Trevor drove away, honking the horn and probably waving, though there was so much stuff in the car Jo couldn’t see what he was doing. Jo waved anyway, then she went back into the house.
Tess was leaning into the mirror by the front door, painting her lips with a lip brush. “Has he gone?” she said to Jo’s reflection.
Jo nodded.
“Well, he’ll soon be back. His little enterprise is guaranteed to go belly-up.” Tess stood back and scrutinized her handiwork. “Is this colour too dark for me?”
“Nothing’s too dark for you,” said Jo. Moderate Horror.
“It’s just that this make-up has got to last all evening, but I don’t want it to look too…you know…”
“Tarty?” suggested Jo.
“…showy. I mean, it’s only teatime now, but I won’t have the chance to take off my daytime face and put on my evening one, so I was just wondering…” – she pursed her lips, as if she were about to kiss the mirror – “…if it’s a bit OTT.”
Jo felt as if she’d walked into the wrong studio in the multiplex. What was going on in front of her was so banal, so inane, and so wrong, wrong, wrong, it should never have got the funding in the first place. And now that it had, why was she wasting precious eyesight watching it? “It’s fine,” she told her mother.
“Right.” Tess seemed satisfied. She put the lipstick and brush in her make-up bag and closed it with an emphatic click. “I’ll just get my shoes on, then I’ll be off.”
“Where are you going?”
“Oh, here and there,” said Tess, starting up the stairs. “You can get your own supper, can’t you, darling?”
Jo didn’t even bother answering this. She thought about Trevor heading for the motorway with the window open and the fan full on, because Tess wasn’t there complaining about her hair getting messed up, or demanding to know why he didn’t have a car with air conditioning like any normal person. He’d probably be singing, too. ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, or, if he was especially pleased with himself, ‘Copacabana’.
Her throat constricted. This was stupid.
Tess clonked downstairs in very high heels. “If you go out, remember to lock up the house,” she instructed Jo, giving herself one last inspection in the mirror. “And feed Blod.”
Jo knew there was no point in mentioning that for months and months she was the one who had managed the locking up of the house and the feeding of the cat, along with many other things, while Trevor had been in the pub. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even nod.
Tess whipped round. “Are you sulking?” she asked sharply. “Because if you are, let me tell you, young lady, that cuts no ice with me. Trevor’s gone and that’s that.”
Jo still didn’t speak.
“I mean it!” After she’d said this Tess set her mouth in a shiny line, checked she’d got her keys, opened the front door, strode out and slammed it behind her.
“I’m sulking!” said Jo to the space where Tess had stood.
Into her mind came an image of the nail scissors, which hung there, glittering, like the ghostly dagger in Macbeth. She saw Holly’s blue eyes, pleading with her to be sensible and weeping when Jo had refused. And she saw Toby’s grey eyes, getting darker and darker as he stood there lying to her.
It was insanity, but it worked. In that split-second of relief, the little spurt of blood, the mark on her skin, everything would disappear. Trevor’s desertion. Tess’s uncomprehending unkindness. Toby’s fingers grasping the top of the lacy knickers she’d so knowingly put on, fumbling for the secret place, filling her with panic and revulsion. The little scissors would cut out her pain.
She pictured the scarred, scary girl she’d seen in a scandal-mag Pascale had brought into school. The patch on Jo’s arm where she’d picked and picked the flesh, destroying the scab every time it formed, had already scarred, quite noticeably. It was a secret scar though, hidden by all but the shortest sleeves.
Jo didn’t want to look like the girl in the magazine. She’d stop before it got anywhere near that. But not now. She grasped the banister she could no longer see, hauling herself up, step by step.
The scissors were in their place. She opened them and stared. Two blades. More pain, more relief. It had been a hot day, and she was wearing a short cotton Rose and Reed skirt. She caught hold of the hem to pull it up, then paused. Would two points cause twice the bloodshed of one? It was Wednesday today; Sylvia the Chinese Cleaner was due tomorrow. She wouldn’t have said anything about a tissue in a bin, especially not to Trevor, but if she found a larger bloodstain in Jo’s room, on the window seat cushion, or the carpet, she would wonder what it was, and perhaps mention it, cautiously, anxiously, to Tess.
