Clever Girl

4

MADELEINE AND I ARE WAITING AT the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our summer school uniform: green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazer. In the summer we are allowed to leave off our hated green felt hats. Summer is thick everywhere, a sleepy, viscous, sensuous emanation; hot blasts of air, opaque with pollen from the overblown suburban gardens, ripe with wafts from bins and dog mess. We are mad with summer, chafing and irritable with sex. We’re in the fourth year, studying for our O levels; we have breasts (small in my case — luscious in Madeleine’s) and pubic hair and periods. A breeze, stirring the dust in the gutter sluggishly, tickles up round our thighs, floats our dresses — we can hardly bear it.

Our talk is rococo with insincerity, drawling, lascivious. We sound at that age huskier from smoking than we ever do later when we smoke much more. We say that the pods in the gardens are bursting with seeds, and that we like to eat ripe melons, and that the cars are covered with sticky stuff dropped off the trees — everything seems obscene with double significance, even though it’s only quarter past eight in the morning and behind us in our homes our mothers are clearing the breakfast tables, scraping soggy Rice Krispies and burnt toast crusts into the bin, wiping the plastic tablecloths. My mother is bending over Philip in his high chair, playing pat-a-cake to trick him into letting her wipe his face and hands, making his mouth spill open in delighted laughter, his eyes roll up. She lifts up his little shirt and kisses his belly; I might be jealous except that I haven’t got time to crane that way, backwards towards home and the cramped circle of old loves. My attention is all thrusting forward, onward, out of there. I’ve burned my boats, I can’t go back — or rather, I do go back, dutifully, every evening after school, and do my homework still at the same table in the same stale olive-green dining room, and still get the best marks in the class for everything, nearly everything (I even manage not to fail in physics). But it’s provisional, while I wait for my real life to begin. I feel like an overgrown giant in that house, bumping up against the ceiling like Alice in Wonderland after she’s found the cake labelled ‘Eat Me’: head swollen with knowledge and imagination, body swollen with sensation and longing.

Madeleine and I have never even kissed boys: at fifteen we don’t have any actual sexual experience whatever except a few things we’ve done with each other, experimentally, and out of desperation. (Not shamefaced afterwards — flaunting and wicked; it is the 1970s, after all. But it’s boys we want.) At an all-girls school we don’t get many chances to meet boys, although there are usually some on the bus, going in to the Grammar School. This is a part of our excitement, at quarter past eight. There are certain boys we are expecting to see, and we may even pluck up the crazy courage to speak to them, a word or two; any exchange will be dissected afterwards between Madeleine and myself in an analysis more nuanced and determined than anything we ever do to poems in English lessons. (‘What do you think he really meant when he said that his friend had said yesterday that you weren’t bad?’)

Anything can happen in the bus in the next half an hour; even something with the power to obliterate and reduce to dust the double maths, scripture, double Latin and (worst) games which lie in wait at the end of the journey — a doom of tedium, infinitely long, impossible to bear. After games, the nasty underground shower room with its concentrated citrus-rot stink of female sweat, its fleshly angsts, tinpot team spirit, gloom of girls passed over, games teacher’s ogling, trodden soaking towels.

Something has to happen.

Into our heat that morning came Valentine.

He walked down to join us at the bus stop. We’d never seen him before: into the torpor of the suburb his footsteps broke like a signal for adventure on a jaunty trumpet. I loved his swaggering walk immediately without reserve (and never stopped loving it). His glancing, eagerly amused look around him — drinking everything in, shaking the long hair back from around his face — was like a symbol for morning itself. (His energy was no doubt partly the effect of the Dodos — caffeine pills — he’d have swallowed in the bathroom as soon as his mother got him out of bed. Soon we were all taking them.) A Grammar School blazer, hooked by its loop around one nicotine-stained finger, was slung over his shoulder, his cigarette cocked up cheekily between lips curved as improbably, generously wide as a faun’s. The pointed chin was like a faun’s too, and the flaunting Caravaggio cheekbones, pushing up the thick flesh under his eyes, making them slanted and mischievous. He was tall, but not too tall; his school trousers slid down his impossibly narrow waist and hips, he tucked his shirt half in with a careless hand. The school tie others wore resentfully as a strangled knot became under his touch somehow cravat-like, flowing. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone. He was sixteen (a year older than we were).

