by Nicci Cloke
‘Not very friendly today, are you?’
We were nearing the main road, and suddenly I could hear the sounds of the rest of the world through the straggly trees. The thin dirt path that led through them seemed to glow in the grey shadows. Kay flicked the cigarette away from him. Things were going slowly now, my body heavy and dragging, and as I broke into a stumbling run, he grabbed me in a flash.
‘Ah ah ah,’ he said, his fingers tight around my arm. ‘Stick around a bit. Let’s be friendly, shall we? Neighbour.’
So much is hidden from people driving past a place. Trees and buildings hide the layers and layers of people and lives that are being and happening at any given moment. In one short stretch of road, you can be passing happiness, sadness, fear. Things forgotten, things lost. Lights on, fires burning, people left out in the cold. People at the end of the road.
He held me up against the trunk, one of his knees forcing mine apart. His breath was hot on my face.
‘You stink,’ he said. ‘Dirty bitch.’ He was fumbling with his jeans. ‘Now, how much do you owe again? Let me think.’
The day it happens is a Sunday. We’re sitting in a caravan in a tiny terraced back garden with a plastic bottle of cider in the middle of the table and the Top Forty on the radio. Lick is holding my hand. I have never had my hand held before. I feel very special. He isn’t the best-looking boy in year eleven but he is in year eleven and that’s really quite old. Even Quin says so. I think Quin is going to be jealous squared when he finds out Lick has held my hand. I look at Abby, sitting on the other side of the table. She’s a good friend. She found me Lick. Spoon isn’t holding her hand but it’s his caravan so he has to pour the drinks. Abby and me have been drunk before. At least, we think so. But this must be what being really drunk feels like, warm and cosy and lovely. I wonder when Lick will actually ask me to be his girlfriend properly. Having a year-eleven boyfriend – I don’t think anybody else has done that yet. They will probably all want to be my friend. I know that Quin will still be my best friend, of course. Things like that never change.
Abby and Spoon are going to get cigarettes. I’m practising liking smoking. I hope it doesn’t make the caravan spin like it did the time Abby and me tried it in her sister’s wardrobe. Abby is laughing at something Spoon has said, and they’re all looking at me and laughing. I smile back but I haven’t heard what they said. My head feels floppy and my fingers are lovely and warm in Lick’s hand. The door shuts and I can hear Abby giggling all the way down the garden path. Lick asks me if I’m okay and I say yes and he says good. Then he kisses me. He sticks his tongue in and pokes it about and pushes at my teeth. My face gets wet and his breath smells of cider. He moves his hand, which is still holding mine, down to his legs and he lays my hand on his zip. He puts both his hands round my head and squiggles at my hair with all his fingers at once. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my hand so I give it a little pat and then I squiggle like he’s doing, my face going all hot and pink. He makes a funny noise and then he pushes me hard onto the cushions and he starts squiggling his fingers under my skirt, which I only made yesterday from an old pair of jeans and it looks pretty cool, it really does, but the sewing isn’t very good and I hope it won’t rip. He starts poking at the crease between my leg and you-know-where with his finger and I don’t think that’s where he means to be poking but I don’t want to say anything, in case he does and I just don’t know anything at all. He’s still making noises and getting my face wet and when he pulls down my knickers, which aren’t even the nice pair I got for Christmas, and pulls down his jeans I say, ‘no’ but it’s lost in all the wet and the teeth and the lips so I say it louder I say, ‘NO’ but his face is buried in my hair and he doesn’t hear me and he pushes in anyway and so I look up at the dirty ceiling and I wonder if he’s my boyfriend yet.
I was frozen, only the rough bark at my back holding me up. In my head I had already drifted away. And then, somewhere, from deep in my heart, I thought of Fitz, and I thought that somewhere, in some tiny place, I mattered now. I had someone waiting for me. I brought my knee up hard into Kay’s soft crotch, and as he doubled over, I brought it up again, harder, into his face. And then I ran.
I ran through the trees until everything was blurred, until I thought I was dead and everything was disappearing. I ran in the wrong direction, so that when I finally came through the trees, I was halfway down the road. And then everything really was disappearing. And then everything went black.
‘You okay, love? That’s it, open your eyes. Easy does it.’
The sun was on my face again, and there were stones digging at the back of my legs. Somebody with soft hands was pulling my dress down carefully.
