by Anna Hope
1987–92
They are suspicious of each other. They know of each other’s existence because they got the first and second highest marks in English last year, and these things are talked about. But they have not shared any classes together, until now. And here they are in the same classroom. Top set English, Miss Riley. They are twelve years old.
Miss Riley has long curly hair and glasses like Su Pollard from Hi-de-Hi! She passes round a poem by Thomas Hardy. Who would like to read first? She looks over the faces. They are in one of those prefab classrooms, the mouldy ones built after the war.
Hannah and Cate do not, this first day, put up their hands. They watch each other like snipers, each waiting for the other to make the first move. When the poem has been (badly, haltingly) read out loud by someone else Miss Riley lifts her face to her class.
Right then. Cate? Can you tell me what this poem is about?
She is not particularly pretty, Hannah thinks, this girl who got a full 5 per cent more than her or anyone in the English exam – 97 per cent. She has a round face. In an era in which girls wear their socks ruched around their ankles and hoist their skirts above the regulation height, Cate wears her skirt at the ordinary length. Her hair is cut to just above her shoulders and she is a little bit overweight. But she has something about her that Hannah doesn’t have the words for, something going on under the surface, some force.
It’s about love, says Cate. And losing that love. He loves his wife and she’s gone.
Good. Anyone else?
Hannah raises her hand. Her hand feels hot.
Yes, Hannah?
She’s dead, she says.
How can you tell?
She’s dissolved to wan wistlessness. Heard no more again far or near. She’s a ghost.
Yes.
But he’s feeling bad. He’s feeling guilty about something. You can tell by the metre, by the way it stumbles, changes in the last stanza. It doesn’t end well.
Excellent! Miss Riley beams.
And Cate, from the other side of the room, stares at this triumphant girl, her long dark hair, her eyes intent, like a bird’s.
The game is on: from that day forth they are locked in vicious, ecstatic rivalry.
After a certain time has elapsed – half a year or so – they go on a school trip together and end up sitting side by side in the coach on the way to Styal Mill. They get along surprisingly well. The next weekend Hannah stuns Cate with an invitation to tea, and Cate surprises Hannah by accepting.
Hannah’s house is small, a semi on a council estate off the Parrs Wood Road. It has a long garden out the back. It still has a hatch between the tiny kitchen and the dining room, through which Hannah’s mum passes oven chips and Angel Delight. Hannah’s room is tiny – smaller than her brother James’s, even though he is younger. The injustice of this makes Hannah fulminate.
Her parents go to church and Hannah is expected to go too, every Sunday morning. She often takes books to read in the sermon. After she tells Cate this, Cate lends her a copy of Forever by Judy Blume, backed in William Morris wallpaper and made to look like an innocuous book of poems. I’ve turned down the corners of the good bits, she says.
Next Sunday, while the vicar drones on, Hannah opens it and reads:
He rolled over on top of me and we moved together again and again and it felt so good I didn’t ever want to stop until I came.
Hannah grins, and begins to understand that the force she saw running beneath Cate’s mild exterior, although she does not have the words for it yet, is subversion. She is a girl with a rebel heart.
Cate’s house is an Edwardian semi in Didsbury, on the other side of the Parrs Wood Road, with four big bedrooms and a garden. She has a mum and dad and an older sister, Vicky, who is seventeen and stalks the landing like a wrathful deity.
Cate’s mum is a nurse, pretty and round. She has long red hair which falls around her face and freckles scattered over her nose. She laughs a lot. She makes her own bread. Hannah has never eaten homemade bread before. Cate’s dad is tall and has a beard, and when he is around he plays music in the living room; he has a collection of old vinyl and plays Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Cat Stevens. Sometimes, after tea, they put on music and dance in the kitchen. Cate’s mum is a really good dancer. So is her dad. Sometimes they dance close to each other, sometimes they laugh and kiss. Hannah has never seen parents touch each other before. Cate’s sister, if she ever witnesses this display, rolls her eyes. For fuck’s sake, she says. Leave it out.
Compared to her own parents, Cate’s mum and dad seem young.
Cate’s family vote Labour. Hannah’s vote Conservative.
