‘For God’s sake, Heather, you’ll catch your death,’ Ruth muttered to herself but was conscious, amid the dampness of disapproval, of a fiery zest of envy. How she would love to be so carefree! So wealthy that no problem could not be solved. Heather had turned from the woods now and was running back towards the house. Her face was lifted up, her eyes ecstatic, her mouth open, as though catching drops of liquid moonlight on her tongue. Below her people were stepping out onto the terrace. Jude, smoking a cigarette or more likely, Ruth thought with a sniff, a joint. Simon, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a large brandy balloon. Belinda, holding Heather’s ridiculous dress and shoes and behind her James, out of things as always, hovering on the periphery, his shirt un-tucked from his waistband and, even in this light, she could see a stain or smear of something on his shirtfront. Ruth glowered down at them, feeling bitterly excluded. Were they all having fun downstairs without her? Belinda shuddered suddenly and looked uncomfortable, as though feeling someone walk across her grave. Ruth looked on and what she saw next caused her to clap her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. James stepped up behind Belinda and placed his hands on her shoulders. He rubbed his large, soft, warm hands slowly up and down Belinda’s arms. He pressed her back against his front, to share his warmth and bent his head down to say something quietly into her ear. Belinda turned her face up to him, and her face, like Heather’s, was open and elated; her eyes shone. A tendril of hair had escaped from her bun and rather than tucking it hastily away again, she wrapped it playfully around her finger.
Simon – A Memoir from 1984
Simon trailed home from school. It was a baking hot June day and he had taken his tie off. He dragged his blazer along behind him as he walked through the building site, between the new houses which had been built in the field behind their house. The new houses were a good thing; new people, lots of families with teenagers, and this new short-cut through to their back garden which saved him the walk the long way round through the avenues and crescents of their labyrinthine estate. And also a bad thing; now it was too risky to open up the roof-light in his bedroom and clamber down the wisteria to meet his mates on the wasteland when he should have been in bed. Some new nosey do-gooding neighbour was bound to see and tell his parents about his nocturnal meanderings, eager to get one over on the whiter-than-white, squeaky-clean McKays.
Also, he missed the view of the fields and the line of trees along the river, and the blackness at night, and the quiet.
Simon arrived at the pond which had once nestled virtually unknown in the corner of the field. As children he and Ruth had often gone there to play and had once brought home a bucket full of frog-spawn to keep in the back porch. In time it had hatched into a seething mass of slimy, sperm-like tadpoles and they had taken most of them back to the pond. Then, one morning the back porch had been alive with little green frogs and Heather had had hysterics and stepped on dozens of them, squashing them wholesale under the soles of her little pink shoes. The more she squashed the more hysterical she became. The more she leapt and stamped about the more frogs she squashed until the floor was a carnage of flattened frogs. The developers had landscaped the pond into the new estate and fenced it around. The exuberant hedgerow had been ripped away to make room for uncomfortable wooden seats and mean, formal planting. Now, in the heat, and without the shade of the hedges, the pond was almost dry, the black, sucking leaf-mould and mud making an earthy stink so that no one chose to go and sit there. People hurried past with averted eyes. It had become a depository for litter and the kind of refuse which the council wouldn’t take away, an eye-sore which they could barely look at much less address. And so it remained, an ugly but irreversible blight on their smart new semis and neatly landscaped lawns and pristine patio furniture.
He had just taken his last ‘O’ level exam and the summer stretched before him with no school, no homework, no revision and no more exams to cloud the prospect. Plus, in only a few days, it would be his sixteenth birthday. He was one of the youngest in the year and all of his mates had already celebrated with barbecues in their gardens or trips to the Speedway. One of them had had a party in a garage, with cider and girls and punk so loud that the stuff stacked on the father’s shelves – turpentine and weed-killer and emulsion paint and tile adhesive and WD40 – had rattled and jangled and clashed together and the sawdust and muck had danced and leapt like fleas. Simon had drunk more than his fair share of the cider and smoked some cigarettes and snogged a girl called Wendy with his tongue down her throat. He had pogoed with his friends and been copiously sick in a flower bed. Another lad had sniffed some of the tile adhesive and been taken to hospital. It had been the best party ever. But there would be no party for Simon’s birthday.
His sixteenth summer. It ought to be wonderful; hot nights, hot girls, days by the river, an endless blissful parade of empty blue-sky days with nothing to do but laze. And then in the autumn there should be technical college, the end of childhood, the beginning of the future. But none of this was what Simon had to look forward to. He was not going to be allowed to go to technical college; he had to start work at the yard straight away, with no summer break. He would be set to washing the wagons and hosing the yard down. It wasn’t that he minded the menial work - it was the sense of being locked in, incarcerated; it felt like a life-sentence. Simon picked up a stone and lobbed it into the mud of the pond. It landed with a satisfying splat and sent a circle of thick black mud spraying in every direction.
