by Tessa Hadley
He was very vague this morning.
—Where was this? he asked her irritatedly. Where did you say you’d been?
CLARE THOUGHT about Helly, her best friend.
She was cooking fish fingers for the children’s lunch; Helly didn’t have any children. It was raining outside. There was another week before Coco and Lily went back to school and Rose to nursery. That morning Rose had woken them at six o’clock, and Clare, whose turn it was to get up, had sat resentfully downstairs watching Rose play for an hour and a half before the others got up, drinking tea and listening to farming programs on the radio, wrapping her cold feet in the hem of an old pinkish-gray nightgown that had once belonged to Bram’s grandmother. In fact it still had Bram’s grandmother’s name stitched into the neck, from when she had ended up in an old people’s home where all their washing was done together and things got mixed up and lost.
Bram got up and went to work. Since then Clare had made breakfast for the children, washed the dishes, got them all dressed, tidied the beds. She had sorted out a load of washing for the machine and hung it out on one of the two drooping wooden clothes horses she had to use to dry the clothes in a corner of the kitchen when it wasn’t fine enough to hang them outdoors: their rungs were permanently blackened with wet and left marks on pale clothes if you weren’t careful. The children had mostly watched the television (Clare had bought it for them at the beginning of the summer and they hadn’t fallen out of love with it yet). Rose had managed to step on the Tintin comic Coco was meticulously drawing with a ruler and pencil crayons; she crumpled and tore it and left a dirty bare footmark. Coco understandably but unpicturesquely went berserk, trying to pound his baby sister with his fists and baring his teeth and squeezing out from between them a kind of growling scream. Clare thought helplessly of different, better children somewhere sometime else who played adventurous games together away from the adults and had been taught self-control and discipline and that you didn’t hit girls or anyone younger than yourself. She sagged with the sense of a lost civilization and was nagged by a guilty idea that she ought to be doing something creative with them. But she knew what it was if you began creative things without conviction, how quickly you were found out, how shamingly your temper would fasten on their ingratitude.
And anyway, there were all these other uncreative things she had to do, taking up an impossible space, swelling to stuff out every corner of her time and to smother any chinks she had fondly imagined she was keeping for a grown-up coffee and a read of the paper. Now it was lunchtime; the children must be fed. One felt as if one invented this stuff in some kind of crazy conspiracy of martyrdom; surely other better mothers had found sweeter brighter ways of passing their days than this? She must be producing this impasse, this stickily inflating burden of routine, out of sheer spite; it must be oozing from her own smothered vengefulness. But if she tried to come clean and step out of it, she was confronted with real unanswerable problems. What would happen if she didn’t feed them? Didn’t dress them? Didn’t tidy the house and wash the dishes and wash the clothes and shop and cook? It wouldn’t be liberation, they would simply all drown deeper and more miserably in their sticky mire. This domestic machine required her drudgery, implacably; the hours of her life were the fuel it needed just to tick over.
She had a pain somewhere: was it in her heart? In her spleen, more like; or, no, between her ears, curved like one of those rigid Alice bands she had once worn to school. Or a dim poisonous fog connecting and attacking all the organs of her body.
She thought about Helly.
She imagined a morning for Helly, a parallel place in the world where Helly moved with lightness between free choices, taking a long shower, picking out clothes from her wardrobe, drinking filter coffee, eating a croissant and then a peach from a shallow ceramic fruit bowl on a glass table, looking over a script for a rehearsal she was going to in the afternoon. She knew enough about Helly’s life, of course, to picture her surroundings accurately and fill in some authenticating detail. The flat was not tidy—Helly was notoriously slovenly—there were clothes dropped over the backs of chairs and on the floor, the duvet in its yellow cover with red poppies was heaped on the bed where she’d climbed out from under it, and Sunday supplements and magazines were strewn all over the place. But it was clean, she could afford a cleaner these days, after the ice-cream contract and now the work for the TV series about a special-needs teacher (Helly was not the special-needs teacher but the French teacher the special-needs teacher’s partner was having an affair with). Sunlight struck in through its open sash windows across the polished wood floor, there were flowers in a vase drinking up the light, unusual cut flowers, delphiniums or something that you could only buy in good florists in London. Blue delphiniums and yellow goldenrod. Not in season: but Clare allowed herself this one little cheat.
