The Kiss

by Lucy Courtenay

  Leaning one elbow on a list of empirical and molecular formulae, I take off my bust-up shoes and massage my toes. New shoes would be good.

  ‘Talk me through both,’ I say wearily.

  Tab lingers on her description of the low-cut green jumper a bit longer than the tight-fitting blue one. When I advise green, she argues the case for blue, so I switch arguments, which brings her back to the green again.

  ‘Rehearsal starting at seven?’ I check when we have exhausted both options and she is as confused as she was at the start of the conversation.

  ‘Assuming I ever get any clothes on. Any messages for Jem?’

  ‘Tell him to kiss Maria. She blatantly wants him to. He can do it in front of Sam like a Crimewatch reconstruction.’

  ‘I’m not sure Sam could cope with two girlfriends kissing the same guy in front of him.’

  I rub my eyes. ‘OK, scrap that. Anyway, he does his bodypainting thing on Thursdays. He won’t be around much.’

  ‘Is he good at the body art thing?’

  ‘You saw what he did to my hand,’ I say.

  ‘I dreamed about Sam last night,’ she tells me. ‘He was singing to me, only I was on the top of this bus on the way to Ibiza and I was leaving him behind. I tried to stop the driver, but he was a dog so he didn’t understand.’

  Much as I love her, I need Tab to go away. ‘I have to learn about the ratio of atoms in compounds, babe,’ I say, hoping she’ll take the hint. ‘Will you try and get a decision out of Honor about the show tonight? I really need to know.’

  When she’s gone I set my alarm for one hour. I’ll learn as many formulae as I can and then forage for food. There are usually a couple of tins of spaghetti knocking around in the cupboard. It isn’t steak, but it will do.

  My phone rings again. I snatch it up, irritated now. ‘What?’

  ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ I say. ‘I passed it to the police.’

  Dave sounds terrified. ‘No way, Dee! You—’

  ‘I’m joking,’ I say shortly. ‘I’m not doing this.’

  ‘They said I could offer you up to a hundred and fifty quid. They’re trialling these things, testing them out. If yours works, they’ll do more in the area. It’s worth their investment.’

  I’m pressing the phone so hard to my ear that my ear hairs are buzzing. ‘No.’

  ‘Dee, I meant something to you once. They’ll kill me if I don’t sort my debt out. You want that for me? You want my death on your conscience?’

  ‘I thought they were only after your balls,’ I say, and hang up.

  On Friday evening I prowl behind the Gaslight bar, watching the doors of the auditorium like a cat waiting for the mouse convention to emerge for their half-time cheese. Honor is making a final decision about the show tonight. They’re in there right now, deciding my future. That’s what this is. No show means no job, no money, no college, no research work, nothing ahead of me but pulling pints and dreaming of what could have been.

  ‘I’m guessing you know that if she cans it, there’ll only be enough work for me and Jem?’ Val says, turning the screws. ‘I’m sorry love, but that’s economics.’

  Keynes is nodding sagely somewhere, an otherworldly wind riffling through his moustache. I nod, biting my lip. I can taste the blood.

  ‘It’ll be panto season in a month’s time,’ she says. ‘Plenty then for a hard worker like you.’

  A hundred and fifty would tide me over until panto season, with a couple of extra bar jobs through Oz along the way and the odd stroke of luck.

  ‘Great,’ I say, hopelessly. ‘Thanks.’

  Val pops out for milk as Jem strides among the tables, disinfectant in one hand and cleaning cloth in the other. The bruising on his face has gone down, and is now brown and yellow at the edges. Whoever did it really worked him over. I hope they have a couple of bruises of their own to show for it. I watch him for a bit, wondering if I’ll ever see him again after tonight.

  Coming up to the bar, he sets his squeegee and his cloth down. ‘You look like a corpse,’ he says bluntly.

  I should have conditioned my hair this morning, I realize. It is standing out around my head like an anaemic microphone. My shirt needs a wash too. My mind hasn’t been on shampoo bottles and laundry baskets of late.

  ‘I saw you in a car yesterday,’ he says. ‘On Leasford Hill.’

