by Judy Astley
Chapter Twelve
Simon sat on the middle section of the see-saw, one foot on the ground trying to keep it balanced. He took his tobacco tin out of his pocket and started the artistically satisfying process of constructing a cigarette.
‘Think you’re hard, do you, skinning up out here in public?’ Darren Gibson plonked himself onto one end of the see-saw so that Simon was almost catapulted off on to the bark chippings beneath. He just about managed to keep his balance, his hold on the tin and his dignity. He felt his usual reflex twinge of fear which veered dangerously towards laughter when he noticed that Darren was wearing his white baseball cap perched so fashionably high on top of his hair that he looked like he was wearing an extra, false head.
‘Wearing that hat for a bet, are you?’ Simon taunted, unable to resist taking the risk. Even Darren wasn’t likely to beat him up, with no audience other than two bored young mothers sunning themselves on the bench and a gaggle of toddlers squabbling on the roundabout.
‘What?’ Darren’s hand went up vaguely in the direction of the cap and he shoved it down hard so that it bent the top of his left ear. Simon smirked and quietly lit his neatly rolled cigarette. ‘What you got in it then, Lebanese?’ Super-cool Darren was clearly impressed.
‘Golden Virginia,’ Simon replied nonchalantly, inhaling deeply. He watched Darren have another little think and savoured the rare moment of superiority while he could.
‘Oh. Right. Thought it was a spliff.’
‘Wish it was,’ Simon admitted, at last making his bid for acceptance. ‘Haven’t had any since school. I’m not going back, got thrown out,’ he said as casually as he could, eager not to look as if he was showing off.
Darren grinned. ‘That should impress that girl you fancy.’
Simon felt an uncomfortable boyish blush creep up his neck. ‘Which girl?’
‘That Kate. Likes a bit of rough, that one. Likes me.’ Darren sat upright, the green and purple dragon on his T-shirt swelled out proudly. Simon decided he loathed him. ‘I could have her any time, just like that,’ Darren bragged, snapping his fingers
Simon’s own fingers were trembling now and the cigarette paper was starting to feel soggy. ‘Why don’t you have her then, if it’s that easy?’ he managed to ask.
‘Too fuckin’ easy, that’s why. And she’s not my type. She’s skinny and she’s posh.’ He spat on to the bark. ‘You wanna come out with me and my mates some time, find yourself some nice little slag that’s not so picky.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ Simon grunted, feeling insulted yet somehow pleased. It felt good, halfway to being included.
‘D’you drive?’ Darren suddenly asked.
Simon didn’t like to confess he wouldn’t be seventeen till October. ‘Yeah, why?’
‘No reason,’ Darren said, watching his own foot trying to kick a stone out of the bark chips. ‘Just a thought.’ He stood up and yawned. ‘See you,’ he said, and strode off in the direction of the neat row of council houses.
Simon rolled another cigarette, less elegantly this time, so flakes fell out on to his jeans as he smoked. He could drive a car, he hadn’t lied about that, but he was too young to have a licence. Russell, car-mad and with a fantasy that involved his son becoming another laurel-garlanded British world champion Formula-one driver, had given him off-road lessons since he was about ten and could just about reach the pedals. Simon had also once gloomily but obligingly raced with other young teenagers in a special event at Brands Hatch, miserably aware that this was the blissful fulfilment of all the other competitors’ wildest dreams, whereas he would have preferred to be playing tennis. Perhaps Darren wanted advice about buying a car from Russell, he thought, then dismissed it as wholly impossible, unless Darren had had a major secret win on the National Lottery.
