Writing On the Wall

by Lynne Reid Banks

  Now he said, “Con don’t fancy me, she thinks I’m thick.”

  The minute he said that, I knew he liked her. It just figured, a kid like Darryl fancying someone sure of herself, like Con.

  “She said you’d be useful, speaking Dutch and that.”

  He swerved a bit and then straightened up his front wheel.

  “You mean, she’s actually said something about it?”

  “You know Con. She doesn’t like to be with a crowd. She’s a loner.”

  “The cat who walks by himself.”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s a story. I am the Cat who walks by himself.” He was staring straight ahead across his handlebars now. “I always thought I’d like to be like that. I can’t be, though. I can’t stand being alone for five minutes.”

  Me neither. Well – ten minutes maybe, when I’m miserable. The cat who walks by himself. Yeah, that was Con all right, specially in her black get-up, and her dyed stiff hair brushed up on end like fur.

  “Would you go though?”

  He shook his head, still looking ahead. “I wouldn’t like to leave Michael,” he said. “Anyway she probably didn’t mean it. She wouldn’t take me. Never.”

  No opinion of himself, that’s his trouble. And stuck on Con. Poor old Darryl.

  10 · Dutch Disco

  We didn’t make it to Rotterdam that second day. We found a nice camping spot and spent the night there. Funny how easy it was to put the tents up the second time. We weren’t so tired either. Just as hungry though. This site had its own canteen, sort of, where you could get snacks and even hot meals. We all had the same – sausage and chips. Well, frankfurters, really. The only really Dutch thing was that you could have apple sauce with them. Naturally only Michael and Darryl did. I nicked a bit of Darryl’s just to try. Not bad by itself, but you can’t tell me it goes with chips.

  Karen came up to me just as we were eating.

  “Can I sleep in your tent tonight?” she whispered. “Connie won’t mind sleeping on her own, will she?”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  She went red in the face a bit, and looked away. “I’ve gone right off Cliff after last night,” she said.

  So that’s what she was sulking about all day – not leg ache at all. I thought it was the other way round, the boy doesn’t want the girl any more after. I didn’t know what to say. I was off Karen. But there she was, giving me this begging look, and we had been friends a long time. Once. So I said, “I don’t mind if Con doesn’t. Only what’s Cliff going to say?”

  “I don’t give a shit what he says!” she said, half shouting suddenly. I wanted to put my arm round her then, only you can’t, can you. Everyone thinks you’re a Les.

  I had to fix it with Con. She just gave a shrug and said, “Don’t blame her. He’d better not come slithering in on top of me, that’s all!”

  “Don’t you like him?” I asked.

  “No. Either he’s a fool or he’s NF. I’ve always wondered. You know when he first had his ear pierced, he came to school with a gold swastika hanging off it. I told him to take it off. He wouldn’t, so I grassed to Barry.” Barry was our old form teacher. “He had it off him in five minutes. He was in the war and all, when he was young, same as my grandad. He can’t stand nothing to do with the Nazis.”

  “My dad lost all his family in the Polish concentration camps.”

  Con looked at me. “I never knew that,” she said.

  We didn’t have a camp-fire that night because we heard there was a disco in the little town nearby and we all went to that. It was a proper riot. The Dutch really let their hair down. I danced with a couple of Dutch boys. One looked very Dutch, blond with blue eyes and this big, pale face like a lump of dough, but very sweet somehow, though he couldn’t talk English. We just smiled at each other.

  Later on we went outside for him to have a fag, only turned out it wasn’t a fag he wanted, it was a quick grope. Nothing doing. So we sat on a bench and he smoked with one hand and held mine with the other. I let him do that because we had to do something instead of talking.

  Suddenly someone grabbed my free hand and pulled me onto my feet. Kev, of course.

  “I been looking for you!” he said, furious. “What you doing out here, as if I couldn’t guess?”

