“So that if you lose it no one else can use it.”
“But the dinner ladies don’t know who we are.”
“They can certainly check if you report your ticket lost.”
“But isn’t it our right to lose it?”
“What?”
“Why is it a rule?”
“I’ve just explained that.”
The girls at the front were sighing now as they brushed their hair, examining themselves in their own little mirrors, exchanging humorous what-now glances with Mr. Kay.
“Why shouldn’t we be free to write our names on the back or not, so that it’s our own decision?”
“Well, it would just be foolish.”
“Isn’t it our right to be foolish?”
“It’s just a school rule.”
“But why is it a school rule?”
It went on for twenty-five minutes, until the bell rang. By the end of it, Mr. Kay was having a very bad morning, and Tim was full of envious admiration. Since then, Stig had been not only his best friend but the object of constant emulation. Tim adopted his style of dress, with zigzag Fair Isle tank tops over granddad shirts and a pair of round wire glasses like John Lennon; he observed, with speechless envy, Stig’s sardonic habit of addressing his parents, to their resigned faces, as “Vicar” and “Fat Marge,” something he could only translate into a sneer when talking to his own parents. Of course he’d go along with Stig and smash up a CND meeting.
He put the phone down and wandered back into the dining room, but he’d finished his plate of pork chops, peas and potatoes; he’d not been concentrating, and had finished it before noticing.
“I’ll be upstairs,” he said, turning round.
“Don’t you want any sweet?” his mother said.
“No, thanks,” Tim said. “I’ll be upstairs.”
“It wasn’t anything special,” she said. “Just what was left of the crème caramel yesterday.” Tim took the stairs two at a time, glad no one was overhearing the words “crème caramel.”
He could have moved into one of the bigger bedrooms, Daniel’s or Jane’s old ones now they’d moved out, but he’d stuck with his own. It didn’t really matter. In the same way, it hadn’t been decorated for ten years, since he was a little boy, and the walls were still a pale blue, the colour of Blu-tack. They’d offered to redecorate a year ago, but when he’d said he’d like the room painted black, they’d refused and he’d said he wouldn’t want anything else, so nothing was done. He didn’t really see the room any more—perhaps only when Stig or someone came round. It had a little desk and a low bookcase; in the bookcase were fifty favourite books, the three Shakespeare plays he’d done for O level and A level, some Marx, this week’s library books and, behind them, tucked away, a packet of Benson & Hedges, only three smoked. He’d bought it a month ago; he’d decided he ought to smoke, he could see himself cadging a light from a miner on a picket line. He didn’t want his mother to find out, though.
Underneath the bed, two drawers, and in one of the drawers, a shoe-box, his Sandra box; in it, some photographs of Sandra that Daniel had taken, an essay of hers Daniel had borrowed once and then, as he thought, lost, some of her writing, a spoon she’d once used, a postcard she’d sent to Daniel with her address in Australia on it, which he’d got to first when the postman had delivered it. There was no reason he’d find out why he’d not received it, or probably ever know that she’d sent one in the first place. Tim thought about Sandra, still, all the time; he was sure Daniel never did. On the walls, the poster of the woman tennis-player scratching her bum had gone, and there was a big poster of Che, another one, a streamlined spiky Soviet one in red and white and black, of Lenin; he’d got them from the radical bookshop, not understanding much beyond his own blushing embarrassment when the woman had smirked when he’d bought a life of Che at the same time. He could have gone on with what he’d been reading today, Capital, but he wandered over to the window and looked out on to the street. He’d taken down the net curtains last year.
It was quiet outside; the man opposite, five houses up, trimming his hedge, and there, running across the road, some small animal—a squirrel. It would be a squirrel here, Tim thought. Squirrels were a sort of middle-class right-wing animal. A car approached, its diesel engine ticking, labouring up the little slope; he watched it go, turn the corner, fade away. God, this was dull. But then another, and as it turned into the road, he saw with alarm that it had the white and blue of a police car. Don’t be stupid, he told himself, don’t panic straight off, but the two policemen inside were looking out of the window, counting the house numbers, and slowed to a halt directly outside their house. They got out, and cast a brief, severe glance upwards at where Tim stood, framed in his window. He quailed. But then he remembered. He had always known what he was getting into. He knew a hell of a lot. He had always known that the police would take an interest, and it seemed that now the time had come. He concentrated on his telephone conversation with Stig. If he had said anything, he reminded himself in the words of Trudy’s instructions, it was all completely deniable. He had said nothing, and Stig had too much sense to give anything away. He watched the two big blue corruptible policemen, one a woman, walking up the drive as if they had some heavy task, weighing down their arms and legs, and prepared to be called downstairs.
