by Tessa Hadley
At Poynton, Clare met boys. Helly belonged, improbably, to the Methodist youth club, which seemed to have nothing to do with religion but was a sort of cover operation for disaffected teenagers. There was an intimate core of girls who ran things and then a number of boys moving more loosely on the periphery: like planets, unconsciously exerting their huge gravitational pull upon the center. Some of them, like Helly, were bussed into the selective schools in the city, but most of them went to the local school, and it was with these boys Clare fell in love: cocky, teasing, irreverent, dangerous. The grammar-school boys kept apart in a different set and were too superior and sophisticated to bother with Clare and Helly; also, there was a kind of embarrassment of recognition, the clever girls and boys looked at one another, knew they had all bought in to the same system, and did not particularly want to be reminded of this outside of school, where they were pretending to be something else.
Helly and Clare would spend an hour or more in Helly’s bedroom dressing up and putting on makeup, then they walked self-consciously along to the church hall, without the coats that would spoil the effect, however cold it was. There they played table tennis or badminton or hung around in the kitchen making powdered coffee and taking part in some repartee that was usually sexual teasing. The boys outdid one another in outrageous suggestions and boasts, often involving sexual disgust at the exploits of some girl not present.
—She was fucking desperate; she was all over me.
—Man, she was gasping for it; and she’s fucking huge; I was suffocating, her big tits were in my face, I wanted air.
The girls responded as required with a certain kind of fending off, a demure immunity of slow-burning smiles, avoiding eye contact with the boys, glancing blazingly at one another, then down again, as if they moved flexibly and slowly inside a sexual shape of the boys’ words’ making, exciting but dangerously capable of shaming them. Clare found it felt very womanly to be spooning out coffee and boiling kettles of water at the same time as the teasing, capable and impatient (“Wait! That one’s not got sugar in it yet!”). And there was a certain kind of dry bold loud derisive remark that made you strong in your resistance, which the boys particularly admired: Helly was good at these.
—David Taton, you were so keen to get your trousers down, you didn’t care who it was!
—So what do you expect if you suffer from wandering-hands trouble, Stuart Hopkin?
Clare wondered at their complex ironic other selves, suddenly insignificant and tiny; none of the languages they had used before had ever seemed as powerful as this coarse one. She was not quite sure what reality it represented: were these boys really doing half, or any, of the things they boasted of? Where did such things happen? How did they begin? Sometimes couples disappeared around the back of the church hall, but they were never left alone long enough—surely?—to be having intercourse. Helly was evasive: she wasn’t sure; things happened at parties.
The boys would break off from time to time into scuffling fights, more or less serious, flares of violence raging out of nowhere. The girls split up into factional gossip. Clare feared some of these girls more than any of the boys; the boys mostly ignored her, the girls smelled out right away that she was an outsider. Two of them, two short fat girls with blue eye makeup whose names often figured in the boys’ stories, took Helly outside to talk about her. Was she pregnant? (That was something to do with the way she stood and the dress she was wearing.) “Pregnant” was a sexual word in their talk, like other ordinary words suddenly electrified: “fancy,” and “talent,” and “touching up,” “sucking” and “hard” and “coming,” all these words revealed other, explosive selves. That it could be thought she might be pregnant! She was excited and humiliated.
Helly and Clare walked home; sometimes some of the boys walked part of the way with them. A different mood would settle on them all. The walk from the youth club back to the Parkins’ could make you think you really were in the country: there were dark fields and trees with birds rustling in them, a few cottages with televisions flickering in rooms with turned off lights. Their voices were quiet and intimate under the high starry spaces of night, dreamy because they were invisible to one another. A kind of gallantry came out in the boys, they confessed their ambitions, which turned out to be rather honorable and stirring: one wanted to be an Air Force pilot, one wanted to work relieving poverty in Africa, one of them wanted to draw cartoons. All of these goals seemed improbable to Clare; the parents of these boys were car mechanics or worked in supermarkets or the local meat processing plant, and she had in those days, for all her socialism, a rather fixed idea of who got to be pilots and artists. (She was wrong, about the pilot at any rate.)
