Dot. Araminta Hall
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was troubled by the mate she knew nothing about and the mysterious favour. She didn’t want to be a bystander to Tony’s life any more, she wanted to be part of it, which was enough to pull her through the lie to Clarice and get away with it.
Tony met her off the bus on the first day of their pretend holiday and held her hand all the way to the Ford Escort he’d parked a few streets away. They were unusually quiet, embarrassment radiating between them at what they were doing and all it said about how they felt. On the drive Tony wound down his window and turned Radio 1 up full blast, singing along to bands Alice didn’t know. But it lightened the mood and made her laugh. Alice’s hair whipped across her face and she let her head rest against the seat, drinking in the countryside around her, thinking that she would probably never feel happier. Briefly Alice thought about Clarice, either sitting in her chair under the apple tree, or maybe discussing the pruning of the roses with Peter, perhaps listening to the afternoon play on Radio 4, and she was filled suddenly by the sensation that she couldn’t catch her breath, as if she was drowning. Fear of the future loomed over her, a complete knowledge that she could not submit to such a life, that eking out your days was not enough.
They parked in a dusty car park and walked over a hill to the beach, Tony carrying the picnic he’d brought along and Alice their towels. The sky was so blue it was as if you could look through it and Alice had to keep watching the horizon to stop herself from feeling giddy. The sun was hot and round and hard, as it so rarely was in the first week of October where they lived, so that by the time they reached the steps to the beach they had forgotten they were only half an hour from home and both were imagining Greek islands.
‘Have you ever been here before?’ Tony asked.
Alice laughed. ‘Of course I haven’t. It’s so beautiful.’
They started their climb downwards. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ Tony said. ‘I’ve never been abroad, but people who have say it’s better than any beach there.’
‘How do you know about all these things?’ asked Alice as she watched the top of Tony’s head bobbing down the steps in front of her.
He turned back and smiled at her so that her stomach contracted into itself. ‘I don’t know. How do you not?’
They swam and they kissed and they lay in the hot sand and they were so beautiful and perfect and so complemented the beach that the weather rewarded them with a week of perfect sunshine. There was hardly ever anyone else on the beach and even when there was there were rocks and grasses to hide behind. Alice knew that she would lose her virginity to Tony, although the whole phrase seemed inadequate for the process. She was not losing anything and it did not belong to her. But Tony seemed strangely reluctant. She couldn’t imagine that he was a virgin and she had imagined that he would lead her through this with the same confidence that accompanied everything else he did. She pushed her body into his, but still his hands seemed to stop at all the right moments.
By Thursday night Alice felt desperate. Desire had overtaken her body so that she tingled if a fly so much as landed on her. She showered when she got home, tasting the salt as it washed off her skin, and then stood for ages in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at her now brown face, wondering if perhaps she wasn’t as pretty as she’d suspected. She rubbed at the freckles on her nose and worried that she looked like a child.
‘You’ve changed colour,’ Clarice said to her as they ate their incongruous supper of pork chops, sitting in their brown dining room, even though the evening was still warm and the air was as light as a kiss.
‘Oh, I’ve been lying on the grass outside college at lunchtime with some of the other girls,’ answered Alice, amazed at how easily lies now tripped off her tongue. Like everything else, lying seemed to be simply a matter of practice.
Clarice nodded. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you finish?’
‘I suppose get a job in Cartertown.’ Even the words tasted stale to Alice.
‘It’s funny’, said Clarice, ‘to see you growing up. There were times when you were younger that I thought it would never happen and now it’s happened so suddenly.’
Alice had no idea what her mother was talking about and so she took a sip of water and the conversation stopped.
The next day was their last and Tony seemed as jittery as Alice. She felt him staring at her as she ran to the sea and his hands shook as he touched her body in the cool water.
‘You really are so beautiful,’ he said as they stood waist-deep in the ocean. ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.’
But there won’t ever be anyone else, Alice wanted to shout, please don’t say that.
After lunch they went to their favourite rock where Alice lay back into the sand but Tony stayed sitting, hugging his knees. ‘Have you told your mother about me yet?’ he asked, letting sand run idly between his fingers.
‘No, she wouldn’t understand.’ Alice didn’t want to talk, she just wanted him to lie next to her. But his next question shocked her.
‘Is there someone else? You can tell me, you know, I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d rather know.’
‘Of course there isn’t. Why, have you got a girlfriend or something?’ Alice imagined a string of girls trailing Tony like confetti wherever he went.
He smiled over his shoulder at her. ‘No, no. Only you.’
Alice sat up as well and wondered if they were stuck not because of her, but because of him. I have approached this whole encounter like a job interview, she realised, all the time worried that I wasn’t good enough. Maybe he is feeling the exact same way. Maybe the fact that I haven’t asked him anything about himself is troubling him, not soothing him. It was the first time that Alice had considered herself from the outside and this new perspective shamed her. She placed her hand on his bony back, curved and dotted by the ridges in his spine and he felt warm and sticky from the salt. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked simply.
‘Manchester.’
‘What are you doing here?’
He shrugged under her hand and the movement pained her in its loneliness. ‘Just had to get away. My dad’s a wanker and my mum’s what you might call harassed. I’m the fourth boy and she never made any bones about the fact that she wanted a girl. Not that she didn’t love us, but she was pretty spent by the time it got to me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice and she didn’t think she’d ever spoken truer words.
‘What about your dad? Why’s it just you and your weird mother?’
‘He died when I was nine. He had a boat and got caught in a storm. Swept overboard. They never found his body.’
Tony turned round at this. ‘No, really? That’s shit.’
And it was shit, shitter than Alice had perhaps realised before. She saw herself standing next to her mother at her father’s memorial, in her black dress and little white gloves, swallowing her tears, desperate for a shred of comfort from Clarice, who just looked forward, a veil over her eyes, her hands clasped in front of her.
‘Don’t cry,’ Tony said and she felt the tears on her cheeks.
‘Sorry.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that.’ He leant forward and kissed the tracks they had made on her face. ‘Look at the two of us,’ he said. ‘I’m never having kids. Parents just fuck you up.’
And as much to stop him from saying words that Alice could not bear to hear as anything else, she pulled him towards her and something about the way she kissed him or the pitch of the seagulls’ screeches or maybe just the way the planets were moving round the earth gave Tony the courage to take the movement as far as they both wanted.
Sometimes you can feel summer ending