Lydia had a new record – Absolutely Free. She put it on the turntable; although her record player was compact, it was stereo and it sounded much better than our radio. Frank Zappa shrieked and moaned, very much out of tune. Lydia assured me he was doing this on purpose. ‘It’s a musical fuck you,’ she said, glancing at me to see if I looked shocked. She seemed disappointed when I just nodded.
I sat on the bed with its deep pink cover while Lydia danced. Her fingers clutched the air as if she were playing an invisible harp above her head. Her nails were long. Mine were bitten, like yours. She closed her eyes as she absorbed the music and continued to sway. She opened them again and held out her hand for me to dance too. I shook my head and remained where I was. I felt self-conscious with Lydia, and besides, I’d never find the beat, buried as it was beneath discordant wailing.
As ‘Call Any Vegetable’ started to play, someone came into the room. I sprang up from Lydia’s bed in case I wasn’t meant to be there.
‘What the hell is this racket?’ a man asked. He had to stoop to avoid the butterfly mobile in psychedelic shades of yellow and green that spun slowly while Lydia continued to dance. He was trying to loosen his tie with abrupt, tugging movements.
Lydia gave the rhetorical question an answer. ‘It’s the Mothers of Invention, Pa.’
‘Turn it down now! Who’s this?’ he asked, looking at me.
‘This is Zora Bunting. She’s one of the twins I told you about. She used to live at the back of us when we were at the old house.’
He nodded almost imperceptibly but he didn’t look pleased to see me. ‘Joyce said you were rude to her this morning.’
‘Sorry, what? I couldn’t hear,’ said Lydia.
‘That’s because the music’s still too bloody loud.’ He went over to the record player and turned the record down with an angry flick of his wrist. He repeated his statement about Lydia’s rudeness.
‘I wasn’t rude, I was just truthful.’
‘Try to be a little less truthful in future or you’ll find yourself without an allowance.’ As he went towards the door, he added, ‘Dinner will be on the table in five minutes. We need to eat promptly. Joyce and I are going out for the evening.’
‘Okay, I’ll be down in a minute. Can Zora eat with us?’
I thought he was going to say no, but he nodded curtly and left.
‘I shouldn’t really stay,’ I said. I didn’t want to spend the evening being polite to Lydia’s ‘pa’ and the not-so-wicked Joyce. I wouldn’t know what to say to them.
‘Please, Zora, stay for a bit longer,’ Lydia wheedled. ‘Pretty please.’
‘What was the rude but truthful thing you said to Joyce?’
‘I told her God didn’t exist, that it’s one big lie to keep us all in line. I said it was no wonder they called Jesus the shepherd. If she’s an example of the faithful, they are indeed just a load of sheep.’
I laughed.
‘You will stay to dinner, won’t you? I can’t promise it will be particularly nice – Billy’s cooking is very mediocre – but at least we could spend a bit more time together.’
It was always hard to say no to Lydia. ‘I’ll need to phone Mum or she’ll wonder where I am.’
‘The phone’s down there.’ She pointed to a space on the floor beside her bed.
I looked at it enviously. ‘You’ve got your own phone?’ There was just one phone in our house and it had only been put in last year. ‘It must be nice to be rich, never having to worry about money.’
Lydia looked surprised. ‘We’re not rich,’ she replied.
‘You can buy anything you want.’
Lydia laughed. ‘Not anything. I suppose you could say we’re reasonably well off but rich would be stretching it.’
I thought of her big old house, the one that backed onto ours and had turrets. It had been turned into luxury flats. I picked up the phone.
‘Be careful what you say – it’s not exactly private. Joyce keeps listening in via the extension in the sitting room, nosey cow. It’s one of the things we were arguing about. Tell your mother you’re staying here tonight. Then you won’t need to worry about getting the bus. It’ll be fun; with Pa and Joyce out for the evening we’ll have the place to ourselves.’
