by SJI Holliday
‘It’s aubergine and sweet-potato pie for tea, Joanne,’ she said. ‘I hope that’s OK.’
‘My favourite,’ I said, and then we were there, at Rose Cottage, and all I could think about was how soon could we leave and go back to Claire’s, where her mum would have a freshly baked chocolate cake to celebrate the first day of the summer holidays.
I was vaguely aware of a change in the light. The sun making its way westwards to start a new day in another world. I was still staring at Rose Cottage when I saw the yellow hue of a lamp being switched on in the bay window, a shadow of a figure, then the curtains being drawn.
I wondered if it was Gareth Maloney.
On the other end of the bench, an old man was singing quietly to himself, and I turned to him with a feeling of mild alarm. I hadn’t noticed him sit down. Had he been talking to me?
‘Excuse me, have you got the time please?’
He pulled up the sleeve of a threadbare beige cardigan to reveal one of those watches with the elasticated metal strap. It looked about as old as him. ‘Ten to, hen,’ he said. ‘Bus’ll be here the now.’
‘Ten to six?’
He laughed, and it turned into a cough. I waited for him to recover himself, feeling panic rising in my chest. ‘Naw. Ten to seven.’
Had I really been sitting there for over two hours?
‘Thanks,’ I muttered, already off the seat.
I took off down Burndale Road in the direction of town.
Claire hated it when I was late.
12
I nodded at the barman as I walked in. He was slowly drying a pint glass with a blue and white dishcloth.
‘She’s up the back,’ he said. ‘You’ve got one in the tap, I’ll bring it over.’
His name was Gary and he’d been the year below me and Claire at school. He was all right now, but he used to be a nasty little shit at school and I hadn’t completely forgiven him. I ignored him and walked past a crowd of teenagers who were nursing a pint between them and methodically ripping up the beer mats. Next to them, an elderly couple sat, studiously ignoring each other, him with a half-drunk pint of something dark in front of him, her with a stemmed glass of clear liquid with a sliver of lemon drowning beneath the surface.
‘You’re late,’ she said and squinted up at me, taking in my latest follicular disaster.
‘Sorry …’ I let my voice tail off. ‘Was someone with you?’
To the right of her sat an empty pint glass, the foam still mobile on the inside, suggesting that it’d recently been finished. Her own glass had trickles of condensation running down the outside, her sauv blanc still icy cold.
Her eyes flicked to the right and she blinked a couple of times. I could always tell when Claire was about to tell me a lie. We joked about it. Sang the Eagles song about the lying eyes. I didn’t feel like singing it then, though; I felt a strange uneasiness.
‘Jake was here. You just missed him.’
Who else.
‘Hmm. It’s almost as if you magic him away when I appear. How do you do that, Claire?’ I hadn’t meant for it to come out nastily, but when I played it back in my head, I realised it sounded bitter. As far as Claire was concerned, I had no interest in Jake, and the feeling was mutual. He was just the boy from across the road who, for some reason, she’d taken a shine to. Or maybe it was the other way round. Claire was good at collecting waifs and strays. Maybe I had more in common with Jake than I thought.
She opened her mouth to say something just as Gary the barman appeared. He slid a Belhaven Best mat towards me and placed my pint of Strongbow on top. Claire smiled at him and he walked off, stopping on his way past the teenagers to scoop up the ripped pile of beer mats they’d left at the edge of the table.
Claire took a sip of her wine.
I sat down. ‘What were you going to say?’
She sighed. ‘Doesn’t matter. How are you, Jo?’
I gazed at her and smiled. She looked lovely, as usual, her blonde hair twisted up neatly at the back of her head. She put her glass back down on her mat and the soft chiffon of her blouse rustled with the movement. I glanced down at my own scruffy outfit and felt grubby. I probably didn’t smell too fresh either, compared with Claire and her characteristic floral scent. She stared at me across the table and her eyes shone in that way that they did when she wasn’t really there.
