by Susan Barker
Eventually, after the bell had rung and the yard was empty, Sally left the car and scuttled into the school building. The secretary led her to the fifth-form classroom, where the form tutor, Miss Ng, brought Sally to stand next to her on the teaching platform. The class of sixteen-year-old girls hushed their chatter about the Christmas holidays and stared at the larger than average newcomer, who stared back at them, fighting the powerful urge to throw up. How slim and pretty they were. How well-groomed and fresh-looking, as though lightly misted with dewdrops. Sally blazed with self-consciousness, her classmates’ inquisitive eyes like ants crawling over her skin. Whatever must they think of her? Of her weight? Of her wild tumbleweed hair (unsmoothed by the nightly applications of olive oil, singed from the unsuccessful attempt to iron it flat that morning)? Miss Ng asked Sally to introduce herself and, blushing, Sally whispered her name. What did she say? a voice called from the back row. Miss Ng repeated what Sally had said and sent her to an empty desk.
The majority of Sally’s classmates were British or Australian, with a few mixed-race girls of dual nationality thrown in. To Sally’s horror the classes were very lively. She sat meekly at her desk as the lessons moved swiftly along, praying she would not be called upon to speak.
The bell rang for lunch at half past twelve. There were seven tables in the dining hall, one for each class, and lunch was a refined affair with silver cutlery, napkins on laps and tea served from teapots. Miss Ng presided over the fifth-form table, and three lunch monitors served the rest of the class vegetable consommé, asparagus, new potatoes and slices of chicken, and then little bowls of vanilla ice for dessert. A wild anxious fluttering in her belly prevented Sally from eating a single bite, and as her classmates chattered she stared at her plate, feeling as though she could no more join in than converse in Tagalog. Fortunately, after the soup course, the girl sitting next to Sally came to the rescue. Do you like Cliff Richard? the girl whispered (as if whispering the codeword for a secret underground organization). Yes, I do, Sally lied. The girl flashed a broad metallic grin and said her name was Melissa. After lunch Melissa took Sally to the library, where she showed off her Cliff Richard scrap-book; the pages were crammed with magazine clippings, song lyrics and fan-club letters. As Melissa reverentially turned the pages, preaching the gospel of Cliff, Sally stared at the snaking metal wires harnessing Melissa’s teeth – the work of a mad visionary of an orthodontist. Melissa was a crashing bore and listening to her was torturous, but in the terrifying wilderness of teenage girls she was a friendly face, and Sally was grateful.
Later that day, after her chauffeur had dropped her home, Sally stood in the yard, her mind galloping. Why had her father chosen such a posh school? The lessons were too difficult and her classmates too pretty and accomplished. Back in Cricklewood, where she’d been home-tutored surrounded by the potted palms of the conservatory, Sally had been the star pupil. But at Amethyst she was the class dunce, the lumbering class elephant. Sally dumped her satchel (bulging with textbooks and assignments she didn’t understand) on the ground, and there and then decided not to go back. She’d look in the Encyclopaedia of Tropical Maladies and fake the symptoms of some illness until her father got her a private tutor. Inner peace somewhat restored, Sally tiptoed past the Dobermanns, snoozing in the afternoon sun, to rinse her hands under the standpipe. As water splashed over her sticky fingers and into the drain, Sally heard a clank, clank, clank at the gate. Trixie and Tinkerbell heard it too, and leapt up, barking, heavy metal chains dragging across the yard as they ran over to the small Chinese girl rattling a stick back and forth across the railings. The girl smiled at the snarling dogs and rattled her stick faster. She wore the same blouse and grey pleated skirt as Sally, and Sally guessed she was a student in one of the years below. Laughing, the girl tossed the stick high over the gate into the Hargreaves’ yard. Trixie and Tinkerbell lunged after the stick, tails wagging.
‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘You’re the new girl. I saw you in my class.’
Though the girl looked pure Chinese, her English accent was perfect. Sally had no memory of having seen her at school that day.
‘How d’you get here?’ Sally asked.
‘Flew,’ came her breezy reply.
