Mary George of Allnorthover

When the clock reached seven thirty, he opened his front door. The fetid air of the bungalow, its trapped smells of fried food, cigarettes, sweat and aftershave, lingered on the forecourt most of the day. Charlie blinked, his only response to the sun. It was a Monday morning and the commuters were there, wanting to be gone in time for the city train. Once Charlie had filled their tanks, they relaxed and said good morning as they turned the key in their ignition. It would occur to those who worked in international banking or on the trading floor that Charlie was, of course, in the same game. They made fraternal, esoteric remarks about indices and monopolies. Charlie was polite: ‘The government says …’ He nodded as they accelerated away.

Allnorthover had two bus stops. A brick shelter with wooden seats and a tiled roof sat in a paved square on the edge of the green near Mary’s cottage. There were rarely many people in it as this was the stop for buses going only to Mortimer Tye, where you could do little more than catch a train. A hundred yards along the High Street, on the opposite side of the road, was the stop where you waited to go into Camptown, where Mary went to school. Here, the Council had recently erected a tin shelter, a single wall with a narrow roof and a plastic ledge on which to sit. It was like an open hinge, already tilting as the paving stones had begun to erupt. The pavement was squeezed between the road and the thrusting hedges of the long front gardens that kept the village’s bigger and better houses – square, butter-coloured Georgian villas – out of sight. While the older cottages and shops built on the road had long ago grown dull with dirt from the exhaust fumes of lorries, their windows permanently filmed with dust, the villas gleamed.

The fuel crisis meant that the first three morning services into Camptown were reduced to a single bus that came at eight. Pensioners who usually had to wait till nine o’clock to use their passes were now allowed to travel early and so this morning, six elderly members of Allnorthover’s First Families – Laceys, Hepples, Kettles or Strouds – headed the queue. The women wore nylon gloves and lace-knit cardigans over loose floral dresses made from the same material they used to make stretch covers for their chairs. The men dressed in suits that had been so well cared for they were worn to paper, their creases to glass. They wore caps they had had all their adult lives. Married for fifty years or more, couples like the Kettles rarely looked at or spoke to one another but once in retirement, weren’t often seen apart.

Mr Kettle squinted into the sun at this arrival, a child in old man’s clothes, a singlet and baggy flannel trousers, held up by braces and gathered in a wide leather belt. ‘That a boy or a girl?’

‘It’s the George one.’ Mrs Kettle shifted her weight from hip to hip by way of greeting. Behind the Kettles were some Hepples and Strouds. Spreading themselves just a little, they filled the shelter, taking whatever shade it could afford.

Behind them were the early workers, who usually caught the seven o’clock. They worked the first shift on the industrial estate, making the fruit juice, electrical goods and sausages for which Camptown was known. The early workers were used to being able to sit apart in a bus that arrived empty. Each took a seat by the window and set down beside them a sandwich box, flask and bag of clean overalls. They came home together, too, just before the end of the school day, with their overalls back in their bags with their stains, the bright splashes of pig’s blood and artificial orange, a whiff of something sweet and rotten or sour and citric. Only men worked in the electronics factory. They smelt of nothing and told their wives that the holes in their sleeves that had been eaten away by hydrochloric acid were cigarette burns.

The early workers stood uneasily in single file while beyond them, school children spilled onto the road. The youngest were hot and already bored of pushing each other into hedges or playing chicken with the juggernauts. Two older girls lolled against a fence. Mary tentatively joined them.

‘Says you were followed by a loony, Saturday …’ a Lacey girl began, her doll-face turning sour. She primped her blonde curls. ‘Your type?’ Her mouth, already a tight purse like her mother’s, clasped in a satisfied grin.

Mary laughed and shook her head, half-heartedly. ‘Right nutter.’

Julie Lacey looked her up and down, unconvinced. ‘Student, was he?’ Then she turned suddenly to a plump girl on her other side. ‘Says your uncle, June!’

