Clever Girl (9 page)

The summer I got my O-level results (all As apart from Cs in physics and chemistry), Uncle Ray got me a job at the chocolate factory. I wept to Val, about how the women there hated me and put me on to the worst tasks (I had to take the moulds off the hot puddings – at the end of the first day my fingers were blistered) because I was only a student worker and because I took in a book to read in my breaks. I wanted him to tell me to give it up but he didn’t – I think that actually he liked the romance of my working there and having relatives who worked there – it was not ‘middle class’. He said he loved my Bristol accent. Really? Did I have one? I didn’t think so, my mother had always so strictly policed the way I spoke at home (‘I wasn’t doing anything’, Stella, not ‘I weren’t doing nothing’). Apparently, however, I said ‘reely’ for really, and ‘strawl’ for stroll.

— Your mother has an accent too, he said. — Broader than yours. Can’t you hear it? But I prefer it to the way my parents speak.

Valentine and I were bored one night with the flirting in Madeleine’s bedroom. He rolled a joint – quickly in the fingers of one hand, as only he could – and we went outside to smoke. It was summer and a moon, watery-white, sailed in and out behind dark rags of cloud blown by the wind; we lay spreadeagled on our backs on Pam’s lawn. Only our finger-ends were touching – through them we communicated electrically, wordlessly, as if we emptied ourselves into each other. As the dope went to my head I thought I felt the movement of the world turning.

Then I was sure someone was spying on us from our garden next door. Madeleine’s garden was perfunctory, compared to ours: there was a patio swing with chintz cushions, a birdbath on the scrappy lawn, a few plants in the flower beds. Ours was densely secretive behind fences top heavy with clematis and rose and honeysuckle; it had a trellised arbour and young fruit trees and a rockery which Gerry built to make a feature of the old tree stumps left behind by the developers. I despised his prideful ownership, the ceaseless rounds of pruning and spraying and deadheading. And I thought now that he was hidden in there, aware of Val and me. He did walk out in the garden in the dark sometimes; ‘to cool off’, he said. He must be skewered with irritation, snooping involuntarily.

— I don’t think that my real dad’s really dead, I said aloud to Val, the words spilling unexpectedly, making the thought actual for the first time although it felt at once as if I’d been preparing it for years. I didn’t know if Gerry could hear what I was saying from next door. — I think he just left my mum when I was a baby, before I had time to have any memories of him. The way people talk about him – or don’t – is all wrong, for a dead person: not polite enough. Not as if he’s finished. Perhaps she had to divorce him, before she married Gerry. Only they didn’t bother to tell me anything about it.

Val turned his head in the grass towards where he couldn’t see me clearly. — That makes sense. I wondered why there weren’t photographs of him. Why don’t you ask her? Do you care?

— Not really. Not if he didn’t ever care, to come and find me.

— If he’s alive, he’s a cunt.

I agreed. — Why exchange one cunt for another?

Consoling me, Val began to stroke my hand, rubbing his thumb around my palm, then pushing it between my fingers, one by one, over and over, until I was sick with love for him, but knew better than to make any move towards him from where I lay dissolving. Val didn’t like me all over him. There was a rustling from among the shrubs next door; a head like a pale moon-blob rose above the top of the clematis mound, looking far-off.

— Stella, come inside, the blob said. — You’ll catch your death. That grass is damp.

Gerry’s voice in the night was sepulchral, ridiculous, tight with disapproval.

Only when I heard it was I aware of myself sprawled so provocatively on my back with my legs spread wide apart, my arms flung open. Let him look, I thought. I didn’t move. I pretended I didn’t see him.

— Did you hear something? I said to Val, squeezing his hand in mine.

We were going to laugh, I knew we were.

— Come inside, Stella, now, at once, Gerry said, but keeping his voice down as if he didn’t want my mother to know what he had to see. — I’m telling you. Get up!

Pointedly he didn’t address Valentine, ignoring his existence.

— I think I heard something, Valentine said. — Or was it cats?

Leisurely Val sat up, crouching over the cold end of the joint, hand held up to shield it from the wind and hair falling forward, hiding his face. Then came the scratch and flare of the heavy, shapely silver lighter that had been his mother’s until she gave up smoking; fire bloomed momentarily in Valentine’s cave, I saw him aflame – devilish, roseate. I scrambled to my feet. I really was stoned, the garden swung in looping arcs around me.

