7 Miles Out

by Carol Morley

  *

  Susan sat in the front. Terry held my hand on the back seat, hidden from view.

  ‘Where to?’ Alistair asked.

  ‘Alderley Edge,’ said Susan.

  ‘What’s there?’

  ‘The Edge,’ said Terry, in a deep mysterious voice.

  Alistair turned his headlights on into the fading light and pressed and accelerated onto the road. He was a chaotic driver and swerved and braked unexpectedly. Susan gave directions in a nervy whisper. I imagined her in the front, clutching onto her seat with fisted, white knuckles. Alistair pulled his handbrake up and the car screeched and turned the corner.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alistair, grinning into the rear-view mirror.

  His driving settled down and I relaxed and looked out of the window. Squares of house lights, beams of car headlamps and the low hanging, orange moon punctuated the press of bluish black, but even then there was a dark quality to the countryside that seemed threatening. My mind drifted to Lady Di earlier that day on television, and how a shot from above of her in her white dress made me think of the time I’d seen a swan landing on a pond.

  A car came towards us out of the darkness on the other side of the road.

  ‘He’s way too young to be driving,’ Susan said about the driver of the oncoming car, who looked younger than me.

  ‘Bet it’s nicked,’ Terry said.

  The car drew level and it was as though a flashbulb went off and froze the moment, because I saw the girl on the back seat so clearly and for much longer than was really possible. She was about my age but full of summer. She had freckles and sun-streaked hair, and her lower lip was swollen and expectant. She seemed fresh and uncomplicated, like I wanted to be. Her hand fluttered across the window, like the wing of a bird. She was waving at me.

  We parked the Mini and shambled through the woods using a torch that Alistair had discovered under his seat. Alistair twisted his ankle in a hole and my sister let him lean on her shoulder for support. We reached the Edge, a jutting piece of ground with views of distant towns and their twinkling clusters of lights that Mum used to tell me were fairies. A dope-smoking hippy with long, lank hair had beaten us to it. He was sitting by a fire that he’d made. The flames flickered into the deep-purple night and sent glowing embers floating into the air as he told us he’d had a vision that we were coming. We shared his joint and exhaled the communal smoke into the warm night air.

  I lay on my back and Terry lay beside me. Her body pressed secretly against mine. The hippy told us how there was a cave below us, where Arthur and his band of knights were frozen, waiting for the time when Britain needed them to return. On the damp, sandy earth, aware of laughter and the twisted smell of fire and smoke, I only half listened to the hippy spin tales of the wizard Merlin.

  We stayed there till dawn, dozing, and woke shivering with cold as the fire had long since gone out. We said our goodbyes and promised the hippy that we’d all meet here on the same date and at the same time every year for the rest of our lives. We returned home happy, apart from Alistair. He was quiet and subdued, because he had discovered at some point in the drift of the night that Susan was engaged and his love for her was destined to be unrequited.

  *

  It was Alistair who pointed the story out to me in the newspaper, thrilled that it had happened on exactly the same night we had driven to Alderley Edge. A stolen car with four teenagers inside, driven by a fourteen-year-old boy, had crashed and overturned and all the passengers had been killed. I thought of the summery girl in the back of the car, her pale hand against the passenger window, waving at me, as clear to me that night as Lady Di had been in her glass carriage.

  Two days later there was a solar eclipse, but according to the man on the television it was too far east to be seen from Britain. I wondered what it would be like though, seeing the full round moon wipe out the dagger rays of the sun and plunge the world into darkness.

  brynn

  She looks at the copy of his letter she discovered in Ann’s dictionary some time ago. Each word stabs its way into her heart. Her eyes sting with tears as she reads.

  Dear Brynn,

  I’m so sorry to do this to you and the kids but since the last breakdown I just haven’t felt right and I realise that I can’t go on any more. I’m so sorry and I hope you will forgive me but I can’t see any other way out. It feels like I’ve tried everything and nothing ever seems to work. I will only be a burden to you if I carry on. I hate to think I am leaving things in a terrible mess but they are only going to get worse if I am around. All I can ask is that you know that you are in no way to blame. I am so sorry to let you down.

