Never Mind Miss Fox (17 page)

“It was pretty hot in there,” said Jimmy. Then he took her hand and held it. She felt his fingers press her wedding ring and he asked, “Does this mean you're married?”

“Yes,” she said. She waited for her head to stop whirling and then she added, “Well, yes and no. I'm separated.”

She had not said this before:
separated. I am separated.
It didn't make sense.
We are separated
—that was better. But then: “we.” She frowned; “we” was not right. Could she ever be one person again? Eliot was always only one—“She's a tiger—she goes around on her own”—but Martha belonged to other people—“You're a lion, Mum. You have to be, because of me and Dad.”

Martha was separated; Eliot was unattached. “She doesn't speak to her parents,” Eliza had said. “She doesn't like them.”

Jimmy interrupted her jumbling thoughts and linked her fingers with his. Their two palms pressed together.
Am I doing that?
she wondered. Aloud, she repeated—as if perhaps she might convince herself—“I'm separated.”

“Good,” said Jimmy in reply. With a deft movement he swung her to face him—as if they were still on the dance floor—and then kissed her, pressing smiling lips against her startled mouth.

“Oh!” She made a surprised sound but of course she had known a kiss was coming since the first cigarette—she had as good as asked him for it:
Will you make it for me?
That was the way it worked. It was gratifying to have requested something in an old code—only an hour or so ago—and now to have received it. Success! At last there was something to show for this wretched day. She was buoyant with triumph; if Jimmy had not been holding her she might have bobbed away.

The kissing began again and now she was distracted and absorbed because it felt so good and she wanted more, she wanted to be overwhelmed and to stop the grind of that turning millstone in her head. She pushed and pulled at Jimmy a little bit, her hands on his collar; he in answer shifted so that he held her not by the hand but by the body—at her waist—at her shoulders—under her hair. His thumb touched her jaw and he fluttered light, guessing fingers on her cheek. She felt her legs begin to tremble.

She had not expected to want to do this quite so much. Desire made her stutter on her feet and open her eyes to watch Jimmy's dreamful face as he kissed her with lowered lashes and a little concentrating frown between his eyebrows.

This kissing might have been her idea but now she felt herself pliable, surrendering, delighted and longing in his hands, every touch of his lips leaving her more helpless. “You're—” she began.
You're making me forget myself.
She was beginning to lose her bearings.
Wait; you're confusing me.
She had forgotten to breathe and now she could not; his mouth was over hers. Cider; cigarettes; the press of his lips and now of her own, kissing him back. Her head whirled: she had to decide what would happen next.
What was it,
she wondered,
that I wanted to do? Have I done it already? Shall I stop?

Jimmy turned her hips towards him and pressed her with his own. Martha felt her body turn liquid and hopeless. In a moment it would be too late to take a decision. “You're so gorgeous…” he said, kissing her on her mouth and now away and down her throat—it made her blink and tip her head back with a pure, keen pleasure like spring warmth—and he murmured, “What kind of man would let you go?”

The word—words—made Martha jump as if Clive had appeared next to them and touched her with a live wire.
What are you doing?
“Oh!” she said, stepping back. “Oh, no! I'm—What am I doing?” She put both hands up to her temples and gave a small, embarrassed laugh.

“What's happened?” asked Jimmy. His hands dropped to his sides. “Are you OK?”

“Yes. No. I mean, sorry,” Martha said. She put her palms flat against his shoulders and took a deep breath, as sober as if someone had switched on a light. “I'm so sorry; this is all wrong—I'm married, I have a husband…”

“I thought—you said—you were separated?”

“We are, sort of, I mean…oh dear, I've made a muddle. I'm sorry,” she said, “I hate women who behave like this.” She frowned, standing in the half-dark, her head tilted to try and read his expression.

“Hey, don't worry,” said Jimmy. “It's not a big deal; don't panic.”

Martha smiled,
phew,
and pushed her hair back off her face with both hands. She straightened her dress. She was ashamed of herself. “I like you, and everything, but—”

“Look, it's only a bit of kissing; you won't go to hell.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I mustn't. I want to, but it's not fair.”

