by Laura Furman
“Oh—then I mustn’t get in the way of virtue! God forbid. But I will see you Tuesday, after school?”
“Is it Tuesday?” Val was vague. “I’m not sure.”
“You must come on Tuesday. We’re broaching the divine Marianne.”
I was disappointed. Val had talked about Fred Harper (the boys doing the Oxbridge entrance called him Fred) as if he were a portal to higher things, yet here he was chaffing and prodding about work like any other teacher. Also, he was rumpled and pear-shaped, with pleading eyes, and a bald patch in his hair, which was dark and soft like cat fur. He had a drawling posh voice. I knew that there was a Mrs. Harper and also children; and that Mrs. Harper got bored if her husband and Val talked for hours about poetry. Sometimes she went to bed, leaving them to it.
“Who’s the divine Marianne?” I said jealously when we’d walked on.
Valentine shrugged, irritated. “A poet in the A-level anthology.”
Mum and Gerry were afraid I was bringing a contamination into their house. When I bought junk-shop dresses, Mum made me hang them outside in case of fleas. Val found an old homburg and wore it pulled down over his eyes.
“What does he think he looks like?” Gerry said.
“What’s the matter with that boy?” Mum asked. “What’s he hiding from?”
He stood in our neat kitchen with its blue Formica surfaces, as improbable—in his collarless shirt, waistcoat, and broken canvas shoes, with a scrap of vermillion scarf at his neck—as an exotic bird blown off course. Even in those days, when he was fresh and boyish, the drugs left some kind of mark on him—not damage, exactly, more like a patina that darkened his skin to old gold, refining its texture so that minute wrinkles appeared at the corners of his lids when he frowned. His eyes were veiled and smoky. He smelled, if you got up close: an intricate musk, salty, faintly fishy, sun-warmed even in winter—delicious to me.
“Hello? Anybody home behind that hair?” my mother said.
Val looked at me quickly, blissfully. Later, he would imitate her for our friends. While he was with me, everything was funny. Without him, I was exposed, on a lonely pinnacle—afraid of tumbling. They were still strong, my parents. I couldn’t, wouldn’t yield to their judgment of what I loved, but it weighed on me nonetheless, as monumental as a stone. If I tried to carelessly condescend to them, they found me out. I was clever, I was still doing well at school, but Gerry was clever, too.
“What’s so wrong with Communism?” I’d lightly say, trying to be amused at their naive politics. I really was amused—I knew about so much beyond their blinkered perspective. I’d read poets and visionaries and The Communist Manifesto. “Doesn’t it seem fairer that everyone should start out equally, owning a share of the means of production?”
“It’s a nice idea, Stella,” Gerry said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out in practice. People in those countries wouldn’t thank you for your high ideals; they’d rather be able to buy decent food in the shops. The trouble is, a command economy just isn’t efficient. Breaks down because of human nature in the end. Every man naturally wants to do better than his neighbor.”
Because he knew those words—“command economy”—and I didn’t, how could I answer him? His knowledge was flawed, but substantial—an impregnable fortress. My attacks on it—so effective when we were apart, and Gerry dwindled in my imagination to a comic miniature—faltered in his actual presence, so that I battered at the fortress with weak fists. Even in the seventies, the old order hadn’t changed much. Young people wore their hair long and had afghan coats and went to music festivals—some young people did those things. But at the top, bearing down on everyone, there were still those ranks of somber-suited men (and the occasional woman): politicians, professors, policemen—inflexible, imperturbable in their confidence about what was to be taken seriously and what was not. You could jeer at them, but their influence was a fog you breathed every day, coiling into your home through their voices on radio and television and in newspapers. Gerry said that Africans suffering in a famine should know better than to have so many children, or that feminists did women no favors when they went around like tramps, or that there was no point in giving to charities because it was well-known that they spent all the money on themselves.
