I looked away, p.20
I Looked Away, page 20
‘Is that a compliment or not?’ I asked, thinking of my roommate’s comment before the ball, which still rankled.
‘Of course it is.’
My heart swelled with gratitude. We’d all known we were different at Highbridge. It was our biggest fear. Each of us had been there for a terrible reason. How were we ever going to lead normal lives? I was the only one who had gone on to uni. But already I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do afterwards. Supposing a prospective employer looked me up in the newspaper archives and found out what I had done, despite the fact that I’d changed my name?
‘I was going to cycle down to Sonning this afternoon,’ Roger said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Would you like to come? It’s a really pretty place on the river with a lovely pub.’
A lot of students rode bikes, but not me. The responsibility was too great – it was why I’d vowed never to drive. What if I injured someone? ‘I haven’t cycled for years,’ I said.
‘That’s all right. You never forget.’ Then he glanced at the scars on my arms but didn’t say anything.
Embarrassment made me rude. ‘Don’t you have anyone else you can ask?’
‘Yes – but it’s you I want to go with. You’d be doing me a favour.’ He looked at the envelope in his hand. ‘I need to clear my head from this failure.’
‘It’s not a failure,’ I said quickly. ‘Just see it as a new start.’
‘You know what? You’re right.’
Was I? If only he knew. For years, I’d dreamed of leaving Highbridge with all its rules and regulations so I could be free. But now I was alone in this new world, able to do whatever I wanted, and I was terrified of making another awful mistake. What if this was one more? And I wasn’t only talking bikes …
But Roger was right. It was easier to get on a bicycle again than I’d thought. I was so busy concentrating on balancing and looking ahead that I forgot to worry about hurting anyone. Even so, it was a relief when we arrived at Sonning in one piece.
‘Aren’t the views beautiful?’ he said, pointing out the river snaking by as we sat in the back garden of a pub. He had a pint of real ale. I, as usual, had lemonade.
‘Yes,’ I said, forcing myself to look at the water. So unpredictable. Just like roads. And planes. You didn’t know when disaster was going to strike.
Later, when we walked back to our bikes, I almost stood on a pavement crack. To avoid it, I swayed. He put out his hand to steady me. ‘Thanks,’ I said, blushing furiously. I bent down to undo my padlock. When I stood up, his face was close to mine. In that instant, I knew he was going to kiss me.
‘No,’ I said, taking a quick step back and nearly falling over my feet as I did so. ‘Sorry.’
His forehead crinkled as if he was confused. ‘Do you mean “No” as in you’re not ready now or “No” as in you don’t want this ever?’
‘I don’t know.’ My face was red. Hot. Shamed. How could I tell him the truth?
‘I can give you time,’ he said, reaching out to catch my arm.
I nodded. ‘OK. Thank you.’ Then I got on my bike. ‘May I follow you?’ I said. ‘I’m still a bit nervous.’
‘Ellie,’ said Roger gently. ‘You never have to be nervous when I’m around. I’m here for you.’
A burst of gratitude flooded through me. The only other person who had ever said anything similar was my father in the old days, before Sheila.
Yet what did Roger see in me? It was only later that I realized my reluctance had spurred him on. Roger had been used to women falling at his feet.
I was his first challenge. When he’d said he didn’t want to lose me, he really meant that he didn’t want to fail.
38
Jo
His name is Steve. At least, that’s what he tells me. He’s a street artist, which means he draws on pavements or anywhere else on the ground that ‘takes’ his pastels. He wears these funky open-toed sandals – apparently he’s been on the road for so long that he doesn’t feel the cold any more – and he’s got long light-brown hair that curls on his shoulders. The length suits him, though it might look weird on any other middle-aged man. (I reckon he’s a bit younger than me but not much.)
He used to be an accountant. He tells me this as he leads me across the bridge I’d seen earlier. Is he telling the truth?
‘How come you’re on the streets if you were an accountant?’
‘I like it better,’ he replies simply. Then he jumps over a step and holds out his hand. ‘Want some help here?’