Jo remembered with relief that she was alone in the house. She didn’t have to hide in the bedroom. Clutching the open scissors, aware that their points were digging into her palm, she went downstairs.
The garden lay under the low light of a warm, early-August evening. Jo remembered the white brightness that had drenched Toby’s garden, obliterating everything in it. Her behaviour that day had been unforgivable; she hadn’t encountered Mrs Ferguson since, and didn’t know what she would say when she did. If she did. But what she’d felt was panic. Desperation, like you’d feel if you were drowning, or someone was trying to strangle you.
But this numbing, half-blind compulsion was a different desperation. She just had to do it.
She went down the path and plunged into the green gloom under the bushes near the shed, ducking as a pair of wood pigeons flapped indignantly away. No one could see her. Her heart pumping hard, she pulled up her skirt and the edge of her knickers, tensed her leg and stuck the twin blades into her groin. Then she pulled them out again and sank to her knees on the leaf-strewn earth under the laurel bush. Eyes closed, she knelt there, breathing softly and regularly until she calmed. She opened her eyes, her wounded flesh burning, and inspected what she had done.
Two blades hadn’t caused twice as much damage, or twice as much blood, as one, but they had made an untidier cut. She’d forgotten to bring a tissue. As the blood oozed up, startlingly red and thick-looking, like cheap jam, she pulled off some laurel leaves and pressed them to the spot. Her hand clamped to her groin, she crept into the darkness of the shed. Gratefully, like an animal finding a place to give birth, she sat down on a stack of rodent-ravaged newpapers in the corner, her back against the wall, dizzy with still-hot pain.
Through the open shed door the house looked abandoned, uninhabited except for a prowling Blod. Later, when it was too dark for any neighbours to notice her blood-streaked leg from an upstairs window, Jo would slip furtively across the lawn, and let herself back into the empty house.
* * * * * *
The next morning, Jo turned from the cupboard in the Staff Room, her identity tag dangling round her neck, to find Toby blocking the doorway. He stood with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, his shoulders hunched. It was a while since he’d got his hair done, she noticed suddenly, and it sprang up in tufts. Her heart was stirred by the apprehension in his eyes. “Hello,” she said.
They still hadn’t spoken since their uncomfortable exchange on Tuesday morning. Neither had called or texted the other. Jo had thought Toby would come in this morning, ignore her and go straight up to Menswear. But here he was.
“I can’t stand this” he said.
He came towards her, giving her a modified version of The Look, with more sexy and less funny. She could hear Eloise greeting Sophie upstairs in the shop. They’d come down soon. Whatever Toby was going to do, he’d better do it quick.
He rubbed the tops of Jo’s arms with the palms of his hands. “I just couldn’t go on with the ‘I’m offended’ act.”
“Me too,” said Jo. Wondering if this was the truth, she decided to say something she had no doubts about. “I mean, I didn’t do so great myself on Saturday. I must have sounded like…I don’t know, some sort of – ”
“Some sort of you.” He gave up on The Look,
gathered her to his chest and put his face in her hair. His heart beat steadily underneath her right ear. “That’s the thing about you, Jo. You can’t be someone you’re not.”
His words resonated through Jo’s skull. In a sudden rush of understanding she realized that she liked him putting his chin on her head like this, simply because it was something he did. If she could be some sort of her, then he could be some sort of him.
She felt relieved, and grateful to Toby that he’d been the one to give in. It didn’t matter what he’d been doing in that club. It was all childish and distant now. Now, it felt right to be squashed between him and the cupboard door, with her arms round his waist and her head on his chest.
He took a breath and released it. “Would it help if I said I know I acted like an idiot, and that’s the reason I went out clubbing and got too drunk to know my phone was being nicked?”
“It might,” said Jo.
Toby took hold of a strand of her hair and began to wind it round his finger. “Are we cool?”
“We’re cool.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I thought you’d dumped me.”
