The Sky is Mine

by Amy Beashel

  ‘Loosened you up a bit, didn’t I, Fingers?’

  Despite our silence, he keeps going.

  ‘You need to drop her back at KFC, Max. Recycle her bucket.’

  My big toe finds a small patch of sand among the pebbles, digs in.

  ‘You at football in the morning?’ Max asks.

  I see what Max is doing, but changing the subject doesn’t stop the burn in my face, that churn in the pit of my belly.

  ‘Yeah, mate.’

  The two of them drift up the path in a rush of banter and brawn, and I wonder how long it’ll last, this easy chat about my vagina. It’s not like either of them is calling it that but, let’s face it, that’s what it comes down to. What I boil down to. For them.

  ‘Sorry ’bout Jacob,’ Max says when he comes back, snatching the last Freddo from my palm. ‘He’s all right really. He’s only trying to be funny.’

  And I’d love to believe him but…‘Is it though?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is it funny?’

  You’d think from his silence that I’d asked Max the square root of 3.8 billion.

  ‘What Jacob says, I mean. What he does. Is it actually funny?’

  And I’m not usually one for confrontation. I mean, there’s no way I’d speak with Jacob like this, but Max isn’t Jacob. It’s not that I know what Max is exactly, but he’s not that.

  ‘Like the other day, when he was banging on about the fingers thing for, like, the millionth time, you know, when he said he knows how much I liked his sweet stuff.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, with the Curly Wurly.’ And maybe it is actually funny, because then Max is kind of laughing when he remembers how Jacob unwrapped the long chocolate bar, poking it up inside my T-shirt, prodding my boobs with it, playing to the crowd, asking if anyone fancied fetching the crumbs. ‘It’s not like he actually touched you though, Izzy.’

  And yeah, there were no fingers that time, I guess.

  ‘Shall we then?’

  My eyebrows must be, like, what?

  ‘Get something to eat?’ Max says, smiling as if ‘it’s not like he actually touched you’ will have undone all the shame that comes with Jacob’s ‘jokes’.

  ‘Sure,’ I tell him. Cos it’s not like it’s his fault Jacob’s a complete bellend. And, more importantly, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do, what with Grace otherwise engaged and my stepdad on the prowl at home.

  So we start walking up to McDonald’s and Max turns to me, totally serious, and tells me, ‘Your old-person programme’s not so bad, you know.’

  ‘My old-person programme? I hope you’re not demeaning the iconic brilliance that is Desert Island Discs?’

  ‘Not demeaning it at all actually. I quite liked it.’

  ‘You listened to it?’

  ‘Yep. Some comedian. He only went and admitted he was a virgin until he was twenty-six! Twenty-six!’ Max repeats, with a quick look over his shoulder to check no one but me is listening. ‘No way I’m waiting that long.’

  ‘So you’re…’

  ‘Yeah.’ His voice is a finger to his mouth, like, don’t say anything though.

  ‘The way you and Jacob and that lot bang on…’

  ‘Just bants though, innit.’

  Yeah, right, isn’t it always? But I don’t say that, obviously, because I’m not Grace, am I? Never will be.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, when we’re done with the Happy Meal and back outside in the late-evening sun. Max looks at me, like, what for?

  ‘About Grace.’

  ‘Whatever.’ And if Max’s voice were a pair of glasses, they’d be rose-tinted to match his not-totally-given-up-yet grin.

  ‘Max.’

  He turns around when I call him back.

  ‘You reckon you could have a word with Jacob? See if he’ll ease up on all that finger stuff?’

  ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘but you do know it’s just ban—’

  I put my earphones in as hard as they’ll possibly go so I don’t have to hear any more.

  SIX

  ‘You smell like fast food.’

  I should have thought of the stink of it. Of Daniel’s hound-like nose and his face when he spots that I’ve strayed from his plan to save my arse from its meteoric proportions. His words, not mine.

  ‘Like mother like daughter,’ he says, and he’s all smiles, right, but the shake of his head’s a different story – the one that ends with him pointing at those pictures of models he’s pinned to the fridge as ‘thinspiration’ and me looking at my thighs in the mirror wondering how all those other girls do it. Fall out of hate with their bodies, I mean.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ Mum whispers when Daniel leaves the kitchen, but her voice is too much like tissue paper to wrap me up in anything that feels like safety or strength or truth. I wish she’d say it when he was here. So the all-rightness of my fat doesn’t come across as an afterthought or some secret she’s so obviously ashamed of.

