The Northern Clemency (27 page)

“Yes,” Francis said, but his voice croaked and he had to say it again.

“What was that?” she said, looking him frankly in the eye. “Yes,” he said, then, “Miss Barker,” he added.

“You’ll have to sit on your own for a bit,” she said gleefully. He waited, and then she said it. “Georgy-Porgy,” she said, as if she’d just thought of it, and she got the general laugh she wanted. He knew that was exactly how it was going to be. There was nothing he could do about it.

It was like a river delta, the walk home. When the bell rang, all the kids left, all through the same gate, and half turned left, down the hill, and half turned right, like Daniel, upwards. Then there was a tributary, the stream divided, and some turned off. Not halving again, more like a third or a quarter. It went on like that: at each road junction, the stream divided, and kids went in different directions, tracing their different routes, going to different homes. But they all ended up in the same sea—ah. Daniel smiled. But he liked the idea anyway.

He liked those geographical names; oxbow, crater, fjord lake, plug, and he liked the idea of them; he liked the idea of rivers carving out a huge valley, or a great big dirty grey glacier, thousands of years ago, melting and leaving the land in a particular shape. He hadn’t tried to remember any of that; he’d just started listening one day, and he’d remembered it, and got an A, to everyone’s surprise. They came to his mind in unexpected ways; yes, it was a bit like a river delta, the way all the kids made their own routes home.

There was a bit at the top of the hill where the road had never been made up properly, a muddy track linking two proper roads. It was unlit, and pitted with potholes. You had to be careful if it had been raining and it was dark; you’d put your leg in halfway up to the knee. Now it was the end of March, and the walk home from school was getting to be a pleasure again. He’d said goodbye to Ben at the top of the road, and was walking down the muddy track. The girl in front of him, he sort of recognized her.

“Hey,” he said. She turned round. It was the girl who lived opposite. She’d moved in, what?, six months ago. She was wearing their uniform. He hadn’t really known she was at the same school as him.

“Hey yourself,” she said, turning back. He speeded up a little.

“What year are you in?” he said.

“Fourth,” she said. “What do you want to know for?”

“You live opposite,” he said. It amused him as much as anything, someone speaking to him like that straight off. “I see you sometimes.”

“Your brother’s really weird,” she said. Her face was directed downwards, reddened. He knew her now; sometimes she was really spotty, but today not so much. She was all right.

“Yeah, I know he is,” he said. “It’s not my fault.”

“You know what they say?” she said.

“No,” he said. “What do they say?”

She shrugged, and whatever the general wisdom was about his little brother, or about pairs of brothers in general, she couldn’t produce it for him. “And your mother,” she said.

“My mother what?” he said. “Oh, she’s weird as well, you mean.”

“Not weird,” the girl said. “She’s frightening.”

“Oh, yeah,” Daniel said. “I’m terrified of her. I hide under the settee when I see her coming.”

“I bet you do,” the girl said. They walked on for a moment, the girl not looking at Daniel, just down at the road. “Go on, then,” she said. They were walking by the bungalow at the top of the road, the one with the china leaping horse in the front window.

“Go on what?” Daniel said.

“Say whatever you were planning to say,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Tell me I’m a stuck-up mardy cow, or I should go back to London, or do me, the way I talk, or whatever it was going to be,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t,” Daniel said, surprised. “I wasn’t going to say anything like that.”

“You’re the first, then,” the girl said. With a gentle question or two, he found out her name was Sandra, and she wished she hadn’t had to come here. He had seen her, after all; walking home on her own, or sometimes in the corridors, clutching her bags to her, a bit spotty, her face to the floor. There were people like that. You didn’t necessarily notice them for any particular purpose. He supposed most people didn’t.

After that, the next day, walking home, he kept an eye out for her, and saw her, but earlier. It was on Osborne Avenue, heavily hung with trees, the monumental cliff-like façades of the decaying houses behind falling-down dry-stone walls. He was with Ben and his brother still,
and he didn’t greet her. She was on her own—he realized how often he’d seen her, hardly registering that thin, resentful, brave stance. She was on the other side. They crossed the road when they’d passed her about a hundred yards; there was no real need to greet her, but he felt the force of her stare at his back, and regretted not being a bit braver, turning round to give her a wave. He knew it would have been the nicest thing that had happened to her today. Once he’d said goodbye to Ben and his brother, at the top of the road, he dawdled on purpose, but she didn’t appear; she must have taken a different route home. He felt sorry, and guilty. It wasn’t that he fancied her, though.

