Repeat It Today With Tears (9 page)

‘It’s all right, it’s only Eunice, she lives upstairs. Kiss me like that again.’

Later when I was dressing he stood in the middle of the room with bare feet and no shirt. It could have been a holiday house and us off outside to stroll on the beach and to pick up shells and him pointing out the hidden primitive creatures in rock pools to make me squeal.

‘Listen, Miss, I still think I should drive you home, I feel I should insist.’

‘It’s all right, really.’

‘Well, I don’t know, I’m a bit out of touch, of course, but surely it’s still… I mean when you’ve spent the night with a man isn’t it usual for him to make some effort to take you home?’

I was buttoning up the shirt; it had fine wrinkles at the arms and at the waist, like a shed skin. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘What do you mean, no idea?’

‘I mean I wouldn’t know, whether they do or not.’ I stood up to find my shoes.

‘Now, hold on a minute, Susie, I think I need to ask you something.’

I knew what it was going to be.

‘Susie, you have done this before, with a man, haven’t you?’

‘No, you are the first.’

I was glad that I had decided that the Windmill Drive occasion did not count. How sweet it was to provoke his reaction. At first he had to resort to the phonic forms again and he shook his head and pushed back his hair where it fell forward.

‘Susie, I really don’t think I know what to say to that… I mean, I did wonder but I… I never thought… Come here, you.’

My father held open his arms for me and when I was inside he put them around me and then crossed them over, behind my back, so that I was doubly held and protected. He rubbed his face in my hair and breathed in it and sighed into it and then he said, ‘So, will you come and see me again?’

‘Can I come tonight?’

‘Of course you can. You must come whenever you like. I’ll always be here. But listen, Susie,’ he took my head in his two hands and held my face to look at me, ‘when you feel, you know, when you decide that you want to stop coming, then that’s all right too, know that it is all right, when it happens.’

‘It won’t happen.’

‘It might do.’

‘It won’t.’ I kissed him again.

On the way home I discovered that while sometimes semen runs back out of you straight away, at other times it stays inside you for ages. You are unaware until it comes out in a sudden rush; you can feel a certain alarm at this unexpected leak. After
the shock of it, walking home across the Common from Cedars Road, it was amusing. Also, the utter secrecy of the phenomenon, even in the most public of settings, appealed to me. I contemplated how many of the stories that we tell ourselves are crafted from secrets. It begins with fairy tales, the sleeping enchanted are hidden away behind many layers of concealment. Chamber, tower, castle, courtyard, drawbridge, thorn and forest.

In the kitchen I felt light-headed with hunger. When I reached for the cupboard I thought that the leak was going to happen again so I tried standing in a cross-legged attitude, like a ballet position. I cut bread and spooned golden syrup on to it from the tin, mesmerised by the gorgeous transparent colour as it fell and spiralled from the spoon.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ my mother had come in behind me.

‘Nothing.’

I folded the bread and put it into my mouth and edged out of the room. I went to bed until it was time to get up for the shift at the restaurant. Sighing in and out of sleep, I recreated my father’s arms and his body and the sound of his voice deep inside my ear in the dark night room, ‘You cling like a limpet, don’t you? No, don’t stop, I don’t mean that I want you to let go, it’s just that I don’t think anyone’s ever held on to me so tightly before.’

From that time I took to staying with Jack on as many nights or part nights as I dared. My mother raised no objections; I told her that I was staying with Alison. I embroidered, explaining that Alison’s mother had taken a job in the evenings at a cinema box office so that we babysat the young brothers. I wondered if Alison would mind if she knew how much I used her in my deceits. She
had written to me once, she had annotated the paper with small biro hearts when referring to boys. She said that she liked the high school she attended and that she had made friends with a girl whose father was an army major. Write back soon, she insisted, with many exclamation marks, in her closing line, but I did not because I knew that we had left each other behind.

