Notes from an Exhibition (32 page)

‘I’ll need to get our tickets, Ray,’ she said gently, taking care not to look at her directly. ‘Two one-way tickets to New York. Are you sure that’s what you want?’

Ray was muttering to invisible enemies, making small, violent gestures as though to brush away crumbs or ants from the front of her coat. However she held out her case to Joanie with her free hand.

‘Oh. You’re sure?’ Joanie asked. ‘Thanks. You watch mine for me, OK?’

She left Ray with her suitcase, her mutters enough to scare away any thief, and sought out the ticket windows. She unzipped the case while she was still safely at the back of a line to slide a bill from the stash in the shopping bag. She tweaked a second one out and tucked it in her pocket for security. And another. If anyone caught her with all this loot, they’d never believe her story, not with Ray in her current state.

As first one then another passenger bought their tickets ahead of her, she asked herself the same thing she had asked Ray: was this really what she wanted?

‘Miss?’

She didn’t want her parents. After what they’d done they were as good as dead to her. Joanie certainly didn’t want Etobicoke or anything like it.

‘Miss?’

If she felt any pang it was unexpectedly for Winnie, for whom she found she still harboured an older sister’s wary love. Winnie couldn’t help being what she was.

‘Next please, Miss!’

What the Hell! She could do the ladylike, Havergal thing and write her a letter.

She stepped forward and thrust a bill at the ticket-seller and asked for two tickets to New York. Perhaps she would go no further than there? Perhaps that would be enough? Perhaps she could enrol in an American art school or just hang around in Greenwich Village and find herself a life class to go to or at least some reefer.

Ray had stopped muttering, thank God, and pulled herself together again but she was plainly scared of the noise and the swelling crowds and Joanie saw she would have to take charge.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We can get breakfast on board. There it is, see? Way over there on those last platforms.’

She led the way, pausing to buy them magazines because she felt in need of camouflage and it seemed like a normal thing to be seen to do. She found them a car that was still empty and would probably stay so as they had only a few minutes to spare. Ray refused to give up her case and sat hugging it to her as though there were something inside it she was scared of letting out.

Thinking to distract her, Joanie handed Ray a magazine and tried to read the other herself, hoping to settle
Ray by example. Out of the corner of her eye, however, she could see Ray hunched awkwardly over her case, flicking the pages much too fast for normality. Oh well, she thought. At least Ray would keep their end of the car empty for them. Joanie had not yet readjusted to life in the real world and was worried normal people would think her odd.

She looked away, staring out of the window at the men and women in the train across the platform from them. As it pulled out she had that confused sensation of being the one moving while they were staying put. Which made her think of all the times she had caught trains from there with her family. To visit her cousins. To visit Niagara. To weddings and funerals of people she hardly knew.

Her stomach was turning over with nerves now as much as hunger and she wondered if she would soon be feeing sick. It had been a mistake not to grab something to eat as they crossed the concourse. The dining car might not open for hours. There might not even be one on Sundays.

To calm herself she imagined how all this would one day be a madcap bitter anecdote; how celebrated artist Joanie Ransome once escaped a Canadian lunatic asylum with a crazy bank robber girl with a bag of loot and none of the right clothes and hopped on a train for Manhattan. She knew her future listeners would picture something wild and rough-edged, a louring Victorian asylum, two ragged girls hurling themselves into the open boxcar of a freight train headed south. This easy, almost genteel escape, hardly felt like an escape at all. But it was and when the whistle blew she found she had been digging
her nails into her palms in the fear that someone they knew, some authority figure, some policeman, would fling wide the carriage door and stop them. Or worse, her mother.

She became aware Ray was muttering again and shaking her head and hugging her suitcase tighter than ever.

‘Ray?’ she said, forgetting to look sideways at her. ‘What’s going on? Want me to put your case in the rack for you? Stay calm for me, Ray. Stay calm just till we cross the border.’

‘I’m oh! I just! I just can’t,’ Ray said and for once she actually met Joanie’s eye. ‘I can’t,’ she said again, quite gently now, apologetically almost, then opened the door beside her and jumped out as they started to move. The door swung loose in her wake.

‘Ray!’ Joanie shouted. She dropped her magazine and hurried over to look down but the door slammed back in her face as a train arrived from the other direction, blaring its horn.

Ray had jumped down on to the tracks and directly into its path.

