by Jo Verity
Bing caught her arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
We’re seventeen. We can do what we like.
‘Okay.’
While their friends were buying pop and crisps, they collected their coats and slipped out of the hall. After the sweaty fug, the air was shockingly cold but Miriam’s uncontrollable shivering had as much to do with nerves as with the temperature. Barely speaking, they hurried past Presto, keeping going until they reached the railway station. The café in the ticket hall was still open, picking up trade from late travellers and those with nowhere to go on a cold Saturday night.
‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘I’ve a confession to make,’ she said. ‘I don’t actually like coffee. Can I have tea?’
He smiled. ‘You’re funny.’ He waved away the coins she offered. ‘You get them next time.’
Next time.
‘Before you say anything,’ he said when he returned, ‘I know about Frankie.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s that bloke from the coffee bar, isn’t it? The one with the stupid ponytail.’
She’d got the wrong end of the stick. She was here to lend a sympathetic ear.
‘I went to meet her from work,’ he said. ‘He was in the shop with her. She spotted me through the window. And d’you know what she did?’ He paused. ‘She kissed him.’
Had anyone else been the injured party, she might have excused Frankie. But Bing – it wasn’t on.
‘That’s a rotten thing to do,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what comes over her sometimes. I’m sure she’ll come to her senses—’
‘She doesn’t deserve a friend like you.’
She blushed and looked down. An oily film had formed on the surface of her tea. The station announcer’s tinny voice was reeling off a list of stations.
‘Actually it’s fine,’ he said. ‘You see I went to the shop to tell her it’s over.’
He was no longer wearing the sticking plaster and she could see stitches, like three black spiders, running through his eyebrow. The blemish made his face more beautiful.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve met someone else.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘Can you guess who?’
‘Barbara?’
‘No, silly. Not Barbara. You.’
Instead of catching the bus, they walked. Bing positioned himself on the edge of the pavement, between her and passing traffic. Her father did that when he walked alongside a woman and it made her feel grown up. She was no longer the least bit cold because Bing had his arm around her, holding her close. They talked non-stop. Shop window displays. The chrome on a monster motor bike. An old man walking four podgy dogs. Litter. Whether chips tasted better with ketchup or brown sauce, which led naturally on to the question of vinegar. She liked it, he didn’t.
When she could put it off no longer, she said, ‘What’s Frankie going to say.’
‘About…?’
‘Us. What’s she going to think?’
‘Us has nothing to do with her. She’s made it crystal clear she doesn’t give a toss about me. She can’t expect me to hang around on the off chance she’ll change her mind.’
He was right. But Frankie Slattery wasn’t the most rational person in the world.
‘Shouldn’t we at least wait until you’ve spoken to her?’ she said.
‘Don’t worry. I was always going to be a stepping stone to someone else.’
‘So why did you put up with her?’
‘The same reason you do. She’s funny. Disrespectful. Dangerous. It’s thrilling at first but you can have enough of that sort of thing.’
As they neared the house, she grew apprehensive. Light was filtering through the closed curtains of the living room. Her parents would be watching TV and glancing at the clock on the sideboard. She had to be in by ten-thirty and her father was a stickler for punctuality. Danny used to joke that if he didn’t get in five minutes early, he got a ‘rollicking’ for being late.
They stopped in the deep shadows of the evergreens that framed the front gate. ‘I’d better go in,’ she said. ‘I don’t want my father coming out to look for me.’
‘Now you’re scaring me,’ he said.
He pulled her towards him and kissed her, gently at first and then more insistently, his tongue probing deeper and deeper. A tingle, barely noticeable at first, spread through her body, building and building until it she could think of nothing else.
Next day, Sunday, Miriam heard nothing from Frankie. Neither was she in school on Monday. She’d mitched off before but she’d never been out of touch for this long – especially baffling knowing what she’d been planning for Saturday night. But surely if Frankie had disappeared or anything terrible had happened to her, Mrs Slattery would have been in contact. Most days, the two girls dawdled homeward together, going their separate ways when they reached St John’s Church. Today she stopped at a phone box and dialled the Slatterys’ number. If Mrs Slattery answered she risked a tricky conversation about Frankie’s supposed night at her house. But she needn’t have worried because there was no reply.
Frankie turned up at school on Tuesday with a note ‘from her mother’. Apparently she’d been laid up with period pains – the good old standby. It wasn’t until they were walking home that Miriam had a chance to question her. ‘Where have you been? I was getting worried.’
‘After the party we went back to his flat. Then on Sunday we drove to London. In. His. Car. It was brilliant. His friends live in a squat. We smoked pot and drank vodka and listened to music. It was the best thing ever.’
Miriam couldn’t see beyond the practicalities of Frankie’s two-night absence. ‘What did you tell your mother?’
‘That your parents were going away, and they’d asked me to stay at yours to keep you company. She thinks the sun shines out of your bum so she was fine with that.’
