Offcomer (14 page)

One evening, tired from school, Claire had found herself
standing over him, talking to him slowly, simply, as if he were a child. He had looked up at her in silence, blinking lopsidedly. She had seen herself suddenly, from where he was sitting, and had had to run off upstairs without finishing her sentence. She had beaten her head against her bedroom wall.
“Arsehole. Fucking arsehole,”
her nose bubbling and tears running down her face. The thick breezeblock and plaster wall was percussionless. No one heard. She had come back downstairs dry-eyed and sore and smiling. She sat at his feet in silent apology. His heavy hand had rested on her head, clumsily stroked her hair. Whenever she remembered it, how ever long it was afterwards, that moment could still make her crumple up inwardly, make her want to hurt herself.

The three of them had come to a tacit agreement. They had filled up the soft unmanageable emptinesses with constant TV. The incessant voices, music, flickering light had come to fill up the wordlessness and stillness that surrounded them. It made all three of them feel easier, all three of them feel guilty.

And tonight, Claire was again glad of the constant noise, the false focus to the room. Ever since she had arrived, her mother had been flicking her sidelong questioning glances, and she knew it was only a matter of time before the actual questions started. After dinner, Claire installed herself on the sofa, remained resolutely in profile, pretending to be engrossed in the news. She knew there was washing up to be done, but if she was cornered in the kitchen there would be no way to avoid her mother’s gently persistent enquiries.

“Mum, leave it. I’ll do it in the morning.”

“You could give me a hand now.”

“I want to see the news.”

Belfast was on TV. A half-filled debating chamber, a glowing digital clock, the minutes ticking by. Angry laughter and polite fury. Then cut to elsewhere. She recognised the brownbrick building near the bus station. Square spectacles, a boiled, thin-eyed face, and clustering around him, men familiar from local news back in Belfast. The one who looked like Mr. Burns from
The Simpsons
, the brushy sergeant-major type, the swelling spreading Jabba-jawed one. Claire could never remember their names. All of them with narrow smiles. They would not be taking their seats.

In Belfast she had never felt entitled to an opinion. Now, across the water, she felt a sympathetic ache for the city. Things had faltered, halted, broken down. She felt a sudden urge to go back, to be there. Not to have run away.

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“I’m tired.”

She was tired. Her stomach was full of roast potatoes and casserole, the fire was hot and her face had started to glow. She felt shivery.

“I’ll do it in the morning. I’m knackered, honestly. I think I’ll just head on up to bed.”

Claire lay in bed underneath the uncurtained skylight. Darkness had not yet fallen, and tonight, there would be no stars. The sky was covered with a thick grey crust of cloud. The rain picked up soot from the chimney smoke, and left streaky dark marks down the sloping glass. She pulled her duvet up to her chin, rolled onto her side, closed her eyes. She did not want to look around the room again. It was not as clear as she’d remembered it.

When she stuffed her bag in the wardrobe, she had noticed the few forgotten clothes left there: her school tie and skirt hung next to the overcoat Alan had hated so much, which was on the same hanger as a top she’d borrowed from Jen and never got round to giving back. The bookshelves were incoherent too: they rambled.
Ape and Essence
sat between
Fantastic Mr. Fox
and
The Magician’s Nephew
, and she couldn’t remember what it was about. There was a
Bunty
Annual for 1968,
A History of The English Language
, a copy of
Romola
that she knew she’d never finished, a pop-up version of Jack and the Beanstalk and
Beowulf
in the original. She’d seen them: she didn’t want to look again. The room was wrong, it was misleading. It was full of anachronisms.

And on the walls, her pictures. A few had fallen down, slid between the divan bed and the wall or behind the chest of drawers. They left torn scraps of paper on the wall, and blobs of blu-tack which had stained the wallpaper with grease. Many more were still stuffed into her old art file. A corner of it projected from behind the wardrobe. Mostly GCSE stuff, some sixthform. Nothing later. Inky outcrops, tangled roots, torn and twisted stubborn moorland trees. Claire had known what they would be without looking at them. But by her mirror, pinned with a single thumbtack, one sketch had curled up around itself. She couldn’t remember what the picture was, or when she had drawn it, or why she had not blu-tacked it out flat like the rest of the pictures. She had held it flat with the palm of her hand. Ink-and-wash. Yellowish skin, heavy lidded eyes, close-pressed little face: hers. It gave nothing away.

