by Fiona Neill
The light was on and Jay’s laptop was lying on the bed, the screen lit up. His guitar was under the duvet, its neck resting on the pillow as though it was asleep. I giggled and looked around in case he was playing a trick on me but he definitely wasn’t in the room. I lay down on my side on his bed beside the guitar and pressed the mouse on his laptop. The screen lit up and split into two. On one side were the latest football scores. Norwich had lost against Manchester United 2–0. On the other a woman was giving a blow job to a man with a penis way bigger than the one in Stuart’s selfie. The volume was turned down. The man’s mouth hung open as he came all over the woman’s face. I wondered if he was having a stroke. She tried to look up at him but there was so much sperm in her eyes that it looked as though she had a bad case of conjunctivitis. Gross, I thought, quickly closing down the web page. There were bundles of scrunched-up tissues under Jay’s pillow.
‘You total wanker,’ I said out loud and laughed bitterly at the utter appropriateness of the insult.
I checked Jay’s search history, knowing exactly what I would find. Today’s list was so long I couldn’t even reach the bottom of it. At least there was a certain consistency that made my decision easier. I understood that whatever he was trapped in was bigger than me. In that moment I knew it was over, even though it had never really begun. It was a stillborn relationship. I slammed shut the lid of the computer, hoping that I’d cracked the screen.
I went over to the window and scanned the garden for him, feeling sadder than I had ever felt before. I thought of my dad and I thought of Jay and wondered when everyone claimed it was the most natural thing in the world how sex could be so complicated. And how it brought everyone together and blew everyone apart. I understood why priests and Buddhist monks and Hindu sadhus were all celibate. I think this is when I started crying without being really sure who or what I was crying for. Dad, Mum or Jay. Crying always feels monumental, doesn’t it?
Someone burst into the room.
‘Sorry,’ Marley said, checking the room for his brother. He closed the door behind him and leaned against it. He was wearing a pair of black jeans. His T-shirt was balled in his hand. ‘I wanted to go in my own room but Luke’s in there with a girl. Fucking awkward. Better than awkward fucking though.’ He laughed at his own joke.
‘Are you tired?’ I asked, trying to compose myself. When in doubt, ask questions, Mum always advised. He shook his head and remained by the door. His upper lip had an ironic curl, which made it difficult to know if he was being sincere or cynical.
‘I wanted some time out. To take stock. I want to remember everything about my party. Loveday always says you have better recall if you try and be consciously aware of the moment even if it’s just for a minute.’
I nodded even though I didn’t really understand.
‘Now you’ll be part of the memory.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you all right, Romy?’
I quickly rubbed my swollen eyes with the edge of Marnie’s dress, spreading mascara all over the skirt. Mum would know how to get rid of it. She had a cupboard full of different solutions for stains. Blood, cat pee, pollen. Mum was reliable like that. I wondered if she had an antidote to a broken heart.
‘It was meant to be waterproof,’ I said to Marley. ‘But it never is.’
‘So was my gold leaf,’ he said. He now resembled one of those trees whose bark peels off in sheets. He pulled at the edge of a wafer-thin layer of gold. It floated to the floor.
‘Maybe it’s the salt in sweat that dissolved it,’ I suggested. ‘Sodium chloride is really corrosive.’ He laughed again and I tried to laugh back but somehow it made me start crying again. Laughter and tears are so close to each other. Like love and hate. And good and bad. I remembered Dad telling Mum that Johnny Cash’s dogs were called Sin and Redemption. I felt overwhelmed.
Marley looked panicked. I opened my mouth to try and tell him that he could leave and that I would be fine on my own, but my chest was racked with sobs and instead I sounded like Mum and Dad’s car when the engine wouldn’t start. I got up from the bed and went over to the window with my back to him so that he couldn’t see my face. He walked over and wrapped his arms around me. He felt both familiar and unfamiliar.
‘You’re the closest he’s got to getting with someone,’ he said gently as I kept crying. ‘If it’s any consolation.’ I rested my head in the warm dip beneath his shoulder.