  I blanch. ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Running.’

  I stare at him, feeling hunted. Your deeds will find you out.

  ‘Who was the guy?’ he asks. Ever so casually.

  ‘No one important,’ I manage to reply.

  ‘Looked like maybe that ex of yours.’ He studies me. ‘Whoever it was, was making you laugh.’

  I remember the runner now. The Pringles crumbs. Talk about timing.

  ‘Been to the bank yet?’ he says, with a sudden subject swerve that should make me feel calmer but doesn’t.

  I roll my eyes jerkily. I probably look like a terrified cow. ‘I’ll go in my own time, OK?’

  I wish I’d never told him about the flaming bank. Right now I’m feeling like a kid caught shoplifting and I haven’t even done anything. The air crackles. We are back in the wardrobe, talking of life and death, guilt and responsibility, and the scent of him is making me breathless.

  I need to get away from him. I need to know what they are deciding through the double doors of doom. The two elements come together with perfect urgency as I half-run towards the auditorium doors, tripping over my bag in my haste. Opening the doors as quietly as I can, I enter the dark space.

  The stage is lit softly, illuminating a beautiful set: an Italian courtyard, cobbles on the floor, a flight of stairs rising to some kind of balcony. The cast is sitting slumped in metal chairs beside an ornately tiled fountain.

  ‘More!’ Honor shouts, banging away at the piano.

  No one is giving it much. The air of hopelessness is tangible. The voice coach rubs her face with long-taloned fingers. ‘Give me a reason to keep this going, people. A weddin’ and a beddin’, it’s where we’ll all be headin’, although the bride is lookin’ kind of pale . . .’

  ‘A weddin’ and a beddin’,’ drones the chorus in response, ‘is something Hero’s dreadin’, and not for fear of treadin’ on her veil . . .’

  ‘Can’t say I’m looking forward to it much myself,’ says Patricia.

  I slide out again as silently as I entered. They won’t be continuing after tonight. My granny could sing that stuff better, and she’s dead.

  The contents of my upturned bag lie spilled around Jem’s feet beside the bar. Tampons, tissues, a hairbrush. The swipe machine is in his hand. I think haphazardly of a guinea pig facing a jaguar deep in the Amazonian jungle because that’s the way I roll when I’m in a corner and there is precisely no way out.

  ‘When exactly,’ Jem says in a voice of dangerous calm, ‘did you start keeping a spare card reader in your bag?’

  I am so frightened by the sight of Jem holding the machine that I practically wet myself.

  ‘What are you doing, going through my stuff?’ I manage to say.

  ‘You kicked your bag over,’ he says. He rises slowly to his feet, waggles the incriminating gadget from side to side. ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘I know it looks bad,’ I begin, trying to get a grip on the situation. ‘But seriously, I—’

  He pulls his arm back and lobs the machine across the room. It skids on the crusty carpet, takes out a wastepaper basket, whangs into a fire extinguisher with the most appalling clang and breaks in half. He points at the bruise on his face, his voice way calmer than his gaze. ‘I got this for you,’ he says.

  I stare at him, uncomprehending. ‘What?’

  ‘Go to the bank. Go to t
he bank. How many times do I have to say it?’ He runs his hands through his hair, swears under his breath. ‘You were about to rip off my mother, Delilah!’

  I urgently need to explain. ‘I wasn’t—’

  He is advancing towards me. ‘Banks don’t care if you’ve spent your own money. They only call when there’s a problem. A real problem. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid as to add to that problem.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to use it! I swear!’

  My head is going BOOM BOOM BOOM. I can’t think. The questions are still coming.

  ‘You carry spare card readers around for fun? Where did you get it?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to use it!’ I repeat helplessly. ‘I was going to chuck it in the river after work!’

  His expression suddenly changes. ‘You got it from your so-called ex, didn’t you? Dave, the guy in the car? The one that was making you laugh, the one you wept all over me for?’

  He isn’t listening. This is bad. I cover my face with my palms. THIEF is as good as inked on the backs of

  my hands.

  ‘I can’t believe I fell for you,’ he says in wonder. ‘I thought you were real, Delilah. What kind of idiot am I?’

