Accidents in the Home (15 page)

Clare considered: she was slightly in awe of Helly and her absolute seriousness. She found a button in her purse that the others said would do as a sacrifice, to begin with.

—Close your eyes, said Helly. Keep them shut. She took hold of Clare's hand, painfully tightly, squeezing it until Clare protested, although still with her eyes obediently shut. Helly held on, pressing Clare's fingers down inside something wet, mossy, splintery. It was only when Clare thought of slippery creatures that might be lurking in the stump that she had the strength to pull violently away, letting go of the button.

—Well done, said Helly, smiling into her eyes.

Clare's heart was actually thumping, and all afternoon she could smell moss and rotten wood on her fingers. The details of the cult seemed to her gauche and embarrassing. But she somehow didn't mind it getting around that she was Helly Parkin's friend now. She even helped Helly steal bits of stuff from certain girls in the class—scraps of notes, bits of the ties from their science aprons, even name tapes cut out of their gym blouses in the locker room—which they then pinned to the stump with thumbtacks to bring bad luck: “evil chance,” as Helly called it. Whenever something unfortunate really happened to one of these girls, the four cult members were drawn together in an exhilarating uneasy mixture of guilt and skepticism.

*   *   *

C
LARE AND
H
ELLY
fell in love with one another's houses.

On weekends Clare and her sister Tamsin lived with their mother; during the week they lived in a big chaotic house in Kingsmile with their father, who was a ceramicist, their stepmother, and a half-brother. There were four flights of echoing stairs and rooms at the top they didn't even properly use. There were striking things everywhere: Graham's ceramics and paintings, an Indian embroidered canopy over the fireplace in the sitting room, a copper vase full of unusual flower heads Naomi had dried, old jewel-colored Turkish rugs on the stripped wood floor, bookcases built of stained planks piled on bricks, a crumbling antique rattan settee. In the kitchen there was a vast stripped pine table around which any number of family and friends might be assembled to eat Naomi's vegetarian curries and whole-meal pies. There was always a mattress and a sleeping bag for anyone passing through or temporarily homeless, or for the girls' friends, or Toby's. In the evenings the adults would sit around the big table drinking wine and rolling joints, and the smell of marijuana, thin with just an undertone of acrid nastiness, would rise through the house.

—Be sensible girls, said Graham. You know what not to mention, and where not to mention it.

Helly loved the house in Kingsmile. Its emptiness and air of casual improvisation made her wild. She raced up the bare stairs three at a time, she lay on her back on the floor in the sitting room in the dusk so that Graham and Naomi fell over her, she climbed out the attic windows and sat with her feet in the old lead-lined gutter looking down over the parapet to the faraway street. She would pretend she got high, leaning over the banisters on the top landing and breathing in the smell of the marijuana. She staggered about and fell on Clare's bed, describing her visions, the room swaying like seaweed in a pool, rainbow colors, something cold and scary touching her.

—It's the guardian of the stump, said Clare, and Helly screamed and then they wrestled together on the bed and Helly tried to make her beg forgiveness for her sacrilege.

For Clare there was something unsatisfactorily unfinished about the house. Because there were no carpets anywhere it was filled with noise. Doors didn't shut properly, the stairs had been partly stripped and then abandoned, one wall in the sitting room was half painted red. In the cinders in the big fireplace there were orange peels and cigarette packets in the morning; no one did much dusting or sweeping, and when she thought of the house when she wasn't there she thought of cold bare feet on gritty floors. It was difficult to get comfortable to read, except in bed: the chairs were all unusual—an old green chenille chair with a broken mechanism for folding out and supporting your legs, a circular 1950s basket chair in an iron frame—but there were none that you could snuggle down in. She did her homework at a beautiful fragile little walnut desk in her bedroom whose drawers had lost all their knobs and which was never quite big enough for her books.

