‘Nice.’ Star indicated the balloon. ‘I suppose it’s changed quite a bit, over the years.’
‘I suppose so.’ I clung on to the holes in the fence and thought of Mr Prendergast. ‘Perhaps they’ll build houses on top of it.’
‘Perhaps.’ Star opened her bag and produced a battered-looking joint. She waggled it and said, ‘Fancy a smoke?’
Star had offered them to me before, and I’d always refused. Now, though, thinking about the task ahead of me, I looked at it and said, ‘Okay.’
‘Good. Me too.’ She put the joint between her lips, took a box of safety matches from her bag and struck one, holding the flame to the twisted end of the paper.
I watched it catch, mesmerized, and she looked at me from over the top of it. She smirked.
‘Better than Johnny’s soggy roach-ends, eh?’
‘He’s not doing a very good job of giving it up,’ I replied, as she pouted to blow out smoke and frowned at me. ‘Well, that’s what he said he wanted to do, wasn’t it?’
She shook her head and leaned against the gate. ‘He wasn’t talking about this.’ She indicated the joint.
‘Oh.’
She handed me the joint, and our fingers collided.
‘Then what?’
She paused, as if weighing up a decision in her mind and then said, with a little sigh, ‘Johnny … he’s queer.’
I paused, the joint halfway to my mouth. ‘What?’
She folded her arms across her chest. ‘That’s what he wants to give up. At least, that’s what he says. I don’t even know whether to believe him any more. I think he’s just saying it because it’s what I want to hear.’
Slowly, jigsaw pieces slotted together. Adam, the dodgems boy; a half-wave, barely acknowledged, on the promenade. ‘Oh my God. Are you sure?’ I sucked on the end of the joint.
‘That day when we were supposed to go dancing, remember? I came home and they were – well, he was with … he was with somebody, all right?’ She bit her lip. ‘I threw a plate at his head. That’s why I completely forgot about, you know, the One-Two and all of that. Ended up drinking all night in the Walmstead Arms; there was a lock-in. Me and Johnny, talking for hours, going round in circles.’
‘Wow.’ I blew out smoke as I’d seen Star do. I found the
thought of Johnny being queer curiously exciting. ‘You wouldn’t know, would you? I mean, that he’s one of them. Not that I’ve met one before.’
‘Rosie!’ she snapped, and I looked at her, startled. ‘He’s supposed to be my man. He might, you know, end up in prison or in the paper or something. Never mind that it’s totally against all the laws of nature. You have to swallow.’
‘What?’
She patted her throat and gulped down air. ‘That’s how you inhale.’
I sucked and swallowed; my lungs burned and I coughed violently. ‘Yuck.’ I stole a glance at Star, wondering if I dared to ask a particular question to which I’d always been nervous of the answer, and so airily, as if it meant nothing to me either way, I said, ‘I suppose you love him very much?’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ she said tightly, and I thought to myself with a ripple of anticipation,
Perhaps she doesn’t
. ‘Imagine if people found out. Nobody would ever speak to us again. Or worse, they’d feel
sorry
. I’d hate that. To be pitied.’
Then again, I thought, my head spinning already from the effects of the tobacco, maybe she did and she didn’t want to discuss such a soft-centred concept with me. Shrugging casually, I said, ‘Maybe you should, you know, split up.’
‘I don’t think you understand how serious this is.’ She snatched the joint back from me and sucked on it viciously. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
She ground the end out in the mud and stalked back along the path.
‘Wait a sec,’ I said, my legs wobbling a bit as I hurried after her. ‘You don’t even know how to get there.’
But Star didn’t stop.
‘And the worst thing is, he’s not even ashamed,’ she was muttering as she marched back towards the high street.
‘I’m taking it seriously, honestly,’ I called, although the further we walked the less serious I felt, and as we turned on to the road I’d grown up on, all mown grass verges and plane trees, I felt the effects of the hashish shredding my brain. ‘I think I’m stoned,’ I said to Star in a stage whisper.
She finally slowed and turned back to me, her face softening, a smile curling her mouth. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ she said, ‘you’ve only had a couple of puffs.’
‘I’m new to this game.’ I nodded at the garden gate. ‘This is it.’
Star nodded. In a BBC announcer’s voice she intoned, ‘And so we arrive at the childhood home of the great Rosemary Churchill.’
This struck me as idiotically funny, and I collapsed into giggles as we staggered together up the path.
‘Come on,’ hissed Star, ‘you can do it,’ and this made me giggle even more.
