Multitudes

by Lucy Caldwell

  I used to say her name to myself sometimes. Angie. Angela Beattie.

  What else? She cut her own hair – at least that’s what people said, and it looked as if it could be true, slightly hacked at, although the mussed-up style made it hard to tell. Her father was a born-again Christian – he belonged to a Baptist church that spent summers digging wells in Uganda or building schools in Sierra Leone – and when our school joined up with another in West Belfast to play a concert at St Anne’s Cathedral she wasn’t allowed to take part because it was a Sunday, even though it would be in a church, even though it was for peace.

  There was so little I knew about her then.

  *

  In the summer term of fourth year, everyone took up smoking, or pretended to. The school was strange and empty that time of year, the Upper Sixth and Fifth Form on study leave, the Lower Sixth promoted to prefects and enjoying their new privilege of leaving the grounds at lunchtime. It was ours to colonise. We linked arms and ducked behind the overgrown buddleia into the alley behind the sports hall, boasting that we needed a smoke so badly we didn’t even care if anyone caught us.

  The day they did, it was raining and so we weren’t expecting it, but all of a sudden there they were, coming down the alleyway, one at each end. I was holding one of the half-smoked cigarettes, and I froze, even as all the others were hissing at me to chuck it away.

  The prefect walking towards me was Angie.

  I could feel the flurry as those with cigarettes or a lighter scrambled to hide them and others tore open sticks of chewing gum or pulled scarves up around their faces, but only vaguely, as if it was all happening a very long way away.

  Angie stopped a couple of metres away. My hand was trembling now. ‘Oh my God,’ I heard, and, ‘What are you at?’ and, ‘Put it out, for fuck’s sake.’ But I couldn’t seem to move.

  Angie looked at me. The expression in her eyes was almost amused. Then, ignoring the nervous giggles and whispered bravado of the others, she took a step forward and reached out for the cigarette. Her fingers grazed mine as they took it from me. She held it for a moment then let it fall to the ground, crushed it with her heel. She looked me in the eye the whole time. I felt heat surge to my face. ‘You don’t smoke,’ she said, and then she said my name.

  I felt the shock of it on my own lips. I hadn’t known she knew it: knew who I was. She gazed at me for a moment longer in that steady, amused, half-ironic way. Then she said to the other prefect, ‘Come on,’ and the second girl shouldered past, and they walked back the way Angie had come.

  ‘It’s not cool, girls,’ she called, without turning round. ‘You think it is, but it’s not.’

  There was silence until they’d turned the corner. Then it erupted: ‘What the fuck,’ and, ‘Oh my God,’ and, ‘Do you think she’s going to report us?’, and, ‘I am so dead if they do,’ and, ‘What is she like?’, and then, ‘Do you reckon she fancies you?’ It was the standard slag in our school, but out of nowhere I felt my whole body fizz, felt the words rush through me, through and to unexpected parts of me, the skin tightening under my fingernails and at the backs of my knees.

  ‘Wise up,’ I made my voice say, and I elbowed and jostled back. ‘It’s because of the music. My lungs will be wrecked if I carry on smoking. I actually should think about giving up,’ and because we were always talking about having to give up, the conversation turned, and that got me off the hook, at least for the moment.

  *

  For the rest of term, I agonised over whether to stop hanging out with the smokers at lunch or whether to keep doing it in case she came back. In the end, I compromised by going behind the sports hall as usual but not inhaling so I could say with all honesty, if she asked, that I didn’t smoke any more.

  My days became centred around those ten minutes at lunchtime when I might see her again. I would feel it building in me in the last period before lunch, feel my heart start to flutter and my palms become sweaty. But she didn’t raid the alleyway again. There was nowhere else I could count on seeing her: orchestra practice had ceased in the last weeks of the summer term – the Assembly Hall was used for examinations and there were too many pupils on study leave anyway – and the sixth-form wing, with their common room and study hall, were out of bounds to fourth-years.

  I passed her in the corridor once, but she was deep in conversation with another girl and didn’t notice me. On the last day of term, I saw her getting into a car with a group of others and accelerating down the drive, and that was that.

