She remembers:
Karl coming back from the river in his belly, making a pillow of his jacket in the long grass, telling her to sleep it off and that when it’s dark he’ll bring her home.
Karl sitting close by her, leaning forward; he is holding a bottle by its neck. A picture of a woodpecker on the bottle’s label. The woodpecker swinging to and fro. The sky beginning to spin; the long blades of grass swaying. The skin on Karl’s back: yellow red, purple. The scars in between, little fishes.
*
When she wakes up, her brain is throbbing and her throat is raw. Karl is lying down beside her now, counting the stars. Everyone else has gone home. It’s late, he tells her. The middle of the night.
‘Oh no! I have no key,’ she says. ‘I’ll have to wake my mother. Oh no!’
‘Do they lock the back door?’ Karl says.
‘My father does, but he’s away.’
He stands up and holds out his hand.
Karl takes her around the back of the cul-de-sac through a grassy patch and behind a few bushes. He makes a stirrup of his hands and helps her climb over a high wall. And now she finds herself crouching in a gap between two high walls: the Caudwells’ and the Shillmans’.
‘How did you know this was even here?’ she says.
‘You’re not the only one who knows how to sneak around,’ Karl says.
Her mother is still up. They can see over the wall, all the way up the back garden, right in through the kitchen window. Her mother and Mrs Shillman and another woman Elaine recognises as a golfing friend of Mrs Shillman’s. The two visitors move towards the door as if they are leaving, then they change their minds and move back again. They sit down, stand up. Light a cigarette. Drink something. Sit down again. Drink again.
‘They’ll be a while yet,’ Karl says.
‘Oh God,’ she says, ‘I’m so thirsty I could die…’
Before she has even finished her complaint, Karl has climbed the wall and disappeared into the Shillmans’ garden.
‘Karl!’ she whispers. ‘What are you doing!’
He makes a long shhhhh at her, through the wall.
He’s back then with a plastic bottle filled with cool water.
‘It was clipped onto Mikey’s racer. I filled it from the garden tap.’
‘Jesus, Karl, are you mad? What if someone heard you?’
‘I didn’t make a sound; I could be a cat burglar, if I wanted.’
He tells her how, a few weeks ago, he and Paul stole the key into Dr Townsend’s surgery and went looking for drugs.
‘What!’
‘We didn’t find any. Actually, we didn’t really look. Once we got in, we couldn’t stop laughing and so we got out again.’
She tells him about the time she was night-walking with Rachel and Agatha and they saw Dr Townsend come home so drunk that he fell out of his car.
Then she tells him about the time they got over the back wall of Hanleys’ and saw Ted walking around the garden room wearing nothing but a pair of purple Y-fronts and for ages afterwards they called him Purple Balls Hanley.
He laughs when she tells him that; he laughs so much the tears run out from the side of his eyes.
In the moment she is tempted to tell him about Agatha and what she has seen in the shed. She gets as far as saying, ‘Karl, if I tell you something…’ But then he tells her about his bruise, the shape of Australia.
‘My mother must look like a whole atlas,’ he says; ‘he hits her and then I hit him. He’s bigger than me, well for the moment, but I’ll still have a good go.’
She doesn’t know if she should believe him – everyone knows Karl is a bit of a spoofer. Then he lights a cigarette and his face shows in the flare of the lighter.
She says, ‘That’s terrible, Karl, that’s just…’
‘One day I’m going to break his fingers and that’ll be the end of him and his fucking orchestra.’
He stubs the cigarette against the wall, twists it into shape and puts it into his pocket.
‘Light’s just gone off in your kitchen,’ he says, ‘are you right?’
The second time she drinks, she starts crying like a baby. She cries because Agatha is blind and because even if they make it up she can never be her friend again and be Rachel’s friend at the same time. She cries because her mother is fat and she knows other people jeer her. She cries because she feels lonely, as if she is bricked in behind a wall and can hear everyone outside, but nobody can hear her. She cries because Jonathan doesn’t love her.
And she cries because Karl’s father hits Karl’s mother and men rape their wives and go off with other women and sometimes even go off with their daughters’ friends.
