Offcomer

by Jo Baker

  “What does he look like, Paul?” she asked, handing Alan a fork.

  Alan watched her seat herself, watched the blank expression on her face. His heart thumped loud and fast. He could feel it there, underneath his ribs, racing. He should have known this would happen. If he was honest, he thought, he had known this would happen. He felt fury rise inside him. He couldn’t look at her any longer. Couldn’t stand looking at her beautiful, deceitful face. He leant down over his plate, began shovelling farfalle into his mouth.

  “Does it matter?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  Alan stabbed angrily at the pasta, stuffed another forkful into his mouth.

  “Well then.”

  He chewed, scooped up more food onto his fork.

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve never met him.”

  He glared at her, fork hovering above his plate.

  “Of course not.”

  “So I won’t know him when I see him.”

  Alan put down his fork.

  “He’s short,” he said. “He’s got dirty-fair hair. He wears glasses.”

  “Right.”

  “You’ve never met the girlfriend either and you didn’t ask about her.”

  She glanced up at him, then back down at her plate.

  “What does she do?” she asked, quietly.

  “I don’t know. Teacher, I think.”

  “What’s she called?”

  “Grainne, apparently.” He stuffed the last forkful of food into his mouth. He was still hungry. He looked up.

  “That’s unusual,” she said. She didn’t look up from her plate. She didn’t seem to have eaten anything.

  “No it’s not,” he said, watching her push the pasta bows around in their pool of sauce. “It’s quite common.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s an Irish name.”

  “Right.” She put her fork down.

  “Don’t you want that?” he asked.

  “Mn?” Her voice sounded thick.

  “The pasta. Don’t you want it?”

  “Not really.”

  He reached over and took her plate.

  “No point eating it if you’re not hungry.” He scraped the mess onto his own plate.

  Alan didn’t know quite what he was looking for. Some extra care, perhaps, in her choice of clothes, or an excessive precision in the painting of lipstick onto lips. He wasn’t sure. He was sure, however, that he would know it when he saw it. There would be no fooling him. He sat waiting for her on the sofa, legs crossed, right foot bouncing in mid-air. He glanced every two minutes at the hands of his watch. When the hands had ticked round to eight o’clock, he sprang up and marched through to the bedroom, his knuckles whitening and his eyes narrowed. She had been ages.

  “What’s taking so long?”

  She was just standing there in her knickers and bra, doing nothing. Not her best underwear: they were greyed, and elderly, and didn’t match. He could see her ribs rippling the surface of her skin, the knots of her shoulders and the smooth ridge and dip of her collarbone. She had lost weight.

  “You have beautiful bones,” he said, startling himself, and reached out to touch her.

  “Your hands are cold.”

  She ducked down quickly to hurry on her trousers. His chest tightened with annoyance.

  “You’re not wearing them?”

  “I thought I would,” she said, pulling a T-shirt over her head.

  Alan sat on the edge of the bath. She stood staring at her face in the mirror as if she didn’t know what to do with it. She must have done her make-up a million times and tonight, Alan thought, she didn’t know where to start. He scowled.

  “We’ll be late,” he said.

  She picked up a powder puff and wiped it clumsily across her cheek.

  He sat with his arm around her shoulders. He felt vividly conscious of every move and shift she made. She could not keep still. She rolled up till receipts, twisted her hair round her fingers, played with the cellophane off Paul’s cigarette packet. And when she spoke, she blushed and stammered and looked down at her twisting, moving fingers.

  Tonight, he told himself, he should have been relaxed, and happy, and proud. He should have been showing off his success, at last, to Paul. This was supposed to have been his moment. This should have been his finest hour. And she would not let him have even that. It was all so obvious, so graceless. She might as well have offered Paul a blowjob the moment they arrived. Alan bubbled with fury. And Paul. She would have to pick Paul. Paul with his A grades and his elegant girlfriends and his first class degree. Paul whose aura of self-contained contentment had dogged every step that Alan had taken, tainted every disappointing moment of Alan’s success. Alan’s only consolation was that he had sufficient grace not to let his anger show. And that Paul and Grainne seemed to have decided that they too would pretend nothing was happening.

