The Facts of Life (33 page)

‘Your trouble, Alison,’ she said, splashing some more whisky into the pan, ‘is that you’re a Good Child.’

Alison smiled, taking this as a kind of back-handed thank-you.

The following day, her friend Sandy, never one to stifle opinions she could share, also accused her of being a Good Child. Prompted by Alison’s blank reaction, she lent her a paperback from her library of self-help books,
Know Yourself
. Alison read the relevant chapter with a shock of recognition. She was, it seemed, a textbook case – quiet scion of a noisy mother, an only daughter using goodness as a cement to hold together a home which could not with any accuracy be called broken since it had never been whole. She discovered at an early age that the world wanted her to be good – easy, compliant, no trouble. She also discovered that she had a
gift
for goodness. When Jamie went away to boarding school and she found herself spending long periods as the commune’s only child, she deduced that, since children made demands, childish was the least convenient thing for her to be.

As if by some physical law, she and her brother expanded to fill contrary roles. He did exactly as he wanted, while she fulfilled the wants of others. She had tried to emulate Jamie from time to time, just as she now tried to emulate Cynthia; to be transgressive, as she did on most of the occasions when she slept with anyone. Time and again, however, she then discovered that what she took for transgression was merely what someone else required of her. The world, it seemed, was a checkerboard of conflicting wills and whenever she stepped bravely onto a black square, it turned white. She aspired to anger, a white-hot rage of will that would silence rooms and command respect, but found she merely became angry with herself. When, as on the telephone earlier, she required an apology from another, she could not bear the tension of waiting, and so supplied one herself.

She wondered how she would introduce herself at a first therapy session.

‘My name is Alison Pepper. I am a disappointment to my mother; despite my having taken her name. I am twenty-seven. Sometimes I am so envious of my brother and step-siblings, with their money and their ease, that I must leave a room rather than commit an act of violence. I have a good job which often bores me and that in turn makes me feel guilty. Spoilt. I live alone. I dislike my face but have learned to live with it, unlike my mother. My life lacks motion. At times I feel I am not yet quite alive. I am still marking time.’

She could flash before her mind’s gaze phases from her life so far, like so many brightly coloured educational cards. Her Commune Girlhood, Her Two-Month Summer of Subsidised Rebellion, Her University Years, The Dawn of Dissatisfaction. She had recently cut out and faxed Jamie an interview with several of their contemporaries, also children of middle-class communes. Apart from one, who had been imprisoned for rape, all had reacted to the revolutionary shapelessness of their early years by carving out young lives of supreme conformity. All lived in cities, all worked in offices, and none planned to continue the experiments of their parents. Alison pictured the pair of them, she, parcelled tidily away in her office at Pharos, on the fringes of Covent Garden, and Jamie, boxed more tidily still, in his dust-free, bookless office in the City.

She often wondered about Jamie. He might be seeing a therapist already. He kept his private life so private, was so selective, at least, in the version of his private life he revealed to her, that she could never have guessed at anything he chose not to tell her. She felt that he strove to obliterate the need for a private life at all. He worked and played obsessively. He watched a lot of television. If ever she felt threatened with self-pity, she had only to think of Jamie to feel better, for all the freedom of his love life, easy money and parental adoration he heedlessly received. Her envy of him was never lasting. Sometimes he seemed so tense with things unspoken she was astonished he did not crack. Perhaps he yet would. Cracking ran in the family, after all.

She left the brightly lit station for the walk home. Even so late, Mile End Road was busy with cars and lorries. Few of her friends or colleagues understood her decision to buy a terraced house on the edges of Bow, far from delicatessen, wine bar or bookshop, while they were settling amid the cosier hostilities of Kentish Town or Westbourne Grove. They accepted, however, her excuse that the East End was handier for driving out to The Roundel on a Friday night – weekend cottages were part of their vocabulary.