But the improbability made the boys’ ambitions all the more poignant; afterward, upstairs in Helly’s bedroom, the girls talked about them tenderly.
—Imagine, said Clare, if it was like the First World War. (They had been studying the war poets at school.) Imagine if they had to go off and fight, and we were going to say goodbye to them at the station. Imagine how they’d look, in their uniforms, all brave and solemn. We’d be desperate to stop them, they’d be sort of fatalistic and stubborn. Stuart Hopkin: although he’s so small, he’s sweet, he’s really intense; imagine the look he’d give you, just as the train began to leave.…
She had real tears in her eyes, real pain in her heart.
—Imagine how we’d kiss them, said Helly, if they might not come back.
The idea of kissing hovered over those walks home, the sensation of the possibility of it brushed them for moments with its panting heat, unspoken. They might kiss where the boys turned off to go a different way. Mostly it didn’t happen. Once or twice when Clare was there it happened to Helly. There was a movement with which a boy chose you, separated you off; even the rehearsal of that movement in her mind, its astonishing predatory decisiveness, could make Clare melt: that he could be so sure he wanted that, and from you! She could only imagine the total acquiescence of the flesh at such a tribute. Then he bent over you and put his arms around you and the kiss was taken while others watched and jeered, long and slow, and there were names for this too: “snogging,” and “French kissing”—techniques you were afraid you might not know.
—It’s weird, said Helly. Not exactly nice, having someone else’s tongue in your mouth.
—Like what? said Clare.
Clare and Helly in their bedrooms tried out kissing on each other, and sex. “Imagine if he did this,” they said, “and this.” They took it in turns to be Mr. Garrick, the French teacher (the only male teacher at school), or David Taton from youth club, or Elvis Costello. Sometimes it was into this trying out that Helly’s father’s voice intruded through the wall, telling them to be quiet and go to sleep. It never occurred to them to wonder what he thought they were doing, rustling and murmuring and squealing with giggles in the same bed together. Clare was astonished sometimes thinking about it afterward that they had no adequate sense of how they should conceal what they were up to. Partly they simply assumed that their teenage secrecy was impenetrably dark and deep; it was unimaginable that adults could know anything about their lives. Also, Helly had a friend in the village whose father had subscribed to a sex encyclopedia in weekly issues; everything they read in there—and avidly, of course, devouring its initiations, such as that you might pass out with the pleasure of orgasm, or that the male organ when erect could be twelve inches long—seemed peculiarly preoccupied with reassuring them that there was nothing they could do that they need feel ashamed of. They took the encyclopedia’s word for it; blithely and with no burden of embarrassment, they did what they liked.
What they did together seemed uncomplicated. What they longed for were complications; for that barbed bitter maleness that would drag down and darken and make real at last their little lightweight floating clouds of pleasure.
* * *
NOW CLARE was slicing peppers for supper with her Sabatier knife, cutting away the pith and picking out s
tray pips with its point. Tomato sauce bubbled messily in the frying pan, speckling the stove with orange: pasta again.
Bram was pressing Coco’s crumpled picture flat with a hot iron. Coco had brought it straight to him when he came in, trusting that he would have solutions; Clare had only said it didn’t matter and not to make a fuss. Bram even thought he might be able to get Rose’s footprint off with an eraser. He was tall, he stooped over the ironing board, he looked tired, but he had been brought up never to complain. Clare felt sorry for his thin strong back and jutting shoulder blades under his saggy T-shirt.
—I’ve been so fed up, said Clare. I’ve not stopped for a single second all day, and yet I’ve achieved precisely nothing. The kids have been hideous, bickering and whining.