— Oh, I cried, exulting in it. — Oh . . . oh!

We were laughing now. Under my soles, the world rocked, and steadied itself, and rocked again.

— What’s the matter with you? Gerry hissed. He must have been balancing on something – a rock? or a box? – on the other side of the fence, because it was too tall ordinarily to see over; his two fists, hanging on, were smaller moon-blobs against the night. — Are you drunk?

(They still didn’t get it, about what we were smoking.)

— You’d better come back the front way. Come round by the front door.

— Back the front way, Stella? Valentine imitated softly, looking at me, not at Gerry. — Front the back way? Which way d’you like?

I had always had this gift to see myself as my stepfather saw me – only in this vision I used to be a small and thwarted thing, blocking him. Now in the moonlight I was transfigured: arms outstretched, veering like a yacht tacking, I was crossing the garden, flitting ahead of the wind, like a moth, weightless.

Valentine and I looked so consummately right as a couple: stylish, easily intimate without fuss, his arm dropped casually across my shoulder, our clasped hands swinging together. We looked sexy. I knew that because I saw it in the others’ faces. Oh well. The truth was, we hadn’t had sex much. (I think Madeleine half guessed this.) All those times we lay down on his bed together (or, occasionally, mine) we hadn’t done an awful lot – apart from our talk – for Mum and Gerry to disapprove of.

We did work ourselves up, there was some touching and fumbling. I touched him, mostly; if he touched me he turned it into a joke, put on a funny voice as if my breasts were little animals squeaking and crawling around on my chest. Kissing, he pecked dry kisses all over my face with a satirical, popping noise, smiling at me all the time with his eyes open. Then sometimes if his mother banged the gong for supper, or the phone rang and she called upstairs to say that Val was wanted, he grabbed my hand with sudden aggression, pushed it down inside his jeans, used it to rub himself fiercely and greedily for a moment, before he flung off the bed and ran to the phone, zipping up as he went, cursing, pushing his erection away inside. Remember, I was wholly inexperienced, a virgin. I wasn’t disgusted; actually I’d say I was more fascinated, by my transgression into that crowded heat inside his stretched underpants, his smell on my fingers afterwards. But also I was confused – if that was desire, it was unmistakably urgent. So what was the matter?

Who wants to remember the awful details of teenage sex, teenage idiocy?

I loved him because he was my twin, inaccessible to me.

One evening I was supposed to babysit while Mum and Gerry went out to a Masonic Ladies’ Night. My little brother Philip was four, I liked him very much (I still do): he was always an enthusiast, entertaining us with jokes and little performances, looking quickly from face to face for our approval. He had to sit on his hands to keep them from waving about and he swung his legs under his chair until it rocked (all of this got him into trouble at school later, where he also struggled with learning to read). When Mum came downstairs, perfumed and startling in her silver Lurex bodice and stiff white skirts, he and I were laughing at
Dad’s Army
on the telly. She stood clipping on her earrings by feel, giving us her instructions. This whole process of her transformation, she managed to convey, was only another duty to discharge.

— Stella, I don’t want anyone coming round.

— Madeleine said she might.

— I don’t want Valentine hanging around Philip if I’m not here.

I wasn’t even expecting Val: he was at one of his sessions with Fred Harper. But out of nowhere – everything had been all right, the previous moment – I was dazzled with my rage. — What’s the matter with you? I shouted. — Why have you got such a nasty mind?

I knew in that moment she regretted what she’d said – but only because she’d miscalculated and hadn’t meant to start an argument. She was afraid it would make them late: she glanced at the wristwatch on a silver bracelet which had been Gerry’s wedding present. — Who you choose as your friends is your own business, Stella, she said stiffly. — But I’m not obliged to have them in my house.

— Your house? Why d’you always call it your house? Don’t I live here or something?

My stepfather hurried downstairs in his socks, doing up his cufflinks. He’d heard raised voices: I loathed him for the doggy eagerness with which he came sniffing out our fight.

— What’s going on, Edna?

