Heart-Shaped Bruise

by Byrne, Tanya

  ‘Oh,’ she said, drawing it out so it sounded about a week long.

  I shouldn’t have bitten, but I did. ‘Oh, what?’

  ‘You like Sid. Awkward.’

  I chuckled. ‘Yeah. Okay.’

  She was the first one to call me on it. I hadn’t considered it before then, but as soon as I did, the tops of my ears started burning.

  ‘Awkward. Awkward. Awkward,’ she said with each step.

  I made myself look at her feet in case my cheeks looked as hot as they felt. She was wearing high heels, green suede high heels. I remember staring at them. The teachers at St Jude’s didn’t wear green suede high heels.

  ‘Here we are! Come in,’ she said when we got to her office, sweeping in with her arm out as though she were introducing me to an old friend. ‘Welcome to Graceland. Get it? I’m Grace, and this is my, y’know, land.’

  I raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You’re quite the wordsmith.’

  When I stepped into the office, I had to stop.

  ‘I know.’ She nodded, walking over to the chair opposite her desk and picking up a handful of newspapers so that I could sit down. ‘This is what the inside of my head looks like.’

  I’d never seen anything like it. The teachers’ offices at St Jude’s had crooked stained-glass windows and oil paintings of sullen alumni glaring down from the wood-panelled walls. But the walls of Grace’s office were covered with posters for giving up smoking and safe sex, and the light from the only window was filtered though the tired leaves of a spider plant that hung over the edge of the windowsill as though it was trying to summon the energy to throw itself into the bin beneath it.

  When I sat on the chair opposite her desk, she had to slide a pile of paperwork out of the way so that she could see me. ‘Peek-a-boo!’ She grinned, then gasped, ‘Oh!’ and scribbled something illegible on to a pink heart-shaped Post-it note.

  When she slapped it on the desk, I tried to read it. I think it said MILK, but I gave up and looked into the mug by her phone instead.

  ‘Science project?’ I asked, pulling a face.

  ‘Don’t worry about her, that’s Penny,’ she said, and I blinked at her.

  ‘You named your mug?’

  ‘Penny, penicillin, get it? She’s gonna save the world one day, aren’t you, Penny?’ She tapped the rim of the mug with her pen. ‘Yes, you are.’

  Sometimes, when I’m sitting in Doctor Gilyard’s tiny white office, I think of that moment, of Grace and her pink heart-shaped Post-it notes.

  ‘Right, Rose. Rose Glass,’ she said, sliding a file out of one of the precarious piles on her desk. The pile wobbled, but didn’t fall. ‘How are you doing? Tell me everything.’

  I shrugged. ‘Fine.’

  ‘How are you finding the College of North London?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And your classes?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’re doing A levels, right?’ She looked down at the file. ‘English lit, sociology, history and art and design? That’s a lot of reading. Are you keeping up?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘And I see you’ve made friends. Sid’s in my drama class. He’s brilliant, isn’t he? So sweet.’ She gave me a theatrical wink.

  I noticed the framed Spring Awakening poster on the wall behind her desk and suddenly wished I was in her drama class. When Olivia had suggested doing Spring Awakening at St Jude’s, Mr Carmichael almost had a stroke.

  ‘And Nancy seems lovely, from what I’ve heard,’ she said, and I remembered why I wasn’t doing Drama. Why I was there.

  ‘She’s been through a lot,’ she added and I looked at the poster again.

  ‘You have too, Rose,’ she said, her voice lowering. It made my stomach knot.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘How are things at home?’

  I shrugged. ‘Fine.’

  ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Your parents just got divorced, right? You’re living with your mother now. How’s that going?’ She held her hand up. ‘Don’t say fine!’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good? That’s two words! Now we’re getting somewhere.’ She pointed at me over the desk. ‘Let’s make it three. Tell me about your dad, do you still see him?’

  I knew she’d ask, but it still made the tops of my ears burn again so I lowered my chin until my hair fell over them, sure that if she saw how red they were, she’d know I was lying.

