Offcomer Page 11

  And on the walls, her pictures. A few had fallen down, slid between the divan bed and the wall or behind the chest of drawers. They left torn scraps of paper on the wall, and blobs of blu-tack which had stained the wallpaper with grease. Many more were still stuffed into her old art file. A corner of it projected from behind the wardrobe. Mostly GCSE stuff, some sixthform. Nothing later. Inky outcrops, tangled roots, torn and twisted stubborn moorland trees. Claire had known what they would be without looking at them. But by her mirror, pinned with a single thumbtack, one sketch had curled up around itself. She couldn’t remember what the picture was, or when she had drawn it, or why she had not blu-tacked it out flat like the rest of the pictures. She had held it flat with the palm of her hand. Ink-and-wash. Yellowish skin, heavy lidded eyes, close-pressed little face: hers. It gave nothing away.

  And now she lay awake, aware of the muddle of the room around her, listening to the sounds of her parents’ evening ritual. The same ever since Dad came home. The TV was silenced, then she heard her mother’s voice. Then the sound of opening and shutting doors, the toilet flush, a creak and sigh of bedsprings, and the house was silent.

  She rolled over onto her belly, pressing herself down into the cool sheet, the solid yielding mattress. Her body remembered the weight and press of Paul’s body, the smell of his skin, and the dark. She slipped her hand down, past the elastic waist of her pyjamas, underneath the smooth cotton of her pants. She slipped her fingertips into the wet.

  From the moment she had woken, the sky had been thick with cloud, the skylight drumming with rain. Downstairs, the house was muggy and hot, the coal fire consuming, it seemed, more than its fair share of the front room’s air. Claire, heaped in the armchair, half watching a mid-morning cookery programme, felt sluggish and achy, but knew she couldn’t leave the room: to go upstairs would only elicit comment, would mean her mother could follow and corner her there. But she knew, nonetheless, that this could not be avoided forever. Her mother was populating the house with silences so pertinent and direct that sooner or later Claire would be obliged to fill one of them. She’d have to say something and “I don’t want to talk” would never do. It wasn’t allowed. But what could she say that her mother would actually hear? I cut myself. I keep on cutting myself. I fucked someone I shouldn’t have. I came home because I thought it would help. I thought I might find something here, I don’t know what, and now I can’t help thinking I was wrong. Her mother wouldn’t want to hear it, probably wouldn’t even be able to hear it. Too much like I need help, and I need help wasn’t allowed. So she’d have to put up with I don’t want to talk. She’d have to lump it.

  The fire spat as water dripped down the chimney. Claire reached over, lifted the newspaper from the coffee table, shook it flat, scanned the headlines. Arms extended to full stretch, she turned the page, folded it, shook it out again. Belfast was splattered all over the broadsheet. Features, analysis, comment. She turned the pages awkwardly, slowly, searched the print with a new eagerness. It would begin to cohere; it would be in there somewhere.

  “Claire,” her mother called from the hall door.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you come and give me a hand?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m just in the middle—”

  “It won’t take a moment.”

  “I’ll just finish—”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “But—”

  “Claire.”

  “Okay.” She dropped the paper, gave her father a quick smile. “Coming.” She followed her mother up the hallway. “What is it?”

  Her mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, the old photograph album on her knees.

  “I thought we would look at these. We never get a chance nowadays. Come and see.”

  She patted the bed beside her, sending ripples through the duvet. Claire sat down. There would be questions, sooner or later. She knew they were coming. This was just a tactic. They would look at the pictures and she would soothe Claire with the familiar rhythm of the stories and names, and then just when Claire felt safe she would slip in an apparently innocent enquiry and suddenly Claire would be spot-lit, paralysed, gaping.

  Her mother spoke softly, turning the pages. The family stories twisted out like long pale roots growing into the dark. Claire sat, watching, listening, responding, filling in the gaps too quickly, leaving her mother no space to shift tack. She pointed to a photograph. Two little boys in football boots and shorts so big that they had to be held up with belts. The bigger one had his arm around the smaller boy’s shoulders. Her mother said, “That’s Ben and Sam, Aunty May’s little boys.”

