Free Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley Page B

university. Their children were too small to join in the Cooley boys’ games.
    At first Graham took no more notice of Claudia than of any of the others who swam in and out of focus on the far-off adult surface of his world. Then she started to pay him attention in an extraordinary way. Fourth of five brothers, he was surprised enough if any of his parents’ friends even remembered what school he was at and how old he was. Claudia, this grown-up mother of three children, began to make a point of sitting next to him. When they all squeezed into the back of the old Dormobile van, or around the cottage table for lunch, or in the sitting roomin the evening for cards and Monopoly, she simply sat up against him and then let the weight of her leg lie against his. They had bare legs, usually: he was still young enough for shorts even on cool days, and it was at the time when women wore short skirts. She shaved her legs, brown legs (his mother didn’t): he saw the stubble, felt it. Sometimes, after a while, almost imperceptibly, she began to press, just slightly press. It always could just have been accidentally.
    Probably she was doing it for a long time before he even noticed: he was thirteen, sex had hardly occurred to him, not as a physical reality he could have in connection with other people. And evenonce he’d noticed, once he’d started excitedly, scaredly, to wait for her to choose her place, even then he couldn’t be sure, not at first, that he wasn’t just crazily making it all up.
    And at this point he began to take notice of Claudia all the time, to hardly take notice of anything else. She was plump and blonde, pretty, untidy: he noticed that a button kept slipping undone on a blouse too tight across her bust, and that her clothes bought to be glamorous were crumpled because her children were always clambering over her. Struggling down to the beach with a toddler on one arm and beach bags slung across her shoulder, she kept turning over on a sandal with a leather thong between her toes, and he heard her swear – shit! – in an undertone. Once he heard her snap at her husband, when she was trying to read the paperback book she brought down every day to the beach, and the children interrupted her one after another to pee or for food or quarrels, —If I don’t get to finish this bloody sentence I’ll scream! Graham’s parents never swore, he only knew those words from school and from his brothers.
    Claudia was a perfectly competent adult. She brought down to the beach everything her family needed: costumes and towels and picnic and suntan oil and changing stuff forthe baby and rackets and balls. She fed them and soothed them all. One of her little girls stepped on a jellyfish and howled for half an hour before she fell asleep on Claudia’s lap, while Claudia sat stroking her sticky salty hair. But when Graham watched her playing badminton with his brothers – dazzling against the sea, grunting and racing and scooping up the shuttlecock in halter top and John Lennon peaked cap – he saw that she was still young, not his kind of young, but Tim’s and Alex’s. That must be why she was still crazy enough to be doing this thing to him. She couldn’t have done it to Tim or Alex because with them it would have been real, she would have had to acknowledge what was going on, they would have known. With him it was so completely, completely outside possibility. It couldn’t be happening.
    On the beach it wasn’t possible to be squeezed side by side. But she found other ways: he’d feel a gritty sandpapery toe just making contact, or when she reached across him to hand out sandwiches, he’d get a scorch of the flesh of her arm against his shoulder. It was so subtle that no one, however scrupulously they watched, could ever have seen: it was a chain of innocent accidents only connected through his burning consciousness of her touch.
    On the surface she was particularly nice to him, asking him about school, asking his