His touch feels warm. Natural. Then I shake myself. Don’t be so bloody daft.
‘This way.’ He scrambles down the last slope. It’s so dark now that I can barely see. Sand rubs between my toes.
‘Don’t worry. The place I am taking you to is above the tidal level.’ His voice rises with excitement. ‘I can’t wait to show you. Up here.’
We’re at the mouth of a cave. It stretches out before us like a dark tunnel. What? ‘I’m not going in there.’
‘Just follow me. Please.’
I don’t know why but I can’t disobey. Years ago I saw this thing on telly about a hypnotist who put a girl in a trance. I feel like that now. The walls of the cave are closing in on me. My head scrapes against something hanging down from the top. I scream. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s OK,’ says Steve. ‘They’re just stalactites. You can remember the name because they have to hang on “tight” to stay put. Stalagmites are the ones that grow upwards from the ground.’
I’ve never met anyone like this bloke before.
He stops. ‘Close your eyes,’ he says, putting his hand over them. Now I know he’s going to kill me. It’s my own bloody fault for coming here. What the hell was I thinking of?
‘Open,’ he commands, like he’s some magician.
I can barely see a thing. My throat tightens with fear. ‘Hang on,’ says Steve’s voice. ‘I’ve got a torch in a bag somewhere.’ I hear him fumbling. ‘Ah. Here it is. Now you can get a better view.’
There are rock shelves round the sides. On one, there’s a sleeping bag. There’s a blanket too and a Primus stove. Over there is a stack of tins and bottles of water.
‘How long are you going to keep me here for?’ I whimper.
‘Keep you here?’ His voice is soft. ‘You’re not my prisoner, Jo.’
Earlier, when he’d told me his name, I’d told him mine. Now I wish I hadn’t.
‘Well, it seems that way to me.’
‘If you’d rather, I’ll take you back to the town,’ he says. He sounds hurt. ‘You could try and find somewhere to sleep. But I warn you. It’s not easy. There’s no crisis centre here, and even if you’ve got money, the B&B people don’t care for us. They think we’ll leave fleas in their beds.’
I hesitate. He sees it. ‘Or,’ he continues, ‘you can stay here with me and I’ll cook a bean curry on that stove over there. Do you eat chillies?’
Does it bloody matter? Supposing he comes onto me like Paul had in Bristol?
‘You can have my sleeping bag,’ says Steve, as if he’s reading my thoughts. ‘I’ve got a blanket. Separate ends of the cave, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ Then he touches my arm. ‘Honestly, Jo. You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’m not that kind of person.’
‘So who are you and why did you really stop being an accountant?’ I blurt out. ‘Did you break the law?’
He strikes a match to light the stove as he speaks. ‘Course not!’ He looks thoughtful. ‘It’s a bit of a long story. I’d wanted to be an artist at school but my parents thought I should get a proper job. So I trained as an accountant. Did it for years. Worked in the City.’
‘Didn’t you have a family? A wife, I mean. Children?’
‘I’d have liked to. I was actually engaged to someone. But she changed her mind at the last minute. Said I was boring.’
His voice sounds as if someone’s punched him in the gut. Poor bloke.
‘Then one day, during my lunch break, I saw this man on his knees outside the National Gallery. He was drawing on the pavement, using chalks. I stood, amazed by the picture of the London skyline. He said he was homeless. I gave him a few coins. Every day after that I stopped to talk to him and buy him a hot drink and a sandwich. One day he handed me a yellow stick. “Why don’t you have a go?” he said. “Put in the sunshine.”
‘So I got down on my hands and knees too, in my pinstriped suit, and did just that. I felt a sense of freedom I’d never had before. I went straight to my office and handed in my notice. When I told my parents, they thought I’d cracked up. But at least no one could accuse me now of being boring.’
He makes one of those dry laughs that doesn’t sound funny. ‘At first, I told myself I was taking a sabbatical to walk the South West Coast Path. But when I finished, I didn’t want to go home. So I just turned round and went back into Cornwall. It’s been fifteen years now. I’ll be fifty soon.’