  ‘That your boyfriend?’ Daniel calls from the other room when my phone beeps with a message, and he laughs this laugh that’s totally not funny, but Mum still gives me this look, like, well? Like she actually believes Daniel might be on to something. But even if Max were my boyfriend, which obviously he isn’t, it’s not him cos the number’s a new one, the words ‘photo’ and ‘frigid’ flashing on my screen like the red man, like do not cross, but sometimes something pushes you into the oncoming traffic and you go.

  ‘Isabel!’ But Daniel’s fuss about my elephant gallop up the stairs is the least of my worries because the mystery sender’s got to be Jacob and his words are a ten-tonne truck.

  I have another photo. Shows your not so frigid side. Meet me to work something out.

  Jacob?

  You recognised me. Nice.

  What photo?

  For me to know and you to avoid. My house. Tonight. ASAP. Or Fingers XL goes viral.

  Shit. Like, proper shit. Like heart-in-the-mouth, I-coulddie-here shit. And maybe Max was right when he said I was gone at that party. Because my body may have been there, but that bit of my brain that should have stored whatever it was that happened with Jacob was too drenched in vodka to make any pictures of its own. To make any memories that might have given me some kind of clue what Jacob has on me. What Jacob did to me. When I was gone.

  Think of the desert island, Izzy.

  Because sometimes it helps, right? To imagine there is nothing but me and the sand and the sea. To think what happens to me in my world is my own doing, to think I can choose my narrative as easily as I can choose my songs. All fine in theory, but what if I can’t? What if some dickhead from my college takes my narrative and slaps photos over it, the way Grace and I used to cover our notebooks in Years Seven and Eight, when it was still OK to stick photos of Harry Styles on everything, a way of making the workbook more enticing. Only Jacob’s photos are gonna make everything so much worse. What happens then? When I’m trapped in the story of the Finger Slag and someone else is dictating my ending?

  ‘Mum and Dad’ve gone out.’ Jacob quickly checks the street and I’m not sure if he’s looking for last-minute signs of his parents or for anyone who may have clocked him going in with Izzy Chambers. ‘We have plenty of time,’ he says, and his voice is a know what I mean? and his hands are a guide dog leading me blindly up the staircase and into his room.

  ‘Sorry ’bout the mess.’

  No kidding, cos it’s the kind of shitstorm of clothes and books and crisp packets that’d send Daniel into full-on thunder.

  ‘’S all right,’ I say, even though none of it is – all right, I mean. Not the mess, not the being here, not the rustle in my head that says run, not the weight in my legs that stops me.

  Then Jacob shifts his copy of Men’s Health to make space on the bed and pats the duvet like you’d pat a dog, like all this is sweet really, you know, in spite of what he said just now about this photo he has of me and his fingers and my…well, you get the picture.

  ‘Your face is in it to
o,’ he’d said, like that was such a good thing. ‘You were well up for it.’

  And I’d have asked for the evidence, but his hands were already on my back, telling me exactly what I’d need to do to keep that picture between the two of us.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, Izzy…’ he says now, and there’s this flicker of a moment, as he shifts from the mattress, and I think this was all his idea of a sick trick, and relief floods into me like the Jack Daniel’s rushing from the bottle into Jacob’s glass, ‘if I put something on to get us in the mood, yeah?’

  And the laptop screen’s not big but it’s like IMAX the way it fills the room with its full-on tits and arse, and those two girls to the one guy are nothing, nothing, nothing like me, which is the point, I guess.

  And I should say something, but Jacob’s kisses are harder now and his tongue – it’s like the underside of satsuma peel, furred by the Jack Daniel’s and Coke he’s knocked back with the two bags of Monster Munch since I got here. The empty packets scrunch between the sheet and the skin of my back when he lies me down. And his fingers, probably still coated in Monster dust, claw at my folds as I suggest that, maybe, I’ll go.

