by Emlyn Rees
Jimmy nodded.
Marianna considered this for a moment. ‘Well, that’s something at least,’ she eventually said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jimmy said.
‘So you should be. But I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.’ Marianna frowned at him, then smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she told him. ‘You put the kettle on and I’ll put my knickers on and we’ll have that talk you mentioned after all.’
‘So there you have it,’ Marianna was telling Jimmy ten minutes later, as she sat with him at the shop counter, sipping her tea from a chipped Cagney and Lacey mug (Sharon Gless was a personal heroine of Marianna’s, who still had all the series episodes available for rent). ‘If you think you’re on to a good thing, go after it for all you’re worth. Don’t do what I did and end up settling for OK, and then spend the rest of your life regretting it.’
The subject of her regret, Jimmy knew, was obviously her husband, Bill, who ran a fishing tackle shop on Queens Parade. ‘But how?’ he asked. ‘Verity’s got a boyfriend.’
‘Fight for her.’
Jimmy pointed at his black eye. ‘But he’s the one who did this.’
‘Then fight with your brain …’ Marianna said, ‘… your heart … show her who you are … what you like … what you do … Show her who she’ll be missing out on if she stays with him …’
‘But what if I’m wrong about her?’
‘I already told you,’ Marianna said with conviction, ‘you’re not.’
‘But how do you know? How can you be so sure?’
‘It takes two people to kiss the way you described it, Jimmy. And if she hadn’t felt something for you, she would have stopped herself from doing it. It would never have happened.’
There was the sound of a key in the door and both Jimmy and Marianna looked up to see Marianna’s husband – a plump man with a satanic-looking black goatee beard – opening the shop door and stepping inside. Bill was accompanied by a mild smell of fish and he looked up and acknowledged them with a nod, before turning his back on them and continuing to talk loudly and querulously into a mobile phone about an order of live maggots for his shop, which had obviously failed to materialise. Marianna glanced at her watch. ‘Just as well we did end it when we did, eh?’ she whispered into Jimmy’s ear.
‘Too right,’ Jimmy whispered back, before walking over to the PC and starting to boot it up.
Jimmy smiled, watching the screen come to life. He believed what Marianna had just said. Verity wouldn’t have kissed him if she hadn’t felt something for him. Which meant he had reason to hope. And reason to fight. And reason to think of ways to show Verity who he was. He believed Marianna, because all she’d actually just done had been to provide him with confirmation of what he’d intuitively already known.
He thought back to yesterday morning, to when Verity had caught up with him in the crowded school corridor after their English lesson. The whole meeting had lasted only seconds. She’d apologised and asked if he was OK, and whether there was anything she could do. Then she’d told him how upset she’d been by what had happened and, looking into her eyes, in an instant all the anger he’d felt since he’d been hit by Denny had dissolved. In an instant he’d forgiven her for running off on him like that. Because, in an instant, he’d glimpsed something buried there in her expression, and he’d recognised it as something far more intense, and far more secret, and far more rare, than mere friendship or concern. That look had stayed with him long after Verity had gone, pulled off into the crowd by a passing friend.
Here, in the shop, taking up his customary slouched position, he waited for the afternoon’s first customer to arrive. He gazed out of the window on to the rainy street, amazed at how optimistic he now felt, and amazed, as well, at how much his mood could have altered from late last night, when all he’d been capable of wishing was that he’d never been born.
Late last night, they’d been round at Jimmy’s room, Jimmy and Tara, squatting there side by side on his box bed. Jimmy had been feeling queasy and his eyes had been aching, partly because of the joint they’d shared down on the beach before coming up here, partly because of the black eye Denny had given him the previous afternoon, and partly because of the fact that they’d been playing Metal Gear Solid 2 on Tara’s PS2 for upwards of two hours now instead of completing their History assignment for their Monday morning test paper.
‘Out-fragged again!’ Tara exclaimed as Jimmy bit the dust once more on the screen before them. She pulled a pack of gum from her ripped denim top and popped a piece between her black-painted lips.
‘You’re just jammy.’
‘Just jammy nothing. You’re just super-skanky.’ She laughed, rattling her recently beaded black hair extensions at him, before falling suddenly silent.
