‘Go on,’ she says, chewing her gum very slowly, ‘try me.'
‘I thought you might be her,’ Spencer says suavely, hopefully, desperately, anyway sticking to the script.
‘Fraid not. I think you’ll find she’s in the Olympic swimming team.’
Another fit of giggles and then what the hell, the girls heave with laughter, as if together they comprise a single organism which feeds off the embarrassment of fifteen-year-old boys. Despite being made acutely aware of his position in this particular food-chain, Spencer has the traditional resilience of his kind (boys). He can withstand a setback or two because surely if his brother can manage it then so can he, and Philip has now proved beyond any doubt that he has sex with his plump wife Alison by making her pregnant. It’s going to be a girl and it’s due any day now, but just then Spencer notices, a little uncomfortably, that his Russian friend is still watching him. He turns away and draws strength from all those flawless rehearsals to make another approach to a briefly separated third of Louise or Marianne or Lynne. He says hi there again it’s only me, and did you know that when you die your whole life flashes before your eyes?
‘Before or after?’
‘No. I mean. Important moments from your life flash before your eyes just before you die.’
‘So what?’
‘Now, if I die, you will always flash before my eyes.’
He looks at her expectantly. She shakes her head. Is that good? She walks away. That’s not so good.
Spencer is left stranded, alone, but the world keeps turning because his best line he’s saved until last. Perhaps he should keep it for later. He could try to have a normal conversation with someone. He could talk about his mother, for example, who wants to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. He could describe how she’s already been to see, without any luck, the Bishop of Birmingham and the Bride Valley Team Rector and the Substitute Chaplain at Belmarsh Prison and even, in a rare crisis of desperate optimism, the non-stipendiary curate-in-charge at St Oswald’s. But even if this is all true it’ll never work as a chat-up line, exactly because it’s true.
A boy from the year below asks Spencer if he wants his caricature done. But apart from having no money, Spencer assumes he’ll be drawn as teenage lust, with his eyes popping out and his tongue lolling, so he says no. He is tapped on the shoulder and he wishes death to all caricaturists, but in fact it’s the Russian girl, with big grass-green eyes and a truly enormous mouth, her lips bold and shiny with bright red lipstick. She smiles with or between or around her wide even teeth. She is holding a can of Heineken, presumably a special concession to Russians. She offers it to Spencer and he takes it and drinks. She says:
‘My name is Tidora Zhivkov.’
Spencer nods, and it’s visible bras. He strays from the script and asks her what star sign she is.
‘My name is Tidora Zhivkov.’
'I'm Scorpio,’ he says, and then thinks why not, for all the luck he’s having he might as well try out his last and best line on Tidora Zhivkov. He touches her arm, and she doesn’t hit him so he guides her towards a corner. He tells her, his voice resonant with melancholy, that he once had a sister. He tells her the whole sad story, the championship medals unwon, the wasted talent, his own incurable grief. He falls silent and waits to be rescued.
‘My name is Tidora Zhivkov,’ the Russian girl says. She finishes the Heineken in one go, and then holds the back of Spencer’s head and kisses him with her huge mouth. Her tongue tastes of lipstick and beer. She takes his hand and leads him from the gym, along empty corridors, and Spencer is grinning foolishly, meaninglessly, happily, trying to remember every moment of this so that he can describe it accurately later to Hazel.
It is an interesting thing to tell her, and they have fallen into the habit of telling each other interesting things.
11/1/93 MONDAY 10:48
Definitely a man’s voice. It could have been her father or the landlord or a friend of the family. It was the gasman, who had no business answering the personal phone of a customer. A likely story. It was almost certainly a boyfriend, and Henry immediately despised him and was glad, because jealousy was among the best of signs. It was a safe way of knowing you were truly in love.
