The Opposite of Amber

by Gillian Philip

  Halfway up, I met Jinn and the dreadlocked girl sitting on the landing.

  The girl had been crying, but she wasn’t any more. Jinn had her arm round her; she was murmuring something comforting in her ear as she squeezed her shoulders. The girl was tucking the stray dreadlock behind her ear and sniffing and giggling.

  She was also wearing my necklace.

  There must have been thousands of the damn things sold. But no, even in the dimness of the stairwell I recognised the mutilated paw and the Cyclops eye. And Jinn’s wrist was bare.

  My sister gave me one of her Looks as I pushed past without a word. She didn’t follow me immediately, though. I had time to squirm through the press of bodies to the punch bowl and slug a swift plastic-glassful.

  Jinn was at my shoulder by now. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Why’s she wearing my necklace?’

  We were both shouting, only partly because of the music.

  ‘It isn’t yours. You didn’t want it!’

  ‘I gave it to you!’

  ‘No you didn’t, I took it because you didn’t want it.’

  Who’d have believed we were screaming at each other over a cheap necklace neither of us had wanted? But I was so mad about her giving it away. Just giving it away!

  She grabbed my arm and dragged me through to the quieter bedroom where several people were snogging, one couple was going a bit further than that, and at least one boy had lost consciousness. It was easier to talk in here with the human detritus.

  ‘Marley’s miserable. I gave it to her to cheer her up.’

  ‘Marley? She’s called after a dog?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. She’s had a fight with her mum and dad and then she had a fight with her boyfriend.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, looking like that.’

  ‘She looks lovely and you know it, Ruby. She was going to run away and sleep rough and I told her nah, if she promised not to, I’d give her the cat. My valuable jewel-encrusted cat. It was kind of a joke, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I saw the pair of you sniggering. You gave away my necklace for a joke!’

  ‘So what? YOU DIDN’T WANT IT!’

  At which point I stormed off and got drunk.

  I had a wonderful time. The combination of first being happy, and then being insanely, irrationally furious: that’s what did it, I think. I actually talked, and talked a lot. I’d discovered the angel alcohol and it was good, it was the salvation of me, it taught me to speak and not just that: to make jokes. God, I was funny. I was witty like you wouldn’t believe (I wish I could remember some of my lines). I didn’t hesitate to say things and my tongue was not coated in Velcro, it was smooth and slippery and quick like a cobra. Thoughts bubbled up in my brain and they didn’t go their usual roundabout way, they bypassed the barriers and fizzed right out. I was making people laugh, in a good way. They looked a bit startled and some of them took the piss, but I didn’t even mind that. This was the new me and I was never going back. All I had to do was keep my punch levels topped up.

  So one moment I was having a lovely time, necking punch after punch, not feeling remotely bad or odd, just high, high, high.

  Then it happened. Something like a fingernail scratched at the back of my throat, and I hesitated. It scratched again. I stood up but the room did too. Astonishing. The room stood up and wheeled round me like a wonky Wall of Death and I had got halfway to the bathroom before Mount St Ruby erupted.

  I knelt before the toilet like a worshipper, gripping its cold white rim, and barfed and barfed again. No question of making it downstairs like that other guy. I had the vaguest of memories of the Bathroom Dash, of seeing things through a great fan of vomit the colour of punch, so I guessed I’d made a bit of a mess. There were several varieties of Molotov in that punch along with vodka, rum and cider; I think that’s when I first went off the Molotov magic rainbow.

  Somebody must have summoned Jinn because she was kneeling at my side, making soothing noises and rubbing my back. I wanted to tell her to stop, because the gentle movement of her hand was making me throw up more and more and I wanted it to stop. But I couldn’t speak, and anyway, stomach spasms or no stomach spasms, it was very comforting having her there. Through the fog in my brain I somehow knew this would be a matter for bitter regret in the morning – that yes, I’d know the true meaning of a Velcro tongue but that wouldn’t be the worst of it – and I needed Jinn there to tell me it was fine, no worries, I’d feel better soon, and nobody was angry. I needed her there to swear loudly at the poor soul banging on the door, desperate to get in before her bladder imploded.