‘How do you pay for food?’ I ask, watching him empty a couple of cans into a saucepan and begin stirring.
His reply has a ‘who cares’ sound to it. ‘I do OK with my street art. My parents are always offering to help out but I want to do this alone. I chose to go. It’s my responsibility. I keep in touch every now and then; they’re almost eighty now. Sometimes, I go back to Cambridge to visit them. My father – he was also an accountant – told me he wished he’d had the balls to do what I’m doing. My mother frets because I’ve never married or had children.’
I squat on the ground, where Steve’s put down a blanket. ‘Didn’t you find it tough on the road after being in a fancy office?’
‘Sure. Once this bloke in a doorway tried to slash my throat because I’d taken his spot accidentally but I talked him out of it.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him it wasn’t worth ending up in prison for the rest of his life. I’ve found that if you talk to people, they’re less frightening than you think. And the street art helps. Folk always stop to chat about the pictures and why I do it. I have one rule. Always tell the truth.’
Is he crazy? It’s dog eat dog on the road. Everyone knows that.
Steve gives the dish a final stir and then spoons some beans into a bowl. ‘Here. Try this.’
I start to eat with my fingers. This stuff is good!
‘Sorry. I forgot to give you this.’
He hands me a plastic spoon and then takes a mouthful himself. He asks, ‘What about you? How did you end up here?’
I try to remember my manners and finish my own mouthful like him before speaking.
‘I made wrong choices with men and drink,’ I say shortly. I feel bad for leaving things out but he doesn’t need to know everything.
‘Actually I’m sober now,’ I say quickly. ‘I’m just trying to find somewhere safe. Get a place, get a job.’
He looks at me thoughtfully and for a second he reminds me of someone else from a better time. Or maybe it’s just my imagination.
1.37 p.m., 17 August 1984
On our way out to the garden, one of the waitresses offers us a glass of champagne. I’ve never had alcohol before. ‘Try it,’ urges Peter.
My father had always told me I had to wait until I was sixteen before my first drink but I want to look grown up in front of Peter. Besides, my father and Sheila are lost in the party crowd now.
It tastes cool. Sparkly. One of the popular girls at school had been expelled for smuggling a bottle of gin into another dorm. Apparently it had ‘gone to her head’, whatever that meant. I wait for this to happen to me but I feel just the same.
‘Can I have one?’ demands Michael.
‘No way,’ I say. ‘Do you want to get me into even more trouble with your mother?’
Peter gives me a sharp look. I’d told him a bit about Sheila in our letters. ‘Still like that, is it?’
I nod, not wanting to say any more in front of my brother in case he reported it back. ‘Ellie says you’re a pain in the arse,’ he’d told Sheila during the last holidays. This then went back to my father and I lost half a week’s pocket money. The irony was that I didn’t usually use dorm language like that – it had slipped out of my mouth in one frustrated moment with my brother but he’d remembered it!
Now Michael, cross that I hadn’t let him have a drink, has run on ahead, through the big French windows and out to the lawn. Peter and I walk side by side down through the enormous garden to find him. His left arm brushes mine. It sends the most delicious thrill through me. Did he do that on purpose? Slowly, daringly, I let mine brush his back.
39
Ellie
Students like me who had shared accommodation in the first year were given beautiful large individual rooms in our second. I loved my privacy. My roommate had become too curious. Once she had asked if she could borrow a tampon. I told her I never used them. She’d rolled her eyes. ‘A sanitary towel, then?’
‘Sorry,’ I’d said briskly. ‘I don’t have periods any more.’
‘What?’
I should have kept my mouth shut. But the truth was that they’d stopped after Michael and never come back.
I shrugged. ‘Just one of those things.’
‘But … well, how are you going to have kids one day?’
‘I don’t want any.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re too much of a responsibility.’
My roommate had given me a strange look. ‘You really are different, aren’t you?’
