Harry laughed out loud. ‘Jane, you should be writing fiction, not criticism. Is this what passes for intellectual rigour in the English Department?’ He joined her behind the bar, taking glasses from the dishwasher and replacing them on the shelves.
Jane leaned on the counter and grinned. ‘Maybe I should turn to fiction. And if I did, I’d start with William Wordsworth’s lost epic’
‘Wordsworth’s lost epic?’ Harry said, sounding bemused.
‘She’s kept the best till last, Harry,’ Dan said. ‘This is the “woo-woo” moment. You’re going to love this one.’
Jane carried on regardless. ‘“Innocence and Corruption; the True History of the Mutiny upon the ship the Bounty in the South Seas.” Or something similarly Wordsworthian.’
‘Huh?’ Harry said.
‘They were at school together, Harry. William Wordsworth, the Lakeland Laureate and head honcho of the Romantic poets, and Fletcher Christian, Bounty mutineer, were contemporaries at Hawkshead School. Fletcher’s brother Edward was their teacher. He went on to become Professor of Law at the same Cambridge college where Wordsworth took his degree. And he represented the Wordsworth family in an important lawsuit. So who else would Fletcher choose to tell his version of events to but his old schoolfriend? The friend of his family who went on to become a famous man of letters. And even if he knew he could never publish it because of the potentially dire consequences, Wordsworth couldn’t have ignored a story as big as that, could he?’
Although I offered him no response, he continued to approach me. The man seemed entirely at ease as he made himself at home on the bench that sits nearby my work table. He stretched his legs before him, crossing them at the ankles. ‘Do you not know me yet, William?’ he said, a note of amusement in his tone. As he spoke, he pushed his hat to the back of his head, allowing me to see his face fully for the first time. Many years had passed since I had last cast my gaze upon his countenance, but I knew him at once. The vicissitudes of time & experience had left their marks upon him, but they were not sufficient to blunt his essential characteristics. My suspicion turned to certainty & my heart leapt in my breast.
Tenille knew all about choices. She understood that although teachers loved to lay out their holier-than-thou shit about creating options for their pupils, deep down they believed that people like her didn’t have choices. Not really. Not like the teachers and their own middle-class brats. In their hearts, they thought kids like Tenille were stuck without hope in the life they already had. So whatever their mouths might say, the way they acted shouted something different. The way they acted said, ‘You’re going to do drugs, go shoplifting, get pregnant in your teens and have a shit life on a scummy council estate till you die a premature death from smoking or drinking or drugs or deprivation. So why am I bothering trying to teach you anything?’
But they were wrong. She did have choices, even though they weren’t as obvious or as wide-ranging as most thirteen-year-olds’. But Tenille was damn sure she had more going for her than any of the rest of the no-hopers from the Marshpool Farm Estate. That was why she didn’t hang out with the other truants. She wasn’t interested in dodging the Attendance Officers or the security guards in the shopping malls and the amusement arcades. Joining the gangs shoplifting tatty clothes and cheap make-up held no charms for her. Not that she was above nicking stuff. Just not the crap that interested them. She couldn’t imagine talking Aleesha Graham and her crew into raiding Waterstone’s for books of poetry. Apart from anything else, you put them in a bookshop and they’d stick out like a three-piece suit in the mosh pit at a hip-hop gig. Just the thought of it made her roll her eyes back in her head and curl her lips in a sneer. Nor did she have any desire to spend her days holed up in some shithole of a flat watching nicked DVDs with a bunch of losers who just wanted to get out of their heads on weed or extra-strong cider and alcopops.
It hadn’t been so bad when Sharon had been unattached and working down the café. With her aunt safely out the door by ten, Tenille would sneak back indoors, curl up under her lumpy duvet and read until school kicked out and she could colonise one of the computers in the library to get online and hang out in chat rooms. There she could find other weirdoes who read poetry and wanted to talk about it. If she got desperate for the sound of another human voice, she would sneak downstairs and check out Jane Gresham’s flat. If Jane was home, she’d usually let Tenille in to raid her bookshelves, and if she wasn’t too busy, they’d sometimes sit drinking coffee and talking. Except when Jane got one on her and decided to deliver her lecture about how Tenille shouldn’t be dogging it. Like anybody in that dumping ground called Marshpool Comprehensive was ever going to teach her anything that would make her life one single step easier.
It was Jane who had told her about the chat rooms, even letting Tenille use her computer occasionally when Jane was reading and not needing the machine herself. Now they’d become Tenille’s lifeline, providing her with a retreat where she could be the person she knew she was deep inside. By most people’s standards, it wasn’t much. But it was enough to allow a narrow chink of optimism into Tenille’s life.
But all that had gone to shit a few weeks before. It had started when Sharon had left the café to take a job in the works canteen of a local plastics factory. Instead of regular days, she was on shifts, so two weeks in three, Tenille lost a substantial chunk of her daytime sanctuary. That had been bad enough, though Tenille was resourceful and soon found ways around the problem. But then Sharon had found herself a new boyfriend.
In the seven years she’d been in the nominal care of her aunt, Tenille had grown accustomed to the steady stream of unsteady men who pitched up at the flat for indeterminate lengths of time. She’d learned early to stay out of the way when they were around. Sharon didn’t want her dead junkie sister’s bastard putting them off, and she’d made it clear that Tenille should be neither seen nor heard when she was entertaining. So Tenille shut herself in her room for hours on end, tuning out the animal noises that seeped through the walls and under the door, sneaking out when the coast was clear to raid the fridge and kitchen cupboards for whatever she could find to kill the hunger that gripped her. Sometimes she felt like the invisible child, a phantom who slipped into the cracks and corners nobody else wanted to occupy. It wasn’t a notion she enjoyed, but recently she’d begun to yearn for that invisibility.
Of course, it had occurred to her before the arrival of Geno Marley in her life that there were distinct advantages to slipping under other people’s radar. It made truanting and shoplifting so much easier. But as far as Sharon’s boyfriends were concerned, she’d believed the only benefit she gained from remaining unnoticed was to avoid Sharon’s wrath if she inadvertently got in the way of her aunt’s love life. Although she knew in theory about men who preyed on kids like her, she’d never experienced it first hand. The kind of men who had been attracted to the overripe charms of her aunt had thus far shown no inclinations in her direction. After all, there was nothing childish about Sharon, a tough mixed-race woman who exuded a mature and knowing sexuality that promised the delights of experience rather than the temptations of innocence. She wasn’t one of those women who fought a doomed rearguard action against time; Sharon accepted she was past the first flush of youth and understood that mutton can be a far tastier meat than lamb. And so her men tended to be those who wanted a woman who had a firm grasp of the pleasure principle.
If she’d confined her neediness to the sexual dimension, Sharon’s