Twenty Questions for Gloria

by Martyn Bedford

  That was the first time I skipped a class to be with him. Design Tech, last period on a Wednesday. Sneaking out of the building was exhilarating. Also, surprisingly easy. It dawned on me that some rules—“thou shalt not walk out of school in the middle of the afternoon,” for example—remain unbroken not because they are actively enforced but because the rule-makers assume no one would dare to break them.

  DI Ryan nods to herself, like she’s had the same thought.

  On the train into Leeds, Uman and I pretended to speak German so the conductor wouldn’t realize we were English POWs on the run. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much.

  Another afternoon, we just sat in Caffe Nero and talked. About what, I’ve no idea. I just remember talking and talking and talking.

  Tierney didn’t take it well. “Just because you like him, you don’t have to stop liking me.”

  “I haven’t stopped liking you, Tier.”

  We were walking to school as usual, along the path where Uman had tricked us that time.

  “You don’t sit with me in class, unless it’s one Uman isn’t in,” she said. “You don’t hang out with me after school. You don’t message me or answer me when I message you.”

  “I do answer your messages.”

  “And if I call you, your phone goes straight to voice mail.” She clicks her tongue, exhales. “I mean, do you even go on Twitter anymore?”

  Truth was, I hadn’t switched on my iPad in days, except for schoolwork, and I hardly looked at my phone. “I’m hanging out with you now, aren’t I?” was all I could find to say.

  “Hanging out? We’re walking to school!” She shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other, roughly, like what she really wanted to do was swing it right at my head.

  “You were the same when you started seeing Nathan,” I told her. “For about a month, it was like I didn’t exist.”

  “That’s so not true.”

  This is going to sound mean, but I enjoyed the reversal of roles. The whole time I’d been friends with Tier, she had been the cute one, the pretty one, the popular one, the confident one, the one who called the shots in our friendship.

  For once, it was so good not to be the needy one.

  “You do realize that when he gets bored of you,” Tierney said, “you’ll be sobbing snot down my shoulder and expecting me to pick up the pieces.”

  “Hmm, would that be pieces of snot or pieces of shoulder?”

  She looked at me. “Christ, you’re even starting to talk like him.”

  Teachers noticed the change in me, too. Mr. Brunt asked me to stay behind after tutor time for a “quick word.” Leaving the room with everyone else, Uman mimed a tightrope walker as he went through the doorway. I stifled a laugh, but Brunt was sorting his papers and didn’t notice. For Uman and me, the guy at the Hangingstones had become conflated (an Uman word) with Jack Kerouac and the stripy-roof man. Symbols of individuality, nonconformity. Of madness to live.

  “Now, I know this hasn’t been your finest year, Lory,” Mr. Brunt said, adjusting the knot of his brown tie the way that he does when he’s nervous (i.e., talking to a girl). “Since Christmas especially, your…ah, performance has deteriorated. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  So why are you telling me? Uman would’ve said it, but I just thought it.

  We’d had a couple of “quick words” before—in December and again before half-term and Easter, as my marks dropped and the comments in my planner began to stack up. But this meeting felt more serious, more urgent.

  Mum interrupts. “Why didn’t I know about any of this?”

  “I can’t imagine,” I say, looking at DI Ryan, not Mum.

  “What does that mean?” Mum again.

  “If you’d ever asked me about school, or actually looked in my planner when you signed it, or bothered to come to a parents’ evening, then maybe—”

  “This isn’t helping,” DI Ryan says. “Gloria, Mrs. Ellis—this isn’t why we’re here.”

  Actually, it is, in a way. But she still doesn’t get that. Neither of them do.

  Back to Brunt. He wasn’t playing the concerned uncle this time; he might’ve been talking to Callum Rudd or Jordan Mackay, who spend more time in isolation than they do in class.

  But I’m a good girl, I wanted to say. Was that even true anymore?