He grinned at Madeleine and me.

At me first, then at Madeleine, which was not usual. Madeleine in her lazy indifference had bloomed, she was willowy and languorous, sex had dusted a glitter into her long curls and kitten-face, her pink cheeks. I was too small, too plump and shapeless, and my eyes, I knew, were blackly expressive pits in a too-white face. Madeleine, trying kindly to advise me on my sex appeal (I asked her), had said I might be ‘too intense’ — but I didn’t know how to disguise that. Valentine stopped at the bus stop and offered us his cigarette, me first. It was not any ordinary cigarette, oh no! (we went to school stoned for the first time, but not the last).

— Hello girls, he said, beaming. — Does this bus go into town? Do you catch it every day? That’s good. I like the look of you.

We looked at each other and giggled and asked him what he liked about us. Thinking about it, surveying us up and down, he said we looked sceptical.

What did he mean, sceptical?

Thank God we weren’t wearing our hats.

I longed for the bus not to come. Proximity to his body — a glimpse via his half-untucked shirt of hollowed, golden, masculine stomach, its line of dark hairs draining down from the belly button — licked at me like a flame while we waited. His family, he explained, had just moved into one of the posher streets behind Beech Grove. When the bus did come he sat on the back seat and took Beckett out of his rucksack: End Game. The very title, even the look of the title — its stark indiscreet white capitals on a jazzy orange cover — was a door swinging suddenly open into a new world. I’d never heard of Beckett; I think I was ploughing then through The Forsyte Saga. None of the other boys on the bus read books. Val smiled at us encouragingly, extravagantly, over the top of his.

— He was gorgeous, I liked him, Madeleine conceded as we trudged in a tide of other green-gowned inmates up the purgatorial hill from our stop to where school loomed, the old house frowning in the sunlight as a prison. — But I couldn’t actually fancy him, could you? There was something weird.

I was disappointed in her; I was already wondering if I’d find Beckett in the local library. (The librarian, warmly supportive of my forays into Edwardian belles-lettres, would startle and flinch at my betrayal.) And my heart raced at the idea that Valentine might not be at the bus stop the next day. (But he was — and was there most days, right through to the middle of the upper sixth.) Madeleine didn’t insist on her doubt, she never insisted — and I closed a door on an early intimation of danger. I wanted Val because he was different — as I was different. What I felt at my first sight of him that summer morning was more than ordinary love: more like recognition. When I read later in Plato about whole souls divided at birth into two separated halves, which move around in the world ever afterwards mourning one another and longing for a lost completion, I thought I was reading about myself and Valentine.

And it was the same for Val. He recognised me too.

I truly do believe that, even now, even after everything that happened. We found each other out, we were kindred spirits, it was mutual.

— What a scarecrow, Gerry said after he came to my house for the first time. — I can’t believe the Grammar School let him get away with that hair.

— He looks like a girl, my mother said. — I’m not that keen, Stella.

Following up the stairs behind Val, I was faint from the movement of his slim haunches in his tight white jeans. How could she think that he looked like a girl? Yet all we did in my bedroom was cosy up knee to knee, cross-legged on the bed to talk. We swapped our childhood stories. He was born in Malaya, he had had an ayah.

— What were your family doing in Malaya?

— You don’t want to know.

— I want to know everything.

— My father worked for the government, he’s an awful tax expert. Now he’s retired, he’s just awful and old. What does yours do?

— He’s not my real dad. My real dad’s dead.

Mum brought in a pile of ironed clothes to put away in my chest of drawers. Then she called to ask if we wanted coffee. Philip came knocking at the door, asking us to play with him. Afterwards Mum spoke to me awkwardly, about self-respect. The familiar solidity of the house and its furniture melted away around Val; after he’d left I couldn’t believe I really lived there. I couldn’t hold in the same focus my two worlds brought into conjunction. Yet I wanted Val to be brilliant for my parents and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He never made any concessions to them, or small talk. If they asked him questions he sometimes didn’t even seem to hear them; his eyes were blank. He seemed to simply pause the flow of his life in the presence of anyone unsympathetic.

