Selected Stories

  ‘I like a McDonald’s,’ the man said, coming with the coffee.

  He was smiling again, and she wondered if he had smiled all the time at the counter. She didn’t know his name. Three weeks ago she first heard his voice on the chat line. ‘I’m Jasmin,’ she’d said, expecting him to say his name also, but he hadn’t.

  ‘I could nearly tell your age,’ he said now. ‘From talking to you I nearly could.’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘I thought sixteen.’

  They sat at the counter that ran along the window. People on the pavement outside were in a hurry, jostling one another, no cars or buses allowed in this street.

  ‘You’re pretty,’ he said. ‘You’re pretty, Jasmin.’

  She wasn’t really. She couldn’t be called pretty, but he said it anyway, and he wondered if there was a similar flattery he would particularly enjoy himself. While they watched the people on the street he thought about that, imagining the baby voice in which she gabbled her words saying something like he knew his way around, or saying he had an easy way with him.

  ‘You think I’d be younger?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ She gave a little shrug, her thin shoulders jerking rapidly up and down. The blue anorak she wore wasn’t grubby but had a faded, washed-out look. Other girls would have thrown it away.

  ‘I like your charm,’ he said, and pointed because she didn’t know he meant the brooch that was pinned to the flimsy pink material of her dress. Her chest was flat and he could have said he liked that too because it was the truth. But the truth didn’t always do, as he had long ago learned, and he smiled instead. Her bare, pale legs were like twigs stripped of their bark and he remembered how he used to do that, long ago too. Her shoes were pinkish, high-heeled.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, referring to her brooch. She shrugged in the same jerky way again, a spasm it seemed almost, although he knew it wasn’t. ‘A fish,’ she said. ‘It’s meant to be a fish.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, Jasmin.’

  ‘Holby gave it to me.’

  ‘Who’s Holby then?’

  ‘My mother got married to him.’

  ‘Your father, is this?’

  ‘Bloody not.’

  He smiled. In one of their conversations he’d asked her if she was pretty and she’d said maybe and he’d guessed she wasn’t from the way she’d said it. They went in for fantasy, they put things on. Well, everyone did, of course.

  ‘Same age as you, Jasmin – you think that when we talked? What age you think?’

  ‘You didn’t sound a kid,’ she said.

  She had a stud in one side of her nose and a little coil pierced into the edge of one ear. He wondered if she had something in her belly-button and wanted to ask her but knew not to. He wanted to close his eyes and think about a gleam of something nestling there, but he smiled instead. Her hair was lank, no frizziness left in it, brightened with a colouring.

  ‘You take trouble,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be the kind. I could tell you’d take trouble with yourself.’

  Again there was the shrug. She held the paper coffee mug between her hands as if for warmth. She asked him if he was in work and he said yes, the law.

  ‘The law? With the police?’ She looked around, an agitated movement, her eyes alarmed. He could take her hand, he thought, a natural thing to do, but he resisted that too.

  ‘The courts,’ he said. ‘If there’s a dispute, if there’s trouble I have to put a case. No, not the police, nothing to do with the police.’

  She nodded, unease draining away.

  ‘You going to be a nurse, Jasmin? Caring for people? I see you caring for people, Jasmin.’

  When they asked, he always said the courts. And usually he said he could see them caring for people.

  The Gold Mine was a place he knew and they went there to play the fruit machines. He always won, he said, but today he didn’t. He didn’t mind that. He didn’t raise the roof like Giggs did when his money went for nothing. He didn’t say the whole thing was fixed. Good days, bad days, was all he said.

  ‘No, you take it,’ he said when she had to explain she hadn’t any money, and in the end she took the two-pound coin he gave to where they broke it down for her. He picked up a necklace for her with the grab, guiding the grab skilfully, knowing when to open the metal teeth and knowing not to be in a hurry to close them, to wait until he was certain. He’d cleared out everything there was on offer once, he said – sweets, jewellery, dice, three packs of cards, two penknives, the dancing doll, a Minnie Mouse, ornaments. He swivelled the crane about when he got the necklace for her, asking her what she wanted next, but this time the teeth closed an instant too soon and the bangle he’d gone after moved only slightly and then slipped back. They spent an hour in the Gold Mine.

