Bad Blood (25 page)

There was a great mystery here: did being a teenager mean you grew up faster, or slower? Were Gail and I tense with excitement or bored stiff? Or both at once? We crackled with emotional static. As we waited for the bus, or dawdled Whitchurch streets, we held hands to earth ourselves – not gently or sentimentally, but squeezing hard as though we'd fall or float any minute and only our interlaced fingers kept us grounded. We regarded Hanmer mores with scorn and went off into gales of contemptuous giggles if avuncular Hanmer types asked us when we were going to start courting.
Courting!
Nonetheless we scrutinised the Young Farmers (
young!
some of them were pushing thirty, waiting for their red-faced fathers to die or retire) looking for any sign – sideburns a little too long, a dark glance – that they
knew
. But knew what? Something we knew, or something we didn't? The world teased us with
possibilities. Even the tame boys who played ping-pong and drank warm pop at vicarage socials could take on in three-quarters profile, in the right shadow, a louche look. We talked for hours – to each other, not to them – speculating, reading in the symptoms of suppressed want.

It was a thankless and perverse task, particularly with vicarage ‘do's', for the new order in the vicarage was peaceful and bland. Mr Hopkins, my grandfather's replacement, was a mild-mannered man – mildly snobbish, mildly well-off (his children went away to school) – not given to showy sermons or excesses of any kind. There were no dark corners left in the vicarage, it had been thoroughly spring-cleaned. Mrs Hopkins let it be known that the house was in a scandalously dirty state when they moved in and she was understood to refer to moral hygiene as well. Now it was light and open to inspection, and Mr Hopkins held his blameless ping-pong parties in the attic and confirmation classes in the parlour that used to turn dusty blind eyes to the square.

The confirmation classes, as it turned out, provided more of an occasion for sin than the table tennis. After a couple of sessions the old vicarage spirit of place, so ignominiously turned out of doors, prompted me to take a stand. I stayed behind when the others left and announced that I couldn't be confirmed because I didn't believe in God. This was true: a combination of
Poetry for the Young
, Shaw, Hardy and my grandfather's defection had turned me at thirteen into a believer in Universal Mortality and Pitiless Nature. Mr Hopkins, however, was not interested in the state of my ideas. He seemed weary and embarrassed by my apostasy, and said that he thought I should anyway be confirmed because if I wasn't it would look odd and my parents would be upset. I was outraged by his superficiality and worldliness, and at the same time hugely gratified.
I took his advice and extorted from my mother a pair of new white shoes
with heels
to be confirmed in. These had to be worn with proper stockings, which meant I had to have a suspender-belt, which meant that confirmation was in truth a rite of passage. The actual ceremony left me cold – it was the first and last time I ever took communion. Gail, ever avid for sensation, claimed that she felt a definite frisson when the Bishop laid his hands on her head, but she didn't go back for more either.

The magic of the Church no longer impressed us. Our own bodies were more mysterious than the wine and wafers, and the whimsical notion put about by the Mothers' Union that the spell of the marriage service changed a couple's every atom in order that they could make babies had never seemed very convincing in Hanmer, where so many brides went bulging to the altar. The Church's job was more like exorcism, turning the incubus into a husband and provider after the event.

Once, when Gail and I went swimming in the mere the summer I was thirteen, just such a bad boy was staring moodily into the water, sentenced to be married in two days' time. His way home, we knew, took him past the end of my lane and I hung about for a daring hour that evening pretending to pick blackberries from the hedge, hoping he would spare me a desperate word, even a doomed kiss, but he never came by. Instead, the late summer midges gathered round and sucked my blood, and their bites festered and blistered since I'd become wildly allergic to all sorts of new things. My body was overreacting to every stimulus, from inside or outside, my period came every three weeks in a heavy iron-smelling flood, along with backaches, headaches and cramps. Each time I'd swell, and then lose pounds in a couple of days off school, moping around the house, insulated with aspirin and groggy daydreams.
The metabolic misery had its pleasurable side. I'd writhe in a chair and read, and wrap the bloody sanitary towels in brown paper and poke them into the back of the fire, where they smouldered slowly, like me.

