by Tessa Hadley
— I have to talk to you, the Pune said to Peggy. — I’ve had this incredible dream. You were in it, of course. We were at the zoo together, you and me. We looked through the bars of all the cages at the animals, and they were looking back at us, only not with animal expressions, it was as if they knew everything about us, better than we did. I was afraid of them, I wanted to go, but then it turned out that you, only you, could communicate with them.
— Like Doctor Dolittle, Kristen suggested.
He was annoyed. — Well, no, not like Doctor Dolittle.
— Just give me a minute, Simon. Give me time to draw breath.
You could hear Peggy was fed up with him, but at the same time she couldn’t help wanting to find out what he’d been dreaming about her. Kristen got to know a certain expression on her mother’s face, whenever the Pune was with her: guarded and curious, with a spot of feverishness in her cheeks. Peggy was small and compact with pale skin and big eyes with thin, sensitive lids; she had a mass of red hair, just beginning to be threaded with grey, which was always a statement however she wore it: loose, or pinned up with ribbons, or in a swinging plait. Kristen was small and pale like her mother but her hair was nondescript. Peggy dressed brilliantly too, in green dungarees and striped satin shirts and old flowered party dresses from junk shops: this was one of the things that made her stand out from the company wives at the parties (by this time Jim had moved on from Anglia World to Transglobal Services).
If Kristen went into the kitchen when children’s programmes had finished, the Pune would be sitting at the table still holding forth, while Peggy in her apron was getting supper ready. By this time he would have lapsed from his excitement at the beginning of the conversation, and sunk into despair about himself. This was their pattern, familiar as a ball game: he chucked the unravelling bundles of his despair, Peggy fielded them and beamed back her resilient brightness.
— I can’t talk to girls; I don’t know what they want to talk about. They run a mile when they see me coming. I’ll be the only twenty-one-year-old virgin left on the planet.
— Don’t be silly, Simon. Peggy would be batting out escalopes of pork with her rolling pin and flouring them. — You’re an exceptionally attractive young man, with your gorgeous looks and your brains. The only thing you haven’t got is belief in yourself.
— They’ll want to talk to me about their feelings, he said gloomily. — I don’t know about anybody else’s feelings.
The Pune had the sense not to want to discuss this subject around Jim and Tom; when they came in he’d stare fixedly into his empty mug, wrapping his long legs together under the table. He was shy of anyone seeing his face, but Kristen was always having to notice the gap between his sagging loon trousers and half-unbuttoned grubby shirt: the stretch of lean belly was whorled with surprisingly vigorous black hair, heading in a bristling line down into the fraying waistband of his underpants. He wore his socks without shoes around the house, which Kristen wasn’t supposed to do. It disturbed Kristen, when she and the Pune sat watching TV side by side with their legs stretched out, to know that they had even this one accidental detail in common; though hers were tidy fawn regulation socks, and his would very likely not even be a pair, and often had a white knobbly potato-toe poking out from a hole in one of them.
— He’s a bit of a poor specimen, Jim said, — you must admit.
— He’s actually a very good-looking boy, said Peggy, — if you look below the surface of his problems.
— He’s so puny, said Tom (this was where the nick-name came from). — His wrists are so skinny, they look like they’d break if they had to hold up more than a cup of coffee; and he can’t even hold that, he spills everything. He’s always staggering about, falling over his own feet.
Red-headed Tom was small and hard and solid, invaluable in the rugby first fifteen at Dulwich College.
Jim said he was blinded by the surface and couldn’t get past it.
Kristen didn’t know how to dress up for this party. She messed around for hours in her bedroom, putting things on then taking them off again: she was too old for stuff from the play box, not old enough to look right in grown-up clothes. Her new breasts, little pyramids of fat, embarrassed her whatever she wore. In the end she resorted to an inconspicuous pull-on denim skirt and T-shirt, devoting herself to decorating her head instead, screwing her hair up in joke knots and plaiting in bits of beading and lace, glueing sequins above her eyes. She could have had a friend over, Peggy had offered it; she had dithered over who she should ask, then with relief abandoned the idea. She got on well with everyone in her crowd at school, but whenever she brought any of them home she suffered from a strange dissociation the whole time, as if this wasn’t her real home but another parallel place resembling it in every detail.
