by Fiona Neill
‘Why Grandpa?’
‘Because he’s worrying about Granny feeling tired all the time,’ I said, one eye on the revision timetable as I tried to calculate whether I could afford to delay blood groups until the following morning.
‘Why is she worrying about Grandpa when Granny is the one who is tired?’
‘Because Grandpa is more high maintenance,’ I said, repeating a phrase I had heard Aunt Rachel use to describe him.
‘Is Dad worrying about Mum?’ asked Ben. ‘Because he should be.’ It was a good question.
‘I have no idea.’
A couple of months later Mum had applied for a new job, Dad had resigned from his university post and they were both trying to convince us all that leaving London, our friends and the home we’d grown up in was the best thing that had ever happened. Then my grandmother died and suddenly they were telling everyone who cared to ask that they needed to move to be close to my grandfather. None of it made any sense.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Jay. He had listened to me without interrupting once. We were sitting on his desk by the bedroom window, sharing a cigarette. When we moved to Luckmore, Mum and Dad had emphasized the importance of trying new things so I took up smoking the same week that Mum introduced the school uniform policy. Blazers were good for hiding the paraphernalia of cigarettes and I had sewn a pocket into the lining to keep mine hidden. But my heart wasn’t really in it.
The storm outside had entered a different phase. The wind had picked up and changed direction. Its low moan overwhelmed Justin Chancellor’s bass guitar riff, which Jay had announced was the top in his best bass riff list. I had argued in favour of ‘Good Times’ by Chic, but although he had a poster of Nile Rodgers on the wall, he stuck with Justin Chancellor.
The light in the centre of the room kept flickering. We sat with the hoods of our coats pulled up before the open window and I noticed how the tree where Ben had created his opening was now doubled over as if exhausted by this new weather event. My calves were still burning from the snow during the walk here and my boots were soaked. But I didn’t move away from the window in case Jay suggested we go back downstairs.
‘Has your mum ever behaved like that before?’ Jay asked, staring at me as he took a deep toke on the cigarette before passing it back. ‘It’s always useful to spot patterns.’
I thought about Jay’s question for a moment. His curly fringe bobbed up and down when he talked. When I caught a glimpse of his blue eyes beneath the fringe, they were so pale that I had to blink to stop my own from watering.
‘Like what?’ I said, flicking ash out of the window.
‘If my dad takes even a sip of alcohol, Mum stops having sex with him.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘They’re hippies. They talk about everything with everyone. And he gets really fucking grumpy.’
‘And you don’t talk about everything?’
‘I think a lot of shit is best unsaid. There’s too much information out there. And I’m choosy about who I tell stuff too.’
Actually, although it seems incredible now, my biggest criticism of Mum used to be how boring her life was. Living by lists, timetables, planning ahead all the time. Totally oppressive. I used to think that endlessly doing things was a way for her to avoid actually thinking about things. But when she stopped doing things our life fell apart. Routine is only comforting when you don’t have it any more.
‘She’s never done anything like this before,’ I said, leaning forward to blow the smoke out of the window. ‘She used to be a very steady person.’
‘Elaborate.’ This, I quickly learned, was one of Jay’s favourite words.
‘When she painted the sitting room in our old house she tested twenty-three samples until she had found the exact shade of blue she wanted. She did the Christmas shopping in October. Booked dentist’s appointments six months ahead.’
Jay had begun eating a chocolate reindeer that Ben had given him in exchange for another can of Coke. He ate it as though it was an ice cream, with slow licks. And I tried to stay focused on the cigarette because I didn’t want him to catch me watching how his tongue curled around the reindeer and wondering how it might feel if he did the same to me.
‘Did it definitely start before your grandmother died?’ he asked. I nodded, appreciating his forensic approach to the problem. ‘If you think too much about the past you don’t focus on the present,’ which, I was soon to learn, was his stock answer when anything went wrong. ‘And she never mentioned that she was unhappy with her old job?’ Jay continued.
‘She loved it. She was deputy head of a really good school.’
‘You know, people who say they are moving to make a new life are generally trying to escape something they don’t like about their old one,’ he said.
‘So what do you think she was trying to escape?’
‘I think that you need to think about whether you really want to know the answer to that question,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know stuff. But in my experience if you really want to know what’s going on in someone’s life, you should look in their bathroom cabinet.’
I laughed because after all his analysis this seemed so unscientific. He smiled back. Unoffended.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Mum and Dad eat organic and refuse to use antibiotics but there’s a big stash of Viagra hidden in a tin of Bach Rescue Remedy at the back of theirs. Not very tantric.’
I looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was ten minutes to ten on New Year’s Eve and I already knew that Jay Fairport was one of the best things that had ever happened to me. We had already covered a lot of ground: why Stuart Tovey took his brother’s Ritalin to help him revise for science tests; how dogs and wolves share almost 99 per cent of the same genes; why waves in the Pacific were better for surfing than those in the Atlantic; how my recently acquired best friend at school, Marnie Hall, fancied his brother, Marley; whether it was better to be a good person who has done a bad thing or a bad person who has done a good thing.