The house was pretty, even if it did look out over a succession of tower blocks. She had Bengalis on one side, West Indians on the other and an heroically camp Irish priest and his young ‘lodger’ two doors down. A superb, chaotic Indian restaurant, two markets and three Hawksmoor churches were all in easy walking distance. On weekends when she was forced to stay in town, she borrowed the priest’s dog and took long, determined walks. If there was a park, muzak-free pub or unspoilt Dickensian backstreet, she had discovered it. She liked the area. At least, she was hell-bent on liking it. When she wanted prettiness, there was always The Roundel. Bow was vigorously alive.

To a therapist she might have admitted that she chose to move there from a superstition that its rough energies might kickstart her life, its inconveniences produce an adventure. Several years on, the adventurousness remained resolutely an inconvenience and she had to throw a serious party, with a lot more than bowls of crisps on offer, to convince friends into visiting. The fickle editorial assistant had visited, but then, he was as ambitious as he was pretty. She gleaned a certain retrospective pleasure from contemplating the nightmarish tube voyage he must have taken to shave and change in Tooting Bee before returning to Pharos the morning after their night before. On dark, drizzle-swept nights she, too, found her decision to settle there hard to understand.

Tonight, however, was mild and clear. Above the sodium cloud of street lighting she could make out a faint dusting of stars. She slipped into a grocer’s to buy milk and a pair of tights. As she turned off the Mile End Road into the rabbit run of narrow backstreets that made up a shortcut to her terrace, she became aware of the human sounds emanating from all the windows open to the night – the murmur of televisions, voices raised in anger, the punchy rhythm of dance music, a sudden peal of uncontrolled female laughter.

She stepped out into the road to pass a ragged pool of cats picking over the contents of a toppled restaurant dustbin. She had to pass through one of the rare sections of bomb-damaged land still untouched by developers or council after fifty years, a summer sanctuary for buddleia and butterflies. Where there had been mean houses backing onto a railway embankment there was now yard upon yard of corrugated iron fence held together as much by thick layers of record company posters as by its original bolts. The drifting population of the homeless had claimed this no man’s land as their own. Travelling by on the train, one could see their make-shift shacks of planks, car bodywork, discarded curtains and polythene sheeting. By day there were few signs of life – she supposed they left early to take up begging positions around the City – but at night one could see firelight flickering beyond gaps in the fence. She saw it now, as she passed by and she heard someone playing a guitar badly. She smiled to know that some buskers actually practised. A dog bounded up to the fence barking and she hurried on, reminded of her hunger by the harsh scent of cooking meat.

She slipped quickly through the dankly cavernous space under the railway lines, which was unnerving even on summer nights, and came to the isolated pub on the other side. The pub was inexplicably popular. Jamie said he had heard that some of the East End ‘lads’ among the City traders bought drugs there, but it seemed unlikely. As usual the pavement around it had been encroached upon by the drinkers’ cars – fast-looking things, much waxed and improved-upon, which made Alison guiltily aware of how much she neglected her company car. She rarely washed it and used it so little during the week – preferring the tube because it allowed her to read – that she had been known to forget where she had parked it.

Two men emerged from the pub as she passed. Young men. Younger than her, she guessed. She smelled their strong cologne. They looked as pampered as their cars, groomed, waxed, careless. They were fraudulently dressed as American high school students from the late ‘fifties – chinos, deck shoes and gaudy baseball jackets. As she passed, she thought they were commenting on a car, then realised it was her they were appraising. She made out something about her legs and a supposedly flattering mention of her tits before their words degenerated into mere roosterisms.

Alison was used to this. She knew she was not beautiful but that her scrawniness made her breasts seem larger than they were and that something about her, an air of vulnerability, of immaturity even, invited the comment of men who clammed up in the face of a real, womanly sexiness like Cynthia’s.

Her defences rising, she clutched her bag more tightly and marched on, trying to speed up imperceptibly. She was not entirely sober, but she was more so than they.

