Heatstroke: an intoxicating story of obsession over one hot summer

by Hazel Barkworth

  The whole group were crowded together. They were usually draped around their little domain as if it was someone’s bedroom. Rachel had never seen them in such a tight cluster. She sat up straighter in her seat, waiting to see what was in the centre of the huddle. A plume of smoke spiralled towards the streetlight. The boys occasionally posed with a Marlboro, but that wouldn’t capture the attention of the others. This was not a cigarette. Rachel felt her heart thud. This was something new.

  It was a moment she’d dreaded. All parents must. She knew it was naïve to hope that Mia would skate around the edges of that danger, but she had never expected to witness it. They remained bent over. Rachel knew it was hypocritical; if they really were smoking something other than tobacco in those Rizlas, she had no right to judge them. But there was a difference – the slivers of marijuana they’d acquired in her own youth were just tiny shards of pure nature. The stuff the kids got hold of now was nasty; tarry synthetics that could tie their brains in knots. She could see the orange-red tip burning in the dark as they sucked it one by one, the occasional flash of the Zippo as they had to relight.

  Then came the water. One by one they swigged from a two-litre Evian bottle. Rachel felt her throat tighten. After their gulp of water, they walked away, thinning the huddle until Rachel could see more clearly. They were picking something up, swallowing it, then drinking from the ceremonial bottle. She was a teacher. She’d seen the pamphlets, watched the educational videos. She knew the pretty little drops they were sharing were not sweets. They’d be in pastel shades, like macarons, with tiny pictures miraculously carved into them: seahorses or the CND logo or Harry Potter’s lightning bolt. She knew the names – doves, molly, thizz. She’d cringed during the inset day when the trainer had pronounced the words as if he’d cracked some eternal code. She was sure that teenagers would never use those terms, but is that what was sitting on their tongues, swooshing down their gullets, whirring their brains?

  The distance made the movements blurred. Ella was, of course, the first of the girls. The boys had stayed low, but she tilted the bottle right back, making it dramatic, sending her dark hair halfway to the ground. Only Abby stood back, suddenly eager to search through her bag, away from the others. Rachel wanted to drive away, to unsee it. But if she turned the engine on, they’d see where she was sitting, watching them, stalking them from the bushes. She had to stay there. Mia would swallow a pill. If that was what was in the outstretched palm at the centre of the circle, she would swallow one. Rachel knew it as a fact. It wasn’t just the pressure of the crowd. She’d have to prove to herself that she was whole. The slogans on Instagram never spoke of living a careful life, a life that avoided danger. They were all about taking risks. Mia would fight her natural caution. Lily wasn’t there, but the gauntlet she’d thrown was. The others had to be every bit as wild. Rachel still knew Mia. She could still predict how her daughter would react, still understood how her mind worked.

  Rachel knew she should march over, grab their arms, throw the pills to the ground, tell their parents. But she froze. She felt the tears growing heavier behind her eyes. She was trapped by her own machinations. She was stuck being their silent guardian. She knew it wasn’t enough. It was outrageously irresponsible not to act. The other mothers, other teachers, would be horrified. They’d be over there now, calling everyone’s parents, dashing to the hospital. Rachel just sat in her car and sipped from her own plastic bottle, staring at the same patch of scrubland she’d watched for so many days.

  The girls were shrieking now – Ella, Keira, Mia – throwing their heads back as they laughed. They were stumbling, gripping each other in amplified hilarity. Rachel’s heart hammered so loudly it had to be audible. They could be caught in the frenzy of a reckless stimulant. It could be smothering them, snuffing them from inside. Or they could just be laughing. That’s what girls did. They might have swallowed pellets of gum, Tic Tacs, Smarties. It was too dark to see in the dusk. The girls danced around much like they had before, fingers in peace signs covering their faces, the dandelions of summer still catching in the breeze. Rachel wanted to see inside Mia’s head and understand what was happening there.

  Rachel was rigid behind the glass. She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her hand, letting out a guttural shout. She bucked like a toddler in a pushchair, desperate for any release. The seat belt she hadn’t unclipped choked her neck. She was stuck in her response, harnessed in the airless cocoon of her car as the tumult of youth danced in front of her.

  Rachel scooped the guts from a butternut squash, and slammed the masher into them. It always felt like a compromise. She’d rather have been pulping fluffy masses of potato than this sweeter, glossier, less satisfying mound, but she knew about fibre and calories and made her decisions accordingly. It could be a fight to keep her flesh compact. She played by the rules. She counted tablespoons and made willing sacrifices. The only time it became easy was when everything else was hard. Anxiety always went for her throat. She knew she was tense when swallowing became a trial; she could shed ten pounds over an Ofsted visit, and Tim’s first month away had whittled her down to something fragile.

  Rachel mashed hard, pounding the bottom of the bowl. Aaron was the first boy Mia had ever brought home, even if it was under sufferance. He was the first man to eat at their table in weeks. Mia was supposed to help – they were supposed to have driven to the supermarket that Thursday night, picked out the right ingredients and then cooked it together – but she’d pleaded homework, hunkered down in her room and left Rachel to sort the food alone. Rachel had stared at Mia, trying to discern a change, to see the impact of a drug on her daughter’s face, her actions. Mia looked the same as ever. Rachel had spent considerably more than she’d intended to. She filled the fridge with covered plates, and readied the salmon to grill once Aaron arrived.

