Moderate Violence

by Veronica Bennett

  “It’s not you that’s the arse,” said Ed, “it’s Pascale. She can’t act like this and expect to keep her friends. She’ll end up such a famous bitch no one will speak to her.”

  Jo looked up at him. “No she won’t. Kingsgrove’s not exactly short of bitchy girls. And there’ll always be another sucker waiting in line.”

  “All right,” conceded Ed. Then he smiled sarcastically. “But I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Holly finds out. She’s going to go ballistic.”

  It was true. Holly’s morality was ingrained. A sudden rush of affection flooded over Jo. “I love Holly,” she told Ed. “She was my friend before Pascale ever was. We were in Reception together.”

  Ed was unimpressed by this admission. He pushed his empty cup away and crossed his arms on the table. “So will you call Toby and fix to meet tomorrow night? Then call me and I’ll get Pascale.”

  Jo bent down and took her phone out of her bag, letting her hair swing forward over her cheeks in case he was watching her. “What’s your number?”

  He recited it and she put it in her phone. Then she said, “Actually, how did you get mine?”

  “Off Holly. I told her that Pascale had tried to phone you from Spain, but it wouldn’t connect, so she wanted me to give you a message. It was lame, but you know Holly, always ready to help.”

  Jo looked at him. His ears had gone pink. He’s as dopey as I am, she thought. “If she asks, I’ll pretend that’s what happened.”

  “Thanks.” He looked at Jo awkwardly for a second, then pushed back his chair. “I’d better get going. I’ll pay for your coffee.”

  “No, it’s OK, really,” protested Jo, but he’d already got the money out. “And call me, about the double date,” he reminded her.

  She nodded. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  He paid at the counter, collected his change, stuck his hands in his pockets and set off towards Burgerblitz without looking back. Jo went on sitting at the table, cradling her coffee cup, looking reluctantly at the phone that lay beside it. Call Toby, Ed had said. But Toby would be at work, and she’d have to leave a message which he probably wouldn’t pick up until this evening. She could call his landline and leave a message with his mum, but he might not go home after work. Sunday was one of his clubbing nights. And she didn’t particularly want to speak to his mum.

  Stolen mobile phone, indeed. A blade of fury stabbed Jo’s insides. He could, conceivably, have been with Pascale on that Sunday evening when he said someone had spiked his drink in a club. It was unlikely, though, as she and her family had to catch an early flight the next day. On the Monday, when he’d thrown the sickie, at least Pascale was in Spain so he couldn’t have been with her. But wherever he was, Toby still hadn’t been with Jo.

  She called his mobile. “Hi, it’s me,” she said to the messaging service. “I miss you! Can we meet tomorrow? Call me after work.”

  She hung up, but her phone rang immediately. “I’m on lunch hour,” said Toby. “You called me. What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” Her heart jerked around in her chest. Mendacity made her nervous, even when she was lying to such an uncaringly mendacious person. “But we just didn’t arrange anything last night, and I want to see you.” Her voice really did sound unnatural. Surely he’d notice?

  “Well…”

  Here it comes, she thought. Lie number one thousand, two hundred and sixty-three. “Look, Jo, I’m going clubbing tonight.” His voice didn’t sound natural either. Or maybe it never did when he was lying, but she hadn’t realized until now. “And tomorrow night I’m busy too.”

  “Oh.” She tried to sound suitably disappointed. “Well, Tuesday?”

  She waited. Toby was calculating silently. “OK, then, where?”

  “You choose.”

  There was another silence. “Er…look, can I get back to you?” he asked. “It may not be Tuesday, but I’ll try to make Wednesday. I’ll call you. Bye.”

  When Jo hung up, her armpits felt clammy. Liar, liar, liar, she murmured to herself. She pocketed her phone, picked up her bag, and, abandoning the almost-cold coffee, opened the swing door and went out into the midday sunshine.

  Chapter Twelve

  The double date idea hadn’t worked, but the following day Jo and Ed made a new plan.

  Pascale had phoned Ed from the airport earlier to say she’d had a stomach upset in Spain and was still feeling queasy. When Ed had pressed her further, she’d said she was very tired after the journey and wanted to go to bed early.