I picked up the receiver, feeling anxious as I pictured Joyce listening to every word, even though it was hard to imagine anything more innocuous than ‘I’m with Lydia, she’s invited me to stay over, so I won’t be back tonight, if that’s okay.’ I thought of you hovering next to Mum, asking where I was and when I would be home. I knew you would be envious. It was bad enough that Lydia had asked me round, and not you, without a stopover being included.
The LP came to a halt. It made a hiccupping sound as the needle reached the final grooves and got stuck. Lydia strode over to it and lifted the arm off the vinyl impatiently. ‘Come on, we’d better go down to eat.’
The dining room had a large oak table, already set with heavy silver cutlery. There was no tablecloth, just placemats. The red wallpaper darkened the room, which was in shadow, lit by ornate table lamps, one at each end of a sideboard. Joyce was standing by her chair when we arrived, looking slightly perplexed. She nodded to me just as Lydia’s father had done but said nothing. ‘Is Harry coming?’ she asked Lydia, who didn’t reply. ‘We’re going out shortly. We’ll be late if he doesn’t get a move on.’ Joyce was slender, with backcombed hair in a beehive that was too young for her, yet three or four years out of date. Her wine-coloured dress clung to thin, shapeless legs that showed pale beneath it. Lydia’s father finally arrived and we all took our seats, me opposite Lydia, and Joyce and Harry at either end of the table.
Joyce clasped her hands together and bowed her head and I realised she was about to say grace. I glanced at Lydia, who rolled her eyes but still looked down with a suitably demure expression as Joyce muttered the prayer. I thought of you – you wouldn’t have been embarrassed by this sign of devoutness; you would have lapped it up.
There were three courses: homemade tomato soup, thin and rather bitter, followed by cod in a thick parsley sauce, and finally, fresh fruit salad with single cream, which was the most edible part of the meal. When we had fruit salad at home, it came out of a tin and was topped with evaporated milk.
I’d been expecting animated conversation that I would struggle to keep up with, but instead there was silence, broken only by the sound of cutlery clattering on plates. There was no discernible tension; it was as if the Russells simply had no interest in each other. When our family had a meal together, there was barely a pause in the conversation. Mum would ask how school had been or what we’d eaten at dinner time. She would tell us which flowers were in season at the florist and describe the wedding bouquets she’d made up. Cal would repeat a bad joke he’d heard and we’d all be helpless with laughter. We would chat about things we’d watched on TV or listened to on the radio. Then the conversation would become more serious. We would be angry, collectively, about calls for immigration to come to an end. We would talk proudly of Arthur Ashe and Muhammad Ali, and Dad would tell us about Althea Gibson. We would repeat the gist of speeches by Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Then we would shift back to lighter topics and Dad would share stories about awkward passengers on his bus, like the man who sang opera very loudly all the way from Clapham Common to Liverpool Street station, and the woman who stripped naked to dance on the top deck of Dad’s bus because, she said, she couldn’t do the splits in tight trousers. Sometimes Dad reminisced about the way things used to be back home, and we’d realise how much he missed Jamaica; he’d come here after being in the merchant navy during the war, but he’d always meant to go back – he would have done, if he hadn’t met our mother.
Lydia rested her spoon on top of the slices of orange she hadn’t been able to finish. ‘May I leave the table?’ she asked. I assumed the request was a throwback to her childhood.
‘You may,’ her father replied.
Lydia got up, beckoning me to follow.
‘What about the washing-up?’ I whispered.
‘Billy will do that. She’s here till eight. It’s a pity she’s such a lousy cook. I’ve asked Pa to get rid of her and get someone else instead but he says she’s cheap and she’s willing to do split shifts, so we’re stuck with her, worst luck.’
‘You just can’t get the help nowadays,’ I replied as we ran up the stairs.
‘I know,’ said Lydia, failing to detect any irony.
‘Your dad doesn’t speak very much, does he?’
‘He’s a man of few words. Joyce used to chatter but she’s given up now too. I suppose I should be thankful for small mercies.’ She went over to the record player. ‘Shall we listen to the other side of this?’ she said, turning over Absolutely Free.
