Princess Tina, Dawn says, and blows smoke out and up.
Tina looks at her blankly. Throw me them, she says. The matches and all.
You’re too young, Dawn says. It’s bad for you.
Tina has a list of swears the like of which Dawn has never heard before, not even in any of the places she’s been over the last few months. Tina sounds like she’s from Glasgow though Dawn’s not very good at accents; she could be from anywhere down here. I’ll bet she’s Glaswegian, though, Dawn thinks. I mean, she really knows stuff, even if she is younger than me.
The swears stream through the air at Dawn until the cigarettes land at Tina’s feet. And the matches, Tina says.
Dawn reaches behind the counter for a new box and throws them over. Tina bends the Broons annual open on her knee to keep her place, lights a cigarette.
Did you ever read that one when you were wee, Dawn says, where they have these posh people coming round for tea and the mother is all up to high doh about the state of their house and the posh people seeing it? The one where they all have to stand in a funny way, like the tall one has to stand with his hand covering the damp patch on the ceiling and one of the girls has to lean against the wall with her elbow to cover something else, and someone else has to stand on the patch that’s in the carpet? That’s a really funny one.
Tina doesn’t look up. On the front cover of the book there’s pink-purple pretend tartan; the Broons are gathered for a family portrait. In yellow, the words say Scotland’s Happy Family. It’s not even the real Broons any more, Dawn thinks, Daphne’s supposed to be uglier than that. She feels dull suddenly, like something angry in a dark tweed coat is thudding itself at her from behind a wall of misty glass or ice. On the back cover, the Bairn is asleep on Paw’s lap in a big chair.
They always have one about new year on the very last page, Dawn says.
Tina flicks to the back and reads the page hard. Aye, she says eventually, so there is.
Dawn stubs out the cigarette on the papers she’s sitting on. The date she stubs the cigarette out near is December 31st. All over the front are the things that have happened over the last year. People who’ve been shot or killed. OJ. That house where they buried those girls. Princess Di. Dawn puts another cigarette to her mouth, looks around the shop. There’s so much stuff in here. Cold drinks and books and all those magazines, sweets and chocolate and postcard racks and batteries and things for cameras, and things for tourists, tartan things, fluffy white dogs wearing tam o’shanters, dolls dressed up as pipers. She wipes the ash and picks the black burnt bits off the top newspaper, smooths down the burnt place with her hand.
Tina is coughing hard. After she finishes she says, is it new year now?
I think so, Dawn says. She looks at the inside of the silver metal shutter over the front of the shop. I wonder who’ll first-foot us, she says. Tina laughs, and coughs. She always coughs like that when she gets in somewhere warm.
What were you doing this time last year? Dawn asks.
Jesus Christ, I don’t know, Tina says, and looks at Dawn as if she’s said something really stupid. She lies back on the splay of shiny covered magazines; she looks like women do when they lie back in luxurious baths on adverts on tv.
No, Dawn says. It’s important. What you do on New Year’s Day makes your luck for the whole year.
Tina sits up. I know what we could do, she says.
What? says Dawn.
We could phone our horoscopes, Tina says.
For the next while they listen to long messages on the ends of the numbers they find in the women’s magazines. Tina is Sagittarius, Dawn is Leo. They are both going to have a year filled with changes in their careers and on the domestic front. Tina phones a thing she calls the itching line and they hold the phone between them to hear an oriental-sounding man telling her she will meet her master in the street, and that two mountains sit between her and the future.
Aye, Tina says, that’ll be right.
Then Tina closes her eyes and punches in a number at random. It rings at the other end, and someone answers. Happy new year, Tina shouts down the phone. Happy new year from Tina and Dawn.
She does this three or four times. It’s Tina, she says to one person. Dawn can hear it’s a man’s voice. Tina, Tina says. From that party. I’m really hurt you don’t remember me.
At another number there’s someone playing the pipes at the tinny other end of the phone; happy new year, they both scream, happy new year, a lot of people at the other end shout. Tina gets them to tell her the address. That sounded like a good laugh, she says to Dawn.
