Things to Make and Mend (12 page)

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t tell a nice girl like you.’

‘What? What do you mean? Go on, Colin, tell –’

‘Condoms.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s great,’ he said. ‘You get all these free packs.’

‘Oh,’ she said again, aware of someone in the flat next door, hoovering their carpet. Bashing the hoover against the skirting board. She wondered if Colin had all those free packs there, at that moment, in his bedroom.

Colin began to laugh. ‘Don’t look so scared,’ he said more kindly. ‘Come here.’ And he walked towards her and put his arms around her, folding her up roughly, like an octopus.

‘You’re nice,’ she said into his armpit.

‘You’re nice too. So. Why don’t we go to bed? It’ll be lovely.’

‘Not yet.’

‘What are you worried about?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So why don’t we?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You’ve got to do it some time. Someone’s got to show you. I bet loads of girls at your school have …’

‘I know, but …’

It was late. Nearly ten o’clock. Her parents would be home by now, worrying. She had said she would be home by nine. In the flat next door, the hoover was being pushed around a more
distant
room.

‘You’ve got to do it some time,’ Colin said again. ‘You’ve got to do it with someone. So it might as well be me.’ He paused. ‘You love me.’

‘I do. I do. But …’

When the bus arrived, nearly ten minutes late, Colin gave her an unexpectedly brief, dry kiss, like a Russian politician.

‘See you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Hope your parents forgive you.’

Then he patted her backside and watched her get on the bus, stumbling a little as she made her way to the back seats. She tried to make her profile look enigmatic and beautiful. But he had already turned and walked away. He had not stayed to smile or wave. She watched him turn down a side street as the bus drew away. A middle-aged woman sitting on the back seat was staring at her in her school uniform, evidently amazed that she was
capable
of kissing a grown man. 

In our hotel room we sit on a small, red sofa and listen to the quiet tick of some nameless instrument.
A thermostat?
we
wonder.
The mini-bar?

We look up at the rose picture on the wall and speculate whether it is a Redouté. We discover two CDs that a former guest lost down the back of the sofa.
The Cutter and the Clan. Tubular Bells.

‘Someone will be missing those,’ says Kenneth. ‘Better hand them in to reception.’

‘Hmm.’

The CDs make me feel a little depressed. I put them on the arm of the sofa, get up, walk into the en-suite bathroom and shut the door. It is warm in here and smells of pine. I take off my clothes and drop them on the floor-tiles. I look at the small
bottles
arranged on the little wooden ledge.
Out of Eden
Shower Gelée.
Out of Eden
Shampoo.
Out of Eden
Moisturising Cream.

In the shower, I unzip my sponge bag and use my own shampoo.

‘So. What shall we do this afternoon?’ Kenneth asks when I return, my hair wrapped in a Royal Burgh towel. He is listening to the
Tubular Bells
CD. There is a drone of notes and the
occasional
chanted word.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Go to bed?’

I am weary, after too much translating of late – too many
complicated
sentences about nineteenth-century hand-looms. Weary, too, with the effort of getting here. Hotel rooms always make me feel like this in any case; the sight of the bed makes me want to get
straight into a pair of practical pyjamas and hide between the laundered sheets.

‘Let’s have a look at this folder of Interesting Ideas,’ Kenneth suggests, hauling out a large pink file from beneath the coffee table.

‘Nothing that involves a big trek,’ I say, sitting down beside him. I lean my head against the sofa back.

‘So,’ says Kenneth.

‘Glockenspiel!’
intones the CD.

‘Do you really want this on?’

‘I think it’s kind of soothing. So … there’s the Tron Kirk. There’s the castle. There’s the museum. Or the botanic gardens.’

‘Yes, but they’ll all be closed and it’s freezing anyway.’

‘We could go out for lunch. Or we could eat here, where we will be offered “a superb dining experience in
sumptuous
surroundings”.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Just some sandwiches then? Room service?’