  So, after all that, you’d think I’d be more sympathetic three months later when the exact same thing happened to Alex Jerrold.

  I don’t even know why Alex was invited to the next party, which was held in a nice old house in a good part of town, the parents in question having gone away for a week and trustingly left their daughter in charge. I suspect Alex was meant to be the light relief, kind of a jester. Either that or the hostess fancied Tom and thought she’d get brownie points with him for inviting Alex too.

  As I’ve mentioned, Tom Jerrold was about three hundred per cent cooler than Alex. He was protective to a degree, but both for his own sake and for Alex’s, there was a limit to how protective he could be. And he couldn’t watch him all the time. That was how Alex, drunk to the eardrums, found himself a lair in the corner by the parents’ CD collection and the amplifiers. Nobody paid him much attention until the amplifiers (which were huge, expensive, sophisticated and loud) suddenly let rip a solid pure blast of orchestral music.

  Wagner, it was. The Ride of the Valkyries. Everybody turned round, stunned, to see Alex Jerrold standing in a small mountain of discarded CDs doing a Jesus Christ impersonation, eyes shut and arms spread wide like wings. And he was singing along, in pidgin made-up German, an expression of pissed ecstasy on his screwed-up face.

  How could he have hoped to get away with it? Maybe he hadn’t. It caused more stupefied hilarity than rage but he had to suffer for it anyway, so he was grabbed and hauled upstairs, then dangled over the top banister rail by his ankles. He endured it, silent and dignified as a painted martyr, his expression suffused with pained irritation like an inverted St Sebastian.

  As for the perpetrators, it wasn’t the best idea they ever had either. Holding a bladdered miserabilist upside down by his ankles is only ever going to have one outcome. The outcome was all over the hostess’s mother’s stair carpet, and because it came from a height, it splattered and sprayed a really long way.

  The hostess was not drunk enough not to get hysterical about this, and it was mostly Alex who was blamed, then and later – which seemed less than fair to me, but after all, he had asked for it in a big way.

  It was Jinn who cleared up the mess. She cleared up Alex’s vomit and she cleaned up Alex too. She scolded the perpetrators, who were howling with laughter, dragged Alex to the nearest bathroom and ensured he’d emptied his heaving stomach. She rubbed his back and made soothing noises, just like she’d done for me.

  Natural mother, that was Jinn. God knows where she got it.

  Tom joined her after a while, silent as he watched his brother retch, passing Jinn a bottle of wine when she got a chance to take a swig. They kept one another company till Alex had curled up in a ball, fast asleep, a tiny vomit trail at the corner of his upcurled mouth. About an hour later, I found them snogging comfortably on a sofa.

  This time, I thought. This time!

  But yet again, it came to nothing. The following Monday, back at school, Jinn and Tom were mere friends once again, and she was the occasionally-favoured acolyte of Nathan Baird. He toyed with Jinn like he toyed with all the girls, flirting and scattering compliments, swaggering and showing off and sometimes kissing her like he meant it.

  But he didn’t need her in those days. Or now I think that he maybe did need her, and liked her more than he wanted to even then, but that he needed his reputation more. So Jinn went on lusting
after him, and he went on encouraging her, and Tom and Jinn came to nothing.

  Not then, anyway.

  counting games

  I remember the second girl because she made the news the morning after that party. The day after, rather, because I probably didn’t see much of the morning. And the funny thing is, I remember thinking, Oh no, that’s just like the other girl, the one with the stripy T-shirt and the big smile.

  Didn’t make a real, proper connection though.

  Jinn was up already, of course, drifting elegantly around the house in a white waffle bathrobe and a hangover. Nothing like as bad as mine, which had had me up at four o’clock glugging pints of milk and water, but she was definitely a bit rough. She smiled at me, eyes all shadowy, our drunken squabble forgotten, and said she’d make a pot of tea and why didn’t I go and sit down and watch TV.

