Down the Figure 7

by Trevor Hoyle

  ‘Can you see all right?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘Yeh. Just about.’

  At one point they went over a big stone and she fell forward against him, her arms around his waist, her fingers laced together across his stomach. Near the Arches, where the track narrowed and petered out into the long grass, they had to dismount. It was dark here, the lamps of Gowers Street some distance away.

  ‘What time do you have to go in?’ Terry asked.

  ‘What time do you?’

  ‘Oh … anytime,’ Terry said with an indifferent shrug, though he knew it must be getting on for nine o’clock. They walked between the garages, Terry wheeling the bike, and it was as if there was electricity in the air. They both could feel it. Terry’s mouth was parched and he could hear his own breathing: he wondered whether he ought to say or do something: he wanted the walk between the garages to last forever. Margaret said:

  ‘Let’s stop and have a smoke.’

  That was something else he liked about her. She had a quiet even voice that didn’t offend the ear. It spoiled some girls, he reckoned, no matter how pretty, that their voices were flat and ugly.

  He leaned his bike against a garage and lit a cigarette. He passed it to Margaret; she was resting the back of her head on the creosoted wood, her face upturned, and in the glow of the cigarette he saw that her eyes were looking towards the sky where a few stars glimmered behind the drifting patches of cloud. Should he do it now? Was this the moment?

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ Terry said.

  ‘I don’t much. Muriel smokes like a chimney.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘She pinches her mam’s Park Drive.’ Margaret inhaled once more and passed the cigarette back to Terry. As he took it in the darkness their fingers touched and it was as though a current had been transmitted between them. He drew the smoke in deeply and the dizziness expanded inside his head, making his skull tight. He couldn’t let anything spoil it now, throwing the unsmoked cigarette into the grass, saying in a strange croaky voice, ‘Margaret,’ as he kissed her satisfactorily on the lips and felt her hands on his shoulders. While it was happening he couldn’t believe it was happening – until the kiss was finished and she said in a single breath in the darkness, ‘Will you go with me?’

  Then it was true. He was actually here behind the garages on Gowers Street with Margaret Parry and he had just kissed her and she had asked him to go with her. Terry kissed her again and this time her mouth was open and he thought his senses would explode. It had been worth throwing nearly a full Woodbine away, and he didn’t even care any more what Shap had done, or might have done, or said he’d done. If Margaret Parry was his, and wanted to go with him, then he could knock Shap and his gleaming quiff into the middle of next week.

  ‘Will you?’ she said more urgently.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve liked you a long time.’

  ‘I’ve liked you.’

  ‘You promise to go with me. Honest and truly.’

  ‘Honest and truly.’

  ‘Swear on the Holy Bible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve got to say, “I swear on the Holy Bible”.’

  ‘I swear on the Holy Bible.’

  Margaret took his hands and placed them on her small developing breasts. She said, ‘Do you want to open me blouse?’

  Terry nodded dumbly.

  ‘Well, do you?’ Margaret said impatiently, unable to see him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go on then. I’ll let you.’

  Terry did as he was told and cupped her breasts in his hands; it was an instinctive gesture, almost mechanical, because he was still floating in a delirious dream. She pressed her mouth against his in a long hard kiss and he felt the first stirring of genuine desire. Her hand was touching his thigh. She hooked her fingers under his trouser-leg; it was as though a light had been switched on in his brain and he suddenly realised what was happening. The warm curved objects in his hands became Margaret Parry’s breasts and the tickling sensation on his thigh Margaret Parry’s fingers.

  ‘Let’s lie down,’ Terry said.

  ‘I’ll get me skirt dirty.’

  ‘In the grass.’

  ‘It’s too wet; I have to go in soon anyway.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘In a few minutes I have.’ She said, ‘You’re still going with me aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Terry, smiling to himself in the darkness. This is what it felt like to be holding a girl’s breasts. It was a nice feeling. He said truthfully, ‘I think you’re great. You’re the best-looking girl round here.’ He pressed and kneaded and massaged her breasts, enthralled by their softness and shape and texture.