  There is a massive wrecking ball of misunderstanding crashing through the bar, choking everyone with dust.

  ‘I know what you must think, but I wasn’t going to use it,’ I insist, shaking like tissue paper in a high wind. ‘It was tempting, but I wasn’t – things have been really hard lately, but I would never . . .’

  He leans towards me, his voice low and hard.

  ‘Liar.’

  Hell isn’t hot. It’s a freezing, merciless space, bleak and dark and lightless, unbroken by anything but buses going the other way. I throw my phone into the first bin I pass on leaving the Gaslight. Chuck my holey Vans in the next one. All the screaming and shouting and pleading in the world, and Jem still looked at me like I was a heap of nothing. I showed myself the door before he could do the honours.

  I make it home with shredded feet and get into bed in my clothes, and there I pretty much stay. Rigid with injustice and shrivelled with guilt at the same time. Dry-eyed. Thinking.

  At least ten times over the weekend I sit bolt upright as a car pulls up outside, convinced it’s the police coming to cart me off to jail. I didn’t do it! I want to shout at the walls. I did nothing!

  At times like this, it would be nice to have a mum that I can talk to. But I don’t, so I keep staring at the walls and thinking. By Wednesday my sheets are starting to stink, but I can’t find the energy to do anything about it. I can barely move.

  ‘Someone to see you,’ Dad shouts up the stairs on Wednesday afternoon.

  Tab stops at my bedroom door, wafting her hand vigorously in front of her nose. ‘It reeks in here,’ she declares. ‘What’s going on? Why haven’t you been answering your phone? Oz said today you haven’t been in college all week.’

  ‘I’ve been ill,’ I say, not looking at her.

  Picking her way gingerly through the mess on my floor, she opens my bedroom window and wafts her hands some more. ‘Since when has illness stopped us talking to each other at least once a day?’

  ‘I don’t have a phone any more.’

  ‘Why weren’t you there when we came out of the last rehearsal? Honor canned us. Our sorrows got so drowned they grew tails and fish gills. Even Sam had half a shandy.’ Tabby stops and visibly rewinds. ‘You don’t have a phone any more? What are you, dead?’

  The mid-October air coming through my window is cool and a little damp. Reviving, somehow. I burst into tears. Tab rushes to put her arms around me.

  ‘Is it Jem?’ she asks.

  This provokes a fresh storm of weeping. I tell her about Dave’s inane idea about the cash fraud and about Jem hating me forever.

  ‘And the stupidity of it all is that it started with me doubting him and his friends,’ I croak, gasping for air. ‘And now he’s doubting me and mine. He won’t ever trust me again because he thinks I’ve lied to him and that’s his worst thing. He got that bruise for me, he said,’ I add with a feeble flash of pride.

  The look on Tab’s face cheers me up a little. ‘He must really love you for a bruise like that,’ she says. ‘What happened? Did he fight Dave?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I wail. ‘This should be the big finale when I fall into his arms and he tells me how he got his shiner by vanquishing the evil Nazgul for love of me and instead I’m lying here with my life in shreds!’

  ‘Everything’s a mess,’ Tabby says gloomily. ‘The show’s been cancelled. Sam and Maria are still together. Warren tried to get my number on Friday night. Patricia is talking about moving to the Bahamas. Desmond’s at death’s door and Eunice is heartbroken. She’s been in love with Desmond for years, Patricia says. The only good thing all week has been Oz. He’s been so sweet that he’s stopped me dwelling on the rest.’

  I wipe my eyes. Yelp as I get a blast of my own breath reflected back at me off Tabby’s shoulder.

  ‘Give me a minute?’ I say out of the corner of my mouth.

  ‘You might need longer than that,’ she says kindly.

  I return after a long shower, having brushed my teeth till they bled, scrubbed myself from head to foot, conditioned every inch of my hair and tried my damnedest to wash as much of myself down the drain as I could. Dad will kill me for using so much hot water, but as I haven’t showered in several days I figure I’m owed at least half an hour. The thoughts I have been having are starting to crystallize into something. I daren’t look too closely in case the crystals break up again.

