by Fiona Neill
‘You’re late,’ he said, his voice muffled by all the goose feathers. Ailsa froze and anticipated his reprimand, like he gave Luke or Romy when they were late. He normally never waited up for her.
‘It’s like being the captain of a sinking ship. The head teacher can’t leave until the last person has gone home,’ Ailsa whispered, relieved that he couldn’t see her red, puffy eyes. Her arm was uncomfortably arched over his body.
‘Who was the last person?’
‘Phil. Turns out he’s an amazing dancer. Stuck in a 1980s time warp, but completely compelling all the same. You couldn’t believe how such a big man could be so graceful. It almost made me cry.’
Harry laughed and slowly manoeuvred from his side onto his back as if it required a massive effort. He pulled back the duvet so that Ailsa could put her head on his shoulder and drew her towards him with an arm around her.
‘You don’t sound drunk. I love the way you always manage to keep a clear head when everyone around is losing theirs. Requires a lot of self-discipline.’
‘Shall we talk about it tomorrow? I’m exhausted.’
‘Sure.’ He paused. ‘So was it a good party?’
‘Interesting.’
‘Give me the headlines.’
‘I discovered that Mrs Arnold probably wants my job. That Ali Khan’s wife doesn’t know that he smokes. That at least half of my staff could audition for Strictly Come Dancing and that warm wine from cartons is the devil’s work.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Shoot.’ She sounded like someone from an American TV series. She never used words like that.
‘Have you moved anything in my office?’
Ailsa groaned. Harry always blamed other people when he lost anything, but invariably it was his fault when papers went missing. She usually located them in the toilet. She drew comfort from the predictability of this scenario, as if order was being restored.
‘I’ll look tomorrow morning. I mean later this morning.’ She now felt genuinely sleepy. ‘Is it one of your chapters?’
‘I haven’t lost anything. It’s just someone has been moving around some of my stuff. I wondered if you had taken anything out of the briefcase that sits under my desk? There’s a wooden cigar box at the bottom. The lid is missing.’
‘Not guilty. How did the party go next door?’
‘It finished early. There was a drama. Apparently Marnie fell out of a tree and ended up going to hospital, so Wolf and Loveday sent everyone home.’
‘Romy?’
‘Asleep.’
‘Luke?’
‘I think he smuggled a girl in. Which means at least they kept the noise down.’
‘So business as usual.’
‘Business as usual.’
Ailsa switched off the light.
16
I had no idea what was going on when Mrs Arnold pulled me out of my Biology class later the next week and melodramatically informed Mr Harvey in front of everyone that the head teacher wanted to see me. It took me a moment to register that she was talking about Mum. This better be good, I thought, all eyes turned towards me in the back row as I packed up my bag.
It was almost the last lesson of the day and I was in the middle of a Biology past paper, labelling a diagram demonstrating the direction of blood flow in the human heart. Mr Harvey didn’t believe in letting us off lightly after exams. At the beginning of the lesson he had taken me aside to warn that I had missed the grade I needed for medical school in my mocks by two points and suggested this test was the perfect opportunity to prove to him that I could raise my game. As I pushed my stool under the table I noticed Mrs Arnold exchange a knowing look with Mr Harvey and I understood, whatever it was, he was in on it too.
‘Head teacher? Does she mean your mum?’ Becca asked me in confusion. Becca had remained loyal since the party. She was one of the few people who didn’t assume that I was a double-crossing scheming cow (polite condensed version of the chat online). I gave an embarrassed shrug and walked to the front of the classroom, head held high, everyone staring.
Jay looked down when I walked past him in the front row, pointedly turning his entire body away from me. He had moved next to Stuart at the beginning of the week in a very public demonstration of the new alliances formed since the party. We hadn’t spoken since, and he hadn’t responded to any of my messages. I understood why he didn’t want to tell anyone the truth. Even from a distance I could feel his shame.
