Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

Daniel was home by half past four. He’d been at Hathersage all day, pretty well; it had been a hot day, a perfect one. The pool was built on a hillside just outside the Derbyshire village. Surrounded by schoolmasterly red-brick walls, it was concrete and tile inside; outside were the Derbyshire hills, and the huge sky. If you hurled yourself from the highest diving board, you were horizontal for one moment, poised above the water, framed against the sky and hills. Perfect. He’d got there at ten, in the first bus of the morning, still empty; later buses were full of kids, as he said to himself. Barbara had been supposed to come, and he’d told her to meet him at the bus stop at the bottom of Coldwell Lane at nine, but she hadn’t been there when the bus came. He’d got on anyway; not a bad excuse to dump her, especially since she hadn’t been on the next bus.

He’d spent an hour thrashing up and down, throwing himself off the diving board in bold, untidy shapes, enjoying more the gesture and the moment of flight than anything else, and grinning when he surfaced after a bellyflop, his stomach red and stinging, joining in with the laughter of the girl lifeguard. By eleven or so another bus had arrived from Sheffield, much more full, and they came in; some he recognized from his school, three girls from his sister’s year, finding Daniel splendid in his exercise, brown limbs jumbled, the disconcerting swirl of his turquoise-patterned trunks, flying above the vivid oblong of water which shone with the Derbyshire blue of the sky. He’d met some friends and made some more; he always did. But in the end he went home on his own, hardly saying goodbye, burying his face in a bag of cheese and onion crisps from the machine.

The bus home, the three-thirty, was as empty as the morning bus had been – too early for most people – but with all that day’s exercise he ached, sitting at the front of the top deck. Ached, too, slumping up Coldwell Lane when the bus let him off; it was uphill all the way, and just a bit too far; his black sports bag, the one he used for school, banged away in the heat at his bony hips. Half enjoying his exhaustion, groaning as he slouched up the hill, he almost expected Barbara to be sitting on the wall outside their house. Perhaps crying.

There seemed to be nobody in the house. Daniel was terribly hungry; he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, apart from the crisps. He went through to the kitchen, dropping his bag in the middle of the hall, and went through the cupboards and the fridge, banging the doors as he went. He poured himself some vividly orange squash; it was always too weak and watery when your mother made it for you, and he liked it about one part to three. In a few minutes, he’d got the stuff for a magic sandwich together, and sat down with a breadknife, contentedly putting it together and eating the constituent parts individually as he went.

‘That looks revolting,’ Jane said, opening the kitchen door. She must have been in the garden.

‘You don’t have to eat it,’ Daniel said, putting the sandwich spread on awkwardly with the breadknife. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I bet you had some chips in Hathersage,’ Jane said. She put down her notebook and pen on the table. He noticed that her dress was stained with grass.

‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘What’ve you been doing? Writing poetry?’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Where’s Tim?’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘I only just came in. You know Jason in my year? Him and his brother Matthew were out on the crags a week ago and he said to me, “I saw your sister. And she was sitting on a rock and gazing at the landscape and guess what she was doing? She was making notes in her little book.” Making notes.’ He broke into hilarity.

Jane flushed, picked up her notebook and hugged it to her. ‘I couldn’t care less what someone like that says about anything I do,’ she said. ‘Whoever he is.’ She knew who he was: they’d thrown a stone at her.

‘Making notes, though,’ Daniel said, subsiding. ‘It was dead funny.’ He leant back in his chair, took a satisfied look at the complex sandwich he’d put together, with ham and sandwich spread, cheese and salad cream, all bursting out from the sides, then took an enormous bite. Much of it fell out, splattering his red shiny shorts and his brown legs.

‘That’s disgusting,’ Jane said. ‘You know what? Dad came home this lunchtime.’

There was a noise from upstairs, a little thud and a door opening – Tim coming downstairs. ‘I thought he’d gone out,’ Jane said. ‘I haven’t seen him all day.’

‘Upstairs reading his snake books,’ Daniel said. ‘He’s made himself a sandwich, though.’ He nodded at the mess on the work surface. ‘He’ll not have been starving.’

‘That was me,’ Jane said. ‘I was saying, I thought you’d gone out.’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘I was upstairs in my room. Can I have a sandwich?’

‘Make it yourself,’ Daniel said. ‘Upstairs with your snake books?’

‘Yes,’ Tim said, and then, in a singing tone, ‘Do you know—’

‘Probably not,’ Daniel said.

‘Do you know what the most venomous snake in the world is?’

‘No,’ Jane said, with a feeling she’d been asked this before.

‘Lots of people would say the cobra or the rattlesnake. But it’s not. It’s the inland Taipan. It can get up to eight feet long. If it bites you you’re bound to die. It’s brown, it’s called Oxy, Oxyripidus something. Oxyripidus – Oxy – I’m almost remembering it—’

‘Where’s it live?’ Daniel said.

‘Australia,’ Tim said.

‘Just so long as it doesn’t live near me,’ Daniel said.

‘It wouldn’t hurt you,’ Tim said. ‘It’s quite timid, really. It would avoid you and it’s probably more scared of you than you would be of it. You wouldn’t have to worry about it even if you were in Australia. Most people think snakes would attack you but they wouldn’t, really. They only bite if they’re in danger. I like snakes. I wish I could have one. Do you think if I asked they’d let me have a snake in my bedroom? I’d keep it in a glass case. I wouldn’t let it out and it wouldn’t have to be venomous – or not very.’

‘What do you mean, “if” you asked?’ Daniel said. ‘You ask them all the time, about once a week, and they always say no. You’re not getting the most venomous snake in the world to keep under your bed. Face facts.’

‘I’d save up,’ Tim said, reciting his case stolidly on one note, ‘and I’d pay for it myself. I wouldn’t want an inland Taipan – I wouldn’t want any venomous snake, really. And I’d buy the mice with my pocket money. They don’t need to eat very often, it wouldn’t be expensive. I wish I could have a snake. It’s not fair.’

‘I dare say,’ Jane said. ‘Go and make yourself a sandwich or something. I’m going to watch the telly.’

‘There’s nothing on,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s rubbish.’

‘It’s better in the holidays,’ Tim said. ‘There’s stuff on in the mornings. For children.’

‘It’s still rubbish.’

‘This boy told me a joke,’ Tim continued with his dull reciting voice, though the subject had changed.

‘What boy?’ Daniel said.

‘This boy I know,’ Tim said.

‘You haven’t seen anyone for five weeks,’ Daniel said.

‘Yes, I have,’ Tim said, not crossly, but setting things right. ‘I saw Antony last week. We went to the library.’

‘Did smelly Antony tell you a joke?’ Jane said incredulously. Tim occasionally gave the impression of a rich and varied social life once out of sight of his family, but Antony was its only visible representative. They’d all concluded, with different degrees of worry or amusement, that Antony, a boy as pale and quiet as a whelk, was not the tip of some festive iceberg but probably Tim’s best or only friend.