“No, you didn’t.” Jo smiled, though he couldn’t see her face.
“Shall we go out on Saturday? For a curry?”
“I’d rather go to a movie.”
He stepped back and looked at her with his head on one side. Jo gazed at his arms coming out of his short sleeves, and his wristwatch nestling among the hairs on his wrist. He was so familiar that she couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t know him. It seemed like hundreds of years ago, in some ancient, forgotten time. BT. Before Toby. “Come on,” she coaxed. “I promise I won’t criticize the editing, or the direction, or the writing. And you’re the one that always criticizes the clothes.”
He smiled a proper, toothy smile. Jo hadn’t seen the smile for so long it sent a jolt of pleasure through her.
“All right, then,” he agreed. “But only if we can go for a curry afterwards.”
* * * * * *
Tess came in the back door, weighed down with yellow and purple plastic bags from Oxford Street stores. Without saying hello, she gave Jo a look. “So have you been thinking about which subjects to take next year?”
It was Friday night. Jo, exhausted from the week in the shop, was trying to eat a bowl of pasta she’d cooked herself for supper. She wasn’t very hungry, and she suspected the half-used jar of pasta sauce she’d found in the fridge had been there too long. “Tess, I haven’t even got my results yet,” she said patiently. “I might fail everything.”
Tess put her load down on the kitchen floor. “No you won’t,” she said airily. “And anyway, that’s irrelevant. They’ll take you back whatever happens. Alan Treasure is a personal friend of mine.”
“Really? Poor him.” Jo’s mouth was full of spaghetti, some of which landed back in the bowl when she said the ‘p’ on ‘poor’.
Tess’s voice took on an accusing tone. “You are such a rude girl! Who taught you to be so rude? Not me, I’m sure.”
“Must have been Trevor, then.”
Tess took off her jacket, hung it on the back of a kitchen chair and sat down. “Haven’t seen much of Tony recently. What’s up?”
“For God’s sake, Tess, his name’s Toby.”
“Cracking at the edges, is it?” asked Tess, putting her chin on her hands. “How long’s it been? Couple of months? Well, time for a bit of structural damage to show through.”
“It’s two and a half months.” Jo picked up the bowl and tipped the rest of the pasta into the bin. “You don’t know anything about him, and you couldn’t care less. You can’t even be bothered to remember his name.”
“Trevor says he’s a very personable young man.”
Jo slung the empty bowl into the sink. “I don’t care what Trevor says. Or you, for that matter. I can see Toby or not see Toby without sharing the information with you, thanks very much.”
“Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss,” said Tess, with exaggerated scorn. “When the wind changes your face will stay like that if you’re not careful, and you’ll end up as ugly as…” She abandoned the sentence, preferring to lean towards Jo with a listen-to-this look. “You know, my lunch crowd were very interested to hear that my little girl’s got a boyfriend. They can’t believe you’re so grown up, darling!”
This, of course, was because Tess didn’t look old enough to have a sixteen-year-old daughter. “Really?” said Jo from the sink, clattering the plates. “Did you tell them I’m grown up enough to have a job in a shop, too?”
Through the kitchen window she watched Blod stalking a bird under the rhododendron bush. Life must be simple if you’re a cat, she thought. You wouldn’t have to put up with Trevor going off to Wales and leaving you with an incurable, ingrained, permanent, unchangeable snob. “No, of course you didn’t,” she added lightly. “But you’ll have to tell them when I leave school and work there permanently, won’t you?”
“You’re not doing that!” Tess stood up. She picked up a tea cloth and twisted it between her hands. “What would people say? Everyone I know sends their children to university. None of my friends will ever speak to me again if you leave now.”
“Well then, you haven’t got to worry about what they’ll say, have you?”
Tess wound the tea towel tighter. “Oh, Jo, why are you being so stubborn?”
“I’m not being stubborn, I’m being practical. And if you keep repeating the same arguments, so will I. How come the shop’s good enough for Toby but not good enough for me? Because I’m cleverer than him? How do you know how clever he is?”
“Don’t browbeat me, darling!” wailed Tess fretfully. “I’ll get a migraine.”