  “She said in this little-girl way, ‘You can wait till tomorrow if I can, can’t you?’” Ed had reported.

  They decided that later that evening Jo would show up unexpectedly at Toby’s house and that Ed would do the same at Pascale’s. If neither of them was at home, the game, as they say in old gangster movies, would be well and truly up.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll catch them,” Jo had assured him.

  At five to eight in the evening, with her feelings swinging between anger and dread, Jo walked from the bus stop down Whittaker Road to Keats Close. She knew that on the other side of Kingsgrove, Ed would be on his way to the igloo.

  When she got to the zebra crossing she turned to check the traffic. Then she saw something so unexpected that her heart did a somersault. Dawdling along Keats Close consulting her wristwatch, was a blonde girl who looked so much like Holly it had to be Holly. Jo saw her produce her phone, press some keys and put it to her ear.

  Jo, who had gone hot and cold and hot again, didn’t cross the road. She hurried down the alley between the dry cleaner’s and the kebab shop. Holly hadn’t seen her.

  She waited for about five minutes, leaning on the wall of the kebab shop. The hammering in her chest slowly subsided. Stupid, stupid moron. She tried to calm herself, reasoning that Holly hadn’t been going to see Toby at all, but just happened to know someone who lived in Keats Close. But Jo’s common sense told her that after eleven years of friendship, she knew everyone that Holly knew.

  Why was Holly, not Pascale, on her way to Toby’s?

  Her brain reeled. Could he actually be cheating on her with both of them? In fact, cheating on each of them too? Everyone knew that boys were either the loyal type who had one girlfriend or the serial cheat type who had lots. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before that Toby was a prime example of the second type?

  She tried to think clearly. She hadn’t seen Holly for almost a week, since the scene last Tuesday at Press Gang. They’d had a couple of non-committal phone conversations, Holly sounding a bit strained. Jo had assumed that she was worrying about approaching the subject of Sixth Form again without upsetting Jo. But she hadn’t been worrying about that at all, had she?

  Blood surged through Jo’s veins, making her ears sing. She wanted to run away, but she knew she should go straight to Toby’s house and confront him with the news that she knew Holly was there. She mustn’t let him get away with it. Ed wouldn’t mess around, and neither would she.

  Breathing unevenly, she left the alley. Long shadows fell across the street, and a breeze tugged her hair across her face. Slowly, she walked down Keats Close and up the path of Toby’s house.

  “Jo!” he said when he opened the front door. He was wearing a new-looking, ironed shirt with the Rose and Reed logo on the breast pocket. His face looked as if someone had just told him he hadn’t won a million pounds after all. “Um…I’m about to go out, but come in.”

  As Jo stepped into the hall her nose detected his familiar going-out smell – shower gel, shampoo, aftershave. Robson was barking somewhere at the back of the house. “Anybody in, apart from you and Robson?” she asked, reaching up to kiss Toby’s cheek.

  “Um…my mum’s gone to Scotland for a couple of weeks, in fact, but – ”

  At that moment Holly came out of the sitting-room. “Hello, Jo! How are things?”

  Jo pretended surprise, then bafflement. “What are you doing here?” Then suspicion. “Er…am I interrupting something?”
/>   Toby held up his hands. “Not guilty, Your Honour.”

  “Of course he’s not guilty.” Holly slapped Jo’s arm lightly. She sounded her usual self, but Jo could see that at the very back of her eyes, behind the self-confident brightness, she knew that she was guilty, Your Honour. And she knew that Jo knew that. “We’re just hanging out, aren’t we, Toby?”

  They were both looking at Jo. Holly was twisting a tendril of hair around her finger, which she only did when she was nervous. Jo thought the better of protesting that Toby was her boyfriend, so she should be the one hanging out with him. She wanted to lull them into a false sense of security. And she certainly didn’t want to sound like the kind of girlfriend she despised – possessive, paranoid and pathologically uncool. “I see,” she said ponderously. “You’re just…” – she made speech marks in the air with her fingers, something that Holly always said only brainless saddos do – “‘hanging out’. O…K…”

  A small frown appeared between Holly’s eyebrows. Jo knew it meant that she was embarrassed by what Jo had just said, but was prepared to tolerate it because Jo was only an artless little thing, and Holly was in charge here. “What does that mean?” she asked carefully, as if Jo were hard of hearing. “Don’t you trust us?”