Sally asked her if she lived near by, and with an unsubtle shiver of distaste the girl said, God, no; she lived above a shop in Chinatown, and had just come to Petaling Jaya to visit her mad aunt. She pointed at the Christian hospice at the end of the street.
‘She lives over there,’ she said, ‘in that loony bin. When I was a baby she covered herself in petrol and set herself alight. They chucked a bucket of water over her to put the fire out and she had a heart attack. She’s OK now, though she’s paralysed down one side and disgustingly scarred.’
Sally didn’t know what to make of this information. She wiped her damp hands on her skirt and went nervously up to the gate. She asked the girl her name.
‘Frances Milnar,’ she said, slipping her small hand through the railings. ‘Enchantée.’
Sally asked Frances if she’d like to join her for afternoon tea, and Frances laughed, showing off her tiny vampirish teeth. For a moment Sally thought she was laughing at her offer, but then Frances announced she was starving, adding in a mock sophisticated drawl that tea would be absolutely divine. Sally unlatched the gate and let her in. Frances was tomboyish and scrappy-looking; five-foot nothing and flat-chested as a ten-year-old. She had short hair that she tucked behind her ears, small almond eyes, and freckles on her snub nose like the speckling on a bird’s egg. Frances skipped over to Trixie and Tinkerbell, and the chained beasts reared up to paw Frances’ school uniform and lick her giggling face. Sally was horrified. Her friend of less than five minutes was about to be mauled to death by her own dogs! But they merely sniffed her and smothered her with loving, slobbery licks.
The ceiling-fan blades gently chopped the air of the dining room. Sally lifted the wicker cage on the table to uncover the jug of lemonade and the plate of red-bean pastries.
‘Wow!’ said Frances. ‘Are all these cakes for you?’
‘They’re for my father too,’ Sally replied, defensively.
There was only one glass, so Sally called for Safiah, who padded to the doorway, barefoot and giggling. Sally pointed at Frances and mimed drinking out of a glass.
‘That’s Safiah,’ Sally said, as the servant disappeared into the kitchen. ‘She never speaks.’
When Safiah returned, Frances spoke to her in Malay, and Sally, listening as the servant girl strung together sentences of three words or more, was peeved that she hadn’t made a similar effort for her on the afternoon of the Malay–English dictionary.
‘What did she say?’ Sally asked, as Safiah crouched by the door jamb.
‘She says she is very happy here. She likes working for you and Mr Hargreaves very much.’
As they drank their lemonade and chatted, Frances laughed to hear that Sally had quit boarding for good at the age of eleven. Though Frances had spent her childhood in Kuala Lumpur, when she was ten her expat father (He’s English, but I don’t look half-caste, do I?) sent her abroad to be educated in Hampshire. Frances did not adapt well to boarding school life. She returned to Malaysia for the Christmas holidays and when the holidays were over refused to go back.
‘I climbed up on to the roof of my house, and stayed up there for two weeks. I threw stones at anyone who tried to climb up after me. My father thought I was on hunger strike, but my ayah secretly brought me a plate of noodles twice a day. In the end my father promised not to send me back to boarding school in England and I climbed down.’
‘How did you go to the lavatory?’ asked an incredulous Sally.
‘I had a chamber-pot. Madame Tay emptied it for me. Or I’d chuck it out in the street.’
Sally gazed admiringly at Frances, who held her cake in both hands and nibbled it like a monkey, her eyes glittering with disobedience and adventures to be had. Frances asked Sally where her mother was. With downcast
eyes and a sorrowful tone of voice cultivated over many years of practice, Sally told Frances that her mother was dead. Agnes Hargreaves had died in childbirth, and Sally had never known her. Telling people about her dead mother used to be Sally’s guilty pleasure. Poor motherless Sally Hargreaves – it was almost a mark of distinction. Accustomed to the awkwardness and pity of others, Sally was sorely disappointed by Frances’ reaction.
‘Mine too!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘I could tell, you know,’ Frances added, ‘that you had no mother.’
This irritated Sally. She demanded to know how.
