Who wants to remember the awful details of teenage sex, teenage idiocy?
I loved him because he was my twin, inaccessible to me.
One evening I was supposed to babysit while Mum and Gerry went out to a Masonic Ladies’ Night. My little brother Philip was four, I liked him very much (I still do): he was always an enthusiast, entertaining us with jokes and little performances, looking quickly from face to face for our approval. He had to sit on his hands to keep them from waving about and he swung his legs under his chair until it rocked (all of this got him into trouble at school later, where he also struggled with learning to read). When Mum came downstairs, perfumed and startling in her silver Lurex bodice and stiff white skirts, he and I were laughing at Dad’s Army on the telly. She stood clipping on her earrings by feel, giving us her instructions. This whole process of her transformation, she managed to convey, was only another duty to discharge.
— Stella, I don’t want anyone coming round.
— Madeleine said she might.
— I don’t want Valentine hanging around Philip if I’m not here.
I wasn’t even expecting Val: he was at one of his sessions with Fred Harper. But out of nowhere — everything had been all right, the previous moment — I was dazzled with my rage. — What’s the matter with you? I shouted. — Why have you got such a nasty mind?
I knew in that moment she regretted what she’d said — but only because she’d miscalculated and hadn’t meant to start an argument. She was afraid it would make them late: she glanced at the wristwatch on a silver bracelet which had been Gerry’s wedding present. — Who you choose as your friends is your own business, Stella, she said stiffly. — But I’m not obliged to have them in my house.
— Your house? Why d’you always call it your house? Don’t I live here or something?
My stepfather hurried downstairs in his socks, doing up his cufflinks. He’d heard raised voices: I loathed him for the doggy eagerness with which he came sniffing out our fight.
— What’s going on, Edna?
He irritated my mother too. — For goodness’ sake get your shoes on, Gerry. We’re late already.
— I won’t let her get away with talking to you like that.
— I’ll talk to her how I like, I shouted. — She’s my mother.
Philip went off into a corner, dancing on tiptoe with his head down, shadow-boxing, landing tremendous punches on the air: this was what he did when we were quarrelling, trying to make us laugh. Dad’s Army wound up, the ordinary evening melted around us; then they were too late for their dinner-dance, their treat was spoiled. Mostly I was shouting and they pretended to stay calm. Soon I couldn’t remember how it had all started: I felt myself washed out farther and farther from the safe place where usually we cohabited. I couldn’t believe how small and far away they seemed. It was easy to say everything. — You think you’re so sensible and fair, I said to Gerry. — But really I know that you want to destroy me.
— Don’t be ridiculous, he said.
— Oh, Stella. D’you have to make such a performance out of everything?
Gerry said that I wasn’t a very easy girl to like, and that I was arrogant and selfish. He crossed the room to close a window, because he didn’t want the neighbours to hear us. At some point Philip went quietly upstairs. I said I would die if my life turned out as boring and narrow as theirs was.
— Just you wait, my mother warned. — Boring or not, you’ll have to get on with it like everybody else.
Gerry called my friends dropouts and deadbeats, a waste of space.
— That’s what we think you are, I said. — We think you’re dead.
— I’d watch out for Valentine if I were you, my mother said. — You might be barking up the wrong tree.
Gerry did lose his temper eventually.
— Get out, Stella, if you can’t respect this house. Just get out.
Mum remonstrated with him, half-heartedly.
— Don’t worry, I said. — I’m going. I wouldn’t stay in this house if you begged me.
They didn’t beg me. It was that easy. I let myself out of the front door, into the street.
Freezing without my coat, and weeping, I went to Val’s. His mother let me in and I waited for him in his attic, getting under the blankets to keep warm. When he came home from Fred Harper’s I heard her expostulating downstairs, saying I couldn’t stay, she wouldn’t put up with it. So she didn’t like me either. And I heard Val’s voice raised too, shouting awful things. (‘You silly bitch. Don’t touch me!’) Some contamination of rage was flashing round between us all that night, carried from one through another like electricity.
— I can’t go back, I said, when he erupted into the room.
And I saw he understood that it was true. Anyway, he’d had a row, too — with Fred Harper. He was leaving school. We’d both leave school. What did we want with school any longer? We’d leave home too. I felt this was the beginning of my real life, which I had only been waiting for. My real life, in my imagination afterwards, always had that attic shape, high and empty and airy, cigarette smoke drifting in the light from a forty watt bulb. Val said he knew someone who had a flat where we could stay. Tomorrow he’d sort it out. For tonight I could stay here. He didn’t care what his mother thought.
— Poor little Stella, he said. — Poor little you. I’m so sorry.
He was stroking my arms and nuzzling between my shoulder blades, trying to warm me up where I was rigid with cold. And there you are: that night he made love to me, properly — or more or less properly. Anyway, we managed penetration. And we did it another time too, in the early morning a few days later, in a zipped-up sleeping bag in the front room of a fantastically disgusting ground floor flat belonging to the freckled red-haired man, Ian, who sold Valentine his drugs. We lay in the dawn light, crushed together on our narrow divan in the blessed peace of the aftermath, Val’s head fallen on my breast: proudly I felt the trickling on my thighs. I suppose we must have heard the milkman’s float passing — or perhaps by that time we had dozed off.
Then someone threw a full milk bottle through the closed window. Though I didn’t understand at first what had happened: it was just an explosion in the room, appalling and incomprehensible, the crashing glass loud as a bomb, milk splashed violently everywhere. (It seems improbable that a drug dealer had a daily delivery — the bottle must have been picked up from someone else’s doorstep.)
— What the fuck? Val leapt up from the divan, naked.
Ian came running in, pulling jeans on. — What the fuck?
He cut his feet on the glass.
I knew from Val’s face that he knew what the explosion was, and who.
Some other girl, I thought. Some old love. Someone he loves, or who loves him and is desperate for him the way I am.
Of course it wasn’t any girl. It was his English teacher.
I thought — when the whole truth came out, when at last I’d understood about the sex, and Ian was so fucked off with Val about the window and the milk and was looking for him everywhere, and Val got the money from his sister and went to the States, and it was all such a collapse of my hopes — I thought I could still go back, defeated, to my old life. Back home and back to school, and pick up where I left off, and be a clever girl again, and get to university. Even if I could never ever again, in my whole life, be happy.
But I wasn’t that clever, was I?
Had I forgotten everything they’d taught us at school? That you only had to do it once, just once, to get into trouble. We had even done it twice.
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