Yeah, Dawn says. She gives the receiver to Tina, pushes it to Tina’s ear as she presses a combination of numbers for her. Then she steps back, goes over to the magazine racks and watches from there.
Hi, Tina says to the voice that answers. Happy new year. It’s Tina. Don’t you know me? It’s Tina and her friend—
She looks over at Dawn, sees Dawn’s face.
It’s Tina and her friend Denise, she says. No, never mind, you won’t, it’s been a long time. We’re just calling to wish you a very happy new year. All the best for ninety-six. And many more of them and all. Cheers now. Bye.
Tina puts the phone down.
Who answered it? Dawn asks.
A woman, Tina says. She didn’t know who we were or anything. I told her happy new year from both of us.
Then Tina and Dawn spend half an hour spelling out, in tubes of peppermints and packets of chewing gum across the floor of the shop, the words HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE SEXY SUPER MODELS WE WERE HERE BUT YOU WERE NOT YOUR LOSS. They stand back to look at what they’ve written. They tidy the magazines back on to the shelves and keep the ones they want to take with them. With chocolate and more cigarettes in their pockets, with their magazines and with one of the disposable cameras from the peg above the lottery machine, they lock the door behind them and head for the party with the pipes that they heard down the other end of the phone.
Morning is coming up now, grey and clear. As they go along the road they take photos of each other and of the people who drunkenly pass them. One man has his photo taken with his arm round Dawn, calls her darling and gives her a fiver when she asks. When the roll of pictures jams to an end in the camera Tina tosses it over a hedge into someone’s garden. Well, she says, that’s what they’re for, you’re supposed to throw them away.
They link arms, laughing. All the way down the road, looking for an address that Tina’s not sure she remembers right, they laugh about how the man who runs the newsagent’s in the station will be getting the biggest phone bill he’s ever had, and what he’ll think when he gets into his shop and finds their message, and how he’ll remember it every new year, maybe be telling his customers and his family and friends all about it for years and years to come.
TESSA HADLEY
Buckets of Blood
The coach journey from Cambridge to Bristol took six hours. Hilary Culvert was wearing a new purple skirt, a drawstring crêpe blouse and navy school cardigan, and over them her school mac, because it was the only coat she had. The year was 1972. In the toilets at Oxford bus station where they were allowed to get out she had sprayed on some perfume and unplaited her hair. She worried that she smelled of home. She didn’t know quite what home smelled like, as she still lived there and was used to it; but when her sister Sheila had come back from university for Christmas she had complained about it.
—You’d think with all these children, Sheila had said,—that at least the place would smell of something freshly nasty. Feet or sweat or babies or something. But it smells like old people. Mothballs and Germolene: who still uses mothballs apart from here?
Hilary had been putting Germolene on her spots; this was the family orthodoxy. She put the little tube aside in horror. Sheila had looked so different, even after only one term away. She had always been braver about putting on a public show than Hilary was: now she wore gypsy clothes, scrumpled silky skirts and patchwork tops with flashing piece
s of mirror sewn in. Her red-brown hair was fluffed out in a mass. She had insisted on washing her hair almost every day, even though this wasn’t easy in the vicarage: the old Ascot gas heater only dribbled out hot water, and there were all the younger children taking turns each night for baths. Their father had remonstrated with Sheila.
—There’s no one here to admire you in your glory, he said.—You’ll only frighten the local boys. Save your efforts until you return to the fleshpots.
—I’m not doing it for anyone to admire, said Sheila.—I’m doing it for myself.
He was a tall narrow man, features oversized for the fine bones of his face, eyes elusive behind thick-lensed glasses; he smiled as if he was squinting into a brash light. His children hadn’t been brought up to flaunt doing things for themselves, although the truth was that in a family of nine a certain surreptitious selfishness was essential for survival.
