Multitudes

by Lucy Caldwell

  Lisa turned to face me. ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘Come on,’ I said.

  ‘But what will we say?’

  ‘We’ll say we’re lost, we’ll say we’re after a glass of water – I don’t know. We’ll think of something. Come on.’

  Lisa stared at me. ‘Oh my God, you’re mad,’ she said. But she giggled. And then we were crossing the road and walking up the driveway, and there we were, standing in Mr Knox’s porch. ‘You’re not seriously going to do this?’ Lisa said.

  ‘Watch me,’ I said, and I fisted my hand and knocked on the door.

  *

  I can still picture every moment of what happens next.

  Davina opens the door (Davina Calvert, Davina Knox) with the baby in one arm and the toddler hanging off one of her legs. We blurt out – it comes to me, inspired – that we live just round the corner, and we’re going door to door to see does anyone need a babysitter. All at once, we’re like a team again, me and Leese. I start a sentence, she finishes it. She says something, I elaborate. We sound calm, and totally plausible. Davina says thank you, but the baby’s too young to be left. Lisa says can we leave our details anyway, for maybe in a few months’ time? Davina blinks and says okay, sure, and the two of us inch our way into her hallway while she gets a pen and notelet from the phone pad. Lisa calls me Judith, and I call her Carol. We write down Judith and Carol and give a made-up number. We are invincible. We are on fire. Davina says what school do we go to, and Lisa says, not missing a beat, Dundonald High. Why aren’t you at school today, Davina asks, and I say it’s a Baker day. I suddenly wonder if all schools have the same Baker days, and a dart of fear goes through me, but Davina just says, Oh, and doesn’t ask anything more.

  We sense she’s going to usher us out now, and before she can do it, Lisa asks what the baby’s called, and Davina says, Melissa. That’s a pretty name, I say, and Davina says thank you. So we admire the baby, her screwed-up little face and flexing fingers, and I think of having Mr Knox’s baby growing inside you, and a huge rush of heat goes through me. When Davina says, as we knew she was going to, Girls, as I’m sure you can see, I’ve really got my hands full here, and Lisa says, No, no, of course, we’ll have to be going – and she’s getting the giggles now, I can see them rising in her, the way the corners of her lips pucker and tweak – I say, Yes, of course, but do you mind if I use your toilet first? Davina blinks again, her red-raw eyes, as if she can sense a trap but doesn’t know quite what it is, and then she says no problem, but the downstairs loo’s blocked, wee Reuben has a habit of flushing things down it, and they haven’t got round to calling out the plumber, I’ll have to go upstairs. It’s straight up the stairs and first on the left. I can feel Lisa staring at me, but I don’t meet her eye, I just say, Thank you, and make my way upstairs.

  The bathroom is full – just humming – with Mr Knox. There’s his dressing gown hung on the back of the door, his electric razor on the side of the sink, his can of Lynx deodorant on the window sill. There’s his toothbrush in a mug, and there’s flecks of his stubble in the sink, and there’s his dirty clothes in the laundry basket. I kneel and open it and recognise one of his shirts, a slippery pale-blue one with yellow diamond patterning. I reach over and flush the toilet so the noise will cover my movements, and then I open the mirrored cabinet above the sink and run my fingers over the bottles on what must be his shelf, the shaving cream, the brown plastic bottle of prescription drugs, a six-pack of Durex condoms, two of them missing.

  The skin all over my body is tingling, tingling in places I didn’t know could tingle, in between my fingers, the backs of my knees. I ease one of the condoms from the strip, tugging gently along the foil perforations, and stuff it into my jeans. Then I put the box back, exactly as it was, and close the mirrored cabinet.

  I stare at myself in the mirror. My face looks flushed. I wonder, again, what age she was when he first noticed her. I realise that I don’t know how long I’ve been in here. I run the tap, and look around me one last time. And then, without planning to, without knowing I’m going to until I’ve done it, I find my hand closing around one of the bottles of perfume on the window sill and rearranging the others so the gap doesn’t show. You’re not supposed to keep perfume on the window sill anyway – even I know that. I slide it into the inside pocket of my jacket and arrange my left arm over it so the bulge doesn’t show, then I turn off the tap and go downstairs to where Lisa’s shooting me desperate glances.