I had also to be careful of Lin. All our lives, if she was not fully occupied she was likely to seek diversion in bullying me. Once when I came home from Jack at past midnight she was sitting alone in the living room. ‘What the hell do you do till this time of night?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you know, just stuff.’ I sat on the arm of a chair so that she would not think I was trying to get away from her. She lit a cigarette, there was only one left in her packet and the ashtray was full. I thought about the evening I had spent with our father. I had finished waitressing at seven o’clock and Jack had jazz playing on the record player. I sat cross-legged on the bed and he sat looking at me until the music finished. When someone loves you that much it is like feeling the sun on your face. The needle lifted off the record and Jack came over to the bed. When I knew that he was about to put his fingers on me or in me I could feel it and rehearse it happening before ever he made contact. Sitting on the chair arm in the living room I shook myself out of remembering what he had done before Lin noticed.

‘How is Mickey?’ I asked her. Mickey was the new boyfriend who ran his uncle’s pub.

‘Bastard hasn’t rung me tonight, that’s what I’m sitting up for.’

‘Do you want me to keep you company?’

‘No, it’s okay, you get to bed, you’ve got school in the morning.’

In fact, we were being given time off from school to begin revising for our O-levels. I did not tell them at home, instead I
used the days to take on more shifts at the restaurant. During my breaks I would sit at one of the tables at the back and annotate my copy of
Richard II
and Ali would bring me plates of apple pie and ice cream.

When I stayed the whole night long with Jack I was sure that time passed differently in the room above Phene Street. It is not only because I wished it to have lasted longer than it did. It did not seem like ordinary time, measured by the movement of clocks, but as if it was being counted by some other device, like the fall of drops of water. When he pushed me very hard I thought that we ourselves must surely fall. Down through the floors of the tall house in Oakley Street and on, beyond and below, descending through the centuries of London layers until we reached the first clay that the river itself laid down.

I think I was quiet mostly, it was a shyness I still had, though all physical hesitation soon left me. Jack was not silent, sometimes his moans repeated on and on, like a singer who is practising scales.

At other times he talked to me incessantly, whispers all in nonsense endearments repeated into my ear that lulled and soothed me until the stage when he knew that I did not own myself anymore. And each time he was persuading me in the dark of my inner ear, telling me, ‘Now see, see what I can do to you, Susie, you can’t help it, can you, there is nothing I can’t make you do for me, nothing, now you really have to give yourself to me, don’t you, now, now you are mine, now you are all mine.’

But each time he did not know that it was not only my succumbing to the seducer’s braggadocio lullaby that meant that I belonged to him. Each time I was imprinted on my father and
his history like the negatives that become overlaid, one image upon another, on the film of an old camera. By taking my hand he had joined me to him and to that history, to the lawns and terraces of the Edwardian summer gardens, to the formal, sad-eyed people and their raffish terrier dogs and to the pages in the clasped albums where all pressed flowers turn to the colour of straw.

In the early mornings while he moved around the room and the curtained kitchen and I waited to hear the gas jet light under the kettle, I would lie watching him at these domestic rituals as rapt as if he had been a priest preparing at the altar. He made tea in one big white cup which we shared. I learnt to like tea brewed strong, and with sugar, although I had not done before. Before we got up properly we would sit side by side in the bed, leaning against each other as though it was the end of a journey. We would hear Eunice moving around and talking in low tones to herself or to her cat. Quite early on Jack decided that he should explain my presence to her; I stayed in the room while he waylaid her on the landing.

‘Eunice, I just thought I should mention it… you may have seen Susanna, Susie, she’s a friend of mine, sometimes she stays the night.’

‘I know, Jack, I’ve heard.’

I could tell that he was embarrassed, I heard him shuffle his feet in the battered brown shoes. ‘Yes, well, I know what you’re probably thinking, Eunice, that there’s no fool like an old fool, but it’s just… it’s just happened, with Susie… all right, I know it can’t last, but every day it goes on and I am with her is… it is a bonus.’

‘There is nothing wrong with fools, Jack, let’s have more of
them, that’s what I say.’

At first, because I was too young to identify her brusqueness as the exoskeleton of the irretrievably shy, I felt an uneasy dislike for Eunice. Later, when I discovered her innate kindness and perception, I recalled those first feelings of mine with guilt. Later still, in the end, I used to think of her deliberately, because it brought me the relief of tears.