David, Helly’s boyfriend, was not part of Clare’s picture.
Partly, it was precisely the singleness of Helly’s life that Clare most envied. She and David kept their separate flats and didn’t see one another for days at a time. The idea of such empty acres of solitude was a cooling balm against the promiscuous itch of Clare and Bram’s crowded little house, where every surface was greasy with touching and there was no lock on the toilet door and at night the children wandered from bed to bed.
Partly, it was better not to think about David’s life with Helly, because of what was going on between him and Clare: not an affair exactly, not yet, but some kind of promise of one. This promise occupied a very particular space in Clare’s thoughts at the moment. It was buried deep under all the casual daily material of her life and the deliberate thought of it was mostly avoided by her; and yet at the same time she never for a single fraction of a moment was unconscious of it wrapping her around and changing her like an alien skin fitted indistinguishably over her real one.
She was going to meet him in London in ten days.
* * *
FOR A LONG TIME Clare Menges hadn’t distinguished Helly Parkin from the alien crowd at school. Helly didn’t practice the moody dark withdrawal that was standard for those who chose not to belong: she was even good at netball, and loud and exuberant, with light brown hair braided onto her head like Angie in East Enders, protuberant ears, a husky voice, a grin so wide her laughter was a red gulf. Clare inclined toward the ones who wore their hair like Annie Lennox, short and spiky, and didn’t grin.
One lunch break toward the end of their second year, when the games and lessons to come were casting their deep shadows across the sunshine and the crowds of green-clad girls in it, foolishly-innocently French skipping across knotted elastic bands, Helly claimed her. Clare was sitting on the grass with her back to the wall of the biology lab, devouring a book, holding it open with her elbows, with her hands over her ears and her forehead screwed up in what was meant to be an all-excluding frown. She and a couple of friends were in a phase of passing around dreadful historical novels: in irony, knowing they would be disappoved of, but also genuinely addicted to the ripe lurid matter inside, which fed some hunger left over by the long pale schooldays. (She never had any trouble later in life remembering the marriages and adulteries and sticky ends of the royal families of Europe.)
Helly, who as far as Clare could remember had never talked to her before, crouched on the grass in front of her, forcing her to look up from the book and speaking in an absurdly portentous artificial voice.
—Come forth with me to witness the secret sacrifice. Speak to none else of it.
Clare was dizzy from being dragged out of her story in too much of a rush: Ferdinand and Isabella had just made a messenger who brought unfortunate news eat his own boiled shoe leather. Helly’s words seemed an extravagance from the book spilled out into the thin real air; otherwise she might simply have ignored her. She certainly felt embarrassed for her: by the end of the second year it was not the thing to play imaginary games, you were supposed to have graduated to games with rules.
—I don’t wan
t to, I’m reading.
Helly put a finger to her lips in convincingly real dismay. Speak not: ‘tis deadly dangerous, if they but knew. Come forth at once, utter no further word.
With a darting surreptitious glance around at the crowds of tranquilly idling girls, she walked off; after an exasperated moment’s hesitation, Clare followed. They wound through the knot garden beside Old House, through the door onto the terrace, then down the terrace steps and past the tennis courts and around the huge trunk of the old cedar to a gap in the tall thick shrubs that grew around the boundary wall. Clare felt apologetic and ridiculous, following—she shrugged at an inquiring friend who passed going the other way—but at the same time she was half excited, susceptible to the suggestion that under the banal surface of school life there must be reserves of possibility, untapped.
Behind the gap in the shrubs was a space big enough for a den; Clare had been in there before. The earth was worn shiny, the bushes in their interior were twiggy and dusty and leafless; you could sit on the wide top of the wall. The wall overlooked a suburban street whose empty ordinariness was mysterious and desirable because it was outside and free. Helly had two other acolytes already squeezed into the space, girls Clare didn’t know well. They couldn’t keep up the unfaltering seriousness Helly managed; they giggled and looked as if they felt exposed in foolishness when Clare joined them.
