‘Well?’ she said, a little awkwardly.
He could not interpret the word. Well. Did that mean, Well what now? Maybe it meant, Well get off my seat, I have typing to do.
He stood. She was an inch or so taller than him.
He reached out and placed his hand around her upper arm. Through the thin softness of her jumper, he could feel how slender she was. His hand seemed large and rough by comparison. She did not move. He could not bring himself to meet her gaze in case it held reproof, so he stared at her throat; her pale, fragile, immaculate throat.
Then he felt the lightest of touches, her hand on his shoulder, resting her fingers there for a moment. The feel of them burned through the light cotton of his shirt.
There was a pause during which the air caved in, the clouds collided, and the stars burst into fatal showers that set the sky alight.
They both heard it at the same moment: the unmistakably prosaic sound of Raymond whistling to himself as he strode down the office, the chink of loose change in his pocket. They broke apart. Annette dropped down into her chair and lifted her hands to the computer keyboard. William reeled away, wondering, as the world righted, how on earth he was going to find his way back to his desk.
Chapter 3
The only parts of school that Helly had enjoyed were taking up smoking and her history project. Their teacher, a thin Scottish man they called The Beard, had asked them all to think of a local topic. Helly, along with four others in the class, had come up with The History of Stockwell Tube Station. It had been one of the first to open, on the fourth of November 1890, as part of the City & South London Railway. There was a display in the local library.
She had started the project with some zeal, drawing the front cover before she had even written the introduction. The earliest tubes had distinctive domed roofs which housed the lifts. She drew her dome with great care. The rest of the station had been built with red bricks and decorated with white tiles. She bought a tin of Lakeland pencils specially for the task and drew three Victorian ladies, complete with bustles and parasols, promenading in front of the station. They held their parasols at an angle and their faces were smudgy, like the one in a Degas painting she had seen in the school secretary’s office. At the end of two weeks she had the best drawing she had ever done and a contents list.
One day, The Beard asked them all to get out what they had done so far and lay it on their desks so that he could come round and check on their progress. He worked his way round the class.
Next to Helly was Marhita, the sulky girl who had joined the class last term after her father had pulled her out of her previous school, because of trouble with some boy. Marhita ran to the toilets at the end of each day to wash off her make-up. She was a year older than the rest of them and determined to leave at Easter. When The Beard got to her desk she sat back in her seat and shrugged. In front of her was a lined pad with two sentences scrawled on it. The Beard did his best to be angry but his heart wasn’t in it. Marhita was already a lost cause.
Then he turned to Fola, who sat in front of Helly. Fola was the class brains. He did all his homework. He had never been late. The other kids thumped him around and called him a clever dickhead but Helly knew they were mistaken. He is not clever, she would think, in scornful silence. He just works hard. The Beard was soft on all the black kids because he was scared of being racist but he was particularly encouraging to Fola. Here, after all, was a black kid who worked hard and enjoyed his classes. He would do well at exam times. In the staff room he could be pointed to as a success. Fola was The Beard’s insurance policy.
Fola had also chosen The History of Stockwell Tube Station as his project. Spread out on his desk were the two chapters he had already completed and summaries of the rest. Helly leant forward and caught a glimpse of the first chapter heading: The Problems: Tunnel Construction and Train Propulsion. The Beard picked it up and flicked through it. He paused for a respectful period. Then he put it back down and said, ‘That looks very promising Fola. Very promising indeed.’ Fola gave a rare shy smile. Mostly, he was a solemn boy.
The Beard paused in front of Helly’s desk where her picture and her contents list were laid out.
He picked up the contents list and read out loud, ‘Contents: Introduction, Transport in General, Stockwell Tube, Conclusion.’ He paused, then lifted an ironic eyebrow. ‘That it?’
Helly sat back in her seat and shrugged, like Marhita. ‘Yeh.’
‘Where is the rest of it?’ The Beard had begun to talk very slowly. The rest of the class sat up and looked round. When The Beard started speaking slowly it was a sure sign that he was about to lose his temper.
