First Love, Last Rites

  Kate spends more time with her friends in Reading. One morning I’m in the kitchen when she comes in very smartly dressed in a kind of leather suit and high leather boots. She sits down opposite me to wait for Jenny to come down so she can tell her what food to give Alice that day, and what time she’ll be back. It reminds me of another morning almost two years ago when Kate came into the kitchen in the same kind of suit. She sat down at the table, undid her blouse and started to knead with her fingers blueish-white milk into a bottle from one tit and then the other. She didn’t seem to notice me sitting there.

  ‘What are you doing that for?’ I asked her.

  She said, ‘It’s for Janet to give to Alice later on today. I’ve got to go out.’ Janet was a black girl who used to be living here. It was strange watching Kate milk herself into a bottle. It made me think how we’re just animals with clothes on doing very peculiar things, like monkeys at a tea party. But we get so used to each other most of the time. I wonder if Kate is thinking of that time now, sitting with me in the kitchen first thing in the morning. She’s got orange lipstick on and her hair tied back and that makes her look even thinner than usual. Her lipstick is sort of fluorescent, like a road sign. Every minute she looks at her watch and her leather creaks. She looks like some beautiful woman from outer space. Then Jenny comes down, wearing a huge old dressing-gown made out of patches and yawning because she’s just got out of bed, and Kate speaks to her very quickly and quietly about Alice’s food for the day. It’s as if it makes her sad, talking about that sort of thing. She picks up her bag and runs out the kitchen and calls, “Bye,’ over her shoulder. Jenny sits down at the table and drinks tea and it’s like she really is the big mama left behind at home to look after the rich lady’s daughter. Yo’ daddy’s rich and yo’ mama’s goodlookin’, lah la-la-la la-la don’ yo’ cry. And there’s something in the way the others treat Jenny. Like she’s outside things, and not really a person like they are. They’ve got used to her cooking big meals and making cakes. No one says anything about it now. Sometimes in the evenings Peter, Kate, José and Sam sit around and smoke hashish in Peter’s homemade water-pipe and listen to the stereo turned up loud. When they do that Jenny usually goes up to her room, she doesn’t like to be with them when they’re doing that, and I can see they sort of resent it. And though she’s a girl she’s not beautiful like Kate or Sharon, my brother’s girl friend. She doesn’t wear jeans and Indian shirts like they do, either, probably because she can’t find any to fit her. She wears dresses with flowers on and ordinary things like my mother or the lady in the post office wear. And when she gets nervous about something and does her laugh I can tell they think of her like some sort of mental patient, I know that by the way they turn their eyes away. And they still think about how fat she is. Sometimes when she’s not there Sam calls her Slim Jim, and it always makes the others laugh. It’s not that they’re unfriendly to her or anything like that, it’s just that in some way that’s hard to describe they keep her apart from themselves. One time we’re out on the river she asks me about hashish.

  ‘What do you think about it all?’ she says, and I tell her my brother won’t let me try it till I’m fifteen. I know she’s dead against it, but she doesn’t mention it again. It’s that same afternoon I take a photograph of her leaning by the kitchen door holding Alice and squinting a little into the sun. She takes mine too, riding no-hands round the back yard on the bicycle I put together out of bits and pieces.

  It’s hard to say exactly when Jenny becomes Alice’s mother. At first she’s just looking after her while Kate visits friends. Then the visits get more often till they are almost every day. So the three of us, Jenny, Alice and me, spend a lot of time together by the river. By the jetty there’s a grass bank which slopes down on to a tiny sand beach about six feet across. Jenny sits on the bank playing with Alice while I do things to my boat. When we first put Alice in the boat she squeals like a baby pig. She doesn’t trust the water. It’s a long time before she’ll stand on the small beach, and when she does at last she never takes her eyes off the water’s edge to make sure it doesn’t creep up on her. But when she sees Jenny waving to her from the boat, and quite safe, she changes her mind and we make a trip to the other side of the river. Alice doesn’t mind about Kate being away because she likes Jenny, who sings her the bits of songs she knows and talks to her all the time when they are sitting on the grass bank by the river. Alice does not understand a word of it but she likes the sound of Jenny’s voice going on and on. Sometimes Alice points up to Jenny’s mouth and says, ‘More, more.’ Kate is always so quiet and sad with her she doesn’t hear many voices speaking right at her. One night Kate stays away and doesn’t come back till the next morning. Alice is sitting on Jenny’s knee spreading her breakfast across the kitchen table when Kate comes running in, scoops her up, hugs her and asks over and over again without giving anyone time to reply,

