The Opposite of Amber

by Gillian Philip

  There was a tiny triangle of grass and scrub between our street and the main one. I always took a short cut across it, even when I wasn’t several hours late, and that’s where, that night, I ran into Jinn.

  I didn’t recognise her at first, aimless and crying and soaked through. Care in the Community, I thought, preparing to give the apparition a bodyswerve. Then I recognised the gleam of her hair, just as she stopped short and stared at me. And then she started yelling.

  I just stood there, buffeted by her hysterical rage and a little bewildered too.

  When she ran out of words and breath, she rubbed her eyes. ‘I’ve been phoning you for hours!’

  I tugged my phone out of my pocket, flipped it open, switched it back on. Oops.

  It was too exhausting to explain. And of course it was far too complicated to explain to Jinn about the library and the dog and the vomit. So all I said, when she’d calmed down a bit, was, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I tried everywhere! Bertha! Foley! You weren’t anywhere!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I lost track of time. I didn’t know you’d –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d miss me.’ God, I hated the way that came out. ‘I mean, I didn’t know you were expecting me. I mean, I thought you’d be with – you know. I thought you . . . well. Did you have tea ready?’

  ‘Like always!’

  I opened my mouth but managed not to say it. Maybe she didn’t realise tea had been a bit hit-and-miss lately. Maybe she’d lost count of the times I’d just gone for chips with Foley. It was the stupid phone, that was all. If I’d left it switched on it would have been fine. ‘Sorry.’

  She looked as if she was about to say something more, but just cracked her finger joints instead, and turned uncertainly, and walked beside me. Now that she’d run out of temper, her company was quite peaceable. We walked together under a swiftly dimming sky back towards the little grey house.

  ‘Ruby,’ she blurted as she opened the rusty gate. ‘A girl got murdered.’

  We sat on the doorstep, chilling our bums on the concrete and watching the street lights warm up in hazy orange auras. It seemed like the thing to do, madly enough: sit on the outside of our safe little house when a girl had washed up on the beach a mile north. Go figure. I think it was the coldness of the air, and the way it cleared our brains.

  ‘How could somebody get killed here?’ Jinn was hugging herself, as if she was trying to squeeze out tears of anxiety, but she was too hyper to cry.

  Anyway, I think it was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer it.

  ‘You can’t stay out late any more, Ruby. You’ve got to take care.’

  ‘Course,’ I said. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Don’t know. They just said on the news about the body.’

  ‘So it’s probably somebody she knew. Usually is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, it’s not likely to be the Breakness Strangler, is it? I mean, can you see it?’

  ‘I know, Ruby. It’s just – it’s just.’

  OK. I could accept it was – just. I knew it couldn’t happen to me, but getting oneself murdered by crazy strangers was the sort of things mothers fretted about, and so by extension Jinn.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said yet again.

  ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ Jinn put an arm round me and jiggled my shoulders. ‘I get worried, that’s all.’

  Which gave me a warm, reassuring sense of the-way-we-used-to-be. ‘Is he back yet?’

  She didn’t have to ask who. Nathan had gone away south last night in somebody’s borrowed car, which had made me wonder what he had on the Somebody. ‘No. He decided to go and see his dad. He’ll be another few days.’

  Despite her wistful tone, I was glad. Not having Nathan was a treat.

  ‘So we can go and see Lara tomorrow?’ I suggested.

  ‘Sure,’ said Jinn.

  Going to see Lara had never been morbid or depressing, except for the one time. The cemetery was like a park, with clipped lawns and rose beds and more-or-less unvandalised benches, and fairly unobtrusive CCTV cameras. It was a little oasis of municipal prettiness, though it overlooked the bypass and the industrial estate and even if there had been any birdsong you wouldn’t have heard it, not with the constant roar of lorries. On the other side of the cemetery, overlooking it in turn, was a small estate of council flats, the kind with those inset balconies that must have been a charming idea at one time but which were now crammed with bikes and washing lines and washing machines. The yawning gaps gave the row of buildings a sort of Gaza-chic, like they were pockmarked with shell holes. Anyway, why would anybody waste their useful balcony space on flowers when they could look straight at everybody else’s on the pristine graves beneath?

