He stopped at the gate of a medium-sized brick house with a little roof over the porch like the one on Jo’s old dolls’ house. In fact, the whole house was a little girl’s fantasy, with lacy curtains and window boxes full of petunias. There was even a plant stand in the shape of a small wheelbarrow beside the front door.
“It’s lovely,” said Jo. She kissed him on his cheek and giggled. The champagne she’d drunk at lunch was making her feel inanely happy.
“Your mum’s really fit, if I’m allowed to say that,” he said, squeezing her close to him and smiling. It was the smile she’d first seen when he’d met her at Kingsgrove station on Wednesday. A candid smile, that smoothed his face and showed that perhaps, despite being so good-looking, he truly liked her.
They walked up the path, still entwined, and he unlocked the front door. “My mum’s not so fit, I warn you. She’ll be back soon too. She’s only gone shopping.”
“This seems to be the day for meeting mothers,” said Jo. “Should I be nervous?”
“Oh no, Mum’s cool.”
Taking her hand, Toby led her from the tiny square hallway into a sitting-room that occupied the whole depth of the house, with windows at the front and sliding patio doors at the back. These were open onto a garden, lovingly kept. A long-legged, drooly dog bounded in, its claws clicking and sliding on the polished floor. “I told you, I’ve got my mum trained. She’s as obedient as Robson here.” He released Jo’s hand, squatted and rubbed the dog behind its ears. “Hey, Rob, what’s going on?”
Jo looked around the room. It couldn’t, she realized with a sinking heart, be any more different from the sitting room where she had left Toby with Blod on his lap that first night. All the furniture looked brand new. There were expensive rugs on the floor, and everything sparkled with conscientious cleanliness. No one cleaned Jo’s house except Sylvia the Chinese Cleaner, who only came for two hours each Thursday. The carpets and furniture bore the evidence of Trevor’s smoking habit, and bits of The Guardian that always became separated from each other, junk mail, CDs, beer bottles, half-read books and half-watched DVDs littered every surface. The smell of stale booze, cat litter, un-emptied bins and un-opened windows was noticeable the moment you opened the front door, except on Thursday evenings. But Jo was willing to bet that in Toby’s house the kitchen worktops would be strangers to bacteria, and every lampshade, curtain rail and skirting board free of dust. And there was no smell, not even of dog.
“Does your mum do all this herself?” she asked warily.
“Do all what? Come on, let’s go in the garden.”
Robson was running around them in excited circles, hurling himself against their legs. Jo almost fell over.
“Sorry, he can be pretty crazy,” said Toby. He caught the dog’s collar and wrestled him to the grass. “Come on, you stupid animal, lie down.” He looked up at Jo, squinting against the sun. “How was your lunch?”
“All right,” muttered Jo.
“What did you eat?” asked Toby, scratching Robson’s ears.
A vision of the golf club restaurant came into Jo’s head. The swirly carpet and pink tablecloths, the parties of intoxicated golfers and murmuring middle-aged couples, the young waiter who flushed with embarrassment when Granny Pratt spoke French to him. Overcooked lamb on Jo’s plate, Grandad pursing his lips seriously when he tasted the wine, Tess chirruping pointlessly about the importance of A Levels. And university, of course. University was the only thing Tess had ever done in her life. Jo had to go to university; it was what everyone did, except Trevor, of course, but that was another story.
Jo’s mood suddenly darkened, almost to misery. Is that what champagne does to everyone, she thought? Make you feel happy, then daft, then plunge you into depression? How much alcohol did you need to drink, and how often, to achieve Trevor’s level of tolerance? He drank as if getting drunk was a project he was working on, requiring dedication from which nothing would distract him. But for all his tolerance it never seemed to make him happy, or daft, or even depressed. It just sent him to oblivion, a place where all feelings – good or bad – disappeared.
“Roast lamb,” she told Toby. “And sticky toffee pudding. And champagne.”
Toby was still crouching beside Robson, looking up at her. “Were you celebrating something?”
