Just after one, Penny shook herself free of the scene. She looked at the rumpled tablecloth, the crumbs, the scattered cutlery, and thought over this talk — the relaxed tone, the loud vigour of their mutual epiphanies, and the starchy friendliness of the evening’s start. She was keeping it all in mind. Saving the implications for later.
‘I’ll have to go to bed.’
They looked at her. She liked the bus driver. He had done everything he could to make her like him. So she did.
‘Thanks for your company,’ he said.
‘That’s all right,’ she returned.
Liz grinned at her and Penny made her way out into the hallway, securing the door behind her. Naturally she stood to listen.
Nothing at first. Liz and Cliff were evidently wrestling with the weight of each other’s undivided attention. Then the odd murmur, their conversation was picking up again. Penny caught, ‘… a lovely girl. You’ve done amazingly well, bringing her up on your own.’ She groaned and headed off up the stairs.
Cliff’s voice sounded more distinctly. Yet she could not be sure whether she had heard correctly, so she sat perfectly still on the middle stair and listened hard just to make sure.
‘I’ve been following you around. You know that, don’t you?’
As if he was enacting a scene in a play, weighing down his words so that everyone could follow.
‘Have you?’ Liz wasn’t playing his particular game. She was still indistinct, slurred, playful. Penny thought, when people turn serious, they have to pretend they’re in a TV play if they want to come across as real. Cliff was suddenly intent, almost hammy.
‘Ever since the day you moved in.’
‘Oh.’ There was the clinking of glass, the thud of an empty bottle.
There was that dusty smell of carpet, poking itself right up Penny’s nose, and the tough, fibrous feel of it, harsh down her side as she leaned across the stair. She put her forehead on the next step up and closed her eyes.
So that’s all right, then. He’s in there pleading his troth. Liz will be pleased.
How can the room, she thought, spin round like this, when my eyes are shut? All the darkness available to her was oscillating. She shifted her head and everything began a sideways slide. It was as if a plug had been pulled in one corner of her brain and the fluid had begun to roar away, leaving her parched and sick. Then the darkness was clearing in bleeding patches of purple.
‘You want to stay, don’t you?’
At least the conversation was gentle. There was no fighting, no raised voices. Penny’s memories of sitting on the middle stair in the early hours all had to do with fighting going on. Flinching at the sounds of breaking glass, praying that there would be no injuries, though there always were.
‘Yes, I want to stay. I don’t want to go now.’
Staying.
People can’t be relied upon. People leave, people go and you can’t stop them. They expend themselves in your life and they have to go. Penny knew this. For her, life seemed to be about the very act of relinquishing. She had let Liz go, freed the constraints and waved goodbye in the school corridor. But did such acts necessarily involve separation, separateness, never seeing again?
The patches of purple in her darkness lightened to a view of violet snow, crusting the brickwork of the cathedral and castle in Durham. A scene plucked from her childhood, the winter sky that turned the snow purple on the night her mam gave her back to her dad.
Penny was five. She stood on the bridge alone with the searing cold. She was fascinated by the buildings looming above, over the river. Their tops surmounted high embankments formed by blackened trees. All the buildings were chocolate brown, ancient and edible. She stood in the middle of the bridge, her footsteps in either direction now lost.
Two cars faced each other across the bridge. Their separate headlight beams shone across the slush and refused to meet, to illuminate Penny.
Mam in one, Dad in the other. Mam had left her, swished away in her long brown coat, back to her own car. Dad was coming out of his, hurrying towards her, urging his daughter into the safety of his car, where it smelled of cigarettes and Bob Dylan was playing. Penny at the age of five watched this bearded father in his patched jeans and headband with interest and hindsight.
He approached her with a smile. ‘Let’s get fish and chips. You must be starving.’
‘No, Liz,’ she was bursting to say. ‘You’ve only just cooked a lovely meal for me and the bus driver.’
And that shifted the dream’s tone. Her father frowned under the lemony streetlight, his beard softened and vanished. His features darkened and became harder, pricked out in eyeliner, lipstick, blusher. His hair sprang out into well-tinted curls and his body actually changed shape. He grew aware, almost painfully aware of each nuance his movements took on. He moved with grace and it seemed to cost him dearly. He was starting to act as if the eyes of the world were watching each fragment of his body.
His heavy man’s clothes were falling away. He was in his gold lame, skin-tight and shimmering across the snow, a hot knife through butter.
Ravishing, Penny thought. Yet when you were close enough to see the eyes you could count the cost of the scrutiny he suspected. From nowhere he produced a black scarf, calmly wrapping it about his throat. To make it look more tender, more vulnerable, make it seem as if there was not an Adam’s apple there.
Each sinuous movement was a dead giveaway. He hung his head and stared down at himself. Penny watched her father in a dream become a mother, and worry that the world might glimpse the impression of his cock through what he liked to wear.
But this dream came up to date. Cliff appeared, hiding part of Liz’s body with his own, in an embrace acknowledging