When people met Claire for the first time they’d be forgiven for thinking there was nothing wrong with her. It was only occasionally, when it happened like this: when the light changed behind her eyes, like someone had flipped a switch. Then before you knew it, she’d blink, and she’d be back and her eyes would say silently, Now, where was I? I rarely noticed it any more.
‘So Scott dumped me,’ I said.
She blinked. Came back. ‘Yeah. God, that’s shitty, Jo. I thought things were going well. Didn’t you say you’d talked about getting engaged later this year?’
I picked up my pint and downed half of it in one. ‘Hmm. Yeah. I really don’t know, to be honest. I mean, he’d been a bit odd for a while, now that I think about it.’
‘Odd, how?’
‘Oh, you know. Distant. Like he had something to tell me but he didn’t know how to. I reckon there might be someone else …’
‘The prick! Who?’
‘Well, he didn’t actually say there was someone else, but … I don’t know. Really. I mean, what else could it be? I was still giving him BJs …’
Claire laughed. ‘So oral sex is the gauge of a relationship now, is it? Did you read that in Cosmo or something?’ She shook her head. ‘You’re priceless, you know.’
I stared at her. ‘I wasn’t joking. Don’t you do that with Jake? I mean, it’s probably one of the easiest things you can do, what with—’
She gave me a filthy look and I stopped talking. Fucking hell, Jo. You do say the most inappropriate things sometimes.
‘I’m going to the toilet,’ she said. ‘You should get yourself another drink. I’m fine with this one.’
She moved as she spoke, sliding her way along the wooden bench seat. She pulled the wheelchair in closer, then put her hand on the table and levered herself up. I leant forwards to steady her chair, then stopped myself and sat back. She hated it when people tried to help her like that. She hovered, half-standing for a second or two, before flopping into the wheelchair. She swivelled and spun it out of the alcove, then propelled herself along with her arms towards the ladies’. She rammed the metal kick plate with her footplate and disappeared inside.
The barman reappeared at the table. ‘Same again?’ he said. He looked at me pityingly. Must be hard having a friend like that.
No, I thought. It must be hard having a friend like me.
‘Just for me, Gary,’ I said and handed him a pile of coins.
He’d brought me the second pint and Claire still hadn’t come back. I contemplated going in to see if she was OK, but I knew she wouldn’t like it.
I tried to formulate the words in my head into an appropriate sentence.
I’ve seen him, Claire.
Remember the boy from the woods, Claire? As if she could forget.
Claire, I’ve got something to tell you …
I heard the door squeaking open and the sound of her wheels swishing across the carpet. I think if I was her, I’d stay in the chair. Sit at the end of the table. But no. She manoeuvred herself back onto the bench and slid the wheelchair back into the alcove.
Smiled.
Pretended that everything was all right.
‘I saw Bridie earlier,’ she said. ‘Apparently some girl’s been attacked up at the Track …’
‘Claire, I’ve got something to tell you.’ I downed the rest of my pint. Refused to catch her eye. ‘Remember the boy from the woods? I’ve seen him, Claire. He came into the shop today. Bold as brass. He’s living here. He came back. His name’s Gareth Maloney. I’ve told Davie and he’s going to help. I—’
‘Shut up, Jo.’
‘What
? I−’
‘It was twenty years ago, Jo. You’ve got to forget this now. You’ve got to let it go. You’ve got to deal with what’s happening to you now. I’m worried about you, Jo. I don’t want you getting ill again …’
How could she say that? Her of all people. Sat in that chair. Having those blackouts all the time. Ever since it happened, I’d rarely thought of anything else. It had destroyed me as much as it had destroyed her. We had to talk about it. Didn’t she even understand why I got ill?
‘Claire, for Christ’s sake! How can you tell me to forget it? Don’t you want the police to catch him? To make him pay for what he did to you?’
‘Please, Jo. I don’t want to talk about this. Forget it. For me. Please.’
But how could I forget it? It wasn’t just this. There was so much other stuff she didn’t know.
I had to tell her. It had been eating away at me for so long, and now … now I just wanted to tell someone. I wanted to tell Claire.
