England and Other Stories (8 page)

He rang the bell at number fifteen and, after a pause, Karen’s mother stood before him, blinking at him. Perhaps his disappointment was written on his face. But he had to go ahead.

‘Mrs Shield? I’ve got Karen’s bag.’ He held it up like a piece of evidence. ‘She left it on the bus.’

He noticed how she blinked and he noticed her red fingernails on the edge of the half-opened door. She stopped blinking and looked at him sternly.

‘Who are you?’ she said slowly, as if she might have just woken up.

‘I’m a friend of Karen’s. At Holmgate. Is Karen here?’

He’d peered in, towards a tiny hallway and the foot of a staircase. There was no sign or sound of anyone else.

But Karen’s mother was undoubtedly Karen’s mother. She was like a bigger version of Karen. She was wearing a smoky-coloured dress of a close-fitting but fluffy material. It went somehow with the red nails. The dress wasn’t very long, and what he mostly noticed, as he tried to look beyond her, was her hip. As she stood holding the door one hip was hidden, but the other was pushed out. It was oddly alert. The idea of a hip, even the word hip, seemed new to him. Strangely, it had never entered his mind when he thought of Karen.

‘She’s not here,’ Mrs Shield said, still looking at him sternly. ‘Karen’s not here.’ She said it so deliberately it almost sounded like a lie, but he felt sure himself now that Mrs Shield was alone.

Karen had got off the bus less than half an hour ago, to go home. It was a mystery. And he was somehow now under suspicion, for his good deed.

‘She goes round to Cheryl Hudson’s most afternoons before she comes home,’ Mrs Shield said. ‘God knows what they do there.’

She looked at him as if this were something he should have known already, as if he should have gone himself to Cheryl Hudson’s. (What went on there?) He felt put on the spot. It was like being called out to the front by a teacher. But Mrs Shield didn’t look like a teacher. And, though she was Karen’s mother, she didn’t really look like a mother.

‘Have you got a name?’

‘Sean.’

‘Sean who?’

‘Sean Wheatley.’

‘And that’s Karen’s bag?’

It seemed a strange question, and even before he could answer she said, ‘I can see it’s Karen’s bag.’

She looked at him searchingly. Her hands were still holding or rather fingering the edge of the door.

‘Tell me something, Sean Wheatley. Did you come round here now to hand over Karen’s bag, or did you come round here because you were really hoping to see Karen?’

It was a big question and he knew there was no ducking it. He knew that Mrs Shield would have spotted a false answer better than any teacher.

‘Both, Mrs Shield. Mainly to see Karen.’

She looked at him again for a long while.

‘Well, you’d better come in and wait for her.’

This was confusing. If Karen was round at Cheryl Hudson’s, then how long was he going to have to wait? Did he want to wait? But he also somehow knew that just to have handed over the bag and left would have been a big mistake.

She shut the door behind him. There was the vague smell of what he thought of as ‘other people’s house’. It was different in every house and you could never work out exactly what it was made of. Part of it must be Mrs Shield. Part of it must be Karen.

But, now the door was shut, Karen seemed suddenly far away, even though he was for the first time inside her home and he was holding her leopard-skin bag.

‘Through here,’ Mrs Shield said.

There was a small cluttered living room, like any living room, with a glass coffee table. He knew that quite often in other people’s houses (sometimes in his own) there’d be a bottle of something, opened, on the coffee table, even in the afternoon. But he couldn’t see any bottle. The telly was on with the sound down. She must have turned it down when she answered the door. The picture on the telly was weak because of the sunshine now streaming through the window. Outside, the clouds had completely dispersed.

He stood by the coffee table, politeness enveloping him, along with dazzling sunshine. He knew that you weren’t supposed to sit in other people’s houses till they asked you to.

‘So, Sean—’ she said, taking a breath. Then she stopped. ‘God, it’s blinding in here, isn’t it?’

She turned. It was the first time she’d moved suddenly and spontaneously, almost girlishly. She drew the curtains. They were a pale yellow and still let through a buttery glow. To close them, she put one knee on the sofa and reached up behind it. He saw an exposed heel and again, dominantly, her hips. Both this time.

