Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Zoe and Fiona wandered hand in hand, and Zoe showed Fiona that you could eat the “bread and butter” berries off the hawthorns. They had hopping races up the path, elbowing each other off, holding their spare ankles up in their hands behind; they played at paralyzing each other’s fingers, stroking wrists with a special circular technique. They had the Dumps pretty much to themselves, only meeting a couple of dog-walkers and one of the usual old tramps who haunted the place. A slanting chilly late light glided onto the heath from behind a cloud and smothered the Dumps in shadow. The girls knew it would be dark next. Then there was an eruption of noise some way off: calling, a snapping of branches, scuffling, yelps of laughter.

— Oh, hell, Fiona said, it’s probably that lot.

It was the first time Zoe had ever heard her use bad language. (Jean said “sugar” and “scuse my French.”)

— What lot?

— You know: Lester and Jackie and that.

Zoe started to worry; she could imagine how “that lot” might be delighted to find one of the conforming and obedient children from school exposed out here where their power was unchecked.

— Are they allowed to play out in the Dumps?

— What do you think? Fiona frowned. No one bothers where they are.

— Let’s go back to your house then.

— There’s no time. But there’s a den; we could hide. Probably it’s so dark they won’t see us.

There must have been nights, Zoe realized, when Fiona came out to play with these others in the Dumps voluntarily and was part of the whooping and yelling and breaking of trees. For now, though, Fiona pulled Zoe after her into a thicket of bushes with a secret space inside, a dusty mud floor littered with a few dirty sweet wrappers. Perhaps she decided to hide partly because Zoe was a liability and it was inconvenient to be found with her. They crouched down on their haunches, holding on to each other for balance, smelling the day’s heat baked into splintery wood, pungent leaves, and dog dirt. They felt each other’s breathing; Zoe was aware of Fiona’s soft skin and her aura of talcum powder and clean washing and found under her fingers the fine gold chain Fiona wore with a cross around her neck. They shook with silent giggling, half nervous, half real fun.

It wasn’t Jackie and Lester and “that lot” after all; the boys and girls who came racing, pounding, leaping through the Dumps in the long last shadows of the day were strangers. The thudding of their feet and the blare of their yelling hung there for moments after they’d passed through; one boy shouted out the word “fuck” and something worse, and the terrible names used so flauntingly tore a vivid gash in the air. She and Fiona clung together, laughing into each other’s shoulders. Zoe was completely happy. Instead of imagining life’s possible intensity, she was inside it; it filled her.

As the girls crossed the road on their way back to Fiona’s house, Zoe’s father drew up in his car. He looked surprised to see her out at that time; and in truth when she looked around her through his eyes she saw that it was effectively by any adult standards dark.

— We’ve been in the Dumps, she called out ringingly, to forestall any idea of her having been put upon or taken advantage of. We’ve been having a super time.

Ray peered at them worriedly.

— You should have crossed on the zebra, he said.

— Oh, it’s all right, said Fiona. My mum lets me.

— Well, I’m not so sure. The cars come round that corner very fast. And it’s dark.

Zoe knew he wouldn’t be able to sustain the burden of responsible parental anxiety for very long; her favorite tease of him was for his laziness. After all, nothing had happened, there had been no accident, the girls were safe. He might not even mention to her mother that they had been out on the heath alone at night, because he got irritated with how she fussed and worried over her children. When he was a boy, he said, he came and went as he wanted, as long as he turned up with clean hands for meals. Fiona walked neatly backward up the path away from them, opening and shutting her fingers in a little coded farewell.

— I don’t need to go inside to thank the mother, do I? Ray asked Zoe.

She snuggled up against the sweet tobacco smell of the top pocket of his corduroy jacket.

— I told Fiona to say thank you. And her mummy doesn’t even have to come to the door. Fiona has her own key, on a string round her neck.

He was safety, and rescue, and she was very glad of him; but she didn’t need him to know anything about the dazzle of the places she’d been without him.

* * *

Grandma lil died. she had had for years a swollen mole on her temple, which her daughters had urged her to show to the doctor; one afternoon it burst and released a blood clot into her brain. She came home from work at the cake shop with a severe headache; Martin asked the neighbors in the flat upstairs to telephone for an ambulance when she began vomiting and passing out. By the time Joyce and Ann arrived at the hospital, she was in a coma and the nurses sent them home, telling them to call first thing in the morning.

Joyce went out early to the telephone box, which was about a hundred yards down the street, against the long high red-brick wall of a small factory that made brake linings. This was a street of handsome Georgian houses in Kingsmile, but at a time when such streets were only just beginning to be bought up and decorated and made fashionable. Most of the houses were still multifamily, some of them with ancient layers of flaking paint and dirty windows hung with rags of lace curtain. When Joyce had made her call, she came home and sat down at the breakfast table without taking off her mac or untying her scarf. Daniel noisily poured himself cereal. She told them how, while she waited to be put through to the ward, a fire had broken out in a house opposite to the telephone box.

— There were real flames leaping up out of the windows of the first floor, and billowing smoke. And there were people waving for help at the windows of the floor above. I thought that really I should use the telephone to call the fire brigade, but while I was thinking that I got through to the ward and the Sister told me that Mum died this morning. And then two fire engines rolled up and firemen got out and put ladders up to the windows and carried the people down over their shoulders.

She looked with puzzlement at Ray.

— Did I really see that? Or was I just having a hallucination?

He shrugged helplessly.

— Do you want me to go and look?

— No, not really. I don’t really care.

All of them felt the painful strangeness of Joyce sitting motionless at the breakfast table in her outdoor things, with her bag on her lap, the familiar smart little bag shaped like a segment of orange, whose leather top fastened over with a clasp. Ordinarily she would be standing in her apron at the cooker or at the sink, busy supplying them with tea and toast and (in Ray’s case) bacon and eggs. Grief came over Zoe in the form of a monstrous embarrassment, so inhibiting that her limbs felt wooden and her tongue wouldn’t move properly. She had to hold in her mouth a little square of soggy toast that she couldn’t swallow.

— Grandma’s dead, Grandma’s dead, hooray, sang Daniel just under his breath, shoveling in spoonfuls of crispies. (He was only eight.)

— Don’t worry about him, said Joyce quickly, before Ray felt obliged to be stern. He’s just upset and doesn’t know what to say.

This gave Ray his pretext for transferring his irritation to Joyce, angry with her because he was so sorry she was hurt.

— He gets away with his sheer insensitivity and rudeness as usual.

Joyce looked at Ray as if she was seeing him from far off.