4
MADELEINE AND I ARE WAITING AT the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our summer school uniform: green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazer. In the summer we are allowed to leave off our hated green felt hats. Summer is thick everywhere, a sleepy, viscous, sensuous emanation; hot blasts of air, opaque with pollen from the overblown suburban gardens, ripe with wafts from bins and dog mess. We are mad with summer, chafing and irritable with sex. We’re in the fourth year, studying for our O levels; we have breasts (small in my case – luscious in Madeleine’s) and pubic hair and periods. A breeze, stirring the dust in the gutter sluggishly, tickles up round our thighs, floats our dresses – we can hardly bear it.
Our talk is rococo with insincerity, drawling, lascivious. We sound at that age huskier from smoking than we ever do later when we smoke much more. We say that the pods in the gardens are bursting with seeds, and that we like to eat ripe melons, and that the cars are covered with sticky stuff dropped off the trees – everything seems obscene with double significance, even though it’s only quarter past eight in the morning and behind us in our homes our mothers are clearing the breakfast tables, scraping soggy Rice Krispies and burnt toast crusts into the bin, wiping the plastic tablecloths. My mother is bending over Philip in his high chair, playing pat-a-cake to trick him into letting her wipe his face and hands, making his mouth spill open in delighted laughter, his eyes roll up. She lifts up his little shirt and kisses his belly; I might be jealous except that I haven’t got time to crane that way, backwards towards home and the cramped circle of old loves. My attention is all thrusting forward, onward, out of there. I’ve burned my boats, I can’t go back – or rather, I do go back, dutifully, every evening after school, and do my homework still at the same table in the same stale olive-green dining room, and still get the best marks in the class for everything, nearly everything (I even manage not to fail in physics). But it’s provisional, while I wait for my real life to begin. I feel like an overgrown giant in that house, bumping up against the ceiling like Alice in Wonderland after she’s found the cake labelled ‘Eat Me’: head swollen with knowledge and imagination, body swollen with sensation and longing.
Madeleine and I have never even kissed boys: at fifteen we don’t have any actual sexual experience whatever except a few things we’ve done with each other, experimentally, and out of desperation. (Not shamefaced afterwards – flaunting and wicked; it is the 1970s, after all. But it’s boys we want.) At an all-girls school we don’t get many chances to meet boys, although there are usually some on the bus, going in to the Grammar School. This is a part of our excitement, at quarter past eight. There are certain boys we are expecting to see, and we may even pluck up the crazy courage to speak to them, a word or two; any exchange will be dissected afterwards between Madeleine and myself in an analysis more nuanced and determined than anything we ever do to poems in English lessons. (‘What do you think he really meant when he said that his friend had said yesterday that you weren’t bad?’)
Anything can happen in the bus in the next half an hour; even something with the power to obliterate and reduce to dust the double maths, scripture, double Latin and (worst) games which lie in wait at the end of the journey – a doom of tedium, infinitely long, impossible to bear. After games, the nasty underground shower room with its concentrated citrus-rot stink of female sweat, its fleshly angsts, tinpot team spirit, gloom of girls passed over, games teacher’s ogling, trodden soaking towels.
Something has to happen.
Into our heat that morning came Valentine.
He walked down to join us at the bus stop. We’d never seen him before: into the torpor of the suburb his footsteps broke like a signal for adventure on a jaunty trumpet. I loved his swaggering walk immediately without reserve (and never stopped loving it). His glancing, eagerly amused look around him – drinking everything in, shaking the long hair back from around his face – was like a symbol for morning itself. (His energy was no doubt partly the effect of the Dodos – caffeine pills – he’d have swallowed in the bathroom as soon as his mother got him out of bed. Soon we were all taking them.) A Grammar School blazer, hooked by its loop around one nicotine-stained finger, was slung over his shoulder, his cigarette cocked up cheekily between lips curved as improbably, generously wide as a faun’s. The pointed chin was like a faun’s too, and the flaunting Caravaggio cheekbones, pushing up the thick flesh under his eyes, making them slanted and mischievous. He was tall, but not too tall; his school trousers slid down his impossibly narrow waist and hips, he tucked his shirt half in with a careless hand. The school tie others wore resentfully as a strangled knot became under his touch somehow cravat-like, flowing. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone. He was sixteen (a year older than we were).