And now she lay awake, aware of the muddle of the room around her, listening to the sounds of her parents’ evening ritual. The same ever since Dad came home. The TV was
silenced, then she heard her mother’s voice. Then the sound of opening and shutting doors, the toilet flush, a creak and sigh of bedsprings, and the house was silent.

She rolled over onto her belly, pressing herself down into the cool sheet, the solid yielding mattress. Her body remembered the weight and press of Paul’s body, the smell of his skin, and the dark. She slipped her hand down, past the elastic waist of her pyjamas, underneath the smooth cotton of her pants. She slipped her fingertips into the wet.

From the moment she had woken, the sky had been thick with cloud, the skylight drumming with rain. Downstairs, the house was muggy and hot, the coal fire consuming, it seemed, more than its fair share of the front room’s air. Claire, heaped in the armchair, half watching a mid-morning cookery programme, felt sluggish and achy, but knew she couldn’t leave the room: to go upstairs would only elicit comment, would mean her mother could follow and corner her there. But she knew, nonetheless, that this could not be avoided forever. Her mother was populating the house with silences so pertinent and direct that sooner or later Claire would be obliged to fill one of them. She’d have to say something and “I don’t want to talk” would never do. It wasn’t allowed. But what could she say that her mother would actually hear? I cut myself. I keep on cutting myself. I fucked someone I shouldn’t have. I came home because I thought it would help. I thought I might find something here, I don’t know what, and now I can’t help thinking I was wrong. Her mother wouldn’t want to hear it, probably wouldn’t even be able to hear it. Too much like I need help, and I need help wasn’t allowed. So she’d have to put up with I don’t want to talk. She’d have to lump it.

The fire spat as water dripped down the chimney. Claire reached over, lifted the newspaper from the coffee table, shook it flat, scanned the headlines. Arms extended to full stretch, she turned the page, folded it, shook it out again. Belfast was splattered all over the broadsheet. Features, analysis, comment. She turned the pages awkwardly, slowly, searched the print with a new eagerness. It would begin to cohere; it would be in there somewhere.

“Claire,” her mother called from the hall door.

“Yes.”

“Can you come and give me a hand?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“I’m just in the middle—”

“It won’t take a moment.”

“I’ll just finish—”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“But—”

“Claire.”

“Okay.” She dropped the paper, gave her father a quick smile. “Coming.” She followed her mother up the hallway. “What is it?”

Her mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, the old photograph album on her knees.

“I thought we would look at these. We never get a chance nowadays. Come and see.”

She patted the bed beside her, sending ripples through the duvet. Claire sat down. There would be questions, sooner or later. She knew they were coming. This was just a tactic. They would look at the pictures and she would soothe Claire with the familiar rhythm of the stories and names, and then just when Claire felt safe she would slip in an apparently innocent
enquiry and suddenly Claire would be spot-lit, paralysed, gaping.

Her mother spoke softly, turning the pages. The family stories twisted out like long pale roots growing into the dark. Claire sat, watching, listening, responding, filling in the gaps too quickly, leaving her mother no space to shift tack. She pointed to a photograph. Two little boys in football boots and shorts so big that they had to be held up with belts. The bigger one had his arm around the smaller boy’s shoulders. Her mother said, “That’s Ben and Sam, Aunty May’s little boys.”

But it was Great Uncle Sid and Granddad.

“Brought up Jewish, not like me.”

That went with the picture of Aunty May. Not with the picture of the little boys. The boys were Granddad and Great Uncle Sid. Granddad and Great Uncle Sid played football. They had muddy knees. Great Uncle Sid had his arm round Granddad’s shoulder. Granddad had a front tooth missing.

“They lived in Whitechapel round the time of the Fascist marches.”

It was Great Uncle Sid and Granddad. Of course it was. It always had been.

“That’s my Great Uncle Sid and Granddad,” Claire said.

A pause.

“No, no,” her mother said.