Before he cycled off to his friend’s house, Tom came into her room with instructions. His eyebrows – faint dark brush strokes, not red – lifted in surprise at the sight of her hair decor, but it would have been beneath his dignity to comment.
— Keep an eye on the Pune, Kristie. Don’t let him make an idiot of himself. I’d stick pretty close to Mum, in case he starts shooting his mouth off to her in front of all her friends.
These days all his campaigns were directed against one thing: the Punic Wars, he called them. Kristen had no intention of spending her evening standing guard over her mother. Before the party began she stowed supplies among the flowerpots in the greenhouse: two slices of Peggy’s lemon fridge cake in a Tupperware box, apples, and the old Action Man flask filled up with sherry. Sherry wasn’t really what anyone drank at parties, but it was the only alcoholic drink she liked, so far. She also put a candle and a box of matches ready, and for a few minutes felt excited, then silly, because nothing could really happen if she was all by herself. But the greenhouse might be a good place to hide away in, if the party was awful.
The sky was shut under a grey lid of cloud, the late afternoon was limply warm. Kristen ran a bath for her mother, combining scented oils like a witch mixing potions; once she thought she heard, behind the thunder of the tap, waves of rain insisting at the open windows, but when she looked out the garden was still dry and blank. Her dad was hanging paper lanterns in the trees. Peggy’s 1950s strapless evening dress, green silk, was laid out on the bed with her new strapless bra, new tights still in their packet, ropes of beads; in a glass on the dressing table was the yellow rose she’d cut in the garden for her hair. When Peggy had finished setting out the food the caterers had delivered, she came upstairs to change.
— That bath smells extraordinary. I suppose it’s safe to get in, I won’t turn into a frog or anything?
Undressing, she scrutinised her daughter in rapid assessment. — What are you going to wear, darling?
— This, said Kristen briefly. She looked away from the sight of her mother in her underwear, the complicated adult voluptuousness. — D’you like my sequins?
Peggy baulked for one audible instant then forgave her. — You’re rather wonderful, she said. — You’re like …
— No, shut up, don’t say what I’m like.
The Pune, miraculously, wasn’t the first to arrive, as Tom had predicted he would be. And when he did come he looked quite like a normal human being, he’d changed out of the usual Pune-wear into a black polo-neck top with black trousers. He walked round everywhere with his cigarette in his hand, of course, sucking on it as if it was the first one he’d had in weeks; and his trousers were too short, they showed stretches of hairy leg when he sat on the floor with his knees up in front of him. He wasn’t any good at the polite stuff like talking to strangers, but some of the teachers from school knew him and got down on the floor with him, even when the party was really still in its stage for standing up chatting, holding on to plates and glasses. The group on the floor seemed to have more fun, they were shrieking with laughter. Kristen was sure she heard him telling them the thing about him being the only twenty-one-year-old virgin left.
Kris
ten moved around between the clusters of guests for a while, standing at the edge of each one with her glass of juice, looking from face to face as they spoke, responding politely if they made an effort to include her. But there wasn’t much they could ask her about, apart from school: she saw herself insignificant, as if from a great distance, her inner life compacted into a small flat tasteless cake. She got tired of telling them that chemistry was her favourite subject; they seemed to think this meant she would go on to win a Nobel Prize or something, though she didn’t really like it all that much, she just found the chemistry lab an orderly and tranquillising place. Peggy kissed Kristen and squeezed her tight against the green dress: its skirts stood out stiffly, the material crackled and was scratchy like coarse paper. — My daughter is the most sensible girl in the world, she said. — Much more sensible than her mother. Don’t be fooled by the crazy plaits.