  He tightened his grip around Claire’s shoulders. He felt her breathe, and was surprised to find his penis twitch and stir at the rise and fall of her narrow ribcage. This was, Alan felt, completely baffling, and a total pain in the hole. That he could feel so blindingly furious with her, and at the same time want to get her straight home and into bed. He pulled uncomfortably at his trouserleg.

  “So where are you from, then?” Paul asked her. Alan felt her squirm, gritted his teeth.

  “North of England,” she said.

  “You don’t have much of an accent.”

  “I’ve lived in Oxford three years. And Mum and Dad aren’t local.” Alan watched in irritation the small hand that reached out and picked up a beermat. She began to pull it into shreds.

  “Yous’re blow-ins, then,” Paul said.

  “Blow-ins?”

  “If you’re not locals, you’re blow-ins. Blown in on the wind,” he explained.

  Claire smiled.

  “Offcomer. That’s the word they use at home.”

  Alan snorted.

  “That’s the English,” Paul asked, “for blow-in?”

  “I think it’s more of a local word,” Claire said. “I’ve never heard it said anywhere else. Just at home.”

  “Where you’re a blow-in,” said Alan.

  “An offcomer, you mean,” said Grainne, smiling.

  “Same as here,” said Paul.

  “Same as Oxford,” said Alan.

  “Yep,” Claire said. She picked up her drink, brought it towards her lips. “That’s about the size of it.”

  SEVEN

  It must have been a Thursday because there was always double games on a Thursday and the whole memory was permeated by the sour odour of PE. And it must have been Third Year, because as she sat on the school bus next to Jennifer, they had both had their hockeysticks clamped between their knees and after Third Year, girls like Jennifer joined the school team, and girls like Claire were allowed to give up hockey altogether. And if they were playing hockey, it must have been the winter, so she wouldn’t yet have had her fourteenth birthday. And Nick, Jen’s brother, was sitting behind them on the bus. He left school after Fifth Year, so they must have been in Third, and Claire must have been thirteen when she had first told Jennifer.

  “I didn’t know you were Jewish,” Jennifer had said.

  “Not really Jewish. Mum wasn’t brought up Jewish. Her foster family brought her up C. of E. And Dad’s not Jewish, so I’m more of a mix, a mongrel. I’m Jewishish.” And Nick had leaned over the chrome rail on the back of their seat and howled in Claire’s ear.

  Double History with Mr. Lownes. Room 21. That must have been Friday, then, or the following week. Jennifer had Miss Nelson for History. Her class was in room 19. They had thumped up the dirty stairs together, separated at the top.

  The classroom was already full. It was dark outside. The big windows reflected back the room. She walked across to her desk, conscious of her movement, her reflection on the windowpane. She sat down. The seat next to hers was empty. It was still
empty when Mr. Lownes arrived. It remained empty until the bell went. Sandra, who usually sat there, was sitting on the far side of the room, next to Sally Parry. She did not look up.

  On the bus home, Nick started chanting. A stupid, moron chant, Claire told herself. It didn’t matter, because he was a stupid moron and what could you expect. “Little Jew Girl, Little Jew Girl,” he sang, over and over again, leaning over the back of her seat and pulling at her hair and tugging on her brastrap and shouting it in her ear, and a couple of his mates started shouting too, and Jen turned round and screamed at him and everyone was staring and some of them were laughing and the big girls at the back were laughing. And she could feel her ears were burning and as they walked down the aisle he followed them, getting louder and louder and she didn’t know where to look and there were games bags in the way and she stumbled and felt sticky and didn’t know where to put her feet.

