by Fiona Neill
‘Don’t let that boy get in the way of your future,’ he warned.
Like the way you let that girl in the way of ours, I thought to myself bitterly.
Of course I had thought about telling Mum about my discovery. I had gone downstairs once since that afternoon to check that the phone was in its box, hoping that I had imagined the whole thing. I took it out, turned it over in my hand a couple of times but didn’t switch it on. It would have taken less than a couple of minutes to bring it upstairs and hand it over to Mum. But I couldn’t do it to her. It would break her heart. She had been through so much the previous year and had put so much effort into keeping our family together. I understood this now. I remembered overhearing her tell Rachel that staying married requires a lot more courage than getting divorced, and for the first time it made sense.
And if I’m completely honest, there was a more selfish reason too. This phone and the messages it contained would surely end her marriage to Dad. They would get divorced, sell the house, and I wouldn’t be able to live next door to Jay any more. We would probably end up in my grandparents’ house on the coast, where there were more boats than cars.
What happened next was my idea. Jay didn’t make me do it. I can’t say that enough times. That same week we caught the bus back to Luckmore together. It must have been the end of February because there were daffodils poking through the hedges and it was no longer dark when we walked home.
Something Dad said had stuck in my mind. It was about how the reward system in the brain worked in the same way for healthy human functions, like reproduction and eating, as it did for unhealthy ones. Jay’s brain needed to find a new way of getting the same high.
I thought of Loveday’s explanation of the homeopathic principle of treating like with like. And the principle of vaccination, where you gave a tiny dose of disease to create immunity. I was his cure. It was a light-bulb moment.
‘I have a plan.’
‘That sounds good. I like your plans. Please elaborate.’
‘It’s more of an idea really.’
‘I like your ideas. I love everything about you.’
‘Even my forehead?’
‘Especially your forehead.’ He ran three fingers back and forth from one temple to the other and I closed my eyes in pleasure. He leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. His tongue pressed against my mouth. It was the first time that he had ever kissed me in public and I could hear Stuart and Marley and other people from school whistling and shouting from the back of the bus. I didn’t care. I wanted everyone to know that we were together because it somehow ironed out the kinks a little and I wanted to let a little light in on the darkness. Because to be honest I was getting worried about the pathways that might be forming in my own brain. Neurons that fire together wire together. I couldn’t get Dad’s favourite statement out of my head. Maybe I would never be able to have straightforward sex. Maybe I had caught his disease. Maybe I was going to turn into my dad. Everything whirred around my head so fast that I could almost hear it buzzing. I felt completely out of my depth. I pulled away from him.
This was the only time that I really considered telling Mum what was going on. I had texted her at school to see when she was coming home, but she said something had come up with one of the teachers. I thought about describing the situation as though it was someone else’s problem. Marnie, for example. She was the obvious candidate. Her relationship dilemmas were legend in our family. This was exactly the sort of situation she might find herself in. For a moment I felt elated. Then I realized that Mum already knew that Marnie had the hots for Marley, and the trail would lead back to the Fairports when I needed it to lead away from them. I even considered calling up Aunt Rachel. Because she was a bit left of centre herself. Although, as I was learning, it wasn’t telling someone the truth that was problematic but what they did with the information. That was the bit you couldn’t control.
There was a big part of me that wished I had never found the phone. Because it had also begun to dawn on me that Rachel wasn’t necessarily right about Mum being an ostrich. She was the one who had made all the decisions about moving here. It was more about Aunt Rachel being a rhinoceros, barging through life without considering who she might be trampling on. Sometimes discretion was the better part of valour. Although it sounds unbelievable in light of what happened later, I could see the value of caution.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Jay whispered as the bus pulled up at our stop and we disentangled.