  Jinn and I usually took a picnic with our garden flowers: ready-made sandwiches out of the mini-mart, cans of Coke, a giant pack of Maltesers. It was almost like a regular family picnic with Lara, except that she was under the neat green turf, peaceably decomposing.

  I chewed on a cold BLT (tough bacon, not enough mayonnaise) and wrinkled my nose at the headstone: black granite, polished to a gloss except where it was etched with Lara’s name and her dates and a pointlessly monochrome rainbow. I thought that headstone was a big mistake but it was something I could never say to Jinn, who had chosen it in a spasm of grief. It cost a fortune – demonstrably so, because that kind of ugliness doesn’t come cheap.

  Speaking of ugliness. ‘He looks really rough,’ I said.

  Jinn looked up from the petunia-arranging, which was not going well. ‘Who?’

  Like she didn’t know. ‘Nathan.’

  She contemplated me for a few moments, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘I know.’

  ‘Bertha says, is he on drugs?’ I blurted.

  Jinn stayed silent for a bit, but I saw the petunia petals tremble in her fingers, and one of the little stems broke. ‘It’s none of Bertha’s business, is it?’

  ‘It’s mine.’

  Quite violently she stuffed the fistful of petunias into their jar. ‘That Foley’s really bringing you out of yourself, isn’t he?’

  I didn’t dignify that with an answer.

  ‘He doesn’t take it any more.’

  It. I didn’t ask what. ‘Oh, right. Sure he doesn’t. He could afford a bit of rent, then.’

  ‘He’s got his problems. He owes people money.’ She didn’t quite look at me. ‘I wouldn’t walk away from you and I’m not walking away from him.’

  ‘He’s not us.’

  ‘Yes, Ruby. Yes, he bloody well is.’ She was angry now; I could see the tears glitter in her eyes. ‘I don’t care what you think.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ I could get angry too.

  ‘Yes – uh-huh, sure. Ruby, I know you don’t like him but I do. Does that matter to you?’

  I shrugged. My turn to avoid her eyes.

  ‘I can help him, Ruby.’

  ‘Aye, right.’ I couldn’t help that one.

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘Not by nicking stuff to pay his debts.’

  ‘Christ on a bike, Ruby. I LOVE him, right?’

  I licked my lips.

  ‘I bloody love him. I always loved him. He needs me, right?’ She slapped the jar of abused petunias on to the ground, so hard I was amazed it didn’t crack. ‘He needs me.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Yeah, well, my life doesn’t revolve around you, Ruby! Not all the time, not for ever!’

  Well, that took me aback, because I’d always kind of assumed it did. Jinn rubbed her eyes fiercely and it struck me for the first time (believe it or not) that she might need looking after too. And that if she did, old-fashioned girl that she was, she’d chosen the wrong kind of new-­fashioned boy.

  ‘We shouldn’t be out late,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Seven

  Jinn was an old-fashioned girl and she liked her traditions. She liked Lara’s old-fashioned holidays, which we always took s
omewhere on the west coast. If you asked me to point it out on a map, there’s no way I could, though we must have gone to the same place six years in a row at least. It must have been somewhere between the Kintyre peninsula and Assynt, that’s all I know. (There are some great words up that coast too but I’ve no idea what any of them mean.) That coast is longer than it looks because it dives in and out of sea lochs, it twists and jigs and doubles back. I used to imagine it was thousands of miles long, if you could only untwist it and lay it out in a straight line. It would circle the globe three times or something, like picturesque intestines.

  The cottage itself was one of those ones that look lovely on the web page, white against a sky that’s bluer than reality. Inside it had damp walls, paper that peeled in dark corners, awful kitchen cupboards where you kept everything towards the middle so your food wouldn’t touch the mouldy sides, and crockery we’d wash before we used it. The house was always cold, even on a blue and green summer day, and we had to pay for the electricity by shoving coins into an endlessly hungry meter. But there was a coal fire that filled the room with smoke and the smell of firelighters, so we could always huddle round that in the evenings, and at night I’d crawl into Jinn’s bed so I could get warm enough to fall asleep. She’d tell me to go back to my own bed because I kicked in my sleep, but in the meantime she’d rub my back, her thumb bumping down my spine and up again, and when I was next aware of anything it would be morning and I’d still be cuddled against her, and her thumb would be motionless against my spine from when she’d finally dozed off.

