Goose

by Dawn O'Porter

  ‘Oooooo, got your period, have you?’ retorts Pete. That classic immature response from a guy when they have no better come-back but to humiliate a girl about her vagina or womb. I can’t wait to leave school and be surrounded by adults so I never have to listen to this crap again.

  ‘Boys our age have no idea,’ Meg tells me. ‘They’re so immature it’s painful. You don’t get that with older guys, especially the ones who have been in relationships before. They don’t talk about periods like it’s a disability, and they wash their dicks.’ She takes a long, deep tug on her cigarette and stubs it out under her foot. ‘Anyway, I have to go. See you in English on Thursday, and that’s really cool you can make it on Saturday. Dean will be happy.’

  She walks away. I want to scream after her, but I manage to contain myself.

  I watch her walk. It’s slow, relaxed, almost a swagger. She is probably stoned – she doesn’t hide the fact she likes getting high. One time she came into English, sat next to me and said, ‘I haven’t slept in two days. I’m quite off my face. How are my pupils?’

  Her pupils were massive and she looked like she had been attacked, but I told her she looked fine and she still answered every question Mr Frankel asked correctly and had obviously done all of her coursework. I don’t know how she does it.

  ‘Who is up for chicken?’ bursts Pete, full of confidence and an incessant need to show off.

  ‘Chicken is stupid,’ I say. ‘What is the point of driving at each other like that? You either pull away and look weak, or you keep going and die. It’s such a stupid game, can’t you just go and get pissed in town instead?’

  ‘All right, mardy pants,’ says Marcus. ‘You should do it in your car, that would be funny. Actually, there are quite a few things I would like to do in your car. Like shag you.’

  ‘In your dreams,’ I say, walking off. Is that seriously how he expects to get sex?

  I get to my car and throw in my bag. When I put the key in I turn and pump my foot, but nothing. It’s failed again. Having to go back to Pete and Marcus and ask them to bump-start me is mortifying, but needs must.

  ‘I’ll do it for a squeeze of your tits,’ says Pete.

  ‘How about you just do it to be nice?’ I say. They both nod and agree that’s reason enough. They are not bad people, just clueless.

  As they push my car down the road my engine eventually kicks in and I make it home in one piece, avoiding all major hills so I don’t have to use my brakes. I love my car, but it really is a pile of crap.

  3

  Spice Up Your Life

  Flo

  Sitting in the window of Christies, Renée and I spend another two hours of our lives watching people we recognise walking up and down Guernsey High Street. It’s the same faces every time. We know what time that blonde with the burnt orange cheeks leaves work at the hotel opposite, and when the sexy guy from the estate agents walks past on his way to the car park. We see random people with no schedule, very often from whom Renée has to hide because she snogged them the weekend before in The Monkey. Or girls she has to avoid because she got off with their boyfriend once. She does that sometimes. It sounds worse than it is. Renée is an opportunist. If something fun is staring her in the face she grabs it, not worrying about the consequences. She is a good person, sweet, loving, but capable of throwing her morals up in the air and not caring where they land. I know her well enough to know she’s not a bad person. She just can’t say no.

  ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Our UCAS forms are being passed around to all those universities and people are judging us without ever having met us.’

  She grunts and puts far too many chips in her mouth, even for her.

  ‘You need to revise so you pass these exams, Renée. Or you won’t get in and we won’t have any chance of going to the same uni town. Can you imagine if you pass and I don’t? That would be funny.’

  ‘That would be unlikely,’ she says, looking bored. ‘Wait, weren’t you going to do life-saving or something?’

  ‘Yeah. I went once, but I hated how people can see you in the pool. There’s that balcony and loads of boys gather on it while the lesson is on and laugh at all the girls’ bodies. I felt way too self-conscious to save anyone’s life. So I quit that. I hope I never come across anyone who’s drowning. I’ll feel so guilty watching them sink.’

  Renée giggles. I love it when I make her laugh. She is the funny one, not me. It’s always such an achievement when I crack a successful joke.

