‘Honey,’ she says, and she puts the cloth down on the counter and comes and sits opposite me. ‘What’s up?’
I don’t say, This isn’t fair – for the last few weeks I’ve felt like a normal person with a normal life and a normal house and I was almost thinking I could invite Ed back here and now . . .
I just look at her, and I know my face doesn’t say anything good.
‘Have you had a bad day?’
I wave my head sideways in a non-committal manner.
She reaches forward to squeeze me on the knee.
‘I’m not feeling great,’ I say, and I stand up. ‘I might just go and lie down for a bit.’
‘Let me know if you need anything,’ she says.
‘I’ll be fine. Probably just a bug.’
‘Well, I’ll come and check on you in a bit.’ Mum’s face brightens. ‘Nice to be able to say that without it taking half an hour for me to bum-shuffle up the stairs, huh?’
The next morning, I catch the bus. There’s an intensive swimming course on from ten until two, and Cressi needs my help.
I haven’t texted Ed. I’ve composed a hundred different messages, but I don’t know what to say. And he hasn’t texted me, so maybe he feels the same way.
After I messaged Cressi to say I could make it, I switched my phone off. I sit on the bus trying to work out how I feel. Apart from her – and Claudia, it turns out – nobody knows about us. I start to wonder if I made the whole thing up in my head.
I’m sure I didn’t imagine him. I stare out of the bus window and begin to wonder if maybe I did. Or maybe he imagined me. I’m not sitting here getting butterflies in my stomach with the anticipation of him meeting me off the bus, and me wrapping my arms round his waist and kissing him hello. I’m feeling dread that he might be in town by some coincidence and I’ll get off the bus and he’ll be there and I haven’t worked out what to say.
But he’s not there.
Town is summer-holiday busy with gangs of halfway-through-the-holidays bored teenagers hanging around, out of money and out of inspiration for what to do, waiting for someone to come up with something. Even though I don’t know any of them, I duck my head down and walk quickly, pulling my switched-off phone out of my pocket and pretending to look at it as protection. They might not be the people from school who make life hell, but they may as well be. A memory of Ed that first afternoon, dodging them exactly the same way I did, pops into my head, but I chase it away.
‘Excellent. I was so glad to hear you were free today.’ Cressi’s sitting in the foyer of the pool, checking off a list of names on an iPad. She puts it down for a second and pulls a band out of her bag. ‘We’ve got a lot of bodies around because it’s the holidays, so the council have asked if my volunteers can wear these.’
I take the circle of fabric and look at it dubiously.
‘Over the shoulder and round the waist,’ Cressi explains, motioning across her body on a diagonal. ‘Like a Miss World sash – that sort of thing.’
I raise my eyebrows, and she gives a bark of laughter. ‘I know, I know.’
‘Miss World?’ I shake my head in disbelief.
‘Just go with it.’
‘Fine.’
The morning rushes past. The children are around four or five, and trying to get to a level of proficiency that’ll take them up a level when the lessons start again after the holidays. I’m so busy that I don’t have time to think about Ed, until I remember that I’m not thinking about him, and then Cressi asks why I look like a ‘wet weekend’.
‘It’s nothing,’ I say.
We usher the children into the arms of their parents. We’ve got an hour to grab something to eat and then half an hour of waiting before we can get back in the pool because of health and safety regulations.
Once the last child is handed over, skinny and dripping wet in their regulation swimming hat and school trunks, we unfasten the lane and allow the other swimmers access to the side of the pool we’ve been using. Moving the lane divider on to the side and hanging it up, Cressi gives me another searching look.
We sit down in the corner of the cafe with a baked potato each. I squirt mayonnaise on to my slightly limp-looking salad and tear open a little sachet of black pepper and sprinkle it precisely on top. When I look up, I realize Cressi is staring at me intently.
‘Spit it out, then.’
I lift up my fork and rotate it.
‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s nothing,’ I say again.
