Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher

  Sophy took out the tissues she had brought with her for the purpose and wiped a trickle of blood from her thigh. The man said, in high humour and to no one in particular.

  “Had a virgin!”

  Sophy pulled on her pants. She was wearing a dress rather than jeans, which was most unusual but another bit of foresight. She looked curiously at the man who was now evidently delighted with life.

  “Is that all?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Sex. Fucking.”

  “Christ. What did you expect?”

  She said nothing, since it was not necessary. She then had a lesson in the extraordinary nature of men, if this specimen was anything to go by. This instrument of her initiation told her what a risk she had run, she might have been picked up by anyone and lying there at this very moment strangled, she must never, never do such a thing again. If she were his daughter he would take the strap to her, letting herself get picked up and she only seventeen, why she might, she might—

  By this time Sophy lost patience.

  “I’m not sixteen yet.”

  “Christ! But you said—”

  “Not till October.”

  “Christ—”

  It was a mistake. She saw that at once. It was another lesson. Always stick to the simplest lie like the simplest truth. He was angry and frightened. But then as he blustered about deadly secrets and how he’d find her and cut her throat she saw how slight and silly he was, all this about never letting on, forgetting him, if she said a word—if she mentioned anyone had picked her up. Bored, she broke it to him.

  “I picked you up, silly.”

  He made for her and she went on quickly before his hands touched her.

  “That card I posted when you stopped by me. It had the number of your van on it. It’s to my Dad. If I don’t pick it up—”

  “Christ.”

  He took an uncertain step among the leaves.

  “I don’t believe you!”

  She recited the number of his van to him. She told him he was to take her back to where he had found her and when he swore, mentioned the card again. Finally, of course, he drove her back, because, as she told herself, her will was stronger than his. She liked that idea so much that she broke her recent resolve and told him in so many words. It made him very angry all over again but pleased her. Then what was the most extraordinary part of the whole thing, he got positively wet, telling her she was a lovely kid really and she shouldn’t waste herself on this sort of thing. If she waited for him at the same place and time next week, they’d go together regular. She’d like that. He had a bit of money—

  To all this Sophy listened silently, nodding occasionally, since that was what kept him planning. But she would not tell him her name or give him her address.

  “Don’t you want to know my name then, kiddy?”

  “As a matter of fact, not.”

  “‘As a mattah of fact not.’ Christ stone the fucking crows. You’ll be murdered one of these days. Straight, you will.”

  “Just put me down by the post-box.”

  He shouted after her that he would be at the same place, same time, next week and she gave him a smile to get rid of him and then walked a long way home by all the sidestreets and alleys she could think of so that the van could not follow. She was still in the grip of her astonishment at it meaning so little. It was so trivial an act when you subtracted the necessary and not-to-be-repeated pain of the first time. It meant nothing at all. There was little more sensation to it than feeling the inside of your cheek with your tongue—well, there was a little more but not much.

  They said too, whoever it was said, that the girl cried afterwards.

  “I didn’t cry.”

  At that, her body gave a long shudder, all on its own, and she waited for a bit, but nothing more happened. Of course, the sex lectures always added in the bit about pair-bonding and about achieving orgasm which might not happen to a girl for quite a long time—but really so trivial an act and significant only in the possible, though quite unbelievable outcome. It seemed to her, walking home by way, at last, of the towpath, vaguely right that this thing they made so much fuss about—wrestling with each other on the box or grunting at it on the wide screens, all the poetry and music and painting and everybody agreeing it was a many-splendoured thing, the simplest thing, well it was very nearly the simplest thing and so much the worse, yes, vaguely right in view of how the whole thing is running down—well, it was silly.