She cries and she cries. People ask her – why are you crying, Elaine? She says, ‘Nothing, nothing.’ Or she says, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Before she starts crying, Patty is kneeling beside Jonathan, cutting his hair with a nail scissors. She lays each curl on the palm of her hand, then lifts the palm to her face and stares into it, turning her palm towards the fading light, then away from it, smiling at each curl as if it was a live thing and as if she really loved it. Patty picks each curl up in the pinch of her fingers, raises it over her head and slowly lets it drop on the ground.
‘Jesus – what’s the matter with her?’ Brenda Caudwell asks.
‘She’s dropped acid,’ Paul says.
‘Dropped what?’ Brenda says, looking around.
The third time she drinks, she doesn’t get sick. She talks and talks and makes everyone laugh. They are in the Shillmans’ house.
Rachel makes them drinks from the cocktail cabinet. She opens all these bottles and puts ice into a shaker then puts on music and dances around like a South American. Then they all start dancing around. Until a group of older boys comes knocking on the door, some of them with girlfriends; boys who are practically men. One of them says, ‘Is this the free house?’ He has black hair on his hands. Peter Caudwell walks through the gate and Brenda has to rush through the kitchen and sneak out the back and over the wall. Elaine goes with her to give her a leg up.
‘Fuck him, anyway,’ Brenda says. ‘And I was really looking forward to trying out that acid stuff.’
*
When she comes back in, Paul Townsend is falling backwards on top of the cocktail cabinet. He falls like a shot cowboy. Bottles from all over the world topple and bounce on the black rag-rug. Two bottles fall on the side of the fireplace; one smashes, the other spews out a thickish green liquid. Two of the older boys pull Paul out of the cabinet and steady him up. Paul leaves a big crack right through the middle of the glass. ‘Oh no!’ Rachel screams with her hands on her head. ‘I’m in such trouble now, I’m in such trouble.’
‘It’s okay,’ Karl Donegan says, ‘It’s okay.’
‘How is it okay? How? How? Look at the place. That’s my mother’s Indian kaftan that girl is wearing. They’re my father’s Cuban cigars. I’ll be killed, I’ll be— Look at the cabinet. My mother’s cabinet. She spent a fortune on that cabinet!’
‘Don’t worry,’ Karl says. ‘We’ll get rid of everyone, clean up. I’ll say I tripped on the rug and fell on the cabinet. I’ll say I broke it.’
‘I don’t want you to say you broke it!’ Rachel screams at him. ‘Why should you take the blame?’
‘I don’t mind,’ Karl says. ‘Really, I don’t.’
Another row with her mother.
‘Have you been drinking? Elaine – answer me, please, is that drink I smell off your breath?’
‘Is that drink I smell off yours?’
Her mother grabs her by the arm and squeezes it.
‘I thought I told you to stay in tonight. I thought I told you you weren’t allowed to go out after six o’clock in the evenings.’
‘I’m not staying here on my own. While you go off drinking with Martha Shillman.’
‘I’m not out drinking! She’s teaching me golf and we go into the club house afterwards for a bite to e
at and maybe one or two— How dare you question me anyway? How dare—! For once in my life, for once in my life I have a hobby and you’d begrudge it me.’
‘I’m here on my own all day. And now you want me—’
‘I thought you were in Serena’s.’
‘I don’t like going there any more.’
‘You don’t like Serena?’
‘It’s Patty, always sneering and saying mean things.’
‘Oh now, you’re just being silly.’
‘She said you were the fattest person in the neighbourhood.’
Her mother lets go of her arm.
‘You won’t even let me go to the stables during the day. And now you want me to stay in every night too.’
‘You have to be punished, Elaine. After what you lot did to the Shillmans’. The place destroyed and that Karl Donegan smashing the good cocktail cabinet.’
‘He didn’t smash it. He didn’t go near it!’
‘Bad enough, Elaine, you telling lies on your own account, but lying for your friends too. You are staying in for the next two weeks and that’s all about it. And you can forget about any tennis camp too, missss. You can put it straight out of your head.’
