Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  He subsided back into himself and smelled the moss and leaves beneath him and Bettany’s sugary scent and the entirely new smell of her and him together which presumably was how sex smelled. She was still rocking away, eyes shut, apparently as self-involved as he had been moments before. Luckily he was still as hard as a rock inside her. In fact, if she kept this up he might even start coming all over again. He raised his hands and cupped the palms of them very gently over her breasts so he could feel her nipples rubbing against them. He had never felt breasts before, not even through a shirt. You had to call them tits with your mates but that never seemed right as it made them sound sort of small and silly and powerless when they were obviously very powerful indeed. They needed a longer word, with more syllables, like mammaries.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Bettany. Oh bugger.’

  ‘West End Girls’ stopped playing for a second or two inside and the sound of people’s voices was suddenly loud. Then someone put on ‘Spirit in the Sky’. Troy probably, as he fancied himself as a sort of DJ and spent hours making compilations. And, as if it was the music that had tipped her over the edge, Bettany came.

  He had heard about this, of course; about girls who made lots of noise or who went on and on and on. He heard smutty stories about girls using electric toothbrushes and spin dryers and girls who faked it. But Bettany was very restrained. She just clenched him, with her thighs and her insides, so tightly he thought she’d leave bruises, and her rocking got slower and slower and then she stopped. She opened her eyes. She had rather small ones, clogged with eyeliner, but he could see them shine. She bent down and gave him a quick kiss that tasted of rum and Coke. She had been swigging from a can of Coke earlier and he guessed She had tipped rum in through its opening. Her hair smelled of dope. They hadn’t kissed much earlier, which was a relief because he wasn’t sure he’d be any good at it and it struck him as the most intimate thing, in some way, perhaps because of using tongues. The rest was intimate too, naturally, but it was limbs and body parts whereas mouths were sort of where your personality came out.

  She sat back on him rather heavily then stepped off him and almost lost her footing, which made her giggle. She was quite drunk. ‘Whoops,’ she said. ‘Shit. You got a tissue on you, Pet?’

  By a rare chance he had a proper handkerchief Hedley had brought him back from Italy. It was big and had famous Italian sights all over it, like the Colosseum and the Leaning Tower. He handed it to her.

  ‘You sure?’ she said and then used it to wipe between her legs. She sort of folded it up and handed it back. ‘Souvenir,’ she said. ‘Where are my fucking …? Oh.’ She giggled. ‘There they are. She found her knickers, stepped back into them without taking off her shoes and tweaked them up under her dress.

  Cold now, because she had left his middle sweaty, he pulled up his pants and jeans and stood too, tidying himself away.

  ‘You’re very sweet, Pet,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That your first time?’ She ran a finger down the front of his T-shirt.

  ‘No,’ he lied and hated his voice for sounding so young and wimpy.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s all right, then. It’s just, well, we can’t really … I’m sort of seeing someone else, is all.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s cool.’

  ‘No hard feelings?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘You sure?’ she said, giggling some more and she rubbed the front of his jeans where his cock was swelling all over again and sort of bent sideways by his second-best pants which had shrunk in the tumble dryer.

  ‘Get off!’ he laughed, shoving her away, and she gave a sort of shriek and became just a mate’s sister again.

  ‘I’m getting another drink,’ she said. ‘You coming back in?’ But the music had changed to ‘You Spin Me Round’, which he hated so he said, ‘In a bit,’ and she lurched away, having difficulty on the twigs and stuff in her heels. She had dressed up a bit tonight; normally she was in trainers.

  Petroc tucked the damp handkerchief into a back pocket and walked the other way, circling the farmhouse and outbuildings at a distance, listening to the music, that wasn’t too loud heard from outside, and watching the glimpses through the windows of people dancing or drinking or just standing around and shouting. He saw Morwenna, dancing the way she tended to, with her hands constantly snaking up above her shoulders as though she was dancing in a tube and the only way to move them was up. She had a cigarette in one hand and was either on Speed or E or wanting one to think she was. She had quite a habit, though he was the only one in the family who knew; Charlie, when she could cadge it. He’d seen her begging Es off Troy and overheard Spencer saying he liked the way they made her so horny.