The spare key under the flowerpot felt solid and satisfying in my fingers, and it turned nicely in the lock. Then we were inside, in the narrow hallway, and it all looked so familiar and unchanging that I could hardly believe I’d been gone all this time.
Star took off her cape and hung it on the peg next to the telephone stand. ‘Mind if I have a look round?’
I waved her off. ‘It’s not very interesting.’
‘Let me be the judge of that,’ she said as she walked
towards the kitchen. I leaned against her cape, breathing in the scent she’d left behind. I closed my eyes and remembered how it had been here, in the hallway, where I’d first met Harry, when Mum had invited him over for Sunday lunch one day and I’d opened the door to him.
‘Ah, the famous Rosie!’ he’d exclaimed, and had presented me with a bunch of roses as a gift. I’d been goggle-eyed, fourteen years old and already half in love with this stepfather-to-be, with his raucous sense of humour, his generosity, his listening to my opinions as if I really did have something to say.
‘All mod cons,’ I heard Star call from the kitchen. There was a noise like grinding knives; I peeled open one eye and saw her repeatedly pressing the button on the waste disposal unit at the sink. Harry had bought the kitchen with his fat chequebook when he’d moved in; nothing was too good for the new ladies in his life, he said, and Mum had her evening dresses and pieces of jewellery, and I got taken out to the Golden Dragon to try Chinese food, and to the pictures like a proper grown-up, and thought Harry the best thing since sliced bread.
I was sixteen when I began scrawling his name in my diary, wishing I’d met him before Mum, because she was too old for a proper love relationship. They were more like friends, I supposed, and when I began noticing his eyes lingering upon me I kept the observation to myself, bubbling with suppressed desire.
It was in the kitchen, when I was seventeen, that Harry had kissed me for the first time, the night he and Mum had come home late from a party, both of them a bit squiffy, and Mum had gone up to bed, leaving us alone.
He’d pinned me against the Royal Houses calendar, his tongue pressing through my teeth, and then he’d pulled away from me, his lips still glistening with my saliva, told me I was a very naughty girl, and went upstairs to bed. The next day he came home with a present for me, a fountain pen wrapped in tissue paper, and said he’d seen it in the stationer’s window and had just known I would adore it, and he was right.
I shook myself into the here and now. Star had disappeared from the kitchen, and I heard a thump from the front room next door to the hall, where we never usually sat except for when we had visitors. I remembered suddenly what was in the room, and panic assailed me. ‘Wait!’ I called, and flung open the door.
She had spread herself horizontally on the sofa, her legs raised, her skirt falling back over her thighs. I stood in the doorway and watched her, remembering how Harry had beckoned me to join him on the same sofa, that night when Mum was away at the farm sorting through my dead grandma’s bits and pieces, telephoning at ten o’clock to say there was so much work she was going to stay overnight.
‘Just you and me then, eh, Rosie?’ he’d said, offering me a beer and patting the space next to him. He’d bought me more presents since that first time, and had given me more kisses too, and sometimes fondled my breasts through my clothes. He was my secret sweetheart, nibbling my ear in his dusty office that day when I’d gone to visit him at the building site, telling me how beautiful I was.
I’d been kissing him a while on the sofa before he put
my hand in his lap and had said, ‘That’s what you do to me, Rosie.’
I’d stared at him, not properly understanding, and then he’d said thickly, ‘We’ve just been playing toy houses up till now, haven’t we?’ He’d stood up and held out his hand. He’d drawn me to standing and led me out of the room and up the stairs.
Star beamed up at me, stretching first one arm, then the other, like a cat. ‘Lap of luxury, this. Not at all like the vicarage, you know. That’s about two hundred years old and it’s always freezing.’
She hadn’t seen the sideboard. To prevent her spotting it, I came over and sat on the sofa next to her. ‘Enjoying yourself, are you?’
‘Mmm. I think I’ll stay.’ She giggled.
I sensed she was about to look round the room, so I leaned over her, pinning her wrists to the sofa’s cushions with my hands.
She gasped a soft, ‘Hey!’
‘I’ll make you stay.’ I bent down, my hair trailing in her face. ‘And you can be the best daughter ever.’
She relaxed into my grip. Her elbows framed her face like a portrait. Her lips bowed into a smile. ‘You’ll make me?’ she whispered.
I nodded. I leaned closer, and Star’s eyes switched suddenly, nervously, her gaze skittering around the room. She squealed, ‘Oh, photographs!’ and pushed aside my grip, jumping to her feet.