‘That sounds not too exerting.’

Kenneth looks at me. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You look sad.’

He thinks I’m thinking about Joe. But I’m not.

I’m actually remembering a ten-minute bus journey
undertaken
one Sunday in East Grinstead in 1979. A journey I made in order to meet my friend Sally Tuttle. It had been a number 18 bus, and I had been sitting on it with a Tubular Bells album in a plastic bag by my feet.

Colin Rafferty had got on the bus. That is why I still
remember
the occasion: he had suddenly been there, at the top of the bus steps, buying a ticket. And I had looked up and felt alarmed.

Colin had not acknowledged me straight away; he had just
come and sat down in the seat in front of me, and the bus had roared on, down London Road. I continued to stare, pink-faced, through the window.
Look nonchalant, look nonchalant.
I clutched the handles of my plastic bag and tried to think of the homework I was supposed to do: an 800-word Chemistry essay. Then, apropos of nothing, Colin Rafferty had suddenly turned, leaned one arm casually over the back of his seat and said, ‘Hello, Sally’s friend.’

I flicked a quick glance in his direction.

‘Hello,’ I replied, bunching both hands into fists around the plastic-bag handles.

Colin smiled and I noticed his teeth.

‘So. Where are you going?’

‘To see a friend.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Wouldn’t be someone I know, then?’

‘Maybe.’

And then he said it: the thing that stays in my memory. ‘Do you know, Sally’s friend,’ he said, ‘you have the most beautiful eyes.’

And he smiled again, and turned back in his seat.

I sat rigidly and regarded the back of his head. The bus droned and clanked on. My head throbbed. I felt oddly
paralysed.
I wished, more than anything, that Colin Rafferty would get off the bus.

Then, after a couple of stops, he did. Without looking back at me or even acknowledging my continuing existence, he stood up, walked down the aisle and descended the steps. He turned the corner of a street and disappeared.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in Sally’s bedroom, not telling her what had happened.

‘I’m really not sure about this,’ I remember Sally saying, picking  
up the sleeve of my Tubular Bells album to look at the notes. ‘I really don’t like the way he says
Glockenspiel
and stuff. It’s a bit bloody peculiar.’

‘Hmm?’

‘I mean:
Glock-un-shpeel
! What’s that all about? It’s a bit bloody airy-fairy isn’t it? You ought to listen to the Clash.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Anything wrong? You’ve gone all mopy.’

‘Just tired, Sal.’

After our wine (white, slightly sour) and sandwiches (ham, tuna mayonnaise), Kenneth and I leave our room to go in search of the hotel’s embroidery exhibition. We walk along carpeted
corridors,
down hushed staircases, past vases of flowers, pewter bowls of pine cones and brass plaques indicating room numbers. We walk into a room marked Function Suite and then into another marked Conference Hall. A lone man in a T-shirt that says
I’m with her
 
is staple-gunning pieces of paper to the walls. 

‘Is this where the embroidery exhibition is meant to be?’
Kenneth
asks.

‘We’re behind schedule, pal,’ says the man with the staple-gun. ‘I can’t see me getting this on the walls before the back of
midnight.’

‘You’re not staple-gunning the embroideries are you?’ I ask, alarmed.

The man looks at me. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll not be staple-gunning the actual artwork.’

At his feet is a box of photocopied pictures. Beside him is a wooden frame supporting a large embroidered canvas. It is turned the wrong way round, the stitches neatly finished off in reds, greens and blues. I can make out the shape of a face,
clothing,
the soft glitter of sequins.

‘Could we take a look at the embroideries?’ Kenneth asks.

‘Best not, if you don’t mind,’ the man says. ‘I don’t really want to touch them, pal, with my butterfingers. Best if you come and see them tomorrow.’

And we walk away, back up to our room.

‘Never trust a butterfingers with a staple-gun,’ Kenneth observes in the lift.

