The denim skirt didn’t look bad, though. Jo model-posed in front of the mirror. Toby was right. Her legs, though not in the same league of brownness, smoothness or length as Pascale’s, were pretty good. She sat down on the bed and inspected the plaster on her arm. The shower had loosened a corner, so she ripped it off. The wound had stopped weeping yellowy water, but it hadn’t started scabbing over either. She prodded it gently, wondering if this would be the last time she’d touch it. Toby, mendacious or not, couldn’t be her boyfriend – her proper boyfriend – if she never let him see her naked, could he? Somehow, by a serious effort of will, she had to make herself leave it alone.
She opened her bedside-table drawer and reached right to the back, where she kept an empty crisp packet. She folded the used plaster and placed it in the crisp packet with all the others, and the papers they came wrapped in. It wasn’t Sylvia’s business if she found used plasters in the waste paper basket or the bathroom bin, but Jo couldn’t stand the idea of her inspecting them, wondering. The soiled plasters would stay in the crisp packet until the day came when Jo would put it in her bag and nonchalantly, on the way to the bus stop, screw it up and throw it into a public litter bin.
When she’d put on another plaster and dressed in a long-sleeved top, she took the rollers out of her hair. But when she pinned up the curls, the result was more 1970s starlet than sophisticated wanton. Pascale’s hair must be more receptive to curling than Jo’s. Swearing softly, she heated up the straighteners.
Her phone rang; it was Holly, asking what Jo and Toby were doing tonight. Jo rushed through the conversation, afraid she’d miss the train.
“Let me know what happens!” said Holly.
“Will do!” replied Jo.
She left the house without saying goodbye to Trevor and walked to the station as quickly as the effectiveness of her deodorant would allow. She didn’t get a seat because a lot of other people were going to Waterloo Station on a Saturday night. Swaying in the carriage, she thought about Trevor sitting alone with his shepherd’s pie. For a moment she felt guilty, but then she remembered that he still hadn’t made an appointment to see Mr Treasure. Every time Jo reminded him he said, “Can’t Tess go? Teachers frighten the pants off me. And anyway, I’m going to Wales.”
She sighed. On TV and in movies, and even in her class at school, people’s parents just got divorced. Kids said, “my parents are divorced, and I live with my mum and see my dad every other weekend.” But it seemed to Jo that her own parents’ separation just got muddier and muddier. If anyone asked her to explain, what would she say? “Well, my mother’s living with her parents and I’m living with my dad in a house my mum and dad both own, and he wants to sell it and spend his half on another house, but my mother doesn’t want to live in a flat, she’d rather come back and live in our house, with him paying for it even though he’s just been made redundant and wants to go and live in Wales anyway. Still with me?”
And where was Jo in all this uncertainty and vagueness? Did Trevor or Tess ever think about that?
The train arrived late at Waterloo. Jo saw Toby before he saw her. As she walked across the concourse she watched him jittering from foot to foot. He looked nice, in his usual loose-limbed way, neatly groomed despite not having been home after work. He greeted her with a relieved hug. “Thought you weren’t coming!”
“Train was late. What have you been doing? Where’s your shopping?”
“Didn’t buy anything.” He saw her face. “Sorry, couldn’t find what I wanted. I booked the table, though, so come on.”
The restaurant wasn’t like the golf club, or any of the pseudo-rustic pubs on Jo’s grandparents’ dining-out circuit. It was a proper restaurant, with starched tablecloths and discreet waiters who pulled out her chair and spread her napkin on her lap for her. Jo and Toby even ordered cocktails.
Jo watched him, trying to gauge his mood. It was different from how he’d been in the shop. He seemed nervous, as if it was their first date. Of course, he could be nervous about what was going to happen later. But if that were the reason, why didn’t Jo’s willingness, which she was making as obvious as she could, make him feel at ease?