As for my mother, cleverness could never beat her. In my mind, I was convinced that her life—housework and child care—was limited and conventional. But, in my body, I was susceptible to her impatient brisk delivery, her capable hands fixing and straightening—sometimes straightening me, brusquely, even when I had half grown away from her: a collar crooked or a smudge on my cheek, which she scrubbed at with spit on her handkerchief. She was in her late thirties then, and no doubt she was very attractive, though I couldn’t see it—compact good figure, thick hair in a short bouffant cut, definite features like strokes of charcoal in a drawing. Probably she was sexy, too. In her withholding and dismissing manner, she seemed to communicate that women knew the prosaic and gritty and fundamental truth that underlay all the noise of men’s talk and opinion. Something I ought to know, too, or would come to know sooner or later.
I wanted to resist knowing it with all my force.
The summer I got my O-level results (all A’s, apart from a C in physics), my uncle Ray got me a job at the chocolate factory where he worked. I wept to Val about how the women there hated me and gave me the worst tasks (I had to take the molds off the hot puddings—at the end of the first day my fingers were blistered), because I was only a student worker and because I took a book to read during my breaks. I wanted him to tell me to give it up, but he didn’t. I think that he actually liked the romance of my working there—it was not “middle-class.” He said he loved my Bristol accent. Really? Did I have one? I didn’t think so; my mother had always strictly policed the way I spoke at home (“ ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ Stella, not ‘I weren’t doing nothing’ ”). Apparently, however, I said reely for really, and strawl for stroll. “Your mother has an accent, too,” he said. “Broader than yours. Can’t you hear it? But I prefer it to the way my parents speak.”
Valentine and I were bored one night with the flirting in Madeleine’s bedroom. He rolled a joint—quickly, with the fingers of one hand, as only he could—and we went outside to smoke. The moon, watery white, sailed in and out behind dark rags of cloud blown by the wind; we lay spread-eagled on our backs on Pam’s lawn. Only our fingertips were touching—through them we communicated electrically, wordlessly, as if we were emptying ourselves into each other. As the dope went to my head, I thought I felt the movement of the world turning.
Then I was sure that someone was spying on us from our garden next door. Madeleine’s garden was perfunctory, compared with ours: there was a patio swing with chintz cushions, and a birdbath on the scrappy lawn, a few plants in the flower beds. Ours was densely secretive behind fences top-heavy with clematis and rose and honeysuckle; it had a trellised arbor and young fruit trees and a rockery, which Gerry had built to make a feature of the old tree stumps left behind by the developers. I despised his prideful ownership, the ceaseless rounds of pruning and spraying and deadheading. And it occurred to me now that he might be hidden in there. He did walk out into the garden in the dark sometimes—“to cool off,” he said. If he was there, he’d be skewered with irritation, snooping involuntarily.
Val began to stroke my hand, rubbing his thumb around my palm, then pushing it between my fingers, one by one, over and over, until I was sick with love for him. But I knew better than to make any move toward him—he didn’t like me all over him. There was a rustling from among the shrubs next door, and a head like a pale moon-blob rose above the top of the clematis mound.
“My stepfather thinks that I should get a job in a bank, when I leave school,” I said aloud to Val.
Surprised, Valentine turned his head toward me. “Do you want a job in a bank?”
“Of course not. I’d rather kill myself. But he thinks it would be good for me, and provide for my future.”
“He’s a cunt,” Valentine said. “What does he know about your future?”
“I know, he’s a cunt.”
The blob spoke. “Stella, come inside. You’ll catch your death. That grass is damp.”
Gerry’s voice in the night was sepulchral, ridiculous, tight with disapproval. Only when I heard it was I aware of myself sprawled so provocatively on my back, with my legs spread wide apart, my arms flung open. Let him look, I thought. I didn’t move. I pretended I didn’t see him.
“Did you hear something?” I said to Val, squeezing his hand in mine.
We were going to laugh—I knew we were.
“Come inside, Stella, now, at once,” Gerry said—but keeping his voice low, as if he didn’t want my mother to know what he had to witness. “I’m telling you. Get up!”
Pointedly, he didn’t address Valentine, ignoring his existence.
“I think I heard something,” Valentine said. “Or was it cats?”
