by Byrne, Tanya
I wanted to take the cinema ticket, but when I saw the charcoal drawing on her desk, I waited until she wasn’t looking and knocked it off so that it fell between the desk and the wall.
‘I always paint my toenails,’ she said suddenly. I tensed, sure that she’d seen me do it, but she hadn’t even looked up.
‘I’m kind of paranoid about it,’ she said, leaning down to blow on her nails. ‘Ever since I watched one of those American crime scene investigation shows. They found this girl’s body in an alleyway but couldn’t identify it so they thought she was homeless. Then the detective saw that her toenails were painted and realised that she had to belong to someone, so he looked into it and found her family and they gave her a proper funeral.’
She looked so serious that I had to laugh. ‘What?’ Something in me relaxed as I realised what she was saying. ‘You paint your nails in case you’re murdered?’
She thought about it for a moment, then frowned. ‘Yeah. I suppose.’
‘Who thinks like that?’ I laughed again, so hard that she laughed too. And when I looked at her, sitting on the bed with her red toenails, I wished Uncle Alex was there to see her. To see what Dad had done to her, how scared she was that he’d find her.
The next morning at college, I had to keep pressing my lips together to hide my smile as I watched her ripping through her locker trying to find the charcoal drawing.
‘Did you leave it at home?’ Sid asked, fanning through one of her textbooks.
‘It was on my desk last night. I saw it,’ she said, her head in her locker. ‘But when I went to get it this morning it was gone. I checked everywhere.’
‘Maybe Mike ate it,’ I suggested, but they ignored me.
She slammed her locker shut and stepped back. ‘I have to go home and check again.’
‘Now?’ Sid checked his watch. ‘We have English lit. You’ll be marked absent.’
She shrugged and took her bag from him. ‘I know, but I have art straight after and it’s part of my coursework.’
‘I’ll go with you.’
I had been leaning against the lockers, picking at my already chipped nail varnish and stood up then. I adored Sid, but I wanted to punch him in the face sometimes.
Thankfully, Juliet looked equally mortified at the suggestion. ‘What? No, Sid! It’s not your fault I can’t find it. Why should you be marked absent too?’
‘Nance—’ he started to say, but she stopped him with a kiss on the mouth.
‘Go,’ she said, pushing him towards the classroom. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’
I watched as she ran towards the lifts, her bag bouncing against her hip, and when I turned round again, Sid looked unimpressed.
‘Why are you looking so pleased with yourself?’ he asked as we walked to class.
That was the first time I missed a step.
Friday night. Fish for dinner. The nurses let us watch a film in the TV Room earlier. It was shockingly bad; some PG-13 shit about an awkward brunette who defeats the mean girls with witty banter to get the cutest boy at school.
I think it was supposed to be inspirational, but Naomi and I just talked through it.
‘What would you be doing tonight if you weren’t here?’ I asked her during the makeover montage. I wished I lived in America; all you need to do to overcome your demons is to get contact lenses and a blow dry.
‘Shagging Tom,’ she said with a filthy laugh.
I rolled my eyes. ‘You’re so rock and roll.’
‘Don’t hate on me because the boy I love wants to shag me, not my friend.’
I kicked her so hard she fell off the sofa.
‘Juliet isn’t my friend,’ I reminded her as she climbed back up, but she grinned.
‘That’s worse.’
Actually, it is.
‘So what would you be doing, then? Trying to get your leg over with Sid?’
I ignored her. ‘All sorts. We never stayed in on a Friday night.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We went to a lot of gigs. Juliet’s a proper hipster – she only liked bands that played tiny venues. As soon as everyone at college started talking about them, she moved on.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Me and Sid didn’t care; we’d listen to anything—’
‘Me and Sid,’ Naomi sang.
I glared at her. ‘Hands up who’s not helping.’ Reta put her hand up and I rolled my eyes. ‘Put your hand down, Reets.’ When she did, I crossed my arms. ‘We went to this wedding once. It was Sid’s cousin’s cousin, or something. I don’t remember. It was at this rugby club in West Ham.’
‘Classy.’