Now Hilary in her half-term week was going to visit Sheila in the fleshpots, or at Bristol University, where she was reading Classics. A lady with permed blue-white hair in the seat next to her was knitting baby clothes in lemon-yellow nylon wool which squeaked on her needles; Hilary had to keep her head turned to stare out of the window because she suffered terribly from travel sickness. She wouldn’t ever dream of reading on a coach, and even the flickering of the knitting needles could bring it on. The lady had tried to open up a conversation about her grandchildren and probably thought Hilary was rude and unfriendly. And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn’t talk to. Outside the window there was nothing to justify her fixed attention. The sky seemed never to have lifted higher all day than a few feet above the ground; rolls of mist hung above the sodden grass like dirty wool. The signs of spring coming seemed suspended in a spasm of unforgiving frozen cold. It should have been a relief to leave the flatlands of East Anglia behind and cross into the hills and valleys of the west, but everywhere today seemed equally colourless. Hilary didn’t care. Her anticipation burned up brightly enough by itself. Little flames of it licked up inside her. This was the first time she had been away from home alone. Sheila was ahead of her in their joint project: to get as far away from home as possible, and not to become anything like their mother.
At about the same time that Sheila and Hilary had confided to each other that they didn’t any longer believe in God, they had also given up believing that the pattern of domestic life they had been brought up inside was the only one, or was even remotely desirable. Somewhere else people lived differently; didn’t have to poke their feet into clammy hand-me-down wellingtons and sandals marked by size inside with felt-tip pen; didn’t have to do their homework in bed with hot-water bottles because the storage heaters in the draughty vicarage gave out such paltry warmth. Other people didn’t have to have locked money boxes for keeping safe anything precious, or have to sleep with the keys on string around their necks; sometimes anyway they came home from school to find those locks picked or smashed. (The children didn’t tell on one another; that was their morality. But they hurt one another pretty badly, physically, in pursuit of justice. It was an honour code rather than anything resembling Christian empathy or charity.) Other people’s mothers didn’t stoop their heads down in the broken way that theirs did, hadn’t given up on completed sentences or consecutive dialogue, didn’t address elliptical ironical asides to their soup spoons as they ate.
Their mother sometimes looked less like a vicar’s wife than a wild woman. She was as tall as their father but if the two of them were ever accidentally seen standing side by side it looked as if she had been in some terrible momentous fight for her life and he hadn’t. Her grey-black hair stood out in a stiff ruff around her head; Sheila said she must cut it with the kitchen scissors in the dark. She had some kind of palsy so that her left eye drooped; there were bruise-coloured wrinkled shadows under her eyes and beside her hooked nose. Her huge deflated stomach and bosom were slapped like insults on to a girl’s bony frame. She was fearless in the mornings about stalking round the house in her ancient baggy underwear, big pants and maternity bra, chasing the little ones to get them dressed: her older children fled the sight of her. They must have all counted, without confessing it to one another: she was forty-nine, Patricia was four. At least there couldn’t be any more pregnancies, so humiliating to their suffering adolescence.
As girls, Sheila and Hilary had to be especially careful to make their escape from home. Their older brother Andrew had got away, to do social policy at York and join the Young Socialists, which he told them was a Trotskyite entrist group. He was never coming back, they were sure of it. He hadn’t come back this Christmas. But their sister Sylvia had married an RE teacher at the local secondary modern school who was active in their father’s church and in the local youth clubs. Sylvia already had two babies, and Sheila and Hilary had heard her muttering things to herself. They remembered that she used to be a jolly sprightly girl even if they hadn’t liked her much: competitive at beach rounders when they went on day trips to the coast, sentimentally devoted to the doomed stray dogs she tried to smuggle into their bedroom. Now, when they visited her rented flat in Haverhill, her twin-tub washing machine was always pulled out from the wall, filling the kitchen with urine-pungent steam. Sylvia would be standing uncommunicatively, heaving masses of boiling nappies with wooden tongs out of the washer into the spin tub, while the babies bawled in the battered wooden playpen that had been handed on from the vicarage.