  *

  Outside, she can’t believe what I’ve done. None of them can. We catch up with Donna and Tanya still waiting for us on the main road. Although it feels like a lifetime has passed, it’s only been ten minutes or so since they left us.

  ‘You’ll never believe what she did,’ Lisa says, and there’s pride in her voice as she tells them how we knocked on the door and went inside, inside Mr Knox’s house, and talked to Davina, and touched the baby, and how I used his bathroom. I take over the story then. The condom I keep quiet about – that’s mine, just for me – but I show them the perfume. It’s a dark glass bottle, three-quarters full, aubergine, almost black, with a round glass stopper. In delicate gold lettering, it says, ‘POISON, Dior’.

  ‘I can’t believe you nicked her fucking perfume!’ Donna says.

  Tanya stares at me as if she’s going to be sick.

  Donna takes the bottle from me and uncaps the lid. She aims it at Lisa.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Lisa says. ‘You’re not spraying that shit on me.’

  ‘Spray me then,’ I say, and they all look at me. ‘Go on,’ I say, ‘spray me.’ I roll up the sleeve of my jumper to bare my wrist.

  Donna aims the nozzle. A jet of perfume shoots out, dark and heady and forbidden-smelling.

  ‘Eww,’ says Tanya, ‘that smells like fox. Why would anyone want to smell like that?’

  I press my wrists together carefully and raise them to my neck, dab both sides. It’s the strongest perfume I’ve ever smelt. The musty green scent makes me feel slightly nauseous. It doesn’t smell like a perfume you’d imagine Davina Calvert choosing: he must have bought it for her; it must be him that likes it. I wonder if he sprays it on her before they go out, if she holds up her wrists and bares her throat for him.

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’ Lisa says.

  ‘We could bring it into school,’ I say, and all at once my heart is racing again. ‘We could bring it into school and spray it in his lesson. We could see what he does.’

  ‘You’re a fucking psycho,’ Donna says, and she laughs, but for the first time ever it’s tinged with awe.

  ‘You can’t,’ Tanya’s saying, ‘I’m not having anything to do with this,’ but we’re all ignoring her now.

  ‘Me and Lisa have Spanish tomorrow,’ I say, ‘straight after lunch. We’ll do it then. Right, Leese?’

  ‘What do you think he’ll do?’ Lisa says, wide-eyed.

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, ‘he’ll keep us behind after class and shag our brains out on his desk.’ I say it as if I’m joking, and she and Donna laugh, and I laugh too, but I think of the condom hidden in my pocket and the tingling feeling returns.

  *

  That night, I lie in bed and squeeze my eyes closed and play the scene of them meeting in Granada with more intensity than ever before, and when I get to the part where he undoes her halter-neck top and eases her skirt off and lies her down on the bed, my whole body starts shaking.

  *

  The next day in Spanish, we did it, just as we’d planned. Before class started, we huddled over my bag and sprayed the Poison, unknotting our ties to mist it in the hollow of our throats. We were feverish with excitement.

  He didn’t know how close to him we’d got.

  I had his condom with me too. I’d slept with it under my pillow, and now it was zipped into the pocket of my school skirt. I could feel the foil edge rubbing against my thigh when I crossed my legs.

  Mr Knox came in, sat on the edge of his desk and asked us what we’d been doi
ng over the weekend.

  My heart was thumping. I suddenly wished I’d prepared something clever to say, something that would get his attention, or make him smile, but I hadn’t, and I found myself saying the first thing that came into my head, just to be the one that spoke.

  ‘Voy de compras,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure you go shopping all the time, but in this instance it was in the past tense.’ He looked straight at me as he said it, his crinkled eyes, a teasing smile. He seemed surprised, or amused, to see me talking. I was never one of the confident ones who spoke up in class without prompting. ‘Otra vez, Señorita.’

  Señorita. I’d never been one of the girls he called señorita before. I imagined he’d called Davina señorita. His accent in Spanish was rolling and sexy. Hers would be too, of course. They’d probably had conversations of their own, over and above everyone else’s heads.

  ‘Fui de compras,’ I said, locking eyes with him.

  ‘Muy bien, fuiste de compras, y qué compraste?’

  ‘What did I buy?’ The cloying smell of the perfume was making me dizzy, and I couldn’t seem to straighten my thoughts.

  ‘Si – qué compraste?’

  ‘Compré – compré un nuevo perfume.’