  *

  The summer holidays that followed were long. My father, a builder, had hurt his back a few months earlier and had been unable to work so money was tight: there wasn’t even to be a weekend in Donegal or a day trip to Ballycastle. The city, meanwhile, battened down its hatches, and I was forbidden to go into town – forbidden, in fact, from going further than a couple of streets away from our house. All my friends who lived nearby were away; I was too old to ride my bike up and down the street or play skipping games like my younger sister.

  ‘Why don’t you practise your flute?’ my mother would say as I sloped endlessly about the kitchen. Normally I’d roll my eyes, but as the days stretched on I found myself doing it. I didn’t admit to myself it was because of Angie Beattie, but as I practised I couldn’t help thinking of her. When you first learn the flute, you’re told to imagine you’re kissing it. Now, every time I put my mouth to the lip plate, I thought of her. I’d think of her mouth, the curve of it. I’d think of the times I’d watched her at the start of orchestra practice, how she’d wet the reed of her clarinet and screw it into place, test it, adjust it, curl and recurl her lips around the mouthpiece. I’d let my mind unfurl, and soon I’d think other things too, things that weren’t quite thoughts but sensations, things I didn’t dare think in words and that afterwards left me hot and breathless and almost ashamed.

  *

  I got good at the flute that summer. When school started up again, the music teacher noticed. He kept me back after the auditions and found me some sheet music, asked me to learn it for the Christmas concert. Then he said he’d had a better idea and rummaged in his desk some more. A sonata for flute and piano, he said – we were short on duets. Angie Beattie could accompany me.

  ‘She might not want to,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said.

  I don’t remember much about the first few lunchtime practice sessions we had together. Each one, before it happened, seemed to loom, so inflated in my mind I almost couldn’t bear it, then, when it was happening, rushed by. At first I could barely meet Angie’s eye: it was mortifying, the extent to which I’d thought about her, let myself daydream about her, and more. But the music was difficult – for me, at least, which made it hard work for her as my accompanist – and that meant there was no time to waste; we needed to get straight to work. After the first week I found I was able to put aside, at least when I was actually with her, the memory of the strange summer’s fantasies. But sometimes, late at night, I’d be consumed for an instant with an ache that seemed too big for my body to contain.

  *

  One evening, we stayed late practising after school, and, completely out of the blue, she invited me back to her house for dinner. My heart started pounding as I tried to say a nonchalant yes. I’d imagined her house, the rooms she lived in, so many times; I’d imagined so often a scenario in which she might ask me back there. I phoned my mum from the payphone in the foyer, and then we walked back together, down the sweep of the school’s long drive, through the drifts of horse chestnut and sycamore leaves in the streets, swinging our instrument cases. There was mist in the air, and, as we turned off the main road, the taste of woodsmoke from a bonfire in a nearby garden.

  The Cherryvalley streets were wide and quiet, thick with dark foliage, lined with tall, spreading lime trees. It was all a world away from my street, its neat brick terraces and toy squares of lawn, the gnomes and mini-waterfall in our neighbour’s garden that I used to love and show off to
schoolfriends before I realised they weren’t something to be proud about. Cherryvalley seemed to belong to somewhere else entirely – a different place, or time.

  ‘It’s nice around here,’ I said.

  She glanced at me. ‘D’you think so?’ There was something in her expression I couldn’t read, and I remembered – of course, too late – that her mother had died here, maybe on this very street, or the one we just walked down. The streets felt not quiet but ominous then, the shifting shadows of the leaves, the plaited branches.

  ‘I meant,’ I said, flustered, ‘the streets have such pretty names.’

  She didn’t reply, and I tried to think of something else to say, something that would show I was sorry, that I understood. But of course I didn’t understand, at all.

  We walked on in silence. I wondered what had made her ask me back and if she was already regretting it.

  *

  The Beatties’ house was draughty and dark. Angie walked through, flipping on light switches and drawing the curtains. I thought of my house, the radio or the TV or often both on at the same time, my mum busy cooking, the cat always underfoot.

