Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

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Zoe soon understood that one reason fiona hadn’t seemed afraid of coming to a new school was because she had had so many more terrible things to practice being brave on. Her cousin, Jackie Potter, was already in their same class, so the word quickly got around — bred out of the little closed circles of murmuring girls with their arms hung around one another’s necks in the playground, faces long with portent or indignation — that Fiona’s parents were divorced. “Divorced” in those days stood for something lurid, only half comprehended, shaming. Zoe wished she hadn’t heard and refused to tell anyone else, although she was supposed to; she had been in trouble for this before, when messages came down the line with the tag, “Pass it on.” She feared and hated those closed circles of girls and all the high dramas they generated out of their intimate heat: once-favored ones excluded and weeping, once-excluded ones reinstated and brilliant with relief, lashing out in turn to prove themselves.

Because she was pretty and well liked, Fiona with her divorced parents could have queened it, ostentatiously afflicted, her protectors scowling about them to forestall any intrusion or insensitivity. Instead, when once the divorce was awkwardly produced in conversation, her smile was quite steady, and her perfectly light and polite tone deflected any further inquiry.

— Yes, they are, she said. But it’s all right. It was all for the best.

The girls’ toilets were in a sort of shed at the end of the playground; it was customary for five or six girls to share one dank cramped cubicle, shuffling round to wee and wipe themselves on the hard paper in turn. Fiona sometimes stood in with Zoe and Barbara and Pam and sometimes in Jackie Potter’s cubicle across the way; only she could have moved effortlessly across the gulf dividing these two extremes of playground society without causing offense. Jackie had a memorable woman’s face, black-rimmed big eyes, and mobile mouth. She claimed a knowledge of the body and its forbidden and savory effects that the nice girls in the other cubicles couldn’t but respond to with fascination as well as disgust. Once, for example, she had a “suppurating sore” on her belly, which girls queued up to see (Zoe, Pam, and Barbara did not want to, nor were they invited, although the idea of the suppurating probably preoccupied them all the more for remaining nonspecific).

Jackie was supposed to be having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend, who was fifteen (she was ten). In private with her friends, Zoe poured fierce scorn on this, claiming it was physically impossible, although her sense of the mechanics of sex was vague. There was something in Jackie’s stories she angrily resisted even while they worked powerfully on her imagination, conjuring an underworld of scuffles and shriekings and groping exchanges of intimacies, out on the streets as the light faded, slipped from the leash of parental scrutiny. The boyfriend’s pronouncements on male need, passed relishingly on by Jackie, seemed even savage: apparently he liked girls “with a bit of meat on them.” Zoe was horrified to think what for: she pictured him sinking his teeth into a leg or a neck as part of some sexual process.

And somehow, mysteriously, Fiona was part of all this, although she gave none of it away; her name was mixed up with boys’ names in Jackie’s account of the arcane negotiations that always sounded more like a kind of war than “love.” “Martin loves Diana.” “Lester says he loves Fiona more than he loves Sandra.” Fiona didn’t even blush. “So he says”—she laughed lightly — or, “I don’t think so.” And yet she must have been there, she must have come out on the street with the others in order to be “loved.” You could tell from the way Jackie pressed her, too, that she was not marginal to these transactions, that Jackie gained status and negotiating power through being Fiona’s cousin. Yet it was impossible for Zoe to imagine Fiona of her own volition choosing to go down on the street and be snatched at and fought over. She had a way of moving through arrangements as if they were always other people’s, so that they seemed to leave no trace on her.

Already, other girls in Jackie’s crowd looked marked and set apart from the good children. Their skin was sallow and bruised easily, their hair was lank; some had gold hoops in their ears, and their clothes were skimpy hand-me-downs, stained and unironed. It wasn’t entirely unattractive, this marked and used look; it was certainly to be preferred to looking like the children from the Homes, who were at the bottom of the playground hierarchy, neat always, but with giveaway chopped-off haircuts, clothes all tainted with the same sad charitable grayness, and smelling sometimes of wee (Jackie Potter only smelled of strong perfume). Fiona’s appearance, however, gave nothing away. She could have been one of the girls who went riding and had ballet lessons, for all you could tell. She didn’t speak with a broad local accent, but Gary Lyons couldn’t tease her for sounding “posh,” either. What stood out was something quietly adult in her demeanor and in how she was dressed: clean white sweaters and tartan skirts, white lace tights and black patent shoes with straps across.

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Fiona was very willing to be zoe’s friend; the only difficulty was that she was willing to be everybody’s. Zoe was jealous and persistent; she grabbed Fiona by the arm in a quick settling gesture of claim and possession whenever they had to make pairs for games or Music and Movement; she asked Mr. Lloyd if she could move to Fiona’s table, pretending she was sick of Paul Andrews banging down the desk lid on her head. She would have liked to help Fiona with her work; she had done this for other friends. But although Fiona didn’t have the usual outward signs of cleverness — the clumsy mix of awkwardness and smugness — she turned out, to Zoe’s surprise, to be as quick and clever at most things as Zoe herself (only she didn’t get the stars that Zoe got for her stories; Mr. Lloyd was a fan of Zoe’s descriptive passages). She was invited to become part of “grub days,” when Zoe’s gang took turns bringing in something to eat in the playground: sultanas, or salt, or stock cube, wrapped in a twist of paper tissue. Fiona brought in hundreds and thousands; they all wet their fingers and dipped in. At home Zoe pestered her mother until she bought the same tiny candies at the supermarket, which Zoe then licked up alone in ritual imitation.

There was eventually some understanding in the class that she and Fiona belonged together, though it was never enough for Zoe, because Fiona wouldn’t unbend from her evenhandedness. She was a serious and sympathetic listener, but she didn’t volunteer needs or prejudices of her own. She would gracefully detach from Zoe’s group to join in some game of Please Jack May We Cross the Water? or I Wrote a Letter to My Love that had swollen to fill the whole space of the concrete playground between its high walls. Zoe and her friends kept aloof from these games. Fiona was quietly expert in all the variants, the forfeits, the different dipping-outs; she sang out confidently, “Jack says anyone with blue” or skipped round the outside of the ring, giving no sign when she let fall the handkerchief behind some chosen person’s back.

She came to Zoe’s house to play. Zoe, who had longed to reveal her whole real life to her friend, was aware of herself in a rush of showing off, talking in a silly artificial voice to Daniel, rolling in the goatskin rug in the lounge that left her covered in hairs, rudely stealing biscuits Joyce would have given to her anyway, playing all her piano pieces over badly and much too fast. She was hardly able to take in that this was the real Fiona, transplanted disconcertingly into the too-familiar spaces. They adored the kitten; Fiona was politely interested in Zoe’s treasures, her inkwell and her white china horses and the beaded pincushion with “BABY” on it. Then they were at a loss for what to do. Zoe simply didn’t know what Fiona liked.