  But it was Great Uncle Sid and Granddad.

  “Brought up Jewish, not like me.”

  That went with the picture of Aunty May. Not with the picture of the little boys. The boys were Granddad and Great Uncle Sid. Granddad and Great Uncle Sid played football. They had muddy knees. Great Uncle Sid had his arm round Granddad’s shoulder. Granddad had a front tooth missing.

  “They lived in Whitechapel round the time of the Fascist marches.”

  It was Great Uncle Sid and Granddad. Of course it was. It always had been.

  “That’s my Great Uncle Sid and Granddad,” Claire said.

  A pause.

  “No, no,” her mother said.

  Another pause. She glanced at her mother’s face. The older woman’s head was bent, her hair falling around her face, but Claire could see her cheeks were flushed, her eyes deliberately intent upon the page.

  “Oh,” Claire said. “Right.” She swallowed. “Must be my mistake.”

  They sat for a moment, saying nothing. Stories unravelled in Claire’s head, silently: Great Uncle Sid, forty-two, muddyknee’d and booted, studs slipping on a toppling chair and drifts of parlour curtains. And dot dot dot across the map from Godknowswhere to London, Great Granddad crosslegged on the back of a cart, a needle in his fist, a thread between his lips, his beard tucked into his collar. Two small boys squirming, crammed into the dark of a kitchen dresser, passed over.

  And then it struck her. She felt a sudden sickening lurch.

  “Who told you?” she asked.

  “Sorry?”

  It came out in a rush, uncensored.

  “That it’s Ben and Sam. Or Granddad and Great Uncle Sid for that matter. Who told you? You always said Granddad and Grandma died when you were little, so who told you the stories? Your foster-folks can’t have known anything.”

  “I just remember,” she said. “From when I was little.”

  “Ah,” Claire said, her jaw tight, catching the flow of words back. “Right.” She felt her heart beat thickly in her chest. Deliberately, she pressed her fingertip down on the paper beside the photograph.

  “Go on,” she said. “What happened next?”

  Her mother breathed in shakily. “Nothing at all …” she began. She spoke quickly, leaving no space for Claire to comment, and did not look up. She turned the pages breathlessly. Claire sat in silence, watching the images as they flickered past. Names and faces shifted and slid and as her mother’s stories twisted round her she thought she could detect other slips, other lapses, but couldn’t be quite sure. The stories melted, the pictures bleached themselves with uncertainty. If they weren’t who she said they were, who were these people? The photographs, with their shadows of Claire’s face, were of strangers now, looking at her with familiar eyes.

  Something else, however, had begun to make sense.

  “Why can’t Dad know we’re doing this?” she asked.

  Her mother hesitated a moment, did not look up.

  “It upsets him,” she said.

  “Right,” Claire said, and drew her lips back in a smile. She stood up, brushed her trousers down. “Well,” she said. “I’ll be off then.”

  The bed squeaked as she stood up. Her mother looked up at her, still flushed. Claire walked out, leaving the door open behind her.

  “Claire�
�”

  She unhooked her jacket from its peg by the back door. The latch grated noisily against the doorplate; her father called out something. She walked out into the rain. She would head up to the reservoir. It would be quiet there. Her feet slipped on the wet cobbles. The rain was cool on her face. She breathed.

  SIX

  Alan glanced at his watch for the fifth time in five minutes. The hands didn’t seem to have moved. They were still standing resolutely at a quarter to eleven. He sighed, glanced up at the telescreen timetable. It still showed, beside the number of the bus, the increasingly irritating phrase “On time.”

  Alan did not like bus stations, particularly at night. He felt very uncomfortable. The bench was metal and cold; he could feel it through the seat of his trousers. The air was dirty with smoke and over-use. Three seats down from him a wino slept, wrapped in a dirty parka. The smell of sweated alcohol and old clothes made Alan’s nostrils quiver. Alan stared anxiously at the shiny dirt of the sleeper’s jeans, the battered trainers, the way he shivered in his sleep. At any moment he might wake up and start hassling him for money.

