Levitation for Beginners

by Suzannah Dunn

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'A deliciously unsettling read' Clare Chambers, bestselling author of Small Pleasures

A sharp eye and keen wit are brought to bear on the secrets and lies of a small rural community - secrets and lies that may prove deadly.

It's 1972 and ten-year-old Deborah is living a ten-year-old life: butterscotch angel delight and Raleigh chopper bikes, and Clunk Click, and Crackajack and Jackanory, Layla and the Bee Gees, flares and ponchos.

But new girl Sarah-Jayne breezes into school, pretty as a picture and full of gossip and speculation, as well as unlikely but thrilling stories about levitation. The other girls are dazzled but Deborah is wary and keeps her distance. That same week, eighteen-year-old brickie Sonny turns up on her doorstep with a stray tortoise and begins an unlikely friendship with her young widowed mum. That's bad enough, Deborah thinks, but then Sonny starts work on a site opposite the school and Sarah-Jayne decides he's the latest love of her life. Nothing escapes Sarah-Jayne, and Deborah fears what she'll make of her mum. It's good to be different, her mum often says; but not, Deborah knows, too different.

So, Deborah changes tactics, keeping her friends close and her enemy closer, even stepping up for some of Sarah-Jayne's levitation sessions. Then she's invited to Sarah-Jayne's lovely house, where she meets her charming family and encounters Sarah-Jayne's big sister's fiance, Max, which is when she senses that all isn't quite as it seems.

Readers say:

'Suzannah Dunn is a master at dissecting the relationships that are closer than "just friends", those love affairs we have with our oldest friends, the attachments we formed before we were old enough to rationalise our preferences - the friends of our blood and bone. This book is a subtle, elegant and creepily powerful examination of what happens to one such friendship' Five star reader review for Venus Flaring

'I love this book and have read it and re-read it many times. It is so evocative of being a teenage girl in the late eighties and yet it somehow manages to be timeless. It perfectly captures the sense of self-importance that we all have as a teenager' Five star reader review for Blood Sugar

Release date: April 4, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 80000

Sample

Whenever I think of what happened all those decades ago, what comes to mind is something I know for a fact had nothing to do with it. What I picture is the injured, abraded face of my teacher’s son. A bloodied and bruised twelve- or thirteen-year-old, unfit that day to attend his own school, and installed instead in a chair beside his father’s desk to stare glumly back at awestruck nine- and ten-year-olds. And even though I know better, even though I know there was no connection with what was to happen a year or so later, to me it’s as if his accident was the start of it.

As to the circumstances, I don’t recall exactly what we were told, but we did know he had been hit by a car. Or run over as we would have said amongst ourselves, and certainly a nine-year-old looking at that mess of scabs could persuade herself of tyre tracks. My adult eye, looking back, sees that the damage – shocking though undoubtedly it was – was superficial. He had glanced off that car and there were no other apparent injuries. No bandages or splints, and he sat on that chair with no obvious physical discomfort, the chief insult to his tender twelve- or thirteen-year-old pride.

And it’s possible that almost half a century later he bears few if any scars from the incident and – who knows? – might not even remember it, or not as often as, inexplicably, I do. It’s possible too that he might already have had, or have gone on to have, a lot of scrapes. But me, at nine years old: I had never come across a wounding so spectacular, and I was astounded that anyone could be so damaged and still standing, or sitting. It looked to me to have been a terrifyingly close-run thing.

If I close my eyes it is as if it were yesterday, but now, thinking about it, I wonder if it wasn’t the spectacle of that poor face – the cuts and scrapes – that made the impression, but the fury in the eyes of a boy who, I imagine, miscalculated in a moment of high spirits and was brought down to earth with a bump. Then brought so low as to be stuck in that chair at the side of his dad’s desk, staring down a class of nine-year-olds and daring us to pity him.

The seventies: butterscotch Angel Delight and Raleigh chopper bikes, and Clunk Click, and Crackerjack and Jackanory, ‘Layla’ and the Bee Gees, flares and ponchos, and the long hot summer of ’76. But then again: Vietnam, Pinochet, Watergate, Bloody Sunday, the IRA and ETA and the Baader–Meinhof and Black September and the Red Brigade and the Angry Brigade. And little girl after little girl lifted in broad daylight from lanes and pavements and bundled into a van; bike dropped, wheels still spinning, for friends to find. A thirteen-year-old boy delivering a newspaper to a farmhouse shot in the head at close range.

In 1972, we had almost all the seventies still to come. We were a year shy of the Wombles and Man About the House, to say nothing of M*A*S*H and For Mash Get Smash, with several more years before Starsky & Hutch and Charlie’s Angels and The Good Life. In June of that year, we had yet to marvel at the Olympian feats of Olga Korbut and Mark Spitz. And still training as if their lives depended on it were those athletes who would be massacred in Munich that September.