  ‘Have you done this to other girls?’ Margaret whispered.

  ‘Some,’ Terry said. ‘One or two.’

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘I don’t think you know them.’

  ‘Who though?’

  ‘Just some girls.’

  ‘Were they as nice as me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘I swear on the Holy Bible.’

  Margaret’s hand was inside his trouser-leg. ‘I can feel your thingy.’

  ‘I know,’ Terry said, dry-mouthed.

  ‘Does it feel nice?’

  ‘Mmmggghhhnn.’

  ‘Why does it go all stiff?’

  ‘Um. Dunno.’

  ‘Doesn’t it stick out of your pants when it’s like that?’

  ‘No. Yeh. No,’ Terry said, finding it difficult to concentrate on the conversation. This was how he dreamed it would be but it was still too good to be true.

  ‘Aren’t boys funny?’ Margaret said. She paused. ‘It’s wet at the end. Is it wee?’

  Terry swallowed and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s stuff… that comes out.’

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just when somebody holds it?’

  ‘It does, yeh; sometimes.’

  ‘It’s slippery, isn’t it?’ Margaret said, interested and yet detached. She removed her hand and fastened her blouse. ‘I have to go now. Will you be coming round tomorrow?’

  ‘I have to deliver the papers first. Give us a kiss before you go in.’ When she had kissed him he said, ‘I think you’re fantastic, Margaret, honest I do.’

  They walked holding hands towards Gowers Street and said goodnight on the corner under the gaslamp. Before she left him Margaret said anxiously: ‘You still want to go with me, don’t you?’

  ‘If you want to go with me.’

  Terry rode home along Entwisle Road, a great bursting bubble of happiness inside. He had no words to describe how he felt, except to say that he was joyously, helplessly, hopelessly in love.

  VE Day

  IN THE WEEK THAT A COACH PARTY FROM DENBY went on a trip to the Festival of Britain (Terry mithered and mithered to go but his dad said it was a waste of money, which in the language of the Webb family meant he hadn’t the cash to spare but wouldn’t admit it) Teddy Travis, Danny’s big brother, ran into a wall on his Norton at sixty miles an hour and was killed outright. What was left of him they buried in the local cemetery, which by a black quirk of fate was situated on Bury Road: there was a saying that sooner or later, whatever happened, you’d end up on Bury Road. Teddy Travis had managed it – sooner rather than later – at the age of seventeen and three days.

  The school holidays began in the middle of June. While everyone in 4A was looking forward to four weeks of freedom, the last days of term were tinged with sadness because some would be returning to Heybrook (having failed the eleven-plus) and others, the clever buggers, would not. And it was very emotional, on the very last day, parting from Mrs Butterworh, who treated every member of the class to a cream cake and a bottle of pop; in return they presented her with a Real Leather writing case and a potted plant, the collection organised by Terry and Betty Whe
atcroft, who also went to buy the presents.

  Ever since he had been told that she fancied him, Terry had been casting sly sidelong glances in Betty’s direction, hoping that a covert look of understanding would flash between them. Sometimes he imagined that it had, though being together in the same class for five years had hardened their relationship into a mould of friendly yet innocuous intimacy that was hard to break. He had always liked her, but now he saw her not merely as a friend but as a potential conquest. Since the episode with Margaret Parry he had cast himself in the role of the sexy-eyed predator whose fixed burning gaze was enough to have the girls queuing up behind the garages one by one to gratefully receive his expertly lethal attentions.

  Strangely, however, Betty Wheatcroft failed to respond to his burning eyes and petulant lower lip. She once asked him, solicitously, if he was sickening for a cold, to which Terry replied, his face an indignant shade of beetroot, that even if he was it was nowt to do with her.

  ‘I only asked’, Betty said, ‘because your voice sounded funny. Have you got a sore throat?’

