Kiss

by Wilson, Jacqueline

  ‘Here, have a glass of water,’ I said hastily.

  I drank myself, so quickly that I gave myself hiccups. ‘Oh God, not again,’ I said.

  I made much of the hiccups, holding my breath, gulping from the wrong side of the glass, all the party tricks, to divert us both from the painful embarrassment of the situation. Carl saw that I didn’t want to discuss it and acted as if he hadn’t understood. But when I stood up to go he whispered, ‘I’m so sorry, Sylvie. If only—’

  There was no point in him even finishing the sentence.

  I went home and made desultory small talk with Miss Miles in the kitchen. When Mum came home she was in the mood for big talk. She was obviously feeling guilty for going out with Gerry at the weekend, so she was now determined to spend quality time with me to compensate. She started all sorts of Sylvie-centred topics, asking about Carl and Miranda and Lucy, about school, about my reading, even about my Glassworld writing.

  I didn’t want to talk about anything at all and became increasingly monosyllabic. Mum misinterpreted my attitude, thinking that I was in a sad little sulk because she’d been neglecting me.

  ‘Oh, Sylvie, darling, you do know you’ll always always come first with me, no matter what,’ she said, trying to hug me.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Mum,’ I said, wriggling free.

  ‘But it’s true,’ she said. ‘Gerry or no Gerry.’

  ‘So I take it he’s now a close second?’

  ‘Well. Yes. He is so special, Sylvie. Please will you meet him next week? You could come out with us or he’ll come over here, whichever you’d prefer. I just know you’ll get on with him. He’s so funny and yet so gentle. He’s so different from your dad. He was always so bossy and belligerent, and he’d never listen to me properly. Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that. He’s your father and no matter what’s happened between the two of us you’re still his daughter and he loves you very much.’

  ‘Mum. Stop it. I’m not a little kid any more. You don’t have to say all this stuff. Dad doesn’t give a toss about me. He hasn’t even seen me for years. He’d probably walk straight past if he saw me in the street. Ditto me him. I don’t care.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Mum said gently, as if she was soothing a silly toddler.

  ‘I don’t need my dad any more. I don’t need a new dad either. I don’t need anyone. I’m perfectly happy as I am,’ I shouted.

  Then I burst into tears. I wouldn’t let Mum comfort me. I stamped upstairs, aware that I was behaving ridiculously but unable to stop. I kept hearing If only if only if only. I kept seeing the pity in Carl’s eyes. It made me want to curl up and die.

  I cried until I gave myself a headache. I ached all over, my chest, my stomach, my back. I wondered if I was really ill. Heart-sick. It had a melodramatic, glamorous ring. I peered at myself in the mirror. I looked ill, very pale, with dark circles under my eyes. I hoped they made me look a little older.

  My tummy was really sore now. I wondered if I was going to be sick like Carl. I went to the bathroom and found that I’d started my period. I stared at the stains on my underwear. I’d waited for this moment for so long. I was the last girl in our whole class to start. I’d begun to think I was going to be a freaky new phenomenon, stuck in little-girlhood for ever. Here at least was real proof that I was turning into a woman. I touched my sore chest, wondering if that was suddenly metamorphosing too, but sadly it felt as flat as ever.

  I washed myself and then took Mum’s box of tampons and puzzled for ten minutes over the instructions. I put my leg up on the side of the bath. I seized the tampon, trembling, as if I was holding a hand grenade. I tried to insert it but couldn’t work out exactly how to do it. I didn’t want to push too hard in case it was the wrong bit of me. I couldn’t see what I was doing – and didn’t really want to anyway. Maybe I wasn’t formed properly. Maybe I really was a freak, a girl doll minus the proper working pieces.

  I gave up and used the horrible pad thing from the packet that Mum had put on the top shelf of my wardrobe. They’d been waiting there untouched for a good two years. I felt as if I was wearing a nappy. We had PE tomorrow. How on earth was I going to manage?

  I wished I wasn’t a girl. If I was a boy I wouldn’t have to cope with such a sore and messy and embarrassing problem once a month. If I was a boy Carl might love me back the way I loved him.