June Hepple swung her lowered head slowly from side to side, ‘Nothing to do with me …’

Mary looked at June’s quivering cheeks, her vague brown eyes, her frizzy hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She didn’t know whether she wanted to comfort or shake her. Mary took a book out of her bag and sat down on the kerb to read. Julie Lacey nudged her book with her toe. ‘There’s dirty … dogs and that …’

The buses were old double-deckers with an exhausted and complicated rumble that everyone living along the High Street could recognise. They rarely bothered to leave their houses to catch one until they heard it coming. Mim began barking long before the eight o’clock pulled up, already half full. The Kettles, Hepples and Strouds sat downstairs in the two long seats that had been left empty, as if reserved for them. The early workers made for the stairs but were overtaken by a swarm of children and ended up scattered miserably among them. The three girls, all wanting to smoke, went upstairs too. Julie Lacey cleared a gaggle of younger boys off the front seats with a look.

Tom Hepple had sat up all night, his legs stretched out beyond the end of the child’s bed, his face caught in the mirror on the dressing table opposite him. The quilted nylon cover crackled beneath him. He kept his gaze fixed on his reflection but at the edges of his vision, the rosebuds on the wallpaper throbbed. Above the mirror were shiny posters of musicians and footballers, all eyes and teeth. He had not let Christie turn off the light.

Tom grew tired and could guard against his body no longer. His feet jerked and the fingers of his right hand began to tap rapidly on the bedside table. He became aware of the same acrid breath going in and out of his lungs, getting smaller each time he inhaled. His hand gripped the spindly table which tipped, its contents slipping to the floor: a china shepherdess, an etched glass, a plastic snowstorm and a bowl of sequins. Tom got down on his hands and knees. Nothing was broken, but the sequins embedded themselves in the thick strands of the carpet and were too small anyway for his fingers; the shepherdess’s head came away in his hands. Tom’s chest tightened, his stomach churned and he felt the pressure of his panic and knew that any minute he would lose control. He rushed into the hall where identical doors carried flowery ceramic plaques: ‘Mum and Dad’, ‘Darren and Sean’ and ‘Bathroom’. There was one behind him, too, ‘June’. Tom crept into the bathroom. He tried not to make a mess but he was shaky and all wrong. He rubbed at the wet carpet till the tissue disintegrated and stuck to it.

‘Carpet in the bathroom. What would Ma have thought?’ Christie stood in the doorway. He lifted Tom to his feet, took the tissue from his hand and threw it away. ‘Have a wash and come down. You’ll not know where you are yet.’

In the kitchen, Sophie was filling a kettle. She wrenched the tap on so strongly, water sprayed up over her hands. She banged the kettle down on the hob and tried to strike a match, but it snapped.

‘June off to school already?’ Christie did not meet her eye.

‘Couldn’t wait, I reckon. Good job the boys are still over at Mum’s.’ Sophie snapped two more matches. ‘He’s no better, is he?’ she continued. ‘He should’ve stayed where they know … how he is and can help him.’

Christie approached and put his hands on her shoulders. She turned abruptly in his arms, ‘We never could help him, could we?’

He looked into her broad face and saw that its softness had been exhausted. Tom appeared in the doorway. He was trying to smile. Sophie looked past her husband at his brother, the crazy twin who fluttered in and out of their lives, coming close like a moth that must be caught and put out of the window. They would try to hold him and free him but he would flap out of reach, terrified and bruised by any such contact. Then he would be back, circling them again.

Sophie gestured to a chair but Tom hovered, uncertain. Her white kitchen and bleached hair dazzled him. She put a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It’ll have to be black. The milk turned on the step.’ His electricity had once seemed like a kind of wild static that confused everything nearby. After ten years of hospitals and halfway houses, he was still jittery but his eyes were dull.