Miriam gasped. ‘That’s outrageous.’
Frankie ran a few yards ahead then turned to face her. ‘So… do I look different?’
For months Frankie had been preoccupied with losing her virginity. Reading about it. Talking about it. Fantasising about it. All the same, Miriam was shaken by her decision to surrender to a stranger, even if he did have a car and a ponytail.
‘Not really,’ she said.
‘Well I feel different. And that’s because I am different. I’ve been liberated.’ Seizing her satchel by its strap, Frankie twirled around, the buckled bag inscribing a horizontal circle. ‘Sex is a million times better than I imagined.’ She twirled a few more times then let go, releasing the satchel to fly through the air and land with a thump in the middle of the road.
Miriam had spent the best part of two days worrying about divulging her news. But Frankie’s recklessness infected her and out it spilled. ‘Bing’s asked me to go out with him.’
Disbelief flitted across Frankie’s face. ‘And?’
‘And I said I would. That’s okay, isn’t it?’
She grinned. ‘It’s more than okay. It’s perfect.’
They were interrupted by the blast of a car horn as a motorist swerved to avoid the satchel. The din attracted the attention of several pedestrians who watched Frankie saunter into the road, pick up her bag, raise her middle finger to the driver, and saunter back again.
‘Let’s give the nosey old biddies a fright,’ she said and plonked a swift, rough kiss on Miriam’s lips.
Initially her parents’ disapproval of her friendship with Bing amounted to nothing more than a negative undertow. She put this down to their reluctance to accept that she was old enough to have a real boyfriend. Paul Crosby standing in their hall waiting for her, and her flushed cheeks when he brought her home, were proof that she was no longer their ‘little girl’. She hoped that the more they saw of him, the more accepting they would become. He was hard-working, courteous and dependable. He was going to be a doctor, for goodness sake. What more could they ask? But as the weeks and months passed, their resistance stiffened. He ra
rely made it further than the front door where he was met (usually by her father) with frostiness. It got so that she was on pins before he came to collect her and, to protect him from their hostility, she waited for him in the porch.
His parents, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more welcoming. Julia and Angus Crosby were doctors with a laissez-faire approach to domestic chores, homework, bad language, hairstyles, bed- and mealtimes – matters which obsessed her parents. The family lived in a grand but ramshackle house which hummed with interesting people doing interesting things. If she happened to be there when a meal was in prospect, a place would be set for her at the vast kitchen table. (Never a tablecloth which she found daring and thrilling.) No one interrogated her about school or her plans for the future. No one batted an eyelid when she and Bing went up to his bedroom. The same went for his sisters and their boyfriends, when they were around. She wondered whether, immersed in illness and death, his mother and father understood how important it was to live in the now.
‘Don’t you feel like doing mannish things sometimes?’ she said.
They were in Bing’s room. The door was open, a babble of voices drifting up from the kitchen where a game of brag was in full swing.
‘Mannish?’ he said. ‘Is that even a word?’
‘You know what I mean. Drinking. Telling dirty jokes. Chatting up birds. Seriously. You’re surrounded by women. Me. Your sisters. Doesn’t it get you down?’
‘I love it,’ he said, ‘although now you come to mention it, I feel like doing a mannish thing right now.’
He closed the door and switched off the light. ‘Come here, you.’ His arms folded around her and she breathed in the smell that was becoming as familiar to her as her own. Tangy shampoo. Lanolin from his sweater. A hint of sweat – not unpleasant.
They kissed, the ache she’d grown to crave spreading to her most secret places. Next, as though by accident, his hand brushed the front of her sweater. Back and forth, back and forth, causing her breasts to tingle and her heart to race. (All the time, kissing, her skin getting hotter.) Easing up inside her sweater, his practised fingers undid her bra. He stroked her back, keeping her waiting until, when she thought she would scream, his hands moved around to cup her breasts whilst his thumbs circled her nipples until they were hard and sore and she felt faint. This was their ritual and she had become addicted to it.
‘I love you,’ he murmured and pulled her down onto the bed and they carried on, pressing against each other, their legs entwined and she felt him hard and hot through his trousers. Suddenly he was sneaking his right hand inside the waistband of her skirt, past her suspender belt, moving down, tracing the lacy border of her knickers. Edging closer and closer.
Once upon a time, before she’d experienced this visceral sensation, when sex was something baffling, she’d made up her mind to save ‘below the waist’ for the man she married. Once upon a time, that had seemed so clear-cut, so easily achieved.
‘Stop,’ she murmured, pulling away.
He stopped, his hand resting on her thigh.
‘I want to. Honestly I do,’ she said.
Retrieving his hand cautiously as if removing the fuse from a ticking bomb, he rolled away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’
‘You don’t have to explain, Mim. It’ll happen one day. We’ll know when the time’s right.’ He reached for her hand. ‘Frankie and I… we didn’t go all the way.’