We started walking on the path beside the road and I told him about what I had discussed with Dad. Jay looked totally panicked. His face went shiny and he ran his hands through his fringe over and over again until it stood stiff as a meringue. ‘You told your dad about me?’ He stood stock-still for a moment and stared into my eyes without blinking, which made me blink even more. I put my hand on his arm. I could feel his arm muscles tense through his blazer.
‘Of course not. I said I was doing research for a Biology project at school. Which it sort of is. Except you are the project.’
‘If he knew, he wouldn’t let me near you. He would probably want to kill me. If you were my daughter, I would kill me. People would think I’m a total sick freak.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I put my arm through his to urge him to keep moving. ‘You can totally trust me. I am the keeper of everyone’s secrets.’ He didn’t say anything but he stopped running his hand through his hair. A thought occurred to me. ‘Do you regret telling me?’
‘Sometimes it’s a relief. I feel like I’ve finally met someone who understands me. And I really appreciate that you don’t think I’m a total wanker. Although of course that is literally what I am.’
Right use of literally, I thought.
‘I feel a lot less lonely. But sometimes the fact that you know makes me feel more out of control, as though now I’ve got to think about what you’re thinking as well as what I’m thinking. And then I freeze. I worry that I might not be able to stop. That I might let you down. When it was just me and the porn it was easier. I mean I felt shit afterwards but the two of us had this really good routine going.’
‘The porn and me,’ I corrected him, trying to inject a bit of humour into the situation. Because I recognized the truth of what he was saying. He had definitely been more subdued since he had told me. But mostly because I was realizing that I was facing a powerful rival in our relationship. His pair bonding, as Dad called it, was definitely well off-kilter.
‘Sometimes sharing a secret makes it seem even bigger. More shameful,’ he said.
‘You need to create new healthy reward pathways in your brain and close the old ones down,’ I said breezily. ‘Get your dopamine from other sources. It is possible. We need to rewrite your sexual brain map.’
‘You make it sound so simple, Romy. Like building new roads.’
As we got closer to his house, instead of going home I suggested to him that we head to the sweat lodge in the woods. The timing was perfect. Mum was stuck at a meeting at school and Dad would be dealing with Ben. Wolf and Loveday would be doing downward dog. No one would disturb us there.
‘To cleanse and purify?’ Jay joked. ‘I need some of that. Sounds a lot simpler and less painful than excavating new tracks in my brain.’
‘Actually. Yes,’ I said. He opened the gate into his front garden.
‘This was where I saw you for the first time,’ I told him, trying to make him less anxious. ‘We were watching from the sitting-room window.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘We could see you hiding.’
‘God, how embarrassing. What did you think?’
‘Dad said we should put on a show so that you’d freak out about your new New Age neighbours. We refused but Mum and Dad did their worst.’
‘You mean the bongos and the chanting?’
He nodded. ‘I knew as soon as I saw you,’ he said.
‘What did you know?’
‘That there was a connection. Marley caught me staring
at you. That’s why he thumped me on the arm.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he was the oldest and had the right to first refusal.’
‘That’s like Luke getting the bedroom in the loft. Ridiculous,’ I said, trying not to give away that I was flattered, because Marley Fairport was properly hot although I found him a bit obvious.
We closed the gate behind us and headed past the kitchen window deep into the back garden. I checked whether the slats had been removed from the fence, and they hadn’t, which was good because it made it less likely that Ben was skulking around.
It was raining, silent rain, and the closer we got to the woods, the deeper my school shoes sank into the mud. Jay offered to give me a piggyback. I hitched up my skirt and jumped on his back, holding my shoes in one hand, and he cantered off with me clinging to his shoulders. My tights made me slippery as an eel and Jay had to keep hoiking me up so that I didn’t slide to the ground.
‘My lungs are on fire,’ he panted as the mud got deeper. He said that he felt like a medic carrying the wounded through the Somme during the First World War, and we discussed whether the dead weighed more than the living.
‘Maybe if it’s a decomposed body and the bacteria have multiplied,’ I suggested.
