Still Falling

by Wilkinson, Sheena;

  ‘Oh.’ she says, ‘You’re here. I thought something must have happened to you. I couldn’t find you.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘As you can see I managed to get here in one piece.’

  Jasmine looks disappointed. She glances at Donovan, who has just located the spare copy of The Great Gatsby under the pile of handouts, and is trying to pull it out without making them all topple, which involves a lot of huffing and frowning, and seems to decide he isn’t worth apologising to. She scans the room, her eyes sliding over me like I’m invisible, and goes to sit with Cassie.

  Luke’s eyes follow her down the classroom. He might be a bit brusque with her but he clearly hasn’t failed to notice her attributes.

  What about my attributes, Luke? I might be plump and quiet but I’m brighter than she is. And quite a lot nicer.

  As if that ever counted for anything.

  Would you give him one, Esther?

  If only.

  I have to catch myself on. I’ve had crushes before – crushes are all I’ve had – but never on someone I’ve actually spoken to. Never on someone real.

  _____________

  I dodge McCandless outside the locker room door, and have to step over outstretched ten-denier legs. Because our names are close together – Wilson and Wright – my locker is near Jasmine’s. I try to manhandle my art folder so it fits in.

  Jasmine leans back against her locker and opens her make-up bag. ‘Don’t move, Cassie,’ she says. ‘I’m going to prop my bag up on your leg.’

  ‘Go ahead, babes.’ Cassie looks as if life can hold nothing better than being a human make-up table for Jasmine Wright. Her nose has been out of joint since Jasmine’s been letting the twins hang round her.

  ‘Watch out for McCandless,’ I say. ‘She’s on the warpath.’

  Cassie makes a who-asked-you? face.

  ‘Huh!’ Jasmine says, squeezing foundation on to her hand. ‘I’d like to do a makeover on her. Can you imagine trying to cover up those whiskers? So, Esther,’ she goes on, in something more like the friendly voice she used yesterday lunchtime, ‘are you sure there’s nothing going on between you and Luke?’

  I shake my head, willing my cheeks not to burn.

  ‘You were very quick to take him under your wing.’ She smooths foundation over her already perfect cheeks.

  I shrug. ‘We were just going the same way.’

  ‘Right.’

  I remember what Toby said to Luke this morning, Two girls fighting over you on your second day. He was joking. But if this is a fight – and it does feel a tiny bit like one at this moment – what weapons have I got against Jasmine Wright?

  As always, my spirit relaxes the moment I enter the library. It’s old and pretty, with stained glass windows and scratched wooden tables, and tightly packed shelves running up to high ceilings.

  The only free seat is in the far corner under the picture of the school’s founder, Elias Mansfield. I take out The Great Gatsby and one of Donovan’s handouts about the Jazz Age. I chew my pen and look up at Elias. I’ve never really noticed him before. He’s one of those Victorian guys with weird swoops of facial hair. Hands clasped across a huge stomach. Big teeth resting on a too-red under-lip; droopy eyelids. If you look closely his eyes are kind and suggest he’d enjoy a joke – a nice clean Victorian one – but I reckon most people, if they notice him at all, just see the ugliness. If Luke looked like that, or like that pizza-faced boy in the upper sixth, who I always feel sorry for though I don’t know his name, those girls wouldn’t be so keen.

  I frown at my notes. Why am I so annoyed? Do I want Luke to get a hard time because of what happened yesterday? No, of course not. I was relieved this morning when nobody stared or whispered. I’m delighted for him that the cool girls want to make friends.

  OK, not delighted.

  A shadow looms beside me. It’s Luke, as if I’ve conjured him up. My stomach flutters.

  He sets his bag on the table. ‘D’you mind?’ he asks. ‘All the other tables are full.’

  ‘Course not.’ I pull the handouts towards me to make room at the desk. I try not to over-analyse his remark about the other tables. Did he mean he wouldn’t have sat here if he’d had a choice?

  He takes out a file block and the notebook I lent him. It’s funny seeing it in his hands, my loopy scrawl and doodled margins. He leans back in his seat and looks up at the high vaulted ceiling and stained glass.

  ‘Wow,’ he says.