A Transglobal wife said Peggy was so clever to wear something old, she’d never dare. Kristen slipped away to watch television in her bedroom, but the waves of noise from below made it difficult to concentrate. After a while departing guests, looking for the room where they’d left their coats, came trekking past her door, and sometimes even opened it by mistake and peered inside: it must be odd for them to stumble on this pocket of dullness tucked away inside the noisy adventure of the party. The music was beginning to get louder: ‘Dancing in the Street’, then ‘Relax, Don’t Do It’, then ‘Purple Rain’. She went to see if things had taken off at last, half sliding on her bottom down the banister; her dad was crossing the hall, fetching more wine from the downstairs bathroom. In photographs from when he was young Jim was almost unrecognisable, with bare feet and long hair; that wild past self was packed away inside his genial, paunchy, present one, and his hair now was normal, wearing thin at the temples and on top. Jim could answer all the difficult questions on the quiz programmes; he seemed too solidly knowledgeable ever to have been a hippie.
— What are you up to, Pigeon? Are you having a nice time?
— I hate parties.
— Oh God, he said, exaggeratedly glumly. — So do I.
With his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, hands bristling with bottles, he didn’t look as if he wasn’t enjoying himself; the tie would come off altogether, later. — I suppose you’re pretty snug in your little bolt-hole of a bedroom. Are you foraging for food?
— You can come and watch telly with me if you like.
— Don’t tempt me. I’m a slave chained to the wheel of pleasure down here.
She stepped out through the door in the extension room, into the garden. Coloured paper lanterns were strung across the patio, floating like balloons filled weightlessly with light; the night stood back among surprised pale trees, cigarette smoke hung motionless. Peggy had put out a rug on the flagstones, and all the big floor cushions: she was sitting cross-legged in a circle of friends like an audience, the Pune lying stretched out with his head in her lap. If Kristen could slip behind the trellis which screened the oil tank, then she could make her escape to the greenhouses.
— What do you know about our life? Peggy was saying to the Pune, in an amused, scratchy, drawling voice that made Kristen think of the surface of the green dress. Peggy never got really drunk, but if other people were drinking she arrived at a state like an exaggerated performance of her usual self: she held court, she was opinionated and funny, she was less tolerant.
— Are you accusing us?
All the time she was doing something to the Pune’s hair. He had his eyes closed. He had taken his glasses off and was holding them in his hand; she was pushing back the long fringe from his white forehead, raking through it with her fingernails (which she had had painted crimson for the party). The sight of his naked head embarrassed Kristen, reminding her of swimming lessons at school, familiar friends translated into seal-creatures under sleeked wet hair, all ears and eyes.
— I know about Transglobal Services, for instance, said the Pune.
— Who’s that? asked somebody.
Jim had arrived in the open doorway. — They paid for the wine, he said. — So don’t bite the bloody hand.
The Pune craned his head for a moment up off Peggy’s lap, blinking in Jim’s direction. — The bloody hand, he said, — it’s just that. Don’t enquire too closely into where the money comes from, for this lovely house on the hill.
He was trying to pick one of his fights over politics: about some company Jim said was only a TGS subsidiary anyway.
— Nobody’s allowed to spoil my party mood, said Jim. — Don’t even let him get started.
Peggy was drawing out long strands of the Pune’s hair, tugging at them. — What about me? she said, in a fake-pleading voice. — Don’t I do good? Haven’t I done good to you, ungrateful boy?
— As I’m sure you’re aware, Jim went on, — European Community sanctions prohibit the export of any military hardware to South Africa.
— But you export them to an Italian firm, which sells them on.
— Don’t be simple-minded. It’s not the manufacturers who make the wars.
— That’s debatable, said one of Peggy’s friends from school.
— Decent jobs and economic stability are more use to them than your pure fucking thoughts.
— I don’t have any pure thoughts, said the Pune. — Only fucking ones.
Peggy started pushing at him, to roll him off her lap. — Go away, you’re being horrid. I don’t like you very much tonight.