  ‘Muy bien.’ He grinned at me. ‘Fuiste de compras, y compraste un nuevo perfume. Muy bien.’

  ‘Do you want to smell it, Mr Knox?’ Lisa blurted.

  ‘Lisa!’ I hissed, delighted and appalled.

  ‘Gracias, Lisa, pero no.’

  ‘Are you sure? I think you’d like it.’

  ‘Gracias, Lisa. Who’s next?’ He gazed around the room, waiting for someone else to put their hand up. I’d said it: I couldn’t believe I’d said it. I felt the colour rising to my face. Lisa was stifling a fit of giggles beside me, but I ignored her and kept my eyes on Mr Knox. He hadn’t flinched.

  At the end of class, we hung about, taking our time to pack our bags and wondering if he’d keep us behind, but he didn’t. We left the room and fell into each other’s arms in fits of giggles, but we were exaggerating, both of us kidding ourselves that we weren’t disappointed. Or at least I was. Maybe for Lisa it was just a big joke. I don’t know what I’d expected, exactly, but I’d expected something – a moment of recognition, something.

  My last lesson of the day was Maths, where I sat with Tanya – none of our other friends were taking Higher Maths. We walked out of school together. Tanya lived up by Stormont, and it was out of my way, but I sometimes walked home with her anyway. My mum had gone back to work since my dad moved out, and I didn’t like going back to an empty house. And today there was the increased attraction of knowing that this was the way Mr Knox must drive home.

  We walked down Wandsworth and crossed the busy junction, then up the Upper Newtownards Road. When we got to the traffic lights at Castlehill Road, by Stormont Presbyterian, I kept us hanging about. I made sure I was standing facing the traffic. I was waiting for the Alfa Romeo to pass us. I knew in my bones that it would, knew that it had to. When it did, I turned to watch it and didn’t take my eyes from it until it was gone completely from sight. And by the time I turned back, something inside me had shifted.

  *

  I spent an hour that night learning extra French vocab and practising my Spanish tenses, determined to impress him the following day, to make him notice me. The next day, I walked home with Tanya again, and the day after that, and pretty soon I was walking home with her every day. It was a twenty-minute walk from school to hers, and most days by the time we reached the Upper Newtownards Road his car would be long gone. But I took to noting which days he held his after-school language club for sixth-formers, or had staff meetings, and on those days I’d try to time our journey, persuading Tanya to come to the Mini-Market with me and killing time there choosing sweets and looking at the magazines, then lingering at the traffic lights by the church in the hope of seeing his car.

  On the days that I did, even just a flash of it as it sped past through a green light, I’d feel I was flying all the way home.

  Lisa and Donna were friends again, and Lisa still didn’t invite me on their Cairnburn nights, but suddenly I didn’t care. Three Saturday evenings in a row I let my mum think I was going to Lisa’s, and I walked the whole way to Mr Knox and Davina’s house, and I walked past two, three, four, five times and saw both cars in their driveway and the lights in their windows and once even caught a glimpse of him in an upstairs room.

  It had to happen. I knew it had to happen.

  *

  The days you were most likely to see his car, I’d worked out, were Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and one Wednesday, as I kept Tanya hanging about at the end of her road, Mr Knox’s Alfa Romeo finally pulled up at the lights.

  He was right beside us. Metres away. It was real. It was happening. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. ‘There he is,’ I said, and Tanya followed my gaze and said, ‘No, wise up, what are you doing?’

  ‘Mr Knox!’ I yelled, and I waved at the car. ‘Mr Knox!’

  His windows were wound halfway down – he was smoking – and he ducked to look out, then pressed a button to wind them down fully. ‘Hello?’ he said. ‘What is it, is everything okay?’

  ‘Mr Knox,’ I said, ‘we need a lift, will you give us a lift?’

  ‘Stop it!’ Tanya hissed at me.

  ‘Please, Mr Knox!’ I said. ‘We’re really late and it’s important.’

  The lights were still red, but any moment they’d go amber, and green.

  ‘Please, Mr Knox,’ I said. ‘You have to, please, you have to.’ I had taken to wearing a dab of Poison every day I had a French or Spanish lesson – even though Lisa told me I was a weirdo – and I could still smell the perfume, Davina’s perfume, on me, and I wondered if he could too, creeping from me in a slow green spiral.