Heather felt as if she was suddenly living on the wrong planet. There didn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the air, and she was doing a lot of deep inhaling followed by lengthy sighs. It had been going on for days now and she was starting to wonder if she was making herself ill with hyperventilation and lack of proper sleep. She felt as keyed up as if she was about to take a major examination, and the ground was spongy beneath her, as if she was walking just a millimetre or two above it, and not quite having the usual amount of firm contact. In the sultry-aired privacy of the greenhouse, she gave herself up to what she was pretending wasn’t on her mind and thought about Iain and warm, delicious contact with his body. Only a small hug, she reminded herself, and one she hadn’t wanted, definitely hadn’t wanted, so it was all his fault, really. Only it wasn’t a small hug, she recalled, as she shakily felt the green peppers to see if they were ready to pick. A hug was what she might give Margot, to make her feel better – a small, top-of-the-body squeeze of friendly affection, nothing complicated. Iain had been expressing more than a bit of amiable cheering up. You didn’t do cheering up with your whole length of body. You didn’t press. She thought about the smell of him, how it had seemed, even this many years on, snugly, smugly, sexily familiar – hints of Floris and clean skin. She didn’t even like him – the last thing she wanted him to do was touch her, really, honestly. But when the phone in the shed rang she jumped and dashed to answer it, conscious that her blood pressure was racing up. She said hello and could hear her voice echoing back at her, the irritating delay on the line telling her instantly and with shocking disappointment that she was probably about to talk to Tom.
‘This is Hughie. I expect Tom has told you all about me,’ said a hesitant voice.
‘Well, no he hasn’t actually, should he have done?’ Heather asked politely, wondering if she was about to be punished for feeling lust towards Iain by the news that Tom had fallen victim to something dangerous and tropical. Weren’t there poisonous spiders in Australia?
‘Oh,’ the voice said, then ‘Oh’ again while Heather wondered if the echo was getting worse, or if the news was going to be even more awful than she could immediately imagine; it came over as ‘Oh-oh-oh-oh’, like a keened lament.
‘We’ve become very close. I was sure he’d have told you by now,’ Hughie went on.
Heather, hearing everything as if in an empty Albert Hall, was having trouble making out his meaning. ‘Close to what?’ she heard herself saying, absurdly thinking close to dying, close to crashing the plane, close to a man-eating tiger. Close to each other was eventually the only one left. For a disorientated moment she couldn’t quite remember where Tom had flown off to. She pictured distant Mongolian sands, with Tom costumed in a Lawrence of Arabia outfit and saying something along the famous lines of ‘Have that boy washed and brought to my tent.’ She wasn’t sure if it was the shock of Hughie’s bombshell or the idea of Tom in desert regalia that made her want to giggle.
‘Are you still there?’ the anxious voice was asking. He sounded, she thought, like an assistant in a menswear shop, dealing inadequately with a customer’s enquiry. She could just tell he would be twittery and hopeless and incapable of finding, say, the green polo shirt in size 42 that the customer was sure he’d tried on and wished he’d bought the day before.
‘Yes I’m still here, why are you calling me? Is Tom all right?’ There was a hissy quiet on the line.
‘I just wanted to say, you know, sorry for any trouble. We didn’t mean it to happen.’ He was almost whining now, almost tearful. Perhaps he’d realized, she thought, that he hadn’t been important enough for Tom to tell her about after all, poor boy. He sounded so like a child – ‘we didn’t mean it’ – like a cowardly schoolboy caught and confronted after a vicious bout of name-calling.
Heather switched the phone off and sat down in her battered old cane chair outside the tool shed, trying to sort out her reactions. She had a peculiar sense of being slightly underwhelmed by Hughie’s revelation, as if the disclosure was only a superficial shock instead of being a lightning bolt that bordered on electrocution. Perhaps it wasn’t, deep down, as great a surprise as it might have been, given Tom’s wariness of full-bodied women
. But numbly unstunned as she was, it still took one hell of an imaginative leap to go from knowing Tom tended to back nervously away from excess cleavage to picturing him indulging in boys-only shower-play. She tried to visualise the scene that might now be going on down at the other end of the phone line. Hughie, she imagined, would go straight back to Tom and accuse him of not loving him enough to tell his wife he was leaving her. Tom would start making plans to disentangle himself from Hughie and there would be another deluded casualty of romance weeping in the back of the plane all the way back to Heathrow along with the usual quota of broken-hearted stewardesses. She went back into the greenhouse to pick tomatoes and caught herself sighing again, this time from something nearer to despair that Fate, or whatever it was, couldn’t allow her just a small amount of adulterous lust without whamming straight in with some punishing complication. If Tom had overseas adventures, and she’d never been so foolishly complacent enough to assume he didn’t, they should not intrude into home life, not even over long distance telephone calls. Suppose he really did retire soon, she thought, and then got bored and, following on from the discarded Hughie, started looking for boyish playmates locally? There was nothing better than scandal for linking a rather fractured community. The church organ fund would benefit at least, she thought, due to increased attendance at gossipy bring-and-buys. She imagined the two of them eventually separating and the rumours going round the village about ‘another man’, one each, his and hers, like newly-weds matching bath towels.