“It’s all this moaning about A levels that’ll give you a migraine,” replied Jo, unrelenting.
“Don’t be so disagreeable, darling,” pleaded Tess. “It makes you look so horrible, and you can look quite nice when you try. I do wish you’d smile more and not sulk so much.”
Exasperation surged through Jo. Tess was talking, but she only heard a sort of bleating noise, underpinned by that strange ‘r’ sound like the droning of a wasp. “Tess!” She slammed her fists down on the table. “Just shut up, will you? Shut up!”
Tess stopped twisting the towel and looked at Jo in astonishment. “You can’t speak to me like that!”
“I just have,” said Jo, breathing heavily through her nose.
All the misery of the last few days gathered behind her eyes. Her mother’s red lipstick, heavy mascara and bobbed hair blurred like a reflection in a distorting mirror. Jo’s eyeballs burned, but the tears didn’t fall. “Will you just listen?” she wailed. “For the millionth time, you can’t make me do something I don’t want to do!”
Tess put her hands over her eyes. Her small nose, pink with emotion, protruded from between them. A shock wave passed through her gym-toned, expensively dressed body, and she began to shake. Standing there, drawing quivering breaths, striving for control, she looked like an abandoned child. She sobbed quietly for a few moments. Then she wiped her nose on the towel. “I just can’t bear the thought of you throwing away your chance to…” She sighed heavily. “It’s such a waste.”
Jo breathed in, held her breath for a moment, and let it out again. “Tess, there is nothing more to say.” She stood up. “I’ll be upstairs if you want me.”
In her bedroom, she opened the DVD labels file and looked at Tess’s ‘Moderate horror’ description. She wondered what sort of daughter goes upstairs and judges her mother as if she were a silver disc slotted into a machine. The same sort of daughter who inflicts pain on herself, and likes it, while loathing herself for it at the same time? The sort of daughter who has a panic attack in her boyfriend’s house, in front of his mother?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She deleted ‘Moderate horror’, and studied the empty space beside her mother’s name. Suddenly, she felt hot. From the depths of her brain, or perhaps her heart, came a sp
urt of vitriol. The shininess of Tess’s shopping bags, the pinkness of her nose, the fatuousness of her attempts to engage Jo in girl-talk – all of it enraged her beyond endurance. She began to flip through DVD cases.
Here was a good one: ‘Strong, violent horror’. She typed it in, half-wishing it could be ‘Weak, violent horror’, which described Tess better. But part of the game was using real DVD guidelines, not made-up ones, and she had to stick to the rules she’d made for herself. That was what it was all about – being in control. She sat back, satisfied.
But in the next instant her satisfaction vanished. Regret, as futile as Miss Balcombe’s French lessons, took its place. Venting her fury on Tess had achieved nothing. She thought about the slow-to-heal wound in her groin. Had that achieved anything? Really, tangibly improved anything, except her reluctant, recurrent, ever-rising desperation? She was still confused about Toby. Trevor was still a drunk. Tess was still Tess. The computer screen still stared back at her. And she still felt desperately, incurably useless, as if everything she did seemed OK at first, but then wasn’t.
Sighing, she pushed the keyboard away. If her life was a movie, she decided, the audience would have left by now.
Chapter Eleven
In the cinema, Jo put her hand on Toby’s leg as a sort of experiment. He was so deep in concentration on the film that he didn’t notice. She pressed her hand into his thigh a bit harder, and he put his hand over hers. But after a few moments, when both their hands got sweaty, he took it off again. Feeling a fool, she did the same.
“Hello lovebirds!” trilled Tess when they got back from the Indian restaurant. She was sitting at the kitchen table with half a bottle of wine in one hand and a full glass in the other, while Blod circled her chair. “I’m as drunk as a skunk, and as happy as a hatstand!”
“I thought you were going out,” said Jo, opening the fridge. “Toby wants a beer. Did Trevor leave any?”
“Hello, Toby darling!” called Tess, raising her glass to him as he stood in the doorway. Jo almost laughed at how embarrassed he was.
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