—What’s all this about?
Helly closed her eyes, waited for silence.
—Clare Menges, you have been chosen.
—For what, exactly?
—To join the sacred sisterhood of the stump.
There was a sawn-off stump of some kind of shrub at the back of the den, beside the wall: when Clare looked closely she could see it was studded with thumbtacks; there were hair clips and scraps of cloth and bits of jewelry stuffed behind its bark and into its crevices. They looked wet and dirty and rather dismal.
—You have to give something, Helly said. In return for our sacrifices the guardian of the stump protects us with his powers and brings misfortune to our enemies.
—The thumbtacks are the curses, one of the others said. They really work.
—I don’t know if I want to belong to the sisterhood of the stump, said Clare.
—Too late, intoned Helly, who could sustain her portentous intonation without collapse or irony. You’ve seen his mysteries. If you betray them, may you rot in torment.
—But anyone could see them. And anyway, why does the guardian of the stump have to be a he? (Clare’s stepmother was a regular at the Greenham Common women’s protest against cruise missiles.)
Helly frowned. He just is. Don’t you want his powers?
—I just thought it would make more sense to sacrifice to a female thingy, that’s all. As it’s a sisterhood.
—But the powers that control this school are female: haven’t you thought of that? We need him to combat them, the great guardian of the stump: let his name be ever sacred, and his mystery deep.
—If you say so.
Clare considered: she was slightly in awe of Helly and her absolute seriousness. She found a button in her purse that the others said would do as a sacrifice, to begin with.
—Close your eyes, said Helly. Keep them shut. She took hold of Clare’s hand, painfully tightly, squeezing it until Clare protested, although still with her eyes obediently shut. Helly held on, pressing Clare’s fingers down inside something wet, mossy, splintery. It was only when Clare thought of slippery creatures that might be lurking in the stump that she had the strength to pull violently away, letting go of the button.
—Well done, said Helly, smiling into her eyes.
Clare’s heart was actually thumping, and all afternoon she could smell moss and rotten wood on her fingers. The details of the cult seemed to her gauche and embarrassing. But she somehow didn’t mind it getting around that she was Helly Parkin’s friend now. She even helped Helly steal bits of stuff from certain girls in the class—scraps of notes, bits of the ties from their science aprons, even name tapes cut out of their gym blouses in the locker room—which they then pinned to the stump with thumbtacks to bring bad luck: “evil chance,” as Helly called it. Whenever something unfortunate really happened to one of these girls, the four cult members were drawn together in an exhilarating uneasy mixture of guilt and skepticism.
* * *
CLARE AND HELLY fell in love with one another’s houses.
On weekends Clare and her sister Tamsin lived with their mother; during the week they lived in a big chaotic house in Kingsmile with their father, who was a ceramicist, their stepmother, and a half-brother. There were four flights of echoing stairs and rooms at the top they didn’t even properly use. There were striking things everywhere: Graham’s ceramics and paintings, an Indian embroidered canopy over the fireplace in the sitting room, a copper vase full of unusual flower heads Naomi had dried, old jewel-colored Turkish rugs on the stripped wood floor, bookcases built of stained planks piled on bricks, a crumbling antique rattan settee. In the kitchen there was a vast stripped pine table around which any number of family and friends might be assembled to eat Naomi’s vegetarian curries and whole-meal pies. There was always a mattress and a sleeping bag for anyone passing through or temporarily homeless, or for the girls’ friends, or Toby’s. In the evenings the adults would sit around the big table drinking wine and rolling joints, and the smell of marijuana, thin with just an undertone of acrid nastiness, would rise through the house.
—Be sensible girls, said Graham. You know what not to mention, and where not to mention it.
Helly loved the house in Kingsmile. Its emptiness and air of casual improvisation made her wild. She raced up the bare stairs three at a time, she lay on her back on the floor in the sitting room in the dusk so that Graham and Naomi fell over her, she climbed out the attic windows and sat with her feet in the old lead-lined gutter looking down over the parapet to the faraway street. She would pretend she got high, leaning over the banisters on the top landing and breathing in the smell of the marijuana. She staggered about and fell on Clare’s bed, describing her visions, the room swaying like seaweed in a pool, rainbow colors, something cold and scary touching her.
