Midland

by James Flint

  Matthew introduced him. ‘This is my brother, Alex.’

  ‘Hi Alex.’

  He swivelled around to say hello. She flicked away the strands of hair that had fallen across her face and met his gaze. She was astonishing, even more so because she probably didn’t know it yet.

  ‘Nice of you to give us a lift,’ she said.

  ‘No problem.’ Alex turned back and started rifling through the mess of mix tapes scattered in the front passenger footwell. ‘Shall we have some tunes?’

  He found the tape he wanted, clacked it into the player, and soon they were rolling along to the sounds of S’Express and Bomb Da Bass.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’ Caitlin called above the music.

  ‘Sure,’ said Alex, who hated people smoking in his car and until that moment had always forbidden it.

  Caitlin took out a pack of ten Marlboro Lights and offered one to Matthew, who declined. Then she leant forward between the front seats. ‘Would you like one?’ she said to Alex.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ll light it for you.’ She indicated the cigarette lighter. ‘Can I use this?’

  ‘That’s what it’s for,’ Alex said.

  She pressed the light and remained crouched forward while it heated up.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of tapes.’

  Her scent, whatever it was, was almost effervescent, and it reacted with Alex’s sinuses in a way that seemed to connect them directly to his groin. He angled his head, ostensibly to look at the tapes but in fact to bring Caitlin’s chest within the ambit of his vision. She wore no bra, and her position allowed her breasts to hang down into the hammock created by her lime-green V-neck. Through the frame of the delicate gold chain of her necklace, Alex could clearly see how full and round they were, how snugly they’d fit into the palms of his hands.

  ‘Yeah. They’re kind of a thing, right now, at college.’

  The lighter clacked out and Caitlin lit one of the cigarettes, leaned back, lit the other one off it, and passed it to Alex while he drove. Alex put the cigarette to his lips, hunting its tip for tantalising deposits of the girl’s saliva.

  He dropped the two of them off in Stratford as requested and then returned to Snitterfield just in time to join his parents for dinner. While his mother dished up lamb casserole his father asked him how things were going at university. Not wanting to talk about Vanessa, he mentioned instead that a lot of his friends were thinking of going into the City. The ‘Big Bang’ of financial deregulation that had taken place a couple of years before had opened things up. Firms were hiring, there was plenty of buzz.

  ‘It’s hardly a sensible way to earn a living.’ Miles said. ‘All these computers they’re using have made the markets terrifically volatile.’

  Computerisation was generally a recipe for disaster in Miles’s view, a way to automate idiocy and let it flourish unbridled. He still had raw memories of deregulation’s immediate aftermath: the Black Monday stock market crash in 1987 had wiped more than a third off the value of his pension and investments overnight. For Alex, however, Black Monday remained a largely abstract event, something that had been discussed much in the news and in his A-Level Economics class, but which had had no apparent impact on his material existence.

  ‘There was a problem with computer trading,’ he told his father confidently, ‘around portfolio insurance, if I’m correct. But that was two years ago, and the technologies have matured massively since then. The trading systems are much smarter now and have all sorts of fail-safes built in. And without the City, how would the economy function? Credit is the blood of business, right? Seems like a pretty good way to make a living to me.’

  Much of this, including its pompous tone, came from Freddie Winston, the college friend with whom Alex spent most of his time. But pomposity was something that didn’t go down well in the Wold household. Especially frowned upon was a mixture of pomposity and petulance, and Alex’s sign-off phrase had strayed into that territory.

  ‘As we haven’t seen you all term, Alex,’ Margaret said, deciding that this conversation had gone far enough, ‘I think we’ll have a ban on politics at the dinner table. Can we please change the subject?’ Which they did: to the current season of plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company – much safer territory.

  After dinner Alex told his parents he had an essay to finish and went upstairs, lay on his bed, and thought about Vanessa. But his contemplations soon became infected by angst, and Alex didn’t like angst. It was, he felt, not just unpleasant, but unnecessary. Shit happened. Learn lessons. Move on.

