The Home Corner (5 page)

‘When did you get here?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

He looked at me.

‘Thank,’ I added, holding my glass out like Oliver Twist with his tragic little bowl of gruel.

‘
Thank
?’ Ed asked, staring at me too, and grinning. Ed and Craig, both. Grinning at me.

‘-ks,’ I said.

‘Oh: “
thanks
”.’

And, wordlessly, he poured more wine into my glass, right up to the top, glanced briefly at my small suggestion of cleavage; at the silver button that coincided with it, and then walked back out of the room.

‘So, where were we?’ asked Craig. ‘What were we talking about?’

I felt a kind of weariness, like a low mist, come rolling into my head.

‘Oh yes: about the UCCA form.’

I didn’t reply. I stood against the warmth of Mrs McRae’s Aga for a while – or maybe it was for a long time: it had become hard to tell, with the way the clock was behaving and Time having altered its nature. I stood there, anyway, with Craig Dillard, and watched the rest of the party happening a long way away without me, through the open kitchen door. Somebody, I noticed – Mrs McRae perhaps – had wound swathes of silver tinsel around the stair banisters and hung bunches of mistletoe from all the doorways leading off the hall. And it was all silver: silver and white. Mrs McRae (or whoever it was) had even gone out into the front garden and continued the festive theme out there, with silver lights in the trees. I had never known that kind of house or garden, or that way of living. Lights in the trees would have horrified
our
neighbours. And I thought suddenly of my mother, who always got out the same concertinaed paper bells every December from the same battered cardboard box marked XMAS and hung them in our porch. There was also a concertinaed robin in the box. It was put up with the bells, its feet brushing the heads of visitors when they came to the house.

Ed was standing in the hall now, telling people a joke, and everyone was laughing. Oh, because he was a funny boy! He was funny and quick and creative and beautiful. And sitting, wise and beautiful too, in the glass arch above the McRae’s front door, was the moon. ‘Look at the moon,’ I announced to Craig. The moon, and Ed McRae, seemed suddenly more important than anything I’d ever seen. I wanted it to be just me and the moon and Ed McRae. I wanted to paint a picture of them. And I knew for an absolute fact that I did not want to study geography for as long as I lived. I didn’t want to leave school and study  it at university, as I was supposed to do. Because studying geography appeared to lead to claims on the land: to hacking lumps of rock out of the earth. Basalt and quartz and pearlite. It led, eventually, to people like Craig Dillard going up to the moon in
rockets
and trudging around it, defacing it with their moon buggies and their gauges and flags and probes and their stupid moon boots. Geography was not for me.

I was aware of Craig still peering at me, rather anxiously, from his gangly height. Maybe he could see something troubling or enlightening, or maybe he was just short-sighted. ‘There’s really nothing wrong with me, Craig,’ I wanted to say, ‘nothing at all. I can see everything very clearly, in fact . . .’

And, smiling, I turned and saw that, in the hallway, Ed McRae was plonking his arm around a girl’s shoulders. And the girl was Stella Muir. She was standing there, her hair pretty and newly washed and swept into a cooperatively wispy ponytail. She looked straight through me. And I suppose that was when I first realised that friendship means different things to different people. And that to some people, it doesn’t mean very much at all.

‘So, what are your second and third choices on your UCCA?’ Craig persisted, scooping a large handful of Bombay mix from a pure white bowl and tipping chickpea noodles into his mouth.

‘My second and third choices?’ I asked.

‘Are you putting any Scottish yoonies down?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Sorry?’

There was a smell of burnt garlic and cigarettes. Someone was being sick in the McRaes’ downstairs toilet. Someone else was beginning a countdown from ten. Stella had disappeared now, and Ed was wandering around with a plastic Addis bucket.

‘. . . London?’ Craig said.

But I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember what I’d put on my UCCA form. I couldn’t think what UCCA meant, or why I’d ever wanted to study geography, or had Stella Muir for a friend. I looked up and noticed that the McRaes had a shelf in their kitchen about six feet long and filled from one end to the other with spice bottles; and I wondered whether Ed had ever got those spice bottles down off that shelf when he was a little boy, and made biscuits with his mother.

‘. . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .!’ people were saying now in a kind of chorus, because it was nearly the New Year – Jesus, it was nearly the month I was turning  eighteen, nearly the year I was supposed to
become
someone! And now there was nothing to do and no one to kiss, because even
Craig
had disappeared, had evaporated into thin air, just at the moment when our conversation might have had some point.