  I don’t mean my behavior, but my work, my (lack of) enthusiasm. Year ten had been a period of drifting, getting by on 50 percent effort; since Uman came on the scene, I’d been making barely any effort at all. Just as I’d imagined a tsunami sweeping away the houses I could see from my bedroom window, so I’d sat in lessons imagining a plane crashing into the school.

  “Miss Sprake tells me you missed English yesterday,” Brunt said. “Design Tech on Wednesday—another absence. What did you do, hide away somewhere? Or just walk off-site?”

  I offered him a shrug. This close, he smelled so strongly of toast and coffee and shaving gel, I could picture him at home earlier performing his morning routine. His gaze settled, as it always does, on my chin. Eye avoidance; boob avoidance. When he talks to Tierney, he stares at the window, the wall, the ceiling.

  “You’re turning up late for classes,” he went on. “You’re missing homework deadlines—and when you do hand in work it’s way below your…ah, capabilities.”

  I sat across the desk from him, saying nothing. There was nothing to say. He hadn’t asked for an explanation, he was simply laying out the evidence.

  Then he did ask me to explain.

  “Is it the new lad?”

  “Is what the new lad, sir?”

  Like a phone with a poor signal, he started to break up. “The past week or two…Since he…Things have worsened, wouldn’t you say? Your disengagement.”

  “You’re saying it’s Uman’s fault?”

  Mr. Brunt leaned forward, elbows on the edge of the desk, fingers interlocked. “Lory, you seem to be…Since Uman joined us, you appear to have fallen under…to be, ah, in his thrall.”

  In his thrall. Was that even a phrase?

  “I’m capable of making my own decisions. Sir.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure you are. I’m just saying…just trying to get to the root, as it were.”

  We went around in circles for a few more minutes. I said the usual: Yes, sir; no, sir; sorry, sir, I’ll try harder from now on, sir. All the time, though, another response remained unspoken.

  What’s the point, sir?

  Day after day, year after year, you go to school to learn stuff to pass exams, and they give you bits of paper to say you’ve learned all this stuff (most of which you’ll end up forgetting or never needing to know); then these bits of paper get you into university so you can learn more stuff, to get more bits of paper, so you can use these bits of paper to get a job you don’t want to do and won’t enjoy, working day after day, year after year, to earn enough money to pay for a home you don’t like (or you do like but can’t really afford), which looks just like every other home, in a town full of people just like you, living lives just like yours, where you live with a partner and have 2.0 children so you can raise them to do exactly the same with their lives, while you get older and older until you die.

  And with your last breath, you whisper: Is that it? Is that why we’re here?

  —

  Uman didn’t make me think like that. He made me realize I already thought like that.

  Uman didn’t make me do what I did. He made me realize I wanted to do it.

  QUESTION 8: Why do you think he lied to you?

  On a Friday evening, after dinner, I was in my room when Mum called up the stairs.

  “Lor, you have a visitor!”

  He was in the hallway, wearing a bright-pink hoodie with a picture of Barbie smoking a spliff. Uman Padeem was in our house. Talking to my mum.

  “H-hey.” I gripped the banister as I descended the last few stairs. I couldn’t have said which bothered me the most: him meeting her or her meeting him.

 
; “Oman was just telling me—”

  “It’s Uman,” I said. “Oomaan.”

  “Oh, sorry, Oman.”

  I exhaled. “It’s pronounced—”

  “That’s quite all right, Mrs. Ellis,” Uman said.

  “Call me Liz, please.” Mum wore her plastic smile—an expression that said I’m not sure about this young man, but I’ll try to be friendly, with a hint of Hmm, I wonder if this is Lor’s boyfriend?

  “D’you want to come upstairs?” I said to Uman.

  “Oman says you’re working together on a history project.”

  I flicked a glance at him, then at Mum. “Yeah. We are.”

  The awkward silence probably lasted only a few seconds but felt longer, as if we were all waiting for someone to tell us what to do next.

  “Right, I’ll leave you to it,” Mum said. “Help yourselves to biscuits.”