—It’s the guardian of the stump, said Clare, and Helly screamed and then they wrestled together on the bed and Helly tried to make her beg forgiveness for her sacrilege.
For Clare there was something unsatisfactorily unfinished about the house. Because there were no carpets anywhere it was filled with noise. Doors didn’t shut properly, the stairs had been partly stripped and then abandoned, one wall in the sitting room was half painted red. In the cinders in the big fireplace there were orange peels and cigarette packets in the morning; no one did much dusting or sweeping, and when she thought of the house when she wasn’t there she thought of cold bare feet on gritty floors. It was difficult to get comfortable to read, except in bed: the chairs were all unusual—an old green chenille chair with a broken mechanism for folding out and supporting your legs, a circular 1950s basket chair in an iron frame—but there were none that you could snuggle down in. She did her homework at a beautiful fragile little walnut desk in her bedroom whose drawers had lost all their knobs and which was never quite big enough for her books.
She knew her father sometimes felt the unsatisfactory unfinishedness too. She and Tamsin were very finely attuned to his moods, they called him “the honeypot” and catalogued his behavior with a mixture of derision and devotion, smug at having their place in his favors without trying. He sometimes as much as admitted to them how the trying wore him out: Naomi’s anxious efforts to please him especially, although they suspected that their own mother’s sensible phone calls about practicalities and money (the girls needed new shoes; Tamsin wanted to start clarinet lessons) were in a hidden way a kind of trying too.
—What a burden it is, Tamsin pretended to sigh when he wasn’t there. What a mess these women make when they fall at my feet and I have to walk all over them.
The
y knew their mother still wanted to know about him; they saved up fragments of his dissatisfaction with the house like trophies to compensate her. He suffered with backache; he asked why they couldn’t buy a decent sofa. There was always money for special little finds in junk shops but there was never the kind of money that bought decent sofas. Naomi in any case preferred to sit cross-legged on the floor.
—But I’m nearly fifty, he said, with a little grim laugh. (His “at least someone round here has a grasp on reality” laugh, the girls agreed.) Naomi (who wasn’t thirty yet) looked frightened; it was one of her superstitions, that she didn’t like anyone to mention their age difference.
In spite of his dissatisfactions, the girls knew that the little remarks he made when they went off for their weekends at Marian’s weren’t really complimentary. He said, “It must all seem terribly sensible and organized and quiet compared with living here” (that meant dull). He took an amused interest in Marian’s decorating—“She must have been longing for built-in kitchen cabinets all along”—and was delighted when the girls let slip that she didn’t allow them to use a mug without a saucer in case of drips. When she had a burglar alarm installed, he started calling her house Fort Knox. They didn’t report these jokes to Marian.
* * *
CLARE WOULD HAVE LIKED to live in Helly’s house in Poynton. Poynton was a little village that had been absorbed at the edge of the city’s advance; Helly had a long bus ride to school every day. (She didn’t mind: the same bus picked up boys for the grammar school too, so there was always some fantasized romance on the go, someone to swoon over if he brushed obliviously past you.) The Parkins lived in an estate of new houses: her father had a management position with British Gas; her mother was a primary-school teacher. There was a younger brother who played the guitar and wanted to be in a band. Everything in the house was new and clean and comfortable and worked. The walls between the rooms were so thin that when they lay whispering in Helly’s bed at night her father in his bed next door hardly had to raise his voice to tell them to be quiet: you felt you slept with the whole family; the partitions were merely polite. Helly’s father, whom she quarreled with bitterly—luxuriously, Clare thought: somehow she and Tamsin just couldn’t afford to quarrel with Graham—was short and dapper and satirical; he was good at crosswords and puzzles and competitions. Helly was good at them too; before she was a teenager and turned against him they had won things together, a holiday and a freezer and a diamond ring. Mostly they quarreled about politics; he was an enthusiastic supporter of Mrs. Thatcher and exaggerated his enthusiasm to goad her.
