Homesick (11 page)

The white house was three storeys tall. One of Cassie’s friends, Suzie, had once told a hushed sixth-form common room that she had delivered maths homework to Cassie, lying in bed with shingles in a flat of her own at the top of the house: “She has a little red sofa, and a kitchenette with a toaster and a kettle and a mini fridge!” Preethi and the other girls looked at one another, standing outside the white house, and wondered which one of them would ask to see the flat. When they went up the stairs into the hall, Cassie nervously volunteered a walkabout tour of the house but refrained from showing them her quarters.

When they walked into the basement kitchen, their supper
had been laid out on gold-rimmed white plates: slivers of ham and tomato salad and crusty baguettes and pâté and cheese. And a case of wine. They all gasped, and Cassie looked embarrassed. The tour upstairs had already made her falter: glass-fronted bookcases in the library, the wood-panelled sitting room, each shrinking her more. Preethi, in the spirit of the day, linked her arm with Cassie’s.

“It’s all right, posh girl. We’ll still talk to you on Monday,” she whispered, and Cassie squeezed her arm closer.

Ollie sauntered into the kitchen, picked up bread and cheese, and ate it as if it were a normal moment in his day.

He stood now, in the dark, with a bottle of beer on the veranda, and lit another cigarette. Freddie and Preethi were in the kitchen with the others, Freddie with his back to the French doors, Preethi facing him, joining in the conversation, allowing Freddie to stare at her. Occasionally she would look at him, then blur her gaze beyond him, as if to stare into the distance, understanding his need to drink her in, as she watched Ollie.

When they were full, they all erupted into the June night and lay on the lawn, making a crisscross of limbs, a few girls laying their heads on each other’s bellies. The music—“American Pie” and “If You Leave Me Now” and “I’m Not in Love”—gently pervaded, and someone asked, “So where are you guys planning to travel to this summer?”

Freddie said, “We fly to Delhi, stay at Shiv’s parents’ house in Kashmir, then take the train down and somehow get to Sri Lanka. And then we’re taking a plane from Sri Lanka to Australia.”

“Is Daddy paying, Ollie?” Ollie punched a bloke in the dark. It was Simon, who was jealous of the boarders and came from Forest Hill, like Preethi. Simon said, “You’re from Sri Lanka, aren’t you, Preethi?”

“No, South London,” and people tittered. She said it to be cool, but it sounded defensive. She never knew where she was with these spoilt brats.

“No,”
he said, because he was that well-meaning, prosaic sort of boy. “I mean you were born there, weren’t you?”

“No,”
she mimicked. “Paddington.”

Freddie and Preethi had had a conversation about Sri Lanka the day before, about where he and Ollie should go, about how much things cost and how ideal it all was. She talked as if she knew, when really she had only been to Sri Lanka three times, the last time almost four years ago, during a period of danger and curfew. She and her family were taxied about by uncles and cousins, spending their evenings looking out from a veranda into the darkest nights, envying the freedom of the dogs who gathered on street corners, sharing their scavenged meals and howling. Freddie asked for names, people he could call: as if Preethi’s family were the same as his, as if her uncles worked in government ministries or the arms business and could facilitate a quick ride out on a private plane. Preethi’s dad’s brother was a retired bank manager; her mum’s sister still taught at the village school where her grandmother had been the headmistress.

Now, in the dark, Ollie said into the air, “But Freddie says you’ve given him some ideas … is it really as lovely as it looks?” Others murmured, asked similar questions, and Preethi allowed herself to be dragged back into this illusory evening, where these people were her friends. She talked of the aroma, as soon as you land, the smell of dried rice, the humidity, the soil: its colours rose up in front of her, the reds of the earth, the greens of the trees, the whites of women’s teeth as they bathed in the rivers. She did not mention the shanty towns her father never failed to point out as they drove from the airport, the mounds of rubbish
and their stink. She edited, so that chaotic driving became eccentric and delightful for her audience; the Kades, where her father insisted they eat, became an opportunity to try the workingman’s meal. She was selling dreams, and she was on the edge of them like an insect, buzzing back and forth from teacup to wineglass to coffee cup, and in each receptacle was a liquid of each world that surrounded her: home, Sri Lanka, school, church. When she read a book, it was familiar immediately, because she could play parts: she could be everyone. And here, in this champagne flute of an evening, she could be immersed in sparkling intoxication and roll onto her side and look at all of these blond, auburn, brunette heads in their jeans and shirtsleeves, their Laura Ashley dresses, with the daisy chains still in their hair, and she could imagine she was as beautiful as they were.