The next day they did coincide, and a lot earlier. Ben played the trumpet, it was his evening for band practice, and Daniel found himself for once walking home on his own. “Hey,” he said to her, hastening to catch up.

“Oh,” she said unconvincingly. He knew she’d observed him, been holding herself in against another snub. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me,” he said, really not caring what she said to him, and in five minutes he was producing really quite an irresistible fable for her, all lies. Do you want to know something? he said. Last weekend, him and his brother, the weird one, and his mother, the frightening one, at least according to her, and his dad and his sister, they’d had to go to visit his dad’s cousin. He lived in Rotherham, they didn’t see much of him, once a year or less than that, really. And his dad’s brother, his uncle Ian, he lived on his own because his wife had left him, years ago, on his own apart from his dog. It was new, his dog—at least, he’d got it since the last time they’d gone over there because, to be honest, none of them really liked Uncle Ian, even his mother and he was her brother—

“I thought you said he was your father’s brother.”

“No, my mother’s, he’s my mother’s brother.” And he, Daniel, he’d gone to stroke the dog, just put his hand down in an ordinary friendly sort of way, to pat his head, the dog’s head. A sort of mongrel, a funny-looking dog, it made you want to laugh almost just looking at it, and his name’s, his name is—

“Are you sure about this story?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I just can’t remember what the dog’s name was, not that it’s of vital importance.”

So he, Daniel, just put his hand down to stroke the dog, as anyone might, and the dog, instead of letting him stroke his head, coming up to be stroked, he just pulls back, he whines and he goes and buries himself
in a corner. That’s strange, Daniel thought, and he asked his uncle Ian about this dog who runs and hides if you go to stroke him, and according to Uncle Ian he’s from a home, and the previous owners, or someone, they’ve only raised their hands to him to hit him. So now he doesn’t recognize it if you try to be friendly. He either runs away or, if you’re unlucky, he goes to bite you, only he’s getting better now. The thing is—

“This was last Sunday, was it?” Sandra said.

“That’s it,” Daniel said. “I remember because I missed most of the chart countdown, it was half over by the time we got home.”

“Because actually,” Sandra said, drawing out her London word, “actually, all of last Sunday you were at home, and the car was in the driveway all day, and around four o’clock you changed your shirt, and about five o’clock a girl came round and you and her were snogging in your room without closing the curtains. So that’s all a lot of complete rubbish.”

Daniel looked at her with appreciation and, all at once, burst into laughter.

“You must think—” Sandra said, laughing too, not unkindly. “Do you know what all that sounded like? It sounded like the sort of rubbish you have to listen to in Assembly, that sort of story, and at the end of it they explain what it’s all about. So I’m a little dog, who someone’s supposed to have been beating, and you, you’re—”

“All right,” Daniel said. “But, you know—”

“Yes,” Sandra said. “I suppose I do know.”

He hadn’t fancied her, not at all; anyway, she was two years beneath him, and everything about her until that moment had given off a sense of what he didn’t like, the prospect of gratitude. Until the day before yesterday, he’d never bothered to notice her, and until that exact moment he hadn’t understood why he was making any effort to speak to her. He didn’t need what most people needed, confirmation of what he was best at through the tribute of grateful inferiors, and he wouldn’t, unlike Ben and the others, stoop to fingering any girl to be rewarded with panegyrics, ecstatic descriptions of the person he was hoping to become one day. Barbara’s speeches on the subject had, as they grew more and more exuberantly tearful, sickened him a bit by the end. He hadn’t known why he was taking the trouble with this girl, but she’d laughed at him and it was a little clearer. She wouldn’t, after all, be grateful for anything, and if there was still no possibility of sex between them, there was something newer, stranger, the spectacle of someone who gave the impression of being quite a lot like him.

“I hate this place,” she said, as they were coming up to their houses, hers facing his.

