Copyright © 2010 by Helen FitzGerald
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VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my wonderful, funny daughter, Anna Casci
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER
ONE
It was a typical breakfast except for two things.
The typical things:
My mother sighed heavily and stared into space.
Dad found corrupt politicians in The Scotsman and it made his lips go green.
Not typical things:
The doorbell rang. It was Matt the postman with my fourth year exam results, as well as a congratulatory letter from the head teacher.
I screamed.
History: A (top of class)
Physics: A (top of class)
Math: A (top of class)
English: A (equal top with Louisa MacDonald, who rang later hoping she’d beaten me but she hadn’t. Ha!)
Chemistry: A (top of class)
Biology: A (top of the world)
I blurted out my results to my mother and my father.
Just so you know, it had been a long time since I’d thought of my mother and my father as Mum and Dad. Mum and Dad, in my opinion, indicated some kind of intimacy, and I didn’t have any with my mother and my father. Not because of some massive disaster—like my mother drinking, or like my father bashing her head in with a saucepan when dinner’s crap, or like the death of a younger, better sibling—but because my mother and my father were emotional retards.
When I told my mother my results, she said, “Hard work pays off.” She had finished staring into space.
My father said, “Don’t let it go to your head.” He had finished with The Scotsman.
But it was too late. It had so gone to my head that I screamed then rang all my friends.
And they were like, “Really?”
“I know; I can’t believe it!”
My ruddy-cheeked pal, Katie Bain, said, “We should celebrate! I’ve got it! A brisk walk to the standing stones and a picnic of Mum’s homemade oatcakes and Mrs. Goslan’s famous blackberry jam! Oh, and a thermos of hot chocolate! Steaming!”
Katie Bain only ever spoke with exclamation marks. I said maybe another time. There was a call waiting.
It was Louisa. She seemed a bit pissed off.
“But you did really well too!” I said.
(But not as well as me!)
Straight As.
Top of the class.
Top of the school in fact.
And my enormous success stayed in my head right up till dinner, by which time I’d ridden my bike all the way down my drive, along the two-mile coastal road and into the village to show the piece of paper to all of the above and their parents and their brothers and their sisters.
Only Louisa seemed interested in my results.
Her folks owned Aulay’s whitewashed pub. Aulay’s and the church bookended the seaside strip of fifteen houses and three shops. In her cozy bedroom above the bar, she read the letter with a scrunched up face, checking to see if they’d made a mistake, then said, Wow! The others said, Oh great, gotta go to the post office/Pick some rosemary/You really should come to the standing stones!
So when I got home for supper, a fog of anticlimax had settled over me. Who cared if I did well? What would it change anyways?
As if to prove my theory, my mother told me to go to bed at the stupidly early hour of 9:00 p.m. and said, “Say your prayers. Ask for humility.”
“Please god can I have some humility,” I said out loud.
She was like, “Properly.”
“Please god may I have some humility,” I said.
“And ask for forgiveness.”
“Please god forgive me…” I obeyed, then opened my eyes a tad and looked at my mother, who was standing over me, steely faced…“What for?”
“For your sins.”
“For my sins and god bless my mother and god bless my father and please may I go to Aberfeldy Halls. Amen.”
I wanted to go to Aberfeldy Halls more than anything in the entire universe. Louisa MacDonald and Mandy Grogan were going there. It was the best senior boarding school in the highlands. It had the best science grades in the UK. Nine out of ten graduates went on to university after going there.
I needed to go to university. I needed to do medicine and make money and live in the city, maybe even in London. At Aberfeldy Halls, you got your own cubicle and you studied for four hours every night. You got two choices for dinner. You got big shiny science labs and literature teachers who came from exotic countries and also wrote novels.
The outcome of my wish depended on the good lord apparently. (I am deliberately not using capitals.)
My mother said, “The good lord will tell us if you should go to Aberfeldy Halls. If you listen hard enough, you will hear.”
Listening to the good lord was very dull. Especially on Sundays, when the whole island did nothing but listen to the good lord, their ears pricked as they sat still in their living room seats, bibles in hand. No ferries; no cars; no shops; no television, talking, music, nothing. Just listening, waiting to be saved. From what? From boredom? From hour-like-minutes that ticked a sharp bird-beak into your skull?
They had plans for me, my parents. They wanted me, their only child, to stay on the island and be safe: tucked away from the evils and temptations of the city. They wanted me in our small croft house, where the ghosts of wet farmers from two hundred years ago lived with the ghosts of us. They wanted me to go to the local state school—a gray seventies scar on the outskirts of the village—wher
e teachers yawned and pupils’ shoulders lowered with the hours. They wanted me to get just enough education to handcuff me to some god-fearing McFarmer for the rest of my life.