They drank almost two bottles of wine with the meal. Although Toby had more of it than Jo, she still felt very drunk. It was more wine than she’d ever had all in one go. She wondered, not for the first time, how Trevor could get through bottle after bottle and still stay upright. Well, almost.
The wine didn’t seem to relax Toby. In the end, Jo encouraged him to have another cocktail, and she had one too. Leaning on each other, they left the restaurant.
“You’re drunk,” said Toby amiably.
“So are you.”
“I’m going to get a taxi,” said Toby, flailing his arm at the nearest one, which didn’t stop.
“Why can’t we go on the Tube?” asked Jo.
“Because I want to go in a taxi.” He scanned the traffic. “There’s one!” They scampered between the lines of cars. “Waterloo, please!” said Toby, opening the door.
Nestling with his arm around Jo in the corner of the cab, Toby seemed to make a decision. He put his hand up her skirt, almost as far as her knickers, and left it on her thigh. Jo was so drunk that she watched without protest as his eyes got a dreamy, unfocused look, and he breathed faster. She let him put his tongue in her mouth, and even arched her back so that his other hand could locate the fastening of her lacy bra. She was aware that her own breath was shortening, and that she wanted to swallow, but couldn’t. Holly said that happened all the time, but Pascale said that when you really want to do it you get a feeling inside you like a period pain, though not so bad. In fact, quite nice.
Jo waited, there in the taxi, for the nice pain. But all that happened was that the constriction in her throat increased as Toby went on kissing her. He smelled of alcohol. The hand that was up her skirt had found the top of her knickers and was trying to pull the elastic away from her body. The other hand had undone her bra and was kneading her left breast uncomfortably.
Things were going wrong. Jo didn’t feel nice. She felt ill, partly from the unaccustomed alcohol, and partly from plain, old fashioned shame. What was the taxi-driver thinking? Although it didn’t matter, because she would have felt the same even if she and Toby had been doing this at home.
She clamped Toby’s knicker-hand with her own hand. “Tobe, we can’t do this in a taxi.”
“You want to, though, don’t you?”
“Not here,” Jo said as forcefully as she could. But registering outrage was hard because Toby’s face was still all over hers.
“Don’t worry,” he insisted. “I’ve got some – ”
“Toby!” She tried again. “I don’t want to do this here.”
He took his hand out from under her skirt. He looked agitated and sweaty, as if he’d set himself a task he was regretting embarking on. “What the hell is it with you?” he asked aggressively. “You were all over me in the restaurant, and then you come on like I’m a criminal or something because I want to have a bit of fun in a taxi.”
Jo tried to wriggle free, but Toby’s bra-arm was still clamped around her, squeezing her against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered.
“Why is it such a big deal?” he persisted. “I thought, after what you said last night – ”
“Toby…” She had to stop him. The ‘If you loved me you’d do it’ argument was too painful to hear. It made him sound like a hormone-crazed fourteen-year-old. “Maybe what I said last night…I mean, people say things…”
“So you didn’t mean it, then.”
She tried not to hear the petulance in his voice. “I don’t know what I meant, Toby. I was…look…it didn’t feel right.” Then she added something she wished she hadn’t, “maybe you’re not…you know, the one.”
He slid his free hand under her cheek, lifted her head and looked at her with exasperation. “Christ, Jo, who is ‘the one’, then? One of those wetheads at your school?”
“No, of course not!”
The taxi was crossing Waterloo Bridge. It was only two more minutes to the station. Jo wished she could get out and walk.
“You just don’t fancy me, do you?” Toby had clamped her head onto his chest again. His heart hammered against her cheek. “You’re saving yourself for Mr Wonderful. Well, when you meet him, be sure to introduce me, so I can be as dazzled as you are by his wonderfulness.”
Jo knew he was being mean, but felt too weak to argue. Pascale’s theory was that if you did anything at all to bruise a boy’s ego, even something as small as observing that your uncle’s got the same jumper as him (this had actually happened to Pascale), the boy would get back at you by equally small, but very noticeable acts of meanness. You had to feel sorry for them, really. And how many times had Toby bruised Jo’s ego, without even noticing?