  I tried hard to imagine what I’d be like as a boy. It would be even worse being so small and skinny. I wondered what my hair would look like chopped short. I’d look like some weird little pixie person. I wouldn’t be able to hide my sticking-out ears. I’d never be good looking like Carl. I wasn’t bright or talented or witty. The other boys would hate me. Carl might hate me too. No, worse, he’d feel sorry for me and hang out with me sometimes, just to be kind.

  I would be no use as a gay boy. No one would ever fancy me. I would have even less success with girls. Someone like Miranda would make mincemeat of me. I saw her squashing me into a mincing machine and turning the handle, squeezing me out at the other end as a string of limp little sausages. She’d despise me as a boy. Thank goodness she liked me as a girl, so long as I played along with her.

  I liked her too. I thought about the possibility of loving her. I thought she was beautiful in her own dark dramatic way. I loved the glossiness of her red hair, her even white teeth, her wicked dimples. I loved her clothes, especially her exotic underwear and her bold buckled boots. I tried to imagine taking her in my arms and kissing her. I wasn’t sure it would work. Her lips would feel too full, her body too soft, her hair too long. I longed to look like Miranda, even to be Miranda, but I didn’t want to love her.

  It was so silly. You couldn’t help the way you felt.

  I loved Carl. Carl loved Paul. Paul maybe loved Miranda. I wasn’t sure Miranda loved any of us. She just wanted us all to love her.

  I fell asleep long before Mum came upstairs. I woke up when she crept into my room, but I kept my eyes closed. I could sense her standing there, looking at me. She sighed softly, then bent over and kissed my hair. I wanted to reach round and cling to her neck and have a good cry, the way I’d done when I was little. But in those days Mum could always make it all better for me. There was nothing she could do to change Carl. I didn’t even want to tell her I’d started my period because she might gush in an embarrassing way.

  She found out anyway.

  ‘So you’ve started your period, Sylvie!’ she said in the kitchen at breakfast.

  She didn’t lower her voice at all. Miss Miles could easily have heard upstairs in her room.

  ‘There no need to blush, darling. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. We should be celebrating your becoming a woman.’

  I squirmed. ‘I don’t want to be a woman,’ I said. ‘Shut up about it, Mum. How do you know, anyway?’

  ‘The toilet was blocked up with bits of sanitary towel. I knew it wasn’t me and dear Miss Miles is way past that stage in her life.’

  ‘I wish I was too,’ I said.

  I was tired of being a teenager. It was too sad, too complicated, too worrying. I wanted to fast-forward fifty years and be really really old. Then it wouldn’t matter if I was small and scraggy. It would be a positive advantage if I still looked young for my age. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t have a boyfriend. I could just shake my head enigmatically when anyone asked about my past love life and say ‘I had my moments’ just like Miss Miles. I wouldn’t have to make friends to prove I was popular. I wouldn’t have to fit in at school. I wouldn’t even be at work any more. I could simply please myself and do what I wanted. I could read for hours. I could write and draw and paint. I could live all day in Glassworld. I could stay eternally young as Queen Sylviana, and King Carlo would love me, only me, and we would live happily ever after.

  I went to school with a couple of horrible pad things in a plastic bag. The outline of the one that I was wearing showed horribly through my knickers. I wondered about asking Lucy how she coped. We rarely talked about intimate things but
I knew she’d started her period last year. She called it ‘her visitor’.

  I leaned over as far as I could during double maths to ask for advice.

  ‘Hey, Sylvie, are you copying from me?’ she said, shielding her answers.

  I was hurt that she should think this, or indeed would mind sharing her solutions with me. I was also irritated. I am bad enough at maths, but Lucy is worse. Only a total fool would choose to copy down her answers.

  ‘I just want to ask you something, Lucy,’ I hissed. ‘Look, what do you do when we have PE if you’ve started?’

  ‘Started what?’ said Lucy.

  I sighed. ‘You know.’ It was no use. I had to use her twee little phrase. ‘When you’ve got “your visitor”.’

  ‘Oh!’ Lucy went a little pink. ‘Well, I always wear two pairs of knickers.’

  ‘Ah.’ I thought about it. It was a reasonably sensible solution, though it sounded hot and uncomfortable. I only had the knickers I was wearing. I couldn’t really ask to borrow an extra pair from Lucy.

  ‘It stops the pad thing showing?’ I whispered, pink myself.

  ‘More or less. And it helps if you start flooding.’

