by Fiona Neill
I followed his gaze out of the window, across the central courtyard, where Mum’s car was parked, and down to the ground floor on the opposite side of the D-shaped complex, where the canteen was located next to a series of rooms with big glass windows at the quietest end of the school. It took me a moment to realize that he was staring straight down into Mum’s office. I could see her at her desk, squinting at her computer screen without typing, no doubt worrying about Grandpa, who had come to stay for two nights and almost a week later showed no symptoms of wanting to go home.
I’d heard Mum and Dad arguing about him last night. They were down in the storeroom, also known as Dad’s office. The door from the storeroom into the garden was half open. I was in their bathroom, having decided to follow Jay’s advice and check out the cabinet. Grandpa was in his usual position, in Dad’s armchair in the sitting room next to the kitchen, reading Dad’s copy of the Guardian and complaining about it being left wing. This was the reason for the row. But, like most arguments between parents, it wasn’t about that at all. It was about everything that lurked beneath and then periodically erupted onto the surface like an outbreak of acne.
I had instructed Ben to stand outside the bedroom door in the corridor and was glad because not only would he take his duties as lookout seriously, he wouldn’t hear the row taking place two floors below. I stared in the mirror of the bathroom cabinet before I opened it, turning my head from side to side, worrying that the reason Jay hadn’t suggested meeting up after New Year was because my nostrils were too flared, my forehead too prominent and my mouth too pale. Luke once stopped going out with a girl because her earlobes were too big.
All this was eclipsed by what Mum said next. ‘Remember, Harry, how the marriage guidance counsellor told us how important it is to identify what is annoying you and say you hate that, rather than, “I hate you.” ’
Good advice, I thought to myself, until it hit me that Mum was talking about her and Dad. This was serious: their marriage was in such trouble that they had recruited someone else to unravel the knots. I waited for Mum to deliver one of her favourite lines, ‘Hate is a very strong word.’ But she didn’t. My reflection in the mirror looked worried at this unexpected revelation. Yet part of me was almost gratified. There was something wrong and I had intuited it despite what Dad called ‘the fog of teenage narcissism’. The other part of me sneered at myself for not considering this possibility before. How could I not have realized? I knew the differences between a bacterial and viral infection; I knew how atoms were ionized in a mass spectrometer; and how domestic inbreeding meant Persian cats were more likely to die prematurely than wild cats. But I hadn’t recognized the symptoms of my parents’ marriage decaying. And yet now it was obvious what had happened. Mum had been miserable living in London. Dad had agreed to leave his job so she could take this promotion but still it wasn’t enough. No matter how hard Dad tried to please her, it would never be enough.
I imagined a new reality where my parents split up, moved into different houses, and we spent every other weekend with Dad. I thought how upsetting this would be for Ben, who didn’t like change, and Lucifer, who adored Dad. I imagined Luke arguing that he was old enough to decide which bed he wanted to sleep in and never visiting Dad because, although no one said it, he was closer to Mum. I tried to think of the advantages: more holidays; guilt-fuelled high-tech gifts, possibly a new iPhone; an excuse if I didn’t get the grades to do medicine; finally a proper drama to share with Becca and Marnie, who wouldn’t be impressed unless there was a really compelling backstory, because both their sets of parents divorced years ago.
I opened the bathroom cabinet slowly, convinced I was about to uncover conclusive evidence. Jay had briefed me what to look for. Xanax. Prozac. Seroxat. Wolf and Loveday were expert in the dark arts of self-medication, he told me. But there was nothing inside. No trace of my parents. None of Mum’s Tampax nestling against Dad’s razors. No spare toothpaste or antacids. No half-used suntan cream or dental floss. No strip wax. Just an unopened packet of tissues. I felt a sense of overwhelming anticlimax and turned my attention back to what was happening downstairs.
