Chapter Eight First being loved.
Everyone was going away for the summer, so, although we were
keeping the same flat, I wrote off to Brighton art college and asked them
to put up a card asking for a place to stay, and set off with one small bag
of clothes for six weeks at an address in the Ditchling Road where two
other strangers were also staying. I went to a nightclub, met a merchant
seaman in the hot dark pulsating disco and had a rash uncomfortable
one night stand as it was termed. He left me his betting slip which I
cashed in as he had won. For the first time I encountered the bleak
atmosphere of a betting shop, all men intent on watching the screens,
cigarette butts all over the floor, despair and hope like a fog of wasted
frozen dismal life. I’d be more careful now, not get into situations where
sex was expected and then it was over and it wasn’t much fun.
I took a job as a cleaner. On arrival at the house on the first day I was
asked to iron and to peel potatoes. Both of these things I had never
done. I made a stab at it. The house was on three floors and the
vacuum cleaner was heavy. I was only seven stone and fragile looking
even in a workish dress. The son of the house was home and he
offered to carry the Vacuum cleaner up and down each floor for me. I
didn’t think to stop him. That was Saturday.
The next cleaning day was Tuesday and I arrived early, eight o’clock
start. The woman opened the door and looked perturbed, hadn’t I got
her letter? She was very sorry, she couldn’t continue to employ me. I
was unsuitable, I didn’t even look as if I could scrub floors.
I walked away. By the end of the road I was skipping and singing a little
song to myself about how I didn’t look like a scrubber. I wasn’t sorry. It
was a nice day and I made for the beach although I had nothing with
me, no money, no swimming things and it was far too early for the
beach, there was no one there.
I took off my lime green suede sandals and paddled at the edge of the
sea despite the pebbles, humming to myself, scanning the glittering
horizon. Free of work, the horizon was one of infinite possibility,
immensity, like the Courbet painting in the National Gallery. Tomorrow
would do for looking for another job.
In the distance there was one person, with a dog, a youth in jeans
and a pinky-red jumper, The dog was a puppy, playfully jumping about.
How did we get to speak to one another?
I can’t remember. I must have walked within earshot, he must have
spoken, maybe he asked the time.
How did I get to sit down next to him? And then he moved the dog from
between us to his other side, shared his towel because the pebbles
were uncomfortable, fetched me tea and sausage rolls with his last
luncheon vouchers, leaving me to hold onto the dog by his short lead so
I couldn’t leave.
The day passed and we were talking for a long time. He had been born
in Rhodesia, he had blue eyes, a sort of deep sea blue, not the pale
kind. He had not been a student, he was two years younger than me,
his hair was blonde and quite long. He was unhurried, undemanding and
listening and serious and smiling in a lovely way. And then he was
balancing one pebble on my knee as I lay still and then another and one
more and all down each leg so I wouldn’t move in case they fell off. He
made no move to touch me, asked for nothing and waited like someone
encountering a small deer in a wood, motionless, both waiting and
listening to see if trust would allow getting a little nearer.
It got later: we were hungry. I suggested going back to where I was
staying to get something to eat. I had eggs and bread. There were two
other people there, it was quite safe, I wouldn’t let him stay and he didn’t
suggest it.
And all the time we were talking and it was getting more interesting
and exciting and light and sweet and something not to lose but to
consider and I liked his blue eyes, his smile.
I couldn’t think, I needed to go and talk to myself, to see myself in the
bathroom mirror, to slow down, not to become someone who slept with
anyone, not like the last one, who had been a mistake. I went into the
loo and looked at myself in the mirror and saw that I had already
decided and came back with this clearly seen. He would be staying and
he knew I had decided in the toilet and he was very pleased.
