‘Me too. Not because I’m mad about animals, mind you. I get through a lot of hamburgers. There’s a lot of sentimental rubbish talked about animals. Like that fool Gillian. It’s just that I loathe the meat here so much. It’s like eating dishcloths.’
‘Is it?’ Arse said and began to pick at his Spanish rice. It was coloured a fiery yellow and didn’t look very appetizing. Dilly’s half-eaten plateful had been pushed to one side; now she was eating an apple, though with small signs of any enjoyment.
‘Someone ought to poison that bastard,’ she said and Arse looked sideways at her and his lips curled.
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. I thought ground glass might do. Easy to get hold of. Just grind it up in the woodwork room. But it’s not all that good. Doesn’t always work.’
She looked at him, her eyes wide over her apple. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Why not? It’s always useful to find out things. I do it a lot. Get an idea and then try to see if it’ll work.’
‘Christ,’ she said and then laughed. ‘Well, if he keels over good and dead one afternoon, I won’t remember a word of this.’
‘Thanks,’ he said and went on eating his rice, pushing it neatly into his mouth and swallowing it almost immediately, seeming neither to taste nor chew it.
There was a silence between them as the big canteen increased its roaring and clattering because the second lunch sitting of the first two forms came thundering in to push the first sitting out of the way. Here at the sixth-form table, one of the privileges the older people of the Foundation were permitted, there was ample room and a pretence of peace; most of the others had gone, though there were a few people from the Geography set at the far end of the table, their heads down over some project they were involved with, and Dilly stretched and turned her head to look at the staff tables set behind a row of bamboo screens on which plastic ivy was entwined, and laughed.
‘Just think, if ground glass really did work, you could fill all their water jugs with it and kill off the lot.’
‘I don’t think you can put it in water,’ Arse said seriously. ‘I think you’d be able to see it. There’s a refraction problem or something. I haven’t tried. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to kill all of them. Just Collop. Probably. Maybe later …’ His voice drifted away and he looked at Dilly and smiled and she thought, He’s really quite nice. His face changed completely when he smiled, losing the pinched, empty look it usually had, and his eyes were a rich green colour she rather liked. He was a bit short for her, by an inch or so, but so what? She’d never been the sort of person to choose her friends by their looks. It could be pleasant to make a friend of this chap. She’d kept her distance from the girls, apart from Bonnie perhaps, who was a cheerful soul and good enough company here at school, but even she Dilly didn’t see out of school. It was a bit lonely sometimes, even though most of her time was taken up with her course work and revision of some of the earlier stuff; it could be good to have someone to go around with, see a flick maybe, go to a concert.
‘I’ll have to think of something else,’ Arse said, and pushed his plate away. It was quite empty. ‘I dare say something’ll come to mind.’
‘I’d be careful who I said things like that to. Someone might take you seriously?’
‘Who says I’m not? Anyway, I’m all right with you.’
‘How do you know?’
He looked at her and smiled again. ‘I am, aren’t I? You wouldn’t do anything to stop me.’
She was suddenly uncomfortable. ‘Look, what you do is none of my business. But you’d make it bloody hard if you’d told me all sorts of stuff and then some sort of accident happened.’
‘There aren’t any accidents,’ Arse said. ‘Only things people do. Everything that happens to you is partly your own fault. You make it happen. No accidents.’
‘Oh, don’t be daft! How can it not be an accident if you happen to be on a train and it crashes and breaks your legs? That can’t be your fault.’
‘Who pushed you on the train? If you get on a train or a bus or anything you take a chance that it won’t crash. If it does, and you’re hurt, it’s because you made the wrong choice.’
She shook her head. ‘That sounds awful. It’s like —’ She stopped and tried to get the thoughts clear in her head. ‘It’s like you can’t ever stop being careful. You have to think all the time about what you do and who you do it with.’
‘That’s right,’ Arse said and got to his feet. ‘I’m going for a Coke. Do you want one?’
She hesitated and then nodded. ‘All right. Where?’
