Midland

by James Flint

  The paradox expressed itself right now in the desire Matthew had to brush the back of Caitlin’s hand with his own and the fear that was preventing him from doing so. But Caitlin seemed to be waiting for him to do something, and the proximity of the tiny blonde hairs on her arm was causing patterns of what felt like static electricity to crackle between his elbow and his wrist.

  A cloud slid across the sun and Caitlin shivered a little.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m kind of cold.’

  ‘Why don’t we walk down to the river? I’ll show you the boats. And where the herons nest.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She followed him down to the water’s edge, and although he still didn’t touch her, while they wandered past the boathouse and along the river they walked really close, so close that Matthew fancied he could feel the warmth of her skin.

  ‘Let’s take a boat out,’ she said as they looked across to the herons’ island in the lee of the castle’s high walls.

  ‘That’d be cool. We could do it tomorrow, if you think you can get out again.’

  ‘Not tomorrow. Now.’

  ‘But it’s nearly two. We’ve got to be back.’

  ‘Listen to Mr Rebel Smoker. Don’t be so dull. Who cares if we miss a couple of boring old lessons?’

  Matthew hesitated. He could think of quite a few people who’d care very much if he skipped double French. He glanced at his watch, then back at the café. The lunch break was almost over, and Stuart had already started traipsing back across the park in the direction of the school. He looked Matthew’s way, spotted him, and with a deep sweep of his arm gestured for him to come. But there in front of him was Caitlin, her face glowing with expectation, her eyes polished, a tiny skein of moisture dampening her upper lip.

  ‘Okay, sod it. Let’s do it,’ he said, and taking her hand he walked with her back along the path towards the boathouse.

  ‘I haven’t got any money,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s only a few quid.’

  It made him feel good, to be able to pay for her. He gave the money to the attendant who then led them along the boat-nuzzled jetty. A breeze plucked at the water as he helped them into one of the skiffs, gave them some oars, and cast them off.

  Matthew took the oars and started to row. It was the first time he had been properly alone with Caitlin, and he was nervous: he caught a crab almost immediately, and then, because he was annoyed at himself for not projecting the image he wanted to project, he caught another.

  ‘Do you want me to row?’ Caitlin asked. ‘I know how, you know.’

  ‘I’m just finding my rhythm.’

  ‘Have you actually done this before?’

  ‘Yes! Tons of times. Isn’t it obvious?’

  Caitlin laughed, a sound that gave Matthew sweet release. ‘Where are we going, anyway?’

  ‘Let’s go to the island. Then we can get out of the boat.’ He had an image of helping her out onto the bank, her slipping in the mud and grabbing onto him for support, him bringing her face level with his. Then: kissing.

  He’d watched too many films.

  While he was fantasising Caitlin was craning her neck towards the castle ramparts, which reared up out of the water beyond the road bridge like the face of a giant dam. In their shadow was a tuft of land, thick with trees.

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They drifted under the bridge and Matthew threw his head back to bounce an echo off its broad, shallow arch. Caitlin called out too, and their voices chased each other across the smooth surface of the concrete. Matthew closed his eyes for a few moments, the better to savour the effect.

  When he opened them again he was looking not at the bridge, from beneath which the boat had now emerged, nor so much at the sky, although there was plenty of sky going on. What he was looking at was the ruddy complexion of a middle-aged woman, staring down at him over the edge of the bridge’s stone parapet.

  The complexion spoke. ‘And what precisely do you think you’re doing?’ it said.

  Matthew snapped upright and locked eyes with Caitlin, who was doing her best to suppress a giggle.

  ‘Who is that?’ he hissed.

  ‘It’s Ms Hinton, our deputy head,’ Caitlin explained. ‘I’m totally for it now. She’s going to slaughter me.’

  ‘Get over to the bank this minute!’ said Ms Hinton, her voice sounding reedy after the rich echoes of their own.

  Matthew picked up the oars and began to scull towards the riverbank, his mind darting like a rodent trying to flee a maze, while the teacher picked her way down the steep stone steps that zigzagged from the road to the water’s edge.

  ‘Your watch,’ he said abruptly, as the teacher passed the halfway point on the stairway. Caitlin looked at him blankly. ‘Quickly, turn it back half-an-hour or so. We’ll tell her that it stopped, and that we didn’t realise the time.’

  ‘But what about your watch?’ she said, as she fumbled with the winder.

  ‘I’ll ditch it,’ Matthew said. ‘We can’t wind them both back.’ And as the boat nosed into the bank he dropped the oars, slid the metal bracelet off his wrist, and let the handsome Sekonda, given to him by his parents only a few months previously, slip over the side and into the oily water.

  Caitlin watched it go, open-mouthed.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ she said. ‘This is never going to work.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  Ms Hinton huffed down the last flight of steps and strode across the path towards the boat.

  ‘Names?’

  They told her.

  ‘And what precisely do you think you’re doing out here at this time of the day?’

  ‘But it’s only half past one, Ms Hinton,’ Caitlin said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know perfectly well what time it is.’

  ‘But my watch says half one, Ms Hinton.’