She snorts in disbelief. ‘I’ve had you waltzing in here on cloud nine for the last however many weeks, and today you’ve come in looking like you’ve had all your happiness surgically extracted. What’s he done?’
‘What makes you think it’s –’ I stumble over the words.
‘I know you think I’m some sort of ancient dinosaur, but I did actually have a life before I got married, you know.’
I put my fork down and tell her the whole story.
‘. . . And I feel like – like I’ve turned into one of those people who meets a boy and stops having a life, and I feel completely pathetic.’
And used, and stupid, and humiliated, my inner voice adds, helpfully.
‘You’re sixteen, Holly.’ Cressi attacks her baked potato with a knife and fork. ‘This thing’s like a bloody bullet,’ she mutters under her breath.
‘And?’
‘Don’t be so bloody hard on yourself.’ She shoves in a forkful and chews for a moment, before continuing with her mouth full. ‘And everyone else, for that matter.’
I realize that I’m actually starving, and I’m once again reminded that I’m never going to be the sort of person who pines away through lack of food under any circumstance. I eat some of my lunch and think about what she’s just said for a while.
‘You’re finding out who you are, and what the world is like,’ Cressi continues, ‘and that means you’re going to balls things up.’
The cafe is baking hot, and the tables filled with gangs of children and their parents, and the sound of slushies being slurped, and the games machine beeping and whirring. My head feels full of too much stuff and I don’t know what to do with any of it.
‘And Ed?’ I say bitterly, and I feel my stomach contract at the memory of his words. I feel shame. Shame at being poor, shame at living in a tiny little house, shame at coming from – what was it he called it? – the arsehole of nowhere. And, most of all, I feel angry at myself for feeling that way.
‘Give him a chance,’ she says, and links her hands behind her head, stretching upward with a sea-lion groan.
I keep my mind empty of everything as I help with the classes in the afternoon.
‘You’ll have your hours in no time at this rate,’ Cressi says, taking a swig of water from the bottle she’s stashed by the side of the pool.
I look down at the log she keeps. Once I reach thirty hours of voluntary help, I’m eligible to go forward for Stage One instructor training. The pay’s pretty good, and I’m hoping I can manage to juggle it with working on my Highers. That’s assuming I pass my exams, of course. It’s funny that everything that’s gone on has pushed out my worries about the results. I’m concentrating so hard on not thinking about Ed, though, that it’s as if all the other things I usually focus on have jostled back into position, and school and (lack of) social life and everything else are still there. They were just waiting quietly in the wings for the last few weeks, biding their time. I gnaw my thumbnail, tasting chlorine from the water. My skin is wrinkled and pruned from the long day standing in the pool.
We finish and hand over the children in the waiting area. I re-tie my hair in a ponytail and set off towards the changing rooms, but as I do a movement in the corner of my eye causes me to turn round. Cressi raises her eyebrows and motions towards the pool, where I see the distinctive, familiar sight – his face is underwater, but there’s no mistaking the power of his freestyle strokes.
‘Looks like you’re not the only one
who’s taken to the water today.’
I turn on my heel and head for the showers. I’m about to pull my bag out of the locker when fury overtakes me and I realize that, no, I want to swim and this is ridiculous. I reach into the locker and pull out my goggles and swimming cap, pulling it down hard over my face so that – with the goggles in place – I’ll just be another anonymous swimmer.
I hover by the edge of the changing room until he’s at the far end of the pool and then plunge into the next lane. And in a second, the world is drowned out. I swim fast and turn my head to the right to breathe, just in case he happens to be looking my way when I take a breath. I count my strokes and settle into a rhythm, tumble turning and pushing off and one, two, three, four. My arms begin to ache – I’m a strong swimmer, but this pace is much quicker than I would normally go. I keep pushing on until I can feel my heart thumping hard in my ears and my muscles screaming at me to stop. I don’t want to chance it, but I have to. I slow to a stop and hold on to the edge of the pool, keeping myself submerged so low that from a distance I must look like a bowling ball in black goggles.
