Sunstroke and Other Stories (6 page)

In the coach, aware of her reflection in the window from
time to time when the scenery was dun enough behind to make a mirror out of it, Hilary sat up very straight. She and Sheila had practised with one another, remembering never to lapse into the crumpled unawareness that smote their mother if ever for a moment she left off being busy. She was almost always busy. She had driven Hilary in to catch her coach that morning only because she had to go in to Cambridge anyway, to buy replacement school shorts and other uniform from Eaden Lilley for the boys. The boys had larked around in the back seats of the ropy old Bedford van that was their family transport, kicking at each other’s shins and dropping to wriggle on their bellies about the floor, so that their mother – who drove badly anyway, with grindings of the gears and sudden brakings – spent the whole journey deploring fruitlessly, and peering to try and locate them in the rear-view mirror. She had taken to wearing dark glasses when she went anywhere outside her home, to cover up the signs of her palsy. She stopped the van on Parker’s Piece and had to get out to open the door on Hilary’s side because the handle was broken. Hilary had a vivid idea of how her mother must appear to strangers: the sticking-up hair and dark glasses and the worn once-good coat she never had time to button up; her jerky burrowing movements, searching for money or lists in bags or under the van seats; her cut-glass enunciations, without eye contact, of bits of sentences that never became any whole message. When Hilary walked away with her suitcase to take her place in the little huddled crowd of waiting travellers she wouldn’t look to see if any of them had been watching.

Bristol bus station was a roaring cavern: everything was greasy and filthy with oil, including the maimed pigeons. Green double-decker city buses reversed out of the bays and rumbled off, important with illumination, into the evening.
A whole day’s light had come and gone on the journey. Hilary looked excitedly for Sheila while she shuffled down the aisle on the coach. She wasn’t worried that she couldn’t see her right away. ‘Whatever you do don’t go off anywhere,’ Sheila had instructed her. ‘Stay there till I come.’

Someone waited slouching against the metal railing while she queued for her suitcase, then stepped forward to confront her when she had it: a young man, short and soft-bodied, with lank light brown hair and a half-grown beard, wearing a pinstriped suit jacket over jeans. He also had bare feet, and black eye make-up.

—Are you Hilary?

He spoke with a strong northern accent.

Hilary felt the disapproving attention of the blue-rinsed knitting lady, focused on his make-up and his feet. She disdained the disapproval, even though in the same instant she judged against the man with Culvert passionate finality. ‘What an unappealing little dwarf of a chap,’ she thought, in her mother’s voice. Of course her thought didn’t show. To him she would look only like the sum of what she was outwardly: pale with bad skin, fatally provincial, frightened, with girls’ school gushing manners.

—Yes.

—Sheila couldn’t be here. She’s unwell. You have to come with me.

He swung away without smiling or otherwise acknowledging her; he had only ever looked perfunctorily in her face, as if he was checking basics. She had to follow after him, out through the bus station back entrance into a twilit cobbled street and then up right beside a high grim wall that curved round to join a busier road. The tall buildings of a hospital with their lighted windows rose sobering and impassive against the evening sky, where the murky day in its expiring was suddenly brilliantly deep clear blue, studded already with one or two points of stars. The man walked
ahead and Hilary followed, hurrying, struggling with her suitcase, three or four steps behind. The suitcase was an old leather one embossed with her grandfather’s intials; he had taken it to ecumenical conferences in the thirties. Because the clasps were liable to spring open she had fastened an elastic Brownie belt around it.

Unwell! Unwell was the word they had to use to the games mistress at school when they weren’t having showers because they had a period. Hilary saved the joke up to amuse Sheila. Then she was flooded with doubt; why had she followed this rude man so obediently? She should have at least questioned him, asked him where Sheila was and what was wrong with her. Sheila had told her to wait, whatever happened, at the bus station. She opened her mouth to protest to him, to demand that he explain to her, and take a turn carrying the case. Then stubbornly she closed it again. She knew what a squeak would come out of it if she tried to attract his attention while she was struggling along like this. And if she put the case down and stopped she was afraid he’d go on without noticing she was no longer behind him, and then she would be truly lost in an unknown city, with nowhere to spend the night, and certainly not enough money to pay for anywhere. She could perhaps have hired a taxi to take her to Sheila’s hall of residence, although she wasn’t sure what that would cost either. She had never been in a taxi in her life, and would never have the courage to try and signal to one. And what if Sheila wasn’t at the hall of residence?

