The Collected Stories

They would all be there: Eleanor, Liz Jones, Susie Crumm, Eileen Reid, Joan Moate, Mavis Temple, and all the others: forty smiling faces, and Miss Whitehead standing at the end of the middle row. If you kept the photograph it would be a memory for ever, another record of the days at Springfield Comprehensive. ‘Who’s that with the bow legs?’ her father had asked a few years ago, pointing at Miss Homber.

‘Anyone incorrectly dressed on Tuesday,’ Miss Whitehead said, ‘will forfeit her place in the photo.’

The bell rang for the end of school. ‘Forfeit her bloody knickers,’ said Liz Jones just before Miss Whitehead left the classroom.

The girls dispersed, going off in twos and threes, swinging the briefcases that contained their school books.

‘Walk with you?’ Susie Crumm suggested to Eleanor, and together they left the classrooms and the school. ‘Baking, innit?’ Susie Crumm remarked.

They walked slowly, past concrete buildings, the Eagle Star Insurance Company, Barclays Bank, the Halifax Building Society. Windows were open, the air was chalky dry. Two girls in front of them had taken off their shoes but now, finding the pavement too hot to walk on, had paused to put them on again. The two girls shrieked, leaning on one another. Women pushed prams around them, irritation in their faces.

‘I want to get fixed in a Saxone,’ Susie Crumm said. ‘Can’t wait to leave that bloody place.’

An Evening Standard van swerved in front of a bus, causing the bus-driver to shout and blow his horn. In the cab of the van the driver’s mate raised two fingers in a gesture of disdain.

‘I fancy selling shoes,’ Susie Crumm said. ‘Fashion shoes type of thing. You get them at cost if you work in a Saxone.’

Eleanor imagined the slow preparation of the evening meal in her parents’ flat, and the awakening of her father. He’d get up and shave himself, standing in the bathroom in his vest, braces hanging down, his flies half open. Her mother spent ages getting the evening meal, breaking off to see to his uniform and then returning to the food. He couldn’t bear not being a wrestler any more.

‘What you going to do, Eleanor?’

She shook her head. She didn’t know what she was going to do. All she wanted was to get away from the estate and from Springfield Comprehensive. She wondered what it would be like to work in the Eagle Star Insurance Company, but at the moment that didn’t seem important. What was important was the exact present, the afternoon of a certain day, a day that was like others except for the extreme heat. She’d go home and there the two of them would be, and in her mind there’d be the face of Miss Whitehead and the voice of Liz Jones. She’d do her homework and then there’d be Crossroads on the TV and then the fried meal and the washing-up and more TV, and then he’d go, saying it was time she was in bed. ‘See you in the morning,’ he’d say and soon after he’d gone they’d both go to bed, and she’d lie there thinking of being married in white lace in a church, to a delicate man who Wouldn’t hurt her, who’d love the virginal innocence that had been kept all these years for him alone. She’d go away in a two-piece suit on an autumn afternoon when the leaves in London were yellow-brown. She’d fly with a man whose fingers were long and thin and gentle, who’d hold her hand in the aeroplane, Air France to Biarritz. And after wards she’d come back to a flat where the curtains were the colour of lavender, the same as the walls, where gas-fires glowed and there were rugs on natural-wood floors, and the telephone was pale blue.

‘What’s matter?’ Susie Crumm asked.

‘Nothing.’

They walked past Len Parrish the baker, the dry cleaner’s, the Express Dairy Supermarket, the newsagent’s and post office, the off-licence attached to the Northumberland Arms.

‘There’s that fella,’ Susie Crumm said. ‘Denny Price.’

His head was awkwardly placed on his neck, cocked to one side. His hair was red and long, his face small in the midst of it. He had brown eyes and thick, blubbery lips.

‘Hullo,’ he said.

Susie Crumm giggled.

‘Like a fag?’ he said, holding out a packet of Anchor. ‘Smoke, do you, girls?’

Susie Crumm giggled again, and then abruptly ceased. ‘Oh God!’ she said, her hand stretched out for a cigarette. She was looking over Denny Price’s shoulder at a man in blue denim overalls. The man, seeing her in that moment, sharply called at her to come to him.

‘Stuff him,’ she said before she smiled and obeyed.

‘Her dad,’ said Denny Price, pleased that she had gone. ‘You want a fag, Eleanor?’

She shook her head, walking on. He dropped into step with her.

‘I know your name,’ he said. ‘I asked Liz Jones.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Denny Price. I work in Grimes’.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re at the Comprehensive.’

‘Yes.’

She felt his fingers on her arm, squeezing it just above the elbow. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘Come down by the river, Eleanor.’

She shook her head again and then, quite suddenly, she didn’t care what happened. What harm was there in walking by the river with a boy from Grimes’? She looked at the fingers that were still caressing her arm. All day long they had handled meat; the fingernails were bitten away, the flesh was red from scouring. Wasn’t it silly, like an advertisement, to imagine that a man would come one day to marry her in white lace in a church and take her, Air France, to Biarritz?