  A bit shamefaced from last night’s scene, I curled my bare feet under me on the sofa and pillowed my aching head on lots of cushions. I was going to flip channels when I saw she’d left it on News 24, but then I saw the ticker rolling at the bottom of the screen, and I’m no different from anyone: I can’t look away from a murder.

  She was in a river, Girl 2; but they thought she hadn’t died there, they thought she’d died somewhere else and probably with a punter, because she worked the red-light district. And there she was: she’d floated downstream, a naked Ophelia, surfing the current like a pale log till she bumped gently into the bank and tangled herself in branches with the crisp packets and the foamy river scum.

  Her boyfriend said he hadn’t seen her in two months. He said she was trying to get clean, but not like that. It was such an odd thing to say, even through his tears, they thought it was probably him.

  Nine

  I still hoped against hope that it might happen, Tom and Jinn. I fancied Tom myself, in an unattainable, worshipful, older-man kind of way, but I knew that wasn’t a going concern, so I was wistfully thrilled rather than jealous that he fancied my sister. Anyway, the combined glamour of Tom and Jinn couldn’t help but rub off on me.

  I was doing my homework in the kitchen one night when there was a rap on the door, very peremptory, and I thought for the thousandth time that we ought to get a bell, it would be less unnerving. I was annoyed – I was concentrating, abnormally interested in social conditions in 1832 – but I wasn’t so annoyed when I opened the door.

  ‘Hello, Ruby,’ said Tom.

  I smiled at him, so that he had to smile back. He was shifting from foot to foot – a good sign, I decided. Romantic anxiety.

  ‘She’s not in.’

  ‘Oh, OK. I’ll –’

  ‘Just come in. She’ll be home from work soon.’ Standing aside, I flung wide the door so that he had no option but to come in. If he’d had a flat cap to take off and wring as he sidled past, he’d have done it. Sweet.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘Yeah. Um. Thanks.’

  Gotcha.

  He couldn’t do anything else but sit at the pine table as I bustled. He clasped his hands. Unclasped them. Glanced at his watch.

  I set a mug of coffee down and gave him a dazzling smile. ‘Five minutes. She’ll be back in five.’

  ‘Right. Thanks.’

  Even I couldn’t tolerate the awkward silence. ‘How’s Alex?’

  ‘Uh? Alex is fine.’

  ‘Recovered, then.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Recovered.’ He rolled his eyes in a what-can-you-do way. ‘Sobered up, anyway.’

  ‘It was a shame,’ I said.

  ‘It was his own fault, the wee tosser.’

  ‘Biscuit?’

  ‘No thanks.’ He eyed the bright yellow clock on the wall. The second hand lumbered towards another half-minute. ‘Well, OK. Yeah.’

  I shoved a Breakaway across the table, wishing I could tie him to the chair or something.

  It seemed I’d at last got him talking, though. ‘He’s a pain in the arse, my brother. But he’s not normal. I hate it when he gets hurt.’

  Oh yeah, everybody at school knew that. Everybody knew what had happened to the ringleader behind Alex’s party humiliation. Damien Harris had been so proud of his long, artfully tousled hair, till it got mysteriously and incurably clotted with farty putty in the boys’ toilets after school. His mother had to shave it all off that night. No complaint was made. Damien kept his shaved head down in shame and Tom remained inscrutably cool.

  ‘He’s eccentric,’ he said now. ‘He’s not normal, is all. Alex doesn’t think like other people think.’

  I nodded, wishing Jinn would get her arse in gear and come home. I had a very bad feeling about this now and I didn’t want Tom to go on talking. But it was too late.

  ‘Listen, do me a favour,’ said Tom. ‘If Alex asks you to the Halloween dance. Gonnae say yes?’

  And that’s how I came to be on Alex Jerrold’s arm at the Breakness High Halloween Horror. You’d think he’d be pleased with his remote-control conquest, but he didn’t say a lot.

