Clever Girl Read online

  If I got dressed, I thought, I could walk out into this – what could stop me? Because no one had ever thought of it, I’d never been forbidden to go out before anyone else was up. My latchkeys were warm on their ribbon against my chest, under my vest – though I wasn’t supposed to sleep in them in case I strangled myself. I could go home by myself without telling Nana, and surprise my mother. Gleefully I imagined the reversal of our roles: Mum’s tousled head raised, blinking and sleepy and astonished, from the pillow at the end of her sofa pulled into its night-position; my own bright wakefulness, airy and full of implications from its journey through the outdoors. For once, I would have the advantage of her. Pulling on my knickers and socks and slacks, buttoning my check shirt, diving into the V-neck of the jumper Nana had knitted in rust-brown stocking stitch, I was light-headed with sensations of freedom and power. All the time I was listening out for mouse-noises from Nana. Now I had started, I couldn’t bear to be prevented. I had worried sometimes about making the transition into being grown-up – how did you know when to begin? Now I understood that you stepped out into it, as simply as into a day.

  People forget that in 1966 there were still bomb sites: it took a long time to stitch back together that fabric of our cities ripped open by the war – or rather, not to stitch it back at all, but to tear the fabric out and throw it away and put something different in its place. Every time I made my way home from Nana’s I walked across an open area where bombs had fallen: you could still make out different wallpapers on the high standing walls, distinguishing the squares of vanished rooms, washed by the rain to faint ghosts of their former patterns. Traces of staircases climbed in zigzag patterns; doors opened on to nothing. Whatever desolation there must once have been was softened and naturalised after two decades; overgrown with buddleia and fireweed, the sites were as consoling as gardens. We played out there and boys rode their bikes round on the grass in the evenings.

  Our flat was on the first floor of a spindly Georgian terrace in Kingsdown, Bristol; because it was on a high bluff, from our back windows we surveyed the plain of Broadmead sprawling below, punctuated then by the spires of churches, ruined and otherwise, and only just beginning to be drowned under a tide of office blocks and shopping centres, a new world. These Georgian houses were five storeys tall if you counted the basements which were at garden level at the back; they were mostly raddled and neglected, broken up into flats and bedsits, showing up on their exterior – like intricate dirty embroidery – the layers of complex arrangements for living inside. There was broken glass in some of the windows; at others filthy torn lace curtains, or bedspreads hooked up to keep out the light. A frightening old woman next door wore a long black dress like a Victorian. Mrs Walsh – kindly but with a goitrous bulge on her neck I couldn’t bear to look at – lived in our basement with her elderly son (she used to say, ‘Can you believe it, he was my little boy?). Beneath that basement was a windowless cellar, its mineral cold air as dense as water, where stalactites grew down from the vaulted ceiling (I knew what they were because we’d been on a school trip to Wookey Hole caves). They used to say there were iron rings where they chained the slaves in some of the Bristol cellars – and secret tunnels leading to the docks. In Bristol stories there were always slaves and sugar and tobacco.

  You should see our old road these days. I shouldn’t think those houses change hands for much less than a million. Everyone now covets the ‘original features’, the spindly height, the long walled gardens, the view. Those places sing with money and improvement. Nana’s little Victorian box around the corner, which we used to think was so much ‘better’, can’t compare. Sometimes I’m nostalgic now for that old intricate decay, as if it was a vanished subtler style, overlaid by the banality of making over and smartening up that came later. My mother never was nostalgic. She got out the minute she had the chance.

  I pulled Nana’s front door shut behind me. From somewhere far off came the ruminative stop–start of the milkman’s electric float, but still I had the morning more or less to myself. I could hear the crêpe-soled creak of my sandals on the pavement and the jangled clang of the gate as it closed with finality after me, as if these sounds bounced off the silent houses opposite. I could almost see my surprising self, setting out about my own business in the streets, my windcheater zipped up and my hands in its pockets; I fancied I walked with a masculine casual bravado, brown hair chopped off in a clean line at shoulder length. I wasn’t interested at that point of my life in being girlish – what I admired were horses and the boyish girls who hung around horses.