Stuart aggressively stuck out his tongue at me. I assumed he either blamed me for the humiliating end to his relationship with Marnie or was gloating because for the first time that year he had beaten me to the top of the class.
‘Head down, Stuart,’ shouted Mr Harvey.
‘Maybe Romy could give some tips on that.’ He smirked. Other students laughed, including some I wouldn’t have expected to, like Ali Harn, a bespectacled nerd who was the only other person applying to medical school from my year, and Olivia Khan, the daughter of one of the teachers.
‘Right. You’re not having your phone back till the end of next week,’ yelled Mr Harvey, who had confiscated Stuart’s mobile earlier in the day after he caught him using it in class. Everyone was shocked into silence because Mr Harvey never lost it.
I wordlessly followed Mrs Arnold to Mum’s office. She was a parasite on other people’s misery, and I didn’t want to give her any pleasure by asking what was going on. She told me to wait on the bench outside.
‘If you need to talk to me about anything. Absolutely anything, Romy, you know where to find me,’ she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. She was big on using full stops to increase drama. She had what Mum called her lemon-sucking expression, both pained and bitter at the same time. I wanted to tell her that no sane person would ever come to her with a problem. ‘You can speak to me in complete confidence.’
God, it must be bad, I thought as I pulled my Biology textbook out of my bag and began checking the diagram of the human heart to see whether I had answered the question correctly. ‘Right atrium, left atrium, inferior vena cava, superior vena cava,’ I whispered. All correct. The words soothed me. I noticed that Mum’s blinds were drawn. This also seemed a bad omen.
My stomach cramped. What was going on? I needed the toilet but didn’t want to walk past Mrs Arnold’s window. I ran through the possibilities. My grandfather had suddenly been taken ill. Ben kept saying that old people gave up when they went into homes. Except as Mum kept explaining, it wasn’t a care home. Grandpa had his own flat and friends his own age to keep him company. ‘Dying is contagious,’ Ben said, unconvinced by her argument. But if Grandpa were ill wouldn’t Luke also be sitting here beside me? And surely Mum would have gone home? I remembered the phone and the mutilated SIM card in Dad’s briefcase and wondered if he had told Mum that someone had found it. But they wouldn’t deal with this at school. Mum would sooner die than reveal Dad’s dirty little secret to Mrs Arnold.
It had to be something related to what had happened at the party. Perhaps Loveday and Wolf had spoken to Mum about the fight or a snoopy parent had read someone’s Facebook page and informed the school. It wouldn’t be surprising. All anyone could talk about was how I had kissed my boyfriend’s older brother, causing my best friend, who was in love with the same boy, to break her ankle falling out of a tree and Marley and Jay to have a fight, although Loveday was the only one who got hurt – her feet had been shredded by the glass.
Even Luke and Becca had raised an eyebrow when I told them my version of events the afternoon after the party. We were in Luke’s bedroom. Me on the floor, Luke on his bed and Becca cross-legged on the desk by his window. The girl from the night before was still asleep in his bed. There was a trail of her clothes leading from the door to the bed. I felt a stab of jealousy at the ease of Luke’s relationship with her. It was all I had wanted for myself. Instead I had ended up with something way beyond my amateur dealings with boys.
‘So talk me through what happened one mor
e time in case I missed something,’ Luke instructed. He picked up a weight from the floor and did some bicep curls.
‘I went into Jay’s room and got really upset because I realized that he wasn’t in love with me and our relationship was over. Marley came in and found me crying. He tried to comfort me but we accidentally kissed each other.’
‘How exactly do you accidentally kiss someone?’ asked Becca sarcastically. ‘Did you trip and suddenly find yourself with your mouth pressed against his? Because that happens to me a lot.’
‘More his mouth pressed against mine,’ I rambled. ‘I can’t really remember the details. We were both out of it.’
‘You seemed very in control when you went to get the first-aid kit and bandaged Marnie’s ankle and kept going on about tibulas and fibulas,’ commented Luke. ‘And when you called for the ambulance and described to them exactly how to get here.’