‘You knew?’ My voice was a whisper.
‘Sort of. More suspected. You know what it’s like.’ He stroked my hair a couple of times and his hand rested on the back of my neck.
‘I don’t really.’ I looked up at him.
‘We’re all in it but Jay’s the only person I know who can’t get out of it.’
Marley had this odd way of speaking in a tone of utter certainty but with only the vaguest content. He held my face between his hands so that I was forced to look him straight in the eye.
‘Don’t think this has anything to do with you,’ he said affectionately. ‘You’re perfect.’
I realized that I was still crying. He wiped away a tear with his thumb, like Mum might do with Ben, and hugged me to him again. We were standing in front of the window, swaying in time to the beat of the music from the sweat lodge. My only worry at that moment was that I might get gold leaf on Marnie’s dress.
‘I’ll definitely remember this part of the party,’ he said. I looked up at him. We took each other in. Then his lips were on mine and we kissed. It was pure pleasure.
‘A kiss for what might have been,’ he whispered.
A long and terrible scream came from the garden. It was followed shortly by a burst of hysterical crying, the sort where you panic someone has stopped breathing in between sobs. The pitch was higher than the music, which meant it was audible to everyone apart from a few stragglers still dancing in the sweat lodge. Marley and I disentangled. We opened the bedroom window and scanned the garden, trying to adjust to the darkness to work out where it was coming from. For a few seconds there was silence. Then the crying started up again: there were more tears and sobs but this time they were more nasal, muffled by phlegm.
‘It’s Marnie,’ I whispered to Marley.
‘How do you know?’
‘I recognize the sound of her crying.’
‘Does she cry a lot?’ he said, sounding embarrassed in that way boys do when girls engage in extreme emotion. He put his arm around my shoulders.
‘She just feels things deeply,’ I whispered.
‘Why are you whispering?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
The sound wasn’t coming from ground level. I adjusted my gaze up by twenty degrees and looked across at a platform built around a tree close to the back door. It wasn’t a tree house, more a lookout post. I had never noticed it before, probably because it was hidden in the branches of a fir tree.
Marnie was leaning over a rickety railing, staring at Marley and me.
‘You bitch, you total fucking bitch,’ her voice wailed over and over again. It took a while to realize that she was addressing me.
‘She’s shouting at me,’ I heard myself tell Marley in astonishment. ‘Why is she shouting at me?’ Marley tightened his grip on me protectively.
‘I don’t know. Because she’s off her head on 2C-B,’ he said. ‘If she remembers, she’s going to really regret this tomorrow morning. And the following morning. And next week and possibly next year.’ I was surprised by the way he could think about the following day when I was unsure what might happen the following minute. I guessed that he was angry that Marnie was creating a negative vibe at his birthday party.
Marnie was either really drunk or really high. Or both. She was waving a bottle in one hand. Becca was with her, her arm around Marnie’s shoulders, trying to pull her away from the edge of the platform. I felt guilty for Becca. She always ended up looking after people at parties. She was the one who magically rustled up clean T-shirts from nowhere when people were sick and made calls to
parents suggesting it might be a good moment to come and collect their children.
Someone had turned down the music. It seemed like a sensible idea until I realized that it meant that the sideshow up the tree had suddenly turned into the main entertainment. By now small groups of people had gathered beneath the tree, heads craned, trying to work out what was going on.
‘I need to go and help Becca,’ I told Marley. There was the sound of glass breaking as Marnie dropped the bottle and it fell to the ground.
Someone yelped. ‘That was my fucking head.’ I recognized Luke’s voice. He came into frame as he started climbing a ladder up the platform then temporarily disappeared before emerging through a hole at the top. He stood up and tested the planks then weaved his way precariously towards Marnie and Becca. He spoke but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Whatever it was it didn’t have much impact.
‘How could you do this to me, Romy? You knew I was in love with Marley.’
Marley looked mildly panicked.
