Moderate Violence

by Veronica Bennett

  Trevor’s head lolled against the back of the sofa. His eyes were closed. “Shut up and leave me alone.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “I’ll get something later.”

  “In the pub?”

  “Shut up.”

  Jo began to gather her books from the table. “I had to go and see Mr Treasure after school, because you forgot to go and see him at twelve thirty.”

  Trevor’s eyes opened. “Oh bloody hell,” he said, and closed them again.

  “He wants you to make another appointment.”

  “I’ll phone him.”

  “And he says to tell you that he doesn’t like being messed around.”

  “All right.” Trevor’s eyes opened again and looked at Jo. “He’ll be OK when I tell him I was doing something important.”

  “You were in the pub, Trev.”

  “I was being made redundant! Isn’t that more important than going to see some stupid headmaster?”

  “He’s not stupid,” said Jo, struggling to stay calm, “and if you knew anything at all you’d know that headmasters are called headteachers these days.”

  She went upstairs. She wanted to cry but not cry, shout but not shout, lie down on the bed and run around the garden, all at the same time. She sat down at her computer. Maybe she’d email her mother and tell her that Trevor had lost his job. But Tess would only start to bleat about Jo coming to live with her now Trevor didn’t have any money. It was Trevor’s inability to be as rich as Tess wanted that had sent her back to Prattland, as Trevor called Tess’s parents’ house, in the first place.

  Ah, life at Prattland! Comfortable, well-appointed, sherry before dinner and gin and tonic after, the Daily Telegraph crossword and Sunday lunch at the golf club, forever and ever amen. And Granny Pratt’s remarks about Welsh people, with “nothing personal, Joanna darling,” attached to the end of them.

  There was no getting round it. Tess’s Home Counties family had a lot of money and Trevor’s South Wales family didn’t. Tess had met Trevor in a pub after an international rugby match at Twickenham straight after she left university. She’d got pregnant with Jo, married Trevor, who was already working in London as an accountant, and had never bothered to get a job. Her parents thought, correctly as it turned out, that Trevor would never earn enough to keep their daughter in the style she liked. So for the whole of Jo’s life Trevor had gone to work every day while Tess had stayed at home, all the time taking handouts from Grandad Pratt and complaining about not having enough money. She said that looking after Jo and keeping the house that Grandad had practically paid for, was a big enough job, thank you. And now she’d gone.

  Since she’d moved out, three months ago, Trevor had begun to sleep in the spare room. Jo’s narrow room above the hall had become a junk room and Jo had taken over the main bedroom. The fitted wardrobes, which had been too small to hold Tess’s clothes, were too big for Jo’s. And the dressing table that used to be covered with Tess’s expensive bottles made a good desk. The bed was too huge to fit into any of the other bedrooms, so Jo had had to keep it.

  She’d pushed the bed against the wall and filled up the empty half with soft toys. Sylvia the Chinese Cleaner who came on Thursdays, always complained about having to move the toys when she changed the duvet cover. But Jo took no notice. Sylvia lived with her parents, grandmother, brother and sister-in-law in a maisonette, so the idea that you can have more space than you want must have seemed like madness to her.

  Jo looked at her reflection in the large, side-lit mirror behind the dressing-table desk. She hadn’t inherited Trevor’s red-gold-auburn-copper genes. Tess had given her darkish, straightish hair that stayed close to her head whatever she did to it. It would never spring up healthily like Holly’s, or tumble about harlot-style like Pascale’s. Jo thought her face looked odd too. Fat at the top and thin at the bottom. Was it possible to have a fat forehead and a thin chin? But at least her skin wasn’t as bad as this time last year, when Tom Clarke had said that revolting thing about her.

  She switched on the computer, shut her eyes, selected a random DVD, opened the tray and slotted it in. It was The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Jo had seen it recently when she should have been revising. Watching DVDs on the computer was easy to hide from Trevor. If he came in she could shrink the screen and pretend she was working.

  She didn’t want to watch the film again, even the creepy bit with the Black Riders going sniff, sniff. She slid down in her chair and put her chin on her chest. Her right handed rested on the mouse. With her other hand she turned the DVD case over and over, slapping it lightly on the desk.

