by S Williams
‘Right, yes, it all looks lovely. I’ll have bacon, please, with tea, and hot rolls on the side.’
Athene smiles and returns the laminated menu.
Jamie grins and slots it between his side and his arm as he finishes writing down the order. ‘Great; the bacon is local, and the bread is baked in the next village, so you know everything is fresh. I’ll be back in a bit with the tea.’
Jamie smiles at her and walks away from the dining area, through the arch, across the lobby and into the kitchen. As he begins putting the breakfast together, he lets his mind wander over the girl’s body. When she had arrived the previous night she had been soaked. He’d already laid out a towel for her in the bedroom and made sure there was hot water in the tank in case she wanted a bath. She was the only guest, now the season had ended, and he was grateful for the business. In the winter, apart from the week of the fair, the whole valley turned into a corpse.
He’d waited by the little reception desk. It had been nearly an hour after Mary had phoned, and he was beginning to think the girl was a no-show. He wouldn’t have blamed her. If it had been him, and someone had stiffed him out of his holiday cottage, he’d have wanted to fuck off and stay in the Travelodge near the motorway: somewhere clean and modern where he could regroup and re-plan. Jamie was a big fan of Travelodges. Nobody bothered with your business in those places. Everyone stayed anonymous.
No. Wouldn’t have blamed her… but would have been pissed off. Heating the emersion wasn’t cheap. And he’d changed his top because, well, you never knew in this game. Sometimes people coming on holiday wanted to include the landlord in their experience.
When she’d finally come through the door, soaked, however, he knew he had no chance. She was younger than him, not that that always mattered, but he could tell: this time it completely mattered. The clothes she wore, and the hair. The way she held herself and the fact that she looked straight into his eyes.
No chance. Completely out of his league.
Still, the sticky way her sodden top clung to her cleavage when she’d taken her jumper off… that was a freebie, wasn’t it? That was a Brucie-bonus for him.
Jamie had welcomed her and taken her coat, and only ogled her breasts when he was mainly certain she wouldn’t notice. He learnt a long time ago to think mainly certain, as opposed to completely.
Because there was no completely. Women always seemed to know. Even when their backs were turned, and he was checking out the rear view, he could see a stiffening of the posture. A pulling up of the jeans or a smoothing down of the skirt.
Jamie sighs and takes the pre-cooked bargain price bacon out of the fridge, and puts it into the microwave. As the bacon starts its slow spin he opens the freezer and removes a couple of part-baked rolls and pops them into the oven on a baking tray.
Fresh today, he smirks to himself.
While he’s waiting for the bread to cook he thinks some more about his new guest.
He’s not quite sure what it is, but there is something a little off about her. He absently scratches his balls through the deadening material of his jeans, and flicks on the kettle.
Jamie thinks about what Mary had told him on the phone the previous night, about the girl being stiffed out of some cottage rental. Maybe what was off was the fact that the girl was going to rent a cottage at the time when everybody else stopped renting them.
But then, if she was up here to finish her essay, or whatever they did for a masters, then just when everyone else left would be exactly the time, wouldn’t it? And it would be half the price, out of season.
Jamie pours the boiling water into a little teapot-for-one and sets it on a tray. He adds a tiny milk jug, butter dish, a couple of sachets of sugar, and a small wicker basket for the rolls, then leans against the prep table, absently stroking the scar on his face. It stretches from his left eye, and up into his hairline. It is razor-thin and hasn’t itched for years, but he still strokes it.
Jamie lets his hand drop.
Maybe it’s that she just acts so young? She couldn’t be more than ten years younger than him – fifteen tops – but she still held herself like she’d just got out of school. When she’d first come in, out of the rain, she’d ripped off her scarf and shaken her head like a dog, spraying water everywhere, and pissing herself with laughter.
Jamie has a sudden porn-flash image on the wall of his mind; of the girl in a school uniform, dog collar attached around her neck, skin all flushed and shiny, shaking pearly thick liquid off herself. He blinks it away and leans down, opening the oven and taking out the rolls. He places them in the little basket, along with a teaspoon and knife for the butter.
