The Things We Never Said (9 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Are you a virgin?’ Jack whispers. Maggie has drunk rather a lot of gin and has somehow found herself in a darkened bedroom, lying on a pile of coats that are still damp from the rain. She can hear the hollow whistling of the wind trapped inside the chimney and the occasional chink as a puff of soot and other debris falls down into the bedroom fireplace. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re not, you know.’ His breath is warm and thick on her neck, his voice tight and strained. ‘I don’t mind. I don’t think girls should have to behave differently. I bet you’re a right little raver when you get going, aren’t you?’ He is pushing against her and she can feel his thing, hard and swollen, pressing against her thigh.

Maggie
is
a virgin; she nearly did it once but neither she nor the boy really knew what they were doing, so they gave up.

Jack is beginning to sweat. His fingers are brushing the inside of her thigh, playing with her stocking top.

‘Jack, slow down. It’s our first date.’

‘So what,’ he murmurs, kissing her again. He’s a good kisser, she’ll say that for him. His hand is moving again, more insistently this time, up to her panty girdle. He groans as he touches her. She is breathing heavily herself now and instinctively flattens her stomach so his hand can slip inside her pants. His fingers make her gasp and she wonders what it would be like to go all the way. She is wondering whether to ask if he has a French letter when the door bursts open.

‘Oops! Sorry, pal.’ She recognises Jimmy the set-painter and his girlfriend, who giggles.

She and Jack sit up, dishevelled. Her heart is pounding and she can hear the music downstairs, more subdued now. The door closes again.

‘Now, where were we?’ Jack says, pulling her back down.

The wind is getting stronger; she can hear what sounds like a metal dustbin lid being blown down the road.

‘No, Jack.’ She sits up, smoothes her hair. ‘Sorry, but not yet. Let’s wait until we’ve been going steady for a while.’

‘Oh, come on, Little Mags.’ He pushes her back on the bed; his hand shoots up her dress and tugs at her pants. ‘I’ll be careful.’

She can feel his tongue in her ear, warm and solid and slimy. She doesn’t want to do it after all, she decides. It just doesn’t feel right. ‘No, Jack, really, I don’t want to.’

‘Yes, you do,’ he breathes. His breath is hot and damp on her face. It smells disgusting, a mix of beer, tobacco and Twiglets. ‘Come on,’ he says again. ‘You want it, don’t you? Tell me you want it.’

‘No!’ she shouts and pushes him away. She leaps up and straightens her clothes. He looks furious.

‘You know what you are, don’t you?’ He fumbles for the cigarettes, throws one at her and squints against the smoke as he lights his own. ‘A prick-teaser.’ But then he grins. ‘Can’t blame me for trying, can you?’

*

Downstairs, things are quieter. The party has thinned and people are sitting on the floor in the front room, the tips of their cigarettes glowing in the dark, singing along to ‘I Fall to Pieces’, which must be playing for the third time. The street door rattles in the wind, lifting the carpet slightly with each gust.

‘Jack,’ Maggie says. ‘I should be getting back to my digs.’

‘Yeah, it’s late; we’ll go in a minute. Dance with me first.’

She hesitates.

‘Oh, come on,’ he says. ‘You don’t want me to
fall to pieces
like poor old Patsy, do you?’ Then he makes a big show of falling to his knees, spreading his arms and singing along.

Maggie is glad it’s dark so no one can see how much she’s blushing. ‘Stop it, Jack,’ she says, but she can’t help smiling.

His voice gets louder as the record nears the end then he mimes heartbreak and collapse. Everyone laughs and claps, and she can’t help feeling just a little proud when he takes a bow. Then he grins at her. ‘Get your coat then; I’ll see you home.’

*

Outside, the wind is far stronger than it was earlier. Maggie allows Jack to take her arm as they make their way along the street towards the bus stop. She leans in to him as a particularly powerful gust assaults them and a sheet of newspaper flaps around her legs, trapping her until she manages to kick it away. A cardboard box blows past and there is a crash further down the road as a slate flies off a roof.

Maggie opens her mouth to speak but the wind grabs her words and tears them away. Another slate hits the ground behind them.