I had to laugh. She was right. The last wedding I went to was at Claridge’s so I’d never been to a wedding with paper plates and a balloon arch before. I should have been horrified, I suppose, but as the Daily Mail once said about me: you can take the girl out of the council estate, but you can’t take the council estate out of the girl, so I loved it. What’s not to love about sausage rolls and cheese and pineapple? Food of the gods, that.
By nine o’clock the father of the bride was shirtless and everyone was dancing to ‘Come on, Eileen’. Sid had lost his black suit jacket and was twirling one of the bridesmaids. She was clearly besotted with him, ignoring another bridesmaid who was not so patiently waiting her turn. Three year olds don’t fuck about, though, so after a few minutes, dresses were tugged and hair was pulled. I was horrified, but Sid was unfazed, and just picked them both up and danced with them at the same time, one on each hip.
I nudged Juliet, but she was fiddling with her phone. ‘Let’s dance.’
She wrinkled her nose and continued tapping away.
The DJ must have been on my side because he put ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ on.
I jumped to my feet. ‘We have to dance to this!’
She wrinkled her nose again. ‘What? This is old people’s music.’
I stared at her, horrified. ‘It’s Sinatra.’
She ignored me and continued sending a text, but before I could slap some sense into her, someone took my hand.
I looked up as Sid tugged me towards the dance floor. ‘I’ll dance with you, Ro.’
‘Okay,’ I breathed, so bewildered, I almost tripped over my own feet.
We found a gap between a gaggle of cackling aunts and a group of thirteen-year-old girls who were swishing around in their dresses. They blushed in unison as Sid approached.
‘Nice dress, Bex,’ he said with a grin, sweeping a hand through his hair.
I knew immediately which one he was talking to because the poor girl looked ready to collapse. Not that I was much cooler; as soon as Sid pulled me to him and put his hand on the small of my back, my cheeks started to burn, too.
That was the first time he touched me. Not play-punched me or grabbed my sleeve at a gig when he was trying to get my attention over the roar of the band, but really touched me. I could feel the heat of his hand through the silk of my dress and when he lifted his other to reach for mine, his fingers were rougher than I expected. I remember the shock I felt when the calluses on the tips of his fingers brushed against my own. Until then, all I could hear were the aunts cackling and the swish swish swish of petticoats and taffeta as the girls spun around next to us, but then I couldn’t hear a thing my heart was beating so hard.
He must have felt the shock as well, because he smiled. ‘You play the guitar, too.’
‘What?’
‘The guitar,’ he said, running his thumb over the callus on my right index finger.
I had to gulp down a breath before I could speak. ‘The cello.’
‘The cello?’
‘I’m no Rostropovich, but I almost played at the Royal Albert Hall once.’
‘Really?’ His eyes went from brown to black. ‘Why didn’t you?’
I thought about Dad, the trial, the newspapers and realised what I’d said.
‘I—’ started to say, as a voice in my head screamed at me to pull my hand away so he couldn’t feel it
shaking, but I couldn’t let go. ‘Something came up.’
When I turned my face away, he held my hand a little tighter, but he didn’t push it.
We didn’t speak again for the rest of the song. When ‘Mack the Knife’ came on, I waited for him to take a step back, but he didn’t, he twirled me and I giggled. I giggled again as one of the page boys skidded past us on his knees. Sid laughed, too, and I’ll never forget how it felt, how his whole body trembled. It made my heart throw itself against my ribs like a rubber ball. He must have felt it.
‘Why the cello?’ he asked, pulling me closer, so close that I could feel the chill of his belt buckle through my dress. He said it with a whisper, his breath warm against my ear, and it was enough to make one of the locks in me buckle and fall apart.
‘My dad,’ I whispered back. I lifted my eyelashes to look at him again. His eyes were still black. ‘I wanted to learn how to play the guitar but he’s kind of old fashioned. He left school at fourteen so he’s obsessed with me getting a good education.’
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Proper A levels like physics and economics.’
‘Not art.’ Sid grinned.
I shook my head with a small smile. ‘Not art.’
‘And no guitar.’
