‘Well. You’re wrong. You should know me better,’ I said. ‘But I never thought you’d go around telling everyone.’
‘I didn’t say I’d told everyone. I said I’d told my best friend.’
I’d chewed away at all this like a dog picking at the scraps of meat on a bone, shaking it and gnawing it till it was dry and tasteless.
‘I suppose you’ve told your mother as well,’ I’d said. We were walking apart, our hands thrust in our pockets, not looking at each other. All I wanted to do was to hold her, and I didn’t know how.
‘As a matter of fact I haven’t. She’s not that sort of mother. I wish she was. You know how awkward she is, Chris. Ruthlyn tells her mother everything.’
‘So I suppose she knows now, too.’
‘I shouldn’t think so. Of course she wouldn’t. There’s no need for her mother to know about you and me. Chris…’ Helen had stopped and put her hand on my arm. It was like a spark of electricity. ‘Please don’t be mad at me.’
‘I can be what I like.’ Actually, now the danger was passed, I realized I was beginning to enjoy my anger a little bit. I wasn’t quite ready to give in.
‘You don’t own me, you know, just because of what we did together,’ Helen had said then, so quietly that I could hardly hear her. ‘You have no rights over me at all.’ And it was that quietness that had been like the touch of icy hands on me, as if she was so much older than me and knew so much more than me. I felt as if I could slip away from her, as easy as anything, and that she would let me.
And now it looked as if it was all happening again, as if we were walking on cracked ice that threatened to spin us away from each other.
‘What’s up with you these days?’ I asked her.
‘Nothing.’
‘I seem to be upsetting you for some reason.’
‘Nobody’s upsetting me. Just go home or something, Chris. Don’t keep on at me.’
I shrugged and kept on walking, holding my head up, whistling slightly as if I didn’t care.
‘It’s not you, Chris. I started the day wrong. I shouldn’t have come out, but we said tonight, so I came.’
I wanted to comfort her, and to be comforted by her. I wish we could have started the evening again. I glanced at her and she looked away. Her face was cast bronze in the light of the street lamps, and her eyes were gleaming. We had come to her road, big houses set in their own gardens, all the windows lit, the curtains closed to. I thought of all the families carrying on their particular lives, all the houses in the world, people loving each other and hurting each other, people closing curtains round themselves.
When we came to her house she left her door open and I followed her in. The house smelt of paint. Helen slipped her shoes off and I remembered to wipe mine on the door mat. I never do that in our house.
Ted Garton, her dad, was singing loudly to himself in the kitchen. He reduced it to a self-conscious hum when we went in, as if he was practising a new tune.
‘How’s the guitar coming on, Chris?’ He always says that. He never really knows what to say to me. It’s a good job I play guitar.
‘Not bad. Wish it was an electric, though.’
‘When are you going to join my band, eh?’
‘Can’t do jazz chords. They’re too hard.’
I was watching Helen as she stood by the window, lifting her hair and letting it fall again on her shoulders. I could see her reflected in the glass. She’s miles away, I thought. Where are you, Nell?
Mr Garton grunted and sat down, smiling at us both, ready to let us chat to him. We didn’t talk. Helen still stood by the window lifting and lifting her hair, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I thought my staring at her must make her turn round to me again. I felt helpless. Ted Garton cleared his throat a few times and at last seemed to realize that he was in the way. After a bit he hummed loudly again and went into the back room and began to play the piano. Soon he would be so absorbed in his playing that he wouldn’t hear his wife Alice if she came in to complain, and the members of his band would have to be let in by whoever else was in the house because he’d never hear the doorbell.
‘Talk to me, Helen,’ I said. I went over to her and turned her round, tilting up her chin so I could look at her. She clamped shut her eyes and set her mouth in a firm, hurt line. I wanted to kiss away the hurt, whatever it was, but she just bowed her head down again, and her mother came in. In the brief look that I caught before I let go of her I saw that she was afraid.
