by Julia Green
He shrugs. How’s he supposed to know?
‘What time’s Nina back? I’ll give her a ring later.’
He squirms. ‘Dunno,’ he says.
‘Well, what’s she doing? A meeting, she said. Work?’
‘At my school,’ Simon mumbles. ‘With a teacher.’
‘Oh dear! Hope you’re not in trouble!’ Rita chuckles.
Ellie chirps up. ‘No. It’s because he’s good at art –’
‘Shut up, Ellie,’ he growls.
Ellie’s lip quivers. Get away, quick, he thinks, before she starts crying. ‘Come on, Ellie. Piggyback?’
He can be nice when he tries. She is only little, after all. He can remember what it’s like, just. He crouches down so she can climb on to his back and then he straightens up quickly on purpose to make her squeal and hang on really tight.
‘You’re strangling me, Ellie! Hold my shoulders, not my neck!’
He lets her play horses all the way home. He’s the horse, and she has to tell him which way to go and say things like ‘Giddy-up!’ and ‘Whoa there!’ It’s one of the games he can remember playing with his dad.
The girl – Leah – is leaning over her gate. Ellie scrabbles to get down off his back and runs over to her. Simon dawdles, watching them. They’ve obviously been getting to know each other. It’s so easy for Ellie, talking to people. She doesn’t care what they think. But it looks as if Leah likes Ellie; she’s smiling at her as she chatters on. Once or twice she glances towards Simon. He pretends to be looking for his front door key in his bag.
What was Rita going on about just now? It’s not really surprising that she knows Leah. It’s a small enough town when the tourists aren’t around. But what did she mean about her mother?
He hasn’t ever seen Leah’s mother. Not that he can remember. Not that he’s been looking, or anything. But it’s odd when they live just across the road. He knows most of the people in this bit of the road by sight, at least. And he’s seen a man who must be Leah’s father, leaving early in the morning sometimes. He drives a white van.
‘Hi, Simon.’ Leah’s voice teases him. He has to speak now. He can feel the blood race up his neck and into his face. He must look totally stupid.
‘Hi.’ His voice comes out OK this time. He dives through the gate and into the house.
Ellie bounces in after him a few minutes later. ‘Look what Leah gave me!’ She holds out a hairclip in the shape of a butterfly. Pretty. Before he can. stop himself, he’s imagining it in Leah’s hair, the feel of undoing it so the hair sweeps back over her face. He blushes, snaps at Ellie, ‘You shouldn’t take presents off strangers.’
‘She’s not a stranger, silly. She’s Leah. She’s my friend.’
‘No she’s not.’
‘She is. And she’s going to babysit for me.’
‘That doesn’t make her a friend.’
Ellie gives up. ‘What’s for tea?’
‘I don’t know, do I? Get yourself something to eat.’
‘When’s Mummy back?’ Her lip quivers slightly. ‘I want Mummy.’
Simon pours himself a bowl of cereal and takes it into the sitting room in front of the telly. Ellie tags on behind. She’s filled her bowl too full; milk sloshes over the edge on to the carpet. They watch the end of Neighbours, flip to The Weakest Link and then The Simpsons. Ellie’s snivelling. He doesn’t look at her.
A car pulls up outside. Ellie goes to the window; she runs out to fling herself at Nina.
‘Sorry, sweetheart. Didn’t mean to be this late. How was your day?’
Simon shoves the door so it slams shut, cutting off their voices, but Nina opens it again almost immediately.
‘Hello, Si. OK?’
He grunts.
‘Thanks for getting Ellie.’
Grunts again.
‘Don’t you want to know what Mr Davies said?’
‘I’m watching this.’
‘All right. Get the message. Later. I’ll start supper.’
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t know yet.’ She closes the door.
Ellie’s hopping up and down the hallway, making a racket. He turns up the volume. It’s a repeat, of course. He’s seen them all by now. When it’s over he slouches along to the kitchen. Ellie’s already at the table, drawing figures with big heads and things that might be ears, or possibly wings.
