A Dry Spell Read online

  Inside the telephone box was a montage of stickers and postcards offering to cater for sexual depravity in all its forms. Corporal Punishment, Whips and Fetters, one promised. That’s what happens when society starts to break down, thought Nina. When there’s no respect for authority. You even have to pay someone to beat you. She foraged in her bag for her diary. In the booth next to her a man in overalls was taking down all the cards, painstakingly scraping off the stickers with a knife. By nightfall a fresh outbreak would have taken their place. He gave Nina a weary smile through the glass.

  She found Kerry’s number at last under G. For girlfriend, perhaps? What was their surname? She had written it down on the registration document when she’d sold them her car. No. Like so much lately it was quite beyond retrieval.

  ‘Yes?’ The phone was picked up immediately, before it had even rung at Nina’s end.

  ‘Oh!’ said Nina, taken aback. ‘Is that Mr . . . er . . .’ – she almost called him ‘Mr Bob’ – ‘. . . Kerry’s father?’

  ‘Yes. Hello, James’s mother.’

  ‘Oh. How did you know it was me?’

  ‘I recognized your voice.’

  ‘Goodness.’ Nina gave a nervous laugh. ‘We’ve hardly spoken.’

  ‘It’s very distinctive.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was thoroughly wrong-footed now. The conversation had taken a flippant turn which didn’t suit her purposes at all. ‘I’m ringing because I’m afraid I’ve just discovered something rather alarming about James, and it may have implications for Kerry.’ Now that he’d mentioned her voice she was bound to be self-conscious. It sounded plummy and artificial even to her ears.

  ‘Really?’ said Mr Bob, not joking any more.

  ‘I think he’s been injecting drugs.’ There. She felt better already, just for having told someone. Simply saying the words seemed to give her the measure of the problem. There was a silence. ‘Hello?’ said Nina.

  ‘Are you sure?’ came the reply. ‘That seems very unlikely to me, though of course you know him better than I do.’

  ‘Well, I would have said it was unlikely myself.’

  ‘I mean, they don’t even smoke. Kerry does a lot of dance and sports – she’s very against that sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, yes, so is James, ostensibly. But perhaps that’s just what they tell us. I mean, that’s what they would say, isn’t it?’ Nina was feeling less sure of her diagnosis by the second. What if there was some innocent explanation? James would be furious with her for interfering. Mr Bob would think her a neurotic.

  ‘Have you spoken to James?’

  ‘No. I’ve just this minute found out. I saw the puncture marks on his arm this morning.’ There had in fact only been the one, but Nina was prone to exaggeration in moments of self-doubt.

  ‘Ah. Would you like me to talk to him?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t want to drag you into this,’ she said, then thought: yes I did.

  ‘Oh that’s all right. Drag away.’

  ‘I didn’t know who to tell – and I thought you’d probably have some experience of this sort of thing.’

  ‘No. I’m very law-abiding, I’m afraid. It’s an occupational hazard.’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I know. I’m joking.’

  ‘Oh.’ Again Nina had a sense of the conversation slipping away from her. ‘Right. Well, I suppose the only thing for it is to confront James.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll have a word with Kerry, too, just for reassurance. It’s a question of choosing the right moment. Perhaps you’ll let me know how you get on.’

  ‘Of course.’ The right moment be damned. Her motto was: Do it Now.

  ‘There’s the question of money, too,’ said Mr Bob.

  Nina wasn’t listening. Her attention had been caught by one of the sex adverts on the wall above her head. The illustration was a bit fuzzy – a result of repeated photocopying – but it seemed to involve a girl in bondage gear and a golden retriever. Were there no limits?

  ‘I’m sorry?’ she said, standing on tiptoe to get a better look. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared: someone had in fact stuck a Guide Dogs for the Blind sticker over the girl’s crotch.

  ‘If he had a heroin habit he would need money.’