He grinned at Madeleine and me.
At me first, then at Madeleine, which was not usual. Madeleine in her lazy indifference had bloomed, she was willowy and languorous, sex had dusted a glitter into her long curls and kitten-face, her pink cheeks. I was too small, too plump and shapeless, and my eyes, I knew, were blackly expressive pits in a too-white face. Madeleine, trying kindly to advise me on my sex appeal (I asked her), had said I might be ‘too intense’ – but I didn’t know how to disguise that. Valentine stopped at the bus stop and offered us his cigarette, me first. It was not any ordinary cigarette, oh no! (we went to school stoned for the first time, but not the last).
— Hello girls, he said, beaming. — Does this bus go into town? Do you catch it every day? That’s good. I like the look of you.
We looked at each other and giggled and asked him what he liked about us. Thinking about it, surveying us up and down, he said we looked sceptical.
What did he mean, sceptical?
Thank God we weren’t wearing our hats.
I longed for the bus not to come. Proximity to his body – a glimpse via his half-untucked shirt of hollowed, golden, masculine stomach, its line of dark hairs draining down from the belly button – licked at me like a flame while we waited. His family, he explained, had just moved into one of the posher streets behind Beech Grove. When the bus did come he sat on the back seat and took Beckett out of his rucksack: End Game. The very title, even the look of the title – its stark indiscreet white capitals on a jazzy orange cover – was a door swinging suddenly open into a new world. I’d never heard of Beckett; I think I was ploughing then through The Forsyte Saga. None of the other boys on the bus read books. Val smiled at us encouragingly, extravagantly, over the top of his.
— He was gorgeous, I liked him, Madeleine conceded as we trudged in a tide of other green-gowned inmates up the purgatorial hill from our stop to where school loomed, the old house frowning in the sunlight as a prison. — But I couldn’t actually fancy him, could you? There was something weird.
I was disappointed in her; I was already wondering if I’d find Beckett in the local library. (The librarian, warmly supportive of my forays into Edwardian belles-lettres, would startle and flinch at my betrayal.) And my heart raced at the idea that Valentine might not be at the bus stop the next day. (But he was – and was there most days, right through to the middle of the upper sixth.) Madeleine didn’t insist on her doubt, she never insisted – and I closed a door on an early intimation of danger. I wanted Val because he was different – as I was different. What I felt at my first sight of him that summer morning was more than ordinary love: more like recognition. When I read later in Plato about whole souls divided at birth into two separated halves, which move around in the world ever afterwards mourning one another and longing for a lost completion, I thought I was reading about myself and Valentine.
And it was the same for Val. He recognised me too.
I truly do believe that, even now, even after everything that happened. We found each other out, we were kindred spirits, it was mutual.
— What a scarecrow, Gerry said after he came to my house for the first time. — I can’t believe the Grammar School let him get away with that h
air.
— He looks like a girl, my mother said. — I’m not that keen, Stella.
Following up the stairs behind Val, I was faint from the movement of his slim haunches in his tight white jeans. How could she think that he looked like a girl? Yet all we did in my bedroom was cosy up knee to knee, cross-legged on the bed to talk. We swapped our childhood stories. He was born in Malaya, he had had an ayah.
— What were your family doing in Malaya?
— You don’t want to know.
— I want to know everything.
— My father worked for the government, he’s an awful tax expert. Now he’s retired, he’s just awful and old. What does yours do?
— He’s not my real dad. My real dad’s dead.