  The coach was already fifteen minutes late and there had been no announcements. He could well be stuck there all night. Part of him hoped that he would be; or at least for an hour or so, so that he would have a good reason to feel angry. He could not believe he had agreed to meet her there. What had possessed him? What was the point? There were plenty of taxis lined up on Glengall Street; he had passed them on the way in. It wasn’t as if they were lurking there to take unsuspecting English girls hostage. She could have jumped in a cab, told them the address and she would have got to the flat in five minutes, ten minutes, tops. Right now, he would have been reclining comfortably on the sofa with a cup of tea and a Jaffa Cake watching The Clive Anderson Show. Instead, he had had to perch on this cold metal bench for a quarter of an hour, staring down the concourse of the stuffy, grimy bus station, expecting at any moment to be asked for ten pence for a cup of tea.

  Headlights swept the dark tarmac. The coach rounded the corner, swung across the forecourt, and pulled up at Gate 17. The engine shut off with a rattle. Alan stood up reluctantly, not sure if he should feel relieved or even more annoyed. He walked slowly over towards the automatic doors, careful not to get close enough to make them slide open. It was cold outside. He didn’t want to stand waiting in a draught. The coach door hissed open and the driver jumped down. He walked along the flank of the bus and swung open the boot. He began lobbing out bags and suitcases, tartan shopping-bags on wheels, rucksacks. Alan watched the passengers get off. A young couple with a baby, a dribble of elderly unsteady women, and some scruffy, denimed student-types. They all gathered round the side of the bus, picking through the baggage. Then, through the curved coach windscreen, he saw Claire coming down the steps. She walked out onto the tarmac. She seemed unsteady on her feet, she looked frail. He realised suddenly that he was surprised by her. She had managed, somehow, to seem unfamiliar. She was smaller than he had remembered. She was slender. Delicate even. He had never noticed before. If she wasn’t his girlfriend already, he realised, he would have fancied her.

  She stood at the back of the crowd, waiting for her bags. Alan watched her slim straight back for a minute, then glanced at his watch again. They would be there all night if she didn’t push her way through. The young couple were already strapping their baby into its push-chair, the old ladies were navigating their way through the crowd, their bags bumping and knocking against shins, and a couple of the younger lot had hitched their rucksacks up onto their backs and were marching off down towards the taxi rank. The crush was clearing and still Claire stood there, waiting. Why didn’t she shove past the others and grab her bags? There would be no taxis left at this rate. He drummed his fingers against his thighs, frowned, rocked back on his heels. Finally, she moved forward. He watched her thread her way between the remaining passengers, towards the driver. Alan didn’t hear her speak, but she must have said something because the driver smiled at her. He was, Alan noticed, quite young. He lifted up a rucksack and held it out towards her. He spoke and she came closer and turned her back to him. He held the weight of the bag as she slipped the straps up over her arms. She said something over her shoulder to him and the man laughed. Alan took a step forward. The electric doors slid open with a blast of cold air. Claire glanced over. She saw him. She smiled. She bent and picked up two more bags from the tarmac and spoke again to the driver. This time Alan heard the words:

  “Thank you. Goodnight.”

  And she turned, started to head for the doors.

  As she came towards him, the last grains of his ambivalence crumbled away. He suddenly realised, for the first time, that she was, in fact, beautiful. The idea was startling, even terrifying. Even that evening nearly a year ago, when she had taken off her clothes for him to draw her, when she was utterly new and unknown to him, he hadn’t really thought that she was beautiful. He had wanted her, right enough, but that was different. Perhaps, he thought, he’d been so focused on his thesis that he’d been unable to look past it, and see her properly. Perhaps her spell at home had refreshed and revitalised her, and she actually looked better than she used to. Perhaps she had lost weight. Alan couldn’t be sure, but from the moment he knew that she was beautiful, he was filled with an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation. A lurking, inexplicit terror. It made his teeth ache and his skin crawl. From that moment on, he was never quite rid of it. He never quite identified it. He never even really thought about it. It didn’t occur to him that he might be jealous.