‘What’s for supper?’
‘Sausages, chips and peas. All out of the freezer. You could’ve been doing it while you were waiting for me to get back, then it wouldn’t have been so late. Lay the table, will you?’
‘Why me? How come you never ask her to do anything?’
‘Because she’s six and you’re fourteen. You didn’t have to do it when you were six.’
Nina’s voice is clipped. He knows what she’s not saying. When he was six, everything was different. His father was still there. She, Nina, wouldn’t be doing absolutely everything single-handed. And Ellie wasn’t even born.
‘Can’t we eat in front of the telly?’
Nina frowns. ‘But I wanted us to talk. About your drawings. Matt Davies… Oh, all right, then. Get on with you. Take everything in on a tray.’ She spoons peas on to the waiting plates.
Simon grabs the tomato ketchup from the fridge and takes his plate into the front room. Ellie follows. She thrusts her picture at Simon. ‘It’s for you. A present.’
‘What’s it supposed to be?’
‘It’s a picture of Leah, silly.’
He crumples it in one hand. Ellie starts to snivel. Nina sits down next to her on the sofa, puts one arm round her. ‘Don’t take any notice, bunnikins. He’s a crosspatch today.’
Simon flicks the channels, finds some programme called The Tudor War Machine. It shows you how to make saltpetre for gunpowder out of horsedung, black earth and piss. Some bloke in a foundry casts a Tudor-style cannon and they test fire it on Salisbury Plain. It has to be done by remote control in case the whole thing blows up.
Nina keeps interrupting to tell Simon things about the art teacher. ‘You’re lucky being taught by a proper artist,’ she says. ‘He’s passionate about art, isn’t he?’
The replica Tudor cannonball has shot through the wooden target, leaving a jagged hole. In oak, like on a Tudor battleship, the bloke says, those splinters would be deadly.
‘– so he invited me to have a look round.’
‘What?’
‘His studio. You haven’t been listening to anything I’ve been saying, have you?’ Nina slides Ellie off her lap. ‘Come on, sleepyhead. Let’s get you to bed.’ She turns back from the doorway. ‘Oh yes, and he says you’re late with some homework. So turn that off and get on with it.’
He scowls.
The phone rings. And rings. Simon ignores it; it won’t be for him, anyway. He hates talking on the phone.
Nina’s feet clatter down the wooden stairs. She glares at Simon through the half-open door. ‘You could have –’ but she’s picked it up now. ‘Rita!’ she says instead. ‘How are you?’
Simon half listens to Nina’s side of the conversation.
‘Why? What did she say?’
‘Oh!’
‘And the mother?’
‘No wonder. Poor Leah.’
‘Yes, I understand. Thanks, Rita. See you then, bye.’
She stands for a moment in the dark hallway next to the silent phone. Simon watches her, but he says nothing. What does she mean, poor Leah?
Then he wonders why he’s even bothering to think about it. It’s bugging him, the way Leah’s getting everywhere. He tugs his art book out of his school bag and flips through the pages already filled with drawings. Pencil, mostly. He knows they’re good. The sheep’s skull, and the dead bird, and part of an ammonite. There’s a detailed drawing of his Black Widow catapult. He doodles around on one of the blank pages, a sort of arrowhead shape. Then he draws a head and shades in the long hair, so that starts turning into Leah too. He scribbles over it, messing it up. That
means he has to rip it out of the book. What was the homework? A still life. That’s what he always draws, isn’t it? Things that aren’t alive. Still lives.
His school bag still stinks of rotting rabbit skin. He sniffs his fingers. They smell too. He goes out to the scullery and washes his hands over and over under a running cold tap. He doesn’t bother to turn the light on.
He can hear muffled sobs coming from Ellie’s room. He tramps upstairs and stands in Ellie’s doorway. Her light’s still on; she has it on till after she’s asleep, and then the door must be left open so the landing light can shine in.
‘Still awake?’