She laid a hand on my arm and I blinked back a tear. ‘Just leave it, Jo. Call me a taxi, please. I want to go home.’
13
After it first happened, they weren’t sure she was going to wake up at all. I stood outside the window of the private room she was in. I think it’s called the high-dependency unit now, but back then it was plain old intensive care.
The corridor smelled of bleach and boiled cabbage, with an underlying hint of dirty nappies.
I remember pressing my face up against the glass, trying to see her. A small shape on the bed, wrapped up in white sheets, a pulley attached to her pelvis and legs, trying to keep the bones in place. Hoping they might knit back together again.
Later, I found out that she’d broken two vertebrae at the base of her spine and that the compression had caused a partial severance of her spinal cord close to the base of her neck. She’d also stopped breathing for long enough to cause oxygen starvation to the brain – she was more than likely going to have brain damage.
Back then, they just told me she’d broken her back. At first I imagined her snapped in two like an old rag doll.
‘Can’t I go in, Mum?’ I’d said. The tears had left a sticky, snotty film on my cheeks and I had tried to wipe it off. Someone else’s mother might’ve hugged them, then done that thing where they spit on a tissue and wipe your face. Not mine.
‘You’ve seen her through the window, Jo. What’re you wanting to go in for? She’s been in here a week and you’ve no’ wanted to come in to visit her once.’
My mum was drinking coffee from a beige plastic cup. She kept blowing on it and the puffs of steam smelled like burnt mince stuck to the bottom of a pan. I hadn’t wanted to see her at first. I was too scared about what I would see. But then, from the window, I could see that they were trying hard to keep her joined together.
I didn’t reply, just looked up at her through my eyelashes. My bottom lip quivered.
Mum sighed. ‘Five more minutes. I’ll meet you outside,’ she said. I watched her back as she disappeared down the corridor. Her shoes squeaked on the shiny lino. I wondered if I’d be able to find her again, but then I remembered what the nurse at the desk had said when we’d arrived: ‘Follow the blue line for intensive care.’
I’d follow it back towards the car park, where my mum would be standing outside with a Superkings Menthol stuffed in her mouth, sucking like she was trying to get the last dregs from a carton of Ribena.
‘Hello, hen. Can I help? Are you lost?’ I turned round to see another nurse, this one blonde-haired and fat-faced. She was smiling at me, bent down like she was about to pat me on the head. She was short and dumpy like three marshmallows on a skewer. I took a step back.
‘I’m just visiting my friend.’ I pointed at the window. ‘She’s in there …’ I turned back towards the nurse. ‘My name’s Jo,’ I added.
The nurse’s eyebrows shot up into her fringe. She squeezed her lips together like she was snapping her purse shut. I could almost hear the cogs whirring inside her head. She blinked once, then she was all smiles again, as if she’d reset herself. ‘Is your mum with you? You shouldn’t really be here on your own, hen.’ She glanced up and down the corridor, her head turning quickly this way and that like a little bird. ‘Wait there.’ She scurried off, her feet making fast little squeaks as she went.
I went back to the window and stared in again, cupping my hands round the sides of my face to block out the reflections at either side.
Claire’s bed was side-on to the window, so I could see all of her right side. One arm was outside the covers, a little stick and a tube attached to the back of her hand. The tube led up to a metal stand with a big plastic bag full of clear liquid hanging off the side. On top of her was what looked like a metal-legged coffee table without a top. Sticking out of that were her legs, attached to two thick straps.
Her chest moved up and down as if she was being pumped up and deflated. In the background was the faint hiss of the machine that was blowing air into her lungs; over that, the constant beep beep beep of the machine that was monitoring her heart.
I’d seen this stuff on TV. I watched Casualty in bed every Saturday night. Mum always said it wasn’t suitable for tenyear-olds, but she never bothered to check if I was watching it or not. It’s not as if she was in the house to check. She and dad went out to the pub most Saturdays, leaving me with a microwaved cheese and tomato pizza, a bottle of cheap cola and a packet of Maltesers. The number for the pub was written on the ripped-off back of a fag packet and stuck onto the fridge under a magnet. I’d only ever had to call them once, when a man had come round the door saying he was collecting for something and I hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at me in my short summer nightie.
