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Trish straightened up, popped the brush back into the bottle and screwed down the top. Poppy wiggled her freckled toes, admiring the silvery-pink. ‘Do Katie’s,’ she said to Trish.
‘I’m not going to waste it,’ said Trish.
‘I don’t want mine done,’ I said quickly. Trish was right. I wouldn’t be careful: it would get chipped, and I didn’t have any nail-varnish remover to take it off properly. Still, I’d have liked her to paint my nails silvery-pink.
‘So,’ said Poppy, ‘what are we going to do now?’
They both looked at me. They wanted me to invite them back to my house. But I wanted to stay in the field, with the worn-out cows and the ammonites.
‘Let’s do biology,’ I said, to buy time. Trish looked pleased; this game starred her. She fished in her satchel.
There was no hurry. No one was waiting for us. My dad wouldn’t be back from rewiring someone’s house until half past six. Poppy’s parents were in Scotland that week, where her grandmother was taking her time over dying, so Poppy was staying with Trish. Trish’s mum was always relaxed about the time they came home after school.
My dad had not yet plucked up the courage to tell me the facts of life. He left that to the school, which had been slow getting round to it too. But this term we’d been thrilled to find our new biology textbook was rather more forthcoming on the subject than our teacher.
Trish pushed her hair into a tight little bun on the top of her head, and flared her nostrils in imitation of Miss Millichip. ‘Turn now to page one-nine-four, girls,’ she trilled. Poppy and I, playing dutiful pupils, opened our books. We stared at mysterious illustrations that reminded me of the plumbing schemes and wiring diagrams my father worked on at the kitchen table.
‘Today we are going to study reproduction,’ continued Trish. We’d had a real lesson on it this afternoon, but Miss Millichip had revealed nothing more exciting than the gestation period of a rabbit. ‘What kind of reproduction, Poppy McClaren?’
Poppy giggled. ‘Human reproduction, miss.’
The diagrams bore no resemblance to any human body I’d seen. Were those coils of pipework really tucked away inside me? On the opposite page there was a diagram of the male reproductive system. Staring at it, I felt an odd sensation. It was grounded somewhere not far from the pipework, but it seemed to swell up through the whole central stem of my body, so even my lips and tongue felt thick and hot and clumsy.
Trish’s mother, more advanced than the average Green Down parent, had explained matters to her daughter more than a year ago, so Trish considered herself an expert. ‘A woman,’ she intoned, ‘has an opening called the regina.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Poppy. ‘It says here it’s called the vagina.’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Trish, loftily. ‘It’s Latin for “queen”. It must be a misprint in the book.’
Poppy looked sceptical, but neither of us felt brave enough to contradict Trish. Her mother had come from London, and worked as a photographer’s model before marrying Trish’s dad.
‘And the man,’ Trish continued, ‘has an appendage called a penis.’ That did it. We were all off on a fit of giggles.
‘Have you ever seen one?’ asked Poppy, a little later when we had recovered.
‘Of course I have,’ said Trish. ‘I used to have baths with Stephen.’
‘That doesn’t count,’ said Poppy. ‘Your brother’s ten. I meant a grown-up one.’
I could see Trish weighing up whether to lie or not. In spite of her mother’s racy career, her home was probably as modest as the rest of suburban Bath in the 1970s. Fathers and brothers did not wander around naked.
‘No,’ she finally admitted. ‘But I have seen my mother’s fanny. It’s all hairy.’
I decided it was time to make my own contribution to the debate. ‘I have,’ I said.
They looked at me, astonished.
‘Really?’ said Poppy, at the same moment as Trish said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Really I have,’ I said. ‘It was horrible.’
‘Was it a flasher?’ asked Poppy.
‘No, it was my dad’s,’ I said. ‘I was on the toilet, and hadn’t locked the door, and he came in not knowing I was there. It was sticking out of the gap in his pyjama bottoms. It looked like a boiled beef sausage, red and a bit shiny. Except it was more wrinkled, and had this kind of eye-thing at the end, looking at me.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Trish. ‘I would have screamed. I’d have called for my mum.’
She didn’t mean to be unkind–at least, I don’t think she did – but it stung all the same. Poppy saw my face, and jumped in quickly. ‘What did he do?’
‘He went out again,’ I said. ‘Then afterwards, at breakfast, he shouted at me for not locking the bathroom door.’