‘When I told him I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, he bought me a cello.’
‘But you’re doing art now,’ he whispered, looking at me like he was waiting for me to tell him about the epic battle I’d had with my dad, how I’d gone against him and won.
I looked over at Juliet. She was still fiddling with her phone. ‘Yeah.’
‘Hello,’ a voice said, and I turned my head to find a woman about Eve’s age – maybe a little younger – smiling at me.
‘I thought I’d better introduce myself,’ she said, shooting Sid a filthy look. ‘Well, you’re not going to do it, are you?’
He took a step back. ‘Not now,’ he said, lowering his voice.
But she didn’t listen and put her hand on my shoulder. Her fingers were cold. ‘Hello,’ she said, stopping to kiss me on both cheeks. She smelt of cigarettes and hairspray. ‘I’m Gina, Sid’s mum.’
‘Oh,’ I gasped, blushing a little. ‘Hello, Mrs King. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
She held up her glass of white wine. ‘Lovely to meet you too, sweetheart.’ She winked at me and, in that moment, she looked just like Sid. They had the same dark hair and eyes, the same honey-coloured skin. You could tell that, when she was my age, she was stunning. I imagined her at seventeen, her eyes thick with eyeliner, curls tumbling over her shoulders. I bet she could have broken a boy’s heart with a wink.
But that day at the wedding she looked exhausted, the skin under her eyes dark with some misery that wasn’t letting her sleep. Her make-up was smudged, her leopard-print dress too tight. She had a tattoo of a Chinese symbol on her left arm and it made me think of Olivia’s sister. She’d got a similar tattoo on her hip while she was travelling through Asia. She thought it meant lady but later found out it meant whore and was thrilled. ‘How apt!’ she’d howled when she told Olivia and me, tipping her head back and slapping the table with her hand so hard that the salt and pepper shakers shivered.
‘Are you having a good time? Decent spread,’ Sid’s mum said, nodding at the buffet table that had been all but picked clean. She looked unsteady on her heels as she lifted the glass of wine to her mouth. When I felt Sid tense next to me, I realised that she was drunk and I felt as if I should look away; he wouldn’t want me to see her like this.
‘He doesn’t shut up about you,’ she said after a long gulp. There was an edge to her voice. It wasn’t a compliment.
‘Mum—’ Sid tried to interrupt, but she carried on with a wave of her hand.
‘Nancy this and Nancy that.’
Nancy.
‘I’m Rose,’ I said, my voice shaking as I dug my heel into the dance floor hoping that a hole would open up and snatch me.
She looked confused. ‘What?’
‘Mum, come on,’ Sid said tightly, reaching for her arm, but she pulled away.
‘I’m not, Nancy, Mrs King. I’m Rose.’
She stared at me for a moment. ‘Who?’ She had to shout as the DJ put ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ on and everyone on the dance floor cheered, doubling my humiliation.
‘Rose,’ I repeated, a little desperately. ‘Rose Glass.’
I watched for a flicker of recognition, but there was nothing.
‘Rose,’ she said as though she was tasting it, rolling it around on her tongue. Then she sneered and swallowed another mouthful of wine. ‘He’s never mentioned you,’ she said with a sharp smile, then waited, like a magician holding up a white rabbit, waiting for a reaction. But I didn’t give her one; I just lifted my chin and smiled back.
I didn’t realise until that moment that Sid was still holding my hand, but he squeezed it and I began shaking for another reason.
‘I saw you dancing with Sid and assumed,’ she continued, finishing her glass of wine with one last gulp. ‘Which one is Nancy, then? The half-caste one?’
‘Mum!’ Sid barked.
‘What?’ she sneered. ‘Am I not supposed to say that?’
Sid glared at her and she rolled her eyes. ‘What? People call us Guidos.’
‘When has anyone called you a Guido?’
She lifted her chin. ‘I’m just saying: they’re so sensitive.’
‘Mum—’
‘Alright, alright. I’m going.’ She held her hands up. ‘I’ll stop embarrassing you.’
Sid and I watched her stumble over to the bar with her empty wine glass and when she was out of sight, he turned to me.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he started to say, but I stopped him.
