Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

Madeleine and I have never even kissed boys: at fifteen we don’t have any actual sexual experience whatever except a few things we’ve done with each other, experimentally, and out of desperation. (Not shamefaced afterwards — flaunting and wicked; it is the 1970s, after all. But it’s boys we want.) At an all-girls school we don’t get many chances to meet boys, although there are usually some on the bus, going in to the Grammar School. This is a part of our excitement, at quarter past eight. There are certain boys we are expecting to see, and we may even pluck up the crazy courage to speak to them, a word or two; any exchange will be dissected afterwards between Madeleine and myself in an analysis more nuanced and determined than anything we ever do to poems in English lessons. (‘What do you think he really meant when he said that his friend had said yesterday that you weren’t bad?’)

Anything can happen in the bus in the next half an hour; even something with the power to obliterate and reduce to dust the double maths, scripture, double Latin and (worst) games which lie in wait at the end of the journey — a doom of tedium, infinitely long, impossible to bear. After games, the nasty underground shower room with its concentrated citrus-rot stink of female sweat, its fleshly angsts, tinpot team spirit, gloom of girls passed over, games teacher’s ogling, trodden soaking towels.

Something has to happen.

Into our heat that morning came Valentine.

He walked down to join us at the bus stop. We’d never seen him before: into the torpor of the suburb his footsteps broke like a signal for adventure on a jaunty trumpet. I loved his swaggering walk immediately without reserve (and never stopped loving it). His glancing, eagerly amused look around him — drinking everything in, shaking the long hair back from around his face — was like a symbol for morning itself. (His energy was no doubt partly the effect of the Dodos — caffeine pills — he’d have swallowed in the bathroom as soon as his mother got him out of bed. Soon we were all taking them.) A Grammar School blazer, hooked by its loop around one nicotine-stained finger, was slung over his shoulder, his cigarette cocked up cheekily between lips curved as improbably, generously wide as a faun’s. The pointed chin was like a faun’s too, and the flaunting Caravaggio cheekbones, pushing up the thick flesh under his eyes, making them slanted and mischievous. He was tall, but not too tall; his school trousers slid down his impossibly narrow waist and hips, he tucked his shirt half in with a careless hand. The school tie others wore resentfully as a strangled knot became under his touch somehow cravat-like, flowing. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone. He was sixteen (a year older than we were).

He grinned at Madeleine and me.

At me first, then at Madeleine, which was not usual. Madeleine in her lazy indifference had bloomed, she was willowy and languorous, sex had dusted a glitter into her long curls and kitten-face, her pink cheeks. I was too small, too plump and shapeless, and my eyes, I knew, were blackly expressive pits in a too-white face. Madeleine, trying kindly to advise me on my sex appeal (I asked her), had said I might be ‘too intense’ — but I didn’t know how to disguise that. Valentine stopped at the bus stop and offered us his cigarette, me first. It was not any ordinary cigarette, oh no! (we went to school stoned for the first time, but not the last).

— Hello girls, he said, beaming. — Does this bus go into town? Do you catch it every day? That’s good. I like the look of you.

We looked at each other and giggled and asked him what he liked about us. Thinking about it, surveying us up and down, he said we looked sceptical.

What did he mean, sceptical?

Thank God we weren’t wearing our hats.

I longed for the bus not to come. Proximity to his body — a glimpse via his half-untucked shirt of hollowed, golden, masculine stomach, its line of dark hairs draining down from the belly button — licked at me like a flame while we waited. His family, he explained, had just moved into one of the posher streets behind Beech Grove. When the bus did come he sat on the back seat and took Beckett out of his rucksack: End Game. The very title, even the look of the title — its stark indiscreet white capitals on a jazzy orange cover — was a door swinging suddenly open into a new world. I’d never heard of Beckett; I think I was ploughing then through The Forsyte Saga. None of the other boys on the bus read books. Val smiled at us encouragingly, extravagantly, over the top of his.

— He was gorgeous, I liked him, Madeleine conceded as we trudged in a tide of other green-gowned inmates up the purgatorial hill from our stop to where school loomed, the old house frowning in the sunlight as a prison. — But I couldn’t actually fancy him, could you? There was something weird.

I was disappointed in her; I was already wondering if I’d find Beckett in the local library. (The librarian, warmly supportive of my forays into Edwardian belles-lettres, would startle and flinch at my betrayal.) And my heart raced at the idea that Valentine might not be at the bus stop the next day. (But he was — and was there most days, right through to the middle of the upper sixth.) Madeleine didn’t insist on her doubt, she never insisted — and I closed a door on an early intimation of danger. I wanted Val because he was different — as I was different. What I felt at my first sight of him that summer morning was more than ordinary love: more like recognition. When I read later in Plato about whole souls divided at birth into two separated halves, which move around in the world ever afterwards mourning one another and longing for a lost completion, I thought I was reading about myself and Valentine.

And it was the same for Val. He recognised me too.

I truly do believe that, even now, even after everything that happened. We found each other out, we were kindred spirits, it was mutual.

— What a scarecrow, Gerry said after he came to my house for the first time. — I can’t believe the Grammar School let him get away with that hair.

— He looks like a girl, my mother said. — I’m not that keen, Stella.

Following up the stairs behind Val, I was faint from the movement of his slim haunches in his tight white jeans. How could she think that he looked like a girl? Yet all we did in my bedroom was cosy up knee to knee, cross-legged on the bed to talk. We swapped our childhood stories. He was born in Malaya, he had had an ayah.

— What were your family doing in Malaya?

— You don’t want to know.

— I want to know everything.

— My father worked for the government, he’s an awful tax expert. Now he’s retired, he’s just awful and old. What does yours do?

— He’s not my real dad. My real dad’s dead.

Mum brought in a pile of ironed clothes to put away in my chest of drawers. Then she called to ask if we wanted coffee. Philip came knocking at the door, asking us to play with him. Afterwards Mum spoke to me awkwardly, about self-respect. The familiar solidity of the house and its furniture melted away around Val; after he’d left I couldn’t believe I really lived there. I couldn’t hold in the same focus my two worlds brought into conjunction. Yet I wanted Val to be brilliant for my parents and he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He never made any concessions to them, or small talk. If they asked him questions he sometimes didn’t even seem to hear them; his eyes were blank. He seemed to simply pause the flow of his life in the presence of anyone unsympathetic.

He was stoned a lot of the time.

Yet among our friends he was magnetic, commanding, funny. He was a clever mimic. In the evenings we started getting together at Madeleine’s — a whole gang of six or seven of us from the streets round about. Madeleine’s father was often away; her mother Pam was bored and liked flirting with teenagers. She brought home-made brownies and cheese straws and jugs of weak sangria up to Madeleine’s room and we cadged her cigarettes. Madeleine fancied a boy who played the guitar and wrote his own songs; we tried to talk a shy, blonde girl out of her faith. Madeleine bought a red bulb to put in one of the lamps, we draped the others with Indian silk scarves. When my stepfather was sent across to fetch me home, he never stepped across the low fence between our front gardens but went punctiliously via both front paths and gates. He said if Pam wanted teenagers carrying on under her own roof it was her business.