Special, p.6
Special, page 6
‘How many you got?’
‘Hundreds.’ Hen ran one hand casually over her hair. ‘Been collecting since I was about eight or something.’
‘Hey,’ said the bloke. He looked almost impressed. ‘Love to see them. Got thousands myself.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Hen modestly.
He didn’t say anything more, just turned back and began his interminable flicking again. Did she do something wrong? Did she say something that pissed him off? She could see the man at the counter watching them, bored but appraising. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be somewhere quiet where there wasn’t this noise, and this bloke standing in front of her wanting answers to things she didn’t know about, and Jules’s expectations. She tugged at the Celtic cross around her neck, swinging it tight.
‘You live round here?’
‘Sort of. We’re staying. Couple of miles out of town.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Hen.’ She giggled; no reason, but somehow the saying of her name sounded ridiculous.
He extended a hand, mock-formal. ‘Adrian. Adey.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Not near here. Only here for a field trip.’
He could be quite nice. If she’d been into crazed mutant albino freaks. ‘We’ve finished exams,’ she said. ‘They don’t know what to do with us. Sent us to this dump to do some shitey activity thing. Came down here to hang out.’
He nodded. ‘Same here. Half-day. Come down here on Wednesdays during the afternoon. This place is OK. Rest of the dump’s a dump.’
Hen felt something tugging at her arm and turned. Jules. She gave Adey a bright impertinent smile, whispered, ‘Fat one’s boring. Let’s go,’ and dragged at Hen’s sleeve.
Hen frowned. ‘Hang on.’
Adey watched her. He looked annoyed. She must have done something to upset him. Jules pulled her towards the door. Hen looked once more at Adey and then let herself be bundled outside. The sunlight was so bright it made everything—the street, the pavement, the people walking past—vanish into whiteness for a second.
‘Don’t fucking do that.’ She wrenched her arm out of Jules’s grip. ‘So fucking annoying.’
‘OooOOOooh. You fancy him?’
‘No.’ Hen was still rearranging her skin the way she wanted it. ‘No. Not that.’
‘He ask you out?’
‘No.’
‘The fuck were you banging on about then?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘You fancied him.’
‘I was just talking to him.’
‘You were standing really close to him.’
‘No!’ Things didn’t seem to be ordering themselves the way Hen needed them to. ‘No. Hang on!’
‘Didn’t look that tasty to me.’
‘Just shut up!’ Hen walked off down the street.
Jules caught up and started tugging at her backpack again.
Hen whirled round. ‘Look, just stop touching me! Leave me alone!’
For a second, Jules looked bruised. Then her face went hard. ‘All right. Stupid cow.’
Hen swung the backpack round, settled it onto her shoulders and walked off so fast that Jules would have had to run to catch her. When she reached the corner of the street, Hen let her hair swing over her face. She tried to push the tears back down her throat, but they wouldn’t go. She had to keep holding her breath and then letting it out in a rush. She felt beset by the jangle of the traffic, the scream of rusty brakes, the man at his stand rasping out the late final of the local paper. The sunlight blattered down on her head. It made her skull hurt.
As she reached the next corner, she looked back. Jules had disappeared. She must have gone into one of the shops. Hen turned and kept walking. She’d have to take some kind of back route. She couldn’t risk being seen by Jaws or Miss Naylor and she didn’t want to bother dreaming up lies and excuses for where Jules was.
When she got to the traffic lights at the edge of the town, Hen turned right and began to walk down one of the lanes. It was quieter here, less oppressive. The shadows from the houses on either side made the sunlight seem less cruel. The sound of birds began to replace the crashings of the traffic. Fucking birds, thought Hen, just fucking piss off. She kept on going, not looking back any more, feeling lonely and daft and obtrusive, rushing down a lane on a sunny day in a place she’d never been before.
She passed a church with a noticeboard pointing out towards the lane. It had a poster printed to look like the front page of a newspaper. Come and Hear the Good News, it said. It made Hen think of another poster she’d seen outside a kirk when they’d gone to visit her uncle near Aberdeen. The Church is Full of Hypocrites, it had said. Come and Join Us.