Granny and Grandad Pratt often ordered champagne in restaurants, usually after a serious discussion with the man they and Tess called the sommelier and Trevor and Jo called the wine waiter. “I think they wanted to wish me good luck,” she said.
“In your exams?”
She nodded.
“Wow.” He fondled Robson’s ears more vigorously. “What will they do when your results come out? Take you to Las Vegas for the weekend?”
Jo didn’t smile. “No, that would be far too naff. Venice, perhaps, for an art lesson. Or the Pyramids, for a history lesson.”
Toby let go of the dog and stood up. “Blimey. Your family’s something else.”
Something else. What, exactly? Toby could have no possible idea what the Probert-Pratt experience was like. Suddenly, Jo thought about how ugly Tess’s mouth got when she said things that exasperated Trevor, and how Trevor narrowed his once-nice eyes when he retorted with things that annoyed Tess.
There was a light all round the edge of the garden. Jo watched it get brighter and brighter, wondering what it was, and why Toby seemed unthreatened by it. She felt panicky.
“It’s very bright out here, isn’t it?” she said. She couldn’t make her lungs draw in enough breath; the words came out very quietly.
“Haven’t you got any sunglasses?”
Sunglasses wouldn’t help. The sun was on its mid-afternoon trajectory, making defined shadows under a recently-planted row of saplings, but the light crowding Jo’s vision wasn’t the sun. It was a relentless glare, barging in from all directions, flattening the contours and perspective of the garden into two dimensions, bleaching the lawn, the dog, and Toby himself into an over-exposed Kodak print.
Jo didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want Toby’s mum to come home to find a strange girl, possessed by a rush of elemental loathing, in her spotless house. Bewildered, she clutched the nearest thing, which turned out to be the back of a plastic garden chair. “Toby, I don’t feel right. Maybe I’d better go home.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I drank too much champagne. My head feels funny, and I can’t see properly. Maybe it’s a migraine or something.”
His lips tightened, and he blinked a few times, searching her face. “Come in out of the sun and lie down, then. Take an aspirin or something.”
Jo’s panic increased. She had to get home. She couldn’t stay in this place. “I can’t do that, Toby.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t!”
She was almost shouting. Toby gave her a “Whoa there!” look. “All right,” he said suspiciously, “I’ll take you home. Come on.”
As they walked through the house the front door opened and a short woman with a supermarket bag in each hand eased her way in. “This is Jo, Mum,” said Toby. He didn’t offer to take the bags.
Mrs Ferguson was tawny-haired, with peachy skin and a fleshy face. Her jeans squashed her hips and thighs, and she had on a yellow blouse with very short sleeves, the kind that were at the top of Tess’s Unflattering Sleeves list. Her sweet, eager expression didn’t make her look like the sort of woman whose husband would go all the way to Saudi Arabia to avoid her. “Hello, Jo,” she said in a Scottish accent. “I won’t shake your hand, if you don’t mind. Supermarkets are full of germs, aren’t they?”
Jo couldn’t speak. Her head pounded. Images of the DVD case floated through her mind. The sharp pain, the shock of blood. The light around her increased, but when she closed her eyes she saw redness, not darkness. She swayed, and had to put her hand on the wall to steady herself.
“Too much champagne” said Toby to his mum. “I’m just taking her home
.”
“Sorry,” blurted Jo. She hoped Mrs Ferguson didn’t think they were leaving because she’d come in.
“She’s not usually like this,” said Toby, more sarcastically than apologetically. He must think Jo was making all this up, just to get away from him. He must think she considered the house, or the garden, or even his dog, unsuitable in some way. Jo’s family were something else, he’d said. Something different from his, he’d meant. Oh bloody hell, he thought they were too refined for him. Of course he did; he hadn’t met Trevor.
“Well, I’ll maybe see you when you’re feeling a wee bit better, Jo,” said Mrs Ferguson, smiling thinly.
Toby took Jo’s arm firmly and steered her out of the door. “We’ll wait for ever for a bus on a Sunday. Let’s walk.”
“I can’t walk.”
He stopped and looked at her. “What do you mean, you can’t walk?”
