Special, p.2
Special, page 2
She turned back to face the Manor. Directly in front of the house was a slab of buckled tarmac and then a rectangle of lawn bordered with tubs of geraniums. Below the lawn the ground sloped downwards into what must once have been an elegant landscaped vista leading halfway to the river, but which had gradually run wild and was now a tangle of selfseeded birches and weeds. A high rusting chain-link fence marked the boundary of the grounds. Ali could just trace out the shape of the gardens as they must once have been. In places there were still gaps in the trees and someone had been fighting to keep some of the pathways open. Perhaps the people here had once felt secure in the division between the town and the country; perhaps when it had first been built the Manor had stood splendidly alone. But during the last hundred years the world had sidled closer and it wouldn’t be long before this place became part of the suburbs of Stokeley. Time and neglect had collapsed the divisions between the natural landscape and the artificial one, and Ali had the impression that it would only be a matter of a year or so before the lawn itself slipped back into the wild.
When the minibus had finally shuddered up the hill and into the drive, Ali felt a brief flicker of anticipation, and then—having taken in the thin curtains waving at them from an upstairs window and a glimpse of a beaten Parker Knoll armchair—subsided back into indifference. The house itself was horrible. It was a large asymmetrical building, constructed from the type of Victorian red brick that made Ali think of rain and cold Sundays. It had evidently been built as an institution and had remained one, unloved and unlovely. There were Gothic arches above the windows and dark stains down the front of the building where the gutters had leaked. Four or five trees overhung the roof, blocking out most of the natural light, and two tubs of dead conifers leaked earth on either side of the front entrance. The whole place had a scrappy, passing-through feeling to it. It looked like what it was, thought Ali: a school away from school.
According to Jaws, who had found the place for them, Dean Manor had been built in the 1880s as a private asylum for the insane. A Glasgow speculator with a rich, despairing client list and a faith in fresh air had bought up much of the surrounding land and equipped it with landscaped grounds and its own arboretum. His enthusiasm for the area had survived for as long as it took him to build the asylum, admit the first generation of patients, watch the local landlords hack down much of the nearby forest for timber, and slide abruptly into bankruptcy. Much of the land was sold off, until all that remained were the landscaped lawns with their distant view of the river and a small patch of struggling pine plantation. Since then the building had gone through various incarnations, each a little more dishevelled than the last: a medical supply depot during the First World War, a training centre for missionary priests, a school for evacuees during the Second World War. For a while the local council had considered turning it into a hostel, but most backpackers and tourists found the choice between a hand-crafted castle and a leaking Victorian ex-lunatic asylum remarkably easy to make. The rooms weren’t large or modern enough to attract the local conference trade, so Dean Manor and its part-time staff of three disaffected local women got by on the proceeds of school groups and trade associations in need of somewhere cheap, quiet and uncomfortable from which to conduct meetings. Two or three evangelical Christian groups used it regularly for prayer and counselling retreats, and a small ecological organisation took it for three weeks in late summer. And so the Manor had remained largely as it was—part hostel, part barracks, part derelict.
Ali, who had initially been interested by the frisson of insanity, sat back and absorbed only as much of the history as was necessary to figure out two things: where to find solitude, and how to escape.
‘Upstairs,’ said Miss Naylor, hauling open the doors of the bus. ‘Supper’s at six. We’ll do the timetable then.’
Hen sat where she was, staring sightlessly out of the windows.
‘Lola. Lola. Out.’
Jules nudged her. ‘You all right?’
Hen nodded.
‘Beds,’ said Jules offhandedly, picking up her case. ‘Get you one.’
When Ali walked into the hall, she found it dark as winter. Long ago, when the building was still an asylum, it must have been decorated to give the impression of authority and competence. It had been built rich and ugly, and was now poor and even uglier. Sometime in the last twenty years, the walls had been painted a gynaecological pink. Three dusty rectangles indicated where paintings must once have hung, and one of the rectangles was partially covered by a cork noticeboard. There was a table to the right with copies of rules and instructions, and a payphone jammed into a corner. The doors leading off the hall had been replaced at some point with plywood substitutes and above her two striplights gave off a liverish glow. From down below Ali heard the tickle of a radio. Otherwise there was silence.
