Never Mind Miss Fox Page 7

  Danny took a gold lighter off the mantelpiece and examined it. “I met her earlier. I dropped a present round for Eliot, and Sabrina gave me some cake. Where’s Martha?”

  Clive did not answer but asked, “What present?”

  Eliot interrupted them, coiling around Danny like a vapor. “Danny Danny Danny! You came back!”

  “I said I would,” he said. “Happy sixteenth birthday—again.”

  Eliot took his hand. “Sweet sixteen,” she said, blinking up at him, “but not for long.”

  Danny laughed. “Oh yes? Which of these poor sods have you set your sights on?”

  But Eliot just twisted his fingers in hers and gazed at him. Then she said, “Come on,” and took his drink from his hand. She passed the glass to Clive and led Danny away, downstairs towards the dance floor.

  Clive bobbed in the swirled air left behind them, trying to stay afloat. Eliot wanted Danny—it was plain—but wanted what? Putting the drinks down on a side table he turned to see Tom, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Where did Eliot go?” Tom asked Clive with a helpless look.

  “Downstairs.” They both went down to watch Eliot dance round Danny. She held her hands above her head and twisted round him, glittering and luminous. Danny did not respond but only danced. He made no move to touch her and Eliot, trying to tease, floated towards him and away again.

  If Danny could not—would not—see what Eliot wanted, Tom could. After a few minutes he lifted his shoulders from the wall he had been leaning on and, defeated, leaned towards his brother. “I’m going to go,” he shouted into Clive’s ear.

  Clive followed him up the stairs. “You can’t,” he bleated. “What about me?”

  “I’m not going home,” said Tom. “I just took half an E. I’ll go round the corner to a mate’s. He’s gone already, taken some people.”

  “Is Eliot on drugs?” Clive asked. “Should I be worried?”

  “No, just pissed. She doesn’t do drugs.” He picked up his jacket from the couch in the hall. “See you at home,” he said, “tomorrow.” And then he was gone.

  Clive stood in the hall and wondered what to do. The grown-ups had left, the caterers’ van had disappeared from the driveway and Eliot’s parents had retired to what Sabrina referred to as “The Orangery”—an annex in their garden which was “about ten times nicer than our actual house,” according to Tom. There seemed to be no one to take things in hand. Was he the only one who could see what might happen? If Eliot got into real trouble, who would care?

  Fretting, Clive trailed back downstairs but both Eliot and Danny had vanished. The music played to a near-empty room and he stood and stared at the place where they had danced. In this slow moment he pictured them locked together on a sofa, perhaps in the drawing room, surrounded by framed photographs of Eliot as a younger child. With a burst of frenzied energy—breath coming in gasps—he flung himself around the house, opening and shutting doors.

  In a small study he found Danny sitting in an armchair while two girls—the sheepdogs—lay on the rug, sharing a spliff and giggling at MTV.

  “Hello, Clive,” said Danny. “Look at these two—they’re wasted.”

  “Where’s Eliot?”

  “I don’t know.” Danny looked at him, puzzled. “Are you all right?”

  Clive could not contain himself. “It depends,” he spat at Danny, “on what’s happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh come on, Danny—you know what I mean. I saw the way you were dancing with Eliot.”

  There was a brief pause while Danny looked Clive full in the face, his expression of astonishment curdling to contempt. Clive held his ground but he could feel a hot flush creep up his throat. The girls, oblivious, continued to giggle, yawn and grapple like tired puppies.

  “You’re pathetic,” said Danny. “You’re a joke.” He turned back to the girls and the television screen.

  Clive tried again. “If you so much as—”

  Danny did not respond—he did not react at all—and Clive withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  Treading slowly upstairs through the house he watched each foot lift from one step to the next. He had got it all wrong. He should never have come. On your own you can be a bit…Tom was right.

  “You’ve got to go home,” he said to his reflection in the window on the landing, but another voice spoke in his head: I’ll say goodbye to Eliot, and then I’ll go. He turned to climb the next flight of stairs.

