by Patrick Gale
The old her had never been what one would call religious, merely ticking Church of England on forms and knowing how to behave when attending Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve or Communion on Easter Sunday. She expected Eustace to be confirmed at twelve with his classmates, simply as the preparation for becoming an adult and passing for normal, as she often used to put it, but she always approached religion as she approached politics, wearing her irony like a pair of irreproachable Sunday gloves. But now she routinely had a bible on her bedside and took to devouring other books people mysteriously brought her, books with rainbows or clouds on the covers and with heart-on-sleeve titles like Summoned By Grace or Christ the True Friend . And she began to be visited not only by Father Tony but by two or three women who had not been her friends before. They were her age or older and had in common a fondness for folksy, homespun clothes, a lack of make-up and a very slightly reserved, even assessing manner towards Eustace, as though waiting for him to leave so they could return to less guarded conversation with his mother. She had never had much in the way of friends before, which was why her friendship with Carla had been so transformative. He quite liked Barbara, the tall, bony-faced one closest to her in age, because she laughed at things and didn’t refer to Jesus as though he were a friend who happened not to be present.
The increasing presence of these new confidantes at her bedside, with their little posies of wild flowers, plastic bags of home-baked flapjacks or mottled windfall apples, made it all the stranger that he never saw Carla there, especially given how kindly Carla had asked after her when he ran into her downstairs that time. He made a point of ringing her, although they had agreed not to arrange a resumption of cello lessons until after half-term. He reached her answering machine, a device that few people had and which made him shy so he hung up and wrote a little message down on the telephone pad as he always did, then rang her back to leave it in as lifelike a manner as he could muster.
‘Mother’s much better,’ he told her. ‘She’s had a sort of stroke but she’s walking and talking and I know she’d love to see you, if you were passing.’
He was inexperienced at the dynamics of friendship but he was observant and had seen the way people at school protected their pride after an argument by drawing stand-in, second-best friends to them while the principal friendship recovered or died. He felt sure that, once Carla swept up to his mother’s bedside with her bouncing hair and long limbs and beautiful clothes, the proper order would be restored and these new women and Father Tony and Jesus, especially Jesus in fact, would slip back to their proper places on the margins of her life.
He imagined Carla encouraging his mother to make a virtue of her new short hair with a good salon cut and some hoop earrings to show off her exposed neck and ears.
Carla didn’t call him back – he hadn’t suggested she should and had been quite clear that his mother was still in the hospital, on Carla’s doorstep, in fact – but he left it a few days until, sitting with his mother and Father Tony in the rehabilitation ward’s day room, he said, as cheerfully and as naturally as he could, ‘So has Carla been to see you yet? I ran into her and Louis the other day and she asked how you were doing and I told her she could find you here.’
Father Tony cleared his throat, as though to cover a rogue fart, and his mother looked Eustace in the eye and said, ‘I can appreciate how much she has done for you, darling, but Carla Gold is no longer my friend.’
‘But—’ he started.
Only Father Tony touched him on the shoulder and said, ‘Eustace? I think we have to accept that your mother knows her own mind.’
They were distracted just then by the arrival of the tea trolley and the conversation was swiftly swung around to focus on Eustace and how he was doing at his new school, but he realized afterwards that it was the first time the priest had been there when he arrived and still there when he left.
The head of rehabilitation had made it clear that his mother would be ready to leave hospital at the end of that week, on the understanding that arrangements would be made for her to attend regular physiotherapy sessions to improve her motor control and continue to see a therapist to restore her speech. They had warned her that some of her brain damage would be permanent and that she could not expect to recover all her lost faculties. When she was tired, her symptoms were likely to become worse.
Eustace and Mrs Fowler had been preparing for her return. A second, sturdier hand rail had been fixed on the stairs up to their private part of the house and grab rails fixed beside the bath and lavatory so that, short of the installation of panic bells and a commode, there was not much left to distinguish the elderly guests’ territory from his mother’s.
But on the Friday when he returned from school expecting to find that a hospital car or ambulance had dropped his mother off, Mrs Fowler told him a very nice, tall woman he guessed was Barbara, had called round instead to help pack a suitcase of clothes for his mother to wear during a recuperative stay at a Christian community some way inland. Mrs Fowler seemed to think this perfectly understandable and possibly was slightly relieved at not suddenly having to take on the care of her employer’s wife as well as the management of the home.
They did not even have an address or a name for where she had gone until the first of her postcards arrived for him after that weekend. It was a beautiful old manor house with orchards and a vegetable garden. Whatever its old name, the Christian community who owned and ran it called it Grace Manor.
The food is all vegetarian and very healthy, she wrote in her new childish handwriting. Lots of pulses! And we all help cook and clean. I’m a bit clumsy at dusting. But it’s so very special. Father Tony calls by most days.