I had been in his bedroom for one hour and forty-seven minutes but it seemed like five minutes, and yet it felt as though we had known each other for years. I understood why physicists argue that time doesn’t exist. I thought about how we might have missed this moment if I hadn’t been freezing in my skirt and boots because Luke had thrown snowballs at me on the way through their garden. If I had gone outside with the others for a snowball fight instead of accepting Jay’s offer to go and watch series two of Breaking Bad we might never have got to know each other.
‘Life is really random,’ he said, and I wondered if he could actually read my mind.
Even a couple of weeks later, I could almost make myself cry thinking about the possibility that our paths might never have crossed. I regretted the six weeks that we had been living next door to each other, travelling on the same bus to school and getting on and off at the same stop without talking to each other. I tried to calculate the lost hours. I wondered why we had never spoken before when the pull towards each other was so irresistible.
We finished the cigarette. Jay slammed the window shut and carried his laptop over to the bed. He kicked a pair of crumpled underpants under his bed and I knew that this was all unplanned. He settled down cross-legged on a pillow and the springs of the mattress shrieked. There was a wooden box beside the bed that acted as a table, and I recognized the paraphernalia of teenage boy, the spot cream, the crumpled tissues, the overlapping circular stains from coffee mugs like the potato prints that Ben used to do. He smoothed the duvet and plumped the pillows beside him and indicated that I should come and sit next to him. Apart from my brothers’, I had never sat on a boy’s bed before. This was his kingdom and I was being asked to enter it. I must have hesitated.
‘You can keep your boots on,’ he said, in case this was my dilemma. Then he added, ‘The sheets are clean,’ as if I might be worried about sitting on a tiny damp patch of sperm, which I was actually, beca
use girls don’t make as much mess. I remembered Mum saying something about how if you feel uncomfortable with someone you should mimic their body language so I sat down cross-legged on the throne of pillows beside him.
‘Will you listen to something?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘I mean really listen and tell me what you think. You can close your eyes if you like.’
I nodded. A piece of music started playing. I didn’t recognize it. The first part was instrumental. A guitar, some drums in the background and sad strings, possibly cellos. I closed my eyes, glad to have something to focus on so I didn’t think about our proximity. A man began singing. I could hear the lyrics clearly. It started slowly. The first verse was about a man walking blindly through a wood. He was lost but unsure if he wanted anyone to find him. He wondered if he should give love a chance to drive out his darkness. The singer had a mournful, gravelly voice. The bass guitar and drums built up in layers to the chorus, angry and passionate, but catchy, like something Deaf Havana might do.
You are the best of times. You are the worst of times.
And I know if you show me my better self then you will leave me.
There was a second verse. He had found love. The light had extinguished the darkness. They danced as though there was no one watching. Then the chorus again; this time it sounded more hopeful, like the coda to a romcom. The final verse was desperate. She had left him. He was alone again, hated for what he was rather than loved for what he wasn’t.
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s beautiful, angry and sad, all at the same time. What’s the name of the band? Maybe we could go and check them out in Norwich?’
‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘I’ve never played it to anyone before. If you didn’t like it I would have destroyed it.’
‘It’s amazing,’ I said. ‘Is it about something that happened to you?’
‘Perhaps but not necessarily,’ he said. If I hadn’t been so distracted by the way his eyes were consuming me and wondering what this meant I might have saved myself a lot of heartache later. He looked away.
‘Shall we watch Breaking Bad?’
We settled on our fronts beside each other. He put on the DVD and pressed pause at the bit where the charred pink and white bear floats in the pool. Jay rolled onto his side and leaned on his arm.
‘You know you have the blondest hair and darkest eyes I have ever seen,’ he said.
‘And you have the darkest hair and bluest eyes that I have ever seen,’ I replied, turning towards him. We were facing each other. Outside the wind howled. And at that moment it felt as if we were the last people on earth.
‘We’re like photographic negatives.’
‘My Armenian ancestry,’ he said. ‘My grandfather survived the 1915 massacre and migrated to the USA. He was the only male in his family to survive.’
‘That combination of black hair and blue eyes is a really rare genetic mutation.’
‘How so?’
‘You really want to know?’ I asked, because one thing I had learned about boys you liked was that being clever could count against you. He put out his hand and it drifted towards my face, lingering by the side of my cheek so that I could feel its heat. I tried not to think about what might happen next because from my limited experience of clumsy fumblings I knew that anticipation mostly beat the event. But he didn’t try to touch me and instead put his hand back on his hip.
‘I want to know everything about you,’ he said.
‘The genes for dark hair and blue eyes don’t usually travel together. They’re further apart on Chromosome 15.’
‘How do you know this shit?’
‘I just do,’ I said. ‘My dad’s a scientist. He has an explanation for everything.’
‘Why don’t you ask him about your mum then?’
We were back where we started. And that’s how it usually worked with boys. You talked and thought you were getting somewhere, and then they retreated because they thought they’d invested enough time on the preamble. From previous experience I knew this was the point he might suggest half jokingly that I might want to blow him. The Internet had reduced oral sex to a form of extreme kissing, and even though most girls refused, enough said yes to make it worth a punt. But Jay didn’t follow the script.