  All my love, Darling,

  Ronald

  Xxx

  She folds his words up again and tries to put them from her mind, but she can’t stop thinking of him. She decides to have a lie-down. She curls up on the settee, closes her eyes tight and wills herself into hollow, dreamless sleep.

  the lady of situations

  I went to school now and again, but never on Fridays. On Fridays I worked in the second-hand bookshop where my brother had once worked, and the owner seemed unaware that I was supposed to be at school. The bestselling books were the Mills and Boon romances and the Westerns, and there were some porn magazines that we shouldn’t have been selling hidden away at the back that men would browse and sometimes buy, and I would put them into brown paper bags without making eye contact. But my favourite books were on a shelf near the window. I read Colette, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and D. H. Lawrence, and the thrill of being a writer and the impossibility of matching their words came to me – I felt suffocated with hope and despair.

  Even though I still loved Terry, I realised I needed my mind stimulated more, so I finished with her to go out with Terry’s former flatmate, Janis, who was the cleverest woman I’d ever met. She was seventeen and stomped about in a man’s suit, even though she didn’t want to be a man, not like Terry did. Janis was anti lots of things, including beauty, and made no attempt to fit in with society’s ideas of what a woman should look like, or behave like.

  ‘I love being ugly,’ she said. ‘I like the way it gets up peoples’ noses. Garrotte them all with their small, fucking narrow minds.’

  Janis had gone to a grammar school but had to leave before her exams.

  ‘I mean, all I did was wear pyjamas to school. The headmistress said to me: “I will not tolerate such acts of disrespect. Please leave these premises and never return to darken our doorstep.” I think what really got to her was that I had the audacity to turn up in men’s pyjamas.’

  Janis didn’t have a dad around, but she never told me why, and I knew not to ask questions after my first few ones, as she had put an invisible wall up where enquiries about him were concerned. She had left home at sixteen and now she was signed on the dole and had ambitions to be a proper writer, and began to encourage me to write more than my occasional sentences so that we could go and live in Paris together and write for a living.

  ‘I want us to be a notorious couple,’ Janis said. ‘Not a gay couple, no – we would be like Sartre and de Beauvoir. A force times two.’

  She gave me a reading list and books that included The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsider and La Bâtarde. She wrote down page numbers that I should pay particular attention to and we lay about in bed a lot, talking about literature and our relationship.

  ‘I can’t understand what you see in me but I adore you,’ Janis said. Her face was softer than the one she used on the street. ‘Don’t feel awful about having someone think you’re wonderful, it’s one of the best things in the world. I want to be your slave! Does that scare you? It scares me! I hope you don’t just go out with me because I’m kind and dependable,’ she said.

  ‘Course not,’ I replied, knowing it was her mind that had seduced me.

  Janis lay on her front and pushed her face into her pillow. I sat on her fleshy bum and scratched satisfying lines of blood to the surf
ace of her back.

  ‘Sartre, y’know, thought suicide was a way of responding to how absurd life was,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘He saw suicide as a logical reaction to life.’

  Was what Dad did just a logical reaction to life? In so many ways, I could see his point.

  ‘But Camus, right, saw it differently,’ Janis continued. ‘He saw suicide as a kind of weakness. He thought that if you killed yourself you weren’t up to facing life as what it really is. Nothing. Life is nothing.’

  I looked at the scrapings of Janice’s skin under my jagged nails and felt panic.

  ‘But life’s got to be something,’ I said.

  ‘Does it? Most people go and get married, have kids and nine-to-five jobs and get up day after day and do the same thing. Then their children grow up and do it all over again. Even if we don’t do that – what’s the point of it all anyway?’

  Anger surged inside me. It was too hard to bear to think of life amounting to nothing. Then a thought came to me.