Helly narrowed her eyes, looking at him. She knew that he would feel obliged to lose his temper with at least one of them during the inspection and she was damned if it was going to be her.
‘At home,’ she replied calmly.
‘At home?’
She held his gaze, defiantly. ‘I forgot it.’
The Beard wavered. The class waited. ‘See me afterwards,’ he said at last – a cop-out. The class relaxed.
They were supposed to work on their projects for the rest of the lesson. While Fola sat writing earnestly, head bent, Helly picked a blue pencil from her Lakeland set and drew a spaceship floating over Stockwell tube and the Victorian ladies. In the window of the blue spaceship she drew a blue alien, with two tentacles and a beard. She drew a speech bubble coming out of the alien’s mouth and wrote in it, We will be landing shortly, Headteacher.
At the end of the afternoon, Helly packed up her things slowly while the other members of the class leapt to their feet and stampeded out of the door.
The Beard was standing and sorting through his papers, shuffling them around. As Helly approached him he sat down again and looked up at her. The skin around his eyes was saggy. His hair was unkempt. He was wearing a navy blue V-neck pullover over a grey shirt. She felt sorry for him.
‘I’m not going to do Stockwell,’ she said.
He looked at her, grateful that she was not expecting a bollocking. ‘Why not?’
She shrugged. ‘No point.’
He sighed and leant back in his chair. ‘Well, we’ll have to come up with something else then. There must be something. You’ll have catching up to do.’
This was not true. Most of the class hadn’t even started yet. She would have some catching up to do if she wanted to pass, like Fola. She shrugged again.
‘It doesn’t have to be local,’ he said. ‘Anything, really. Why don’t you do something else about transport, seeing as you’ve made a start?’
She looked at him.
‘How about this?’ he said, leaning forward and flicking through some notes on his desk. His voice had taken on an eager tone. ‘This really tickled me.’ He slid over some photocopied pages from a textbook. ‘See here,’ he pointed to half-way down one page. ‘Things got really out of hand in Victorian times. It was almost as bad then as it is now. By 1875 London’s trams were taking forty-nine million passengers a year. But even before then, before they got the trams going, they had a Parliamentary Select Committee to decide what to do. This guy came up with an idea about London’s streets being built on three levels, one for horses and carriages, one for people and one for trains. It was all going to be built out of glass, like the Great Exhibition. It was going to be called the Crystal Way. That’s what you could call your project, The Crystal Way . . .’
He looked up from the pages to see that Helly was observing him. He was slightly embarrassed. ‘Well, I thought it was interesting, anyway, the crackpot ideas these Victorians had. Just imagine it – all built of glass.’
Helly hesitated. She knew that any minute now he was liable to sit her down and have a little chat. Teachers did this to her, on average, once a term. They told her that she was a bright girl and asked her, what did she want to do with her life? What did she really want? They were hoping she would reply, ‘Oh, do you really think I’m clever?’ as if she didn’t k
now, as if they had given her some vital piece of information that would transform her life. Henceforward, she would attend classes on time, work on her essays, give up smoking and generally metamorphose into a useful member of society. They were asking her, in fact, to validate their last remaining glimmer of optimism. She resented their demands. They were paid to be teachers, weren’t they? Nobody made them do it. Why lean on her?
If she didn’t say something quickly then The Beard would start to tell her how she could produce a very interesting project, if she really tried. The Crystal Way. Who the fuck did he think he was?
‘Could do something on disasters,’ she suggested, standing back and folding her arms.
‘Disasters?’
‘Yeh, you know, where lots of people get killed.’
The Beard looked deflated. ‘Well, I suppose, research would be relatively—’
‘Yeh, I could get quite into that, buses and train crashes. Accidents and that.’
The Beard lifted his hands, to indicate defeat. ‘You had better start at the library. There must be a book. But don’t just take it all out of the book. Go to the newspapers section. They keep old journals, you know.’