He was stoned a lot of the time.

Yet among our friends he was magnetic, commanding, funny. He was a clever mimic. In the evenings we started getting together at Madeleine’s — a whole gang of six or seven of us from the streets round about. Madeleine’s father was often away; her mother Pam was bored and liked flirting with teenagers. She brought home-made brownies and cheese straws and jugs of weak sangria up to Madeleine’s room and we cadged her cigarettes. Madeleine fancied a boy who played the guitar and wrote his own songs; we tried to talk a shy, blonde girl out of her faith. Madeleine bought a red bulb to put in one of the lamps, we draped the others with Indian silk scarves. When my stepfather was sent across to fetch me home, he never stepped across the low fence between our front gardens but went punctiliously via both front paths and gates. He said if Pam wanted teenagers carrying on under her own roof it was her business.

— What’s this? he joked, when I brought Beckett back from the library.

— He’s a play writer. Haven’t you heard of him?

— Playwright. (Gerry did crosswords, he had a good vocabulary.) — Aren’t they all waiting for some chap who never turns up?

Gerry had been so keen for me to go to the High School; yet he was hostile to the power my education brought me. He thought I was putting on airs — and I expect I was, I was probably pretty insufferable with my quotations from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, my good French accent (I corrected his: ça ne fait rien, not san fairy ann). He could still usually trip me up, though, in geography or history — my sense of things fitting together was treacherously vague. Gerry knew an awful lot, he was always reading. He subscribed by post to a long series of magazines about the Second World War, which he kept in purpose-made plastic folders on a shelf. Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books.

He was amused and patient, correcting my mistakes. He did it to my mother too: so long as we were wrong, then he was kind. If I could have given in gracefully to that shape of relations between us — his lecturing me and my submitting to it — then we might have been able to live happily together. My mother didn’t care about knowing things, she just laughed at him. (‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gerry — as if it mattered!’) But I couldn’t give in. It was a struggle between our different logics. Everything I learned, I wanted to be an opening into the unknown; whereas Gerry’s sums added up in a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him.

I took Beckett up to my bedroom.

It wasn’t the kind of writing I was used to. I’d taught myself to stir in response to the captured textures of passing moments — the subtle essence of unspoken exchange, the sensation of air in a room against the skin. Now, I learned to read Beckett (and then, under Val’s influence, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti) like a convert embracing revolutionary discipline, cutting all links with my bourgeois-realist past.

— Is he your boyfriend then? Madeleine wanted clarification.

I was disdainful. — We don’t care about those kinds of labels.

— But is he?

— What does it look like?

Val and I were inseparable. We saw each other almost every day — not only on the bus going to school and coming back, but in the evenings, as often as my parents allowed me out or said he could come round. They claimed they worried about my school work but I didn’t believe them, I saw in my mother’s face her recoil from what she dreaded — the dirty flare of sex and exposure; my making a fool of myself. (They were so innocent, I don’t think they guessed about the drugs until much later.) Sometimes I went out anyway when they’d forbidden me, and then there was trouble. When I got home Gerry took me into the lounge for one of his old lectures, screwing up his forehead, leaning towards me, pretending to be impartial justice. From my dizzy vantage point (high as a kite), I believed I could see right through him to his vindictiveness, his desire to shoot me down where I was flying.

— They hate me, I said to Val. — Under his pretence of being concerned for my future, he really he hates me. And she doesn’t care.

— Don’t mind them, Val said, his eyes smiling. He blew out smoke, he was serene, bare feet tucked up on his knees in the lotus position. — They’re just frightened. They’re sweet really, your parents.