‘What?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Check it out.’ Tara giggled.
Tara reached for the sound system and turned down The Streets’ Original Pirate Material album she’d insisted on playing five times in a row now. The sweet scent of apple bubble bath had been drifting through Jimmy’s open bedroom door for the last ten minutes, while Rachel had been giving little Kieran a bath next door.
A sound came, soft and mournful, through the wall. It was Rachel singing to Kieran.
‘Bless,’ said Tara.
But the word ‘Summertime’ was as much as Jimmy caught of Rachel’s rendition before the shrill and strictly trashy analogue ring of the flat’s telephone cut through.
‘Can you get that for me?’ Rachel called out.
Jimmy rolled his eyes at Tara.
She knew all about his reluctance over answering the flat’s landline. ‘Go on. It’ll be fine.’
‘We’ll see,’ he muttered, getting up and slipping out of the room.
Jimmy glared at the phone as he walked across the living-room floor towards its resting place on the small glass table next to the metal-legged leatherette sofa. Jimmy hated answering the flat phone. For one thing, it was never for him, what with most of his friends not bothering with landlines at all these days. Mainly, though, it was because of who he dreaded it might be: one of the nurses from the William Bentley Hospice, telling him that something else bad had happened to his gran; or his dad, being flaky about when he was going to be coming back from Portugal on a visit, or hooking up with Rachel over there.
‘Jimmy!’ Rachel shouted again from the bathroom, panicking now as the phone rang for the fifth time.
‘I’ve got it,’ he called back, picking the phone up and answering, ‘Yep?’
‘Jimmy!’ his father’s voice came down the line. ‘How you doing?’
The words sounded as overblown and fake to Jimmy as the ‘Enjoy your meal’ you got whenever you bought a burger over at the FunBurger franchise on George Street. Jimmy let the silence hang there for a couple of seconds, and when he did speak he made his voice sound as flat and unenthusiastic as possible. Undermining his dad’s lame attempts at father–son camaraderie was one of the only powers Jimmy had over him. ‘I’m doing OK,’ Jimmy said.
‘Wicked.’
Jimmy felt a shiver run through him. His dad was forty going on fourteen, and was in the habit of using words that were way too young for him. Words like ‘wicked’ and ‘dumb-ass’ and ‘minging’ and ‘sound’, words that he’d picked up from hanging out in bars and clubs with kids Jimmy’s own age and younger, words which he was clueless as to what American show they’d been lifted from in the first place.
‘So what have you been up to?’ Jimmy’s dad asked.
‘Cotchin’.’
‘Eh?’
Jimmy smiled. Gotcha, he thought. ‘It means hanging out, Dad,’ he told him. ‘It’s a youth culture thing. You wouldn’t understand.’
Jimmy didn’t ask his dad what he’d been up to in return, but his dad started telling him anyway. The words sounded rehearsed, like he’d practised them in a mirror before dialling. ‘Things are coming on good here. I got a rise and I’m still working on Alfie and his proper
ty mates to maybe bankroll me enough to get me started on that theme bar idea I had. I told you about it, yeah?’
Jimmy wasn’t in the mood for humouring him today. ‘So you’re not planning on coming home any time soon,’ he stated. ‘Not planning on seeing Rachel or me or Kieran.’
‘Hey, look. I’m working on it, OK?’ his father answered, coming over all hurt. ‘But it’s a matter of money. I can’t just produce plane tickets out of thin air …’
His dad’s words started washing over Jimmy and he found himself listening instead to the dull throb of a bass line playing in the background. His dad was probably outside a club, about to go in and meet up with someone who wasn’t Rachel. He was probably just putting in a call to make himself feel better about what he was about to do. ‘Hey, listen,’ he was saying to Jimmy. ‘What do you think about maybe coming out here for Christmas? You and Rachel and Kieran,’ he went on when Jimmy failed to respond. ‘We could make it a real family event.’
‘What about Gran?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Or doesn’t she count any more?’
‘But she’s ill. She wouldn’t know.’
‘No, Dad, I don’t think so,’ Jimmy told his father, watching Rachel come out of the bathroom and walk towards him with baby Kieran wrapped in a towel in her arms.