Helen’s mother had flecks of white paint on her hair and her nose, her glasses and her hands. She was wearing an old shirt of her husband’s. She sank down into a kitchen chair and slipped off her shoes. One of her stockings had a toe hole in it, and she curled her big toe under to hide it.
‘I’m tired out,’ she said. ‘Put the kettle on, Helen.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I said. Helen stayed where she was, staring out into the night. I had to squeeze past her to get to the sink.
‘If you think there’s a dinner waiting for you in the oven, you’re mistaken, my girl,’ said Mrs Garton. ‘It was help yourself night tonight. I’ve been busy.’
‘I don’t want any,’ said Helen.
‘I’ll do you some beans if you like,’ I offered.
She shrugged. ‘I’m not hungry.’
She sat down opposite her mother, and began systematically shredding the corners of a straw table mat till her mother leaned across and snatched it from her.
I put two cups of coffee on the table and went back to the drainer for my own. Helen pushed hers away from her.
‘And what’s wrong with that?’ her mother demanded.
‘I don’t want it,’ said Helen. ‘I don’t like coffee.’
‘First I’ve heard!’ I laughed, surprised. ‘You drink it by the gallon!’
‘I didn’t ask for it in the first place.’
‘Take it through to your father, then,’ said Mrs Garton. ‘It’ll wake him up out of his trance, maybe, before that gang of his arrives.’
Helen sighed and did as she was told. Mrs Garton eyed me over the rim of her cup. I felt uncomfortable. It was as if she was trying to probe into my mind. I always felt awkward when I was left on my own with her.
‘Had a tiff?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Looks to me as if you have, whether you know it or not,’ she said. ‘I’m always having tiffs with Ted, and he never seems to notice either.’ She yawned. ‘Men! Insensitive bunch, the lot of you.’ She swivelled round to look at Helen as she came back in. ‘I think you’re sickening for something,’ she said. ‘Your eyes are watery. You might be in for a dose of flu.’
‘I think I might be,’ Helen agreed. ‘I think I might have an early night.’
‘You do,’ said Mrs Garton, satisfied. She nodded at me. ‘Looks as if you’ve got your marching orders, young man.’
I shifted uncomfortably on my high stool. ‘I’ll just finish my coffee first.’ They were ganging up on me.
She went over to the sink and squirted washing-up liquid on to her hands. She scrubbed at them viciously with a green scratchy cloth. ‘You heard the girl,’ she said, her back to us both, hunched and vigorous over the sink. ‘She’s tired. It’s all this school work. You can’t have a social life and study for A–levels. I know that. You shouldn’t go dragging her out in the rain like this. She could have watched that eclipse of the moon on the news, for goodness’ sake. You take up too much of her time, Chris. She’s got enough on with her school work.’
I looked anxiously at Helen, but she wasn’t giving me any help. She seemed to have slipped back into her day-dreaming. The cracks in the ice had deepened, and she was floating away from me fast, fast, over black water. ‘Right,’ I said at last. Everything was wrong with me all of a sudden. My hands had grown too big to stuff in my pockets, even. ‘I think I’ll be off, then.’
Helen followed me into the hall. The door to the kitchen was still open, and I could just see Mrs Gart
on leaning back slightly in her chair, as though she was straining to hear us above the sound of her husband’s piano playing. I felt desperate, as if I was seeing Helen for the last time. ‘Come outside a minute,’ I said.
We closed the door slightly. Helen put her arms up to loop my neck and put her head against my chest. My heart was lurching like a bird.
‘What’s wrong?’ I whispered.
‘Nothing. Nothing, honestly.’
‘You’ve been so strange. I feel terrible. I thought you were going off me.’
She let out her breath. I stroked her hair, a little comforted by the warmth of her against me.
‘You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if you were going off me? If there was somebody else?’ My lips were sticking together with nervousness.
‘There’s nobody else. Don’t be daft, Chris.’ Her voice was so low that I could hardly hear her.
‘Then what is it?’
A car pulled up in the drive and two men got out, slamming the doors noisily. They were both carrying instrument cases.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered.
