Multitudes

by Lucy Caldwell

  ‘Wow,’ I say, ‘thanks,’ and I try to look grateful.

  ‘D’you know,’ she says after a while, and smoothes my ponytail, ‘every party I’ve ever had I’ve worried about nobody coming.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. There’s no way of explaining that while I’m dreading people not coming, I’m dreading them arriving even more. At last the doorbell goes. ‘You see?’ says my mum.

  ‘Have a blast,’ my dad says, and winks to show they won’t mind the noise, and they go upstairs as they’ve promised.

  About half the class turns up, boys as well as girls, and enough people that it’s not a disaster. But after the pizza and cake have been demolished and the boys have got bored of chucking leftover chips at each other, everyone decides to play Truth or Dare. They say I have to go first because I’m the birthday girl, and Vicky Shaw makes a show of smirking at her clique. Then she asks, ‘Have you ever seen anybody?’

  I can feel everyone looking at me. Someone sniggers.

  ‘We’re waiting,’ says Alison Reid.

  ‘Did you not hear the question?’ says Vicky Shaw. ‘I’ll ask it one more time. Have … you … ever … seen … anybody?’

  ‘Dare,’ I say, and everyone cracks up.

  ‘All right then,’ Vicky Shaw shouts over them, ‘all right then, here’s your dare,’ and they all go quiet again, waiting to see what it’ll be. ‘As your dare,’ she says, ‘as your dare, you have to see all the boys in this room.’

  ‘Wise up,’ I say.

  ‘You have to,’ Alison Reid says.

  ‘You don’t have a choice,’ Emma J chimes in.

  Vicky Shaw swishes her hair. She’s loving this. Everyone is loving this. ‘I’m not going to,’ I say, lamely.

  ‘Why not? Are you a lesbo?’ she crows. ‘Were you and Susan Clarke lesbos together?’

  At that the whole room goes mad with wolf whistles and clapping and cries of ‘Gross,’ and ‘Yeooooo,’ and ‘Lesbo!’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘wise up, of course not.’ My voice sounds hoarse. ‘That’s disgusting,’ I say.

  Last year, a rumour started that Helen Russell from the year above was looking at other girls in the showers after PE, and for a whole term people stuck sanitary towels on the back of her blazer and Pamela Anderson posters on the door of her locker. We had a Junior School Assembly about bullying, but it didn’t change anything, and eventually her parents took her out of school. You saw them in Supermac sometimes, Helen Russell trailing after her mum, staring at the floor in case she saw someone she knew.

  I don’t have a choice. ‘Fine then,’ I say, ‘I’ll do the dare.’

  They blindfold me with someone’s scarf, and the boys spin an empty Shloer bottle to decide the order they’ll go in. The first kiss isn’t too bad, pepperoni breath and dry chapped lips and then it’s over. The second is wet and spitty, like being kissed by a Labrador. The third goes on for so long people start slow-clapping. The fourth boy thrusts his tongue so hard I almost gag. The cheering is getting louder. Someone gulders, ‘Get her bucked!’ and for a few seconds it becomes a chant. Then the fifth boy grabs my shoulders and shoves me onto my knees and up against his crotch. When I realise what’s happening and manage to wrench away and rip off the scarf, everyone goes mental, howling and whistling and punching the air and yelling. It’s Paul Forrester – fat Paul Forrester, who got stuck halfway up the ropes in PE last year and started crying in front of everyone – and as he zips up his flies and pushes his glasses back on his fat sweaty face, Andy Milford gives him a high five and says, ‘Nice one, big fella.’

  My eyes are stinging, and I blink furiously and try not to cry, tell myself I must not cry because they are all watching me to see if I will, and I realise that I haven’t got a single friend in the whole room.

  *

  After that, I put off writing to Susan. At night, I can’t seem to sleep. When I close my eyes, I can’t get rid of the memory of Paul Forrester’s dick: how it had taken me a few seconds to realise what it was, how it had been soft and squashy and musty-smelling at first and then a tremor had run through it and it had twitched through his boxer shorts against my mouth. I lie awake and stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling.