‘Oh, I always can.’
Then, very abruptly, Frances scraped back her chair and said that she had to go and visit her mad aunt, because the nuns wouldn’t let her in after six.
Sally walked her to the front gate.
‘Do come for tea, next time you visit your mad aunt,’ she said.
Frances shrugged and said: ‘I only see her once a month. That’s about as much as I can stand.’
She gave a little wave as she slipped out of the gate and Sally was crestfallen. But no sooner had Frances started off down the road than she turned round again and, skipping backwards a few steps, shouted: ‘Why don’t you come with me to Chinatown tomorrow? It’s a lot more fun than around here.’
Sally nodded and Frances smiled, dimpling her cheeks, her little vampire teeth on display.
‘See you in school!’ she cried.
And Frances ran off to the hospice, leaving Sally to latch the front gate, her fingers trembling with joy.
9
‘ADAM … JULES AIN’T here.’
Rob surfaced in the doorway, squinting as if the daylight corroded his retinas. The chain was broken and the door opened narrowly, Rob’s plimsoll and bony shoulder wedged behind it – a feeble precaution against forced entry. When he saw it was Adam he eased up, lifted his hand and scratched his red-rimmed nose, the sleeve of his baggy jumper swamping his thin arm.
‘Where’s she gone?’
‘Shops.’
‘Shops?’ Adam echoed.
‘Yeah.’
The tarry edges of Rob’s teeth showed themselves, his tongue slothful in his mouth. He’d answered the door because he’d expected someone else and he wanted Adam gone as quickly as possible.
‘When will she be back?’
‘Hard to say. This evening?’
Rob’s squint eased up and Adam could see the pale blue of his irises, his pupils microdots of dark. Rob is a decade older than Julia and over the years has come to look more like her brother than Adam ever will. They have the same eyes, the irises haloes of splintered ice, the same dirty blond hair in lank ponytails; the same rotting teeth and matching his ’n’ hers trackmarks. They’ve succumbed to the same degree of weight loss, a similar bone structure emerging underneath; identical bumps of skull and hollows beneath the temples, as though they were a twin birth, delivered by forceps squeezed too tight. No matter how alike they look, though, they will never be equals. Rob scores for Julia, fixes for her, looks after her. His fists have pummelled her stopped heart back from the brink of death (after delivering the shot that nearly killed her). Adam hates him. He hates the obnoxious swagger of him. He hates that his sister is so dependent on this weasel of a man.
‘D’you mind if I wait inside?’
The words almost stuck in Adam’s throat. He wanted to barge past Rob and find his sister. But things aren’t so easy. Rob only has to click his fingers and Julia would agree never to see Adam again.
‘Would if I could but I’ve got some mates round. Sorry, Adam.’
Adam heard the low thudding music and murmur of voices coming from the living room. He’d seen these get-togethers before, where everyone’s slumped about like they’ve got muscular dystrophy, staring at their shoelaces for hours on end. He knew then that Julia was in there, and had to remind himself that she was not some victim. For all he knew she’d remembered he was coming and asked Rob to send him away.
‘Tell her I came, then.’
‘Will do. I’ll get her to give you a call.’
No such thing had happened in the last three years, but Adam nodded and Rob lifted his hand in a swift, mocking salute, before letting the door slam shut.
After leaving Julia’s, Adam went over to the Mountbatten high-rise, the keys to his grandfather’s old flat jangling in his jacket pocket. The rehousing of the tenants was nearly over and outside the tower block a large council sign gave notification of demolition on 28 January. The main entrance was locked, and Adam strolled backwards, craning his neck to take in the twenty-eight floors.
He did a tour of the ground floor, peering in the windows, hands cupped around his eyes. Stripped of furniture, most rooms were stark as prison cells, though a few of the walls had been transformed into graffiti canvases; egos unleashed from spray-cans in a chaos of tags. Some of the graffiti was very impressive – works of imagination and skill – and Adam wondered why the artists had gone to so much effort, knowing that in eight weeks the tower would be rubble and dust.