  The bus lights swung away and left them standing at the lane end. Claire blinked, hitched up her hockeystick and turned towards the village. She heard Nick inhale open-mouthed, and, hot with misery, she turned back to snap at him, but before either of them could speak, Jennifer had leapt upon her brother. She grabbed handfuls of his hair and tore at it, screaming in his face, calling him a little shit and a dickhead and a stupid wanker. He gripped her fingers, trying to prize them off, his mouth now wide open, howling, eyes squeezed shut, kicking at her shins. She jabbed her knee neatly into his groin. He sank down onto the tarmac.

  “Me goolies, me goolies,” he wheezed, deflating.

  “Mam says I’m not allowed to do that,” Jen said, shouldering her games kit. “But sometimes you just have to.”

  Big purple bruises blossomed on Jennifer’s shins, faded with the days to yellow flushed with pink. Claire swelled with pride every time she thought of them. Whatever anyone said, she wouldn’t mind, now. She wouldn’t mind anything. Jen had wanted to protect her. That, in itself, was wondrous. And anyway, Claire thought, she hadn’t changed, so she couldn’t change back. It was in her, in the spiralling strands in her blood and bone and marrow. It was there, always had been, always would.

  So she was thirteen. She’d probably told Jennifer soon after she’d found out herself. So that left thirteen years to account for, thirteen years in which she had been unaware of Ben and Sam, crammed in between the pudding basins and the baking trays. Thirteen years before she’d heard about what had seemed, until this moment, to have been laid down in the deepest stratum of her knowledge.

  The rain had stopped. Claire looked out across the flat surface of the reservoir, scuffed her hand in the grit. Her fingers found a pebble; she lifted it, lobbed it out across the water. Tiny ripples spread back towards her.

  It could, easily, be just one of who knew how many fantasies, this Jewishness. For thirteen years, when Claire was a child, a baby, even before she was born, her mother might have been weaving away at any number of stories. Back before then, while she herself was still a child, standing out like a tasteless joke amongst the blond endomorphs of her foster family, her mother might have dreamed up a dozen different ways of explaining her own dark hair, dark eyes, pale olive skin. One year her forebears might have been Arab merchants, bringing silks and spices along the land route from Asia; the next year, she would have had an obscure Spanish ancestor, a sailor wrecked on English shores with the Armada. Another time, Romany. Cross her palm with silver, tell your fortune. And then time to up sticks again and move on. She would have found a dozen different reasons why her family would have had to change its name to something plain and English. But maybe even Taylor was a lie. Perhaps her maiden name had already changed a dozen times, and might change again. And Claire’s father would have heard all these stories over the years, and knew that she was lying, and right now he would be bursting with frustration that he couldn’t tell Claire.

  The ripples faded, flattened. Above her, on the fell, a sheep called out baritone, was answered by a yearling’s tenor.

  Maybe not. Maybe for thirteen years there were no stories, just a hand-me-down knowledge that came from all the way back, through the fosterers and the children’s homes, from the time before. Along with the album, a faint remnant thread of truth. Ben and Sam’s story was just a way of telling, a parable in fact, made up to communicate something abstract and unfamiliar to a child. And it was a good story. It was believable. If more had happened in it, it would have seemed less real.

  And the thirteen years, well, you had to wait, didn’t you. You always do. People always save up this kind of information till you’re old enough to understand, and still far too young to tell them to shut up, to ask them what the fuck they think they’re doing telling you at all. And her mother, in particular, had had good reason to hesitate: this was, after all, no uncomplicated heritage, no restoration of tradition: this was, instead, an initiation in loss, a lesson in fracture. She had had to wait, because Claire had to be old enough, old enough to understand that loss.

  The damp concrete beneath her was cold.

  Claire scratched up a handful of gravel, scuffing her nails. She flung it out across the reservoir. The grit hit the surface like a squall of rain. She felt heavy, empty. She had, she realised, never grieved for them before. All those years she had looked at the pictures and heard the stories and known that these people were dead, and she had never felt bereaved. But now, suddenly, they were gone, and she missed them. She missed the pair of little boys who wriggled and complained in their hiding-place. She missed her schoolboy-Granddad’s muddied knees, his gaptooth grin and Uncle Sid’s arm around his shoulder. She missed Aunty May with her folded-in lips and folded-back arms. She missed the imagined dotted line on her mental map that had traced her great-grandfather’s footsteps from Poland to South London. The stories had died. The people died with them.

