by Amy Beashel
If I’d put it like this to Grace, I swear she’d have been rolling her eyes, like, you just don’t get it, do you, Izzy?, and citing it as an example of Max’s patriarchal power. But it was more gentle than that, more of a question, and not even a piss-take when I had to explain it wasn’t Radio 1 or Spotify but this show, Desert Island Discs, that basically sums up my childhood with Mum.
‘It’s a radio programme,’ I said to Max. ‘On Radio 4.’
‘Radio 4! Isn’t that for old people?!’
‘Not always!’
And I reached for the earphones, but Max was all ‘I’m kidding, Izzy!’ and totally ‘Go on then, tell me more…’
‘It’s simple really. Each guest imagines they’re cast away to an island and has to choose the music they’d take with them.’ Funny, isn’t it, how easily the words came when it was just the two of us. ‘Eight songs. Possibly the only music they’ll have for the rest of their lives!’
‘Cool.’
And I couldn’t tell if Max was serious, but: ‘It is!’ I was practically gushing. ‘Cool, I mean.’ Though really it’s so much more.
I’ve been listening to them all again, those Desert Island Discs. On my own this time around, although sometimes, but not so much recently, if Daniel’s out I’ll give Mum an earphone, and while it’s not the green chair the two of us would squish into when I was a kid – that didn’t go with Daniel’s leather sofas apparently – the shared wires bring us close enough for me to feel her shoulders drop and her breaths deepen, for me to believe she’s also remembering how Desert Island Discs was once our thing.
Because it was definitely a thing. We’d kick off Sundays listening to pop music in a super deep bath. She’d let me wash her hair, stick a flannel to her face and make shampoo potions, which I’d rub into the purplish lines on her tummy, and we’d marvel at my wizard genius as, over time, they faded silver. When the water was cold and we were wrinkled, we’d get dressed, and I’d curl into Mum’s lap in that charity-shop green chair she bartered down to seven pounds fifty-five after we first moved out of Great-grandma’s place. And she’d stretch to switch from Radio 1 to Radio 4, ready to welcome guest after guest on to this island we’d made perfect for two.
And my mates reckon it’s a bit weird cos, I know, right, Desert Island Discs isn’t exactly Teletubbies or Postman Pat. And, to be clear, I did watch those things too. But Sundays were special. ‘Incredible’, Mum would say sometimes when the castaway had chosen their eight tracks, their luxury and their book, struggling occasionally to decide which one record they’d save if their collection was at risk of being lost to the sea, ‘what some people do with their lives…’ She’d hold me for some time after. ‘What they overcome.’
And last Friday, Max’s smile when I did hit play – it was curious, none of that sneering they’re so full of in the canteen. And it felt kind of nice, kind of all right, to be with Max Dale when Grace was so obviously caught up in Nell.
‘’S cool.’ He nodded, like, honestly, Iz, I’m not taking the piss, returning the earphone when the castaway’s track ended.
Jacob was hurling ‘oi oi’s from across the street by then, sniffing and waving his fingers, and it was clear the moment was done.
‘Later!’ Max was away, over the road, shrugging off whatever Jacob was saying, with one last look back at me before they were gone.
‘Quite sweet?’ Grace says now. ‘This flake is sweet, Iz.’ She licks at the 99. ‘Max Dale is not sweet. He might not be as gross as Jacob, but he’s best mates with the guy, and that’s got to say something.’
‘I’m best mates with you. I hope people don’t judge me for that!’
I take a swipe at her ice cream, but she’s too quick.
‘Should have got your own,’ she says. Then, like always, she says, ‘Have a bit if you want.’ But I’m on this food plan my stepdad Daniel’s cooked up for my mum and me. ‘Suit yourse— Oh, hold it a mo, would you?’ And the Mr Whippy’s practically in my face as she starts digging for her ringing phone in her bag. ‘Babe,’ she says, as the cold slips down my throat and into my belly. ‘Sure,’ she says, ‘about ten minutes, yeah?’
And the cold mixes with the sad cos it’s clear I’m about to be abandoned. It’s practically a habit now, how Grace leaves me for Nell. Even the chocolate’s no consolation.