  Of course, the cottage’s big advantage was that it didn’t cost much. And the outside lived up to the promise, and when the weather was good it was true that the sky was unfeasibly blue.

  The cottage was cheap because it involved pet-sitting two goats. I never saw a kid, and so far as I know Lara didn’t have to milk them, so that’s why I call them pets, though the cottage called itself a croft. The goats, like the ones in the petting zoo, were evil. The billy was marginally the better of the two, but the nanny swiftly learned to ambush Lara getting out of the car. Lara was scared of her, and the nanny knew it, so when the car pulled up she’d be waiting. She’d stand patiently beside the driver’s door, watching Lara with her empty yellow devil-eyes. The first time, Lara thought this was adorable. As she climbed out of the car, cooing, and turned to pick up her groceries, the nanny put her head down and lunged, butting her violently in the bum. Lara and the groceries went everywhere.

  After that, Lara was afraid to get out of the car. Jinn, who was not in the least afraid of the nanny goat (and the nanny goat knew that too), had to get out first and shoo her away. If Lara was on her own, she’d sit in the car tooting the horn, and depending on Jinn’s mood either she’d rush out to do her duty, or she’d call me and we’d watch Lara through the flimsy net curtains, whispering and giggling and looking at our watches and taking bets on how long it would take our mother to lose her temper. Eventually Jinn would saunter out the front door and round to the back of the cottage, and pretend she’d been out playing and had only just realised.

  Lara could never prove otherwise, though once or twice I could tell she was on the verge of furious tears. If she ever tried to cope on her own, the shopping ended up all over the garden, dropped in her panicked flight from the goat. So in the end she always waited for Jinn, for however long it took. It was Jinn’s little game of control with our mother, but then it was the only one she really had. And sometimes she was just mad at Lara. Come to think of it, I don’t think she ever stopped being mad at Lara.

  It wasn’t that Lara herself was over-controlling: quite the reverse. And it wasn’t that she didn’t care. Lara was just too fusionless. Her mind was on other things; either that, or it wasn’t anywhere at all. Sometimes her mind went into hibernation, like a computer when you leave it sitting unused. You’d have to hit the space key – or butt Lara in the ribcage – to get it going again.

  It was there at the cottage that Jinn first fell in love with goats. I think it was the whole set-up really, but the goats were a symbolic thing. Jinn wanted to live on a croft and keep chickens and perhaps a pig, but most especially goats.

  I couldn’t imagine Jinn coping with the winter cold, but she only knew the summers. Sometimes they were fabulously warm and we’d bask half-naked in the dunes, gently baking, letting ourselves get so hot we’d have to plunge into the sea to cool off. That hot. But sometimes, when the breeze stirred itself, you could feel how it might turn nasty in November. When the wind got stroppy and started to whip up little sandstorms, Jinn would hold her cardigan over the both of us, so we could still suck on ice lollies that were pebble-dashed with sand particles.

  Jinn would sit up on the dunes with her arms round her knees, eyes half-shut, blonde sea-roughened hair breezing and flapping out behind her like the ragged mane of a pony, a perfect little happy smile on her face. Jinn’s protective countrywear consisted of a useless lacy cardigan with no buttons, just a ribbon threaded round under the empire-line that she could tie at the front but never did, so it flapped loose, fluttering and shimmering in the breeze. The colour of the ribbon matched the river that wound down through the dunes and the rocks before spilling itself aimlessly over the beach. And the river was like scraps of ribbon cascading on to the sand, silver-blue and silky and rippling. I could look at Jinn, exactly matching the river, happy like a pony, and forget I’d rather be at Center Parcs.

