Huts39

I poked and picked and eased my tongue into a hole where a tooth should have been, but that didn’t stop me smiling when the day shift finally let go of me. The sun shone and the fields fleshed out smoky green grasses, floating blue iris and a gold buttercup path all the way home.

Mary Russell sat quietly in Bluebell woods, sprawled out at the side of the worn dirt path, all elbows and knees, her hair unkempt like an unruly child, picking at a moon daisy. She was warm on the eye. She loves me? She loves me not? flashed through my mind. But underneath her fringe, her blue eyes were those of a stranger, cold, like rock pools.

‘I was waiting on you,’ Mary said, dusting herself down and gently smiling, at something or nothing, which took me in, and made me smile back, even though I didn’t want to.

But Mary was already up and linking her arm through mine. She had that way about her and the certain knowledge that she could push and pull me about like some kind of faithful collie dog.

‘I heard what happened to you and I just wanted to see that you were ok, she said, looking me up and down. ‘But you’re not. You look like a…a…Indian… squaw,’ she finally decided on, after searching my face. There was no consolation in her words. She may as well have poked me with a stick. And she hadn’t even allowed me the consolation of being male. But as she pulled me closer, hip-to-hip, we were both happy with her decision.

‘I got a letter from Norean,’ Mary said, stopping suddenly to face me with this news, which brightened up her face, her whole world, that I expected her to pull it out and wave it around. And it came to me just as instantaneously, Mary didn’t get many letters. There were no letters and packages at birthdays and Christmas, just a thousand little nicks, that meant getting nothing and, as usual, no cakes, just the taste of cabbage and potatoes for dinner. And she had no one else to share it with. All her talk of concern about me was a played out sham. My face was still trained on hers and framed a half smile. But she was too bright with the glory of the letter to notice. ‘She even put her address on it. Even though they read out mail in the hospital, before they give it to us. That’s? That’s?’

‘Brazen?’ I offered.

Mary grabbed at the word. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. She really doesn’t give a fuck!’ And there was something impish about the way she said it, that it made me seem churlish not to also grin at the reflected cussedness on her face. ‘She’s working, you know? Two jobs. One in a pub.’ She said, words piling one on top of another. ‘There’s millions of work. You can walk out of one job and into another on the same day’.

We both looked at each other and tried to imagine such a world. But the effort was perhaps too much. We both looked nervously away.

‘But it’s dear,’ Mary said, shaking her head, as if she’d been there herself and she was going to tell me the price of a loaf and how much a pint was. ‘And she wants me to go. She says I should go. She’d get me a job. And she’d put me up and everything.’

Mary’s excitement was contagious, spilling over, so that I found myself shaking my head and saying, ‘Yeh, you should go. You should really go’.

‘You could come as well,’ said Mary, grabbing my two arms, facing me once more, and inviting me to share her largesse. And there it was all spread out in front of me. Canarby Street. Euston Station. The Rolling Stones. Mary Quant. Twiggy, Charing Cross and the Beatles. I’d meet up with Dad when he came down to Wembley for the football, when we stuff England. And just as quickly it all disappeared.

‘Yeh, that’d be good,’ I said nervously.

Mary grabbed at my arm again, trying to regain possession of me, as we walked the last little bit. We stopped, just before the stepping-stones, like ragged teeth in the stream that stood as smiling sentinels and marked the end of the hospital grounds.

‘You’re no fun,’ said Mary, pulling me along, ‘we could get the overnight train and we’d be there in the morning. If it didn’t work out you could always come back.’

The thought of over-night with Mary seemed to suddenly stand out, like a lewd carnival worker, all painted up in the bright colours of a clown, winking at me, which touched and flagged up the whole idea once more. It was that simple. But three hops and a skip and I was over the stream and practically home. She looked at me. Waiting. She didn’t make it any easier, once more closing the gap between us. Her soft curtain of hair brushed lightly against me like a breeze. Her breath on mine, with no space to breathe, so that we were both muddled, on the same spot, but I was lifted far away. Her soft lips once more found the path to mine, and grounded me, but it was more like a peck, with a promise of more.

Mary was already scuffing her shoes, and whistling like a boy, on the way back to the hospital ward, before I could get the words right, as if it was a last ditch oral exam: ‘Tell Norean I was asking for her. I’ll pop in and see you.’

Mary’s arm pushed up into the air. But she didn’t turn. I wasn’t sure if she held up one finger or two.