  He wandered, still circling. The Eurythmics came on and he saw everyone in the room sort of speeding up to match the music. He wondered where Hedley was and how soon they could leave without being rude or uncool. Petroc didn’t like parties much and hadn’t wanted to come only Morwenna and Hedley were clearly going and he couldn’t stand being alone. He was no good at dancing, didn’t like alcohol and loud music made his ears hurt. But these were all things you couldn’t admit, like wanting a better word than tits. When the question of the party came up it was clearly an issue. Working at his desk on a model of a pilot cutter, he heard Wenn and Hed discussing it. Hed was saying there’d be hell to pay if Antony and Rachel found out they’d left him on his own and she said fifteen and three quarters was easily old enough to be left without a babysitter and what could go wrong.

  Nobody knew about his fear of being in the house on his own because it never arose. Someone was always there and, if they weren’t he just went out with friends. He didn’t need to be in the same room as people but he needed to know they were in the house somewhere and always had. One of his longest recurring bad dreams involved being in his and Hedley’s room and hearing the front door slam and whoever was leaving locking it behind them.

  He was coming too, he insisted. Trying to be grown-up, Morwenna said he was still too young to drink and wouldn’t know anyone there but he was able to bluff with confidence, having a few mates in the sixth form now and said he had friends going and that even if Hed and she hadn’t been asked, he would have been gate-crashing it. If they didn’t take him, he’d only bum a lift, he cheerfully pointed out, with some mate who’d have been tanked-up on cider first. So they brought him and all went their own ways within minutes of arriving.

  There was no food, of course, not even crisps, because food wasn’t cool and the Youngs brothers lived like cavemen to the point where their own crippled father had moved out and lived in a caravan for a bit of civilization. Petroc came upon Mr Youngs now. He was sitting in a nylon deckchair in the caravan’s open doorway, watching the world go by, listening to ‘There Must be an Angel’ and drinking beer from a glass.

  ‘All right?’ Petroc greeted him. He looked friendly enough and he was half-tempted to beg him for a bit of bread and butter and some cheese as he was so hungry. But Mr Youngs couldn’t talk properly and sort of mumbled in response, which made taking the conversation further a bit tricky. ‘Lovely evening,’ Petroc said instead and just stood with him companionably for a while and then left it at that.

  The anxiety was returning that had never quite left him since Rachel announced, with no trace of excitement, that she and Antony were going to have to go to New York for a week. He wasn’t superstitious, nothing remotely like that, but the announcement had left him with a growing dread that something bad was going to happen to her there. She’d be mugged or she’d have a bad turn and jump under a subway train or their plane would malfunction and catch fire. The others were so independent now – what with Wenn being in her last year at LSE and Hed having been to Italy on his own for two whole months – that it wouldn’t have occurred to them to worry that their parents were away. They wouldn’t worry about Rachel, at any rate.

  Sometimes he felt as though he had grown up with a different mothe
r to the rest of them. He knew about her being bipolar, how could he not with her regular trips for blood tests and the pills that had been cluttering up the butter compartment of the fridge door all his life. And the medication wasn’t foolproof, not least because its success relied on her taking it and she was not a reliable woman. So he had suffered with the rest of them when she had bad patches or went a little crazy telling lies or spending money she didn’t have or flying into her white-hot rages, which they probably all made worse by tiptoeing around her talking in soft voices rather than dealing with it and shouting Oh my God there’s a dangerous animal where our mother used to be! But what with all the ageing hippies and potheads and sculptors and jewellery designers around Penzance now, she seemed to him to fit in pretty well, as an unusually successful eccentric.

  But then, she seemed different to him because she had never had a real breakdown in his life, never been hospitalized with it, whereas Garfield and Morwenna and Hedley’s childhoods had been overshadowed by regular crises so they had grown up thinking of her as mad first and their mother second. Whereas they knew the worst, having witnessed it, Petroc could only imagine it and had grown up waiting for it to happen again. This made him protective where the others were merely wary.