  ‘I suppose I could check his account,’ she said. ‘I’ll do that now.’ She didn’t relish the idea of snooping through his belongings, but her experiences with some of her clients had taught her that once children started on drugs they became crafty and devious. You had to fight guile with guile.

  ‘Well, I hope your anxiety turns out to have been unnecessary,’ Mr Bob was saying, attempting in the politest way to terminate the conversation. Nina took the hint and said goodbye, asking in passing if the car was still behaving. She wondered whether in a spirit of friendly co-operation she ought to mention the faulty rear seatbelt, but decided not to put herself at even greater disadvantage. Nina, whose telephone manner was usually so brisk and controlled, didn’t feel she had acquitted herself particularly well.

  She turned back to the tube and then changed her mind and hailed a taxi instead. It would cost a small fortune to get all the way back to Tooting, but she could always forgo some other luxury: this was potentially a matter of life and death.

  James’s room was, as usual, in a state of chaos and decomposition. Nina threw open the windows to let out the smell of trainers. She had replaced his hardbacked chair with a stool to prevent him using it as a clothes horse. Instead he now stuffed his clothes under one side of the bed, or threw them in the direction of the laundry basket to lie where they fell. On his bedside table were the ossified remains of a satsuma and half a cheese sandwich, dried to the texture of a loofah. Nina gathered up these and the four mouldy coffee-mugs from among the dead flies on the window sill and dumped them in the kitchen before beginning the hunt for his building society book. After a lengthy search, which inevitably evolved into a tidying up job, she finally spotted it, tucked into a perspex box of computer disks. Locked. He probably had the key on him, Nina thought, shaking the box in frustration. In fact it turned out to be sitting on top of the computer console – the only uncluttered surface in the room.

  Nina picked it up to reveal a key-shaped stencil in the dust. The account book yielded up just the information Nina had feared: two recent withdrawals of one hundred pounds. It would have taken him a month of Saturdays in the supermarket to earn such a sum. The blood rose up in her cheeks in a hot tide of indignation. How had her handsome, intelligent, considerate son been reduced to this? She telephoned for another taxi with trembling hands.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked James, standing up as his mother approached, not out of courtesy, but from a desire to waylay her and hustle her off somewhere more private. She had one of those carrying school-mistressy voices and a high embarrassment threshold: in his experience the two often went together.

  ‘I must talk to you,’ she said, more agitated than he’d ever seen her.

  Bad news, he thought. Something’s happened to Kerry. He abandoned his lunch unfinished and led her out of the refectory into one of the corridors. Nina grabbed his wrist and twisted it round so that the crook of his elbow was exposed. ‘What’s that?’ she said, indicating the needle mark.

  He looked at her with a combination of astonishment and dismay. She must have X-ray vision, he thought. She can penetrate brick and stone. ‘If I tell you, you’ll only be upset. Why do you keep trying to find out things you don’t want to know?’

  ‘You’ve been injecting drugs,’ Nina said. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. I have worked with addicts before.’

  James gaped. ‘Mum. Have you gone mad?’ He lowered his voice and said, rather fast and without looking at her, ‘If you must know I had a blood test so that Kerry and I can have sex without using a johnny. She’s had one too and they’re both negative, so we know we’re okay. And she’s on the pill so you don’t need to worry about her getting pregnant. Satisfied?’

  ‘But . . .
but . . .’ Nina was completely taken aback. ‘What about all the money you’ve been drawing out?’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘The two hundred pounds missing from your account.’

  ‘Have you been going through my things?’ he demanded, red in the face with anger.

  ‘Yes. What about the money?’ I’ve gone too far, thought Nina, cringing. James was more uptight than she had ever seen him. That was exactly it: he was both Up and Tight like an overpumped balloon. Any second now he might explode.

  ‘I used some of it to pay my phone bill and I bought Kerry a gold chain for her birthday,’ he said, when he had contained his fury. ‘You are totally out of order, Mum. That book was in a locked box. I don’t go looking in your handbag.’