  In order to do just that he got up and did a few sets of sit-ups in front of the full-length mirror on his wardrobe. It worked, sort of, but to complete the process he needed some chemical assistance. Cue the small pick-me-up he’d brought back with him from Oxford: half a gram of heavily cut cocaine wrapped inside a sock and buried deep at the bottom of his holdall. He dug it out and leaving his door open so that he could be absolutely sure of hearing anyone coming up the stairs, he laid out a small line on his desk.

  The drug made him feel better – for a while. But then the glow it induced deteriorated into nerves and pent-up frustration, and with no TV to watch without going down and sitting in the living room with his parents he did some work on his essay in order to calm himself down. Strangely it proved the ideal activity, and he soon became absorbed in the task. Thanks to the stimulant the ideas flew at him; writing furiously he scribbled them down, forgetting the time in the process. It wasn’t until he ran into trouble trying to tuck in a recalcitrant paragraph that he looked up from his pad and saw that there were only fifteen minutes before he was due to meet Matthew and Caitlin in Stratford, which was at least twenty minutes away in the car.

  He finished his sentence, put on his jacket, grabbed the car keys, and – almost as an afterthought – stuffed the cocaine deep into one of his pockets. Just in case.

  As he descended the stairs his father padded through the hallway dressed in his pyjamas, carrying two empty cocoa mugs back to the kitchen.

  He glanced up. ‘Ah, just the man.’

  ‘Hey Dad. Just on my way out to collect the two lovebirds.’

  ‘You couldn’t do me an enormous favour?’

  ‘I’m sort of running late.’

  ‘It won’t take a minute. I meant to pick up some post that was delivered to the Bearley cottage this week, but I haven’t had a minute to get over there and it needs to be dealt with. You couldn’t pop in on your way back from dropping Caitlin, could you, and fetch it? I believe it’s on your way.’

  Alex nodded. It was a peace offering. He had to accept.

  ‘Sure. No problem.’

  ‘Thank you Alex,’ said Miles, using his son’s name to acknowledge receipt of the olive branch. ‘I’ll get you the keys.’

  —————

  Matthew had started feeling queasy during the journey into town. The smoke had set him off – three burning cigarettes, even with the windows half open, had created a toxic atmosphere inside the car. His brother’s driving style didn’t help. He’d forgotten about Alex’s propensity to hurl any vehicle he was in charge of round every corner like he was competing at Le Mans. And he was sitting in the back, which made matters even worse. He’d wanted to be next to Caitlin, to recreate the situation of their daily school run, but now the need to concentrate on retaining the contents of his stomach deprived him of the energy for conversation.

  He’d hoped things would improve once he got out of the car, but they didn’t. Alex dropped them outside the McDonald’s on Bridge Street and Matthew had two minutes in the fresh air to try and clear his head and settle his digestion before they were inside the restaurant and enveloped in another fug of smoke, this one laced with the miasma of greasy steam emitted by the food-processing machines behind the service counter.

  Matthew hadn’t really wanted to go to McDonald’s. His perfect evening would have consisted of a quiet dinner somewhere where the food was guaranteed organic, then a
drink or two in a pub that was lively but not too lively and in which they were unlikely to meet anyone that they knew, followed by a walk down the riverbank on the far side of the theatre, a shared spliff or two on a bench while watching the swans, all rounded off with some amorous petting and, perhaps, the loss of their mutual virginity on a bed of reeds under the stars.

  But there was a social logic to teenage dates, he well knew, and that kind of slightly manipulative romanticism disrupted it. To impress girls, despite what all the love songs said, you needed not sentimentality and tenderness but access to fun, and preferably access to money if the fun in question required it. Matthew had already scored on one of these fronts by getting them a lift into town for the evening. He had another one snug in his pocket: money, enough of it to buy food and drinks for them both. Now he needed to be fun all evening, more so than anyone else they encountered. Which might have been fine: he’d proved himself capable of it during his and Caitlin’s little boating adventure. But now he was feeling sick and he just wasn’t sure he was up to it.