  “Listen, I was just—”

  “You come inside with me,” he said. “And you—” he shouted at the Dutch boy—“you can piss off!”

  Well, it seems this lad could understand a bit of English after all, because his face turned brick red in the light of the lamp we were sitting under. The doughy look wasn’t there any more; he looked like a big angry hard man. He got slowly to his feet and Kev suddenly saw he was six foot tall and with fists like cauliflowers. He shrank back. Well, who can wonder? He’d be a fool not to.

  “Cripes,” he said under his breath. “Come on, girl, out of it!” And he pulled me back into the disco-hut. We started dancing and soon worked our way into the middle of the crowd. Kev’d got the white face now.

  “What you mucking around with him for?” he yelled at me through the din.

  I wouldn’t answer. I reckoned till we’d been to that hotel it was none of his business who I mucked around with. I wasn’t, anyway.

  “You nearly got me in dead trouble!”

  “You nearly got yourself in, you mean.”

  “You was holding his hand; I saw you.”

  “I had to do something. We couldn’t talk.”

  “Maybe I’d better forget English then!”

  We danced till near closing time, all except Cliff. Poor old Cliff! Karen wouldn’t dance with him, and nor would Con, and somehow he didn’t have the bottle to tackle the Dutch girls. I had to dance with him myself in the end, he looked so down, just hanging around smoking.

  Kev was off in the toilet round the back, so I just went up to Cliff and said, “Want to dance?”

  “Don’t mind,” he said, but he chucked his fag away sharp enough.

  The reason I haven’t described Cliff is because it’s hard to. He’s not got any definite features really. He’s the kind you wouldn’t notice in a crowd, even if it was a crowd of five people.

  I remember one time at school, he was walking home with four other boys, including Kev and Darryl, and he smashed a Pepsi bottle in the gutter. A man was just getting into his car. He heard the crash and called them back. Of course they just ran like rabbits, shouting rude things back over their shoulders. So this man chased them, in this car. They ducked up a one-way street and he lost them, but he complained to the school. Said he’d got a good look at them and could identify them.

  Well. So he could. All the other four. But Cliff got away with it, just by being like he is – dead ordinary. Thin, pale, neither tall nor short, with this mousy hair. Maybe, I thought to myself as we danced, that’s why he wears swastikas and makes National Frontish remarks to shock people. To make himself noticed. He would choose a girl like Karen, too. Anybody choosier wouldn’t have looked at him. Unless she felt sorry for him, of course, like I was. Not that sorry, though. His hands are damp and he smells funny. Not bad, just funny.

  Kev came back from the bog, but he didn’t do his nut this time. He just waited till I was done dancing with Cliff and then he came up to me and said, “It’s late. What do you say we start walking back?”

  “Yeah, why not? Only let’s tell Michael where we are.”

  “What’s it his business?” Kev said. But he let me sort Michael out and tell him we were going. He was dancing with this Dutch girl. Ever so pretty she was. Lots of curly hair. And she was wearing this kind of rose-coloured skirt. We were all in jeans of course, and they were getting pretty grotty-looking too. I looked at her white blouse and thought, I’ll wash all my stuff before I go to bed tonight, even if I do have to carry it wet tomorrow. Not that I’d brought anything like that, all frills.

  Michael said we might as well wait because it was nearly over and we could go together. But Kev was signalling me
across the room and I said, “We’ll just go ahead.” He looked at me a minute, then gave a bit of a shrug and went on dancing.

  Kev and me started walking along the narrow streets of the town. It was dead quiet. We strolled along, between the dark buildings with their funny high pointed roofs. There was a moon. It was ever so romantic. I just wanted to walk like that, quiet, hand in hand, and not talk or even think much, just drink it in. But Kev’s not the quiet type.

  “What sort of a dancer’s Cliff then?”

  “Okay.”

  “They say if you dance well together, you’re good in bed together.”