‘You know our bedrooms face each other?’ he said, suddenly biting off the head of the reindeer.
‘I didn’t until today.’
‘Why do you close your curtains during the day and open them at night?’
‘It’s much darker here at night than in London. I get scared.’
‘I really like the way you dance and pretend your hairbrush is a microphone,’ he said. ‘I like the way you move. So fluid. Like you’re made of liquid.’
‘You’ve been watching me!’
‘It made me feel less lonely.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I feel like I’ve got to know you without the pressure of getting to know you, if you know what I mean.’
‘I think so.’ Actually that part I didn’t understand. And by the time I did, I was in too deep. But according to my dad, when you meet someone for the first time and you really like them there’s a part of your brain which switches off your response to anything that might make you feel uncomfortable.
‘Why don’t you have anything hanging on your walls?’ he asked. ‘It looks like you could pack up your room and disappear without a trace in less than ten minutes. We were wondering if your family was in some kind of witness protection programme. Are you living in a safe house under an assumed identity? Might you just disappear one day without telling us?’
‘It’s because none of us really wants to accept that we’ve moved here,’ I explained. ‘It’s the same with Mum and Dad’s room. Only Ben has made everything exactly the same as it was in London. Luke hasn’t even bothered to put his clothes in drawers. He keeps everything in boxes and bags on the floor.’
‘Luke sleeps with a lot of girls,’ said Jay.
‘You think that’s why his room is a shit hole?’
‘My room is a shit hole and I haven’t got lucky.’
I laughed to give myself time to analyse his response. Were we both equally inexperienced? Because boys do Sex Ed on the Internet, which makes them long on knowledge and short on experience. In which case sex could be reminiscent of the Biology class when we had to put the condom on a banana and Mr Harvey messed it up by peeling it first and then apologized ‘for the cock- up’ with no sense of irony.
Or did he mean he had slept with other girls but just not as many as Luke? It was a more intimidating thought but might prove a better outcome. I hadn’t seen him hanging out with any girls at school, so maybe he was talking about girlfriends at his old school in Ibiza.
‘That’s not enough of a sample group to draw any conclusions or do you have more empirical evidence?’ I asked, doing a pretty good imitation of Mr Harvey.
‘Judging by his disastrous condom technique, I would say Mr Harvey’s bedroom is pretty tidy,’ said Jay, lobbing a pillow at me. I caught it and tried to throw it back but Jay was too quick for me. We tussled over the pillow for a moment and then suddenly he was on top of me, straddling my hips and pinning down my arms with his hands. ‘What do you think? Can you elaborate?’
‘I would say the empirical evidence suggests that was his first relationship with a tropical fruit,’ I responded. We laughed. Really laughed. Jay let go of my arms and I could feel the weight of him on top of me, his thighs squeezing my hips.
‘If you want to start Breaking Bad some time this year, you better start soon,’ said Jay, staring down at me. He leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. And then suddenly Mum was in his bedroom. I still can’t work out how she actually got there and why we didn’t hear her come in. Afterwards Jay joked about her being a shape-shifter but I didn’t laugh. She stared at us for a moment, her eyes darting from me to Jay.
‘What the hell is going on here? Downstair
s now.’ Her face was bright red. Even the tip of her nose and her earlobes. I focused on the earlobes because she was wearing the pair of yin and yang earrings that I had given her for Christmas and I thought that if she remembered them she might pull back from the brink. They were meant to bring harmony but she looked angrier than when Luke told her that he’d done an essay on how magic mushroom omelette was his favourite meal in his GCSE English, angrier than when Grandpa got drunk at Granny’s funeral and asked the caterer if she would come and live with him, angrier than when Dad told her a few weeks ago that he had been offered a part-time teaching post at his old university, which meant he’d have to go to London once a month.
Jay threw himself off me and sat straight-backed on the edge of the bed. After all Mum was his headmistress.
‘We’re just watching Breaking Bad, Mrs Field,’ said Jay politely. ‘Romy said she’d watched the first series so I figured you wouldn’t mind. It’s an American series. Won loads of Emmys.’
‘I thought you were outside with the others,’ Mum said.
‘I was cold so I came back in. Please, can you stop acting so weird?’
Then Loveday was in the room, asking if everything was fine. We all agreed that it was even though it wasn’t, and Jay and I fled downstairs. Mum looked shocked but I think it was with herself rather than me.
Back in the kitchen Ben was taking photos of the meal with Mum’s old iPod Touch. Dad had given her a new iPhone for Christmas that she hadn’t even bothered to take out of its packaging. Everyone was circling the table with plates and cutlery, piling up food, completely unaware of what had just occurred upstairs. I didn’t feel like eating any more. I followed Jay around the table, taking whatever he took, and then sat down beside him opposite Marley and Luke.
‘What’s up?’ asked Luke.
‘Mum’s gone mad,’ I said, trying to muster a smile.
‘Old news.’ Luke shrugged.
‘This is amazing,’ said Rachel, who was now more than slightly drunk. A pomegranate seed was stuck to her cheek.
‘Wolf cooked it all,’ said Loveday.