‘Aye aye, it’s a kiss and a cuddle, is it?’ said one of them, a big bearded man in his late forties. His beer belly squashed up against us as he squeezed past. ‘Love’s young dream. Takes me back a bit, that does.’
She was soft and warm in my arms again.
‘Don’t let us disturb you! Just carry on!’ said the other man, winking at me.
‘We won’t,’ I murmured. I was wishing them miles away.
‘I might be in for a touch of flu, like Mum said.’ Helen pulled away from me. ‘I’ll stay off school tomorrow.’
‘I’ll come round,’ I said.
Another band member roared up on his motor bike.
‘Don’t,’ said Helen. ‘Meet me after school on Wednesday.’
‘That’s years away,’ I said, fool for her that I was. ‘I can’t wait that long.’
I urgently wanted to say things that no one else should hear but her mother was coming up the hall, her paint shirt draped over her shoulder. She leaned against the doorway, arms folded, watching the motor bike man. He propped his bike up on its stand and took a pair of drumsticks out of the pannier.
‘How d’you fit your drum kit into that?’ she asked.
‘My car’s packed in,’ he told her. ‘I’ll be banging pans tonight, Alice.’
‘That’ll please the neighbours, anyway.’ Alice laughed and held open the door for him. She tapped Helen on the shoulder. ‘Thought you were having an early night, Madam,’ she said.
‘Wednesday, then,’ I said. Helen squeezed my hand and followed her mother and the little drummer back into the house. But I stood for ages watching the closed door, and the curtains being pulled across the window where the men were practising, and the light going on upstairs in the room where Helen slept. She didn’t look at me once, I thought. I’ve been out with her for four whole hours and she hasn’t looked me in the face once. What is it, Nell?
When I got home my dad was in the cellar. He came up, wiping his hands on his boiler suit. He was carrying a mug that he’d made. ‘Don’t you think this is a lovely design, Chris?’ he asked.
I hardly looked at it. ‘Marvellous,’ I said.
My dad looked disappointed. ‘It’s not that bad. What’s bugging you?’
‘Nothing.’ I dug my hands in my pockets and found my mother’s letter there, as cold and shocking now to my touch as a handful of melting ice-cubes. ‘I’ve got an essay to do for tomorrow.’ I ran upstairs and sat on my bed to re-read the letter. Helen was right. My mother had taken four weeks to answer and hadn’t even asked me how I was. She hadn’t bothered to make contact with me for eight years; birthday and Christmas presents had come as money paid into my father’s bank account. She’d made a point of telling me how busy she was, how full and successful her life was, how much she had in common with her natty bloke, as if I cared. I wished I hadn’t written to her. She didn’t need me, that was quite obvious. What a fool I would have felt if I had decided to go to her house. What on earth would we have said to each other?
‘Hello, Mum. Hello, Joan, I mean. I’m Christopher.’ I tried it out loud. I tried to sound casual and pleased. I tried to sound like Tom, deepening my voice. I did a falsetto bit for my mother. ‘ “My, you’ve grown. Look Christopher, these are my new crampons. This is my zoom lens.” “They’re nice, Joan.” “This is Don.” “Hello Don. Hi, Don. How d’you do? You’ve got a lot of hair on top! What a lot of books, Don!” ’
I screwed up the letter and chucked it in the waste paper basket. Well, if she didn’t need me, I didn’t need her.
I kept trying to ring Helen. She never seemed to be around. Her mother always said, ‘She’s working, Chris,’ as if she was trying to make me feel guilty for disturbing her. She does work hard, though. Both her parents have always seen to that. I think they have ambitions for her; I think she has for herself, too. I wondered what my mother expected me to do with my life. I don’t suppose she even thought about it.