‘Fuck!’ Jack yells, pulling her close to the wall. She hasn’t heard him swear before. Bits of houses are flying off and tumbling along the road. Dogs are barking and she can hear glass smashing in the distance.

Having lived close to the sea all her life, Maggie is used to strong winds and severe weather. She has seen a huge section of the pier torn away by a sea storm and tossed about on the waves like a matchstick; she has seen the coastguard called out, watched the lifeboat being launched and seen the fishermen’s wives and mothers huddled together on the east cliff steps, waiting for news. But she has never seen anything like this. Is it possible to have a hurricane in England? Something is rolling down the church roof, too big for a slate or a tile. There is a massive, thudding crash as it hits the ground. The Holy Mother, dashed to pieces.

‘Come on,’ Jack shouts, pulling her towards a passageway.

She holds back. The passageway is completely dark and there are no lights on in the houses, but she can see curtains blowing out into the street through a smashed window, waving frantically for attention. Another piece of debris falls from above, catching her on the side of the head. She yells, and allows Jack to pull her into the darkness.

‘We’ll wait here until it drops,’ he says. ‘It’s got to let up soon, surely.’

He puts his arm around her shoulders and strokes the hair out of her eyes. He kisses her, a gentle, tender kiss, and she responds.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jonathan carefully disengages the carrier bags from the deep red grooves they’ve made on the insides of his fingers and sets them down on a bench outside Mothercare where he’s supposed to be meeting Fiona. He glances up. Those angels, he thinks, are wearing too much make-up. For a moment, he pictures them, not suspended from the glass roof of Lewisham shopping centre on tinsel-covered wires, but sitting in a prefab classroom, chewing gum and looking bored as he tries to interest them in
Hamlet.

The play area is packed with prams and pushchairs. Parents, mostly mums but there are a few dads too, mill around, rubbing hurt knees, peeling satsumas or giving bottles to their babies while watching their toddlers negotiate the slide. Did his own father ever play with him like that, he wonders? He can’t remember going to parks when he was very little, although he does remember the odd walk in the woods, and a trip to Windsor Safari Park when it first opened. They’d ended up going home after a couple of hours because a chimpanzee pulled off one of the windscreen wipers and Gerald was so full of rage that no one could enjoy the rest of the day anyway.

This time next year, he might be right here, giving his baby a bottle, holding him or her on the baby slide while Fiona pops into Mothercare. Looking after Malcolm’s or Lucy’s kids is easy, but it’s not the same as your own baby. You can care for someone else’s child, love them, even, but you’re only responsible for their physical well-being, and even then only while you’re
in loco parentis.
You’re not responsible for their happiness, for whether they feel safe and secure, for whether they grow into confident, socialised, fulfilled adults.

‘Robbo!’

A boy’s voice, rasping, thick with testosterone. Jonathan turns around, but he can’t see anyone.

‘Robbo!’ A different voice, louder. ‘Punched any more kids lately?’

He leaps up this time, spins around to look. He can hear sniggering but he still can’t see anyone. It’s always the same if they see you out of school:
I saw you in the holidays, Sir. You was down Lewisham on Saturday, Sir; you said hello.
They can’t quite get over the fact that you exist outside of the classroom. He spots Fiona walking towards him. She obviously heard the comment, as did some of the play-area parents. ‘Just kids from school, trying to wind me up,’ he says, loud enough for the parents to hear. He takes her bag. ‘Come on. Let’s go home.’

‘Bloody hell, is there anyone who
hasn’t
heard?’

‘What do you mean?’

Her eyes flicker and she looks away.

‘Fi?’

She sighs. ‘I didn’t tell you before, but Laura – you know, teaches Year 2 next door to me – well, she knew you’d been suspended. Not about the police, though.’

‘Well, that’s something. How did she know?’

‘Some of her kids have brothers or sisters at your school. Some of mine probably do, come to that. I just hadn’t thought about it.’

‘But it’s only Laura who knows?’ he asks as they reach the car. He unlocks the boot and lifts the bags in.