“Give it a chance,” he said, and broke into a run, down their drive. It was a strange thing for her to say. It was a nice clear day; you could feel the sweetness in the air off the moors, and see it, too. Between the houses, a complicated or an ordinary garden, but then, on that side of the road, you could still see the way the trees stopped and then there was just the moor, rolling off into purple and green hills, sunshine, sky. It wasn’t to be hated, this place. He didn’t mind the houses, the way they were sort of alike but all made slightly different. It was a bit ridiculous, he could see that. They all had the same porch, white-painted and glazed in, which most people left unlocked, and they all had an up-and-over garage—in the morning, you could hear the same creaking and hollow bang up and down the street as people set off—though everyone had painted their door a different colour, making sure they didn’t have the same colour as the next house. Some had net curtains up and down, some only upstairs, one or two not at all, and mostly you could see the same thing, in the front bedroom, against the window, the unfinished back of a dressing-table. He supposed it was best to put it there, for the light, when the mothers put their makeup on. His mother, too.

He fumbled in his pocket for his key, putting the moment off. For some reason, talking to the girl over the road, thinking about the estate, he’d managed to lose his family in an idea of a family, an idea of how every family up and down the road was more or less the same, and more or less nothing in particular. He’d felt quite happy about that. It was only at the thought of his mother in particular, and her particular dressing-table, that it came back to him. After all, you did have to go back to your own family, your mum and your dad and your sister and your brother, those particular people. He let himself in. Sandra, over the road, turned and watched the door shut behind him.

Sandra had made a mistake, almost her first day: she’d chosen the wrong girls, chosen them for the wrong reason. She’d chosen the ones brushing their hair. The first day she’d been assigned a place, staring boldly back at the kids, and the fat girl she’d been put next to, she’d answered her questions coldly and shortly. Yes, she came from London. No, it didn’t seem that strange. She looked round the class for the people on her sort of level. She thought she identified them.

At the lunch break, the three girls she’d spotted stayed in, clustered
at the back, got out their hairbrushes, started to talk. Sandra stuffed her books into her bag, wandered over casually.

“I’m not going again,” one said.

“You say that,” another said. “You always go, you. You love disco.”

“It’s always same,” the third said. “You get off wi’ another lad every Friday, every Monday it’s ‘I’m not going, I’m not showing my face down there again.’ You love that disco, you, it’s only because of you—”

She broke off, and they examined Sandra, up and down, still brushing their hair, back from their face.

“Is there a disco?” Sandra said.

“I weren’t talking to you,” one said.

“I know,” Sandra said. “I overheard, though. I love going to discos.”

The girls laughed.

“You come from London,” one said.

“Yes, I do,” Sandra said. This seemed a little less unfriendly; and it hit upon what Sandra thought of as one of her main points.

“There’ll be discos there and all,” a girl said.

“Right posh ones,” the main girl said.

“I suppose some of them are,” Sandra said.

But this seemed incredibly funny to the three girls. “I suppose,” one said, putting on a voice, a really awful voice. It was nothing like Sandra’s. Sandra didn’t walk away; she just stayed there, waiting. The classroom smelt of sour milk, of babies; it was the dusty black curtains, like black-out curtains. This was a room for German, and all around it were posters, their corners peeling away from the adhesive like the ears of animals. They showed all sorts of things in sunshine: cathedrals, rivers, a pointy castle made out of white icing like the tower of a beleaguered German virgin, and on each a few words in German. Die, one of them began to advise.

They did German here. They hadn’t in London. Sandra expected she’d catch up, learn how to speak it in time. It was on Thursday afternoons, for only an hour.

“What else,” one of the girls said, “do you suppose?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sandra said. “I’ve only just got here. When’s the disco?”

“It’s on Fridays.”

“It’s at the youth centre.”

They looked at her. There seemed to be nothing more, and not really an invitation. Sandra’s prepared account of herself lay there, uselessly.
She’d wanted to say some London things; she’d wanted to introduce herself as someone who had been used to going to the West End on a Saturday, to buy a new outfit, once or twice a month; she’d wanted to impress, and had heard herself, in advance, telling the whole class about the time she’d actually seen—who?—in Selfridges once. There were London discos, of course there were. The reality, the trip on the train up to London once a year and, once, tea in Selfridges where they’d seen and marvelled at Thora Hird, would have done to improve upon. She’d have offered it on the slightest invitation.