The Northern Clemency (25 page)

That was a bond, and so was where Andrew lived, at the top of Coldwell Lane. They got the same bus home, the fifty-one, and got off at the same stop. Once Francis had gone by slowly extracted invitation to Andrew’s, but it was a bit strange. His father worked at the university, and they lived in a big messy house at the end of an unmade and unlit road. It was dark and frightening to walk down that road, even with Andrew who did it every day, and there were shapes to either side that might be broken walls, or bushes moving of their own accord, or anything at all. Andrew you could normally get to do what you were going to do anyway—he had four elder sisters and another, Angela, a bit younger. But then, for once, walking down the unlit road, he had been a bit impatient with Francis. “Come on,” he said, “it’s just here.” The house was alarming; you couldn’t put it all in a van and move to another one. In every room there were books, even lining up sourly in the toilet, grey-backed and snobbish. It had no television, anywhere, and was crowded out with burst and broken furniture. The worst and dingiest of the furniture was in Andrew’s narrow room with its one well-ordered bookshelf; it had just ended up there, like the worn-out adult phrases he had had to learn, and came out with, surprising people. The five sisters, each with the same long black tangled hair and the same ugly pink glasses, the ones you got free from the optician, you
couldn’t tell them apart, except for their different sizes. Only mooning Angela, scowling hungrily at him: she made Francis nervous in a different way from the others, and so distinguished herself. There wasn’t much to play with, it turned out, and you had to get everything yourself—a glass of milk, that was all. Because Andrew’s mother, he said, suffered from depression and would be lying down upstairs.

So after that one time they went to Francis’s, and sat in his room upstairs. His mother brought them peanut-butter sandwiches, which Andrew had never had before, and sometimes, too, he stayed for tea, chattering through the stare Sandra kept giving him. “It’s warm in your house,” he said. “You don’t need your sweater on when you eat. I expect you’ve got central heating.”

“Yes, we do,” Francis’s dad said, amused.

“I expect,” Andrew went on, still addressing his remarks to Francis, “that’s because your dad works for the Electricity Board, doesn’t he?”

“Anyone can get central heating,” Francis’s dad explained. “You don’t need to have particular connections or anything.”

“We can’t, worse luck,” Andrew said. “You see, my dad, he works at the university, and he says that wood fires are more natural and self-sufficient, and when they drop the bomb or the coal runs out, you know.”

“And what’s your poor mother think about that?” Francis’s mother asked—the first snow of the winter had already fallen, and she sincerely hoped it wasn’t a sign of how things were going to be from now on.

“I don’t know what she thinks about that,” Andrew said. “To be honest. She’s mostly in bed, she’s got severe depression. Of course, we can’t all of us have baths every day. We’ve got a rota, on account of the hot water.”

“Poor soul,” Alice said, aghast, meaning his mother. “I don’t think you should be telling everyone about your mother. She might not like it.”

“It’s an illness just like any other,” Andrew said, repeating something and ending the discussion.

They were upstairs in Francis’s room after school when Francis raised the subject of the new and violent players of the game. Andrew didn’t say anything dismissive, as Susan had done. “I know,” he said. “I don’t like them either.”

“They’re Beaver Hateman,” Francis said, but he faltered a little bit, not just because there were already other Beaver Hatemans between the two of them, but because in this case, Beaver Hateman no longer did.

“I say, Francis,” Andrew said, although there were only the two of them there, “you know—before …” He paused, tactfully. It was a kindness in Andrew only to allude lightly, when Francis was in the room, to a time when Francis hadn’t been there; it was like, in reverse, a disinclination to refer openly to a future time, after a certain event, by relations about the sentient bed of a moribund, and Francis distinguished even between the kind and friendly on the oversensitive basis of those who, like Susan, say, frankly said “before you came here” and those who, like Andrew, stepped about it with delicate paraphrases.

“You know—before …” Andrew said, “… those were the same people who weren’t at all nice, not one bit, to me or Anthony. They used to throw bits of stuff at me in class—” He stopped. You could see the memory of some specific evolved cruelty, much repeated.

“But they don’t do it now,” Francis said, jollying him along. “They’ve stopped it now. They play the game with us. It’s all different.”

