The Northern Clemency (32 page)

She had a horrid morning, one of the worst, but by lunchtime she’d given herself a good talking-to. It would show Henry if, after all, she punished herself as they all wanted her to. So, in small journeys from bedroom to bathroom, back to bed, and then to the wardrobe and back in tiny weeping spurts, she put herself together. She brushed her hair in front of the crowded mirror, and then, step by step, she went
downstairs to look for her coat. It wasn’t her fault if this would return her to bed for weeks. It was what Henry had bullied her into.

He’d left the number of a taxi company by the telephone, and she called it. Her voice sounded small to her, but the difficult instructions of how to find the house, not used for months, came back to her quite readily. It took her ten minutes to find her coat, beneath the others in the cloakroom, and by the time she’d found it, the car was hooting outside. In a rush, she forced herself to open the door, and pulled it to behind her before she could think about it.

“You’re tucked away here,” the driver said.

She agreed, getting into the back.

“Children’s hospital, is it?”

She agreed again.

“Never mind, love,” the driver said, reversing into the empty garage and setting off. “I’m not much of a talker either.”

She felt sick all the way, and had to close her eyes when there were too many people. All too soon they were there. She remembered it now—ten years before, Lucy had had her appendix out. That was when she could go out. It was on a main road, an elaborate, flushed palace of red brick, striped with glazing, ornamented with ruffles and cartouches, half château, half public lavatory. The founders of it had built it opposite the university and the park; she supposed they thought that the sick children could look out at the pleasures they’d return to, and think about their future.

“I’ll let you out here,” the driver said on the main road, just by the entrance. She made herself think of Andrew. It was so unfair, what Henry had said. She was a caring person. She paid the driver.

But, inside, she grew angry again. She forced herself to ask the receptionist—Henry knew how she couldn’t deal with strangers—where Andrew was but quickly afterwards she got lost, hardly having listened to the brisk directions. Didn’t they know how ill her son was? Couldn’t they have spared someone to take her up, the mother of the sick boy? Quickly she was in strange wards; the corridors were lined with terribly sad pictures, done by dying children, all of animals and smiling nurses. And behind a door she glimpsed a horrible menagerie, the drawn animals made plush and stuffed, a whole room of ugly common toys, left there by children who had died and no one had collected them.

“You know where you’re going?” A small nurse accosted her.

Mary explained quietly. It was, it seemed, on the next floor up; the
nurse took her all the way to the stairs, but left her there. “It’s just one flight up,” she said again, but laying a hand on her arm.

“He’s just there,” the sister explained, “in room three, on his own. He’s got his little friend with him, the one who comes every day.”

No one offered to take her any further, and she walked to the door of the room. There was a square of wire-strengthened glass set into it, and she peered in. There was Andrew, very pale and thin against the propped-up pillows, and next to him in a chair, a boy his own age. He had his back to the door, and was leaning close to Andrew. He was talking, very quietly. Andrew’s face was drawn and worried. He closed his eyes, and swallowed; she could see the effort. Then he opened them again, and looked beyond his friend at the door. He saw her face, his eyes opening wide. She went in.

The boy got up, not looking at her. “I’ve got to go,” he said roughly.

“It’s my mummy,” Andrew said, in relief. “You don’t have to come back—” but the boy was gone, making his way roughly past her.

“It’s me,” Mary said.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he said, and she sat down and took his hand. “You’ve had your friend here,” she said.

He closed his eyes. She couldn’t understand. It was almost as if he didn’t want any of it.

“You know when people start loving you a bit too much?” Daniel said.

Sandra agreed.

“It’s ridiculous, they can’t help making themselves ridiculous,” Daniel said. “It starts out as a bit of fun. Say your friend, he has a party on a Saturday because his mum and dad, it’s their twentieth wedding anniversary and they’ve gone away for the weekend, for a dirty weekend to rekindle the sparks of their dying marriage, and they leave your friend in charge because he’s sixteen and he’s supposed to be responsible now that everyone thinks he’s mature. So he has a party, like a secret party that no one knows about until two or three days before.”