Eustace was cross with her at first for going there without warning so he didn’t write back until her second postcard – a view of the gatehouse – and then did so carefully without a hint of surprise or disapproval at her defection. He showed her postcards to his father, who read them without comment and passed them back.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Eustace had begun his first term at Broadelm in a daze, his head still full of what he had learnt and experienced at Ancrum, his heart full of unexpressed fears about his mother, who was then still comatose and possibly dying in hospital. Most boys and girls began there aged eleven, moving directly from primary schools. He and Vernon were an anomaly, arriving from a fee-paying prep school – so marked out as posh – and two years older, so expected to slot into a year group who had already spent two years establishing their pecking order and networks of friendship and antipathy.
The day before term started they and a handful of other boys and girls who were also, as Vernon put it, private-school refugees, had the humiliating experience of being herded through a brief induction day with that year’s intake of eleven-year-olds who were, of course, far more numerous and felt much smaller and younger. Eustace was shocked by how big and impersonal the school felt compared to St Chad’s. Its classrooms were twice the size, its desks Formica, not wood, its corridors as wide and long as streets, its lavatories unimaginably large and frightening.
Mulling over the challenges in their shelter afterwards, Vernon said that the way to fit in was to begin silently and discreetly, to avoid speaking out in class unless it was unavoidable and to smile if teased or mocked rather than mounting a challenge.
‘And there are words to avoid saying,’ Vernon told him. ‘Like actually and however . I’ve been studying their speech patterns. We have to avoid complex sentence structures. Try to speak in single clauses and you’re less likely to be beaten up.’
It was at once better and worse than expected. As at St Chad’s, they had to wear uniform, though at Broadelm it was almost office wear: grey trousers, black jacket, white shirt and a school tie of indestructibly stiff nylon. Like St Chad’s, Broadelm was sports mad, although the only sports it recognized, which were compulsory for the entire school, were football and, in season, rugby not cricket or tennis, and the girls played netball and hock
ey. Like any school, St Chad’s had its share of bullies and teasers but, off the sports field, violence had been confined to the occasional threatening shove or Chinese burn. Nothing had prepared Eustace for the fights at Broadelm. These were proper knock down, punch, kick and hair-tug fights, which broke out at least once or twice a week and would swiftly gather a circle of baying, whooping spectators. Girls, he soon discovered, could be equally the fighters – which got the boys hideously excited – or, more chillingly, they could be instigator-spectators. Fights broke out over simple arguments and rivalries but were also often tribal. They were studying Romeo and Juliet in English, reading it with antidramatic slowness around the class, but the savagery of Montague and Capulet paled beside the sworn enmity between pupils from the rival estates of Bourneville, Coronation and Oldmixon. It made him realize how little he understood his own town, how he had spent the last decade ignoring whole tracts of it, unaware of the social niceties of living in one street or another or being related to this or that notorious family.
Fights, he found, were easily avoided by giving no offence, drawing no attention to oneself and generally keeping out of the paths of the more obviously dangerous people as a well-trained housemaid would strive for invisibility from the gaze of her employers. If ever he heard or saw a fight breaking out, he walked swiftly in the opposite direction and so was never at risk of being drawn in as witness or, worse, second. Happily, Royal Crescent and its district were too under-represented to constitute a tribe worthy of battling.
Girls, however, were unavoidable and insistent. The week spent with the nicely brought up, if single-minded ones at Ancrum had been scant preparation for encountering most of the teenage girls of Weston en masse . With their uniforms daringly modified, their hair as big as ingenuity and a brush could make it, their breath alive with artificial fruit flavours and cigarettes, their tongues as sharp as their glances were withering, they were every bit as frightening to him as the boys. As new blood, thirteen and possibly rich – the bush telegraph having swiftly informed everyone in days that he had been at St Chad’s – Eustace found himself the object of curiosity rather than disdain. Girls in his own year group were entirely fixated on boys in the year or years above or with a handful of particularly well developed boys their own age who could pass for older, but both he and Vernon were soon being tailed around the place and even along the streets after school by girls of twelve or eleven whose boldness was like nothing he had ever encountered. Who was he going out with, they demanded. Who did he like? Did he fancy this girl or did he prefer that one?
‘No one you know,’ he would tell them. ‘Never you mind,’ and he would remember to smile, trying to convey worldly experience beyond their years even as he broke out in a sweat at how unconvincing he felt he must sound.
What he could not have predicted was how interesting the lessons were. Compared to the teachers at St Chad’s, many of whom were either dry as dust or bored to cynicism, many of his teachers at Broadelm showed an abiding enthusiasm for their subjects, even if forced to teach them to classes so large that keeping order throughout the room was an impossibility. The trick, he found, was to sit sufficiently near the front to be able to hear above the constant chatter from behind, yet not so far forward as to seem too keen or attention-seeking.
The library was well stocked, calm, often largely empty and safe.
Somehow two of the most daunting girls in his year, a complementary peroxide blonde and Gothically black pair called Sasha Hedges and Suzanne Cassidy, quickly discovered that his mother was unconscious in hospital and quite possibly dying and took it upon themselves to keep a protective eye on him. In his first week, when, despite Vernon’s frantic warning signals, he couldn’t resist putting up his hand to solve an algebra question that was baffling everyone, one of the bigger boys, a known rugby thug, started to mock his accent but Suzanne Cassidy silenced him with a tongue-lashing so impressive that even their maths teacher waited for her to say her piece before continuing without rebuke.
