By the Shore

by Galaxy Craze

  “Where? Which cheek?” they wanted to know.

  “He’s kissed her lots of times,” Patricia told them.

  “Did it make you feel all tingly?” Courtney asked, in a whisper. “I get shivers just thinking about him.”

  “No. He’s like an older brother,” I said. It was easy, making things up. It becomes real; it was real at that moment.

  “Like an older brother?” They all stopped with their mouths open. “You’re good friends with him?”

  I was getting nervous. What if they wanted to meet him or see pictures? “But he’s been really busy lately with his singing.”

  “He flew to Italy last night,” Patricia said.

  “Oh,” they said, sounding disappointed. As if they’d been told to read a book over the Christmas holidays.

  “I have lots of homework to do,” I said. I wanted to go home, to see someone I knew, my mother.

  “I parked my car down the street,” Patricia said.

  “’Bye, May. ’Bye, Patricia. See you tomorrow, May.” I wasn’t used to them talking to me, so I just waved and walked away.

  I wondered what the girls would do when we left. I thought they might go to an older boy’s house, sit on the rug in his bedroom listening to records, smoking cigarettes. Barbara and Courtney would sing along, Polly would tap her foot.

  Patricia and I walked to her car. The sky was darker now. The shopkeepers were closing up, turning the signs around, pulling down blinds, sweeping floors.

  When I was sure we were far enough away, I said, “Why did you tell them I know Jet Jones?” I tried to sound obnoxious like I thought she was stupid, the way the kids in American movies speak.

  “It’s true, he really is my brother,” she said, turning to me.

  “But I don’t know him and they’ll find out.” I was afraid they would tell everyone in school, and Jolene would hear and know it was a lie.

  “They’ll never know unless you tell them. You’ll meet him one day.” I didn’t believe he was her brother. I thought she would have told me before.

  She stopped in front of a navy blue car. It looked new. I didn’t want to get in the car with her.

  “I’ll walk home,” I said, and turned to leave.

  She grabbed me by the arm. “Don’t be silly, May.”

  “How did you start talking to them?” I asked her. I was curious because I had never been able to.

  “I was waiting for you so I asked one of them if they knew you and we started talking . . . . I was trying to make them like you, May,” she said, opening the car door.

  We sat in the car and closed the doors. Patricia turned the key and the radio came on too loud. It made us jump in our seats. I tried not to ask, but I had to know. “How did you know they didn’t like me? I mean, what did they say?”

  She looked at me and sighed. We were driving down the road, “Are you hungry?” she asked, looking at the stores on the street.

  “What did they say?” I needed to know; I wanted to know what was wrong with me.

  “They didn’t say anything.” She stressed the word “say”. “I could tell . . . There was a group of them at my school too. It’s always the same, nothing ever changes. Where’s the shop that sells those vegetable pastries?”

  “Down that road.” I pointed to the left. “It’s quite far, at the end.” We didn’t speak for a moment. Then I said, “But you were probably part of that group.”

  “Eventually I was,” she said, looking straight ahead.

  …

  When we got home, I went right upstairs and locked the door to our flat. It was an old lock we never used; we never needed to. My mother and Rufus were in the kitchen, sitting at the table over the Scrabble board. The radio was on and they were singing.

  “Who’s winning?” I asked, walking in.

  “He won the first game but I won the second, and now he’s exactly ten points behind me.”

  “We’ve been playing since two,” Rufus said. He looked happy, sitting up straight, smiling. There was a bottle of wine on the table and a box of biscuits, plain ones covered in milk chocolate. They had a picture of a boy holding a flute on them. They were from Germany.

  “Can I have one?” I don’t know why I asked. I usually just take things right off her plate.

  “Of course you can. I bought them specially for you.” They were my favourites. I was glad to see Rufus. I wanted him to help with my homework.

  “Can you help me with my French tonight? It’s important.”

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure, I’m behind.”

  “Are you hungry? I was going to make beans on toast,” my mother asked us.

  “Beans on toast. I’ve never had that before,” Rufus said. He thought he was funny, and she did too. I sat down with them and ate the chocolate from around the edges of the biscuit. It was nice to be with them in the kitchen with the wine and Scrabble and the door locked.

  “I’ll help you,” Rufus told me.

  My mother was looking at her letters, picking them up, moving them around, putting them back down. I looked over at them, but I couldn’t see any words. It’s annoying having someone look over your shoulder, so I stopped. When I looked up, Rufus was staring at us.

  “Just then you two looked exactly alike. I never thought that before.” This made my face feel hot. My mother was pretty, not in the same way Patricia was but the way a shell is, or a leaf, something you have to pick up and hold up to the light and turn around and around in your hand to see clearly.

  “I like Patricia’s new haircut.” I said it quickly, I didn’t want him to talk about how I looked any more.

  “What?”

  My mother looked up at him, holding a square wooden letter between her fingers.

  “Patricia’s new haircut?” he went on, as though he didn’t understand what I was saying.

  I nodded. “It’s short.” I moved my hands to my ears, trying to explain to him.

  “Patricia’s not here,” he said.