  She agreed mildly with Daddy’s cleaning lady that she was home early from school, listened for the electric typewriter then remembered it was the afternoon of his school broadcast, and went to the bathroom where she washed herself out as in the films and was faintly repelled by the mess of blood and spunk, and—reaching far in, her lower lip hurting between clenched teeth—she felt the pear-shaped thing stuck inside the front of her stomach where it ought to be, inert, a time bomb, though that was hard to believe of yourself or your body. The thought of the possible explosion of the time bomb started her even more elaborately probing and washing, pain or not; and she came on the other shape, lying opposite the womb but at the back, a shape lying behind the smooth wall but easily to be felt through it, the rounded shape of her own turd working down the coiled gut and she convulsed, feeling without saying but feeling every syllable—I hate! I hate! I hate! There was no direct object to the verb, as she said to herself when she was a little more normal. The feeling was pure.

  But washed and cleaned out, menstruated and restored, this active hate sank down like a liquid to the bottom of things and she was a young girl again, felt she was; a young girl conscious of listening to the sound of space, confused over the possibilities of weirdness since the word was used in several ways, conscious of resisting the proposal of teachers that you should make one last effort to use your unquestioned intelligence; or—and suddenly—a giggly girl about clothes and boys and who was going with whom and yes isn’t he gorgeous and catch phrases and catch music and catch pop stars and catch and catch as catch can be simple.

  All the same, with Toni not yet retrieved and staring into her own bland face, she was worried over it meaning nothing, even though that in itself was about as simple as you could get. She thought round the whole circle of people she knew, even dead Gran and forgotten mother and she saw they were shapes and it worried her. It was almost better being forced to be everything with someone you didn’t really like than this living with yourself and to yourself. With a confused and fundamentally ignorant expectation that wealth and sophistication would make a difference—and besides, now she was sixteen!—she picked up an expensive car, only to find that the man inside was much older than he looked. This time the exercises that took place in the wood were not painful but more prolonged and she did not understand them. The man offered her more money than she had ever seen before to perform various actions for him, which she did, finding them a bit sick-making but not more so than the inside of her own body. It was only when she got home—Yes, Mrs Emlin, school is out early—she thought; Now I am a whore! After the bathroom she lay on her divan, thinking about being a whore, but even if she said it out loud it didn’t seem to change her, didn’t seem to touch her, just was not. Only the roll of blue five-pound notes was real. She thought to herself that being a whore didn’t mean anything either. It was like stealing sweets, a thing you could do if you wanted, but boring. Not even rousing the Sophy-creature to say—I hate!

  After that she put sex on one side as a discovered, examined and discarded bit of triviality. It became nothing more than playing with yourself lazily in bed to the accompaniment of quite unusual or what seemed like quite unusual imaginings, very private indeed.

  Antonia was flown home and had terrific cold rows with Daddy in the column room. There was a little, a very little, communication in the stables but Toni was not inclined to give a blow by blow account of her life. Sophy never knew why or how Toni and Daddy worked it, but before long Toni was living in a hoste
l in London which was official and would keep her safe from everything. She said she was an actress and tried for it, but the odd fact was that despite her intelligence and her transparency she wasn’t any good. There seemed little for her but the university but she swore she wouldn’t go and began to talk wildly about imperialism. Also freedom and justice. She seemed to have even less use for boys or men than Sophy had, though they swarmed after her remote beauty. No one was really surprised when she disappeared again. She sent them a defiant postcard from Cuba.

  Sophy got a job that demanded nothing. It was in a travel agent’s and after a few weeks she told Daddy she was moving up to London, but would keep her bit of the stables.

  He looked at her with evident dislike.

  “For God’s sake go and marry somebody.”

  “You’re no advertisement for marriage, are you?”

  “Neither are you.”

  Later when she thought that one over and understood it, she had half a mind to go back and spit in his face. But as a remark the farewell at least served to confirm her in her understanding of how deeply she hated him; and even more than that—how much they hated each other.