  ‘No, I bloody haven’t,’ Terry answered sullenly, at a loss for a suitably crushing reply, and ran off to join Alec and Male playing Desert Rats in a corner of the schoolyard, vowing never again to waste his time with stupid soppy boring girls.

  Leaving Heybrook – and he assumed it was for good – put Terry in one of his introspective moods. The first two or three days of the holidays he spent lying in bed till nearly dinner time, listening to the brook trickling and gurgling at the bottom of the backyard, watching the golden trapezium of sunshine imperceptibly changing position and shape on the flowered wallpaper. From outside came the cries and screams of kids playing, and these sounds plunged him into a deep and painful sadness that was baffling, going over in his mind the tiny store of memories he had accumulated.

  Terry thought it strange that even at his young age he should feel a yearning pang of nostalgia for things that had happened only last summer or the previous winter; it was almost as if, once experienced, these events and happenings turned into little romantic playlets inside his head, and he held them intact, their colours and sounds and smells still bright and fresh and real – more real now than then, in fact, because with the progress of time they had gained the quality of permanence, of being an essential part of the paraphernalia he would always carry with him.

  He could recall with perfect clarity, for example, the day they had hung the Union Jack out of the front bedroom window, little pouches of sand stitched to the corners to keep it hanging straight, to celebrate the war ending. There were flags all along the street and lines of bunting and everyone seemed to be smiling, even Mr Heap, who had given Terry a boiled sweet. People seemed to spend all their time standing on doorsteps or out in the street in groups or going in and out of each other’s houses.

  Some time after this – weeks or months, Terry wasn’t sure – it was VE Day, when once again the flag with the little pouches of sand was propped on its pole through the bedroom window. His dad, as usual, hadn’t wanted to go into town that evening, so Terry and his mam got dressed up in their best clothes and walked to the town centre, stopping outside Fashion Corner on Drake Street, which was lit up with hundreds of fairy lights. He must have been five at the time, chubby-cheeked, big-eyed, with fair wavy hair cut short at the sides and long on top, a lock of it hanging over his left eye. (He knew the details by heart from the artificially-tinted photograph in the silver frame above the fireplace.)

  The fairy lights had gone straight into his head and stayed there, standing on the pavement outside the Champness Hall, his neck craning upwards and his eyes dazzled with twinkling pinpoints of light – though the words they illuminated on the long white streamer had been lost and forgotten, probably because at the time he was too young to read them.

  Then the scene changed to the town hall square, jam-packed with hundreds of people standing in row upon row outside the Empire Cinema and Flying Horse Hotel, watching those in the main square dancing to a band whose tinny strains came and went on the breeze. At first he had been unable to see, until a man hoisted him up onto his shoulders and he had a giant’s-eye-view of soldiers, sailors, airmen and men in ordinary suits swirling in a huge circle with women wearing dresses cut severely square, with vee-necks and padded shoulders. The women’s stiff waved hair never altered a fraction, despite the breeze and movement and giddy excitement.

  The two visible faces of the town hall clock looked impassively over the motley, over the bunting and the strings of lights suspended from the iron lamp standards: an impression so firmly embedded in Terry’s mind that whenever he saw the town hall clock it reactivated the memory of that night in the square when the crowd danced and sang; Barbara had wanted to join in but she couldn’t leave Terry on his own or with strangers, no matter how friendly, and had to make do with singing along and moving her feet to the rhythm. After what seemed like hours they walked through the thinning crowd and Terry was handed a greasy bag of fried potatoes by an anonymous reveller which he and Barbara ate on their way to catch the No. 6 back to Cayley Street.

  He pondered all this, lying in bed watching the trapezium of sunlight moving down the wall. Recently he had started keeping a diary and one of the entries, even though he himself had written it, bewildered him: ‘My mother and father are people’. They were individuals, separate from himself. The world hadn’t been created the day he was born. Incredible as it might seem, Joe and Barbara had met and married and had a life together in the limbo of non-existence before he was thought of. Of course they must have existed before he was born. The trouble was, he couldn’t conceive of a world which didn’t contain him, Terry Webb. No matter how hard he thought about it, his imagination failed to conjure up a credible picture of what it must have been like. It seemed to have the same level of reality as a scene in a Biggies book.

