Free England and Other Stories by Graham Swift Page B

mother’s face, daubed with all that slap. Or at the father’s. Karen’s face was the only one you wanted to look at.
    The mother. He knew her name.
    And now all three of them were walking directly towards them and Andy was saying, flicking at his cigarette, ‘Well, I don’t like yours much.’
    He didn’t want to look at her, but he wished there were some secret sign he might nonetheless make, without the need to catch her eye, to indicate that he’d never told anyone, not at Holmgate, not at Wainwright’s. Other blokes might have done, sooner or later. ‘I banged her mother.’ He’d never breathed a word. Least of all to his best mate Andy Sykes here, goggling like a prat.
    Some sign. So at least she wouldn’t feel humiliated on that score. Only on the score of looking a mess—a dressed-up, painted-over mess, which made it worse. But maybe she really didn’t know that. Maybe she thought she looked the image of her daughter.
    He wasn’t sure at all how he was going to manage this. It was cowardice not to look at her. Were they going to have to do all that hand-shaking stuff, the hugging and kissing, the strange grown-up but childish lovey-dovey stuff that was going on all around them?
    ‘She looks a right dog, doesn’t she?’
    ‘Shut up, Andy, they’ll hear.’ Just for a moment he hated Andy.
    ‘
Where-as!
’ Andy was preening himself, wriggling his shoulders. ‘And she’s not
with
anyone, is she?’
    He looked at the father.
He
can’t ever have known, or he’d have known, himself, big-time. And Karen can’t ever have known, he was sure of that. Or she wouldn’t be acting so full-on now.
    Just for a moment, as she drew close, he hated Karen Shield too. Intensely. For looking fantastic and making a fool of her mum.
    ‘
Ooo-ooo!
’ Andy was saying, clearly about Karen. Then he said, ‘Is that really her mother?’
    ‘Yes,’ he replied with an authority he didn’t like. He dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. ‘So, Andy boy,’ he said, ‘let it be a lesson to you.’
    He had to say it quickly, under his breath, with no time to explain what he meant—if he knew what he meant. Though he thought, rapidly and cruelly, of what he might have gone on to say.
    Karen was upon them, in her silly irresistible hat.
    ‘Sean Wheatley and Andy Sykes! Still together after all these years!’
    He’d always been a jump or two ahead of Andy; now he felt he might be twice Andy’s age. He almost felt he might be like old Daffy, up there on the stage at morning assembly, telling them all what was good for them, telling them what the future held.
    ‘Have you got an erection, Sean?’ He’d hear those words on his dying day.
    Karen was opening her arms as if she meant to enfold them both like lost sons.
    ‘You run after them, Andy boy’—this is what he might have said—‘you get the hots for them and you have your wicked way with them and then you end up marrying them. And then years down the road, look what you get. So—let it be a lesson to you.’

H ALF A L OAF
     
    H ALF A LOAF . Not even that.
    She has gone again. She’s stayed the night and she’s gone again. But part of ‘my time’, as I think of it—I don’t ever dare think of it as ‘our time’—is the time it takes for her to walk from the front step to the street corner, no more than a minute, the time in which I watch her, getting smaller, from the angle of the bay window. She never looks back. Perhaps she guesses that I watch her. I’ve never told her. To tell her would be to give her ammunition—for my eventual destruction. It’s coming one day. Of course it is.
    Don’t give her ammunition. But then if you make out you’re calm, you’re equable, you will only give her the excuse she needs.
    Her name is Tanya. Even to watch her walking away is something. And it’s a kind of training—but I don’t dwell on that. You’ve drunk the glass, I tell myself, till it’s filled next time, but there’s still this last drop.