“OK,” he said. “If you say so.” He slung an arm around her shoulders to steer her back down the grassy slope, towards the pub and the tent. “C'mon then, naughty married lady,” he said.

Martha blushed. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It's not you—”

Jimmy laughed. “No, I didn't think it was me,” he said, and kissed the side of her head.

Martha squeezed his hand, smiling in relief. He was just a kid! For him kisses came and went and did not matter.

“I wanted to, but then—”

“Look, it's OK, I swear. We're all allowed to change our minds, even about being married.”

Now she knew it really was all right and so she laughed.
It's nothing,
she thought.

Loosely clung together, they strolled down the hill. Martha's hair had escaped its ties and Jimmy walked with his warm hand placed underneath it, resting on the nape of her neck. She hung an arm around his waist and felt the muscles move under his shirt. She longed for him now even more than she had, but this was the way it would stay. She shook her head at herself.

It was getting dark and although the tent was lit—bright, noisy and crowded—the field was not. Cars were coming and going, lurching over the bumps in the grass and turning to park where their headlights found room. Everyone was occupied by the thump and tumble of the band. The children had taken no notice of the creeping dusk and were still playing their running, shouting game. They must be tired, Martha thought, as they hurtled past her. Those at the back were so little that she longed to clap her hands and call out, “Time for bed!” One small, tired boy trotted and walked on his own, breathless and pleading, “Wait! Wait!”

Emotion flooded Martha, and almost made her stumble.
Eliza,
she thought. Her mind was filled with nothing—no one—else.

She remembered tears at night, and bleeding fingers in the morning.
Please, Mum, please don't make me go to school.

“What is it that they do to you?” Martha had asked her daughter. “If you tell me we can make them stop.”

But Eliza would not tell. “No, Mum.” She shook her head. “I can't.”

These children—flickering, glimmering, laughing as they ran in the dusk—would have frightened Eliza half to death and now Martha was frightened for her.
Eliza.
She wanted to go home.

“I ought to go,” she said.

“One more drink?” begged Jimmy, “for the road?”

“You're lovely,” she said, “but no.”

Jimmy hugged her goodbye and she felt the warm, strong weight of him, pressing her body. She put her cheek against his shoulder and closed her eyes. When he let go she felt weak.

Back at the gate she collected her bike and set off into the wind. The red light behind her saddle gave an occasional, feeble wink.

At the end of the lane she decided to walk, got off the bike and pushed it slowly up the track. Above her the sky glowed and flickered in black and white as the wind blew thickening strips of cloud past a confident, climbing moon. Martha looked up but the sight of it—a newsreel with an urgent message—made her so sad that she looked for the house instead, its sturdy shape at the top of the field with the black wood banked behind it.

There were no lights lit but she could make out the roof by the glint of its slates where the moonlight struck them. The walls beneath glowed a little luminous, as if daylight had somehow been trapped in the pores of the stone. Martha thought of the bats, huddled in the roof, and of Eliza in her bed under the eaves.

“What will happen?” Eliza had asked her, pleading.

“I don't know.” Martha had replied with a kind of defiance:
I don't know. Blame your father.
But blame was no comfort to Eliza; she only wanted to know where home was and whether she would be safe.

Tom's tents were still pegged to the grass but neither light nor movement came from inside. Martha trudged past, hoping that someone might hear her and welcome her home—“Martha? Is that you?”—but no one stirred. In the yard she leaned her bike next to Eliza's against the wall and clicked open the kitchen door.

Once inside she felt weary and hungry but waiting for the kettle or even eating muesli out of the packet seemed too much of an effort. The lights in the room were dazzling; her eyes smarted and she wanted to be in bed.

At the sitting-room door she paused and listened. The up and down sighs of Clive's sleeping breath came from the sofa. An idea took her by surprise:
I could curl up there beside him.
The sudden vivid longing shamed her like a blush.
His arms around me.