And then I see him. He’s standing by the wall beside the changing room, and Cressi is nodding at something he says. He shakes his head, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes, and turns away.
I swim slowly towards her.
‘You planning on staying in there until someone gives you a medal?’
I haul myself out on my arms, sitting on the edge of the pool with my legs dangling in the water. My legs look whiter than ever.
Cressi squats down beside me, the whistle hanging round her neck. As she talks, she’s still watching the pool area – she doesn’t trust the newly qualified lifeguard we have on duty, and she’s not doing a very good job of hiding the fact.
‘Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him the tornado hurtling up and down the slow lane terrifying the weekend swimmers was you.’ She indicates an elderly gentleman swimming a ponderous breaststroke at the end of my lane. ‘But I did say that perhaps you two needed to have a chat.’
‘You didn’t say anything to him?’
‘About what?’
And I don’t know what to say – all I know is I realize that since yesterday I’ve had this creeping sense of shame. And a terror that she might say something, tell him what my house was like. If she lifted the lid on it, and all the clutter and mess and spiders and dirt got out, I feel like we’d never get them safely back inside. And I feel like it would spoil everything. Cressi’s the only person who knows exactly how we lived.
‘About . . .’ I tail off. ‘Nothing.’
‘The two of you need your heads banging together. Get yourself changed. I’ll tell him to wait for you in the cafe, if you like.’
Ed looks at me through his fringe as I approach and pockets his phone. ‘You OK?’ he says, and he doesn’t try to kiss me.
I nod.
‘Look, Mummy, it’s Holly!’
There’s a tug at my arm, and I look down to see one of the little girls, Sophie, from our lesson, her mouth stained blue with slushy. She gives me a beaming smile.
‘She’s my teacher, Mummy!’
I smile at the two of them, and Sophie, putting her thumb in her mouth, potters off.
‘She is adorable,’ Ed says, smiling. ‘They think you’re amazing.’
I see another little boy at the counter with his mum – it’s Christopher, and his mother has a habit of pinning me down after lessons to talk about his progress until I’ve lost the will to live.
I indicate the door with my head. ‘Shall we go?’
Ed pushes himself up from the table, untangling his long legs from the chair with difficulty.
We walk, and don’t talk.
We take a different path out of town, a way I’ve never been with him before. It’s a road I know from childhood trips up here with Mum and Neil and Lauren, and it leads up the hill and into the farmland that takes us away from Hopetoun.
The pavement narrows and gives way to a single-track road, and we have to walk in single file, tall hedges on either side, the sound of tractors humming in the distant fields. There’s no traffic to speak of – a couple of cyclists whizz past on road bikes, dressed in bright Lycra. A huge grey horse leans its head over a wooden gate, watching us as we pass.
‘Are we walking to Glasgow?’ Ed says, eventually.
‘Nope.’ I shake my head and look at him sideways. His mouth is curved upward in a half-smile.
‘Are we going to talk?’
‘Yes.’ I nod. And then I see the sign for the footpath and say, ‘It’s down here.’
The path is narrow, and the earth baked dry. This has been the hottest summer holiday we’ve had in ages, and the whole place is heavy and buzzing with bees and sunshine. My limbs are aching now, from the walking and the swimming and the hours of standing in the pool. We trek up the path a bit further and down a little wooded path and – it’s there.
‘Wow,’ says Ed.
I smile despite myself. We’re in a tiny clearing beside a waterfall, which splashes into a pool filled with clear, peat-brown water and then trails off down a stream where the bed can be seen covered with stones. It looks like a picture-book scene.
‘So,’ he says, and he collapses on to the grass.
‘So,’ I say. I sit down and cross my legs and look at him.
He rolls over on to his stomach and puts his chin in his hand. ‘I haven’t been completely honest with you,’ he begins.
My mouth dries as I try and form a reply. ‘Ah,’ I croak.
‘But I think – I want to try and explain.’
I cross my arms as well as my legs, so I’m sitting on the grass like a pretzel.
‘Go on.’