  The food they’d be eating would be packed, bulging, into a string shopper, so French it almost seemed sarcastic. Mark would go to buy it alone. It would be too much of a risk for Lily to be outside. Rachel knew the boulangerie he liked. He’d keep his head down, barely speaking, paying from the wads of euros in his pocket, aware all the time of people looking too hard at his face, of the CCTV cameras that leered down from every lamppost.

  The bread he chose would be so fresh and warm that yeast would seem to rise from it in clouds. Rachel could imagine the smell. It would be a different substance altogether from the sliced white Lily was used to; that bread would seem dead compared to these breathing cobs. They wouldn’t cut it, just rip great handfuls from the loaf, smearing each ragged chunk with butter. They would fill little glass beakers with red wine. They’d eat chocolate with seventy percent cocoa.

  They’d drink fresh ground coffee in the morning, so rich it was nearly sweet, and eat meat sliced so thinly it was transparent on Lily’s plate. These would be nothing like the meals she’d eat at home, nothing like that bland, sodium-saturated food, piled too high by her mother, laced with disappointment if she didn’t finish it all. This was the food of adults. The little morsels would be an assault on Lily’s virgin taste buds. The new flavours would jar her tongue, these deeper, darker notes stimulating parts of flesh that had lain dormant. Do you like it? He’d watch her, not looking away, waiting for the moment she swallowed.

  When the plate was in front of him, Aaron turned his fork around and used it like a shovel, scooping up fish and mash and wilted spinach. It somehow looked butch rather than childish. The food seemed too small for him. Butternut squash had been the wrong call; Rachel realised she should have gone traditional, meat-heavy, substantial. He seemed too big for their table, taking up half the room with his bulk. Without Tim there for balance, he felt too male for their feminine home.

  Mia had hurtled down the stairs when the doorbell rang, greeting Aaron like she hadn’t seen him an hour previously at school. She clung to him, tended to him, showing him where to sit, hanging his coat up. Rachel pursed her lips into a smile. She
played the role she’d rehearsed so well; calm, polite, curious. Every time she ventured a comment or question, Mia glared, but Rachel persisted, gaining the outline of where he lived and with whom. It became clear that Aaron had the kind of divorced parents who battled for his affection. He’d been indulged. Rachel clocked up the visible spend on his body. The Nike Flyknit trainers, so clearly outside of the school’s regulations but worn along corridors every day. Two hundred pounds. The G-Star RAW jeans. Sixty, seventy pounds. The Diesel watch with three dials on the screen. Two hundred and fifty at least. He was impeccable, and it reeked of testosterone. Rachel tightened the grip on her knife, letting the urge to interrupt, to bark the question she most wanted to ask, abate.

  Despite how flimsy it looked on his fork, Aaron ate Rachel’s food with enthusiasm, loading his plate with more mash from the white bowl in the middle of the table. He wasn’t the monosyllabic grunter she’d expected. Instead, he dominated the conversation, keeping up a steady commentary about finishing his exams, about the outrageous loss the school football team had suffered against St Christopher’s, and his plans to apply to Loughborough next year. Rachel’s mouth ached with the tightness of her grin. It was Mia who sat silently. She ran her fork through her mash as if she was grooming it, but rarely lifted a scrap to her mouth. She kept her gaze determinedly on Aaron, never acknowledging her mother.

  So, this was Aaron. Rachel searched his face for the charm, the specific quality that had beguiled Mia. His hair was still nothing but stubbles with a flourish, but at this proximity, his eyes were startling. Rachel couldn’t understand why she hadn’t noticed them before. They were so blue they were nearly navy, against a spray of ink-black lashes. Could so much power reside in a space so small? Could those balls of aqueous fluid, that would take up no more than the very centre of a palm, really hold such sway?

  When Aaron left the kitchen to use the downstairs toilet, Rachel raised her eyebrows at Mia; a query, a check-in. Mia looked away, then stood up and started to clear the plates. She clattered each one heavily into the sink. Rachel bit back the instinctive criticism. The plates should be rinsed, then stacked correctly in the dishwasher. They could chip in the sink. She sat still as Mia thumped them down one by one, raining cutlery onto the pile. Rachel closed her eyes to cool the simmering just under her skin. The tension was broken by Aaron’s voice in the hallway.

  ‘Is that you, Mrs Collins?’ He was standing in the door of the toilet, pointing at a framed photograph.

  Rachel flinched at the Mrs; at school she was firmly Ms. She’d allowed herself to hang the picture as an indulgence. It was of her on stage in the mid-nineties. She wore ripped tights and her skirt was riding high up her thighs. Her mouth was parted as she sang. The band – Hurricane Gloria – had never taken off, not properly, but they’d released an EP on an indie label, had played the major venues in London, even had a fanzine briefly created in their honour.

