Sunstroke and Other Stories (7 page)

—You could take it down to the lavatory for me. It’s a flight and a half down, door on the right.

Hilary didn’t stir.

—Please, Hills. You could cover it with a newspaper or something.

—Did you do this deliberately? Hilary said. —Is this an abortion?

—No. It just happened. I might have done it
deliberately, but I didn’t need to. I’d only just realised that I was pregnant. I’ve only missed two periods, I think. I never keep track.

—Who is the father of it?

Sheila’s eyes snapped open incredulously. —Who do you think? she said. —I wouldn’t have just sent any old person to get you.

Hilary helped. Several times she carried the chamber pot down one and a half flights of stairs, holding the banister rail, watching her feet carefully in the gloom (there was only the one bulb in the hallway, which Neil had switched on when they first came in). She covered whatever was inside the pot with a piece of newspaper, then tipped it into the lavatory without looking and flushed the chain. Thankfully it had a good strong flush. She stood listening to voices downstairs, a long way off as if they came from underground, from a basement room perhaps: Neil’s voice and others, male and female, subdued but nonetheless breaking out into laughter sometimes. Opening off the landing above the lavatory Hilary found a filthy bathroom, with a torn plastic curtain at the window, overgrown with black mould. An ancient rusted red-painted reel wound with canvas rope was secured to the wall beside the window, with instructions on how to lower it as an escape harness in case of fire. She ran the bath taps for a while, but although the pipes gave out buckings and bellowing noises and hiccuped gouts of tea-coloured cold water into the grit and dirt in the bottom of the bath, she couldn’t get either tap to run hot.

—There’s no hot water, Sheila said. —This is a squat: what did you think? Everyone goes into the halls to bathe. We’re lucky to have electricity: one of the guys knew how to reconnect it. You could ask Neil for the electric kettle. What do you want hot water for anyway?

—I thought you might like a wash. I thought I could put some things in to soak.

—Don’t worry about it. I’ll wash in the morning. We can take all this stuff to the launderette later.

Although they had always lived so close together in the forced intimacy of the vicarage, where there was only one lavatory and fractious queues for the bathroom in the mornings, the sisters had been prudish in keeping their bodily functions hidden from one another. This was partly in scalded reaction to their mother, who poked curiously in the babies’ potties to find swallowed things, and delivered sanitary towels to the girls’ room with abandoned openness, as if she didn’t know that the boys saw. They had even always, since they stopped being little girls, undressed quickly with their backs turned, or underneath their nightdresses. It was a surprise how small the step seemed, once Hilary had taken it, over into this new bodily intimacy of shared secret trouble and mess. Sheila’s pains, she began to understand, had a rhythm to them: first a strong pang, then a pause, then a sensation as if things were coming away inside her. After that she might get ten or fifteen minutes’ respite. When the pain was at its worst, Hilary rubbed her back, or Sheila gripped her hand and squeezed it, hard and painfully, crushing the bones together.

—Damn, damn, damn, she swore in a sing-song moan while she rocked backwards and forwards; tears squeezed out of her shut eyes and ran down her cheeks.

—Are you sorry? Hilary said, humbled.

—How could I possibly be sorry? Sheila snapped. —You think I want a
baby
?

She said the pains had begun at three in the afternoon. She told Hilary at some point that if they were still going on in the morning they would have to call an ambulance and get her into hospital: she explained in a practical voice that women could haemorrhage and die if these things went
wrong. By ten o’clock, though, the worst seemed to be over. There hadn’t been any bad pains for over an hour, the bleeding was almost like a normal period. When Neil came upstairs Sheila wanted a cup of tea and a hot-water bottle.

—You’ll have to take Hilary out, she told him, —and buy her something to eat.

Hilary had eaten some sandwiches on the coach at lunchtime. She hadn’t had anything since then; she didn’t feel hungry but she felt light-headed and her hands were shaking.

—I’m fine, she said hastily.—I don’t want anything.

—Don’t be so silly. Buy her some fish and chips or something.

Hilary was too tired not to be obedient. She put on her mac and followed Neil downstairs, as if their fatal passage round the city had to recommence. At least this time she wouldn’t be carrying her case. She waited on the street outside; he said he had to fetch the others.

—By the way, he added, not looking at her,—I shouldn’t mention anything. They just think Sheila’s got a tummy bug. They’d be upset.