I don’t reply. I am thinking of the art of embroidery: the
innocent
pull of thread through cloth.

Everyone worked in pairs and they were always a pair, Sally and Rowena, hunched over the gentle heat of the Bunsen burner. At their experiments bench they peered at the copper sulphate
crystal
they were supposed to grow. It was not nearly as symmetrical as everyone else’s. It was wonky, and made them laugh.
Chemistry
was always funny. There was some mixture, some chemical composition that Miss Haugh kept talking about.
Fehlings.
Pronounced
failings. That made them laugh too.

‘So. He’s quite witty, isn’t he?’ Rowena said, mid-morning, and Sally froze.

‘So. When are you going to tell your mum and dad about him?’

‘I’m not.’

Rowena twiddled the gold stud in her earlobe. She peered at Sally through her plastic goggles. Her eyeliner had run. She looked pale: off-colour, weighed-down.

‘They’d wig out, Ro,’ Sally said. ‘They’d think he was too old. They’d probably ban me from seeing him or something.’

Rowena shrugged, stuck a piece of Sellotape on to their
badly-formed
crystal, and placed it into their ‘Experiments’ folder. A couple of weeks earlier, as she had threatened, she’d had her hair permed. She’d had it done at Hairizons, the trendiest
hairdresser’s
in town. The curls had smelt slightly of ammonia and looked solid, almost as if they had been carved out of wood. Sally was a little unsure about whether it
worked.

‘Do you think he thinks I’m too young?’ she asked.

Rowena sighed. ‘It’s what you think that matters,’ she said. ‘It’s just, I …’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter.’

And for a while they didn’t say any more. They peered at their copper sulphate crystal and tried to think of ways to describe it.

Then Sally broke the silence. She wanted to say something nice, because it was frightening her, this misunderstanding, this veering off the track.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Your hair’s so thick it just stays put. If I had mine permed it would just go all limp, like Rhian-anon’s.’

‘You should get
something
done to it, though,’ Rowena snapped. ‘You’ve had it long all your life.’

‘No I haven’t. You haven’t
known
me all my life,’ Sally retorted, flicking the end of her plait. Something was altering, definitely; something was fading away.

‘A perm would give it more volume,’ Rowena said.

‘It doesn’t need more volume. I’d end up looking like Kevin Keegan.’

‘Well, if you don’t watch it, Sally, you’ll end up looking like Colin’s daughter.’

And Rowena turned back to her chemistry book.

Sally sat, her plait heavy and childish against her back. She felt a strange kind of pain appear and expand beneath her ribcage. She thought of the two sea lions she and Colin had seen at the zoo; the way one of them had just seemed to get bored with the other and suddenly flopped its great hulking body off the
concrete
ledge and into the water.

She looked down at the copper sulphate crystal, at its chipped, bright blue edges. Then she reached into her school bag, got out a Black Jack, unwrapped it and crammed it into her mouth.

‘Anyway. You should be careful, Sal,’ Rowena said, her head bowed over her book. ‘Y’know, if you … You’d have to make sure he wore a thingummy.’

Sally chewed and chewed, aware of a blush advancing up her neck, over her cheeks, across her forehead.

Rowena stopped talking and looked up. ‘Blimey, Sal,’ she said, ‘you’ve gone really red.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you? If someone started talking about
your
love life in the middle of Chemistry?’

Rowena glanced at Miss Haugh, pensive, woolly-haired Miss Haugh, struggling with a malfunctioning Bunsen burner.

‘What love life?’ she said. ‘I don’t have a love life.’

They worked in silence for a while, eyeing the clock while Miss Haugh intoned sadly about chemical reactions. In ten
minutes
they would be in different classrooms, considering,
respectively
, the use of symbolism in
Madame Bovary
and irrigation in the Nile Valley.

The bell rang, and there was an instant, alarming surge of chairs being pushed back, of noisy conversations drowning out Miss Haugh, of flat-footed trudging to the classroom door.

