Midland

by James Flint

  ‘I thought we could use a boost, if we’re going dancing,’ he said, by way of explanation.

  It took a moment for it to dawn on Caitlin what exactly he was suggesting. ‘Oh, right,’ she said, working it out. ‘I’ve not done this before.’

  ‘First time for everything. It’s nice. Go on.’

  He moved back to give her access to the line of white powder laid out on the sideboard; she balanced her cigarette on the edge of the worktop, tucked her hair behind her ears, and bent as he had done.

  A hand in the small of her back, now, a hand on her hand.

  ‘Hold one nostril closed. Inhale with the other.’

  She sniffed, gently. Nothing happened. She tried again, harder this time. Half of the powder vanished. She hardly felt it go in. In a spot between and behind her eyes that she had not been conscious of before there was a tingle, a tickle, a slight burn.

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I think.’ She took another sniff and finished the rest of the line, then stood up, trying to gauge if she felt any different. She didn’t, particularly. She was a little light-headed, but that could have been the bending over. Her cigarette was smouldering away beside her; she picked it up, puffed on it, and then had a mouthful of wine.

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She breathed, relaxed. Breathing was easy. She reached up and stretched.

  ‘Um. Feels good.’

  She giggled, then swayed, then stumbled.

  Alex grabbed for her, took her by the arms.

  ‘Whoa, you’re rushing. It’ll pass.’

  Caitlin nodded.

  ‘Can I have some water?’

  ‘Sure. You okay to stand?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Slowly removing his hands, Alex filled a fresh glass from the tap. She took it in two hands, drank it in one draught, and gave it back to him. Then she rubbed her eyes. She looked a little better, he thought.

  ‘Have you got any more?’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘No, that.’ She pointed to the sideboard.

  Alex raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay … if you’re really sure.’

  She nodded, so he pulled out the tiny envelope of powder and cut another line, which she took. Alex looked on, wondering if she was going to teeter over again. But instead she turned to him, her eyes black and bright.

  ‘Let’s dance!’

  She reached for the tape machine, turned the volume up, then started jiving round the kitchen. Alex joined her, slightly unnerved by her enthusiasm and wondering if he had perhaps made a mistake. The idea had been to seduce her, but now it was looking like she might in fact be more impressionable than he’d realised. He didn’t want to do anything that they’d regret – and then of course there were Matthew’s feelings to consider. What had felt like a bit of a lark half-an-hour before now looked like it might have some serious consequences.

  Still, she was gorgeous. And she wasn’t Vanessa. And she was turning her face up to his, her eyes closed, as if waiting for him to bend down and kiss her. Just a kiss … that wouldn’t be so bad would it? What harm a kiss?

  He leant into her, slipped his arm around her back, and guided her to him. She didn’t resist and so, when their bodies were touching, he brought his lips down to touch hers, gently once, gently twice, then the third time firmly. Her mouth opened, their tongues connected, her hand went up to his shoulders, his hair … then she was grabbing, pulling him back, twisting away.

  ‘What are you doing? What are you doing!’ She was shouting, her fists clenched, the veins on her forehead livid with blood.

  ‘I just thought …’

  ‘No! No! No!’ Vicious, cornered, she growled the words at him then collapsed where she stood and curled up in a ball on the floor.

  Alex spun over to the tape deck, switched off the music, and then crouched a little way from her, afraid to go too close.

  ‘It was just a misunderstanding, okay?’ he said, extending his hand. Nothing’s going to happen. It’s just the coke, it can be quite intense.’

  She didn’t respond, but he waited, and after a minute or so she gave an almost imperceptible nod. ‘Okay, look, I can take you home, here …’ He got up, fetched her cigarettes from the table and lit one for her. She slowly uncurled and pushed herself up onto her knees before taking it.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Hey – a minute ago I was apologising. It’s no one’s fault. We just got carried away.’

  ‘You won’t say anything to Matthew, will you?’