‘Were you trying to make Marley feel sorry for you to get close to him because secretly you always fancied him, not Jay? Because that’s what Marnie thinks,’ asked Becca, trying a different approach.
‘I was upset because I realized Jay wasn’t in love with me.’
‘I don’t believe you, Romy,’ Luke said, swapping the weight from one hand to the other as he shone his bedside light onto my face. ‘You’re saying exactly the same thing over and over again. I watched this film once about the Stasi in East Germany and it said that if people are telling the truth, there are subtle changes in their story. You’re saying the same thing over and over again. You sound too rehearsed.’
Luke was like a sniffer dog when he got the scent of a lie. I put up my hand to shield my eyes from the light.
‘Come on, Romeo. Tell me what happened. You know you want to.’
If I’d been alone with Luke, this was the moment when I would have capitulated. He was a surprisingly good listener and he would have good insights into Jay’s problem. Because although he never talked about it, I was pretty sure Luke was not immune to the lure of PornHub. But Becca was there.
‘I saw you and Jay dancing together at the party. You looked really happy,’ said Becca. ‘Actually I saw you kissing him too. I don’t get why you suddenly thought he wasn’t in love with you any more. I mean it’s not like a tap that you can turn on and off.’
I had promised Jay that I would never betray his secret, and the best I could do was a partial truth, but with hindsight a total lie would probably have been better.
‘Doesn’t add up, does it?’ Luke asked Becca.
‘He was comforting me.’
‘Come back to bed, Luke,’ said a muffled voice from beneath the duvet. ‘Please.’
Stuart swaggered down the corridor and stopped right beside me. I focused on the diagram of the heart until the words began to blur. I waited for him to say something and when he didn’t I looked up. He put his middle finger slowly in and out of his mouth, laughing at my shocked expression, and turned to blow a kiss in the direction of Mum’s office. Even then I didn’t realize what was going on. Shortly afterwards Mum’s assistant indicated that I should go in. Mum’s face had that pinched grey look that I hadn’t seen since we left London. Her lips had shrunk and her eyes were sunken.
‘Come in, Romy,’ she said formally, as if she was pretending I wasn’t really her daughter.
‘Everything is fine at home,’ she said quickly as I followed her in. When I left the door open she went back to shut it, all the time asking me questions. What were we doing in the Biology class? Could I catch up another time? Did I realize how competitive it is to study medicine? None of it made much sense and I could tell she wasn’t really listening to any of my answers.
‘There’s something you need to see, Romy,’ said Mum suddenly. Her voice was all fragmented. The way she kept saying my name made me feel uncomfortable. It didn’t sound like her speaking. It gradually dawned on me that she was in a state of shock.
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.
Mum went over to her computer and tapped the keyboard.
‘I’ll sit on the sofa while you watch. I’ve seen it already.’ She went over to the canary-yellow sofa beneath the window and sat with her arms crossed, staring at me. She was breathing out through her mouth and in through her nose like someone doing yoga in reverse.
‘Is it something to help with my university application?’ I asked as I sat down in her seat. She shook her head and pointed at her computer. In the centre of the screen on her desktop was a file called Romy. I pressed play and within a couple of seconds was watching the video that Jay and I had made together. I had only seen it once before on the tiny screen on his phone in the dim light of the sweat lodge, when we first filmed it.
Now it was blown up there were details that I hadn’t noticed first time round. The slightly long preamble where the camera was focused on Jay’s crotch as his dick rose in the air from his underpants and slapped against his stomach; the way I shuffled forward on my knees to meet it, mouth half open, eyes half shut, and the huge scab on my knee from slipping on the netball court. I couldn’t believe that Mum had watched this when it was so obviously something private between Jay and myself. It was as though she had read my diary or intercepted my Instagram. I felt a brief moment of blind fury. Why did she always want to be so involved in my life? It was sick.
‘How did you get this?’ I asked angrily. ‘You have no right to violate my private life like this.’