Maybe she was right. I didn’t fit in with any of the other students. They were so happy. So carefree. They all seemed to be on the pill and having one-night stands. They did stupid things without realizing the possible consequences. One of my roommate’s friends abseiled down the hall tower for a dare. Everyone else thought he was amazing. ‘Idiot,’ I told him to his face. ‘You could have killed yourself or fallen on someone.’
My roommate stopped saving a place for me at dinner. I didn’t like the way she and the others whispered about me. Maybe that’s why I accepted Roger’s next invitation to a bike ride. And the next. Before long, it became a regular event at weekends.
I loved the freedom of cycling through the beautiful Berkshire countryside with its woods and bridleways, past beech trees and silver-birch branches hanging overhead. Sometimes we’d have lunch in a pub and have earnest discussions about novels we were reading. I was going through a J. P. Donleavy stage and was obsessed by The Ginger Man. At first, I deflected questions about my family. When he pressed me, I gave him a sanitized version (without mentioning Michael or Highbridge), ending with the truth that there was no one in the world I could turn to.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re not alone now.’
For a minute I thought he was going to give me a hug. But he didn’t. I was both relieved and disappointed.
Roger didn’t want to talk much about his previous life either, although I got the impression that money had been tight when he was growing up. He also mentioned that he was the first person in his family to go to university.
In the winter, we went for walks. Once when I slipped on an icy slope, he caught my hand. This time, it felt warm and safe. ‘You can keep it there if you want,’ I said.
‘You’re sure?’
I nodded. He didn’t go any further. I was grateful for that.
Roger also introduced me to Leonard Cohen. I preferred his soulful music to the Carpenters. I would sit on the floor of his flat, my head against his legs. But whenever he tried to touch me again, I moved away. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. A flash of Peter in the Daniels’ garden came into my head. ‘I’m not ready yet.’
He seemed more amused than irritated. In gratitude, I tried to do things that I thought would please him. I bought myself a Marguerite Patten cookery book and made my first steak and kidney pie. Unfortunately, I’d missed out the stage where you had to cook the meat before adding the pastry. But he ate it anyway and didn’t die.
The months were going by. Finals were looming. By my third year, I was beginning to panic. I knew my work. I’d revised enough. Suppose I looked at the exam paper and couldn’t answer anything? ‘That won’t happen,’ Roger assured me.
Yet my fear just kept growing. Cornelius had warned me about this. ‘Your actions before the incident with Michael made you feel a failure, amongst other things. We’ve worked hard to help you realize that isn’t the case but you may find these emotions returning when faced with a big challenge in life,’ he’d told me just before I’d left Highbridge.
He was right. I could barely walk into the examination room. When I looked at the downturned paper before me, I could actually see it dissolving into little tiny bits. Melting. Shrivelling. I broke out into a cold sweat.
‘No.’ I staggered to my feet. My hands gripped the edge of the desk as I tried not to fall. The invigilators shot me an alarmed look. ‘I can’t do this,’ I cried.
Every face in the room turned to look at me. ‘It’s that weirdo,’ whispered a boy from my hall. Someone led me out. Roger was in the corridor. (Later, I found he’d just adjudicated another exam.)
‘I can’t do it!’ I repeated hysterically.
‘Yes, you can.’
He put his arm round me and shepherded me out of the building.
He drove me to the medical centre. There were ‘special facilities’ there for those who didn’t want to take the exam in a hall, Roger told me. I recognized a few faces, including a seemingly arrogant and highly intelligent boy from my seminar group.
I was put in a room of my own. Without the pressure of an exam situation, I could breathe. I wrote, my hand not stopping.
Afterwards I felt so stupid. But Roger reassured me. ‘Exam fear is a horrible thing. But it happens to a lot of people.’
‘I’m scared of everything,’ I told him.
‘I can see that,’ he said, stroking the palm of my hand. ‘But you’re all right now.’
We were in his rooms by then, I was so worked up that I couldn’t even remember getting there after the exam. There was a modern white leather sofa in the middle. We were sitting on it. Close. ‘You need something to calm you down,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. (What had happened to the pipe?) ‘Try this.’