  In answer to his knock at the bedroom door came a muffled sound that might have been, “Who is it?” Clive, with a responsible adult’s sense of concern, pushed open the door of the room and stepped inside. He found Eliot collapsed on the bed with clothes and hair twisted in a bundle around her like a bird’s nest that had tumbled from a hedge into the road.

  The room was silent and still—the close-knit air of a London attic. Clive closed the door behind him and exhaled. The pounding in his ears subsided.

  “Eliot?” he said. “It’s me, Clive. Are you all right?”

  “Clive—” A hand stuck out towards him from the middle of the nest. There was a stifled sob and then Eliot said, “I’ve been such an idiot.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I wanted…it was so embarrassing. I love him so much. I can’t believe…and now we’ll never be friends. He wouldn’t…he didn’t want to…” She faltered on the words.

  So: Danny had turned her down. Clive waited for the softening sensation of relief but to his surprise he felt again that strike of flint within.

  She was devastated. He wanted to console her—he told himself to—but he struggled to muster sympathy, even to his voice. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. “Poor you.”

  “I told everyone.” Eliot was crying now, in a series of sniffs and hiccups. “Everyone knew I wanted him to be the one…everyone’s going to think I’m such an idiot…”

  “No one thinks you’re an idiot,” Clive said. “Tom was just a bit sad, that’s all.”

  “Poor Tom,” she said with a gulp. “Oh, God, poor Tom…I’m such a bitch to him. Is he still here?” She lifted her head with a hopeful look at the door.

  “No,” said Clive firmly. “He’s gone to another party.”

  “I’ve blown it,” said Eliot. “My birthday party. What a joke.”

  “It was great,” said Clive, but it sounded lame and insubstantial. After a pause he added, “And I think you’re great.”

  There was no response to this and then in a small voice she said, “Do you?”

  “Yes,” said Clive. He trusted the tone of his voice: avuncular; certain. The poor little thing, he thought, being rejected like that. He raised his eyes from the heap on the bed and looked around the room.

  His eye was caught by the coat that Danny had given Eliot that day at the races—the only piece of clothing not in a tangle on the floor. It had been straightened onto a hanger and hung from the curtain pole. The sight of it struck Clive with as much force as if Danny himself had been standing in the room looking down at them with his tall certainty, his glamour and his fatal magnetism. He’s a total bastard, Martha and Viv had said.

  Clive felt weary, defeated and alone. “Good night, Eliot,” he said. “I’m going to head off home.”

  But again the hand reached from its knitted blur of twigs and stretched towards him. “Don’t go,” she said. “It’s my birthday—well,” she corrected herself, “it was.” She shifted her cheek on the pillow. “So drunk…stupid…tired…” Her voice could only be a moment from sleep.

  She tugged at Clive’s hand and he sat down on the edge of her bed and looked at the formless tumble of her, lying there. “Shall I take your shoes off?” he asked. “Your feet’ll be murder tomorrow if you sleep in them.”

  “Oh, go on then.” It was a mumble. “May as well…Not going back downstairs.”

  She was lying on her side and Clive reached round and pulled off her shoes, one after the other. He dropped them on
to the floor. “You’re wearing a dress,” he said in a slow voice, looking down at her. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress.”

  “Whaddya think?” she slurred.

  “Very pretty,” said Clive. With an absent-minded gesture he pulled its hem down over her calves.

  After a little pause Eliot muttered into the pillow, “Don’t say ‘pretty’; say ‘sexy.’”

  There was a silence which to Clive was filled with noise. He looked down at her ankles, crossed on the bed, and the red marks her shoes had left on her feet. He moved his hand from the hem of her dress to her uppermost foot and with his thumb he rubbed at the bruised skin.

  “…Feels nice…” came Eliot’s voice, but it was just a murmur.

  She did not stir again for a moment or two and Clive stared down at his thumb, moving to and fro across her skin, just an inch one way and then back, and away, and back. It seemed to be the only thing moving in the world.

  “Mm,” repeated Eliot. “That feels nice.”