But then, quite suddenly, hovering in front of me, there
was
someone. There was a person, taller than me, peering, moving in close. ‘. . . four . . . three . . . two . . .’ people were chanting. And without any warning, before I’d even properly registered who this person was, he grabbed me. He grabbed me, pulled me towards him and put his mouth against mine. And I had no time to know what to do about this, I didn’t even have the ability to speak, now that Ed McRae’s mouth was pushed against mine. He was wearing his
Life’s a Bitch
T-shirt and it smelt incongruously fragrant, like a baby’s newly washed babygro, but his mouth tasted slightly metallic – of iron and Irn-Bru and beer and liquorice and cigarettes, and his tongue was warm and wet and rude, and his hands were sliding, flat-palmed, down my thighs, and despite the shock of this – or perhaps because of it – we’d gone on kissing and kissing.

‘Are you feeling OK? Shall we go somewhere quieter?’ I remember him whispering after a while in a voice of sweet concern, and he took my hand and led me out of the room.

We went straight upstairs and into a living room. I remember being amazed that the McRaes had not one but two living rooms, on separate floors.
Maybe they even have another one
, I thought;
a flight further up
. This one had two checked sofas in it and a Christmas tree decorated with fake apples and silver angel hair. There was also a fireplace, in the grate of which stood a huge vase of  twigs. There was a small Persian rug, a framed painting of a harbour and one large, empty bowl positioned, perfect and simple, on a round mahogany table. And that was all there was. It was a beautiful room. I remember how Ed had peered around it for a second before quietly, almost reverentially, closing the door again. His
mother
would maybe have disapproved of us going in there. Then he led me wordlessly out again, back along the carpeted landing, through a door and into somewhere a little less magnificent. A utility room. I think it must have been a utility room because I remember a pile of dirty washing and a tumble dryer, and an economy-sized box of Persil and a big woven basket like something out of
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
. Ed said something then, but I can’t remember what it was. I don’t quite recall, either, where I sat, or lay. Maybe on the pile of washing: I was pretty drunk by then. I have a vision of Ed pushing a wooden clothes horse against the door handle, though, for privacy’s sake. There was still the sound of music downstairs, a lot of bass notes and a lot of hilarity and screeching. And I remember wondering, as he loomed in to kiss my burgundy lips and to undo, at last, my pearlised buttons – whether he’d ever played houses under that clothes horse. It would have suited him, I felt: he would have been a sweet, imaginative, home-loving boy. But then maybe I had misunderstood the sort of person he was. It was the beginning of misunderstanding things.

My mother drove us home from the supermarket. I sat in the passenger seat and looked out through the window.
Kellogg’s Raisin Splitz: There’s Raisin in the Middle
, announced an advert on a bus stop.
Wispa: Bite It and Believe It
, said another that was stuck to a wall. An old, thin man with a Bejam bag and a walking stick slowly traversed a pedestrian crossing. He came to a complete halt for a moment and waved his stick at our car, as if it was a beast that needed taming.
Get back! Get back!

‘What a funny man.’

‘Yes.’

Although I felt he was probably, in some ways, the sanest person on the street. Two young women walked past the car as we waited for him to get to the other side of the road. They were both wearing short white T-shirts, stretched tight across the bust and proclaiming, in glittery writing, the words
Gorgeous Babe
. They were both
Gorgeous Babes.

‘So, that was funny, bumping into Stella,’ my mother said, as we slowed to a halt at another set of lights.

‘Hmm.’

‘Why did she call you Lulu? When did she start calling you that?’

‘I can’t remember,’ I lied.

‘I do hate it’ she said, ‘when people change a pretty name into something ugly.’

‘It’s not ugly,’ I snapped. I don’t know why I was defending Stella Muir: I suppose it just seemed preferable to agreeing with my mother, who was often, in an irksome way, right. I could actually remember
exactly
when Stella had started calling me Lulu. It had been during an afternoon we’d spent once in our school library, looking up people’s names in the
Guinness Book of Names
. There’d been all kinds of interesting ones with profound meanings to them. Hannah, for instance, meant ‘blessed’, Emma meant ‘universal’, Astrid meant ‘divinely beautiful’ and Stella meant ‘star’.

‘Lulu,’ I remembered Stella reading out. ‘Native American name meaning “rabbit”.’

She’d looked at me.

‘How funny.’

I hadn’t replied for a moment. Then I’d said, ‘You’re the only person who calls me that, though, Stella. And Lulu’s only
short
for Luisa. Which has nothing to do with rabbits.’

‘How funny,’ Stella had said again.

Maybe I am quite rabbit-like
,
I thought now, as my mother and I drove along
. Maybe there is a touch of the rabbit about me.

‘What is that van
doing
?’ my mother asked.

And we both watched as a large white van, slowly being manoeuvred down a side street, crunched with a kind of inevitability into the side of a bin. A man walking past began to shout and wave his arms, as if the van had reversed into
him.

‘What is it
doing
?’ my mother said.

‘It’s reversing.’

‘Yes, but into a bin!’

The Roof Company
, it said on the side of the van.
Flat-Roof Specialists. All Other Roofing Work Undertaken.

‘Well, oh dear,’ my mother said, driving on.