  ‘I’ve got no secrets,’ Nina replied. ‘In my handbag.’

  ‘No life you mean,’ James muttered, and then regretted it as he saw the frown gather on his mother’s forehead.

  ‘So if you’ve nothing to be ashamed of, why lock the book away?’

  ‘Because I knew you’d think it was extravagant to spend a hundred quid on Kerry.’

  Well it is, thought Nina. ‘It’s your money,’ she managed. The relief which ought to have accompanied his explanation had not quite materialized. Instead she felt hot and bothered: James had obviously been engaged in free-range sex for some time, or why have a test? She herself had missed an important meeting without giving any warning; she had stooped to breaking and entering; she had revealed herself to be paranoid and naïve.

  ‘And this is what happens when I try to act responsibly,’ James said, palms up, addressing an imaginary third person – a recent habit which Nina found intensely irritating.

  ‘So tell me again. You’ve never taken drugs.’

  ‘No. Have you?’

  Nina hesitated, contemplating a blatant lie. It had been different in the mid-seventies when she was at university. Everyone smoked dope: you were considered deviant if you didn’t.

  ‘Only marijuana. I never took acid or anything.’ How quickly he had turned the tables. Here she was justifying something she had done eighteen, nineteen years ago.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said James. ‘You?’ He couldn’t quite absorb the image of his mother, who was so straight, as a dope-smoking hippie. He had seen her and his father in their panoramic college photo, so he knew what she had looked like then. But as with all old photos he couldn’t believe that the subjects, those hairy men in tight shirts and flares, and women with centre partings and lank hair and platform boots, weren’t just got up that way for the picture. They were surely smiling because they knew how freakish they looked. ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Nothing special. Anyway, it was different then,’ said Nina. This wasn’t what she had trekked back and forth across London to discuss. She had always wanted to be the sort of parent who was unafraid of difficult questions, who would be able to explain the facts of life on demand without a blush; who would not be evasive or embarrassed. What a vain endeavour that had proved. Perhaps since they were both in semi-confessional mood now was the time.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re my mother sometimes,’ James said, shaking his head. It wasn’t clear from the tone of his voice whether this was a compliment or not.

  ‘Well, believe it,’ said Nina. That much, at least, was not in dispute. ‘I’m sorry I went through your things,’ she went on. ‘I do trust you really.’

  ‘Good. Can I go and finish my cold lunch now?’

  ‘No,’ said Nina. ‘Let’s find somewhere quiet where we can sit down. There’s something important I want to tell you.’

  9

  Early in Nina’s first term at UCL there was a residential field trip for first year geography students. They could choose one of two possible destinations – the Yorkshire Dales or the Forest of Dean – and were expected to devise their own research project. Equipment was provided and members of the faculty were on hand to offer advice and suggestions, but individuals were encouraged to work as independently as possible. Nina, whose school holidays had always been spent in whatever foreign country her father currently had a posting, had seen very little of England, and therefore approached this with a tourist’s enthusiasm.

  ‘When are you going to wear a bikini in Yorkshire in October?’ Jean demanded, watching Nina packing her case on the morning of their departure. Jean had by way of luggage a small rucksack, of the size that might serve Nina as a handbag, containing underwear, spare jeans and jumper, toothbrush, tobacco pouch and a copy of the I Ching.

  ‘I don’t know. I thought there might be somewhere to swim,’ Nina said, pulling the bikini out, along with several pairs of tights, with which it was now entangled.

  ‘And what the hell’s that?’ Jean pounced on a circle of elasticated plastic with a lace trim.

  ‘It’s a bath hat,’ said Nina, suddenly losing confidence in her domestic habits. ‘You know, to keep your hair from getting wet.’

  ‘A bath hat,’ said Jean gleefully. ‘I thought it was a pair of incontinence pants. You haven’t got a bedjacket and slippers in there as well, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Nina, who had in fact packed a pair of slippers and a dressing gown.