He had now arrived at the Central London Institute of Learning, and he’d been expecting something more impressive than this. Grander or quainter or older. Or simply more British. In its advert the school offered itself as a location, and he’d therefore imagined a façade easily cast into a BBC classic serial, instantly convincing as a Jane Austen town house or Kipling’s London home. In fact the school buildings were long, flat, and mostly made of plastic in different colours, all of them fading. It was as if a series of temporary cabins had gradually evolved around a playground, following no recognisable pattern. But what surprised Henry most of all was that it actually seemed to be a school, a real one, with children in it.
Behind the gates, right to left bouncing a basketball, Iain Pike who would grow to seven feet tall and earn more than sixty-six million American dollars playing centre for the Orlando Magic. Left to right Alison Wood in a mini-skirt, outraged at being under-cast as a dancing cat in the school’s production of Cinderella.
It wasn’t what Henry had been expecting. Children made him nervous. He changed his umbrella and his M & S bag from one hand to the other and watched Mr David Brock of the British Bankers’ Association, undeniably an adult with the unreleased Oceana Consolidated interims in his briefcase, turn in to the school and stride confidently across the playground.
Henry didn’t know what to do. For inspiration, he summoned up a vision of Miss Burns from the clues in her voice. She was a strict bespectacled English rose, several years older than him, her greying hair tight in a schoolmarmish librarian’s bun. She had a liking for tweed skirts, and a small black cat called Henry, although the name wasn’t that important. As part of the miracle he expected from falling in love, Henry assumed she must be somewhere close. He therefore resolved to follow the courageous example of Mr Brock, who looked plausibly like someone who would want to learn at a distance, due to business commitments. Mr Brock walked straight across the playground, ignoring an unmissable arrow to Headmaster. Henry, hoping to avoid contact with children, followed these signs until he came to a door in a yellow plastic box which was genuinely a temporary cabin. Inside, the walls of an office were covered with term-planners exotically pocked with coloured pins, and behind a long desk there sat a broad woman with huge spectacles and wiry hair which quivered at the ends like antennae.
Henry asked in his most polite voice if she was the receptionist.
‘I have a full PA role with the headmaster. Are you here for the reunion?’
He flashed her his distinctive smile. 'I'm distance learning.’
‘We have nothing to do with that here.’
His smile wasn’t having the best of days. He was brusquely informed that the school’s only connection with the distance-learning centre was to provide it with a postal address. She pointed peremptorily at a tray containing a padded envelope, just like the ones he’d addressed so many times himself.
‘I saw a man in a suit.’
‘Business in the Community.’
However hard he tried, Henry found he couldn’t imagine this woman having any life other than this, sat suspiciously behind her long untidy desk, obstructing him. He made sure of the powder in his pocket. He couldn’t even invent her a name.
‘Would you know anything of the whereabouts of the teachers?’
‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘Otherwise how could I send on the envelopes?’
‘I’m trying to get in touch with Miss Burns.’
She said never, never under any circumstances did she give out home addresses, and Henry thought what about if I feed you enough poison to make your insides bubble? Remember Dr Osawa, Henry told himself, but he could invent no other life for this woman except as a victim of his urgent need to locate Miss Burns. With no name, and no lif
e, she was hardly worth wasting the poison on, so perhaps instead he’d slip off one of his chunky oatmeal socks from Brook Street and strangle her with it until she told him what he wanted to know. Remember Dr Osawa. Or if that doesn’t work, remember the difference between thinking a thing and doing it. Henry therefore postponed the woman’s torture, and said he already knew where Miss Burns lived.
‘Well you shouldn’t do.’
‘I was wondering if you had any other addresses for her. Parents. Special friends?’
He smiled again, hoping for everyone’s sake that none of the friends were as special as all that.
‘Absolutely not,’ the woman said. ‘No, no, no.’
Henry fingered the plastic envelope in his pocket. This woman had a life. Everybody did. She was personally responsible for the props (guns, lethal umbrellas, booby-trapped telephones, knives, more guns) needed for the holdups, police chases, hostage situations, kidnaps and drug-dealings which plagued the school whenever it was used as a location in films like Lock Up Your Children or Fathers in Fear or Cracker. The school was sometimes even used for school scenes, but only in Casualty.