Adam pushed open a window with a broken lock, climbed up and jumped down on the other side. He went up the fourteen flights of echoing stairs and down the corridor to the flat where he’d lived with Julia and his grandfather. He twisted the key in the lock and went inside for the first time in eight years.
Everything was the same and not the same. The left-behind furniture was the same, the upholstery in the same dilapidated condition as when they’d lived there, but the rooms were smaller, as if the ceiling had descended and the walls inched stealthily inwards. Adam wandered from room to room, memories of living there stirred up by the cracks in the bathroom tiles and the rings of limescale in the kitchen sink. The room where he and Julia had once slept, side by side on the narrow beds, smelt of unwashed bodies, and in the bathroom stale piss choked the throat of the toilet. Adam stood in the kitchen, remembering the silent leakages of gas from the faulty cooker, and the charred patch on the ceiling where the flames in his grandfather’s frying pan once leapt five feet high. The silence of the fourteenth floor suffocated Adam, and he heaved the force of his hearing into it, ear-drums taut, listening for footsteps, or voices, or the distant slam of a door. But there was nothing, not even the wind.
In the living room Adam lowered himself into the armchair where he once sat for seven- or eight-hour stretches, every day for two years. His elbows jabbed the armrests and his head settled in the hollow in the floral upholstery (a perfect fit – as if the chair had been waiting eight years for the prodigal grandson’s return). Spurred by the physical déjà vu, Adam tried to re-enter the mind of that sullen fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old boy. He no longer understood what motivated his exile, what day-to-day endurance such loneliness demanded. The other armchair used to be his grandfather’s. Adam remembered the never-ending melodrama of the old man’s imagination; the invisible cast of thousands, persecuting him for hours on end. Years after his death Adam still wakes in the night to the old man’s bewildered croak. When this happens his stomach bottoms out, and for a moment he believes he’s trapped in the council flat again, as his grandfather paces, shouting at nobody in the room next door. Adam is frustrated at his younger self. He and Julia didn’t have to live like that. But he hadn’t known any better. He’d been too afraid (and, Adam suspects, not quite right in the head himself).
But there were lulls to the madness, tranquil interludes during which Adam’s grandfather was genuinely likeable. Sitting opposite Adam, his cardigan buttoned up over his shirt, slippered feet shuffling closer to the gas fire, Christopher Milnar would remark: Look at you reading those books! You’ll be as clever as old Socrates before long … But his grandfather never pressured him to go to school, just as Adam never pressured his grandfather to see a doctor about his illness. The two hermits just left each other to get on with it. Occasionally Christopher would talk about Frances. How she broke his heart when she ran away and how he hired a private detective to track her down. When he
discovered, a decade later, that Frances was in London, he moved to England to be near her and his baby grandson. Christopher wrote letters seeking reconciliation and sent her cheques for hundreds of pounds on birthdays and Christmases. Frances returned the letters to sender via the Royal Mail and refused to let her father see his grandchildren. Adam’s grandfather kept up his letter-writing campaign for fourteen long years – until Frances’ death in 1995. That stubborn child never did tell me what I’d done wrong, he grumbled to Adam, but I wouldn’t let her forget me – not so long as I had money to spare for postage …
Adam knows how stubborn his mother could be. More than ten years have passed since they walked out on Jack Broughton. He doesn’t remember the date exactly, but knows it was springtime, after the clocks had gone forward. Frances broke the news to them one tea-time, when he and Julia were sitting on the sofa, eating from plates of spaghetti on toast on the low coffee table. Julia was engrossed in whatever was on the telly, and spaghetti hoops slid off her fork prongs, staining her school blouse with splotches of tomato sauce. Frances was perched on the arm of the sofa, not eating, not watching TV. She was wearing her nurse’s pinafore, which was unusual, as Frances always changed as soon as she got in from work (before she opened the bills or put the kettle on – as if she couldn’t stand the lingering odour of hospital and sickness). Adam noticed that Frances still had on her stark white uniform, with the clip-on watch hanging upside-down from her pocket, but said nothing. He was unhappy at school and said less and less back then.