‘Get the water out of the car, Jo.’
I opened my eyes. I was lying on the pavement, cars driving past with their wheels turning softly on the sharp grey gravel, some slowing to catch a glimpse of the misfortune that had this time missed them. There was a red car parked beside me, hazard lights flashing, and a man kneeling beside me, rolling up a sweatshirt. He put it gently under my head.
‘Keep still. You’ve fainted.’
The car door shut and a woman came back with a plastic bottle of water. She smiled at me kindly. ‘Here we go. Such a hot day.’
I sat up and the world turned sideways and then changed its mind. The man unscrewed the cap and handed the bottle to me. I took a deep swig and sicked it straight back up on the woman’s lovely shoes, clear and still tepid. I tried to say sorry, but she knelt down next to me. ‘Here,’ she said, taking the bottle. ‘Small sips, that’s it.’ And she held it to my lips, once, twice, again, waiting while I swallowed. In the car a toddler pressed his face to the window. A fat baby sat strapped into a car seat next to him. The car’s windows were rolled down, the radio playing faintly out into the warm air.
‘Police have found the car they believe to have been used to abduct Fate Jones. Early forensic reports suggest that strands of hair found in the boot belong to the missing student. The investigation continues.
‘Ex-England footballer Cayden Kingsley is today facing allegations that he cheated on his wife of fourteen years more than fifty times. An unnamed woman has claimed to a tabloid that he fathered three of her four children while captaining the squad – a team that prided itself on bringing family values back to the sport. A spokesman for Kingsley said there would be no official comment, but representatives from his various sponsorship deals, including childrenswear label Free Kicks, are expected to issue statements over the coming days.’
‘Feeling better, sweetie?’ the woman asked, screwing the top back on the bottle. I nodded. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you up. We’ll take you home.’
I let them lift me onto my feet. I looked at the two little babies in the back seat. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk.’ And I walked away, leaving them standing on the pavement behind me.
The day he moves in, I stand at the top of the steps and watch him unload his boxes from the back of Eddie’s little car. I don’t have any shoes or socks on but I’m so fizzy with excitement that I don’t even notice how cold the November concrete is. We leave his boxes on the pavement and, as Eddie drives off, he picks me up and carries me down the steps and over the threshold.
In the shower, warm water pouring down over me, soft like rain, beating out a relentless rhythm on my scalp and sending tingles down my spine. Turning the dial slowly, feeling the water turn from rainforest shower to cold drizzle and then clicking off. The drops of water on the glass catch the light as they run away. Picking two and watching them race, trying to guess which will reach the ground first. The drops on the tiles are different, tiny beads, still and silent. Smudging them into a long wet smear with my thumb. Furry black mould creeping round the edge of beige tile. Mould is all around, oozing out of every gap, sliding fingers around the edges of floor, crawling up old bottles and blunt razors. The air is thick. Stepping backwards out of the shower door quickly and shutting i
t tight behind me. The touch of the tiles on the soles of my feet, flat and solid and cold and smooth. Lying down on my front and feeling the flat solid cold smoothness of it all along my skin, from the tops of my feet to my cheek and ear.
There is an evening once, just a normal evening, when we talk and talk. We sit together, then sit apart, stretching legs and arms over and around each other. We sit on the floor, we lie on the floor, all the time talking and talking as if we have never seen each other before. We move round and round, the streetlamp’s light stretching through the tiny window and the sun slowly coming up over the grey of the pavement. As the orange of the lamp clicks off and grey dawn washes over us, we are lying with his face next to my hip and his breath hot through my thin dress. He kisses me gently through the fabric and I don’t think he even means me to feel it. We stay there for hours, rolled onto our sides. We talk and we laugh until the sun starts to sink back down through the little window.
Lying on the dusty floor, head spinning. That night seems to belong to a different lifetime, two different people speaking a different language. I’m an outsider, even from my own memories.
The last waves washing over me, stretching out the minutes and making every touch and every sound seem far away and strange. Walking naked to the bedroom, water cooling on my skin. Wrapping myself in an old jumper. My wet hair drying in curls around my neck.
Fitz on the sofa. Curling up next to him and pulling his arm around me and letting the music from the TV wash around us. The air is sparkling and the tips of my fingers are gold. I turn to look at Fitz and the tears on his cheeks are gold too.