How did I stop being young? he thinks as he takes the bacon out of the microwave and puts it on a plate. When did he stop being young? After the wedding? After the fight? Or just when he’d left school, and started working for his dad in the pub.
Maybe he’d never been young. He’d started helping out when he was eleven; pot-boying, and washing up. Cleaning the rooms on a Saturday. He’d enjoyed it. Drinking the dregs of all the pints before he washed the glasses. Nicking little bits of money from the rooms – never enough to arouse suspicion – and using it to buy sweets to show off at school. Not that it ever did any good.
And sometimes not only money. By the time he was in his teens he was nicking other stuff.
Underwear. Toiletries. Anything that might have touched a naked body.
He’d had his first sexual encounter at thirteen, when a guest had caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing in her bathroom. Rather than tell his father, she had shut the door, stood in front of him, grabbed his shaking hand and pushed it down the front of her skirt. Jamie had been petrified. She had smelt of old-woman and dead-flowers and had whispered threats and swear words in his ear as she made him rub her. Faster and faster, with more and more violence in her words, more and more stench on her breath. Afterwards, he had run to his room at the back of the pub and wept into his pillow. A little after that he had revisited the moment; the feeling, the sheer wrongness of it, and found himself aroused.
After that, he suspected, he had no fucking chance of having a normal relationship. He’d found himself becoming more and more isolated at school, if that were even possible. He hadn’t been able to look at any of the girls in his class, in his year, without thinking about what was under their clothes. What they did to themselves when they were alone. What they’d do to him if they found him in their bathroom doing something he shouldn’t.
Jamie picked up the tray and took the breakfast back through to the girl. With each step his face slowly changed, his mask stitching back into the resemblance of ordinariness, until the smile he displayed as he re-entered the dining area looked almost completely genuine.
7
Mary’s House
She can see Bella talking, her head close to Trent’s ear, but she can’t hear what she says.
The music is too loud, and she is too drunk. Or maybe it’s the drugs. Or what Bella whispered in her ear as they danced.
The car is slipping and slewing on the snow and ice, but Trent isn’t slowing down, he’s photograph-still, driving one-handed, the other wrapped around Bella. Trent’s been in a Heathcliff-mood all night. From when he picked them up, through the fair, to the disco in the Craven Head and this mad drive home.
‘Trent, for fuck’s sake slow down!’ is what she wants to say, but the words come out of her mouth like syrup. They seem to coalesce in the air, and slip down her front like they’re too heavy. She smiles.
Outside the stars are frozen in the black sky. She feels like everything outside of her head is made up. That the stars are painted on the car window. She is having trouble focusing on her thoughts.
‘Where are we going?’ she mumbles, fumbling out a cigarette from her coat pocket.
Bella turns round in the bench seat to grin at her. ‘Straight To Hell!’
She grins back. She was right. The Clash was pulsing out of the spe
akers, with Joe Strummer saying there was no need for her. That they were indeed going straight to hell.
And then Bella turns back round, shouts something, and grabs the steering wheel, knocking Trent sideways. She feels the car sliding on the ice. There is no screeching brakes and no screaming. Just the silent and unstoppable movement of a tonne of steel and bodies skating across the icy road.
She has just enough time to wonder why Trent isn’t braking before the car hits a patch of road where the ice has melted and flips over, and then she can’t think anymore.
Mary wakes up screaming Bella’s name, screaming the scream she hadn’t screamed then, when she watched Bella die. Mary looks around wildly, covered in sweat, with her heart pounding, until eventually she realises where she is. Sighing shakily, she lies back on her sodden sheets and looks at the ceiling.
‘Bella,’ is all she whispers. No one answers. The ceiling is bumpy, like someone decided to pebble-dash the inside. As she looks at it, letting her heart settle, she thinks of Bella, and of Trent.
And then she thinks about what the girl, Athene, said to her in the café. About how the weather here reminded her of Heathcliff.