‘Yeh, I know,’ said Helly as she slung her bag over her shoulder. She was still holding her picture of Stockwell tube in one hand. She had folded it into four, with the contents list inside.
On her way out of the class room, she dropped it in the bin.
Helly’s project was called The Sinking of the Princess Alice. A trip to Brixton library had indeed produced a book, coincidentally of the same title. It informed her that on the third of September 1878, the passenger carrier Princess Alice was making a routine trip across the Thames when it met unexpectedly with another ship called the Bywell Castle. They collided just off Woolwich. Seven hundred and eighty-six people were killed, the highest death toll of any disaster other than in war time.
Helly thought it a pretty impressive figure. She decided to do a comparative study of contemporary death and disaster. She listed the numbers of people killed in recent transport accidents. Fires, wrecks, crashes – the figure only just topped a hundred. Are we to deduce, Helly wrote in the conclusion, that the Victorians were more accident prone than us? Of course not. You only needed one big bad piece of luck to add up to the same as a lot of small pieces.
One of her appendices was a survey which she carried out amongst her class, entitled, Are You Afraid of Accidents? It listed recent disasters, including bombings, and asked people who they thought responsible; the Government, the IRA, the Capital Transport Authority, Nobody, God. The Government took a clear lead, with Nobody and God tying for second. Not all her friends took the survey entirely seriously. Some added their own suggestions at the bottom of the list, including: Saddam Hussein, Norman Tebbit, the gnomes of Elsinore and my pet rabbit, Kenneth.
Her marks were good. At the end of the appendix which included the questionnaire, The Beard wrote: Interesting use of primary research method.
On the last day of the summer term, two of the boys in Helly’s class set fire to The Beard’s class room. The projects, returned from the external assessor and waiting to be collected by pupils, were sitting in a pile on The Beard’s desk. They went up in smoke. Helly was at first annoyed, then amused. It seemed rather appropriate.
Along with the rest of the class, she received a visit at home from the police. She had no help to give them and would not have given it if she had. The boys later got youth custody for criminal damage.
After the police had gone, her mother came downstairs. It was a summer afternoon, a Wednesday. Her mother had been asleep.
‘Who was that?’ she asked Helly as she passed into the kitchen.
Helly followed her and went to the freezer compartment for two slices of bread. ‘The police,’ she replied.
‘Oh. What did they want?’ her mother said, sitting down at the table. ‘Make us some toast too Hels.’ Helly’s mother was slumped forward at the table with her chin on one elbow. She was wearing a cream-coloured towelling robe with a tea stain on the left lapel. The robe was loosely tied and the pale swoop of her right breast hung forward. Despite her love of self-abuse her face had stayed attractive, but her body showed clear signs of strain.
Helly turned back to the grill. ‘They aren’t after me anyway. Make your own fucking toast.’
‘Stupid little slag,’ her mother replied neutrally, as she withdrew a cigarette packet from the pocket of her robe.
A six month period of secretarial training followed. Helly’s scheme involved three days a week work experience at a painting and decorating firm off the Black Prince Road, combined with two days at Vauxhall College. She learnt that pencils should always be sharpened, that paragraphs could – nowadays – be either indented or blocked and that office juniors were the repository of all the boredom, grief and egotism that other employees could muster.
When she left for her first proper job interview, with the Capital Transport Authority, her mother advised her casually, ‘Plenty of lipstick and don’t forget to stick your tits out.’ It appeared to work.
There was a honeymoon period at the CTA. She had been interviewed by Richard and Annette, whom she thought were probably at it. Helly had met women like Annette before – in school, at the job centre: women who would organise your entire life but never tell you anything about themselves; women who never let go. They weren’t particularly likeable but neither were they very offensive. You knew where you were. Richard was a prat, that much was obvious, but once appointed she had little to do with him. Joan was alright – good for the occasional laugh. The other men were stiffs. By the end of the first day, Helly could foresee the progress of her employment with the CTA. The job itself would be interesting for as long as it took her to learn where things were put and kept. It would be easy to tell lies, as long as she didn’t make anybody feel stupid. She and Annette would eventually get on one another’s nerves. It would always be tolerable, never more. It got her out of the house.