Forget, too, any long hot summer, because the summer of 1972 in England was one of the worst on record, with the Wimbledon men’s final rained off for the first time in ninety-five years. And this summer that was no summer followed two national states of emergency and the three-day weeks during a winter in which we often spent our evenings in our coats by candlelight. And – remember – there were no smoke alarms in our homes in 1972. And a lot of unguarded hearths for us to gather around in our flammable nightwear. Upstairs on our mothers’ bedside tables were bottles of barbiturates with no child safety caps; and beneath the beds, plastic bags for pulling playfully over our heads. Outside, in the garden shed, boxes of fireworks that on Bonfire Night would blow up in our faces. And all this was for those of us lucky enough to have a home because – as we all now know – God help you if you were taken into care. Our neighbours’ gardens glittered darkly with laburnum seeds, and in the alley behind the fence were abandoned fridges perfect for our games of hide-and-seek. At the end of the street idled the ice cream van from behind which, brandishing our Mivvis, we could bolt into the path of a driver – un-clunked, un-clicked – who’d had one more for the road. I’m only half joking when I say I’m surprised that any of us lived to tell the tale.

At least at school we were relatively safe, if you turned a blind eye to points of compasses and held your breath against asbestos; we, snug in our two-classroomed Home Counties village school, were thriving. My cohort, tail end of the boomers, was going out with a bang: we were numerous compared to the handful of pupils in other year groups. In another way, too, we were a blip, in that our year was top heavy with girls: we were six strong; the boys – just two of them – mere bystanders. And if each of us girls was more friendly with some than others, we were all friendly enough. We got along, more or less, give or take, most of the time. At the start of June 1972, we were beginning our final half term there. And so we were almost done, nearly gone, when Sarah-Jayne turned up.

I was the first to encounter her. At break time I nipped back in from the playground to fetch my cardigan and, dashing into our classroom, intent on getting back to play, crossed paths in the doorway with our teacher – our headmaster, Mr Hadleigh – who was beating a retreat in his slippers and a haze of nicotine.

‘Ah! Deborah’ – his relief was audible – ‘this is Sarah-Jayne, she’s new.’ With that one deft move she was sprung on me, left for me to deal with.

Mr Hadleigh would have been busy thinking of the cubbyhole squeezed next to the kitchen that counted in our school as the staff room, longing for a cup of tea and a cigarette and a plateful of digestives, and perhaps a natter with young Miss Drake, the only other teacher, the infants’ teacher, if she wasn’t detained in her own classroom, the modern extension, consoling one of her little charges or mopping some spillage. And anyway, to give him his due, I was a good bet, safe hands, a sensible sort, and always did as I was told.

There across the classroom, luminous in the glow from the high Victorian windows, was blonde, blue-eyed Sarah-Jayne in a pillar-box-red trouser suit that was broad-belted and bright-buttoned, flared and wide-lapelled. What did she see when she looked over at the scrap who, back then, was me? Like my friends in the playground I probably couldn’t have said, even in that moment, what I was wearing. Because what did it matter? – that’s what my mum would have said. For God’s sake, who’s looking? We girls dressed in what we were given – hand-me-downs and jumble-sale finds and home-made affairs, pretty enough and soft with wear. Now, though, someone was looking, someone who was dressed to the nines, and fifty years later, those extraordinary eyes of hers are as vivid for me as they were at first glance: too blue and somehow diamond-cut. She dispensed that bright gaze warily, inclining her head as if to deflect it. She kept her eyes narrowed, which, along with the tilt of the head, gave her an air of appraising me although at the same time she seemed to wince, as if pained: This hurts me more than it hurts you.

Which, as everyone knows, is never true.

Rooted to the spot, I smiled back at her but my hackles rose. She got my back up even as she stood there nice as pie and butter-wouldn’t-melt, with what should by rights have been a winsome tilt of the head. I knew then and there, right from the start, that she was trouble, and something inside me – everything inside me – rose up so that there I was, standing my ground, standing a little taller, digging in my heels, determined not to fall for it.

Still, I did what had to be done, took her back with me to the playground, and there, where I had left them, were Susan and Mandy. Susan, my best friend, was as usual a-flitter with chatter, her knobbly knees bobbing, with sunlight – such as there was, that grey day – rolling in her dark curls and sparking off her gold-encircled baby-bangled wrist. Her socks were slack, having given up the ghost, and around her waist her cardy was hanging on for dear life. Buck-toothed, bug-eyed Mandy was sunk back against the fence, pale blue T-bar shoes slotted side by side and her tummy making a bell tent of her skirt, as she sucked on the clot of elastic band at the end of her plait.