  ‘You can’t leave,’ Jacob says, winking as he points to the crotch of his jeans stretched tight like he’s part Hulk and he isn’t to blame for what might happen when it bursts through.

  And I know what they say, a man thinks with his dick, but I’m not sure that’s true, cos his dick doesn’t look like it’s thinking at all. If anything, it looks like it’s up for a fight.

  ‘We had a deal,’ he says.

  And his hands too are bulging, or the veins of them, gripped tight on my shoulders, knuckles as yellow-white as Monsters, scored with fine lines the colour of rare steak the way Daniel has it so it bleeds on to his peas. You’d think Jacob’s fingers would be easier to look at than that bulldozer dick, but this view’s no kinder, his lockjaw-hold making a concertina of my flesh, his smile detached from the clench he has on me and his eyes twinkling as if he’s Santa Claus about to make all my Christmas dreams come true.

  From what Grace told me, sex is like magic. It makes you like that woman who steps into the box and disappears to this other place, where only one other person in the whole entire world knows you’re there. Because they’re the one that sent you.

  I’d disappear if I could, but I can’t.

  ‘I should go,’ I say, but my words are an echo and his room is a cave with its closed curtains and the bedside lamp suddenly switched off by his swift fingers, which somehow turn to fire in the dark, spreading wild across my body so I can no longer tell which bit of him is where because the whole of Jacob is on me, against me, burning itself into me as my echo presses into what might be his chest but could be his shoulder. Whatever piece of him is so close to my mouth, it melts my ability to speak, any words I try to summon seeping into a wet patch of nothing on his shirt.

  ‘You like that, huh?’ Jacob says, cos maybe my damp echo wadded with his collar or his sleeve sounds like pleasure. ‘Izzy Chambers,’ he says, and his voice isn’t mean. It’s just somewhere else, in the film on his computer maybe, with those girls who are all ‘yes’s and groans and loving whatever it is the man does to them.

  I hate him. Him and all those words he’s drawling into boa constrictor shapes around me, and his eyes as heavy a weight upon my chest as his hands.

  ‘Let’s get a picture.’ One of his hands comes away from my hip to snatch his phone. ‘Cheeeeeeeese,’ he says, like his bed is a monument, like we’re tourists, or friends.

  And he’s laughing, but this is no joke. Because here I am now, on Jacob Mansfield’s monument bed, with Jacob Mansfield undoing my flies, fingers digging at my knickers like he’s playing Tetris and flipping shapes to fit them in a hole, those Monster knuckles inflicting tiny punches against my pubic bone, which kind of shrinks back into me, as I tell Jacob Mansfield’s chest or shoulder, ‘Wait.’ Only Jacob Mansfield’s chest or shoulder isn’t listening, cos Jacob Mansfield’s mouth is making these other noises, these grunts like the howler monkeys we heard when Daniel took Mum and me on our first ‘family date’ to the zoo.

  ‘Izzy Chambers,’ Jacob repeats now, and I wonder if, like me, he can’t quite believe that I’m here.

  Isn’t this what I wanted? A boy and his hands and his mouth saying my name?

  ‘You OK, yeah?’

  I must have known this was what I was coming for, right? When I climbed up the stairs of Jacob’s house and into his bedroom with the door pushed to? When I sat on the bed while he ate his Monster Munch? When I shook my head no to the crisps and said nothing when he kissed me? Isn’t this what I expected when Jacob pushed me gently on to the pillow and reminded me of our deal?

  ‘Izzy,’ Jacob says.

  And I wonder if this is it, if this is the moment when he’ll offer to stop so I don’t have to come up with a yes or a no, but all he says, as he slips the condom from the packet with these fingers so delicate you’d think he actually cares, is: ‘Don’t say I don’t look out for you, yeah? You ready?’

  But before I can answer, Jacob Mansfield has taken my virginity as easily as he took that photo with his phone.