Cate’s family have Zola and Updike. Hannah’s have Reader’s Digest and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Cate’s dad does something to do with engineering. Hannah’s dad works at Christie Hospital as a porter.
Cate’s family have olive oil. Hannah’s have salad cream.
When they are thirteen Cate’s mum becomes ill. She loses weight and loses her hair and experiments with scarves. Sometimes she comes to pick Cate up at the school gate but Cate wishes she wouldn’t. She wishes she could walk straight past the strange thin woman with the headscarf and the earrings and the lipstick, who is trying too hard, whose teeth are too big in her face.
After a while, though, her mother gets better. Her hair grows back, though a little differently, a little more thinly than before. Cate’s dad still plays music, but they don’t dance in the kitchen any more.
When they are sixteen Cate puts a picture of Patti Smith on her wall, a life-sized poster of the cover of Horses. She got it at the Corn Exchange in town. They go to Affleck’s Palace and search the musty rails for jackets like Patti’s. Hannah actually suits the look better, as she has no breasts to speak of yet. All that summer, on Monday nights they tell Hannah’s mum she is having a sleepover at Cate’s and they take the bus into town to the Ritz, where they jump up and down on the bouncy dance floor to the Pixies and Nirvana and R.E.M. Cate wears tutus and DM boots and stripy tops with frayed edges. Hannah wears long patchwork skirts and DMs. If she pushed it any further, her mum would have a heart attack. As it is, when she applies kohl pencil her mum nearly has a fit.
They go to a small town to the west of Paris on their French exchange and come back speaking halfway decent French. They walk on Saturdays, arm in arm in Fletcher Moss Park, where they practise speaking French in loud voices. They test each other on past exam questions.
How is Emma Bovary responsible for her own downfall? Or do the nature of provincial society and the people around her make her unhappiness inevitable?
Their English teacher that year is a dedicated, energetic woman who believes in social mobility, in empowering girls. She suggests that they both apply for Oxford and she puts in extra time in the evenings, tutoring them both for the exam. They enter a new era of competition, spurring each other on.
One Saturday morning Cate’s mother falls, crumpled over herself in the cereal aisle in Asda. She goes back into hospital and Cate stays at Hannah’s, on a camp bed in Hannah’s room. At night, when Hannah is asleep, Cate lies beneath the duvet and looks at Hannah, cocooned in her sleep, in her security, and feels horror waiting for her in the dark.
She goes to see her mum in the hospice the week before she dies. Her mum’s eyes are enormous. She seems to take up so little room on the bed. The room smells sharp and thick at the same time. Oh, her mother says, when Cate comes into the room. It sounds as if someone is pressing her stomach, letting out all the air. Cate walks slowly towards her. She thinks this is probably the last time she will see her mother. Part of her wants to laugh; she puts her hand to her mouth and presses it to stop the laugh from coming out.
Here you are, says her mother as she gathers Cate to her. Here you are.
After the funeral Cate’s sister Vicky moves into her boyfriend’s house. And now it is just Cate and her father, rattling around at home. Her father gives up cooking, and Cate often forgets to eat. She
stops writing essays for the extra Oxford classes. Hannah is simultaneously horrified, appalled for her friend and, in a small uncharitable place, relieved.
They apply for their colleges. Since neither they nor their teacher know anything about the university, they choose them randomly – Hannah hers because it looks the most beautiful, Cate hers because it says it takes the largest number of state-school pupils each year. They take the exam. They are both invited up for interview, one dank weekend in November. Hannah is given a room looking over a quadrangle, which is misted in the morning and makes her heart rise with the beautiful future that seems to breathe from its walls. Cate is in modern accommodation round the back of the dining hall. Her window backs on to a ventilation shaft and the smell of cooking infuses her room.
They get their letters a month later, just at the start of the Christmas holidays. They call each other, as they have arranged they will. They open the letters. Hannah looks down at hers in disbelief.
Cate looks at hers. Shit, she says. Oh shit.
2010
Cate
‘Morning, my little soldier!’
Despite the early hour, Alice is her usual immaculate self: gilet, hair, ironed jeans. ‘How’s my little soldier doing today? Are you ready for our date?!’
Tom grins and flaps his hands and makes eyes. ‘Good,’ Cate says. ‘He’s good. We’re good.’
