1 October 1974. A detention. Held back forty-five minutes after school (for claiming, in a music lesson, that Roger Daltrey was a greater musician than Johann Sebastian Bach) and as a result, Clara missed her four o’clock meeting with Ryan on the corner of Leenan Street. It was freezing cold and getting dark by the time she got out; she ran through piles of putrefying autumn leaves, searched the length and breadth of Leenan, but there was no sign. It was with dread that she approached her own front door, offering up to God a multitude of silent contracts (I’ll never have sex, I’ll never smoke another joint, I’ll never wear another skirt above the knee) if only he could assure her that Ryan Topps had not rung her mother’s doorbell looking for shelter from the wind. ‘Clara! Come out of de cold.’ It was the voice Hortense put on when she had company — an over-compensation of all the consonants — the voice she used for pastors and white women.