  “Thank you,” Uman said, “but being a vampire, I don’t eat regular food.”

  Mum gave a strange little laugh. “Well…very nice to meet you, Oman.”

  —

  “What are you doing here?” We were up in my room. I’d shut the door and rounded on him the moment we were inside.

  “I wanted to familiarize myself with your domestic circumstances.”

  “But how d’you even know where I live?”

  “You pointed up the street toward your house that time I caught you following me,” he said. “I just knocked on a few doors till I found the right one.”

  I covered my face with both hands. “I can’t believe you were talking to my mum.”

  “She opened the door. What was I meant to do—mime at her?”

  “And what was all that about being a vampire?”

  “I blurt out stupid things when I’m nervous. And when I’m not nervous, actually.” He laughed. “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?”

  We were standing in the middle of my bedroom, Uman having to take care not to bash the light shade with his head. I gestured toward the chair. “You might’ve let me know you were coming,” I said, lowering myself onto the bed and sitting cross-legged at one end.

  “Spontaneity. We like spontaneity, remember? Nice room, by the way.”

  Mine is the smallest of the three bedrooms, with a sloping ceiling, an alcove fitted with a clothes rail and shelves, and a “multi-unit” that trebles up as homework desk, dressing table, and chest of drawers. The chair is secondhand, from Dad’s office; you have to keep readjusting the height when you’re sitting on it or you end up with your chin on the desk.

  “Ivan’s room is fifty times bigger,” I said. “Rough estimate. And now he only uses it when he’s home for the holidays.”

  “Your long-haired, beardy brother.”

  “That’s him.” I smiled. “You’d get on well, you two.” But I wasn’t sure that was true. They were too similar.

  He just nodded, noncommittal.

  Uman, in my bedroom. It was too strange. Good strange, though. “The look on Mum’s face.” I smiled, leaned back against the headboard.

  “Am I hallucinating,” he said, glancing at the ceiling, “or has the room got bigger?”

  “It’s the chair.” I pointed. “There’s a lever underneath.”

  “That’s a shame. I was rather hoping it was the room.” Uman jacked the seat so high his feet no longer reached the floor, then spun around so he was facing away from me. “Gloria?” he said, tapping the wall as if searching for a secret door. “Gloria—where did you go?”

  —

  It was dusk by the time he left. I snuck him out of the house without Mum or Dad realizing. Just beyond the foot of the drive, concealed by the conifer hedge, we said our goodbyes.

  I thought he might kiss me. It was the first time I’d had that thought and I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to, or whether I was disappointed that he didn’t.

  We were standing beneath a streetlamp that turned our skin yellow. Moths zigzagged and spiraled above us in the hazy light like they were daring one another to settle on our heads.

  “Let’s meet up tomorrow,” Uman said. “There’s something I need to show you.”

  He refused to say what it was because it would spoil the surprise. Only after he’d gone did it occur to me to wonder why he’d said “need” instead of “want.”

  —

  Saturday morning, he was waiting outside the supermarket on Leeds Road. He wore the pink Barbie hoodie again and sat on the back of a bench, with his feet on the seat. He was reading the novel he’d borrowed from my room the previous evening. The title—Being—had caught his eye.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Uman lowered the book at the sound of my voice. “I’ve often thought the same thing.” He touched his chest. “That on the inside, I’m not all I seem from the outside.”

  “It’s a good book, isn’t it?”

  “It’s actually somewhere between very good and excellent.” He folded the corner of the page to mark his place. I have a thing about that. “D’you have any others by him?” Uman asked.

  “Yeah. I could even lend you some bookmarks.”

  It took him a moment to get the point. “Ah. I’ve always been a folder myself.” Then, as if registering my expression, he added, “But this isn’t my book, is it? It’s yours. Sorry.”

  “It might take thirty or forty years, but I’ll probably forgive you.”

  He stowed the book in his holdall. “Shall we start this conversation again?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “To my house.” He coughed, just once. “Now that our relationship has progressed from ‘impending’ to ‘embryonic,’ it’s time you knew the truth about me.”