Another pause. She glanced at her mother’s face. The older woman’s head was bent, her hair falling around her face, but Claire could see her cheeks were flushed, her eyes deliberately intent upon the page.

“Oh,” Claire said. “Right.” She swallowed. “Must be my mistake.”

They sat for a moment, saying nothing. Stories unravelled in Claire’s head, silently: Great Uncle Sid, forty-two, muddyknee’d
and booted, studs slipping on a toppling chair and drifts of parlour curtains. And dot dot dot across the map from Godknowswhere to London, Great Granddad crosslegged on the back of a cart, a needle in his fist, a thread between his lips, his beard tucked into his collar. Two small boys squirming, crammed into the dark of a kitchen dresser, passed over.

And then it struck her. She felt a sudden sickening lurch.

“Who told you?” she asked.

“Sorry?”

It came out in a rush, uncensored.

“That it’s Ben and Sam. Or Granddad and Great Uncle Sid for that matter. Who told you? You always said Granddad and Grandma died when you were little, so who told you the stories? Your foster-folks can’t have known anything.”

“I just remember,” she said. “From when I was little.”

“Ah,” Claire said, her jaw tight, catching the flow of words back. “Right.” She felt her heart beat thickly in her chest. Deliberately, she pressed her fingertip down on the paper beside the photograph.

“Go on,” she said. “What happened next?”

Her mother breathed in shakily. “Nothing at all …” she began. She spoke quickly, leaving no space for Claire to comment, and did not look up. She turned the pages breathlessly. Claire sat in silence, watching the images as they flickered past. Names and faces shifted and slid and as her mother’s stories twisted round her she thought she could detect other slips, other lapses, but couldn’t be quite sure. The stories melted, the pictures bleached themselves with uncertainty. If they weren’t who she said they were, who were these people? The photographs, with their shadows of Claire’s face, were of strangers now, looking at her with familiar eyes.

Something else, however, had begun to make sense.

“Why can’t Dad know we’re doing this?” she asked.

Her mother hesitated a moment, did not look up.

“It upsets him,” she said.

“Right,” Claire said, and drew her lips back in a smile. She stood up, brushed her trousers down. “Well,” she said. “I’ll be off then.”

The bed squeaked as she stood up. Her mother looked up at her, still flushed. Claire walked out, leaving the door open behind her.

“Claire—”

She unhooked her jacket from its peg by the back door. The latch grated noisily against the doorplate; her father called out something. She walked out into the rain. She would head up to the reservoir. It would be quiet there. Her feet slipped on the wet cobbles. The rain was cool on her face. She breathed.

SIX
 

Alan glanced at his watch for the fifth time in five minutes. The hands didn’t seem to have moved. They were still standing resolutely at a quarter to eleven. He sighed, glanced up at the telescreen timetable. It still showed, beside the number of the bus, the increasingly irritating phrase “On time.”

Alan did not like bus stations, particularly at night. He felt very uncomfortable. The bench was metal and cold; he could feel it through the seat of his trousers. The air was dirty with smoke and over-use. Three seats down from him a wino slept, wrapped in a dirty parka. The smell of sweated alcohol and old clothes made Alan’s nostrils quiver. Alan stared anxiously at the shiny dirt of the sleeper’s jeans, the battered trainers, the way he shivered in his sleep. At any moment he might wake up and start hassling him for money.

The coach was already fifteen minutes late and there had
been no announcements. He could well be stuck there all night. Part of him hoped that he would be; or at least for an hour or so, so that he would have a good reason to feel angry. He could not believe he had agreed to meet her there. What had possessed him? What was the point? There were plenty of taxis lined up on Glengall Street; he had passed them on the way in. It wasn’t as if they were lurking there to take unsuspecting English girls hostage. She could have jumped in a cab, told them the address and she would have got to the flat in five minutes, ten minutes, tops. Right now, he would have been reclining comfortably on the sofa with a cup of tea and a Jaffa Cake watching
The Clive Anderson Show
. Instead, he had had to perch on this cold metal bench for a quarter of an hour, staring down the concourse of the stuffy, grimy bus station, expecting at any moment to be asked for ten pence for a cup of tea.