  The PG symbol on the back of the case made her think about Trevor’s puny attempt to tell her off. Parental Guidance, indeed. Why did parents imagine their sons and daughters might want to be guided by them, or anyone? And Parental Guidance was even more useless if the parent was drunk. Trevor might as well have a white stick, for all he could see of what Jo’s life was like. She smiled, imagining him and his self-pity tap-tapping around like an idiot in a sightless world.

  When she read the guidelines on the DVD case, she stopped smiling. ‘Some scenes may be unsuitable for young children’. How would the censors describe that scene downstairs just now, with Trevor moaning and Jo giving him pills? ‘Moderate drug use’? Jo felt tears behind her eyes, but she wasn’t upset. She didn’t care if he wanted to kill himself with alcohol. But she was angry. In fact she was furious. Trevor might even be worse, Jo decided, than Tess, whose crimes against being a parent were numerous and spectacular.

  The top shelf of her bookcase was littered with piles of DVDs, some in their cases, some not. Jo grabbed some cases, put them on the desk and began to flip each one over, reading the guidelines on the back. She had never realized before that they were so…what was that word Mr Gerrard said in English that made all the babies in the class honk with laughter? Pithy. Right, DVD guidelines were pithy. They said things in a short, no nonsense way. No one would think ‘mild peril’ could mean anything other than mild peril. A perfectly pithy phrase.

  She looked at some more. ‘Coarse’ language was obviously different from ‘bad’ language, which was different again from ‘strong’ language. It was all clear and simple, like movies themselves. In movies people weren’t people, they were characters. The actors spoke words written for their character by the screenplay writer, and the director told them what to do. Jo wished real life had a script and a director. But no-one wrote the words for you to tell your headteacher why you couldn’t carry on any more, and no one told you how to change things.

  She frowned at the computer screen. If DVDs could have little labels that went to the heart of what they were like, maybe people could as well. She pulled the keyboard towards her, opened a new Word file and typed ‘Trevor’. She paused a moment, and then wrote: ‘Unsuitable for young children’. He could be gross, especially on whisky-and-chaser days, when he would belch or fart fruitily, and swear at newsreaders.

  Under Trevor’s name Jo typed ‘Tess’. But then she left a space. Tess was difficult. Jo was tempted to put ‘mild nudity’, since Tess thought she was still nineteen and didn’t wear enough clothes. But that was only a small part of the wide-ranging problem of Tess. She scanned the backs of more DVDs. Labelling people as if they were movies might seem a horrible thing to do, but the point of labels was that they told you what to expect. Maybe, thought Jo, if you could learn not to expect more of people than their label showed, you wouldn’t be disappointed.

  She typed Pascale’s name under Tess’s. As she did so, a thought she didn’t want to think forced its way into her mind.

  In the back of Trevor’s car last Saturday night, Pascale had huddled close to Ed. “Your place or mine?” she’d said in his ear.

  “Ready for it anywhere, darlin’,” Ed had replied in an exaggerated I’m-a-geezer voice.

  Jo had been in the front passenger seat, watching Trevor as he drove, hoping he
wasn’t very far over the limit. He had obviously heard this crass exchange between Pascale and Ed, but had had to pretend not to have heard it, and Jo had had to pretend she didn’t know he was pretending not to have heard it.

  Without hesitation she labelled Pascale ‘Explicit sexual content’. Then she typed ‘Strong sex references’ next to Ed’s name. Immediately her heart found its way to her throat and stayed there, pushing her blood around so hard she could feel her temples throbbing.

  “Grow up, you child,” she murmured, sitting up. She typed Holly’s name below Ed’s.

  What was Holly like? Teachers were always saying things like, “That’s very sensible, Holly.” She was sensible, in a way, but the face she displayed to teachers was a conscious one, learnt by heart. The unrehearsed version of Holly was much harder to define. Jo’s fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment, and then she typed ‘Fairly adult’ alongside Holly’s name. ‘Fairly’ was a suitably vague word for Holly’s level of maturity. And of course, Holly did have ‘fair’ hair, which made the sort of satisfying pun Mr Gerrard would enjoy.