‘See you, then,’ Rowena said, swinging her bag over her shoulder.

And Sally watched her disappear through the doors and up the stairs. The burden of maintaining her oldest friendship made her feel tired, world-weary, like the parent of a difficult child.

She saw her again at lunchtime on Monday, through the glass pane of the Needlework room door.

‘Hi, Ro,’ she said, guardedly, and Rowena looked up. She was definitely, Sally thought, looking a little run-down. Sickening for something. Pale, with dark circles beneath her eyes. She was
sitting
beside a plate of sandwiches that Miss Button had arranged mysteriously and rather ineptly beside one of the Bernini sewing machines.

‘How was Geography?’ Sally asked.

‘Stuff about gum trees.’

‘Oh well. It’s over for another week.’

Sally looked down at the sandwiches. A row of white triangles and a row of brown triangles.

‘What are these doing here? Are we supposed to eat them?’ she asked, and Rowena frowned and didn’t reply. She looked, for some reason, as if she might cry.

‘I think they’re left over from some sixth-form session,’ she said eventually.

‘What?’

‘The sandwiches. Miss Button said we could help ourselves. They make me feel a bit sick, actually.’

‘Do they?’

‘Yes, I –’ she began, and then stopped talking.

‘Well, they look pretty grim,’ Sally said impatiently, looking at the way the sandwich fillings oozed out a little over the edges. Sandwich spread: some awful, unrecognisable yellow paste. She thought of the jokes Colin might have made about it. But she could never think up jokes like that. She could only ever
remember
the one about the koala bear falling out of a tree.

Rowena suddenly put her hand up to her mouth. ‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ she said.

‘Really? Are you OK?’

‘No.’

‘Eat up, girls,’ said Miss Button, perky, contemptuous Miss Button, suddenly appearing at their side. Because, as far as she could tell, they were just loitering in the Needlework Room for no real reason. They were, really, Sally supposed.

‘Not for me thanks,’ said Rowena, her face ashen. Sally glanced at her with alarm.

‘We were just trying to work out what was in them. The
sandwiches,’
she said. 

Miss Button looked at her and then at Rowena. She frowned, and Sally thought of the word
moue
, which they had just learned in French.

‘The school cooks spent a long time preparing those
sandwiches
, Rowena Cresswell,’ Miss Button said. ‘For your delight and delectation. You should make the most of it. There’s not
usually
such a thing as a free lunch.’ And she sashayed back across the room in her little soft, practical shoes.

Sally looked at Rowena. Rowena looked at Sally.

‘I’m OK, I think,’ Rowena said, ‘Just came over a bit funny. So …’

But she suddenly put one hand up over her mouth, her other over her stomach, and sat there, her eyes closed.

‘You all right? Would a Black Jack help?’

‘Shut up,’ Rowena replied, through her fingers. She sat silently for a moment. Then she looked up. ‘Sorry, Sal,’ she said. ‘I’ll be OK.’

They moved away from the sandwiches to stand by an open window, through which the desolate cries of breaktime could be heard. Tentatively, Sally put her hand on Rowena’s arm and glanced around at their other schoolmates. They all seemed to be having a cheerful time. They had all, Sally realised, suddenly found their own place – over the past few weeks, while she was not watching. They had all sorted themselves out and now
presented
a kind of united front. They had found their own best friends. Nuala Odette, a very pretty black girl with dozens of braids, had joined up with Alison Smith, who was small and
pastry
-white; troubled Natalie Craven had a confidante in motherly Emily Banks. Even Rhiannon Clark had, in recent months,
transformed
herself from being slightly weird to unaccountably
popular.
People no longer called her Rhian-anon. Her chosen friend was Wendy, a shy girl who had now grown bolder, like a hyacinth blooming on a sunny window sill.

Sally turned back to Rowena.

‘Sure you’re OK?’ she chirped. ‘Not pregnant, are you?’

