Notes from an Exhibition (33 page)

‘Christ you’re only fifteen and you sound about forty-five.’

‘Sorry,’ he said.

She ran a hand through his hair to show she hadn’t meant it. ‘Maybe Hed can drop you back. I want to dance some more then we might head over to the Lizard. Spencer’s heard there’s a bit of a party happening on someone’s farm down by Mullion.’

‘Can I come?’

‘No way. If you don’t like this, you’d be completely miserable and a right pain.’

‘So where’s Hed, then?’

‘I dunno. He danced a bit but I don’t know where he is now. Shazz, have you seen Hedley?’ she asked a girl who had just left one of the catty cars and had paused on her way back inside to light her cigarette off Morwenna’s.

The girl glanced at Petroc then glanced at him again, in a way that made him feel as if he needed more clothes on. ‘He was going in the barn,’ she said. ‘Last time I saw him.’

Morwenna gasped because the only reason anyone went in the barn was to have sex. Everyone knew that, which was one of the reasons Bettany had led Petroc into the woods instead. ‘Who did he go in with?’ she asked.

Shazz shrugged, taking a deep drag. She fired the smoke out through her nose in a way that must have taken weeks of practice. ‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Think he was on his own,’ and she headed indoors.

Morwenna had started shivering. ‘I’ll be inside if you can’t find him,’ she said. ‘I suppose we could always drop you off on our way, if Spence hasn’t filled the car with his pet idiots …’ She followed Shazz inside, already rocking her hips to ‘I Wanna Wake Up With You’.

One of the pet idiots honked the car horn making Petroc
jump, which was absurd given all the other noises going on. He had to get away. He had never been good at waiting. One of the few things he disliked about coming from a largish family was the seeming impossibility of leaving anywhere fast, the second you’d decided to go. If he worried about the relative solitude he would face once Hedley as well as Morwenna had left home for good, he cheered himself by remembering how much more quickly he and Antony and Rachel could leave the house. Hed was a notorious last-minute changer of clothes and brusher of teeth.

What people meant by
the barn
was not the newer, open-sided one where straw was stored but a long, low, stone building which had fallen into disuse and disrepair, having no opening wide enough to admit a tractor with ease. An uneven flight of stone steps led up one end to the doorway that gave on to the old hayloft, a first storey whose treacherous boards spanned roughly a third of the building. In the cavernous space beneath lay stacks of plastic potato trays, a battle-scarred three-piece suite and several straw bales. The Youngs’ old machinery still produced small, rectangular bales when everyone else was making the round ones that were too heavy for a man to carry.

Petroc had only ever looked in by daylight, excited and curious because this was a building whose reputation had reached him in school even before Morwenna decided to outrage their parents by casually taking up with the least suitable boy with the same postcode. There was old straw everywhere, inches deep, a heaven for mice and a hell for hay-fever sufferers. The doorway from the hayloft was letting in some moonlight so that even in the relative gloom of the lower room he could make out quite a lot once his
eyes had adjusted to it. He could see or hear nobody and he realized that the place’s reputation was probably a horny schoolkid’s myth because not even a drunken idiot would have smoked in such a powder keg and any fool knew that most people liked to smoke after sex.

‘Hed?’ he said softly, anticipating the rustle of hastily rearranged clothes. But there was no response, just the competing musics from down the track and the revving of Spencer’s customized Fiesta. There was a wooden ladder leaning against the edge of the hayloft floor. He tested it gingerly – most things being rotten in this place – and found it sound so took a few steps up to peer into the upper level. ‘Hedley?’ he said.

They were standing in the hayloft doorway with their backs to him, smoking a joint. It wouldn’t have seemed a scene any different from the other little glimpses Petroc had been catching all evening, only instead of passing Hedley the joint bloke to bloke, Troy held it out for him, obliging Hed to lean forward slightly to suck at it. Moving forward slightly to take a drag, Hed stepped closer into the moonlight, revealing that he had nothing on below his T-shirt.

Until that moment, Petroc had been thinking to join them to cash in on the fun; he disliked the taste of alcohol but was curious about the effects of dope. So he was on the point of stepping off the ladder on to the hayloft floor when he saw he was an intruder and began to back off.

Troy saw him, however, and muttered something to Hedley who spun round then lurched down to the floor in search of his jeans and underwear, comically trying to keep himself decent with his shirtfront as he fumbled for them.

‘Hey!’ he stammered. ‘We were just…’

‘It’s fine, Hed,’ Petroc said. ‘It’s cool. I’m probably going to …’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Sure. I’m … Look, I’m heading home, that’s all. Catch you later.’

He backed down the ladder as fast as he could. He was flustered at first, of course and could feel his face burning. Walking out of the barn and across the farmyard and out to the lane, he avoided meeting anyone’s eye because he wasn’t sure what he might say. It was like when someone forgot to lock the bathroom door and you came suddenly face to face with them wiping their bum or shaving their legs; you couldn’t help blundering in and they weren’t doing anything wrong in there but it was impossible to say who was more embarrassed and it was equally impossible to know what to say. If you said nothing and just ran away it implied you’d seen something unspeakable and bad, which was stupid, but if you just stood there and started speaking there was the danger it would turn into a conversation in which one of you was naked or inserting a tampon or something.