I sat back against the sticky plastic of the car seat and tried not to think about Stella and her body buddies and her bottles of beer, and the way her life was progressing the way people had always expected it to – how it was like some smooth, correctly laid path leading up to a pretty front door – and how mine was not. My life was more like a lot of tracks running across each other on Portobello beach.

‘Have you talked to anyone about this? Have you told your mother?’
the doctor had asked me when I went to see him, a few weeks after Ed’s party. It was early February by then and my time of the month had come and gone, had arrived and departed
: the Curse
, as Mary Wedderburn had used to put it, had not made an appearance. Which was, of course, the real curse. I’d gone to my own doctor first, one afternoon after school; and then  a few days later I’d had to go to another place – a clinic, a white, flat-looking building located behind a car showroom and a furniture warehouse on the far side of town. I’d had to take the bus there, and then another bus, and then another. It had taken me almost an hour to get there, and it had been dark by the time I arrived at the door. I’d told my mother I was going to Stella’s house for tea.

‘So your mother is aware of the situation?’
the clinic doctor had asked me, in his consultancy room. 

‘Yes,’ I’d lied. ‘She knows about it.’

‘Good. Because it’s always a good idea, in . . . cases like this . . . talking to your mother. Even though technically now, at your age . . .’ – he petered out and peered across the room at a large, parched-looking yucca plant that someone had stuck into a pot full of pretend pebbles – ‘technically, we don’t need your parents’ consent.’

‘No.’

‘And how about the . . . ah . . . your . . . boyfriend?’ he’d continued, scooting across the room on his little wheeled chair, picking up a pen and scooting back again. He seemed oddly coy for someone in his line of work. ‘Have you spoken to him?’ he asked, glancing up.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I
had
, in fact, spoken to Ed, accosting him scarlet-faced the previous week behind the Physics shelves in the school library. ‘Hi. Just thought you should know I’m
up the duff
!’ I’d whispered rapidly, almost merrily, as if mentioning some homework assignment he might not have heard about. And he had stared at me, stared and stared and looked quite unhandsome suddenly – quite sour-faced and angry. Then, in a low voice, he had said, ‘Jesus Christ.’

I’d looked at him.

‘Do your folks know?’

‘No,’ I’d said, ‘they don’t.’

‘Do you want money?’

‘No. I just have to take a pill. One pill, and then another pill. I have to go to this place and take these pills. You can do it like that now. It’s on the NHS. I’m eighteen,’ I added, apropos of nothing, really.

‘Jesus. Well, God, yeah, just get on with it. God. Jesus.’

And he’d picked up a book he’d temporarily placed on a shelf and walked out of the library. And that was that. That was all. He didn’t say sorry, I remember.

‘You should think yourself lucky, that you live in the twentieth century,’ the next doctor had said when I’d gone back the following week. There had to be at least two doctors: it was one of the rules. And I’d had to return to check that the pills had worked. ‘It’s also fortunate,’ the doctor had said, ‘that we got in quick. A lot of girls in your position make the mistake of . . . delaying. And then find it’s too late. And if we’d left it much longer we’d have had to have gone down a more . . . distressing route.’ This doctor was a big-faced man called Dr Birdseye. (‘Like the fish fingers!’ he’d quipped, on introducing himself. Although his own fingers had been more like sausages.) And I
did
think myself lucky that the pills had worked. The pills didn’t always work, Dr Birdseye said, but these ones had. So it was all over. Over and done with. All rather painful and unnecessary, of course. But next time you’ll know better, hmm? Or at least start using contraception.

‘Yes,’ I’d replied. Yes, it
was
painful, I could have added. The pain, in fact, had been intense. And the amount of blood had frightened me, flowing and flowing for days, like a rebuke. I’d thought of Lady Macbeth. I’d thought maybe I would die. ‘Thank you,’ I said to Dr Birdseye. And I’d risen from my chair, headed past the yucca plant to the door and gone back out into the Reception bay. Things seemed to wobble slightly, in and out of focus, as I walked through it.
Beneath a small table there was a box of wooden building blocks and a plastic, flip-up farm-animal game and a dog-eared book entitled
Ted Goes to London
. On the wall above the desk there was a child’s drawing of two mad-looking people with huge, purple smiles and outstretched sticks for arms.