Rowena breathed in.

‘So. You’re not going to throw up in Maths or anything, are you?’

‘No. Sally –’

‘Yeah?’

But before she could continue, the lunch bell rang.

‘What? Are you OK? What’s wrong?’

‘It’s OK. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Sure? You can talk to me, honey pie.’

‘It’s OK. I’ll tell you later.’

Through the window Sally could see a collision of schoolboys on the pavement outside, all pushing each other and swearing.
Flinging little fire-crackers on to the ground, to make the girls scream as they walked past. All of them, without exception,
lacking
beauty, irony, sophistication.

She turned back to Rowena, leaned forward and touched her friend’s shoulder briefly, the way she might have patted the side of a horse.

Her love for Colin had started to expand by this time, to increase without warning. Of course he loved her! He wasn’t interested in Rowena: she felt ashamed for suspecting it.

Something in particular had triggered her confidence: the comment he had made about her eyes.

‘Your eyes are so beautiful,’ he had said, brushing her cheek with his finger. ‘So blue and so sad. And with the slightest, cutest little squint.’

‘Squint?’ Sally replied, horrified.

‘Are my eyes squint?’ she had asked Rowena a few days later during lunch break, as they stood in the queue for Vegetarian Goulash.

And she wondered why Rowena had had such an angry expression on her face.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Rowena said.

‘Do you think my eyes are squint? Colin thinks they are.’

‘Haven’t you got more important things to think about?’ Rowena snapped, declining a plate of orange stew and stalking back to their table with a side plate, a knife and a Golden
Delicious
apple.

Hurt, Sally chose to sit somewhere else. She sat with Christine Pringle and Susan Temple and discussed their shared love of Supertramp.

At the time she thought it was because Rowena was jealous. She really thought that was why they were falling apart.

She was supposed to have gone back to Rowena’s house that evening: the day of the goulash and the Golden Delicious apple. But, still angry, she told her she didn’t feel well and went home. She felt a little hollow. Bleak. She let herself in to the house and roamed around for a while, eating toast and watching children’s programmes:
Jackanory. Paddington.
The feeling of hollowness did not go away. And neither of her parents was in to cheer her up. Her mother was cleaning some big house in the posh part of town, her father was on late shift at the sorting office.

After she’d finished her toast she switched the television off. The house was terribly quiet. Nothing moved. And suddenly she felt a kind of compulsion, a magnetic pull towards somewhere else. Someone who understood. Colin.
My soulmate. My kindred spirit.

Now she didn’t hesitate. This was the only thing to do. She hardly even stopped to check her reflection in her bedroom
mirror
– just briefly, to brush her hair (washed for the second time that day) and to reapply shimmery eyeliner at the corners of her eyelids. To wonder about her slightly squint eyes.

Then she flew down the garden path to the pavement, up to London Road, past the station, down a long flight of steps and on, the soles of her feet crashing against the tarmac. She ran past the library, the pet shop, the supermarket, her old primary school. She pounded through the streets towards Colin’s flat.
I love you, I love you.
It was cold and raining now, but she had put on her mother’s big trench coat because it looked dramatic – like a coat in a film she’d seen once. And she was wearing her hair long and loose and wavy from the plait. But her big feet in her big shoes – she could do nothing about them. Her big shoes went slap, slap through the shiny puddles. And beneath the rain her scalp tingled with apprehension.
In ten minutes I will be there.
She was wearing her best knickers and new white bra. She had already Strip-waxed her legs and applied Nivea moisturising
cream to her arms and shoulders. Now she imagined herself
running
up the worn stone steps, past the sign that said ‘No
Hawkers,
No Salesmen’; she saw herself arriving at his door, knocking on the peeling green wood. Waiting. And then, when he opened the door, she pictured herself falling into his open arms.

‘Sally, what’s wrong?’ he would say. ‘What’s the matter?’