  Jo’s strategic intentions vanished. She felt hot with rage. She felt like her six-year-old self, who used to make scenes in toyshops, and had to be dragged out, kicking. She felt like she’d felt just before she’d driven the compass into her arm, and stabbed herself with the nail scissors, first one blade, then both.

  “Toby!” she said, so sharply that Holly actually jumped, and Toby blinked. Jo pushed Toby with all her strength. There wasn’t much room in the hallway, and as he took a step backwards he caught the banister post with his ankle, stumbled and sat down heavily on the stairs. Jo stood over him, shouting. “You bastard! If you want to hurt me, why don’t you just beat me over the head with an iron bar and have done with it?”

  Holly had caught hold of both Jo’s arms. Struggling to free herself, Jo shouted at Holly too. “And you’re supposed to be my friend!”

  Toby got to his feet. He was stronger than Holly. He caught hold of Jo and pressed her to his chest. To her shame she began to cry, not with lung-wrenching sobs, but pitiful, poor-me tears, like Cinderella in the ashes.

  He loosened his grip enough for Jo to look up at him. She knew her face was blotchy, but she didn’t care. She pushed him away. “You, and Pascale, and you…” – she gave Holly a venomous stare – “I wish I’d never seen any of you. I wish you were all dead, and in Hell.”

  Through blurred vision she saw that Toby and Holly were exchanging stricken looks. “It isn’t how it looks, Jo. Honestly,” said Holly. The false brightness and the accusation had disappeared from her voice. She sounded like the Holly Jo loved, and had imagined loved her. “Toby and I are just friends, that’s all. And what’s Pascale got to do with it?”

  Of course. Holly didn’t know about Pascale. Toby had deceived her as ruthlessly as he had deceived Jo. She took a tissue from the pocket of her jacket and wiped her eyes. The tears kept coming, though. She couldn’t speak, and the only thing she could hear was her own jerky breathing.

  Holly was framed by the sitting-room door, her hair silvered by the light behind her. Blonde strands, some of them ringleted where they’d been wound round her finger, fell round her face. The desire to be forgiven made her bright eyes even brighter. But Jo couldn’t forgive her. She knew an important scene was being played out here by these three characters on this little stage. And it wasn’t over yet.

  She struggled to calm herself. “Just friends?” she repeated sarcastically.

  “That’s right,” said Toby.

  Jo looked at him. Automatically she began one of her if-this-was-a-scene-in-a-movie fantasies. The director would want Toby to do The Look, filmed in soft-focus, and then the camera would show Jo’s face, attractively tear-stained with the help of the make-up girl and half an onion. She would gaze imploringly at him, then turn to Holly, who, looking even more gorgeous than her real self, would smile an actress’s smile, lips perfectly lipsticked, teeth fixed and whitened. She would have some line like, “How could you think anything else, Jo? Don’t you know I love you?” And then she and Holly would hug, and the camera would show Toby looking deliriously happy, and the music would have a lot of strings in it.

  But the audience, if they were bothering to watch Jo carefully enough, might pick up what she was feeling. Patronized – she was sure she could act that if she tried. Distrustful? Easy. Actresses did that all the time, employing the lowered chin, raised eyes, prettily-puckered brow method. Most of all, though, she felt liberatingly bloody-minded.

  “So, Holly…you’re going out tonight with my boyfriend?” she asked slowly, pretending not quite to understand.

  Holly flicked Toby a what-the-f… glance.

  “No, I’m going clubbing,” explained Toby patiently.

  Jo’s eyes were dry now. She put the balled-up tissue back in her pocket. Holly tried to put her arm around her shoulders, but she wouldn’t let her. “Why’s Holly here, then?” she asked Toby, “If you’re going clubbing?”

  Toby’s expression was wary; Holly’s was panicky. “I just came round to tell him about something,” she said awkwardly.

  Jo couldn’t read the truth in either of their faces. What was Toby afraid of? What was making Holly panic?