We were talking in his bedroom, so unlike my little pink cell: a draughty attic where his books and clothes lay around in chaos on a Turkey carpet grey with cigarette ash. (When I asked if his mother never cleaned in there he said she didn’t clean anywhere, they had a woman in.) His attitude towards his own parents was coolly disengaged. I was afraid of them, I tried to avoid meeting them on my passages through the rambling big house (built when Stoke Bishop was still the countryside). They were both tall and big-boned: his father was stooped, with brown-blotched skin, long earlobes, thinning white hair; his mother had a ruined face and watery huge eyes, she wore pearls and Chinese jade earrings at the dining table in the evenings (unlike us, they actually ate in their dining room). The arrangement of their furniture — elegant, shabby, mixed with exotica from the East — seemed provisional; they had only just moved in, and might move on. They were polite with me, and their conversation was as dully transactional as anything in my house — yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.

Val had older sisters and brothers who had left home but often came visiting, or taking refuge from some drama in their complicated lives: all good-looking and dauntingly confident, even if they seemed conventional beside Val. They called their parents Mummy and Daddy (Val didn’t call them anything, in my hearing). His sister Diana — next to him in age, excitable, with dark hair cut in a thick fringe and very white teeth — chatted to me about horses and somehow I knew not to give away too much detail about Budge’s ramshackle stables. When I asked if Diana had been to university, she laughed at me. — Darling, I can hardly read. I’ve never passed an exam in my life, I’m virtually an idiot.

When he was bantering with his sister, petulant, I got a glimpse for a moment of a different Valentine: less sublimely solitary, more a type — their type, mannered and competitive. Valentine was the baby of the family; conceived at an age when his parents ought to have known better, he said disgustedly. — I’m the painful reminder of lost virility.

— Don’t take any notice of him, Diana said. — He’s Mummy’s little pet.

He chucked a cushion at her head. — Di’s a dirty slut, he said. — She thinks through her yoni.

— My what? she giggled. — Yogi Bear?

— Ignoramus.

Apart from Diana, Val’s family never came up to his attic room (nor did the cleaner). Sometimes his mother shouted up the stairs, if a meal was ready or Val was wanted on the telephone. We were private up there. I loved the evening shadows in the complex angles of the sloping ceiling. In summer the heat under the roof was dense; in winter we cuddled up for warmth under the blankets on his bed. Our bodies fitted perfectly together — my knees curved into the backs of his, my breath in the nape of his neck, his fingers knotted into mine against his chest, under his shirt; we lay talking about everything, or listening to Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Dylan. The shape of the long, empty room seemed the shape of our shared imagination, spacious and open to everything. I couldn’t believe the long strides he’d made in his mind, all by himself. Sometimes, depending on the pills, he would talk and talk without stopping.

— How do you know that I really exist, outside you? he asked me urgently. — I might be a figment of your imagination.

Our heads were side by side then on his pillow. How lucky I was to lie like that, so intimate with his lovely looks that I couldn’t see them whole: teasing green eyes, down on his upper lip, curving high hollows in his cheeks. I longed for him to begin kissing me, as he sometimes did — but I had learned that I must not try to initiate this. — But I just know! I insisted, stroking his face as if the feeling in my fingers was proof. — And I’m not a figment of yours either. I’m really here, I promise.

— I believe in you. I’m not so sure about me. You’re solid. You’re fierce.

I wasn’t as solid as I had been. Since I met Val, I’d stopped bothering to eat. I couldn’t bear my mother’s gluey gravy any longer, I drank black (instant) coffee and gave up sugar; the weight had flown off me. Although I was small and Val was taller, we nonetheless came to look like a matching pair: skinny and striking. By this time we were on the fringes of a set who gathered at weekends in a sleazy bar behind a cinema in town. Val had a good instinct for the people worth getting to know — a man with freckled hands and a mane of red hair who sold him speed and other things; a clever art student, half-Greek, who played in a band (they sounded like art-punk before punk had really happened). These men were older and powerful and a lot of people were eager to be their friends, but Val was able to impress them. He was good company, with his quick wit and the cultural know-how he carried off gracefully.

I knew it mattered to Val that I looked right. I wore his shirts and his sleeveless vests and his Indian silk scarves, over the tight jeans he helped me to buy. I put kohl round my eyes, and so did he sometimes. We both dyed our hair the same dark liquorice colour (my mother was aghast, another scene — ‘whatever are they going to say at school?’). I paraded up and down the attic in different outfits for his approval, getting the effect just right — and yet when we went out we looked as if we didn’t care what anyone thought. Val’s idea of me was that I was single-minded, fiery, uncomplicated, without middle-class falsity (— But aren’t I middle-class? I asked, surprised). And I performed as his idea, became something like it.

