And it was the same for Val. He recognised me too.
I truly do believe that, even now, even after everything that happened. We found each other out, we were kindred spirits, it was mutual.
— What a scarecrow, Gerry said after he came to my house for the first time. — I can’t believe the Grammar School let him get away with that hair.
— He looks like a girl, my mother said. — I’m not that keen, Stella.
Following up the stairs behind Val, I was faint from the movement of his slim haunches in his tight white jeans. How could she think that he looked like a girl? Yet all we did in my bedroom was cosy up knee to knee, cross-legged on the bed to talk. We swapped our childhood stories. He was born in Malaya, he had had an ayah.
— What were your family doing in Malaya?
— You don’t want to know.
— I want to know everything.
— My father worked for the government, he’s an awful tax expert. Now he’s retired, he’s just awful and old. What does yours do?
— He’s not my real dad. My real dad’s dead.
Mum brought in a pile of ironed clothes to put away in my chest of drawers. Then she called to ask if we wanted coffee. Philip came knocking at the door, asking us to play with him. Afterwards Mum spoke to me awkwardly, about self-respect. The familiar solidity of the house and its furniture melted away around Val; after he’d left I couldn’t believe I really lived there. I couldn’t hold in the same focus my two worlds brought into conjunction. Yet I wanted Val to be brilliant for my parents and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He never made any concessions to them, or small talk. If they asked him questions he sometimes didn’t even seem to hear them; his eyes were blank. He seemed to simply pause the flow of his life in the presence of anyone unsympathetic.
He was stoned a lot of the time.
Yet among our friends he was magnetic, commanding, funny. He was a clever mimic. In the evenings we started getting together at Madeleine’s — a whole gang of six or seven of us from the streets round about. Madeleine’s father was often away; her mother Pam was bored and liked flirting with teenagers. She brought home-made brownies and cheese straws and jugs of weak sangria up to Madeleine’s room and we cadged her cigarettes. Madeleine fancied a boy who played the guitar and wrote his own songs; we tried to talk a shy, blonde girl out of her faith. Madeleine bought a red bulb to put in one of the lamps, we draped the others with Indian silk scarves. When my stepfather was sent across to fetch me home, he never stepped across the low fence between our front gardens but went punctiliously via both front paths and gates. He said if Pam wanted teenagers carrying on under her own roof it was her business.
— What’s this? he joked, when I brought Beckett back from the library.
— He’s a play writer. Haven’t you heard of him?
— Playwright. (Gerry did crosswords, he had a good vocabulary.) — Aren’t they all waiting for some chap who never turns up?
Gerry had been so keen for me to go to the High School; yet he was hostile to the power my education brought me. He thought I was putting on airs — and I expect I was, I was probably pretty insufferable with my quotations from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, my good French accent (I corrected his: ça ne fait rien, not san fairy ann). He could still usually trip me up, though, in geography or history — my sense of things fitting together was treacherously vague. Gerry knew an awful lot, he was always reading. He subscribed by post to a long series of magazines about the Second World War, which he kept in purpose-made plastic folders on a shelf. Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books.
He was amused and patient, correcting my mistakes. He did it to my mother too: so long as we were wrong, then he was kind. If I could have given in gracefully to that shape of relations between us — his lecturing me and my submitting to it — then we might have been able to live happily together. My mother didn’t care about knowing things, she just laughed at him. (‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gerry — as if it mattered!’) But I couldn’t give in. It was a struggle between our different logics. Everything I learned, I wanted to be an opening into the unknown; whereas Gerry’s sums added up in a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him.
I took Beckett up to my bedroom.
It wasn’t the kind of writing I was used to. I’d taught myself to stir in response to the captured textures of passing moments — the subtle essence of unspoken exchange, the sensation of air in a room against the skin. Now, I learned to read Beckett (and then, under Val’s influence, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti) like a convert embracing revolutionary discipline, cutting all links with my bourgeois-realist past.
— Is he your boyfriend then? Madeleine wanted clarification.
I was disdainful. — We don’t care about those kinds of labels.
— But is he?
— What does it look like?
Val and I were inseparable. We saw each other almost every day — not only on the bus going to school and coming back, but in the evenings, as often as my parents allowed me out or said he could come round. They claimed they worried about my school work but I didn’t believe them, I saw in my mother’s face her recoil from what she dreaded — the dirty flare of sex and exposure; my making a fool of myself. (They were so innocent, I don’t think they guessed about the drugs until much later.) Sometimes I went out anyway when they’d forbidden me, and then there was trouble. When I got home Gerry took me into the lounge for one of his old lectures, screwing up his forehead, leaning towards me, pretending to be impartial justice. From my dizzy vantage point (high as a kite), I believed I could see right through him to his vindictiveness, his desire to shoot me down where I was flying.
— They hate me, I said to Val. — Under his pretence of being concerned for my future, he really he hates me. And she doesn’t care.
— Don’t mind them, Val said, his eyes smiling. He blew out smoke, he was serene, bare feet tucked up on his knees in the lotus position. — They’re just frightened. They’re sweet really, your parents.
We were talking in his bedroom, so unlike my little pink celclass="underline" a draughty attic where his books and clothes lay around in chaos on a Turkey carpet grey with cigarette ash. (When I asked if his mother never cleaned in there he said she didn’t clean anywhere, they had a woman in.) His attitude towards his own parents was coolly disengaged. I was afraid of them, I tried to avoid meeting them on my passages through the rambling big house (built when Stoke Bishop was still the countryside). They were both tall and big-boned: his father was stooped, with brown-blotched skin, long earlobes, thinning white hair; his mother had a ruined face and watery huge eyes, she wore pearls and Chinese jade earrings at the dining table in the evenings (unlike us, they actually ate in their dining room). The arrangement of their furniture — elegant, shabby, mixed with exotica from the East — seemed provisional; they had only just moved in, and might move on. They were polite with me, and their conversation was as dully transactional as anything in my house — yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.