He had tried to tell them - he really had. Without saying in so many words that he didn’t want to go into the business he had argued the advantages of further qualifications and pointed to Ruth, who had stayed on at school to do ‘A’ levels and who, in October, would be going off to University. That was another problem. With Ruth gone he would have no ally in the house at all. Belinda was out at work in the council offices during the day and at night-school two or three evenings a week. Heather was only a little girl, just ten, and lived in a world of her own.
‘There’s no point in wasting time at college lad,’ his father had said, ‘when all you’ll ever need for the future is right there in that yard.’
When he got home his mum was in the garden taking washing down from the line. There was always washing - billowing blue-white sheets and brightly flapping t-shirts and tea towels and trousers. But there was never underwear: that was dried privately on an airer in the bathroom. She greeted him as he came through the gate and asked him how his exam had gone. Then she smiled, with a peg in her mouth, and told him that there was a surprise for him in the kitchen. He walked through the back porch (and thought again about the frogs) and up the step into the kitchen. On the counter there was a new lunch box and thermos, just like the ones his dad had been taking to the yard for years. On the kitchen table a new blue yard-suit embroidered with the company name and logo lay neatly folded and, on the floor (because of course it was bad luck to put new shoes on a table) a pair of new black steel toe-capped boots.
‘There you are, my little man,’ Mum said, coming in behind him. It was a name she’d called him since he was little and she still used it occasionally even though he was taller than she was. She put the laundry basket down on the side. ‘All ready for your first day at work.’
Simon stared at them, aghast.
He waited until after tea to tell them. Belinda had taken Heather to Brownies and then gone on to night-school. Ruth, who had finished her ‘A’ levels a week before, was upstairs getting ready to go out to a party, trying on and discarding one outfit after another until the room she shared with Heather was ankle deep in clothing, the beds and chairs festooned with it. Duran Duran played at top volume on her portable record player. In the back of his mind he acknowledged how stupid it was to be speaking to his own mother and father like this - as though they were judges or teachers or royalty, and how wrong it was that he should feel so nervous and awkward and afraid. He thanked them for the opportunity - he tried hard to convey his appreciation of it while
being unmistakably clear on the fact that it wasn’t at all what he wanted. What he wanted, he explained, was to go to technical college and study electronics, and then to work in computers. He said he was sorry if it seemed ungrateful, sorry that it would be a disappointment to them, but hoped they would understand that this was a decision - about his own future - that he must be allowed to make for himself.
His parents simply stared at him as though he had announced that he was contemplating entering holy orders or having a sex change operation - almost as though either of those options would have been preferable to this. They sat side by side on the settee, their faces drained and parched with disbelief.
Then his dad’s face changed, like a shutter going across it, like a light going off, like a lid being put down. He got up from the settee and said, ‘Need to be at the yard at eight tomorrow. Make sure you’re ready.’
It was Simon’s turn to display disbelief. ‘You haven’t been listening to me, Dad. I’m not going to the yard tomorrow, or any day.’
Suddenly his dad’s hands were all over him and he was being man-handled out of the lounge and across the hall. In the room behind him his mum cried out. Ruth, descending the stairs at just that moment, ready at last for her party, gave a shout of alarm and hurried the few remaining steps down. Dad’s voice roared in his ear as he was pushed and shoved through the kitchen and down the step into the porch. At the time, and afterwards, Simon was unable to say what words his dad had spoken; they had been incomprehensible, a rant. They had felt, against his face, like an incessant gushing stream, hot and acrid and choking, like the vomit on the flowerbed after the party. He only knew that they were empty of love.
Ruth tried to intercede between them as they jostled through the house, pitting her voice of remonstrance against Dad’s infuriated tirade. The three of them pushed and shoved at each other, banging into furniture and squeezing awkwardly through the bottleneck between the door and the counter in the kitchen. The iron, left to cool on the side, toppled over and broke the clay pot which one of them had made at school and where Mary kept pens and pencils. The back door was still open into the balmy summer evening. The man next door was mowing his lawn but the noise of their shouting cut through the buzz of his mower and he stopped in his tracks as Simon and Ruth were both bundled out of the house and the porch door slammed and bolted behind them. They looked across the fence at him, and at each other, and almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Then Ruth was reaching into her bag and bringing out her front door key, and they ran round the side of the house and let themselves in through the front door. He met them in the hall again with a further eruption of fury so loud that, like the tins and bottles on the shelves of the party-garage, their mother’s carefully displayed willow pattern shook and rang on the plate rack round the hall.
Simon was ejected again, pushed out of the door. He fell backwards over a tub of flowers and landed on his back amongst the roses. From inside the house he could hear Ruth screaming on his behalf and his mum’s voice ineffectually added into the fray and his dad’s going on and on - a torrent of angry words. Simon got up and went back around the house, setting his foot on the trunk of the wisteria, but when he was only a little way up, the window of the back bedroom opened, and a flurry of clothing fell past him. At first he thought that his dad had thrown Ruth bodily from the house. But it was only her clothes, armfuls of clothes - trousers and scarves and tops and underwear - dropping past him onto the lawn and then, with a splintering crash, the portable record player smashed into smithereens below him.
From that time it was as though Simon had evaporated away to his father, like the water in the pond, leaving only a nasty but unavoidable smell, a depository for blame and accusation, an eye-sore which he could barely look at much less address, an ugly and shameful blight on the triumphant McKay landscape.