In the coach, aware of her reflection in the window from time to time when the scenery was dun enough behind to make a mirror out of it, Hilary sat up very straight. She and Sheila had practised with one another, remembering never to lapse into the crumpled unawareness that smote their mother if ever for a moment she left off being busy. She was almost always busy. She had driven Hilary in to catch her coach that morning only because she had to go in to Cambridge anyway, to buy replacement school shorts and other uniform from Eaden Lilley for the boys. The boys had larked around in the back seats of the ropy old Bedford van that was their family transport, kicking at each other’s shins and dropping to wriggle on their bellies about the floor, so that their mother – who drove badly anyway, with grindings of the gears and sudden brakings – spent the whole journey deploring fruitlessly, and peering to try and locate them in the rear-view mirror. She had taken to wearing dark glasses when she went anywhere outside her home, to cover up the signs of her palsy. She stopped the van on Parker’s Piece and had to get out to open the door on Hilary’s side because the handle was broken. Hilary had a vivid idea of how her mother must appear to strangers: the sticking-up hair and dark glasses and the worn once-good coat she never had time to button up; her jerky burrowing movements, searching for money or lists in bags or under the van seats; her cut-glass enunciations, without eye contact, of bits of sentences that never became any whole message. When Hilary walked away with her suitcase to take her place in the little huddled crowd of waiting travellers she wouldn’t look to see if any of them had been watching.
Bristol bus station was a roaring cavern: everything was greasy and filthy with oil, including the maimed pigeons. Green double-decker city buses reversed out of the bays and rumbled off, important with illumination, into the evening. A whole day’s light had come and gone on the journey. Hilary looked excitedly for Sheila while she shuffled down the aisle on the coach. She wasn’t worried that she couldn’t see her right away. ‘Whatever you do don’t go off anywhere,’ Sheila had instructed her. ‘Stay there till I come.’
Someone waited slouching against the metal railing while she queued for her suitcase, then stepped forward to confront her when she had it: a young man, short and soft-bodied, with lank light brown hair and a half-grown beard, wearing a pinstriped suit jacket over jeans. He also had bare feet, and black eye make-up.
—Are you Hilary?
He spoke with a strong northern accent.
&n
bsp; Hilary felt the disapproving attention of the blue-rinsed knitting lady, focused on his make-up and his feet. She disdained the disapproval, even though in the same instant she judged against the man with Culvert passionate finality. ‘What an unappealing little dwarf of a chap,’ she thought, in her mother’s voice. Of course her thought didn’t show. To him she would look only like the sum of what she was outwardly: pale with bad skin, fatally provincial, frightened, with girls’ school gushing manners.
—Yes.
—Sheila couldn’t be here. She’s unwell. You have to come with me.
He swung away without smiling or otherwise acknowledging her; he had only ever looked perfunctorily in her face, as if he was checking basics. She had to follow after him, out through the bus station back entrance into a twilit cobbled street and then up right beside a high grim wall that curved round to join a busier road. The tall buildings of a hospital with their lighted windows rose sobering and impassive against the evening sky, where the murky day in its expiring was suddenly brilliantly deep clear blue, studded already with one or two points of stars. The man walked ahead and Hilary followed, hurrying, struggling with her suitcase, three or four steps behind. The suitcase was an old leather one embossed with her grandfather’s intials; he had taken it to ecumenical conferences in the thirties. Because the clasps were liable to spring open she had fastened an elastic Brownie belt around it.
Unwell! Unwell was the word they had to use to the games mistress at school when they weren’t having showers because they had a period. Hilary saved the joke up to amuse Sheila. Then she was flooded with doubt; why had she followed this rude man so obediently? She should have at least questioned him, asked him where Sheila was and what was wrong with her. Sheila had told her to wait, whatever happened, at the bus station. She opened her mouth to protest to him, to demand that he explain to her, and take a turn carrying the case. Then stubbornly she closed it again. She knew what a squeak would come out of it if she tried to attract his attention while she was struggling along like this. And if she put the case down and stopped she was afraid he’d go on without noticing she was no longer behind him, and then she would be truly lost in an unknown city, with nowhere to spend the night, and certainly not enough money to pay for anywhere. She could perhaps have hired a taxi to take her to Sheila’s hall of residence, although she wasn’t sure what that would cost either. She had never been in a taxi in her life, and would never have the courage to try and signal to one. And what if Sheila wasn’t at the hall of residence?
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 80