Pridefully she marched on, though her breath was hurting in her chest and her hand without its glove – they were somewhere in her shoulder bag but she couldn’t stop to find them – was freezing into a claw on the case handle. Her arm felt as if it was being dragged from her shoulder. It wasn’t clothes that made her case heavy, but some books Sheila had asked her to bring. Every forty paces – she began
to count – she swapped her case and shoulder bag from hand to hand, and that gave a few moments of relief. She fixed her eyes on the back of the rumpled pinstriped jacket. Once or twice, on the zebra crossings, he looked back to check for her. Luckily his bare feet seemed to slow him down somewhat, probably because he had to keep an eye out for what he might be walking in. There were quite a few people on the streets, even though the shops were closed; sometimes he held back to let a crowd go by, perhaps because he was afraid of someone stepping on his toes. Perversely Hilary started slowing down too whenever this happened. She was damned now if she wanted to catch up with him. Even if he stopped to wait for her, now, she thought that she would stop too and wait, as if the distance between them had become a fixed relationship, an invisible rigid frame of air connecting them and holding them apart in the same grip.

She thought she recognised the streets that they were walking through. When their father had driven Sheila over with her things at the start of the autumn term, Hilary had come with them; she had wanted to be able to picture where Sheila was, when she wasn’t at home. This shopping area was on a hill behind the city centre: it had seemed lively and fashionable, with tiny boutiques, cafés, a department store whose long glass windows were stuck with brown and yellow paper leaves. She had seen Sheila taking it all in from her front seat in the van, satisfied with her choice, impatient to be left alone to explore. At home they could only ever get lifts in to Cambridge every so often, and anyway their shopping there was dogged by waiting parents, ready with ironic comments on whatever the girls chose to buy with their money. Dimly in the dusk now, Hilary could see the Victorian Gothic university tower where it ought to be, over to her right. Manor Hall residence where Sheila had a room should be somewhere off to the
left, up past a little triangle of green grass. The pinstriped jacket struck off left, and Hilary was relieved. They must arrive soon, and she would be able to put her case down, and be rid of her dreadful companion.

The road he took didn’t lead up past any triangle of grass but downhill; it was wide, busy with fast through traffic but not with people. They left the shops behind and it seemed all at once to be completely night; the pavement ran alongside a daunting high wall to their left. The steep hills and old high walls of this city were suddenly sinister and not quaint, as if they hid dark prisons and corruptions in their folds. Hilary followed the pinstriped jacket in a grim, fixed despair. In spite of the cold she was sweating, and her chest was racked. She thought that catastrophe had overtaken her. She had made an appalling mistake when she meekly followed this man out of the bus station, like a trusting child, like an idiot. The only form of dignity left to her was not to falter, or make a worse fool of herself screaming and running, not to break the form of the rigid relationship in which they moved. She thought he might be taking her somewhere to kill her with a knife. She wouldn’t say a word to save her life; she might swing at him with her grandfather’s suitcase. Or she imagined drugs, which she didn’t know anything about: perhaps drug addicts recruited new associates by bundling strangers into their den and injecting them with heroin. She didn’t ever imagine rape or anything of that sort, because she thought that as a preliminary to that outrage there would have to be some trace of interest in her, some minimal sign of a response to her, however disgusted.

The pinstriped jacket crossed the road, darting between cars. Following, Hilary hardly cared if she was hit. He struck off up a narrow precipitous hill with tall toppling houses facing on to the pavement on either side. Because of the effort of climbing she had her head down and almost walked
into him when he stopped outside a front door. He pushed the door and it swung open. The house inside was dark.

—In here, he said, and led the way.

Hilary followed.