  Turning the corner at the end of Nana’s street, I started along the path across the bomb site. When I saw a man sitting facing away from me on one of the broken low walls, it was too late to go back, but my heart beat with shy anxiety: I hated the idea of any strange adult speaking to me, perhaps telling me off. Wearing a dark overcoat, the man was bent over with his head in his hands. The path ran close behind where he sat, and hurrying past I could make out the black cloth of his coat worn to gingery brown across the shoulders, freckled with scurf from his greasy hair. I thought it was strange that an adult man came out to sit alone on a pile of stones: I couldn’t imagine either of my uncles doing it. I didn’t know much about men but in my experience they were always purposefully on their way somewhere. Then I realised that the man was Mrs Walsh’s son Clive. I hadn’t recognised him because it was the first time I’d ever seen him beyond the end of our street. He lifted his head and peered over his shoulder at me: doleful long face, unshaven cheeks and chin, the beard-growth specked with silver. The inner rim of his lower eyelids was lined in sore, wet red.

  — Come and look at this, he said.

  Clive was strange. One of his boots was made up with a special thick sole because of his sloping, dragging walk; he had had meningitis when he was three and his twin sister had died of it. We had lived in the same house since I could remember, but he and I had an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge each other, except when our connection was mediated by our mothers. — Can you believe he had yellow curls once? Mrs Walsh would sigh. — Say hello to Stella, Clive.

  — Say hello to Clive, my mother would order, shoving me sharply in the small of the back. She was full of ostentatious pity for the ‘poor thing’, but also thought it might be better for everyone if he was ‘put away’, whatever that meant. — It’s not much of a life, she said.

  I’m not sure whether Clive really recognised me that morning; we never spoke about it afterwards. I might just have been any passing little girl.

  — Look what I’ve found, he said.

  Warily I stepped over the wall into the interior of the vanished house. Swallows were flitting and shrieking inside the space, they nested there. Against the wall where Clive was sitting, fallen into the cracks in the stones and rolled into the grass, was an improbable slew of buttons of all sorts – thousands of buttons, much more than a handful or even a tinful. I crouched down to them, wondering, not touching yet.

  — Who do they belong to? How did they get here?

  Clive said he had known the woman who once lived here and they must be hers. I’d played here often and I’d never seen the buttons before, but I began to believe him because he was so certain. Did he mean a woman who’d lived in this house before it was bombed? Some of these buttons were old: carved jet ones, brass ones with military insignia, cream cloth-covered ones for shirts. Others looked modern: coloured plastic ones, like the ones my Nana put on my cardigans, were still sewn on to the cards they’d been bought on. Some were fastened into sets – miniature mother-of-pearl buttons for baby clothes, pink glass drops – but most of them were loose, jumbled chaotically together: ordinary black and brown and white ones, a coral rose, wooden toggles, a diamanté buckle, big yellow bone squares, toggles made of bamboo.

  Something about the sheer multiplicity of the buttons – the fact that you couldn’t get to the bottom of them – started an ache of desire in my chest. I thought that Clive was feeling the
same thing. He breathed through his mouth noisily. His cheeks under their strong beard-growth were dramatic, hollow as if they’d been carved out with something clumsy like an axe; the raw mask of a man’s face was overlaid on his life which was more like the life of a child. Every afternoon Clive was allowed to wander out along our road. He always stopped at one particular lamp post, as if it was a limit his mother had set him; he would be standing there when the children came home from school, hunched over, smoking and watching us, wearing his overcoat in winter, a short grey mac in summer. We squealed and ran past him – even I did, pretending I didn’t know him. Every teatime Mrs Walsh came out to bring him back, pulling him coaxingly by the hand; a small, bent, fat old woman tugging at a tall, scowling, resisting man, showing her patient smile around to anyone who might see them.

  — We could take them home for your mother, I suggested.

  But I wanted the coral rose for myself, or the buckle. I put my hand out to pick them up; angrily Clive pushed it away, scuffing some of the buttons into the dirt with his normal boot.