“Look, Toby…” Already, before she’d even got to the end of the sentence, Jo was beginning to regret her next words. “My mother says – ”
“Oh, your mother! How old are you? Twelve?”
Through her alcohol fuelled haze, Jo realized that Tess, for all her shortcomings, understood about boys. Jo believed her when she said that they can separate sex from love, but girls can’t because they don’t see why they should. But it was impossible to say the L-word to Toby now. She shouldn’t have said it in the first place.
“It’s all right, Tess doesn’t think I’m saving myself for my wedding night,” she told him. “But she’s always said I should be really, really sure before I commit myself.” What Tess had actually said was that Jo must trust someone. But she couldn’t say the T-word to Toby either.
He seemed to be thinking about this. After a few moments he let go of Jo’s head, and she sat up, looking at him warily. His face bore no expression. He didn’t speak, but sat with his hands folded on his stomach, as if he were watching TV, until the taxi stopped. He looked out of the train window all the way to Kingsgrove, and they walked home in silence. At her house they exchanged a chaste kiss. They didn’t arrange their next meeting, and Toby didn’t say he’d call her. The effects of the wine were receding, but Jo still felt helpless, unsure of what to do. She watched him walk down the street for a few moments, then she put her key into the lock and pushed the door.
Trevor was watching a movie, his armchair surrounded by half-empty beer bottles, half-smoked cigarettes and loose pages from The Guardian. He put up his hand in case she spoke. Jo could see that the film was almost over. She knew the last scene of Fight Club pretty well. As soon as the credits started to roll, she asked, “What’s happening with you and Tess?”
Trevor gestured to the cooler beside his chair. “Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
“Mind if I do?”
“Are you serious?”
“All right.” He opened another bottle of beer. “Tess is pissed off because I’m not letting her have the house, that’s all.”
Jo looked around the living room, wondering how much longer it would be hers, and Blod’s. “Well, do you have to sell it?”
“All my money’s tied up in it, Jo-girl, and I need money to start this thing with Mord.” He glanced up, and when he saw her face his expression softened. “Look, love, if Tess’s dad’s prepared to give her the money to buy out my half, he’s welcome, and then you can go on living here.”
“With Tess, though?”
“’Fraid so. I’m going to be in Wales, where your mother is always telling me I belong, and should never have had the presumption to venture out of. But all I can say to that is…hah bloody hah!”
This struck him as intolerably amusing. Jo watched him for a minute, shrieking and coughing, and fumbling for a cigarette and dropping the pack and picking it up again, and then she went upstairs and sat down in her computer chair.
She tried to make herself think. She wanted to work out what had happened tonight, consider it and deal with it, like a sensible person. But it didn’t happen. She sat there with her hands at her sides and her legs stretched out under the dressing-table desk, and the movie that ran inside her head folded into darkness, like the black screen at the end before the credits roll. That’s all, folks, go home now. There were no thoughts and nothing in her imagination. She was besieged by first-take, un-edited emotions, on which her brain had no influence. Unnamed, untamed, they twisted in her stomach, impossible to separate.
She pictured Toby’s watchful eyes, the way he looked at his reflection in shop windows and fiddled with his hair, the space his long limbs and shambling walk took up, the feel of his skin, the smell of his shower gel. She remembered how his heart had practically jumped out of his chest when she was kissing him in the doorway of the shop, and what she’d said, and her eyes began to burn.
Panic rose. Her right hand closed around her left elbow, but then she released it again. The scratch-patch wasn’t what she needed. She tried to breathe. The room was full of light. It shouldn’t be – it was the middle of the night – but Jo stood up and walked into the brightness, conscious suddenly of what she did need. She sat down on the window seat that ran around the bay window. Her make-up lay all higgledy-piggledy in a glass tray on the window-sill. Beside it stood her make-up mirror. And beside that, in its usual place, was the little china box she’d brought back from Delft.