Headlights from the road above shining on the wall, lighting up the flat and letting the outside in. Fitz lifting me, leading me to the bedroom. My legs feel weak and the world starts to swim. He lays me down carefully. Waiting to feel his weight on me, holding me down and keeping me safe. But he’s gone.
Sounds in the hall, voices, footsteps. My mother and father. They loom in and out of view, the sounds of them muffled and far away. Clothes folded into a bag and clothes forced onto me as my eyes roll in and out of black.
Lifted, up and away. As the car door closes, my eyes do too. I don’t even get a chance to look back.
I opened my eyes to flat white ceiling. No meringue, no possibility, no shape. For a moment I thought I was back at Happy Blossoms where everything was flat and white or flat and pink and everything and everyone was different degrees of dead. I lay there for a minute and imagined what it would be like never to get up, to lie there until I just stopped being. From outside the window I could hear Lulu in the front garden, riding her bike up and down the front path. I knew she’d have on a helmet, knee-pads, armpads, wrapped up in cotton wool just to ride back and forth along the twenty-three flagstones that led up to the house. They’d bought her these beads that slotted on to the spokes of her wheels, all beautiful blues and pinks and purples and one very bright green, and they clattered around as the wheels turned. Everyone was always fussing over how lovely they were, how unusual. Nobody remembered that I had asked for them for my first bike, or that my mother had said that the noise would bring on her migraines.
My window was open, the curtains lifting gently in the breeze. The windows in our house were always open; as if they were afraid that without an opening to the outside we would all suffocate. I could hear the sharp clip-clip of my mother’s pruning scissors, and every so often Lulu would shout to her, ‘Mummy, look at me!’ They sounded close; as if I could sit up and peer through the window and see them right there in front of me, instead of a storey down and a world apart. The front door opened and Dad stepped out.
‘Ginny on the phone for you, love,’ he said, in a voice that was trying hard not to carry further than the privet hedges. The clip-clip stopped and I heard my mother sit back on her heels on the grass.
‘Tell her I’ll call her back, will you? She’ll only want to go on about Georgie and the doctors. And it’s so lovely out.’
‘Right you are,’ he said, and I heard rubber slipper-soles step carefully back onto parquet floor. ‘Looking good, Lu,’ he said, as the door began to creak shut, ‘Maybe get those stabilisers off next week.’
They carried on for a while, the clip-clip of pruning and the clattering of plastic diamonds on shiny spokes and the singsong of birds in the trees all along the street. The ceiling stayed flat and white. No cars passed, the odd starling was the only traffic from house to house to the post office and back. I could hear the baby two doors down crying in his bedroom faintly. After a while, the squeak of a pushchair passed the window and stopped by the pruning scissors.
‘Morning, Pippa. Hello, Bluebell!’
Lulu grunted in response and the diamond clatter barely slowed its cycle of sparkly sound, but the clip-clip stopped and I heard my mother stand up and brush her hands on the legs of her jeans. ‘Hi, Una! How are you? Hello, little ones, hello.’
Una lived at the end of the street in a pretty white house in a leafy plot. She was beautiful in a pinned-back kind of a way, flicked hair and eyebrows and cheekbones all sprayed and pumped and pushed until they were fighting their way off the back of her head. Her husband Rupert worked in the City; when I’d first moved to London my parents had tried for ages to get me to meet him for dinner. They gave up soon after; or maybe they remembered it was better if I went unseen. The previous year Rupert and Una’s third cycle of IVF had worked and she had become pregnant with twins. She’d waddled through the village in kaftans and leggings and flip-flops, skin stretched across her huge centre, ankles fatter and fatter and her face filling in until her neck was just the rest of her chin. You could hear the pavements creaking as she walked past and her muscles being slowly torn and pulled like Play-Doh over the things growing inside her and filling her up. The babies were born in the spring of that year, freakishly hot and feeling like summer in March. Two boys, fat and white and pink, paraded around the village along with the number of stitches and the hours in labour and the needles and the forceps and the stretchmarks.
