by Lissa Evans
‘Hi, Dad. Just to say I’m off to the parents’ evening at college. I’ll phone you when I get back, if it’s not too late. Bye.’
‘Grandad out on the razz?’ asked Tom, wandering into the living room with his forearm deep in a packet of cornflakes.
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Iris, replacing the receiver. ‘He’s not very communicative these days.’
In the past, her father’s rare evening outings had been referred to and planned around for weeks beforehand, adjustments made to his schedule, early meals shopped for and cooked, the oven timer set to ring to remind him, the bus timetable checked for potential problems; now he just switched on the answer machine (a brand-new, spur of the moment purchase, never previously mentioned as a possibility – Iris had almost dropped the phone the first time she’d heard it) and grabbed his coat. Last week he’d even cancelled the unalterable Sunday visit, explaining cagily that he ‘had something on’. It was so long since Iris had had the day to herself that she hadn’t known what to do with it; it had been like getting a self-assembly gift with no instructions. He had not mentioned Mrs McHugh’s name, or referred – even obliquely – to that Monday night, six weeks ago, but knowledge of it infused every subject and muddied every conversation. Far from having to prise him off the phone after twenty minutes, Iris found that the calls dribbled to a conclusion in less than half that time.
‘Maybe he’s got a bird,’ suggested Robin, supine on the sofa. Tom cackled and wandered out again, leaving a scattering of Golden Nut flakes behind him.
‘Hang on,’ said Iris, ‘I want to finish this list.’
‘Done it,’ said Tom. ‘I’ve told you everything I know.’
‘You haven’t. Who’s your Geography teacher? I’m seeing him first.’
He slackened his jaw and pushed his tongue into his lower lip, so that he looked like one of the unluckier recipients of the Hapsburg gene. ‘Mithtuh Lomakth,’ he said, thickly. Robin snorted.
‘Say it properly.’
‘Mr Lomax. That’s how he speaks. I’m just helping you to identify him.’ He resumed the impression. ‘Thuh Nile ith uh thlathic exthampul of uh delthuh thormathion. You’re starting to laugh, Mum, I can see you.’ He held out his hand. ‘Goodth evthning, Mith Unwin, ith fabbuluth to thee you.’
Iris fought down a grin. ‘That poor man.’
‘You’re laughing,’ he taunted.
‘No I’m not. Anything else I should know about him?’
‘He fancies the French exchange teacher and she’s only twenty.’
‘Dirty old man,’ added Robin.
‘Anything relevant, I meant.’
Tom shrugged. ‘He said I could get an A if I put some work in.’
‘You didn’t tell me that!’
He shrugged again.
‘Boffin,’ said Robin.
‘When did he say that?’
‘Last year.’
‘And you didn’t tell me?’
‘I forgot.’
‘Oh Tom,’ she said, exasperated. He grinned and wandered away with his hands in his pockets.
‘Come back. Is that everything?’
‘Thath all folkth,’ he said, disappearing into the bedroom.
She made a note on the rough timetable and turned to Robin. ‘What about you? Anything more I should know?’
He looked glumly at the floor, scratched his stubble and said something inaudible.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’
‘I said “not that I can think of”.’
‘Haven’t been expelled or anything?’
‘Nah.’
‘And just in case I bump into Stephanie’s mum, are you still going out with her?’
He hunched his shoulders. ‘Not really.’
‘Not really?’
‘Nah.’ He stood and stretched hugely, drumming the ceiling with his fingertips in the annoying way that both boys had adopted. She’d made them repaint it last year, but the grubby prints were beginning to build up again. ‘I’m gonna have a bath.’
‘All right. I’ll see you later.’
He paused in the doorway. ‘How are you getting back?’
‘Alison Steiner’s giving me a lift.’
He nodded, apparently relieved, and padded off to the bathroom. Within a few seconds the antiquated water heater had started with a thud and a roar, to be immediately drowned by a pounding bass line. The luminous yellow splashproof radio which now stood on the cistern, and which had instantly become the boys’ favourite possession, had been a birthday present from the fast-talking Leon.
‘Why’s there red paint all over the handle?’ Iris had enquired when the boys brought it home.