They were walking down their road now. There was a brisk wind off the moor, puffing the fat white clouds along; behind them, far above, a screen of unmoving high clouds like a rippling veil. The sky like a diorama, its dramas in clean flat layers. Almost every day now they caught up with each other at some point on the walk home, and fell into conversation. He made her laugh; she, it seemed, could make him laugh
too, make him throw his head back and croon with hilarity. She had seen him leave the house in the morning, and his shirt was buttoned up, his tie was pulled up to his neck. He didn’t greet her then, he didn’t greet her if they passed each other in the corridors at school, but when they met, six hours later, as if by chance on the walk home, the top button of his shirt was undone, or the top two buttons, and his tie, if it was still on, was loosened into a five-inch-wide knot, the tie itself a jutting fat three inches of defiance. He made her laugh with his going on about love.

“And you find yourself in the kitchen, say, or, I know, on the stairs letting people run up and down, and everyone’s supposed to be in and out the bedrooms with everyone else, there’s someone being sick in the downstairs toilet, because he’s only got lager and cider in and everyone’s mixing them. Well, you’re on the stairs, you know, and without knowing how it happened you’re talking to a girl who’s in your maths set, you know her but you’ve never talked to her, really.

“But you’re talking, and it’s really great, you might be having a deep conversation like about life and the universe, like what’s the meaning of life, and you realize that she’s really not bad at all. She’s called Barbara.”

“Daniel,” Sandra said, in a mock-adult, reproving voice. “Is this a true story you’re telling me? It isn’t a story that’s happened to you by any chance, is it?”

“It might be,” Daniel said, grinning.

“Well, I’ll never hear how it turned out,” Sandra said, because now they were coming up to his house, with the blue curtains in the upstairs windows, the vase of stargazer lilies and red tulips on the downstairs window-ledge, and to hers, with the red and yellow curtains in the upstairs windows, the handmade model of a tea clipper in the downstairs window.

“Don’t you want to hear?”

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear how it turns out,” Sandra said sarcastically, even though she did.

“OK, then,” Daniel said. “Come on, let’s go down the bottom crags.”

“I’ve got my bag,” Sandra said. Daniel shrugged, and took it from her shoulder—through her school blouse she could feel the manly rasp of the skin on his fingers, and how, indifferently and impersonally, his hand pressed in an investigative way on the strap of her bra. He took his bag with hers, and threw them both behind the neatly trimmed hedge in the Glovers’ front garden. They fell into the flowerbed.

“Come on,” he said.

“Your dad’ll kill you,” Sandra said, because she had by now found out quite a lot about the Glovers, their interests, even if the hard neatness of their garden had needed any kind of explanation. “You can’t start chucking stuff at his flowers like that.”

“No one’ll see your bag there,” Daniel said, as if that was the point of it.

“There’s nothing valuable in it,” Sandra said. “I don’t care if anyone nicks it or not, they’re welcome to my German textbook, my German homework book. It’s only stuff like that.”

“I hate German,” Daniel said.

“I don’t know whether I hate it or not,” Sandra said, knowing this was the sort of remark Daniel liked. “I never listen to any of it. It might be quite interesting for all I know.”

Daniel cracked up and, all of a sudden, they were running together, before Daniel’s mother could come out and upbraid them. Not that she would: she probably wasn’t home yet. She worked in a florist, came home by six or sometimes an hour or so later. (There was stuff to do after the shop shut, Daniel had explained, now that his mother had been given a bit more responsibility, wasn’t just an assistant any more.) They ran down the road, howling madly, and when they reached the bottom, instead of following it round to the right, they turned left, where a track quickly petered out and you were on the moors. This was the bottom crags. The top crags, a wind-blasted path along a low cliff leading you all the way to Lodge Moor Hospital, ran along the edge of the bleak golf course; the bottom crags a rough path between sheep pastures, running quickly into moorland.