  Angie made me sit at the kitchen table, like a guest, while she hung my blazer in the cloakroom and made me a glass of lime cordial, then hurried about getting dinner ready. She turned on the oven and took chicken Kievs from the freezer, lined a baking tray with tinfoil, boiled the kettle to cook some potatoes, washed lettuce in a salad spinner and chopped it into ribbons. I had never, I realised, imagined how her home life actually worked. I felt shy of this Angie – felt the two years, and everything else, between us.

  When Mr Beattie got back, he looked nothing like the man you used to see shouting on TV or gazing down from lamp-posts. He was tall and thin and washed-out-looking; his shoulders were stooped, and his hair needed cutting. He shook my hand, and I found myself blurting out, ‘My dad used to vote for you.’ It was a lie: my dad never bothered to vote, and my mum, even though Dad teased her about it, only ever voted Women’s Coalition.

  I felt Angie looking at me, and I felt my neck and face burning. ‘Good man,’ Mr Beattie said. ‘Every vote counts. These are historic times we’re living through.’

  ‘And history will judge us,’ I heard myself say. I have no idea where it came from. The car radio, probably, the talk show Mum always had on and always turned off. Mr Beattie blinked, and Angie burst out laughing.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘He likes you,’ Angie said, when Mr Beattie had left the room. ‘He really likes you.’

  I wasn’t sure what there had been to like, but before I could say anything, she said, ‘If he talks about church, don’t say you don’t go.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s just more trouble than it’s worth.’

  When everything was ready and the three of us sat down at the table, Mr Beattie bowed his head and clasped his hands and intoned a long grace. I looked at Angie halfway through, but she had her head bowed and her eyes closed too. I took care to chime in my ‘Amen’ with theirs.

  As we ate, Mr Beattie asked questions about school, about music. Often Angie would jump in with an answer before I had a chance, and I couldn’t work out if it was for my benefit or her father’s. When he asked what church I went to, Angie said, ‘She goes to St Mark’s, don’t you?’

  ‘St Mark’s Dundela,’ Mr Beattie said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Angie said.

  ‘That’s the one,’ I said. St Mark’s was where our school had its Christmas carol service, the only time of year my family ever set foot in a church, and only then because I was in the choir.

  ‘Good, good,’ Mr Beattie said, and I made myself hold his gaze. All that nonsense was just hocus-pocus, is what my dad liked saying. Once, when some Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on our front door and asked if he’d found Jesus, my dad clapped his forehead and said, ‘I have indeed, down the back of the sofa, would you believe?’ My sister and I had thought it was the funniest thing ever.

  ‘St Mark’s Dundela,’ Mr Beattie said again. I started to panic then, trying to remember something, anything about it. But he didn’t ask any more. ‘C. S. Lewis’s church,’ was all he said, and I smiled and agreed.

  The meal seemed to go on for ever. The St Mark’s lie had made me feel like a fraud, but it wasn’t just that: the whole situation was putting me on edge. Angie was more nervous than I’d ever seen her. In fact, I couldn’t think of a time when I had seen her nervous, not when she confronted the smokers, not even before a solo. I must be doing everything wrong, I thought. I had the horrible feeling, too, that Mr Beattie could see through me, or, worse, could see into me, into some of the things I’d thought about his daughter.

  For dessert there was a chocolate fudge cake, from Marks & Spencer, shiny and dense with masses of chocolate shavings on top.

  ‘Dad has a sweet tooth, don’t you, Dad?’ Angie said. She cut him a slab of cake, and they grinned at each other for a moment. ‘We used to have chocolate cake for dinner sometimes, didn’t we?’ she said. ‘Or cheesecake.’

  ‘Strawberry cheesecake,’ Mr Beattie said.

  ‘We reckoned,’ she said, turning to me, ‘that because it had cheese in it was actually quite nutritious.’

  ‘A meal in a slice,’ Mr Beattie said.

  ‘Protein, fat, carbohydrate and fruit,’ she said, turning back to him.

  ‘A perfectly balanced plate,’ he said, and they smiled that smile again, intimate, impenetrable.