  “I saw her after school in town.” He looked confused, and my mother was still holding the letter.

  “You saw Patricia in town?”

  I nodded again.

  “It was probably just someone who looked like her, but with short hair. She wouldn’t cut her hair.” He said this to my mother. She looked back down at the Scrabble board.

  “No, I talked to her. She drove me home.”

  “She’s here? Right now?” he asked. He looked worried.

  “Yes. I mean, I think so.” I came right upstairs but I remembered hearing her car door close.

  “Did she tell you she was coming?” he asked my mother. There was an advertisement on the radio. She stood up and turned it off. “Lucy.” He said her name softly, as though he were bending down to pick up something that might break.

  “What?” She was standing near the counter with her hand on the radio.

  “Did she tell you she was coming?”

  “No, she didn’t.” That’s what it is like here: empty rooms; anyone can come. We need the money. “I have to put sheets on the bed. Or is she going to sleep in your room?”

  You couldn’t see anything on my mother’s face, but her voice sounded as if she were talking to a stranger. To a guest. He just sat there looking at her. She went to the fridge and opened it.

  “No, she’s not going to sleep in my bed.” He sounded angry.

  “Maybe I should make cauliflower and cheese instead. Does that sound good, May? Eden likes it.” She closed the fridge door and looked around the room at the walls, like she was looking for a clock. “What time is it?”

  “I think it’s around six or something,” I said.

  “Six? I have to collect Eden.” Eden was at his little friend Jake’s house. They spent hours building forts for their Action Men. He liked it better at Jake’s house because I wasn’t there. Once, they had left the men set up in fighting positions, and Jolene and I came in and stole their clothes and put them
in our Cindy doll’s ballerina outfits. There was no one to bother them at Jake’s house.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked. She went to the sink and turned the tap on.

  “You should go down and see Patricia,” she said, rinsing her hands.

  “Aren’t you going to help me with my French?” I asked him.

  “I can help,” my mother said, but I didn’t want her to. She wasn’t good at French either.

  Rufus stood up. I thought we would go to my room and he would give me all the answers, but then the phone rang. The three of us stood, looking at it. No one moved. It rang again and again. Finally my mother picked it up.

  We stood by the door waiting; she had her back turned to us.

  “How are you? . . . I’m well, thank you . . . . May’s right here.” She held the phone out to me.

  It was Jolene. She wanted to know what Madame Monet had said to me. “Did you get in trouble?” she asked, as though it were a happy question.

  “I’m going to pick up Eden,” my mother said, and walked out of the kitchen. Rufus stood there for a moment; then he followed. I heard him call her name.

  “No, she was nice,” I told Jolene.

  “She was?”

  “Yup.”

  “Really?” She sounded disappointed.

  I could hear them talking at the end of the hall by the stairs. I untwisted the phone cord and stretched it to the doorway, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  “What did she want to talk to you about?” she asked again.

  I remembered that Barbara, Courtney and Polly all thought I knew Jet Jones. I walked back inside the kitchen, holding on to the phone cord.

  “Did I ever tell you that I know Jet Jones?” I said.

  “No, because you don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t, May.”

  “Yes, I do, Jolene.”

  “If you do, why haven’t you ever told me before? When did you meet him?”

  “In London. He’s my friend’s brother.” I couldn’t tell her the friend was Patricia, because she knew I had just met her.

  “You’re mad,” Jolene said, laughing.

  “I have to do my French lessons. The writer man said he would help me. He knows lots of languages.” I was getting worried that Rufus would go downstairs and never come up again.

  “All right then, see you tomorrow.” She sounded upset. I had never got off the phone to do homework before.

  I walked down the hallway to the stairs where I’d heard Rufus call my mother’s name, but they weren’t there. I looked in the sitting room, then my mother’s bedroom, but they were both empty.

  I went to my room and took the French book out of my satchel. I put it carefully on my desk. I took off my shoes by stepping on the heel, something my mother always said not to do. I sat down at my desk and opened the book, a big hardback that explained all the grammar. We were on page fifty. I read it but didn’t understand. I reread it but nothing stayed with me. The cahier in which we have to translate sentences, put things in the past tense, and use pronouns looked dead in front of me. I had hardly written anything in it all year and didn’t know how to start; I was too far behind. I smashed the pencil point into the open book. It’s hard to change yourself.

  …

  Later, I heard the sound of running water and Eden’s voice. I walked towards the bathroom door; he was telling Mum about what he had done at Jake’s house. His voice was bright, like Christmas lights.

  I opened the door and walked in. Eden was sitting on the toilet with his knickers hanging down around his ankles. His feet didn’t even touch the floor. I thought he might fall into the toilet. He stopped talking when he saw me; then it was just the sound of the running water. My mother sat on the edge of the tub, with her sleeves rolled up. She ran her hand through the water, stirring it, like a pot of porridge. She had done this for me when I was little, mixing the water, making sure it wasn’t too hot or too cold in any one place.

  “I can’t do a poo,” Eden said. He pushed himself up off the toilet and pulled his knickers up.

  I sat down on the edge of the tub. The air was warm and steamy.