‘OK,’ shouted Dad. ‘Have it your way.’ For a moment I thought that was it. Then he continued. He had that icy staccato tone that he used when he was really angry. ‘I don’t hate your dad. I just hate him being here. Under this roof. I hate the way you jump every time he clicks his fingers. I hate the way he sits in my chair and scratches his nails on the arms when we’re watching the news. I hate the way that when he eats toast the butter dribbles down the side of his chin. Most of all I hate the way he drinks whisky and water with his lunch and tries to pretend it’s ginger beer. Is that enough to be going on with?’
I hadn’t noticed Ben come into the bathroom. He was standing beside me, holding Mum’s old iPod Touch, filming everything, including the empty bathroom cabinet. I should have told him to stop, to go back downstairs, that it isn’t good to spy on people in case you misinterpret what’s going on, but I didn’t want to miss Mum’s response. So I put an arm round him as he leaned towards the open window beside me.
‘What can I do? He can’t live on his own. We don’t have enough money to pay for someone to look after him.’ Mum sounded calm. Reasonable even, which was annoying because I had her playing the role of Dementor. ‘I can’t keep driving over to his house every couple of days after work to go and see him. Even if I only spend an hour it’s a ninety-minute round trip.’
‘Take him to a home,’ shouted Dad.
‘He’s not a stray dog, Harry. It would be easier to rehome him if he was. There isn’t somewhere that we can dump him,’ she said. ‘We have to take responsibility.’
‘Haven’t we got enough on our plates?’ shouted Dad. ‘Luke’s got A levels that he’s probably going to fail. Ben is spending more time next door than with us. Why do you want to pile even more pressure on us? I don’t see Rachel taking any responsibility. I see her leaving you to deal with all the shit while she fucks around with someone young enough to be her son.’
At this point I put my fingers in Ben’s ears. He pulled away.
‘Only if she’d had an underage pregnancy,’ Mum pointed out.
‘She’s right,’ whispered Ben. ‘Aunt Rachel would have had to have given birth to Mr Harvey when she was twelve for him to be her son.’
‘You know what I mean. It’s absurd,’ said Dad. ‘She’s pissing on your parade. And when it all goes tits up she’ll be here too, wanting you to look after her.’
‘I don’t think you’re really in a position to judge Rachel’s behaviour, Harry,’ said Mum in an ominously even tone. This was news to me because historically Dad was always judging Aunt Rachel’s behaviour and finding it lacking. But before I could analyse any further Dad started shouting again. I had never heard my parents talk to each other like this. It was both shocking and mesmerizing, like the first time you learn how people really have sex.
‘You’re at work all day. I’m the one who has to get him lunch and make sure he hasn’t wandered off somewhere. Last week when I saw him heading down the road I just let him go. It was pouring with rain and he wasn’t wearing a coat, and when he came back looking like a drowned rat I felt depressed that he hadn’t fallen in a ditch and drowned. He takes bottles of wine without asking. He puts the television on full volume. I can’t hear myself think let alone work properly.’
‘He’s only got half his hearing,’ said Mum. ‘Try and be more humane, Harry.’
‘It’s easy to be humane when you’re out of the house ten hours a day and I’m at home trying to write a book, cook dinner, get Ben to do his homework, keep an eye on Luke and remind myself not to ignore Romy because she is the only member of our family who has got her shit together. Compassion fatigue sets in pretty quickly.’
‘You seem to forget that the reason we’re here is because of you,’ said Mum coolly. That really was news to me. I waited for Dad to lob back a hand grenade of his own but he didn’t. ‘You�
��re starting to believe your own propaganda, Harry.’
‘You’ve brought him to live with us to punish me,’ said Dad. His voice was quieter now. He sounded defeated. And then it stopped. Or they closed the door. Unsatisfactorily inconclusive, I thought to myself. It was the kind of comment that Mr Harvey would write at the bottom of my Biology homework.
I realized that I must have been staring at Mr Harvey all the time I was thinking about this row, my eyes following him even as he moved to his desk. He looked up, caught my eye, checked the clock and told us we had fifteen minutes left to finish the paper. At the end of the lesson he asked me to stay behind.
‘Is everything all right, Romy?’ he asked. ‘You seem a little distracted.’