“I feel like I might faint.” She couldn’t muster more than a whisper. She took her phone out of her pocket. “I’ll call my dad to come and get me.”
“Oh.” Toby was still holding her elbow. “So I’m staying here, then, am I?”
She hardly heard him. She had to concentrate on pressing the right keys, getting Trevor’s number, listening to the ringing sound, willing him to answer.
“Y…ello!” said her father in his Homer Simpson voice.
“Will you come and pick me up?” she asked, hoping he could hear her properly over the pub noise. “I’m not feeling very well.”
“Where are you?”
“Toby’s house. Keats Close. Off Whittaker Road. Number six. Trev, are you sober enough?”
“Have to be, won’t I? See you in a minute.”
She shut the phone. The brightness was still all around her, obliterating Toby.
“Why did you ask if he’s sober enough?” he asked, his suspicious tone darkening. “Is he in a pub?”
Jo shrugged. She couldn’t embark on an explanation.
“What’s wrong?” asked Toby. “Why are you shivering?”
Because I’m dying! She though. She gasped for breath. What the hell was happening? Panic? Is that what it was, a panic attack? She’d heard that’s what Juliet Parslow had had at Thorpe Park when they’d gone there on a school trip in Year Nine. Mr Phipps had told her to sit down and put her head between her legs, and the boys had sniggered. “I don’t know. Maybe I ate something bad.” She clamped her teeth, but the shivering didn’t stop. “Sorry, sorry,” she muttered through her teeth.
“Look, come back in the house to wait for your dad,” suggested Toby. He sounded uncertain, and much more concerned.
“No!” It came out more aggressively than she intended. “I mean, I’m all right here, thanks. Just ignore me.”
He didn’t ignore her. He put his arms around her and held her stiff, trembly body, murmuring comforting words until Trevor’s car drew up with all the windows down and the sun roof open, and ‘Hotel California’ on the stereo.
“You must be Toby,” said Trevor, silencing The Eagles. “I’m Trevor Probert.”
Jo registered vaguely that Trevor had got Toby’s name right. “Hello,” said Toby He opened the passenger door and helped her in. “Jo’s not well.” He did up her seat belt for her. “I’ll call you later and see how you are,” he told her, and shut the door.
“Thanks for looking after her,” said Trevor.
As the car pulled away from the kerb, Jo turned. Toby was standing on the pavement with a gap between his thighs and his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Panic swirled around her, but she summoned her voice. “Toby!” she called. He was too far away to hear her.
But what would she have said anyway? It’s nothing to do with you? I really like you and want you to be my boyfriend? Please don’t think this is anything to do with you?
“What’s the matter anyway?” asked Trevor as she turned back, defeated.
She leaned against the headrest and closed her eyes, ambushed by nausea. “Don’t know, I just feel crap.”
“Better phone the golf club, then.” Jo could feel that he was driving slightly too confidently. He broadened his Welsh accent. “Listen, you toffee-nosed bastards, you’ve poisoned my daughter. Fancy a court case, do you?”
“Very funny.” Jo opened her eyes. The world was going by very fast. “Try not to kill me, will you?”
Trevor slowed the car enough to make a more or less successful turn off the main road. “I’ve only had a couple of pints, or three. And we’re almost home now.”
Jo stared at the sunlit London roads, the rows of houses with bicycles and dustbins on their front paths, the worn grass verges and littered pavements, the new-paint green of the trees. The unnerving brightness that had obliterated reality in Toby’s garden had gone; now everything she looked at seemed extra-clear, as if, like Dorothy and Toto, she’d emerged from ordinary life into a Technicolor world.
“I’ll be OK,” she assured her father. “I haven’t got food poisoning. I just felt…”
But she couldn’t explain the panic in the garden, or the desperation now.
When Trevor had parked haphazardly in a too-small space, swearing under his breath, Jo opened the car door. “I’m going upstairs,” she told him. “I’d better have a rest.”
He leaned his arms on the steering wheel and looked at her with a troubled expression, blunted by alcohol. “Cup of tea might help, love.”
“If I drink anything I’ll be sick.”