  Chapter Nine

  Runways Travel was boring but undemanding. Despite what she had told Daddy she travelled up to it every day for a bit, and then the manager’s wife found her a room which was good but expensive. The manager’s wife produced plays for a small amateur group and persuaded Sophy to act but she wasn’t any better than Toni. She went out with boys a few times and fended them off from the boring sex stuff. Really what she liked was to lie in front of the television and watch programmes indifferently, advertisements or even the Open University, and let it all go by her. She went to the flicks sometimes, usually with a boy and once with Mabel, the lanky blonde who worked next to her, but without much enjoyment. Sometimes she wondered why nothing mattered and why she felt she could let her life trickle out of her hand if she wanted to, but most often she did not even wonder. The thing at the mouth of her tunnel brandished a pretty girl who smiled and flirted and even sounded earnest now and then—“Yes I do see what you mean! We’re destroying the world!” But the thing at the mouth of the tunnel said without sound—as if I cared.

  Someone—Daddy? a cleaning woman?—sent on a postcard from Toni. This time the print round the picture was Arab writing. All Toni said was, “I (and then she had crossed out the I) We need you!!” Nothing else. Sophy put it up on the mantelpiece of her bedsitter and forgot all about it. She was seventeen and not to be fooled by the pretence that they were everything to each other.

  A ponderously respectable person began to visit her desk and ask questions about voyages and flights she suspected he had no intention of taking. At his third visit he asked her to come out with him and she did in an exhausted kind of way since it was what was expected of a girl who is seventeen and pretty. He was Roland Garrett, and after the first two times she went out with him—once to the flicks and once to a disco where they didn’t dance because he couldn’t—he said she should take a room in his mother’s house. It would be cheaper. It was. She got it almost for nothing. When she asked Roland why it was so cheap he said his mother was like that. He was protecting a girl, that was all. It seemed to Sophy that the protecting came from Mrs Garrett but she did not say so. Mrs Garrett was a haggard widow with dyed brown hair and little substance to her body other than its skeleton. She stood in the open doorway of Sophy’s room, leaning against the doorpost with her skinny arms folded and a dead fag-end hanging from one corner of her mouth.

  “I expect you have trouble being so sexy dear, don’t you?”

  Sophy was folding underwear in a drawer.

  “What trouble?”

  There was a long pause then, which Sophy did not feel inclined to break. Mrs Garrett broke it instead.

  “Roland’s very steady you know. Very steady indeed.”

  Mrs Garrett had large eye-hollows that looked as if they had been charred. Her eyes, deeply set in them, seemed extra bright, extra liquid by contrast. She put up a finger and touched one hollow delicately. She elaborated.

  “In the civil service dear. He has very good prospects.”

  Sophy understood why she had got the room for next to nothing. Mrs Garrett did her best to thrust them together and quite soon Sophy had shared his narrow bed with that freedom which stemmed from the pill; and he performed correctly as if it were a bit of civil service work or bank business or duty. But he seemed to enjoy himself, though as usual there wasn’t much in it for Sophy. Mrs Garrett began to keep on at Sophy to consider herself engaged. It was fantastic. She saw that Roland couldn’t get himself a girl and his mum had to do it for him. Being tied to Roland with his prospects was a thought that made her shudder and giggle. Of course there was a bit of warm pleasure in it, and on her side a faintly pleasurable contempt for them both, as she said to herself, putting words to what wouldn’t really go into them. Roland had a car and they looked at places and pubs and she said why not this new thing, hang gliding, you know. He said I’d never let you do a thing like that it’s dangerous. She said of course not I mean you. However, he taught her to drive, more or less, complete with L-plates; and he wanted to meet her father. Amused, she took him to Sprawson’s and of course it was Daddy’s day in London. So they went through to the stables. Roland displayed a kind of automatic interest in the layout as if he were an architect or archaeologist.

  “It’ll have been for the coachman and the grooms and ostlers. You see? They must have built it before the canal because now you couldn’t get a coach out. That’s why the house went downhill.”

  “Downhill? Our house?”

  “There’ll have been other stables along there—”

  “They’re just warehouses for storing things. When I was little there used to be a big ironmonger’s. Frankley’s, I think.”

  “What’s beyond that door?”