Once he reached the soothing darkness of the lane, however, and the music and sounds of people were beginning to recede, he slowed his pace and realized what he had just seen was a good thing. He found it hard to talk to Hedley about emotional stuff and this would spare them the necessity of an awkward conversation. He had guessed Hedley was gay weeks ago. A dim suspicion had been confirmed when Hed came back from Italy without once mentioning Italian girls, who were, after all, half the
point of going there. In the seconds before he’d realized Petroc was watching him, Hedley had looked blissed-out which was good to see because he had been prickly and faultfinding, a bit of an old poof in fact, ever since he’d got back from abroad.

Petroc wondered if his brother and Troy had been doing their thing at the same time as he and Bettany had and then wondered if, by some miracle of synchronicity, Morwenna and Spencer had also been making out then, in the back of Spencer’s car or even, like proper grown-ups, on Spencer’s bed directly over the blare of the party. The idea of the three of them yards and yards apart but somehow linked by shared experience led to him unthinkingly doing what he had been taught to do in Meetings for Worship, holding each of them in turn, each pair, in the light of his mind.

He had compared notes with Morwenna once about what they did in Meeting and discovered that she imagined herself sort of holding the person in a warm light beam that fell on them from above. There wasn’t any setting as such, she said, just soft darkness and, in the middle of it, this healing light. And her task, as she saw it, in praying for someone, was to use her mind like a sort of tractor beam in
Star Trek
, to hold the person at the centre of that light, almost as if she was toasting them on a Bunsen burner only it came down instead of up and did the opposite of hurting them. Somehow his version was completely different. There was still light – they’d had the same Sunday School teacher, after all – but there was a room, a totally blank box of a room, about the person. It wasn’t much bigger than a lift and the light
came from the walls of the room and the floor and ceiling and he had to make it bright enough to light the person until there were no shadows. What he didn’t tell Wenn was that, when he prayed for people, they had always seemed to be naked, even Rachel and Antony. Not in a sexy way but like naked people in old paintings, where the nakedness was sort of truthful and a sign of vulnerability and innocence. When he pictured a couple naked, it made him feel protective towards them, as if they were children, made it seem less pushy to be praying for them without their knowledge or permission.

So it was quite natural to picture him and Bettany, who admittedly he found stayed rather blurred and in the shadows. He felt guilty and left himself out of the picture and tried, more successfully, to picture her on her own, sucking rum and Coke from a can and dancing a brave, self-involved dance, her eyes shut and her expression as open as when she had been rocking and riding earlier.

Then he pictured Hed and Troy kissing. But that was hard to do so he pictured Hed on his own, just happy, very happy, and relaxed and unHedleyish, as if a Hedley-shaped suit of armour had finally been lifted off him to reveal the real Hedley underneath, sexy and cheeky and not so worried about what people thought.

Then there was Morwenna, doing a dance for Spencer or maybe just for herself, with her hands snaking up above her head and smiling to herself as though she knew something good the rest of them would only find out later.

Praying for Garfield was difficult. It was hard to make him smile or relax as he seemed to care even more than
Hedley what people thought of him. He wanted to please so much it was almost painful. So Petroc concentrated on making the light so bright it almost blanked out Garfield’s expression and he made the light Rachel’s approval, which was what he sensed Garfield wanted best.

And this naturally led to thinking of Rachel and Antony. And they showed up in separate boxes because that was how they needed to be. So he made their light not just love and success but a kind of freedom too, from having to be parents and husbands and wives all the time. Seeing Antony on his own for once was a revelation. He was so practised at thinking of Antony as Rachel’s minder, her guard even, at thinking of him sometimes as the thing that held her back with pills and peace and Quakerly carefulness from being her own wild self, that it was startling to understand the truth might be the other way around and that it was her constraining Antony.

Petroc had reached the main road, almost without noticing how he got there. It was deserted, of course, but he still crossed with care as it was a notorious one for night-time accidents. Its hedges were regularly studded with improvised shrines of mouldering flowers and rain-soaked teddies. The dead were always young, all unproved potential and bad school photographs, tearing home from clubbing or a party. They were never the old and sensible.

Safely across the road he dived down the lane that led through Chyenhal to the edge of Paul. The first mile was one of his favourite stretches. Trees were rare in this bit of the world for some reason (like shallow soil or salty winds) but they thrived where the lane dipped around the edge of a damp valley for one magical stretch. They
formed a kind of roof there, touching branches in a sequence of overhead arches that was thrilling when you flew beneath it in a car and looked up, because you were torn excitingly between the impulse to look up and watch the tree roof flying overhead and the instinct to look ahead, even though you weren’t driving, to look out for what might be coming in the other direction.

By night, he saw, it became special in a different way. Your eyes soon adjusted to the darkness so that the trunks and branches showed black against the blue-black of the sky. Moving so much more slowly gave the trees time to form a room about you rather than just a roof. He walked in the very centre of the lane, looking up and about him and it was like walking through a natural church, full of the twitchings and rustlings of night animals and not remotely frightening as a real church in darkness might have been.

A car engine revved in the distance but this place felt so far removed that the main road might have lain on the other side of a pane of thickened, frosted glass. He found he had left all thoughts of family behind and, just as happened after the best Meetings, felt as though he had returned to his body to find it made new and doubly alert. He felt he could have sprung up a tree with the agility of a squirrel or flitted into the darkness beyond the hedges with the silent elegance of a moth. The engine sounded closer and he remembered he was no longer a virgin and would never be quite as young and naïvely aimless as he had been that afternoon.

Coming in 2012, the new novel by Patrick Gale.

Returning readers to the same beloved Cornish coastline as
Notes from an Exhibition
, Patrick Gale brings us
A Perfectly Good Man.