‘I’m not staying in this house on my own. I hate this house. I hate it.’
At the end of August, they hear the truth about Junie Caudwell, and then, one truth leading into another, they hear about Agatha.
Maggie Arlow is the one who tells them about June. She tells them first thing one morning when she’s not even drunk. Elaine is on her way to the shops when she looks over the wall and sees everyone by the stableyard archway. Only Jonathan is missing. She sees Agatha is there and almost walks on by because it feels too awkward. But then Rachel spots her and starts waving like mad and so Elaine decides to wander in. When she gets near, Paul puts his finger to his lips and nods his head towards the yard.
Maggie inside shouting at one of the lads – ‘You fucking simpleton.’
And the rugged mumbling of the lad trying to defend himself – ‘Buh bu dubbedy, bud bu.’
‘What? What? I can’t understand a word you’re saying!’
‘Buh bu, dub bu.’
‘Oh, just get out there now and clean up that mess, or you’re back on the train this afternoon to whatever arsehole of the country you were shat out of.’
‘Someone has a big fat hangover,’ Rachel says.
Brenda Caudwell says, ‘How do you know?’
‘By the look of her.’
Brenda tuts. ‘How can you know just by looking at her?’ she says. ‘That’s just ridiculous.’ She turns to Elaine. ‘You can’t tell if someone has a hangover just by looking, can you, Elaine…?’
Elaine says nothing.
They can see through the archway into the stableyard, Maggie crossing from one side to the other, still shouting at the stable lad. Brenda is holding an envelope; she lifts it to her mouth and sniggers.
Agatha is also holding an envelope in one hand, in her other a cigarette. She takes a pull and then says, ‘Oh God, I don’t want this. Does anyone…?
Brenda shouts out, ‘I’ll take it!’
And then Elaine takes a small breath and says, ‘I will.’
Brendie said it first, but Agatha holds the cigarette out towards Elaine and, for the first time in weeks, says her name.
There is the hard wet scratching of a yard brush; the clean, hard clip of horses’ hooves on stone. There is the savoury stench of horse-piss on hay. There is Maggie. She comes out from the tack-room and begins towards them.
‘Well?’ she says when she gets there.
She is short of breath; her eyes look startled; her face is ruddy, her mouth clenched as if she’s eaten something that’s slightly off.
‘Back in a minute,’ she says suddenly and then rushes into the house.
‘What did I tell you?’ Rachel says. ‘A stinker.’
They wait.
‘You’re not even smoking that properly,’ Brenda says to Elaine, then, ‘I mean to say, what a waste. I wouldn’t mind but I baggsed it first.’
‘Shut up, Caudwell,’ Agatha says and Elaine tries not to show her pleasure.
‘Yeah, shut up, Caudwell,’ Elaine says, ‘you’re always moaning.’
*
Maggie comes back out of the house. Her short dirty hair stands up in peaks.
‘Doesn’t she look like a man?’ Brenda Caudwell says under her breath. ‘She looks like that postman – do you remember him, that old pervert with the bandy legs? One time he flashed his mousey at our Peter.’
‘His what?’ Karl laughs.
‘Well, that’s what we call it in our house.’
Agatha asks, ‘Does she? Does she look like the old postman?’
Rachel says, ‘Oh God, yes, she does, shut up, shut up, she’ll—’
Maggie is standing in front of them now.
‘What’s so funny?’ she says.
‘Nothing,’ Brenda says. ‘I just want to pay for last week’s lessons and to book in for next week.’ She hands the envelope to Maggie and then walks around and stands behind her.
Agatha says, ‘I want to pay too but I’m not feeling well today so I won’t be able…’
‘You’re looking a bit peaky, all right,’ Maggie says and lights up one of her French cigarettes.
Behind Maggie’s back Brendie Caudwell is making faces. She is imitating Maggie’s crabby expression. She has put her hand under the waistband of her jodhpurs and stuck her index finger out through the top of her zip. She is doing a little dance and wagging her finger pretending that it’s Maggie’s mousey.