‘By the market. Are you sure you’ve made the right choice?’ Again he produced that disarming smile. ‘I mean, if a motorbike runs off the road and ploughs into us while we’re there in. the street, it’ll be because you were there to be ploughed into. You’re choosing now. Taking a chance there’s a motorbike on its way.’
‘Yeah? Well, I’ll take it. The odds are ridiculous anyway.’
‘Tell ’em that when you wake up in Old East.’ And this time he actually laughed, and Dilly got to her feet and followed him out of the canteen. She hadn’t felt as relaxed with someone for ages, she thought. Absolutely ages.
‘You really must stop sulking at me, Mrs Clements,’ Martin Collop said, and stood back to let her into the staffroom from which he’d been just about to emerge. But he turned back to follow her into the room. ‘That really was the most frozen of stares you gave me then!’
‘It was meant to be. And I don’t sulk. I just choose the people I want to speak to very carefully.’
‘And you don’t want to speak to me. All because I got irritated with your dear little girls. But really, you know, the first day, casting a new play — it’s always a pretty fraught affair. I apologize. There! Does that help? I hope so. I really can’t do with having you sitting at every rehearsal glowering at me like a tricoteuse. What do you think I’m going to do to your little ewe lambs? Rape ’em?’
Hattie looked at him and lifted her brows. ‘I don’t think about you at all. I just do my job here, looking after the ewe lambs.’
‘Well, they’re safe enough with me, I do assure you. We’ve been rehearsing for weeks now, almost at the end, and I haven’t laid a finger on one of ’em.’
‘You’ve used your tongue to good effect,’ she said with a certain tartness of her own.
‘Ye gods, what do you expect? Constant If-you-pleases and Do-you-minds? There isn’t time for that. They get no worse than the boys do, and I thought you women were all into equality these days.’
She opened her mouth to lash back at him and then closed it. It would be a waste of time and very boring, much as the past few weeks had been. Afternoon following afternoon had been spent in the cold but stuffy gym as The Taming of the Shrew took some sort of form, and although it was a play she’d always liked, now it irritated her beyond measure; she’d come to share Dilly’s view of it as having the wrong ending for modern women, but it wouldn’t help to say as much to Collop. There he stood, his head on one side, smiling his patronizing oily smile; she could have hit him.
‘Let’s just leave it that as long as the play’s in rehearsal, I’ll be there to keep an eye on the girls. And not for anything else. No pleasant conversation with you to pass the time. It’s bad enough I have to be there; I don’t need to bore myself stupid into the bargain,’ she said, and picked up the coat she’d come to fetch and marched out, leaving him staring after her with his face white with temper. She felt better; she’d managed to be very rude without even trying very hard, and it had hit home. That would be enough to keep her warm all through a long dull evening at home, after the girls had gone to bed.
‘No,’ Genevieve said. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘What you want and what you’ll do are two very different things, young lady,’ Gordon Barratt said, and leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. ‘You might as well give in. You always have to in the end. Don’t you?’
There was a lon
g silence and then Genevieve said softly, ‘No, I don’t.’ And sitting in her armchair on the other side of the room, her shoulders hunched, so that she was smaller, less visible, Stella felt colder still, though already it was as though her inner parts were crackling with ice. Just listening to them talk made pictures form in her mind, horrible pictures; it took all her concentration to keep her attention on the words they said so that she didn’t have to look at the images.
‘You will this time,’ Gordon said and got to his feet. ‘Do you hear me? You’ll drink that chocolate and then you’ll drink another cup, if I have to pour it into you with a funnel. And don’t think I wouldn’t.’
‘Try it,’ Genevieve said, still very softly. ‘I’m not a little girl now, am I? It wouldn’t be so easy now, would it?’
‘You look like a child,’ he said and there was a whip in his voice that made Genevieve redden for a moment. But it faded fast and she smiled back at him, sweet as ever.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I suppose I do in some ways.’ She looked at Stella then, who, caught unawares, found herself making eye contact and felt sick, flicking her eyes away, not wanting to look at her daughter, not that way at any rate.