  There is a pause in the conversation. A chance for me to tell her what’s been happening in my life over the last few weeks, the side I haven’t really told her about yet. The side I know she won’t like.

  ‘But I am going to keep going to church,’ I say.

  ‘Another “Flo fad”?’ she says, undeterred and continuing to guzzle her fried potato like her life depends on it.

  ‘This isn’t a fad, Renée. Not this time.’ I don’t pick up another chip. I don’t do anything to distract from what I am saying. I stare at her until she has no choice but to stop eating and listen to me.

  ‘I believe in God. The last few weeks have been incredible for me,’ I say. ‘I go to church every Sunday, and to a friend’s house every Thursday to pray and discuss the Bible. I am learning about Christianity, and it’s changing my life.’

  Silence.

  A bit more silence, then …

  ‘What friend’s house?’

  ‘No one’s in particular … There are five of us. We take it in turns to meet at each other’s houses on Thursday nights. Well, everyone’s house except mine, because, well, you know my mum doesn’t want me having people over. But we sit around, drink tea and talk about the Bible. We pray too, which at first I thought would be weird, but I really like it. One of us says what is on our mind and we hold hands and pray for them.’

  ‘And then what happens? Does God appear floating on a cloud with a big white beard and tell you all how to live your lives?’ she says, much more sarcastically than I was expecting.

  ‘No, Renée, God doesn’t just appear. But we all get some clarity and it helps us focus on what is important.’

  ‘So, what is important then?’

  ‘Our faith.’

  ‘Oh right, of course.’ She shrugs. ‘Well, I give it a month.’

  We sit there staring out of the window. Is she not even going to try to understand the positive effect this is having on my life? I am pleased for the break in tension when I see my friend Matt. I wave. Renée looks stunned, almost offended.

  ‘Wait, who did you just wave at?’ she asks, accusingly.

  ‘Matt Richardson. He goes to my church.’

  Her eyes start bulging, like I’ve taken all of my clothes off in front of her.

  ‘Matt Richardson goes to church? But he smokes in the lay-by. And he’s weird.’

  ‘Well, you think that people who go to church are weird, don’t you?’ I say, giving her a moment to think about that. ‘But he isn’t, Matt is lovely. Ooh, he’s coming in. And his mum is with him. Yay.’

  Renée has gone stiff, like a scared cat. Only her eyes are darting around.

  ‘Hi Matt, hi Mary,’ I say as they come in. ‘This is my best friend, Renée.’

  Mary Richardson shakes Renée’s stiff hand, and Matt just nods at her.

  ‘We have come in for a hot chocolate,’ says Mary. ‘We will see you later on, though, Flo? Matt is happy to be having the group at our house tonight.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I say. ‘Enjoy your hot chocolate. See you at seven.’

  They go to the back of the café and we sit back down. I take the last chip from my bowl.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ Renée asks, as if I just did something really inappropriate with Matt and his mum.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Matt? I’m just trying to get my head round it. He goes to church?’

  ‘Yep. He doesn’t want to get teased for believing in Jesus, so he has this character that he plays at scho
ol that is not the Matt I know. We don’t judge him for it, he just wants to fit in. But when he is with us he is so different, he’s lovely. We respect that he doesn’t want to be teased.’

  ‘Who is this we?’ asks Renée, clearly trying to deal with this conversation bit by bit. I know I am giving her a lot of new information all at once, so I hadn’t expected her to take it on the chin.

  ‘I told you … My friends and I – that we,’ I say.

  ‘Who are these people, exactly? You suddenly believe in God, you go to church? You have a load of new friends you pray with and Matt Richardson is lovely? Christ.’

  Renée puts a fiver on the table and goes outside. I watch her walk to the other side of the road and light up a cigarette. Her arms are crossed and the hand holding the fag is up by her mouth. She is tapping her teeth with her fingers, lost in thought. It’s what Renée does when she is trying to work something out. I don’t go out to her. I will leave her to it, pay the bill and go home to get ready for tonight. Hopefully she will calm down soon.