‘We don’t ask questions like that,’ Tom had said.
When the bus doors opened the wind surged in and inflated her skirt like a crinoline. The air outside was filled with whirling leaves and she zipped her anorak up to the neck and started to pull on the knitted gloves she’d bought at her father’s church bazaar last spring. They had been a particularly poor purchase – pale fawn, scratchy wool, the fingers so full of bobbles and unexpected loops that it took a great deal of wiggling dexterity just to put them on – and she had only bought them out of sympathy for the home-crafts stall holder and her sad piles of lumpy garments and asymmetrical teddy bears. Mrs McHugh had been there that afternoon, of course, running the refreshments area and dispensing simultaneous rivers of tea and chat while charging an unheard-of twenty pence for slices of coffee cake. ‘All in a good cause,’ she’d chirped, repeatedly, as the coins clanged into the tin.
Turning the corner from the bus stop, Iris found that she’d shoved one of her fingers straight through a missed stitch in the palm, and she peeled the gloves off and dropped them into the nearest bin.
The walk from the bus stop to Broderick Gale Sixth Form College (motto: Learn and Achieve) normally took ten minutes, but assisted by the wind, which thrust her along in a series of skittering runs, she turned the corner into Uckfield Close in record time – noting, as she blew past, that the usual F had been appended to the road sign by some felt-tipped wit. The college was a jumble of seventies prefabs clustered around a solid chunk of finest municipal Victoriana, originally the home of the Water Board. In the local history section of the library, Iris had once found a photograph of it being built. A line of dusty-aproned masons had been assembled by the photographer, and stood shoulder to shoulder, arms folded, looking like a row of bouncers. Their current equivalent was the pencil-thin figure of the vice principal (a ‘tragic hippy’ according to Tom) who stood just outside the double doors, swaying in the wind and extending a hand to visitors as if grabbing a lifeline. ‘Good of you to turn out on such a wild night,’ he said to Iris, his shoulder-length hair whipping about his head like a sunburst. Wondering what her own must look like, she went into the toilets to repair the damage.
She had combed her hair into submission and was wiping leaf mould off her shoes with a wad of damp loo roll when Alison Steiner came in, closely followed by a heavily made-up woman who went directly into one of the cubicles. Alison darted over to Iris and hissed urgently in her ear, ‘Do you know who that is?’
‘No. Who?’
‘Tory local councillor. She’s got a daughter here – Melina Scott. Do you know her?’ Iris shook her head and Alison pantomimed amazement; they had known each other for fourteen years – since their sons had shared an infants’ class – but she was still astonished that Iris lacked her own perpetually swivelling social radar. ‘You must, she’s a Goth. Dead-white face, dead-black hair, head-to-foot black clothes, earrings.’ Iris shook her head again, and Alison waved a hand impatiently and continued in her habitual telegraphese. ‘Never mind. Apparently the father’s bankrupt – that’s the reason she’s here and not at Roedean. Overreached himself in property and crashed with the market. Ha bloody ha. Just desserts. Anyway, she’s part of the –’ The toilet flushed and Alison straightened up, raised her voice to its normal, commanding level and seamlessly
changed subject, ‘…car’s got a battery problem. It’s been a real bore. I recharged it just before I came out so it should be all right, but I might need a bit of a push. Warning issued.’ She nodded briskly at Mrs Scott as she emerged from the cubicle, and then leaned towards the mirror and examined her face, as bare of make-up as a scrubbed knee. ‘Would you believe,’ she said, ‘that you could still get blackheads at my age?’
The woman, radiating suspicion, applied another coat of lipstick and fluffed her hair before shutting her handbag with a noise like a pistol shot and stalking out.
‘Banzai!’ said Alison. ‘Nearly got us. She’s part of the rightwing caucus that wants to close the library.’
‘Oh!’ Iris was stung into a response, and found herself directing a venomous if pointless look at the door through which Mrs Scott had exited. She felt deeply proprietorial about the library, as though it were only her own visits that kept it open.
‘There’s a public meeting about it. Tuesday evening,’ said Alison, groping round in her shoulder bag and extracting a sheaf of orange flyers. ‘Want to come?’
