Tessa Hadley - Sunstroke and Other Stories

— There’s no hot water, Sheila said. — This is a squat: what did you think? Everyone goes into the halls to bathe. We’re lucky to have electricity: one of the guys knew how to reconnect it. You could ask Neil for the electric kettle. What do you want hot water for anyway?

— I thought you might like a wash. I thought I could put some things in to soak.

— Don’t worry about it. I’ll wash in the morning. We can take all this stuff to the launderette later.

Although they had always lived so close together in the forced intimacy of the vicarage, where there was only one lavatory and fractious queues for the bathroom in the mornings, the sisters had been prudish in keeping their bodily functions hidden from one another. This was partly in scalded reaction to their mother, who poked curiously in the babies’ potties to find swallowed things, and delivered sanitary towels to the girls’ room with abandoned openness, as if she didn’t know that the boys saw. They had even always, since they stopped being little girls, undressed quickly with their backs turned, or underneath their nightdresses. It was a surprise how small the step seemed, once Hilary had taken it, over into this new bodily intimacy of shared secret trouble and mess. Sheila’s pains, she began to understand, had a rhythm to them: first a strong pang, then a pause, then a sensation as if things were coming away inside her. After that she might get ten or fifteen minutes’ respite. When the pain was at its worst, Hilary rubbed her back, or Sheila gripped her hand and squeezed it, hard and painfully, crushing the bones together.

— Damn, damn, damn, she swore in a sing-song moan while she rocked backwards and forwards; tears squeezed out of her shut eyes and ran down her cheeks.

— Are you sorry? Hilary said, humbled.

— How could I possibly be sorry? Sheila snapped. — You think I want a baby ?

She said the pains had begun at three in the afternoon. She told Hilary at some point that if they were still going on in the morning they would have to call an ambulance and get her into hospital: she explained in a practical voice that women could haemorrhage and die if these things went wrong. By ten o’clock, though, the worst seemed to be over. There hadn’t been any bad pains for over an hour, the bleeding was almost like a normal period. When Neil came upstairs Sheila wanted a cup of tea and a hot-water bottle.

— You’ll have to take Hilary out, she told him, — and buy her something to eat.

Hilary had eaten some sandwiches on the coach at lunchtime. She hadn’t had anything since then; she didn’t feel hungry but she felt light-headed and her hands were shaking.

— I’m fine, she said hastily. — I don’t want anything.

— Don’t be so silly. Buy her some fish and chips or something.

Hilary was too tired not to be obedient. She put on her mac and followed Neil downstairs, as if their fatal passage round the city had to recommence. At least this time she wouldn’t be carrying her case. She waited on the street outside; he said he had to fetch the others.

— By the way, he added, not looking at her, — I shouldn’t mention anything. They just think Sheila’s got a tummy bug. They’d be upset.

— OK, Hilary mumbled. Furiously she thought to herself that she wouldn’t have spoken to his friends about her sister if he had tortured her. ‘You silly little man,’ she imagined herself saying. ‘How dare you think I care about upsetting them?’ She tipped back her head and looked up the precipitous fronts of the houses to the far-off sky, studded with cold stars.

She noticed that Neil had put on shoes to come out this time: a pair of gym shoes, gaping without laces. His friend Julian had jug ears and long dyed blond hair; Gus was shy and lumpish, like a boy swelled to man-size without his face or body actually changing to look grown-up. Becky was a pretty girl in a duffel coat, who giggled and swivelled her gaze too eagerly from face to face: she couldn’t get enough of her treat, being the only girl and having the attention of three men. She knew instinctively that Hilary didn’t count. Even her patronising was perfunctory: she reminisced about her own A levels as if she was reaching back into a long-ago past.

— You’ve chosen all the easy ones, you clever thing! My school forced me to do double maths, it was ghastly.

— Are you sure you’re not hungry? Neil said to Hilary as they hurried past a busy chip shop with a queue. — Only if we don’t stop we’re in time for the pub. You could have some crisps there.

Hilary gazed into the bright steamy window, assaulted by the smell of the chips, weak with longing. — Quite sure, she said. She had never been into a pub in her life. There was a place in Haverhill where some of the girls went from school, but she and Sheila had always despised the silly self-importance of teenage transgression. It was impossible to imagine ever wanting to enter the ugly square red-brick pub in the village, where the farm labourers drank, and the men from the estate who worked in the meat-packing factory. Neil’s pub was a tiny cosy den, fumy light glinting off the rows of glasses and bottles. The stale breath of it made Hilary’s head swim; they squeezed into red plush seats around a table. Neil didn’t ask her what she wanted, but brought her a small mug of brown beer and a packet of crisps and one of peanuts. She didn’t like the taste of the beer but because the food was so salty she drank it in thirsty mouthfuls, and then was seized by a sensation as if she floated up to hang some little way above her present situation, graciously indifferent, so that her first experience of drunkenness was a blessed one.

When the pub closed they came back to the house and sat around a table in the basement kitchen by candlelight: the kitchen walls were painted crudely with huge mushrooms and blades of grass and giant insects, making Hilary feel as if she was a miniature human at the deep bottom of a forest. She drank the weak tea they put in front of her. The others talked about work and exams. Becky was doing biological sciences, Gus was doing history, Julian and Neil seemed to be doing English. Hilary couldn’t believe that they sounded just like girls at school, scurrying in the rat-run of learning and testing, trying to outdo one another in protestations of how little work they’d done. Not once did any of them actually speak seriously about their subjects. Hilary felt so deeply disappointed in university life that on the spot she made up her mind to dedicate herself to something different and nobler, although she wasn’t clear what. Neil and Julian were concentrating upon sticking a brown lump of something on a pin and roasting it with a match. From her indifferent distance she supposed this must be drugs, but she wasn’t frightened of that now.

— Don’t tell your daddy the vicar what you’ve seen, said Neil.

She was confused — did the others know what had happened after all? — until she realised that he meant the brown lump.

— Are you two really from a vicarage? asked Becky. — It’s like something out of a book.

— We can’t offer the respectability that Hilary’s used to, Neil said. — She’ll have to slum it here for a few days.

Hilary could see that Neil was the centre of all the others’ attention. At least he had not joined in when the others were fluttering and fussing about their work; he had smiled to himself, licking the edges of little pieces of white paper and sticking them together as if none of it bothered him. He had an air as if he saw through the sham of it all, as if he came from a place where the university didn’t count for much: she could see how this had power over the others. He didn’t say much but when he spoke it was with a deliberate debunking roughness that made the others abject, ashamed even of the feel in their mouths of their own nice eager voices.