Another five minutes with Sarah. Brisk walk home. Light lunch and an attempted chat with whoever was there – Jenny, or Norman, sometimes neither, never both. Perhaps half an hour in the hall, cooling my three contemporaries (Sarah was mornings only). Here I attempted a few minutes’ work, not easy because the fifty bawling sprogs had classes there in the afternoon, normally acting classes, or singing classes, or self-expression classes.
This, then, was the humdrum background to the fecundities of my nocturnal reading. For I had begun to explore the literary grotesque, in particular the writings of Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, to find a world full of the bizarre surfaces and sneaky tensions with which I was always trying to invest my own life. I did my real study at home, of course, mostly on Rachel, and on English Literature and Language, which, or so it seemed to me, I was really fucking good at.
Since the night of the punch-up things were quieter between Jenny and Norman. But on the rare occasions they were together the room was muggy. It wasn’t day-to-day aggro, nor the drooped, guilty, somehow sexless disgruntlement I had seen overtake many relationships, where the tension never tries to become articulate. No, there was definitely something at stake, some issue, and I felt I ought to be able to see what it was.
Predictably, Norman’s behaviour was more illustrative than that of his wife. Now, in the early evenings, he would moon over the kitchen table, toying with his car keys or staring, glaucous-eyed, at the wall. At some point he’d slope off headlong towards the door – but he was going out just to get out; he had lost that air of breezy purpose.
After my first morning at school, I was in the kitchen, enjoying – rather sweetly, I thought – a sandwich and a glass of milk for lunch. I hardly noticed Norman’s entrance. He came in – again, not to the traditional manic flurry of crashes and shouts, but with hesitation, uncertainty, as if only on reaching the kitchen would he be sure he was in the right house. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘Jennifer around?’ (‘Jennifer’, in Norman’s parlance, tended to mean ‘that bitch Jenny’.) I said I supposed she was out. We both shrugged. Nodding to himself, as if in thought, he opened the door of the fridge. ‘Any food?” he asked, his eyes quartering the room. Norman’s eyes saw: a sinkful of crockery, a soiled cat-tray, a basket of fetid sheets, knitting kit splayed on the table, a cooker like a tinker’s stall.
The odd thing about what followed was that I had never seen Norman take any interest whatever in domestic affairs, behaving usually as if he were living in a tent or semi-permanent pre-fab – chucking newspapers on the floor, undressing on the stairs, pasting his beetle-crushers over clean upholstery.
He took a step forward and booted the rubbish bin beneath the sink; he sent a pot slithering up the draining-board with the flat of his hand.
These fucking slags,’ he yelled, head thrown back. ‘All they can bloody do is gorge down great fucking fry-ups and squirt ponce all over themselves.’ He flicked on a tap and rolled up his sleeves, tone getting jerky with righteous sarcasm. ‘You work all bloody day and they’re wiggling their bums in fucking dress-shops and spending pounds in Sleazy fucking Wheezy’s or whatever the fucker’s name is. You’re up the shop while they’re on their arses doing their eyes.’ His voice rose half an octave. ‘Juskers they wear the tits doesn’t mean -‘ He cut out on a long, shuddering growl of rage and frustration.
Norman finished the washing-up (with Boy-Scout meticul-ousness), put on his jacket and left the house.
But that wasn’t it. If it had been it, then nothing on earth would have made him do what he had done.
My next encounter with Rachel was on the Friday, three days after the Tea Centre Incident.
It couldn’t have been more spontaneous if I had planned it. All the more startling, because I had resigned myself to dumping the entire Rachel opus. Shaving on Wednesday morning I cringed and winced as I recalled the mawkishness of my thoughts the night before. At best she had felt merely sorry for me; at worst it was phase two of her and DeForest’s plan. I was too scared and ashamed to ring her that evening. Perhaps tomorrow. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.