Kevin was so very cautious and gentle and then excited and so
happy and he opened the window and got out on the roof naked and
walked along balancing on the ridge of the roof, and made tea, and said
he loved me. I was not used to hearing this, what was love and how
could he know? He knew and had none of the studenty intellectual
reservations. He was in fact in need of love as well, but he knew what
ell, but he knew what love was in a way I had never known and he
was unafraid, he had nothing to lose and he saw me as a lovely possibility,
a future different from his past, a sweet lovely girl with no guile and no,
no anything that could spoil her, like the blue fairy, like his old love but new
and better and here and not lost or broken and he relaxed for a moment on a
mattress on the floor, with his dog in the corner and his girl by his side
and we slept and we woke up together as if we were married as far as
he thought, just for the summer I thought, its just for the summer,
even if the love-making made me cry and feel something in a new way
and both of us with our eyes open.
The puppy got out somehow and was lost.
I stayed home in case he returned and Kevin went to search. He
searched all day until he could not walk any further and came home and
we waited and waited and left the door open, but how could a puppy find
again a place he had only been to once?
At last we lay down, still hoping, sharing the sadness and the longing
until we dozed off.
Suddenly there was a scrabbling on the stairs. Unbelievably Butch
staggered in and fell over into an immediate sleep, his eyes darting
behind the pale fur, his little paws still moving, searching and searching.
It was a marvellouslly happy moment.
Kevin had been staying with a man he met on the beach who was a
social worker who probably hoped to seduce him but wasn’t pushy. We
went to get his things, a small bag, I waited outside.
I got a job at the cinema, watching ‘Where Eagles Dare’ every evening.
Some of the usherettes had seen it two hundred times as it was on for
the season. They knew all the continuity mistakes. I had to fetch and
carry down a very heavy tray of ice creams, down five flights of stairs,
and get the change right in the dark or it was deducted from my meagre
wages. On the day off we were given free tickets for the other cinema.
Kevin came into the bar in the interval every night and met me out, until
he got a job as a double - glazing installer, coming home with cuts on his
fingers and powdered glass in his hair. He went off to do a job in
Nottingham one weekend and phoned the police when he couldn’t get
home and they came into the cinema to tell me he was o.k.
A few days after we met Kevin was ill. It was like pissing razor blades.
He knew what it was because he’d had it before. He wasn’t angry, he
took us off to the clinic for pills, a week’s abstinence and we were cured
of gonorrhea, another present from the merchant seaman.
Unexpectedly my parents called in, passing on their holiday. So they
met Kevin and afterwards said they had thought there was more to it
than that he was another person staying in the house. It was something
about the way he looked as he leant out of the window waving goodbye
next to me.
One day we rowed about something and I walked off the beach, but
loitered on the first corner so much hoping Kevin would follow. A young
woman started to talk to me, suggesting that we pick up two men for
money, or maybe we could do without them and just have fun the two of
us? How did I know I didn’t want to if I’d never tried it? I was so
surprised I couldn’t think what to say. I had a boyfriend. Well, o.k. She
was up for a threesome. At this point Kevin appeared to the rescue and
the woman melted away to try another corner.
We decided to go off to the pop festival on the Isle of Wight.
Kevin played cards after work and won a sleeping bag, so we had one
each although we tried squeezing into one, which was just possible but
it wasn’t possible to make love because it was such a tight fit.
We left the dog with Kevin’s grandfather, who lived in Brighton. We had
to spend a night on the floor in the same room as the old man, who got
up twice in the night and peed loudly into a bucket while we held onto
one another shaking with laughter but repectfully silent.
The music was amazing, Hendrix. The crowds were vast and entirely
peaceful. We slept out on the grass. We smoked a little dope. Kevin
smoked roll ups and kept a piece of orange peel in the tin to make the
first drag taste of it, and he’d offer this to me whilst never trying to get
me to take up smoking, and I didn’t.
I was thinking that now it would be over. I had had a wonderful summer
but I had to go back to Nottingham to University. Kevin however insisted
that he was now with me, we would hitch to Nottingham, he would never
leave me, he loved me. As we set out together, I began to believe him,
to recognize that I wanted to believe him, that I maybe felt the same but
hardly dared to feel this.
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