The Northern Clemency (28 page)

“Right,” she said. “I can’t wait.” She walked away and out of the classroom. It was better than nothing.

“You’ve really got everything sorted out,” her mother said, at home, passing the door of Sandra’s room. It was true. One of the things that drove Sandra mad about the rest of them was the way they left their stuff as it was. They’d unpacked the removal boxes, most of which were standing about uselessly in the room behind the dining room, as if they’d ever find any kind of use for them ever again. It was amazing to her that they’d ever managed to unpack everything they needed to live in this house. It was a perfect outrage, the way this family lived. When she grew up, she would do something about it; meanwhile, she wouldn’t live the way this family lived.

Objectively, it was a perfect outrage, too, that only two days after signing on at this glass-fronted boutique of hatred, she was going to be asked to change into stupid clothes and run about for a whole afternoon, less one initial half-hour. There it was on the timetable she’d copied down from her unwilling neighbour. Wednesday afternoon, periods 6–8, Games. Games! Pretentious name. At least when it was called PE, as it had been in London, the stupidity of it had been obvious from the start in a name that was childish rather than ambitious. She’d always hated PE—hated rounders, hated running, hated netball, hated fucking hockey with the clunk-clunk-whack of the bully-off, hated that more than anything. If she’d ever been likely to be any good at it, she’d meticulously trained herself out of it with a slouching derision. Objectively, it was, after all, much more mature not to be keen on games, to run about in a field like a sheep to the directions of a whistle. This attitude, more than one games mistress had remarked in exasperation, spread easily to the other girls until all a class could provide in the way of a hockey team was two keen-as-mustard morons up at the front, and then (they said afterwards, their voices rising) that Sandra
Sellers’s cronies imitating her standing round the goal mouth, resting on the blades of their hockey-sticks as if they were shooting-sticks, folding their arms and comparing bosoms, nattering on as if they were in a cocktail bar with a cigarette-holder each. Which was where they’d end up, sure as eggs is eggs.

Well, that was the general view. It amused but slightly disturbed Sandra, since the memory of the games mistress in a fury tended to bring up the reminder of what she didn’t now have, a set of cronies. Nevertheless, even the lack of that wouldn’t change her attitude to games—she didn’t need cronies to shore it up, she’d recruited half a class to her initially solitary stance.

She’d made all that clear to her mother, on that awful day when they’d traipsed round the shops of Sheffield, list in hand, trying on the strictly defined items of uniform. A blazer with a badge, two blue skirts, pale blue blouses (the specifications of the list grew almost hysterical at this point), thick black tights, a tie, and even new black shoes. The shoes were the only thing that could have been carried over from her last, London, school uniform to this one. But whether through absent-mindedness or the misplaced generosity that had been bribing her and Francis for weeks with all sorts of unlikely or undesirable purchases, her mother had decided to buy her new ones. The shoes could have been carried over; everything else from the London uniform was purple, and couldn’t be reused. (That was probably the reasoning behind the purple in the first place.) So they trailed joylessly round the department store—Cole Brothers, wasn’t it?—radiating respectable necessity rather than any sense of fun. Her mother kept saying, “Well, that’s really quite OK,” and, objectively, the overall tone of this uniform was less ghastly than the old mad-girls’ purple. Finally, they’d crossed everything off List A. They’d half a dozen plastic bags, full of clothes. It could have been the best shopping trip ever. List B was next, and together, by the foot of the second-floor escalators, as people pushed past them, they examined it doubtfully. List B was sportswear. “Excuse me,” her mother said, to a passing man in a white shirt and a tie, a green enamel badge at his left nipple, “can you tell me where girls’ sportswear is?” Girls’ sportswear was, it seemed, over the road in a different building. “Laces
must
be black and 12” in length;” at the turn of the escalators, her mother and she looked at the list and, with a consideration that could only be called mature, concluded that they’d done enough by obeying the crazy force of the instructions in List A. As for List B, sportswear—“
PALE BLUE
hockey shirt to match school
colours,” whatever they were, her mother and she were of the same mind, apparently.