  ‘Go back to the bus station for a while?’ he suggested, and Jasmin said she didn’t mind. But on the way there were some seats, one on each side of a small concrete space with a concrete trough of shrubs in the middle. The shrubs were mostly dead, but one of the seats was empty and he asked her if she’d like to sit there.

  ‘Yeah, it’s nice,’ Jasmin said.

  An elderly man, asleep, was stretched out on the seat opposite the empty one. On another, a mother and her children were eating chips. On the third two women, in silence, stared at nothing.

  ‘I come here when it’s sunny,’ the man Jasmin was with said. ‘Nothing better to do, I come here.’

  He’d made her wear the necklace, putting it on for her, the tips of his fingers cool on her neck as he fiddled with the clasp. He’d said it suited her. It suited her eyes, he’d said, and she wondered about that, the beads being yellowish. When they’d been going towards the machine that took you to the stars he’d said he was twenty-nine and she’d wanted to say she liked his being older, and almost did.

  ‘The sun all right for you, Jasmin?’

  The two women looked at them, one and then the other, still not speaking. The mother scolded her children when they asked for more chips. She bundled the empty cartons into a wastebin and they went away.

  ‘There’s vitamins in the sun. You know that, Jasmin?’

  She nodded, although she hadn’t been aware of this. She tried to look at her necklace but she couldn’t see it properly when she pulled it taut and squinted down at the beads. If she’d been alone she would have taken it off, but she didn’t like to do that now.

  ‘Jasmin’s a great name,’ he said. On the chat line he had said that, complimenting her, although he didn’t know she had given herself the name. She’d often thought he was affectionate when they had their conversations on the chat line, even though she’d been puzzled a few times when he described the telephone box he was in or read out what was written on a wall. The first time he’d read something out without saying he was doing it she’d wondered if he was all there in the head, but then he explained and it was all right. She imagined him in the courts, like you’d see on TV. She imagined him standing up with papers in one hand, putting a case. She imagined him looking to where she was watching, and his smile coming on, and wanting to wave at him but knowing she mustn’t because he’d have told her that. The first time on the chat line he’d commented on her voice. ‘You take it easy now,’ he’d said, and she hung on because she didn’t want him to go. ‘Love that voice,’ he said, and she realized he meant hers.

  He was smiling at her now and they watched the sleeping man waking up. He had made a pillow of a plastic carrier-bag stuffed full of what might have been clothes. He had undone his shoelaces and he did them up again. He looked about him and then he went away.

  ‘I thought you might say no, Jasmin, when I put it to you we’d meet up. Know what I mean, Jasmin? That you wouldn’t want to take it further.’

  She shook her head, denying that. She wanted her mother to go by, coming back from the betting shop, where the man Holby didn’t know about worked. Holby was pathetic, her mother said, another mistake she’d made, same’s the o
ne with Jasmin’s father. She had got into a relationship with the betting-shop man and the next thing would be he’d be a mistake too, no way he wouldn’t.

  ‘I’d never,’ Jasmin heard herself protesting. ‘I’d never have said no.’

  She shook her head to make certain he was reassured. He’d lowered his voice when he’d said he had worried in case she’d say no. She didn’t want anything spoiled; she wanted everything to go on being as good as on the chat line, as good as it was now.

  ‘You at a loose end, Jasmin? You got the time today, come round to my place?’

  Again there was the ripple of excitement. She could feel it all over her body, a fluttering of pins and needles it almost felt like but she knew it wasn’t that. She loved being with him; she’d known she would. ‘Yeah,’ she said, not hesitating, not wanting him to think she had. ‘Yeah, I got the time today.’

  ‘Best to walk,’ he said. ‘All right with a walk, Jasmin?’