‘So, do it.’ He sounded rough now, angry, and that seemed to make Genevieve even stronger.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t make me. Just try it!’
‘Don’t think I won’t,’ he said. ‘Stella, she’s to drink it, you hear me? I won’t be back till eleven, but if she hasn’t had it by then, and the other one as well, believe me, I’ll pour it into her. And if you try to cheat, throw it away, any of that nonsense, I’ll know. I always do, don’t I?’
Stella said nothing and he repeated it, a little louder. ‘Don’t I?’
‘Yes,’ Stella said, and then with a sudden spurt of animation, ‘I want her to drink it even more than you do.’
‘Well, then,’ he said with an oddly triumphant note in his voice, and went, leaving the door open behind him so that they could see him in the hall, winding his scarf round his throat, tying the belt of his overcoat in the old-fashioned trendy way, with the buckle dangling, pulling on his gloves. Neither of them said a word.
He came back to the living room to stare at them both.
‘I’ll know,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that. I’ll know!’ And turned and went. And they listened to his footsteps on the crazy paving of the path and the creak of the gate and the footsteps again as he went down the road. He never took the car when he went out to his committee meetings. Stella had asked him once why not, but she’d long ago forgotten the explanation he’d given her. There’d been one but it had been pushed out of her memory, like so many other things.
‘It’d be easier if you did drink it,’ Stella said after a while. ‘You know how he is.’
‘I know better than you do,’ Genevieve said. She was sitting at the table now, her revision books spread around her. She had put the radio on and it bleated softly at them. Melody Radio, where music comes first. No talk, just music. It’s like us, Stella thought, and wondered what would happen if she reached out and switched it off or changed the channel. Gordon would have done that. Of course she didn’t.
‘All the same,’ Stella said after another long pause, ‘I wish you would, darling. You really are — I mean, now there are other people who are talking …’
‘Other people?’ Genevieve didn’t lift her head from her books.
‘That teacher, nurse, or whatever she is. At your school.’
‘She doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with her,’ Genevieve said. ‘Look, I’ve got work to do here. Do you mind? If you chatter I can’t do it.’
‘You’ve got the radio on.’
‘That helps,’ Genevieve said, and turned it up louder.
‘You’ve got to drink it. For peace and quiet.’ Stella tried again, desperate now, and this time Genevieve lifted her head from her work. ‘And for your health.’
‘You don’t really mean that,’ she said.
‘Of course I mean it!’ Stella cried, and sat up more straightly. ‘You know I worry about you, darling. You really do need to get a little more vitamins and so forth into you. It’s winter. It’s unhealthy to be so — well, you are rather thin —’
‘It’s unhealthier not to be thin,’ Genevieve said, still sitting staring at her mother. ‘You know that.’
‘You’ll never be really fat,’ Stella said, hopelessly, knowing she was going to lose the argument. ‘Not to be fat …’
‘Bigger than I am would be unhealthy. Why don’t you let me explain it, Mum? You never let me explain it.’
‘Because it’s all too silly!’ The tears were starting in Stella now, deep inside. She could feel them gathering somewhere around the level of her bottom ribs. They’d gather into a pool and that would rise and rise, until it could climb up to her chest and then her throat and then she wouldn’t be able to talk at all and it would just — She shook her head as though that would help. It didn’t, of course.
‘Well, if you think it’s silly,’ Genevieve said, turning back to her books. ‘Silly …’ And she said no more at all however hard Stella tried to persuade her. And after an hour Stella gave up and took the cup and drank the cold chocolate herself. He could always tell if the cup had just been emptied into the sink rather than drunk from. Then she went into the kitchen and made another cup because he always knew how much milk there was and how much cocoa powder, and drank that too, though they both made her retch. But it was worth it. Better than the row there’d be if he came in and thought they’d not done as he said.
