Tessa Hadley - Clever Girl

What have you done?

(Though Nicky would never have accused anyone, let alone me.)

— I didn’t ask to be born, Rowan used to sulk when he was a boy, long after we left the commune, if I asked him to tidy his room or dry the dishes. He was beautiful — strong limbs twisting out of my grasp, silky black curls and skin that burned dark chocolate-brown in the sunshine (Nicky’s father was mixed-race Brazilian, though Nicky grew up with his white mother in Glasgow). And I know it sounds foolish, but I took him seriously; his argument seemed a valid one, I was afraid of it. Rowan had never consented to existence: I had cheated him into it. Like a classical philosopher, like Oedipus, he would rather never have lived. What right had I to impose my laws on him?

— You have to play your part, I said. — Everyone has to do their share, and help each other.

(The words fake and tasteless as old gum in my mouth.)

— Why? Why should I? I don’t want to.

I met Nicky because students from the art college and the university used to come into the café where I worked. This café was part of a wholefoods shop on Park Row, painted pink and green and yellow. We sold mung beans and mate tea, stodgy slabs of cake flavoured with carob, organic vegetables crusted with earth, and olives from a huge tin on the floor; we made our own coleslaw and hummus and wholemeal bread, and believed we were getting in touch with a more authentic way of life — connected to the past, and vaguely to other cultures abroad. The style of the place — bare sanded boards, an odd assortment of wooden tables and chairs, blue and white striped china — was in itself a political statement. Posters were pinned on a noticeboard, advertising yoga classes or feminist reading groups or political meetings. The girls who worked there wore dungarees over stripy jumpers, or shapeless vintage print dresses and handmade flat leather shoes with straps across the instep like children’s sandals. They despised make-up, although they tolerated mine: I painted my eyes heavily with black eyeliner and mascara and brown eye-shadow. I was allowed to get away with it because I was a mother and because of the knocks I had taken.

I liked the art students best because they were less earnest. I didn’t single Nicky out at first, though you couldn’t help noticing him: he was exuberant and charming, with a Glasgow accent and brown skin and a mop of black curls. I liked him as an element in that whole crowd. In a way I suppose I fell in love with them all collectively, with their excitement as if they were at a perpetual party and their outfits like fancy dress (Nicky wore a miltary jacket with frogging and epaulettes). Jude, who moved into the commune with us later, was from the art college too. And so was Baz, a tall good-looking boy with dyed orange hair. I thought Baz was Jude’s boyfriend until Nicky explained to me that Jude was a lesbian and Baz was stalking her: he was obsessed with her and wouldn’t let her alone. At the time this just seemed like another part of the drama of that crowd. After my life at Dean’s House I couldn’t get enough drama. I loved all the little flares and upsets and scandals, but I didn’t take them seriously.

Nicky started to pay attention to me. He began by drawing me. I had presumed that all the art students would be able to draw — but it turned out that life drawing wasn’t part of their curriculum any longer, they weren’t encouraged to make their art look like things or people in real life. Nicky was almost embarrassed by his gift, which seemed to be a trick from an old-fashioned repertoire. He had been able to do these little sketches ever since he was small, and they were what had singled him out as a child and made him special — he had drawn his family and the characters in his neighbourhood, and had won prizes at school. I loved his pictures, which caught and exaggerated some essential quality or gesture in his subject and yet weren’t caricatures.

He drew me when I wasn’t conscious of him watching: I was making the coffees or collecting the china from the tables or tending to Lukie if he was with me — Lukie would sit happily for hours in the café while the students entertained him. Because Nicky was close to his own mother, he was attracted to an ideal of maternal tenderness (meanwhile I was chafing at the responsibility of motherhood and envying the freedom the other girls had). The drawings seemed to be glimpses into my secret life, which I thought no one else saw — though I couldn’t quite connect these glimpses with Nicky’s unsubtle outward persona. He was gregarious, noisy, popular: not beautiful, exactly, though plenty of girls found him attractive — his round sweet face, the shadow of silky hair on his upper lip, his nose that was crooked because he had broken it falling off his bike when he was a boy. Everyone liked Nicky, he had no enemies, and he liked everyone. He wasn’t suspicious or critical as I was. He was even kind to Baz, whom everyone else avoided because Baz was so dreary in his obsessive pursuit of Jude.

Nicky courted me and I went out with him, we slept together. This was exciting because it drew me deeper inside the set of my new friends. I never let on to them just how lonely my life had been before I met them; because I’d left school at seventeen and was a mother, they imagined I’d tasted more than they had of real life. I hid the self-doubt I felt because I hadn’t passed beyond the threshold of education. I don’t remember any one moment when I gave my consent to our becoming a couple, Nicky and I; he used to put his arm around me in public and then we began to be asked out together. He looked after Lukie for me and didn’t mind playing with him for hours in the park or with his toy cars; Lukie adored him. This made all the practicalities in my life so much easier. I allowed our connection to be established as a certainty — but I always knew that I was keeping something back, a cold stone hidden in my thoughts. I made up for my doubt by being competent and kind and reserved, which was what he liked. And it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to being loved. I had been so abandoned and alone — and then all of a sudden this love was available to wrap round me, warm as a blanket. I got used to the warmth and forgot that I’d ever not had it.

Nicky believed that I was good, and innocently natural. Perhaps it was my inexperience that he misconstrued as innocence; he was the first boy I’d made love to properly, although I never told him this. I was lucky with him, he was a kind and easy lover and undid a lot of the rage from the beginning of my motherhood. He was a good beginning. That’s what I used to think, even at the time. Even when I was pregnant with his baby, I couldn’t be convinced that Nicky was the end of my story.

And so it turned out.

For a while after he died I actually forgot what he was like in bed, I blanked it. It wasn’t something you could ask anyone. No one else could know, and there weren’t any photographs or words or mementoes left as traces of those scenes, to act as clues. It used to torment me, trying to recreate the sensations of our intimacy and thinking I’d forfeited them through what I’d done, through my carelessness.

At first our relationship was fitted in around my life at the café and at Fred Harper’s. It had worked out well, the arrangement by which Lukie and I lived in Fred’s flat rent-free in return for housework. Fred got on well with my new set of friends and they were welcome at the flat, though I held back sometimes from inviting them because I was ashamed of letting them see too much of my daily routines of childcare and cleaning and shopping and cooking; these seemed so unlike the students’ improvised, dramatic lives which had no fixed framework apart from the lectures (which they often missed), and their exams and degree shows.