“Yes, they do. I’m not saying it’s not,” Andrew said. “But they only stopped when we started the game, like something they could see was fun. They’re only joining in because we’d got something and they couldn’t take it off us, so, you see—oh, I don’t know—” But Francis saw: it was the game which, in its splendour, like a performance, had risen up and protected Andrew as it had him, the players like a posse of protectors, and with this infiltration by the envious and the sharp decline in its prestige with the glamorous, unchanging propitiations of the Shirley Temple game, that protection was going altogether.

“I don’t want to play it any more,” Andrew said bravely. “I’d rather stay in and read.”

“You’re not allowed to,” Francis said, astonished at a terror he had never suspected could be more substantial and historically so much more deeply rooted than his own was, so thoroughly had Andrew kept it to himself. “You’ve got to go outside unless it’s really snowing hard or something.”

“I don’t care,” Andrew said. “I’ll hide in the cloakrooms and read.”

“It’ll make it worse in the end,” Francis said, conscious of the adult wisdom of this advice.

“I don’t care,” Andrew said again. “I don’t want to play any more with them. I don’t want to have to be friends with those people because they don’t like me at all. Timothy Glover, he’s really horrible.”

“He lives over there,” Francis said, looking out through the net curtains of his bedroom, facing the road, and the Glovers’ tidy house, thirty feet below on this sloping terrain.

“I know he lives there,” Andrew says. “He’s always on the bus coming home, isn’t he? He’s mental, he’s horrible, he’s a spastic—” and then, with little encouragement, Andrew, the only son among five plain daughters, embarked on a story of hair-raising obscenity and violence, what Timothy Glover was generally supposed to have done the summer before his tenth birthday. Francis had heard it before, somewhat less elaborated, and listened again, believing and not believing it; he did think Timothy Glover was mental and frightening. His whole family frightened him. He wished they didn’t have to live here, not exactly here.

“It’s teatime,” a voice came from downstairs. It was Francis’s mother. “Andrew, are you staying?” she went on, her voice coming up the stairs. “Andrew? Francis?”

The two looked at each other; Andrew made a fake-dread face, shaking his head. Francis, with the deliberate sense of being adult again, shrugged his shoulders.

There was a knock at the door, and Francis’s mother came in. “Are you staying for tea, Andrew?” she said; there was an affectionate tension in the way she avoided looking at Francis, and Francis remembered what Andrew once, spontaneously, had said, “She’s dead nice, your mum.” She was pleased that Francis, at least, had made friends so easily, she had said, when the compliment was relayed. And after that, it did seem to Francis as if it had been easy, however fragile the situation. “There’s plenty if you want to ring your mother. You’re very welcome, though it’s nothing special.”

“I ought to go home,” Andrew said, laying emphasis, however, on the “ought.”

“They won’t notice you aren’t there, with all those sisters of yours,” Francis’s mother said, but in a nice way. “It must be ever so noisy in your house.”

“It’s getting into the bathroom that’s a problem,” Andrew said.

He thought he’d better go home anyway, and got off the edge of the bed.

At the bottom of the stairs there was Francis’s sister. She was called Sandra, and she was always around. “It’s your little friend again,” she said to Francis, as he and Andrew came downstairs, but her scoffing was genuine, done in a miserable, jeering, envious tone. She was wearing a purple loose-knit sweater with a draping roll of a collar, spreading across half her shoulders like a moulded pudding that had lost its
shape; a pair of green Birmingham Bags, the square pockets at the side flapping against her thighs, her hair home-frizzed and bushy. She peered at Andrew, angrily, looking at him as if in investigation, closely; it was almost as if she had taken his head in her hands and was investigating the texture of his skin, her own being spotty and ruptured with splashes of dried blood where she’d picked at it. Andrew knew all about that; he’d seen it in his tartan-skirted sisters. “Yeah, OK,” she said in the end, and turned away.

“What do you do,” Francis said to his mother, when his father and sister were in the other room and Andrew had gone home, “if you don’t want to be friends with someone? And they won’t leave you alone?”