‘Have you got a kiss?’ Alice swoops on Tom. ‘Have you got a kiss for Grandma?’
Tom lunges delightedly for his grandmother. ‘Terry’s in the garden.’ Alice takes Tom into her arms. ‘Terrible wind last night.’ She nods through the window to where Sam’s father is wrestling gamely with a leaf blower. The three of them regard him for a moment in silence. Terry seems to be creating as much mess as he is managing to contain.
‘I never know quite what they do,’ Cate ventures. ‘Those things.’
‘They clean up the leaves,’ says Alice.
‘Ah. Yes.’
Terry looks up, sees them and manages a wild wave, while Tom kicks and bucks in Alice’s arms. ‘He wants to be with the big boys,’ says Alice. ‘I’ll take him out for a bit. And we’ll see you later.’
Cate swallows down her horror; her tiny son, that stupid machine. ‘Whatever you think.’
‘I think,’ says Alice crisply, ‘that it will do him good.’
Cate waits at the bus stop but no bus comes, and so she walks down the hill into town, the cathedral ahead of her. She has five hours to fill – five hours in which she can do anything, within reason. She could take the train to Charing Cross, go to the National Portrait Gallery. Look at the Sickerts. The Vanessa Bells. Walk up St Martin’s Lane, through Covent Garden, go to the Oxfam bookshop at the bottom of Gower Street, buy a cheap paperback and sit in one of the squares with it, begin to feel the old contours of herself.
She knows what she should do – go home, wash tea towels and Babygros and chef’s whites. Fold clothes. Unpack boxes. Finish moving into her house. But she does none of these things – instead she walks, her feet finding the old Pilgrims’ Way, in through the city walls, down Northgate, Palace Street.
At the cathedral entrance the inevitable line of foreign students and international Christians wait to go inside. Cate ducks into Pret, where she buys a coffee and a pastry and sits in the window looking out at the half-timbered heart of the city. There are stalls selling tourist tat, baseball caps with LONDON emblazoned on them. Sweet shops selling gobstoppers and rhubarb and custards with 1950s lettering over their fronts. Red-jacketed young men cruise the crowd, selling punting trips, touting for business. All the ersatz thrills of Merrie twenty-first-century England.
Her eyes are caught by a small stall amidst the throng, a banner along the front reading: PROTEST TUITION FEE HIKES. VOTE 10TH DECEMBER.
A young woman stands in front of it, handing out leaflets, her hair long and dyed pink. Cate watches the way she talks to passers-by. Her small frame wrapped in a large jumper. The animation on her face. She reminds her of Lucy.
Despite checking her emails almost hourly, Cate has heard nothing back from Hesther yet.
When she has finished her coffee, Cate goes outside, approaching the stall shyly.
‘May I have one?’ she says to the young woman with the pink hair, pointing to the leaflets.
‘Of course,’ smiles the young woman, taking one and pressing it into Cate’s hand. ‘Do you want to sign the petition too?’
‘Sure.’ Cate leans in and does so, and then, suddenly self-conscious, and with no real idea of what to do next, mumbles a goodbye and moves away, joining the queue for the cathedral. It is ten pounds to go inside. She baulks, but pulls out her wallet and pays with her card. A cobbled road leads to the cathedral entrance and the building itself rears ahead. She goes inside, to the nave, where the roof soars above her and sweet-faced tabard-wearing guides stand selling guidebooks. She moves away, past the racks of candles, over to the far wall, reading the inscriptions on tombs set into the stone. They are a maudlin scrapbook of colonial misadventure: young men dead at Waterloo, in India, in West and South Africa, all the way up to the greatest hits of the First and Second World Wars. Tattered black flags hang from the walls. Somewhere in the distance is the sound of an organ. She stops before an oval-shaped monument, tomb of a certain Robert Macpherson Cairnes, Major of Royal Horse Artillery, ‘taken from this sublunary scene June the 18th 1815 aged 30’.
This humble monument
erected by the hand of friendship
is a faithful, but very inadequate, testimony
of affection, and grief which no language can express,
of affection which lives beyond the tomb,
of grief which will never terminate
till those who now deplore his loss
shall rejoin him
in the blest realms
of
everlasting peace.