  ‘No. He’s a surgeon, so he works weird hours.’

  ‘And your mum?’

  ‘She’s a medical rep so she’s on the road a lot.’

  ‘That must be hard.’

  ‘I suppose.’ I started to pick at my nail varnish. It was so quiet that I could hear a tutor in the corridor berating a student for not turning off his phone in class.

  ‘How’s your mum? All of this must have been really hard on her.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said with a long sigh, pressing her fingers to her eyelids. If she wasn’t a teacher, I think that’s the point at which she would have picked me up and shaken me. I kind of want to introduce her to Doctor Gilyard, sometimes, but I’m sure that if you put the two of them in a room together, one of them would spontaneously combust.

  ‘Okay, Rose,’ she said, holding her hands up. ‘Okay. I know things are all over the place right now and I’m the last person you want to talk to about it. I do. If I was seventeen, there’d be about forty-seven people I’d talk to before I talked to a teacher, including the bloke who used to stand outside Oxford Circus tube with a megaphone asking everyone if they’re a sinner or a winner.’ She smiled softly. ‘All I’m saying is that I just got divorced. I know how horrible it is at home right now. I’m just grateful I don’t have kids so that they don’t have to see me sobbing and eating cheesecake straight from the freezer.’

  ‘It isn’t like that.’ I sat back in the chair with my arms crossed. I don’t know what she said to make me so defensive, if I’d agreed or pretended to cry about how miserable I was, like I did with Mike and Eve, she would have left me alone. But I glared across the desk at her. ‘Mum’s fine. Not all women are hysterical and eat their body weight in Ben and Jerry’s because their husbands leave them.’

  As soon as I had said it, I looked away, furious with myself. I don’t know how, but she’d found a raw nerve and dug her five-inch heel in.

  I expected her to swipe back, but her eyes lit up. ‘Hello, Rose. There you are.’

  She smiled but I couldn’t look at her and stared at the Spice Girls alarm clock on top of her filing cabinet instead.

  ‘Where’ve you been, Rose? This girl,’ I could see her waving my file out of the corner of my eye, ‘the girl who sits doodling in class and paints half-arsed bowls of fruit isn’t the girl I’ve been told about. The girl with the bright red hair who reads Andrea Dworkin between lessons. What’s going on, Rose?’

  When I didn’t respond, she carried on. ‘Your English lit tutor says that you spend most of your time looking out of the window, but the moment he said something remotely negative about Daisy Buchanan you were all over him.’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s what happens when you read too much Dworkin.’

  ‘Hey,’ she said, her gaze narrowing. ‘Humour as a defence mechanism is my thing. Get your own thing.’ She wagged her finger at me. ‘And drunk on Dworkin or not, your English lit tutor said you were articulate and witty, if a little dismissive of the point he was trying to make. But then, you’re sixteen, you’re supposed to be dismissive. You know everything, right?’

  I heard her chuckle and I think she was waiting for me to chuckle back. When I didn’t, she sighed. ‘Okay. Rose, I know how painful this is. I can feel it, believe me. I’d gladly have a bikini wax over this.’ She sighed again, more melodramatically this time. ‘But the reason I’m putting us both through this is because I think you need to talk to someone. You’re obviously very bright but your tutors say that you’re quiet and wit
hdrawn in class and you’ve lost weight since I last saw you.’

  That hit me like a slap. ‘Hold on.’ I glared at her over the cluttered desk. ‘Let me get this straight, there are eight thousand students at this college. Eight thousand. Someone came into the canteen last week with a butcher’s knife and you drag me in here because I’ve lost a couple of pounds?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t drag, Rose. I charm.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ I snapped. And I shouldn’t have, but I could feel the panic bristling across my scalp.

  ‘I don’t want anything from you, Rose. I just want you to be okay.’

  ‘I am okay.’