‘I go to Dad’s on Tue –’ Iris paused mid-weekday.
‘Sorry?’
‘Yes, all right. Why not?’ She took a flyer.
Alison gave her a sharp glance. ‘So how is your father? Is he still seeing Mrs –’
‘McHugh,’ supplied Iris. ‘Yes, I think so. His social life’s certainly picked up.’ To her own ears her voice sounded dry and strangely spiteful.
‘Good,’ said Alison briskly. ‘Then you won’t be quite such a slave to his routine – isn’t that what you’ve been wanting?’
Iris was silent for a moment. The present situation hardly tallied with the controlled, incremental nudges towards freedom she’d had in mind. ‘In a way,’ she said.
Her friend looked at her speculatively, head cocked. ‘I was thinking about you the other day – I took a seminar on attitudes to senile sexuality.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ said Iris. ‘Please.’
‘Fascinating subject,’ continued Alison, inexorably, her voice slipping into lecture mode. ‘Most younger people, even those who’d consider themselves quite liberal, find it difficult to talk about the topic without facetiousness. We completely deny our parents that aspect of their lives. I’m as guilty as the next woman. We assume our teenagers are at it the entire time – obviously I’m not guilty of that, Lawrence, God love him, being the boy he is – but when it comes to our parents –’
‘I cannot talk to my father about his sex life,’ said Iris flatly.
‘But that’s exactly the standard response!’ Alison leaned towards her, eyes burning with proselytizing zeal. ‘Why not break the mould? Why not give it a try?’
‘Because…’ Unbidden, images floated into her mind of her mother smuggling sanitary towels into the house as if they were contraband, of her father clearing his throat during a hymn as a way of avoiding having to sing the phrase ‘lo! he abhors not the Virgin’s womb’, of watching a wildlife programme dwindling into a white dot after oestrus cycles were mentioned, of her father’s face when she stepped off the train from Cardiff carrying rather more than a suitcase and a copy of Middlemarch. ‘Because I was eight and a half months pregnant before he could bring himself to mention mine, that’s why.’
They emerged together into the corridor and then separated, Iris to the scrum of the arts and Alison to the echoing canyons of the science department, under whose aegis her son Lawrence was taking five A Levels. According to the twins, science students were pitiful freaks, friendless fashion-voids with bottle glasses and personality disorders. They were vastly unimpressed that Lawrence (of whom this was actually a pretty fair description) had already gained a place to study Physics at Cambridge.
‘Only complete saddoes go to Cambridge,’ as Tom had explained to her yesterday. She had been attempting to engage him, for the thousandth time, in a serious talk about his future, but the conversation had quickly degenerated into the usual facetious meanderings.
‘I might go travelling for a bit.’
‘But you haven’t got any money.’
‘Oh, I could grape pick or something. Or juggle.’ Both he and Robin had recently, and effortlessly, acquired this skill and could keep three oranges up in the air for what seemed like hours. ‘Do you know I can do it with my eyes shut now?’ He’d picked up a Spurs mug and smiled dangerously.
‘But even if you take a year off you could apply for college before you go. Then you’d have something to come back to.’
‘Not everyone goes to college, Mum. You didn’t.’
‘I did.’
‘Well, you didn’t finish it anyway.’
‘No, but if you look at most successful –’
‘Richard Branson didn’t.’
Iris had groped for a response. Your father went to college, she’d wanted to say and he’s probably got a mansion and a yacht by now. Though she didn’t know that, of course; it was just an image, part-filched from Eudora Welty, that sprang to her mind like a pictogram whenever she thought of him: Conrad standing in front of a Plantation House, the sheltering trees heavy with Spanish Moss, a horse pawing the ground at his side, a speedboat parked on the Bayou beyond.
‘You’ve never liked this mug, have you?’ Tom had said, dispelling the vision. He’d tossed it into the air and caught it with one hand.
‘Seriously, Tom. This is terribly important.’
‘OK.’ He’d put the mug back on the table and folded his arms, frowning purposefully. ‘Serious conversation. What do you need to know?’
‘Have you thought about courses?’ she’d said, doggedly.
