For the rest of the afternoon he slumped in front of the television only half attending while in his head by turns rewriting the telephone script so that he came out of it better and mentally flogging himself for not having done so.
At dinner that evening his father said, ‘No progress on the Tarzan residence, then.’
‘Very funny, Dad.’
‘I meant what I said.’
‘I was going to do it yesterday but there was a girl sunbathing next, next, next door.’
‘Which reminds me,’ his mother said quickly with the extra cheerfulness she injected into her voice at such dangerous moments, ‘I met Mrs. Harding this morning.’
‘Beech Grove’s own double agent,’ his father said, predictably.
‘According to her, the girl is the Bells’ niece. Donald Bell’s brother’s daughter, Rosie.’
‘A stunner is she, Jim?’
‘From London,’ his mother said.
‘Big city girl. Watch yourself, Jim!’
‘She’s here for a change, apparently, a sort of holiday. Mrs. Harding thought there was a health problem.’
‘Hard luck, Jim, steer clear.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, nothing to worry about. Nothing catching. Emotional apparently. One of the phobias.’
‘Like my Hardingphobia, you mean? Poor girl.’
‘I didn’t quite catch the technical name. You know how she is. Loves the medical jargon. But I gathered it’s the one that means you’re afraid of crowds. I didn’t want to show my ignorance by asking her to explain.’
James smiled to himself, as people do when they discover secrets, especially when the secret is that the other person is worse off. He felt too the encouraging warmth of affinity. At least they were both afraid of something. But what good was knowing this if they could never get together? As it was they were locked in separate cells, imprisoned by fear of people—his of himself, hers of others. If only they could get together they might help each other break out. Why not? And why not chance it? Could do no harm. Wouldn’t matter if he made a fool of himself. Again.
Wouldn’t be like making a fool of himself with people he had to go on seeing every day for ages afterwards. She’d be gone soon. And this time he’d try the head-on approach, nothing hidden, no pretending.
As soon as he could, he shut himself in his room and started writing.
That night, slipping out about eleven o’clock on the pretext of getting some fresh air before bed, and having ensured no one was around to catch him at it, he pushed his letter through the Bells’ letterbox.
Next morning, just after his parents left for work, the telephone rang.
‘This is Margot Bell.’
‘Heh, heh, hello.’
‘That must be James.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was you I wanted to talk to, James. Please don’t bother Rosie. I’m sure you were only being friendly. But she really isn’t well. She’s better on her own. That’s why she came here. I hope you’ll understand. Thank you, James. Mustn’t keep you talking, I’m late for the office. Give my best to your parents.’
He took a hammer and butchered the tree house with satisfying violence.
When it was done, bruised and splintered spars of wood lying where he had dropped them around the foot of the tree, he climbed higher, to the topmost branch that would bear his weight, and sat there, swaying in the breeze, clinging on, almost enjoying this different fear for a change, a fear strong and fresh enough to override at last the crushing embarrassment of Mrs. Bell’s call.
He’d been up this high only once before, the day his shyness took hold. He often thought of it, but now, clinging there in a sweat chilled by the breeze, he not only remembered it, but felt it again with as much clarify and pain as he had felt the first time.
When at last he was calm he climbed down and went inside.
Immediately, the phone rang.
‘Rosie.’
He slammed the receiver down but wasn’t out of the room before it rang again. He let it yell in its maddening baby-demanding way till he could refuse no longer.
‘Please don’t hang up . . . This morning, my aunt, I’m sorry. I tried to stop her. She saw your note. I mean, she found it and brought it to me and wanted to know who it was from and what it said. I didn’t tell her, only it was from you and you were offering to keep me company . . . She isn’t awful, only trying to help . . . You don’t have to say anything, I just wanted you to know I didn’t . . . Well . . . Thanks anyway for telling me about yourself. I’m sorry you suffer like that, I wish I could help but . . . I liked getting your letter, though, just as a letter, I mean . . . We can’t get together—not because of my aunt—something else . . . I can’t explain . . . But I thought if you wanted to write again, well, I’d like that, and, I thought, in case of further interceptions, you could always post it to me in the tree in your garden. There’s a kind of knothole just where the first branch hangs over the fence. You could put it in there and I’d pick it up when the coast was clear. I could phone you when I’d read it, if you like . . . That’s all I wanted to say . . . I’ll wait for a bit in case you want to say anything, then hang up . . .’
‘OK. That’s a, that’s a, that’s a good idea.’
‘Great! I’ll go now, then. Bye.’
His letter took all day to write, drafting and redrafting. He planted it in the hole in the tree a few minutes before his mother arrived home.
At dinner his father said, ‘I see the deed is done but the resulting mess isn’t cleared up.’
‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’
‘Can’t have taken all day to demolish the thing. God knows how you spend your time at my expense.’
‘Planning what I’ll do when I take over the world.’
‘You and all the other teenage layabouts, you mean.’
‘Now, you two,’ his mother said.
He dreamed that night of being at the top, the very top, only the sky above him, of his tree. But he was not alone. Rosie was with him. They were naked. He was her branch. She straddled him, face to face, clinging, and kissing him with a devouring passion.