‘Hey!’ one of them shouted. ‘Hey! Cop a load of this, then!’ She walked on, busily mapping out alternative routes to take should she have to break into a run. She must not look round.

‘Oil’ called the other. ‘Take a look!’

They chuckled. The second one had a slight huskiness to his voice, like Tony in the post room at work, which she had always found rather sweet. They could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen. Boys not men. She decided to humour them, stopped, sighed and looked over her shoulder.

It was clearly something they had rehearsed, a laddish routine. They were side by side, hands in their open flies and the second she turned they whipped out their beer-gorged pricks and started to pee towards her. Alison found herself freezing and staring like an idiot. It was only when she realised she was standing still and they were still walking towards her as they peed that she gasped, lurched back and began to run. They whooped and followed. She looked wildly about the street ahead of her but it was deserted – a tunnel of corrugated fence. Someone else left the pub and drove past her heedlessly.

They caught up with her easily. A hand seized her arm. Pulled off balance, she found herself clutching at a shoulder with her other hand to stop herself falling. Realising what she was doing, she tried to jump back, clawing out, and received a slap on her face. She had not realised a slap could hurt so. They pushed her hard up against the metal fence, face first. Regaining her breath, she tried to shout but a hand clamped brutally over her mouth. A huge hand, with a thick gold ring that dug into her chin. She tried to bite it but the bruising grip was so fierce that her lips and teeth were crushed into immobility. Another hand clutched at hers, another tugged down her skirt, scratching the skin on her thighs. They were laughing still. She could not believe they were laughing. The laughter of boys teasing a cat or burning a beetle. Then agony made her yell behind the muzzling fingers. Unable to get it up, the one who had been lunging at her was punishing her for his impotence by scrabbling vindictively with his hand.

‘Stupid cunt,’ he hissed. ‘Stupid fucking cunt!’

There was a sudden commotion. Pressed against the fence she could see nothing. The man holding her cried out in pain and shock, releasing her hands from above her head.

‘Shit! Tel! Wha –?!’ the first man began. He started to pull away from her then pushed fiercely back into her spine. There was a dull crack, like a stick breaking and he let out a deafening roar into her ear. He rolled aside and fell against the fence in time to receive a massive punch to his jaw. Turning, Alison saw it was not from the second man, as she had expected, but a third, much taller than the others. The second man was twenty yards away already, poised for flight, calling nervously to his companion, who had now slumped, groaning, to the ground.

‘Mike? Come
on
, for fuck’s sakes. Jesus!’

He turned and ran.

‘My bag,’ Alison murmured to herself, rubbing her arms as the feeling returned to them. ‘The wanker’s got my bag.’

The fight had gone out of her entirely. She knew how these things went. She expected the attack to be continued, first by one man, then the second, then the third. But the third simply touched her shoulder and sprinted away. She tried to walk, then stumbled and stooped to readjust her torn clothes.

‘Bitch,’ she heard from behind her. ‘Stupid cunt.’

She turned back to where he was lying. Carefully avoiding looking at his face, she parted his outstretched legs with two hacks from her toe, then delivered a quick, hard kick to his groin. She had thought he would squeal but he merely let out a kind of wheeze and doubled up. She calculated she had a good five minutes before he managed to follow her. She glanced both ways and decided to double back towards the Mile End Road in search of a minicab. She was only minutes from home but either of the other men might be lying in wait up ahead. She dared not face the pub in her present state.

Walking back, she feverishly rehearsed what had just happened, not to go over where she might have done something wrong, but to enumerate what she had been spared. They had abused her, clawed her, called her childish names. Her face was bruised. Her skirt was torn. But the man had not penetrated her. He had not dirtied her utterly. Not possessed her. And she was alive. She would get home, take a bath, call Sandy, then ring the police. She could give descriptions of near photographic accuracy. She knew two of them were called Terry and Mike. She knew where they drank. She would see them sentenced.