‘I thought she was with Stuart? Stuart definitely thought she was in love with him.’
Marnie leaned over the railing of the platform. I knew that she was sufficiently off her head to throw herself over the edge. She would see it as a tragic gesture in the best tradition of Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was her favourite English A-level text. Usually her grand gestures made me laugh.
I tried to shout back to her that nothing had happened. But behind us the bedroom door flew open and the metal handle slammed against the wall. A small piece of plaster fell to the ground. Jay stormed in. He looked wild. More Game of Thrones than A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Someone had decorated his face with the same thick black paint that was on his arms and torso. There were three streaks across each cheek. Marley smiled at the make-up, his senses too dulled by alcohol and exhaustion to read his brother’s mood accurately. Jay’s blue eyes darted from Marley to me and back to Marley. I tried to warn Marley but I couldn’t get the words to take shape.
Jay ran head down at his brother like a bull, his head slamming into Marley’s stomach. Right by his spleen. But you can live without your spleen, I remembered thinking. Kidneys were more vulnerable. They couldn’t regenerate like the liver. They had always been the most difficult part to get out when I played Operation with Dad.
‘What the fuck,’ groaned Marley.
Even though Jay was shorter, the impact threw Marley hard against the bedroom wall. He instinctively leaned forward to protect his solar plexus as Jay hammered his fist into Marley’s stomach. I heard Marley moan. It was an adult sound, more animal than human. He didn’t hit Jay back.
Wolf and Loveday appeared at the door. Wolf was completely naked. Don’t stare at his penis ring, I told myself as he rubbed his eyes. He was either half asleep or couldn’t believe what he was seeing in front of him. Loveday ran in and shouted at them to stop. They ignored her. She tried to pull them apart, finally succeeding when she grabbed a handful of Jay’s curls between her fingers.
Marley slumped back against the wall. There was a loud crash as the framed poster of Nikki Minaj fell on top of them all. Glass rained down. Loveday stood immobile and barefoot, covered in tiny shards as fine as snow.
The back of Jay’s head took the impact but his thick black hair that I loved so much protected him. They were both lying on the floor, and I realized that Marley was holding Jay and that they were no longer fighting. Instead Jay was sobbing in Marley’s arms, and Marley was hugging him and telling him that everything was going to be all right. Outside the window I could see that people’s attention had switched from the drama in the tree to the bedroom. They could hear Jay crying, had put two and two together and assumed that it was because Marley and I had betrayed him. Marnie had planted the seed of the idea and it had taken hold like Japanese knotweed.
Only I knew that Jay was weeping for himself. Marley had an idea, but only I could know how truly alone he was. There was another scream from outside and then silence. We all went to the window, ignoring the glass on the floor, and saw Marnie lying at the foot of the tree. I stood with my hand over my mouth. I imagined Marnie in a wheelchair, unable to feed herself or go to the loo on her own, and how everyone would blame me. So you can see how I wasn’t really thinking about where Jay’s mobile phone might be.
15
Midway through the event in the school gym Ailsa realized with absolute clarity that she had always loathed staff parties. Almost simultaneously it dawned on her that now that she was in charge she could no longer duck out after dinner and would have to stay until the bitter end. Feeling trapped, she looked up at the strip lighting incubating them all from above and down at the paper plate wilting in her hand from the heat.
The yellow lighting highlighted every physical flaw: from nasal hair to pimples, broken veins and sagging skin. Everyone and everything had a liverish hue, and the vinegary smell of cheap wine added a few more notes to the thick soup of stale sweat that hung over the room.
Health and safety regulations meant she had to keep the fire doors that opened out on to the car park bolted shut. Ailsa would have overruled them and allowed people to smoke by the open doors if the deputy head hadn’t been standing right in front of her. But she knew Mrs Arnold might use this against her at a later date to demonstrate Ailsa’s ambiguous approach to discipline. She had to watch her back with Mrs Arnold in a way that she didn’t with anyone else at Highfield. She was the only teacher Ailsa didn’t call by her first name.