The reason I wanted to go into Claire’s room was that I wanted to talk to her. I’d heard the adults whispering about it when I’d been in the supermarket with Mum, some saying they didn’t think she could hear anything. Mum ignoring them.
I reckoned she could hear just fine. I’d seen it on Casualty.
Her face looked peaceful, her hair brushed out onto the pillow, like she was sleeping and someone had given her a makeover for when she woke up.
I pressed a hand to the glass.
‘Jo! Come away from there, right now. Where is your bloody mother?’
I spun round in the direction of the raised voice, one that I’d heard many times before. Several sets of squeaking footsteps. Claire’s raspberry-faced mum striding towards me, flanked by Claire’s dad and the fat nurse.
I spotted my own mum in the distance, just round the bend and coming towards us, panting from her hastily stubbed-out fag. ‘Linda,’ she was saying. ‘Leave her …’
Claire’s mum was at me by then. She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard, all the while spitting in my face: ‘Why? Why? Why?’
I tried to wriggle away, but she had a tight grip on me. The nurse and Claire’s dad, Mike, were trying to grab at her arms and pull her away from me.
Eventually, her grip loosened and I twisted away, but one of her arms swung back, catching my mum – who had appeared at the back of the commotion and tried to squeeze in at exactly the wrong time – square in the face.
My mum’s hands flew to her face, just as a single spurt of bright-red blood shot free from her smashed nose, spraying the window of Claire’s room like a streak of wet paint.
Linda started to wail: a long, low sound that reminded me of one of those wild dogs that you see on nature documentaries. The ones that slaughter sheep.
I slid back against the wall and down onto the floor as the scene unfolded in front of me. Mike comforting Linda, the nurse holding a thick white pad up to Mum’s nose and getting her to sit down on one of the blue plastic chairs. I shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears, sang quietly to myself until eventually it all stopped.
14
I’d never had a problem sitting in the pub on my own.
I wondered briefly about what Claire had started to tell me about the a
ttack at the Track. Decided it was probably nothing. Maybe I’d ask Gray about it next time I saw him.
Poor Claire.
She thinks I don’t know what she really thinks of me, but I do. I always have. But I still think of her as one of my best friends, because in reality who did I have? Craig, of course. But I couldn’t spend all my time with him, even if I wanted to.
Claire and me had been pushed together when we were toddlers, when Claire’s mum offered to take me back to theirs after nursery because she thought Mum was struggling for childcare. She wasn’t. Not with my gran just up the road. But she let me go to Claire’s anyway, just to spite her mother. I never knew what my gran was meant to have done that was so bad that my mum hated her, but she did.
Claire’s mum was one of those mums who like to be involved in the community. She didn’t work, because Claire’s dad’s job as the manager of the town’s biggest bank gave him a high standing and a high salary. Of course he wasn’t in such an elevated position now, since the bank had collapsed due to its ridiculous lending policies and had had to get bailed out by the government. After that, his job got moved to the head office. He became obsolete. But forty years’ service had given him a pension that would make you sick, and now he spent most of his time propping up the bar in the golf club, talking to all the other unemployed bankers.
Her mum, oblivious to the plight of the people who’d lost their homes in the economic disaster, somehow managed to spin the situation to her advantage and started a support group for the middle-class unemployed, catchily named ‘New Beginnings’.
I don’t know what I ever did, but Claire’s mum took an instant dislike to me as a child.
She tolerated me when my mum and dad were still around, even after the accident, once the dust had settled and Claire was back at home.
Back in the eighties, my parents did her a good deal on jewellery, which she sold at parties in her house that she catered for with vol-au-vents and cheap German plonk. Like Tupperware parties, but with nine-carat gold lockets and charm bracelets and cubic zirconia stud earrings. She never wore the stuff herself, though, after one of her fingers had turned green from a bottom-of-the-range rose-gold dress ring my mum had given her as a ‘Client Loyalty Bonus’.