The school buildings had more life for Henry than the woman, and he didn’t need Dr Osawa to tell him that this wasn’t healthy.
‘About Miss Burns,’ he said.
‘There is absolutely no chance of me telling you anything.’
‘We’re supposed to be meeting for lunch. It’s nearly lunchtime.’
‘You don’t fool me, you know.’
She gave Henry the benefit of a long, intolerant, anonymous stare through her enormous glasses which magnified her eyes. 'I know your sort.’ She pointed at him with a short fat finger. 'I wouldn’t give you a woman’s address in a million years. I can see straight through you.’
‘I just want to know where she is, to confirm our lunch-date.’
‘I bet you do.’
‘Some people are nice. Not everybody’s nasty.’
'I know what I know.’
If I was nicer than I am, Henry thought, or if I hadn’t been ill and you had the least quality which inspired me to give you a life, I would pity you. As it is, I shall very probably push the tip of my new umbrella against your forehead until you fall backwards off your chair, fatally cracking your skull. After locating Miss Burns’s file, I shall quietly bury the body in wasteground where nobody will find it for several months. It happens all the time. It’s always in the paper.
Henry took a more decisive grip on the handle of his umbrella, when unexpectedly it came to him: Janet Kennedy, unacknowledged collaborator on Baroque Needlepoint.
He let his grip loosen, he remembered Dr Osawa and calmed himself, turned on his heel, walked out. It was a relief to have invented Janet Kennedy just in time, but it was also a tragedy to have lost his best chance of finding Miss Burns. He ignored several children and whacked the concrete of the playground with the point of his umbrella. He swore at himself in Japanese. Back in the street, one two three people passed him by with no lives of their own so what did it matter what happened to them? Stabbing, kidnapping, mugging, shooting, poisoning: quotidian events because they happened every day to somebody, so why not to these random people today, whose lives he couldn’t begin to imagine and who therefore meant nothing to him? He walked left, right, left again, not knowing where he was going, the possibilities of his own life receding with each step.
It started to rain, stinging him back to his senses and the here and now. He stopped walking and found himself alone, in a street he didn’t recognise, feeling a devastation so complete its cause could only be love. He put up the umbrella between himself and the rain, wondering what to do next. He could catch the Circle Line back to the hotel, agree that his father was right, pack his bags and his diploma and board an aeroplane destination Dr Osawa. He could resign himself to his father’s money and surprising presents which for the rest of his otherwise unchanging life would make tiny changes in his daily moods. He could grow old, unchallenged by miracles, untouched by lightning.
He stepped into the road between two parked cars and decided to try Miss Burns one last time. In a desperate final appeal for luck he whispered the sacred words, 'I love you’. Small words which changed entire lives, all the time, every day of the year.
He tapped out her number and it was answered almost immediately. A man’s voice. Younger this time. Unsure of itself.
‘I didn’t know it was turned on. I haven’t really used. Sorry, I thought it was turned off.’
Henry said he was hoping to get in touch with Miss Burns.
‘Are you alright? You sound a bit wobbly.’
'It was today. I’m one of her students. It’s planned we have lunch.’
‘Where?’
‘She told me to meet her there, except I’ve forgotten where there is.’
‘Where where is?’
‘Where there is.’
‘Which is where?
‘Where she is.’
‘You mean here.’
‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘if she’s there. She arranged it herself. It’s my last day. It’s been planned for ages. Please.’
‘And who exactly are you?’
‘I’m a very very good friend of hers.’
There was a pause in which Henry held his breath until the voice at the other end said yes, of course, he understood, these things happened. Nobody remembered everything, not even Miss Burns. He gave Henry an address, and then offered him the library as a landmark. He would know it when he saw it because the clock was permanently stopped at half past four.