  The phone started ringing then. I waited for her to answer it, but she picked it up and put it back down again. ‘Okay. If you say so. But I’m just saying: I know things are rubbish right now and it helps to have someone to talk to.’

  ‘I do have people to talk to. Do you?’

  She laughed at that, then looked at me with a small smile. ‘Not really. My best friend had a miscarriage last week. She’s been trying for years and it was her third so she’s devastated,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘But I need to talk to her, about the divorce and selling the house and the twenty-minute row I had with my ex last week over a vase I threw against a wall so that neither of us could have it.’

  She shook her head. ‘But I can’t talk to her because she’s going through hell and she doesn’t need to hear me ranting about a vase. But that happens sometimes, Rose, you want to talk about stuff but you can’t because your friends are going through things – real things, painful things – and you can’t talk to them because your stuff doesn’t feel as important as theirs. So I’m just saying—’

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ I interrupted with a defeated sigh. ‘You’re not exactly being subtle about it. You think I can’t talk to Nancy because my parents got divorced and hers died. I get it.’ I sighed again. ‘If I want to talk, I can talk to you.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me! I can’t help you. Look at the state of me.’ She pointed at her tangle of curls. ‘I forgot to wash the conditioner out of my hair this morning.’

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Grace Humm is the only person who has ever been able to make me go from livid to silly in less than thirty seconds.

  ‘Of course you can talk to me, Rose. Or the qualified counsellor in Welfare who is less likely to use your parents’ divorce as an excuse to whinge about her own.’

  She winked at me and I smiled. ‘Thanks, Miss.’

  I stood up, but before I walked to the door, I turned to look at her again. ‘Out of curiosity, how do you eat a cheesecake straight from the freezer without breaking your jaw?’

  She stared at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Lick it like an ice lolly, of course.’

  Of course.

  I got a reprieve from talking about Sid today because Doctor Gilyard wanted to talk about Uncle Alex. I don’t know why. Maybe she’s trying to lull me into a false sense of security and I’ll wake up tonight to find her standing over me with her notebook. Tell me about Sid.

  I actually shuddered as I wrote that.

  She started our session this week with: ‘Your Uncle Alex was supposed to be looking after you while your father was in prison.’

  It wasn’t the best start. I wanted to punch her in the face.

  ‘He did look after me,’ I told her with a filthy look.

  ‘But you were supposed to be in Spain with him and your grandmother?’

  ‘Yeah. So?’

  ‘You said that he was unhappy with your decision to go to London and befriend Juliet, so why didn’t he stop you?’

  ‘He couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ She took off her glasses to look at me. ‘From what I’ve read, your uncle doesn’t seem the type of man to be held to ransom by a seventeen-year-old girl.’

  I tipped my head back and laughed. ‘Have we met?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Hello.’ I waved at her. ‘I’m Emily Koll, I’m a fucking nightmare.’

  She chuckled at that and wrote something in her notebook. ‘I know more than anyone how wilful you are, Emily. But your uncle was the grown-up in this instance, and you were the child. You said that you were relying on him for money, for the paperwork you needed to corroborate your fake identity, he didn’t have to do any of that. He could just have said no and let you seethe impotently in Spain.’

  ‘First of all,’ I leaned forward, ‘I’m not a child. Second of all, I was gonna do it, with or without him, and he knew that. At least if he was involved he could make sure I had what I needed so that I didn’t use a shitty fake passport I bought off the Internet and get myself arrested.’

  ‘But you did get arrested.’

  I sat back again with sigh. I know Dad blames him for what happened, but I was gonna jump. All Uncle Alex did was try to break my fall.

  ‘Did he ever try to stop you?’

  ‘About once a week!’ I chuckled to myself. ‘He was always threatening to come to London and drag me back to Spain.’

  ‘But he didn’t?’

  ‘He couldn’t. The police were all over him. If he’d come to London, they would have been on him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was living down the road from Juliet. If Alex Koll showed up in Islington, they’d know why and arrest him before he got to my front door.’