In the hall he switched on a light: a bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The place was desolate: ancient wallpaper washed to colourlessness hung down in sheets from the walls. Even in her extremity, though, she could tell that this had been an elegant house once. City lights twinkled through a tall arched window. The stairs wound round and round a deep stairwell, up into blackness; the handrail was smooth polished wood. Everything smelled of a mineral decay. They climbed up two flights, their footsteps echoing because there was no stair carpet. He pushed another door.

—She’s in there.

Hilary didn’t know what she expected to find.

Sheila was sitting with a concentrated face, rocking backwards and forwards on a double bed which was just a mattress on bare floorboards. She was wearing a long black T-shirt, her hair was scraped carelessly back and tied with a scarf. The room was lit by another bare bulb, not a ceiling pendant this time but a lamp-base without a shade, which cast leering shadows upwards. It was warm: an electric radiator painted mustard yellow was plugged in the same socket as the lamp. Hilary felt herself overheating at once, her face turning hot red, after her exertions in the cold outside.

—Thank God you’ve come, Hills, Sheila said.

She sounded practical rather than emotional. That at least was reassuring.

Pinstripe stepped into the room behind Hilary. He put on a shifty uncomfortable smile, not quite looking straight at Sheila, focusing on the dark tangle of sheets and blankets that she seemed to have kicked to the bottom of the bed.

—D’you want anything? Tea?

Sheila shook her head. —I’m only throwing it up.

—D’you want anything?

Hilary couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her. —No, I’m fine, thanks, she said.

—I’ll be downstairs, he said. —If you need anything.

They heard the sound of his footsteps retreating. Hilary put down her case: her hand for quite a few minutes wouldn’t ease from its frozen curled position. —Shuggs: what’s going on?

Sheila groaned: not in answer to the question, but a sound ripped from inside her, a low and embarrassing rumble as if she didn’t care what anybody heard. She rocked fiercely.

—I’m miscarrying a pregnancy, she said when the spasm seemed to have passed. —It’s a fine mess. Blood everywhere. Buckets of blood. You’ll have to help get rid of everything.

—I can’t believe this, Hilary said. She felt she was still somewhere inside the Bluebeard story she had been imagining on her way from the bus station. For a few pure moments she blazed with anger against Sheila. It wasn’t fair, for Sheila to have spoiled her visit with this, her so looked-forward-to chance to get away. Sheila’s mission had been clear and certain: to cut herself free of all the muffling dependencies of home and childhood. If she could succumb to anything so predictable as this melodrama – just what their parents would have warned against if only they hadn’t been too agonised to find the words – what hope was there?

—What are you doing here? she demanded. —What is this place?

—It’s a squat, said Sheila calmly.—Neil’s squat. I told them at Manor Hall that I was going away for a few days. They’re not to ever know anything about this, obviously.

—You’d be kicked out.

—Uh-oh, said Sheila, attentive to something inside her. Then she lunged from the bed to sit on something like a
chamber pot in the crazy shadows on the far side of the room. Hilary tried not to hear anything. —Oh, oh, Sheila groaned, hugging her white legs, pressing her forehead to her knees.

—They wouldn’t kick me out, she said after a while. —It’s not that.

—And who’s Neil?

—That’s him, you idiot. You’ve just walked in with him.

Hilary hadn’t moved from where she stood when she first came in, or even made any move to unbutton her mac. She felt as if there was an unpassable waste of experience between her and her sister now, which couldn’t be crossed. Sheila had joined the ranks of women submerged and knowing amid their biology. She realised with a new shock that Sheila must have had sexual intercourse, too, in order to be pregnant.

—I don’t want Mum to know, that’s why, Sheila said. —I’ll simply kill you if you ever tell anyone at home.

—I wouldn’t, said Hilary coldly.

—I just can’t bear the idea of her thinking that this is the same thing, you know? The same stuff that’s happened to her. Because it isn’t.

Hilary was silent. After a long while Sheila stood up stiffly from the chamber pot. She stuffed what looked like an old towel between her legs, and moving slowly, bent over as if she was very old, she lay down on the bed again, on her side this time, with her eyes closed.