Hen began to cry. The tears wouldn’t let her stop them any longer. She crushed her wrist against her face, pushing them away. But they kept coming, kept burning down her face. The worst thing was, she didn’t even know why.
. . . Wednesday
From where Ali was sitting, she could hear someone pacing back and forth, calling occasionally. She couldn’t hear the words, only the tone. The voice sounded unsure of itself.
Ali stared at the wall. It was dark down here, but once her eyes had adjusted she could see enough to pick out the shapes of the stone. It wasn’t the sort of place that Izzy would look. She would be too frightened by the darkness to come crawling down here. Ali could see two or three little ferns growing out of the walls, and the remnants of what looked like a rusty iron ladder.
When she had walked away from Izzy, she hadn’t known where she was going. She had turned and seen Izzy looking back the way they had come and then plunged off the track into the wood. She thought of Izzy spinning in the white glare of the sun, alone. Then she moved on, deeper into the trees.
The landscape was odd around here. There wasnt much undergrowth except for a few brambles which clawed at her trainers, snagging her into reverse. The ground was covered in pine needles, and it was so dark in places that she could no longer sense the sunlight behind her. Once in a while the ground would dip down into a cavity surrounded by tree roots and ivy. Some of the cavities were large enough to have created gaps in the canopy of pines and birches where the sunlight slipped through. The shapes of the trees, the mutable light and these hidden caves all made Ali think of the useless story she’d been telling Izzy. Maybe down where the stones became shadows there were things living.
When she got to the third or fourth cavity, she paused. This one seemed bigger than the others, a deep hollowed-out space in the wood softened by fallen beech leaves. From where she was standing the ground dropped abruptly fifteen or twenty feet. At the bottom of the cavity there were two large boulders and a crumple of plants. Somewhere beneath, there was probably a decent-sized cave. She walked round to where the ground dipped more gently and slithered downwards, first on her feet and then on her haunches. At the bottom of the dip, all she could hear were the sound of wind in the leaves and her own crunching steps. When she looked up—right up, to the sky—the clouds toppled over her. At the back of the cavity there was an open space in the rock. Something about the way the light filtered across it made it seem more opaque than it should have been. Ali examined it, intrigued. She walked towards the space and felt her feet slide away beneath her.
When she put her hand down to stop herself, her fingers gripped nothing but air. Her hip cracked against something under the leaves and she flailed outwards with one foot, unable to stop herself. The light became darkness. Her foot jolted against solid rock and she stopped. She’d slithered down no more than about four or five feet, but it felt like miles. She wasn’t in the outside world any more; she was in the cave.
When she levered herself upright, inching each foot along unseen footholds, she felt her limbs shiver. Lifting her hand up towards the light, she could see it shaking like the hand of a drunkard. When her eyes had adjusted, she found she was standing on a hollowed-out shelf of rock. Behind her, it dropped away into blackness, but she seemed safe enough where she was. She sat down tentatively and stared up the way she had fallen. Here, suddenly, it was silent: no birds, no planes, no traffic, no Izzy, no evidence of an outside life at all. The only sound came from the back of the cave: the sound of something softly dripping. In this place no one could find her unless she chose to be found. Which, just for the moment, she didn’t.
She sat back, feeling the letter in her pocket crumple against her side. It had arrived in that morning’s post, and she had read it, despite knowing exactly what it would contain. It was always the same. And, as the letters remained the same, so too did Ali’s reaction to them. This one contained the customary domestic progress review with her mother’s longhand views on the areas in which she felt there could be improvement: numeracy, scientific ability, organizational and IT skills, appearance, social graces, catering, tidying up. The words themselves were friendly enough, but there was a thin undertow of dissatisfaction which had more to do with her mother’s state of mind than it did with any genuine failing on Ali’s part. Ali had, apparently, sat for too long in her room, had failed to appreciate the seriousness of her mother’s endeavours, had not offered enough domestic or secretarial assistance . . . She supposed it was Ruth’s way of letting off steam, and it wasn’t as if Ruth never wrote anything nice to her, but still.