  God, this was stupid. Jo took hold of the mouse, ready to delete the incriminating list before Trevor came in and read it over her shoulder. But she didn’t do it. She looked at the names, and the scattered DVD cases, and her reflection in the mirror behind the computer, and remembered how Ed’s shirt had come out of his trousers when he’d been kicking a football around at lunchtime, and she’d stood and watched him tuck it in again as if she were a no-brain fourteen-year-old. But it was just that he’d had to loosen his belt…

  She pushed the keyboard away. Her head sank forward of its own accord and landed among the DVDs. There were still tears inside her somewhere, but they wouldn’t come. All she felt was embarrassed – at her own behaviour, at Pascale’s, at Trevor’s. She wanted to disappear somewhere impossible to reach. Heaven, maybe. Or space, or history. No one would miss her, or try to bring her back. Not even Mr Treasure.

  She stayed there for a long time, her breath dampening her cheek as it condensed on the cover of Knocked Up, her hair covering her nose and mouth. Her hair smelt of school, and her breath was giving it a damp smell too. The smell of hairdressers’ salons. It made her feel enclosed in her own, physical self, as if her body had been wound in a shroud and placed in a coffin.

  She had to press her top teeth as hard as she could against the bottom ones, to try to stop that thought. It always led to one about worms eating her eyeballs.

  She felt the edge of one of the plastic cases dig into the bony part of her cheek. Without thinking she shifted and pressed harder. A sudden stab of pain shot through her body.

  It really hurt, but instead of releasing she just pushed harder and harder until the pain enveloped her entirely, like a black hole swallowing the Universe.

  She sat up breathlessly. Her whole body was tingling. She shut her eyes tightly and lived the electric moment. It didn’t last long and when she opened her eyes, she saw the consequences. The mirror displayed an L-shaped weal on her right cheekbone. She felt suddenly disorientated, and gripped the edge of the dressing-table desk. Leaning closer to the mirror, she saw that the DVD cover hadn’t merely imprinted its corner into her flesh, it had torn it. In the crook of the L, a drop of blood was gathering.

  She looked down at the pile of DVDs. The cover she’d pressed her cheek onto lay open and empty. Jo picked it up and inspected it. It wasn’t the corner of the case that had drawn blood, but the plastic prongs that slotted into each other when the case was closed. The edge of one of them had been broken, leaving a sharp point.

  She dabbed the wound on her cheek with a tissue. It wasn’t a big deal, but people would notice it, so she’d have to think of a lie to tell them. Futile behaviour like sticking a DVD case into your face would elicit bafflement from Pascale and a telling-off from Holly, and Jo didn’t want to experience either.

  The case was still in her hand. She fingered it, feeling a lingering sense of shock. Such an innocuous object; such an electrifying result of…what? Drawing blood? She studied her reflection, looking for the reassurance in the sight of her own familiar features. But there was an expression in her eyes that wasn’t familiar. She looked like someone in a TV news film who had just been rescued from a capsized boat, or an earthquake, or a flood. Adrift, only half in the world, and possessed of a sudden, unwelcome wisdom.

  Chapter Two

  “Wales?”

  “Yep,” said Trevor. He was sitting in the kitchen with his feet on the table. “It’s a principality of some three million souls, situated in the west of the British mainland. It enjoys a constant supply of mountains, castles, rugby and rain, and is God’s own country. As every Welshman knows, and so should you, Jo-girl.”

  Jo put the teapot down quickly and sat at the table, keeping her eyes on Trevor’s face. “Stop being such an arse. What will you do there? Get a job?”

  “I doubt it. I got some money from the firm. Fifteen thousand.”

  “Is that all?” Jo was surprised. No wonder Trevor had felt the need to get off his face on gin. “So when that’s gone, what will you do?”

  It was Saturday morning, so Trevor wasn’t at work. But he only had three more days to work anyway, because they owed him holiday time.

  “Well, my little love,” he said, biting off a mouthful of toast, “you remember Mord Davies?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you do. He’s my mother’s cousin, or nephew, or something. Mordecai, his name is. Anyway, he’s been asking me for years, on and off, if I want to go into business with him. Bed and breakfast, in this farmhouse he wants to do up, see.”

  “Good grief,” said Jo faintly. The thought of Trevor and someone called Mordecai running a bed and breakfast establishment wasn’t even funny. It was just ludicrous.