Mum brought in a pile of ironed clothes to put away in my chest of drawers. Then she called to ask if we wanted coffee. Philip came knocking at the door, asking us to play with him. Afterwards Mum spoke to me awkwardly, about self-respect. The familiar solidity of the house and its furniture melted away around Val; after he’d left I couldn’t believe I really lived there. I couldn’t hold in the same focus my two worlds brought into conjunction. Yet I wanted Val to be brilliant for my parents and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He never made any concessions to them, or small talk. If they asked him questions he sometimes didn’t even seem to hear them; his eyes were blank. He seemed to simply pause the flow of his life in the presence of anyone unsympathetic.
He was stoned a lot of the time.
Yet among our friends he was magnetic, commanding, funny. He was a clever mimic. In the evenings we started getting together at Madeleine’s – a whole gang of six or seven of us from the streets round about. Madeleine’s father was often away; her mother Pam was bored and liked flirting with teenagers. She brought home-made brownies and cheese straws and jugs of weak sangria up to Madeleine’s room and we cadged her cigarettes. Madeleine fancied a boy who played the guitar and wrote his own songs; we tried to talk a shy, blonde girl out of her faith. Madeleine bought a red bulb to put in one of the lamps, we draped the others with Indian silk scarves. When my stepfather was sent across to fetch me home, he never stepped across the low fence between our front gardens but went punctiliously via both front paths and gates. He said if Pam wanted teenagers carrying on under her own roof it was her business.
— What’s this? he joked, when I brought Beckett back from the library.
— He’s a play writer. Haven’t you heard of him?
— Playwright. (Gerry did crosswords, he had a good vocabulary.) — Aren’t they all waiting for some chap who never turns up?
Gerry had been so keen for me to go to the High School; yet he was hostile to the power my education brought me. He thought I was putting on airs – and I expect I was, I was probably pretty insufferable with my quotations from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, my good French accent (I corrected his: ça ne fait rien, not san fairy ann). He could still usually trip me up, though, in geography or history – my sense of things fitting together was treacherously vague. Gerry knew an awful lot, he was always reading. He subscribed by post to a long series of magazines about the Second World War, which he kept in purpose-made plastic folders on a shelf. Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books.
He was amused and patient, correcting my mistakes. He did it to my mother too: so long as we were wrong, then he was kind. If I could have given in gracefully to that shape of relations between us – his lecturing me and my submitting to it – then we might have been able to live happily together. My mother didn’t care about knowing things, she just laughed at him. (‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gerry – as if it mattered!’) But I couldn’t give in. It was a struggle between our different logics. Everything I learned, I wanted to be an opening into the unknown; whereas Gerry’s sums added up in a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him.
I took Beckett up to my bedroom.
It wasn’t the kind of writing I was used to. I’d taught myself to stir in response to the captured textures of passing moments – the subtle essence of unspoken exchange, the sensation of air in a room against the skin. Now, I learned to read Beckett (and then, under Val’s influence, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti) like a convert embracing revolutionary discipline, cutting all links with my bourgeois-realist past.
— Is he your boyfriend then? Madeleine wanted clarification.
I was disdainful. — We don’t care about those kinds of labels.
— But is he?
— What does it look like?
Val and I were inseparable. We saw each other almost every day – not only on the bus going to school and coming back, but in the evenings, as often as my parents allowed me out or said he could come round. They claimed they worried about my school work but I didn’t believe them, I saw in my mother’s face her recoil from what she dreaded – the dirty flare of sex and exposure; my making a fool of myself. (They were so innocent, I don’t think they guessed about the drugs until much later.) Sometimes I went out anyway when they’d forbidden me, and then there was trouble. When I got home Gerry took me into the lounge for one of his old lectures, screwing up his forehead, leaning towards me, pretending to be impartial justice. From my dizzy vantage point (high as a kite), I believed I could see right through him to his vindictiveness, his desire to shoot me down where I was flying.
— They hate me, I said to Val. — Under his pretence of being concerned for my future, he really he hates me. And she doesn’t care.
— Don’t mind them, Val said, his eyes smiling. He blew out smoke, he was serene, bare feet tucked up on his knees in the lotus position. — They’re just frightened. They’re sweet really, your parents.