  Not that we could afford Center Parcs, but Lara wouldn’t have gone there anyway. Lara had romantic dreams of being swept off her feet by a dour wild Highlander (which is proof that you should be careful what you wish for, because as it turned out, the driver of the fatal Vauxhall Astra came from Dingwall). But in the meantime she liked to hang out down at the harbour watching the boats come in and asking eager questions about the fish and the weather and the lobster pots. Every evening she’d be down to the Creel, having pints bought for her, chatting up drinkers who quite often turned out to be dour wild Londoners, but you couldn’t have everything.

  So Jinn and I more or less ran our own holidays, and very successfully. If we got bored of swimming, sunbathing, or nicking magazines out of the hotel, we’d go and annoy the little man who ran the shop. He did not think there was anything funny about life in a remote rural community, nothing AT ALL. He considered Jinn and me to be potential shoplifters and we’d play up to it even though there was nothing we wanted to steal. We’d huddle together over the shelves, picking up mosquito repellent and tinned hot dogs and baby shampoo, then putting them back again, while the little man glared and craned his stubby neck. We’d go up and down the two little aisles, then just as he came out from behind his counter and started to follow to see what we were up to, we’d reverse annoyingly and go back the way we’d come.

  If there was nobody in the shop and Jinn said solemnly, ‘Busy day,’ he’d glower as if he wanted to hang her from the strip light. The fact was he disliked tourists, and he liked children even less. But nothing he could say or do would stop Jinn buying stuff off him, though God knows he tried. We’d giggle our heads off afterwards, sitting in the dunes above the beach, eating our sandblasted lollies. For all his insular Highland pride, we knew fine he came from some grey town two miles west of Leeds.

  So one day Jinn was standing in the aisle letting me read Private Eye over her shoulder – only the funny bits, we didn’t have a lot of time before we got chased out – and she’d just snorted at a political cartoon that went straight over my head, when a voice at the end of the Pasta Sauce & Tacky Chinese Toys aisle said, ‘Jinn?’

  She was smiling even before she turned and looked. And this pleased me, because at the end of the aisle, his grin caught between chancy and shy, stood Tom Jerrold.

  Alex was with him, of course, but we didn’t take any notice of him. Not that Jinn rushed up and hugged Tom or anything stupid. She sauntered up to within millimetres and gave him her open sparky grin, but she didn’t touch him. I just hovered behind her, maki
ng mental notes.

  ‘Brilliant! Hi, Tom! Are you guys on holiday?’

  Tom was clutching two litres of milk, an Independent, a Daily Mail and a box of frozen potato waffles, but he managed to look cool enough as he nodded. ‘We’re stay­cationing. Says Dad. So much for Cape Cod this year.’ He rolled his eyes and made a face that made Jinn laugh.

  ‘Oh, it’s nearly the same.’

  ‘You’re so positive.’

  ‘But we’re annual visitors,’ she said. I liked that term almost as much as Tom obviously did. The words put a new glamorous sheen on our crofty holidays. ‘You’ve only just caught the trend, you sad latecomers.’

  ‘Are the natives friendly?’

  ‘No idea. Never met any. The candidate for Leeds West is a bit of a twat.’

  And so they went on, giggling and flirting. I trailed them, and Alex trailed me. He didn’t even get to carry the potato waffles; he got the air freshener and the midge killer, one canister in each hand. He traipsed along like fragrant pest control, trying not to look like he was trying to keep up. He fell so far behind, I occasionally forgot I was ignoring him.

  Jinn and Tom found a bench outside the only hotel in the local planetary system, and lounged on it. Jinn sat up, arms round her knees, and I could see she was working the charm. Scottish geography and the summer holidays had distanced her from the Blessed Nathan Baird and she was ready for a holiday romance. I was delighted. When Alex shambled past me and tried to join them on the bench, I shot out my arm and stopped him in his tracks. He dropped the insecticide and it rolled noisily up and down on the tarmac.

  I picked it up and stuck it back in his hand. He was eyeing me with suspicion.

  I pointed at the square of lawn in front of the hotel. Obediently he plopped down on the grass, and I arranged myself, elegantly cross-legged, beside him.

  We avoided looking at each other for five minutes, while we ostentatiously breathed west coast air and admired the view.

  ‘You don’t talk a lot,’ said Alex after a bit.