  ‘Shh,’ hisses Miss McGurk, the librarian, who’s probably been here since Elias Mansfield’s time. ‘Silent study.’

  We exchange grins, and Luke gets down to copying out my notes. He works with a fierce concentration, even though it’s only a few basic biographical notes about F Scott Fitzgerald. His handwriting is so clear I can nearly read it upside down. I wonder what school he went to before and why he moved. A boy at the next table goes up to ask McGurk something and she starts tapping at the computer on her desk, chatting to him.

  I take advantage of her distraction to ask Luke, ‘What school were you at before?’

  He hesitates. ‘Belvedere High.’

  ‘Oh.’ Unexpected. The Bearpit, as everybody calls it, is one of the roughest schools in Belfast. It’s always being threatened with closure, and its pupils are more likely to graduate to prison than to the sixth form of Mansfield. That’s statistically true, not me being snobby. And he doesn’t sound like he went to the Bearpit. ‘Why did you move?’

  Luke raises his eyebrows. ‘Why d’you think?’ He underlines a subheading in red. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yesterday – how come you knew what to do? I mean, do you do first aid or something? People don’t usually have a clue.’

  ‘I helped out at a summer scheme for kids with special needs. Some of them had epilepsy as well as other stuff. One kid fitted nearly every day. I just got used to it.’

  On McGurk’s desk the printer hums and then stops. She frowns at it. ‘I’ll have to go for paper,’ she says.

  As soon as she leaves, the noise level in the library creeps up, which makes it easier to talk.

  ‘Have you always had it?’ I ask.

  ‘Only since January.’

  ‘Is it controlled? I mean, normally?’

  He frowns. ‘I keep hoping it is and then …’ His mouth twists.

  ‘Bad luck on your first day.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He seems to think about this, then shrugs it off. ‘Good luck to be sitting beside you, though.’

  ‘Any time.’ Stupid thing to say.

  Luke doesn’t reply but just continues writing. I highlight key points in yellow on my handout. I wish I wasn’t so aware of him across from me. I try not to look at him, but I can’t stop my eyes from glancing up every so often. My brain makes notes without me asking it to.

  Grey-blue eyes, dark lashes – darker than his hair. Pale, freshly shaved skin. His lips are dry, a few tiny flecks flaking away from the skin. He should put some Vaseline on them. My tongue imagines licking his lips, and I have to swallow hard and concentrate on The Great Gatsby, but my eyes and brain keep up their inventory. A tiny cut on his cheekbone – from the seizure. I can’t help comparing the self-contained boy sitting here taking neat notes with the other Luke, unconscious and convulsing on the floor.

  And how weird am I, to have been so much more confident with that Luke?

  Luke puts his pen down and leans his elbows on the table, cupping his chin in his hands. ‘What?’ he asks.

  My face burns. ‘Sorry – I’m just …’

  Just wondering what your lips feel like. Just remembering how close I felt to you yesterday when I was the only one who knew how to help you. Just remembering the feel of your skin under my hand. Just wondering how to deal with all these feelings zinging through me.

  ‘… wondering if my notes are OK?’

  ‘They’re fine,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’

  Luke

  Another good thing about Sandra: she
always knocks.

  ‘Come in,’ I say, looking up from The Great Gatsby.

  Sandra puts her head round the door and smiles. ‘Up and dressed already?’

  ‘I’m always up early.’ I slide my finger between the pages to keep my place.

  ‘Bill always does a fry on Saturday mornings. And then he does the hoovering for me. We just wondered – would you take a wee fry? What do you like?’

  It’s weird, living with someone who doesn’t know what you eat or when you get up.

  ‘I don’t mind. Anything.’

  Sandra looks round the room. It looks exactly as it did when I moved in on Monday, except for my new MacBook Air sitting on the small IKEA desk, and the pile of books beside the bed.

  ‘You can put up any posters you like,’ she says. ‘We want you to feel at home.’

  The walls are OK, freshly painted magnolia. Hardly worth messing them up.

  ‘I could do with some bookshelves.’

  ‘Och, aye,’ she says. ‘We should have thought of that. Brendan said you were a great one for your books.’ Not for the first time I wonder what else Brendan has said. ‘Bill can sort you out something,’ she goes on. ‘He’s hands for anything. Sure, come on down and we’ll ask him.’