  He took a drag of his cigarette and dropped it out of the window. ‘Where are you going?’

  Tanya hissed again and grabbed my arm, but I wrenched it free. The lights were amber, and, as they turned green, I was opening the passenger seat and getting in. There I was, in Mr Knox’s Alfa Romeo. It was happening.

  ‘Where do you need to go?’ he said again, and I said, ‘Anywhere.’ He looked at me and raised an eyebrow and snorted with laughter, and I thought he might tell me to get out, but he didn’t, he just revved the engine and then accelerated away, and in the wing mirror I caught a glimpse of Tanya’s stricken face, open-mouthed, and I looked at Mr Knox beside me – Mr Knox, I was there, now, finally, in Mr Knox’s car, me and Mr Knox – and I started laughing too.

  Afterwards, I couldn’t resist telling Tanya. I told her how he kissed me, gently at first, and his lips were soft. Then harder, with his tongue. I told her how he undid my tie and unbuttoned my shirt, and how his fingers were cool on my skin. I told her how he slipped his hand underneath my skirt and traced his fingertips up, then hooked his fingers under my panties and tugged them down.

  ‘He didn’t,’ she said, big-eyed and scared, and I promised her, ‘Yes, he did.’ And her shock spurred me on, and I said how it hurt at the start. I said there was blood. I said it was in the back seat of his Alfa Romeo, in a cul-de-sac near the golf club, and he’d spread his jacket out first and afterwards he’d smoked a cigarette.

  Once I’d told Tanya, I had to tell Donna, and Lisa, and when Lisa looked at me with slitted eyes and said I was lying, I got out the condom and showed them: as proof, I said, he’d given it me for next time.

  *

  I hadn’t counted on Tanya blubbering it all to her mother – all of it, including the time we went to his house. We got in such trouble for that, but the trouble he was in was worse.

  Even though I cracked as soon as my mum asked me, told her that I’d made it all up, she didn’t believe me, couldn’t understand why I’d make it up or how I’d even know what to make up in the first place. In a series of anguished phone calls, she and Tanya’s mother decided Mr Knox had an unhealthy hold over me, over all of us.

  There
’s no smoke, they agreed, without fire.

  They contacted the headmistress, and that was that: Mr Knox was called before the governors and forced to resign, and I was sent to a counsellor who tried to make me talk about my parents’ divorce. And then, in the autumn, we heard that Davina had left Mr Knox, had taken her babies and gone back to her mother’s. It must have been her worst nightmare come true, the merest suggestion that her husband, the father of her two children, would do it again. She, more than anyone else, would have known there was no such thing as innocence.

  I think she was right.

  I don’t believe it was a one-off.

  What happened that day is that he drove me five minutes up the road, then pulled a U-turn at the garage and drove back down the other side and made me get out not far from where he’d picked me up and said, ‘Now this was a one-off, you know,’ and laughed. But I can still see his expression as he dropped me off: the half-smile, the eyebrow raised even as he said it wasn’t to happen again.

  It had happened before. And there’s a certain intensity that only a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old girl can possess: I would have redoubled my efforts at snaring him. If only I hadn’t told Tanya.

  *

  I lifted my glass of wine and took a sip, and then another. Mr Knox and Melissa were still giggling over the cocktail menu, flicking back and forth through the pages. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, turning to the bar and addressing the nearest barman. He didn’t hear me, carried on carving twists of orange peel. ‘Excuse me,’ I said again, louder. He raised his finger: one moment. But I carried on. ‘You see the couple over there? By the window? The man with the black hair and the blonde girl?’ He frowned and put the orange down, looked at them, then back at me. ‘Can I pay for their drinks?’ I blurted.

  ‘You’d like to buy them a drink?’

  ‘Yes, whatever they’re having. All of it. I want to pay for all of it.’

  ‘I’ll just get the bar manager for you. One moment, please.’

  My heart was pounding. It was impulsive, and utterly stupid. My friends hadn’t even arrived yet, we’d still be sitting here when Mr Knox asked for his bill in a drink or so’s time, and how would I explain it to them, or to him, because the barman would point me out as the one who’d paid for it. Even if I asked them not to let on, not to give me away, my name would be on the credit-card slip, so he’d know. Or would he? Would my name mean anything to him, all these years later? Surely it would. Surely it must.