Selected Stories

They had turned out of the busy streets, into Blenheim Row, leading to Sowell Street, where the lavatories were, the school at the end.

‘A West Indian kid got killed here,’ he said. ‘White kids took their knives out. You ever see a thing like that, Jasmin?’

‘No.’ Vehemently, she shook her head, and he laughed and then she did.

‘You ever think of moving out, Jasmin? Anything like that come into your thoughts? Get a place of your own?’

All the time, she said. The only thing was, she wasn’t earning.

‘First thing you said to me nearly, that you’d got nothing coming in.’

‘You’re easy to talk with, Clive.’

He took her hand; she didn’t object. Her fingernails were silvery he’d noticed in the McDonald’s, a couple of them jagged where they’d broken. No way she wasn’t a child, no way she’d reached sixteen, more like twelve. Her hand was warm, lying there in his, dampish, fingers interlaced with his.

‘There used to be a song,’ he said. ‘“Putting on the agony” was how it went. “Putting on the style”. Before your time, Jas. It could have been called something else, only those were the words. “That’s what all the young folk are doin’ all the while”. Lovely song.’

‘Maybe I heard it one time, I don’t know.’

‘What age really, Jas?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘No, really though?’

She said fifteen. Sixteen in October, she said.

When they were passing the Queen and Angel he asked her if she ever took a drink. It wouldn’t do for him to bring her on to licensed premises, he explained, and she said she wasn’t fussy for a drink, remembering the taste of beer, which she hadn’t liked. He said to wait and he went to an off-licence across the street and came back with a plastic bag. He winked at her and she laughed. ‘Mustn’t be bad boys,’ he said. ‘No more than a few sips.’

They came to a bridge over the river. They didn’t cross it, but went down steps to a towpath. He said it was a shortcut.

There wasn’t anyone around, and they leaned against a brick wall that was part of the bridge. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle he’d bought and showed her how the plastic disc he took from one of his jacket pockets opened out to become a tumbler. Tonic wine, he said, but he had vodka too, miniatures he called the little bottles he had. What the Russians drank, he said, although she knew. He said he’d been in Moscow once.

They drank from the tumbler when he’d tasted the mixture he’d made and said it wasn’t too strong. He’d never been responsible for making any girl drunk, he said. He had found the collapsible tumbler on the same seat where they’d been sitting in the sun. One day he’d seen it there and thought it was a powder compact. He carried it about with him in case he met a friend who’d like a drink.

‘All right, Jas?’

‘Yeah, great.’

‘You like it, Jas?’

They passed the tumbler back and forth between them. She drank from where his lips had been; she wanted to do that. He saw her doing it and he smiled at her.

Nice in the sun, he said when they walked on, and he took her hand again. She thought he’d kiss her, but he didn’t. She wanted him to. She wanted to sit on a patch of grass and watch the rowers going by, his arm round her shoulders, his free hand holding hers. There was some left in the bottles when he dropped them and the plastic bag into a wastebin.

‘Sit down, will we?’ she said, and they did, her head pressed into his chest. ‘I love you, Clive,’ she whispered, not able to stop herself.

‘We belong,’ he whispered back. ‘No way we don’t, Jas.’

She didn’t break the silence when they walked on, knowing that it was special, and better than all the words there might have been. No words were necessary, no words could add a thing to what there was.

‘I can see us in Moscow, Jas. I can see us walking the streets.’

She felt different, as if her plainness wasn’t there. Her face felt different, her body too. In the diner she’d be a different person clearing up the plates, not minding the lorrymen’s cigarette smoke, not minding what they said to her. Nothing she knew would be the same, her mother wouldn’t be, and letting Lukie Giggs touch her where he wanted to wouldn’t be. She wondered if she was drunk.

‘You’re never drunk, Jas.’ He squeezed her hand, he said she was fantastic. Both of them were only tipsy, he said. Happy, he said. Soon’s he heard her voice he knew she was fantastic. Soon’s he saw her at the bus station. In the room they were going to there were the things he collected - little plastic tortoises, and racing cars, and books about places he wanted to go to, and pictures of castles on the walls. She imagined that when he told her, and saw a vase of summer flowers, curtains drawn against the sunlight. He played a disc for her, the Spice Girls because they were in the past and he liked all that.