  When he heard those words again, Clive instructed himself to stop this little movement.

  Eliot still had the fingers of Clive’s other hand clasped between hers. She did not let go but turned her wrist until their two palms were pressed together. Their fingers slid between each other’s and linked securely into place. At the same time, with the smallest motion, she shifted her foot until it was not just resting under his hand but docked in his palm. How did that happen? Clive wondered, looking down. I have not moved.

  He seemed now to be holding her at two points, by hand and foot, and now she turned towards him, stirring and unfolding like a sheaf of papers at the breath of a breeze.

  Back in the hall he found Danny, trying on one of Sabrina’s straw sunhats and admiring his image in the hall mirror.

  Seeing Clive’s reflection in the glass behind him, Danny said, “Is Eliot all right?”

  “Eliot?” repeated Clive.

  “She was so pissed. I thought she might have made herself ill, or got in trouble—”

  “Trouble?”

  “—with her parents.” Danny adjusted the brim of the hat.

  “I don’t know,” said Clive. “I went up to have a slash.” When the throb of the lie had died away in the air he said, “I’m going to go home.”

  “Are you? Me too.” With the hat still on his head Danny followed Clive out of the front door.

  They stood on the pavement for a moment. Danny yawned a tiger’s yawn and stretched. Clive stared at him, unseeing. All his faculties seemed to have been disabled; he felt like an automaton; he was not sure he could even have given a name to himself or to the day.

  It was going to be a grubby sort of dawn. It felt cold to him now but the day would be hot. It felt clammy but he knew it would not rain. It was dark but soon the city would be pressed beneath the palm of a white, accusing sky.

  He said, “I think I’ll walk to Finchley Road,” and glanced at his watch. “It’ll be the first train in a minute.”

  “All right, mate,” said Danny. He stuck out his hand. “See you around.”

  “Where are you going to go?” said Clive, curious.

  “I’ll walk over to my girlfriend’s,” said Danny. “She’s in Camden.”

  Girlfriend? Clive wanted to shout at him and punch him in the face. Girlfriend? “You should have brought her,” he said in a level voice.

  “She’s got kids,” said Danny, “and no one to babysit.” He raised the hat in farewell. “G’night.”

  Clive crept to the station, foxlike, along the darkest gutters and gunnels of the pavement.

  Stowed in his seat on the empty train he stared at his reflection in the opposite window, billowing and diminishing in the glass. At one moment his face was a monstrous distortion—the face of a cheat—and at another it had shrunk to a freakish pebble—the face of a coward. Guilt rattled at the carriage doors—leaped and snapped at the flying wheels—chattered in his ears—pounded at his head. The train swept through the tunnels.

  What have I done? What have I done?

  “Oh, no—” Blinking, fearful, Eliot had spoken afterwards as if she had only just woken and found him there. “Oh no—Tom; Martha—” She had shrunk away from him, furling the bedclothes around herself. “You’ve got to go…Go, please; now. If my dad or my mum…you’ve got to go, Clive—” Her voice had risen, tightened and trembled at the point of tears.

  She had not needed to say it. Clive had known that this was no place for him to stay. He did not belong in that single bed, amid that heap of discarded clothes. In that little room a poster curled on the wall, luminous stars glowed on the ceiling and the coat glared down from on high like a hovering angel.

  As Clive pulled on his shoes a heavy pulse beat in his veins and against his temples. He listened and was afraid, as if the sound was a footfall on the stairs.

  On the train, when he closed his eyes, it was Martha’s face he saw. If he tried to banish it there was his brother’s, in its place. Tom’s expression—desolate—as he had shrugged his way out of the door. “She likes that other bloke,” he had said sadly to Clive. “Your friend.”

  Martha—Tom—Martha—Tom.

  Eliot—Eliot—Eliot.

  Emerging from the dark—pummeling through the suburbs—Clive was relieved to find his ballooning image erased by the dark rushing blur of cutting walls—violet brick; blue-green ivy—under a lightening dawn sky.