‘Mr Harvey found it on Stuart’s phone earlier today. We don’t know how Stuart got it. Presumably someone else sent it to him. We’re trying to trace back the trail.’ Her voice got quieter and quieter. ‘Your private life is very public.’
Afterwards Becca asked me how I felt at that moment. Pure terror is probably the only way to describe it. My entire body went cold until I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t move my fingers. My mouth was dry. Everything was completely numb. I remember thinking that I was paralysed. Just as I had got used to this idea I started to get so hot that within seconds I was soaked with sweat. My hands were bright red and the computer mouse slid through my fingers so I couldn’t stop the film. My face was burning and my heart was beating so fast that when I looked down I could see it pulsing through my chest. I wondered if this was how my grandmother felt before she died and realized that living suddenly seemed a lot scarier than death. This was, I told Becca, the instant when I stopped being a child.
‘Who is the boy?’ Mum asked.
There was a loud thumping on the door of Mum’s office. Dad burst through the door. For the first time in a while I was relieved to see him. He apologized to Mum for being late, came straight over to her desk, arms outstretched, and put them around me, one eye on the computer screen.
‘Oh, my little girl, my little girl,’ he said, as the film continued, ‘what have you done?’
He pulled away from me and tried to shield my eyes from the screen with his hand like he used to when we were little and something inappropriate came on television. Except he was trying to protect me from myself. I knew what was coming next. I couldn’t look at him. I put my fingers in my ears but I couldn’t block it out completely.
‘Oh, Mum,’ I said. Mum looked up at Dad.
‘How has this happened to us?’ she asked.
‘I love love love it when you come in my face,’ I heard myself say in a breathless whisper on screen. The words resonated with Dad straight away because of course he was their inspiration.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ His voice cracked.
I nodded without looking at him. At that moment I didn’t think that I could ever look anyone in the eye again.
‘Oh God,’ said Dad, rocking backwards and forwards, holding me in his arms. I pulled away, desperate to get rid of the images on screen. ‘It’s all my fault.’
‘Harry, we can’t fall apart,’ Mum said, her voice breaking. ‘We need to be strong for Romy.’
Her face was so pale that it was as if all the blood had been drained away. I wiped my hand up
and down my skirt to try to get rid of the perspiration and dragged the file to the trash folder to delete it.
‘There’s no point in doing that, darling. It’s been uploaded everywhere,’ said Mum gently. I could tell that she was trying to regain control of her emotions because she could see the fear in my eyes and wanted me to believe that she could sort everything out just as she had always sorted out all our problems. ‘It’s gone viral,’ she said. ‘Revenge websites, porn sites, Facebook …’ The way she bravely struggled with all the unfamiliar terminology made her seem even more fragile. And it was this that made me really scared.
‘What do you mean?’ Dad asked.
Mum opened a notebook on her desk and pointed at a list written in shaky handwriting.
‘Mr Harvey has been monitoring the situation. This is a list of where we know it has been shown. Matt has been in touch with them and some of them have got back to him. In the eyes of the law Romy is a child and they are distributing child pornography. Some have taken it down already. But some of the websites aren’t registered here – one is in Latvia apparently, so they might not respond. And we’ll never be able to know exactly where it has been sent. It’s out there.’ She pointed out of the window and I looked outside, wondering how it was possible that it had spread so far so quickly.
‘Mr Harvey has watched the video?’ I asked, appalled to think my Biology teacher, the man who couldn’t get a condom on a banana in Sex Ed, had seen it. I thought about the boys in my class and realized they must have too, and possibly some of the girls. It was like wildfire. By now probably half the school had seen it. Mrs Arnold. Stuart Tovey. Marley Fairport. I couldn’t believe that Jay had betrayed me in this way. And yet this kind of thing happened all the time. At my old school I had even been to an Internet talk on the dangers of sexting.
‘The question is, how can we prove it is Jay?’ asked Dad.
It took a minute for me to understand why they kept asking this question. Then it occurred to me that Jay’s face wasn’t visible.