  In my absence, Tab has stripped my bed, gathered my scatterings into manageable piles on my desk and chair and opened the other window for extra air. She fills me in on the details of Friday night as I hunt out clean clothes, and I hang on every word, waiting for the bit where she says: ‘And then they found a bust-up fake card machine and called the police!’ She doesn’t. Jem has cleared up my mess and not reported me, which makes me feel worse than ever.

  There has to be a way out of this. There must be something I can fix. Maybe not Jem’s feelings for me, but something.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Tab asks.

  ‘Go to the bank, I guess,’ I say wearily. ‘Give them a chance to tell me what their problem is. You never know,

  I might get some money back.’

  ‘Oz said he’d take me out tonight to cheer me up,’ says Tabby. ‘Come with us?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d be too pleased,’ I say.

  Tab rolls her eyes. ‘It’s not like that.’

  I gesture at the pile of papers on my desk. ‘I’ve missed three days of class. I need to crack on with that.’

  ‘So you’re not quitting college?’ she says, looking relieved.

  ‘Not yet, apparently,’ I say, a little wryly.

  My best friend flops back on my bare mattress. ‘You know what really stinks about the whole show thing?’ she tells the ceiling tiles. ‘The scenery they built for us at the theatre. They’ll rip it down at the weekend, turn it into firewood. It’s stupid to feel so sad about it, but I do. I should be more bothered about all the wasted work we’ve done learning the songs, and the words, and the dance steps. But it’s the pointless scenery that gets me. Dead before it ever came to life.’

  When she has left, I carry my old sheets downstairs, stick them in the washing machine and make my bed

  with some fresh ones. Then I do myself a ham sandwich, return to my room and sit down at my desk to gaze

  at formulae and think about things that aren’t formulae at all.

  I feel like a surfer in Hawaii, paddling out on a soggy tissue box towards the biggest wave of my life. But hey, it’s my tissue box. Sink or swim, at least I’m giving it a go. And that’s all I can do.

  Oz beams as
I slide into Economics just before lunch on Thursday. ‘Wasn’t expecting you in this side of Christmas,’ he says. ‘Tab said you looked like a bulldozer had flattened you yesterday afternoon.’

  My new Vans have been trying to eat my socks for the last half-hour. ‘I just unflattened myself,’ I say, yanking them up. ‘How was your date with Tab last night?’

  ‘It was a friends thing,’ he corrects. ‘She said “just friends” to me about fifteen times, just to make sure

  I’d got the message. The other people at the bar thought she was my girlfriend though. So that was nice.’ He

  gazes a little wistfully at the whiteboard, where the teacher is jotting down stuff about aggregate supply and demand.

  The morning I’ve had still feels unbelievable. Explanations from Egg Face about rigged cash machines in town, a couple of faxes with my signature on, and just short of four hundred quid back in my account. Seriously. It feels like I just found a unicorn in Tesco’s. And it’s incredible what you can achieve when you ride through a busy morning on a unicorn’s back.

  ‘Can you lend me your notes to cover what I’ve missed this week?’ I ask.

  ‘Haven’t made many, but you’re welcome to what I’ve got. Too busy trying to sort next week’s Hallowe’en disaster. I took my eye off the ball for a couple of days because I was behind on college work and now everywhere’s booked. Can you believe it? Biggest money spinner of the year and no venue. Nightmare.’

  I am almost taken out by a second brain tsunami in as many days. Cogs whirr and turn, wheels within wheels.

  ‘Have you tried the Gaslight?’ I say.

  ‘That’s no good, Tab’s show’s in—’ Oz stops and backtracks. ‘The show’s off, isn’t it? Do you think I could get a deal on hiring it if I move fast enough?’

  ‘Oh, the show’s still on,’ I say as he fumbles for his phone. ‘Kind of. But you’ll probably still get a good deal.’

  He looks surprised. ‘Tab didn’t mention that last night.’

  ‘She doesn’t know yet. Organize your party there, Oz. Fancy dress for Hallowe’en,’ I instruct. ‘I promise it’ll be worth your while.’