‘Are you in there? It’s only me with a peace offering.’ Margot, bright-eyed and leading a swaggering Dalmatian dog, came into the greenhouse. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, ‘Isn’t he pretty? I was so tempted to put on my black and white spotty dress to match him. We’d look like something out of My Fair Lady,’ she said, patting the dog’s head.
‘He’s absolutely lovely but you haven’t brought him for me have you?’ Heather asked, horrified. Julia’s Labradors could tear up a newly planted flower bed in ten minutes flat and they were an elderly, fairly sleepy pair. This young, bounding thing would have the whole garden in shreds in seconds. He was already eying the tomatoes, his tongue hanging out over sharp tiger-teeth as if working out where to bite through the stems to cause maximum speed of destruction.
‘No, no, don’t be daft. I’ve got you a teeny crate of Champers, it’s up in your kitchen – got Brian to carry it round for me. I’m sorry I was such a drunken old slut. You and Iain were terrifically kind to me.’
‘You and Iain’ Heather thought, ‘Me and Iain’ grouped together, linked. She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined she could smell him again, strong as hyacinths but decidedly not as sweet.
‘Are you OK? I am forgiven aren’t I?’ Margot asked anxiously.
Heather grinned at her. ‘Yes of course you are. It could be any of us. We all get these miserable moments, just sadly we’re usually on our own, which makes them even worse.’ She picked a couple more tomatoes, put them into her trug and led Margot and the dog towards the house.
‘I can’t imagine you having miserable moments, not drunken ones anyway.’ Margot commented, ‘You seem to have everything too well organised.’
‘I do have them, though, Margot, of course I do. Wouldn’t be human otherwise.’ Heather just managed to stop herself sighing again so as not to provoke an outburst of worried, confidence-inviting concern from Margot. If only Tom had been having a fling with a full-bodied woman, this would be the moment for her and Margot to embark on a ‘Guess what the sod’s done now’ empathy session covering the comfortably familiar all-men-are-bastards territory. For this one, Margot would probably be able to offer little more than lots of drink and an embarrassed lack of comprehension.
Early that evening, while Kate and Suzy were bickering over the washing up and Delia was examining the bookshelves, looking for something to read that had plenty of violence but no sex in it, the phone rang again. Heather was in her bedroom, searching the back of her wardrobe for the ancient battered school geography folder in which she’d kept small mementoes of her teenage years. A couple of faded black-and-white photos of her wedding to Iain should be among them. There hadn’t been any official photos of course, but one of the witnesses, a girl on her lunch break from the nearby petrol station, had lent them her Instamatic containing most of a reel of film.
‘Heather?’ Iain asked softly as if, she thought, he was just about to tell her a delicious secret. ‘I thought you might like to come round to the rectory. They’re filming a scene on the river as soon as it’s properly dark, which might be fun to watch.’
‘You know my mother’s still staying here? I really don’t want her to know that you are who you are, if you see what I mean.’ She looked round warily, as if her bedroom walls really could have ears.
Iain laughed at her. ‘You could sneak out . . . I won’t say like the old days because I know you’ll get mad at me, but do come. Margot’s hoping you will – and please, do bring Kate, I know she’d be interested.’
Heather abandoned the wardrobe search and went immediately to have a shower, overdosing heavily on the perfumed soap. She put on clean jeans and a cream cotton sweater, hoping she would almost, but not quite, look as if she’d been wearing it all day. She brushed her teeth till her gums ached, washed her hair quickly and fluffed it out with the hair dryer, all the time telling herself not to be so silly, so juvenile, so disgracefully, cravenly infatuated.