‘I’ll go up for more,’ Tom gabbled, thinking he wanted to help and that he wanted to get away. Sophie watched him through the window. She didn’t want him here and above all, she didn’t like to be reminded that it was because of Tom that she had married Christie. Sophie had met Tom first because he had been at the Grammar while she was at the High, before the two schools were amalgamated. Tom had been beautiful and clever, and she had taken his trouble for sensitivity and his agitation for great thoughts. She hadn’t had to get too close before realising that he was a very bad idea – and then there had been Christie. Tom was so away in his head that he’d barely seemed to notice that something was happening between them and then that it had changed. She’d felt such a fool.

You do not have what it takes to be in this world, she thought. You are a monster.

The bus driver, wanting to be gone from the village before Mim got loose, revved his engine but stopped again as Mrs Kettle yanked the cord above her head, ringing the bell repeatedly. ‘Edna isn’t here yet! She’s had to collect her dressings.’ A minute or two passed as Edna Lacey limped towards the bus stop. She stood there, smiling, and didn’t get on. The bus conductor, a weak-minded, yellow-haired boy whose mother was a Stroud, hesitated and looked to Mrs Kettle, who thought for a moment, then called out, ‘Are there more to come, Edna?’

Edna Lacey peered up and down the High Street. ‘Can’t say as anyone’s on the way.’ She kept looking down the road and made no move to get on.

‘Shall we be off?’ Mrs Kettle asked no one in particular and no one felt it their place to reply.

A Triumph came puttering round the bend. Edna Lacey stepped into the road and raised an arm. The car stopped and as Father Barclay got out to see what she wanted, Edna Lacey opened the passenger door and got in. There were three more villagers in the back of the car already.

Father Barclay stood for a moment between the car and the bus. He smiled and shook his head, as if rehearsing something in a mirror. He rocked on his heels, swung his arms and clapped his hands. Then he laughed his high, rapid laugh, which began as a bird call and ended as gunshot.

‘Don’t let me keep you!’ he boomed to the conductor who was standing on the platform, watching him. ‘I’ll bring up the rear!’

The only people in the village whose petrol wasn’t rationed were the two priests, the doctor and Constable Belcher. They never travelled far without being hailed for a lift.

The conductor’s face was expressionless and remained so as Mrs Kettle rang the bell three times on his behalf, the signal that they could set off. The driver waited as Father Swann glided by in his Jaguar, which was also full. He started up the engine and accelerated hard, just as Tom Hepple stepped into the road, stopped in the middle and put down the pint of milk he was carrying. Although Tom kept moving, the driver was confused by the bottle. He braked late and sharp.

The Kettles, Hepples and Strouds fell sideways against one another heavily but silently. They were too old to be startled and make a noise about it at the same time. The early workers gave hoarse grunts or sighs, perhaps the first sounds of their day. The children shrieked and then immediately began laughing at those whose books had slid from their satchels or whose apples had rolled across the floor to be kicked by whoever could reach them.

Tom had been walking slowly so as not to be back in Sophie’s kitchen too soon. And then there was the bus, the one that he had caught from up by Temple Grove, going to school each day. It was waiting. He didn’t have to return to the new road off Back Lane, Stevas Close or whatever it was called, and Christie’s hard new house. He could go home, but the milk? He could leave it here. They would come to find him and there it would be. The bus was crowded. I know everyone he thought, there is my grandmother only she’s dead. He got upstairs quickly and saw all the children, boys that were him and Christie, girls that were Sophie. He walked along the aisle as whispered explanations rippled past him. There were three girls across the front seats and the one on her own in the corner, not turning round, he knew, was her.

‘Mary George.’ He tried hard to say her name softly, but his voice caught and blurted it.

Someone laughed fast and then sucked in their breath. It was quiet for what seemed like a long time and then the conductor was tapping Tom Hepple on the shoulder. ‘There’s no standing on top, sir, come down, take a seat and we’ll be off.’

Tom ignored him. ‘If you could show me again, while the water is falling …’ Mary had shut her eyes. Julie Lacey was staring at her, not at Tom Hepple like everyone else.