‘’Fraid not. I was getting a lot of pitying looks, and Judy Wickson said she thought it was “common knowledge”.’

He slams the boot shut. ‘Common knowledge,’ he sighs. ‘Great.’

On the way home, he turns the radio on in the hope that the afternoon play might distract them both, but he’s not really listening. Neither of those voices in the shopping precinct sounded like Ryan. But perhaps they’ve all heard by now, every child from Year 7 upwards; every teacher from the newest NQT to the Head herself; every parent. Christ. And according to his union rep, there’s nothing,
nothing
he can do but wait.

They drive past the bottom of the school’s approach road. There are quite a few kids around, even though they’re not supposed to be out at lunchtime without a pass. ‘I bet half of this lot don’t have passes,’ he says. ‘But it’s not my problem, is it? Not while I’m suspended.’

‘Good grief,’ Fiona says. ‘How can their parents let them go out like that? Oh God, I’m turning into my mother. But honestly, are they allowed to wear skirts that short to school?’ The girls she’s pointing at are chatting and giggling as they head up towards the school, bare thighs moving scissor-like beneath their tiny skirts as they totter on ludicrously high heels.

‘No. Supposed to be no more than four inches above the knee, but even if it’s the right length, they roll it over and over at the top until you can practically see their bum cheeks, then when you send them to their head of year, they unroll it on the way there and say you’re picking on them.’

Fiona smiles. ‘I used to do that. You have to. You don’t want to be different.’

‘I suppose so,’ he says. ‘What I don’t get is why they can’t be allowed to wear trousers like they want to.’

Fiona shakes her head. ‘Crazy, isn’t it, in this day and age.’

They drive past a couple of Year 10 girls from that geography group he’d covered the day after the funeral, just before it kicked off with Ryan. It was first period after lunch, when they were still hyperactive from an hour and ten minutes of smoking themselves silly and consuming vast quantities of E-numbers and chips. They sat there, fully made-up, staring at him with the top buttons of their blouses undone and thrusting their little chests at him. They were all trying to look older, but most of them were still growing; their heads were still too big for their bodies, for Christ’s sake. Chloé Nichols sat near the front as though she’d practised in front of the mirror: how to sit so Sir gets the best view of my breasts. Her hand frequently went up to her collar to pull her blouse open a little more and she kept turning slightly so he couldn’t look in her direction without seeing clearly the swell of her left breast rising out of a lacy green bra. She tossed her streaked blonde hair and, playing with the silver hoops in her ears, smiled up at him. Then her lips parted and he could see the raspberry pink of her tongue as she churned the chewing gum over and over.

‘Are you looking at my tits, Sir?’ she said, fixing him with her smoky eyes.

The truth was,
Yes, Chloé, how could I not look at your tits? You think you’re being very clever and grown-up by thrusting your tempting, creamy little breasts towards me, but the fact is, I’m a married teacher with a pregnant wife and you’re still a child.
What he actually said was, ‘Leave the room, please, Chloé. Come back when you’ve got rid of the earrings. That goes for the bracelets too.’

‘Don’t you like a woman to make an effort with her appearance, Sir?’ She glanced at her mates for approval. He wasn’t going to fall for that again – the last time he’d questioned a girl for referring to herself as a woman, he’d been treated to a loud and graphic account of her latest sexual encounter. He repeated the instruction. Chloé’s smile disappeared. She got up sulkily, mumbled something and slouched towards the door.

‘And make sure you’re wearing the correct uniform when you come into school tomorrow, please.’

He hadn’t realised at that point that he was teaching Chloé next period; and that was the day she’d sworn blind she’d seen him punch Ryan Jenkins. Why hadn’t it dawned on him before? Hell hath no fury.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Maggie’s feet go slap slap on the pavement as she charges downhill in the darkness, so fast she fears she will be unable to stop. The street is so littered with debris she has to keep leaping over things. The gale is at her back and seems to be aiding her flight, so she lets herself go with it; all she knows is that she must keep moving. A lump of wood falls right in front of her and it’s too late to avoid. The palms of her hands sting as they hit the cold pavement; she scrambles to her feet but then falls again, and her head hits the ground with a smack. That is the last thing she remembers.