‘So, in conclusion, I think we need a general review of disciplinary issues regarding the Internet,’ said Mrs Arnold, who always spoke as though she were addressing an audience. Why did she always wear those unflattering A-line skirts that ended the wrong side of her knee? Ailsa wondered. Mrs Arnold was in her early thirties, a good decade younger than Ailsa, but in her drab grey shirt she could have passed for someone ten years older. ‘Don’t you? And the sooner the better in my opinion.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Ailsa, nodding so animatedly that a piece of baked potato fell from her plate onto the tip of Mrs Arnold’s shoe. She was still bitter from being outranked by Ailsa on the timing of Stuart’s punishment. She was the most ambitious teacher in the school by a long chalk. She hadn’t said as much, but Highfield was definitely a stepping stone to a more prestigious job. The fact that Ailsa had been proved right when Stuart scored three top-level grades in his mock exams last week had only intensified her resentment.
Ailsa gulped down warm white wine from a plastic beaker, imagining the sulphates and chemicals reacting with each other to create the mother of all hangovers. Slow down, she told herself. She didn’t have a high tolerance of alcohol and there was still a way to go until the evening was over.
‘If you like, I can take charge of the review.’
Ailsa found herself fixated by the deep trench between Mrs Arnold’s eyes. It ran horizontally, rather than vertically. Ailsa wondered what expression would create such a line. She unconsciously tried a few until she saw Mrs Arnold had noticed.
‘That would be great. Thank you.’
Ailsa glanced around the room, looking for escape. She saw Phil Moore, the director of studies, animatedly talking to Ali Khan, head of Maths, who must have said something funny because Phil threw his head back and laughed so much that his big belly popped over the top of his belt. When she had started at Highfield, Ailsa had guessed that Phil, an activist closely associated with one of the more radical teaching unions, would be her biggest headache. But he was a conviction teacher and turned out to be the kind of person who liked resolving problems rather than breathing oxygen into them.
Behind them was another small group, mostly language teachers. They all resembled the language they taught, thought Ailsa, amused by this idea. The Spanish teacher was wearing a multicoloured flared skirt, white ruffle shirt and a flower, which might have been real, in her long dark hair. She was speaking to a couple of male French teachers, who stood out in sharp suits and thin ties, although they were accessoriz
ed with e-cigarettes rather than Gauloises. The German teachers were in chunky cardigans and sported retro facial hair that looked East German circa 1970. She continued this theme with the music staff, trying to match them to their instruments.
Despite the heat, the baked potato and quiche precariously balanced in the middle of her plate were lukewarm (the salad was already finished by the time she reached the front of the buffet queue). She could tell because the piece of Cheddar she had just bitten into had turned out to be a knob of butter.
‘Oh God,’ said Ailsa, spitting it into her hand as delicately as possible. Mrs Arnold pulled a look of disgust that revealed exactly how she had developed the horizontal furrow.
‘I just made exactly the same mistake,’ announced Matt, who had unexpectedly sprung up beside them, holding his own wilted plate of food. He was the only other person in the room besides Mrs Arnold who Ailsa wanted to avoid. ‘It’s interesting how some foods taste so good when you mix them with something else but so horrible on their own.’
‘Butter tastes horrible on its own but baked potato isn’t so bad,’ said Ailsa. It wasn’t the right response because it sounded as though she was looking for an argument when what she needed to do was to inject some distance into their interactions.
‘I was thinking more of sugar and butter,’ he said apologetically. ‘Apparently the best-selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts are the ones that have exactly 50 per cent butter and 50 per cent sugar. It’s a magic formula.’
Mrs Arnold was agitated at the way the conversation had been hijacked. ‘Perhaps we can schedule in a meeting next week?’ she intervened, deliberately ignoring Matt. ‘How about early Monday morning?’
Matt made an awkward sidestep. ‘Sorry. Have I interrupted something?’
‘Not at all,’ said Ailsa. ‘We were finishing up, weren’t we?’