  So that’s how his mind was working. No surprise, I suppose, a night like that. I got a sort of thrill up my back myself. So I said, nice as I could, “He didn’t dance that well, not with me.”

  “You and me dance well.” And he put his arm round me.

  I looked back along the old-fashioned, empty street. No sign of the others. Kev edged me into a doorway. Long pause in storyline.

  “Listen,” I got in at last, “it’s no good for tonight, if that’s what you’re hoping. I’m dossing with Karen, and that’s it.”

  “Please, Trace. Don’t be like that.” He was nibbling me all over my face and neck now, and suddenly he put his hands where they shouldn’t go. One hand, anyway – the other was round my waist. First time. I’ve seen it so often on telly I thought I knew what to expect, but honest, when he touched me there I thought my knees’d give way. I couldn’t breathe right. I just stood there with my eyes shut, not thinking, not moving, just feeling. It was so exciting, I forgot where I was and everything. I even forgot who was doing it to me.

  I didn’t go for that. So I kind of made myself come to, and moved his hand. Not pushed it, mind you. Just moved it nicely.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked, quite loud. Jarring.

  “Nothing. Not a thing,” I said, trying to make my voice come out normal, but it didn’t. “Only let’s – keep walking.”

  He dropped me like a hot potato. “Oh well then – that’s all, folks!” he said, very loud now, and he sang the loony-tune like at the end of the cartoons. And he stuck his hands in his pockets and marched off, leaving me to trail along behind.

  I ran after him. I didn’t want to be left alone. “Don’t be hurt, Kev,” I said to him. “Please! It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “I can only stand – a little at a time. That’s all.”

  He didn’t answer me. He didn’t take my hand again either. I felt a bit wild. I had a funny feeling, too. I couldn’t walk properly. I wished he’d be nicer. More understanding. I did want him, I knew that now for sure. But what’d he be like, after? What’d I be like? I didn’t want it to spoil everything. In a way I wished we could just have the trip without all these complications.

  We got back to the camping site and wove through the other tents in the dark till we came to ours, four of them in a line. Then he turned round sharpish and faced me.

  “I can’t take much more of this,” he said, very dramatic. “Boys can’t, you know that.”

  Karen told me boys can’t go without for more than a month or they go mad. She said that’s why there’s prostitutes. Of course I didn’t exactly believe her. But he did look sort of crazy in the moonlight. I couldn’t help being worried. What if me letting him touch me like that, and then making him stop, what if it really was bad for him? I didn’t think it was very good for me, come to that.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Come into my tent with me. Now, quick, before the others come back.”

  “Oh no!” I said before I could think twice. Not that way. Not in a hurry, not with the rest of them tramping about and maybe peeping in.

  And before he could say anything, I’d dived into my own tent, and tied the flap-tapes from the inside.

  Forgot all about washing my gear.

  11 · Old Erasmus

  Couldn’t go to sleep though. I kept thinking: What am I getting in to? Should I or shouldn’t I? It was getting harder and harder not to. Saying no and keeping him off was upsetting me as well as him. Sometimes I wished we’d never started going together, necking and that. That we were just mates.

  Once, when a bunch of us visited another school to play them at netball, they took us into their classroom and showed us this poster. I was fourteen then and it shocked me, to be honest – nothing like it in our school, you can bet. It would hardly go well with the crucifixes we had in every classroom.

  It was headed CONTRACEPTION in big letters, and underneath, it had a bunch of boys drawn on one side and girls on the other. They all had think-balloons about what they thought of sex.

  One of the boys was saying, “I wouldn’t like to marry a girl who wasn’t a virgin.” He was Asian-looking and there was an Asian-looking girl saying, “I’m going to wait till I’m married.” So they were all right, I mean provided they married each other.

  But most of the other kids were thinking differently. One boy said, “If she loved me, she’d let me do it.” But the girl we matched up with him was saying, “If he loved me, he wouldn’t make me do it.” And there was one girl saying, “I could never tell my parents.” And another saying, “I’m afraid of getting pregnant.” Well, we could see their point of view all right, at least I could.