*

She is lying on the cold, damp ground. She raises her head, and tries to make sense of why she’s out in this vicious wind in the middle of the night in a place she doesn’t recognise. There was a party; she was with Jack. She’s trying to hang on to details, half-glimpses, but her mind is pushing them away. She hauls herself to her feet and tries to run, but the debris swirls all around her, blocking her way, making her stumble. She glances behind her but there’s no sign of Jack. She tries to get her bearings but she doesn’t know this area, and anyway, everything looks different in the dark. Something hits her leg and she leaps out of the way as a slab of wood – it looks like an entire garden gate – skids down the road. She must get back to her digs. If only she could just magically be there, in her little room with the torn lino and the creaky bed and the doorknob that falls off every time she turns it. She starts to run again, though with more purpose. If she can get to a main road, she’ll be able to find her way. She begins to head downhill and then – and this is what makes her think she must be dreaming – she sees a little house blowing down the street. She blinks: the ground is littered with slates, broken glass, chimney pots, odd bricks and whole piles of rubble. Things are flying around in the wind and there is a small building – she sees now that it’s not actually a house – moving by itself, with people hanging on to one side, yelling at each other over the scream of the gale. It is as though she has suddenly landed in
The Wizard of Oz
. As she runs, one of the men calls out to ask if she’s all right, but she ignores him, because it can’t be real.

*

Dot and Alf have been up all night, and they and the three other boarders are in their dressing gowns in the kitchen. Half the back roof is missing, Dot tells her, animated by the drama, and the chimney stack is nowt but a pile of bricks in’t yard. She pours hot water into a bowl and adds TCP, turning the water milky. Any other night, she says, as she bathes the cuts on Maggie’s head and the grazes on her hands and knees, she’d have wondered why a young girl wasn’t home at a decent hour, but she can see Maggie was caught in the storm. All those slates flying around, it’s a wonder she isn’t cut more badly than she is; in fact it’s a wonder she got home at all. Dot’s friend Mrs Hallam – her as lives over in Burngreave – rang up just before ’ telephones went down. Mrs Hallam would be stone-cold dead now if it weren’t for her Kenny making her wear his crash helmet when she went to use outhouse in’t yard. What a carry-on. Dot changes the blood-pinked water and sloshes in more TCP. It stings and stinks, but Maggie really doesn’t care. Alf’s greenhouse is smashed to smithereens, Dot says, blown right up in the air and over into next door’s garden. Maggie says nothing. She hasn’t spoken since she came in, but with the drama of the hole in the roof and the outrage of Alf’s flying greenhouse, nobody has noticed. Dot empties the bowl again, turns back to Maggie and pauses, head on one side.

‘Make ’ lass a cup of tea, Alf,’ she says. ‘She’s in shock.’

Maybe she is in shock; all she knows is that she wants to stop hurting. She didn’t feel any of this while she was running, but now her hands and knees smart from the grazes; her head hurts at the back and at the side; and the other thing that’s bothering her is the soreness, a raw, burning soreness between her legs.

‘Come on, duck,’ Dot helps her to her feet. ‘Good job your room’s at ’ front where it’s not so bad. I’ll help thee get tucked up. Bring ’ tea up, Alf,’ she calls over her shoulder as she guides Maggie up the stairs.

When they reach her room, Maggie sits on her bed, so glad to be there she starts to weep.

‘Don’t take on, love,’ Dot says. ‘Come on, now. Where’s tha night things?’ She helps Maggie out of her dress and then she freezes. Maggie looks down and sees what Dot sees: bruises, bigger than a half-crown; the torn slip; the patches of blood; the ripped stocking.

Maggie begins to shake, her teeth rattling, clashing together. Why can’t she remember what happened?

There is a knock at the door and Alf’s voice calls, ‘Is tha decent?’

Dot opens the door. ‘What d’you call this?’ she snaps. ‘Weak as old maid’s water, that is.’ But then her voice wobbles. ‘Make it a bit stronger, will you?’ She half-closes the door, then opens it again and calls after him, ‘And Alf – put a few sugars in.’