Ollie stood and lit another cigarette. Preethi stood, too.

“Can I have one?” she asked. Freddie was quickly at her side.

“Do you want another drink?” he asked. She craned her neck up to look at him. He was unfeasibly tall, and she realised that in any light he was very ugly. She saw him smile down at her, avuncular and eager.

“Yes, all right,” she said, and dismissed him. He went inside with a group of girls, and she and Ollie watched as Freddie gesticulated wildly, making jokes, so that the girls about him put their hands out to tap him lightly on the arm as they laughed.

“I didn’t know you smoked? Do you smoke?”

“No. But I’d like to try.” She had tried before, and actually, it had made her sick. She liked the idea of holding a cigarette, though; she liked the way she looked. He put two Rothmans in his mouth, lighting both with a match, and took one and flipped it around to offer it to her. The smell
made her dizzy—Ollie made her dizzy. She took the cigarette and walked past him toward a swing seat in the corner of the garden. Ollie followed her, as she thought he must, as she had envisioned he would when she moved. The dark was complete here, under a wisteria that climbed the white wall of the large Dulwich mansion.

Everything here was like Shakespeare updated, a Bohemia that had no outside contacts to loud striking miners in Trafalgar Square, or the church fund-raiser her parents were helping at. In the dark, on the swing seat, she could see Ollie’s profile, the cigarette glow, his hair pushed back so that it stood craggy on the top of his silhouetted head. He sat down. She leant forward, turned his face to her, and kissed him. He responded, and the kiss, extraordinary as it was that two people who knew each other so little could kiss, was a very good one. The initial plain-lipped kiss opening up slowly and becoming satisfyingly erotic, the lunge of the tongue just right: not overtly wet or overpowering. Then the drawing back, one peck, then two, and a pulling-away so he could kiss her face and her neck, and then the turning of her head, expertly done, she thought, so that their kiss became more powerful, as if they both really meant it, as if they could both, actually, maybe, fall in love.

Freddie saw. Freddie came out with Preethi’s drink and saw the end of the kiss, and she saw him. She drew back from Ollie, squeezing his hand to warn him, and the squeeze of his fingers felt more intimate than their kiss. To see Freddie stand there as she held Ollie’s fingers: she felt as though they were older, grown up, in their twenties, she lipsticked and high-heeled and he suited, and they were at a dinner party, and here came a man who was notoriously badly behaved and wore his heart on his sleeve, and he would say … Freddie spoke. “Oh. God. Oh, God,” and
still she held Ollie’s fingers, until he shook them off, threw his burning cigarette to the ground, and rubbed at it with the toe of his shoe. She still held her cigarette in her other hand, and she looked at it as a proposition. She put it to her lips, puffed at it, coughed a little, threw it down to the ground, and watched it smoke there, until it rolled away into the undergrowth.

Freddie brought the drink and stood in front of them both. And then he said to Ollie, “But you knew how I felt about her,” and Ollie said, “Yes, but I got carried away,” and Freddie said, “You always get carried away. But she’s not like the other girls,” and Ollie said, “Well, that’s why, I suppose.” And Preethi watched the smoke, wondering if a plant could be set alight, thinking that she wished she was at the church, or with Rohan, on the march. They discussed her back and forth a little longer as she watched the smoke and somehow felt dirty. Ollie coaxed Freddie to sit with them on the swing seat. Freddie took a swig of the wine he had brought out, then handed Preethi the glass. It was that nasty white wine all the girls drank, semisweet and syrupy. It made her feel sick usually, but she swallowed it down in one gulp, aware that she had placed her lips where Freddie’s had been, deliberately, so he would see. So her sensuality would taunt him, as it had through these dozen weeks they had known each other.

“You should go out with her,” Ollie said into the dark silence. He stopped the swing of the seat, holding it with tensed thighs. She could see him clench his jaw and hold them there on the cusp of the decision. She watched him turn to Freddie, smile deeply, as if they had agreed on a plan.

“But,” Freddie started, and they both looked at her.

“But
what
?” Preethi asked. But—what? She stood,
walked away. Went inside, where everyone seemed diminished in the electric light and the sterile-white kitchen. She took her glass to the sink and started to wash it. There was a spray attachment above the taps, and she pulled at it, and a hose came out.