He’d let the pause hang. ‘… Not really.’
‘The form has to be in by the end of November.’
He’d looked startled. ‘This November?’
She’d opened her mouth to protest and he’d crowed with delight. ‘Kidding!’
Robin hadn’t thought about courses either, but that was because he was almost certain he was going to fail his A Levels.
‘But your summer papers were fine. You got a B and two Cs, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, but everyone says the real exams are different. I might go to pieces. Or totally freeze.’ He had picked up the stapler on his desk and idly clicked as he talked, watching with apparent fascination as the wasted staples bounced onto the floor. ‘I’ll probably have to resit them. Loads of people do – it’s not a big deal like it was in your day,’ he’d added, reassuringly.
‘But isn’t it worth looking through a couple of prospectuses. Just in case? Find out if there’s something you really fancy doing?’ She had been aware that she was wheedling, and she’d tried to inject a note of calm reason into her voice. ‘It wouldn’t do any harm to put in an application, would it?’
‘Well… I might take a year off anyway. Even if I pass.’
‘And do what?’
‘Travel a bit. Or just… you know. Chill.’ He’d wiped a weary hand across his forehead. ‘There’s been a lot of pressure this year.’
‘But what would you live on?’
‘Well, Tom thinks we could do juggling. You know, in the street, for money.’ He had put down the empty stapler and picked up a paperweight. ‘D’you want to see me catch this with my eyes shut?’
Mr Lomax, the speech-impaired Geography teacher, turned out to be a handsome man in his forties, with a slightly prognathous jaw and a minimal lisp. Iris introduced herself.
‘Ah, Tom’s mum.’ He assumed the look of smiling indulgence that she had become used to over the years, from the various authority figures on whom Tom had exerted his indolent charm. It always amazed her, the ease with which he strolled through life. He had none of the qualities that she had been brought up to associate with success – he wasn’t brilliant or conscientious or passionate or concerned or single-minded or dynamic or even punctual, in fact he expended very little effort in any direction; if he had a skill, it was that of benign flippancy.
&nbs
p; Mr Lomax steepled his fingers. ‘Well, I expect you know what I’m going to say.’
‘Lazy.’
‘Yup, he really doesn’t put the hours in. It’s a shame, because he’s quite capable of original work. When he can be bothered.’
She nodded resignedly. ‘I’ve heard this so many times.’ Tom usually completed his homework over breakfast, spooning in Weetabix with one hand while writing an essay with the other, at a speed which indicated that he was putting down the first thing that came into his head. Any criticism of this habit, indeed any attempted discussion of exams, revision, timetables, course content, homework requirements or even his handwriting – which was atrocious – was greeted with an indulgent smile and the phrase ‘stop worrying, Mum’, as if her concerns were a sort of trivial tic, on a par with cushion-straightening.
‘But I enjoy having him in class,’ continued Mr Lomax, ‘he always contributes, he’s very articulate. Do you know what he sees himself doing – any future plans?’
Iris grimaced. The end of her conversation with Tom had been as unsatisfactory as the beginning and she was shamefaced about revealing the outcome. ‘He wants to be a millionaire by the time he’s thirty, I’m afraid. Nothing more specific.’
The correct response to this admission, she felt, would be for Mr Lomax to slam his hand onto the desk and shout, ‘Oh for God’s sake, that’s exactly the problem with this generation, they want the world on a bloody plate.’ Instead, he shook his head with an almost fatherly chuckle. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’
Robin’s form teacher, Mr Clark, was a youngish man with a pale, severe face, who looked at her without interest.
‘Ah, Mrs Unwin.’
She couldn’t face correcting him. In any case, she’d never really solved the ‘Miss’ Mrs dilemma; asking to be called ‘Miss’ always made her feel like a character out of Jane Austen, while insisting on ‘Ms’ required rather more assertiveness than she could generally dredge up. ‘Call me Iris’, the third option, sounded like a line from a Barbara Stanwyck movie. She shook hands in silence, and then waited for several minutes as Mr Clark finished appending a note to a file, a task which he undertook with great intensity. At last he recapped his pen and with a sporty flick of the wrist, tossed the folder onto the pile beside the desk.