At home, things deteriorated. Now that she was earning, her mother expected a contribution. As soon as she got it, she took it down the pub. She was seeing a dentist called Jonathan. He was one step up from the usual bus drivers and labourers so she started stealing Helly’s underwear. Jonathan came round for dinner one night and Helly was instructed to stay out of the way. She heard wild laughter from the kitchen, where a bottle of sparkling white wine was chilling in the fridge and Marks & Spencer dips were laid out on the table. Helly pulled on a jacket and crept down. She made it out of the front door just after she heard her mother shriek, ‘Jonathan, put me down!’
She had a boyfriend of her own, briefly. He was the brother of one of her friends from school. Jamie was a rangy lad with bright blue eyes who wore vest T-shirts over baggy trousers. He was good-natured but hid it well. She discovered sex was over-rated. On Saturday nights, they drank with their friends and played pool in the Russell Hotel on Brixton Road. Occasionally they joined the landlord and the other oldies singing karaoke. Mr O’Brien was seventy-five if he was a day and did a great ‘Lucille’, swivelling his creaky hips and tossing the microphone from hand to hand between verses.
The Russell Hotel had a late licence and stayed open until one in the morning. Sometimes Jamie would borrow someone’s car and they would drive up to Clapham Common. More often, he walked her home and they would kiss wet open-mouthed kisses in the alley behind her house and fumble with each other’s flies. There was no need to be quiet. Her mother was rarely at home, although Helly never mentioned this to Jamie. Afterwards, she would let herself in and make a cup of tea. She would sit in the kitchen in the dark, drinking, staring out of the uncurtained window at the partially-lit concrete tower blocks of Lambeth, creating starships in the sky.
She had only been at the CTA for a few weeks when she found out about the letter. She arrived home from work one Tuesday. She hated Tuesdays: well into the week, ages from the end. It had taken her an hour and twenty minutes to get hom
e, longer than it would have taken to walk. The Victoria line was down so she had gone to catch the 36 bus, along with everybody else who worked in SW1. After three of them had come and gone and the crowd had continued to swell, she went back down into the tube to get the District line to Westminster and pick up the 109. When a 109 came it was only going as far as County Hall. She stepped back, knowing that she was breaking the cardinal rule of travelling on public transport: go as far as you can on whatever happens to be available. The next 109 was full. She gave in and walked across the bridge, then down the Albert embankment to pick up a number 3, a sleek modern bus with furry seats that smelt of car sickness.
Her mother was watching television. Helly stormed past the sitting room door.
‘Helen!’ her mother called out.
‘What?’ said Helly. She had paused in the hall but did not go back to the doorway.
‘You’ve just missed your gran . . .’ Helly spelt the word ‘fuck’ with her lips. ‘She said she couldn’t stop. They were going out or something. They brought a letter round. The kitchen table!’
On the kitchen table Helly found a letter on Capital Transport Authority headed notepaper, addressed to her grandparents. It came from Richard’s office but was signed officially by the general manager of the property division. Beneath Dear Mr and Mrs Appleton were the words: Rosewood Cottage, Sutton Street: Notice to Treat.
It was her gran who persuaded her not to ask around at work openly. ‘Don’t get yourself into trouble,’ Joanna Appleton had said. ‘I only brought it round because you work for them and I thought you could find out how long we’ve got. But don’t tell anyone you know us. It’ll make things tricky for you.’
Helly decided not to ask but for a different reason. By then, she was working out her own solution. By then, she knew that Richard was bent.
Benny loved horses. He dreamt of them nearly every night as he lay in fitful sleep in his car-tyre igloo in the works yard of Robinson Builders Limited. In Venezuela, he had once performed a Caesarean section on a thoroughbred mare whose foal had not turned, saving the foal’s life. The tiny horse was healthy, beautiful, perfect. Señor de Angelinos had been duly grateful. Benny’s future looked bright.
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