Bad Blood (27 page)

The awful business of beginning fell to the head boy and head girl, but at least they didn't have to choose, or be chosen. What if no one asked you? You'd gradually sink into oblivion and the dark would close over your head. Boys sidled across the hall, their temples glistening with sweat and Brylcreem, nudging and shoving each other, and suddenly here was one, saying ‘May I . . .' Well, yes, the relief was enormous and this was easy, a waltz. Once my first pang of gratitude had subsided, I noticed that my partner was preoccupied too. He seemed to be having trouble remembering the steps, for he was pumping my arm and counting under his breath (one, two, three), and his breath smelled like the open maws of the pub cellars that gaped on Whitchurch pavements on delivery day. Beer. He'd
been drinking and, although in theory this was glamorous because forbidden (and he was anyway certainly under age), in fact he was distracted, disjointed and clammy. He stepped on my feet (one, two . . . ) and groaned as if his pain was greater than mine, and then it was over and I was back in my corner, my white shoes a bit scuffed, still waiting for the evening's true, occult ritual to start.

Now one of the scatter of sixth-formers wearing dinner jackets would surely pick me out, someone older (teachers only danced with teachers, alas) whose casual touch would unlock the mysteries of the quickstep and A-level physics. But my next two partners seemed just as inept and nervous as me. I wasn't getting anywhere and, as if to rub it in, my first partner was back, more dishevelled than before, his collar unbuttoned, mopping his brow. This time, instead of counting, he talked as we jogged around the floor, into my ear, in a whispered shout over the music: his mother had broken her arm falling from a stepladder in the shop where she worked, where she wouldn't have to work if her sons and her husband looked after her properly, which they didn't, his own bad behaviour was adding to her troubles, no wonder he was pissed . . . He snickered sarcastically and seemed about to burst into tears. This was awful. Each dance with him took me further from my imagined cavalier, he was leaving his messy mark on me – this time it wasn't just the bruised toes and the dirty shoes, there was definitely a damp patch on my dress in the small of my back where his hand had been and my hair felt sticky where he'd leaned on me to tell his story. Who was he? How could I get rid of him?

Back in the girls' corner, they knew who he was at least, he was a distant cousin of one of the fifth-formers, a gangling pariah called Sheila who had wildly protruding teeth and had
once tried to befriend me when I was a pariah with braces. He was Victor Sage, his mother's pride but no one else's, well known for clowning, drinking and fighting after hours behind the Back Street Vaults, and they lived in Whitchurch on the council estate and his mother worked in Dudleston's, the drapers on High Street. My head was starting to ache. I went and stared at myself in the mirror in the ‘Ladies'. Of course. That was where my mother had worked before the war, with Gladys, who must be his mother. I recalled mutual boasting sessions, once in particular when I'd passed the Scholarship, and so had Victor said his mother proudly to mine, pretending to wrap up some lingerie to borrow time to talk. In fact, my mother had often stopped off on the way to Mrs Smith's to talk to Mrs Sage as she now was, while I kicked my heels and tugged at her sleeve. My tormentor was essence of Whitchurch, then, part of the familiar tangle I so yearned to slough off. And he wasn't handsome either, with that gap-toothed grimace, although that wouldn't have mattered if he'd been the magical mentor I'd looked forward to, the prince of ennui.

Gail had done much better when it came to realising her imaginings. Her eyes shone and she hummed a few bars of Paul Anka's number one hit, ‘Diana', about a mythical older woman, which was written when he was fourteen and inspired by falling in love with his babysitter. Against all the odds she'd discovered in Whitchurch a Paul Anka lookalike – same high cheekbones and black, black hair – and although this one's eyes were blue and Paul's were brown (he was ‘of Syrian extraction'), they were deep-set and inward-looking in just the right way. He was called Michael Price, a boy like a startled gazelle who refused to dance at all; he was probably as unobtainable as a sonneteer's mistress and that was as it should be. For my part I returned to the floor furious. The deputy head boy
asked me to dance, but by now it was too late. When Vic Sage reappeared, as I knew he would, I lost my temper, forgot I was shy, and told him to
go away
. He was shocked and staggered back on his heels for a moment, but it was no good, the last waltz was upon us and there was no time to wait for another partner. So we trudged around the gym one final time in silence, and then I bundled on my coat in the cloakroom, my punctual father in full view of everyone picked me up outside in a cattle truck (the car had broken down again) and my mortification was complete.

 

That encounter at the school dance would prove fateful, but not yet, not yet. At the time, it just seemed a bad start to the game. Love–fifteen. I was used to starting a point down, however, and I was no more lastingly disheartened by my experience than anyone else. We all – even girls who'd been wallflowers or had to dance with their brothers – developed over the next days before the Christmas holidays an air of being ‘out'. Doing our Christmas shopping at lunchtime or after school, weighing up the merits of different gift packs of scented soap and bath salts for our mothers, and socks or hankies for our fathers (aftershave was still judged dangerously effeminate), we were doing a new dance you'd only have been able to see from a spotter plane, partnered by boys who were often hanging out a street or two away. Their steps were nonetheless synchronised with ours and vice versa, so at regular intervals our paths would cross and recross. It was a dance you could do sitting down in cafés or standing at bus stops, too, and included catching people's eyes, waving, making remarks designed to be overheard and even small snippets of direct conversation, although they were mostly of the ‘my friend says your friend told
her
that he saw you talking to me' kind.

Gail would stare Michael Price out of countenance until he flushed hot pink, which gave her a thrill; and we'd cross the road to avoid Vic Sage wheeling his bike along a Green End gutter, or walk past the milk bar if we saw it tethered outside, to please me in my turn. It was all part of the pageant. She and I wrote up private diaries each evening to show to each other next day, detailing our sightings of the various grammar school boys whose names we now knew, although almost always we'd both been there at the time. The point was to heighten and savour every hint of an encounter, the more fleeting the better. I remember that some of my best entries described boys glimpsed through spyholes in the condensation on the steamed-up windows of the bus taking us back over the border.

