Damascus (9 page)

‘You didn't see him when you came in?'

‘I came in the back way. I won't be a minute.'

‘In that case,' Hazel said, ‘you can do me a favour.' She turned off her phone and threw it across to him. I've just decided I'm taking a holiday,' she said. ‘And it starts right now. Put the phone somewhere safe, where I don't even have to see it.'

Back in the entrance hall, William was still standing opposite the front door, staring at it. This time he must have heard Spencer coming.

‘I'm going to go outside,' he said, ‘if it's the last thing I do.'

Spencer put Hazel's phone on top of the junk mail on the telephone table, where he was fairly sure not to forget it. William immediately picked it up and tried out various buttons.

‘She's a rich teacher then?'

‘She has to be available.'

William pretended to make a call.

‘Hello,' he said. ‘Is there anybody out there?'

Hazel was right, he did look a bit like Fellini, but in altogether better health. He seemed in no hurry to go outside, so Spencer decided it was safe to leave him on his own for a while.

In the dining room, while she'd been waiting, Hazel had pushed away her book and shimmied the skirt of her sweater-dress above her knees. When Spencer came back she let her hand drift over the cushion beside her. Spencer preferred the chair.

‘Fine,' she said. She crossed her hands in her lap, and was surprised by how much teacher now crept into her voice:

‘Would you mind telling me what's going on?'

‘How's Sir John?'

‘Sorry?'

In the book. 
Sir John Magill's Last Journey.'

‘It's his last journey. Come on, Spencer, we ought to be doing better than this.'

He did that incredibly annoying thing where he looked away, as if something somewhere else had urgently caught his attention. Hazel told him to stop it. They were alone, she said, in the same place for a change and together at last. They could actually try to enjoy it.

‘We have the whole day,' she said firmly. ‘So stop worrying. Or at least tell me what you're worried about.'

‘I'm sorry,' Spencer said, changing chairs. 'I can never relax when people are coming to look at the house.'

‘If there's something wrong you should tell me. We shouldn't have any secrets.'

‘It's not a secret. It's just. Look. Imagine the worst possible scenario.'

‘Of what?'

‘Of us.'

Hazel breathed in, closed her eyes, and imagined more than one Spencer Kelly. This one in the dining room, although he looked something like the Spencer Kelly she'd been expecting, was in fact a completely different Spencer Kelly. He actually owned this house and his father wasn't a warehouseman. Instead he was a senior politician who'd made his fortune preaching fundamentalist sermons against sex before marriage. When he found out about Hazel's familiarity with Spencer's bed, he would automatically suspect an evil connection with Hazel's father's sales trips to Iran or Pakistan or Israel. In a fit of rage the father of the fake Spencer Kelly would then exploit his masonic contacts in the military to initiate pre-emptive air-strikes against any of the above-named countries, who would all retaliate instantly with various weapons of mass destruction. Total nuclear war would follow, resulting in the destruction of everything and the death of the planet.

And then Hazel Burns would never meet the real Spencer Kelly, for whom she may well have been destined in love.

‘Well it's not that bad,' Spencer said.

‘How bad is it?'

Spencer stared intently at a loose thread behind a button on his suit jacket. Hazel snapped her fingers. He told her that when he'd been in the library he'd asked about the moming-after pill.

‘Well hello romance,' Hazel said.

Spencer looked up at her, embarrassed but still hopeful, as if she was contemporary art. She wished he wouldn't do that. It was almost as bad as when he looked away, and not for the first time in her life Hazel wished she believed in a romantic love like Spencer's Damascus. After the certainty of a revelation, little things like these probably didn't matter so much. She said:

‘Is pregnancy really the worst thing you can imagine?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Then it's not so bad, is it?'

‘There's also disease.'

‘We know everything about each other. I thought this was what you wanted?'

'It all seems very sudden. Very quick.'

‘Everything changes, snap bang, instantly. That's what you were always waiting for. And anyway, what's so wrong with children if we love each other?'

Spencer: the dreadful unstoppable momentum of it all, a wedding probably, a honeymoon if they could afford it, the child, temper-tantrums, and no more watching television in the afternoon, consoled by the thought that he was hurting nobody by doing nothing because there was nothing to be done and life could always begin tomorrow.

Hazel: on any particular day, not a special day in time of war or social unrest, but just any normal any old newsday, children could be abducted, fall from cliffs, collide with fireworks, contract meningitis. They could be shot in the face from point-blank range or stabbed or stoned or poisoned by a pellet from a customised umbrella. And even if they survived all this, they'd probably still run away from home to star darkly in dubious films with titles like 
Hellfire Corner
or 
So You Want to Be a Surgeon?
 or 
Clarissa Explains It All
.

There was, however, nothing to be gained from being frightened.

‘There is also joy,' Hazel said. ‘Let's try and live life as if the world was going to stop at tea-time.'

‘Why should it?'

‘What?'

‘Stop at tea-time.'

‘A thousand reasons. Anything could happen. I'm just saying don't be so frightened.'

‘It's not fear, it's thinking.'

Then you think too much. Fear is easy,' Hazel said. ‘It's like being sad. Anyone can be sad and afraid. Now come and sit over here.'

Spencer went and sat on the sofa. Hazel put her hand on his knee. She asked him if he ever wondered what Charles Kingsley was like in bed.

It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Baling or Gala or Aberavon or Newmarket, in Thornton Steward or Durham or Matlock or King's Lynn, Hazel Burns is fourteen years old and a prisoner in her own home. In the front room she and her mother stand opposite each other, locked in full combat.