  “Well, fine,” she said decisively. She opened the front door. “Isn’t that just fan…tas…tic?”

  “For God’s sake, Jo – ” began Toby, but Jo ignored him.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said. “So you can just shag each other’s brains out in peace, can’t you?”

  She walked quickly up Keats Close and into Whittaker Road, where she sat down on the bench outside the library. The white light threatened, but she shut her eyes and breathed, and it retreated.

  What the hell was she going to say to Ed when she phoned him? Oh, Toby’s not with Pascale tonight, he’s with Holly. He hasn’t only stolen your girlfriend, he’s stolen my oldest, closest friend too. He’s turned them both into liars like him, and I’ll never trust anything either of them say, ever again.

  No, she couldn’t say that. The words would sound pathetic to Ed, who would have no conception of the enormity of Jo’s loss. Trevor. Toby. Pascale. Holly. All of them had gone. The only person she had left was Tess. Selfish, stuck-up Tess.

  When she was calm enough, she took out her phone and dialled.

  “Pascale was in,” Ed hurried to say before she could speak. He sounded relieved. “When I got there her mum told me she’d gone to bed early and was fast asleep.”

  Jo wasn’t calm. Her grip on the phone tightened. She could feel her breath condensing against her cheek. “So you just believed her mum, did you?” she asked meanly.

  “Christ, Jo,” he said, not hearing – or pretending not to hear – Jo’s hostility, “you’re as bad as me. I’m such a suspicious bastard, I said I’d left my keys in her room and had had to manage for a week without them, so her mum let me go in, and there she was, fast asleep.”

  Jo could picture Pascale, suntanned, peaceful, sleeping in the dusk of a bedroom curtained against the light of the summer evening. She felt defeated. “Oh,” she said.

  There was a pause. “So what happened at Toby’s?” asked Ed.

  “Um…” There was no point in pretending. “Well, Toby was there. And Holly was with him.”

  There was another pause while Ed processed this. “Our Holly?” he said eventually.

  No, some fantasy Holly you wish had been there instead. Me, too.

  “Yes, our Holly,” she said. At the back of her throat, tears threatened. She swallowed uncomfortably. “They pitched me some stupid story about how they’re just friends and Toby’s going clubbing tonight, and Holly had come round to tell him about something.”

  Ed chewed this over. “So why couldn’t she tell him on the phone, then?”

 
“What?” It came out as a whisper. Jo concentrated on overpowering the tears, trying to sound normal. “How should I know?”

  “Look,” he said. “Let’s get this straight. That night, with the card tricks, Toby was waiting for Pascale, not Holly. Am I missing something?”

  “For God’s sake, Ed!” gulped Jo. She swallowed again. “He’s seeing both of them!”

  He didn’t speak

  “Are you still there?” asked Jo.

  “Sorry, I was thinking.”

  Jo’s exasperation defeated her tears. “What is there – ” she began.

  “I don’t buy it, Jo,” he interrupted. “I mean, when he said he was going clubbing, he meant alone, because Holly’s only sixteen, right?”

  “But he isn’t going clubbing,” said Jo, wondering if flipping burgers all day was affecting Ed’s brain. “He’s going somewhere with Holly, or else why would she have been at his house?”

  “OK,” said Ed. “So they were dressed to go out, were they?”

  Jo pictured the scene in Toby’s hallway. She saw his ironed shirt and clean jeans. But what was Holly wearing? Dirtier jeans, and her red top with the button missing that she’d had for ages. Jo could see her standing there, winding strands of unwashed hair around her fingers.

  Boys, she thought. Burger-flipping hadn’t affected Ed’s brain at all. He was using it to approach the situation logically, instead of using his emotions like Jo herself had done. “Actually,” she admitted, “Toby was, but Holly wasn’t. She looked a bit scruffy.”

  “You mean…as if she’d just called in, as a friend, to tell him about something she couldn’t tell him on the phone?” suggested Ed.

  Jo knew he didn’t mean to incense her, but she was incensed nevertheless. “Ed, he’s my boyfriend!” she protested. “She can’t just go round and see him whenever she likes, and have secrets with him, can she?” She hoped she wasn’t whining, but knew she probably was. “It’s not fair! It’s not even normal!”