  As she walked towards him, upright beneath the weight of her rucksack and bags, a small smile played on her lips, and Alan watched the way her hips swayed, and felt that it was intended for the bus driver’s appreciation, and that her smile was just a little too self-satisfied. So she thought that he wouldn’t notice. She thought that she could fool him. Anger suddenly bubbled up inside him like indigestion. How dare she, right in front of him, flirt with a bus driver? Had she no standards at all? And who else had she been flirting with while he was out of the way? His stomach lurched; he felt hot. What if it wasn’t just flirting. What if she had really taken advantage of their time apart. What if she had been seeing someone else. What if she had slept with someone else. What if she had been fucking all round her? He felt his face burn. All the ignorant hamfaced yokels from the village. Shit on their shoes and accents like treacle. Hung like horses, too, probably. He gritted his teeth. His head began to throb. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t.

  She stopped in front of him. She dropped the bags down on the cigaretty floor. He kissed her angrily and quickly on the lips.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.” Her skin, he noticed, looked pale yellow in the artificial light. There were shadows underneath her eyes.

  “Long journey,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He glared at her, then looked angrily away. Even washed-out with travelling, she was beautiful. “Come on,” he said. “There’ll be no cabs left.”

  She picked up her bags and followed him down the concourse.

  Mum and Dad had taken her to the Blackpool Illuminations. An autumn evening with a heaving dark sky. The gale had buffeted the little car. She had sat in the back gazing up at the coloured bulbs as they swung and rattled in the wind. She had felt safe and warm and proud of the brave, fragile lights that looked as if at any moment they might break themselves against each other, but always managed not to.

  When they turned inland and the multi-coloured bulbs were replaced by orange streetlamps, white-lit windows, traffic-lights, Claire was melted by a vision of completion. The world, containing her, her mother and father, their little metal car, the bright lights, the dark, the wind, and Blackpool there every day of the year, seemed suddenly whole and meaningful. She felt expansive and alive, as if she could wrap herself around everything. She felt suddenly happy, and at home.

  The sensation had faded gradually as they left the bright town and suburbs behind them,
and began the long drive in the dark. She had woken as the car turned into the driveway and stopped, a vague and anxious ache all that was left of her revelation.

  The ache, but not the memory, returned as she sat in the back of the black taxi, looking out at the new city. After the rural dark of home, Belfast seemed brilliant with light. The cab sped them through pools of music, gusts of noise. A fluorescent strip spelt out the name Dempseys. Red dots formed the letters of a message and scrolled away before Claire could read it. A car passed them, windows down. Claire didn’t hear the music but felt the visceral throb of the bassline. Along the pavements, underneath the brown-leafed trees, people were walking, talking, dressed as though this were Italy, and June. Ahead, high up, a giant telescreen flickered. They were past it before she could put the images together into sense.

  Alan was staring out of the window. She could only see the back of his head, his pale neck as he leaned round, away from her. He hadn’t spoken a word to her since they left the bus station. He would tell her, sooner or later, what she’d done. She didn’t like the wait, but it was better than the row that would inevitably follow.

  “How are you?” she asked tentatively.

  “Fine.”

  So he wouldn’t even speak to her. And she knew that if she spoke she’d only wind him up even more. She leaned back in the seat, caught herself mid-sigh. The engine’s rattle dropped as the driver slowed and shifted down a gear.

  The road faded left, up a slight incline. As they passed, she glimpsed a Spar sign, a railway station, a Salsa club. There were trees. Some thick trunks, some slender, surrounded by a protective metal mesh. Lime trees, Claire guessed, by the shape of them. And more cafés, more bars. As the taxi slowed to turn she looked through the bright-lit window of a crowded restaurant and saw an elegant grey-haired woman sipping on a slender cigar. The woman glanced towards the window, smiled. For a moment Claire thought that she was smiling at her. She smiled back, then realised that the glass, lit brighter on the inside, would reflect. The woman was smiling to herself.