Bad blood, excited blood. My nose bled, too. It seemed that no sooner had I got over my fear of the water and learned to swim than the chlorine in the baths inflamed my sinuses and I had to be excused swimming lessons. This was galling because I had found at last a way of impressing my enemy the gym mistress. I wasn't a fast or stylish swimmer, but I could dive into the deep end. Once you'd taken the plunge, gravity did the rest, diving was a wonderful cocktail of inertia and adrenalin, not at all like vaulting over her headless horse, although she thought it was and looked at me with new respect until chlorine made me a malingerer once more. By then I'd had my long hair cut off, to be sleek in a bathing hat. I didn't really regret it, for I'd always associated my pigtails with the shameful years of bugs. Now I had teenage hair, the sort you endlessly, hopefully, experimented with, in page-boy bobs, with and without fringes, sticky with sweet-smelling eau-de-Nil-coloured setting lotion called Amami and crisped like candyfloss with hairspray. Gail, after all
her
years of ringlets wrapped in rags every night, enjoyed the freedom to make her own mess of her hair even more than I did.

Soon, under orders from the Spirit of the 1950s, we both settled for ponytails, and after that our hair was always halfway up and halfway down, our fringes forever growing in or growing out; we were almost ideally untidy. Hair and nails were our fetishes. We didn't use our clippings to make voodoo dolls, but split ends and bitten cuticles were just as spookily significant as if we'd believed in their magic. They were us and not-us, a sign language which expressed our restless conviction that
we meant something new. Nothing about them was trivial. If you changed one part of that language, then other things shifted too.

For instance, ponytails were a particular key because they simply didn't go with school uniform berets. You either had to tuck all your hair inside your beret and look almost bald, or anchor the silly hat on top (more slides and clips and grips) folded flat like a felt pancake. Obviously it was easier, more decorous even, to take it off and put it in your pocket. And at the same time you could turn your school cardigan back to front to look like a turtle-neck sweater (and hide your tie), pull in the belt of your school mac to make a wasp waist and there you were – wearing the Other uniform of the girls who hung around the streets giving Whitchurch High School a bad name. Gail and I deliberately missed the school bus on many afternoons and caught instead the later one that ferried shop assistants and Silhouette factory workers back over the border at five o'clock. This gave us an extra hour in which to chase boys we pretended were chasing us, and sit spinning out plastic cups of grey, frothy coffee as we watched the coloured lights pulse between plays in one or other of the town's curvy new jukeboxes.

Gail had a gift for intentness. She could caress shapeless moments like these as if she was stroking a puppy, until they wriggled into life and sucked your fingers. Even in school she'd people the corners of the day with adventure. She was adept at cultivating crushes on the prefects. She would pick out some gaunt, sporty girl to bamboozle with slavish devotion, following her around, imitating her style of serve, drawing her profile on the blackboard, asking her what was her favourite colour, poring over her horoscope – and then suddenly transfer her allegiance to another, leaving the first wrong-footed, missing
attentions she was supposed (according to the rules of this game) to regard with entire indifference. Gail's crushes were so exigent and arbitrary that it was as though the prefects were the suitors, not she. I was her confidante and shared her obsessions, but it wasn't freckled Dina the hockey captain or willowy, double-jointed Jean who inspired my hero-worship. My crush was on Gail herself, I was fascinated by her strength of conviction. She played the part of Shaw's St Joan when we read aloud in class. She was Jane Eyre, she was Cathy (‘Nellie, I
am
Heathcliff!'), she was the heroine.

Later, when we actually talked to some of the boy gang from the grammar school who'd noisily ignored us in coffee bars, they told us that they'd known straight away (a) that we were lesbians; and (b) that Gail was using me – dreamier, curvier, blonder – as her stalking horse, to hunt down boys she wanted. We were amazed and outraged, but not, alas, for the right reasons. We should have been appalled by their crass assumption that ‘lesbian' meant limbo, the
faut de mieux
condition of females lacking males, and by their inability to imagine that a girl gang (even of two) could generate a frenzy to rival their boy gang rites. But in fact we mostly shared their views.