“You know,” her mother had said, “I don’t see what’s wrong with the sportswear you’ve already got. I mean, most of it isn’t more than six months old and, let’s face it, you’ve hardly worn it.”

“I’ve worn it from time to time,” Sandra said, and her mother laughed.

“That’s about the sum of it,” she said. “What colour is it? This says everything’s got to be pale blue, but what the point of that is when it’ll be covered in mud in ten minutes …”

“Mine wouldn’t be,” Sandra said. “I can’t remember the colour. I think it might be a sort of navy.”

“Not purple,” her mother said.

“No, it’s definitely not purple,” Sandra said.

“Thank heaven for that,” her mother said. “No point in looking any more absurd than you would in any case.”

“Yes,” Sandra said sycophantically, now that she’d got her mother on her side, “you do look an idiot, objectively speaking.”

“Well, blue’s blue,” her mother said. “I can’t face sportswear just now. You’ll just have to tell them that your stuff’s nearly new, that you’ll buy the proper colours when it wears out.”

“Never, I hope,” Sandra said.

“And that your parents aren’t made of money. No, don’t say that. Shall we go and get a cup of tea? It looked quite nice on the fourth floor.”

“Did you like games when you were my age?” Sandra said, when they were settled over tea and two scones, one cheese, one sultana. She put it naïvely, wanting mostly to know.

“No, of course I didn’t,” her mother said. “I hated it. I used to long to be grown-up, because, you know, when I was thirteen, the main point of growing up wasn’t boys, or having a house of your own, or a job or any of that. I always thought that the best thing about growing up was that you wouldn’t have to go out in the cold and run around in a stupid way once a week. It was Thursday afternoons. I can still remember, I used to dread it. Of course, that was after the war, and there wasn’t the equipment to be had. There were only enough hockey-sticks for one match at a time, at my school, so you only got to play that once every four weeks. Not that that was much to be looked forward to. And a bomb had dropped on the tennis courts, which in the winter were supposed to be netball courts, so that was out too. It
was three weeks out of four we went cross-country running, as it was called.”

“I hate cross-country running,” Sandra said. “They’ve started calling it orienteering.”

“What’s the difference?” her mother said.

“Well, they’re supposed to give you a compass,” Sandra said. “But they don’t really need to. It was only past the parade and then down the Wandle for a mile, you’d have to be an idiot to get lost.”

“Yes, I hated that,” her mother said. “It was only running through the woods and being shouted at if you came last, or got a stitch and walked for a bit.”

“Are you done there?” a table cleaner said, fat, blonde and permed, hovering over them.

“Not quite,” her mother said, pouring out a drop more tea from the bottom of the pot. “I always thought I could never marry a man who had the least interest in sport. But fortunately I met your father, who I don’t think has ever run five paces in his life, so the question didn’t arise.”

It was true; you absolutely couldn’t imagine her father taking part in any kind of organized sport. If the television, switched on, should come up with a green field and a cluster of figures, a round object or objects, whether it was football or snooker or bowls, her father would give a prompt yelp and be up and kneeling, stabbing at the channel controls on the mock-teak front of the “box.” The only other thing that had exactly that effect was any kind of opera, which didn’t come up so often. Sandra tried to shrink him in her mind, gave him a fresh face—the glasses and the quizzical look could stay—as he was in the photos with Grandma Sellers and Uncle Henry, then tried to send the little chap off on a cross-country run. It was no good. He hadn’t gone five paces in her mind before he was shinning up a conveniently appearing apple tree, settling among the branches and starting to scrump. That was the sort of thing he could be seen doing.

“I think we’d better go,” her mother said crisply, “since they’re so keen to have their table back”—this last directed at the permed fat blonde who had returned and was flicking with a dirty tea-towel at imaginary flies. “I tell you what, we’ve done enough for one day, shall we take a taxi home?”