Bubblebath foam patterned Rachel’s Wrangler sweatshirt and the humid air in the tiny bathroom had caused her blue eyeliner to run down her cheeks, making her look as if she’d been caught out in the rain. Kieran’s sparse dark hair stood up in a Mohawk and he completed the seminal punk image by burping loudly and making himself laugh.
Jimmy’s dad sighed down the phone, long and loud. ‘You’re obviously not in a good mood, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘So maybe we should chat another time and I’ll speak to Rachel now.’
‘Sure, Dad. That’s crovey with me,’ Jimmy said.
‘What?’
‘Go ask one of your friends,’ Jimmy suggested, handing the phone over to Rachel, pleased to have left his father perplexed and pleased, too, at not having to listen to any more of his bullshit.
‘Ben!’ Jimmy heard Rachel admonish his father as he walked back to his room. ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all week.’
Inside his bedroom, Jimmy found Tara leaning over the framed photo of herself, him and Ryan taken on the afternoon they’d driven down the coast to Lyme Regis. ‘Was he cool, or what?’ she said.
Jimmy smiled. Ryan did look cool in the photo. He had a purple headscarf on, tied with a gangsta-style knot on his forehead and his lips were parted as if he’d been about to say something. His arms were folded across his black sleeveless vest and his middle finger was raised for the benefit of the camera. Jimmy was standing beside him, taller than Ryan, but less powerful-looking. He had on his baseball cap, pulled down low on his brow, so that his features from his nose up lay buried in shadow. On Ryan’s other side was Tara, in a white-striped blue tracksuit and a red woollen hat, looking so much younger than she did now. She was poking her tongue out and pulling her mouth wide with her fingers.
All three of them had shades on and you would have had to have been there to be able to identify them as individuals at all. They were leaning against the bonnet of the stolen Alfa Romeo they’d driven to Lyme Regis in. And behind them was the beach in Lyme Regis, where they’d sat down later on and watched the sun go down.
Jimmy remembered that day with incredible clarity. He remembered the breeze ruffling his baggy jeans against his thighs as he’d set his pocket camera up on a parking ticket machine in the car park, and then stood on tiptoe to get the car in the shot.
‘Hurry it up,’ Ryan had said, leaning further back on the car’s blue bonnet and pulling Tara in close to him. ‘If I’ve got to stay this close to this gorgeous woman any longer, then I’m not going to be held responsible for myself …’
‘Dream on,’ Tara had told him, but without making any attempt to move away.
‘What d’you reckon, Jimmo? Me and Tara. We’re made for each other, right? Why shouldn’t we just surrender to our base desires and get it over with?’
‘Because you’re friends,’ Jimmy had answered. ‘And you never stay friends with people you have sex with. You told me that yourself.’
Ryan had nodded his head, smiling. ‘Ah, such wisdom in one so young,’ he’d reflected. ‘Well, it would be crazy for me to ignore my own advice, so I’m sorry, Tara, I think I’m going to have to pass on you after all.’
‘Yeah, well enough talking about me like I’m a piece of meat, anyway, you dick-heads, OK?’ Tara had piped up, punching Ryan hard on the arm. ‘I wouldn’t touch either of yours with a bargepole anyway.’
‘All right,’ Jimmy had announced, gently pressing the camera’s self-timer button and running round the ticket machine to join the others, planting himself on the bonnet next to Ryan.
‘Shades on,’ Ryan had instructed, and all three of them had pulled their shades from their pockets and put them on.
‘This guy’s going to go nuts,’ Tara had said, yanking her hat down on her head.
‘We’re just spreading a little intrigue into an otherwise dull existence,’ Ryan had said.
The ‘guy’ to whom Tara had been referring had been the owner of the Alfa Romeo, the same person for whom they’d been taking this photograph and several others over the course of the day. The idea had been that they’d get them developed at a one-hour photo shop. They’d then ditch the car back in the Royal Inn’s car park (from where they’d borrowed it that morning), leaving the best photos tucked in beneath the driver’s seat, for the owner to find, hopefully weeks from now.