As she wandered casually into the sitting-room, Delia immediately asked, ‘Going out? At this time? Somewhere nice?’ probably almost knocked senseless by the wafts of Diorella.
‘No, no, just thought I might stroll round to Margot’s. She says they’re filming a river scene, and it might be amusing to watch for a minute or two.’ She was, she realized, picking at the fringe on a cushion, unravelling it and wrapping the threads round her fingers with nerves. Ridiculous, a voice of common sense (which sounded like Delia’s) told her from inside her own head. ‘I won’t be long,’ she said, ‘probably won’t be that much fun really,’ she added, shrugging and attempting to look as if nothing could be more boring.
‘Can I come?’ Suzy ever alert to the possibility of a spot of Simon-gazing, piped up from her usual TV watching position on the floor.
‘And me?’ Kate said, from the lazy depths of an armchair.
‘Well, yes if you like,’ she told them. ‘You won’t mind being on your own for a bit will you Mother? We’ll be back very soon, I’m sure, and it is getting a bit chilly—’
‘Well . . .’ Don’t you dare want to come with us, Heather’s less sensible inner voice was demanding. ‘Better be someone here in case the clinic phones,’ she suggested, hating herself. Delia was frowning, calculating, but her slippered feet were tucked comfortably under her body and as she was settled with the book on the sofa, she showed no signs of unfolding herself to come with them. ‘I’ll take the mobile phone in case you need to contact me,’ Heather went on, heading determinedly for the door. ‘Come on then girls, don’t want to miss it do we?’
From the road, Margot’s garden was lit up like an airport and outside the cricket pavilion, across the road close to the playground, groups of after-match drinkers were staring at the bright spotlight on top of the crane that could be seen slowly winching itself high, clear of the trees down by the river. As Heather, Kate and Suzy made their way towards the rectory, they could hear small rumbles of disapproval from across the road.
‘They always complain,’ Kate grumbled. ‘Don’t they have any sense of fun?’
‘People don’t like anything that’s different,’ Suzy agreed.
Heather thought they were right. ‘I expect they’ll all be happily queuing to see the movie when it comes out. Or getting the video and saying to all their friends “Look that’s the lane by the church” and that sort of thing.’
The village seemed like a cage very suddenly, full of hostile people who were too wary of excitement, who thought that different equalled threate
ning. The watchers looked just like disapproving observers, looking out for signs of trouble at the edge of an illicit pop festival. She told herself it was her own peculiar mood, a feeling that she was on the edge of being overwhelmingly thrilled. Her jeans, as she strode up Margot’s drive, were just a bit uncomfortably tight, chaffing rather pleasurably and reminding her that the overwhelming thrill was nothing but a purely transient sexual one. God, if he just so much as touched me, she suddenly thought, biting her lip at the idea and feeling glad that it was now dark enough for a blush not to show.
Iain wasn’t in the small crowd by the river, Heather realized, as she peered through the half-dark and the shadows cast by the circles of spotlight that picked out groups of activity. Good thing, she tried to make herself think, but she then felt cross with him for not being there when he’d promised Kate he’d talk her through what was going on. Just one more example of his unreliability.
‘Everyone looks so . . . so busy,’ Kate commented, watching all the faces full of earnest concentration, the chewing of pencil-ends, the consulting of notes and clipboards, the adjustment of cameras, the crane, the lighting.
‘Perhaps they’ll give us something to do,’ Suzy said, nervous in case they did just that.
‘What’ve you come for?’ Tamsin, embarrassed to be caught swanning about in a crushed velvet dress and jailbait make-up, demanded of Suzy.
‘Iain asked us,’ Suzy replied nonchalantly, looking the absurdly glamorous Tamsin up and down with an expression that told Heather and Kate that she was trying not to laugh. ‘Why are you all dressed up? Did you think they’d let you be in it?’ Suzy giggled, unable to stop herself.
Tamsin looked haughty and glanced at Kate. ‘Well I don’t see why not,’ she told Suzy. ‘After all, I mean if Kate thinks she can get a part . . .’