This wasn’t what she’d meant to say and wasn’t even strictly true: after lunch she’d fallen asleep in the armchair; then she’d sat down and watched television peaceably with the children for an hour in the afternoon. She had meant to commiserate with Bram; often this happened, that the kind thing she’d meant to say turned in his actual presence into an unstoppable spurt of protest.
The shoulder blades winced. Poor old thing, he said with effort, coldly.
—How was your day?
—Oh, depressing. Meetings.
—But that always sounds so jolly! Sitting round in a nice clean room with grown-ups, drinking coffee and arguing about real things.
—Real enough. The exchange we were promised by the development people—new wetlands designated as a reserve in exchange for wetlands lost—turns out not to be quite so straightforward. They’re trying to back down from it, saying it won’t make any difference to bird populations if we end up with an area half what we’ll have lost. I can’t tell you how much I’d rather have spent the day talking to Coco and the girls.
—You’re always making it sound as if you prefer children to adults.
—You ought to hear the adults.
—It’s the same thing as preferring animals to humans. Sentimental in the same way.
—How’s it the same thing? Why ever are you suddenly picking on this?
She didn’t want to quarrel, really. For a moment she could imagine a reconciliation, her invisible soul stepping over to where he was turned away, concentrating dutifully, using his skill and good sense to make something right for the children that had been spoiled. She could imagine her soul self putting its arms around him from behind in contrition, putting its face against his shoulder blades; she saw them consoling one another.
But he turned his face to her, the too-well-known handsome tanned face, whose almost girlish sweetness was not for her, indifferent to its own effect, closed with lack of sympathy. And she heard her voice pick up the quarrel, as if she was sprightly and jubilant.
—It just interests me. It makes you safe, really—doesn’t it? I don’t mean you, I mean anyone who thinks like that. To have made up your mind from the beginning that everything people do is spoiled and bad and ugly. Really, I can’t separate it from someone who believes in original sin. It’s the new doctrine of original sin, environmentalism: the sins of the technological revolutions shall be visited upon the children until the nth generation. You believe the worst, so you never have to be disappointed. It’s so cowardly, really.
—How would you have any idea of what I believe?
—Well, I don’t know. Perhaps I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?
He folded up the ironing board; she tore open the pasta bag.
—Some other time, perhaps.
—And anyway: your “nature”; how much regret does she feel? When she makes earthquakes, spews lava out of volcanoes, covers up thousands of square miles of land and its precious unique flora and fauna in ice or sea when there’s some climate change of a few degrees? She’s a rotten conservationist, isn’t she?
When he came back from putting the ironing board away, he said gently, I expect things will be better for you once the children are back at school and you’re able to get back to your own work. I know it’s really hard for you, stuck all day in the house with them, I do appreciate that.
—Yes, she said. I’m looking forward to my day in London, getting down to work in the library.
As she spoke she took off the two ends of a clove of garlic with her sharp knife, slit down its skin, and peeled it. Slipping off the papery skin, she was thinking about what she had hidden under her sweaters at the back of her drawer upstairs, wrapped in tissue paper from the shop: new underwear for her London trip, satin and lace ecru underwear such as she had never worn before and which had cost more than—almost twice as much as—their weekly supermarket bill. She was ashamed—really, at that moment her face felt hot at the thought—at how much it had cost, which they couldn’t afford.
That was the only thing she felt ashamed for. The other things that should have made her sorry, the careless sacrifice of her partner and children and friend: she felt as if these things spoke to her through glass; they were mute, they had lost their voices. She was not like a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel realized through her adultery, because there was no counterweight to justify her, no repression to break out from, no self-accusation to expiate her, no fear of punishment or burden of guilt and suffering to hang over her and earn her forgiveness. Where these counterweights should have been to make her sacrifices meaningful there was emptiness.
There was just the sense of want in her like a tiger, a great rapacious cat: want, not need; want like a reflex, the strong tension of slack muscles collecting themselves to spring; unmoralized. And she rejoiced in this rapacious cat in herself, shamelessly, as if strength justified itself.