  ‘Course I am.’ And because it seemed to belong now, Jasmin added that she didn’t know his name.

  ‘Clive,’ he said.

  He liked that name and often gave it. Usually they asked, sometimes even on the chat line, before they got going. Rodney he liked too. Ken he liked. And Alistair.

  ‘I never knew a Clive,’ she said.

  ‘You’re living at home, Jasmin?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You said. A bit ago you said that. I only wondered if you’d moved out by now.’

  ‘I wish I’d be able to.’

  ‘Arm’s length, are they?’

  She didn’t understand and he said her mother and whoever. On the chat line he remembered she’d said she was an only child. Her mother she’d mentioned then, the man she’d referred to in the bus station. He asked about him, wondering if he was West Indian, and she said yes. Light-coloured, she said. ‘He passes.’

  They had turned out of the busy streets, into Blenheim Row, leading to Sowell Street, where the lavatories were, the school at the end.

  ‘A West Indian kid got killed here,’ he said. ‘White kids took their knives out. You ever see a thing like that, Jasmin?’

  ‘No.’ Vehemently, she shook her head, and he laughed and then she did.

  ‘You ever think of moving out, Jasmin? Anything like that come into your thoughts? Get a place of your own?’

  All the time, she said. The only thing was, she wasn’t earning.

  ‘First thing you said to me nearly, that you’d got nothing coming in.’

  ‘You’re easy to talk with, Clive.’

  He took her hand; she didn’t object. Her fingernails were silvery he’d noticed in the McDonald’s, a couple of them jagged where they’d broken. No way she wasn’t a child, no way she’d reached sixteen, more like twelve. Her hand was warm, lying there in his, dampish, fingers interlaced with his.

  ‘There used to be a song,’ he said. ‘“Putting on the agony” was how it went. “Putting on the style”. Before your time, Jas. It could have been called something else, only those were the words. “That’s what all the young folk are doin’ all the while”. Lovely song.’

  ‘Maybe I heard it one time, I don’t know.’

  ‘What age really, Jas?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘No, really though?’

  She said fifteen. Sixteen in October, she said.

  When they were passing the Queen and Angel he asked her if she ever took a drink. It wouldn’t do for him to bring her on to licensed premises, he explained, and she said she wasn’t fussy for a drink, remembering the taste of beer, which she hadn’t liked. He said to wait and he went to an off-licence across the street and came back with a plastic bag. He winked at her and she laughed. ‘Mustn’t be bad boys,’ he said. ‘No more than a few sips.’

  They came to a bridge over the river. They didn’t cross it, but went down steps to a towpath. He said it was a shortcut.

  There wasn’t anyone around, and they leaned against a brick wall that was part of the bridge. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle he’d bought and showed her how the plastic disc he took from one of his jacket pockets opened out to become a tumbler. Tonic wine, he said, but he had vodka too, miniatures he called the little bottles he had. What the Russians drank, he said, although she knew. He said he’d been in Moscow once.

  They drank from the tumbler when he’d tasted the mixture he’d made and said it wasn’t too strong. He’d never been responsible for making any girl drunk, he said. He had found the collapsible tumbler on the same seat where they’d been sitting in the sun. One day he’d seen it there and thought it was a powder compact. He carried it about with him in case he met a friend who’d like a drink.

  ‘All right, Jas?’

  ‘Yeah, great.’

  ‘You like it, Jas?’

  They passed the tumbler back and forth between them. She drank from where his lips had been; she wanted to do that. He saw her doing it and he smiled at her.

  Nice in the sun, he said when they walked on, and he took her hand again. She thought he’d kiss her, but he didn’t. She wanted him to. She wanted to sit on a patch of grass and watch the rowers going by, his arm round her shoulders, his free hand holding hers. There was some left in the bottles when he dropped them and the plastic bag into a wastebin.

  ‘Sit down, will we?’ she said, and they did, her head pressed into his chest. ‘I love you, Clive,’ she whispered, not able to stop herself.