At the other end of the hall, a door opened. The man who entered had on a pair of grey lace-up shoes and a black T-shirt with a drawing of a large mechanical insect on the front. He seemed preoccupied, and as he came in he kept adjusting his glasses. Ali put down her bag and extended her hand. The man walked to the other end of the room, opened another door and stepped into the passageway beyond. Ali stood for a moment where she was, gazing at the door, her hand still outstretched. She was not surprised at being ignored, but somehow it did not encourage her to go and explore the rest of the building. She left her bag where it was and walked out into the sunlight.
+
Hen found their bedroom by listening for Jules’s voice. Jules was always louder than everyone else, particularly when she had a grievance.
‘You’re there.’ She pointed to one of the middle beds.
Hen jumped experimentally on the mattress to test its bounciness. Her knee hit what felt like solid rock, a bed as austere as the building itself. ‘Fuck! God. That’s supposed to be a bed?’
‘Vile, aren’t they?’ Jules flung out a foot. ‘That’s mine.’
Hen was aware that she ought to say something in order to cover for the stuff in the minibus. She wanted to sound bright and careless, but she seemed to have lost the knack. She couldn’t think of anything to say, so she opened her case and began unpacking. There wasn’t much, just the usual photographs, her alarm clock and a book with a gun on the front which she didn’t intend to read.
‘You OK?’
‘Fine.’
‘The road—’
‘Fine. Really. What’s it like?’
‘OK smoking, OK drugs, need to sort men and drink.’
‘Town, isn’t there? Stokeley?’
‘Yeah. Check that out.’
‘Where’s Jaws and Naylor?’
‘First floor. Main block. Nowhere near us.’
Neither of them noticed Izzy standing in the doorway until she put her bag down. Hen looked up, considering her for the first time in a while. It wasn’t really that she was fat, it was just that she seemed that way. Big square bones and defeated shoulders, a long face, small slapped patches of eczema at the elbows. Puberty had not been kind to Izzy. Instead of giving her a waist and breasts, it had given her the beginnings of a moustache and a set of weird growths stretching from neck to hip. Izzy lacked definition, somehow; she looked as though she’d been assembled out of spare parts of someone else. She was tall, but height had only spread out the lumps and growths over a larger area. When her mother looks at Izzy, wondered Hen, does she think she’s ugly, too?
‘Iz,—’ said Jules, ‘there’s three rooms. We could space out.’
Izzy sniffed. ‘Means you don’t want me.’
‘There’s masses of space.’
‘You don’t, though.’
‘It’s . . . easier if we all space out. Less cramped.’
Izzy sniffed again, picked up her bag and walked out of the room.
‘Pfffffff. That was close.’
Hen bent her head.
‘Just want to get some decent sleep. The scratching . . .’
‘Mmmm.’
‘She goes on and on. I didn’t sleep at all last night.’
No question, Izzy was a pain; she scratched, she snored, she extruded. Somehow all Izzy’s bodily functions seemed more complicated than anyone else’s. Blowing her nose took application and thought, eating had to be approached with stealth, sleep was a nightly wrestle against intransigent skin and disobedient breathing. She had asthma, she had eczema, she had syndromes and malfunctions which flourished like bacilli. Every term, she brought back some new triumphant disorder. The others would arrive with their trophies—a jacket, a different haircut, an upgraded grope in the shrubbery of some anonymous garden—and as they chattered and compared, Izzy would coyly unfurl her latest complaint. Psoriasis perhaps, or an outburst of suspected dyslexia. An allergy to the outdoors one year, an intolerance to dairy products the next. Trouble with household pets or a suspected case of Attention Deficit Disorder. Sometimes they changed—the dyslexia had faded as suddenly as it had appeared, and the allergy to dairy products had lasted just long enough to refuse three packets of chocolate and a slice of someone’s birthday cake—but sometimes they remained the same. The scratching, the snoring and the sniffing were old and faithful associates now; Izzy without her sniff—particularly in times of crisis—was as unthinkable as Jules without her temper.