I took Sarah-Jayne towards them and in her splendour she could have been The Golden Shot’s Maid of the Month. Mandy’s eyes bulged and her lips slackened around that strangulated tuft of hair, as Susan’s face broke into a smile as broad as those on the infants’ drawings. When I said, ‘This is Sarah-Jayne,’ Susan cooed, ‘New girl,’ just as she once had for me. But then Beverly came striding over and shouldered her way in. Drifting in her wake was doe-eyed Caroline, her ample self wrapped softly in her own arms. ‘Mutt and Jeff’ was how Mum mysteriously referred to the pair of them. Beverly planted herself squarely in front of the new girl and filed one flank then the other of her long, straight, centre-parted hair behind her ears, ready for business. ‘You’re new,’ she said. She could always be relied upon to state the obvious. And from Caroline, who never said much but could be relied upon to back up Beverly, came a joyful bleat.

Then came the two girls from the year below us, Tracy and Virginia. Outside school, Tracy hung around with the village boys stranded in the no-man’s-land of puberty, thriving on their contempt and derision, enjoying slanging matches in the park and the village hall car park, aflame with indignation. In school, she devoted herself to shepherding Virginia, who was large and unsteady on her feet and couldn’t see very well. Poor Virginia, to have survived a brain tumour only to be left at the mercy of Tracy. We owed her for keeping Tracy occupied and away from us. But had we tried to intervene, Saint Tracy would have beaten us off with a stick, because Virginia was hers, an important job. And now here she was, swinging by, nosy, chewing vigorously, escorting Virginia by the elbow, to make herself known to the new girl and bestow her blessing.

‘Hi, I’m Tracy. And this is Virginia.’ She always spoke for the both of them. Virginia nodded politely to affirm it, her eyes huge in her lenses.

Sarah-Jayne was the picture of politeness and – I watched for it – she didn’t flinch from Virginia.

Tracy said, ‘Welcome,’ with an absurd little bow, and Sarah-Jayne said thank you, and then, thankfully, Tracy was off (‘Come on, Virginia, let’s get you some fresh air’), and as they moved from earshot, Beverly said briskly, ‘Virginia had a growth cut out of her brain when she was five; she can’t help being like that.’

We all looked suitably grave, then Sarah-Jayne said – with a wit that I recognise only now in the retelling – ‘Remind me, which one’s Virginia?’

It had been four or five years since I had been the new girl but in all that time in my group of friends there had been no one newer, so I had always felt that distinction remained mine. In class later that day while Mr Hadleigh taught us how to measure volume, I wondered: if I was no longer the new girl, then who or what would I be? If I had to be different, then better the new girl than the girl with the dead dad. It occurred to me that Sarah-Jayne knew nothing of this: in her ears, it would become news all over again that I had only a mum.

Not that Mum herself cared what anyone thought of her, or so she always said (Who cares what folk think?). She believed it was good to be different. Otherwise, you were just the same as everyone else and would disappear into the crowd. Don’t follow, don’t fall in with the crowd, she was always telling me: stand up for yourself, speak up, stand out, be strong. Take no one’s word for anything. Make up your own mind. If they all went jumping off a bridge, would you, too?

And she certainly was different, although not to my mind at that time because she was a widow, but rather because she was Scottish. (Scottish widow! – but the Scottish Widow was still years away from our screens.) The only Scot I knew of back then, if you didn’t count Ronnie Corbett, was Dad’s Army’s dour, doom-prophesying Frazer.

Or Scotch, according to a lot of people around our way, at which Mum would roll her eyes to me and say, Aye, like the mist. She did say aye. Even och aye. And wee. She really did. And pal, and blether; and the way she put it, people – or folk – ‘stayed’ in places, rather than lived there, as if everyone kept a bag packed by the door. Mercifully, she never said we were doomed. But, unsettlingly, even when she spoke normally, she didn’t, because every what or where or which or when came hooted, owl-like, or so it seemed to me – h-what, h-which.

She called me Dayborah; and I was always the full Deborah, never Debbie or Deb. You’ve got a proper name, make sure you use it. She didn’t often use her own full name, though, which was Sandra. Sand-ra, as she said, like on The Liver Birds, but everyone else around our way said Sarndra, which she’d mimic for me in a deep, booming voice: Sarndra Daaaarke, as if she were being summoned. She preferred Sandy, which sidestepped the problem because no one was going to say Sarndy.

‘Sandy Darke, short and sweet,’ she’d say. ‘Just like its owner. Pair-fect.’

Other times she complained it was an odd name: Sandy Darke what? Sounds like something’s missing. (But she did always sound to me as if she was complaining – that querulous tone, that arched eyebrow of a voice.) Sandy Darke what? We never considered Shaw, probably because that was already so publicly taken. I did once say Beach, but Mum knocked that back, claiming that beaches weren’t dark.

Well, half the time they are, I thought: at night, they are.