  More recently he had started to notice her as a woman instead of simply as Rachel, and had begun to wonder about her marriage to Antony. This was a mystery to him; he so endlessly calm and forbearing, she so demanding and restless. If Antony suddenly cracked and set her free, said, ‘All right. Go to New York on your own. Live in a studio. Do drugs! Take lovers!’, if he refused to take any further responsibility for her, would she have jumped feet-first into the opportunity to run wild or would she have gone to pieces with no husband to nurse and nanny her? How much of her character was shaped by always being handled as though she might break?

  Petroc came around the side of the house, to where the music was blaring out of open windows and the boys’ knock-off disco lighting flickering across the dirty glass made it look as though the place was on fire. Couples were writhing about in two of the broken-down cars that always had feral cats in them by day. A boy he didn’t know, with his T-shirt dangling from a back pocket, was being sick into an old tractor bucket, bracing his hands on its forks. In the far corner of the yard, Spencer was showing off his latest set of wheels to some friends who were clustered about it. He was gunning the engine pointlessly and demonstrating the crazy vigour of its sound system pounding out The Cure which, even at that distance, seemed easily as loud as the reggae now coming from the house.

  Petroc spotted Morwenna at last. She was leaning on the jamb of the open front door, swigging from a plastic water bottle. She shone with sweat. She reached out a hand towards him theatrically.

  ‘Baby brother,’ she shouted. Her eyes were glittering and she looked madder than Rachel ever did. She ran a hand through his hair. ‘Mop top,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  He shrugged, glad she hadn’t seen him slope off with Bettany earlier. ‘Bit noisy in there,’ he said. ‘It sounds better from the woods at the back.’

  ‘What? Hang on.’ She fiddled under her hair and tweaked out an earplug. ‘Fuck it’s loud!’ she laughed. ‘They’ll have the police here soon even with no neighbours.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said and yawned. ‘It’s a bit much.’

  ‘You don’t want to go already, Pet? It’s only just gone midnight.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind. It’s full of tossers.’

  ‘I said you wouldn’t know anyone.’

  ‘I do know them and they’re tossers.’

  ‘Christ you’re only fifteen and you sound about forty-five.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  She ran a hand through his hair to show she hadn’t meant it. ‘Maybe Hed can drop you back. I want to dance some more then we might head over to the Lizard. Spencer’s heard there’s a bit of a party happening on someone’s farm down by Mullion.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No way. If you don’t like this, you’d be completely miserable and a right pain.’

  ‘So where’s Hed, then?’

  ‘I dunno. He danced a bit but I don’t know where he is now. Shazz, have you seen Hedley?’ she asked a girl who had just left one of the catty cars and had paused on her way back inside to light her cigarette off Morwenna’s.

  The girl glanced at Petroc then glanced at him again, in a way that made him feel as if he needed more clothes on. ‘He was going in the barn,’ she said. ‘Last time I saw him.’

  Morwenna gasped because the only reason anyone went in the barn was to have sex. Everyone knew that, which was one of the reasons Bettany had led Petroc into the woods instead. ‘Who did he go in with?’ she asked.

  Shazz shrugged, taking a deep drag. She fired the smoke out through her nose in a way that must have taken weeks of practice. ‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Think he was on his own,’ and she headed indoors.

  Morwenna had started shivering. ‘I’ll be inside if you can’t find him,’ she said. ‘I suppose we could always drop you off on our way, if Spence hasn’t filled the car with his pet idiots …’ She followed Shazz inside, already rocking her hips to ‘I Wanna Wake Up With You’.

  One of the pet idiots honked the car horn making Petroc jump, which was absurd given all the other noises going on. He had to get away. He had never been good at waiting. One of the few things he disliked about coming from a largish family was the seeming impossibility of leaving anywhere fast, the second you’d decided to go. If he worried about the relative solitude he would face once Hedley as well as Morwenna had left home for good, he cheered himself by remembering how much more quickly he and Antony and Rachel could leave the house. Hed was a notorious last-minute changer of clothes and brusher of teeth.

