Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

Author:Tessa Hadley [Hadley, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780312425999
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After the meeting the visitors from Agit Prop had needed a floor to stay on and Caro had taken them back to the disintegrating old mock-Tudor house, its garden as overgrown as a jungle, which she shared with a motley collection of students and friends and politicos. (Later she had had trouble with that house; it was rented in her name, and some of the people using it refused to pay their share. She had to hassle them for it, and came home once to find RACHMAN BITCH scrawled in red paint on her bedroom wall.) They sat up until late smoking pot and sparring; Caro and Keith arguing not about the trouser suit, which wasn't mentioned again, but about the dockers' support for Enoch Powell and its implications for the alliance between Left alternative politics and the working-class movement. Caro had been on the antiracist march to Transport House: Keith thought she was overstating the problem in a way that was typical of bourgeois squeamishness in the face of the realities of working-class culture.

The way Keith dominated a room and laid down the law and didn't seriously countenance anybody else's opinions should have made him obnoxious; but his ironic delivery in that accent of his made it seem as though there was something teasing in his most exaggerated assertions. Everyone was willing to listen to him because he was older and his pedigree was impeccable: a miner's son, kicked out from Hornsey Art College for his political activities, he had been working on building sites ever since. In any case, that sheer imperturbable male certainty was intriguing to women in those days. They felt in the face of it a complex mix of thrilled abjection with a desire to batter at it with their fists; also, they believed that given the chance they would be able to find out through their feminine sexuality the weaknesses and vulnerable places behind that imperturbable male front. (This last intuition was all too often accurate.)

Eventually Caro found sleeping bags for everybody and they distributed themselves around mattresses and sofas and floors in the high-ceilinged damp-smelling rooms of the house. And then at some point in the night Keith must have got up again and wandered about until he found, not Caro, who had half expected him, but her sister Penny, who happened to be staying with her for a few days. Penny was a year older than Caro but didn't look it: most people took her to be the younger sister. She was smaller, softer-seeming, prettier. Caro found them in the morning twined around each other in their zipped-together sleeping bags. All she could make out at first was the mess of Keith's dark curls and his naked young shoulders, tanned and muscular from the work he did, and then she saw how down inside the bag Penny's head, with its swirl of auburn hair like a fox's brush, was wrapped in his brown arms against his chest.

She remembered that she had felt a stinging shock.

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