  ‘So you took advantage of that?’

  ‘Of course! If Uncle Alex was in London, it would never have gone that far.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay. Tell me about the first time he tried to stop you.’

  ‘I told you, he tried about once a week.’

  ‘Did he ever risk a trip to London?’

  ‘Once.’ I sighed and crossed my arms. ‘About a month after I started college, I came home to find him in my living room.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘My personal tutor pulled me into her office and she must have called him afterwards,’ I said with another long sigh. ‘She had his number because I gave it to the college in case they ever needed to speak to my “Dad”.’

  ‘What did she tell him?’

  ‘That she was concerned about my work. That I’d lost weight.’

  ‘He must have been concerned, too, to risk being caught like that?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  I sniggered. ‘He didn’t know I’d dyed my hair so that was his first concern.’

  I remember the look he gave me, how his face went from bewildered to furious.

  ‘Did he like it?’ Doctor Gilyard asked and I sniggered again.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said Dad would do a shit and die when he saw it.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘I reminded him that Dad wouldn’t let me visit him in prison so my hair would be grey by the time he got out.’

  Doctor Gilyard nodded at that. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I just looked out of the kitchen window as I filled up the kettle so I’d have something to do with my hands. You could see the council estate where I was born on the horizon – three tower blocks that didn’t quite reach the clouds – and it made me think of Sid. I’d seen him scribble, IS THIS IT? into the corner of his notebook that afternoon in sociology and I’d been saying it to myself all day.

  ‘Did you talk?’

  ‘Sort of.’ She waited for me to go on. ‘He just told me that he’d had enough, that he didn’t know what I was doing, wanting to be Juliet’s friend. He said that it’d been two months and he didn’t see the point so it was time to go home.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘I told him that I didn’t have a home, that I lived in a school.’

  She wrote that down. ‘What did he say then?’

  I sighed. ‘Th
at he was stopping my credit cards and not paying for my flat.’

  ‘How did you react?’

  ‘I told him I’d get a job.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘He laughed. He said that working in Starbucks wouldn’t finance my sushi addiction let alone pay for my flat, so I might as well come home.’

  ‘Did you agree?’

  ‘I ignored him.’

  I knew he hated it when I ignored him, but I was too angry. So I waited for the kettle to boil, then busied myself with making the tea, even though I knew I was out of milk and neither of us could drink it black. But I made it anyway, the china mug ringing as I stirred two sugars into his.

  I handed it to him and he stared at it. ‘I’m worried, Ems. Since Harry was arrested, you’ve changed, you’ve been drinking and I know you’re smoking; I can smell it on you.’

  ‘Do you really want to compare misdemeanours, Uncle Alex?’

  He didn’t bite. ‘And you’ve lost weight.’

  ‘My teacher tell you that?’ I said, turning away from him to pick up my own mug from the kitchen counter.

  ‘No. I have eyes. You’re so thin, Ems.’

  I ignored him, blowing at my tea. But he kept pushing and it was like he was poking me in the back with his questions. ‘You look exhausted. Are you sleeping?’

  I took a sip of tea. It was too hot and bitter. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ I heard him take a step towards me and my spine tightened like a guitar string. ‘What are you doing, being her friend and going to her college? And now you’re having dinner at her house, with her foster parents? Ems, come on. That ain’t right. Why are you doing this to yourself? It must be killing you.’

  I walked over to the sink and poured my tea down the drain. ‘I don’t expect you to understand, Uncle Alex.’

  And I didn’t, because, say what you like about Alex Koll, about the type of man he is, he didn’t understand because he couldn’t. He wasn’t broken in the same way I am, in the same way Dad is too, I guess. He didn’t get why I needed to do it. Why I needed to be her friend and go to her college. Why it hurt less to know she had to sleep with the light on.

  Doctor Gilyard must have known what I was thinking because she asked me if Uncle Alex had ever asked me why I was doing it.