  The reservoir reflected back the grey sky and the deep perspective of the hills. Years ago, someone had handed her a new OS map, folded and refolded, still crisp along the seams. She couldn’t remember the hand that passed it to her, or who had watched her face as she puzzled it out. Her father, it must have been. He was, after all, the teacher. Mum would just have told her, straight out, this is how it is.

  “What can you see?”

  She had looked at the map for a long moment, wondering if this was a trick, a game. Then, suddenly, the puzzle solved itself. The village she had grown up in was not marked. The reservoir was not there. Where it should have been, she saw a small reedy tarn, another village on its bank.

  “But the reservoir’s been there for ages.”

  “Yes?”

  “I mean, the map’s brand new, but it still shows the old village. If you didn’t know the place—”

  “—you’d get completely lost. You’re right. You see, they just keep on printing the maps, just keep churning them out without checking, but all the time everything keeps changing.”

  Where was that, when? Were they out walking, catching their breath in the wind on Rise Hill? Were they emptying the clutter from the kitchen drawer and had just come across the map, amongst brown windowed envelopes, lighter flints and forgotten keys? It must have been him, before the illness, but she couldn’t quite remember, couldn’t catch the face that must have been looking down at her.

  She threw another speck of gravel, heard the puck sound as it hit the surface. She heaved herself up. Her trousers were soaked through again; they stuck to her. Her hair was wet. Water trickled through to her scalp. She slid down off the dam. Heading downhill, she dug her heels into the wet earth, her eyes turned towards the mossy, slated roof of Jennifer’s old house.

  Hand on the gate, she looked up at the door. Its dimpled glass panels distorted the striped porch wallpaper inside. The glass always made it look as if Jennifer came to answer the door in a cloud of coloured blotches, which resolved themselves into Jen only when the door opened and she smiled out at you. You always felt like you’d conjured her up. But Jennifer wouldn’t be there. If Claire walked up the path and rang the be
ll and waited, it would be Mrs. Rothwell who eventually peered out. Jen would be in New York or Stockholm or Bali or somewhere. Or Birmingham. She might even be in Birmingham. Wherever she was, she would be bright and breezy and buoyant, full of business, full of whatever it was she was up to. Stupid to imagine she might be there, waiting for Claire to call, that they could slip off up to the reservoir again and pull it all back together. That they could make it fit.

  Through the distorting glass, Mrs. Rothwell was smeary fragments of pink and blue. She pulled the door open, stepped out, rummaging in her handbag. She turned, saw Claire, and her mouth fell open.

  “Claire!”

  “Hello, Mrs. Rothwell.”

  As Jennifer’s mother came down the path towards her, Claire smelt the familiar scent of mince and fruit jelly. Mrs. Rothwell was a dinner lady at the primary school.

  “Back from Ireland.” She stopped at the gate, zipped up her anorak.

  “Yes.”

  “I always knew it was a bad idea. I warned your mother. I told her it wasn’t safe.”

  “I’m fine,” Claire said.

  “Well, it’s just as well you came back when you did.” She smiled sympathetically. There was pink lipstick on her flat front teeth. “I don’t know why we don’t just pull out. Anyone who isn’t Irish has no real business being there, do they? They should all move back to Britain if they’re so keen on being British. That’s what I say.”

  “It’s not quite like that, Mrs. Rothwell.”

  “Well, that’s what I say, anyway.” Mrs. Rothwell put her hand to the gatelatch. “Are you looking for Jennifer? She’s not here.”

  “No, I know.”

  “I keep on telling her to get on the phone. It’s such a pain not being able to call her. You may as well wander over though, she’s probably in. It’s a bit of a hike, but you know that anyway.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You know where it is, don’t you, Gorse Cottage?” Mrs. Rothwell continued. “Up that track on the right, just before Braithwaites’ farm.”