She pictured Frankie’s satchel soaring through the air. ‘I know and I’m glad.’
A muffled roar came from the card-players downstairs. Hard to believe there was a world beyond this room. She turned on her side. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and she could make out his profile and, on his bedside table, his alarm clock, the hands clearly visible against its white face. Twenty-to-nine on Saturday evening. The image of her parents, settling down to watch television, flashed, uninvited, into her head.
In the spring and without warning, Danny turned up. For a while they were all on their best behaviour. Her mother fussed, offering to wash his clothes, churning out plates heaped high with what she insisted were his favourite meals. Her father was more guarded, clearly waiting to see why his son had chosen this moment to return. Conversations skimmed the surface, veering away from anything that might prove provocative. With Miriam he was overly polite. The five years between them, a chasm when they were children, should have mattered less now but it seemed as unbridgeable as it had ever been. She longed to get him alone and ask him where he’d been and what he’d seen. But he spent a great deal of time in his room with the door shut and, when he came downstairs, her parents were always around.
They made it through four whole days before the first barney. Her father asked Danny whether he went for regular dental check-ups. Harmless on the face of it, but perhaps not the thing to ask a son who’d left home because his parents were ‘suffocating’ him with their attention. The row progressed rapidly from the bad impression caused by decaying teeth to the folly of smoking, Danny coming out with, ‘What’s the point of making old bones? Look at you two. Are you happy?’
The second row began as small talk over their evening meal. An elderly neighbour had died a few months earlier and, that morning, an estate agent’s board had appeared in the front garden.
‘We’ll be getting new neighbours,’ her mother said.
‘I hope they’ll fit in,’ her father said. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’
Danny looked up from his plate. ‘Trouble?’
‘Well, this is a respectable neighbourhood. The wrong type of people could be detrimental to house prices.’
‘Define “the wrong type of people”,’ Danny said.
‘You know quite well what I mean. People who play loud music. Or have hordes of children.’
‘Funny cooking smells,’ her mother murmured.
‘Ahhh. I get it. You mean foreigners.’
‘Well. Outsiders don’t understand how we do things.’
Daniel shook his head. ‘Given this family’s history, I’d have thought you’d be more understanding – compassionate – towards outsiders as you call them.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I do. That’s the problem. You’re a bigot, Dad.’
Her mother sniffled into a handkerchief and her father looked as if he might have a seizure. Miriam felt sick. She wanted to scream at them to stop it. Instead she ran upstairs and shut herself in her bedroom.
Later that evening, Danny knocked her door. She was lying on her bed trying (and failing) to focus on Middlemarch.
‘Can I come in?’ he said.
She sat up, pushing her skirt down to cover her bare knees. ‘Of course.’
‘How’s it going?’ He drew up a chair, as if she were an invalid, he a visitor.
‘D’you mean school? Or…’
‘I mean life. How’s your life? Are you happy?’
Nothing for days and suddenly he was asking if she were happy.
She drew her legs up and clamped her arm around them. ‘I’m okay. Well. Okayish.’
He raised his eyebrows, encouraging her to continue.
‘They expect too much of me,’ she said. ‘Not academically. That’s not a problem. It’s like they messed up with you and now they’re pinning their hopes on me.’
‘Hopes of what?’
‘Turning into a carbon copy of them, I suppose.’ She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on her knees. ‘I wish I hated them. It’d make things so much easier.’
‘Poor Mim. I’m sorry I landed you in it.’
‘And now you’re going away again, aren’t you?’
‘I can’t stay here. You can see that, can’t you?’ He was silent for a few seconds and she could see he was making his mind up about something. ‘Can I trust you with a secret?’
She looked up. ‘You’re not dying are you?’
He gave a sad smile. ‘We’re all dying. The important thing is how we live. We
have to be true to ourselves.’
‘Frankie’s always telling me that.’
‘Then you should listen to her.’
‘It sounds a bit selfish to me. What if being true to yourself hurts the ones who love you? That doesn’t seem right.’
‘If they really love you – you, not their idea of you – they’ll want you to be happy.’
‘Mum and Dad do love you. They were devastated when you left. Mum cried for days. I know they’re quick to criticise. Especially Dad. But you can’t expect them to approve of everything you say and do.’
‘I’ve never asked them to approve. But they’ve never even listened to my side of things. You and I don’t exist merely to fulfil Dad and Mum’s ambitions. It’s not selfishness, it’s self-preservation.’
More than anything she wished he would lean over and hug her or squeeze her hand, or do something physical to prove that he was her brother and that he cared.
‘So what’s this big secret of yours, anyway?’ she said.
He dug in his shirt pocket and brought out a photograph. It showed a woman with olive skin and lustrous black hair. She was holding up a chubby, laughing baby.