But no, dark wasn’t what you thought of, she said, when you thought of a beach. Cove, though, apparently, was different: she could imagine a sandy cove under cover of darkness. But was that a name – Cove? If not, she said, it should be; and she said it as if she were trying it on for size: Missus Cove. She’d just have to marry a Mister Cove, she said.

I was surprised, I remember, to hear that. I was perhaps seven or eight years old at the time and had never considered that she might marry. By which I mean, of course, remarry. Thinking back, now, it’s a surprise that she hadn’t. She had been widowed at twenty-four. But because she was my mum, I never thought of her as young, although I suppose I knew that others did and I suppose I knew she was younger than the mums of my friends. Everyone always said she and I could be sisters: peas in a pod. We had the same waist-length hair, but that was because we were both went to – as she put it – the Sandy Darke Salon, which was in our kitchen and offered just the one style, a snipping straight across the bottom with the household scissors.

I was aware that widows could remarry, and – true – she had cried when Pete Duel from Alias Smith and Jones shot himself, but then so had everybody because he was lovely and it was sad; it wasn’t that she had actually properly loved him and she certainly wouldn’t have married him. And anyway she was always saying how it was just the two of us: You and me, eh? We do just fine by ourselves.

My dad, unbelievably, had been Ray Darke: a name to conjure with, Mum would say, her eyebrows rising as if he had had only himself to blame, although usually she also said, You wonder what the old girl was thinking when she chose that, except she never did think any further than the next drink. Which was why we didn’t have anything to do with her. Well, and because by the time I was in school she too, Mum said, was dead. Not to speak ill of the dead, Mum would say, but good riddance to the awfy auld besom. I still had a grandad on that side, or last Mum had heard; but he wasn’t interested, she said. Only interested in the horses – which to me, obsessed with the annual WH Smith Win a Pony competition, was a significant point in his favour. That was a man I would’ve liked to have got to know.

Of her own family she only ever said she was best off out of it. She’d left them for London and lived for a wee h-while with her sister and her husband but if you choose to believe a man like that over your own flesh and blood, and they’d had a row and blood isn’t thicker than water and good riddance to bad rubbish, then she married my dad and became a Darke and had me. We didn’t need anyone else, she said: we were fine by ourselves, just the pair of us.

Darke was a poor fit for Mum and me: we were in fact both fair, Darke sitting on us like a joke – a rebuke, even – and a particular failing on my part, seeing as unlike Mum I was Darke by birth. ‘Och, you Darkes never do what’s expected of you,’ she said. (My dad, she said, when I asked, had been ‘mouse’.) Mum had had a different surname before she was married. A maiden name, she called it, which sounded to me like something from a fairy tale. And anyone who found Sandy Darke to be a bit funny didn’t know the half of it because as a girl she had been a Gilhooly, which I judged best kept under wraps. Frazer’s doom was enough of a threat; I didn’t want Mandy getting hold of Mum’s maiden name and following me around with Och GilHOOOOly. And that was to say nothing of her having grown up somewhere called Pee-balls.

I rather liked the poor fit of my surname because I felt as if I were undercover. Anyone looking for a Darke wouldn’t give me a second glance. But it was my first name of which I was proud. Deborah, I felt back then, was a name to be said with an eyebrow-lift of a different kind from my mum’s habitual, derisive kind. A Deborah – it had seemed to me – might come from somewhere other than a village like ours and would know a thing or two about the world. ‘Yours is a name with a history,’ Mum would tell me, ‘but it’s also up to the minute.’ No better position to be in, she said. Pair-fect. It was a proper name, whereas some other names, those of girls at school – Lisa, say, or Karen – she dismissed as made up.

Deborah was a proper name, but there was also that business of my being a Deborah proper, Mum insisting against my being reduced like every other Deborah to Debbie, Debs, Deb, mere winks and nods towards the name. (Stand up, stand out, don’t go jumping off bridges and disappearing.) It goes without saying that Debra was out of the question – not that I needed to be told, because De-bra wasn’t one for the school playground. All that said, there was a brief time – the year before Sarah-Jayne came – when Marc Bolan’s deboree-deb made me the toast of the school.

Sarah-Jayne, I decided on her first day, had a made-up name. Not the component parts – good solid names, both of them – but the conjoining of them. It was bright and shiny, it seemed to me, and somehow pleased with itself, having me think of the twin fake-brass fastenings on the bib of my hotpants.

Something that it’s not, I learned over the years, is a name to conjure with. I’ve searched on and off but turned up no trace of this particular Sarah-Jayne Todd. Presumably she has slipped like the rest of the girls under a married name (or two, or perhaps more, in her case). Unlike me: I soldier on as who I always was, if in name only. That year, 1972, was the year Tutankhamun came to town – to the British Museum – and I lappe. . .