‘It’s okay.’ I shook my head.
‘Yeah, but she isn’t always—’
‘I know.’
‘I wish you’d met her when—’
‘Don’t, Sid. Please don’t apologise.’
I squeezed his hand again and he squeezed it back and you know what? I don’t care. Say what you like at me. Yes, I’m mad. Yes, what I did was awful, but I made him feel better that day. I know I did. Because I was the only person in the room who knew how he felt. Who knew what it was like to be ashamed of someone you love.
Doctor Gilyard thinks I didn’t do anything to Juliet, that I couldn’t do anything, but that isn’t true. I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to ruin everything she had, to carve my name across it all, but I had to be careful. I couldn’t do anything to scare her, anything she’d tell Mike and Eve about, because the Witness Protection team would move her and I might never find her again.
That’s why I followed her when I first found her. I got to know her routine, what books she liked, what films she’d seen. It was those little things that made her trust me, that made us friends. Like the first time we went to the canteen at college and I ordered a green tea because I knew she’d get one, too. If I hadn’t done that, we would never have been friends and if we weren’t friends, she wouldn’t have invited be back to her house and as soon as she did that, I could do other stuff. Nothing big. I took things. Moved things. Tore pages out of her notebook.
I suppose you think that’s nothing. After what you’ve read in the papers, you were expecting something awful, blood even, a few broken bones. But that would have been too easy. It was the little things, I knew, that would unpick her – slowly, slowly. Like when she bought that book from the stall under Waterloo Bridge. When she put it on the shelf in her bedroom, I waited for her to go downstairs and I took it. She asked me if I’d seen it a couple of days later, if she’d left it in one of my bags.
I’d frowned. ‘You didn’t go to that stall with me. Sure it wasn’t with Sid?’
She’d wavered then, her forehead creasing. I wonder if she’d asked herself if someone had been in her room, if Mike had rearranged her CDs or Eve had borrowed her yellow scarf.
She must have thought she was going mad.<
br />
I called her Juliet once. I remember the thrill of it – even now, as I’m writing this – how it made my heart flutter. We were at a pub in Camden. Sid and I were playing darts and he was apologising to everyone standing within ten feet of the board when I threw a dart clear across the pub. It almost hit an old boy who was sitting at the bar reading a copy of the Mirror. He looked unamused, so Sid offered to retrieve it. Juliet was in the loo at the time so when she returned to find him gone, she looked bewildered.
‘Oh, Juliet,’ I said with a sigh, letting the name hang in the air between us for too long before I tilted my head. ‘Missing your Romeo?’
She tried to smile, but I saw.
I saw.
The next day I sent her flowers – a bunch of pink roses. It was her birthday; not Nancy’s birthday, Juliet’s birthday. 2 October. She told me once that her parents used to buy her a bunch every year for her birthday, I knew she meant her father did, so you should have seen her face when Mike walked into her room with them. I’d asked her what was wrong as she tore through the bouquet looking for a card, spilling pink petals across her bed.
‘Nothing,’ she’d said, out of breath. ‘Nothing.’
Doctor Gilyard asked me once if I got any pleasure out of being Rose Glass. How could I not enjoy that? Enjoy asking Juliet question after question; if she missed her parents, how she was related to Eve, why she didn’t see the friends from her old school any more. I’d ask and ask and ask until she began fidgeting and changed the subject with a brave smile.
But the first time I saw her cry wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be.
I suppose if I wanted to play the villain here – be the gangster’s daughter – I wouldn’t admit that. I’d say that I’d enjoyed seeing her cry, that it had renewed my conviction. But it didn’t.
It was a Sunday. I always had lunch at her house on a Sunday, but when Mike answered the door, he looked surprised to see me. When he let me in, the kitchen didn’t smell of anything, either. There was nothing in the oven, no smell of coconut. Eve’s mother wasn’t there, fussing over the roast potatoes and adding more salt to the gravy. Eve was sitting at the table, staring at a mug of tea she obviously had no intention of drinking. When she looked up at me, I could see that she’d been crying.