  But try as he might to see it differently the world looked as damp and soiled as a pile of old laundry, waiting its turn for the wash. It might be doomsday out there. The sun might never come up.

  Tom could not be certain why Eliot did not want to be friends with him anymore, but he guessed at the reason: “It was that man—your friend. Something must have happened, after I left.” His words clawed at Clive’s insides.

  Eliot stopped answering the telephone. Although her mother took Tom’s messages and promised to pass them on, Eliot did not ring him back. Tom puzzled, suffered and agonized in turn. It was his first abandonment; he did not take it well. “I never should have gone home,” he said to Clive. “I’ll kill that man if I ever see him again.”

  “Poor Tom,” was Martha’s comment, “but it was bound to happen. Eliot’s trouble—I could have told him that.”

  Clive knew about trouble. He knew what had happened. He knew how Eliot was.

  Her letter arrived at College on the morning of his first exam; he collected it from his pigeonhole. He saw the handwritten envelope and thought it was a good-luck card.

  When he had read the note he tore the paper into pieces, lengthways and crossways, and then scrunched the pieces into a ball with his fist. He dropped the bundle into a litter bin on the pavement. He stood and stared at the bin until a bus came past him too close and the blast of air made him stumble.

  After having gaped and mimed his way through the exam, he wrote a letter in reply.

  “You’re back late,” said Martha in the evening when he returned. “How was it?”

  “What?”

  “How was the exam?” She looked at him again. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, fine. A bit tired. It was…not too bad, I think.” Clive had no recollection of what the questions had been, or how he had answered them. He marveled at this new person, this new Clive, who could cheat and lie with such fluency.

  A second letter arrived just as exams were over. This time Clive recognized the slant of Eliot’s writing and her blue felt-tip; a sharp tug seemed to loose his heart from its casing. He was on his way to celebrate with Martha but when he saw the waiting envelope he collected it and made a diversion to the public toilets by the town hall. He locked himself into a cubicle and stood with his back to the door.

  The smell of disinfectant skinned his lungs and brought him to a new, acute wakefulness, as if he had been rubbed raw. Holding the note between fastidious fingertips—his pummeling heart colliding against his ribs—he read the contents:

  Clive—

 
; Thank you very much for the money. The abortion didn’t cost that much so I’m going to spend the rest on getting wasted. This is also to let you know that you are scum, I hate your guts and I hope you rot in hell.

  —Eliot

  Clive waited to see what would happen—perhaps he would weep or beat the wall of the cubicle with his fists—but the curious thing was that nothing happened at all. He stirred inside himself with a poker. Nothing but cold ashes. He felt exactly as he had before.

  After a few moments he tore the letter into small pieces and threw them into the toilet bowl in front of him. Then he pulled the chain and stood and watched until they had all been flushed away.

  7

  Everyone agreed that the stairs were dangerous, but Val pronounced them “lethal” and condemned the whole flat as “hopeless for children.” One Sunday afternoon Clive fitted a child’s safety gate at each end so that a tottering Eliza would not plummet from the kitchen to the basement. The next time his mother asked him whether he had “done something about those dreadful stairs,” he was able to crow, “Yes, Mum, so you never need ask me again.”

  “You’ve no idea what toddlers are like,” Val said. “They move like lightning.”

  “What do you want us to do, chop off her legs?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s those stairs—they’re too steep. The way they just fall out of the kitchen floor like that…It’s not right; it’s all upside-down. I’d feel better if the kitchen were downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs, like in a normal house.”

  “It’s normal for a flat,” defended Clive. “Stop fussing.”

  Eliza did not move like lightning, Clive thought, she moved like a crab on roller-skates. Skeetering over the floor with amazing rapidity her gait was both crawling and walking; forwards and sideways. Bottom in the air, palms on the ground, one eye cocked towards him and one to the floorboards as if she were waiting for the starter’s pistol. To watch her made him smile—but he had to be careful: if he took too much obvious pleasure in their daughter, it would set Martha’s temper alight. “You wouldn’t find her so bloody sweet if you’d sat on the bus for an hour with her screaming in your ear.”