She had to push the idea away—quick—step back—turn to the stairs—put a tethering hand on the banister and stand steady.
No.
She did not dare exhale.
What if he heard me? My breathing, or my beating heart?
She chided herself.
This moment of weakness will pass.

She crept up the stairs—sober now, and sensible—and paused on the landing. Resting a hand on the wall, eyes shut, she wondered whether to go on up the stairs to Eliza's room. In that moment she smelled cider, Jimmy, tobacco and sweat on herself. She had better go to bed. Eliza would be distressed to see her like this, late and disheveled.

In her own room Martha climbed onto the bed in her clothes, and lay down on her side. She pushed off her shoes, tucked her bare knees up into her dress and crossed her feet. Pulling a pillow under her cheek she blinked in relief.
Home.

Then she fell asleep.

In the morning Clive's first thought was of Eliza. He remembered her words and the way she had said them:
Why don't you know what you can and can't do?

He dragged himself off the sofa—
Oh God the pain that bloody rope
—and onto his feet. He would wake Eliza up and offer, “Eggy bread?” It was her favorite; she must forgive him for that.

But the bed and the room were empty. She had gone.

T
he ringing alarm had sprung Eliza from her mattress like an electric shock. She grabbed the clock and shoved it under the duvet, panicking and pressing every button she could feel with her fingers. At last the noise was silenced and her heart began to decrease from
molto allegro
to
adagio.

Wide awake and out of bed she had pulled back the curtain, peered out, and wondered, amazed, whether every day began like this. In her imagination, “dawn” had always been a bright, yellow, rising sun and a burst of sunlight over the view, but here was something much more gentle and delighting. The familiar landscape outside her window looked as if careful hands had washed and dressed it, moments before her alarm. The grass had been sprinkled with glittering dew, and even the tents had been draped with jeweled cobwebs. There was no daffodil-yellow, beaming sun—not yet—but the polished, confident sky seemed to promise its future attendance.

The sight had awakened Eliza's sense of purpose. She had pulled off her pajamas and dressed in the clothes she had already laid out on the chair: socks, jeans, T-shirt, sweatshirt. She had made her bed look as lumpy as possible and read through her checklist:
Diary, rucksack, banana,
and then in bigger letters:
Money.

Her mind had been filled with the journey ahead as she held her breath and skimmed downstairs like the family ghost, sneakers clutched in one hand and the other brushing the banister. On the landing she had crept around the edge to avoid the squeak and grimaced at her mother's bedroom door; downstairs she had tiptoed past the sitting room where her father had gone to bed.

In the kitchen she drank a glass of water and tied her ponytail, holding the elastic in her mouth while she smoothed her hair with both hands. She used to put her hair in two plaits for school when she was a little girl but then: “Pig-pig-
pig!
Oink-oink-
oink!
 ” Et cetera. So it had become a ponytail.

“It's just nicer this way,” she said to her mother. “Mozart had a ponytail too.”

Everything on the list had been posted into her rucksack including all the twenty-pound notes she had found in her father's wallet and the credit card whose PIN number she knew. Eliza had felt bad about stealing but there was no other way—every time they took the train Martha said, “It's so expensive!” so Eliza knew that her own £3.82 would not get her to London.

She had clicked open the kitchen door and slipped around it like a cat furring past a table leg.
Quiet-quiet.
But cold! It had made her gasp out and take a sharp breath in.
Quick-quick!
There was no time to faint or falter—she must leave right away before anyone woke. There was no moment to be frightened; none spare for second thoughts. She had grabbed her bike from the wall and snuck it away, silent and slow on the grass, until it was safe to jump aboard and pedal—
Go! Go!
—down the crunching gravel of the track.

Now on the train to London, tucked into a window seat with her headphones clamped on her ears, she felt not
vivace
or
tremolo
but
placido.
The hard part was over.

At break in the early days of school Eliza used to lock herself into one of the toilet cubicles with her feet tucked up on the seat so that no one could see her. Someone had written on the back of one of the doors—

—which was a good reminder of why she had to lock herself in. When the door to the corridor had banged open her heart had thudded in her chest so loud she had thought it would give her away. Sometimes she had forgotten to breathe when there were other people in there, and by the time the door slammed behind them she was nearly dead from not breathing.