Tom could see the girl was shaking, her back was hunched over and her shoulders raised. He didn’t want to frighten her; he must try to explain. ‘You were just a child, I know that, but it was your father …’ Why should she be afraid? ‘Your father could come back …’

June Hepple stood. Since the end of childhood, she had moved like someone in heavy clothes underwater, what little she said floating up in small bubbles from her uncertain mouth, and even though she still could not meet her uncle’s eye, for once June did not look to Julie Lacey for her cue. ‘I’ll take you back now, Uncle Tom. You don’t want to be going anywhere.’

June took his arm and her hand was his mother’s hand, and he felt the world settle into place. She led Tom downstairs. The conductor handed her the pint of milk. Things were ordinary and clear again and Tom could see the children were not him and Christie but what might be their children, and that the old woman looking hard at her folded hands was not his grandmother but his mother’s sister, an aged Aunt May. He tried to greet her but she did not look up. June pulled him gently towards the pavement, ‘May’s deaf sometimes, Uncle Tom. Remember?’

Five minutes silence was all Julie Lacey could manage before she began shifting from side to side, peeling her bare thighs and the damp nylon of her waitress’s uniform from the plastic trim of the seat. She tutted and puffed, and fanned herself with one hand. Mary ignored her. ‘June’ll have to watch her uncle don’t chop her up into little pieces one night! Mind you, he’s not half bad looking, for a loony I mean, if you like that sort of thing.’ She guffawed but Mary only turned her head further towards the window and those children sitting near enough to hear her gasped, not understanding that this was more or less a joke. ‘You’re going to have to be careful too, Mary George … says those Hepples never did forgive your father …’

Mary pulled a tobacco pouch and papers from her bag. She slowly teased out the tobacco, laid it on the paper, creased the edge with her nails and rolled her cigarette. She ran the tip of her tongue along the glued edge and sealed it. Her hands did not shake. Julie had noticed that the children around her were listening eagerly now. ‘Must have felt bad in the end … couldn’t face anyone in the end, could he? Face you, does he?’ Mary lit her roll-up and closed her eyes.

Julie didn’t speak again before she got off at the roundabout on the edge of town. Since leaving school a year before, she had worked at the Amber Grill, the restaurant in the Malibu Motel, built on the site of Barry Spence’s old transport café. The eldest Spence brother, Barry had made a deal so mysterious and successful that his greasy spoon with its unofficial bunkhouse was swept away overnight and replaced by a stucco-fronted restaurant with a reception area, and a string of pebble-dashed motel rooms. He had a tarmacked car park and a sign with neon palm trees at the entrance to his own sliproad. It was said that Barry’s success was due to secrets. The old Amber Café had been a traditional meeting place for those with unofficial business, who thought they would be alone among travellers and strangers. With a sharp eye and careful organisation, Barry had averted many unfortunate meetings. There were councillors, property developers, lawyers, builders and bankers, husbands and wives who were grateful to him.

Barry loved the constant stream of one-night visitors, the late-night traffic turning off the London road, bringing in people who travelled for a living and saw the world. He thought of England as a wide open space, criss-crossed by endless motorways and punctuated by places like the Malibu Motel. He thought of America. Barry mugged up on cocktails, turned the Amber Grill into an American diner and hired burly blondes like Julie Lacey to serve hamburgers topped with pineapple rings to salesmen and lorry-drivers who wanted bacon and eggs instead.

The sixth-form common room of Camptown High was the last in a row of prefabs that no one had ever pretended would be temporary. The pupils were allowed a kettle, a record player and to wear their own clothes. Smoking, although against the rules, was tolerated as long as it was unseen. For this reason, the windows were kept shut and the blinds drawn. There were a dozen low armchairs, arranged in three groups, and a row of desks that were empty and unused. The walls around each group of chairs were covered in posters: psychedelic, sporting and political. Billy was asleep, stretched across two chairs beneath a lurid album cover of chasms and goblins.

Mary walked over and parted the long hair that covered his face. ‘Where were you this morning?’

He stretched and sat up, not smiling. ‘And where were you on Saturday morning?’

Mary sighed. ‘I went home.’

‘Without me.’

‘You had already gone!’