  When the meal was finally over, Mr Beattie said, ‘Well, after all this talk of the duet, you must give me a concert.’

  Without looking at me, Angie said, ‘Another time, Dad, we’re both played out today,’ and I knew she was embarrassed of me. I felt tears boil up in my eyes, and I stood up and said I needed the toilet. I took as long as I could in there, soaping and rinsing my hands several times over, drying each finger. I’d say I had homework, I decided. I’d say my mum didn’t like me being out after dark. Both of these things, I told myself, were true.

  When I told Angie that I had to go, she looked at me, then looked away. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Right.’

  Mr Beattie brought my blazer from the cloakroom and said he’d see me to the door. ‘It’s nice to see Angie bringing a friend back,’ he said. ‘I look forward to hearing this duet of yours one of these days.’

  *

  The whole way home, I felt a strange, fierce sense of grief, as if I’d lost something – a possibility, something that wouldn’t come again.

  *

  After that, I avoided her, concert or no concert. I went with the smokers at lunch, half-daring her to come and find me, half-dreading it. Thursday and Friday passed without my seeing her. An awful weekend, then Monday and Tuesday, and on Tuesday afternoon I knew I had to skip orchestra practice. On Wednesday she came to the mobile where my class did French, in the middle of a lesson, and said to the teacher she needed to speak to me. She was a prefect, and it was known that we were both musical; the teacher agreed without any questions.

  The shock and relief and shame of seeing her coursed through me, and I had to hold onto the desk for a moment as I stood up. As I followed her out of the classroom and down the steps and around the side of the mobile, I couldn’t seem to breathe. ‘How long are you planning on keeping this up?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I could see her pulse jumping in the soft part of her neck. A horrible, treacherous part of me wanted to reach out and touch it.

  ‘Angie,’ I said, and from all of the things that were whirling in my head I tried to find the right one to say.

  The trees and glossy pressing shrubs around us were thrumming with rain. All the blood in my body was thrumming.

  ‘Look at me,’ she said, and, when I finally did, she leaned in and kissed me. It was brief, only barely a kiss, her lips just grazing mine. Then she stepped back, and I took a step back too and stumbled against the roughcast wall of the mo
bile. She put out a quick hand to steady me, then stopped.

  ‘Oh God, am I wrong?’ she said. ‘I’m not wrong, am I?’

  *

  Two weeks later, in my house this time, a Saturday night, my parents at a dinner party, my sister at a sleepover. In the living room, in front of the electric fire, we unbuttoned each other’s shirts and unhooked the clasps of each other’s bras. Then our jeans and knickers: unzipping, wriggling, hopping out and off. We kept giggling – there we were gallivanting around in my parents’ living room in nothing but our socks.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, as we faced each other, and my whole body rushed with goosebumps.

  ‘Are you cold?’ she said, but I wasn’t. It wasn’t that, at all.

  Afterwards, we pulled the cushions off the sofa and lay on the floor, side by side. After a while we did start to shiver, even with the electric fire turned up fully, but neither of us reached for our clothes, scattered all over like useless, preposterous skins.

  ‘We’re like selkies,’ she said, ‘like Rusalka – do you know the opera?’ and when I said I didn’t, she stood up and struck a pose and sang the water nymph’s song to the moon, she told me later, and I jumped to my feet and applauded, and we started giggling again, ridiculous bubbles of joy.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said again, and I said, ‘Here we are,’ and that became our saying, our shorthand. Here we are.

  *

  All love stories are the same story: the moment that, that moment when, the moment we.

  We were we through Christmas, and into the spring. It was so easy: the music had been the reason, and now it was our excuse. We used one of the practice rooms each lunchtime and sometimes after school, and no one questioned it. Sometimes we’d play, or she’d play and I’d listen, or we’d both listen to music, and sometimes we’d just eat our sandwiches and talk. I’d go to hers after school, although I never quite felt at ease there, and I preferred it when we’d go for drives in her car, up the Craigantlet hills or along the coast to Holywood. I drifted from my friends, and she from hers, but the music practice hid everything.