We too took for granted that it was relations with boys and men that would enfranchise us as real women in the world. Our mutual obsession ‘passed' as an unreality, and what made it easier was that apart from holding hands and a bit of grooming – hair-brushing and nail-filing – we never touched, all that kid stuff in the vicarage shrubbery (which anyway she'd never joined in) was lost back in the mists of time. Now, I think: the hands were enough. All our caresses were locked finger by finger into that one. That teenage rite of passage was an end in itself – not a matter of holding someone's hand while you cross the big road, but holding passions past and to be, rejected
parents and siblings, ghostly lovers, husbands, children, pens and pets and self-love from the future, all in the palms of our hands.

Gail and I were determined never to marry or have children, thanks to our parents' example. Love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage. Dad was told by Mother, you can't have one without the o-o-ther. We knew better and decreed them absolutely separate in our imaginations. Meanwhile the solid Whitchurch girls at the high school played the game, confident that whatever we said, types like us wanted what they did, it was just that our Hanmerness was against us. My bugs and braces and Gail's mum's divorce and being bused across the border all accounted for the slackness of our grip on the real world, which was doubtless why we clung to each other in that affected way. So we weren't cast as outsiders or rebels. Outside was reserved for the secondary modern kids, who had failed the social test for which the eleven-plus was just a cover.

The middle-class part of the town kept its character by blandly ingesting anyone who didn't fit. One startling example of this was a girl in my form I watched narrowly because she was dangerously clever and certainly would have done better at maths than me except that I slaved over my homework. She was called Jean Evans, her dad had been away in the army during the war, but afterwards went back to work for the railways, and her mother had been a cashier in a proper shop. They'd married early in the war, like my parents, and were colourlessly respectable. Jean was an only child. So far so unsurprising. But Jean was black. Well, dark yellow with a bloom of sooty down and hair that was frizzy where it wasn't painfully pulled flat. Her father must have been one of the GIs briefly stationed near Ellesmere. However, no one in Whitchurch, and
certainly not at school, ever noticed or mentioned this interesting fact. Jean was her parents' child and attended the high school, and that was that. There were no black people living in Whitchurch then, of course, which in a way may have helped to make her difference invisible. On the other hand there were plenty of ‘common' girls who wore white lipstick and black eyeliner, and curlers in their hair all day long at the factory under their nylon headscarves: they were the ones you needed to draw the line against in those days, the poor whites.

Still, as a tribute to topical teenage angst, the headmistress arranged a make-up lesson by a lady from Pond's. Face paint was strictly forbidden in school, but it was understood that as nice, normal girls we were already dreaming of marrying men like Dad and needed to give off the right signals when we weren't in uniform. After a brief lecture about how to tell whether you had greasy, dry or combination skin, the Pond's lady picked out a couple of fourth-formers, one mouse-brown, one mouse-blonde, and set to work with foundation, powder, eyebrow pencil, eyeshadow, mascara and lipstick to demonstrate how to add make-up to the good girl's armoury. No red, no black, no white, for a start, and
no eyeliner
; instead, pink lips, pale-brown eyebrows and lashes, and blue eyelids. Natural make-up, said Pond's, whipping off their nylon bibs. Which meant more mouse, make-up that made you look neat, presentable, vulnerable; serviceable make-up that once you'd left school would last all day behind your secretary's desk with judicious touching-up; make-up for getting engaged, with pink nail varnish to match the lipstick when you showed off your ring. And above all
prophylactic
make-up. That particular shade of pink lipstick, the hint of turquoise in the awful eyeshadow, were contraceptives. They spelled heavy petting,
waiting
, saving for a semi. The only contraception available to adolescent girls
was mythological, back in 1957, so why not Pond's Vanishing Cream?

Gail and I held hands throughout this scary demonstration of Whitchurch sexual
realpolitik
. She curled her lip, which was something she did beautifully – her face was fine-cut and finished, although the rest of her was pre-adolescent still. She would never need to draw lines round her lips and fill them in with pink grease to keep babies at bay. And I drew courage from her scorn when I privately tried out images for my own future self. My favourites were improbable on principle. There was the one from science fiction B movies, with sculpted cheekbones, hair in an immaculate French pleat, wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard along the humming corridors of a nuclear power plant, with deferential men scuttling behind. Not that we did maths or physics or chemistry at the girls' high school, only something called general science, which didn't even have an O-level attached; you went to the boys' grammar school to take real sciences in the sixth form, if your parents agreed, and that was my private plan. Or one of them.