The china box contained her eyebrow tweezers and hairpins, as well as something that looked perfectly innocent, but would be confiscated at an airport. Jo knew it was there, underneath the hairpins and the tweezers, small, but powerful enough to be considered a threat to air passengers. She thought about it hard. She shut her eyes and rocked backwards and forwards, eyes shut, humming softly to herself, letting the thought possess her. When she was sure the thought had become her, and no longer existed as a thought at all, she opened the lid of the china box.
Her fingers closed around the tiny pair of nail scissors. Each blade had a point like a little knife. Without needing to open her eyes, Jo carefully ran her fingertips over one of the blades.
She could do it, she was sure. She could do it in her leg, high enough for her knickers to hide. Toby would never know. No one would know. And in that nanosecond of physical pain, the endless mental pain he had made would recede.
Still blind, she took a tissue from the box on the windowsill, pulled up her skirt and the side of her knickers, and stiffened the muscles of her leg. First there was the cold of the metal, then a bright heat. Jo gasped. The moment of release. And then there was warmth, and the wetness of the little spurt of blood.
She opened her eyes. Perfect. Not too much blood to cause a fuss, not too little to fail to do the job. And it had done the job. Instantly, unlike the scratch-patch method, and more sensationally, with a more exquisite stab. She pressed the tissue to the wound. It hurt a lot now.
Her heart thudded, fatigue deadened her limbs, her body felt weak. But she got up, and, still pressing the tissue to her thigh, went to the computer chair. She deleted Toby’s ‘Suitable for all’ label, and examined the white space it left behind. Tentatively, as if the keys were burning her fingertips, she typed ‘Scenes of sex or violence’ in it.
The digital clock by the bed read 00:36. She stuffed the bloodstained tissue into the crisp packet and put a plaster on the wound. Then, too feeble to undress, she lay down on the bed.
She would have to live with tonight for ever. It would never go away. Many nights from now, perhaps years and years into the future, the picture of herself and Toby tangled up on a taxi seat, and the sound of her stupid little-girl voice saying, “I just don’t think you’re the one,” would rise up and hover in her brain. And Jo would let out a little yelp at the memory.
But tonight, the scissors’ tiny point had put the pain in its place. She was in control. She pulled the duvet around her ears and put out her bedside light. And very soon, with a peace all around her more profound than any she had felt since Tess had left Trevor, she fell asleep.
* * * * * *
When she w
oke up she lay in bed for a long time, looking at the frame of light around the curtains, thinking about last night. She also thought about the exam results.
The trouble was, if she did really badly no one would employ her, maybe not even Rose and Reed. Though of course if she did really badly, how would she show her face in Rose and Reed or anywhere else? After the build-up Mr Gerrard, Miss Balcombe and even Mr Phipps, who considered her an also-ran as far as the race for grade A Maths was concerned, had given her, the humiliation would be intolerable. The vultures would pounce, stabbing her with, “Oh, you must be so disappointed, Jo! After that essay you did that Mr Gerrard thought was so brilliant”. Or, “Aren’t you supposed to be quite good at French?” And as they gloated, Jo would remember that she was better at almost everything than almost all of them, and want to kill them.
But there was another even worse scenario. If she did really well, the pressure to do A Levels would become intolerable. Different vultures – Trevor and Tess – would stab her repeatedly. Peck, peck, peck. And because of her good results, her case against staying on would be in danger of collapse.
She tried to remember the English exams, the Maths, the French. She’d worked hard for them, and all the other subjects, except Art, which she hated with the white-hot hatred only a project involving wire, glue, bits of net and dry leaves could induce. Why had she worked so hard, and bent for hours over a too-small desk, her wrist stiff, her head throbbing from lack of air and late nights?
Because she couldn’t let herself down. And that was the whole point, surely? To do her best because she could, not because she had to in order to achieve some goal involving anybody else.
Moderate Violence Page 11