‘Sure,’ I said, wanting to get this over and done with as quickly as possible. I focused on my feet so I didn’t have to look him in the eye. Even though I’m not religious I prayed that he wouldn’t mention Aunt Rachel.
‘I rely on you to set the tone in the classroom,’ he said, piling up textbooks on his desk. ‘Don’t squander your talent.’
‘Why don’t you mark my test first and then decide if I’m squandering my talent,’ I replied. He smiled. It was a good response.
‘OK. Point taken. Now I was wondering whether you’ve thought about which medical schools you might want to apply to next year. Part of my role here is to help students who want to study science at university. Any areas you’re particularly interested in? Research or surgery? Head or heart?’
‘Something to do with the brain,’ I mumbled, embarrassed by my certainty. ‘Maybe Neurology.’
‘It would be good to get some work experience. Do you think your dad could help organize something? Your mum said that you didn’t do any after your GCSEs because of all the upheaval when your grandmother died.’
‘Before she died,’ I corrected him. ‘The upheaval came before.’
‘Right,’ he said, clearly uninterested in the chronology. ‘Let me know if I can help with anything.’
Unlike Luke, I had never been any good at working a situation to my advantage. But suddenly I saw how my Biology teacher could help me stay in Luckmore. I liked Mr Harvey, we all did, because he really cared about our results and was genuinely interested in what we wanted to do with our lives. He was solid.
‘You can actually,’ I blurted out. ‘My aunt is so distracted by you that she’s not helping my mum to take care of my grandfather, and I think it’s putting a strain on my parents’ marriage,’ I told him. His eyes opened really wide and his forehead concertinaed. He looked so alarmed that I almost felt sorry for him. ‘My parents have had to deal with a lot of stuff the past year. Maybe you could persuade Rachel to do her share? I really don’t want to have to move house again.’
‘I’m really sorry about all this, Romy, but I think you’re blurring the lines between my professional and personal capacities. I don’t have as much power as you think.’
Teachers are so bloody moist.
I was almost certain that Jay would be waiting for me outside the Biology room. I checked up and down the corridor, hoping to see a woolly thatch of black curly hair emerge from a doorway. I looked at my phone to see if he’d called. Nothing. It was now ten days since New Year’s Eve, and although we’d messaged and he was friendly at school he hadn’t shown any interest in seeing me alone again. Back then there was a lot of ambiguity with Jay, and if I’d known the complications of what was coming next I might have tried to enjoy that ride a bit more.
‘Radio silence. The kindest cut,’ Luke always said when he was trying to let a girl down gently. I would have liked to ask Luke what might be going on in Jay’s head but I knew he would take the piss and probably tell Marley. I even wondered if I had misread the signals. I had gone over that evening in my head so many times that it now ran on a loop like a well-edited short film. I remembered the weight of him as he sat on top of me, the dark hair under his arms and how he smelled of something sweet and musty, like coconut and yeast or oranges and ash. I weighed up the empirical evidence. I remembered something Mr Harvey had said about not looking for evidence to prove a hypothesis but allowing the evidence to point to the hypothesis, and finally understood what he meant. I blamed Mum for putting him off, for interfering with our energy.
In the canteen I caught up with Becca and Marnie. Every day I was grateful for the miracle of their friendship. They had adopted me on my first day at school, and forgiven me for being the daughter of the woman who had introduced a proper uniform to the school for the first time in almost quarter of a century and even worse made a rule about skirt length. Becca had come up to me in our first Biology class and asked if I would be her dissecting partner. ‘Love your hair,’ she said as she sliced through a pig’s heart with her scalpel. Still holding the bloody scalpel she ran the fingers of her other hand through my side fringe. ‘So cool. So white. Like metal.’ It was as simple as that. The fact that I had lived in London sealed the deal. Luke and I were accepted simply because we’d come from Shepherd’s Bush.
