Tessa Hadley: Clever Girl

I couldn’t help reaching out to take the bird-button.

Clive smacked at my hand.

— They’re not yours, I said indignantly. — They’re anybody’s.

Then he pushed me hard on the knee so that I overbalanced and fell backwards. Standing up, he towered over me; it was a surprise to be reminded of how wholly he filled out his big man’s body. Because of the child’s life he led, traipsing everywhere after his mother, it was easy to discount his grown-up shape as if he’d only borrowed it, the way girls dressed up in their mothers’ shoes and lipstick. Now I saw that Clive’s size fitted as inevitably around him as mine did around me, and that he was at home in it. In fact, because he walked sloppily and mumbled to himself, he was more deeply burrowed away inside his body than other grown-ups were. Other grown-ups, especially women, had learned somehow to live on the surfaces of their bodies, controlling them and presenting a prepared version of them to the world.

Sometimes when Clive stood under the lamp post and watched the children coming home from school you could see he was rubbing himself with his hand down in his trousers — not in any kind of sinful frenzy, more as if he was only half aware of doing it, comforting and reassuring himself. There was an old man who did something like this at the swimming baths too, sitting on the edge of the pool, staring at the girls squealing and splashing, rocking himself in a rolling movement back and forwards against the pool’s rim, taking his weight on his hands. If you caught the pool-man’s eye he was jeering and slippery whereas if Clive ever looked at you he was contemptuous, as if you had nothing for him. I knew it comforted men to touch themselves. I had seen Uncle Ray and Uncle Frank putting their hands down there, adjusting themselves inside their underwear, sniffing their fingers afterwards. My mother would make a little face of distaste at it, clicking her tongue. Auntie Jean would dig her elbow in Frank’s ribs, reminding him he was in company.

— Don’t look, my mother snapped if she saw Clive busy in his trousers; she would close her expression tight shut as if it was my fault for shaming her. — Cross the road, Stella!

I ought to have been afraid of him that morning but I wasn’t. I had been relieved all along that it was Clive I met on the bomb site and not a stranger; in relation to Clive I was still powerful and not obliterated. When he stood looming over me I felt more outrage than fear, and rolled over, scrambling to my feet, dusting off my knees, which were not grazed but lightly stuck with bits of gravel and grass. I wasn’t hurt in the least, only shocked and humiliated.

— You’re not supposed to push me!

He took a step towards me, making a threatening gesture with his hand in the air like the one my mother made to me sometimes. I stepped backwards, deliberately insouciant. Then I turned and skipped away. How I used to love that skipping — two bounces on the one foot, then two on the other — which carried you as fast as seven-league boots, buoyant and flinging forwards, rebounding off the ground each time with double strength. What a loss when one day I wasn’t able to fly along like that any longer, ever again. I can’t remember what stopped me. Was it inhibition, because I grew older and reached the point where I wanted to be like the grown women who presented themselves with such poise? After I had a child, in any case (and I was very young when I had my first) something was physically unbound in me, so that if I jumped or ran for a bus my insides seemed to churn in a new disorder.

Clive came lumbering after me but I knew he couldn’t catch me. The smack of his heavy boots when he reached the pavement was loud as gunshots in the empty street. I stopped and waited for him by the grocer’s shop, where the beige sun-blinds, cracked and torn, were still drawn down inside the windows: between the glass and the blinds was stacked a pyramid of tins of peas, their labels faded almost to illegibility. I had looked at those peas a thousand times.

— Here, grunted Clive when he caught up with me, stopping at a respectful distance, holding out his big greeny-white fist.

I held out my open hand to him.

He gave me the coral rose and the diamanté buckle.

I still have them.

Before I turned the corner into our road I had put the encounter with Clive out of my mind — though not my new treasures, which I kept clenched tight in my hand. The only thought I spent on him was that I would tell my mother I had ‘found them’. Standing facing our front door — I had two keys, one for this and one for the door to our flat inside — I was daunted for the first time by my adventure. I had used my keys many times before; but then I had always been expected. Now, because I was not supposed to be there, the street seemed bleached and flattened by its unaccustomed emptiness — though the milkman’s float was working its way by now from the other end. The grandeur of our door was suddenly forbidding: elevated from the street up its flight of worn steps, with an iron boot scraper set into the stone and an ancient heavy iron knocker (no one needed to use the knocker because of the cracked row of plastic bell pushes to one side, where names were written in ink on slips of card). Inside the hall, its air sour with forgotten coats and shoes, the foggy light was freckled with ruby from the coloured glass in the back door, where steps led down into the garden.

There were two rooms on each floor, and for the whole house one bathroom, two toilets. Beside the front door lived old Tom with a cleft palate who was in the Salvation Army; behind him, the woman who worked in the fish and chip shop. On tiptoe I started up the staircase which wound around the deep well at the house’s core: the handrail was polished wood and the banister rods were shaky in their sockets, some of them missing (I had bad dreams in which they gave way and I fell down towards the bottom). There were still brass brackets for gas lamps on the wall; light sifted down through the dirty skylight set into the roof, which leaked when it rained. In the flat above us lived a couple with a baby I had knitted bootees for, and in the attic above them was reticent Geoffrey, who fed me spoonfuls of condensed milk from an opened tin in his cupboard, and painted huge abstracts in cream and brown and black (he left them behind when he flitted without paying his rent). From Geoffrey’s casement windows you could climb out into the lead-lined channel that ran the length of the terrace, eighteen inches deep, with a stone parapet between it and the street so far below. I had sat out there on the parapet more than once, with my back to the street and my feet in the gutter.

I was startled as I let myself into our flat — staggering slightly because the key was still on its ribbon round my neck, and the keyhole was rather high up on the door — to see the sofa untouched, pristine in its daytime identity. Mum couldn’t be up already, could she? But there was no sign of her — and we only had two rooms. Always, if she was up, she was busy: vacuuming, dusting, rinsing our clothes through in the sink — she called it ‘rinsing’ as though that made it a lighter and smarter job than washing, less like drudgery. And she couldn’t be out. Her handbag was on the table, her bright silk scarf flopped, plumy and exotic, between its handles. Beside the sink in the kitchen-end of our living room (the kitchenette, Mum called it determinedly), were two teacups and two glasses, filled with water to soak. I closed the door quietly behind me and stood taking in whatever extraordinary thing had happened. I knew I’d found my mother out in something, although I didn’t know what. Who had been here with her while I was away? Was it Auntie Jean? The glasses came out for Jean sometimes. I wanted to go stamping around the room, to assert my right to do it, but I kept stony still. Mum’s coat was on its hanger. Her high heels were kicked off beside the sofa; I knew how she eased her feet out of them, grimacing in relief. I could smell her perfume and the faint stale-biscuit smell of her nylons, which I liked, as if it was a secret weakness I kept safe for her.