  Alex had a startled crop of dark hair, a hint of bumfluff on his chin, and an expression of permanent astonishment. When I gave him a sidelong inspection, this close up, he had rather a beautiful face: long and pointed, with alarmingly sharp cheekbones and big eyes. The overall impression was not at all spoilt by his green complexion and the plastic bolt through his neck; he took very naturally to freakdom. My own hair was spiked up with the toughest gel I could find, with a sprayed white streak running from front to back; my eyes were sunk in smudged black eyeshadow and talking was even harder than usual through my plastic glow-in-the-dark fangs. I was very aware of the snorts and whispers. How well suited we were. How somebody had to have the pair of us and it might as well be each other.

  I found I could be pretty relaxed about the whispers. Alex was silent, give or take an occasional sharp remark, but he wasn’t nervous so much as distant. There was something just shockingly cool about him up close. Cool in an utterly nerdy and ridiculous way that shouldn’t have been cool. I mean, we all liked to pretend we couldn’t give a toss about anything. Alex Jerrold really didn’t.

  Or that’s how it seemed at the time. Maybe he was just more convincing, or maybe I wanted to believe it in retrospect.

  After one misguided attempt at the Time Warp, we didn’t dance. We sat silently in a corner and then, by mutual unspoken agreement, we wandered out to a mild night and sat on the school steps, giggling quietly at the better-dressed, the more-popular and the altogether-less-chilled. He was funny when he loosened up. It was sweet.

  After a while I turned towards him, thinking I might not mind at all if he kissed me. Nervously, like a heron darting for a fish, he took a stab at my lips but missed, because idiotically I’d jerked my head round towards a shriek from the Assembly Hall. Alex coughed, shuddered, turned away. He didn’t try again.

  He said, ‘That new 3-D movie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You want to go?’

  I had to think for a minute. I wasn’t much into animated films, and there was something I’d much rather see at Screen 5 that week, and I thought maybe Alex would like it too.

  ‘I don’t fancy that one,’ I began.

  I was about to follow that up with my alternative suggestion, but Alex readjusted the bolt in his neck and said, ‘OK.’

  He didn’t quite look at me, didn’t quite smile, just stood up and dusted down his backside.

  ‘Better go back, I suppose.’

  I thought of staying put till he sat down again, and trying to get back to the subject of Screen 5, and maybe doing some more intermittent talking. Instead, I stood up and dithered back into the hall with him to sit on the sidelines. I wish we’d done things differently, but then I wish that a lot.

  Ten

  The burly guy at the mini-mart counter did not look happy. He’d left his engine running – I could hear it through the open door – and he hadn’t even paused to pick up a basket, so he was balancing his sandwich and his six-pack of beer and his wallet in his
huge arms, while he eyed his watch and bounced on his heels and peered towards the back room, as if that would bring anyone running.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said to thin air, or to me. ‘Ridiculous.’ He tutted for emphasis.

  I shrugged, smiled, and muttered as I sidled past. I wasn’t that worried about Burly Man and his petrol consumption, but if Bertha came in and found Jinn skiving off, she wouldn’t be happy. It wasn’t like last summer. Jinn had spent a lot of her credit with Bertha, some of it simply by being in love with Nathan.

  I stuck my head into Bertha’s cupboard-sized office, but there was no sign of Jinn. To be fair, she might have had to go to the loo suddenly. Still, the till could have been emptied by now, and it was pretty irresponsible of her to leave when she didn’t have cover. Unless she’d emptied the till already. I wouldn’t put it past her these days.

  Oh, Ruby, don’t be such a bitch.

  I put my head round the door to the shop, but Burly Man was gone. So was the sandwich and the six-pack, and he hadn’t left any money on the counter. I couldn’t really blame him, but I was livid with Jinn.

  I went through to the back again. The scruffy toilet was at the end of the squashed passageway, round a corner where the coats hung. I thought I’d knock on the door, hard, and give Jinn a fright, but she wasn’t in the cubicle. She was standing beside the jackets, half-hidden, focused on one in her arms, going through its pockets.

  ‘Jinn!’

  I put my hand over my mouth. She jerked up like a startled rabbit, almost dropping the jacket. I saw her quickly stuff something into her pocket.