Further back in the train a woman screamed. There was no screeching of emergency brakes, though. The other train was braking already, being only yards from its platform but Joanie’s train didn’t stop. She was too shocked to do anything. She simply sat there, staring out at the tracks. Then, when the guard came running through and said, ‘Someone jumped out as we were leaving the station. Was it from here?’ a kind of instinct made her lie.

‘I … I think she was sitting further up,’ she told him, not needing to fake her shock.

On his way back through the train he asked to see her ticket. After he punched it and handed it back to her, she unzipped her case to slide her ticket safely into the little pocket with her driver’s licence. She found herself staring not at her familiar, hated clothes and wash things but at several brushes, a bottle of turpentine, the useless wax crayons and a rather good box of oil paints Ray must have bought or stolen on one of her trips out. There was also a huge Hershey bar, the biggest money could buy, and a Gideon Bible, much of its text obliterated by Ray’s insane annotations. Beside them lay the shopping bag stuffed with twenty-dollar bills and a toothbrush so flattened and worn it would barely do for cleaning silver.

Feverishly she ransacked the case’s zippered compartments and found a book of Charlie Brown cartoons, bubble gum, two new sketchpads and there, just when she was abandoning hope and imagining turning back, Ray’s passport.

She grabbed it, zipping the case safely closed, and examined it greedily. Ray, it seemed, was short for Rachel. Rachel Kelly. There was only eight months’ difference in their ages. Acquired for the trip to Ireland, it pictured her in usefully full-faced early adolescence. If she wore her headscarf up and some lipstick and acquired some reading glasses she could travel all the way to England as a young woman mortified to be haunted by such an unflattering snapshot of herself in a larval stage.

When the dining car opened, she bought breakfast, although her appetite had vanished with poor Ray, and made herself eat nearly all of it. Her carriage filled up a little at the first stop. She read both magazines then locked
herself in the washroom to count every bill in the shopping bag. Then she was sick, then she felt much better although she bitterly regretted the hoard of skipped medication she had lost along with her driver’s licence. In New York she would book a boat ticket – not steerage but not fancy either, this was money she would have to live off for a good while.

She could buy clothes and at the first opportunity she would see a doctor to get some Valium. Joanie Ransome was dead to her and her family now. She could face that with equanimity but Rachel Kelly would need a little something to keep her on an even keel.

As Petroc began to come he saw stars: little, blue-white flashes. He shut his eyes, to black out the thin wash of light from the farmhouse, and found they were even brighter.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh my word. Fuck, Bettany. Oh fuck! Sorry. I think I’m …’ And then he came and it was a million times better than on his own with an old T-shirt and a head full of the busty girl from the chip shop. Actually he usually found himself thinking of a blonde woman who read the local news on television, who was sort of sweet but not a sex symbol or anything, not someone you could talk over with your mates. Now he wasn’t thinking about her or anyone. He should probably have been thinking about Bettany, who was still rocking away on top of him with her amazingly uptilted breasts swaying in the moonlight and her meaty thighs clamped about him. It probably wasn’t polite of him but he was thinking entirely of how good it felt and how long it was lasting and how he couldn’t wait to try it again.

He subsided back into himself and smelled the moss and leaves beneath him and Bettany’s sugary scent and the entirely new smell of her and him together which presumably was how sex smelled. She was still rocking away, eyes shut, apparently as self-involved as he had been moments before. Luckily he was still as hard as a rock inside her. In fact, if she kept this up he might even start coming all over again. He raised his hands and cupped the palms of them very gently over her breasts so he could feel her nipples rubbing against them. He had never felt breasts before, not even through a shirt. You had to call them tits with your mates but that never seemed right as it made them sound sort of small and silly and powerless when they were obviously very powerful indeed. They needed a longer word, with more syllables, like mammaries.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Bettany. Oh bugger.’

‘West End Girls’ stopped playing for a second or two inside and the sound of people’s voices was suddenly loud. Then someone put on ‘Spirit in the Sky’. Troy probably, as he fancied himself as a sort of DJ and spent hours making compilations. And, as if it was the music that had tipped her over the edge, Bettany came.