More sobs.
‘Sorry about your drawing,’ he says. ‘Will you do me another one tomorrow?’
Ellie pokes her face out from under the duvet. She nods.
‘Night night, then.’
Nina’s door is shut. She’s still pissed off with him about something. He can’t remember what.
Across the road, Leah watches the pattern of lights in the Piper household. By ten thirty, all the downstairs ones are off. There are two still on upstairs, and one stays on till at least midnight, when she, Leah, eventually falls asleep. She sleeps lightly, wakes when an owl hoots across the dark garden, still half dreaming. Something about a butterfly, and a feeling of being tangled up, caught so she can’t break free. It’s hot in her bedroom; she pads across to the window to open it wide, and sees that the light in Mrs P’s room is still on. The clock says one fifteen.
She lies back down on the bed, kicks the covers off. Where she left a gap in the curtains, the silvery light of a nearly full moon shines in on her naked body, sculpts her limbs in silver shadows. She has that feeling again, of something pressing in, coming closer. The owl hoots again. She’s like someone in a film, she thinks. The heroine, whose life is about to be changed completely as she is woken to love, to life. She smiles, turns over, sleeps again.
6
Simon scans the pages of the old newspaper lying on the kitchen table while he spreads golden syrup on his toast.
City in fear. Drunken youths rampage through town centre…
GCSE boy, 16, found hanging in bedroom…
Policeman arrested on Internet child pornography charges…
‘Bring back our boys!’ say service wives…
Nina is washing up the breakfast things, singing along to the radio, sounding horribly cheerful.
‘Si? I’m going out tonight. Can you make sure to be in, to look after Ellie?’
‘What! Mum! It’s Friday!’
‘Well, yes, I know. And for once, I’m going out. Or I’d like to. Seeing as it’s my first invitation out, almost, since we’ve been in this house.’
‘Where?’ Simon’s suspicious.
‘Matt asked me for supper.’
‘Matt?’ He can hardly believe his ears.
‘Matt Davies. Art teacher. Yes.’
‘What on earth for?’
Nina smiles. ‘I guess he took pity on me, poor single mother with a son like you, Simon, newly moved into the town. He seems a compassionate sort of bloke.’ She laughs, but Simon is not joining in. This is serious.
‘You can’t go out with a teacher, Mum. Not one from my school.’
‘It’s not going out with him, silly. It’s just supper, with other people. OK? Do I have your permission?’ She laughs again, flicks her hair back from her face.
Simon scowls back. ‘But it’s Friday. I always go out with Dan and Johnny and Pike. It’s not fair. Why should I have to look after Ellie?’
Nina sighs. ‘I’ll get a babysitter, then. OK?’
He doesn’t bother to answer. He picks up his bag for school, takes a banana from the bowl on the cupboard, slams the door. He thinks about Nina as he makes his way to the bus stop. Might’ve guessed she’d do something like this. Majorly embarrassing. Supposing someone at school finds out? I’ll have to keep well away from the art rooms.
That’s not difficult, as it turns out. It’s so near the end of term now they’re hardly doing any work. He volunteers to help the PE teacher clear out Lost Property instead of going to maths and then art. Maths will just be a video anyway. He’d have been finishing his painting in art, and he feels a stab of disappointment and then anger at Nina. The painting’s good. He knows that. Now he won’t have time to finish it. Her bloody fault. Simon broods over it as he sifts through mud-stained PE shirts and stinking trainers and gym shorts, sorting them into piles: named, unnamed, good condition, rubbish.
The day gets worse.
Afternoon registration. He waits until Mrs Fielding has finished calling the names and handing out notices, then leans across the scratched, graffitied tabletop to talk to Johnny, a row in front.
‘Shall we sort out our camping trip, then?’ he asks him.
Pike and Dan turn round to listen.
‘What’s this, then?’
Something in Pike’s tone makes Simon uncomfortable. ‘Camping. First week of the holidays. Like we said, remember?’