  ‘Has she been all right? Has she been all right? Has she been all right?’ The same afternoon Alice is back with Jenny because Kate has to go off somewhere again. I’m in the hall outside the kitchen when I hear her tell Jenny she’ll be back in the early evening, and a few minutes later I see her walking down the drive carrying a small suitcase. When she gets back two days later she just puts her head round the door to see if Alice is still there, and then she goes up to her room. It’s not always such a good thing having Alice with us all the time. We can’t go very far in the boat. After twenty minutes Alice gets suspicious of the water again and wants to be back on the shore. And if we want to walk somewhere Alice has to be carried most of the way. It means I can’t show Jenny some of my special places along the river. By the end of the day Alice gets pretty miserable, moaning and crying about nothing because she’s tired. I get fed up spending so much time with Alice. Kate stays up in her room most of the day. One afternoon I take her up some tea and she’s sitting in a chair asleep. With Alice there so much of the time Jenny and I don’t talk together as much as we did when she first came. Not because Alice is listening, but because all Jenny’s time is taken up with her. She doesn’t think of anything else, really, it seems like she doesn’t want to talk with anyone but Alice. One evening we are all sitting around in the front room after supper. Kate is in the hall having a long argument with someone on the telephone. She finishes, comes in, sits down in a noisy kind of way and carries on reading. But I can see she’s angry and not really reading at all. No one speaks for a while, then Alice starts crying upstairs and shouting for Jenny. Jenny and Kate both look up at once and stare at each other for a moment. Then Kate gets up and leaves the room. We all pretend to go on reading but really we are listening to Kate’s footsteps on the stairs. We hear her walk into Alice’s room, which is right over this one, and we hear Alice shout louder and louder for Jenny to come up. Kate comes back down the stairs, this time quickly. When she comes in the room Jenny looks up and they stare at each other again. And all the time Alice goes on shouting for Jenny. Jenny gets up and squeezes past Kate at the door. They don’t speak. The rest of us, Peter, Sam, José and me, we carry on with our pretend reading and listen to Jenny’s footsteps upstairs. The crying stops and she stays up there a long time. When she comes down Kate is back in her chair with her magazine. Jenny sits down and no one looks up, no one speaks.

  Suddenly the summer is over. Jenny comes into my room early one morning to drag the sheets off my bed and all the clothes she can find in the room. Everything has to be washed before I go to school. Then she gets me to clean out my room, all the old comics and plates and cups which have been collecting under my bed all summer, all the dust and the pots of paint I’ve been using on my boat. She finds a small table in the garage and I help her carry it to my room. It’s going to be my desk for doing homework on. She takes me into the village for a treat, and she won’t tell me what it is. When we get there it turns out to be a haircut. I’m about to walk away when she puts her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘You
can’t go to school looking like that, you won’t last a day.’ So I sit still for the barber and let him cut away my whole summer while Jenny sits behind me, laughing at me scowling at her in the mirror. She gets some money from my brother Peter and takes me on the bus into town to buy a school uniform. It’s strange having her tell me what to do all of a sudden after our times out on the river. But I don’t mind, really, I can’t think of any good reasons for not doing the things she says. She steers me through the main shopping streets, into shoe shops and outfitters, she buys me a red blazer and a cap, two pairs of black leather shoes, six pairs of grey socks, two pairs of grey trousers and five grey shirts, and all the time she’s saying, ‘Do you like these ones? Do you like this?’ and since I don’t have any special feeling for one particular shade of grey, I agree with whatever she thinks is the best. It’s all over in an hour. That evening she empties my drawers of my rock collection to make room for the new clothes, and she gets me to put on the whole uniform. They all laugh downstairs, especially when I put the red cap on. Sam says I look like an inter-galactic postman. For three nights in a row she has me scrubbing my knees with a nailbrush to get the dirt out from under the skin.

  Then on Sunday, the day before I start back at school, I go down to the boat with Jenny and Alice for the last time. In the evening I’m going to help Peter and Sam drag my boat up the path and across the lawn into the garage for the winter. Then we’re going to build another jetty, a stronger one. It’s the last boat trip of the summer. Jenny lifts Alice in and climbs in herself while I hold the boat steady from the jetty. As I’m pushing us off with an oar, Jenny starts one of her songs. Jeeesus won’t you come on down, Jeeesus won’t you come on down, Jeeesus won’t you come on down, lah, la-la-la-lah, la-la. Alice stands between Jenny’s knees watching me row. She thinks it’s funny, the way I strain backwards and forwards. She thinks it’s a game I’m playing with her, moving close up to her face and away again. It’s strange, our last day on the river. When Jenny’s finished her song no one speaks for a long time. Just Alice laughing at me. It’s so still on the river, her laugh carries across the water to nowhere. The sun is a kind of pale yellow like it’s burnt out at the end of summer, there’s no wind in the trees on the banks, and no birdsong. Even the oars make no sound in the water. I row upstream with the sun on my back, but it’s too pale to feel it, it’s too pale to make shadows, even. Up ahead there’s an old man standing under an oak tree, fishing. When we are level with him he looks up and stares at us in our boat and we stare back at him on the bank. His face does not change when he’s looking at us. Our faces do not change, either, no one says hello. He has a long piece of grass in his mouth and when we’ve passed he takes it out and spits quietly into the river. Jenny trails her hand in the thick water and watches the bank as if it’s something she’s only seeing in her mind. It makes me think she doesn’t really want to be out there on the river with me. She only came because of all the other times we’ve been rowing together, and because this is the last time this summer. It sort of makes me sad, thinking that, it makes it harder to row. Then after we’ve been going for about half an hour she looks at me and smiles and I can tell it’s all in my head about her not wanting to be on the river because she starts talking about the summer, about all the things we’ve been doing. She makes it sound really great, much better than it was really. About the long walks we went on, and paddling at the edge of the river with Alice, how I tried to teach her to row and remember different birdsongs, and the times we used to get up while the others were still asleep and row on the river before breakfast. She gets me going too, remembering all the things we did, like the time we thought we saw a waxwing, and another time we waited one evening behind a bush for a badger to come out of its hole. Pretty soon we get really excited about what a summer it’s been and the things we’re going to do next year, shouting and laughing into the dead air. And then Jenny says,