  To compound the problem he soon discovered that he had stiff competition. The group they joined, drinking shakes and dipping fries in the smoking area, included several boys from Stratford whom Caitlin had known from her previous school. The picture he’d sketched of a lonely beauty trapped in glorious isolation in the wilds of the countryside, just waiting for her handsome prince to come and free her, suddenly seemed rather wide of the mark. By the way that she was greeted when she arrived, Matthew could see that she was far more in tune with Stratford’s teen social scene than he was.

  And so it proved. As they drifted from McDonald’s to the Cask and Bottle at the bottom of Union Street, then across to the Vintner on the other side of the town centre – fashionable wine bars, rather than the pubs Matthew preferred – it appeared that everyone knew Caitlin and that Caitlin knew everyone. The shy schoolgirl of their shared school journeys was gone and in her place was a capable socialite, adept at surfing the attention of all those around her.

  If she hadn’t kept returning to him and folding him back into the flow of things, Matthew would have fallen behind after the first half-hour. But for some reason she did keep coming back, despite his lack of conversation and the pained expression on his face. In between his bouts of nausea and half-hearted attempts to converse with the other boys he spent a good deal of time trying to analyse why. It wasn’t because she needed him to buy drinks – everyone offered her drinks, and the ones she didn’t decline outright she barely touched. It could be because of her lift home, but that didn’t require her to flirt with him, or touch him on the arm and shoulder, or introduce him to her friends in such glowing terms. Could it be, then, because she actually liked him? Could it be that she found him attractive for his own sake?

  Before he could determine the answer to this most indeterminate of questions, the sickness that had been brewing in his belly welled up inside him and he was forced to repair to the toilets. When he emerged the group was getting ready to move on. Caitlin was nowhere to be seen; he eventually found her outside in the street talking animatedly with David Tate, who was a year Matthew’s junior but was taller and more athletic.

  ‘Oh my God, Matthew, you look terrible. Are you okay?’ Caitlin exclaimed, when she eventually noticed him.

  He played the sympathy card. ‘I don’t feel too good, actually.’

  A look of distaste flashed across Tate’s handsome face. ‘Overdid it on the voddies?’

  ‘I’ve hardly drunk anything. I think it must’ve been something I ate.’

  ‘Oh you poor thing. We’re going to the Slug. Are you okay to come?’

  The Slug and Lettuce was back across town, opposite the Cask, where they’d been before the Vintner. Matthew could not see the point in traipsing all the way back over there when there were so many nearer bars to go to, but he wasn’t in a position to argue, so he tagged along behind the group as it meandered through Stratford, stopping for chats with other teenagers it encountered on the way. By the time they reached the Slug he was ready to visit the toilet again. After that he felt too debilitated to do anything other than sit in a booth in a corner of the bar and wait for the evening to finish.

  —————

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Alex asked, as Matthew collapsed on the back seat of the Fiesta.

  ‘Sick,’ Matthew mumbled.

  ‘How much did you drink?’

  ‘I think it was a dodgy McDonald’s.’

  Alex cackled. ‘Oh yeah? I’ve heard that one before. You must have been a bundle of laughs. You’re not going to throw up in my car, are you?’

  Matthew shook his head, wound down the window, and leant his chin on the sill. ‘Just get me home.’

  Alex raised his eyebrows. ‘You’d better sit in the front,’ he said to Caitlin. ‘You don’t want him to hurl on you.’

  He leant down to scoop the mess of tapes to the side of the footwell and was rewarded with a spectacular view of Caitlin’s lovely legs as she climbed into her seat.

  ‘So did you have a good evening, anyway?’ he asked, pushing himself back upright.

  ‘It was nice. We had a good tour around. Saw some friends. You know.’

  Alex drove and they sat in silence until, a couple of miles outside the town limits, an unmistakable sound came from the back of the car.

  ‘Hey – you haven’t barfed have you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not in the car?’

  ‘Out the window.’

  ‘Bucket and brush in the morning for you, my friend.’ Alex glanced over at Caitlin. ‘Apologies for my brother.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not his fault. Poor Matthew.’