Ali was an only child, the unintended product of a wasted marriage. When her father left home for America, Ali remained at home with her mother. Perhaps if there had been another child, Ali’s mother (Ruth. Always Ruth. Never Mother, or Mum, or Mummy, never anything small or cute or personal. As her father put it, that was Ruth as in Ruthless.) might have conceded more. As it was, she behaved as if Ali’s childhood was an awkward phase to be tolerated but not encouraged, and her only concession was to speak in slightly shorter sentences. Ali didn’t particularly mind, but she had occasionally found it difficult. It was difficult, aged seven or eight, to give a considered and informed response when Ruth asked her what she thought of the position of women at the English bar or how best to handle the financial aspects of divorce. Ali got used to listening, and to interpreting the lurches and slumps of her mother’s temper. At junior school Ali had been taken aback by the softness of other children, the way their childishness was preserved and revered. It made her feel grown-up, knowledgeable, wise beyond her years. It also made her very bad at getting on with her peers. Now, of course, it was fine; Ali had long ago grown tall enough to meet her mother’s gaze and didn’t need explanations any more. Or didn’t seek them, anyway.
When her father had finally left, driven from the house by one slammed phone too many, Ali’s mother had floundered for a while. If Ali remembered that time at all, she remembered it for the smell of her mother’s car, a temperamental Fiat hatchback that Ruth used to ferry both of them to meetings with lawyers and bank managers. In the end, all that time with the car and the lawyers had been put to good use. Her mother had found the legal process so tedious, so hostile to women and so unnecessarily disputatious that she had taken a degree in law and then set herself up as an advocate of womens legal rights. What had begun as a series of letters typed on a wheezing Amstrad in the kitchen had become a major business with a publishing imprint and a well-regarded Web site. Now when Ali went home, she no longer found Ruth slamming courgettes against the side of the pan and fuming over conveyancing disputes, she found a place humming with technology. They had moved twice in the last five years, first to a larger flat in Stoke Newington and then to a house in Camden. The ground and first floors were entirely given over to her mother’s offices, breezy white rooms full of purpose.
Perhaps it would have been different if her parents hadn’t divorced. Had they once loved each other? She used to try to imagine the pair of them in a quiet restaurant, her father’s face warm with hope, her mother stroking the side of her wine glass with the tip of one anticipatory finger. She wondered what they would talk about—books, work, food—but the images didn’t come. It was beyond imagination now. She couldn’t visualize her mother having any other form of discourse with her father than the one she had always seen: stony, disillusioned. If there had been love, then it must have been of the most fragile kind.
Ali did not think her mother would marry again. She gave the impression that the marriage to her father had been a youthful lapse of sanity and anyway, Ali couldn’t see what possible role any man could fulfil in Ruth’s life. Men, in her mother’s view, were difficult and expensive to maintain. When Ruth talked about men, she always sounded as if she was considering some antique historical curiosity, like pirates or the Black Death. As far as her mother was concerned, her father no longer really existed, not even as an insult. He had been reduced to souvenirs and fripperies, to the occasional excitable present and to the promise, often given but rarely fulfilled, of visits to America. Ali thought about writing to him now. But even if he did send a ticket and even if she was allowed to go, her father would spend his days in the office and Ali would be condemned to the company of Mary-Anne, her fathers new wife. Mary-Anne was younger than her mother, and blonde. She plainly found Ali as incomprehensible as Ali found her. ‘How’s school?’ Mary-Anne would ask when she came to the phone. ‘How’s the weather in England?’ Ali would tell her that school was school, and that the weather was still the weather, and that would be it. ‘You must come over sometime,’ Mary-Anne would say, sounding unconvinced. ‘Come shopping.’ Ali could never think of anything polite to say in response, so she would say nothing at all. Through the silence she would hear the plasticky click of Mary-Anne’s rings on the receiver as she passed it back to her father.