“I thought you liked Andrew,” his mother said, raising her head from the dining-table; she was looking over a pile of cut-out adverts and typed letters; she had a pen and a block of that list-making paper.

“I do,” Francis said, surprised. Then he saw the mistake she was making—he couldn’t see how she could even think that. He said, “I didn’t mean Andrew, he’s my best friend. He thinks the same as I do, about these people. He doesn’t like them but they won’t leave us alone.”

“Well, that’s flattering, really,” his mother said. “Why don’t you like them?”

“I don’t know,” Francis said.

“It’s often easier not to like people than to like them,” his mother said. “You should think about why you don’t like them. There’s always something to like about people. If you made a bit more of an effort, if you weren’t so picky, you’d end up with lots more friends. I’m not saying you don’t have friends, love, but …” She put the pen down on the half-finished important list, cast a glance at the door Sandra might be standing behind. He was surprised: he hadn’t known that his friendships or Sandra’s were of any interest to his mother. All the same, she was wrong: those people, they weren’t worth finding good in. “Tell me the whole story,” she said.

“It’s these other people,” he said. “There’s a game we play, and it was just us, but now there’s too many people playing it, and they’re not playing it properly, they don’t want to be friends with us. It was much better when it was just a few of us. I don’t like it now and Andrew doesn’t either.”

“Can’t you go and play your game in a different part of the playground?” his mother said. “Or tell them to go and play their own game?”

“No, they’d come and join in, and no one wants to tell them to go away,” Francis said.

“Well, I understand that,” his mother said. “It’s not always the easiest thing, to tell someone to go away. What about the teacher? Isn’t there a teacher there, on duty in the playground? Couldn’t you say to her that you want to play the game on your own, you don’t want them to be pushing in the whole time? What about that?”

Francis felt horrified, and it must have showed; he couldn’t begin to explain that participation in a game couldn’t be considered a matter falling within official or grown-up jurisdiction. The process of adult appeal, which seemed so simple and plausible to his mother, was inconceivable to Francis, and he felt somehow that he had sharply broken some convention even in mentioning the matter to her. “I don’t know,” he said eventually, then, trying to be helpful, said, “I suppose we could always find a different game to play, me and Andrew and the others,” thinking of the alluring Shirley Temple game, which, indeed, that day he had joined for the first time. But as if to confirm that his problems were, after all, laid out to the imperfect observation and understanding of his mother, she now gave an entertained snigger and said, “In any case, I was driving past the playground today and everyone seemed to be playing a big game of Ring-a-rosy. You’re a bit old to be playing that, anyway, I should have thought.”

It was painful, the apprehension of these several errors; the lumping in of the saucy and raucous vulgarity, so nearly adult in its humour, of the Shirley Temple game with something only known about as if from scholarly research, from classroom discussions, and in any case never played, in any case not called “Ring-a-rosy;” the idea that he was seeking escape from that game, rather than considering it a refuge; all these uncaring errors of his mother’s hit him because, really, she did care, she did understand, and was only putting on her adult voice for a moment. “It’ll be all right,” she said, yielding a little. “You’re lucky, anyway—you’ve only been there a couple of months and you’re picking and choosing what friends you have. I wish …” She cast another glance at the door. It was true; Francis didn’t feel overwhelmed with firm friends, but his sister, it seemed, didn’t have any yet. He didn’t see why that should be.

It was the next day when it all went wrong. In the morning before lunch old Barker went on about—what?—about the general election, about the Labour Party and why they’d won, about who she’d voted for, about her father, dead in the Stone Age, and something he’d said
once, about this woman they’d made leader of the others, the Conservatives, and something about a new broom—it was almost frightening, listening to her mad, insistent, triumphant voice going on, and you knew there was nothing you could say about it, no one you could say it to, that feeling that this was what you were getting when you were supposed to be learning things, this mad old woman going on, very pleased with herself, saying the first thing that came into her mind, and no way of interrupting her, either. He had his head down on the desk and, with the point of a pen, was tracing and retracing a deep gouge made long ago by some other victim. If you didn’t do something, anything, you might find yourself listening. It went on for fifty minutes, that voice, uninterrupted, insanely satisfied, and then suddenly stopped.