— But anyone could see them. And anyway, why does the guardian of the stump have to be a he? (Clare’s stepmother was a regular at the Greenham Common women’s protest against cruise missiles.)
Helly frowned. He just is. Don’t you want his powers?
— I just thought it would make more sense to sacrifice to a female thingy, that’s all. As it’s a sisterhood.
— But the powers that control this school are female: haven’t you thought of that? We need him to combat them, the great guardian of the stump: let his name be ever sacred, and his mystery deep.
— If you say so.
Clare considered: she was slightly in awe of Helly and her absolute seriousness. She found a button in her purse that the others said would do as a sacrifice, to begin with.
— Close your eyes, said Helly. Keep them shut. She took hold of Clare’s hand, painfully tightly, squeezing it until Clare protested, although still with her eyes obediently shut. Helly held on, pressing Clare’s fingers down inside something wet, mossy, splintery. It was only when Clare thought of slippery creatures that might be lurking in the stump that she had the strength to pull violently away, letting go of the button.
— Well done, said Helly, smiling into her eyes.
Clare’s heart was actually thumping, and all afternoon she could smell moss and rotten wood on her fingers. The details of the cult seemed to her gauche and embarrassing. But she somehow didn’t mind it getting around that she was Helly Parkin’s friend now. She even helped Helly steal bits of stuff from certain girls in the class — scraps of notes, bits of the ties from their science aprons, even name tapes cut out of their gym blouses in the locker room — which they then pinned to the stump with thumbtacks to bring bad luck: “evil chance,” as Helly called it. Whenever something unfortunate really happened to one of these girls, the four cult members were drawn together in an exhilarating uneasy mixture of guilt and skepticism.
* * *
CLARE AND HELLY fell in love with one another’s houses.
On weekends Clare and her sister Tamsin lived with their mother; during the week they lived in a big chaotic house in Kingsmile with their father, who was a ceramicist, their stepmother, and a half-brother. There were four flights of echoing stairs and rooms at the top they didn’t even properly use. There were striking things everywhere: Graham’s ceramics and paintings, an Indian embroidered canopy over the fireplace in the sitting room, a copper vase full of unusual flower heads Naomi had dried, old jewel-colored Turkish rugs on the stripped wood floor, bookcases built of stained planks piled on bricks, a crumbling antique rattan settee. In the kitchen there was a vast stripped pine table around which any number of family and friends might be assembled to eat Naomi’s vegetarian curries and whole-meal pies. There was always a mattress and a sleeping bag for anyone passing through or temporarily homeless, or for the girls’ friends, or Toby’s. In the evenings the adults would sit around the big table drinking wine and rolling joints, and the smell of marijuana, thin with just an undertone of acrid nastiness, would rise through the house.
— Be sensible girls, said Graham. You know what not to mention, and where not to mention it.
Helly loved the house in Kingsmile. Its emptiness and air of casual improvisation made her wild. She raced up the bare stairs three at a time, she lay on her back on the floor in the sitting room in the dusk so that Graham and Naomi fell over her, she climbed out the attic windows and sat with her feet in the old lead-lined gutter looking down over the parapet to the faraway street. She would pretend she got high, leaning over the banisters on the top landing and breathing in the smell of the marijuana. She staggered about and fell on Clare’s bed, describing her visions, the room swaying like seaweed in a pool, rainbow colors, something cold and scary touching her.
— It’s the guardian of the stump, said Clare, and Helly screamed and then they wrestled together on the bed and Helly tried to make her beg forgiveness for her sacrilege.
For Clare there was something unsatisfactorily unfinished about the house. Because there were no carpets anywhere it was filled with noise. Doors didn’t shut properly, the stairs had been partly stripped and then abandoned, one wall in the sitting room was half painted red. In the cinders in the big fireplace there were orange peels and cigarette packets in the morning; no one did much dusting or sweeping, and when she thought of the house when she wasn’t there she thought of cold bare feet on gritty floors. It was difficult to get comfortable to read, except in bed: the chairs were all unusual — an old green chenille chair with a broken mechanism for folding out and supporting your legs, a circular 1950s basket chair in an iron frame — but there were none that you could snuggle down in. She did her homework at a beautiful fragile little walnut desk in her bedroom whose drawers had lost all their knobs and which was never quite big enough for her books.
She knew her father sometimes felt the unsatisfactory unfinishedness too. She and Tamsin were very finely attuned to his moods, they called him “the honeypot” and catalogued his behavior with a mixture of derision and devotion, smug at having their place in his favors without trying. He sometimes as much as admitted to them how the trying wore him out: Naomi’s anxious efforts to please him especially, although they suspected that their own mother’s sensible phone calls about practicalities and money (the girls needed new shoes; Tamsin wanted to start clarinet lessons) were in a hidden way a kind of trying too.
— What a burden it is, Tamsin pretended to sigh when he wasn’t there. What a mess these women make when they fall at my feet and I have to walk all over them.
They knew their mother still wanted to know about him; they saved up fragments of his dissatisfaction with the house like trophies to compensate her. He suffered with backache; he asked why they couldn’t buy a decent sofa. There was always money for special little finds in junk shops but there was never the kind of money that bought decent sofas. Naomi in any case preferred to sit cross-legged on the floor.
— But I’m nearly fifty, he said, with a little grim laugh. (His “at least someone round here has a grasp on reality” laugh, the girls agreed.) Naomi (who wasn’t thirty yet) looked frightened; it was one of her superstitions, that she didn’t like anyone to mention their age difference.
In spite of his dissatisfactions, the girls knew that the little remarks he made when they went off for their weekends at Marian’s weren’t really complimentary. He said, “It must all seem terribly sensible and organized and quiet compared with living here” (that meant dull). He took an amused interest in Marian’s decorating—“She must have been longing for built-in kitchen cabinets all along”—and was delighted when the girls let slip that she didn’t allow them to use a mug without a saucer in case of drips. When she had a burglar alarm installed, he started calling her house Fort Knox. They didn’t report these jokes to Marian.
* * *
CLARE WOULD HAVE LIKED to live in Helly’s house in Poynton. Poynton was a little village that had been absorbed at the edge of the city’s advance; Helly had a long bus ride to school every day. (She didn’t mind: the same bus picked up boys for the grammar school too, so there was always some fantasized romance on the go, someone to swoon over if he brushed obliviously past you.) The Parkins lived in an estate of new houses: her father had a management position with British Gas; her mother was a primary-school teacher. There was a younger brother who played the guitar and wanted to be in a band. Everything in the house was new and clean and comfortable and worked. The walls between the rooms were so thin that when they lay whispering in Helly’s bed at night her father in his bed next door hardly had to raise his voice to tell them to be quiet: you felt you slept with the whole family; the partitions were merely polite. Helly’s father, whom she quarreled with bitterly — luxuriously, Clare thought: somehow she and Tamsin just couldn’t afford to quarrel with Graham — was short and dapper and satirical; he was good at crosswords and puzzles and competitions. Helly was good at them too; before she was a teenager and turned against him they had won things together, a holiday and a freezer and a diamond ring. Mostly they quarreled about politics; he was an enthusiastic supporter of Mrs. Thatcher and exaggerated his enthusiasm to goad her.