  ‘Me? God no, why would I do that?’

  ‘I need him.’

  Alex nodded, breathed out, and lit a cigarette for himself.

  ‘He’s a lucky guy,’ he said.

  —————

  The following Monday it was Caitlin’s turn to pass a note. She crushed it into Matthew’s hand as Emily’s car drew up at the front gates of St George’s School for Boys.

  Call me at 9

  He did call at 9. Caitlin was waiting.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh. You know. Stuff. I’m so embarrassed about what happened on Saturday.’

  The words came out of their own accord. ‘Don’t worry about it Matty. It’s fine, honestly. Look – do you want to get together next weekend?’

  ‘Really? You want to go to Stratford again?’

  ‘Let’s not do that. Why don’t you just come over here?’

  ‘To yours?’

  ‘You’ve got a bike, haven’t you? Come on that.’

  Matthew quickly did the calculations. It was about seven miles to the Nolans’ place. It would take a while, but he could do it. They’d probably hang out by the pool. Just the two of them, with any luck.

  ‘Is it okay with your folks?’

  ‘I thought we could go for a walk.’

  Right. So they were going for a walk. This was the countryside. Nobody under the age of forty went for a walk. But that’s what they were going to do.

  ‘Great. I’ll bring a picnic.’ Matthew cursed himself. What did he say that for? Why on earth was he bringing a picnic? They were going for a walk. Who needed a picnic? ‘What time should I get there?’

  ‘Lunchtime, I guess,’ said Caitlin, who’d been thrown by the picnic idea. It reminded her of one of her mother’s refrains: that it was typical for a man to think of his stomach in times of crisis. Of course Matthew didn’t know the nature of the crisis, didn’t know the trouble she was in. But she’d asked him to go for a walk. It was a weird request. He must have known that something was up. Boys were so dim.

  Saturday came without further communication between them on the subject, despite several shared car journeys. Matthew woke at five and, like a child on Christmas morning, could not get back to sleep. For a while he lay beneath the covers contemplating the bedroom floor, head on the edge of his mattress, then got up and took advantage of the slumbering household to assemble some sandwiches and pack them, along with some pieces of fruit and a bottle of wine filched from the recesses of Miles’s small cellar, into an old canvas backpack that he found in the brown cupboard room. He stashed everything in the garage next to his bike and carried on as normal until eleven-thirty ticked round. Then, tyres pumped, chores done and a History assignment out of the way, he lied to his parents about where he was going and set off.

  It was a blustery autumn day. The brass barometer in the Wolds’ hallway was pointing to ‘changeable’ and thick balls of cumulus tumbled through the sky, but it was warm nonetheless. Matthew cycled in and out of shifting patches of sunlight and shade, his mood switching gears accordingly. Shelfield was further away than he’d thought, and the trip was requiring much more effort than he’d anticipated. He’d never actually cycled anything like this far before, and it was already obvious that he didn’t have the stamina for it. He’
d barely got to Bearley before his calves were complaining and the straps from the backpack had started chafing his skin. And he still had another four miles to go.

  Caitlin was watching for him from her bedroom, one eye on the lane, one eye on that week’s edition of Going Live! on the portable TV Tony had given her for her birthday. When she saw Matthew toiling up the road like some wind-up metal toy she hurried downstairs and across the driveway to greet him.

  ‘I thought maybe you weren’t coming!’

  ‘It took a bit longer than I expected,’ he panted, almost falling off the bike in his haste to put down the backpack. ‘I brought the picnic.’

  Caitlin looked at her empty hands. ‘I haven’t … I could go and get some stuff from the fridge?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty to eat. And wine. Let’s just go.’

  Matthew tucked the bike out of sight of the road then followed Caitlin down the lane to a T-junction marked by an old iron signpost with a circle on the top. Behind it grew a dense clump of field maple, hawthorn and laurel, almost an extension of the Nolans’ sizeable hedge, and into this the girl abruptly vanished.

