by Glass, Lisa
I ate so much I felt sick and I thought of how upset the models would be if they had to eat a plate of food like I just had. Up at the camp I had listened to the way they talked and it was scary. They went on and on about fat grams and calories and how eating greasy foods would make your veins run white and milky with lard. One of them had been paid to do a clinical trial and she said the nurses told her that about the blood. That the nurses always knew when people had sneaked in fatty food, because it showed up in their samples. Horrible thought. I looked at my stomach from the side in the mirror and could see it sticking out. Even though I was years younger than those models, I bet I weighed more than any of them. But I was not to compare myself to them. That was one of the rules of me working there. My mum had made me promise. But it was difficult. Them girls had bones where I didn’t even know you had bones. Jutting things coming out of their collars and the tops of their jeans. ‘Biafrans’, my dad said, and when my mum wasn’t shocked enough by that, he added, ‘Like they been on a holiday to Auschwitz’.
I jumped up from my seat.
‘I’m going for a run,’ I said.
‘Now?’ my mum said.
‘Good on you, girl,’ my dad said.
It wasn’t too bad. It was a nice feeling of freedom to run as fast as I could along the cliff path, the dark sea beneath me stretching west all the way to America. All the heaviness left me and for a moment I felt like I could run forever. The sun had already set, but there was still enough light for me to make out a good three feet of surf and a fierce offshore breeze blowing the white of the breaking waves back out to sea, like sparks. It was beautiful. I reached the path that led to the beach and kept on running, sweat pouring off me.
I ran along the beach until I reached the cave that everyone called “The Witch’s Cauldron”, and then I stopped to catch a breath. My eyes scanned the water, looking out of habit for seals or dolphins, or maybe even the tail of a humpback whale. All them things had been seen in our bay, usually at dusk. Small wisps of fog were starting to drift ashore and as a patch cleared, I saw two heads in the water. Two boards. Night surfers.
I walked nearer the water to see them better. Though her short dark hair was plastered against her head, when she caught a wave and stood up on her board I could see that it was Vega. Nobody else was that tall, that thin. Next to her, dropping in on her wave like he’d told me you wasn’t ever supposed to do, was the person I’d thought about pretty much every day since I was a kid. I watched his board turn towards her until he was surfing right next to her, close enough that they could collide with one wrong move. She grinned and without even looking at him, she put out her right hand and pushed him off his board. He wiped-out spectacularly, diving into the water head first. A few seconds later he reappeared, laughing as he used his ankle leash to reel in his board.
The sound of him laughing with her was the most painful thing I’d ever heard. Han. Surfing with Vega. Not teaching her. Surfing as equals. Watching those two surf – them making it look all easy and graceful – and seeing how much fun they were having, I knew they were in a club that excluded me. Worse still, they looked so right together. I’d always thought Han and me were meant to be together, but maybe I was wrong. That thought made me so upset that before I knew what I was doing I was knee-deep in freezing water.
Han saw me and the laugh vanished from his face. Vega closed her eyes and said something I couldn’t hear.
‘What was the point of all this?’ I shouted, still wading out towards them, the water past my waist. ‘Why did you even bother stringing me along if you wanted to be with her?’
Han started paddling towards me but Vega just sat on her board, watching.
‘And you!’ I said, looking at her. ‘Pretending to be all pally and paying me to fan your perfect Size Zero body, like I’m your bloody servant or something. Who do you think you are?’
By then I was so cold that my teeth had started chattering and I could hardly get out my words. Vega just shook her head and looked sort of sad.
It wasn’t just that they were having some sort of relationship, it was that they were deliberately trying to do it behind my back. Going for a cosy surf together after sunset, way up the beach where they thought I wouldn’t see them. It made me sick.
‘You can’t keep doing this, Jenny,’ Han said. ‘I told you. She’s just a friend.’
‘Oh yeah, course she is.’
‘Shit,’ Vega said. ‘Rip.’
Her board started sucking her out to sea. She was moving really fast.
‘Good,’ I shouted. ‘I hope you drown!’
I’d really lost it. I knew it, even as I was saying them nasty things, but it was like the voice wasn’t even coming from me. I couldn’t stop myself.
‘I’d better help her,’ Han said. ‘Wait for me on the beach, okay?’
But I didn’t wait. Soaking wet I ran the way I’d come and I didn’t stop until I was panting outside Sunny Daze.
By the time I’d had a hot shower and two cups of sweet tea, I was less jittery but I still felt really cold inside. When I looked out my bedroom window that night, the fog was properly on us and was drifting by in a way that reminded me of a hideous eighties film where a spooky sea fog comes in over this small American town and all these sailor ghosts come out of it and start killing the locals. I thought about Han and Vega, out there together in a rip with the fog coming in, and whether they were okay, but I knew Han would’ve rescued Vega. He was strong, and knew all the right things to do in that situation. Surfing with Han was like surfing with a lifeguard.
The next day I overslept but when I checked the window, I saw that though it was past ten o’clock, the sun had still not burned away the fog. It was dank and cold, so I put on my winter hoodie, which seemed bizarre in the height of summer.