‘Was it–you know, up?’ asked Trish.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘It all happened quite quickly, and what I mostly remember was the eye-thing.’
‘It must have been up if you saw the eye,’ said Trish. ‘Because if it had been down, it would have been pointing to the floor, instead of looking at you.’
‘But if it had been up, it would have been pointing at the ceiling,’ argued Poppy. ‘So it can’t have been up. Anyway, why would it have been up? He can’t have been having sex.’
‘It goes up when a man just thinks about sex,’ said Trish. ‘I expect he must still think about sex, your dad. Maybe it was half-way, on its way up or its way down.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. My hand slid off the book and came to rest on the comforting earth. I wanted to stop this conversation. I felt embarrassed, as if I’d taken a picture of my dad’s penis and shown it to them.
‘You know, men are supposed to think about sex almost every two minutes,’ said Poppy. ‘There was something about it in the DailyExpress. Some survey scientists did in America. So I don’t think it has to go up when men just think about sex.’
Trish looked belligerent. ‘My mother said it does. But you might not be able to tell, if they’re wearing trousers.’
‘I think you would be able to tell,’ insisted Poppy. ‘I mean, it gets bigger, doesn’t it? So they’d get a big bump in the front of their trousers.’ That set us off giggling again.
‘In that case Gary Bennett’s jeans might split,’ said Trish. There was a reverent silence, as we all contemplated this shockingly delicious idea.
Gary Bennett was the reason Trish and Poppy were so keen to come round to my house whenever they could. He was only two or three years older than us, but he had already left school and was working as a decorator’s apprentice. He had dishwater-blond hair in tangled curls, blue eyes and a mouth like a Roman statue’s, and we all three dreamed of that curvy mouth clamped on our own. Mrs Owen, from three doors further down the street, who sometimes brought round casseroles because she refused to believe my dad could cook, was best friends with Gary’s mum, a widow who worked at the Co-op. It was only a couple of months since mother and son had moved in across the road, and Trish had noticed him first.
‘You’ve got a boy living opposite you,’ she told me.
I wasn’t much interested. Then the decorator’s firm Gary worked for was hired to repaint Poppy’s house. Every afternoon for the whole two weeks he worked there she and Trish rushed home from school together to get a glimpse of him.
‘Why don’t we go to your house and wait for Gary to get home?’ asked Poppy.
I looked at my hands. They were scrabbling almost manically in the soil now.
‘Come on,’ said Trish. I knew her eyes would have gone sea-dark, fixed on my face, willing me to look up so she could stare me into surrender.
My fingers touched something slimy: a big fat worm. I pulled them away quickly. ‘My dad …’
‘He won’t be home for ages. And Poppy’s got binoculars.’ They’d planned this together, I could tell.
Early that year, when Trish and I were only just getting to know Poppy, I’d caught a mysterious virus, like flu but longer-lasting. My father had asked Mrs Owen to look after me. She didn’t need much persuading, her grey curls bouncing cheerfully as she trotted up and down the stairs with bowls of soup. I got better gradually, but my muscles stayed weak, and the doctor said I needed more time to recover. I would have quite enjoyed being off school if I hadn’t been worrying that Poppy would usurp me in Trish’s affections.
My father fetched me books from the library, but I soon got bored. Mrs Owen tried to keep me in bed, but I would sneak out and sit in our spare bedroom at the front of the house to watch the street.
This had once been my parents’ room, and although it had not been occupied for more than ten years it was fascinating to me because it still contained traces of my mother. Her old cosmetics were in the dressing-table: worn-down lipsticks in unfashionable shades, creamy green and blue eye-shadows, dried-up mascara. I rummaged through the drawers, slipping costume jewellery on to my wrists and fingers, wrapping silky scarves round my head: first Grace Kelly, then a Woodstock hippie. There were clothes in the wardrobe too, duster coats and full-skirted dresses that would have been already old-fashioned by the time she was gone, but they scared me too much to touch.
Mrs Owen had gone out to do her weekly shop, and I was curled on the window-seat, keeping an eye open for her. It was late afternoon. The streetlamps had not yet come on when I noticed a light in the front bedroom of the house across the street: Gary Bennett’s house.