  Bill, cracking eggs into a pan, face shiny with heat, smiles when he sees me. ‘Och, that’s great,’ he says. ‘Nothing like your fry.’

  We never had fried stuff. Stir fry maybe, but not an Ulster fry – the full heart attack on a plate – all bread and shiny egg and processed pig, glistening with grease on Sandra’s old-fashioned flowery plates. Not that you can see the pattern for the food piled on top. You’d think Bill and Sandra would be obese, eating this stuff, but she’s just grannyishly plump and he has only a bit of a belly.

  I stick my fork into the egg, and yolk spurts out.

  Sandra pours tea from a huge brown pot, then squeezes into her seat. ‘That wee cat’s on the windowsill again,’ she says. ‘I’m going to have to start feeding it.’

  I look up at the window but the black kitten jumps down when it sees me.

  ‘So, what do you normally do at weekends?’ Sandra asks, attacking her own fry.

  ‘Och, Sandra, leave the lad alone. He probably just likes to – what do they call it – hang out. Isn’t that right, son?’ He gives me an all-boys-together smile. A bean is lodged in his moustache.

  I shake my head. I’m certainly not going to hang out on this estate.

  ‘Homework,’ I say, cutting up a sausage. ‘Reading.’

  Sandra looks alarmed. ‘Aye, but you don’t sit in all the time, do you? Young fellow like you?’

  ‘No.’ I try to think what I did, back when I had a normal life. Drawing is the first thing that comes to mind. But there’s no point now. ‘I go running. Or cycling.’ Suddenly the idea of the day – the weekend – two years – stretching ahead in this tiny house is unbearable. ‘I think I’ll cycle to the library.’

  ‘Sure the library’s only round the corner,’ Bill says. ‘Take you two minutes to walk round.’

  I’ve checked it out already. It’s small and full of celebrity biographies.

  ‘I meant my own library – the one I used to go to.’

  ‘Cycle?’ Sandra says. ‘Is that a good idea?’ She means should someone who’s liable to smash to the ground without warning be allowed out on the roads in charge of a bike.

  I shrug. ‘I have a helmet.’

  ‘I know, but … if something …’

  ‘Sandra. Love.’ Bill sets down his knife and fork, burps and covers his mouth. ‘Pardon me. You can’t wrap the lad in cotton wool.’

  ‘But if he fell off – in the traffic? He’d be killed! That main road!’

  ‘He could cycle on the footpath.’

  I’m seventeen, I want to scream. I am not riding my bike on the bloody footpath.

  ‘Did the doctor say you could ride a bike?’ Bill asks, pouring out another cup of tea.

  I frown at my plate. Despite this very annoying conversation, I seem to have eaten most of the fry.

  ‘She said, be sensible. She said’ – I take a deep breath; I’ve heard this a million times – ‘there’s no reason not to lead a perfectly normal life as long as I don’t take unnecessary risks.’

  ‘Well.’ Sandra’s mouth tightens in triumph, ‘I think that counts as an unnecessary risk all right.’

  ‘She meant drink and drugs and stuff, I think,’ I argue. ‘Which I don’t do.’

  Sandra and Bill exchange glances as if they know better. Which means Brendan must have let rip with the gory details.

  I mop up the last of my tomato sauce with a piece of soda bread I’ve been saving. I make a huge effort to sound calm. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I hardly ever have seizures on this new medication. Maybe one a month. Not even.’

  Bill seizes on this. ‘See, Sandra, the lad knows his limits.’

  ‘Bill, he’s a seventeen-year-old boy. Of course he doesn’t know his limits.’

  ‘I am in the room, you know. And I don’t think anybody can actually stop me. I’m not a child.’

  Sandra bangs down the teapot. ‘For crying out loud! Look, you’re right. We can’t stop you. But we’re responsible for you. We don’t want anything to happen to you.’

  ‘It won’t.’

  And really, what does it matter to them? They’d still get paid even if I was in hospital. They met me for the first time a few weeks ago, a polite meeting with Brendan doing most of the talking; I’ve lived in their house for five days. They can’t pretend to care. And at the end of the day they can just send me back.

  Except.