  ‘Oh God.’ So far the blood had been a small trickle. Was it about to start gushing everywhere like a scarlet Niagara? ‘Do you flood, Lucy?’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s terrible. Mum had to take me to the doctor’s. It kept going all over my bed.’

  I started to feel ill. The classroom spun round. Maybe I was going to faint. Then at least I’d have a reasonable excuse for getting out of PE.

  I went flying to the girls’ toilets at break time, not waiting for Lucy or Miranda or anyone. I was starting to imagine great gushing and clutched my plastic bag desperately.

  ‘Sylvie? Sylvie! Hey, hey, slow down!’

  It was Jake.

  ‘I’ve got to dash, Jake,’ I said, trying to dodge past.

  ‘But I’ve got to tell you something,’ said Jake.

  I did stop then, wondering if he had a message from Carl. Maybe he’d decided to stay away from school, pretending he was still sick. If so, perhaps I could risk playing truant again. I had to be with him. He needed me. I was the only one he could talk to.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Wegotagig!’ Jake said.

  ‘What?’ The words didn’t make sense. It sounded like gobbledegook.

  ‘We’ve got a gig,’ Jake said, grinning proudly. ‘They rang up yesterday evening, after you’d gone. They want me and the boys to play at this birthday party and they’re paying – fifty quid, how cool is that!’

  ‘Your band?’ I said. ‘Oh. Well. Good for you.’ I tried to edge round him.

  ‘Will you come, Sylvie?’ said Jake.

  ‘Come where?’ said Miranda, materializing behind me.

  ‘This party. My band’s playing,’ said Jake proudly. ‘You can come too.’

  ‘I don’t think I can make it, Jake,’ I said, rushing past. There! He could get Miranda to go – that was surely what he wanted.

  ‘But you don’t know when it is!’ Jake called after me.

  I pretended not to hear him. He couldn’t very well follow me right into the girls’ toilets. I charged into the cubicle and faced the worst. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but I still had PE to contend with.

  ‘Sylvie?’ Miranda called, outside my cubicle. ‘Why don’t you want to go to Jake’s party?’

  ‘It’s a birthday party. It’ll probably be some little kid wanting to do a bit of head-banging with all his mates. No one sane would employ Jake for a real party. His band is unbelievably awful.’

  ‘OK, point taken. I expect I’ll be on some heavy date with Paul anyway,’ said Miranda.

  I muttered a very rude sentence.

  ‘What? Hey, that’s my boyfriend you’re describing so graphically,’ said Miranda. She didn’t sound too perturbed. ‘What’s he done to upset you?’

  ‘He hasn’t done anything to me.’

  ‘To Carl? Hey, have you found out about this fight?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t know something?’ said Miranda. ‘Hey, Sylvie, what are you doing in there? Have you got galloping diarrhoea or something?’

  ‘Shut up! I’ve got my period,’ I hissed.

  ‘Oh. Right. Have you got a tampon then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘’S OK, I’ve got one in my school bag. Half a tick.’ She passed one under the door.

  ‘I can’t use them,’ I whispered.

  ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

  ‘Miranda! Look, I don’t want to announce this to the whole world. I don’t use tampons, I can’t get them to work, OK? They’re too big or I’m too little, whatever. Shall I broadcast it on the Tannoy system?’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Miranda, giggling. ‘Try my tampon. Go on, it’s a special little one.’

  She gave me full instructions on how to use them. I prayed no one else was in the toilets. But eventually I triumphed.

  ‘Yay! I’ve managed it. Oh God, what a palaver!’ I said, coming out of the cubicle and washing my hands.

  ‘You’re acting like you’ve never had a period before, Little Titch,’ Miranda teased.

  ‘Well. It is my first time if you must know.’

  ‘Really! I started when I was ten.’

  ‘Typical. Precocious brat.’

  ‘That’s me, babe. You come to your Aunty Miranda whenever you need practical advice. What lesson have I got next? I can never remember at this stupid school.’

  ‘I’ve got PE,’ I said grimly.

  ‘Poor you. I hate prancing around in those awful baggy school knickers. God, they’re such depressing garments.’

  ‘Lucy wears two pairs of knickers when she’s got her period,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Lucy would. She’ll wear two pairs of knickers the first time she goes out with a boy,’ said Miranda.

  We giggled unkindly. I knew I was being mean but it made me feel so much better.