I suppose it never occurred to Gary to draw the curtains when he went upstairs to change out of his work clothes. That afternoon he flicked on the light and came into the room, pulling his sweater and T-shirt over his head, then disappeared into the corner to wash. After a while there was another tantalizing glimpse of bare chest as he came back to the wardrobe and took out a shirt. I watched him button it from top to bottom. Then he turned his back as he tucked it into clean jeans, hunching his shoulders to do up the zip.
I remember those flashes of nakedness, like a set of Polaroid snaps–the skinny white shoulders in the nicotine-yellow light of the overhead bulb, the surprisingly solid arms, the flat slabs of pectoral muscle that were just beginning to develop as his boy’s body toned to do a man’s job. I would have watched longer, but I heard Mrs Owen’s key in the lock and scampered back to bed in my own room before she caught me.
I could hardly wait to tell the others what I’d seen. After my first day back at school, Trish and Poppy came home with me, and we settled to wait in the front bedroom. Shortly after five thirty, the light across the road snapped on and Gary crossed the bay window hauling his jumper over his head. He towelled himself dry staring out of the bedroom window, blissfully unconscious of the three admirers ducking below sill level every time he looked towards our house.
Afterwards hardly a week went by without us making at least one attempt to watch him undress. We weren’t always lucky. Some nights he conducted the entire ritual out of sight in the corner of the room. Or he didn’t get back until too late; I had to make sure Trish and Poppy left before Dad got home. Once his mother came into his room in the middle, and–perhaps telling him off for making such an exhibition of himself–crossed to the window and pulled the curtains shut.
By spring Gary’s chest was harder and broader, and his hair had grown longer. The lighter evenings frustrated us. He no longer needed to turn on the light, and the reflection of the sky on the window made it impossible to see much inside. But that didn’t stop us hoping. Perhaps warmer weather would help. Lately he had begun to fling open the windows, and once even leaned bare-chested over the sill for a full two minutes, staring into the street. Trish had timed it.
If Gary noticed our bobbing heads, he showed no sign. But two or three times lately I had passed him in the street on my way to school, and instead of ignoring me he had given me a wink or a wave. I would go hot and red. I was beginning to wonder how much longer we could get away with spying on him.
But that wasn’t why I was reluctant today. My dad didn’t like my friends coming round; he never said as much, but somehow he made it clear. I knew our time on our own together was important to him. He felt bad about being out at work when I got home, and bad about there not being a mother to get my tea. He didn’t get back till six at the earliest, but it was hard to persuade Trish and Poppy that they should leave.
‘Oh, come on, Katie,’ said Poppy. ‘I told Daddy you were a keen birdwatcher, so he’d lend me the binoculars. We’ve got to try them out.’
‘We’ll be able to see Gary in close-up,’ Trish added persuasively.
But what if he saw us? Still, I couldn’t help being excited. This might be the way to see more. Poppy swore she’d once spotted a flash of white Y-fronts when he reached up to take his shirt from the hanger, and we wanted to believe her, but Trish and I had never seen anything to confirm it.
Trish knew I was wavering. She pulled herself to her feet.
‘It’s that or we go to the tennis club,’ she said. ‘Without you.’
Her father was an architect. My dad was a handyman. He couldn’t afford membership of the club where Poppy and Trish had lessons every Saturday.
‘OK,’ I said, reluctantly freeing my restless fingers from the earth. ‘Come on, then.’
The Bath I knew was very different from the one the tourists see: Georgian crescents, terraces of tall honey-stone houses, elegant squares. Where I lived, on the city side of the hill below Green Down, there were circles and crescents, but of modern, semi-detached houses, squat and yellow, faced with cheap, reconstituted stone. The inhabitants made up for the ugliness by going to town on their front gardens. There were sundials and birdbaths, pink paving and bright green gravel, armies of regimented scarlet salvias.
‘All it needs is a weeping Jesus,’ said Trish scornfully, as we passed one particularly elaborate example. A fishing gnome hunched hopefully over a wishing-well, a nymph spilled water from a conch, and red snapdragons, yellow pansies and violet lobelia tumbled out of a stone wheelbarrow.
‘I think it’s pretty,’ I said nervously. There was a weeping Jesus on our living-room wall, and I couldn’t quite see how he fitted into a garden. Our Jesus had big, sad eyes and in the picture he was knocking on someone’s door. He reminded me of a Kleeneze brush salesman at the end of a long hard day. When I was younger I thought he was weeping because he knew he wouldn’t find my mother at home.