‘Well, it wasn’t definite or anything. It seemed a good idea at the time. But it’s different now,’ Johnny says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, now my mum and dad have sorted the holidays and everything. We’re going the first week, soon as school breaks up. Northern Spain.’
‘Well, the week after, or the next one after that, it doesn’t really matter when,’ Simon says, even though it does.
Pike chips in. ‘We’re going to be sailing.’
‘We’re going straight off too,’ Dan says. ‘France. So I can’t go camping either.’
They don’t want to go with me. Why would they when they can do all these really exciting things abroad, with proper families? They’ve changed their minds and not told me, and now I look a complete idiot.
If he weren’t at school he’d feel like crying. He wouldn’t, of course. He hasn’t cried for a really long time. So long, he can’t even remember the last time. They don’t want to be mates any more. They’re moving on without me. Well, they can get lost. What kind of mates are they anyway?
The bell rings for the first lesson after lunch. Just as he’s packing his stuff back into his bag Mrs Fielding calls him up to her desk.
‘Why weren’t you in your art lesson this morning?’ she says.
He explains about helping the PE teacher.
She frowns. ‘Not a very good reason, Simon. You shouldn’t be missing lessons. Anyway, Mr Davies wants to see your homework. You’d better take it to the art room at the end of the day.’
He doesn’t tell her he hasn’t done it.
Johnny, Dan and Pike have already gone ahead in the general scrum out of the classroom. Simon lets himself be washed along with a tide of school kids down the corridor. It’s scary, the way you get swept along by the mob whether you want to or not. Imagine being in a fire with this lot. You’d probably be trampled to death. Just as an experiment, not really thinking, he pushes against the fire exit door as he’s swept by. To his surprise the door swings open on to the car park at the side of the school, and he finds himself stumbling through. He stands there, dazed, and then starts walking across the tarmac. He keeps going, straight up the drive and out along the road. It’s not premeditated. It simply seems the obvious thing to do. In the circumstances.
He glances back. No one has seen, no one’s coming after him. He lopes off down to the second bus stop, not the one nearest the school gates, and his luck’s in: a bus pulls up after only about five minutes.
‘Early closing, is it?’ The driver raises an eyebrow at Simon.
‘Dentist appointment.’
‘Ah. Sit down, then.’
So what if the driver doesn’t believe him? It’s none of his business.
Simon hunches down in the back seat. The bus is almost empty. It rattles along, takes the corners too fast, judders as it climbs the hill and then squeals, braking, on the last long hill down into the town.
All the way he can’t stop thinking.
Why didn’t Pike and Dan and Johnny say anything about the holidays before? What’s going on?
They must have all been talking about me when I wasn’t there. I’m still the incomer; they’ve all known each other for years. They’ve closed ranks.
But why? What’ve I done?
He tries a different tack. Perhaps it isn’t like that. Perhaps it’s simply that they’ve got other plans, family things. It doesn’t mean anything. They can’t really help it. It happens all the time in the holidays: proper families doing things together.
Sometimes, he feels as if he’s completely alone. That Nina and Ellie don’t count. That they’re not a proper family at all.
He gets off the bus at the church in the middle of town and slouches along the narrow street past the newsagent and the post office, cutting through the alley to the main street. It looks different this time of day: mostly old people shopping with those baskets on wheels that stab you in the back of the legs if you happen to get in the way. He’s too conspicuous here; he takes off his school sweatshirt and stuffs it into his backpack, then takes the series of passages which cut through to the lower street and the path down to the beach. He skulks along, kicking Coke cans and pebbles, hands in pockets, shirt hanging loose. He can feel the smooth slim shape of his knife in the bag against his back. Feels good. A reminder of something about himself, something that gets lost when he’s at school.
Seems like he’s not the only one bunking off this afternoon. As he comes round the harbour wall he sees a knot of boys his sort of age crouched round something. Go back? Round? Too late. A familiar shape wheels round.
‘Look who it isn’t. Simple Simon.’