— You sound just like my mother.
— I’m beginning to sympathise with your mother.
Kristen stepped backwards out of the light, into the shadow of the oil tank: no one saw her vanish. From her new perspective, the purple clematis flowers growing thick on the trellis loomed suddenly momentous against the party-glow; the grown-up talk dropped into blurred lively noise, as if she had crossed a frontier. On her side of it was the night-quiet, a bird blundering in the bushes, a dank breath of earth, a rattle when her skirt caught on the shiny laurel leaves. She hadn’t brought out her torch; when she turned to follow the path back past the bike shed into the wood, the blackness at first was like a wall preventing her. After a few moments’ staring, it melted into grey, seeped into by the light of the party behind. Imagining being blind, with her eyes strained open and her hands feeling out all round her, lifting her knees high in case she stumbled, she made her way cautiously past the shed and then on into the denser dark of the wood. Tom would have remembered the torch.
At one point she pitched forward over a root, then crawled for a few yards on her hands and knees, her own breathing sounding in her ears as if it was someone else’s. Arriving at the back end of the greenhouse, she had to feel her way round to the front through clumps of nettles; the door when she pulled it open screamed like an animal. At the end of all these trials, it seemed against the odds that the candle would really be where she had left it, or that she would have thought to bring matches; but she put her hands on both of them easily.
The flare of light was a miracle. Careless of hot wax, she planted the lit candle in a pot of crumbled earth; the flame reflected liquidly on glass panes, enclosing her in the blackness outside. Her hands and knees were muddy and the skin on her legs was coming up in red welts from the nettles. She sat on the tiled floor in a thin layer of chill rising from the earth beneath, distinct from the held-in day’s warmth under the glass; warily she swallowed a mouthful of the sherry, then ate one slice of lemon fridge cake, although she had eaten some already, in her bedroom. She felt herself going through the motions of the adventures a child might have – in an artificial, nostalgic way, because she wasn’t really a child any more. You couldn’t be, once you were thinking about what you were doing as childish.
Once, she and Tom had pushed aside the heavy lid of the well and dropped stones into it, to see if it was deep: it was deep enough to fall into, but there hadn’t been any water in it, only a blind disappointing bottom of debris whose colour had decayed to ro
tten brown. The effects of the sherry began to flood through her; she swallowed more mouthfuls, tasting through the sweetness the plastic lip of the toy flask. When she became aware of the noise of someone approaching through the wood, it took her a few moments to feel properly afraid: at first she thought it might be Tom, back from his friends’ house, but the sounds were too indefinite, too blundering. It could be anyone, any stranger or madman. Guiltily she shrank: she shouldn’t be out here alone, burning a candle.
Someone called out for her. — Kristie?
It wasn’t her father either.
She waited, to be sure, for the Pune’s shape to detach itself from the surrounding darkness and lurch into view in the greenhouse doorway. — It had to be you, he said. — I saw a light shining through the trees. I was drowning, wandering round in the dark out there.
The greenhouse was invaded by his awkward height and limbs; she felt an outraged pang for her lost loneliness. He dropped to sit cross-legged opposite her in the narrow space. — It stinks of booze in here. What are you drinking?
— Sherry.
— Extraordinary. Is there any left?
Silently she handed him the flask. He drank from it, wiped the top, then handed it back as if for her turn; she was almost indignant that he didn’t query whether it was sensible for her to be drinking, at her age. After a moment’s hesitation she swigged deeply.
— This is nice, he said. — I never noticed there was a greenhouse before.
He got out his Golden Virginia tobacco tin and began rolling up by candlelight, not an ordinary cigarette but one of the druggy ones Tom specially resented, with something sprinkled in it out of a little bag. (— Our parents could be arrested, you know, Tom said, — for allowing this to go on under their roof.) The drink’s strong effect coiled powerfully in Kristen, pushing out of her mouth in words a thought she hardly knew she’d had.
— I suppose you and my mum are having a lovers’ tiff.