—OK, Hilary mumbled. Furiously she thought to herself that she wouldn’t have spoken to his friends about her sister if he had tortured her. ‘You silly little man,’ she imagined herself saying. ‘How dare you think I care about upsetting them?’ She tipped back her head and looked up the precipitous fronts of the houses to the far-off sky, studded with cold stars.

She noticed that Neil had put on shoes to come out this time: a pair of gym shoes, gaping without laces. His friend Julian had jug ears and long dyed blond hair; Gus was shy and lumpish, like a boy swelled to man-size without his face or body actually changing to look grown-up. Becky was a pretty girl in a duffel coat, who giggled and swivelled her gaze too eagerly from face to face: she couldn’t
get enough of her treat, being the only girl and having the attention of three men. She knew instinctively that Hilary didn’t count. Even her patronising was perfunctory: she reminisced about her own A levels as if she was reaching back into a long-ago past.

—You’ve chosen all the easy ones, you clever thing! My school forced me to do double maths, it was ghastly.

—Are you sure you’re not hungry? Neil said to Hilary as they hurried past a busy chip shop with a queue. —Only if we don’t stop we’re in time for the pub. You could have some crisps there.

Hilary gazed into the bright steamy window, assaulted by the smell of the chips, weak with longing. —Quite sure, she said. She had never been into a pub in her life. There was a place in Haverhill where some of the girls went from school, but she and Sheila had always despised the silly self-importance of teenage transgression. It was impossible to imagine ever wanting to enter the ugly square red-brick pub in the village, where the farm labourers drank, and the men from the estate who worked in the meat-packing factory. Neil’s pub was a tiny cosy den, fumy light glinting off the rows of glasses and bottles. The stale breath of it made Hilary’s head swim; they squeezed into red plush seats around a table. Neil didn’t ask her what she wanted, but brought her a small mug of brown beer and a packet of crisps and one of peanuts. She didn’t like the taste of the beer but because the food was so salty she drank it in thirsty mouthfuls, and then was seized by a sensation as if she floated up to hang some little way above her present situation, graciously indifferent, so that her first experience of drunkenness was a blessed one.

When the pub closed they came back to the house and sat around a table in the basement kitchen by candlelight: the kitchen walls were painted crudely with huge mushrooms
and blades of grass and giant insects, making Hilary feel as if she was a miniature human at the deep bottom of a forest. She drank the weak tea they put in front of her. The others talked about work and exams. Becky was doing biological sciences, Gus was doing history, Julian and Neil seemed to be doing English. Hilary couldn’t believe that they sounded just like girls at school, scurrying in the rat-run of learning and testing, trying to outdo one another in protestations of how little work they’d done. Not once did any of them actually speak seriously about their subjects. Hilary felt so deeply disappointed in university life that on the spot she made up her mind to dedicate herself to something different and nobler, although she wasn’t clear what. Neil and Julian were concentrating upon sticking a brown lump of something on a pin and roasting it with a match. From her indifferent distance she supposed this must be drugs, but she wasn’t frightened of that now.

—Don’t tell your daddy the vicar what you’ve seen, said Neil.

She was confused – did the others know what had happened after all? – until she realised that he meant the brown lump.

—Are you two really from a vicarage? asked Becky. —It’s like something out of a book.

—We can’t offer the respectability that Hilary’s used to, Neil said. —She’ll have to slum it here for a few days.

Hilary could see that Neil was the centre of all the others’ attention. At least he had not joined in when the others were fluttering and fussing about their work; he had smiled to himself, licking the edges of little pieces of white paper and sticking them together as if none of it bothered him. He had an air as if he saw through the sham of it all, as if he came from a place where the university didn’t count for much: she could see how this had power over the others. He didn’t say much but when he spoke it was
with a deliberate debunking roughness that made the others abject, ashamed even of the feel in their mouths of their own nice eager voices.

Becky told Neil flirtatiously that he would have to be on his best behaviour, while Hilary was staying. —No swearing, she said. —’Cause I can see she’s a nice girl.

—Fuck, he said. —I hadn’t thought of that. Fuck that.

Hilary thought of the farm boys at home, who called sexual words when she and Sheila had to walk past them in their school uniform. She had always thought, however much it tortured her, that they had an obscure right to do it because of their work. In the winter mornings from the school bus you could see the frozen mists rising up out of the flat colourless fields, and figures bent double with sacks across their shoulders, picking Brussels sprouts, or sugar beeting. But Neil was here, wasn’t he, at university? He’d crossed over to their side, the lucky side. Whatever she thought of her life, she knew it was on the lucky side, so long as she wasn’t picking Brussels sprouts or meat-packing.