My mum said, ‘Well, Jen, you won’t need to worry about snakes in this here fog. Far too nippy for the buggers. They’ll be underground keeping their scaly bodies warm as they can.’
My dad came into the kitchen and told us that the Local News reported that a tourist family’s sailing boat had crashed in the fog onto the rocks by Godrevy Lighthouse. Apparently they’d all been wearing lifejackets and everyone was saved, except the family Jack Russell which nobody had seen hide nor hair of, but who I reckoned had swum to the island.
‘Stupid tourists, sailing in fog,’ I said, and my parents agreed.
I had missed the breakfast fry-up, but my mum made me take two pieces of toast that I could eat on the walk to the camp. I ate one and gave the other bit to the crows, which were pulling up the turf and making pits in Timothy’s nice grass.
The chilly grey walk through the dunes was not pleasant, and I spotted four dying myxie rabbits, which didn’t put me in the best of moods.
When I arrived at the camp, I was nearly run over by a police car which came roaring out of a patch of fog and screeched to a halt in front of me. A police officer jumped out and I noticed two other panda cars parked over by the canteen tent. Morgana came rushing out of a tent with a string of assistants behind her, and a copper behind them.
She said something like, ‘What do you think we’re doing here? We aren’t here for a run in the sand. We’re here to make a first rate television programme!’
Then it got really noisy, police car after police car zoomed up the sea road with their sirens howling and soon we was surrounded.
I tried to brush past the copper to get to Vega’s tent. When he barred my way, I explained I was her sort of assistant, helping her out with odd jobs, like fanning her nude body while she was having a massage and such. He raised an eyebrow at that and seemed like he wanted to say something cheeky, but actually he only said:
‘No work for you here. Not today.’
‘What’s happened?’ I said, but deep down I already knew, so that when they told me, all I could do was nod. I stood there, not knowing what to
say, until one of them said to me. ‘Go home, maid. Lock your doors and windows. And stay home.’
Chapter 21In Luke Gilbert’s back garden there had always been a cherry tree. It flowered pink and frothy in the spring and it came up with blood-red fruit in the summer. Rumour had it that Luke’s dad had planted it on the day that Luke was born, so that it would grow year by year as Luke grew. A tree twin, or some hippie idea like that. Luke’s mum – who people whispered was a Jehovah’s Witness before her husband talked her out of it – chatted to that tree from the kitchen window and even named it Lenny. Explained where Luke got his strangeness from.
The story went that one year when Luke was a teenager, a girl from his school snuck into the garden to scrump some cherries. That was what she said, but maybe she had been there to find Luke. Maybe she had a crush on him or something. Stranger things have happened. But Luke was out camping in the dunes and doing other loser things for his Venture Scout badges.
Luke’s dad, Old Mr Gilbert, said course the girl could help herself to the low-hanging fruit but before she did that, he invited her to come inside the house to help herself to the contents of his drinks cabinet. Old Mrs Gilbert was out of the way, helping her sister recover from a fall and a broken leg, so the coast was clear. The girl – Janine was her name – must not have cared that she was in a weird situation, getting drunk with an old perv. After a couple of hours she had to get back home. The old man said she was alright to fill up a bag so her mum could make a cherry pie. Being drunk and thick and naturally greedy she said okay, and as she was reaching up to that tree, the dirty old man put his hand up her skirt. She’d only been wearing one of those thongs because she said she felt his old wrinkly hand on her actual bum. Drunk as she was on port and gin and other biddy drinks, she was caught off balance and she fell to the ground and hit her head on a freshly painted gnome, knocking herself right out and getting its blue hat paint up her nose. When she came around, the old man had done a runner and she couldn’t say what he might have done to her while she was unconscious, though one of her bra-straps hung loose, so at the very least he’d copped a feel.
So that’s how Luke’s father got on the Sex Offender Register. He wasn’t on it for long, mind. After he was arrested and bailed, he came home, apologised to his wife on a Post-It, then strung himself up with his dressing gown cord and hanged himself from that tree. Luke was the one that found him hanging, puke down his front and swinging in the sea wind. Luke must have been really cut up about it because people said he went really quiet after that; quieter even than before.
Luke’s dad was buried in the graveyard by Han’s granny’s house. They gave him a headstone that said a lot of nice and totally uncalled for things about the old perv, but in front of that headstone lying on the grass was another thing, an engraved pebble-shaped rock that Luke’s mum had cemented there. The words on it said, “An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.” I never knew what that meant when I was younger, and it creeped me out because I thought it might have been something to do with vampires, which I suppose it was – families being another kind of bloodsucker.
The dirty old man dying wasn’t the end of Luke’s sadness though. Not long after, Luke was woken up by a noise in the garden. He followed the extension cord down the garden path and found his mum out there with an electric hedge trimmer trying to hack down that nice cherry tree. Luke ran out in his underpants and tried to stop her doing it, because he knew she had once loved that tree, and it was planted the day Luke was born so he must’ve felt sweet on it himself, but Luke’s mum had gone demented and she blamed a tree for what her sicko deviant of a husband had done. The only thing that made her drop the hedge trimmer was the cardiac arrest that all that hacking brought on. So that was the end of Luke’s mum. Not even eighteen and Luke Gilbert was an orphan.