  ‘You’re going to have to carry that case from the station, you know,’ Jean went on, closing it up and testing its weight. ‘I think you’d better take everything out and start again.’

  But Nina had been adamant that she couldn’t do without half her wardrobe, her felt hat, platform boots with the silver stars, hairdryer, sponge bag, file-paper, camera, and all three volumes of Gormenghast. ‘I speed read,’ she explained, when Jean raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I just speed,’ Jean replied.

  There was another reason for Nina’s excitement and careful preparations: Martin. After that first meeting at the corridor party, she had decided calmly and rationally that he was The One, and that a swift transfer of affection from Jean to herself was urgently required. This wasn’t as callous as it sounds: it was by no means established that Jean and Martin were a couple. Jean was usually draped over him, but Nina soon realized that she was like that with everybody, Nina included. They couldn’t even have a chat without Jean gripping Nina’s arm or pawing the front of her clothes. And Jean would never sit on a chair when there was an empty lap available; every time Nina went into the Academical Bar Jean seemed to be snogging someone or other.

  ‘Are Jean and Martin actually going out?’ Nina asked Fee, as casually as possible, when they were alone.

  ‘Yes they are,’ said Fee, ‘but not heavily.’

  So it was that while the other twenty-nine students hiked the two miles from the railway station to the hostel in the pouring rain with their rucksacks on their backs, Nina hitched a lift on a tractor, which took her luggage right up to the door.

  The hostel had draughty single-sex dormitories with creaking iron bunk-beds and grey army blankets. The girls fought like eight-year-olds for the top bunks. There was curling lino on the floor and bathrooms without locks, and water which ran hot for the first thirty seconds and then switched directly to freezing. Downstairs was a recreation room with trestles and chairs, a dartboard but no darts, bar billiards, a ping-pong table and some chewed bats with shreds of pimpled rubber flapping against the plywood. Food was prepared by the resident staff in a huge kitchen where there was an enamel trough for washing up and, perversely, no shortage of hot water.

  The nearest pub was two miles away, but the walk from the station had put people off and evenings tended to be spent in the hostel. The far-sighted had brought drink from home, and although this didn’t outlast the first night, there developed a convivial bar-room atmosphere of smoking, card-playing and conversation. This generally centred around an ongoing billiards tournament and table-rugby, a variation of ping-pong played with the perished bats and a dented ball which bounced unpredictably. The food was execrable, creating an instant bond between those forced to experience it. For her first packed lunch Jean was given a spam sa
ndwich and a hard-boiled egg with a blue-grey yolk. Nina, who had pretended to be a vegetarian to avoid the previous night’s corned beef hash, had a sandwich made from an egg of the same vintage as Jean’s, and a whole, raw, green pepper.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ she asked, unwrapping it and holding it up by the stalk. She, Martin and Jean were sitting on top of the limestone pavement at Malham Cove, eating a picnic in the driving rain. They were now so wet that any attempt to seek shelter was pointless, and besides, there was no shelter to be found on the exposed plateau.

  ‘Do they expect me to eat it like an apple?’ she asked, twirling it between finger and thumb.

  ‘Save it,’ Jean advised. ‘You might be glad of it later. It could be curried marrow again tonight.’

  Nina pulled a face. ‘I wonder what they’ll give me tomorrow lunchtime. An aubergine, perhaps.’

  They had spent the morning measuring clints and grykes on the limestone pavement. In the afternoon Nina was planning to analyse the soil impaction on the pathway. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with all this data, meticulously collected and recorded. Every morning she would set off laden with equipment – clinometers, rulers, ranging rods, soil augers, quadrants – and return having reduced some feature of the landscape to a column of figures, without having any hypothesis in mind to which they might relate. Her tutor had not been particularly forthcoming. ‘Look up some of the articles on your reading list; get inspired,’ he’d advised, from his easy chair, before they’d left. ‘I’m not going to spoonfeed you.’