She knew her father sometimes felt the unsatisfactory unfinishedness too. She and Tamsin were very finely attuned to his moods, they called him “the honeypot” and catalogued his behavior with a mixture of derision and devotion, smug at having their place in his favors without trying. He sometimes as much as admitted to them how the trying wore him out: Naomi's anxious efforts to please him especially, although they suspected that their own mother's sensible phone calls about practicalities and money (the girls needed new shoes; Tamsin wanted to start clarinet lessons) were in a hidden way a kind of trying too.

—What a burden it is, Tamsin pretended to sigh when he wasn't there. What a mess these women make when they fall at my feet and I have to walk all over them.

They knew their mother still wanted to know about him; they saved up fragments of his dissatisfaction with the house like trophies to compensate her. He suffered with backache; he asked why they couldn't buy a decent sofa. There was always money for special little finds in junk shops but there was never the kind of money that bought decent sofas. Naomi in any case preferred to sit cross-legged on the floor.

—But I'm nearly fifty, he said, with a little grim laugh. (His “at least someone round here has a grasp on reality” laugh, the girls agreed.) Naomi (who wasn't thirty yet) looked frightened; it was one of her superstitions, that she didn't like anyone to mention their age difference.

In spite of his dissatisfactions, the girls knew that the little remarks he made when they went off for their weekends at Marian's weren't really complimentary. He said, “It must all seem terribly sensible and organized and quiet compared with living here” (that meant dull). He took an amused interest in Marian's decorating—“She must have been longing for built-in kitchen cabinets all along”—and was delighted when the girls let slip that she didn't allow them to use a mug without a saucer in case of drips. When she had a burglar alarm installed, he started calling her house Fort Knox. They didn't report these jokes to Marian.

*   *   *

C
LARE WOULD HAVE LIKED
to live in Helly's house in Poynton. Poynton was a little village that had been absorbed at the edge of the city's advance; Helly had a long bus ride to school every day. (She didn't mind: the same bus picked up boys for the grammar school too, so there was always some fantasized romance on the go, someone to swoon over if he brushed obliviously past you.) The Parkins lived in an estate of new houses: her father had a management position with British Gas; her mother was a primary-school teacher. There was a younger brother who played the guitar and wanted to be in a band. Everything in the house was new and clean and comfortable and worked. The walls between the rooms were so thin that when they lay whispering in Helly's bed at night her father in his bed next door hardly had to raise his voice to tell them to be quiet: you felt you slept with the whole family; the partitions were merely polite. Helly's father, whom she quarreled with bitterly—luxuriously, Clare thought: somehow she and Tamsin just couldn't afford to quarrel with Graham—was short and dapper and satirical; he was good at crosswords and puzzles and competitions. Helly was good at them too; before she was a teenager and turned against him they had won things together, a holiday and a freezer and a diamond ring. Mostly they quarreled about politics; he was an enthusiastic supporter of Mrs. Thatcher and exaggerated his enthusiasm to goad her.

At Poynton, Clare met boys. Helly belonged, improbably, to the Methodist youth club, which seemed to have nothing to do with religion but was a sort of cover operation for disaffected teenagers. There was an intimate core of girls who ran things and then a number of boys moving more loosely on the periphery: like planets, unconsciously exerting their huge gravitational pull upon the center. Some of them, like Helly, were bussed into the selective schools in the city, but most of them went to the local school, and it was with these boys Clare fell in love: cocky, teasing, irreverent, dangerous. The grammar-school boys kept apart in a different set and were too superior and sophisticated to bother with Clare and Helly; also, there was a kind of embarrassment of recognition, the clever girls and boys looked at one another, knew they had all bought in to the same system, and did not particularly want to be reminded of this outside of school, where they were pretending to be something else.

Helly and Clare would spend an hour or more in Helly's bedroom dressing up and putting on makeup, then they walked self-consciously along to the church hall, without the coats that would spoil the effect, however cold it was. There they played table tennis or badminton or hung around in the kitchen making powdered coffee and taking part in some repartee that was usually sexual teasing. The boys outdid one another in outrageous suggestions and boasts, often involving sexual disgust at the exploits of some girl not present.

—She was fucking desperate; she was all over me.

—Man, she was gasping for it; and she's fucking huge; I was suffocating, her big tits were in my face, I wanted air.