  A week passes, and then another. Susan sends me a postcard saying ‘Troc Till You Drop!’ On the back she has written,

  London is soooo cool. I am happier here than I have ever been in my entire life. It’s such a relief not always to be the only one!!

  I can’t think what to write back.

  It goes all around school what happened at my party. The story gets more and more exaggerated until one day a group of girls from the year above ask if it’s true I gave a boy a blow job in front of everyone and if it is true I’m such a dirty wee hoor.

  At break and lunch I sit alone now. Any chance I had of making new friends is gone. No one wants to risk being seen with me. When we need to split into pairs in class, I end up with Jacqueline Dunne, the other Norma in the class. No one likes Jacqueline because she’s so two-faced. She’s one of the biggest slabbers in the year and yet she’s always the one squealing to the teachers. But she’s all I’ve got. She starts asking me to stay over at hers some Saturday night so we can go down Cairnburn like Vicky Shaw and Andy Milford and all the others do now, and every time I make excuses. I’d rather have no friends at all than have Jacqueline Dunne as a best friend.

  But one Friday night I’m watching TV with my parents when my dad says, ‘What do your friends do at the weekends, ey?’ He says it too casually, and he doesn’t look at my mum as he says it, which is how I know they’ve been discussing it.

  I freeze. ‘They just,’ I say. ‘You know.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask a friend to stay the night?’ my mum says.

  My heart starts thumping. They have no idea about my birthday party. They have no idea about anything. So many times, I’ve felt the longing to tell them everything rise up inside me and spread in my chest like a bruise. I stop myself with the thought of how sad they’d be, how furious, and, worst of all, how extra-specially nice they’d be to me. I know, too, that in private they’d blame themselves for insisting I had a party.

  I’d cried and cried when Susan left, and at first my mum had said things like, ‘You’ll make other friends,’ and, ‘Of course people will want to sit with you,’ and, ‘Just be yourself.’ When she came up with the idea of a big birthday party, she was so delighted I didn’t know how to say no.

  ‘Actually,’ I hear myself blurt out, ‘Jacqueline Dunne said did I want to sleep over at hers tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s great,’ my dad says.

  ‘Of course you can,’ says my mum. ‘You should have said before. We’ve been so worried you were lonely.’

  ‘No,’ I say. I feel my face heating up, so I stand and say, ‘Can I use the phone in your room to tell Jacqueline now?’

  ‘Of course,’ my mum says.

  After I’ve left the living room, I hear her say to my dad, ‘I always said it wasn’t healthy, being so much in someone else’s pocket.’

  ‘She’s a loyal wee soul,’ my dad replies. ‘Maybe she felt she couldn’t have other friends. Maybe she felt it would be abandoning Susan.’

  ‘Do you know I’ve wondered that myself,’ my mum says. ‘I mean, I know the bullying could get nasty. I’d Janet Clarke here in tears about it more than once.’

  ‘I’m proud of her, you know,’ my dad says, ‘sticking by Susan all those years.’

  The skin all over my body is itching and burning. It wasn’t like that, I want to shout. Neither of us cared about anything else. We used to do magic spells so that things people said would bounce right back at them. But then I think of Susan’s final postcard. I don’t want to hear any more. I tiptoe upstairs.

  *

  I walk over to Jacqueline’s after lunch so we can spend the afternoon getting ready. I do her make-up and she does mine. It feels weird, being this close to her, her breath warm and damp, reeking of Juicy Fruit and cheese
and onion Tayto, her fingers on my face. I can see the white-blonde hairs where she bleaches her moustache with Jolene, and I know she can see mine too.

  ‘You’ve actually got quite big lips,’ she says, as she strokes the bud of the lipgloss across them.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, not knowing what to say.

  ‘I didn’t say it was a good thing.’

  I can’t think of anything to say to that.

  ‘I’m only joking,’ she says. ‘Blot.’

  I press my lips too hard against the square of toilet paper she holds out, smudging off too much lipgloss. When she rolls her eyes and goes to apply it again, I stop her.