All these boys. All these mothers. All that grief. And here, no apology for any of it. It would be nice if somewhere, even on a tiny little plaque, it read: Sorry. We got it wrong. All that colonialism and empire and slaying our children. All that God. Lands grabbed. Resources plundered. Patriarchy upheld. Church and military hand in hand.
Who’s a little soldier then?
She wants her son back. Wants to run up the hill to Harbledown and snatch him from his grandmother’s arms. It is suddenly difficult to breathe. She hurries out through the side door into the cloisters, where the wind bites and the grass of the quadrangle is a deep green. She sinks to a stone bench carved into the wall and takes great gulps of air. And it comes to her, why she doesn’t like this city: it reminds her of Oxford – the churches, the tourists, the grass on which you cannot walk. Even down to the punts, generations of students taking to the river, grasping for the Brideshead dream.
Evelyn Waugh was a fascist and a sentimentalist. Discuss.
She hated that fucking book.
There are footsteps on the flagstones. Cate looks up, sees a figure moving towards her, walking quickly. She is wearing a large man’s coat, a beanie hat pushed down on her head, but Cate recognizes her from the playgroup and pulls back against the stone wall – she does not want to be seen today, but it is too late.
‘Oh,’ says Dea. ‘Hey, hi! Cate, isn’t it?’ She smiles, stretches out a gloved hand. Her face is tired, wind-blown. ‘I didn’t recognize you at first. Without the baby. Where is he today?’
‘With my mother-in-law. In Harbledown.’
‘That’s good.’ Dea puts her head on one side. ‘You don’t look sure. Is that good?’
‘Oh, no – it is. It’s just the first time that I’ve left him. It’s all a bit strange.’
‘I know what you mean,’ says Dea, nodding. ‘I have the day to myself on Tuesdays. I look forward to it all week, and I’m supposed to be working, but I just …’ She pulls a face.
‘What’s your work?’
‘Church art. I’m writing a book. But it’s taking me forever.’
/> ‘What sort of church art?’
‘Some of it right here.’ Dea points to the roof and Cate looks up. At first she doesn’t know what she is looking at but then, ‘Here’ – Dea takes her by the elbow – ‘see that Green Man? And the mermaid?’
It is hard to see at first, but as Cate looks closer the details emerge – not just Green Men, but coiled dragons, lizards, shepherds with pipes. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Yes. You’d never know they were there.’
‘Exactly! I like to think of them as little nodes of subversion. Pagan deities holding up the buttresses of the established church.’ Dea looks back. ‘Did I actually just say that? Sorry.’ She gives a rueful smile.
A chill wind is funnelling around the cloisters. ‘It’s cold,’ says Dea. ‘Shall we go back to mine? It’s just around the corner. We can have some tea.’
‘Sure.’
They walk out of the cathedral, past the stall manned by the students, where Dea stops for a second to speak to the pink-haired girl. Cate hangs back, watching as the girl proudly shows Dea the list of signatures.
‘She’s one of my students, or she was before I took maternity leave,’ says Dea as she rejoins Cate. ‘We’re asking our Vice Chancellor to speak out about the tuition fees, but I don’t think she will. It’s interesting, though – all these kids. They’re really taking a stand. I’m proud.’
Dea’s house is close, just off the high street – tucked in a terrace of similar small houses. The front door is painted a muted grey-green; beside it, a window box blooms with late crimson flowers. The narrow hall is a tangle of coats and scarves. Dea leads her through into a kitchen at the back, where the house opens up and becomes light-filled and welcoming. A tall black woman with a loose Afro stands at the stove.
‘Hey, Zo.’ Dea unwinds her scarf. ‘This is Cate. I met her at Playmaggedon. That terrible group I told you about. And I just bumped into her in the cathedral.’
The woman turns. Everything about her is long: long limbs, long neck, long fingers laced around a mug. She is surpassingly beautiful. ‘Nice to meet you, Cate, I’m Zoe.’ Her accent is American; Cate thinks she hears the sounds of the south. Dea wanders over to the stove and kisses Zoe. Cate watches Zoe’s hand briefly linger on Dea’s back.