We made plans to live abroad together — Paris or New York. He’d been to both these places, I hadn’t been anywhere except Torquay and Salcombe. He described walking around the streets in those cities, buying French bread and coffee, and how we’d earn money and rent an apartment. I believed he could really make these dreamed-of things come about in real life: he had the imagination, the bravado, there was a rare blend in him of earnestness and recklessness. And he seemed to know instinctively what to read, where to go, what music to listen to. He was easily bored, and indifferent to anything he didn’t like, as if it didn’t exist. Psychological novels were dreary, he said. The Beatles were consumer culture. I didn’t talk to him about the old-fashioned books I used to love before I met him.

— In New York I’ll work as a waitress, I said, — and you can write.

— Sometimes I think I could do something with my life, he said. — But sometimes in the middle of the night, something awful happens.

— What kind of awful?

— I feel as if I’ve already done it, this important thing — writing a book, or whatever it is. I feel as if it was a mountain to climb, and I’ve toiled up the mountain and achieved the thing and then I’m coming down the other side and it’s behind me, and it’s nothing, it doesn’t alter anything in the world by one feather’s weight. And then when I wake up I panic that because I’ve dreamed the end of the work like that, now I’ll never be able to begin.

More often Val’s mood was buoyant and exhilarated, he was impatient to get started. Everyone supposed he would take the Oxbridge entrance exam, go to university. For the moment he went along with them. — My English teacher at school, he said, — he’s invested a lot of hopes in me. He’s giving me special tuition. I don’t know how to tell him I’m leaving, not yet. Soon I will.

— Wherever you go, I said, — I’ll follow you.

It was often this English teacher who phoned him up.

We ran into him once — the English teacher, Mr Harper. Val and I were arm in arm, walking down Park Street on a Saturday in the crowds of people milling and looking in the shops — jeans boutiques, bookshops, places selling Indian and Chinese knick-knacks and silver jewellery. A stubby middle-aged man was staring in at a shop window; he veered away from it as we passed, almost walking right into us and then recognising Val, putting on a show of surprise which seemed contrived, as if he’d actually seen us coming from miles off and prepared for this scene. I thought at the time that he must be socially inept because he was such an intellectual. I knew what respect Val had for him, and that it was he who had put Val on to reading Pound and Beckett and Burroughs. But I could see that Val wished we hadn’t met him — he looked shocked by this collision of the two worlds of school and home.

— Hello Valentine, Mr Harper said. He was staring leeringly at me. — What a good way to spend your Saturdays. Aren’t you supposed to be revising?

— We’re on our way to the reference library, Val said sulkily, blushing.

— Oh — then, I mustn’t get in the way of virtue! God forbid. But I will see you Tuesday, after school?

— Is it Tuesday? Val was vague. — I’m not sure.

— You must come on Tuesday. We’re broaching the divine Marianne.

I was disappointed. Val had talked about Fred Harper (the boys doing Oxbridge Entrance called him Fred) as if he was a portal to higher things — and here he was chaffing and prodding about work like any other teacher. Also, he was rumpled and pear-shaped, with pleading eyes, and a bald patch in his hair which was dark and soft like cat fur. He had a drawling posh voice. I knew there was a Mrs Harper and also children; and that Mrs Harper got bored if her husband and Val talked for hours about poetry. Sometimes she went to bed, leaving them to it.

— Who’s the divine Marianne? I said jealously when we’d walked on.

Valentine shrugged, irritated. — A poet in the A-level anthology.

Mum and Gerry were afraid I was bringing contamination into their house. When I bought junk shop dresses Mum made me hang them outside in case of fleas. Val found an old homburg and wore it pulled down over his eyes.

— What does he think he looks like? Gerry said.

— What’s the matter with that boy? asked Mum. — What’s he hiding from?