‘Trent,’ Mary whispers.
8
Bella’s Last Day: Breakfast 9am
‘Morning, Mum.’
Sheila paused from attempting to stroke the Esse stove into life and turned to look at her daughter as she entered the kitchen. Bella was wearing her normal uniform of ripped shapeless jeans and thick socks; baggy black French-necked jumper over a white grandfather shirt. The jumper had large holes where the cotton had become unthreaded. Perched on the back of her home-chopped horror-doll hair was a black beret. The girl walked to the scarred kitchen table and sat down, scraping the chair back over the slate floor. Sheila winced slightly. The noise smeared across her brain, sandpapering pain into her hangover.
‘Morning, Bella,’ she said, smiling vaguely, and turning back to the stove. Her jaw tensed as she concentrated, trying to coax a flame out of the smouldering embers with little scraps of wood and strips of paper. She would normally have banked the fire last night, but the argument with her husband had resulted in her storming off to bed, leaving him with the responsibility of shutting down the house.
And the house required shutting down properly otherwise it would bite you in the morning. If you didn’t pay attention to it last thing at night, it would punch you in the face first thing when you woke up. The place seemed to have a will and weft of its own. If the fire wasn’t going then it became the temperature of a tomb; even in summer.
‘Sleep well, darling?’ Sheila smiled with satisfaction as a twist of the newspaper she had delicately placed a moment earlier caught alight.
‘You know. Dead days and all that.’ Bella pulled out a soft pack of Luckys from the sleeve of her jumper and tapped it against her palm. A cigarette slid out of the corner where she had torn off a portion of the foil. She’d seen a documentary about James Dean once, on the antique black and white telly she had in her bedroom, and that was how he did it. Tapping the pack against his palm so the cigarette came half out, then pulling it the rest of the way with his lips, and firing it up with a Zippo.
‘At least it’s quiet. Have you seen outside?’ Sheila reached in her apron for her own cigarettes: menthol and in a hard cardboard box; not like her daughter’s. God forbid they should smoke the same brand. Not that Sheila smoked at all anymore; she still liked to feel one between her fingers. Between her lips. Especially at this time of year. Between Christmas and new year. The dead days.
Sheila heard the click of the lighter as Bella flicked the lid of her Zippo, spun the wheel, and lit her cigarette. Gritting her teeth, Sheila placed wood on the embryonic flames. Bella didn’t answer her question about having seen outside, but then Sheila didn’t expect her to. Getting an unsolicited ‘good morning’ out of her sixteen-year-old daughter had practically made her day. Communication was mainly a one-way street these days. Sheila closed her eyes, feeling the burden of guilt pressing against the inside of her skull; making migraine-fish swim on the insides of her eyelids. After a moment, she opened them again, constructing her features into a semblance of cheeriness.
‘You should have a look; it really snowed heavily last night, then froze at dawn. There’s a hoar frost on the trees you wouldn’t believe!’
Bella shrugged her stick-shoulders slightly, dragging on her Lucky. Sheila saw that her daughter’s black painted nails were bitten and ragged.
She wondered, with a tiny scratch of sadness, if she had heard her crying into her pillow last night.
She debated whether to say anything. Tell her that, whatever happens, she loves her.
‘Why don’t you play with your sister, while I make you some breakfast?’ is what she said instead. ‘Now I’ve got the stove going I can get some coffee on.’
Bella nodded, took a drag of her fag, and placed it carefully in the ashtray her father had ‘liberated’, as he put it, from the local pub. Then, with a fluid movement, she stood and walked over to the playpen in the corner of the room. Inside, sat on a rough patchwork rug, was her baby sister.
‘Hello, Thing,’ Bella said softly, kneeling and sticking her fingers through the coloured bars.
‘I wish you wouldn’t call her that,’ Sheila said, pouring water into the percolator and putting it on the stove hob. ‘She’s got a perfectly good name.’