  ‘What about love?’ I asked.

  ‘Aren’t you the romantic,’ she said, as she roughly pushed me off her back, turned on her side and lifted my skirt. ‘Does love really mean anything in the scheme of things?’ she said, looking into my eyes and burrowing her fingers deep inside of me.

  ‘But isn’t love the point?’ I said.

  I thought about Dad not being able to face up to life being nothing at all. Maybe if he had known just how much I loved him he would have stayed around – why didn’t I kiss him that last time I saw him? But if life really was nothing then maybe it didn’t matter that he had gone and done himself in. Maybe it just didn’t matter at all.

  ‘And I read somewhere,’ Janis said, ‘though I forget who it was that wrote it, that to kill yourself is to destroy the world.’

  I closed my eyes and tried to close my ears. I no longer wanted to hear any more of Janis’ quotes.

  *

  ‘Ann! Get down here now!’ Mum shouted in my dream. She was looking up at me on the top of a mountain and watching me about to jump. I woke up and realised that Mum was calling me in real life. I got up and threw on my clothes, rushed downstairs and prayed with each step that nothing had happened. Mum was at the front door, holding it open a few inches. I thought of the policeman and policewoman knocking us awake all those years ago.

  ‘Here she is,’ Mum said.

  She opened the door wider to present me and I saw a woman behind a clipboard with eyebrows plucked into a surprised expression. I realised with dull dread that this was the truant officer.

  ‘She’s been working away on her studies at home, haven’t you?’ Mum said. She was using the posh voice she used for the telephone, debt collectors and authority figures of any kind.

  The officer tried to edge her way inside, but Mum narrowed the door a fraction.

  ‘She hasn’t been well.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ the officer said, peering over Mum’s shoulder at me.

  ‘Oh, flu and things, isn’t that right, Ann?’

  I nodded. The officer scanned her clipboard.

  ‘That doesn’t account for all these missing weeks and days, though, does it, Mrs Westbourne?’

  School was so noisy and chaotic and fraught with tensions that I never wanted to go. If people were there to learn I would maybe have gone, but that was the last thing on most minds and nobody at all ever talked about anything transformational. Even the Art classes got out of hand, with paint being thrown about the room, and not in a Jackson Pollock kind of way. The only classes I ever attended were English classes with Mrs Pegg.

  ‘It’s likely you’ll be prosecuted. This matter will be going to the town hall,’ the officer told Mum.

  ‘That’s a help,’ Mum said in her driest tone.

  The officer lifted her arch eyebrows and looked at me. ‘Don’t you want to take exams and get on?’

  ‘Oh, she’s taking examinations, aren’t you, Ann?’ Mum said.

  ‘GCEs in English Language, English Literature and Art, and five CSEs,’ I said, wishing I could say eight GCEs, which would have sounded much better.

  The officer raised a single eyebrow, which I took to be a sign that she was surprised I was even sitting any exams.

  ‘She’s likely to pass them too, the amount of work she puts in,’ Mum said.

  The officer looked at Mum.

  ‘I would advise you to make sure she comes to school, Mrs Westbourne.’

  ‘I’m on the case.’

  Mum shut the door firmly and leaned her back against it with a smile of triumph. ‘Haughty cow,’ she said.

  *

  I went out with Janis for a few months, and it was educational in many ways. Not only did she widen my knowledge of authors, she took me to my first lesbian-and-gay bar near Manchester coach station. I picked at the black nail varnish on my fingers and looked around, wishing I fitted in. When and where was I ever going to feel like I belonged? I realised then that I didn’t belong with Janis either. I finished with her but couldn’t explain why, which made her angry. I wanted to tell her that I was finding it hard to feel anything at all about anything at all, but I didn’t know how. For all the books I was reading, I didn’t seem able to use words properly.

  ‘You’re so disconnected, Ann, you really are. You haven’t got a clue, you just treat everyone like an extra in a movie that you’re the star of,’ Janis said.