He had heard about this, of course; about girls who made lots of noise or who went on and on and on. He heard smutty stories about girls using electric toothbrushes and spin dryers and girls who faked it. But Bettany was very restrained. She just clenched him, with her thighs and her insides, so tightly he thought she’d leave bruises, and her rocking got slower and slower and then she stopped. She opened her eyes. She had rather small ones, clogged with eyeliner, but he could see them shine. She bent down and gave him a quick kiss that tasted of rum and Coke. She had been swigging from a can of Coke earlier and he guessed She had tipped rum in through its opening. Her hair smelled of dope. They hadn’t kissed much earlier, which was a relief because he wasn’t sure he’d be any good at it and it struck him as the most intimate thing, in some way, perhaps because of using tongues. The rest was intimate too, naturally, but it was limbs and body parts whereas mouths were sort of where your personality came out.

She sat back on him rather heavily then stepped off him and almost lost her footing, which made her giggle. She was quite drunk. ‘Whoops,’ she said. ‘Shit. You got a tissue on you, Pet?’

By a rare chance he had a proper handkerchief Hedley had brought him back from Italy. It was big and had
famous Italian sights all over it, like the Colosseum and the Leaning Tower. He handed it to her.

‘You sure?’ she said and then used it to wipe between her legs. She sort of folded it up and handed it back. ‘Souvenir,’ she said. ‘Where are my fucking …? Oh.’ She giggled. ‘There they are. She found her knickers, stepped back into them without taking off her shoes and tweaked them up under her dress.

Cold now, because she had left his middle sweaty, he pulled up his pants and jeans and stood too, tidying himself away.

‘You’re very sweet, Pet,’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘That your first time?’ She ran a finger down the front of his T-shirt.

‘No,’ he lied and hated his voice for sounding so young and wimpy.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s all right, then. It’s just, well, we can’t really … I’m sort of seeing someone else, is all.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s cool.’

‘No hard feelings?’

‘Course not.’

‘You sure?’ she said, giggling some more and she rubbed the front of his jeans where his cock was swelling all over again and sort of bent sideways by his second-best pants which had shrunk in the tumble dryer.

‘Get off!’ he laughed, shoving her away, and she gave a sort of shriek and became just a mate’s sister again.

‘I’m getting another drink,’ she said. ‘You coming back in?’ But the music had changed to ‘You Spin Me Round’, which he hated so he said, ‘In a bit,’ and she lurched away,
having difficulty on the twigs and stuff in her heels. She had dressed up a bit tonight; normally she was in trainers.

Petroc tucked the damp handkerchief into a back pocket and walked the other way, circling the farmhouse and outbuildings at a distance, listening to the music, that wasn’t too loud heard from outside, and watching the glimpses through the windows of people dancing or drinking or just standing around and shouting. He saw Morwenna, dancing the way she tended to, with her hands constantly snaking up above her shoulders as though she was dancing in a tube and the only way to move them was up. She had a cigarette in one hand and was either on Speed or E or wanting one to think she was. She had quite a habit, though he was the only one in the family who knew; Charlie, when she could cadge it. He’d seen her begging Es off Troy and overheard Spencer saying he liked the way they made her so horny.

He wandered, still circling. The Eurythmics came on and he saw everyone in the room sort of speeding up to match the music. He wondered where Hedley was and how soon they could leave without being rude or uncool. Petroc didn’t like parties much and hadn’t wanted to come only Morwenna and Hedley were clearly going and he couldn’t stand being alone. He was no good at dancing, didn’t like alcohol and loud music made his ears hurt. But these were all things you couldn’t admit, like wanting a better word than tits. When the question of the party came up it was clearly an issue. Working at his desk on a model of a pilot cutter, he heard Wenn and Hed discussing it. Hed was saying there’d be hell to pay if Antony and Rachel found out they’d left him on his own and she said fifteen
and three quarters was easily old enough to be left without a babysitter and what could go wrong.

Nobody knew about his fear of being in the house on his own because it never arose. Someone was always there and, if they weren’t he just went out with friends. He didn’t need to be in the same room as people but he needed to know they were in the house somewhere and always had. One of his longest recurring bad dreams involved being in his and Hedley’s room and hearing the front door slam and whoever was leaving locking it behind them.

He was coming too, he insisted. Trying to be grown-up, Morwenna said he was still too young to drink and wouldn’t know anyone there but he was able to bluff with confidence, having a few mates in the sixth form now and said he had friends going and that even if Hed and she hadn’t been asked, he would have been gate-crashing it. If they didn’t take him, he’d only bum a lift, he cheerfully pointed out, with some mate who’d have been tanked-up on cider first. So they brought him and all went their own ways within minutes of arriving.

