Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

— What’s this? he joked, when I brought Beckett back from the library.

— He’s a play writer. Haven’t you heard of him?

— Playwright. (Gerry did crosswords, he had a good vocabulary.) — Aren’t they all waiting for some chap who never turns up?

Gerry had been so keen for me to go to the High S chool; yet he was hostile to the power my education brought me. He thought I was putting on airs — and I expect I was, I was probably pretty insufferable with my quotations from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, my good French accent (I corrected his: ça ne fait rien, not san fairy ann). He could still usually trip me up, though, in geography or history — my sense of things fitting together was treacherously vague. Gerry knew an awful lot, he was always reading. He subscribed by post to a long series of magazines about the Second World War, which he kept in purpose-made plastic folders on a shelf. Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books.

He was amused and patient, correcting my mistakes. He did it to my mother too: so long as we were wrong, then he was kind. If I could have given in gracefully to that shape of relations between us — his lecturing me and my submitting to it — then we might have been able to live happily together. My mother didn’t care about knowing things, she just laughed at him. (‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gerry — as if it mattered!’) But I couldn’t give in. It was a struggle between our different logics. Everything I learned, I wanted to be an opening into the unknown; whereas Gerry’s sums added up in a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him.

I took Beckett up to my bedroom.

It wasn’t the kind of writing I was used to. I’d taught myself to stir in response to the captured textures of passing moments — the subtle essence of unspoken exchange, the sensation of air in a room against the skin. Now, I learned to read Beckett (and then, under Val’s influence, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti) like a convert embracing revolutionary discipline, cutting all links with my bourgeois-realist past.

— Is he your boyfriend then? Madeleine wanted clarification.

I was disdainful. — We don’t care about those kinds of labels.

— But is he?

— What does it look like?

Val and I were inseparable. We saw each other almost every day — not only on the bus going to school and coming back, but in the evenings, as often as my parents allowed me out or said he could come round. They claimed they worried about my school work but I didn’t believe them, I saw in my mother’s face her recoil from what she dreaded — the dirty flare of sex and exposure; my making a fool of myself. (They were so innocent, I don’t think they guessed about the drugs until much later.) Sometimes I went out anyway when they’d forbidden me, and then there was trouble. When I got home Gerry took me into the lounge for one of his old lectures, screwing up his forehead, leaning towards me, pretending to be impartial justice. From my dizzy vantage point (high as a kite), I believed I could see right through him to his vindictiveness, his desire to shoot me down where I was flying.

— They hate me, I said to Val. — Under his pretence of being concerned for my future, he really he hates me. And she doesn’t care.

— Don’t mind them, Val said, his eyes smiling. He blew out smoke, he was serene, bare feet tucked up on his knees in the lotus position. — They’re just frightened. They’re sweet really, your parents.

We were talking in his bedroom, so unlike my little pink cell: a draughty attic where his books and clothes lay around in chaos on a Turkey carpet grey with cigarette ash. (When I asked if his mother never cleaned in there he said she didn’t clean anywhere, they had a woman in.) His attitude towards his own parents was coolly disengaged. I was afraid of them, I tried to avoid meeting them on my passages through the rambling big house (built when Stoke Bishop was still the countryside). They were both tall and big-boned: his father was stooped, with brown-blotched skin, long earlobes, thinning white hair; his mother had a ruined face and watery huge eyes, she wore pearls and Chinese jade earrings at the dining table in the evenings (unlike us, they actually ate in their dining room). The arrangement of their furniture — elegant, shabby, mixed with exotica from the East — seemed provisional; they had only just moved in, and might move on. They were polite with me, and their conversation was as dully transactional as anything in my house — yet in their clipped, swallowed voices they seemed to talk in code above my head.

Val had older sisters and brothers who had left home but often came visiting, or taking refuge from some drama in their complicated lives: all good-looking and dauntingly confident, even if they seemed conventional beside Val. They called their parents Mummy and Daddy (Val didn’t call them anything, in my hearing). His sister Diana — next to him in age, excitable, with dark hair cut in a thick fringe and very white teeth — chatted to me about horses and somehow I knew not to give away too much detail about Budge’s ramshackle stables. When I asked if Diana had been to university, she laughed at me. — Darling, I can hardly read. I’ve never passed an exam in my life, I’m virtually an idiot.

When he was bantering with his sister, petulant, I got a glimpse for a moment of a different Valentine: less sublimely solitary, more a type — their type, mannered and competitive. Valentine was the baby of the family; conceived at an age when his parents ought to have known better, he said disgustedly. — I’m the painful reminder of lost virility.

— Don’t take any notice of him, Diana said. — He’s Mummy’s little pet.

He chucked a cushion at her head. — Di’s a dirty slut, he said. — She thinks through her yoni.

— My what? she giggled. — Yogi Bear?

— Ignoramus.

Apart from Diana, Val’s family never came up to his attic room (nor did the cleaner). Sometimes his mother shouted up the stairs, if a meal was ready or Val was wanted on the telephone. We were private up there. I loved the evening shadows in the complex angles of the sloping ceiling. In summer the heat under the roof was dense; in winter we cuddled up for warmth under the blankets on his bed. Our bodies fitted perfectly together — my knees curved into the backs of his, my breath in the nape of his neck, his fingers knotted into mine against his chest, under his shirt; we lay talking about everything, or listening to Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Dylan. The shape of the long, empty room seemed the shape of our shared imagination, spacious and open to everything. I couldn’t believe the long strides he’d made in his mind, all by himself. Sometimes, depending on the pills, he would talk and talk without stopping.

— How do you know that I really exist, outside you? he asked me urgently. — I might be a figment of your imagination.

Our heads were side by side then on his pillow. How lucky I was to lie like that, so intimate with his lovely looks that I couldn’t see them whole: teasing green eyes, down on his upper lip, curving high hollows in his cheeks. I longed for him to begin kissing me, as he sometimes did — but I had learned that I must not try to initiate this. — But I just know! I insisted, stroking his face as if the feeling in my fingers was proof. — And I’m not a figment of yours either. I’m really here, I promise.

— I believe in you. I’m not so sure about me. You’re solid. You’re fierce.

I wasn’t as solid as I had been. Since I met Val, I’d stopped bothering to eat. I couldn’t bear my mother’s gluey gravy any longer, I drank black (instant) coffee and gave up sugar; the weight had flown off me. Although I was small and Val was taller, we nonetheless came to look like a matching pair: skinny and striking. By this time we were on the fringes of a set who gathered at weekends in a sleazy bar behind a cinema in town. Val had a good instinct for the people worth getting to know — a man with freckled hands and a mane of red hair who sold him speed and other things; a clever art student, half-Greek, who played in a band (they sounded like art-punk before punk had really happened). These men were older and powerful and a lot of people were eager to be their friends, but Val was able to impress them. He was good company, with his quick wit and the cultural know-how he carried off gracefully.