  She was right. I did feel like I was in a movie. I was in a movie that wasn’t moving and I was frozen. I didn’t know where to go any more, or how to get there.

  *

  A few weeks after finishing with Janis, I had completed her reading list and I was now choosing my own books. It was the middle of the night and I was reading Saki by torchlight, lying on settee cushions on the floor in the front room as Mum had rented my bedroom out for a few nights. I finished one of his short stories, about a missing woman who returned to her family after eight years and I wished that Dad could come back, that it had all been a mistake. I listened to the lorries hurtling along outside, heading somewhere else, and I wondered about where I was going, where all this would end. In the darkness I hoped that I could disappear and I didn’t want to wait for the moment, or to come back.

  ‘Take me,’ I whispered to the universe. ‘Please take me.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Mum said, groggy from disturbed sleep.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, as I wished even harder for oblivion.

  lost bones

  ‘Tell us you’ll read it,’ they said, pressing the book into my hands.

  ‘Yeah, all right, I promise,’ I said. Brenda and Bill were a married couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses who always dressed alike in beige and were staying in the bedroom next to mine.

  ‘Oh good,’ they said in unison, beaming.

  They said it was a book especially written for ‘young people’. When I looked at it later, I found a chapter on the evils of masturbation. I wondered if Brenda and Bill had seen into my bedroom. I discarded the book and went to bed.

  Under my quilt I decided that I was not immoral, but amoral. I was, to quote my dictionary, outside the domain of morality and I realised I was probably like Meursault in The Outsider. After all, Meursault never cried for his mother when she died, and I had never cried for Dad.

  Inside of me there was a dark weight. It seemed more real than the sensation of being hungry or sick. It made happiness seem like a con. This was the real thing. It was gripping and it gripped me. This was what life really felt like. I wanted to become a fossil that would be discovered in a million years’ time, all hard and set in stone. I wanted to put black rubbish bags over my window to cut out the light and barricade my bedroom door but I was too tired to bother. Instead I spent a few days sleeping, cutting out the light with my eyelids, making late-night visits to the toilet, returning to dreams full of faces, stretched out in front of me like demons, fingers wagging, sending me into shadowy, murderous corners to discover my victims.

 
When I finally did get up, which wasn’t a conscious decision but instead felt like my body was dragging me, I was light-headed and the edges of objects glowed and appeared unreal, fizzing out into the air. The house was quiet, and I found Mum in the front room, pretending to be asleep on the settee. Beside her there was a screwed up letter, which I picked up and smoothed out. My eyes began to focus and I saw it was the council informing her that, after an annual inspection, Dandelion Guest House had failed to meet fire regulations and was to be closed down with immediate effect.

  Mum stopped faking being asleep and scratched at the raw patch of psoriasis on her elbow. ‘I had my hopes pinned to this place,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do now?’

  *

  After a week, Mum’s fighting spirit returned and she said she was not going to let the council’s high and mighty get the better of her. She decided that she would turn the house into a shared house, which meant she didn’t have to declare to the council that she had tenants and so she wouldn’t have to adhere to regulations, such as fire doors, which only the rich could possibly afford.

  ‘We’ll rent out your bedroom and you’ll come in the lounge with me,’ she said.

  I buried my gloomy feelings that I was about to be without a bedroom again, but sighed loudly to make sure Mum knew the arrangement was far from ideal.

  ‘It won’t be for long, Ann. We’ll get ourselves a little place of our own after a bit. I swear we will. Maybe we could convert the cellar here into our very own flat.’

  My sixteenth birthday was not too far away and, even though it was horribly old, it offered me some consolation. It meant that in a few months I could leave school. I could leave home. I would be able to get away from everything, though at the back of my mind there was the worrying thought of how Mum would cope without me.

  Mum’s advert in the local paper soon brought a group of people to live with us. ‘Young twenty-something working professionals,’ Mum said, clapping her hands together.