  — Don’t touch them. Leave them, he scolded.

  Close up, I could smell his familiar smell, the same as in their flat: stale like damp feather cushions or mouldy bread, mixed with something perfumed he put on his hair (or his mother did). Reasonably, I pointed out that if anyone wanted them they shouldn’t have thrown them away but he didn’t listen, he was preoccupied, sorting through the buttons with clumsy yellow-stained fingers as if he was searching for one in particular. Clear snot glistened on the curves of his upper lip. I watched jealously, crouched on my haunches, balancing on the balls of my feet with my hands on my knees. Really, where could so many buttons have come from? Someone might have had a button shop and given it up: but then, why pour out the cornucopia here? I was frustrated that Clive was not a real adult who could offer answers – though often they only dismissed my questions. (— Oh Stella. Don’t be silly. Whatever for?) Clive held a big button up to the light: it was pearly white, so translucent it was almost green, carved with a leggy bird with a long beak, perhaps a heron. I had never thought with any interest about clothes before, but I had a heady vision in that instant of a black velvet cape, full-length, dragging behind me along the smooth floor of a place I’d never been. — Behold, I thought to myself, out of the books I was reading. — She cometh.

  I couldn’t help reaching out to take the bird-button.

  Clive smacked at my hand.

  — They’re not yours, I said indignantly. — They’re anybody’s.

  Then he pushed me hard on the knee so that I overbalanced and fell backwards. Standing up, he towered over me; it was a surprise to be reminded of how wholly he filled out his big man’s body. Because of the child’s life he led, traipsing everywhere after his mother, it was easy to discount his grown-up shape as if he’d only borrowed it, the way girls dressed up in their mothers’ shoes and lipstick. Now I saw that Clive’s size fitted as inevitably around him as mine did around me, and that he was at home in it. In fact, because he walked sloppily and mumbled to himself, he was more deeply burrowed away inside his body than other grown-ups were. Other grown-ups, especially women, had learned somehow to live on the surfaces of their bodies, controlling them and presenting a prepared version of them to the world.

  Sometimes when Clive stood under the lamp post and watched the children coming home from school you could see he was rubbing himself with his hand down in his trousers – not in any kind of sinful frenzy, more as if he was only half aware of doing it, comforting and reassuring himself. There was an old man who did something like this at the swimming baths too, sitting on the edge of the pool, staring at the girls squealing and splashing, rocking himself in a rolling movement back and forwards against the pool’s rim, taking his weight on his hands. If you caught the pool-man’s eye he was jeering and slippery whereas if Clive ever looked at you he was contemptuous, as if you had nothing for him. I knew it comforted men to touch themselves. I had seen Uncle Ray and Uncle Frank putting their hands down there, adjusting themselves inside their underwear, sniffing their fingers afterwards. My mother would make a little face of distaste at it, clicking her tongue. Auntie Jean would dig her elbow in Frank’s ribs, reminding him he was in company.

  — Don’t look, my mother snapped if she saw Clive busy in his trousers; she would close her expression tight shut as if it was my fault for shaming her. — Cross the road, Stella!

  I ought to have been afraid of him that morning but I wasn’t. I had been relieved all along that it was Clive I met on the bomb site and not a stranger; in relation to Clive I was still powerful and not obliterated. When he stood looming over me I felt more outrage than fear, and rolled over, scrambling to my feet, dusting off my knees, which were not grazed but lightly stuck with bits of gravel and grass. I wasn’t hurt in the least, only shocked and humiliated.

  — You’re not supposed to push me!

  He took a step towards me, making a threatening gesture with his hand in the air like the one my mother made to me sometimes. I stepped backwards, deliberately insouciant. Then I turned and skipped away. How I used to love that skipping – two bounces on the one foot, then two on the other – which carried you as fast as seven-league boots, buoyant and flinging forwards, rebounding off the ground each time with double strength. What a loss when one day I wasn’t able to fly along like that any longer, ever again. I can’t remember what stopped me. Was it inhibition, because I grew older and reached the point where I wanted to be like the grown women who presented themselves with such poise? After I had a child, in any case (and I was very young when I had my first) something was physically unbound in me, so that if I jumped or ran for a bus my insides seemed to churn in a new disorder.