  Matthew did a double take, but when he investigated further he discovered that there was an entrance here, simultaneously obscured and created by two sets of interlocking branches. He slipped through and found himself in a natural archway formed by the trees, which framed a narrow footpath leading away between tall banks of treacherous-looking brambles. It was down this that Caitlin was now striding.

  Matthew jogged after her, grateful to operate different sets of muscles from those the bike had strained. On they went, past the house, past the garden, and past the stable block – its shingles still untreated – that Tony had just had built for Sheila in the Nolans’ small paddock so that she could realise her girlhood dream of keeping horses.

  There the footpath ended, and by means of an oak stile barnacled with lichen and compromised by rot they passed into the field beyond, where the plough-churned clay lay like strips of gigantic metal swarf. Forced to pick her way between the docks and tussocks that formed the field’s perimeter, Caitlin’s pace slowed and Matthew finally managed to catch her up.

  ‘If we go round here there’s another stile and from there we can get on the back of Round Hill,’ she said, indicating the dome-like mass that rose ahead of them. Matthew knew the hill well – it was the highest point for miles around. He had climbed it many times, usually in order to examine the ancient stone circle on the summit or to sledge down it in the snow.

  They reached the stile in question and clambered over. The closely cropped grass on the other side made for easy going, and they strolled up the lower slope and around a sheep-notched contour until they were out of sight of the lane and the little row of cottages and houses that comprised the hamlet of Shelfield.

  The sun was out more fully now, the day warming still further as the drifts of cumulus melted back from Warwickshire. The curve of the hill above him appeared to Matthew somehow cranial, as if it housed a giant dormant brain, the elm at the summit a neuron that had somehow escaped the confines of its skull and started to project itself towards the sky like some kind of biological antenna.

  ‘This way!’

  Caitlin headed down away from him towards a tyre-gouged track that led out of the field and into the wood beyond. There was a gate here, on the other side of which was a wild area of farming set-aside – their destination.

  They waded through the swaths of fescue and meadow grass until they reached a wind-flattened patch, and here Matthew unpacked his picnic, surreptitiously cramming a couple of cherry tomatoes into his mouth to alleviate his hunger while he opened the bottle of wine. He glugged some into two plastic cups and passed one to Caitlin, along with a sandwich.

  ‘This is so organised,’ she said, tucking her legs beneath her and accepting the food with a smile. ‘You’re making me feel guilty.’

  ‘Your turn next time,’ Matthew said. He was hoping that at some point Caitlin was going to offer other gifts, and far more precious ones.

  They ate and drank in silence for a while, then Matthew lay down on the grass and squinted up at the Caitlin-shaped cut-out positioned between his eyes and the sun.

  ‘I’m sleepy now,’ he said.

  Caitlin lay down on her elbow, her head towards his feet. She pulled at a clump of heath grass, running its stems between her fingers before beginning to fashion them into a plait. Matthew steeled himself. If he didn’t kiss her now the moment would pass, and he might never get another chance. She wanted him to do it, surely? Why else would she have brought him here? It would be easy. He would sit up and put his hand on her hip. She would turn and her lips would part and he would lean in and embrace her and they’d melt together into the grass. And there, among the flax and the forget-me-not, the primrose and the burdock, they’d be together, properly, and his life would finally start.

  It all seemed easy, suddenly. He sat up; he put his hand on her hip. She turned; her lips parted. He swivelled his legs and leant in as he’d planned … but then her hand came up to check him.

  Matthew pulled back like he’d been stung.

  ‘It’s okay if you don’t want me to kiss you,’ he insisted. ‘I didn’t mean …’

  ‘It’s not that.’ Caitlin pushed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes. ‘It’s not you, you’re so sweet. It’s me.’ She paused, searching for the words. ‘I’ve been so stupid, Matty.’

  ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  Grabbing handfuls of grass she twisted them round as if to get a better grip upon the planet, then looked him directly in the eye. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  A trapdoor opened in the world and Matthew tumbled through it. He felt like he’d slipped into the fabric of a fairy tale, one in which a captured genie had tricked his way out of granting him his dearest wish.

  ‘Pregnant?’ The word squeaked out, compressed by the weight of its implications. ‘But what are you doing to do?’

  ‘I don’t know! That’s just it! I don’t know what to do. I just needed to tell someone.’

  Matthew’s head spun. He wasn’t sure what this meant, but at least she trusted him. That was something to hang on to.

  ‘Okay, well, you can tell me,’ he said quickly, trying to order his thoughts. ‘Have you been to see a doctor?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t that be the first thing? I mean, if you need to, you know …’

  Caitlin squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. ‘Don’t say it! I don’t know if I want that.’

  ‘You want to have the baby?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Oh God, I just don’t know!’

  ‘You can’t have a baby, Caitlin!’

  ‘Why not? Women do, you know. And my family’s bloody Catholic.’

  ‘But you’re still at school! What about your A-Levels? And university? You wouldn’t be able to do any of that.’

  ‘Yes I would, or I could do it later. I mean, this is a person we’re talking about.’

  ‘It’s not a person, not yet. Right now it’s just some cells, multiplying fast, and making you really unhappy. It’s not like you meant this to happen, right?’

  Caitlin drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. ‘No.’

  Matthew felt ready to burst. Every urge in all the songs he’d listened to throughout his teenage years seemed to be prompting him all at once. Only one fixed point was discernible in the midst of the chaos: Caitlin needed his assistance. That is what she would value, and so that is what he would give her. It didn’t matter who she’d slept with, whose child it was: it was pretty clear that she didn’t trust the father as much as she trusted Matthew. And if she trusted Matthew more, then he could be more. He could be the better man. And he would be better; he would be. He would start by giving Caitlin that. And that way he would win her.

  ‘It’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this. You can trust me. You won’t regret it, I p
romise.’

  He wouldn’t ask her. He wouldn’t tell her that he wouldn’t ask her. But just as it didn’t seem right to ask what she didn’t want to tell, it didn’t seem right not to tell what she didn’t want to ask. So he mustered again all the energy he’d gathered when he’d first placed his hand upon her hip.

  ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ The words came out coarse and cracked. And yet they weren’t quite the right ones, they might be misconstrued. ‘I mean, you know I’m in love with you, right?’

  Oh God, that was awful. He’d said what he meant, but it had sounded wrong. And yet it didn’t seem to matter, because this time when he leant in to kiss her, she didn’t push him away.

  —————

  It seemed to Matthew another of the many personal insults issued to him by the universe that this kiss should have led him to the humdrum municipal space of the Arden Medical Centre, among whose pointedly upbeat receptionists and flame-retardant chairs he was now waiting while Caitlin spoke to a doctor.

  On the wall black-and-white pictures of a herd of African elephants roaming through some picturesque patch of savannah alternated with posters advertising the dangers of herpes and chlamydia. On the low institutional tables back issues of women’s magazines were muddled in with half-finished word-search puzzle books and public information leaflets. In the corner a water cooler stood beside a small drinks machine that vended desultory twenty-pence measures of watery coffee. A stained play mat lay strewn with a collection of broken, snot-smeared toys.

  It was Caitlin’s first visit to the Centre – they’d come here because consulting her family GP in Alcester was out of the question – but Matthew had been here many times over the years. Measles, minor burns, bronchitis, holiday jabs: since Stratford hospital had closed it had been the first port of call for non-emergency family ailments. To an external observer his visit with Caitlin would have been just another event in a commonplace series. But inside he was in turmoil, his mind jabbering with possible outcomes and permutations, with the prospect of what might happen if their parents found out. Even the celebrity weddings in Hello! and a ‘twenty ways to get the best in the bedroom’ feature in last month’s Marie Claire couldn’t distract from the churn of his thoughts.