We were talking in his bedroom, so unlike my little pink cell: a draughty attic where his books and clothes lay around in chaos on a Turkey carpet grey with cigarette ash. (When I asked if his mother never cleaned in there he said she didn’t clean anywhere, they had a woman in.) His attitude towards his own parents was coolly disengaged. I was afraid of them, I tried to avoid meeting them on my passages through the rambling big house (built when Stoke Bishop was still the countryside). They were both tall and big-boned: his father was stooped, with brown-blotched skin, long earlobes, thinning white hair; his mother had a ruined face and watery huge eyes, she wore pearls and Chinese jade earrings at the dining table in the evenings (unlike us, they actually ate in their dining room). The arrangement of their furniture – elegant, shabby, mixed with exotica from the East – seemed provisional; they had only just moved in, and might move on. They were polite with me, and their conversation was as dully transactional as anything in my house – yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.
Val had older sisters and brothers who had left home but often came visiting, or taking refuge from some drama in their complicated lives: all good-looking and dauntingly confident, even if they seemed conventional beside Val. They called their parents Mummy and Daddy (Val didn’t call them anything, in my hearing). His sister Diana – next to him in age, excitable, with dark hair cut in a thick fringe and very white teeth – chatted to me about horses and somehow I knew not to give away too much detail about Budge’s ramshackle stables. When I asked if Diana had been to university, she laughed at me. — Darling, I can hardly read. I’ve never passed an exam in my life, I’m virtually an idiot.
When he was bantering with his sister, petulant, I got a glimpse for a moment of a different Valentine: less sublimely solitary, more a type – their type, mannered and competitive. Valentine was the baby of the family; conceived at an age when his parents ought to have known better, he said disgustedly. — I’m the painful reminder of lost virility.
— Don’t take any notice of him, Diana said. — He’s Mummy’s little pet.
He chucked a cushion at her head. — Di’s a dirty slut, he said. — She thinks through her yoni.
— My what? she gi
ggled. — Yogi Bear?
— Ignoramus.
Apart from Diana, Val’s family never came up to his attic room (nor did the cleaner). Sometimes his mother shouted up the stairs, if a meal was ready or Val was wanted on the telephone. We were private up there. I loved the evening shadows in the complex angles of the sloping ceiling. In summer the heat under the roof was dense; in winter we cuddled up for warmth under the blankets on his bed. Our bodies fitted perfectly together – my knees curved into the backs of his, my breath in the nape of his neck, his fingers knotted into mine against his chest, under his shirt; we lay talking about everything, or listening to Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Dylan. The shape of the long, empty room seemed the shape of our shared imagination, spacious and open to everything. I couldn’t believe the long strides he’d made in his mind, all by himself. Sometimes, depending on the pills, he would talk and talk without stopping.
— How do you know that I really exist, outside you? he asked me urgently. — I might be a figment of your imagination.
Our heads were side by side then on his pillow. How lucky I was to lie like that, so intimate with his lovely looks that I couldn’t see them whole: teasing green eyes, down on his upper lip, curving high hollows in his cheeks. I longed for him to begin kissing me, as he sometimes did – but I had learned that I must not try to initiate this. — But I just know! I insisted, stroking his face as if the feeling in my fingers was proof. — And I’m not a figment of yours either. I’m really here, I promise.
— I believe in you. I’m not so sure about me. You’re solid. You’re fierce.
I wasn’t as solid as I had been. Since I met Val, I’d stopped bothering to eat. I couldn’t bear my mother’s gluey gravy any longer, I drank black (instant) coffee and gave up sugar; the weight had flown off me. Although I was small and Val was taller, we nonetheless came to look like a matching pair: skinny and striking. By this time we were on the fringes of a set who gathered at weekends in a sleazy bar behind a cinema in town. Val had a good instinct for the people worth getting to know – a man with freckled hands and a mane of red hair who sold him speed and other things; a clever art student, half-Greek, who played in a band (they sounded like art-punk before punk had really happened). These men were older and powerful and a lot of people were eager to be their friends, but Val was able to impress them. He was good company, with his quick wit and the cultural know-how he carried off gracefully.
Clever Girl Page 7