I was miles away from our side of town. I didn’t really know where I was at all. It was as if that clinic had just appeared out of nowhere, and would go back to nowhere after I’d left. Everything was just white and cold and strange and I walked away from it as fast as I could. I remember that I did stop off at a chemist’s before I reached the bus stop, to buy another huge packet of Kotex towels. I didn’t know when the bleeding would ever stop. ‘Will you want a bag for that, Love?’ the chemist asked.
Well, who wouldn’t?
I thought.
Who wouldn’t want a bag for that?
There was a picture on the bag of a cheerful-looking cartoon woman encirling her children with her arms. ‘Caring for your Family’, it said beneath the picture.
There is no way I am ever going to tell my mother about this
,
I thought, putting it in my schoolbag.
And walking to the bus stop I cried and cried. But apart from that – apart from the crying and the pitch-dark bus journeys and the pain and my mother’s ignorance and the huge packet of Kotex that I hid in my clothes drawer – I suppose I blanked most of it out. Stella was the only person I ever confided in, one freezing cold day in March as we were standing on a netball court in our green nylon tabards;  and she hadn’t even seemed particularly surprised.

‘Oh
Lulu,
’ she’d soothed. ‘Never mind: worse things happen at sea.’ Which was this odd phrase she’d used sometimes, and which never seemed to have anything to do with anything. I think she’d just picked it up from her father, who’d been a ship’s steward, she’d told me once; in the 1950s.
My dad says that sometimes
, she’d said,
and he should know
. And it was around this time that everything I’d been sure of began to alter, anyway; that things began to disintegrate. I remember that a few weeks later that term all the pupils in my year had to go and see a visiting careers advisor, to discuss our futures. We’d all been given a leaflet and a questionnaire to fill in entitled
‘Your Career: Your Future in Your Hands’
,
and I remember it was then that I began to wonder if I
had
a future. Stella had one. And Ed had one. All the sensible people had futures. But mine seemed to have gone a peculiar shape –  scattered, unfocused; to contain things that no longer had anything to do with me.
My future
,
I thought,
is not in my hands.
And sure enough, when my exam results came back later that summer, I was discovered to have achieved three Ds and an E. In art I had a B, based on coursework. But where was a lone B in art going to get me?

‘What
happened
, Luisa?’ my headmaster Mr Deane asked, pop-eyed, at an ‘emergency debriefing’ session the school laid on every year, for all its failed students.

‘Well: oh dear,’ my father confirmed, standing there in his slippers in our cool hallway when I returned home that day. A lot of people had said things like that, that week.
‘What
happened?’
and
‘Oh dear.’
Other words, like ‘university’, ‘student accommodation’ and ‘London’, seemed to have adopted a hollow, clanging quality, like someone wandering around a field ringing a big cracked cow bell.

Stella called round at the end of September, to say goodbye. She was off with her rucksack and her umbrella plant and her CD player, off up to the other side of town, to start her course in veterinary science. And goodbye seemed the right thing to be saying.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ she asked, peering at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

Stella tutted. She seemed strangely cross. My secret trip to the doctor’s the previous February was something that had happened a long long time ago, to someone else; it was something with a beginning, a middle and an end.

‘D’you think you’ll do retakes?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if I was going to do retakes I should’ve signed up for them by now, shouldn’t I? And anyway, there’s no way I’d ever retake geography.’

‘You’ve got decent O-grades, though, haven’t you?’ Stella pointed out, a frown briefly puckering her forehead. ‘You could always do something with them. I mean, it’s not as if you haven’t got maths and English.’ She stared out, across our front lawn. ‘You could do a course at the Open University or something.’

I was silent. The words ‘Open University’ hung in the air between us.
Nobody our age studies with the Open University, Stella!
I wanted to yell.
The Open University happens at two in the morning! It’s for shift workers and posties! It’s for mothers, up in the small hours with their babies!

Stella sighed and yawned.

‘So. Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to go now.’ She paused. ‘Ed’s coming round soon.’

I felt a strange, fizzing kind of heat somewhere inside my head.

‘Ed’s coming round?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Stella replied.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘how very odd. How very odd,’ I said again.

Although Stella
had
briefly mentioned him, I reflected, the last time we’d seen each other. But only in the amusing context of the way he dressed. Only to berate that awful T-shirt; those scruffy trainers; that weird see-through portfolio, that funny trenchcoat. Now the T-shirt and trainers and portfolio and coat seemed to have become less amusing. The clothes he wore and the things he carried seemed to have become acceptable in some way. ‘It’s not as if you were ever going to get round to anything, is it?’ she snapped now. ‘I mean, nothing ever happened, did it, after the . . . thing that happened at his party?’

I couldn’t think how to reply to this. The words failed to form. But something had already begun to shift, to become slippery, like compacted ice. Nothing seemed quite stable any more.

‘. . . and anyway,’ Stella was going on, ‘how about Craig Dillard?’

I stared at her.

‘What?’

‘I thought he was pretty keen, wasn’t he? You two seemed to be pretty much an
item
last term! Always sitting together in geography!’

‘An item?’ I said.

I thought of an item of luggage; of a great, heavy, unclaimed suitcase, revolving slowly round an airport carousel. And it struck me how friendship, of any kind, might never be more than two people occupying the same space at the same time. That was all it might ever be about – like the closeness of two people standing side by side in an airport, waiting to reclaim their luggage.