The next few days brought gales, worse than any I could remember. When we were watching television the carpet kept lifting up in the middle as if it was riding on the waves of the sea. The cat watched its breathing centre, tail twitching, back arched to pounce. During the night we had to drag Guy’s mattress into my room because his bedroom window came bursting away from its hinges, even though we’d tried sticking it down with Sellotape and Blu-tack. I quite enjoyed having Guy in my room again. We sat up in bed till all hours talking. Guy was excited about the gales.
‘You know what’s brought this lot on, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s the greenhouse effect. We can conquer space and invent computer chips and now we’re affecting the climate too! We’re proving how powerful we are.’
‘Don’t talk rot, brat,’ I told him. ‘You don’t know anything. We’re proving how powerless we are. Our planet is set on self-destruct, and we haven’t got the power to stop it happening. Everything’s controlled by fate. It’s all been planned.’
‘Like a computer program?’
We settled down for sleep, listening to the wind moaning like a lurking beast round the houses in the street. During the night the top of our chimney toppled off and crashed down the roof tiles and on to the road. I woke up sweating. I realized that I’d been dreaming about Helen and that when the crash had come she had just rolled away from me and broken into little pieces of bone, and I’d run after her and crouched down to pick up all the splinters in my hands. All I’d had to wrap them in was a blue coat with velvet buttons.
I rang her up before I left for school. The dream was still haunting me like the images of a film.
‘Are you all right?’
There was a long pause at the other end.
‘Are you?’ I asked, scared.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What d’you mean? What’s the matter?’
‘Meet me after school. I’ll have to go. Mum’s in a right mood with me.’
She put the receiver down quickly and I ran out, late. My heels scrunched the pieces of chimney-pot on the pavement. I booted them into the gutter and ran on, head into the wind. Helen wanted to see me again. That was all that mattered.
Her school was a couple of miles away from mine, and it was uphill all the way. I sprinted there. By the time I came to the railings there was no breath left in me. I leaned against the wall, panting, till my breathing was back to normal. There was no sign of Helen. There was hardly anyone around by now, but I guessed she would be waiting for me in the sixth-form centre, out of the wind. I felt self-conscious, walking up the drive of someone else’s school. I’d been there for football matches when I was younger, and soon after I’d started going out with Helen I’d come to watch her in a concert. Actually, it was when I was watching her in the show that I’d realized that she was different from any other girl I’d ever known. I expected to feel embarrassed, watching her dancing on the stage in front of everyone, but that wasn
’t how I felt at all. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I just focused on her, as if she was the only one on stage. I felt as if she was dancing just for me. I think she was. I can remember the exact moment when I thought that. I sat in the audience smiling all night. That wasn’t something I’d bragged about to Tom and the others, either. After the concert she’d come running up to me, full of herself, and I decided then to tell her.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ I’d started off, daring, and she had swirled away from me and back again.
‘And I’ve got something to tell you,’ she had said. ‘The Head of Sixth Form wants me to do A–level Dance. No one’s ever taken it in our school before!’
She had swirled off then, as excited as a little kid, and I caught her excitement and started dancing after her, making out I was all long legs and big feet and elbows poking out all over the place. I was laughing out loud, and so was she.
‘What did you want to tell me?’ she shouted at me.
‘I can’t remember. It wasn’t important.’ I remember brushing my hair out of my eyes and grinning at her, teasing. It would keep. I had a feeling that I would have a lot of chances to say it. Besides, for the moment I had no idea whether I’d get the words out without making a fool of myself.
‘How many words is it?’ she had asked, as cocky as a sparrow.
I told her, ‘Three.’
And she had laughed up at me and said, ‘Three back, Chris.’
She wasn’t in the sixth-form block. Her friend Ruthlyn was there, leaning underneath a portrait of the last headteacher and whistling jauntily. When she saw me she waved and strolled casually over to me, smiling her wide smile, swinging her schoolbag like the pendulum of a clock.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘What d’you mean, what’s wrong?’ Ruthlyn’s smile broadened. ‘Why should anything be wrong?’
‘I can tell by your face. Where’s Helen?’
‘Oh, Helen. She’s gone home.’
Dear Nobody Page 3