‘I’ve never met anyone who thinks the way you think, Romy,’ he laughed as we finally reached the sweat lodge. ‘You are so original.’
It took a bit of time for him to untie the rope that had been threaded through the eyelets on the plastic door to keep it shut. I looked back to our house and wondered if Dad was in his office discovering that he had been outed. Would he guess it was me? Probably. Ben wouldn’t understand what was going on. Luke avoided his office. It had bad karma for him because it was where he went when he and Dad had one of their man-to-man chats about his lack of a future.
Dad would feel sick. He wouldn’t be able to breathe. Or stand up. I suddenly got worried that he might have a heart attack, like Granny. That someone else might discover the phone and put two and two together, and Mum would find out without ever having the opportunity to be reconciled with him and would have to carry the bitterness to her grave.
Jay bent down to crawl through the half-open door and I followed him inside. I watched as he sewed it up again. In the half-light I saw him go over to a table and pull out a box of matches from the drawer. He lit candles on a wooden shelf that ran around the edge of the sweat lodge and it slowly emerged from the shadows, allowing me to absorb each new detail as it appeared. Low wooden beds with animal skins on top; stools made from tree trunks circling the fire; antlers; beautiful old rocks in the hole in the centre. It was really lovely. Wolf was right about circular spaces being more inviting. It smelled of woods, childhood and freedom. I inhaled deeply.
‘It’s eucalyptus,’ Jay explained. ‘Sometimes they use this resin from Guatemala called copal but it’s difficult to source in Norfolk.’
Jay pulled back a plastic flap and took out a couple of bottles of Coca-Cola. ‘That’s not very spiritual,’ I observed. ‘Or organic.’ He removed the tops using a pair of scissors, and I took a couple of gulps even though I hate fizzy drinks. Something else that marks me out as a weirdo, Luke always claimed.
‘Dad hides them here. Mum doesn’t like him drinking Coke. Even though she’s fine with him smoking dope. Because she thinks it’s more natural. Doesn’t make sense, does it?’
‘Nothing does with parents.’
I don’t know why but I hadn’t told Jay about finding the phone. Perhaps it was some residue of loyalty towards my dad. Or the fact that I didn’t want Jay to think my family was a bunch of freaks. Although, given his own parents, that was unlikely. Most probably it was because I thought it might make him refuse to participate in my plan to save him. We lay down on the sheepskin rugs, limbs entwined, and kissed again, and my worries began to dissolve.
‘So, Doctor. Give me your expert opinion,’ said Jay, nuzzling the side of my neck with his mouth while his hand began to undo the buttons of my school shirt.
‘I have a hypothesis. I have no evidence that it will work,’ I said as he put his hand inside my bra and I curled towards him.
‘Will it get written up in medical journals? Will you be able to roll it out as a global service? Will you give a TED Talk on the subject? Because I believe that you’re capable of great things, Romy Field.’
‘We don’t have a control group,’ I whispered. ‘Although there are a lot of people out there in the same situation.’
‘How do you know?’
‘On reddit. I found this forum on the Net.’ He didn’t ask any questions. I couldn’t work out whether knowing there were other people like him out there diminished or heightened the scale of his problem.
‘I want you to want me sexually and no one else,’ I said. ‘You need to stop looking at what you find on the Internet and have as much interaction as possible with real girls,’ I said, pulling away to do up the buttons of my shirt again.
‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ he said breathlessly, pulling me back towards him. ‘I totally want interaction with you.’
‘You need to release pheromones. You need to have real sex. You need to empty your head of all those other images.’
‘How do I do that?’ he asked. ‘I can’t wipe my memory.’
‘We’re going to make a film. With your phone. Then when we’re not together you can look at us instead of all the porn.’
He looked at me, his eyes wide open, questioning and yet not wanting to question because the idea was too irresistible to reject.
‘God, Romy, are you sure?’