It wasn’t the kind of music I was into. ‘Can’t we listen to something else?’
‘You’re such a philistine. There’s a stack of albums over there. You can pick something out if you want.’
I knelt on the floor and looked through the pile of records: the Doors; the Rolling Stones; the Grateful Dead; Buffalo Springfield. ‘You’ve got Jimi Hendrix,’ I said, pouncing on Are You Experienced.
I sat on the bed again. Lydia joined me. I listened to the rapid, intricate chords of Hendrix’s guitar and pictured him plucking the strings with his teeth. Lydia’s leg was touching mine. I could feel myself turning red. There wasn’t much space on Lydia’s bed; two tops, a pair of jeans and three dresses were piled up on the other side of me. Perhaps it was just that there wasn’t room to move. But Lydia edged closer, and I knew she was doing it on purpose. I felt strange, wanting to be touched yet fearing what this might mean. Lydia definitely liked boys. Why would she want to do this with me? Her body curled into mine and then moved away again, almost as quickly; a little tease perhaps, a show of what could take place if only I would let it happen. But Lydia liked boys, I thought again to myself. And then she was kissing me. I kissed her back, confused by the ease of it.
I pulled away. ‘Your father might come in again,’ I said.
‘He’s out for the evening, remember?’
‘They might come back.’
‘Relax, they’ll be gone until dawn, I expect.’
‘They might come back early.’ I was thinking of you. I knew that Lydia would swear me to secrecy and this would be something else I’d be required to keep from you. And it would be such a secret that it would threaten to break us apart. Yet it was impossible not to welcome Lydia’s touch as she caressed the space between my thighs. I responded in kind, breathing in the flowery scent of Diorissimo as Hendrix sang ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.
I woke up while it was still dark, and everything felt wrong. I shook Lydia’s shoulder until she was awake too and I told her I had to go home.
I got dressed silently, ducking to avoid the green and yellow butterfly mobile that spun slowly in the night breeze. Lydia covered her naked body with a pale blue dressing gown and walked me to the front door. Her father had locked it so she had to get the key from his study. She didn’t hug or kiss me as I left, she only said, ‘It was a one-off, you do understand that, don’t you? It can’t go anywhere. I’m straight, we both know that. And you mustn’t breathe a word to anyone, especially not Selina, not ever.’
I don’t know why I nodded. I was desperate to ask why she’d wanted it to happen in the first place if she was so dismissive about it now, so certain that it couldn’t work between us, but I couldn’t find the words. In the dark of the night, it all seemed grubby, and I was full of loneliness.
I walked the three miles home, remembering when we’d first met Lydia. I’d climbed the apple tree that hung over the garden wall because I’d wanted to impress her. She’d thought I couldn’t do it and I’d wanted to prove her wrong. I seemed to spend a lot of time trying to prove Lydia wrong. What had I wanted to prove by sharing a bed with her? And, more importantly, what had she wanted to prove by sharing a bed with me?
I let myself into the house as quietly as I could. As I slipped into our room, you stirred and muttered something, but you were asleep again almost at once. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. I think I’d assumed you’d be fully awake as soon as I walked through the door, anxious about my absence, worried that in asking me to stay, Lydia had preferred me to you.
I stepped out of my clothes, acutely conscious of my body; my skin, the areas that Lydia had touched. I’d touched her back willingly; her body and mine had been intertwined and I had been full of a delirious kind of joy that had now turned to a sharp sense of unease. What did it all mean? I’d had the feeling, even as we had held one another, that Lydia had been playing some sort of game. Why? I knew that I could love her; perhaps I already did. She liked me, yes – some of the time, when it suited her – but she didn’t love me, and I knew beyond a doubt that she never would. Perhaps tomorrow, Lydia would say that we were no longer friends – let alone lovers – if that’s what we had been. In my bunk above yours, I was full of fear.