No one had said anything since she arrived about where Hilary was to sleep. Sheila was supposed to have booked a guest room for her at Manor Hall, but of course she couldn’t go there now. When she couldn’t hold herself upright at the kitchen table any longer she climbed upstairs to ask what she should do, but Sheila was asleep, breathing evenly and deeply. Her forehead was cool. Hilary kept all her clothes on and wrapped herself in an old quilt that Sheila had kicked off; she curled up to sleep on the floor beside the bed. At some point in the night she woke, frozen rigid and harrowed by a bitter draught blowing up through the bare floorboards; she climbed into the bed beside Sheila who snorted and heaved over. Under the duvet and all the blankets it smelled of sweat and blood, but it was warm. When she woke again it was morning and the sun was shining.

—Look at the patterns, Sheila said.

She was propped up calmly on one elbow on the pillow, and seemed returned into her usual careful self-possession. Hilary noticed for the first time that the room was painted yellow; the sun struck through the tall uncurtained windows and projected swimming squares of light on to the walls, dancing with the movements of the twiggy tops of trees which must be growing in a garden outside.

—Are you all right? she asked.

Sheila ignored the question as if there had never been anything wrong.

—How did you get on with everybody last night?

—We went to a pub.

—Oh, which one? She interrogated Hilary until she was satisfied that it must have been the Beaufort. —We often go there, she said enthusiastically.—It’s got a great atmosphere, it’s really local.

—When I told them we lived in a vicarage, Hilary said, —one of them asked if we were Catholics.

—That’s so funny. I bet I know who that was. What did you think of Neil?

Hilary was cautious. —Is he from the north?

—Birmingham, you idiot. Couldn’t you tell? Such a pure Brummie accent.

—He wasn’t awfully friendly.

Sheila smiled secretively. —He doesn’t do that sort of small talk. His dad works as a toolsetter at Lucas’s, the engineering company. No one in his family has been to university before. His parents don’t have money, compared to most of the students here. He gets pretty impatient with people, you know, who just take their privilege for granted.

Hilary felt like a child beside her sister. What had happened yesterday marked Sheila as initiated into the adult world, apart from her, as clearly as if she was signed with blood on her forehead. She supposed it must be the
unknown of sexual intercourse which could transform things in this way that children couldn’t see: Neil’s self-importance into power, for instance. At the same time as she was in awe of her sister’s difference, Hilary also felt a stubborn virgin pride. She didn’t want ever to be undone out of her scepticism, or seduced into grown-up credulous susceptibility.

—But doesn’t he think that we’re poor, too? she asked fiercely.—Have you told him? Does he have any idea?

—It’s different, said Sheila with finality.—It’s just different.

When Hilary drove in the summer with her father in the Bedford van, to pick up Sheila and all her things at the end of her first year, she was waiting for them of course at Manor Hall, as if there had never been any other place, any squat whose kitchen was painted with giant mushrooms. Hilary understood that she was not ever to mention what had happened there, not even when she and Sheila were alone. Because they never wore the memory out by speaking of it, the place persisted vividly in her imagination.

She had stayed on in that house for almost a week: she had arrived on Monday and her return ticket was for Saturday. Sheila rested for the first couple of days, sleeping a lot, and Hilary went out on her own, exploring, going round the shops. On Sheila’s instructions she took several carrier bags of bloody sheets and towels to the launderette, where she sat reading Virginia Woolf while the washing boiled. There seemed to be a lot of hours to pass, because she didn’t want to spend too much time in Sheila’s room; she shrank from the possibility of getting in the way between Sheila and Neil. A couple of times she went to the cinema in the afternoon by herself. They all went out to pubs every evening and she got used to drinking beer, although she didn’t get to like it. While the others joked and drank and
smoked she sat in a silence that must have looked gawky and immature, so that she was sure Sheila despaired of her, although Sheila must also surely have known that she found the conversation impossible to join because it was so tepid and disappointing, gossip mostly about people she’d never met. Sheila, who had been aloof and not popular at school, seemed to be working hard to make these people like her. She made herself brighter and funnier and smaller than her real self, Hilary thought. She surrounded Neil in particular with such efforts of admiration, prompting him and encouraging him and attributing ideas to him, while he smiled in lazy amusement, rolling up his eternal cigarettes. At least they weren’t all over each other, they didn’t cling together in public. Hilary even feared for Neil, thinking that he shouldn’t trust her sister, he should wonder what dark undertow might follow after such a glittering bright flood.