But there were closer contacts and although the headmistress tried to believe that Gail led me astray – because I was so shy and so bookish, despite my peasant proclivities – I was the one who initiated them. For the dance on the streets you wore school uniform, but on Saturday mornings in mufti you could cross-dress as an adult. This was more exciting than it sounds, for in the 1950s glamour was grown-up and fifteen-year-olds dressed to look like thirty-year-olds rather than the other way around. That winter when I went into Whitchurch on Saturdays I wore a boxy fake-suede jacket, a pencil-slim skirt, a tight sweater and high heels (which, rude realist Uncle Bill explained with a leer, changed women's posture, made them thrust out their tits and bums on behalf of biology). It was a get-up that suited me fine – I had the right kind of shape and a sleepwalker's shamelessness, it was as though such bold self-display was actually a concealment, like the Max Factor pancake that hid my blushes.

In this disguise I'd catch the early-morning bus all on my
own, pick up my copy of
New Musical Express
at W. H. Smith's, and go and sit at the corner table by the window in Edwards's café, above the big old-fashioned grocery that smelled of Cheshire cheese, bacon, brown sugar and the ground coffee they turned into the gritty grey soup they served upstairs. The corner table was a kind of crow's nest or lookout from which you could oversee half of the High Street, and various moody boys and girls (but mostly boys) climbed up to observe the passers-by. Being there, you identified with the boys, but you were also flirting – you might exchange knowing glances when
she
stopped to smile at
him
down in the street, but you were being looked over yourself, too. I found I hardly had to talk at all and could pretend to be reading my paper if need be. Gail would usually cadge a lift with her mother and turn up later, but she was only really interested in looking, not being looked at, and by mid-morning the circle of chairs in the corner had become so wide most people couldn't see out of the window. The café was reverting by then to its traditional function, and was about to serve lunches of meat and two veg with lots of gravy to hungry shoppers. So, after a debriefing in the Ladies when I'd recount what I'd seen and heard, dodging the matrons adjusting their hatpins in the mirror, Gail and I would turn back into a girl gang.

Me at fourteen on a Whitchurch market day with the phtographer's parrot

She exerted a contrary pull against the mesmerising compulsion to get boys, almost any boys, to acknowledge my existence, to
make me exist
. But it was a force like gravity, ineluctable. I was desperate to be grown up, I wanted to be haled into a future where I'd be someone and the way of doing it was for now to be no one, blank, masked, wantable. One day that winter another girl at the corner table told one of the boys that it was my birthday: 13 January 1958. How old was I, he asked idly. Fifteen, she hissed and he made a great show of shock
(jailbait!), but he
was
shocked too. Only the white trash from the secondary modern school at Broughall (the Brothel as it was jokily known) flowered so fast, like weeds.

The first boy I actually went out with, just before spring, blond and baby-faced Alan Burns, was in the same fix as me. He too was only fifteen, but he smoked and drank, and was fed up with being so young. For a couple of weeks we went to the pictures together on Saturday nights and necked with such assiduity that my face felt skinned, although I'm sure he didn't shave. The third week he excused himself, telling a friend, who told a friend, who told me, that I was ‘too serious'. I told the messenger, who passed it on, that I didn't care and told Gail that really I did, for I felt I should, but I wasn't sure. Our dates had been fraught with anxious self-love, our mouths were dry with stage fright. I thought at the time that he meant I was too serious
about him
, and felt ashamed and indignant. He probably meant in general – Alan had his escape into the future planned. He would leave school that summer after
O-levels, to join the Merchant Navy. I recall running into him years later, in our swinging twenties, and thinking, well
that
was it, he preferred boys all along.

But perhaps back in 1958 I had simply said something that let him see how bookish I was, how much I lived in my head on the quiet. Like all the girls back then I knew that being too clever was much worse than being too tall. Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads in the fairy tale before I knew it. In any case, you could cultivate the wrong sort of silence – the sort that implied brooding self-absorption rather than attentiveness. Face to face, I was so distracted by speculation about what people made of me that I didn't really listen to what they said.

It was different with books, I still hung on their every word. The night I finished
Dracula
was a lot more exciting than Saturday night at the Regal. Lying in my private pool of light, with moths ricocheting between the bulb and the lampshade, and the wire from the radio aerial tapping on the window, I drifted into a pre-dawn trance while my little brother (not so little any longer, he was nine) slept soundly across the room in the shadows. Although I protested to our parents that I hated having to share a bedroom with Clive, his unconscious presence heightened my pleasure in my orgies of reading. I was sinning with an undead dandy while innocents wallowed in oblivion. The night was mine and Dracula's. How I yawned at the thought of common daylight's coffin.

That was affectation, though: I was ‘out' and determined to sleepwalk my way in the world if I could, and have a career. Boys and homework were supposed to be incompatible but
since I was an insomniac I had time for both and hadn't stopped coming top. Books weren't just a solitary vice. Our new young English teacher, Mrs Davies – large, handsome, her dark hair cut in page-boy style, her broad mouth red-lipsticked – smiled down on Gail and me: on Gail for the panache with which she read aloud in class, on me for my untidy, passionate essays. She understood we were a double act, she was part of one herself. She and Mr Davies were a kind of professional couple new to Whitchurch: he taught physics at the boys' school and they had bought a redundant country vicarage, which they were doing up – or rather, stripping down. That summer they invited over some of their pupils, including us, to help dig the garden and limewash the outhouses.