‘But how about we don’t take the car back after all?’ Tara had suggested. ‘How about we just keep going, to France, to wherever?’
‘Because –’ Ryan had started to reply.
But then: flash. The camera’s self-timer had frozen them there for posterity. Ryan had got up then, Jimmy remembered. He’d walked away from the car and had stood on his own and gazed across the beach. Then he’d turned round to face them and had answered, ‘Because we’d only run out of petrol if we tried.’
Here, in Jimmy’s bedroom, Tara picked the photo up and kissed Ryan’s face. ‘I was completely in love with him that day, you know,’ she admitted. ‘All that stuff he said about me, I know he was only teasing and being sarcastic and everything, but I wanted it to be true.’
‘I sort of guessed,’ Jimmy told her.
‘He never said anything to you in private, did he?’ she checked. ‘I mean about me? About me and him?’
‘No,’ Jimmy lied. The day Ryan had died, he’d told Jimmy that if he had been into going out with girls for the long haul, then Tara was the only girl he reckoned he knew whom he wouldn’t grow bored of. But Jimmy knew there was no point in telling Tara that now; all it would do was open up old wounds.
‘Good.’
‘What is it?’ Jimmy asked, spotting the frown she was failing to conceal.
‘I still think we should fuck him up,’ she said.
She meant Denny Shapland. Ever since Tara had first laid eyes on Jimmy’s black eye this morning at school, she’d been itching to go round to Denny’s shop and graffiti his shop door.
‘No way,’ Jimmy said. ‘He’s not worth it. And anyway,’ he added honestly, ‘it’s too risky. He’d probably catch us doing it and beat the shit out of me all over again.’
‘What about his scrambler, then?’ she demanded. ‘I bet it’s a piece of piss to hot-wire.’ She had a malevolent glint in her eyes. ‘We could ditch it in the harbour at high tide.’
‘No.’
‘Jesus, Jimmy!’ Tara snapped, suddenly angry, up on her feet. ‘Where’s your spirit gone? You used to take risks all the time, remember?’
Jimmy said nothing. He didn’t care about Denny, or the fact that he’d been punched by him. ‘I kissed him back.’ That’s what Verity had said. And that’s what Jimmy still believed she’d meant, no matter how quickly she’d run off afterwards
. No, Jimmy didn’t want to hurt Denny Shapland, Jimmy wanted Verity to realise how much better he was than Denny. Jimmy wanted Verity to know that he was the one she should be with. And for that, Jimmy knew – and he was thinking about his relationship with Marianna in particular now – he needed to clean up his act, not dumb it down.
But Tara was still goading him. ‘No?’ she demanded. ‘Well, let me remind you.’
She marched past him and opened the window.
‘Pack it in,’ Jimmy said, a cold blast of air reaching him.
But Tara ignored him. Instead, she pushed the window wide.
‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked
‘You know why,’ she said softly, before clambering up on to the windowsill, and swinging outside and out of sight.
Jimmy stomach turned over. This time, though, it had nothing to do with the game or the joint. He hurried across the room and stuck his head out of the window, staring up. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he called after her, but Tara was already well on her way. He watched her feet disappearing up the last couple of steps of the fire escape that led on to the flat roof of Carlton Court above.
Jimmy didn’t move for a second, two seconds, three. He was still staring up into the grey, moonlit sky. He shouldn’t go up there, he knew. He shouldn’t follow Tara up that ladder the way she wanted him to. It was crazy, the same as it had been crazy the first time he and Tara had followed Ryan up there.
‘What’s the matter?’ Ryan had asked them both. ‘You chicken?’
It had been down to a movie they’d been watching, there in Jimmy’s room, on the same TV screen that the PS2 game was paused on now. Jimmy couldn’t even remember who’d been in the movie. It had been some late-night straight-to-TV effort about a bunch of American kids their age.
The only reason they’d been watching it at all had been because they’d managed to get themselves trashed on some vodka, which Ryan had lifted from his old man’s drinks cupboard. But then the gang initiation sequence had begun on the TV and Ryan had stopped talking and started watching.
‘Come on,’ Jimmy heard Tara calling out to him now, her voice whittled down by the wind.