‘You don’t mind, do you, Iz?’
Of course I shake my head, no, I don’t mind, because as much as I hate that face Grace has whenever she hears from her girlfriend – that wide-eyed look of the Beast in the animated version when he meets Beauty on the stairs for a dance, sporting a suit and that crazy big can’t-believe-his-luck kind of grin – it offers me hope, too. Hope, I guess, that for all the crappy places it can take you, it’s also possible love will lead you to that top-step moment when anything seems possible, when the Beast changes from a monster and a happily ever after doesn’t seem so much of a fairy-tale trick after all.
‘Go! Have fun.’ I mean it too.
Just like I mean the smile as she skips off and mean it still as Max Dale appears from behind a beach hut, asking in that not-so-swagger kind of voice if I fancy meeting up later. Grinning, totally friendly, totally cool, he says, ‘Thought maybe you’ve got some more old-people radio shows you wanna share?’
FOUR
‘Who was he?’ Daniel’s voice is a can of Coke – I know the rising bubbles are in there but can’t be sure how fierce they’ll be until he opens the can. It’s always tricky to tell how much he’s been shaken.
‘Who do you mea—’
But my stepdad’s speaking over me, already on his next lot of questions, asking if ‘that boy’ goes to my college and where did we head to looking so close and so conspiratorial.
‘Imagine my surprise,’ he says, stirring milk into the tea he’s making for me, taking the sugar from the cupboard but with a quick glance at my belly, an almost undetectable shake of his head, putting it back without adding any, and then arranging three cookies on a plate and leaving them on the end of the breakfast bar, just within arm’s reach. ‘I wasn’t sure if it was you at first. I didn’t think you were the kind of girl to be out with a boy on your own.’
He takes a biscuit, delicate bites, elongated chews, eyes on me while my gaze flits from him to the plate, where a chocolate chip has come loose.
It’s just a chocolate chip. But it’s not, not really. It’s willpower. Or, on Daniel’s part, just power, full stop.
Daniel’s behind me then, his breath in my ear. ‘There’s certainly no mistaking you from behind though, is there, Isabel,’ he says, the smile in his voice as cool as his hand on my back, that flesh between my T-shirt and jeans. Two of his fingertips press and pull on my skin until Mum appears, and he sweeps his palm away, like it was never there, to her waist, easing her from the two remaining cookies. ‘Nah-ah-ah! Not on the food plan, remember!’ And he slides the plate along the work surface straight past me and across to the other side, scooting around to catch it before it falls. ‘Save!’
I don’t know if it’s the actor in him, but Daniel’s always saving things: biscuits, the day, us. I swear he’s waiting for a part as a knight just so he can come home in the shining armour. As if looking like George Clooney isn’t enough. He’d opt for the white horse too, come charging in like he always does with his facial-ed skin, his massaged cuticles and his dyed grey hair to cast his net across the room, hauling Mum in with those practised lines of his, not the ones from scripts but from the part of Daniel that personally wrote their wedding vows in which he promised to love her fully, endlessly, differently from the way anyone has loved her before.
‘He’s passionate,’ Mum’s said in the past, and my mates would back her up, swooning like they do when he dons the tux with the undone bow tie, suit jacket hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder in what appears to be a casual way but, believe me, I’ve seen him rehearsing it in the mirror before heading off to some party so middle-aged women can have their photo taken with
their arms wrapped around a fake George.
So my stepdad isn’t some horsebacked prince but a look-alike, though he prefers to tell everyone he’s an actor really, the George thing is just for fun, but with Clooney being so popular, ‘and so handsome’, Daniel jokes in that way that manages to be self-deprecating even though he’s basically saying he’s, like, really hot, the celebrity-double work just keeps on coming so ‘it’d be foolish to say no’. Daniel is anything but foolish.
‘Come on then, Isabel, spill the beans.’ He winks at Mum. ‘I believe our little minx here may have bagged her first boyfriend.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
‘The lady doth protest too much.’ Crumbs from the second cookie spill from between his teeth.
‘He’s just a friend.’