Becca was straightforward without being straight, which I instantly appreciated. Her features were neat and in proportion, even her nose seemed certain. She wore her brown hair in a loose ponytail, with just the right amount of stray hair poking out the side. She forced us to go and see bands we had never heard of in Norwich and join the school kickboxing club.
She introduced me to Marnie later that first day. Marnie was sitting beneath a tree at the end of the playing fields. She was in crisis. The boy in her Art class who she had fancied the entire previous year had confided in her on the last day of the summer holidays that he was gay. He loved her. They had tried to have sex. He couldn’t. Marnie had draped her long hair around her face so that people couldn’t see her crying. She wondered if you could have a relationship without having sex. Whether he might become straight. She cried because it was a waste that such a perfect specimen of the male species (her words not mine) didn’t love women in the way she wanted to be loved.
‘You can pretend to be a lot of things in life, but not a boy, so I guess that’s that,’ I had said, taking a cigarette from the packet Becca was offering me. It wasn’t meant to be funny, but Marnie and Becca found it hilarious.
‘Oh my actual God,’ laughed Marnie, using one of her favourite phrases. She stood up, so pale and thin that I wondered whether, if I blew too hard, she would topple over. Mum had this theory that everyone had a soundtrack that described their personality better than any words. After I introduced her to Marnie for the first time she played the music to Death in Venice and I understood completely.
‘She’s Mahleresque,’ Dad said to Mum, who immediately questioned whether such an adjective existed.
The next day when they got on the bus they came and sat down next to me.
It took a few weeks to absorb how lucky I was to have these new friends. At Highfield there were the same cliques as back in London: the geeks, the wreck heads, the goths, the cool gang. There were kids with anger issues, a girl my age who had taken a year out to have a baby, and another who was self-harming. But everything was a little less extreme than in London. Mum said London kids looked sophisticated but were more brittle inside. I agreed with this although not with her wacky theory about how the landscape made Norfolk kids strong. But they had all known each other for years, sometimes generations, and if you didn’t make friends at school there was nowhere else to go.
So as I headed towards Becca and Marnie with a tray that was empty apart from a neat pile of salad I said a quick thanks to Philotes, the Greek goddess of friendship. I did a quick sweep of the canteen for Jay but I couldn’t see him. Unlike his brother he was good at melting into the background.
‘We were here first,’ whispered Marnie, sounding elated. I noticed she had undone an extra button of her shirt and had taken the tie out of her sleek chestnut hair so that the ends formed upside-down question marks over each breast, but I didn’t understand the significance of what she was saying until Becca’s
eyes darted to the opposite end of the table, where Marley, Stuart and Luke were sitting.
‘What’s he doing now?’ Marnie asked as she fiddled with her phone.
‘He’s scratching his hair with a plastic fork,’ said Becca.
‘God, I wish I was that fork,’ said Marnie.
‘It’s a disposable fork,’ I pointed out.
‘Is he still doing it?’
‘Significant development. He’s putting the fork back down on the table,’ said Becca.
‘What do you think it means?’ asked Marnie, taking tiny sips from a carton of orange juice because she couldn’t eat when Marley was around. She swallowed the juice delicately like a little bird.
‘He’s got an itchy scalp,’ I said. ‘It’s a sign of something.’
‘Of what?’ asked Marnie hopefully because she wanted to keep the conversation focused on Marley.
I leaned across the table towards her. ‘Of nits,’ I said.
We all giggled, which attracted their attention. Luke looked up and nodded at me as though I was a business acquaintance. Then they stood up together and headed over, holding their trays. I looked for traces of Jay in Marley, noting the same wide shoulders and slouchy gait. But his face was more angular, less flat, and his eyes slanted up like his mother’s.
‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ whispered Marnie. ‘I have waited so long for this moment.’
‘Fags, Romeo,’ said Luke, putting out one hand and holding up the tray in his other like a French waiter. ‘Three, please.’
I undid my blazer and pulled out the packet hidden in the lining and gave Luke three cigarettes.
‘I always get my little sister to do my dirty work,’ he told Marley. ‘Nothing sticks with her.’