  ‘I was planning to take you home first, but if it’s okay I think we’d better take a detour and drop him off before he does any more pebbledash work.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Caitlin, who wasn’t tired.

  Sensing an opportunity, Alex hung a sharp left past The Dun Cow pub and up the steeply winding entrance to King’s Lane, a route that one mile and one turning later brought them to the gates of his and Matthew’s home. He eased the car into the driveway and waited while his brother climbed out of the Fiesta and stumbled up to the front door.

  ‘Goodnight Matty,’ Caitlin called.

  ‘’Night. Sorry about everything,’ Matthew mumbled back.

  ‘That’s okay. I had a good time. See you Monday.’

  ‘Yeah. See you.’

  His brother gone, Alex resisted the temptation to carve a doughnut into the gravel, executing instead a swift but sensible three-point turn before rolling off into the night, his prize at his side.

  The most direct route from his to Caitlin’s house was not back along King’s Lane but through Snitterfield itself and then through Bearley, where the property his father wanted him to look in on was situated. It was an investment play Miles had bought a few years earlier, spent ‘a few quid’ doing up, and was now in theory letting out to cover the payments on the interest-only buy-to-let mortgage that he’d taken out to cover the cost of purchase. The rental agency that Miles’s agency relied upon to find tenants was not, however, the world’s most proactive operation, and the cottage currently stood empty. All of which, apart from the details of the mortgage, Alex knew.

  ‘I’d have thought you and Matt would have been wanting to stay out later,’ he said, as they drove through the woods that occupied much of the land between the two villages. ‘I mean, if he hadn’t been ill.’

  Caitlin shrugged. ‘Maybe. But where do you go?’

  ‘I thought the Cask was open till one?’

  ‘But it gets so rammed. And there’s no dancing. If you want to dance, you’ve got to go out to the Wildmoor or the Tollhouse, then you need someone with a car.’

  ‘I’ve got a car. And I like to go dancing.’

  Caitlin looked at him.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Sure. Why not? I’ve got nothing better to do. Shall we go to the Tollhouse? I h
aven’t been there in years.’

  She sat back and considered this for a minute.

  ‘Hmm. Well, the Tollhouse is actually kind of lame. Maybe we should go to the Wildmoor. Though that’s kind of lame as well.’

  ‘It’s Stratford. Everything’s lame. While we think about it do you mind if I run a quick errand for my dad? It’ll only take a minute.’

  They were in Bearley now and he steered into a small terrace of nineteenth-century agricultural workers’ houses, the last of which belonged to his father. Alex pulled the Fiesta into its diminutive driveway.

  ‘Come on.’ Taking the keys he got out of the car, walked up the two-metre path and unlocked the front door.

  Caitlin followed. The place was furnished with careworn but good-quality items bought at auction, with one or two of the Wolds’ cast-offs and a few flat-packed essentials mixed in. Not being occupied, it was empty of personal effects, and this gave it a strangely poised atmosphere, as if it were a film set on which a drama was about to be played out. Alex scooped up the pile of post from the hallway and took it through to the kitchen at the back, where he sat down at the small round table and began filleting out the junk mail and circulars.

  ‘Won’t be a moment. Make yourself at home. Hey – you know what?’ He jumped up from his chair and went over to the fridge. ‘Dad usually keeps some booze here somewhere, in case he needs to loosen up prospective tenants. Let’s see … Aha! We’re in luck.’ He produced a bottle of white wine and lofted it triumphantly. ‘Fancy a glass?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Funny old place, isn’t it?’ Alex said, as he ferreted around for a corkscrew and glasses. ‘Quite cosy, really. Look, there’s a tape machine here. Shall we have some tunes?’

  Caitlin sipped nervously at her wine while Alex went to the car and fetched a cassette. The moment he slotted it into the machine and pressed play, the cottage was transformed. Before, they’d been interlopers; now, the music made it theirs.

  ‘Is it all right if I smoke?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  She took her cigarettes from her bag and lit one while he fiddled with something on the sideboard. As she watched he bent forward and inhaled sharply before turning and offering her a rolled-up five-pound note.