As she turned back there was a flustered smile on her face at her own agility. It made her look younger and even less like a mother, certainly not the thirty-five or more she must have been.

She came right up close to where he still stood compliantly. The scent and breath of Mrs Shield were suddenly all over him. There was no trace of drink that he could detect.

‘So, Sean, how long have you been friends with Karen? I mean, friends, not just at school with her?’

But once again she didn’t wait for him to answer. With one hand she pulled down his fly zip, then slipped the other hand inside, like a pickpocket stealing a wallet.

‘Have you got an erection, Sean? Do you have one all the time?’

Then he was, in all senses, in her hands.

Silent seconds passed. There was the technical consideration: suppose Karen were to come home any moment now. But that seemed somehow irrelevant, or dealt with. Mrs Shield plainly knew what she was doing, even as she deferentially asked him, ‘So what do you think we should do now, Sean? What do you think we should do? Perhaps you should put those bags down.’

She kept her hand where it was while he did what she suggested.

‘I think we should do the whole thing, don’t you? The whole thing. Can you hang on?’

Hang on!

She took her hand away and, as nimbly as she’d managed the curtains, she left the room, then returned with a large white bath towel. She spread it on the sofa.

It was all done quickly. How could it not have been? Hang on!

But afterwards she’d had the goodness—if that was the right word—just to lie with him for a while, her arms round him, or perhaps it was more that his were round her. He’d felt his own slightness and her bigness—if that too was the right word. She was a fully formed complete woman, like no schoolgirl could ever be. He’d wanted to tell her this, but didn’t know how, or if it would be wise. He’d wanted to thank her, to praise her, to express all his grateful amazement, but hadn’t a clue how to do it. What he should have said—he knew it now, standing outside St Luke’s—was that she was lovely.

In the glow from the window he tried absurdly to work out his bearings. Which was east, which was west? Which way did the window face? Where was Craig Road, where he lived? Where was Holmgate School, the Town Hall, Tesco’s, Skelby Moor? Minutes ago he’d been standing on a front doorstep, holding a leopard-skin bag. Less than an hour ago he’d been sitting on a number six bus.

Finally, as if a timer had registered the appropriate interval, she moved, loosened their mutual grip, kissed him, just a peck, on the cheek and made it clear they should tidy themselves up.

Had she done this before? Was she in the habit of doing it? It was certain that she knew he’d never done anything like it before, just as it was certain that he’d never do, at least in one sense, anything like it again.

‘Now,’ she said before he left, her stern face back again, ‘you don’t breathe a word of this.’ And while he gravely nodded and she looked into his depths, she added, ‘More than your life’s worth if you do.’

Then she said, ‘Don’t forget
your
bag. The name’s Deborah, by the way. Since you ask.’

He realised later that she’d effectively vetoed his going any further with Karen. She’d simultaneously equipped and unequipped him. He looked at Karen now with something like pity.

The sun shone on the wet driveway. That fourth person, whoever he was, seemed to be moving on. The remaining three now turned to look around and a hand suddenly went to cover the daughter’s mouth in a show of recognition and surprise. Her eyes widened. She took away the hand and, at that distance, they half heard, half lip-read her words.

‘Well, well, look who’s here!’

She was making such a thing of it that he didn’t notice the look on the mother’s face. Or he didn’t want to look at the mother’s face, daubed with all that slap. Or at the father’s. Karen’s face was the only one you wanted to look at.

The mother. He knew her name.

And now all three of them were walking directly towards them and Andy was saying, flicking at his cigarette, ‘Well, I don’t like yours much.’

He didn’t want to look at her, but he wished there were some secret sign he might nonetheless make, without the need to catch her eye, to indicate that he’d never told anyone, not at Holmgate, not at Wainwright’s. Other blokes might have done, sooner or later. ‘I banged her mother.’ He’d never breathed a word. Least of all to his best mate Andy Sykes here, goggling like a prat.

Some sign. So at least she wouldn’t feel humiliated on that score. Only on the score of looking a mess—a dressed-up, painted-over mess, which made it worse. But maybe she really didn’t know that. Maybe she thought she looked the image of her daughter.