At the beginning of the path, glowering over it, was a huge limestone rock, just sitting there, crusty with blots of moss, strangely worn and hollowed. A single crack ran through the whole thing that you could just about wriggle through, a favourite challenge presented to fat kids. You could nestle into one of the hollows and hide there for ever, doing whatever you felt like doing, snogging, smoking, nattering, or something really stupid. Daniel’s sister Jane had been spotted there making notes in a notebook, writing a poem possibly. It loomed over the path, and Daniel, followed by Sandra without any complaint or ladylike demur, climbed it in five or six quick grips. It wasn’t as hard as it looked, and then, posted on top, you were invisible from the path,
conspicuous to the whole world and the miles and miles of purple moor, the miles and miles of double-vistaed sky.

Of course, since the top of the rock was invisible, sometimes you got up there to find that someone had beaten you to it, which meant standing around for a sharpish two minutes saying, “What a fantastic view,” in his father’s style to nobody in particular before silently cursing and climbing down again. That sort of thing, in Daniel’s experience, definitely put the kibosh on things where girls were concerned.

But, of course, today he wasn’t there for snogging, he was there with Sandra.

“Go on,” she said, when they’d recovered their breath.

“I’ve got a stitch,” Daniel said. “Go on what?”

“We’ve come down because you wanted to finish your story,” she said. “Or,” she went on, “so I thought.”

“Yes,” Daniel said patiently. She’d get bored of it in time. “Yes, I was telling you my story. So I met this girl, I’d known her, who she was, but I’d never talked to her until Pete’s party, when his parents went away for the weekend. And as I say she seemed a right laugh, and before you know it, you know, she looks up at you and you look down at her, and it’s like two balls rolling towards each other, crash! You can’t help it, the way your heads fall together, your face and hers, and then you’re snogging without knowing it.”

“Is that how it happens?” Sandra said.

Daniel laughed. It was funny how you could talk to Sandra like that. You couldn’t talk to girls like that. Most of them believed in love, insisted on all that going on about love. Sandra, he reckoned, was just interested in where love could get her, and that was how he thought about it. He could talk to girls about love all day long, could widen his eyes and slightly open his mouth and run his thumb, very gently, down the front of his chest in a tight T-shirt. But that wasn’t talking to a girl about love, not in the way he talked to Sandra. “The thing I sort of didn’t think of,” Daniel said, in his most worldly way, “was that she was having her period at the time.”

“Oh, shut up,” Sandra said. “How can you tell?”

“How do you know I didn’t find out?” Daniel said.

“Oh, you didn’t find out,” Sandra said. “You wouldn’t have got as far as all that. I can guess what sort of girl she is, holds it out, then says, ‘Oh, Daniel, we mustn’t.’”

Daniel tried to be offended, but couldn’t. “OK, I didn’t,” he said. “I
didn’t get that far. But you can tell, they go all spotty, and I remember, she was right spotty at Pete’s party—she almost apologized for it.”

“So what?” Sandra said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I heard,” Daniel said, “that girls, women, they’re much more horny when they get their period because, it stands to reason, they’re fertile then, so Mother Nature, she’s going to make them want sex a lot more around then so that they’ll have babies.”

“That’s rubbish,” Sandra said, but she wasn’t sure.

“The problem is,” Daniel said, “that Mother Nature also makes women really spotty and ugly during their period so that even if they want to have sex you don’t want to have sex with them because they look like a right warthog, like an oatcake, they can be that spotty. But it’s true.”

“It’s never,” Sandra said.

“Finger a filly at full moon,” Daniel said, evidently concentrating, “and she’ll follow a fellow to Folkestone.”

“What’s that?”

“I made it up.” Daniel stretched out on his back, arching into the odd lumpy contours of the gritty rock. Above him, the clouds scudded across their background of remote white veils, unmoving, high in the sky, and between him and those floating white beasts, a flash of swallow, darting. He liked the clouds, the birds though his respect was with the immovable.

“That’s disgusting.”

“It’s true. And that’s what happened to Barbara. She just got a bit keen on me.”

“For instance.”

“For instance, she phoned me on Sunday, the day after the party.”

“Oh, you’d not spent the night together in mad passion, then?” Sandra said, inspecting him scrupulously.

“Gi’o’er,” Daniel said, quite as if he was blushing. “She phoned me, and she was all lovey-dovey. And I don’t know where I came in her list of people to phone, but when I go into school on Monday, everyone, all the girls, they just look at me and giggle, you know how it is—”