  Clive came lumbering after me but I knew he couldn’t catch me. The smack of his heavy boots when he reached the pavement was loud as gunshots in the empty street. I stopped and waited for him by the grocer’s shop, where the beige sun-blinds, cracked and torn, were still drawn down inside the windows: between the glass and the blinds was stacked a pyramid of tins of peas, their labels faded almost to illegibility. I had looked at those peas a thousand times.

  — Here, grunted Clive when he caught up with me, stopping at a respectful distance, holding out his big greeny-white fist.

  I held out my open hand to him.

  He gave me the coral rose and the diamanté buckle.

  I still have them.

  Before I turned the corner into our road I had put the encounter with Clive out of my mind – though not my new treasures, which I kept clenched tight in my hand. The only thought I spent on him was that I would tell my mother I had ‘found them’. Standing facing our front door – I had two keys, one for this and one for the door to our flat inside – I was daunted for the first time by my adventure. I had used my keys many times before; but then I had always been expected. Now, because I was not supposed to be there, the street seemed bleached and flattened by its unaccustomed emptiness – though the milkman’s float was working its way by now from the other end. The grandeur of our door was suddenly forbidding: elevated from the street up its flight of worn steps, with an iron boot scraper set into the stone and an ancient heavy iron knocker (no one needed to use the knocker because of the cracked row of plastic bell pushes to one side, where names were written in ink on slips of card). Inside the hall, its air sour with forgotten coats and shoes, the foggy light was freckled with ruby from the coloured glass in the back door, where steps led down into the garden.

  There were two rooms on each floor, and for the whole house one bathroom, two toilets. Beside the front door lived old Tom with a cleft palate who was in the Salvation Army; behind him, the woman who worked in the fish and chip shop. On tiptoe I started up the staircase which wound around the deep well at the house’s core: the handrail was polished wood and the banister rods were shaky in their sockets, some of them missing (I had bad dreams in which they gave way and I fell down towards the bottom). There were still brass
brackets for gas lamps on the wall; light sifted down through the dirty skylight set into the roof, which leaked when it rained. In the flat above us lived a couple with a baby I had knitted bootees for, and in the attic above them was reticent Geoffrey, who fed me spoonfuls of condensed milk from an opened tin in his cupboard, and painted huge abstracts in cream and brown and black (he left them behind when he flitted without paying his rent). From Geoffrey’s casement windows you could climb out into the lead-lined channel that ran the length of the terrace, eighteen inches deep, with a stone parapet between it and the street so far below. I had sat out there on the parapet more than once, with my back to the street and my feet in the gutter.

  I was startled as I let myself into our flat – staggering slightly because the key was still on its ribbon round my neck, and the keyhole was rather high up on the door – to see the sofa untouched, pristine in its daytime identity. Mum couldn’t be up already, could she? But there was no sign of her – and we only had two rooms. Always, if she was up, she was busy: vacuuming, dusting, rinsing our clothes through in the sink – she called it ‘rinsing’ as though that made it a lighter and smarter job than washing, less like drudgery. And she couldn’t be out. Her handbag was on the table, her bright silk scarf flopped, plumy and exotic, between its handles. Beside the sink in the kitchen-end of our living room (the kitchenette, Mum called it determinedly), were two teacups and two glasses, filled with water to soak. I closed the door quietly behind me and stood taking in whatever extraordinary thing had happened. I knew I’d found my mother out in something, although I didn’t know what. Who had been here with her while I was away? Was it Auntie Jean? The glasses came out for Jean sometimes. I wanted to go stamping around the room, to assert my right to do it, but I kept stony still. Mum’s coat was on its hanger. Her high heels were kicked off beside the sofa; I knew how she eased her feet out of them, grimacing in relief. I could smell her perfume and the faint stale-biscuit smell of her nylons, which I liked, as if it was a secret weakness I kept safe for her.