2000 - Thirtynothing

by Lisa Jewell

  And then he went shuffling back to his table and his mates, who were all eyeing Dig with a new-found respect.

  Dig remained quite calm, considering, mindlessly prodding at his flaccid chips with his fork and muttering under his breath, ‘Fucking-hell-Deen-fucking-hell-Deen-fucking-hell.’ His face was flushed almost purple and his feet were banging together under the table. Suddenly he looked up and straight into Nadine’s eyes. ‘Fucking hell, Deen,’ he almost shouted, ‘what am I going to do?’

  In the event, he hadn’t had to do anything. During the last few days of that term Delilah Lillie became omnipresent. Dig’s strategic patrols of the school were no longer necessary, as, wherever he went, Delilah was already there. For a couple of days nothing was said between them, but looks of intense significance were exchanged and the atmosphere between them was so charged that Dig became literally static, every object he touched perforating his skin with little bullets of electricity.

  Nadine began to feel more and more superfluous and uncomfortable during these peculiar encounters, but whenever she suggested to Dig that she make herself scarce, find something else to do, he would grab on to her sleeve for dear life and beg her to stay.

  Finally, on the last day of term, it happened. Nadine and Dig were sitting together on the stairs outside the language lab when Delilah appeared from nowhere, clutching a pile of books to her chest and apparently in a hurry. But she stopped dead when she rounded the corner and saw Dig on the steps, stopped and stood squarely in front of him. For a second the air tingled with electricity, and silence reverberated around the three of them. Nadine stopped breathing and waited for one of them to say something. Finally, Delilah opened her plump crimson lips, slowly enough, Nadine noticed, for two tiny peaks of skin to form between them and stick together briefly before pinging apart like little rubber bands.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ said Dig, his voice not letting him down by cracking, but emanating resoundingly from beneath his ribcage.

  Nadine sat with her hands on her lap and stared at the floor.

  ‘You’re Dig, aren’t you?’ said Delilah.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, still in that deep, clear voice, ‘that’s right. And you are…?’

  Nadine whistled silently under her breath. You had to hand it to him, she thought to herself, that was pretty fucking cool.

  ‘I’m Delilah,’ she said, ‘Delilah Lillie. I’m in 4H. You know, Mr Harwood’s class.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dig, ‘yeah. Right. You’re the new girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘pretty new.’ There was a second’s silence then, and Delilah bit her lip and threw Nadine a sideways glance, a look which told Nadine everything she needed to know. I’m taking over now, that’s what that look said, it’s my shift, off you go, you weird-looking, fat-arsed, ginger-haired nobody.

  It was time to go, it was time to let Dig get on with this, without her. She pushed her papers together into a pile, swung her bag over her shoulder and got to her feet.

  ‘Right,’ she said unnecessarily, as neither of them was paying any attention to her, ‘I’m off. See ya.’ And then she walked, as fast as she’d ever walked, along corridor after corridor, pushing swing doors open with her shoulder as she went, walked and walked and walked until there was nowhere left to walk. And then she stopped, stopped in her tracks and turned to face the wall as the tears she’d been trying so hard to control spilled over her eyes and cascaded in sheets down her cheeks.

  The Pub of Perpetual Darkness

  It was a Saturday lunch-time, the week before Nadine was due to start her mock O Levels and four months since her friendship with Dig had ended.

  Kentish Town Road was bright with the reflection of a dazzling sun on a slick wet pavement following a thirty-second deluge of rain. People emerged from shops where they’d taken temporary refuge and others shook out umbrellas and folded them up. Nadine was with her mother, looking for a book she needed for her history revision, sulking at the injustice of being in a place she didn’t want to be, with a person she didn’t want to be with, looking for something she wished she didn’t need in the middle of a torrential downpour that had pissed on her quiff and left her drowning in a sea of melting Elnett.

  ‘Take these, will you, Nadine?’ her mother asked, handing her a soggy umbrella and a shopping bag full of cabbages. ‘I’ve got to find a lavatory. It’s this weather—all this rain,’ she said, before disappearing into a nearby pub.