  Renée

  I lie back on my bed staring at the ceiling. It’s my favourite place, where I do most of my thinking. My bedroom was never somewhere I could relax before. Sharing a room with Nell was stressful. Not to mention the fact that my mother died in that room at Nana and Pop’s house. But this room at Aunty Jo’s is clean, mine, no history. It’s where I can relax, chat to Mum without anyone hearing me.

  However, right now, I feel quite stressed. Flo is religious. What is that about?

  I am so used to Flo going through phases. Last year she got really into witchcraft. There is loads of it on Guernsey: a witches’ circle that you are supposed to run around three times and make a wish, and in a bush somewhere there is a massive cauldron that has apparently been there for hundreds of years. Flo became obsessed with it all and got loads of books out from the library on local witchcraft. That phase was entertaining. We went on loads of adventures and it was exciting.

  But then it turned into her being obsessed with magic. She saved up and bought a magic kit and started trying to teach herself how to do tricks. Every time I went round she would try a new one, but she was rubbish at it. Not to mention the fact that Flo is really shy, so any hobby that involves having an audience is never going to work. She would never have the guts to do it in front of anyone but me and Abi. When I told Aunty Jo about Flo and all of her fads she said, ‘It’s just her trying to work out who she is. She is looking for an identity. It’s normal for girls your age. All of those teenagers walking around with pink hair and studs through their noses? Most of them will be plain as anything by the time they get to my age. They are just hiding behind an exterior while they work out what is going on inside their heads.’

  As usual I am sure Aunty Jo is totally right, but Flo isn’t like other teenagers. She is more grown-up than anybody else, more grounded, more secure, even though she is paranoid. She doesn’t try to be anyone she isn’t in the way that everyone else does. Sure, she has her fads, but she is fundamentally always just Flo. She doesn’t show off or try to be cool to fit in – she just needs distracting, I think, from her morose thoughts about her dad. I know she thinks about him all the time and feels guilty about how sad he got before he had the heart attack. I know she feels that if she had made him happier it wouldn’t have happened. So she gets obsessed with things to keep her mind off it. I understand it, I think it’s actually quite admirable that she looks for things to perk herself up rather than wallow in the things that bring her down, but God? This is different. I don’t like it. I just don’t get it. And I have thought about it a lot.

  When Pop died and I went to his funeral I thought about every word the vicar said. Pop spent his life grumbling about religion and how ‘Holy Willies’ were ‘lunatics’, but there he was being cremated in a church with a vicar saying he was off to be with God in heaven. Pop didn’t even believe in heaven, so it all felt so insincere. I was very comfortable with the fact that Pop had gone and that was that. He was too – he told me that loads of times when he was dying. He didn’t believe in heaven and didn’t want to go there, even if there was a chance that he might see Mum when he got there, or that Nana would be up soon. His life was lived, it was time to say goodbye, he didn’t want to carry on. I think the way religious people obsess about getting into heaven is just a romantic way of dealing with their fear of death. Who cares about what happens when we die? I say we should just focus on the life we live right now. If I go to heaven, bonus. If I don’t, then I will have made the most of my time on earth. Religion just doesn’t make sense to me. And like I said, I have thought about it a lot.

  How can God be real when he allows people’s mums and dads to die too young? When he makes people sick and tortures people? I see all of those children in Africa who are starving and covered in flies, and they die, all the time. If the bad stuff is the work of the devil, then the devil is winning and God’s doing a really bad job. If God is real then I don’t want anything to do with him – he doesn’t seem like a very nice person. Constantly feeling like he has to prove to people that he is boss, always teaching people life lessons that are really no more than cruel abuses of his power. And what is he anyway? Is he the clouds? The stars? Is he the wind? Or is he an old man with a stick who watches over us? And why is He a he? I think children were once told a story about an old man in the sky and they believed it, like they did about Father Christmas. But it was so long before anyone worked out that this person doesn’t really exist, so adults, not just children, believed these ridiculous stories, and then it was too late – it was embedded into human existence.