Luke inherited the house and the garden but he never cut down that tree. It had a wound in its side but it didn’t die. Instead it got taller and stragglier until the fruits it came out with was small and bitter. Luke could’ve pruned it but he didn’t. He let it grow wild and ugly. And he let himself do that too.
I knew all of this because the spring when all the badness here started, me and Mr Hitchcock had been walking Lizzie across the beach, and we saw Luke climbing the crumbling stacks of rock near Gwithian. ‘A proper suicide mission, that is,’ I said to Mr Hitchcock.
‘Be careful what you joke about,’ he said to me, before telling me Luke’s folks’ story. He didn’t want to, but I wheedled it out of him. I couldn’t believe it, because my parents had never told me a thing; when I went home and asked them why, they said it was better to leave things like that in the past.
‘Do you think he’s having some sort of breakdown?’ I said, as we watched him slip about six feet straight down the rocks and very nearly lose both his grip and life.
‘I hope not,’ Mr Hitchcock said, ‘But you can never tell.’
‘Think he’s dangerous?’ I said.
‘Even without weapons we’ve all of us got teeth and hands. People are dangerous; every one of them. Even you. Even me.’
‘But do you think Luke’s like his dad was?’
‘I couldn’t say, but to be on the safe side, how about you give him a wide berth, just until we know which way the tide is turning?’
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘I ain’t scared of anyone.’
Chapter 22I tried not to think about anything as I walked home. The fog had finally lifted and the sun was blazing hot and the sky pure blue. But it was like that vanished fog had somehow worked its way into my mind. It was so mixed up; the models, the blokes I knew – all tangled together in ways I didn’t understand. Had Vega drowned last night? But then what about the other girls who were missing? What had happened to them? Had they arranged to meet Vega and Han down the beach that night and all got into trouble – a freak wave or something – or had the whole lot of them been attacked by someone else, an organised group of kidnappers targeting the TV show for a big ransom? Was Han safe? I felt weak just trying to wrap my head around it.
I was skirting around Han’s granny’s house when I saw Han come flying out of the front door, pulling on his basketball boots and not even bothering to lace them up.
The relief hit me so hard that I couldn’t speak for a second, but eventually I went with, ‘You’ll break your neck,’ I said, pointing to his luminous yellow laces.
‘Jenny, I can’t talk to you now.’
‘Where are you going in such a big hurry?’
‘Nowhere.’
I looked at him sharply. He looked about eight-years-old, his face was so pale and worried. He was still trying to hide things from me. Even after everything that had happened.
‘You’re such a liar,’ I said.
He stopped and started knotting his boots, just so I couldn’t see his face, I betted.
‘Did you get Vega out of that rip current?’
‘Course. We tried to catch up with you but you didn’t wait.’
‘Why would I?’
‘Cos I asked you to? But that don’t matter now. You shouldn’t be out on your own today, Jen.’
‘Don’t worry about me. If I can walk through Hell Fog, I can walk through this.’
‘Where’s your folks?’
‘Home.’
‘Jen, you’re not safe out here.’
‘Like you care.’
‘Right, I’m walking you to Sunny Daze but then I’ve gotta bounce, okay?’
‘Listen to you. Sound like a Cockney sparrow.’
‘Just COME ON.’
He grabbed my hand and started pulling me in the direction of Sunny Daze. I twisted and tried to push him away but he turned and suddenly I found myself on my back with him on top of me holding my arms down. I suppose I must have been trying to hit him.
I was surprised at how strong and heavy he was. To look at his slim surfer�
��s body you wouldn’t have thought he’d have been much stronger than me. He was though; a lot.
‘Calm down,’ he was saying. ‘I just want to walk you home.’
His faded green hair had fallen onto his face but through it I could see his nice eyes and I saw that they were frightened. I was about to say something when a movement to my side caught my attention; a female adder slithering across a patch of sand not two inches from my hand.
‘Jesus!’ I shouted and a burst of my adrenaline helped shift Han off me. He sat to one side of me, looking dazed. He rubbed his sleeve across his eyes and for about one second I felt sorry for him.
‘Alright, alright. You can walk me home,’ I said.
He got up and held his hand out for me. When I got to my feet, he grabbed me and hugged me to his chest, and then he released me and went silent again.
As we walked through the dunes I saw him looking this way and that way, like some duckling that thought it was being stalked by a seagull. If there were kidnappers or psycho murderers around, I supposed they could have been watching me and Han.
I considered mentioning what I knew had happened up at the camp but Han was obviously in the picture, judging by his bootlaces and his eyes, and I didn’t need to see any more emotions go over his face proving to me how much he liked another girl.
We made it back to my place in record time without either of us speaking another word. At my front door he leaned in towards me, but I faced away and looked at a spot on my wrist, which was already looking like it was going to bruise. I touched the mark and he took it and kissed it gently. ‘I hurt you,’ he said.
‘Not exactly the first time,’ I said under my breath, hoping he’d get my drift.
He shifted from foot to foot impatiently.
‘Need the loo?’ I said, not wanting to be so sarky but not being able to help it.