Trish’s wave took in the dribbling nymph, the constipated gnome and the oversexed snapdragons. ‘It’s naff,’ she said. I still didn’t get the connection with Jesus.
Our house was silent and smelt of wet washing. It always did, regardless of the weather. Every time I let my friends in through the green front door, with its lozenge of cloudy glass, I was conscious of how cramped it was. Trish’s home in Midcombe was especially lovely, an old Georgian rectory looking out on to roses and open countryside. Poppy’s big modern house on the other side of Green Down was architect-designed, and sat in nearly an acre of immaculate lawns and terraces, kept private by tall pines.
My dad had concreted most of our tiny garden and drawn wavy lines on it before it set, to make it look like crazy paving.
My mother’s room was airless, warm and musty. I thought I could catch a whiff of perfume, as if she had spilt some on her way out ten years ago.
‘Put the binoculars here,’ said Trish, marching over to the window and taking charge as usual.
‘He’ll see them,’ protested Poppy.
‘Not if you draw the curtain a bit and poke them underneath.’ Trish was about to station herself behind the binoculars but Poppy shoved her out of the way.
‘They’re Daddy’s. I get first go.’ She knelt on the floor. ‘He’s not back yet. But I can see a Led Zeppelin poster on the wall.’ A strand of red hair had found its way into her mouth again, and she was chewing it rhythmically. ‘And there’s a guitar in the corner.’
‘Hold on,’ said Trish. ‘He’s coming down the street now.’
I could see his boss’s van pulling away at the top of the road. He walked easily, nonchalantly. I wondered if he was planning the evening ahead–a pub, with his mates, perhaps meeting a girl. We had never seen Gary with a girlfriend, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
He swung in through the front gate. Five long minutes crawled by. Perhaps his mum was making him a cup of tea, asking about his day.
‘Get on with it,’ muttered Poppy, through clenched teeth. Then, a moment later, she breathed, ‘Yes …’ Trish and I, huddled on the floor below the level of the window waiting our turn, wriggled in anticipation.
‘He’s in the room,’ reported Poppy. ‘I can see … he’s taking his T-shirt off.’ Silence. ‘Aaahh …’
‘What can you see?’ asked Trish.
‘His glorious chest,’ said Poppy. ‘His lovely, lovely chest. Oh!’
‘Yes?’ we said in unison.
‘He’s got a little hairy triangle just at the top,’ said Poppy, sounding disappointed. ‘I’ve never noticed that before.’ We didn’t rate chest hair. ‘He’s gone now to get washed.’
‘Give someone else a chance,’ said Trish. ‘You’ve had your turn.’
‘Katie next,’ said Poppy. ‘My binoculars, her house.’
I slithered into place. Being shorter, I had to get up on the window-seat instead of kneeling, and then the angle of the binoculars seemed wrong. I was just moving them to get a better view when Gary returned to the window, towelling under his arms. Something seemed to catch his eye, and he opened the window wider. I focused the binoculars on his chest as best I could–it wasn’t very hairy–and then realized as I lifted them that he seemed to be staring straight at me. I gave a little squeak, and fell off the window-seat.
‘What? What did you see?’ hissed Trish.
‘His Y-fronts?’ speculated Poppy, dreamily.
But I didn’t have time to reply, because suddenly I could hear feet on the stairs. The bedroom door swung open, and there was my father.
I saw him take in the scene–three teenage girls, giggling and sprawled on the floor, in the bedroom he had once shared with his wife. There was a terrible silence that seemed to go on and on.
‘What are you doing in here?’ he said eventually, in a mild, calm voice. ‘Katie, you know I don’t like you coming in here.’
Trish and Poppy heard nothing in my father’s voice except quiet disappointment, but I heard something far more dangerous. They didn’t know my father as I did.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Carter,’ said Trish. ‘We … we were just messing about.’
My father appeared to take this in peacefully, as if resigned to the whims of teenage girls.
‘Well, you’d better let me run you home,’ he said. ‘And, Katie, you’d better go to your room and start your homework.’ So softly, so reasonably, that no one but I would have understood.
‘He whistled while he was driving us home,’ Trish told me, the following day. ‘He seemed … well, a bit remote, he didn’t speak to us or anything. But he didn’t seem angry.’ She didn’t know that whistling, through clenched teeth, was how my father signalled extreme fury. ‘I can’t believe … well, he didn’t act cross at all.’