She touched the letter in her pocket again, rubbing the corner of it under her nail. Last time she’d had a letter like this, it had felt just the same. She had read all the ways that her mother would like her to be different and felt so stifled that the only response had been to find air from another source. So she’d gone upstairs, packed a couple of things into her money belt, taken her jacket from behind the door and left. It was no more planned than that; she had needed to go, so she had gone. It was mid-April, and most people were outside on the lawns playing football or reading magazines by the copse.
Nobody saw her go; no one was looking. It had taken two and a half hours for anyone to notice she was missing. Even then, her habit of getting deliberately lost stood her in good stead. They had wasted a further hour searching under beds, up trees, in cupboards, even—for God’s sake—peering hopefully into the waters of the pond. And then, when it was almost dark, a couple of teachers had got into their cars and gone looking for her. One turned right, and the other turned left.
Perhaps she had reason to be grateful that it was Jaws who had found her walking along by the side of the road with her jacket tied round her waist. She had heard the sound of a car slowing, and felt with a slide of inevitability that this was it, that there was no going forward, there was only going back. The car stopped. Ali stood by the side of the road with the other cars rushing past and the rhythmic click of Jaws’s hazard lights flicking on and off.
Jaws watched her through the glass of the passenger window. ‘Get in.’
Ali did as she was told.
‘You walk fast. Could run marathons, the speed you were going.’
No reply.
‘Took them a while to notice you were missing. Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘No.’
‘Something from home?’
‘No.’
‘Something bothering you? Work OK?’
Silence.
Jaws sighed. ‘If you want to talk to me about it, you know you can. Any time. It doesn’t matter. I have to mark papers in the evenings, so I’m usually in my study.’
Ali watched the headlights of the cars coming towards them. There was something irresistible about their brightness, the blinding white dazzle just on the edge of pain, the way they swallowed up all the oxygen in her mind. Every time she watched those inexorable lights they made her want to lean over, grab the steering wheel and drive straight into the middle of that whiteness. She wanted to do that now. She wanted to turn round, take the car away from Jaws and just drive in one smooth fatal movement right into the path of the oncoming car.
After a while she said, ‘You didn’t tell my mother, did you?’ Jaws shook her head.
‘No. We would have done if we’d had to look much longer. But no, we haven’t.’
She dropped Ali by the back door, telling her to see the head teacher. As she stared out of the window at Ali, she raised the palm of her hand towards her. That raised hand looked almost forgiving, like an acknowledgement or a blessing. Ali turned away, towards the steps. As she walked up the stairs towards the head teacher’s office, past the girls who turned to stare, she thought about Jaws. Something in that upturned palm made Ali wonder if Jaws wouldn’t have liked to run away as well. If she’d had anywhere to run to.
+
The passing cars glittered in the late afternoon light. People returning from shopping or school runs, a couple of caravans swinging seasick from side to side. It was turning into a perfect July evening, one of those days that turned everything to gold. The leaves had become temporarily translucent, and the flowers along the verge seemed bright enough to hurt the eye. From somewhere nearby came the faint scents of hay and cattle dung, and in the coppice on the hill the insects crackled with life. It was full summer. In a couple of weeks all of this would be dusty and overblown, but for the moment it looked like a perfect English postcard.
Jules was not conscious of any of it. She didn’t like country-side, anyway. Or rather, she couldn’t see the point of it. She found the notion of people voluntarily electing to stay here bizarre. Country people spoke funny, looked funny, dressed funny, and there was always something beaten about their expressions, as if they’d evolved to exist without visual stimulation. They had wind-proof figures and they walked at a slant as if pushing into a soundless gale. They only ever wore clothes in different shades of mud and they didn’t seem to care about extraneous facial hair or furry teeth. Worst of all, they sounded like a soap opera. The first time she went to Yorkshire, Jules had been convinced people were taking the piss. No one could speak in an accent like that—not seriously, not for real.