In the beginning it was also her appearance that unsettled me. She wore dark serge suits and men’s black lace-up shoes and her coarse hair was cut short and into the back of her head, in barber’s fashion. Her exposed neck, in colouration and texture, reminded me of the slices of luncheon meat that my mother gave us with salad. Eunice worked in the accounts department of Peter Jones in Sloane Square. One or two evenings of the week she also had a job in a pub behind Cheyne Walk; Julian, meeting friends from school, had once strayed there by mistake. He had found it memorable on two counts, first because it was peopled entirely by women, all wearing men’s suits, and secondly because they served him orange squash rather than orange juice with his vodka.

Eunice and my father shared the coat stand and the party- line telephone on the landing and the bathroom with its old hissing gas geyser and tin of Vim. Eunice kept a cat named Haddock. Haddock was pure black and rigid in hauteur towards everyone except my father. He sought out Jack’s company, sitting sculpturally still and polished for hours on the painting desk while he worked. Periodically, and although fond of him, Jack harangued the impassive cat, ‘Look at the bloody thing, for God’s sake, it’s like something out of ancient Egypt. Move, you bastard.’

My birthday is the first of June. On the morning of my seventeenth
birthday I was stuffing books into my schoolbag on top of the clothes that I needed for the afternoon shift at the restaurant and the houndstooth check of the Diorissimo box. I used to leave my uniform in the school cloakroom. The week before I had been threatened with a detention because someone had stolen my tie and so I had to wait until a games lesson and steal another girl’s. A detention would have made me late for crossing the river.

Fixed as I was upon the bag stuffing, I was startled when Ron looked into the room and unexpectedly announced ‘Many Happy Returns’.

I heard him saying something quietly to my mother in the kitchen and then her voice rose in disgruntled response, ‘Well, she said she didn’t want any fuss. I didn’t bloody know, did I?’

‘But surely, Mo, a bit of something, a cake and that… ’

‘We’re not that sort of family.’

She came into the room, ‘Well, do you want us to do anything special tonight, seeing as it’s your birthday? Do you want us to take you out for a drink?’

With her expression she was defying me to say that I did wish for some effort to be made. It occurred to me that my sister might have played out the situation like the line on a fishing reel.

‘No, that’s fine. I’ll be staying over at Alison’s.’

She bustled to fetch her purse, ‘Here, I wasn’t just going to do nothing.’ She handed me a note but she was looking at Ron.

‘And here’s a little one from me,’ he said, also handing me money.

After the restaurant shift I met Julian in the Chelsea Potter. He asked, ‘Where did you get those notes from in the middle of the week?’

‘It’s my birthday, but don’t tell anyone. Let’s both have
Pimms.’

‘But why don’t you want people to know, I would have got you something. What are you doing later?’

‘Seeing, you know… ’

‘What, Phene Man? Does he know it’s your birthday?’

‘No, I don’t want him to.’

‘Why not, you’re legal, you know, doing it at your age, it’s only before you’re sixteen he has to worry.’

The landlord came with our Pimms in half-pint glasses, ‘Here we are, hearts, a veritable fruit salad.’ As well as ice and mint and cucumber the landlord of the Chelsea Potter always put into Pimms slices of orange and apple, lemon and cherries. We drank three each.

Julian did not want to go home on his own. ‘Do you want to do something else before you go?’ he asked hopefully.

‘I can’t, I need to be somewhere… you know… ’

‘Yeah, I know, because you’re meeting him.’

I did not want Julian to be jealous. Because he was my good friend I wanted him to be happy when I was happy.

‘Why don’t you go on to the Pheasantry Club?’

‘No money. My dad’s out tonight and Lalla’s God knows where and I haven’t got my door key.’

‘Here,’ I took the change and Ron’s note from my bag. ‘Here, take this, you can go to the Pheasantry until you know your dad will be home.’

‘I can’t take that, it’s your birthday money.’

‘Yes, you can, I don’t want it, honestly.’

On the Radnor Walk corner Julian, swaying slightly, said, ‘Happy birthday, Suse, you’re the best.’ He kissed me on the cheek and a car hooted at us and then we turned in opposite directions down the Kings Road.