  ‘Wise up and don’t be taking a pointy-head,’ she says.

  ‘I’m not,’ I say.

  ‘Didn’t I say I was only joking? Big lips are good. BJ lips.’ She looks at me sideways as she says it. She was one of the few I hadn’t invited to my party; her and the Bible-bashers, who I knew wouldn’t come. I’ve been waiting for weeks for her to bring it up. But she doesn’t say any more, just layers on the gloopy pink lipgloss.

  When our make-up’s done, we get dressed. I’m wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt, but Jacqueline says I should have worn a skirt. She opens her wardrobe, which is stuffed with clothes, hanging three or more to a hanger, bundled into cubbyholes, piled up in heaps. She picks out a skirt to lend me, a purple rah-rah from Kookaï. It’s a bit crumpled but brand new, the tags still on. I wonder if she nicked it, or wants me to think she did. The girls in our class talk all the time about shoplifting, to impress the boys. Strawberry lip balm from The Body Shop or Take That keyrings from Athena; eyeshadow duos or at the very least handfuls of penny mix from Woolworths. You do it in pairs or groups of three or four, partly so there’s someone to keep their eyes peeled for security guards but mostly so there’s someone to see you do it.

  Jacqueline is watching for my reaction as I hold the skirt up against me. ‘You can keep it if you want,’ she says. She adds, quickly, ‘I never really liked it anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t really go with my shirt.’

  ‘Duh,’ she says, and sniggers to an imaginary audience of Vicky Shaws and Alison Reids. She hokes through one of the cubbyholes and hands me a strappy vest top.

  ‘I have loads of these,’ she says. ‘My dad buys me whatever I want. He’s so pathetic.’ Then she says, ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Well, he is. He doesn’t even look at the price tags. He’s such a dickhead.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, vaguely.

  ‘What do you mean, “yeah”? You haven’t even met him. I’m only having you on. Keep that, too, if you want.’

  I turn away to get undressed, but I can feel her watching me, feel her eyes, narrowed, sliding up my bare back. I yank on the vest top as quickly as possible and wriggle my jeans off only when I’ve put the skirt on over them.

  When it’s Jacqueline’s turn to try on outfits, I pretend to be reading one of her More! magazines. ‘Bet you’re looking at Position of the Fortnight,’ she says, ‘you wee hallion.’

  When we’re both dressed, she makes us pose together in front of the mirror. ‘Looking good, wee dolls,’ she says, and puts her arm through mine. After a couple of seconds, I take my arm away. ‘What?’ she says. I pretend, too late, that I’m adjusting my ponytail. ‘Everyone still says you and Susan Clarke were lesbos, you know,’ she says. Then she says, before I can reply, ‘Oh my God, I’m only joking. Can’t you even take a joke?’

  As we’re leaving the house, she shouts to her mum that we’re away out. Her mum, who’s sat in front of the TV with a puffy face and unwashed hair, doesn’t ask where we’re going or when we’ll be back. I think of the rumours that Jacqueline’s dad pushed her mum right through the French doors, shattering them all over the patio and smashing her collarbone.

  *

  We walk up and down the high street for a while. We don’t meet anyone we know, which I’m secretly glad about, because I don’t want anyone to see me with Jacqueline Dunne. Then I feel mean for feeling that way. Janet Clarke always used to say, ‘You have to give people a second chance, then another second chance, then a third second chance after that.’ I push the thought of Janet Clarke from my head.

  It starts to rain. We sit in the bus shelter and watch the old ladies in the doorway of the musty old tea room across the way, saying their goodbyes, wringing each other’s hands, kissing each other’s powdery dry cheeks with puckered lips, as the stout waitress stacks chairs on tables behind them. It’s funny to think of old people having best friends. I try to say this to Jacqueline, but she pretends to mishear me and says, ‘You like to think of old people having sex? That is so minging, you weirdo,’ and cracks up at herself. The moment is gone then, and I don’t try again. I’m not sure what I even meant in the first place. We sit there, not quite touching. The street lights come on. A queue starts to form outside the Silver Leaf. ‘Why don’t we share a gravy chip?’ I say, without thinking.