All in all, it had seemed like quite a daring thing to do, as well as a nice moment of conspiracy between them. Sandra neatly clipped off the price tags from the, to be honest, still horrible components of the
school uniform, and removed them from the cheap plastic shop hangers, putting them carefully instead on the aligned wooden hangers, all looking in the same direction in the wardrobe. She had no qualms about facing down any games mistress. After all, her mother’s was the more mature attitude. So, it was a bit of a shock when, two days later, her mother went off with Francis to buy his uniform, and they returned not only with the List A stuff, but also with a scrupulously accurate account of the horrible List B demands of sportswear. Maybe he’d already grown out of his old stuff, the weirdo beanpole, but it still looked like a not-very-graceful inconsistency on her mother’s part.

It took Sandra a while to see that her mother’s first duty, as she saw it, wasn’t to the uniform of the two schools, but to the different things that her children needed from her just then. Sandra needed conspiracy and support against an authority that would always be bone-headed and ludicrous, whether in London or Sheffield. Francis, on the other hand, with his shyness and self-consciousness, would be worried, even frightened, by the suggestion that he needn’t bother with the petty rules and prescriptions of an authority not yet known in any detail. For him, the reassurance, the sense that his mother was always on his side, would come more convincingly from her serious-minded attempt to kit him out with absolute correctness. All the same, Sandra didn’t believe that her mother really gave a toss for the whole paraphernalia of sport. The naughtiness she’d revealed to her was, objectively, much less of an act than whatever serious attitude she’d adopted in the shopping expedition for Francis, and after that they’d not taken a taxi home. Apart from anything else, it was much more mature, not taking games seriously.

That comfort had more or less disappeared by the time it came to Wednesday afternoon. The cloakroom was dank and smelly in a fungal way, the dark varnish on the benches shabbily peeling off like dry skin, lit only by a thick-frosted window high up in the wall, six inches deep, running the length of the changing room. It was almost underground. She was last in, and had difficulty finding a peg, finally pushing aside the over-ambitious claims of one of the sneering girls, and getting pushed in return. It was netball, apparently, and she changed into her old outfit, consciously ignoring the giggles and scandalized murmurs around her. The door was half opened and a rough voice, neither man’s nor woman’s, called in, “Hurry up, girls, line up quickly.” It sounded like Miss Whitaker’s voice, the hairy-armed games mistress at Tiffin. Perhaps they all came from the same suppliers, like the uniforms, purple,
black, or snot-green. Sandra finished changing into her crumpled games outfit, now becoming a bit tight, and followed the others out into the little lobby. She joined the end of the line, noticing the daunting uniformity of the others, and waited.

In a moment, the games mistress came back in; she was short and broadly built, her chest without a bosom, but stout like a guardsman’s in her red tracksuit. The white stripes down the side of her track-suit trousers curved outwards like jodhpurs, outlining things massive and firm. She came straight up to Sandra. “That’s not the correct wear,” she said. “And who are you?” Sandra explained that she was new and—

“I can see you’re new,” the woman said. “Never seen anyone so new-looking in my life. And what in heaven’s name are you doing in that unholy get-up?” That, Sandra thought a little unfair; it was what they wore for games lessons at Tiffin, which after all was no more stupid a school than this one, but she told the woman her name and explained about it being a new kit, fairly new, and then, despising herself under the woman’s lobster-like glare, suggested that they would get the right-coloured kit before long. All of this was against the fascinated inspection and ugly giggling of the three girls she’d tried to make friends with. They, slightly surprisingly, were straight out of the box as far as their kit was concerned, conforming to the inch with requirements.

“I don’t care about any of that,” the woman said. “If you’re in my class, you turn up in the right kit, or not at all, or rather,” she went on, perhaps having seen some opportunistic glint at the prospect of licensed skiving in Sandra’s eye, “I’ll send you out on the pitch with whatever ends and odds on I can find in the box in my office. Is that clear? I want you in the right kit this time next week or I’ll want to know the reason why. Today you get off lightly. Now. What position do you play?”

Sandra had thought all this fury, either fake or, more absurdly, real, both risible and genuinely frightening, but that request she absolutely wouldn’t lower herself to give an answer to. In the past, she had been put into positions in netball, could probably even remember the names of some, but out of a sense of her own dignity, she wouldn’t give an impression to the class, now finely gripped by this confrontation, that she could honestly be bothered to remember any of that crap. She lowered her eyes disdainfully, shrugged.