Grace would kill me for even calling Max that. For even walking those few minutes with Max and shrugging my shoulders, like, yeah, when he asked if I was free later.
‘All I’m saying is I hope you don’t do anything you shouldn’t with your friend.’
What I want most is to snap Daniel’s fingers in half as he makes those air quotes around ‘friend’, but I don’t, obviously, cos if Mum’s anything to go by, the best thing to do is just ignore the fact that Daniel’s being a complete and utter dick and just sit there staring at that one last cookie like it might actually be the answer to your woes.
As if.
She won’t even look at me. Picks at her bitten nails instead, pushing them into her hairline, where the red, which looked so electric in those photos she’d begged her grandmother to take of the two of us when I was a baby, is now muted by thicker, wirier stands of grey.
‘You wouldn’t want to end up like Vicky Pollard here, would you?’ He nudges Mum with his elbow.
My face must be, like, I don’t get it.
‘Teenage mum,’ Daniel says. ‘What a slaaaaaaaaaag.’ His voice has echoes of a TV-show insult – a comedy, right. A joke? But Mum had enough of that at the time, I reckon.
I get it at college too. Boys spitting the word out in fake coughs as I walk down the corridor. The girls don’t bother with names, but their quick-up-and-down-on-me eyes are as lethal as slurs, and then there are their giggles behind hands, which have probably been in way worse places than mine are rumoured to have gone at that party.
Ugh, that party. Too much vodka and not enough dinner or Grace, and I couldn’t stop Jacob Mansfield doing whatever he did in that bathroom. The rest would have been a blur if it weren’t for the picture he took of me slumped into the wall, my up-for-it dress ridden over my thighs, legs slightly apart and mouth dropped open like he’d literally only just pulled out his tongue. Three fingers or four, he scrawled in red across my body in the photo, sending it to his mates, who sent it to their mates, who sent it to their mates, cos obviously it was, like, the funniest thing ever.
You know, someone once said how the things that aren’t great at the time are the things that will eventually become your best stories to tell in the pub. Dark humour maybe. So perhaps there’s hope, right, that, one day, I will tell the tale of Jacob Mansfield and his fingers out loud and it won’t feel like fire in my bones.
Today’s not forever, right? Things can change.
‘I’m just teasing, Isabel.’ Daniel’s voice is a don’t-be-ababy-now kind of chiding. ‘Joking aside, you should be careful though. Shouldn’t she, Stephanie?’
Mum looks at him, like, whatever you say, Daniel.
‘You want to save yourself for someone special,’ he says, not for the first time but for the first time in front of my mum. ‘Not like your mother here, sleeping with any Tom, Dick or Harry when she was sixteen.’
I swear her face doesn’t even flicker. My heart, on the other hand – my heart is raging. Because they may have been young, but Mum’s promised me my dad was special. She doesn’t say this now though, does she? Just sits there as Daniel takes his time chewing that last bloody cookie.
‘Oops, sorry,’ he says, hand over his mouth in Oscar-worthy shock at his greed. ‘I didn’t even offer you one. Probably for the best though, eh.’ Mum’s as blank as ever when he pinches her bum. ‘We all know what you ladies are like: a moment on the lips, forever on the hips. I’ll make us something healthy for dinner while you do your homework, shall I?’
Only I don’t do my homework. What I do is sit with my Jar of Sunshine, taking off its lid, removing the yellow beads my real dad gave me and rolling them between my fingers before tucking them back inside along with these whispers about how special he was. How different he was. How much I wish he was here.
And then I think about calling Grace. And then I sit and think about Grace with Nell. And then I sit and think about Grace with Nell and me with nobody, until my phone beeps with a message from Max Dale saying he meant what he said earlier, about meeting up, and, sure, Grace says a nobody is better than a somebody if the somebody isn’t the right body, but she’s not the one sitting on her own, desperate to avoid dinner and its inevitable scene.
Sure, I say to Max, a small part of my big body wondering if there’s some trick in his offer.
This isn’t a joke, is it? I ask him.
And he’s straight back with a No, promise.
So, before I have time to doubt the decision, I put my Jar of Sunshine back on the shelf, and I go.
FIVE
‘I’ve been working on the music I’d take,’ Max says.