  Ms Hinton looked at Matthew.

  ‘And what about your watch?’

  ‘I don’t have a watch.’

  Ms Hinton stared at him. Matthew stared back, trying not to blink, hoping she was going to ask him to turn out his pockets. If she didn’t, he was going to look very foolish in a very short space of time.

  ‘Turn out your pockets.’

  He danced inside as he extracted the calculator, pens, diary, cassette tape and other bits of detritus that lurked about his person and offered them out to the teacher in his outstretched palms. See? No watch.

  She didn’t pat him down – there were some boundaries that teachers could no longer cross.

  ‘The two of you shouldn’t be out here on your own in any case,’ she said.

  ‘But we share school journeys Ms Hinton,’ Matthew said. ‘I had a message from my mum about a change in arrangements this afternoon, and she asked me to go and find Caitlin and tell her.’

  ‘I fail to see how that necessitates a boat trip.’

  Matthew contemplated saying something about only being able to talk to Caitlin when they were in motion, but checked himself. ‘We just thought it would be a nice thing to do.’

  ‘But you know perfectly well that these boats are out of bounds.’

  ‘Not for sixth-form boys, they’re not,’ Matthew protested. ‘We’re allowed to go out in them, if we’re sensible.’

  ‘We were being very sensible,’ Caitlin chimed. ‘Matthew was taking me to see a herons’ nest. It was very educational.’

  Ms Hinton had made the mistake of soliciting answers from the two pupils, and now she was finding herself slowly but inexorably outflanked.

  ‘That’s as maybe. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’re both out of school during lesson time. Caitlin Nolan, you’re to come with me. You’ – she indicated Matthew – ‘you’re to go straight back to wherever you’re supposed to be. And make sure that you do. I shall be calling St George’s this afternoon to check up on you.’

  ‘But what about the boat, Ms Hinton?’

&nbs
p; ‘What about it?’

  ‘I can’t just leave it there. That wouldn’t be socially responsible. I have to return it.’

  Ms Hinton sighed. Having started this process thinking that absolute moral and judicial right were both firmly on her side, she was now going to have to tell this boy that the right thing to do was to get back into the boat.

  ‘Well return it and then go straight back to school. Come on Caitlin.’ And she turned and led the way back up the stone staircase before Matthew could tell her to do otherwise.

  Caitlin owed him now, Matthew figured. On his side of the balance sheet: one boat rental, one watch, and a tricky situation coolly handled. He could sense the heft of these assets, and their weight gave him confidence. He felt more Caitlin’s equal now, less of a supplicant kneeling at her feet. It was good, it was an advantage. He had to play it out.

  That evening on the way home in the car he passed her a note that it had taken him what had been left of double French to write, even though it was in English and consisted of just a single sentence.

  Meet me in Stratford next Saturday night?

  Caitlin unfolded it and inclined her head to read it so that her hair fell forwards and hid her face.

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  —————

  Matthew now faced the crucial problem common to all teenagers living in the countryside: how to date without being able to drive. Before he even got around to asking anyone out, he had to make sure that someone in his family was available to be his taxi service for the evening in question. Real taxis were too expensive, as they charged a premium to venture out into the maze of lanes that began a few miles beyond Stratford’s town limits. And buses were non-existent, with the nearest stop a good hour’s walk away.

  Even if he could get a promise from his parents ahead of time, or from Emily, or from Alex if his brother was around, it would invariably come with escape clauses and conditions attached. The driver could, and often would, withdraw the offer at any time, and Matthew would have no comeback. If he so much as looked disappointed they would point out that they were doing him a favour and whether they did it or not was up to them, which made his disappointment immeasurably worse, because they were, and it was.

  And of course any girl that Matthew was trying to meet up with was likely to be in much the same situation. Factor these two sets of variables with the likelihood of getting an agreed date in the first place, and the possibility of having a successful encounter of any kind with a member of the opposite sex started to look vanishingly small. As for losing his virginity … Matthew tried not to even think about it, though in fact he thought of little else.

  Having suffered so many let-downs in the past, for his date with Caitlin he’d broken with convention and asked her out before organising any kind of transport. Maybe it was a karmic thing, he’d told himself. By being too structured in the past he’d communicated his expectations of success to the universe, and the universe, being a shitty kind of a place, had stymied his plans and had a good joke at his expense. Perhaps if he pretended not to care the universe would waive its chance to trip him up, and the necessary arrangements would somehow fall into place with only gentle prodding.

  Some hope. On Wednesday he’d asked Emily if she would drive him into town that night, but she had tickets to go and see Good Morning Vietnam in Leamington with a group of friends. If only he’d asked her earlier, she’d told him, devastatingly, she could have arranged to see the film a different night. He’d then asked his mother, but she was involved with one of her charity evenings and was going to be ferrying trays of vol-au-vents to some village hall the other side of Ullenhall, so no joy there. And with Alex away at university that left only his father. Did Matthew want his dad chauffeuring him out on a date? He did not. But it appeared he had no choice.

  ‘What will you be wanting with Stratford?’ Miles said, when he asked.

  ‘Meeting up with friends.’

