Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

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When zoe finally left amery-james and went to langham road and was much happier there, she saw even in the first week that Fiona wouldn’t be able to be her friend at school. Just crossing the gap between the schools could not bring her inside Fiona’s world. Even at Langham Road there were gradations and abysses of status and identity, so that Zoe quickly found herself belonging in the set of quiet studious safe ones (though the studying was so easy now that she was usually fairly effortlessly top of the class). Fiona receded ahead of her among the unattainably different bad girls who were glamorous and dangerous, with heavily made-up faces and short skirts and shirts stretched tight to bursting over developed thighs and breasts. Platform heels click-clacking, they yelled and catcalled their way along the school corridors, congregating in the toilets to smoke and do their eyes and sometimes wreak a kind of mayhem of unrolled toilet paper and blocked sinks or a mess of flour and eggs if it was someone’s birthday (the eggs had to be ritually broken on their heads). Fiona, of course, wasn’t one of the rudest or roughest; her appeal as ever was in how she held back with a reserve of watchful fastidious amusement from their excesses.

Some of this crowd Zoe knew from junior school, Jackie Potter and June Fitch and a few of the boys, although none of them ever acknowledged that they remembered her. (Gary Lyons had been killed with three friends, driving a stolen car.) Most of them were only waiting to leave school at sixteen and find work in shops or offices or garages or at the cigarette factory (whereas Zoe’s new friends had ambitions: not to go to university, perhaps, but to teacher training college or into local government). At Langham Road the teachers often liked the bad ones, even though they were constantly in trouble. Their attention as teachers naturally had to be mostly on the obedient boys and girls who would take and pass examinations, but in truth they couldn’t help looking yearningly across at the wild children, especially those progressive teachers whose ideal was a kind of revolutionary rescue of the disregarded and a redress through art or books or politics of the system that failed them. The men teachers were more flattered by the bad girls’ teasing than by the adulation of the good girls; this contained flirtation was one of the strong dynamics in the school, smoldering and giving off its steady heat.

Fiona was not unfriendly to Zoe at school. She was even in some of her top set classes, because she was good at languages and quick-thinking; but she sat slightly apart like an honored visitor from another tribe, greeting Zoe with a wink or a hand quickly touched onto her shoulder when she passed behind her chair. Zoe was grateful for that much. On one exceptional occasion, they did spend an afternoon together: this was in the fifth year, and they had by this time stopped seeing each other out of school. They were supposed to be doing games, but at Langham Road you could easily avoid this if you wanted to; you could carry tennis rackets, for instance, over to where some group was practicing athletics and look perpetually as if you were on your way somewhere else. (Zoe rejoiced at her escape from the frozen drudgery of the hockey pitch and the vicious competition of the netball court at Amery-James.) It was one of those April days that seem exquisite through windows, with a perfect china-blue sky and bright puffs of white cloud; in fact, a fierce wind had been blowing for hours and she and Fiona shuddered with cold in their thin games blouses and went to find shelter behind the groundsman’s shed at the edge of the field. Scraps of brilliant-green young growth from the trees and bushes growing on the boundary had been torn off by the winds and were heaped up against the shed, an autumn harvest of spring leaves.

— I’ve got something to show you, said Fiona. She undid a button and felt around her neck inside her blouse, her olive skin smooth and clear apart from a couple of dark moles, the glimpsed shadowy swell of her breasts in their lace bra mysterious and adult. Zoe, who was tall and clumsy and flat-chested and had to wear an orthodontic brace, felt shamed beside her perfection. Fiona pulled out a ring on a fine gold chain.

— Look. I’m engaged. Only it’s a secret. You’re not to tell anyone.

— Engaged? But who to?

— No one you know. No one at this school. He’s much older. And he’s not from round here.

The ring was warm from lying against Fiona’s skin. Zoe examined it helplessly: gold, with a green stone, cheap-looking to her. Fiona leaned back against the slatted shed wall with her eyes closed, her arms hugged round her knees against the cold.

— He loves me, she said, slowly and voluptuously. He’s crazy about me. He can’t get enough of me. He wants me to leave school and have his babies and all this stuff.

— Oh, my God, Fiona. You mustn’t do that. Remember what you always said? You want to get a good job as a translator, remember, and a flat in London? And you’re only sixteen.

— Oh, yes. And I might still do all that. I haven’t decided anything. I haven’t said when we will marry or anything.

But her face was suffused with thoughts that made her eyes open wide and heated her skin. The way her mouth slipped secretively round the word “marry” made Zoe know she was lost. This wasn’t what Zoe had expected, and she felt cheated.

— You mustn’t give it all up for a boy, she said. There’s the rest of your life for that.

— He isn’t a boy, said Fiona, dropping the ring on its chain back down into her blouse, where it was hidden. He’s a man. That’s what’s different. You’ll see.

* * *

And so they parted. fiona did stay on for a few months in the sixth form to do A-levels with the hardworking girls and boys, but she was fatally bored; she yawned openly in class; all the liveliest of her friends had left. Zoe was happy there, but she saw it would not do for Fiona. At about the same time that Fiona stopped turning up for classes, Jean left her job at the corner café and moved from the flat opposite the heath, and so Zoe lost touch with them finally and totally. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Life filled up so quickly with other things, changing during those years at such a rate it seemed as though almost every six months or so you shed one self and stepped into a new one, leaving behind a phase of your personality and your role and your desires as mere discarded skin.

Once during the summer before she went up to read history at Cambridge (it had turned out to be that easy to do well at Langham Road), Zoe thought she might have seen Fiona again. It was an odd sour summer; things were happening at home. Daniel was playing in a band; he had moved into a sordid flat with filthy purple and orange wallpaper and was taking a lot of speed and dropping acid. He told Zoe in all seriousness that he saw eels swimming around in the toilet. Ray was mostly at work on a new series of pictures in his studio at college (having a studio in the house hadn’t worked out); these were the studies of Moira, a sixty-year-old schizophrenic who lived in hostels and on the streets, that many would rate afterward as his best work. When he was home he always seemed to be on the phone to friends. As Zoe lay on her bed, she could hear his voice climbing up and down, booming and hectoring, taking up much more than his half share of the conversation; without being able to hear his words, she could guess that the gist of it was how he was always right, how he knew so much better than everybody else, how everybody else was an idiot or a sellout, you couldn’t expect anyone to understand. She could tell from this that he was unhappy.

That summer they all seemed to be listening out for signs of life and clues as if they hardly knew one another. In the middle of one night, Zoe woke as instantly and completely as if a clear small bell had sounded through her dreams; her mother was speaking downstairs to someone in a voice of such quiet tenderness and sweetness that Zoe’s heart twisted. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, and she didn’t recognize the male voice (it certainly wasn’t Ray’s, and anyway Ray was probably sleeping at the studio). A deep vibrating bass responded to Joyce’s sweetness like counterpoint, like some essence of male and female interaction. They were speaking together so softly and discreetly, being so considerate of the sleeping house, it was only through some miracle of intuition that Zoe had woken up to hear it at all. After a while Joyce closed the front door very quietly; then Zoe knew from the intimate creakings of the old house that her mother was moving around downstairs, not bustling or tidying, just wandering between the rooms, barefoot on the thick carpets.