But Hen still did not want to be drawn. Some cloudy understanding told her that Izzy was necessary. Izzy performed a valuable function and should be acknowledged for it. Izzy was the scapegoat and the punchbag, Izzy was the scratching post against which they all relieved their itches. Izzy was necessary, because it was always necessary to have someone to hate. If it wasn’t Izzy, then it might have been someone else. And, as Hen was aware, that someone might just have been Hen.
Izzy appeared in the doorway again. ‘I’ve got to sleep in here. Jaws said there’s only two rooms we can use.’
Jules shrugged. ‘Whatever. Caz’s in that bed.’
‘S’pose you want me to go miles away?’
‘Whatever. It doesn’t matter, for fuck’s sake.’
Izzy went over to the bed furthest away from Jules’s corner and placed her case gently on the mattress. Then she turned away.
+
‘That cow,’ said Jules loudly. ‘That cow always has it in for me. Always.’
‘Not you specifically,’ Caz turned a page of the magazine. ‘The way she looks at me. Can just tell she’s so completely longing for me to fuck up, do something so she can kick me out.’
‘Not just you.’
‘Is. Naylor loves you. She wants your babies.’
Caz looked up.
‘No question, she fancies you. Her eyes go all like sheepy when she sees you. You and her and some hot lezzie action.’
‘Jules.’
‘You can just see her thinking about it. You and her and a candlelit dinner, all the lights down low, squeaky violin music . . . Creamy.’ Jules smirked.
‘Please.’
‘You’ve just got to accept it. Naylor loves you. She hates me.’
‘You’d rather she fancied you instead?’
Jules looked momentarily appalled. ‘No.’
‘Well, then.’
Jules was wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt she’d borrowed earlier in the day, which had been fine when they’d been stuck in the fug of the minibus but wasn’t enough for a breezy evening on an exposed roof. Caz could see her arms beginning to mottle with cold. Not that she’d ever admit it; pride, vanity and the pleasure in temporarily possessing the T-shirt would prevent her from complaining until she was blue to the bone.
Jules was pretty in an unremarkable way. Blue eyes, good skin, average height, a temperamental mouth. She’d been dyeing her hair blonde for several years now, and her darker roots were beginning to show. They made her hair seem greasy even when it wasn’t.
The usualness of her looks made them less noticeable. Only the thin crescent-shaped scar scything from the bridge of her nose to the tip of her left eyebrow marked her out. She’d got the scar, she said, when she’d been having a row with her youngest sister. She’d thumped Anna, so Anna had flung a video box across the room at her and been gated for a week. The video was of her cousin’s wedding, and every time weddings were mentioned Jules told the story of her scar.
They were out on the roof after supper, considering their instructions. Miss Naylor’s account of the next two weeks did not sound encouraging. Walking for the next four days, swimming on Saturday and Monday, cycling for the rest, other forms of exercise as and when Miss Naylor saw fit. Up by 7 a.m., church at 9.30 on Sunday, no going anywhere alone, no impromptu visits to Stokeley, one half-day on Wednesday, kindly remember that they were ambassadors for the school and that their behaviour etc. etc. etc. The only remotely encouraging thing about the lecture was that Jaws looked just as miserable about it as they did.
As they smoked, the shadows began to blur over the Manor. Down below they could hear the sound of a car and an occasional crack of gunshot. Jules leaned back on the tiles, letting the warmth of the day seep through to her skin.
She had found the roof when she was checking out potential smoking places around the grounds. Out at the back, there were several well-hidden patches of shrubbery and a couple of rhododendrons so dark and overgrown that the branches vaulted high above her when she crept inside. With the light creeping through the leaves and the decaying flowers soft under her feet, the bushes made her feel safe but a little daunted. Once within them, she couldn’t be seen from outside, but approaching them meant a straight walk across the lawns in full view of anyone looking out of the building.
