It had been snowing in Littlehaven for what seemed like forty days and forty nights, and everyone over four feet tall was tired of having to keep Christmas tree lights on all day long so that flickering neon could counteract a numb and unanimous sense of foreboding. The real world and snow didn’t go.
Then on 9 December, which was a Friday, it stopped.
Inside No. 8 Pollards Close the heating was pumping and the blinds in the master bedroom were still on tilt. Linda Palmer was naked, bent over the open drawer of her vanity unit. When she straightened up, a pair of clean bikini briefs in her hand, she was able to see not only herself, but the reflection of the TV screen and Selina Scott’s face just left of her hips, at pussy-level.
She put the bikinis on and turned the TV off. Since the show’s first airing in January she had done Diana Moran’s workout faithfully every morning, but now they were nearly at the end of the calendar year, her body had clocked up over eighty hours of workout since then and the Green Goddess just didn’t do it for her any more. The Green Goddess was for people who wanted to be like Linda Palmer, so what did she want with the Green Goddess when she already was Linda Palmer.
She turned back to the vanity unit, changed the Barry Manilow cassette in the stereo for a Bruce Springsteen compilation, then climbed onto the mail-order exercise bike she’d had long enough for the rubber stoppers on the legs to leave imprints in the carpet. With the switch on dead flat she started to pedal. If she didn’t do twenty minutes before the aerobics class, sweat formed on the back of her pink and grey striped leotard, and at the end of class Dominique Saunders would ask her if she was okay; tell her she looked tired.
A slow track came on, something about Vietnam, and she switched to gradient. She was just getting into the uphill rhythm when the phoned started to ring. After counting six rings, she flicked the switch from gradient to dead flat to off, and dismounted.
‘Is that you, Joe? Joe?’
‘Hello? Mrs Palmer?’
‘Joe – is that you?’
‘Mrs Palmer?’
The voice sounded foreign, and she didn’t feel like being spoken to by a foreign-sounding voice right then. ‘Who is this?’
‘Mrs Palmer, it’s Mrs Klusczynski.’
‘Who?’
‘Jessica’s advanced physics teacher.’
Linda backed away from the vanity unit, put the phone on the floor and jammed the receiver between her right ear and shoulder. The only word she caught the foreign voice saying was ‘advanced’. ‘Listen, if you’re trying to sell me anything …’
‘It’s Mrs Klusczynski, from Jessica’s school.’
‘… anything at all, I’m just not …’ she stopped herself. A long time ago, she had trained herself to keep the unfamiliar in the background, and this is what she did now. The foreign woman faded out and all she could hear was Bruce, still singing about Vietnam, and she couldn’t work out if he’d actually been or not or whether this even mattered. Maybe she was just missing the point. ‘It’s who?’
‘M-r-s K-l-u-s-c-z-y-n-s-k-i,’ the foreign woman yelled down the phone.
Linda held the receiver away for a moment as forty years of Poland in exile made its way through the barricade of redneck vocals on the stereo. She had a sudden image of a woman who wore cardigans and the sort of slip-on shoes that were more prescription than high-street, emerging from one of the two-bedroom terraces at the top of Pollards Close with her severely epileptic son. ‘Wait. Mrs Klusczynski, top-of-the-Close Mrs Klusczynski?’
‘That’s right. I’m also your daughter’s advanced physics teacher here at school.’
‘Her physics teacher. Right. I knew that. Sorry. I’m with you now.’
Looking at her alarm clock, she saw that there was less than an hour to go before class. The phone line fell in a coil between her breasts as she got back onto the bike. ‘I’m with you now,’ she said again, sideways through the receiver as she started to pedal.
‘Mrs Palmer, are you still there?’
‘I’m here.’ She flicked the switch to gradient, and breathed out hard.
‘I’m afraid there’s a problem with Jessica.’
‘A problem?’
‘It’s an interesting problem.’
Linda had never found problems interesting and didn’t like the fact that Mrs Klushwhatever was enjoying this conversation more than she was. ‘Yes?’ she said harshly, switching from gradient to gradient: steep.
‘She refuses to complete – no – even to look at the module on nuclear physics, which is a compulsory part of the A Level examination.’
‘What d’you mean “refuses”?’
‘I mean she walked out of my classroom just now on ethical grounds.’
Mrs Klusczynski paused. She sounded pleased and this confused Linda, who had begun to swing her head slightly in an attempt to regulate her breathing. ‘You’re sure?’ She couldn’t imagine Jessica walking out of class.
‘I’m sure. It’s never happened to me before.’
This was too intimate – more of a confession than a comment. Linda arched her back and tried to relax her shoulders.
‘But the school said to put her in for early-entry A Level Physics. They said she was a straight “A” – no doubt.’ Linda was having trouble finding enough oxygen to speak, think and cycle at the same time.
‘There is no doubt. All we have to do is get her to overcome her reaction to “nuclear” in the syllabus. I respect it. I respect Jessica and her decision,’ Mrs Klusczynski added, ‘but she doesn’t fully understand the physics of it. Once she understands the physics, or begins to understand, she will be able to see – or she will be a lot closer to seeing, anyway, that it’s not the physics that are corrupt.’
Linda became suddenly, acutely aware of her thigh muscles.
‘… She can’t study physics and turn a blind eye to the splitting of the atom. That’s not wanting to know the whole truth … that’s fanaticism –’ Mrs Klusczynski said, carried away, ‘– and ignorance.’ The art block was being refurbished and they were holding art classes in the science block this term. She reached out for the plastic cup full of mixing water that Miss West had been using during the last period and drank it like coffee. ‘I urge you and your husband to talk to her.’
‘We’ll talk,’ Linda said, with a hungry intake of breath.
‘Tell her – tell her not to throw her strength away on morality; that’s not the path for Jessica. Tell her –’
‘If she does the work she’s meant to do on this … this … module, she’ll still be in line for an ‘A’?’ Linda cut in, breathless, thinking about the number of times she’d told Dominique Saunders and others that Jessica was going to get an ‘A’ in A Level Physics – and Mathematics – at the age of fifteen. Trevor Jameson at the County Times was going to run a whole feature on her when she did – and here was some foreign woman whose garage wasn’t even an integral part of her house talking to her about nuclear bombs; about Jessica and nuclear bombs. Why was this all anyone ever talked about any more? She lunged forward as her lungs collapsed, her entire weight on the edge of the saddle … fuck the bomb.
‘Mrs Palmer?