  Nadine had never been inside a pub before. She wasn’t allowed, which was hardly surprising as she wasn’t allowed to do anything. She’d been in ‘family’ pubs on holiday, consigned to ‘family’ rooms full of fruit machines and bored children, but never inside an actual pub, a proper London sort of a pub. Curiosity inspired her to hover inside the entrance while she waited for her mother, a little closer to the innards of the pub than her mother would have liked.

  The smell got to her first, stale, smoky and stagnant. Slivers of sunlight sneaked in through scratches in the black paint on the tall windows, picking out glittering mites of dust and ribbons of cigarette smoke curling across the top of the room, as if caught in the light of a cinema projector. A juke-box blared out the ‘Ace of Spades’, an artillery of fruit machines whizzed, crashed and banged and above all of this, from a table in the farthest corner, rose a loud and somewhat frightening cacophony of obscenities and profanities.

  Nadine edged a bit further into the cavernous, unlit pub to view the source of this noise. Cloaked in shadow sat a small woman, with dyed black stringy hair, wearing a heavy gold crucifix. She was at least eight months pregnant, her bump accentuated by a too-small white T–shirt emblazoned with the faded legend ‘I DON’T GIVE A **** WHAT FRANKIE SAYS.’ She was smoking a roll-up and drinking a pint and screaming at the huge man sitting next to her in between drags and sips. He was staring straight ahead with a tightness in his face that threatened to turn from tolerance to violence at any moment.

  In front of the table sat a buggy, into which were strapped two rather sullen-looking but attractive children, and to her right sat a beautiful blond-haired boy of about four years old, wearing an Arsenal football strip. He was talking to himself and scribbling in a colouring book with a red crayon. He looked like an angel.

  ‘Mum,’ he said, turning to look at the pregnant woman, ‘Mum. I need the toilet, Mum.’

  ‘Shut up, Kane,’ she spat, stubbing out the spit-softened end of her roll-up and readying herself for the next stage of her verbal assault on the fat man. ‘Can’t you see I’m talking?’

  ‘But, Mum, I need to go.’ One hand had disappeared under the table to hold the end of his willy.

  ‘Will you shut up! You’ll just have to hold on! I’m talking!’

  ‘But, Mum…’

  The woman turned around and fixed the child with a terrifying expression, squeezed the tops of his arms with her bony hands and brought him upwards towards her face. ‘If you don’t shut up, Kane, I’m going to fucking belt you,’ she said, and then, just to make sure he knew she was serious, she slapped him hard across his bare legs, a sharp crack resonating around the pub.

  Nadine winced as the child dissolved into tears and watched in horror as a small trickle of pale yellow liquid began to dribble slowly from under the table, across the grubby linoleum. The woman rose up in her seat to view it better and then turned to the boy.

  ‘You fucking little bastard!’ She yanked him up by one puny arm. ‘You disgusting little fucker!’ A large damp patch adorned the front of his football shorts. She carried him by his arm to the men’s toilets, pushed open the door with her shoulder and flung him through the door on to the grimy toilet floor. ‘Clean yourself up, you filthy bastard.’ The boy crouched on the tiled floor on all fours, tears coursing down his cheeks. Nadine gulped as the door came to a close between them, leaving just the muted sound of the boy’s distress.

  The girl sitting on the other side of the table, with her back to Nadine, stood up then and
put out a cigarette. She was wearing skin-tight drainpipe jeans with a pink-and-white-striped vest top. She fixed the woman with a look, blew out her last lungful of smoke and then marched towards the toilet door. She walked in and began to gather the boy into her arms, whispering soothing words into his ear and smoothing down his hair. The door closed, and the two of them emerged a few seconds later, the boy now shortless, his shirt hanging down to his thighs, and clinging on to the girl’s leg with both arms. It was only at that moment that Nadine realized who the girl was.

  It was Delilah.

  Nadine turned then, turned away very quickly and walked out of the pub and into the sunny safety of the street outside. Her heart was beating frighteningly fast and she took in large mouthfuls of air. That was Delilah! And that was Delilah’s mum. Oh my God. Poor Delilah. Poor, poor Delilah. Nadine had never witnessed anything quite so hellish before in her life.