  “Did he come up and help you with your French?” she asked me, dragging her hand through the water. She knew he hadn’t. She hadn’t been gone very long.

  “Who?” I said, pretending that I didn’t care about him, that I had already forgotten.

  “Rufus.”

  “No.”

  She turned off the taps. “I’ll help you, after I give Eden his bath.”

  “I don’t need help.” I’d filled in the blanks in the workbook. They were probably wrong, but it would look like I had done something when I sat in the middle desk in the front row tomorrow.

  She put a green dinosaur sponge in the tub. It floated around all alone.

  “Does she look pretty with short hair?”

  What she really meant was, Is he in love with her?

  I nodded and said, “She’s really pretty.”

  “Mum. Mum, I think you’re pretty,” Eden said, stepping into the tub. She smiled at him, the way someone smiles who is half asleep, and it disappears before it’s even a full smile. He stood naked, with one hand on her shoulder and just his feet in the water.

  “I can’t believe she arrived without telling him. I would never do that.” That was the difference between her and Patricia. Some people risk everything. They’ll get dressed up, wait on the doorstep with open arms. “Take me, I’m yours. You can have me entirely,” they say. Other people just turn around, quietly folding their wings across their chest.

  I took off my socks and put my feet in the water.

  “Take them out!” Eden yelled at me.

  “Don’t be silly, she can put her feet in the water,” my mother told him.

  He sat down slowly in the warm bathwater. You could see thin blue veins under his eyes and in his hands and feet. He looked young and new; his heart was still close to his mouth. He said things like “Mum, I think you’re pretty.” He could stand naked in front of her, with his feet in the water and his hand on her shoulder.

  My mother took the white bar of soap and rubbed it into the dinosaur. She moved the sponge in circles around his shoulders and back and neck, then gently behind his little ears.

  There was the sound of car doors closing outside. My mother stood up with the sponge in her hand and walked over to the small window above the sink.

  “I wonder where they’re going,” she said to the window. The sponge dripped down the side of her jeans and onto the floor.

  We heard the motor start and the sound a car makes when it drives away. Eden sat still in the bath, with the soapsuds on his back and neck, looking at her.

  “They’re probably going out for a romantic dinner,” I said, throwing it at her back.

  When she walked over to the bath, she moved slowly, as though she were walking through water. She knelt down next to the tub and squeezed the sponge out. Her arm hung in the water, holding the sponge. She was still; Eden was still. I wiggled my feet and splashed him.

  “Did you make cauliflower and cheese?” I asked.

  “No.” She didn’t look at me. “We bought fish and chips on the way home. They’re in the kitchen.”

  I pulled my feet out of the water and stood on the bath mat. I was hungry.

  “Why do you think that?” my mother asked, as she squeezed the water from the sponge down Eden’s back, rinsing him.

  “What?”

  “That they’re going out for a romantic dinner? They’re probably talking about his work.” Sometimes it was like this with us: darts.

  “Why do you care anyway?” I asked, standing at the door. Eden hadn’t moved; he sat straight up in the tub. The water didn’t even move.

  “I don’t care,” she said. Everything that was curious, everything that was like a girl, like a butterfly in her, fell out. “I wasn’t even talking to you,” she said. “I was just talking to myself.�
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  Then I left and closed the door behind me, and all I could hear was the light sound of the water swaying in the tub.

  Twelve

  I stood outside the girls’ lavatory waiting for Jolene. The lunch bell had just rung and all the girls walked by in twos and threes, shoulder to shoulder, on their way to the dining hall. I was standing there with nothing to do, so I bent down to pull up my socks. Someone shouted my name. “May!”

  When I looked up, Barbara was standing in front of me, smiling.

  “Hi.” I was looking at her frock. It came to the middle of her thigh; mine fell past my knee.

  “Come here,” she said, waving her hand for me to follow. We walked down the hall to the cubbyholes. She stopped in front of hers and took out her red heart-shaped handbag.

  “Here.” She held out a pink envelope. “It’s an overnight.”

  My name was written on it in big squiggly letters—May—and it was underlined.

  “Thanks.” I held it in my hand like a medal.

  “It’s going to be so much fun,” Barbara said, hugging her heart-shaped bag to her stomach.

  I nodded, smiling. She made me nervous because I thought I would have to be fun.

  “We’re going to stay up all night!” she said. I looked down the hall to see if Jolene was coming, but she wasn’t. She took a long time in the loo.

  “What do you want for a present?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She took a lipstick out of the bag. It smelled like pink gum.

  “Barbara, come on!” Courtney shouted from the other end of the hallway. I imagined myself standing with them, the four of us.

  “Polly wants a fag,” Barbara said. They hardly ate lunch, they just hung out in the school yard and smoked cigarettes. She ran down the hall, her skirt flying up behind her; I could see the tops of her legs and her white knickers. Suddenly, she stopped and ran back towards me.

  “I know! I know what I want,” she said, catching her breath. “I want a photo of Jet.” Then she spun around and ran down the hallway to where Courtney and Polly stood waiting with their hands on their hips.

  I stood there, clutching the envelope in my hand. She wanted a picture of Jet.