  What people meant by the barn was not the newer, open-sided one where straw was stored but a long, low, stone building which had fallen into disuse and disrepair, having no opening wide enough to admit a tractor with ease. An uneven flight of stone steps led up one end to the doorway that gave on to the old hayloft, a first storey whose treacherous boards spanned roughly a third of the building. In the cavernous space beneath lay stacks of plastic potato trays, a battle-scarred three-piece suite and several straw bales. The Youngs’ old machinery still produced small, rectangular bales when everyone else was making the round ones that were too heavy for a man to carry.

  Petroc had only ever looked in by daylight, excited and curious because this was a building whose reputation had reached him in school even before Morwenna decided to outrage their parents by casually taking up with the least suitable boy with the same postcode. There was old straw everywhere, inches deep, a heaven for mice and a hell for hay-fever sufferers. The doorway from the hayloft was letting in some moonlight so that even in the relative gloom of the lower room he could make out quite a lot once his eyes had adjusted to it. He could see or hear nobody and he realized that the place’s reputation was probably a horny schoolkid’s myth because not even a drunken idiot would have smoked in such a powder keg and any fool knew that most people liked to smoke after sex.

  ‘Hed?’ he said softly, anticipating the rustle of hastily rearranged clothes. But there was no response, just the competing musics from down the track and the revving of Spencer’s customized Fiesta. There was a wooden ladder leaning against the edge of the hayloft floor. He tested it gingerly – most things being rotten in this place – and found it sound so took a few steps up to peer into the upper level. ‘Hedley?’ he said.

  They were standing in the hayloft doorway with their backs to him, smoking a joint. It wouldn’t have seemed a scene any different from the other little glimpses Petroc had been catching all evening, only instead of passing Hedley the joint bloke to bloke, Troy held it out for him, obliging Hed to lean forward slightly to suck at it. Moving forward slightly to take a drag, Hed stepped closer into the moonlight, revealing that he had nothing on below his T-shirt.

  Until that moment, Petroc had been
thinking to join them to cash in on the fun; he disliked the taste of alcohol but was curious about the effects of dope. So he was on the point of stepping off the ladder on to the hayloft floor when he saw he was an intruder and began to back off.

  Troy saw him, however, and muttered something to Hedley who spun round then lurched down to the floor in search of his jeans and underwear, comically trying to keep himself decent with his shirtfront as he fumbled for them.

  ‘Hey!’ he stammered. ‘We were just…’

  ‘It’s fine, Hed,’ Petroc said. ‘It’s cool. I’m probably going to …’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Sure. I’m … Look, I’m heading home, that’s all. Catch you later.’

  He backed down the ladder as fast as he could. He was flustered at first, of course and could feel his face burning. Walking out of the barn and across the farmyard and out to the lane, he avoided meeting anyone’s eye because he wasn’t sure what he might say. It was like when someone forgot to lock the bathroom door and you came suddenly face to face with them wiping their bum or shaving their legs; you couldn’t help blundering in and they weren’t doing anything wrong in there but it was impossible to say who was more embarrassed and it was equally impossible to know what to say. If you said nothing and just ran away it implied you’d seen something unspeakable and bad, which was stupid, but if you just stood there and started speaking there was the danger it would turn into a conversation in which one of you was naked or inserting a tampon or something.

  Once he reached the soothing darkness of the lane, however, and the music and sounds of people were beginning to recede, he slowed his pace and realized what he had just seen was a good thing. He found it hard to talk to Hedley about emotional stuff and this would spare them the necessity of an awkward conversation. He had guessed Hedley was gay weeks ago. A dim suspicion had been confirmed when Hed came back from Italy without once mentioning Italian girls, who were, after all, half the point of going there. In the seconds before he’d realized Petroc was watching him, Hedley had looked blissed-out which was good to see because he had been prickly and faultfinding, a bit of an old poof in fact, ever since he’d got back from abroad.