was the stop where you waited to go into Camptown, where Mary went to school. Here, the Council had recently erected a tin shelter, a single wall with a narrow roof and a plastic ledge on which to sit. It was like an open hinge, already tilting as the paving stones had begun to erupt. The pavement was squeezed between the road and the thrusting hedges of the long front gardens that kept the village’s bigger and better houses – square, butter-coloured Georgian villas – out of sight. While the older cottages and shops built on the road had long ago grown dull with dirt from the exhaust fumes of lorries, their windows permanently filmed with dust, the villas gleamed.
The fuel crisis meant that the first three morning services into Camptown were reduced to a single bus that came at eight. Pensioners who usually had to wait till nine o’clock to use their passes were now allowed to travel early and so this morning, six elderly members of Allnorthover’s First Families – Laceys, Hepples, Kettles or Strouds – headed the queue. The women wore nylon gloves and lace-knit cardigans over loose floral dresses made from the same material they used to make stretch covers for their chairs. The men dressed in suits that had been so well cared for they were worn to paper, their creases to glass. They wore caps they had had all their adult lives. Married for fifty years or more, couples like the Kettles rarely looked at or spoke to one another but once in retirement, weren’t often seen apart.
Mr Kettle squinted into the sun at this arrival, a child in old man’s clothes, a singlet and baggy flannel trousers, held up by braces and gathered in a wide leather belt. ‘That a boy or a girl?’
‘It’s the George one.’ Mrs Kettle shifted her weight from hip to hip by way of greeting. Behind the Kettles were some Hepples and Strouds. Spreading themselves just a little, they filled the shelter, taking whatever shade it could afford.
Behind them were the early workers, who usually caught the seven o’clock. They worked the first shift on the industrial estate, making the fruit juice, electrical goods and sausages for which Camptown was known. The early workers were used to being able to sit apart in a bus that arrived empty. Each took a seat by the window and set down beside them a sandwich box, flask and bag of clean overalls. They came home together, too, just before the end of the school day, with their overalls back in their bags with their stains, the bright splashes of pig’s blood and artificial orange, a whiff of something sweet and rotten or sour and citric. Only men worked in the electronics factory. They smelt of nothing and told their wives that the holes in their sleeves that had been eaten away by hydrochloric acid were cigarette burns.
The early workers stood uneasily in single file while beyond them, school children spilled onto the road. The youngest were hot and already bored of pushing each other into hedges or playing chicken with the juggernauts. Two older girls lolled against a fence. Mary tentatively joined them.
‘Says you were followed by a loony, Saturday …’ a Lacey girl began, her doll-face turning sour. She primped her blonde curls. ‘Your type?’ Her mouth, already a tight purse like her mother’s, clasped in a satisfied grin.
Mary laughed and shook her head, half-heartedly. ‘Right nutter.’
Julie Lacey looked her up and down, unconvinced. ‘Student, was he?’ Then she turned suddenly to a plump girl on her other side. ‘Says your uncle, June!’
June Hepple swung her lowered head slowly from side to side, ‘Nothing to do with me …’
Mary looked at June’s quivering cheeks, her vague brown eyes, her frizzy hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She didn’t know whether she wanted to comfort or shake her. Mary took a book out of her bag and sat down on the kerb to read. Julie Lacey nudged her book with her toe. ‘There’s dirty … dogs and that …’
The buses were old double-deckers with an exhausted and complicated rumble that everyone living along the High Street could recognise. They rarely bothered to leave their houses to catch one until they heard it coming. Mim began barking long before the eight o’clock pulled up, already half full. The Kettles, Hepples and Strouds sat downstairs in the two long seats that had been left empty, as if reserved for them. The early workers made for the stairs but were overtaken by a swarm of children and ended up scattered miserably among them. The three girls, all wanting to smoke, went upstairs too. Julie Lacey cleared a gaggle of younger boys off the front seats with a look.
Tom Hepple had sat up all night, his legs stretched out beyond the end of the child’s bed, his face caught in the mirror on the dressing table opposite him. The quilted nylon cover crackled beneath him. He kept his gaze fixed on his reflection but at the edges of his vision, the rosebuds on the wallpaper throbbed. Above the mirror were shiny posters of musicians and footballers, all eyes and teeth. He had not let Christie turn off the light.
Tom grew tired and could guard against his body no longer. His feet jerked and the fingers of his right hand began to tap rapidly on the bedside table. He became aware of the same acrid breath going in and out of his lungs, getting smaller each time he inhaled. His hand gripped the spindly table which tipped, its contents slipping to the floor: a china shepherdess, an etched glass, a plastic snowstorm and a bowl of sequins. Tom got down on his hands and knees. Nothing was broken, but the sequins embedded themselves in the thick strands of the carpet and were too small anyway for his fingers; the shepherdess’s head came away in his hands. Tom’s chest tightened, his stomach churned and he felt the pressure of his panic and knew that any minute he would lose control. He rushed into the hall where identical doors carried flowery ceramic plaques: ‘Mum and Dad’, ‘Darren and Sean’ and ‘Bathroom’. There was one behind him, too, ‘June’. Tom crept into the bathroom. He tried not to make a mess but he was shaky and all wrong. He rubbed at the wet carpet till the tissue disintegrated and stuck to it.
‘Carpet in the bathroom. What would Ma have thought?’ Christie stood in the doorway. He lifted Tom to his feet, took the tissue from his hand and threw it away. ‘Have a wash and come down. You’ll not know where you are yet.’
In the kitchen, Sophie was filling a kettle. She wrenched the tap on so strongly, water sprayed up over her hands. She banged the kettle down on the hob and tried to strike a match, but it snapped.
‘June off to school already?’ Christie did not meet her eye.
‘Couldn’t wait, I reckon. Good job the boys are still over at Mum’s.’ Sophie snapped two more matches. ‘He’s no better, is he?’ she continued. ‘He should’ve stayed where they know … how he is and can help him.’
Christie approached and put his hands on her shoulders. She turned abruptly in his arms, ‘We never could help him, could we?’
He looked into her broad face and saw that its softness had been exhausted. Tom appeared in the doorway. He was trying to smile. Sophie looked past her husband at his brother, the crazy twin who fluttered in and out of their lives, coming close like a moth that must be caught and put out of the window. They would try to hold him and free him but he would flap out of reach, terrified and bruised by any such contact. Then he would be back, circling them again.
Sophie gestured to a chair but Tom hovered, uncertain. Her white kitchen and bleached hair dazzled him. She put a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It’ll have to be black. The milk turned on the step.’ His electricity had once seemed like a kind of wild static that confused everything nearby. After ten years of hospitals and halfway houses, he was still jittery but his eyes were dull.
‘I’ll go up for more,’ Tom gabbled, thinking he wanted to help and that he wanted to get away. Sophie watched him through the window. She didn’t want him here and above all, she didn’t like to be reminded that it was because of Tom that she had married Christie. Sophie had met Tom first because he had been at the Grammar while she was at the High, before the two schools were amalgamated. Tom had been beautiful and clever, and she had taken his trouble for sensitivity and his agitation for great thoughts. She hadn’t had to get too close before realising that he was a very bad idea – and then there had been Christie. Tom was so away in his head that he’d barely seemed to notice that something was happening between them and then that it had changed. She’d felt such a fool.
You do not have what it takes to be in this world, she thought.