Elaine can hear Rachel behind her, trying not to choke. Maggie looks at Rachel’s big red face then at Karl, who chews his lip and stares at the ground. Paul has walked off. Elaine is about to follow him. Then Maggie swings around suddenly and glares at Brenda. There is a split second between her swinging around and Brenda’s freezing. Brenda looks at Maggie with a blank, innocent face.
Maggie turns back and asks Agatha if she needs to go to the doctor.
‘No, no,’ Agatha says, ‘it’s just a bit of a bug or something. I’ll be fine in a day or two.’
Maggie finishes her cigarette, throws it down and screws it into the ground with her boot. Then out of the blue, and without even looking at Brenda, she says: ‘And how is that sister of yours doing, Brenda?’
Behind Maggie’s back, Brenda stops grinning. ‘Who, June?’
‘You only have the one.’
‘She’s fine. Thank you.’
‘Brussels, isn’t it? Where she’s working?’
Brenda says, ‘Yes, Brussels.’
Maggie turns around and carefully looks at Brenda.
‘Is she putting on any weight over there? I hear the food can be fattening.’
‘No. I mean, I don’t know.’
‘Didn’t send a photograph or anything?’
Brenda shakes her head.
‘Whereabouts in Brussels is she, anyway? I know Brussels actually; competed there once a few years ago.’
‘I… I don’t know.’
‘The address, you must have seen the address, when you write to her and that?’
‘I… I can’t remember.’
‘Are you sure it’s Brussels at all? It’s not somewhere else?’
Brenda gives a slow blink and cocks a cheeky lip at Maggie.
‘I think I know where my own sister is, thank you. Anyway, I better go now, I told my mother—’
‘Sure now – it’s not the home for unmarried mothers, you know, out there near the old airport road? The home where they lock you up and make you scrub floors for your sins and then when your baby is born the nuns drag it out of your arms and give it to some couple who pretend it’s theirs. And then you come on home with the spirit kicked out of you, and everyone thinks you’re just a bit thick because you don’t appear to have learned much French in Brussels or wherever the fuck it was you were pretending to be.’
Brenda’s face
is white; her mouth begins to wobble. Maggie throws the envelope on the ground at her feet. ‘You tell your mother from me, keep her money. Keep it for her grandchild. And if I ever see your snide little face here again, I’ll punch it.’
Then Brenda runs off, and Maggie goes back into her house.
They come out of the yard without looking at each other; without saying a word. Agatha linking Karl, Elaine walking behind Rachel and Paul. Brenda is waiting on the corner by the Townsends’ bushes.
‘Is it true?’ Paul asks her and hands her the envelope that Maggie threw on the ground.
‘Yes,’ Brenda says. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘Bitch, to say it like that, though, in front of everyone,’ Karl says. ‘Fucking old cow.’
‘Poor June,’ Rachel says, ‘what will happen to her now?’
‘I don’t understand how she found out,’ Brenda says. ‘How the hell did she… we were so careful. I’ll have to tell my parents. Will I? Will I have to tell them? My father will go mad. He tore the place asunder when June told him she was pregnant. Kicked the washing machine, the fridge. The whole kitchen got it. Oh, fuck June anyway, she’s ruined all of our lives now.’
They sit in a row on the Townsends’ wall and for a few moments nothing is said until Karl stands up – ‘Jesus, Agatha,’ he says, ‘what’s wrong?’
Elaine looks down the line and sees that Agatha is crying.
‘Agatha?’ she says and gets up. ‘Agatha – what’s happened? What’s the matter with you?’
‘I’m in trouble,’ she says simply, ‘I need your help,’ and she puts her arms out to Elaine.
13
Winter Present
January
BY THE TIME I get into town and wander around and get home again, hours have gone by and the light is already fading. I come into the house and there is no Lynette. My father is not in the sitting room. The kitchen door is ajar and I see through the crack the side of his wheelchair. I imagine all sorts: his colostomy bag has burst and he’s frantically searching for paper towels to clean up the mess; someone has broken into the house and has dragged him into the kitchen…
I rush into the kitchen and find him calmly positioned by the counter. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in this room since I was a child and it throws me a little.
The Lives of Women Page 19