Next morning he waited for an hour after his parents and (he was watching for them) the Bells had left for work. But the phone remained silent. Doubts began to flicker in his mind. He fled into the garden, where he distracted himself by gathering the broken tree house timber into a pyramid on a patch of untended ground at the bottom of the garden, adding whatever other flammable rubbish he could find. When it was done he returned to the house, needing newspaper and matches to light the bonfire. He was no sooner inside than the phone rang.
‘Rosie.’
‘You got it?’
‘This morning. After they left . . . I don’t know what to say.’
‘You don’t, don’t have to, have to—’
‘I know I don’t have to say anything. But I want to. I mean, you’ve told me all this about you. There’s something I want to tell you about me.’
‘. . . OK.’
‘Not on the phone, though. It doesn’t feel right.
And there’s something I want to give you as well.’
‘How then?’
‘You were making a bonfire. Are you going to light it?’
‘Yes. I came in for, for matches.’
‘I’ve been watching you. All the time. All yesterday. When you were sitting in the tree I looked at you through my uncle’s binoculars. He bird-watches sometimes. I could see it all happening in your face. What you told me.’
They were silent. Only the sizzle of telephone static in his ear. He could hardly breathe.
‘Go back into the garden. By the tree. Stand close to the fence there . . . OK?’
He could say nothing. She put the phone down.
He waited by the tree, leaning against the fence for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes. Had she meant it? Because he had not replied, had she thought he wouldn’t come? But then he heard, close to his ear on the other side of the fence, the
sound of breathing.
‘James?’ His name was hardly more than whispered.
‘Yes?’
‘You haven’t lit your bonfire.’
‘I thought I’d, I’d do it later. After . . .’
‘I like bonfires. We used to roast potatoes in ours.
Now it’s barbecues with all the gear and that’s not the same.’
‘When I . . . start it, I’ll row, roast one for you.’
‘Thanks.’
They were silent.
‘Your letter.’
‘Yes?’
‘What I wanted to tell you. It’s not that I’m afraid of crowds. We just say that because it’s easier. I can’t talk about it usually. But . . . You see, the thing is, I was out one night a few months ago with a boyfriend. He swore he really liked me. Loved me, actually, he said . . . That word! What does it mean? . . . And wanted us—you know—to have sex. But I didn’t want to, not yet, I wasn’t ready . . . Anyway, on the way home we met some of his friends from work. He called them his mates. Don’t you think it odd, James, that men call each other mates? I mean, isn’t it a bit suspect? . . . Well, they weren’t exactly drunk. Merry, I suppose people would call it. Game for anything they said . . . How people love games! Boys especially. They think they can get away with anything so long as they call it a game. And you’re supposed to put up with it, and excuse them, whatever they do, girls have to at any rate, as if it wasn’t real, didn’t really happen, only pretending. I hate games and I don’t pretend about anything anymore. There’s only real, there’s only what happens . . . Well, anyway, they played a sort of kissing game with me. Not that I had any choice. My so-called boyfriend was playing too. In fact, he was all for it. Having a great time, he was! Really enjoying himself. And it didn’t stop at kissing. Kissing was only kids’ stuff to them. They had lots more fun, knew lots more games than that. They even started competing to see who knew more than the others . . . No one sang a song while it happened and it lasted more than your few minutes behind the gym, James . . . A lifetime already.’
He could hear her heavy, urgent breathing now.
‘Rosie?’
‘Don’t say anything, please don’t say anything. There’s nothing you can say that would help. Everybody’s tried. It only makes it worse. But there’s something you can do.’
‘What?’
‘Will you put your hand up so it’s above the top of the fence?’
‘Sure.’
He raised his right arm till his hand was clear of the fence and held it there, palm towards her. He watched, trembling with anticipation, as her slim, long-fingered left hand, appearing above the fence, reached up hesitantly, slowly, and at last with sudden decision laid itself palm to palm, fingers to fingers on his.
And then their fingers meshed and she gripped hard, locking their hands together.
She held him a moment, before saying, ‘Can you stand so your head is above the fence?’
He glanced down. ‘If we move a bit to, to your left.’
There the roots and bowl of the tree caused the ground to rise higher.
They edged along till their heads were visible.
From the second they could see each other her eyes held his eyes as firmly as her hand gripped his.
For some long time they gazed at each other, separated by only the thickness of the fence.
At last she said, ‘When it was over, their kissing game, I made myself a promise. I can keep it now.’
‘What?’
‘Will you—’
‘What?’
‘Kiss me?’
‘I wan, wanted to. Since I saw, saw, saw you.’
‘Say it without stammering.’
He shook his head.
‘You can. Say it!’
He took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to since I saw you.’
‘There, you see!’ She laughed. ‘I bet you imagined doing it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And more?’
He smiled.
‘At night. In bed.’
‘Yes. You too?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve been imagining . . . So kiss me, why don’t you?’
‘Is that wha, what you wanted to give me?’
‘And something else.’