The girls responded as required with a certain kind of fending off, a demure immunity of slow-burning smiles, avoiding eye contact with the boys, glancing blazingly at one another, then down again, as if they moved flexibly and slowly inside a sexual shape of the boys' words' making, exciting but dangerously capable of shaming them. Clare found it felt very womanly to be spooning out coffee and boiling kettles of water at the same time as the teasing, capable and impatient (“Wait! That one's not got sugar in it yet!”). And there was a certain kind of dry bold loud derisive remark that made you strong in your resistance, which the boys particularly admired: Helly was good at these.

—David Taton, you were so keen to get your trousers down, you didn't care who it was!

—So what do you expect if you suffer from wandering-hands trouble, Stuart Hopkin?

Clare wondered at their complex ironic other selves, suddenly insignificant and tiny; none of the languages they had used before had ever seemed as powerful as this coarse one. She was not quite sure what reality it represented: were these boys really doing half, or any, of the things they boasted of? Where did such things happen? How did they begin? Sometimes couples disappeared around the back of the church hall, but they were never left alone long enough—surely?—to be having intercourse. Helly was evasive: she wasn't sure; things happened at parties.

The boys would break off from time to time into scuffling fights, more or less serious, flares of violence raging out of nowhere. The girls split up into factional gossip. Clare feared some of these girls more than any of the boys; the boys mostly ignored her, the girls smelled out right away that she was an outsider. Two of them, two short fat girls with blue eye makeup whose names often figured in the boys' stories, took Helly outside to talk about her. Was she pregnant? (That was something to do with the way she stood and the dress she was wearing.) “Pregnant” was a sexual word in their talk, like other ordinary words suddenly electrified: “fancy,” and “talent,” and “touching up,” “sucking” and “hard” and “coming,” all these words revealed other, explosive selves. That it could be thought she might be pregnant! She was excited and humiliated.

Helly and Clare walked home; sometimes some of the boys walked part of the way with them. A different mood would settle on them all. The walk from the youth club back to the Parkins' could make you think you really were in the country: there were dark fields and trees with birds rustling in them, a few cottages with televisions flickering in rooms with turned off lights. Their voices were quiet and intimate under the high starry spaces of night, dreamy because they were invisible to one another. A kind of gallantry came out in the boys, they confessed their ambitions, which turned out to be rather honorable and stirring: one wanted to be an Air Force pilot, one wanted to work relieving poverty in Africa, one of them wanted to draw cartoons. All of these goals seemed improbable to Clare; the parents of these boys were car mechanics or worked in supermarkets or the local meat processing plant, and she had in those days, for all her socialism, a rather fixed idea of who got to be pilots and artists. (She was wrong, about the pilot at any rate.)

But the improbability made the boys' ambitions all the more poignant; afterward, upstairs in Helly's bedroom, the girls talked about them tenderly.

—Imagine, said Clare, if it was like the First World War. (They had been studying the war poets at school.) Imagine if they had to go off and fight, and we were going to say goodbye to them at the station. Imagine how they'd look, in their uniforms, all brave and solemn. We'd be desperate to stop them, they'd be sort of fatalistic and stubborn. Stuart Hopkin: although he's so small, he's sweet, he's really intense; imagine the look he'd give you, just as the train began to leave.…

She had real tears in her eyes, real pain in her heart.

—Imagine how we'd kiss them, said Helly, if they might not come back.

The idea of kissing hovered over those walks home, the sensation of the possibility of it brushed them for moments with its panting heat, unspoken. They might kiss where the boys turned off to go a different way. Mostly it didn't happen. Once or twice when Clare was there it happened to Helly. There was a movement with which a boy chose you, separated you off; even the rehearsal of that movement in her mind, its astonishing predatory decisiveness, could make Clare melt: that he could be so sure he wanted that, and from you! She could only imagine the total acquiescence of the flesh at such a tribute. Then he bent over you and put his arms around you and the kiss was taken while others watched and jeered, long and slow, and there were names for this too: “snogging,” and “French kissing”—techniques you were afraid you might not know.