  Except this is Last Chance Saloon. I’m not stupid, and Brendan has been pretty up-front. ‘It’s not easy getting foster carers for older teenagers, Luke,’ he’d told me. ‘We’re very lucky that Sandra and Bill are willing.’ We. Like it mattered to him. ‘Put me in a flat,’ I told Brendan. ‘I can look after myself; I don’t need carers.’ But Brendan told me not to be stupid; they don’t set seventeen-year-olds up in flats. ‘Especially not ones with epilepsy. Can you imagine if you had a seizure in the shower? With no one around? Or hit your head?’

  ‘A hostel then,’ I suggested. I didn’t need to be in a family. I don’t do family. ‘All I need’s a room. Some meals. Just somewhere to stay till I go to university.’

  Brendan laughed – not at the idea of me going to uni; he’d realised by then that I’m not as thick as most of the losers he works with. ‘Luke, you wouldn’t last two days in a hostel. They’d eat you alive. No. Our recommendation is another foster placement. And Sandra and Bill are great; you’ll like them.’

  The stupid thing is I do like them. They’re a bit old and a bit (let’s face it) common, and their house is too fussy for me, with all those photos of their daughter and even their old foster kids – but they are nice.

  It’s the bloody epilepsy that is the trouble. Nobody knows how to deal with it.

  Including me.

  ‘Everybody else my age is learning to drive,’ I point out. ‘I need to have some independence.’

  ‘And he probably wants to see his old friends. That’s only natural,’ Bill says. I don’t know yet if I should welcome Bill being on my side, but he’s got it wrong about the old friends anyway. People at Belvedere didn’t live in South Road. People who lived in South Road went to Mansfield. And now I go to Mansfield and live in the same kind of estate as people from Belvedere. But on the far side of town. I can’t keep up with my own social mobility.

  Esther’s face swims into my head. Talking to her yesterday was the first conversation about epilepsy that hasn’t done my head in. For the first time I kind of understand why Brendan is always trying to pack me off to support groups and things. Not that I’d be seen dead at one.

  With a supreme effort at self-control and maturity I say, ‘Well, I suppose I don’t have to go today.’

  Bill looks relieved; Sandra triumphant.

  I look at the flowery wipe-clean tablecloth and wonder
how I’m going to survive weekends in this house, on this estate, for two whole years.

  _____________

  I sit on my bed and take Esther’s notes out of my schoolbag even though I know the two pages by heart. Her writing is loopy and girly, slightly backhand, and there are doodles in the margins – a flower; the letter E made fancy and swirly like something out of the Book of Kells; a cat. Nothing revealing. Blue ink. Red underlining.

  I smooth the two sheets of paper and put them in a plastic folder.

  ‘Luke?’

  Bill’s knock comes a fraction after his voice and the head round the door. I frown but say, ‘Uh-huh?’

  He looks round. ‘Phooo!’ He lets out a long breath. ‘I’ve never seen this room so tidy.’

  ‘I’m a tidy person.’ I wonder how many kids have slept in this room before me.

  ‘Sandra said you need shelves for your books.’ He takes a tape measure out of his back pocket and puts his glasses on. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘we can put some up above the desk – three maybe? Would that be enough? About – what – three foot long each?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I don’t know why he wants to mess up his walls. It’d be easier to buy a bookcase in IKEA, and probably cheaper. Maybe he has loads of wood lying round in his shed. Maybe he likes a project. Or maybe he’s trying to get in with me.

  He leans across the desk. ‘Just grab the other end of this, would you, son?’ He indicates the tape measure.

  I stand up and hold it. He mutters measurements, lifts a pen from the desk and scribbles them down on his hand.

  He clicks the tape to make it slide back into the plastic casing and puts it back in his pocket. I wait for him to go. I can probably finish The Great Gatsby, or read my history textbook. One full day at Mansfield has been enough to show me that people are far cleverer than I’ve been used to. At Belvedere it was easy being top of everything – most of the others were barely literate; now I know I’ll have to work my ass off just to keep up.

  Bill doesn’t leave; he grabs the chair at the desk and nods at me as if asking for permission to sit down. I can’t say no, so I nod back. He sits. I stay standing.

  ‘Look, lad, I’m sorry if Sandra came across a bit– overprotective.’