He irritated my mother too. — For goodness’ sake get your shoes on, Gerry. We’re late already.

— I won’t let her get away with talking to you like that.

— I’ll talk to her how I like, I shouted. — She’s my mother.

Philip went off into a corner, dancing on tiptoe with his head down, shadow-boxing, landing tremendous punches on the air: this was what he did when we were quarrelling, trying to make us laugh.
Dad’s Army
wound up, the ordinary evening melted around us; then they were too late for their dinner-dance, their treat was spoiled. Mostly I was shouting and they pretended to stay calm. Soon I couldn’t remember how it had all started: I felt myself washed out farther and farther from the safe place where usually we cohabited. I couldn’t believe how small and far away they seemed. It was easy to say everything. — You think you’re so sensible and fair, I said to Gerry. — But really I know that you want to destroy me.

— Don’t be ridiculous, he said.

— Oh, Stella. D’you have to make such a performance out of everything?

Gerry said that I wasn’t a very easy girl to like, and that I was arrogant and selfish. He crossed the room to close a window, because he didn’t want the neighbours to hear us. At some point Philip went quietly upstairs. I said I would die if my life turned out as boring and narrow as theirs was.

— Just you wait, my mother warned. — Boring or not, you’ll have to get on with it like everybody else.

Gerry called my friends dropouts and deadbeats, a waste of space.

— That’s what we think you are, I said. — We think you’re dead.

— I’d watch out for Valentine if I were you, my mother said. — You might be barking up the wrong tree.

Gerry did lose his temper eventually.

— Get out, Stella, if you can’t respect this house. Just get out.

Mum remonstrated with him, half-heartedly.

— Don’t worry, I said. — I’m going. I wouldn’t stay in this house if you begged me.

They didn’t beg me. It was that easy. I let myself out of the front door, into the street.

Freezing without my coat, and weeping, I went to Val’s. His mother let me in and I waited for him in his attic, getting under the blankets to keep warm. When he came home from Fred Harper’s I heard her expostulating downstairs, saying I couldn’t stay, she wouldn’t put up with it. So she didn’t like me either. And I heard Val’s voice raised too, shouting awful things. (‘You silly bitch. Don’t touch me!’) Some contamination of rage was flashing round between us all that night, carried from one through another like electricity.

— I can’t go back, I said, when he erupted into the room.

And I saw he understood that it was true. Anyway, he’d had a row, too – with Fred Harper. He was leaving school. We’d both leave school. What did we want with school any longer? We’d leave home too. I felt this was the beginning of my real life, which I had only been waiting for. My real life, in my imagination afterwards, always had that attic shape, high and empty and airy, cigarette smoke drifting in the light from a forty watt bulb. Val said he knew someone who had a flat where we could stay. Tomorrow he’d sort it out. For tonight I could stay here. He didn’t care what his mother thought.

— Poor little Stella, he said. — Poor little you. I’m so sorry.

He was stroking my arms and nuzzling between my shoulder blades, trying to warm me up where I was rigid with cold. And there you are: that night he made love to me, properly – or more or less properly. Anyway, we managed penetration. And we did it another time too, in the early morning a few days later, in a zipped-up sleeping bag in the front room of a fantastically disgusting ground floor flat belonging to the freckled red-haired man, Ian, who sold Valentine his drugs. We lay in the dawn light, crushed together on our narrow divan in the blessed peace of the aftermath, Val’s head fallen on my breast: proudly I felt the trickling on my thighs. I suppose we must have heard the milkman’s float passing – or perhaps by that time we had dozed off.

Then someone threw a full milk bottle through the closed window. Though I didn’t understand at first what had happened: it was just an explosion in the room, appalling and incomprehensible, the crashing glass loud as a bomb, milk splashed violently everywhere. (It seems improbable that a drug dealer had a daily delivery – the bottle must have been picked up from someone else’s doorstep.)

— What the fuck? Val leapt up from the divan, naked.

Ian came running in, pulling jeans on. — What the fuck?

He cut his feet on the glass.

I knew from Val’s face that he knew what the explosion was, and who.

Some other girl, I thought. Some old love. Someone he loves, or who loves him and is desperate for him the way I am.

Of course it wasn’t any girl. It was his English teacher.