I watched her approach my mother’s sideboard, my guts slithering. It had always been the repository for our important photographs, all the frames placed at an angle
to avoid the bleaching of the afternoon sun through the net curtains.
Star picked up one and showed it to me. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? Aren’t you adorable?’
I nodded mutely. She picked up the photograph of my father in uniform, and cooed over his moustache.
‘And this one!’ she said, picking up another. ‘Is that your mum? And who’s this with her?’
‘My stepfather,’ I said miserably, as Star frowned at the handsome face, the face that she had seen twice already this week, and, beneath the photograph, the telltale inscription
Harold & Grace, 11th April 1962
.
She turned to me, still holding the photograph. ‘Rosie … ?’
I pounced on something. ‘Oh, God, what’s this?’
‘Eh?’ Distracted, she watched me pick up a small framed photograph at the back of the collection.
‘This wasn’t here before.’ I looked at the sepia snapshot of the baby in a crib, with a blurred speck of grass behind.
‘Okay,’ said Star. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘No, but …’ I peered at the photo in my hands and looked up at Star. ‘I’ve seen it before, I’m sure of it. Recently. Very recently.’
‘Yes, well, all babies look the same.’ Star took the photograph from me and set it back with a soft
tock
on to the counter. She pointed to Harry’s face. ‘It’s him, isn’t it? The chap in the sports car who brought you the present.’
Her eyelids flickered, and I knew she was thinking of the note Harry had left with the shoes, the sort of note no proper stepfather would ever write. I flicked a glance at the clock on the wall. ‘I must get upstairs and sort out my
clothes,’ I said, as breezily as I was able. ‘Otherwise I’ll completely forget, you know, and that was the whole point of my coming.’
I darted out of the room, muttering something about being back in a minute, and ran up the stairs, leaving her behind.
My old bedroom looked exactly as it had done when I’d left it at the height of summer. My schoolbooks were still lined up in a row on the edge of my desk. My pencil pot held a filigree of dust inside each compartment. I opened my wardrobe and found an old travel case inside, and as I put it on the bed to fold in jumpers, I remembered how I’d sat here beside Harry, and he’d said, ‘Are you ready to be a proper grown-up, Rosie?’
I’d shrugged, scared of what he’d meant by that, but he’d calmed me down by kissing my hands, then my mouth, and running his fingers along my arm, and I’d gasped with that ripple of desire he always managed to spool out of me. He then unhitched my blouse from its moorings in the belt of my skirt, and undid all its tiny buttons. He peeled the sleeves from my shoulders and slid a finger under one of the straps of my brassiere. ‘Take this thing off, won’t you?’
I did as I was told. I was glad to, anyway, because it was a horrible Marks & Sparks one, but once I was topless and sitting in front of him I felt a little bit like being at the doctor’s. I watched from above as he caressed my breasts, and concentrated hard to feel that ripple of desire again. It was there all right, but very faint, almost as if it had gone to sit in a back room while it worked out exactly what was going on here.
He reached around under my skirt and fingered aside the edge of my knickers. The ripple vanished into a seam of marble, and I wriggled away. He waited a second, staring at me impassively, and then said, ‘Don’t worry. We can take our time.’
I’d smiled gratefully, glad he wasn’t annoyed with me for being so gauche. ‘Thanks.’
He winked. ‘Still, you could help me out here, or I might be in trouble.’
‘Yes, yes. Of course.’ I had no idea what he meant. I watched as he unbuckled his belt, freed himself of trousers, underpants and socks, all in one go, and then dragged his shirt over his head.
His neck had a ring of red from its exposure to the sun when he’d been out on the building sites. His chest and stomach were pale, but tightly packed with muscle. His penis looked like nothing I’d ever imagined. It leaned upwards, listing to one side as if drunk. Underneath, his balls hung like two jowls. I felt a second of panic.
Harry took my hand and guided it towards his penis, unfurling my fingers and wrapping them around. ‘Like this,’ he murmured, moving my hand up and down. ‘That’s it. That’s it, baby.’
I moved my hand up and down as he’d shown me. He closed his eyes and rested his hands on the candlewick bedspread. I felt goosebumps prickle my chest. I tasted beer on my breath. I tried to give in to the moment, but instead found myself looking at my textbooks on the chair, my end-of-year revision notes pinned on to my bookshelf, my framed O-level certificates on the wall.