I must look at him like, huh?
‘To my island, Izzy! It’s hard, man. To narrow it down to eight. Didn’t you say they can take a book too?’
‘Yeah’ is all I can manage. I want to be funny. I want to be cool. Basically, I want to be Grace.
‘Go on then.’ Max nudges me with his knee as he hands me a Freddo with one hand and picks up a pebble with the other. ‘What would yours be?’
And I wonder about that feelings book mum bought me, about taking the happiness Daniel cut out of it and sticking it back in, because maybe with that and the desert-island isolation I’d have a chance of finally putting all my screwed-up feelings straight. But no way I’m admitting that to Max, obviously, so: ‘I dunno. Carol Ann Duffy?’
‘Carol Ann Duffy?’ Max’s voice is all are you sure?, and I’m convinced he’ll do a Jacob and call her a dyke, but: ‘You mean the poet?’
‘Yeah, we read her in English Lit.’
‘I know.’
Of course he does – he was there, wasn’t he? Slouched beside Jacob, who was sly-winking: ‘That Duffy, she’s one of your lot, isn’t she, Grace? Go for her, would you? I mean, you like a white one, don’t you? Saw you at that party and you was well into that bird. Whatsherface? Nell, isn’t it?’ And it was all kinds of spineless, but I couldn’t deny the relief that for once they were talking about that party and hadn’t yet mentioned Jacob’s fingers or me. ‘Don’t your mum and dad mind their little black princess going out with a white girl?’
‘White girl, black girl…so long as it’s not a little nob like you, Jacob, they don’t really care.’
She always has the answer, does Grace.
‘“Anon”, that’s one of Duffy’s poems, right?’
And I don’t know what to say now, because Max Dale talking about poetry is as much of a shock as Max Dale inviting me out, as Max Dale not laughing, like, fooled you, when I met him by Tesco Express, half expecting Jacob to appear from behind the bins to take another photo of just what an idiot I am for actually believing Max Dale might want to spend time with me. But the thing is, he does. Want to spend some time with me, I mean, cos he was all smiles and ‘All right, Izzy’, totally shy even as he suggested we go to the beach.
And now, with his Freddos and his pebbles, he looks at me like, come on then, you’re the one who kicked this game off.
‘Yeah, I like that one, “Anon”. Depressing though.’
Max looks at me like, how come?
‘Women not having a voice and all that.’
‘Different these days though, innit?
’ Max says. ‘Look at Grace. No one can say she hasn’t got a voice.’ And his voice? He tries to make it as cool as his Coke but, like the can in the evening sunshine, it can’t quite stay chilled. ‘Speaking of Grace –’ he plonks the whole bag of Freddos in my lap – ‘I know she’s got a girlfriend, Izzy, but do you reckon that it might just be, you know, a phase?’
And thank god for Max’s nerves because all those jitters with his fingers and the pebbles and the looking at me, like, don’t tell her I’ve said this – yeah, it all adds up to him not picking up on my disappointment.
‘You like Grace?’ I ask him, and he nods, shy but not quite defeated.
‘Yeah. Well, sort of.’ He just about dares to look up. ‘And I get she’s gay, but Jacob reckons all girls come round in the end.’
And I might not say anything, but the rolling eyes must convey exactly what I think of Jacob’s theory because Max shakes his head, like, all right, point taken.
‘Did it look like a phase when you saw her at that party with her girlfriend?’
‘S’pose,’ he says. ‘I’m surprised you can even remember.’
Honestly, I’d rather he swooned over Grace than we talk about that.
‘You were gone, Izzy.’
‘No more than you or Jacob or any of your other mates.’
‘Isn’t the same for us though, is it?’
And I wonder how much Max would like Grace if she were here now, laying into him for that.
‘You fancy getting something to eat?’ he says.
‘Haven’t we already?’ I hold up the Freddos in my lap, like, what more could we possibly need?
Max is all fair point, when there are these shouts from up by the huts.
‘Eh, eh, what’s going on here then, Maxy? Getting yourself a bit of Izzy action, are you?’
Jacob’s not looking at his mate though. His eyes are on me.