‘Yes, Thing, you have.’ Bella smiled, wiggling her fingers. The baby crawled forward and grabbed hold of the dancing digits, smiling like it was the most amazing thing ever. ‘And it’s Thing, isn’t it?’
Sheila bit back a retort, controlling herself. Just the fact that Bella was in the same room as her was front-page news these days, and she didn’t want to spoil it. She sat down on the wooden stool next to the stove and watched her daughter. Daughters. Watched her playing with her sister. Since the birth of the baby, Sheila was acutely aware that she wasn’t paying enough attention to Bella.
Wasn’t following who she was hanging out with. Wasn’t following how she was doing at school. Over the last six months, it was clear that Bella was changing. Sixteen years old; it wasn’t surprising. What was worrying Sheila, when she had enough strength to be worried, was what she was changing into.
‘Thing’s nappy needs sorting out,’ Bella said, giving a final waggle of her fingers, then standing. The baby gave a chirrup of disappointment as she pulled away. ‘And don’t ask me to do it, because it’s disgusting.’ Bella walked back to the table and sat down, tucking one leg under her as she seated herself on the refectory bench. She picked up her cigarette.
Sheila poured the coffee, and brought it over to her daughter. She saw that the sleeves of her tramp-jumper overran her wrists, to reach halfway down her hands, the fingerless gloves just poking out beyond. She was painfully, rawly, aware that she hadn’t seen her daughter’s arms for several months. Even in the summer she had worn long sleeves. Dark colours.
In the front of her mind, Sheila put it down to the music Bella listened to. All the bands she liked seemed to dress like they’d raided a beatnik party or a period drama. Either that or stolen clothes from the homeless.
In the back of her mind she thought it might be about hiding, rather than showing. Once again she felt a stab of guilt.
‘Here you go, love,’ she said, putting the cup of coffee down. Bella nodded her thanks.
Sheila sat down opposite her. ‘New Year’s Eve!’ she said with false brightness, willing her daughter to make eye contact. ‘Are you going out with Mouse tonight? To the fair?’
‘Maybe. I’m not sure yet.’
Bella’s response was flat, and Sheila could see the blood pulsing in a vein at the side of her neck. She tried to think of a way of drawing her out; getting under the veneer that she had so carefully built around herself, along with her clothes and her make-up and her music.
‘Or you could have her round here, if you like,’ Sheila persisted. ‘Or anyone. Are you still friends
with that boy?’
Bella finally looked at her. Sheila saw that she had grey eye kohl on her lower lids, smudged like the models in the sixties used to do. Strangely, it made her look older and younger at the same time. After several intense moments, Sheila looked away.
‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke in front of the baby,’ she said, putting her own unlit cigarette back in its packet.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s bad for her health.’
Bella stayed looking at her, unblinking. Sheila thought her whole body became tighter in the stillness. Harder. More like a statue than a girl.
‘Bad for her health? You’re bloody kidding me, right?’ was all she finally said.
Sheila looked at her in confusion, but deep down inside herself, she felt the magma of panic moving; the pressure building.
Before she could say anything Bella let out a short stream of smoke from her lungs. ‘I’m going upstairs; thanks for the coffee.’
And that was it. Gone. Bella stubbed out her cigarette, picked up her drink, the packet of smokes and the lighter, and walked out.
‘Well, will you be in for lunch?’ Sheila said to her retreating back.
‘Not sure. Probably not. I’ll see you at tea though.’
And then the wooden door shut, and she was gone. Sheila listened to the light tread of her going up the stairs to her room. Waited the few moments until the meticulously retro record player began playing out the meticulously retro first song, about boys who never grow up, or girls who always stay sad.
Sheila thought about her life stretching out in front of her, getting thinner and thinner, and tighter and tighter, until one day it might actually snap. Absently, she pulled her cigarette back out of its packet in her pinny, and put it in her mouth, staring into the stove fire. The sound of her baby pulled her out of her thoughts. The infant was clearly uncomfortable in her soiled nappy and the increasing warmth of the room.