There was no food, of course, not even crisps, because food wasn’t cool and the Youngs brothers lived like cavemen to the point where their own crippled father had moved out and lived in a caravan for a bit of civilization. Petroc came upon Mr Youngs now. He was sitting in a nylon deckchair in the caravan’s open doorway, watching the world go by, listening to ‘There Must be an Angel’ and drinking beer from a glass.

‘All right?’ Petroc greeted him. He looked friendly enough and he was half-tempted to beg him for a bit of bread and butter and some cheese as he was so hungry.
But Mr Youngs couldn’t talk properly and sort of mumbled in response, which made taking the conversation further a bit tricky. ‘Lovely evening,’ Petroc said instead and just stood with him companionably for a while and then left it at that.

The anxiety was returning that had never quite left him since Rachel announced, with no trace of excitement, that she and Antony were going to have to go to New York for a week. He wasn’t superstitious, nothing remotely like that, but the announcement had left him with a growing dread that something bad was going to happen to her there. She’d be mugged or she’d have a bad turn and jump under a subway train or their plane would malfunction and catch fire. The others were so independent now – what with Wenn being in her last year at LSE and Hed having been to Italy on his own for two whole months – that it wouldn’t have occurred to them to worry that their parents were away. They wouldn’t worry about Rachel, at any rate.

Sometimes he felt as though he had grown up with a different mother to the rest of them. He knew about her being bipolar, how could he not with her regular trips for blood tests and the pills that had been cluttering up the butter compartment of the fridge door all his life. And the medication wasn’t foolproof, not least because its success relied on her taking it and she was not a reliable woman. So he had suffered with the rest of them when she had bad patches or went a little crazy telling lies or spending money she didn’t have or flying into her white-hot rages, which they probably all made worse by tiptoeing around her talking in soft voices rather than dealing with it and shouting
Oh my God there’s a dangerous animal
where our mother used to be!
But what with all the ageing hippies and potheads and sculptors and jewellery designers around Penzance now, she seemed to him to fit in pretty well, as an unusually successful eccentric.

But then, she seemed different to him because she had never had a real breakdown in his life, never been hospitalized with it, whereas Garfield and Morwenna and Hedley’s childhoods had been overshadowed by regular crises so they had grown up thinking of her as mad first and their mother second. Whereas they knew the worst, having witnessed it, Petroc could only imagine it and had grown up waiting for it to happen again. This made him protective where the others were merely wary.

More recently he had started to notice her as a woman instead of simply as Rachel, and had begun to wonder about her marriage to Antony. This was a mystery to him; he so endlessly calm and forbearing, she so demanding and restless. If Antony suddenly cracked and set her free, said, ‘All right. Go to New York on your own. Live in a studio. Do drugs! Take lovers!’, if he refused to take any further responsibility for her, would she have jumped feet-first into the opportunity to run wild or would she have gone to pieces with no husband to nurse and nanny her? How much of her character was shaped by always being handled as though she might break?

Petroc came around the side of the house, to where the music was blaring out of open windows and the boys’ knock-off disco lighting flickering across the dirty glass made it look as though the place was on fire. Couples were writhing about in two of the broken-down cars that always had feral cats in them by day. A boy he didn’t
know, with his T-shirt dangling from a back pocket, was being sick into an old tractor bucket, bracing his hands on its forks. In the far corner of the yard, Spencer was showing off his latest set of wheels to some friends who were clustered about it. He was gunning the engine pointlessly and demonstrating the crazy vigour of its sound system pounding out The Cure which, even at that distance, seemed easily as loud as the reggae now coming from the house.

Petroc spotted Morwenna at last. She was leaning on the jamb of the open front door, swigging from a plastic water bottle. She shone with sweat. She reached out a hand towards him theatrically.

‘Baby brother,’ she shouted. Her eyes were glittering and she looked madder than Rachel ever did. She ran a hand through his hair. ‘Mop top,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

He shrugged, glad she hadn’t seen him slope off with Bettany earlier. ‘Bit noisy in there,’ he said. ‘It sounds better from the woods at the back.’

‘What? Hang on.’ She fiddled under her hair and tweaked out an earplug. ‘Fuck it’s loud!’ she laughed. ‘They’ll have the police here soon even with no neighbours.’

‘Yeah,’ he said and yawned. ‘It’s a bit much.’

‘You don’t want to
go
already, Pet? It’s only just gone midnight.’

‘I wouldn’t mind. It’s full of tossers.’

‘I said you wouldn’t know anyone.’

‘I do know them and they’re tossers.’