In the cool of the hallway, Blod slipped out of the shadows and curled herself round Jo’s leg, but Jo ignored her, and Trevor picked her up. Jo watched them go into the kitchen. Her legs felt very tired, but she took hold of the banister and slowly climbed the stairs.
The light in her room was muted; the sun was round the other side of the house. Jo lay down on the huge bed with her face to the wall, burying her nose in the pink belly of an ancient rabbit who stood guard at the end of the line of cuddly toys. She tried not to think about Toby, or what he thought of her and her family. She tried to think about nothing.
Trapped under her body, her left arm throbbed. The blood supply to it was being restricted by her weight. She lay still for a few moments, thinking about her left arm. It was made of bones, and ligaments, and flesh, and arteries and veins and skin, like everyone else’s left arm. No one but Jo would think there was anything special about it, or that it had any power beyond the usual things left arms do. It did, though; she knew that now.
She closed her eyes tightly, waiting for the red circles surrounded by the pulsing light. When she saw them, she opened her eyes again. The light was still there at the edge of her vision, white and insistent. She rolled over, liberating her arm, and closed her eyes again.
The fingers of her right hand locked themselves around the fleshy part just below her left elbow. She thought about the whiteness of the skin on the inside of her arm, the part where no one ever seemed to get sunburned. She began to press and release. Press. Release. Press. Release. Then she stopped releasing and just pressed, digging her nails in, clamping her teeth, willing herself not to gasp with the pain.
She opened her eyes. Where she’d pressed hardest, with her middle fingernail, a bluish-purple mark had appeared. She scratched it, hard. It produced a bud of blood. And it didn’t take much more pressing and releasing for the bud to burst.
Jo scratched more and more with sticky, scarlet nails, smearing blood over her arm. It was agony. But when she stopped, in the place of agony came peace.
She lay there with her eyes closed, breathing steadily, unaware of any sensation except the absence of pain. But when she roused herself and looked at her arm, her heart gave a thud. The wound was bloody, as she’d expected, but there were also glistening patches of watery goo, like the pretend lacerations on the pretend corpses in CSI. Her nails, which must be sharper than she’d thought, had penetrated the liquid-producing layer of flesh which burns and blisters exposed. And which left a scar. Especially if you picked it.
She mustn’t get blood on the duvet cover. She needed to clean the gouged-out place on her arm, and hide its ugliness. Slowly, she got up and opened her bedroom door. The murmur of ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ with the bass turned up came from the sitting-room. In the bathroom, Jo locked the door, leaned on the washbasin and ran warm water over her right hand. Pink water swirled down the plughole. She wetted some toilet paper and dabbed the patch on her arm where she’d scratched away her flesh. She said the words softly to herself as she worked. Patch. Scratch. My own little scratch-patch.
She flushed away the bloody toilet paper and opened the medicine cabinet. The only plasters remaining in the box were the small ones designed for finger cuts, and Jo had to use two to cover the wound. Then she spread soap over the nailbrush. She felt nauseated, and her legs were wobbly, but she had to get the blood out from under her nails, and out of her sight. The soap went pink and frothy; her nausea grew, but she finished the job and felt her way unsteadily back to her room.
She sat on the edge of the bed and gazed at her ‘Wonders of China’ calendar on the opposite wall. Jo had no particular interest in the wonders of China, but the calendar was Sylvia the Chinese Cleaner’s idea of a Christmas present. Sylvia came into her bedroom to clean every Thursday, so Jo had to have the calendar up.
The picture for June was of a little girl dressed in an elaborate costume with a huge headdress. Just like on every picture, for every month, there was a line of Chinese writing down the side, translated into English at the bottom. Under the picture of the little girl it said ‘Be Free’.
“That’s a joke”, Trevor had said, “Considering how the Chinese might possibly be the most un-free people in the world.” She read it again, and again. Just those two words. Maybe the English translation was done by a rubbish translator. Or maybe, she realized suddenly, the idea of being free is open to interpretation. Hadn’t they learned in History that above the gate at Auschwitz 1, it even said, ‘Work Will Set You Free’?
Moderate Violence Page 7