Ed rolls over again and sits up so he too is sitting cross-legged, facing me – or he would be, if I wasn’t looking intently at a blade of grass about thirty centimetres to the left of my knee.
‘I said I had family stuff to do yesterday.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I nod, still looking down.
‘The girl you saw me with . . .’
I pick up a blade of grass, and tear it apart with my unbitten thumbnail.
‘Claudia,’ I say. ‘Your cousin.’
He nods. ‘You talked?’
‘We did,’ I say. I rest my elbows on my knees, and my chin on my folded hands.
‘Go on . . .’
He looks at me, and I look back at him, and for a second we’re sizing each other up, trying to work out what to say.
‘She told me your dad isn’t giving your mum any money and that she’d tried to help.’
Ed nods slowly. ‘Something like that.’
I don’t say that Claudia told me his dad – her uncle – has always given her the creeps because he’s so charmingly, disarmingly nice. Or that I should ask Ed, because it wasn’t her story to tell. I don’t know how to say that. All I know is that it feels like there’s a lot more to Ed’s family than he’s let on.
‘My mum would kill me if she knew I’d met up with her. We’re – well, it’s difficult . . .’ He screws up his face. ‘I hate him.’ His voice is flat. ‘And I’m sorry that I ran.’
He looks down at the ground, and I can see a muscle twitching in his jawline.
‘I was so angry.’
‘It’s OK,’ I say, thinking of his red face and the way he ran, as if he wanted to escape from everything.
‘And I didn’t mean to be . . . I hurt your feelings.’
I feel the hot-shame feeling again.
‘Look,’ I begin. ‘I know that you come from a completely different world. And I’ve never been captain of a posh school swimming team or lived in a huge house. So I don’t know how it feels to go from that to living . . . the way we do.’
‘It was a really horrible thing to say.’ He looks down at the grass and pulls up a strand, tearing it down the middle. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
I think of the times when I’ve argued with Mum and when she threw a mug at the kitch
en wall because she was tired and fed up of having no money and we couldn’t pay the bills.
‘It’s OK.’ I realize I keep saying the same thing, over and over.
‘And I’m ashamed.’ His voice is quiet.
‘Of what?’
For a second, I think he means he was embarrassed to be seen with me.
‘I’m no better than him, am I?’
I shake my head. ‘That’s not true.’
‘I lost it and punched a gate. What’s next?’
‘Everyone loses their temper.’
‘Not everyone hits their wife, though, do they?’
Ed spits the words out, pulling up a handful of grass and throwing it down. He lifts his eyes to meet mine. They’re almost black.
‘That’s why we live here.’
And it all makes sense. Ed, with his expensive too-small clothes, and his posh public-school accent. He’s not here because his mum wanted to downsize to a village and make jam.
‘We don’t see my dad – or his side of the family – any more. We can’t.’
‘Can’t?’
Ed pushes his arms out for a second and stretches them out so I see how short his sleeves are, his wrists poking out of the ends. He indicates the hole in his jeans.
‘We don’t see my dad any more because we’re living in a safe house.’
And his face goes red again, the same colour it did when he ran off. I realize that, for someone like him, this probably seems huge. To me, living on the edges of things, it’s just another example of the way life is. It’s not always perfect and shiny, even if it looks that way on the surface. I think about Lauren and her expensive clothes and designer schoolbag.
‘It’s only temporary,’ he carries on. ‘He’s not allowed to come near us. And Mum’s not supposed to go near him . . . not that she’d want to.’ His big mouth is set in a flat line. He chews the inside of his cheek.
‘You mean he’s banned?’
‘There’s an order. Some sort of protection thing. I shouldn’t have met up with Claudia – they’d say that was putting myself at risk.’
‘But she doesn’t like him,’ I say, without thinking.
‘I know. That’s why I asked if she’d find out what was going on. I got her to listen in on my dad and hers talking. He’s told everyone Mum’s mentally ill and she’s making it all up, says he’s not paying any maintenance to her because she can’t be trusted.’
My Box-Shaped Heart Page 15
