Sean Happens 10

Tiredness and fag smoke glazed Sean’s eyes. He was falling asleep leaning against the work surface, but he wouldn’t give into it or go to bed. His mum made a move towards making him.

Miss Dill sighed and shook her head. ‘There’s no end to The Spider. No end at all. When you’re in his web, you never get out.’

Mr Martin stared at the scratches on the table as if deciphering them. ‘Or The Mole,’ he added.

‘Spiders…Moles, whit is this?’ Mum shook a can and drunk the dregs. ‘Whit is this? A fucking bug sanctuary?’

Miss Dill began talking again about the long, hot summer when she was fifteen, but felt much older. ‘As most girls our age thought themselves to be. I was invisible to my myself without the attention of boys, and The Spider were giving me.’

She reached for Mum’s cigarettes and shook the packet, frowning, when she realised it was empty. ‘I wanted him to hold me, to kiss me, to want me…I was mostly alone with my thoughts. But my reputation preceded me. There were others, too difficult to resist…’ She waved them away. ‘A boy, well a man, really, who worked on the buses, whose long, silky hair he unwound from a turban and he could sit on it naked in the back seats. And I could sit on him and kiss him until he filled me with his passion. I found it exotically contagious. I was almost addicted.’

‘I heard his car, before I saw The Spider. It rolled close to the curb beside me. He leaned across and pushed open the door.’

Her laugh was like a hiccup. She reached for the last of the lager. ‘It was almost as if I’d never been away. I peppered him with questions about what he’d been up to?  If he’d missed me, or how his mum getting on?’

‘He lit a cigarette and handed me one. And kept his eyes on the road. We rolled on in silence. Got as far as Liverpool and Manchester and returned tired and unfulfilled. With no one to speak to, I stopped prattling on. And I realised how loneliness was eating him up as it was me.’

‘I didn’t care. I started to needle him. To stay things to get a reaction. Even for him to get mad or hit me. But he just kept staring at the road and driving, driving.’

‘It was wearing me out, the lack of sleep. The constant smoking on my unkissed lips. The hacking cough.  I even wore a white bikini under my clothes and had him drive us down to deserted Morecambe Bay. I wanted him to hold my hand as we ran into the water. It didn’t have to be The Poseidon Adventure. We weren’t yet sunk. I wanted us to strike out. But he wouldn’t get out of the car. Sat in the back seat and slept.’

‘I stopped turning out at our meeting point beside the chippy. Or even venturing out much. I holed out at my mum’s and played out that whole adolescent thing of being heartbroken. I read Papillon and was sure I’d have jumped off that cliff. Come what may, whatever the tides brought in, including me.’

Mr Martin smiled at the familiarity of it all. ‘Mum even started putting dinner down for you. She bought ice-cream and jelly, if I remember, rightly.’

‘Em,’ Miss Dill hesitated. ‘And if I remember rightly, Dad gloried in the chance to sermonise. To prove himself right. He didn’t want to hear anymore of me dressing up and going out to all hours and getting up to god knows what.’

Mr Martin replied. ‘That’s right. And if god did know, he wasn’t letting me on. Cause I was growing my hair and wearing your clothes too. It drove Dad nuts. But in a way it was better, because his life was so disappointing, we were unstraight confirmation it wasn’t his fault. We were to blame. Then you got your A-level results. There straight As… He was happier than you were.’

‘That’s cause he thought he’d get rid of me…’Miss Dill smiled. ‘Rid of us. Cause I’d buckled down at school. I always knew my special power was being average. I didn’t excel in the way you did academically, but I’d been shamed into returning and behaving not like myself. I was so fixed on my goals, I’d forgotten who I was.’

Mr Martin corrected her. ‘Who you are!’

‘Quite,’ she said. ‘Who we are. I’d even gained some girly friends who courted me for my opinions on clothes, sex and boys. And asked me if it was true, I’d slept with David Bowie?’ She giggled. ‘Of course I said I had. Hadn’t everybody?’

‘I was one of the few, who hadn’t,’ said Mr Martin, smirking.

‘I’d embraced the friendly friendlessness of this coterie of girls, who all thought themselves different—and better—than the rest. My exam results put me above them and I was treated with contempt. Condoms hidden in my bag, some used, which I thought was quite a delicate touch. I was so well used to that. It hardly even registered. I’d images of myself as a bookworm, hanging around the ivy-league cloisters of Oxford or Cambridge. I’d become an academic and find friends on the page and in the books I published after my PhD.’

‘You became a bit of a haughty cow,’ said Mr Martin. ‘More sarcastic than usual or need be. Everything seemed ugly to you. Useless. And Dad got the worse of it. I almost felt sorry for him.’

‘Yes, there was something feverish in the air. The Spider was still around, of course. He just didn’t show himself. I remembered seeing his new car growling at the traffic lights in our street. Or I thought it was him. I waved. I thought he might see me in his mirror, or something. Circle back the way he used to and bump onto the pavement and park in a side street with the engine running.’

‘Might have been him,’ said Mr Martin. ‘Might not have been. We all know about The Spider and his webs…Then we’d heard he’d taken an overdose.’