  That…woman, that horrible woman, drinking and smoking with a baby inside her and hitting that beautiful little boy. And how many children did she have? Nadine knew that Delilah had older brothers, too. She must have had millions. Making all her beautiful children sit indoors on a day like today, in that dark, dank, dismal place with all that noise and smoke, while she screamed foul language at some hideous fat man with stained clothes and greasy hair.

  All of a sudden, what previously would have seemed to Nadine like the epitome of cool—a mother who actually let her fourteen-year-old daughter smoke in front of her, with her—now seemed to her to be a travesty. It was sick. Delilah’s mum was sick.

  Nadine suddenly realized why Delilah was allowed to do so much, why the rules and regulations which she felt strangled her own development didn’t seem to apply to Delilah. It wasn’t because Delilah was the lucky winner of the Parent Lottery, proud recipient of a wondrous mother who understood that girls needed to stay out later than eleven o’clock and needed to go out with boys, and needed more than one earring in each lobe and needed to do whatever they wanted with their hair. Delilah, she realized, wasn’t lucky. She was unlucky. Because her mother didn’t care, really didn’t care about her or, it seemed, any of her other, numerous children. She didn’t care about Delilah’s hair or her ear lobes or the state of her health. It was unlikely that she cared about her education or her future or the status of her hymen. It no longer seemed cool to Nadine that Mrs Lillie (if that was her name) didn’t turn up to parent-teacher meetings or check Delilah’s homework.

  Nadine’s mother finally emerged from the pub, wiping the palms of her hands distractedly against the sides of her cotton dirndl skirt.

  ‘Those,’ she began, a distasteful expression hanging around her mouth, ‘are the most terrible lavatories I have ever visited. Except for that hole-in-the-ground affair in Calais. No soap, no towels, no seats! I had to sort of squat over the bowl.’ She shuddered and began to unburden Nadine of her bags. ‘And there are children in that place. Can you believe it? Children! I mean who—who—would take children into a place like that? It’s shocking, it really is…’

  As they continued on their way that afternoon, stopping for a cup of tea and a Swiss Finger in the baker’s shop, browsing through the Education section in W.H. Smiths, searching through the bargain bin in the wool shop for a length of peacock blue angora to finish off a sweater her mother was knitting for her, Nadine began to regain a sense of normality, of humanity, of cleanliness. And, for the first time since she’d begun her journey through adolescence towards adulthood, she felt lucky.

  Her mother was traditional and overbearing and her father was distant and predictable. Her little brother was a precocious pain in the arse who could do no wrong and she was treated like a wayward child who could do no right. Their flat was small and old–fashioned, furnished with her dead grandparents’ dark and sombre pre-war furniture, and everyone in her family took this whole Catholicism thing just a bit too seriously.

  But, she concluded, after the shock of seeing a fragment of Delilah’s existence outside school, at least I have love. At least I have affection. At least my family cares about me, even if they care too much, sometimes. At least, she thought, I am not forced to be a grown-up when I am not ready. She would rather want to be an adult and not be allowed than be made to be one.

  Delilah might have been the most beautiful girl at the Holy T but her life away from school was ugly and sordid; she might have been the queen of cool but she had a witch for a mother and a pig for a stepfather and she might have taken Nadine’s best friend away from her, but she had to spend sunny afternoons in places like that.

  Poor Delilah. Poor old Delilah.

  Nadine vowed then that despite Delilah’s sneering indifference to her initial attempts at friendship she would make one final attempt to befriend her. The first thing she saw when she walked towards the doors of Holy T on Monday morning was Delilah, one leg bent up behind her against a wall, a fag in one hand and a crappy photo-strip magazine in the other, giving Nadine the evil eye. Nadine swallowed her feelings and walked towards her.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, forcing a smile, ‘nice weekend?’