* * *
THERE WAS A whole history to Clare’s betrayal of Helly, a history of entangled teenage love affairs.
First, there was the piano player, Alistair, who played for the Methodist church services in Poynton. He was one of the grammar-school boys who got the bus into the city with Helly, and Helly loved him first. She began to sit through the humble services in plain man’s language in the little bare white church where they used Ribena for wine and Ryvita for bread. The congregation consisted of a handful of old people and a few of the teenagers from the youth club. The cheerful bachelor minister who was such an enthusiast for youth was well known for feeling up the girls at youth club parties and outings, so something riotous and crazy was always bubbling underneath the respectable church surface, and the teenagers teetered dangerously on the verge of contempt and blasphemy as if the back pews were the back row of desks in a classroom.
Alistair said he believed in something, but not in the cheap cheerfulness of the Methodist hymns he had to play. His skin was golden, his hair was blond with dark streaks like dark honey, his blue eyes were narrow and slanted, his glance was oblique. He was not tall but compact. His mouth was loose and feminine, he pouted and sulked and delivered his verdicts with a bitchiness that entranced the girls. He believed in a force in the universe, an energy you could tap into if you didn’t let yourself be dragged down by negativity. He came closest to feeling this energy when he was playing the piano, not the hymns whose clichés he parodied to make them laugh, but the other things he played, classical music and songs he wrote himself. He wanted to be a singer-songwriter.
Helly said she didn’t believe in anything. She thought life was just a cruel accident, a freak of chemicals in an empty universe. (This was what her father thought too.) Clare said she thought you couldn’t know what the meaning of things was and she didn’t believe in anything “out there,” but you ought to plunge yourself into life and taste every kind of experience you possibly could. Helly loved Alistair first and then he loved Helly. But as soon as he did, Helly was suspicious and bored, so it was Clare he first kissed and for a while “went out with,” and then later after he’d finished with her Clare discovered that Helly had all the time resented her taking Alistair away, and then Helly and Alistair got back together, and it was obvious he had wanted Helly all along.
; Then there was Danny. Danny was the older brother of one of Tamsin’s friends from the state school, and Clare loved him from the first moment she saw him, as people do in books; only this was probably the straightest, purest desire she ever felt, absolutely unmuddied by literature. He was tall, lean, olive-skinned, with a narrow mouth that smiled at the corners, and a face rapt in a kind of deliberate sleepy sensual attentiveness. Tamsin knew Danny because she bought dope and other things from a friend of his; he was friends with some of the bikers too. But he was a talented boy; he was staying on at school to do art in the sixth form. He lived off and on with his divorced mother in a flat on the twenty-first floor of a tower block in Churchtown, circled at its foot by great orange-lit dual carriageways like broad rivers, eerie in the dark, uncrossable. After the vandalized lift and the shadowy urine-smelling concrete stairwell, the flat was brilliant like the crystal interior of a stone struck open: flock wallpaper, gilt lamp brackets, a lit fish tank, a leather sofa, and a zebra-skin rug. Clare loved the flat with her strong inverted snobbery of that period, although she rather feared Danny’s mother, who had his fine bones but was ironic and haggard with black-dyed hair. When Danny gave his jeans to his mother to mend, Clare envied her.
Clare loved Danny: desperately. Through her he met Helly and he loved Helly, and Helly went out with him for a while, only always holding something in reserve, an implication that while he was very sweet he just slightly bored her. This gave her an advantage in relation to Clare, who was abject. Then Helly finished with Danny to go out with somebody else (her Italian—which was another story), and a couple of times after parties or when parents were away for the weekend Clare and Danny ended up together, and she overflowed with blessedness. She lay beside him, ran her finger ends across his narrow hairless chest, dark-olive skin stretched across bone like the ribs of some beautiful little boat, a coracle, and underneath his heart beating.