  SEVEN

  There was this book Mum got me about feelings when I was a kid. She was paranoid, I reckon, that I was gonna be messed up, by not having a dad maybe, or the fact that my grandparents still refused to acknowledge that I was around. She didn’t come right out and say it and obviously she tried to sweep all that bad stuff under the carpet, but kids aren’t stupid, right? No matter how thick the surface, they feel the bumps in things. I could read it on Mum’s face, when we’d write her parents a Christmas card each year, and she’d lift the post off the mat on those Advent mornings, how the pain she felt at their lack of reply was like treading on Lego bricks. It eased off after Daniel came – he filled a hole, I guess, told us it was their loss and we didn’t need them anyway. ‘Just the three of us,’ he’d say, and we’d huddle in, welcoming the barrier he was shaping against the outside world and gratefully edging in.

  The feelings book had come before then, when it was Mum perhaps who needed the reassurance, when she’d pause on the page that described loneliness, hug me a little tighter and then later, when she thought I was sleeping, whisper to her friends, who were finishing uni by then or moving in with their boyfriends and forging careers, plus all that other stuff ‘normal twenty-somethings’ do. And though she’d have died a little if she’d known she was letting me in on her secret, it was clear I was the thing that separated her from normal, that the catch of being sixteen and pregnant didn’t stop with her giving birth. So I was her hangover, I s’pose. Not the kind her mates had – theirs were a day at most – whereas Mum has been stuck with me for a lifetime. I looked at the book, but that mix of regret and shame I was feeling, not for anything I’d done, just for living – well, there was no page for that.

  Mum seemed less bothered by what the normals were doing once she met Daniel. And that, along with all the other benefits of their relationship – a bigger bedroom, a bridesmaid’s dress, a holiday once a year – made me love him like crazy too because I could really believe Mum didn’t love me less for everything I’d stolen from her. It was Daniel’s idea to cut the happiness from the book and frame it, hang it on the wall so it was the first thing we saw when we got in.

  So obviously that’s what I see now, when I come home from whatever just happened with Jacob, already wondering what it is that I’m feeling, whether it’s relief that it’s done or just a big fat sack of shame. I don’t know where the rest of the book’s got to, all those other pages like ‘sadness’ and ‘confusion’ and ‘guilt’. We weren’t expecting any of those once we had Daniel so we had no need to keep them, I guess, but I tip my room over anyway, hoping maybe I’ll find them and pin them to my T-shirt so they might seep into me, make me feel something, which has got to be better than the blank page I turned into once Jacob was done with me.

  ‘That was all righ
t, wasn’t it, Izzy?’ he’d said after, more of a you can be off now then than an actual enquiry into how I’d found it. Whatever it was.

  And he’d just shrugged his shoulders, like, what?, when I started to cry and kind of mumbled it wasn’t him, it was me.

  But was it? Me, I mean? Or was it him? Or the two of us? Or something else I don’t have a name for?

  Whatever it was, I wanted my mum. Pathetic, right? But I wanted her to be there when I got home, acting like some normal paranoid parent who thinks her daughter might be up to no good. Waiting up for me because I hadn’t told her where I was going and it was dark outside and she was worried. ‘What is it? ’ she’d say, this imaginary mother of mine. ‘You can tell me,’ she’d say. ‘I just want to help you. To protect you.’ And she would.

  But she wasn’t and she didn’t and she won’t. Because she’s sleeping. Keeping the ten o’clock bedtime Daniel insists she needs for her beauty sleep, cos it’s so obvious, right, how Daniel’s rules are so much more important than me.

  I change into my pyjamas. Could I burn the clothes? The knickers I’ve balled with the rest of them shoved beneath my bed because I swear I can smell it, that whatever it was that just happened is stuck in the fabric, not just of the underwear and jeans and T-shirt but of me. What I need is a wash, a scrub, a way to grow new and untouched skin. But a shower would be too loud, too risky, so I make do with changing into my pyjamas and am climbing into bed when —

  ‘Izzy! Izzy!’

  Jacob.

  I hadn’t realised quite how much I never wanted to hear him say my name again. But he’s here. Saying it. And not quietly either. When I open my bedroom window, he looks up, grinning like those boys in Hollywood movies who’ve thrown stones to get their wannabe girlfriend’s attention.

  ‘How do you even know where I liv—’

  ‘Max. Walked you home, didn’t he? The night of the,’ Jacob wiggles his fingers, grins.

  ‘Please.’ My eyes flit from him to the crack between my door and the carpet, willing it to stay black, because light would mean movement would mean Daniel would mean a different kind of dark.