“Cassie? You’re
that
posh that even your kitchen has a shower?” she said idly. She meant nothing, felt dismayed about everything: her behaviour, their behaviour. These were the boys—the men—she had wanted to know forever. Freddie and she were reading Dostoyevsky
together
. She had already finished
Crime and Punishment
, but he was savouring it, going slowly because he loved it so. She was reading Forster while he caught up. What was she to do now? Cassie, drunk and lying on a sofa by the French doors, said, “Preethi, don’t touch that …,” but it was too late, and Preethi had soaked them all. Cassie and Maria, Katie and Paul—all were drenched and laughing and running into the garden to shake themselves dry like so many spaniels running in a pack. Preethi looked about for a drying-up cloth, soaked up the splashes from the floor, and when she was sure it was clear, she found her cardigan and left, letting herself out the side door by the back stairs because she could hear Cassie’s parents coming through the front door, loud and cheery and full of questions that she couldn’t bear to answer.

•

It was the kiss that stayed with her. It was a kiss of sweetness and longing. In it she tasted the eroticism of becoming a woman, the eroticism of making a choice to kiss Ollie, not being chosen from the pack of girls at a party, like a boy taking a Top Trump card. She had chosen him with ambition: he was the most wanted boy of the year, and with
him came status, an ease into the best parties, the bettering of herself. The kiss was something, it was certainly something—perhaps a potential, or a future. Perhaps she and Ollie would be the ones, the ones who lasted.

She could taste his kiss on her lips as she turned the key in her front door. The wine and the cigarette smoke lingered there, although she had chewed gum on the night bus so that any waiting parent would not know she had been smoking. The black girls at the back of the bus, coming home from Brixton, had lit up their cigarettes, and her hair and clothes smelt so much that she climbed off the bus at the bottom of the hill, to walk the rest of the way home in the dark. It was funny: their smoking was a good excuse, but she didn’t want an excuse for this evening—she didn’t want part of it to be wrong.

In the hallway, she was greeted by a short white man. Above his lip grew the beginnings of a moustache; his eyes were small and staring, and his mouth smiled palely. He wore a white T-shirt and very grubby working trousers, which could have been navy once. Rohan and her father stood with him.

“Where’ve you been?” Rohan said.

“Party. I told Mum,” she replied. The man smiled and nodded. He looked as if he were welcoming her to her own house. He looked as if he were the only one at ease.

“This is Bill,” her father said.

“Hiya,” Bill said, quite loudly. She winced slightly—her head had begun to hurt. “Good party, was it?” Bill smiled.

He was a miner, had no money, had come down on the coach, didn’t know where his mates were, and Rohan had brought him home. Ammi had fed him chicken curry and rice, and now they were trying to decide where he should sleep. Their sofa was small and would not hold him. He had
a sleeping bag. Preethi noticed her father’s face. Gehan, her other brother, slept in the bedroom next to her parents’ room. He was studying for his O-levels and was already asleep. She and Rohan slept on the floor above, in attic bedrooms. Her father’s worries were merely sexual. He thinks that we might meet in the middle of the night on the way back from the bathroom, and I might spontaneously be laden with child, she thought.

She followed him to his study, where he had gone to look for something, saying, “I’ll lock my door,” and kissed him on the forehead. She went up to bed, not bothering to brush her teeth but digging under her duvet in her knickers and T-shirt. She lay looking out of the uncurtained window, staring at the moon. She wondered if Ollie was thinking of her, too? Was Ollie thinking of the potential of that kiss? Had her impression on his lips, on his fingers, become a solid place, like a mould of her around him, like his around her? As she lay there, just as she allowed her eyes to close, she could feel his mouth on hers, its weight, its beauty, its heat.

She woke suddenly, thinking it must be late and Papa must be calling her to church. She had heard a gruffness in her dream. The window was still lit by moonlight, though, and she looked toward her alarm clock and saw she had been asleep for only half an hour. She could hear voices. Not another argument, she thought. Rohan and Papa were constantly trying to instill their own sense of what a man should be into each other, and it was tiresome for the rest of them. She sat up to listen again, thinking that perhaps she could stop it. But it was not her father’s voice. Then she remembered Bill. Oh, God, Rohan, she thought. She stood up and went to her door, standing behind it. She could hear Bill’s voice and Rohan’s. They were talking at the same
time, louder, then softer, then louder. It was almost like singing. She turned the door handle gently. The house was Edwardian, and the fixtures had not changed since they were first put there eighty years before. The door rattled, and the voices quieted immediately. She had forgotten to lock the door, so it eased itself open, sliding gently across the anaesthetic carpet.