Daniel had just got home from work, had just climbed the stairs, when he heard the phone ring on the ground floor. He knew it would be for him—it always was—but he carried on taking off his suit jacket and tie. The old sod on the ground floor always surrendered to temptation and got it in the end. He’d had quite a good day: all morning, he’d gone round properties in Nether Edge with a youngish married couple. The wife was pregnant—with twins, she’d confided—and they needed a house with more space than they’d got at the moment. He’d gone around with Jennifer in her Eadon Lockwood and Riddle car—he was just tagging along to watch and learn—and hadn’t said much. The wife would have been quite sexy before she’d got pregnant, and even now had a kind of bloom to her that was quite appealing. He’d done his special smile, levering her into the back of the car, and she’d blushed hor-monally, as she was meant to. At first, he’d thought the whole thing a waste of time: they’d gone round eight different houses, and with every one, there’d been something wrong and apparently unacceptable, as far as the husband was concerned. You’d have thought he couldn’t believe anyone could ever live in dumps like these, and it was a disgrace that Eadon Lockwood and Riddle were prepared to try to sell places so horrible. But Jennifer had just nodded as the wife echoed the husband’s strictures—yes, she didn’t know what they were thinking of either with that décor in the bedrooms, no, speaking personally, she wouldn’t be very keen on taking on a house at that price where there was so much work to be done, he was quite right, it didn’t look as if anyone had touched it for thirty years—and in the end, Daniel was surprised when the husband had asked for five minutes alone with his wife, in the garden of the last house, and had come back afterwards and said they’d be making an offer for the fifth one. “I never thought anything different,” Jennifer said, when they were back in the office. “I could tell they were serious. Some people just like to look at a dozen houses in one shot and then take the pick of what they’ve seen. You get to recognize the type.”
When the time came, Daniel thought he’d be that type as well. For the moment, he was living in this big bedsit at the top of a house in Crookes. It was cheap, and because of that his salary was building up in his bank account—that was all you could say for it. He thought there was something wrong, even professionally questionable, about an estate agent living in rented accommodation. The house belonged to a family dentist—the Glovers’ dentist, in fact—who’d bought it and converted it into three flats at least twenty years ago, and never touched it since. Daniel had seen the card in the waiting room, before he’d gone in to have his teeth declared fine, just like last year. The interior paint in the house was the same colou
r as the front door, a gloomy racing green, a shade obviously going cheap at the time, and the communal parts of the whole house were wallpapered in aggressive florals. At each turn of the stair, there was a forlorn spider-plant in a wicker basket, its children broken off and dead on the dark green windowsill, or a chipped porcelain figurine, a souvenir dish from some English seaside resort, objects that had been downgraded twice, first from the dentist’s elegant home and subsequently even from the waiting room of his surgery. In the hall, letters piled up in the names of tenants from years ago, some with angry instructions to open immediately on the envelope. Somewhere, in anonymous office blocks, machines toiled and spat over the affairs of these lost tenants; one day, perhaps, someone would turn up and demand to see them in person.
It wasn’t a bad place to live, though the furniture was a bit grandmaish, and there wasn’t a lot you could do in the way of cooking, nothing but a Baby Belling on a shelf, its enamel chipped and the rust beginning underneath, and a cramped fridge with its freezer compartment too frozen up to post even a bag of peas in it. He shared a bathroom, too, with the woman immediately underneath, the sod on the ground floor having his own. But the woman underneath was a devoted sherry drinker, and never got up until long after Daniel did, so it wasn’t much of a problem. When it all got too much, Daniel went home with a bag of washing and ate his mum’s cooking. But he did all right, and the bedsit was decent enough, considering that he hadn’t looked at any other flats.
The only really annoying thing was the phone, which was always for him, and on the ground floor. It was a payphone, and right next to the old sod’s door; when the money dropped into the box, you could hear him tutting away inside his flat. You could swear he listened to your conversations; probably the most excitement he got all day. Now he could hear the door of the old sod’s flat opening tetchily, and the phone being picked up; a complaining voice, the words not clear, then a throaty yell: “Phone!” Never his name. Daniel came out, and trotted neatly down the stairs. He liked this moment, not knowing which girl was calling him up. The old sod was standing there, holding the receiver in his fist like a weapon, slippers and green-grey zip-up cardigan on, glaring at him.
“It’s for you,” he said. “If you would answer the telephone sometimes, it would be much appreciated, since I’m not an answering-service, last time I looked.”
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. He went to take the telephone.
“One other thing,” the old sod said, holding it back. “I’ve asked this before, but it’s not right to come in at all hours of the day and night, banging about and waking folk up. I don’t know what unearthly hour it was last night. Bringing girls in, too, a different one every time.”
“I don’t think that’s your business,” Daniel said, painfully aware that the girl waiting on the phone would be hearing this, since the old sod hadn’t covered the mouthpiece. “Even if it were true, which it isn’t.”
“I’ll be speaking to Mr. Bullock,” the old sod said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t be happy to learn about his tenant treating his flats like a bordello. And your way of life isn’t my concern, but the fact that I get woken up, night after night, by your antics, that’s something I’m not prepared to put up with. I’m not going to mention it again.”
“Oh, good,” Daniel said. “If you don’t mind—”
“I’m telling you,” the old sod said, but gave way; he handed over the telephone, and went back into his flat, banging the door.
“Sorry about that,” Daniel said into the receiver before anything else. “Who’s this?”
But it wasn’t a girl: it was his father.
“Can you come home?” he said directly. He sounded remote, his voice high and strained. “There’s something happened.”
“What is it?” Daniel said.
