— Don’t be ridiculous, he said.
— Oh, Stella. D’you have to make such a performance out of everything?
Gerry said that I wasn’t a very easy girl to like, and that I was arrogant and selfish. He crossed the room to close a window, because he didn’t want the neighbours to hear us. At some point Philip went quietly upstairs. I said I would die if my life turned out as boring and narrow as theirs was.
— Just you wait, my mother warned. — Boring or not, you’ll have to get on with it like everybody else.
Gerry called my friends dropouts and deadbeats, a waste of space.
— That’s what we think you are, I said. — We think you’re dead.
— I’d watch out for Valentine if I were you, my mother said. — You might be barking up the wrong tree.
Gerry did lose his temper eventually.
— Get out, Stella, if you can’t respect this house. Just get out.
Mum remonstrated with him, half-heartedly.
— Don’t worry, I said. — I’m going. I wouldn’t stay in this house if you begged me.
They didn’t beg me. It was that easy. I let myself out of the front door, into the street.
Freezing without my coat, and weeping, I went to Val’s. His mother let me in and I waited for him in his attic, getting under the blankets to keep warm. When he came home from Fred Harper’s I heard her expostulating downstairs, saying I couldn’t stay, she wouldn’t put up with it. So she didn’t like me either. And I heard Val’s voice raised too, shouting awful things. (‘You silly bitch. Don’t touch me!’) Some contamination of rage was flashing round between us all that night, carried from one through another like electricity.
— I can’t go back, I said, when he erupted into the room.
And I saw he understood that it was true. Anyway, he’d had a row, too — with Fred Harper. He was leaving school. We’d both leave school. What did we want with school any longer? We’d leave home too. I felt this was the beginning of my real life, which I had only been waiting for. My real life, in my imagination afterwards, always had that attic shape, high and empty and airy, cigarette smoke drifting in the light from a forty watt bulb. Val said he knew someone who had a flat where we could stay. Tomorrow he’d sort it out. For tonight I could stay here. He didn’t care what his mother thought.
— Poor little Stella, he said. — Poor little you. I’m so sorry.
He was stroking my arms and nuzzling between my shoulder blades, trying to warm me up where I was rigid with cold. And there you are: that night he made love to me, properly — or more or less properly. Anyway, we managed penetration. And we did it another time too, in the early morning a few days later, in a zipped-up sleeping bag in the front room of a fantastically disgusting ground floor flat belonging to the freckled red-haired man, Ian, who sold Valentine his drugs. We lay in the dawn light, crushed together on our narrow divan in the blessed peace of the aftermath, Val’s head fallen on my breast: proudly I felt the trickling on my thighs. I suppose we must have heard the milkman’s float passing — or perhaps by that time we had dozed off.
Then someone threw a full milk bottle through the closed window. Though I didn’t understand at first what had happened: it was just an explosion in the room, appalling and incomprehensible, the crashing glass loud as a bomb, milk splashed violently everywhere. (It seems improbable that a drug dealer had a daily delivery — the bottle must have been picked up from someone else’s doorstep.)
— What the fuck? Val leapt up from the divan, naked.
Ian came running in, pulling jeans on. — What the fuck?
He cut his feet on the glass.
I knew from Val’s face that he knew what the explosion was, and who.
Some other girl, I thought. Some old love. Someone he loves, or who loves him and is desperate for him the way I am.
Of course it wasn’t any girl. It was his English teacher.
I thought — when the whole truth came out, when at last I’d understood about the sex, and Ian was so fucked off with Val about the window and the milk and was looking for him everywhere, and Val got the money from his sister and went to the States, and it was all such a collapse of my hopes — I thought I could still go back, defeated, to my old life. Back home and back to school, and pick up where I left off, and be a clever girl again, and get to university. Even if I could never ever again, in my whole life, be happy.
But I wasn’t that clever, was I?
Had I forgotten everything they’d taught us at school? That you only had to do it once, just once, to get into trouble. We had even done it twice.
5
MRS TAPPER SAVED ME. I OUGHT to be grateful to her. We met when I was sitting on a park bench on Brandon Hill and Lukie was asleep in his pram: I was eighteen and he was twelve weeks old. I’d been sitting there too long. It was late afternoon on an autumn day in 1974 and the wind was blowing dead leaves and black bits of twig down from the trees and into drifts on the wet grass littered with worm casts; the bench’s wooden slats were cold as metal against the underside of my thighs, my feet were numb in thin plimsolls, I was trying to keep my hands warm in my pockets. From time to time I reached out to push the pram back and forward if I thought I heard Lukie waking up. The chrome pram handle too was freezing cold — but he was snug inside in his cocoon of nappy and babygro suit and bonnet and bootees and blankets. I’d tested to make sure he was warm enough, pushing my own hand in there between the sheets, down beside his hot little body, damp and urgent in sleep. I wished that I could sleep, and be tucked up in a cocoon of blankets and rocked to and fro, and not have to think about anything except myself.
I did love him.
I’d loved him from the moment he arrived in that awful chaos in the foyer of the maternity hospital — they had to cut my knickers off, he came so quickly. Apparently this happens with young mothers. I still had my shoes on when they handed him to me to hold; the maternity dress my Auntie Andy had bought me, when I couldn’t fit into my jeans any longer, was a bloody rag wrapped up somewhere around my waist, it had to be thrown out (not that I cared — I didn’t need maternity dresses, I was never, ever, going to go through that again). Lukie gazed into my eyes when they gave him to me with such a searching, surmising, reasonable, open look: surprised but not dismayed to find himself in existence. Now that I know my son Luke as an adult I can say that the whole of him was there in that first look, everything he’s ever done and been began from that. (My other son’s so different, so complicated.)
— My God, my mother had said as soon as she leaned over Lukie (not that soon — she didn’t come to see him for weeks after he was born, we were by no means reconciled by then). — He’s the spit of your father.
Now why did she say that? When for so many years we’d never mentioned my father. She was pushing the baby away, I knew it — she didn’t want it connected to her. Needless to say she hadn’t wanted me to have a baby. Never mind all the other stuff, about shame, and loss of face, and people asking ‘How’s Stella getting on at school?’ and my tripping up on my merry road to being so superior: not only that, but it was only a few years since my mother had her own second baby, she was bored with the whole fuss and the puking and crying, no cute little grandson was going to win her round. She had wanted me to triumph and prove something to my stepfather, and I had made a fool of myself instead. Her look at me was hard and flattened and lustreless, it had been for months: as if she’d let go of something. Let go of me, I suppose. But she did bring me some tiny vests, and a matinee jacket she’d knitted herself (she was hopeless at knitting, too impatient, it was full of dropped stitches). And money, most of which I gave to Jean.