‘I did lots of research. If we do this, it will gradually replace the images you have running in your head. It will create the necessary novelty, and the reward system in your brain will signal its approval. You’ll strengthen the networks relating to me. We can have sex. And you will be cured.’
‘More than anything I want a happy ending,’ said Jay.
It all seemed so simple. We put the phone on the shelf and tried out a few angles.
I got him to stand up. I asked him to tell me what he wanted me to do to him and how he wanted me to do it. And then I did it. So you see Jay didn’t force me to make the video. I didn’t make it to impress him. I made it to save him. It was my idea. Our truth. It didn’t belong to anyone else. No one else was ever meant to see it.
13
‘So what did you do last night, Romy?’
It was a throwaway question. Ailsa was looking for some uncontroversial diversion over breakfast. She had stayed up half the night surfing medical websites for information about blood groups that might prove Matt’s theory wrong. When she found none she made an anonymous post on Mumsnet, asking for advice about her dilemma. Within a couple of hours she had thirty-eight contradictory responses, including four from women in an identical situation. Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, one wrote back. No one sums up a problem better than Shakespeare. Common mistake. It was Walter Scott, but Ailsa didn’t feel she was in a position to correct her. Two hours later, she deleted her post in a fit of nerve-jangling paranoia that someone might recognize her.
‘Went to Marnie’s. Watched Gossip Girl. Borrowed a dress for a party,’ Romy said without missing a beat. Her mouth was full of muesli.
‘Oh,’ said Ailsa. ‘That’s nice of her. What party?’
Romy sidled around the kitchen, languid as the cat, bowl in one hand, trying to locate her Chemistry textbook beneath the piles of papers that had taken up permanent residence on the sideboard. Lucifer threaded himself in and out of her legs, doing figures of eight. Ailsa had given up years ago trying to get Romy to sit down for breakfast at the table, conceding that where she ate was less important than the fact that she ate at all.
‘For Marley’s birthday party. Remember. The theme is Professor Green meets A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
‘Sounds very intellectual,’ said Harry as he put the first chapters of hi
s book in numerical order. ‘Or is Professor Green a Cluedo reference?’
After six months in the countryside, Harry looked more youthful than he had for years. His hair was long and wild and his face wind-burned from all the time he spent outside. Exercise had given him a more angular outline. The tension of the previous year had finally dissipated. Ailsa cursed Matt for his overzealous research project just at the point when it looked as though their marriage was back on course and then berated herself for giving someone with so little experience such a free rein.
‘That’s Professor Plum,’ Luke laughed. ‘Professor Green is a rapper, Dad.’
It knocked Ailsa off course hearing Luke call Harry ‘Dad’. She turned towards the window and closed her eyes for a moment. All she could see was Billy, with his lazy smile and sun-bleached hair. She touched her ear, remembering how he had introduced himself to her in assembly his first day at school by flicking her earlobe from the row behind and asking what Ailsa was doing at the end of the day. It had been as simple as that. Harry was right. Love at first sight is pure biology.
‘Mum, are you listening? What do you think?’ Romy pulled out a couple of diaphanous dresses from her school bag and held them up against herself.
Ailsa turned round. Marnie was at least half a foot shorter so she simply selected the longer dress. ‘I prefer the teal colour,’ she said with a quick smile. Even if her advice was ignored she was grateful to be consulted. ‘It goes better with your eyes.’
‘I’ll wear the other one,’ joked Luke, grabbing the dress from Romy and draping it across his torso with one hand while holding his arm above his head to take a selfie with the other. He jutted out his hip and stuck his chin in the air. Just like Billy, thought Ailsa, startled by the clarity of this thought. Luke laughed. Ailsa looked away. She had spent so many years searching for similarities between Harry and Luke, and now all she could see were their differences. Luke lifted the dress to his nose.
‘Smells of roses. Like Marnie.’
‘How do you know what Marnie smells like?’ asked Romy suspiciously.