  “Towpath and canal. And the Old Bridge just along with the dirtiest loo in town.”

  Roland looked at her sternly.

  “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “Sorry, dad. But I live—lived here you know. Me and my sister. Come and see.” She led the way up the narrow stairs.

  “Your father could do this place up and let it as a cottage.”

  “It’s our place. Mine and Toni’s.”

  “Tony?”

  “Antonia. My sister.”

  He peered about.

  “And this place was yours.”

  “Belongs to both of us—belonged to both of us.”

  “Belonged?”

  “She hasn’t been home for ages. Don’t even know where she is.”

  “All these places where pictures were stuck up!”

  “She had a religious thing. Jesus and all that. It was so funny. Christ!”

  “And you?”

  “We aren’t alike.”

  “Twins, though.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You told me.”

  “Did I?”

  Roland was picking over the pile on the table.

  “What are these? Girlish treasures?”

  “Don’t men have treasures?”

  “Not this sort.”

  “That’s not a doll. It’s a glove puppet. Fingers in here. I used to do this a lot. Sometimes I felt—”

  “Felt what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I made this thing in pottery. It rocks all the time because I didn’t get the bottom quite flat. All the same, they fired it. To encourage me, Miss Simpson said. I never made any more. Too boring. It does for tidying things into.”

  Roland picked out a tiny pearl-handled knife with a blade of soft silver folded into it. She took it from him and when she opened the blade to show him, the whole thing was still no more than four inches long.

  “This is for protecting my honour. It’s the right size.”

  “And you don’t know where.”

  “Where what?”

  “Toni. Your si
ster.”

  “Politics. She got politics the way she got Jesus.”

  “What’s in that cupboard?”

  “Skeletons. Family skeletons.”

  All the same, he opened the cupboard door just as if she had told him he could; and that pointless freedom annoyed her so that somewhere in her mind a question was asking itself—why is he here? Why do I put up with him? But by that time he was pawing all her old dresses, even the ballet one, and all still faintly perfumed. He took hold of a handful of frills, then suddenly turned to her.

  “Sophy—”

  “Oh not now—”

  All the same, he put his arms round her and began making swooning noises. She sighed inwardly but laid her arms round his neck since she had found that in this business it was less bother to comply than to exercise will. She wondered resignedly what the order of service would be this time and of course it proved to be Roland’s usual routine, what you might call his ritual. He tried to put her on the divan and at the same time remove both their essential clothing without interrupting the kind of swooning eagerness he thought most seductive. She was obedient, since he was relatively young and strong, passably good to look at, with wide, flat shoulders and a flat stomach. Yet even so as she complied, somewhere or other the question was asking itself—as if this was murmuring from where it lay ambushed, even in daylight, at the mouth of the tunnel—a question concerning life which they said was so important, you must live your life, you only have one life to live, et cetera—life so trivial if it must be organized round such pointless activities as Antonia’s Jesus or politics or ponies or this grunting and heaving. So she lay, clamped down by flesh and gristle and bone. The thing was faceless, no more than a mop of hair shaking by her left shoulder. Now and then the mop paused, turned into a puzzled face for a moment or two and went back to the shaking mop again.

  “I do what you want, don’t I?”

  “There’s more to it than that—”

  And he set to again, if anything, with a more determined energy. So lying there with his weight on her she tried to find out what more there was to it. The weight was—pleasant. The movement was natural and—pleasant. Just so, even the varying degrees of obedience she had experienced with the old man in the big car had been pleasant in some way, like the money; a kind of entry into an area not of secrecy but—outrage. And this prolonged and rhythmic activity about which there was so much talk and round which such a—social dance—was organized? This—ludicrous—intimacy which must be sort of intended since the parts fitted so well? and Roland, irritating Roland, and suddenly exasperating Roland was moving faster and faster as if this were some sort of athletic activity, a private dance after the public one. There was sensation, no doubt of that; and she made some words in her head to describe that sensation which surely would be of more interest, more intensity, with a different head to shake by her shoulder.