‘My lucky day!’
He inclined his head, leaned across the small distance that separated them till his lips touched hers, closed his eyes, instinctively raised his left hand, grasped her head, and pressed his mouth to hers, his whole body now straining against the fence.
Rosie found a gap in the fence, inserted the point of the carving knife into it, and with all her strength rammed the blade through at the level of her waist.
From her bedroom window, using her uncle’s binoculars, she kept watch on the bonfire. The fiercest flames were dying now but thick grey-blue smoke still curled into the air, veiling the upper branches of the tree as the breeze caught it, thinned it out, and carried it away across the garden, swirling up into the sky.
Dear Sir,
I live in a hut in the wood.
I built the hut with my own hands.
I only used materials I found in builders’ skips and on rubbish dumps.
You wouldn’t believe the stuff people throw away, most of it reusable with a bit of thought and work.
I made the frame of the hut out of lengths of two-by-four thrown out of a house being renovated.
I made the walls out of pieces of blockboard thrown out of a factory where they were putting up new partitions for offices.
I covered the outside of the walls with black PVC builders use for damp course lining before they pour concrete floors. They throw out the offcuts, but it’s easy to nail them to the walls and overlap them like roof tiles, to keep the rain out.
I nailed some more blockboard to the frame to make the inside walls, which I painted various colours according to what I could find in leftover cans of paint.
For decoration I’ve pinned up pictures cut from magazines. There are plenty of those thrown out with people’s household rubbish every week.
I get a lot of other things that way as well. Yesterday, for example, I found a whole precooked chicken still wrapped from the supermarket and within its use-by date. The day before, an unopened tin of sardines.
And food isn’t all.
I’ve a nice bottle of shampoo, a quarter full, from last week. And a nice pair of trekker boots exactly my size. Fairly well used but plenty of life in them yet.
(You can always tell when there’s a new fashion for something because you find the now out-of-fashion stuff thrown out, even quite new often. I collect that kind of thing and sell it at the weekly farmer’s market in town. Brings in enough to keep me going for cash very nicely.)
For heating I use a thrown-out wood-burning stove, one of those black iron ones made to look old-fashioned. I made a chimney for it out of thrown-out metal drainpipes. I’m well supplied with wood to burn, of course, from fallen branches. I cut them up with a saw or an axe, both of which I bought secondhand. You do need good tools to live the way I do.
I use a thrown-out kettle for boiling water, a thrown-out saucepan for cooking veg, a thrown-out frying pan for fry-ups, and a thrown out roasting pan for doing meat.
Most of my food, in case you’re wondering, I get for rock-bottom prices from shops in town just before closing time, especially on Saturdays, when they want to get rid of stock that won’t keep till Monday. Some of the shopkeepers know me now and give the stuff to me for nothing. People are generous on the whole. That is, if you keep yourself clean and look reasonably presentable and behave well.
So how do I stay clean?
I’ve fixed up a gutter (thrown-out) along the edge of the roof, which drains into a thrown-out plastic drum. This provides rainwater for washing my clothes and myself in the ordinary way.
For a proper all-over wash I go to a sports club once a week, where I clean the changing rooms, lavatories and washrooms for the minimum rate of pay, and take a showe
r afterwards. That kills not two but three birds with one stone: a bit more income, a good wash, and they also have a washing machine, of course, so I do my week’s laundry while I’m cleaning.
No one can say I’m dirty.
Inside my hut are the following:
My bed. A thrown-out single bedstead, a bit squeaky in the springs but who cares? There’s nobody else to hear it but me.
A mattress I made myself out of thrown-out cloth stuffed with thrown-out polystyrene—the sort that looks like white puffed wheat. I used hay for a while, but you have to renew it quite often. There are plenty of thrown-out mattresses to be had but I don’t fancy them. You never know who’s slept on them or what diseases they had. I’m very careful when it comes to that sort of thing. And I don’t like mucky things.
By now I needn’t tell you that the sheets and blankets I use were thrown out. They’re OK because I inspected them carefully for any nasty stains and gave them a couple of good washes in the sports club washing machine before using them.
A stripped, pinewood table two meters by one and a half, suitable for seating four to a meal, if I ever had guests, thrown out of a house they were renovating in a different style. I also use this as my desk.
I picked up a little stripped wood bedside cabinet from the same place.
Two chairs. A thrown out armchair—you know the sort, with wings and little wooden legs that you see in old people’s homes. In fact, this one came from a house where an old person had died and they were throwing out the furniture they didn’t want. I gave it a good clean with thrown-out furniture shampoo and dried it in the sun. It came up beautifully, and I don’t care if it does look a bit old people’s homey. It’s comfortable.
The other chair is a Windsor dining chair with a couple of the rods missing from the back, but it’s firm enough and does well. I’ve sanded it down so that it has the stripped wood look of the table.
I bought a loose cover from a charity shop to put over the armchair because the design of the upholstery is big flowers and curly leaves, which, to be honest, isn’t my taste and I wanted something that was. The loose cover is a golden yellow like the sun in the late afternoon.