  I need to distract Flo. As her best friend I have a duty to keep her mind off the things that upset her. I need to step up the fun, be naughty, keep life exciting. Remind her how far we have come in the last two years, really make her laugh. I go downstairs and get the phone book. I go straight to R.

  Richardson. M

  That must be them. I am sure Flo called Matt’s mum Mary. I dial the number.

  ‘Hello? Mary Richardson speaking.’

  Bingo!

  Flo

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I say to everyone as I come back in. ‘Renée wants to meet me later.’ Everyone smiles kindly like it doesn’t matter. No one seems to think it’s weird that she called me at Matt’s house. But I suppose their focus is on other things.

  ‘Carry on, Gordon,’ says Sandra.

  He gathers his thoughts and continues with what he was saying.

  ‘Esau knew that to have the grace of God, he must forgive Jacob. So he did. God forgives those who trespass against evil, and to have his grace, we must do the same.’

  Gordon is leading the group this week. Actually, he always leads the group. Not just because he is the oldest, but because he is obviously the most religious out of all of us. He knows every inch of the Bible and he is really good at making sense of it all. Today he is talking about forgiveness. I sit back down on the floor and try to get back into what he is saying, but Kerry interrupts.

  ‘Does Renée believe?’ she asks me.

  They all, including Gordon, wait for my answer.

  ‘She believes we’re all mental,’ I tell them and they laugh. This is nothing new to them.

  ‘That’s why I keep it quiet at school,’ says Matt. ‘I like going to the lay-by and joining in with everybody. If they knew about my relationship with God I would get teased for it. People don’t get it, they don’t like it.’

  ‘You can’t deny who you are,’ offers Gordon, like a parent. ‘If you are not honest about who you are then how will you ever accept yourself? I stopped caring about people having an issue with my faith a long time ago, and just surrounded myself with people who feel the same way. I never have to lie about who I am now.’

  ‘To be fair, though,’ says Kerry, ‘it’s quite hard to do that at school. You either fit in, or you don’t. It takes guts to be different. I get why you want to keep it quiet there, Matt. You know who you are really.’

>   ‘I got teased at school,’ interjects Sandra with a mouth full of biscuits.

  ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Because of God?’

  ‘No,’ she says, swallowing hard, ‘because I’m fat. But I can hardly hide that, can I?’

  We all laugh. There is something strangely endearing about a fat person who laughs at themselves.

  ‘Shall we pray for Renée?’ suggests Kerry.

  I don’t know what to say. The idea of it seems so weird.

  ‘I don’t think she needs praying for,’ I say, hoping Kerry will move on, but instead she says, ‘Everyone needs praying for. Tell us more about her.’

  ‘She’s fit,’ says Matt. ‘I see her in the lay-by all the time. She’s really pretty, but a bit cool for school sometimes, and she flirts with everyone. Well, except me.’ I can’t help but laugh, although I seem to be the only one who thinks Renée being such a flirt is funny. But then my smile disappears. And without really planning what I am going to say, I start to describe my best friend.

  ‘She is very special,’ I say. ‘Renée’s mum died when she was seven and she doesn’t really know her dad. Her sister moved to Spain to be with him a couple of years ago, but Renée would rather pretend he doesn’t exist than deal with how much it would hurt her to see her dad. Renée’s complicated. She is really confident, but a bit lost at the same time. It’s like she doesn’t really have any major ambition – like she just wants to have fun, you know, grab life by the horns? But deep down I think she’ll be disappointed in herself if she doesn’t achieve something. She’s much more fragile than she lets on. So much of what she is about is wanting people to love her, because I think she feels like the person who loved her the most let her down. I don’t mean that she blames her mum for dying, but if she was honest I think she would admit that the way she is a lot of the time is a result of what happened when she was seven. She basically watched her mum die. How can that not be the underlying thought behind everything you do?’