I went out into the street, pondering. Was that what I had? A pressure-cooker relationship? Here I’d been, calling it love. She thought I was too young to love a man, but old enough for screwing. I supposed that she had passed on to me, with her prescription, her malediction: the residue of her disappointment, her let-downs, her sad half-hours under station clocks waiting for men who never came. But how dare she try to sour my life? I imagined myself leaning forward – as in primary-school days – and taking hold of a handful of the woman’s denatured hair; then leaning back, firm and leisurely, until a part of her scalp was in my hand and her desk was awash and her notes were bobbing in a sea of blood. The wine-dark sea.
Sometimes my mother had pressure-cooked. Carrots, of course. Quartered potatoes. I remembered the action – packed metal drum, the stacked weights that rolled in your palm before you threaded them on to the dangerous lid; the muttering that rose from inside, as carrot sang to carrot like mutinous slaves below deck. The hiss of steam into cold air, it frightened me . . . I thought the weights might burst up like Annie Oakley’s bullets and pierce the ceiling and that our roof might fall in. What did people do for a metaphor, before the pressure-cooker was invented?
Each morning – each morning when she woke up at Tonbridge Hall – Julianne would stand before the mirror looking at her breasts. ‘They are, you know.’ She’d knead them, look at them narrowly. ‘They are. Most definitely. Getting. Bigger. Oh, good old Pill! What did a girl do for tits, before it was invented?’
I collected my prescription from the chemist in Store Street, thinking, Well now, I’m ready for Christmas.
The ludicrous notion stopped me dead in the chemist’s doorway. I’ve got the tinsel, the contraceptives, the roast goose and the holly; I’m ready for Christmas.
The term was almost half-way through. I felt a desolate, excruciating loneliness. Still, I thought, there will come a time . . . and then no more Roman roulette, no more counting the Durex. Already I felt perverse nostalgia for that strange condom texture, slippery and elusive, backed by the firm spike of flesh.
When had we found the opportunity, Niall and I, two good schoolchildren? At his parents’ house when his parents were on holiday. (My parents never went on holiday.) On Sundays, when his parents were visiting their relations, or going to see National Trust properties or gardens open to the public. We had been fucking for years; we were old in fucking. Like me, Niall was an only child; there were no siblings whooping up the stairs to catch us on the job.
No more marking the calendar, I thought. Or that fear. That way of listening to the body, as if you could gauge the peregrinations of each cell; the sick gladness each month as you woke to feel a tension behind the eyes, perhaps a soreness in the breasts, a little tentative cramp. The long breath released; the fingers groping in the drawer for Tampax, of which my mother disapproved.
I could not say that the new dispensation was having much effect on my figure. I was as slim as ever. If anything, more so.
You won’t mind, will you, if I call Niall by his real name, and call the other Tonbridge boyfriends by the composite name of Roger? It may seem a confusing technique, but the truth is that all these years on I can’t separate them in my mind. One of Julianne’s gang – who filled the room, drinking coffee and making a noise, while I worked at my desk with my back to them – inquired of Julianne whether I was, you know, fixed up? She replied that I was practically married, but that the man was in prison. Doing a stretch, she said. It’s a shame, but she’s very loyal, is Carmel.
Up and down the corrider, the Sophies began to say, ‘Have you heard, Miss McBain has a fiance who’s in gaol?’
‘Really?’ the second Sophy would gasp.
And the first, frowning, careful, ‘Oh yes, he’s “doing a stretch”.’
Claire came tapping at the door. ‘Look I – Carmel . . .’ Inside her jolly jumper – striped, like a burglar’s in a cartoon – she was turning a deep crimson.
‘Yes?’
‘I heard. Well, you know, I couldn’t help . . . I’m so sorry. It must be hell for you. Sue told me not to come, but I thought I must just say a word.’
‘Ah now, Claire,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you kind?’
Perhaps I wouldn’t have to wait till Christmas. Perhaps one weekend Niall would visit me, when he was in funds. Please God he would visit me, and not let this weary ten weeks stretch out in fretful celibacy and a big hole where my heart used to be. I relished the thought of the dark glitter around him as he trod the corridors. Already I was preparing my little speech . . . Oh, you know, they call it parole . . . The Sophies wanted to ask what his crime was, but they were too polite.
It’s a long way to London from the University of Glasgow, and Niall was too proud to hitch-hike.
The day after Claire’s visit, I ran into Sue at breakfast. It was fried-egg morning. It blinked up from my plate like a septic eye. Sue gave me a big wink.
Let me go back now to my former life, to 1963. Spring came to the north of England; you wait long enough, and it always does. Timid and experimental buds appeared, high on the black trees in the park. Sister Monica, my class teacher, began to tack sheets of tough blue paper on to a trestle table, and to call it the nature table; in time, we were told, we would have the opportunity to observe the Life of the Frog. The florist that we passed on our way to school began to file daffodils in buckets on the pavement outside the shop. They were brassy trumpets, they were brazen instruments; I touched their leaves, and feared they would slice my finger open.
St Patrick’s day was dry but blustery, and the wind bowled us downhill towards school. Twenty minutes to nine, Karina stopped before the florist’s. I stopped too; this was something out of the ordinary. She moved from foot to foot, staring into the window, then said to me roughly, ‘Are you coming or not?’
I followed her in. The shop bell jangled. I had never been into a flower shop before. It seemed colder than the street outside; wetly, it seemed to breathe. The stone floor was running with water, water swished through recently with a yard brush; the marks were still in it, and the brush stood in the corner, up-ended to give its bristles a chance to dry. There was a smell of torn stems and damp newspaper. A woman came out of the back, pinched and blue and wearing a plastic pinny. On the counter was a box of shamrock, fresh in. Karina pointed to an ostentatious bunch. ‘I’ll have that,’ she said.
‘Karina,’ I whispered. ‘You can’t. You’re not qualified. You’re foreign.’
‘I’m English,’ she said stonily.
‘Yes, but you’ve got to be Irish.’
‘There’s no law,’ the woman behind the counter said. She plucked out the bunch Karina had indicated, and shook it gently; silver drops of water scattered into the air. ‘I’ll pin it on for you, love, shall I?’