He wasn’t sure at all how he was going to manage this. It was cowardice not to look at her. Were they going to have to do all that hand-shaking stuff, the hugging and kissing, the strange grown-up but childish lovey-dovey stuff that was going on all around them?

‘She looks a right dog, doesn’t she?’

‘Shut up, Andy, they’ll hear.’ Just for a moment he hated Andy.

‘
Where-as!
’ Andy was preening himself, wriggling his shoulders. ‘And she’s not
with
anyone, is she?’

He looked at the father.
He
can’t ever have known, or he’d have known, himself, big-time. And Karen can’t ever have known, he was sure of that. Or she wouldn’t be acting so full-on now.

Just for a moment, as she drew close, he hated Karen Shield too. Intensely. For looking fantastic and making a fool of her mum.

‘
Ooo-ooo!
’ Andy was saying, clearly about Karen. Then he said, ‘Is that really her mother?’

‘Yes,’ he replied with an authority he didn’t like. He dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. ‘So, Andy boy,’ he said, ‘let it be a lesson to you.’

He had to say it quickly, under his breath, with no time to explain what he meant—if he knew what he meant. Though he thought, rapidly and cruelly, of what he might have gone on to say.

Karen was upon them, in her silly irresistible hat.

‘Sean Wheatley and Andy Sykes! Still together after all these years!’

He’d always been a jump or two ahead of Andy; now he felt he might be twice Andy’s age. He almost felt he might be like old Daffy, up there on the stage at morning assembly, telling them all what was good for them, telling them what the future held.

‘Have you got an erection, Sean?’ He’d hear those words on his dying day.

Karen was opening her arms as if she meant to enfold them both like lost sons.

‘You run after them, Andy boy’—this is what he might have said—‘you get the hots for them and you have your wicked way with them and then you end up marrying them. And then years down the road, look what you get. So—let it be a lesson to you.’

H
ALF A LOAF
. Not even that.

She has gone again. She’s stayed the night and she’s gone again. But part of ‘my time’, as I think of it—I don’t ever dare think of it as ‘our time’—is the time it takes for her to walk from the front step to the street corner, no more than a minute, the time in which I watch her, getting smaller, from the angle of the bay window. She never looks back. Perhaps she guesses that I watch her. I’ve never told her. To tell her would be to give her ammunition—for my eventual destruction. It’s coming one day. Of course it is.

Don’t give her ammunition. But then if you make out you’re calm, you’re equable, you will only give her the excuse she needs.

Her name is Tanya. Even to watch her walking away is something. And it’s a kind of training—but I don’t dwell on that. You’ve drunk the glass, I tell myself, till it’s filled next time, but there’s still this last drop. Don’t waste it.

I stand at the window. It’s a quiet street. She crosses it at a long, oblique, efficient angle, between the parked cars, then at the main road she disappears, but I stand perhaps for a minute more, as if I can see through walls. Just to imagine her walking along a pavement, descending into the Tube is something. Just to imagine her being in the world is something, and may be all I’ll have one day, any day now.

She disappears, but I don’t move. In my head already is a picture of a woman in a red coat, sitting in a Tube train. She’s the woman you notice as soon as you get in, and you can’t keep your eyes off her. This is true for all the men in the carriage, but I don’t think of the other men. She sits as if she’s entirely unaware of this swamp of attention, as if she’d be surprised, embarrassed if you put even the possibility to her. She sits as if she’s also completely, nonchalantly aware of it, as if it goes with being alive. I want to reach out and touch her, but not as a young man would. I want to put my hand on the crown of her head and say, ‘Stay as you are, always. May no harm ever come to you.’ How absurd, when she has the power to destroy me.

Half a loaf? But isn’t this life, the whole of it? Shouldn’t I be thanking, praising heaven?

My mother used to say, ‘All good things come to an end.’ Perhaps all mothers say it. As if the worst harm she foresaw for me was the tragedy of good stuff not being constantly on tap. Lucky little brat. But she must have seen the look of abject misery on my face whenever some seaside holiday or just some happy sunny day approached its end.

There it is, there it isn’t. Now you see it, now you don’t. But now I know it’s not as simple as that. Thank heaven.