  —

  The house was in an area of Litchbury I’d never visited. It stood halfway along a terrace of grubby pebble-dash walls and tiny front gardens, most of which were paved or overgrown, or strewn with litter and toys and, in one case, a partially dismantled motorbike. Another featured a battered green sofa, which two small boys were using as a trampoline. Two of the homes were boarded up.

  “This is a joke, right?” I asked.

  Uman just swung open a gate and led me to the front door of number 15. The paint, the color of a fake tan, was flaking in places, and one of the glass panels was cracked. But the garden was well tended, with a neatly mown strip of grass and pretty flowers lining the borders. Inside, a dog yapped like crazy as Uman slotted a key in the lock. I heard its paws scrabbling at the door.

  “Don’t worry about Fatima,” he said. “She hardly ever bites.”

  Fatima was a Jack Russell. She bit me on the ankle the moment I went in.

  “She gets excited by visitors,” Uman said. “Don’t you, Fats? Yes you do.” He shut the door behind us. “If she was a boy dog, she’d be humping your leg right now.”

  Instead, Fatima was standing guard, growling at me.

  “Let her smell your hand—she’ll be fine then. Go on, she won’t bite you a second time.”

  Tentatively, I offered the dog my hand to sniff. She bit it. “Uman—”

  “Let’s go and find my grandmother. You can make friends with Fatima later.”

  I inspected the puncture wounds on my thumb. “Does your grandmother bite as well?”

  Uman shook his head. “No teeth.”

  The hall was at the foot of a steep flight of stairs, with coat hooks and a shoe rack to one side and a frosted-glass door to the other. Uman pushed open the door, admitting a waft of warm air and television noise into the hallway, and led me through to a lounge that reeked of gas-fire and cigarettes and sweet perfume. Still growling, Fatima accompanied us into the room.

  An old woman sat in a flowery-patterned armchair, watching a cookery program. Her legs were sheathed in a green sleeping bag, like a cheap mermaid costume, and she wore a tartan blanket around her shoulders. A brown cigarette smoldered in an ashtray balanced on the arm of her chair. Uman and I squeezed onto a sofa beneath the window. The curtains
were drawn, but the thin fabric admitted a hazy amber light.

  Without glancing in our direction, or even seeming to register us, Uman’s grandmother said, “Onlar pizza yapiyoruz.”

  “What did she say?” I whispered to Uman.

  “She says they’re making pizza.”

  I looked at the TV. The two contestants were making omelettes.

  “Aptal ne tür pizza yapmak için yumurta kullanir?” the old woman said, turning to me with a fierce expression, as if it was my fault.

  Uman translated. “ ‘What kind of fool uses eggs as a pizza base?’ ”

  “Doesn’t she realize they’re making omelettes?”

  “Her eyesight’s not so good,” Uman said. “And she can’t understand English.”

  “What language is she speaking?”

  “Turkish. She’s my mother’s mother.”

  I shrugged off my jacket. The heat, along with the smoke and the stink of perfume, made it hard to breathe. I wondered if this explained Uman’s cough.

  “I’ll introduce you,” he said. Then, addressing the old woman, “Büyükanne, bu benim arkadaşim, Gloria.”

  Her gaze still fixed on me, she sucked hard at the cigarette, then replaced it on the rim of the ashtray. Her eyes were very dark, beneath arched black eyebrows that looked like they’d been shaved off and redrawn, clumsily, in thick pencil. Her frizzy gray hair might have been a wig.

  On a smoky, outward breath, she said, “Ya sen reçete almak için hatirliyorsunuz?”

  “She’s asking if you remembered to collect your prescription,” Uman said.

  “My prescription?”

  “She thinks you’re my grandfather. He died five years ago.”

  The old woman’s attention had drifted back to the TV. She shouted something at the screen—I think I picked out the word for eggs or fools, I’m not sure which.