‘They’re growing so fast,’ my mother said, and I heard her hands fiddling with the stray stems of the privet, mentally marking them for head-chopping. ‘Can I have a squeeze?’ she asked, and before Una said yes I heard plastic buckles unbuckled. ‘Ooh,’ my mother said. ‘Aren’t you lovely? Yes you are, yes you are. Are we a bit windy? I think we are. There we go, there we go. All better. Isn’t that better? Hello. Yes. Hello. Aren’t you gorgeous? Yes you are. Ah yes you are. Gosh, so beautiful, Una. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? Hello, baba. Hello. Who’s that? Ah, who’s that? Wave at him, Bluebell. Wave. He likes you, doesn’t he? Do you like her? Ah yes you do, yes you do. Don’t do that, darling. Don’t teach him things like that. Lovely, aren’t you? Aren’t you lovely?’
Wheels squeaked over and over as Una rocked the buggy back and forth to comfort the abandoned and neglected twin. ‘How’s everything with you?’
My mother sshed and cooed in response.
‘Terrible, isn’t it,’ Una said, over the squeak of wheels, ‘about the car?’
‘Gosh, yes.’ My mother switched out of baby voice. ‘Darling, go and see if Daddy’s ready to go to the garden centre soon.’ The bike and the diamonds clattered to the ground, the door creaked open and slammed shut. ‘Awful news. You know, I really thought they’d find her one of these days. But this news about finding the car. Well, it doesn’t look good, does it? Makes you grateful, doesn’t it? To have your babies close.
‘Ooh dear, you are a whiffy one, aren’t you? Time for a change, I think, Una. I’d invite you in but we’re just this second heading out.’
The sound of plastic buckles rebuckled. ‘See you, Pippa.’
‘Yes, see you, Una. Bye-bye, tiny ones. Bye-bye.’
The wheels squeaked their way back up the spotless pavement. I heard a few more privet twigs snap, my mother sigh. It was just us, this side of the house, her ten feet below me. She hummed two bars to herself and then stopped. Snap-snap. The sound of her
wandering back towards the house, looking at the flowerbed as she went. I imagined her running one hand through her hair and then, carefully, one finger underneath her fringe. I knew she was standing just beneath my head, looking out at the Redleys’ roof across the road, at the reclaimed pre-war tiles she had lusted after since they’d had them put on, and thinking about fat baby wrists and brand-new blonde roots. She was probably touching her own hairline, wondering if it was red or brown, or if grey was sneaking through. I heard her fresh white shoe turn in the grass and then one or two steps forward. She would be reaching up to fix her hanging baskets, one on either side of the door, one of them right beneath my window, where I would stub out stolen cigarettes when I was a teenager. She was reaching up to me, just inches from my face. I turned away and closed my eyes.
When I woke up an hour later, everything was quiet. My bedroom door was open, propped ajar with the tiny china house I used to play with for hours when I was a child. I always liked things that weren’t really toys. Instead of my own presents I’d play with the boxes everyone else’s came in.
There was a tray on the white desk in the corner, a straight silver rectangle with curly leaves on each corner.
The same things on it as ever:
– Jelly. Harmless, gentle jelly, shaped with a flower-shaped mould.
– One piece of bread and butter. Spread thinly with low-fat spread, cut into squares. Two crusts cut off, two left on: no discernible reason.
– Carrot sticks, five. Dry along the edges and most likely leftover from Lulu’s lunchbox.
– One cup of peppermint tea, brewed so gently that the green was still just a swirl in the middle.
There would be soup on the hob downstairs, made from scratch. That was the next stage. I stepped past the tray and into the hall. The carpet creaked as I walked along, as if my feet were new and strange compared to my dad’s hard skin and my mother’s perfect pedicure and Lulu’s dirty soft soles. I stopped at the stairs and looked at the pictures positioned every three and a half steps. Perfect portraits of each of us as tiny babies, the same painted blue sky behind us, the same pervy old photographer behind the lens. Here was Lu, on her front and gurgling cheerfully with a white china rattle clutched in one pudgy hand. Here was Jel, flat on her back on a white sheepskin rug, grinning at the camera with a wicked smile or a particularly violent bout of gas. Here was me, lying silently against a fluffy white bear. Here was Ella, the eldest, tiny white feathered wings strapped to her back, gazing at the camera with pink cheeks and an angelic smile. Down past the curve of the stairs to the seven straight steps that led down to the sitting room. Only two pictures hung here. In one, my parents were married in a cloud of batwings and puff-balls. In the other, the six of us stood in front of the house, the same photographer kneeling on the pavement with a black silk cloth over his head and just the camera eyeing us suspiciously.