  *

  ‘Are you going to feed your pigeons or not?’ Barbara said when he eventually made it down to the kitchen and washed the daydream from his eyes.

  ‘I’ve no food left.’

  ‘There’s some black peas you can give ’em. In that jar on the top shelf.’

  Terry sometimes wondered what he would do without his mam. He said, ‘Was it in the paper about Teddy Travis?’

  ‘What paper?’

  ‘The Observer. Alec Bland said it was in about the funeral.’

  ‘Then it must have been.’ Barbara went into the front room and came back with the hearth-rug which she threw over the clothes-line in the backyard and started to beat. Dust swirled and eddied in the shaft of light slanting through the back door.

  ‘Are we going away this year?’ Terry asked from the step.

  ‘Going away where?’

  ‘Auntie Hylda’s in Wales.’

  ‘I don’t know; you’ll have to ask your father.’

  ‘We never have a proper holiday,’ Terry said in a peevish sulking voice. ‘Alec Bland and his mam and dad are going to Scarborough.’

  ‘Alec Bland’s mother can afford it,’ Barbara said enigmatically.

  ‘Why can’t we then?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ his mam said, whacking the rug with gusto so that dust rose up in a cloud over the lavatory roof. ‘You’re too young.’

  ‘You’re always saying that.’

  ‘Because you are.’

  Terry sighed. ‘Can I have two bob, mam?’

  ‘What do you want two bob for?’

  ‘Some of the lads are going up to the Lake this aft and they’re buying crisps and lemonade to take with them for a picnic.’

  ‘What about your spence?’ She paused, wiping her forehead with her pinny.

  Terry shook his head. ‘I’m skint.’

  ‘Run an errand to Wellens’s, I need some bread and potatoes. Then I’ll see how much I’ve got left.’ Barbara carried on beating the rug. ‘It’ll have to last you all week though, I can’t spare any more.’

  Terry did his errand, not at all con
science-stricken about the lie he had just told. None of the Gang, as far as he knew, were going up to the Lake that afternoon, but Margaret Parry was. He’d promised to meet her outside the Post Office on the corner of Gowers Street at two o’clock and instead of catching the 8 A bus they planned to walk to the Lake through Belfield council estate and over by Clegg Hall, an ancient ruined manor house that had the reputation of being haunted.

  After dinner he spent a long time combing his hair and polishing his shoes, all the while a sluggish flutter of excitement mounting in his chest. Barbara said, ‘What are you titivating yourself for?’

  ‘You moan when I don’t clean me shoes,’ Terry said defensively.

  ‘Who’s going with you, Betty Wheatcroft?’

  Terry snorted and pulled a face, as though he found the idea ludicrous and offensive. ‘I told you, just some of the Gang.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl, Betty; thoughtful and quiet.’

  Terry had a last look at his quiff in the mirror, kissed Barbara on the cheek, made sure he had the two-shilling piece safe in his pocket, and ran out of the gate into the back-entry where Doreen Hartley was playing three-balls against the door of the dust midden. She stopped her game when she saw him and shrank back, standing close to the wall.

  Terry ran past her, his eyes agleam, and said in a hoarse demon’s whisper: ‘Don’t worry, kiddo, I’m not going to stuff you.’

  A Walk to the Lake

  HE HAD TO WAIT A FEW MINUTES BEFORE Margaret arrived, and to pass the time he studied his dim reflection in the Post Office window amongst the pencil sets and notepads and tubes of glue. He tried to see what his smile looked like, but in the glass there was just a black gap that made it look as if he didn’t have any teeth at all. At least his ears didn’t stick out like Male’s did, and he didn’t have a gob-full of protruding wet teeth like Roy Pickup. He wished, though, that he was an inch or two taller. Margaret was the same height and it would have been great (he visualised it in his mind) to look down on her as they walked along and put his arm protectively round her shoulders.