‘Me neither. It’s all Jane’s doing. We should have asked her.’
‘It’ll be some kind of pick-up joint.’
‘But I’ve already discarded the slutty stuff.’
‘Is that how we should be then? Slutty?’ Fran was enjoying herself now. She shrugged off her anorak and unbuttoned her blouse. ‘Are you going out on the pull, Liz?’
‘If I’ve nothing better to do. But Darlington is full of creeps.’
Fran started to concentrate. Her mam always said she had lovely taste in clothes, when she put her mind to it. Suddenly it seemed important that she prove she hadn’t let it go. ‘We need something plain and classy.’
‘Not sluttish.’
‘No, classic, alluring…’
‘Hm. Alluring like… an old movie star sort of thing…’
‘Aye, no frills… sort of plain…’
‘Tarty.’
‘Slutty.’
‘Tarty it is.’
‘What does it mean when you say you’ve got a talent for something, anyway?’ Penny was asking earnestly. ‘I mean, really. I could be talented in millions of things.’
She was sitting in a poky office with her careers consultant, a small man who seemed to be made entirely from plastic. A fleshy, rubbery plastic partly melted. They were sitting by the radiator and discussing Penny’s vocation.
Shrugging good-naturedly, he set about stuffing his pipe with tobacco. His other subject, besides careers, was photography, for which he coaxed girls of all ages into modelling the various hats he collected. The school couldn’t afford photography equipment, so his small department was scrupulously self-financed. A blind eye was turned. As Penny spoke he examined a new hat someone had brought him from a Blue Peter bring-and-buy sale.
‘So we can’t find one thing that I excel in, or that I really want to do. So what? Does that mean I have to compromise and do the same old thing as everyone else? Does it really?’ What she wanted to tell him was that she was cleverer than that. She knew she was. But she had no way of measuring that. She had no way of showing it. These were frustrating times. Penny felt got at on two sides: by the implacable rationality of the careers master, and by the secret and sure burgeoning of her own dark talents. She knew they were there, but not what they were useful for.
Her careers consultant took a long drag at his pipe and slowly set the lime-green hat on his own head at a jaunty angle.
‘You see, Penny,’ he began at last in a quavering tone, ‘everyone must be good at doing something. Why, I once knew a boy who, like you, seemed stuck for a vocation in life.
Penny was thinking about typewriters. ‘I’m like a shift key!’
‘Pardon?’
‘The shift key on a typewriter that makes the upper-case letters available — that’s what I’m like. It’s exactly how I think about things: on a different level.’
The careers consultant regarded her serenely, half his face shrouded beneath the lampshade hat. She wasn’t pretty enough to model, he thought, and went on. ‘I gave this talentless boy a block of wood. Out of desperation, you see? A perfectly ordinary block of wood and a chisel. And when I came back to him, he had made me the most wonderful antelope you have ever seen. Vocation, you see. He had found his at last. A beautiful creature… I think I still have it in my filing cabinet. It is one of the great successes of my teaching career. That and my portfolio, of course. These days, I believe that same boy is very high up in the town council.’
He rose to his feet. ‘So, Miss Robinson, you have some serious thinking to do. Some serious thinking on practical matters. We shall talk again soon and, if you are still keen on typewriters, we can have a look into some secretarial courses together.’
‘Thanks for all your help,’ said Penny and left.
Upstairs she stuffed her head in her locker. It was midmorning break. Someone in the common room was playing the Cure. She strolled over and asked the boy in dark-framed glasses standing by the speakers if she could put something on. She dug out Vince’s tape of Hunky Dory.
‘That’s really classic, that,’ said the boy who had been forced to remove his Cure album. He was talking to another boy in dark-framed glasses and a cardigan. ‘Changes’ stuttered into life over the speakers. ‘He influenced everyone; the Cure… yeah, everyone.’
Penny liked to think she was bringing some style into their lives. ‘Bowie is God,’ she said.
And they nodded respectfully, as they would for a recently deceased aunt whom they never really knew or understood. ‘My dad reckons this LP is a classic,’ he said.
Penny already knew. She had lived already. Her shift key, the perennial tingling, whatever she liked to call it, had elevated her way above the trees and houses. This was, after all, the term following her great summer of experience.
That summer in Durham she had had her romance with a boy called Rob. Rob was on probation for something that sounded like ‘feathery’.
‘Fucking chickens!’ Penny would crow.
‘I was robbing houses,’ Rob would mutter, abashed. ‘Keep your voice down.’
‘Chicken fucker,’ she’d snicker. ‘You smell of stuffing.’ With him Penny had entered the late-night high life of the ill-lit medieval town centre and discovered that the very hippest of her peers spent their summer evenings on benches with bags of glue and bottles of Woodpecker.
‘Losers,’ she told Rob after their first night out. ‘How can glue sniffing solve anything? Ha ha ha!’ Rob didn’t get the joke. He clung grimly on to her, unsmiling all the way home. She was tottering about, having sniffed too hard that night, and eventually she threw up in a shrubbery.
‘There’s a technique to sniffing,’ he said, patting her back. ‘You have to respect the glue.’
‘It’s all over my jacket,’ she groaned. ‘Like spunk. Never again.’
Rob’s advice about ‘respecting the glue’ confirmed for her his status as an arsehole it would be safe to chuck by September. ‘Respect the glue,’ she would mutter to herself. ‘Typical!’ Rob looked affronted. ‘That’s typical of your sort,’ she would