  ‘And tomorrow you put on your red cap and go to school.’ There’s something in the way she says it, pretending to be serious and telling me off, with one finger wagging in the air, that makes it the funniest thing I ever heard. And the idea of it too, of doing all those things in the summer and then at the end of it putting on a red cap and going to school. We start laughing and it seems like we’re never going to stop. I have to put down the oars. Our hooting and cackling gets louder and louder because the still air doesn’t carry it across the water and the noise of it stays with us in the boat. Each time we catch the other’s eye we laugh harder and louder till it begins to hurt down my sides, and more than anything I want to stop. Alice starts to cry because she doesn’t know what’s happening, and that makes us laugh more. Jenny leans over the side of the boat so she can’t see me. But her laugh is getting tighter and drier, little hard yelps like pieces of stone from her throat. Her big pink face and her big pink arms are shaking and straining to catch a mouthful of air, but it’s all going out of her in little pieces of stone. She leans back into the boat. Her mouth is laughing but her eyes look kind of scared and dry. She drops to her knees, holding her stomach with the pain of laughing, and knocks Alice down with her. And the boat tips over. It tips over because Jenny falls against the side, because Jenny is big and my boat is small. It goes over quickly, like the click of my camera shutter, and suddenly I’m at the deep green bottom of the river touching the cold soft mud with the back of my hand and feeling the reeds on my face. I can hear laughter like sinking pieces of stone by my ear. But when I push upwards to the surface I feel no one near me. When I come up it’s dark on the river. I’ve been down a long time. Something touches my head and I realize I’m inside the upturned boat. I go down again and up the other side. It takes me a long time to get my breath. I work my way round the boat shouting over and over for Jenny and Alice. I put my mouth in the water and shout their names. But no one answers, nothing breaks the surface. I’m the only one on the river. So I hang on to the side of the boat and wait for them to come up. I wait a long time, drifting along with the boat, with the laughter still in my head, watching the river and the yellow patches on it from the sun getting low. Sometimes great shivers run through my legs and back, but mostly I’m calm, hanging on to the green shell with nothing in my mind, nothing at all, just watching the river, waiting for the surface to break and the yellow patches to scatter. I drift past the place where the old man was fishing and it seems like a very long time ago. He’s gone now, there’s just a paper bag in the place where he was standing. I get so tired I close my eyes and it feels like I’m at home in bed and it’s winter and my mother’s coming into my room to say goodnight. She turns out the light and I slip off the boat into the river. Then I remember and I shout for Jenny and Alice and watch the river again and my eyes start to close and my mother comes into my room and says goodnight and turns out the light and I sink back into the water again. After a long time I forget to shout for Jenny and Alice, I just hang there and drift down. I’m looking at a place on the bank I used to know very well a long time ago. There’s a patch of sand and a grass bank by a jetty. The yellow patches are sinking into the river when I push away from the boat. I let it drift on down to London and I swim slowly through the black water to the jetty.

  Cocker at the Theatre

  There was dust on the boards, the backdrops were half painted and they were all naked on the stage, with the bright lights to keep them warm and show up the dust in the air. There was nowhere to sit so they shuffled about miserably. They had no pockets to put their hands in, and there were no cigarettes.

  ‘Is this your first time?’ It was everybody’s first time, only the director knew that. Only friends spoke, softly and not continuously. The rest were silent. How do naked strangers begin a conversation? No one knew. The professional men – for professional reasons - glanced at each other’s parts, while the others, friends of friends of the director and needing some cash, regarded the women without appearing to. Jasmin called from the back of the auditorium where he had been talking with the co
stume designer, he called out in Welsh Camp Cockney,

  ‘Have you all masturbated, boys? Well done.’ (No one had spoken.) ‘The first hard-on I see and out you go. This is a respectable show.’ Some of the women giggled, the unprofessional men wandered out of the lights, two A.S.M.s carried a rolled carpet on stage. They said, ‘Mind your backs,’ and they all felt more naked than before. A man with a bush hat and a white shirt set up a tape recorder in the pit. He was scornful as he threaded the tape. It was the copulation scene.

  ‘I want G.T.C., Jack,’ Jasmin said to him. ‘Let them hear it first.’ There were four large loudspeakers, there was no escaping.

  ‘Well, you’ve heard about the privacy of the sex-uu-aal act,

  Let me tell you people, just for a fact,