I had different plans. I longed to leave the island, my floating prison of rain, hunched shoulders, and the good lord. I was no Katie Bain. I didn’t have red hair, freckles, and a cheeky grin. I didn’t collect rocks on beaches and get into mischief on hillocks. I didn’t want to know everyone or everything about them. I’d only lived in the city till I was nine, but I knew I was a city girl. I’d loved Edinburgh. I’d loved our old flat, a top floor tenement the size of Dundee, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the floodlit Castle, with neighbors who minded their own business, and with hide-and-seek nooks and crannies like the old maid’s room above the kitchen. When I used to open the bedroom window in my childhood flat, noises would fly at me: buses honking, people talking, even bagpipes piping from the touristy Princes Street. When I used to step outside, I’d be confronted with at least ten different things to do: Milkshake here? Dinner there? Movies over the road? Theatre round the corner? Dungeon up the hill? When I stepped out of the croft house, on the other hand, I was only ever confronted with a wind that bit my tonsils off.
I wanted crowds, noise, anonymity, difference. And I figured if I got a really good education, my parents couldn’t argue.
They’d say, “You got into Oxford?”
And I’d say, “I did!”
And they’d be like, “Well done, Rachel! You were right to go to Aberfeldy Halls. We’re proud of you.”
Because while my parents were emotional retards, I wanted to make them proud. I wanted to make them see that to be saved you must first dive into the water. If I dove first, perhaps they would follow. Perhaps they would be happy again.
• • •
The next morning, I decided that I needed to take serious action if my plan was ever going to work. I made my mind up that I would lie to my mother and my father. We were eating salty porridge at the kitchen table.
“I heard him,” I said.
“What was that?” my father asked, not looking up from the corrupt politicians in The Scotsman.
“The good lord spoke. He told me I would go,” I said.
They’d never explained to me exactly how the good lord might tell us stuff, so I had no idea if this would work.
My mother squinted, staring at me, wondering.
“Last night. Clear as day…‘Rachel, you are going to Aberfeldy Halls.’” (I said this in a very deep godlike voice.)
“In that voice?”
“his voice. No doubt about it. I had been listening very hard.”
My mother was like, “Stop your nonsense.”
My father said, “That’s blasphemy, Rachel. Go to your room.”
I vowed there and then that when I visited them in their ocean-view island retirement home and they turned to me and whispered, “I’ve been saved.” I would say, “Stop your nonsense and go to hell!”
My parents’ punishments had always been clear, firm, and followed-through-to-the-letter. When I was nine, they grounded me for seven days solid after I’d dropped my crisps in the back of the car and said the f word. When I was eleven, they grounded me for two weeks (no telephone calls or television) because I’d kissed a boy called James Connor in a game of Truth or Dare at Louisa MacDonald’s birthday party (Louisa’s older sister told her aunt, etc., etc.).
So when they asked me to go to my room, I obeyed, because not obeying would have serious repercussions. I spent hours lying on my bed dreaming of cinemas with movies from France and Germany, of Vietnamese restaurants, of people wearing strange hats and/or huge sunglasses, of markets selling crazy big bubble machines and vintage coats in all shapes and sizes.
Please, please oh non-existent god, I said out loud, may I go to Aberfeldy Halls.
CHAPTER
TWO
It was a whopping 72 degrees the next day.
“Nah, I don’t want to go for a swim,” I said when John got Mandy Grogan to ring and ask if I’d meet him at the beach at 12:00. Truth was, my period had arrived, and I hadn’t made the transition from pads to tampons. I’d tried a few times, lying on the floor of the bathroom, eyes closed (too hard), squeezing at a space that simply did not exist.
“Anyways, I need to work on my mother,” I told Mandy.
So instead of swimming, which would have meant harboring a monstrous cotton surfboard in the pants of my swimsuit which in turn would have swelled and disintegrated in the water, I spent the morning fencing. This did not involve cool silver outfits and a long weapon, but kneeling in the mud hammering nails into the wooden poles that kept our sheep in their waterlogged paddocks. Mum bought the sheep for her “hobby farm,” a euphemism for the fact that she was unemployed and bored out of her mind since moving north.
Our farm consisted of two large paddocks that swept down from our ancient white house to the ocean. People from London would probably pay thousands of pounds to come here for Hogmanay—which is how we celebrate New Year’s Eve here—and marvel at our thatched roof and light our wood fire and walk over our paddocks. They’d call it beautiful and quaint and full of history and mystery. I call it shitesville.
By the time I came in for lunch (roast lamb on white bread—the poor buggers always ended up in my sandwiches), I was wheezing.