  I knew about the pill and that. And the other methods – well, sort of. Of course they taught us nothing about that in our school because the teachers were all Catholics, but you pick things up. I knew boys have this thing they can buy. What I didn’t know was if Kev had any. No good getting myself into this hotel room and finding he hadn’t. It might be too late then. I mean, when do they put them on? Soon enough so that if they don’t, you can get out of doing it? I had an idea they put them on a bit late in the day, so to speak. When copping out would be tricky.

  I decided to ask Karen’s advice. She’s the expert, after all.

  She came crawling in after a while. She whispered, “You awake?” I said yes. She said, “I’m not going to undress. I’m knackered.” And crawled straight into her sleeping-bag.

  After a bit I whispered, “Karen.”

  “What?”

  “Did you really do it last night? With Cliff?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “I only wanted to know if he – I mean, if he’d brought – did he use those things?”

  She rolled over in her bag to face me in the dark.

  “Are you thinking of . . .?”

  “Not with him!” I said before I thought.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “You seemed to think there was something wrong, tonight.”

  “Oh, that. He turned me off, that’s all. Wasn’t his fault.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  We stopped for a bit. I could hear the others laughing as they crawled into their tents. There was a shadow outside, and Michael’s voice: “Early up, girls! We want to be in Rotterdam by lunchtime, or sooner.” We called back, “Okay. ’Night.”

  Then I whispered to Karen, “Remember that chart thing? In that school, ages ago? About contraception?”

  “Oh yeah – that. What about it?”

  “Which of the girls was most like you?”

  We’d all been playing which girls were us and which boys we’d like at the time. Not that we all told the truth. The one I thought was me then was saying, “I want to have a job first and enjoy myself.” Now it was different.

  “None of ’em was like me,” Karen said. “I’d had a couple of boys by then. The schools wouldn’t buy them charts if any of ’em had been saying what I think.”

  “What do you think?”

  She was quiet a bit, making up her own think-balloon. Finally she said, “Sex is nicer than Yorkie bars.”

  I broke up. I had to half-smother myself in my sleeping-bag. At last I got hold of myself enough to say, “But you can’t get in the family way from Yorkie bars.”

  “I’m on the pill,” she
said. She seemed proud of it.

  “Does your mum know?”

  “My mum? She’d kill me twice over if she did. I keep ’em in a tear in my mattress.”

  “Did you bring any?”

  “Course I did.”

  After a long pause I said, “Karen.”

  “What?”

  “Will you give me one?”

  Now it was her started giggling. “You dumb-head,” she said. “Do you think you just take one and go ahead and do it and you’re safe? You got to take a whole course of ’em. It’s got to change all your hormones before it can work.”

  “Oh,” I said. Why couldn’t they at least have told us that much at school? I felt a right goon, not knowing that. But now I did, I didn’t much fancy having my hormones changed. Sounded much too drastic.

  With her still sniggering away, I didn’t feel like asking any more, for fear of making more of a twit of myself. Anyhow, how could she know if Kev had brought any of those things or not? And I certainly couldn’t bring myself to ask, “Do they put them on at the beginning or the end?” So I just said, “Night then.”

  But after a bit, she said, “Didn’t your big sister tell you all about it?” And I said, “Mary’s a virgin.” And Karen said, “Must run in the family then. What about your mum?” And that set her off again.

  Just before I dropped off to sleep, I remembered another couple on that poster, that we paired off. The boy was saying, “Why not? Everybody does.” And the girl was saying, “I’m not going to do it just because the others do.” I thought, Well, that’s sense anyway. But when I went to sleep at last I didn’t dream about Kev, or sex. I dreamt about eating Yorkie bars.

  *

  Michael got us on the road early next morning and even with a swim on the way we were in sight of Rotterdam by eleven o’clock.