He stood in our neat kitchen with its blue Formica surfaces, improbable — in his collarless shirt, suit waistcoat, broken canvas shoes, scrap of vermilion scarf at his neck — as an exotic bird blown off course: immobile, silent, quivering, a smile playing along his lips that was not for their benefit. Even in those days when he was fresh and boyish the drugs did leave some kind of mark on him — not damage exactly, and not unattractive, more like a patina that darkened his skin to old gold, refining its texture so that minute wrinkles came at the corner of his lids when he frowned. His eyes were veiled and smoky. He smelled, if you got up close: an intricate musk, salty, faintly fishy, sun-warmed even in winter — delicious to me.

— Hello? Anybody home behind that hair? my mother said.

Val looked at me quickly, blissfully. He would imitate her for our friends, later. While he was with me everything was funny. Without him I was exposed, on a lonely pinnacle — afraid of tumbling. They were still strong, my parents, my enemies. Their judgement of what I loved (Val, books, freedom) I couldn’t, wouldn’t yield to — but it weighed on me nonetheless, monumental as a stone. If I tried to carelessly condescend to them then they found me out. I was clever, I was still doing well at school, but Gerry was clever too.

— What’s so wrong with communism? I’d lightly say, trying to be amused at their naïve politics. I really was amused, I knew about so much — poets and visionaries — beyond their blinkered perspective. I’d read The Communist Manifesto. — Doesn’t it seem fairer, that everyone should start out equally, owning a share of the means of production?

— It’s a nice idea, Stella, Gerry said. — Unfortunately it doesn’t work out in practice. People in those countries wouldn’t thank you for your high ideals; they’d rather be able to buy decent food in the shops. The trouble is, a command economy just isn’t efficient, wherever it’s been tried. Breaks down because of human nature in the end. Every man naturally wants to do better than his neighbour.

Because he knew those words — ‘command economy’ — and I didn’t, how could I answer him? His knowledge was flawed, but substantial — an impregnable fortress. My attacks on it — so effective when we were apart and Gerry dwindled in imagination to a comic miniature — melted in his actual presence, so that I battered at the fortress with weak fists. In those days, even in the seventies, the establishment was not very much changed from the old order. Young people wore their hair long and had Afghan coats and went to music festivals — some young people did those things. But at the top, bearing down on everyone, there were still those ranks of sombre-suited men (and the occasional woman) — politicians, professors, policemen; inflexible, imperturbable in their confidence about what was to be taken seriously and what was not. You could jeer at them, but their influence was a fog you breathed every day, coiling into your home through their voices on radio and television and in newspapers. Gerry said that Africans suffering in a famine should know better than to have so many children, or that feminists did women no favours when they went around like tramps, or that there was no point in giving to charities because it was well known that they spent all the money on themselves.

As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her.

In my mind, I couldn’t bear her limited and conventional life: housework and childcare. But in my body, I was susceptible to her impatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening — sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even then, when I was half grown away from her: a collar crooked or a smudge on my cheek which she scrubbed at with spit on her handkerchief. No doubt she was very attractive then, in her late thirties, if I could have seen it — compact good figure, thick hair in a bouffant short cut, definite features like strokes of charcoal in a drawing. Probably she was sexy, which didn’t occur to me. Being married to Gerry — and Stoke Bishop, and the baby — had given a high gloss to her demeanour, wiping away the hesitations I might have shared in once when there were just the two of us. And in her withholding and dismissive manner she seemed to communicate how women knew something prosaic and gritty and fundamental, underlying all the noise of men’s talk and opinion. Something I ought to know too, or would have to come to know sooner or later.

I wanted to resist knowing it with all my force.

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.

I thought — when the whole truth came out, when at last I’d understood about the sex, and Ian was so fucked off with Val about the window and the milk and was looking for him everywhere, and Val got the money from his sister and went to the States, and it was all such a collapse of my hopes — I thought I could still go back, defeated, to my old life. Back home and back to school, and pick up where I left off, and be a clever girl again, and get to university. Even if I could never ever again, in my whole life, be happy.

But I wasn’t that clever, was I?

Had I forgotten everything they’d taught us at school? That you only had to do it once, just once, to get into trouble. We had even done it twice.