The Love She Left Behind (9 page)

Mr Hinton, rusty-bearded, tank-topped, touched his shoulder. He showed no reaction to the fart, although the stench was unignorable. Miserably, Nigel shook his head and picked up a needle.

‘Best thing is to outline the design so that you've got something to follow. Unless you're like Toby—pretty confident there, Tobe!'

Toby, who was hugely tall and had the pinkest cheeks Nigel had ever seen, beamed, pulling on a length of banana-yellow embroidery thread. Like all the boys except Nigel, his hair hung shaggily over his face and ears. Mum had ensured that Nigel had been smartly barbered before his departure, mistakenly assuming, like him, that quasi-military standards of grooming would be the norm at a school you had to pay for.

Mr Hinton patted Nigel's shoulder and moved on. ‘Good chap.'

There was no choice. Cautiously letting another one go, Nigel reached for the depleted pile of felt. He chose the darkest colour, a bottle green that was the same colour as his old school blazer. There weren't even uniforms here; Patrick had thought this was a good thing.

‘Soz.'

At the end of his stitch, Toby had caught the side of Nigel's head with his needle-bearing hand, which required a lot of space for its full extension. Nigel edged his chair away. Glancing at the boys around him, he folded the square of green felt into a rectangle, took up a pen and printed N I G E L. The letters sloped down to one corner, erratically spaced and pathetically small. He didn't think he could bear another forty minutes of this.

He put up his hand. ‘Toilet sir.'

Mr Hinton nodded and smiled. Nigel escaped. On recent experience he could take up a good fifteen minutes in the bogs without having to eke it out. And after art there would be Latin, which he was already looking forward to. Any respite from expressing himself was already very welcome. They were big on expressing themselves at St Kit's, as they called it. In words, through the medium of embroidery thread, or even, accompanied by piano music on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and despite the fact of puberty, in movement to music. Even from the little he knew about Patrick, his choice of school astounded Nigel. His dad, without knowing any details, had been very cowed by the opportunity. That's what he'd called it, ‘A big opportunity for you, son.' Mum had agreed, seizing on the same word. To her, it was a ‘wonderful opportunity'. And so it had all been agreed. If his dad had known about the sewing, he would have laughed himself silly. Nigel wasn't about to write and tell him. It felt wrong to write anything at all from a place like this, like the worst sort of boasting, even if he was miserable.

The toilets were wonderfully empty. No one to ask how he was; even though all he ever said was ‘fine', they kept on asking him. Nigel dropped on to the sturdy wooden seat and let it all go. He felt as though he could never get rid of all the shit there was in him. Might he have some kind of disease? Matron was supposed to deal with ‘aches and pains', as she'd told him when he arrived, along with inviting him to call her Linda. She was the Head's wife's younger sister, bosomy and red-haired, and although she wasn't pretty, all of the boys made appallingly crude jokes about her that longed for her in every kind of way. It would be impossible to have a conversation with Linda about his bowels, and it wasn't as though he could write to Mum about it. He was completely on his own.

Nearly spent, Nigel rode the final cramps. They had become familiar enough over the past days that he knew they would pass. It was the porridge that had done it. He would try to avoid it from now on. Bracing his hand on the cubicle wall, he waited it out. At a concluding spasm, his nails twitched over the whitewashed brick and produced a frisson, like scratching a blackboard, that shivered him all the way up to his ears. It was repulsive. Divine. It overcame the turmoil in his arse. Taking a breath, he reached up and scored his hand down the satiny wall, in ecstasy and horror.

‘Nigel?'

It was a boy, outside the cubicle. He knocked politely on the door.

‘Bilbo sent me to see if you're okay.'

Bilbo, as in Baggins, as in the Hobbit, was Mr Hinton's nickname, which the teacher himself celebrated, cheerfully referring to himself as such. The huge desert-booted feet visible in the gap under the cubicle door identified his emissary as Toby.

‘I'm fine.'

Nigel rattled out a length of the medicinal-smelling, waxy toilet paper from the wooden holder. Toby's feet remained planted.

‘I'll be there in a minute.'

The feet retreated, but the sounds from the other side of the door suggested that Toby was determined to hang around. Perhaps he had finished his pencil case already. When Nigel pulled the chain and opened the door, Toby grinned at him from where he perched perilously on the rim of the large mesh bin next to the basins, rocking experimentally and testing his balance by lifting his feet, then stopping himself at the last possible moment from falling back into the rubbish.

‘Christ, pongo,' he remarked amiably, watching Nigel wash his hands. ‘Got the squits?'

Nigel said nothing. He knew that if he did, Toby would mimic it in a tin-eared version of a Yorkshire accent that sounded nothing like Nigel but gave Toby vast, unmalicious delight.

‘You should go to Matron,' he advised, as Nigel tersely detached a paper towel from the holder. ‘She's got all the potions. Get her to rub your face in her tits while you're at it.'

Leering, Toby forgot to check his angle and caved down into the teetering bin, which tipped to the floor with Toby in it, his rump jammed.

‘Shit!'

He held his arm out for Nigel to pull him free. As Toby unselfconsciously grasped Nigel's wet, washed hand with his hot, enormous paw, the shock of being touched hit him, worse than if Toby had kicked him in the nuts. Toby's skin was surprisingly soft, the contact dismally lovely after so many physically isolated weeks. The last time Nigel had been touched was by Mum, her kiss at the station as she saw him on to the train, a hug that pushed him away more than it drew him in, bracing him for his new life. They had barely dared look at each other, because sharing what each knew of the other's feelings was worse than saying goodbye. The new life. No touching. No Louise, whose embrace had been dogged and tear-stained. The very last contact had been Patrick's brief, ambassadorial handshake.