If asked to predict their fates there, Eustace would have said Vernon was the more likely to be picked on, because he was more obviously what Sasha called lahdidah and, where Eustace was merely what St Chad’s boys called wet, he was overtly eccentric. Having urged Eustace that they could best survive by speaking the simpler language of their neighbours, Vernon perversely began to reveal his true nature in class by degrees. Speaking in long sentences, using his driest, most middle-aged wit, even slightly emphasizing his Trollopian cadences rather than, like Eustace, making an effort to ape the long vowels and dropped consonants of Bourneville and Coronation. And though there was the odd attempt to imitate him, there was laughter on his side.
‘You’re funny,’ Suzanne Cassidy declared prominently when he had said something withering about Marie Osmond in the lunch queue. ‘You I like.’
And so it was that Vernon unpredictably went from being a class oddball to being almost popular, or as popular as a boy could be with no sporting ability and a taste for nineteenth-century fiction. His eccentricities, his way of speaking, his habit of wearing his nasty nylon tie like a dandy’s cravat were inimitable, which lent him a kind of rock-star cool.
And like a small fish benefiting from swimming in the wake of one much larger and more noticeable, Eustace was granted a measure of protection by association. Thanks to some quick thinking from Vernon, it was soon established that his name was Stash, whatever it said on notices or forms; even the friendlier teachers began to call him that.
Even though the youngest children there were only eleven, which Eustace remembered as feeling very young indeed, there was a strong sense that pupils at the comprehensive were largely independent of their parents. No parents were ever at the school gates at the end of the last period or at the start of the first. Pupils who lived out in the countryside made their journeys to and from the school on a fleet of battle-scarred buses. He and Vernon had long fallen into the practice of walking themselves to and from St Chad’s but most of their contemporaries there had been scooped up at the longer school day’s end by parents, as though preserving a myth that fee-paying children were somehow more delicate and in need of protection.
Eustace began to understand why the children from the three estates behaved so tribally. As they left their houses and flats in the morning they joined with one another in the streets, forming battalions that grew as they neared the school. He and Vernon were not the only ones who headed towards the older streets and promenade on leaving the last class of the day. There was a handful of Greeks, children of hotel proprietors, who also walked their way and he was fascinated to hear them talk Greek together, though in class they sounded as Somerset as anyone else.
Suzanne and Sasha each had a male cousin in the same year group, Jez and Tyler, big, sullen boys who smelled of Brut and fabric conditioner but already had the thickened ears and noses of rugby-playing brawlers. They padded around together but always within yards of the girls, quite as though they were their bodyguards. Privately thinking of them as Paris and Tybalt, Eustace began to like the sense that, if he was walking near either girl he, too, could probably count on her cousin’s protection.
Before long it felt only natural for Sasha and Suzanne to mooch over to Vernon amid the chaotic stampede that always followed the day’s last bell and say, taking in Eustace with a sweep of mascaraed eye, ‘So where you going now?’
In Broadelm-speak this passed for a polite invitation and soon the four of them, guarded at a studiedly relaxed distance by Jez and Tyler, were strolling towards Suzanne’s home on the Bourneville estate. Sasha’s was closer, she explained, but currently mayhem as her mother was splitting up, or possibly not, with her latest man which apparently meant that everything was broken. Her mother’s rages were legendary, he gathered, as were her sprees for new curtains and furniture when she was ready for a change of paramour.
‘It happens in spring, usually,’ Sasha said. ‘When her sap rises.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Suzanne
said. ‘Or her child support comes in.’
So they went to Suzanne’s, in the estate’s heart.
On the face of it all the houses were identical but of course they weren’t, because each family had expressed itself in a more or less maintained patch of front garden, in the cars and vans parked outside, in the different ways windows were decorated. Sasha reserved especial scorn for a couple of houses with no net curtains downstairs and Indian bedspreads upstairs where curtains should be.
‘Junkies,’ she said. ‘And that lot are Gyppos.’
Suzanne seemed to know something about the tenants in almost every house they passed, which made Eustace feel inadequate for knowing almost nothing about his neighbours in the small crescent where he had spent his entire life. Her parents were both out at work still – her mother in a hairdresser’s, her father, as a plumber – but she was able to give them all out-of-date Mivvis from a full freezer because her father also drove an ice cream van in the summer and got to keep the old stock.
The house was spotless and everything looked brand-new. She had an unexpected clutch of younger siblings who raced downstairs at the sound of her key in the lock and were suddenly all over the kitchen like so many hungry kittens. Eustace was impressed to see the calm authority with which she set about conjuring them supper, which she called tea. While the children were eating, she led the rest of them up to her bedroom where they all smoked mentholated Consulate – Eustace only pretended and still coughed – and flopped around on her pink candlewick bedspread listening to her records before having to leave in a hurry when her father came home. He was currently convinced Jez was a bad influence. It was hard to see how Jez could influence anybody for the bad, except perhaps by hitting them, though his shirt had ridden up on the bed earlier, revealing a thatch of black hair around and below his belly button, which perhaps suggested animal propensities.