  Jacqueline looks at me like I’m mental. ‘You have to have an empty stomach,’ she says.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I say, remembering too late. She means for the alcohol to work. You have to down it through a straw and on an empty stomach. Everyone knows that. She can’t stop smirking, and I know that she’s storing it up to tell the first person she can in Form Time on Monday. She’s probably storing all of it up, everything I’ve done and said since I got to hers.

  I could just walk off, I think. I could just walk all the way home. Except that my clothes and overnight things are at hers. Except that of course I can’t.

  ‘Are we just going to sit here all night or what?’ I say.

  ‘Pointy-head on you!’ Jacqueline says. ‘Fine, let’s go.’

  We cross the road to the Winemark and stand outside until a couple of students going in agree to buy us a carry-out. Jacqueline tells them we want a bottle of strawberry Ravers and hands over some money. I’m pretty sure by the careful way she pronounces strawberry Ravers that she’s never done this before either, but neither of us is letting on to the other.

  ‘Did you and Susan used to get blocked together?’ she says, airily, as we turn into the side alley to wait. I don’t want to admit that we never did, so I say, just as airily, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did you used to drink?’ she says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, and then it comes into my mind from nowhere, the drink my mum once ordered at the Knock Golf Club Christmas party: ‘Pernod and blackcurrant, mostly,’ I say, and Jacqueline goes quiet.

  When the students hand over the bottle, we both stare at it for a moment. ‘Give it here,’ I say, as if I know what I’m doing, and I stick in my straw and manage nearly a quarter of the bottle. It doesn’t taste as bad as I’d expected. It’s a bit like the red marshmallow penny sweets from the very bottom of the tub in the newsagent’s, sticky and slightly melted. Jacqueline has her go and passes it back to me. We’ve the whole bottle finished in less than five minutes.

  ‘We’re going to be blocked,’ she says.

  To my surprise, I giggle. I can feel the glow of it already, sweet and fuzzy and tingling, spreading from my stomach and inside my limbs.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘You’re blocked already. Come on then. We don’t want to waste it.’ She links arms, and this time I don’t take mine away.

  We weave up the road together like a bad three-legged race. It’s still mizzling, but even the rain feels less wet with the strawberry Ravers inside you. An old lady mutters at us as we pass her, something about a night like this and the pair of yous in your figures, and we start giggling and then start laughing and laugh the rest of the way.

  When we get to Cairnburn Park there are a few groups there already, at the benches, in the kiddie playground. We stand at the fence by the playground, looking for people from our year. The only light is from the street lights on Cairnburn Road, running along the far side of the playground. I know Cairnburn Park: I walk past it every day
on my way to school, and when we do cross-country in PE we run circuits around it. I try to remind myself of this. But even the trees look somehow different in the dark.

  ‘The peelers raided the park two weeks ago,’ Jacqueline says.

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘They lifted the under-age drinkers and took them down the station.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘What would your folks do, like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. It gives me a queasy, painful, pleasurable feeling, thinking about what my parents would do if I was lifted by the peelers for under-age drinking; like pressing your tongue hard into the bloody space where a tooth has just fallen out. ‘Ground me?’ I say.

  ‘Obviously, like,’ she says, and rolls her eyes. ‘Obviously they’d ground you. I mean what else.’

  ‘They might not though,’ I say.

  When he was thirteen, my father got himself paralytic on home brew that he and some friends made and stored under the floor of the scout hut. Three of them carried him home and propped him up on the doorstep for my grandma to find, then rang the bell and legged it.

  ‘Yeah, but, duh, it’s different for girls,’ Jacqueline says, when I tell her this. Then she says, ‘My da would bate the shite out of me.’

  I feel her looking at me, and I don’t know what to say. I tell myself that everyone knows Jacqueline Dunne’s the biggest liar there is. She probably started the rumour about her mum and the French windows herself, just for attention. I shiver. I can feel the Ravers wearing off. Jacqueline’s still waiting for me to say something. ‘Maybe we should head on, just,’ I say.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ she says.