When she re-emerged she looked up at the Manor. From the back it was shaped like an upside-down J, with the kitchen block as the bar at the top and their bedroom at the end of the curve. Directly opposite the main building was a smaller parallel wing joined by a flat roof. When she got back upstairs, she discovered that one window opened directly onto the roof through a small cleaning cupboard thick with the reek of disinfectants. Outside Jules could see rooftops, slates and a chimney crazed with splits through the mortaring. It seemed perfect; they could see without being seen, and as long as they kept quiet there was no reason at all why anyone should find them. At the edge of the flat roof was a low wall, more ornamental than practical, which protected them from the sight of anyone in the main building. Time and ice had broken down a few of the stones in the wall and the gap fell in a straight drop three floors to the drive. Someone had tried to patch the gap with wire and a few unmatched bricks but, since no one except workmen were expected to be up here, the wire had rusted and the bricks begun to fur with moss. Over the river, Jules could see an office building far away catch the sunlight and signal it back over the river. There was something about the light—reverent, with a hint of dodgy pink—which reminded her of album covers or boring paintings.
Caz perched upright on the tiles and began flicking through the magazine again. It grinned brightly back at them: fat men and their desperate wives, women in heels and diamante dead-heading flowers.
‘Bike. Bike. Bike. Utter bike. God look at that.’ She picked up the magazine and turned it round. ‘Hideous.’ The picture was of an empty-looking woman in a wedding dress.
Jules couldn’t see anything wrong with it. The woman was a bit tanned for her liking, but the dress seemed fine. ‘Gross,’ she said obediently.
‘She looks like chicken in tinfoil. God. And her, look.’ A woman at a party in a low-cut dress. ‘You could tie knots in those.’
‘Sad.’
‘Falsies. They’re so obvious’
‘Wonder if it’d be worth it?’ Jules pulled out the neck of her T-shirt and stared downwards. ‘Could do with help.’
‘No. Yours are fine.’
‘They’re not. Not even poached eggs. They’re like two little pins on a wall.’
‘You’re fine. Shut up.’
Both of them inhaled deeply and stared upwards.
‘What’s up with Hen?’
Jules shrugged. ‘She was talking about some woman with a hat and blood.’
‘Blood?’
‘Mmmm. Something to do with that crash we passed. Some woman.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Mmmm. Was why she was so weird. That was what she said.’
‘Think she’s all right?’
Now that Jules thought about it, she wasn’t sure. Hen had been odd recently, her presence somehow more insubstantial than normal. Jules kept getting the sense that she had interrupted something, as if Hen had been having an invisible conversation with someone just out of sight.
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘She’s been strange lately.’
‘She’s always strange.’
‘Yeah, but. This is different strange. This is strange strange.’
‘You don’t think she’s becoming . . . ?’
‘No she’s not. She’s fine.’
‘She is,’ Caz said carefully. ‘You know she is.’
‘She’s not. She’s the same as usual.’
‘No. Just watch.’ Caz did not elaborate, just picked up the magazine and melted back through the window.
Jules remained on the roof, smoking a cigarette she didn’t want and gazing up at an unpleasant sunset. If Caz said to watch, then she would watch. She just wasn’t sure that she wanted to see.
+
Hen was awake. The beds were so thin and stiff that she couldn’t get comfortable. If she lay on her side then her shoulder hurt, if she lay on her back then the mattress jabbed at her pelvis, and if she lay on her front she ended up worrying about smothering herself with her own pillow. She’d been twisting in circles for what seemed like hours now. Outside, the sky had turned brown from the lights of some distant city. The lights seemed wistful, a suggestion of something possibly exotic.
Two beds down, Izzy made a faint whistling noise through her nose and began to scratch. Hen turned again and stared back into the bedroom, picking out the shapes of bodies and the silhouette of their dressing gowns on the back of the door. Six beds, three down one side of the room and three down the other, with a chest of drawers next to each. Bare walls, squared heaps of blankets, a fire regulation notice by the door.