  I was still desperately worried about Carl, but I told myself he’d manage somehow. Boys had fights all the time. No one would know why.

  I WENT ROUND to see Carl as soon as I got back from school but he wasn’t there.

  ‘Isn’t it his drama night?’ said Jules. ‘Do you know when A Midsummer Night’s Dream is going to be performed?’

  ‘Oh God, an all-boy Midsummer Night’s Dream?’ said Jake. ‘What’s Carl playing? Please tell me it’s not Titania.’ He started running about the kitchen, flicking back imaginary long hair and flouncing non-existent skirts, proclaiming, ‘Begone, proud Oberon. Where are my fairies?’

  ‘Do you really think you’re funny, Jake?’ I said, and slammed out of their kitchen.

  I went and made myself a sandwich at home and sent Carl a text.

  R U OK? HOW IS PAUL SITUATION? C U L8R. LOVE S

  He didn’t reply. I got a text from Miranda instead.

  RAJ JUST TEXTED ME THIS!!!

  SOME YR 9 BOY IS SENDING ROUND IMAGES OF YOU TOPLESS TO ALL HIS GRUBBY LITTLE MATES – WITH COMMENTS. SHALL I SUMMON FORTH HIT SQUAD AND EXTERMINATE HIM? LOVE R. P.S. HE’S ALSO STARTING GAY-BASHING YR NICE PAL CARL.

  I rang Miranda immediately.

  ‘Oh God, Miranda, what’s he saying?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, something about me and my figure and what he’d like to do. In his dreams, matie! As if I’d let him near me now. Still, it’s kind of weird being a telephone pin-up.’

  ‘No, no—’

  ‘I know you told me not to, but that was kind of like a dare. It was just a bit of fun—’

  ‘Never mind about you and your silly photo! What’s he saying about Carl?’

  ‘It’s not silly. It’s rather a good photo, actually. I’m not totally topless. I’ve got this silky little jacket and my boobs just peep out. I tell you, the Sun would pay a fortune for it. Maybe this is the start of a whole new career—’

  ‘Miranda. Please. Tell me about Carl.’
/>
  ‘Well, there’s nothing to tell. Raj says they’re just all picking on him, saying he’s gay. I must admit, I have wondered myself, but you’ve always gone on and on about him being your boyfriend, you funny girl.’

  ‘You wanted him as your boyfriend!’

  ‘Of course, because he’s gorgeous and funny and imaginative – which, come to think of it, definitely makes him gay. Still, it’s every girl’s fantasy, isn’t it? You’re the one girl in the world who can make him change his mind. So, is he utterly gay, Sylvie, or simply undecided? And why do you think Paul has suddenly grown three heads and is acting so grossly? I mean, I understand if he wants to send a photo of my tits to all his pervy little pals because they are pretty spectacular, but I never thought he’d be a creepy fascist fag-hater. They were best friends, for God’s sake.’ Miranda paused. I could hear her mind going tick-tick-tick.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Did he try it on with Paul?’

  I said nothing. I didn’t need to.

  ‘So that’s why they had the fight! Oh God, Paul’s pathetic! Well, I think we’ll cross him off my list. To be honest, he always came a very poor second to Carl.’

  ‘How was Carl taking it? Did Raj say he seemed very upset? What exactly were they saying?’

  ‘I don’t know. You know how stupid boys can be. Oh dear, everything’s adding up now. Poor Carl. Shall I come round?’

  ‘No, no! He isn’t at home anyway, he’s out at his drama club.’

  ‘Paul’s in that too, isn’t he? Oh dear, they’ll be acting out their own little drama. You go round later though, and give Carl a big kiss and hug from me and tell him Paul’s a little shit and I’m not having any more to do with him, OK?’

  I tried sending another text to Carl the moment Miranda got off the phone but he still didn’t reply. I tried phoning him in case he was on his way home but the phone switched straight to his message service. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to tell him that all these people were talking about him, he’d hate it so. In the end I just said, ‘Hi, Carl, it’s me. I’m thinking of you. Phone me as soon as you can. Lots of love.’

  Mum was late getting home from the building society. I nibbled at another sandwich. I wondered if I should start getting anything ready for supper. There didn’t seem to be anything promising in the fridge. I found some old cheese, hard as a brick. I rifled through the cupboard to see if we had any macaroni but I couldn’t find any.