“I don’t want to say over the phone,” his father said. “No one’s hurt, it’s not that, but—”
“I’ll come over as soon as I can,” Daniel said.
Some nonsense. He put the phone down, and almost immediately it rang again. Daniel picked it up, and this time it was a girl.
“It’s me,” the voice said, maddeningly. The old sod opened the door to his flat and glared at Daniel. “It’s for me,” Daniel mouthed, and the old sod raised his eyebrows and slammed his door. He’d got the phone, hadn’t he? What more did he want?
“Pardon?” the voice said.
“I was just saying something to my neighbour,” Daniel said. “Hi …” He trailed languidly away.
“What are you doing?” the voice said.
“Oh, nothing,” Daniel said, trying to guess.
“You don’t fancy a drink?” the girl said.
“Tonight, I can’t,” he said. He had no idea.
“It’s just I haven’t seen you for, what, two weeks, is it, when we went to Benjie’s?” Ah, it was Kelly. “And I’d not heard from you, though I expect you’ve been busy.”
“It’s been terrible at work,” Daniel said, peeling back a stretch of floral wallpaper contemplatively. “But not tonight, I can’t. I’ve just this second said that I’ll go up and see my mum and dad.”
“I see,” Kelly said. She was a dark girl; she had swimmer’s shoulders, her hair in a sharp bob, her lips an atrocious pillar-box red and a beauty-spot painted arrogantly above her mouth, but in her eyes you could see what she was really like, and what she was really like was nineteen years old. “I don’t want to get in your way.”
“It’s not that,” Daniel said. “Don’t be daft. I’d love to do something with you, you know that. But not tonight. I’ve nothing on Sunday.”
“Sunday,” Kelly said, as if being offered an insulting and inadequate substitute for what she’d rightfully demanded. Perhaps she was right: there was a whole weekend, a whole Friday and Saturday night, she was being excused from. “Well, I suppose I could—”
“Course you could,” Daniel said. “I’ll give you a ring, shall I?”
“Let’s arrange it now,” Kelly said with assumed briskness, all difficulties gone. They arranged it, and he went back upstairs. The old sod was right: he wasn’t an ideal person to have living in your house. There’d been, for instance, three different girls since he’d last seen Kelly, two weeks ago, and it was fair enough, they did tend to stumble through the front door at two o’clock in the morning, knickers round their ankles, clawing at Daniel’s shirt, smearing their mouths, their much-repaired lipstick, all over his face. That, you couldn’t deny; and they did, most of them, phone him up afterwards.
He undressed, and, with a towel round his waist, popped downstairs for a quick bath. The woman never cleaned the tub, and a single long grey hair lay like a calligraphic squiggle on one flank. Trying not to think too much about it, he sluiced it quickly, and ran a bath, the pipes clanking in objection as if, somewhere in the house, they were being hit with spanners. He prepared himself as if he was going out for a date; he stood up in the bathtub and, with his floral soap, worked up a lather, covered himself all over with a half-inch-thick coat of suds. There was a little mirror over the sink, now clouded over with steam; in it, the cloudy reflection of his brown face. It was a tiny bathroom; he leant over and with a sudsy forefinger drew a smily face, outline, two dots for eyes, a vertical line for a nose, a little O of moueing astonishment for the mouth, and he leant back, bare and soapy, and bent his knees a little until the vague reflection of his face coincided with the drawn outline. But underneath the surprised mouth, his own reflected real one was smiling broadly, and he leant forward again, and with his palm wiped the steam from the mirror, and there was his face; dark, listening, with kindness in the eyes and a gleam of a smile, even here in this shabby hired bathroom. He greeted his own face like his best friend.
It was getting a little cold; he plunged back into the bath, splashing noisily, once, twice, three times. He pulled the plug out, and lay there as the water fell to the drains, running his fingers with pleasure through the dense black hair on his chest. He liked that feeling; h
e liked the clean smell of his own body, like an expensive scent, as he towelled it dry. A girl had once told him that he should live his entire life dressed in nothing but a white bath towel, about his hips. He tried to remember, bouncing up the stairs, soap in hand, who that had been, exactly.
Soon he would have a car of his own, paid for by the company, but for the moment he got around in a tatty old yellow Cortina. He’d bought it because it was wide and low, and had, if you chose, a faint echo of those big glamorous American cars. Walking out of the house in a clean white shirt and tightly pressed black trousers, he felt he deserved something more. It was one of those things, like living in a rented bedsit, that would have to be seen to when his life became what it was becoming. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other stretched out across the back of the front passenger seat; he might have been setting off on a long Pacific journey. He had forgotten to bring a bag of washing; it would wait until the next time. As the car whinnied up the hill, he entertained himself between thoughts of girls by focussing on random houses as they came into view, and pricing them. Location; condition; size; adaptability; the office mantra went through his head, and he produced confident figures as if out loud, to a vendor. At the top of the hill the houses drew back behind massive walls, parklike estates, and here and there even a new set of gates at the bottom of their drive. Behind these mansions, the more modest estate of his parents; he slowed, signalled right, turned with a sense of almost American scale to the sweep of the Cortina’s manoeuvre.
The Northern Clemency Page 44