“You’re wheezing,” Mum said.
“No I’m not.”
“You need to go to bed for a while.”
“No I don’t. I’m fine.”
In my room, I read the leaflet in my tampon packet again, unwrapped one of the offending items, and said to myself, Right, this is stupid. You can do anything you set your mind to. You can do this. Even Mandy can do this, and she got D for History.
I wobbled my head from side to side and breathed out (two three) then placed one leg on a chair and breathed out (two three) again, and then, realizing no amount of breathing out (two three) and body wobbling would actually relax me, I placed the white object in the general direction (I hoped) of its target, closed my eyes, scrunched my face, and pushed with all my might. I sometimes watched those television shows about surgery—scalpels cutting and gloved hands going places they best not—and this felt the same to me. I had entered a space that was blood and gutsy. I retrieved my tamponless finger and perched myself on the edge of my bed. The thing had only gone in half way, perhaps due to my eye-scrunching-body-tension. And when I finally gathered the courage to stand up I felt like I’d pushed Mandy’s horse Dusty inside me. It was so obviously there, like someone had shoved a conker up my nostril. But there was a space, which was a relief, because if there hadn’t been one, I’d have been a properly weird female. So I tried to ignore it, moving one leg around the other towards my bedroom door and out.
I waddled down our driveway, across the road, and onto the beach. There are tourist pictures of the beaches on our island. Smiling women in bikinis lie in uncomfortably flattering poses on soft white sand, basking in the sun, spectacular mountains behind, a bright blue sea before, beckoning you to swim in me, swim in me, now. Truth is, Scottish beaches are like polar bears—they both look nice in photographs. Pat a polar bear, it’ll kill you. Stand on a Scottish beach, you’ll realize how shit it is. There’s only one beach on the island that looks a bit like the one in the brochures, and I have never seen anyone swim in it. It’s freezing. And the water is kind of gray, like the sky is most of the time. And the wind is always howling. And that’s only one beach. The rest of them are like the one across the road from my farm, which is a perfect teenage meeting place in that it is the kind of beach that no adult in their right mind would want to go to. Most of Ross beach (I named it that) is black and rocky. Mossy grass stops where the volcanic gunge starts, and this ends with water that is not only freezing but laden with jaggy rocks that make a paddling experience one of pain and inevitable scabs.
Just ignore it, ignore it, I said, as I shuffled along the black rocky strip. There is no c
onker inside me. Breathe. I could spot Mandy’s bikini a mile away. It was bright red with yellow dots, one of the numbers Mandy got on her biannual shopping spree in Glasgow.
Mandy had been my best friend since I’d arrived. We had nothing in common; Mandy believed in god, loved the island, hated schoolwork, and wanted to be a hairdresser—but she was a very relaxing, uncomplicated person to be around. She was short and cute, with curly blonde hair and a constant smile, and was the most fashionable girl within miles. We never fought, despite spending an incredible amount of time together, riding our bikes, riding her horse, drinking tea like old ladies, giggling, and reading (her: magazines; me: textbooks). I loved her.
As I got closer to Mandy, I noticed her red with yellow dots were entwined with some blue board shorts. In the latter was Mandy’s boyfriend, Andrew: an incomer with a huge house on the south of the island. Being the new boy in town, all the girls had their eyes on him, but Mandy nabbed him with her nearly-C cups and her willingness. About a week after they got together, Mandy started wearing jumpers with huge floppy turtlenecks.
“Nice jumper,” I’d lied. It wasn’t very nice at all.
“It’s my concealer,” she’d said, taking me into her bedroom and lowering the neck. Underneath was an almighty love-bite. Looked like he’d sucked so hard her subclavian artery had erupted.
It had faded a bit since then, but clad only in bikinis, stripped bare of her turtleneck concealer, her neck still looked damaged. She and Andrew were snogging furiously, half-sitting, half-lying on a big green towel.
John was lying face down on a towel beside them.
“So are you ready yet?” he asked, sitting up.
John was the same age as me—sixteen. He was five-ten, with shoulder length blonde hair, unusually tanned skin, sparkly blue eyes, long dark eyelashes, and crooked teeth. We’d met at school. His family was full of media types who worked from home and traveled a lot, and he was going to be an actor. Like all the boys in our school, he wanted to go out with Mandy, but she was already with Andrew, and I didn’t mind being second choice when he’d expressed interest at the village dance. Boys weren’t high on my agenda. In fact, I thought John would be better off with someone sillier and taller, like Grace (the butcher’s daughter), who never said the wrong thing to boys and was apparently gagging for it. But if he wanted me, then what the hell?
Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin Page 1