  ‘Where would that be, then?’

  ‘Not sure yet.’

  ‘That’ll make it hard to find them.’

  Matthew sighed.

  ‘Dad, will you just give me a lift?’

  ‘How will you get back?’

  ‘I was sort of hoping you’d pick me up as well.’

  ‘Why not get a taxi?’

  ‘Increase my allowance and I will.’

  ‘Ah, so this is blackmail, is it? Give you more money, or be forced into servitude as your driver.’

  ‘It’s not blackmail, Dad. It’s a lift.’

  ‘What’s in it for me?’

  ‘The joy that comes from perpetrating a selfless act.’ This was a favourite phrase of Miles’s own, one he’d deployed against his children countless times.

  Miles wasn’t buying it any more than his kids ever had. ‘What about a mowed lawn?’

  ‘Oh great. I might have known.’

  ‘You scratch my back …’

  ‘All right, if that’s what it takes. I’ll do the mowing Sunday.’

  ‘Saturday. Before you get your night out. I don’t want you crying off with a hangover.’

  ‘Oh fuuuu—’ Matthew swallowed the expletive, knowing it was the kind of response that would kill the offer of the lift stone dead. ‘I was going to watch the football.’

  ‘Mow it in the morning. Then watch the football. On my television. And don’t swear. Or no lift.’

  —————

  Matthew had finished the patches of grass up in the walled garden and was manoeuvring the mower down the path towards the house’s main lawn when he was distracted by the sight of Alex’s burgundy Ford Fiesta, a reward from their parents for getting into Oxford, rolling into the driveway. If his brother had arranged to come home from university for the weekend, it was news to Matthew. How nice, and all that. How interesting, the consequent range of possibilities.

  He engaged the clutch on the mower, slowed the two-stroke engine to an idle, slid off the seat and wandered down to greet his sibling.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, when he was well within earshot. He didn’t want to seem too keen.

  ‘Hey,’ said Alex. He was unshaven and his hair, though not particularly long by the standards of the late 1980s, was longer than Matthew had ever seen it before.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming home.’

  ‘Last-minute thing. Had some weekend plans, they fell through, thought I’d take the chance to pop up and see Mum and Dad. And you too, of course, buddy boy.’

  ‘How’s whatshername? Vanessa?’ Matthew asked, with the unconscious but unerring sense for a weak spot that only a brother possesses.

  ‘Oh you know,’ Alex said, going round to get his bag out of the boot of the car. ‘Pumped and dumped.’ He slammed the boot shut for emphasis.

  ‘But she was so hot!’ Matthew had met Vanessa only once, but she’d made a strong impression on him. A girl like that in his bed, he felt, and all his problems would be over.

  ‘Lots of girls are hot. Doesn’t mean they can’t be a pain in the arse.’

  Matthew could just not imagine this. Surely hotness excused everything else? ‘I guess so,’ he nodded, not wanting to seem naïve. ‘Shame though.’

  Alex shrugged. ‘Plenty more where that came from.’ This was over-egging it a bit – he wouldn’t be able to get away with that in college. Matthew, though, snickered slightly. But then he also had an agenda of his own.

  ‘Talking of which,’ he ventured, ‘have you got any plans for tonight? Because, well, I’ve kind of got this girl I need to give a lift into Stratford, and only Dad’s free to do it, and he’s being his usual pain-in-the-arse self about it all …’

  ‘And you want me to give you a lift into town?’

  ‘Pretty please.’

  ‘I’m not even through the door and already I’m being press-ganged into service. I must be home.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Matthew said.

  ‘Don’t be so negative. I might’ve said I don’t want to, but I haven’t said I won’t, hav
e I? Look, don’t worry about it, okay? You can tell Dad I’ll run you into town. You and whatshername.’

  His little brother had a girlfriend. This he had to see.

  —————

  Although Alex had come home from Oxford that weekend because of Vanessa, the ‘pumped and dumped’ description of the end of their relationship that he’d given Matthew was not quite accurate. A pouting History of Art student with long slender legs and a generous trust fund, Vanessa had the effortless sense of entitlement that came from growing up in one of the plusher parts of Kensington. It was that, as much as what lay at the top of those legs, that Alex longed to possess, and ten months into their relationship Vanessa had started to feel it. She hadn’t rationalised the notion – it would have offended her deeply if anyone had suggested that she might in any way be a snob; some of her best friends were, after all, working-class. But her instincts eventually told her that Alex was not of her pack and would, whatever else happened between them, always rank low within it. So she had conjured several excuses – his timekeeping, his annoying friends, her stage of life, her need for space – all of which amounted to telling him that it was time to move on.

  The loss of face, even more than the loss of his lover, was more than Alex could bear. Rather than mope around college setting himself up as a target for pity or ridicule, he’d decided that the better strategy was to disappear for a couple of days and give himself time to lick his wounds and construct some armour. He hadn’t counted on stumbling over the perfect antidote to his heartbreak, in the form of Caitlin. As soon as she’d climbed into the back seat and he’d glimpsed her profile in the rear-view mirror, his mouth had gone dry and his heart had quickened its pulse.