Tuesday
Belinda was dreaming. She was at the scene of the road accident; mangled traffic and scorched bodies littered the carriageway. Victims moaned, and cried out to her to help them, but she was unable to move. Elliot’s hand was firmly on her shoulder and he was shouting into her face. She too was shouting, trying to draw his attention to the scene around them, but she could not make her voice heard above his. Suddenly she recognised faces amongst the injured; Mary, Ruth, Ellie, Rachel. It made her need to escape from him all the more urgent. Elliot was haranguing her about something, on and on, but she couldn’t make out what she was supposed to have done. He was telling her that she was stupid and useless, over and over again. Her frustration, at not being able to help the injured, at Elliot’s insensitivity and at his injustice made her thrash and flail about. She wanted to slap him, to shake him. She wanted to scream. The strength of her anger, her desire for violence, scared her.
Then his voice broke into her dream, ‘I’m going now. Back tonight, probably.’
The scene of their argument melded into their room at Hunting Manor. The words and the emotions clung like sticky grey cobwebs to the curtains and the upholstery. They seemed to absorb all the air in the room so that it was oppressive. It was still dark although through a chink in the curtains she could see that it was almost light outside. Lying in the bed she was pent up in the shock and the fury of the dream; breathless and exhausted. The feelings of rage and impotence remained tangibly present. The smell of Elliot’s shaving foam and shower gel was sweet and cloying and seemed to press down upon her. She felt as though, saying goodbye, he might try to kiss her and amid the argument and the carnage it was insupportable. She struggled up through the clinging tentacles of the dream to see the bedroom door closing.
‘Don’t come back,’ Belinda said. Her voice, her real voice actually in the room, woke her up properly. She sat blinking in the gloom trying to get a sense of where the boundary had been between the dream and the truth. For a moment she couldn’t tell. She didn’t know whether the row had been real or not. Elliot had gone but had left a syrupy legacy in the scent of his toiletries in the air, and in the tremors of her own distress. But the bedroom door remained closed. When she thought about it all it was obvious to her that the dream had been the manifestation of all the previous day’s angst over the spread sheet, which had threatened to spill out of Elliot like an enraged, caged animal seeking release. She had come to bed very late in order to deny him the opportunity of taking out his anger on her. So it remained between them and she knew that neither hours nor miles would diminish it, that they would actually augment it, like yeast left to leaven dough until it was knocked back with rough hands.
✽✽✽
Rachel woke up early. Sunlight poured through the window. The curtains had remained undrawn all night and she could see the frost riming the glass. Her watch said it was six thirty. In the adjacent beds Ellie and Tansy slept on. Ellie looked like a sleeping beauty; her slumber troubled. She could not see Tansy’s face. Perhaps they both knew of her betrayal and would never speak to her again.
She could not face them.
She slipped out of bed and gathered clothes from her drawers; the old ones she had brought with her. She did not deserve the new ones now. Everyone would hate her. She didn’t blame them - she hated herself. In the bathroom she got dressed as quietly as possible, avoiding the sight of herself in the mirror pulling on old pilled tracksuit bottoms, a shapeless t shirt, a faded sweatshirt and a man’s warm woolly jumper bought by Ruth at a jumble sale. She dealt with the sanitary towel as she had been shown and then crept from the room and down the stairs.
Uncle Elliot was in the kitchen. He was wore a shirt and tie and was drinking coffee standing at the sink.
He didn’t seem very pleased to see her. ‘Ah’ he said, frowning, ‘another early riser.’
Rachel hovered uncertainly in the doorway, feeling like an intruder. She had not expected to meet anyone and didn’t want to be asked what she was doing or where she was going. In truth she hardly knew the answer to either of those questions. But Elliot lost interest in her and turned to stare out of the windo
w. She felt embarrassed to be eating the food from the house – she had no claim to it - but she was so hungry. While she found a bowl and a spoon Elliot emptied his coffee cup and put it into the sink.
‘See you later, then,’ he said, and left the room, his laptop bag gripped grimly in one hand and his car keys swinging from the other. Rachel was ravenous. She gobbled two bowls of cereal in quick succession and gulped milk straight from the bottle. She placed her bowl and spoon next to Elliot’s cup in the sink. In the hall she slipped her feet into her wellington boots before opening the front door and stepping out into the chill autumn air. It smelled cold and stingy in her nostrils and she could trace the acrid fumes of Elliot’s car, which had gone from its place next to the others on the drive. She hadn’t been outside since Saturday, when they had gone to the shops and everyone had been so kind to her and she had begun to feel like she might belong. Well, that was all over now.
She walked round the house, treading as quietly as possible on the gravel, feeling as though even that, she had no right to disturb. She passed under the brick archway and round to the back of the house, then down the lawn to the place where Ben had said the path through the woods led to the sea. The grass was coated with white frost, thicker where the shadows were but pale and sparkling where the sun was melting it away from the open places, and where her feet left a trail across the lawn.
Relative Strangers Page 40