  ‘We belong,’ he whispered back. ‘No way we don’t, Jas.’

  She didn’t break the silence when they walked on, knowing that it was special, and better than all the words there might have been. No words were necessary, no words could add a thing to what there was.

  ‘I can see us in Moscow, Jas. I can see us walking the streets.’

  She felt different, as if her plainness wasn’t there. Her face felt different, her body too. In the diner she’d be a different person clearing up the plates, not minding the lorrymen’s cigarette smoke, not minding what they said to her. Nothing she knew would be the same, her mother wouldn’t be, and letting Lukie Giggs touch her where he wanted to wouldn’t be. She wondered if she was drunk.

  ‘You’re never drunk, Jas.’ He squeezed her hand, he said she was fantastic. Both of them were only tipsy, he said. Happy, he said. Soon’s he heard her voice he knew she was fantastic. Soon’s he saw her at the bus station. In the room they were going to there were the things he collected - little plastic tortoises, and racing cars, and books about places he wanted to go to, and pictures of castles on the walls. She imagined that when he told her, and saw a vase of summer flowers, curtains drawn against the sunlight. He played a disc for her, the Spice Girls because they were in the past and he liked all that.

  They turned off the towpath into a lane with a row of garage doors running along it, and walled back gardens on the other side. They came out on to a suburban road, and crossed it to a crescent. He dropped her hand before they reached it and pulled down the back of his jacket where it had ridden up a bit. He buttoned all three buttons.

  ‘Would you wait five minutes, Jas?’

  It was as if she knew about that, as if she knew why she had to wait and why it should be five minutes, as if he’d told her something she’d forgotten. She knew he hadn’t. It didn’t matter.

  ‘You be all right, Jas?’

  ‘Course I will.’

  She watched him walking off and when he reached a front gate painted blue. She watched him as she had when he crossed the street to the off-licence. She waited, as she had waited then too, seeing again the little tortoises and the racing cars, hearing the Spice Girls. Across the road a delivery van drew up. No one got out, and a minute or so later it drove off. A dog went by. A woman started a lawnmower in one of the front gardens.

  She waited for longer than he’d said, for ages it felt like, but when he came back he was hurrying, as if he was making up for that. He almost ran, his flannel trousers flapping. He was out of breath when he reached her. He
shook his head and said they’d best go back.

  ‘Back?’

  ‘Best to go back, Jas.’

  He took her arm, but he was edgy and didn’t take it as he had before. He didn’t search for her hand. He pulled her anorak when it was difficult for her to keep up with him. Behind them somewhere a car door banged.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said.

  A red car slowed down beside them as they were turning into the lane with the garage doors. When it stopped a woman with glasses on a string around her neck got out. She was wearing a brown skirt, and a cardigan that matched it over a pale silk blouse. Her dark hair was coiled round her head, her lipstick glistened, as if she hadn’t had time to powder it over or had forgotten to. The glasses bobbed about on her blouse and then were still. Her voice was angry when she spoke but she kept it low, giving the impression that her teeth were clenched.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ she said.

  She spoke as if Jasmin wasn’t there. She didn’t look at her, not even glancing in her direction.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ she almost shouted, and slammed the door of the car shut, as if she had to do something, as if only noise could express what she felt. ‘For God’s sake, after all we’ve been through!’

  Her face was quivering with rage, one hand made into a fist that struck the roof of the car once and then opened, to fall by her side. There was silence then.

  ‘Who is she?’ The woman spoke when the silence had gone on, at last recognizing Jasmin’s presence. Her question came wearily, in a bleak, dull tone. ‘You’re on probation,’ she said. ‘Did you forget somehow that you were on probation?’

  The man whom she abused had not attempted to speak, had made no protestation, but words were muttered now.

  ‘She was looking for the towpath. She asked me where it was. I don’t know who she is.’

  The long, peaky features might never that afternoon, or any afternoon, have been other than they had become in the brief time that had passed: devoid of all expression, dead, a dribble of tears beginning.