‘It's only a mini-skirt. All the girls are wearing them.'

‘Stop being so adolescent.'

‘I 
am
 adolescent.'

‘Do I have to spell it out?'

‘Yes.'

‘What would Sam Carter think?'

‘Spell it out, Mum.'

‘Imagine you're walking home. It's dark. You hear footsteps behind you. You're terrified and all you're wearing is that handkerchief, which, if I may say so, makes you look like a prostitute. The footsteps speed up, following you all the way home. Eventually you reach the front door, you turn round.'

‘And then what?'

‘Use your imagination.'

And there he is, River Phoenix in sunglasses, having faked his death to start a new life as Hazel's secret long-term lover. Destiny would be a fine thing. Or at least, Hazel corrects herself, a fine destiny would be a fine thing.

‘What's wrong with Sam Carter?' her mother asks.

‘He's fat.'

‘What about one of those nice boys you always meet on holiday?'

‘They all live miles away. And anyway, we keep on moving house.'

‘How about your black trousers? You could put on some trousers.'

‘I'm not changing.'

Her mother loses her temper and says well then in that case young lady you're not leaving the house and Hazel thinks fine, if I'm not allowed to leave the house then I won't even leave this room. She sits on the sofa with her knees clamped together, arms crossed, and vows never to speak nor move again until either her mother relents or she starves to death. Her mother leaves the room. So, starving to death it is, then.

She will be sorely missed. She has the leading role in the school's Christmas play, a musical version of 
Cinderella
 or
The Secret Garden
 or 
Sleeping Beauty
, and the cast will be lost without her, utterly devastated. She can think of several boys (including Sam Carter) who will miss her glossy brown hair and her flawless complexion. In fact, it's only because she's so attractive to boys that her mother cares what clothes she wears. It explains why she acts as if Hazel is forever ten years old, and holds her captive in this room, unloved among the never-changing beigeness of the three-piece suite, the endless supply of crossword books, today's predictable paper, and, spread across the coffee table, all the phonecards left over from the disasters which never happened. Hazel and Olive use them as betting slips when they play poker. Hazel wins at poker. Olive usually wins at chess.

Nothing ever changes, Hazel thinks, except the things which always change. This is a different front room, for example, but the only way of telling is by the new pair of moles in the corner cabinet. The chess set is now Romans v Spartans or Crusaders v Saracens, who Olive likes to call the Vanguard of the Jihad, especially when she's winning. The furniture is perhaps a little more carefully spaced, for Olive's benefit, but essentially it's all the same and therefore no better than school, where Hazel is still expected to sit next to the same person every lunchtime. Probably even after she dies from starvation.

Nobody understands her, and Hazel has come to the conclusion that the only place the right way up on this spherical earth is wherever she is. Everyone everywhere else is unstraight and off-balance and only her father sometimes steps into her right-way-up world and remains upright. He is, however, Salesperson of the Year ‘93 and usually away on business in Jerusalem or Islamabad or Cleveland, selling lifestyle ideas to strangers. Hazel looks at the phone but doesn't honestly expect him to ring, and she can't say she blames him. He must be glad to get away from Mum, even though Hazel sometimes suspects her parents actually love each other. Otherwise why would Dad do so many things he didn't want to do? And why would Mum be so paranoid he was having an affair? The usual candidates are his new secretary or an air hostess or some mysterious swan-necked foreigner.

The door slams open, interrupting Hazel's ongoing attempt to perfect the terms and conditions of her early-life crisis. It is Olive Burns, Hazel's twelve-year-old sister, who now prefers to be called Oily. She free-wheels gracefully into the middle of the room, and then swivels to face the sofa. Hazel stands up and walks round her. Olive pushes her clear-framed glasses back up her nose and smiles broadly. She pivots her chair and follows Hazel towards the window. She says:

‘Who's a naughty girl then?'

‘Go away.'

‘Guess who won't be coming swimming with us later? Nice skirt.'

Hazel goes back to the sofa and sits down again and crosses her legs. Olive attracts her attention by waving something above her head. It is a red-and-white striped woollen glove meant for a child. Hazel jumps up to grab it but Olive speedily reverses towards the window.

‘You can't hit me,' she says. 'I'm in a wheelchair.'

Hazel looks at her sister and then at the glove. She shrugs. She composes herself, sits down, smoothes her very short skirt. Olive rolls forward and claims she can read Hazel's fortune by using the supernatural powers latent in the love-glove.

Despite herself, Hazel looks up.

'The 
what?'

'The glove of love. With my intimate experience of the dark-side,' Olive tells her, ‘I can now reveal the secrets of your future.'

Hazel is a little jealous of Olive. Something real has happened to her, and by nearly dying she has really lived, which is only one of the many dilemmas which complicate her intimate experience of adolescence. Olive puts on a funny, spooky voice to announce that today is All Saints' Day, particularly suited to divination in the areas of marriage, health and death.

‘Let's do marriage,' Hazel says, and then remembers she's supposed to be starving to death. She studies the top of her knee, and then a fingernail.

Olive strokes the glove and closes her eyes and says 
I
 
see
 … she says 
I see…
 she says it several more times than Hazel considers strictly necessary.

‘I see fat Sam Carter.'

‘He is not fat.'

‘I see fat Sam Carter grinning. Fat Sammy is Hazel's boyfriend.'

Olive sniggers. Hazel tells her that she doesn't have a boyfriend and she doesn't want one. And if she did want one it wouldn't be Samuel Carter, thank you very much.

‘Saving yourself for someone special?'