Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

In the coach, aware of her reflection in the window from time to time when the scenery was dun enough behind to make a mirror out of it, Hilary sat up very straight. She and Sheila had practised with one another, remembering never to lapse into the crumpled unawareness that smote their mother if ever for a moment she left off being busy. She was almost always busy. She had driven Hilary in to catch her coach that morning only because she had to go in to Cambridge anyway, to buy replacement school shorts and other uniform from Eaden Lilley for the boys. The boys had larked around in the back seats of the ropy old Bedford van that was their family transport, kicking at each other’s shins and dropping to wriggle on their bellies about the floor, so that their mother — who drove badly anyway, with grindings of the gears and sudden brakings — spent the whole journey deploring fruitlessly, and peering to try and locate them in the rear-view mirror. She had taken to wearing dark glasses when she went anywhere outside her home, to cover up the signs of her palsy. She stopped the van on Parker’s Piece and had to get out to open the door on Hilary’s side because the handle was broken. Hilary had a vivid idea of how her mother must appear to strangers: the sticking-up hair and dark glasses and the worn once-good coat she never had time to button up; her jerky burrowing movements, searching for money or lists in bags or under the van seats; her cut-glass enunciations, without eye contact, of bits of sentences that never became any whole message. When Hilary walked away with her suitcase to take her place in the little huddled crowd of waiting travellers she wouldn’t look to see if any of them had been watching.

Bristol bus station was a roaring cavern: everything was greasy and filthy with oil, including the maimed pigeons. Green double-decker city buses reversed out of the bays and rumbled off, important with illumination, into the evening. A whole day’s light had come and gone on the journey. Hilary looked excitedly for Sheila while she shuffled down the aisle on the coach. She wasn’t worried that she couldn’t see her right away. ‘Whatever you do don’t go off anywhere,’ Sheila had instructed her. ‘Stay there till I come.’

Someone waited slouching against the metal railing while she queued for her suitcase, then stepped forward to confront her when she had it: a young man, short and soft-bodied, with lank light brown hair and a half-grown beard, wearing a pinstriped suit jacket over jeans. He also had bare feet, and black eye make-up.

— Are you Hilary?

He spoke with a strong northern accent.

Hilary felt the disapproving attention of the blue-rinsed knitting lady, focused on his make-up and his feet. She disdained the disapproval, even though in the same instant she judged against the man with Culvert passionate finality. ‘What an unappealing little dwarf of a chap,’ she thought, in her mother’s voice. Of course her thought didn’t show. To him she would look only like the sum of what she was outwardly: pale with bad skin, fatally provincial, frightened, with girls’ school gushing manners.

— Yes.

— Sheila couldn’t be here. She’s unwell. You have to come with me.

He swung away without smiling or otherwise acknowledging her; he had only ever looked perfunctorily in her face, as if he was checking basics. She had to follow after him, out through the bus station back entrance into a twilit cobbled street and then up right beside a high grim wall that curved round to join a busier road. The tall buildings of a hospital with their lighted windows rose sobering and impassive against the evening sky, where the murky day in its expiring was suddenly brilliantly deep clear blue, studded already with one or two points of stars. The man walked ahead and Hilary followed, hurrying, struggling with her suitcase, three or four steps behind. The suitcase was an old leather one embossed with her grandfather’s intials; he had taken it to ecumenical conferences in the thirties. Because the clasps were liable to spring open she had fastened an elastic Brownie belt around it.

Unwell! Unwell was the word they had to use to the games mistress at school when they weren’t having showers because they had a period. Hilary saved the joke up to amuse Sheila. Then she was flooded with doubt; why had she followed this rude man so obediently? She should have at least questioned him, asked him where Sheila was and what was wrong with her. Sheila had told her to wait, whatever happened, at the bus station. She opened her mouth to protest to him, to demand that he explain to her, and take a turn carrying the case. Then stubbornly she closed it again. She knew what a squeak would come out of it if she tried to attract his attention while she was struggling along like this. And if she put the case down and stopped she was afraid he’d go on without noticing she was no longer behind him, and then she would be truly lost in an unknown city, with nowhere to spend the night, and certainly not enough money to pay for anywhere. She could perhaps have hired a taxi to take her to Sheila’s hall of residence, although she wasn’t sure what that would cost either. She had never been in a taxi in her life, and would never have the courage to try and signal to one. And what if Sheila wasn’t at the hall of residence?

Pridefully she marched on, though her breath was hurting in her chest and her hand without its glove — they were somewhere in her shoulder bag but she couldn’t stop to find them — was freezing into a claw on the case handle. Her arm felt as if it was being dragged from her shoulder. It wasn’t clothes that made her case heavy, but some books Sheila had asked her to bring. Every forty paces — she began to count — she swapped her case and shoulder bag from hand to hand, and that gave a few moments of relief. She fixed her eyes on the back of the rumpled pinstriped jacket. Once or twice, on the zebra crossings, he looked back to check for her. Luckily his bare feet seemed to slow him down somewhat, probably because he had to keep an eye out for what he might be walking in. There were quite a few people on the streets, even though the shops were closed; sometimes he held back to let a crowd go by, perhaps because he was afraid of someone stepping on his toes. Perversely Hilary started slowing down too whenever this happened. She was damned now if she wanted to catch up with him. Even if he stopped to wait for her, now, she thought that she would stop too and wait, as if the distance between them had become a fixed relationship, an invisible rigid frame of air connecting them and holding them apart in the same grip.

She thought she recognised the streets that they were walking through. When their father had driven Sheila over with her things at the start of the autumn term, Hilary had come with them; she had wanted to be able to picture where Sheila was, when she wasn’t at home. This shopping area was on a hill behind the city centre: it had seemed lively and fashionable, with tiny boutiques, cafés, a department store whose long glass windows were stuck with brown and yellow paper leaves. She had seen Sheila taking it all in from her front seat in the van, satisfied with her choice, impatient to be left alone to explore. At home they could only ever get lifts in to Cambridge every so often, and anyway their shopping there was dogged by waiting parents, ready with ironic comments on whatever the girls chose to buy with their money. Dimly in the dusk now, Hilary could see the Victorian Gothic university tower where it ought to be, over to her right. Manor Hall residence where Sheila had a room should be somewhere off to the left, up past a little triangle of green grass. The pinstriped jacket struck off left, and Hilary was relieved. They must arrive soon, and she would be able to put her case down, and be rid of her dreadful companion.