As Toby staggered to his feet the bell rang—not an electronic bell, but a brass hand bell, serenely deployed by Guy, a retired teacher actually called Mr Fawkes, who also took on gardening duties. Nigel palmed his hand dry on his trouser leg and righted the bin, reinstating some of its scattered contents.

‘You tool,' said Nigel. Out in the corridor, the smell of lunch being prepared hit him, brackish with vegetables. Already, his guts were cranking up to their next expulsion.

‘Oo's tha callin' a tool, ee bah gum,' Toby said, trudging after him. A paper towel had stuck to the crepe sole of his desert boot. As Toby stopped to detach it by trampling it free with his other foot, Nigel left him behind and escaped to Latin.

BY THE TIME
they were on pudding, Auntie B and Patrick were both more talkative. The two of them weren't exactly having a conversation, but no one seemed to mind. Mum sat in the middle, talking to each as they needed and chatting to Louise at the same time, with Patrick's hand on her thigh.

‘It's never!'

Auntie B nudged Mum hard in the side, nodding over at a man who had come into the restaurant with his wife.

‘Micky thingy! Coulter!'

‘Oh my God.' Although Mum continued to smile her new smile, Louise could see she wasn't pleased.

‘Aren't you going to say hello?'

Auntie B waved without waiting for Mum's answer, which would clearly have been no. It was because she didn't usually drink; she would never have waved to someone like that otherwise.

‘An old flame,' B told Patrick, pulling a face.

‘Brenda!' Mum tried to pull her back, but it was too late. Micky and his wife were coming over. Micky wore tight jeans and boots with a heel, but he was still smaller than his wife, who was what Louise's dad called a dollybird. She was wearing a fun-fur jacket with her jeans, which were as tight as Micky's but looked far better on her.

‘Christ on a bike,' Patrick said, before they reached them.

‘You bitch, B,' said Mum, without disturbing her smile of welcome.

Micky seemed truly delighted to see Mum and Auntie B, but most of all to see Mum. His wife and Patrick were undelighted as he exclaimed, ‘Look at you!' and gave Mum a wet kiss, moving on to B with more politeness and less enthusiasm. They didn't talk for long, since it was clear no one had much to say to each other. Micky was doing building contracting, and he and his wife, who had been at school with Mum and B and was called Janet, had three boys. They were celebrating Janet's birthday. Janet said it was pricey at the Berni but always worth it, and anyway, Micky was paying. She took a long, curious look at Patrick while they were all talking, but he remained unintroduced. Then she raked an even more curious look over Mum's clothes, which were unlike anything else being worn in the room, and protectively stroked her fun fur.

‘Could have been you,' said B, as Micky and Janet moved off to their table. Mum picked up her wine glass.

‘I don't think so.'

B leaned over her to Patrick. At some point during the meal she seemed to have become more interested in him than she was in Mum.

‘He played the guitar. Mum and Dad hated that, their daughter going off with a pop star—they thought it was the end of the world!'

‘We were kids,' Mum protested.

‘You were mad about him! Used to sneak out and all sorts!'

‘What was I supposed to do? They stopped me seeing him.'

Patrick kissed Mum on the ear. ‘Would you like me to challenge him to a duel?'

He was joking.

Mum leaned into him. ‘Go on then,' she said, as Patrick moved his lips through her hair, smiling.

B dropped back against her chair cushion. Louise could see her disappointment. Something hadn't worked. Things tended not to, for Auntie B.

‘You always had to be different,' she said, to Mum, but for Patrick.

‘Me?'

‘She did! Always. Nothing were ever good enough. Princess and the bloody pea we used to call her at home.'

Mum made the closed-mouth bark that pretended to be laughter when something wasn't funny. She never said much, but when she was angry she stopped talking altogether. She shook her hair out again and did the stretching thing with her neck. Squeezing her hand, Patrick called the waiter and ordered another bottle of wine.

‘But we've had our pudding,' said Auntie B. She looked shocked, although the waiter didn't. Mum made another bark and B wheeled to look at her, a fight ready in her face, but Patrick was too quick for her.

‘Brenda my love, if you won't have another drink, the rest of the world will have to have it for you.'

And incredibly, Patrick picked up B's hand and kissed it, so that B blushed and called him a daft bugger. He had won, just like that—Louise didn't understand how. But Mum laughed, and Patrick kissed her, laughing himself for some reason, so that his mouth laughed against her laughter. Louise wished she could kiss Mum too, but there was no room. The waiter delivered the wine and Auntie B had some after all. Louise's Coke was long drained, and she resorted to dry slurps of the straw. Still, everyone was happy now. Mum was happy. That was what Patrick could do.

Part Two

 

SARA
sits on the outcrop. It's starting to get dark. Sound of the sea beyond, behind her. She ignores the sea and looks straight out to the audience. She's on the lookout for someone. Alert. NASH and GIL cross from SR, both smoking. They're in uniform.

GIL: You waiting for someone, love?

SARA nods.

NASH: Sure it's not us?

GIL: When's it ever us, Nash boy?