It was bad enough if they came in to talk because talking could take ages, but the worst was if they came to talk about her. This had happened a few times and once she had not gone back into class after the bell but run out of the cubicle, out of the building, across the playground, out of the school and all the way home—not up to the front door but into the bin shelter where the snails lived and from where she could look up at the window of the flat.

Crouched by the stinking bins Eliza had peered through the glass at her mother. Martha had been sitting at her desk, typing, and then she had taken off her headphones to answer the telephone. It would be the school, Eliza guessed, ringing to say they had lost her. Now Martha was standing and had turned to face the window. Now a hand went up to her mouth and a frightened expression broke over her face as if the news had not been, “Eliza's run away,” but, “Eliza's dropped down dead.”

At that moment Eliza had felt so sorry for her mother that she had stepped out of her hiding place and into view. Martha, looking down on her, had placed a hand on the glass between them and spoken into the phone. Then she had hung up and come out of the front door with that expression still on her face like a stain.

Eliza had trembled up the front steps one by one with her own face washed with tears. When she reached her mother's legs she put her arms around them and held on.

Alone on the train to London, Eliza thought of her mother and how she had looked at that moment. She would look the same this morning, Eliza knew, when the empty bed was discovered. She felt a ripple of guilt which made her wobble, and then she shut the image from her mind. There were other things to worry about.

Being found out, for example. She planned to lock herself into the toilet if anyone looked at her or spoke to her in a suspicious way. This might include axe murderers, ticket collectors, the trolley woman, nosy old ladies or nasty children. It was a last resort (because the train toilet stunk even worse than the ones at her school) but it might be necessary and so she held it in reserve.

Getting out her diary she crossed out what she had achieved so far this morning:

Still not crossed out was:

She put the lid on her pen and looked out of the window, wondering whether this was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life. Hugging her rucksack to her chest she thought of other hard things, like learning to dive or the first rehearsal for
Oliver!
when she had thought she might be singled out or spoken to.

There was one thing which would always come top when it came to “Hardest Thing Ever”: the playground. She had hated the playground more than anywhere else in the world—at the beginning she had dreaded it so much that she used to puke up her breakfast. Still she had gone there every day and crossed it alone like a limping wildebeest.

Today's trip she had done many times (with Mum or Dad or both) and it had always been easy and most often pleasant—it had never made her sick. The only different thing on this particular day was that she was alone, but Eliza did not feel more brave to be alone. In fact, she felt safer: she had experienced the treachery of friends and the brutality of strangers at school. Now she had discovered that parents could be treacherous and brutal too.

Taking the lid off her pen she wrote
Worst Things,
underlined it, and then thought about what to put.

When it had first started at school—the bad stuff—her mother had asked her, “What are they doing to you? Tell me, please—then we can make it stop.”

Eliza had known this was not true and that there was nothing to be done. “Don't tell” was the most important lesson she had learned at school. “Nothing,” she had replied. “There isn't anything.” Then she had buttoned her lip and picked at her fingers instead.

Now she was afraid again and although it was not of the playground it was the same fear: that what was bad today would be worse tomorrow.

She wrote down—

—and then stopped. There was something else, but she could not bring herself to write the word:
divorce.

The idea of divorce had only occurred to her quite recently. When first her grandparents and then Tom and Kathy had split up, the separations had been couched in terms of geography: “Grumpeter wants to live in France,” and “Tom's got a job in a different hospital.” Eliza saw now that while both those statements had been true they had only been partial truths. Peter and Tom had moved because their relationships had ended, not because they wanted to live somewhere new. Eliza had been deceived—how stupid she had been! Just a silly little girl, to believe what she was told. At that time her concerns had been as little as herself: Would Gravel still have a Chocolate Orange? Would she still see Stan and Jack at Christmas? Now that she was older and knew more about people in general, and her parents in particular, she carried the word “divorce” around with her like a furled umbrella on a cloudy day.
Just in case.
She did not want to be surprised by rain; she wanted to be prepared.