It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Hayes or Sevenoaks or Sutton Coldfield or Dunvant, in Taunton or Newark or Kirkwall or Leeds, Hazel and her friends have transformed their school’s Assembly Hall into the Viper Room. Sheets dyed black billow from the ceiling. Black and white posters lurk in the shadows, of Val Kilmer or Harvey Keitel or Dirk Bogarde, but mostly the Viper Room is River. River Phoenix, as was, in Stand By Me or My Own Private Idaho or Mosquito Coast or even Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The girls have turned their annual Hallowe’en party into a wake. They all wear black.
The teachers, however, have hired a jazz band. They want their girls to be nice girls, whereas the girls themselves prefer to be nasty. They hate this music. It’s ridiculous, plain wrong, and worst of all, inauthentic. It is harmless and upbeat when everyone knows from newspapers that real life can only be recognised by its lack of niceness, and the real news is that River Phoenix lay abandoned outside the Viper Room on a West Hollywood pavement, drowning in his own vomit.
Hazel goes out into the maths block corridor and squeezes up against the card-phone. She slides in her card, John Lennon’s eyes, and stiff-fingered she punches in the number. If Spencer isn’t at home, she’ll have sex with Sam Carter. Spencer’s father answers, his speech slurred, and Hazel makes up a name. She is Grace Zabriskie. She is Helen Sharman just back from the moon, she is Emma Thompson wondering if Spencer fancies a quick one. No, she has no message. Yes, yes she does. How can he have deserted her like this?
Back in the Viper Room the boys are mostly dressed as extras from horror films, from Dead Planet or Savage Harvest or Terror on Highway 91. Tastelessly, one of them has left a dummy of River’s corpse slumped against the fire-door, but Hazel ignores it and looks at trousers and wonders if it’s true that having sex changes your life. Then she wishes there was more than one way of finding out. She has a condom in her black bag, all squashed up and patient in its sharp little packet, waiting for its special moment.
She dismisses various boys with indifference, familiar with their clumsy advances. She tries in vain to look like the other girls, in black shoes, black mini-skirt, boil-washed black sweater, all in honour of River Phoenix for whom, tragically, there is no tomorrow. Hazel, however, is not like the other girls. On her fifteenth birthday, just when she thought things couldn’t get much worse, she turned blonde overnight.
Sam Carter stands in front of
her. He reaches out to the edge of his conversational range and says:
‘Hello, Hazel.’
He has a nice wonky smile and Hazel has to admit he looks very fine in his tail-suit, like a vampire next best thing. He asks her if she remembers when he was fat. Has she noticed how much leaner he is?
‘It’s a miracle.’
‘I work out in the gym,’ he says, but let’s get down to basics Hazel thinks. You want to lie on top of me and put it in. He looks shocked and Hazel realises she must have said this out loud. Whoops sorry well pardon me.
‘But you do, don’t you? That’s what you want to do.’
Pathetically, Sam Carter pleads with Hazel to be nice to him. He seems to think the evening has been pre-arranged as their special date. ‘Another time, Sam.’
‘Really?’
‘I mean fuck off. Stop being so absurdly smiley all the time.’
Predictably, Olive has managed to crash the party, as if school rules don’t apply to girls whose legs are paralysed. Before the accident, if Hazel remembers correctly, Olive was nothing like the person she’s become, the go-anywhere, do-anything-twice girl. She likes boys and dangerous sports, as if any sense of fear vanished in the moment she discovered that disasters happen anyway, whether you’re frightened or not. She is now collecting an audience as she goes through her fortune telling routine on the palm of a Ewan McGregor lookalike. He’s falling for it even though Olive will soon be telling him he’s destined for disaster. She always predicts disaster because otherwise no-one believes her, and she’s already predicted that Hazel’s first-time sex with the man she marries will be utterly disastrous, in the most extreme.
‘Alright then you’re right,’ Sam Carter says, ‘I admit to it.’ His whole head flushes red to the roots of his blond hair. ‘I do want to have sex with you. I find you very completely. I find you sexy alluring.’
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