  Delilah looked momentarily surprised by this unexpected encounter but quickly regained her composure and self-consciously flicked the long ash off the end of her cigarette. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘it was all right.’ She was unable to meet Nadine’s gaze and began looking over her shoulder and then distractedly around the street, almost like she was panicking, hoping to be rescued. She spotted Dig walking up the road and beckoned to him with a trace of desperation. He came bounding towards them, and Delilah’s face softened as she drew him to her and sunk into his embrace. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and smiled at Nadine. She had Dig. She was strong again.

  Nadine didn’t bother making an effort with Delilah after that day. She felt sorry for Delilah’s unfortunate circumstances, but trying to be friends really wasn’t worth it.

  She had never liked Delilah, and Delilah had never liked her, and on that morning Nadine finally decided that it would be easier all round just to leave the two of them alone and get on with her life.

  The King and Queen of the Holy T

  At around 4.15 a.m. on 17 July 1985 a loud bell from within the school walls pierced the silence, and the playground erupted.

  It was the last day of school.

  Folders and textbooks and feint-ruled pads with margins flew into the air, red-and-grey-striped nylon ties were unknotted from worn shirt-collars and spun like lassos around heads, previously muted transistors were turned up full blast and 120 red-blazered sixteen-year-olds moved as one out of the school gates for the last time, a mass of pent-up energy and hormones released from the confines of five years of study and discipline, erupting like a stream of red-hot molten larva on to the oven-baked summer streets of Kentish Town.

  Nadine found her friends and they joined the crowds rushing towards Caledonian Park for an afternoon of fighting and drinking and pelting kids from other schools with flour and eggs. They drank flat cider from big plastic litre bottles that went floppy in their hands as the sun warmed the liquid inside. They watched the boys showing off. They talked about their plans for the summer and their plans for the rest of their lives. It was all ahead of them, but Nadine couldn’t shake the feeling that the most important part was already behind her.

  It was all over. Not just school, not just five years of rules and regulations, homework and assembly, mass on Fridays and cross-country runs in the rain, wearing a tie and eating school dinners, but what remained of her friendship with Dig. It wasn’t going to survive this, she knew that. He was going to do his A Levels at a college in Holloway; she was doing hers at a grammar school in Archway.

  He was still firmly ensconced in his partnership with Delilah. They were the king and queen of the Holy T, together to the exclusion of everyone else, particularly Nadine. It looked horribly and sadly to Nadine as if it was all over between her and Dig, what had been and what could have been.

  There were going to be no sunny mornin
gs together on a big pine bed, no hosting of raucous Saturday-night parties and cosy shopping trips together. There would never again be any such thing as ‘Dig ’n’ Deen’, only ‘Dig and Delilah’. Delilah had him wrapped up like a fly in a web and he was happy to be there. There was nothing left over for Nadine, no bit of the Dig that Nadine had loved so much for so long, and the thought left her with a lump in her throat and an awful sense of incompleteness in her heart.

  As if to add poignancy to her thoughts, a cloud moved across the sun, a small chill breeze wafted over her, and Nadine looked up just in time to see Dig and Delilah a few feet away exchanging a kiss. The sun was just starting to set across the tops of the council blocks that lined the horizon, they’d run out of cider and two of her friends had fallen asleep on the grass. It was nearly ten and Nadine decided it was time to go home. She gathered her belongings together, her transistor, her cardigan, the bits and pieces of stationery and equipment that symbolized the last five years of her life, got up and began walking.

  Dig caught up with her at the park gates. He was breathless from running. ‘Deen,’ he squeaked incredulously, ‘where are you going?’

  Nadine could see Delilah across the park, sitting up stiffly, her back poker-straight, her eyes slanted closed against the low light, watching the exchange closely.

  ‘Home,’ said Nadine, pulling the sleeves of her cardigan tighter around her waist. ‘It’s getting late.’

  Dig’s face wrinkled in confusion. ‘Oh,’ he said, scratching his head, ‘right.’

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘goodbye and good luck, yeah?’

  ‘What? I mean…yeah. But we’ll still be meeting up, won’t we? You know—the kites and everything?’ He looked anxious.

  Nadine shrugged. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. I think we’ll probably be too busy, what with schoolwork and being at different colleges, you know?’

  Dig’s eyes clouded over with sadness. ‘Right. Yeah. I suppose you’re right.’