Leisurely, Val sat up, crouching over the cold end of the joint, his hand held up to shield it from the wind and his hair falling forward, hiding his face. Then came the scratch and flare of the heavy, shapely silver lighter that had been his mother’s until she gave up smoking. Fire bloomed momentarily in Valentine’s cave; I saw him aflame—devilish, roseate. I scrambled to my feet. I really was stoned. The garden swung in looping arcs around me. “Oh,” I cried, exulting in it. “Oh … Oh!”
We were laughing now. Under my soles, the world rocked, and steadied itself, and rocked again.
“What’s the matter with you?” Gerry hissed. He must have been standing on something—a rock? a box?—on the other side of the fence, because it was too high ordinarily to see over; his two fists, hanging on, were smaller moon-blobs against the night. “Are you drunk?”
(My parents still hadn’t understood what we were smoking.)
“You’d better come back the front way. Come round by the front door.”
“Back the front way, Stella?” Valentine imitated softly, looking at me, not at Gerry. “Front the back way? Which way d’you like?”
I had always had a gift of seeing myself as my stepfather saw me—only in this vision I used to be a small and thwarted thing, blocking him. Now, in the moonlight, I was transfigured: arms outstretched, veering like a yacht tacking, I was crossing the garden, flitting ahead of the wind, like a moth, weightless.
Valentine and I looked so consummately right as a couple: stylish, easily intimate, his arm dropped casually across my shoulder, our clasped hands swinging together. We looked sexy. I knew that because I saw it in others’ faces. But the truth was, we didn’t have sex. In all the time we’d spent lying on his bed (or, occasionally, on mine), we hadn’t done an awful lot for Mum and Gerry to disapprove of.
We did work ourselves up; there was some touching and fumbling. I touched him, mostly; if he touched me he turned it into a joke, put on a funny voice as if my breasts were little animals squeaking and crawling around on my chest. Kissing, he pecked dry kisses all over my face with a satirical, popping noise, smiling at me all the time with his eyes open. Then sometimes, if his mother banged the gong for supper, or the phone rang and she called upstairs to say that Val was wanted, he grabbed my hand with sudden aggression, pushed it down inside his jeans, and used it to rub himself fiercely and greedily for a moment, before he flung himself off the bed and ran to the phone, zipping up as he went, cursing, pushing his erection away inside. I wasn’t disgusted—actually, I’d say I was more fascinated—by my transgression into that crowded heat inside his stretched underpants, his smell on my fingers afterward. But also I was confused: if that was desire, it was unmistakably urgent.
So what was the matter?
Who wants to remember the awful details of teenage sex, teenage idiocy?
I loved him because he was my other half, my twin, inaccessible to me.
One evening I was supposed to babysit while Mum and Gerry went out to a Masonic Ladies’ Night. I liked my baby brother very much: Philip was an enthusiast, always entertaining us with jokes and little performances, looking quickly from face to face for approval; he sat on his hands to keep them from waving about and swung his legs under his chair until it rocked. When Mum came downstairs, perfumed and startling in a silver Lurex bodice and a stiff white skirt, he and I were laughing at Dad’s Army on the telly. She stood clipping on her earrings by feel, giving us her instructions. The whole process of her transformation, she managed to convey, was just another duty to discharge.
“Stella, I don’t want anyone coming round.”
“Madeleine said she might.”
“I don’t want Valentine hanging around Philip if I’m not here.”
I wasn’t even expecting Val: he was at one of his sessions with Fred Harper. But out of nowhere—everything had been all right, the previous moment—I was dazzled by my rage. “What’s the matter with you?” I shouted. “Why have you got such a nasty mind?”
I knew in that moment that she regretted what she’d said, but only because she’d miscalculated and hadn’t meant to start an argument. She was afraid it would make them late; she glanced at the wristwatch on a silver bracelet that had been Gerry’s wedding present to her. “Who you choose as your friends is your own business, Stella,” she said stiffly. “But I’m not obliged to have them in my house.”
“Your house? Why d’you always call it your house? Don’t I live here or something?”