What would divorce mean for her? Two homes. Her heart pinned to each and stretched between them. Dad living somewhere else and maybe—if Mum got a real all-day job—a new flat for her too. That would mean another school and another
fucking
playground. The savage word roared in Eliza's head. She hated her parents. This was a rotten future in which nothing would be certain and all of her questions would be met with “I don't know.”

It was when she thought of
no more home
that she felt as if she were the umbrella and that a gust of wind had blown her inside out to face a pelting rain. No one bothered to mend umbrellas—she had seen them dumped in rubbish bins on stormy days—because unless they stayed up they were useless.

Perched in the toilet cubicle on those dreaded, desperate days, Eliza had told herself that every second which passed, however bad it was, brought her nearer to going home. That was the way she had completed each day: one second after another, each one closer to the final bell. She had tucked her feet up on the plastic seat, bringing her knees to her chest, until she was curled like an anxious hedgehog or shut like a human clam. Nothing—no one—could prize her apart and get inside. Behind the locked door she had bent her head and pressed her closed eyes against her knees until her eyeballs hurt and she saw red and black in flashes. Behind the warm, rough smell of her skirt and her tights—
home
—she had smelled the sharp cut of disinfectant from the floor. That smell would make her tough, she had thought. If she breathed it in for long enough, it would harden her insides.

There had been no crying—not there, locked up safe with her feet off the floor—but only sitting, waiting, and dreaming of being at home.

Last night they had all—apart from her mother who had gone to get drunk in the pub—watched a program on television called
The Ultimate Fate of Our Universe.
Afterwards, Eliza had gone to her room and her father had come to talk to her. Once he had gone away again she got out of bed, opened the window and looked out.

It had been brought to her attention by the television program that being a planet was a lonely business. Each was confined, by the laws of its own orbit, to a solitary life. They might all be called “planet,” but they were not related. There was no communication: if Saturn fell in the river and Jupiter went to the pub, Mars would have nothing to say on the matter at all.

Above the house a starlit sky had glittered behind scraps of blowing cloud. Eliza had leaned out of the window, trying to see as far as possible into the universe. She had squinted at the stars and into the spaces between them.

Then it had occurred to her that “space” began right here, at her open window: there was nothing but a shred of cloud between the end of her nose and the edge of the universe. Her eyes had widened and all the breath had puffed out of her in surprise.
I'm spinning away.
She had become a spider turning slow, astonished circles down the drain; a sheet of paper drifting, helpless, into the yawn of the Underground tunnel. There was no “up” or “down” in space but only further and further away; she was tumbling, head over heels, into the limitless gap, and where she was going could not be called “somewhere” or a “place.” It was just a vacant, empty plot:
deep space.

The ring of her cousins' voices had broken into her thoughts—

“Give me the torch!”

“No!”

“Give it!”

“No!”

—and Eliza had blinked: she was back on the earth, and back at the window. Garden, grass, tree and tent were all laid out below where she had left them. Torchlight had jumped and flickered through the walls of the tent and into the thick night air, sheltered to a soft and mellow stillness.

Those badgery boys knew nothing of these fears, and Eliza had wished she was ignorant too. Snuffling out there in the garden on the grass—with their torch and their funny rocking voices, question and answer like owls in the wood—they were not troubled by such terrors because they had each other. Eliza envied them. They spoke to one another as if one mind, shared between them, spoke with two companionable voices.

That was how she felt when she was with Eliot: as if they were side by side at the piano and playing with one hand each. Eliza would play the part of the right hand and Eliot the part of the left.

At that moment—leaning her cheek against the cool pane of glass, feeling the breath of the night and hearing her cousins speak in canon and fugue—two voices had seemed to strike up a dialogue in Eliza's own head. One had told her,
Go!
and the other,
But you can't.
Looking out of the bedroom window she had begun a spirited argument with herself that had ended when she crept into the kitchen and looked up the time of the morning train:
0742.