Genevieve was already in her room when Stella went upstairs at half past ten. ‘I looked after it all, Jenny,’ she said, standing outside her daughter’s bedroom door. She had never liked to meddle, even when Genevieve was little. ‘They need their own space,’ she’d tell her friends, who admired her good sense, wishing they could be as restrained themselves with their own children. ‘The cup’s still on the table, so he ought to be all right.’
Again that silence, and this time Stella felt the hostility in it. ‘I won’t say a word,’ Genevieve said eventually. ‘Not a bloody word. You needn’t worry.’
So that was another day it was all right, Stella thought, and went to sleep very quickly. It was always the best thing to do.
Harry’s party ended late. There was no reason why it shouldn’t; the parents wouldn’t be home until the small hours, Harry assured them all cheerfully, and even then they’d hardly be likely to fuss.
‘They leave it to me, mostly,’ he said when the Carter twins nagged about it. ‘There’s much too much going on in their lives to let them get over-involved in mine. Which is a consummation devoutly to be wished by you all.’
He had beamed round at them all and they had stared owlishly back at him; there was little more they could do because they really were pretty far gone.
Richard and Robert had brought a full bottle of vodka, and a couple of the others had supplemented that with Martini and Southern Comfort. They preferred it to the joints that Harry and Dave were sharing, with Richard taking an occasional turn.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Robert said. ‘It’s not so much fun if they don’t try and get involved. I like putting one over on the old man. He thinks he knows what we’re doing and the poor cretin hasn’t a clue.’
‘If the father of the Carter twins, the estimable Carter père, who probably managed to achieve the existence of this ineffable brace of youths only because he stuttered, is a cretin, what does that make the Carter twins? Their share of wit and wisdom and general ability will have been diluted as well as attenuated by being passed on … One frets and concerns oneself over the future welfare of the Carter twins.’ Harry beamed at them and they beamed back. ‘You’d agree, my friend?’ And he prodded Dave, sitting next to him.
‘Agree about what?’
‘My opinion of the Carter twins.’
‘I have no opinion of the Carter twins,’ Dave said and cackled delightedly at his own
wit, and Harry sighed.
‘You’ve taken in too much of your own Ketema resin, my friend,’ Harry said. ‘That was a very old joke. Positively bewhiskered with antiquity.’
‘None the worse for that,’ Dave said. ‘And who says I’ve taken too much?’
‘Just have to look.’ Harry leaned over and slid one long black finger into the soft leather pouch on Dave’s knee. ‘That was, as I recall, a somewhat plumper pochette. I like that. Very alliterative. Plumper pochette, plumper pochette …’ He went on repeating the syllables dreamily until they sounded like nonsense in his own ears.
‘Some bugger helped himself,’ Dave said after a long time, seeming to wake up a little. ‘Would you believe it? Right there at school. Makes you sick, little buggers helping themselves.’
Robert Carter managed a giggle of his own. ‘Should have asked in Lost Property.’
‘Very funny, oh very witty, cretin divided by a half,’ Dave said savagely. ‘Was it you that took it, you bastard? You and that shit of a —’ He lunged forwards and Harry pulled him back.
‘Paranoia, side effect of hash as well known to the cognoscenti,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Dave’s been complaining of being robbed ever since I first knew him. Probably you are, dear boy, but there’s nothing you can do about it except hide your stash more carefully. Have some orange juice. You’ll need it in a minute if you don’t already.’
‘I’m dying of thirst,’ Dave discovered and took the bottle and upended it into his mouth, splashing it on his scarlet shirt and not seeming to care. ‘Roll another, Harry.’
‘Might as well,’ Harry said, and reached for the pouch. ‘While you’ve still got it. Could be someone is pinching it, you know. Better find somewhere else to hide it. It’s been discovered.’
‘Yeah,’ Dave said, and yawned, caring now. ‘Yeah. Better think about that. Sometime.’
‘Might be one of the staff,’ Harry said as his fingers worked expertly with paper and shreds of tobacco culled from a filter-tip cigarette. ‘You never know.’
Dangerous Things Page 13