My stepfather hurried downstairs in his socks, doing up his cuff links. He’d heard raised voices. I loathed him for the doggy eagerness with which he came sniffing out our fight.
“What’s going on, Edna?”
He irritated my mother, too. “For goodness’ sake, get your shoes on, Gerry. We’re late already.”
“I won’t let her get away with talking to you like that.”
“I’ll talk to her how I like,” I said. “She’s my mother.”
Philip went off into a corner, dancing on tiptoe with his head down, shadowboxing, landing tremendous punches on the air: this was what he did when we quarreled, trying to make us laugh. Dad’s Army wound up; the ordinary evening melted around us; then they were too late for their dinner dance, their treat spoiled. Mostly, I shouted and they pretended to stay calm. Soon I couldn’t remember how it had all started: I felt myself washed out farther and farther from the safe place we usually cohabited. I couldn’t believe how small and far away they seemed. It was suddenly easy to say everything. “You think you’re so sensible and fair,” I protested to Gerry. “But, really, I know you just want to destroy me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
“Oh, Stella. D’you have to make such a performance out of everything?”
Gerry said that I wasn’t a very easy girl to like, that I was arrogant and selfish. He crossed the room to close a window, because he didn’t want the neighbors to hear us. At some point, Philip went quietly upstairs. I said that I would die if my life turned out to be as boring and narrow as theirs.
“Just you wait,” my mother warned. “Boring or not, you’ll have to get on with it like everybody else.”
Gerry called my friends dropouts and deadbeats, a waste of space.
“That’s what we think you are,” I said. “We think you’re dead.”
“I’d watch out for Valentine if I were you,” my mother said. “You might be barking up the wrong tree.”
Gerry did lose his temper eventually.
“Get out, Stella, if you can’t respect this house. Just get out.”
Mum remonstrated with him, halfheartedly.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going. I wouldn’t stay in this house if you begged me.”
They didn’t beg me. I let myself out the front door, into the street.
• • •
Freezing without my coat, and weeping, I went to Val’s. His mother let me in and I waited for him in his attic, getting under the blankets to keep warm. When he came home from Fred Harper’s, I h
eard her expostulating downstairs, saying that I couldn’t stay, she wouldn’t put up with it. So she didn’t like me, either. And I heard Val’s voice raised, too, yelling awful things. (“You silly bitch. Don’t touch me!”) An infectious rage was flashing around between us all that night, like electricity.
“I can’t go back,” I said, when he erupted into the room.
And he understood that it was true. Anyway, he’d had a row, too—with Fred Harper. He was leaving school. We’d both leave school. We’d leave home, too. This, I felt, was the beginning of my real life, of everything I had been waiting for. My real life, in my imagination afterward, always had that attic shape, high and empty and airy, cigarette smoke drifting in the light from a forty-watt bulb. Val said he knew someone who had a flat where we could stay. Tomorrow he’d sort it out. For tonight, I could stay here. He didn’t care what his mother thought.
“Poor little Stella,” he said. “Poor little you. I’m so sorry.”
He was stroking my arms and nuzzling between my shoulder blades, trying to warm me up where I was rigid with cold. And there you are: that night he made love to me, properly—or more or less properly. Anyway, we managed penetration. And we did it another time, too, in the early morning a few days later, in a zipped-up sleeping bag in the front room of a fantastically disgusting ground-floor flat belonging to Ian, the freckled red-haired man who sold Valentine his drugs. We lay in the dawn light, crushed together on our narrow divan in the blessed peace of the aftermath, Val’s head on my breast: proudly, I felt the trickling on my thighs. I suppose we must have heard the milkman’s float passing—or perhaps by that time we had dozed off.
Then someone threw a full milk bottle through the closed window. I didn’t understand at first what had happened: it was just an explosion in the room, appalling and incomprehensible, the crashing glass as loud as a bomb, milk splashed violently everywhere. (It seems unlikely that the drug dealer had a daily delivery—the bottle must have been picked up from someone else’s doorstep.)