  “So I think the time’s come to take him up on his offer, don’t you?” said Trevor.

  Jo tried to understand. “So if you go into business with him, you’ll take half the profits, will you?”

  “Mm,” nodded Trevor with his mouth full.

  “So you’re going to put your fifteen thousand into setting it up, then?”

  As she said this, Jo could feel her heart doing something weird inside her. She was sure, before he spoke, that Trevor wasn’t going to do that at all.

  “Nope,” he said. “Needs much more than that. I’ll put in what I get from the divorce. Half this house, for a start.”

  Jo poured the tea and they sipped it. She knew that if she asked Trevor to take his feet off the table he wouldn’t, so she didn’t bother. “So you sell a nice house in London and you use half the money to help Mordi-whatever-his-name-is to do up a crappy old house in Wales,” she said after a while. “What will Tess use her half for?”

  “That’s up to her, Jo-girl. But if she’s got any sense, which I doubt, she’ll invest it.”

  “You mean buy another property?”

  Trevor nodded, trying to look wise. He’d had a shower and his hair was still wet on the top. He was wearing trainers and jeans and a faded Guns ’n’ Roses T-shirt. “Well, she can’t live with her parents for ever, can she?” He reached for the teapot. “Top up?”

  Jo shook her head. “Trevor, half the money will only buy half a house. A flat.”

  “That’s right.” He looked at her with sympathy, or almost-sympathy. “It’s that or Prattland, babe.”

  Jo could see her face in the glass of the kitchen door. She looked pale, the mark on her cheekbone showing dark. Her hair was separating into strands and her shoulders were hunched. “Sit up straight,” Tess was forever saying, with that funny ‘r’ sound that came from speaking French when she was a child, “or you’ll grow up to be uglier than the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he was ugly.”

  “Actually,” she said, cradling her mug, “it’s that or begging on Victoria Station.”

  Trevor had stopped listening. He’d taken his feet off the table and picked up Blod, the tortoiseshell cat Tess had rescued then negle
cted. “Come on, let’s get you fed, shall we?” He opened a can and put some food in Blod’s bowl. Then he picked up his keys and jingled them on his palm. “You know, love, I was bloody angry yesterday. I thought the world had come to a freakin’ end, losing my job. They think I’ve got a drink problem, see. But then I was on the phone to Granny Probert last night and she said Mord was still open to offers, and it would be great if I could come back to Wales and be near her and Dad, and I thought, why not? So things aren’t so bad after all.” He gave Jo the lopsided look he thought was charming, and jingled the keys again. “Think I’ll have a walk and buy the newspaper. What are you going to do with your Saturday?”

  Jo began to clear the table. Granny Probert, she thought, should keep her mouth shut. “My interview’s today,” she said.

  They looked at each other. Trevor’s face was blank.

  “I told you,” said Jo. “It’s in a shop. They want someone for the summer, then maybe permanently.”

  “What sort of shop?”

  “I told you. A clothes shop.”

  “What about your exams?”

  “It’ll only be on Saturdays until after the exams. Then all week during the summer. But the interviews are today.”

  He opened the kitchen door.

  “What time’s your interview?”

  “Eleven thirty.” Jo looked at the clock on the cooker. It was already five past ten.

  Trevor took his jacket off the rack in the hall. “Well, good luck, then.” Unexpectedly, he squinted at her. “What have you done to your face?”

  “Walked into a rose bush.”

  “A rose bush?”

  Jo was ready for this. Trevor hadn’t consciously seen her yesterday. “It was sticking out from someone’s stupid garden, and scratched me as I walked past on the way back from the bus stop. It bloody hurt, I can tell you.”

  Trevor grinned. “Try not to get tetanus.”

  “Thanks for the sympathy.”

  “See you later, then.”

  The front door crashed behind him. Jo topped up her mug of tea and took it upstairs. After her shower she dried her hair, trying to push it up a bit so that it looked like there was some air between it and her scalp. But it just wrapped itself round her head and neck as flatly as a scarf. Whoever interviewed her would wonder whether that branch of Rose and Reed could risk giving a job to a girl with a scab on her cheek and such disappointingly dull hair. Dull hair, dull brain, dull personality.