantled, broken up, sighing like the sea for the collarbone lost somewhere around the equator, the metatarsals scattered across the Indian Ocean, so she wondered whether the
re could ever be a reassembly of such scattered drowned bodies, a watery danse macabre on the wreckers’ rocks beneath a full moon. Was it possible to reclaim the scattered-to-the-winds self? She was less afraid of death, or understood it a shade more, purely through coming near it each time she had had a baby; but apart from that, this puzzle was to do with the loss of self that went with the process, or rather the awareness of her individuality as a troublesome excrescence, an obsoletism. What she wanted to know was, was this temporary, like National Service used to be, or was it for good?

  She was filled with excitement at standing by the edge of the sea alone under the sky, so that she took great clear breaths of air and looked at the dimming horizon, opening her eyes wider as if that might help her to see more. It filled her with courage and made her want to sing, something Irish or Scottish, sad and wild and expressive of this, this wild salt air, out here, and of how it was thrilling, being alive and not dead.

  When she turned back across the beach, away from the water, it was dark. The orange lights of the hotel up on the hill lengthened on the wet black sand like pillars of flame. She reached the edge of the beach, where it met the rocks and turf above, and started to climb back. A bat bounced silently past her ear as she crossed the little bridge over the stream, and then she felt the dust of the earth path beneath her feet again. As she walked on, hugging herself against the fresh chill of the dark, she looked at the cottages built on the hills around the bay, their windows yellow lozenges of enclosed warmth in the night.

  Now she was walking back past the house she had envied on the way down, the house which was so secure and self-sufficient with its warm lit windows and snug family within. And from this house came the wailing of a child, a desolate hopeless noise. It was coming from this very house. On and on it went, the wailing, steady and miserable, following her up the path. Her throat tightened and her eyes prickled, she called herself every sort of fool as she trudged on; and she physically ached to pick up and hold the weeping child, and tell it there there, there there, then smooth it down and stroke its hand until it slept. The comfortless noise continued, not a baby’s crying but the sobbing of a child. No child should be left to cry like that, she thought, ambushed by pity, by memory; and – in a rage – people aren’t bloody well nice enough to their children!