  ‘Is that really you?’ There was no doubt that it was. Her face hadn’t changed so considerably. The face in the picture looked somewhere between her current self and Mia’s. The question was a provocation.

  ‘Yes, Aaron, it is. A long time ago. When I was very young.’ Rachel stepped into the doorway to see it more closely, to remind herself of its contours.

  Aaron reached his thick finger out and jabbed, his skin on the glass above the image of her waist, her stomach. It left a smudge. ‘How young?’

  Rachel was now fully in the tiny room with him. ‘Nineteen, I suppose.’ Over half her life ago. ‘It was 1994. A hell of a year.’

  He pushed the corners of his mouth down and nodded his approval. ‘Hot.’

  Rachel ground her molars together. Her pictured self was not considerably older than he was now – a few years, nothing that couldn’t be overlooked. She was suddenly on his level. He was assessing her as a peer, and casting his judgement. He was deciding if she was someone he would pursue. She’d framed the picture only months before as an act of wilful vanity; now it felt exposing.

  Mia pushed past her mother to get to Aaron. She gripped his shoulder, pressed herself against him. All three of them were now crammed into a few feet of space – all four of them: Aaron, Mia and both Rachel’s past and present selves. Her adult self and her teenage self. Mia leaned in towards the picture, mouth distorted.

  ‘That? I hate that pathetic old picture. It just looks weird.’

  He’d have occupied every gap in her mind for so many months. Every advert break, every quiet classroom moment would have been filled to bursting with thoughts of him, all the more solid because they couldn’t be voiced. They had to be held inside her head. She couldn’t doodle his name in the back of her folder, couldn’t dissect their conversations with her friends. She couldn’t talk to him without revealing her gaucheness. She wouldn’t know how to prepare for him, and had no one to ask. The black underwear she had taken from her mother, that leotard made of lace, would feel tacky and foolish now they were together.

  She’d be feeling blank in that bare French room, with nothing to say to him. There would be so little she knew that he didn’t also know. The only pockets of information she’d be able to clutch at were banal; Kardashians, make-up, her friends. She’d wish she could scrub her brain of it all, and fill it instead with nourishing facts, stories he’d find fascinating. She hadn’t even sat her GCSEs yet. She’d wish she could tell him something, explain something new to him. But there was nothing. Everything she’d accumulated would feel like dirty pennies. She’d hate how little she’d managed to lodge in her skull over fifteen years.

  With no phone, she couldn’t even google the references she missed, the names that went over her head. He’d have signed her into the apartment as Kim Gordon. Rachel knew how he thought. He wouldn’t have risked Thurston Moore for himself, but would have opted for Steve Shelley, the drummer. Lily would have no idea. She’d only have the small bag of clothes she’d packed, only the knowledge she’d carried with her. She might never have heard a single Sonic Youth song.

  They sat around the table in the garden, sipping on a non-alcoholic fruit punch that had seemed a good idea to Rachel in the supermarket. She’d thrown a handful of pomegranate seeds into each of the glasses of garish orange fizz and watched now as they lazily drifted to the surface when they’d garnered enough bubbles, then slid back down once they’d shed them. The sun was low in the sky, and it was still warm. It should have been relaxing, but Rachel couldn’t ungrit her teeth. Tim would be home the following day. She wished she’d waited for him.

  Aaron’s hand sat now on Mia’s leg, far too high up her thigh. He was taunting Rachel, pushing her, seeing when she’d crack. She’d watched every gesture between them. Aaron had been nothing but tender, his fingers on the back of Mia’s hand, lightly at her waist, but it still seemed brutal.

  ‘So, Rachel, what do you think about all the Lily stuff?’

  Rachel breathed in, then out. He was in their back garden. She had invited him to dinner. It was reasonable for him to use her first name. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Aaron.’

  ‘I mean, don’t you think it’s all a bit much?’ He was leaning back in the wooden garden chair, taking up every inch of it and spreading beyond its confines. His voice had deepened, mimicking the modulation of adult conversation.

  ‘A bit much? What, the reaction?’

  ‘Yeah. I think it’s all a bit ridiculous. I mean, she’s nearly sixteen. In a few months, no one would care. She can make her own decisions.’

  Mia, leaning towards Aaron, pushed right against the edge of her own chair, nodded. ‘She’s going to be sixteen in October. October the third. She’s a Libra.’

  Rachel sighed. A bird landed on the fence behind them, stood with its legs apart and squawked with gusto. The noise was alarmingly loud. Rachel turned to see it; small, brown and speckled, with its throat open and its beak wide. ‘But it’s only June.’

  Mia seemed imm
ediately riled. ‘So, it’s just about a couple of months, is that what all of this is? Three or four months?’

  ‘To an extent, yes. She is a child. She can’t legally give her consent, even if she’d very much like to. That isn’t her choice, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s so stupid. What’s meant to happen in that time? What’s going to change so much about Lily that it would be okay then?’

  Rachel paused. What magic did those months hold? What seismic alterations were set to take place across those ninety days? What in Lily’s body or soul could grow so much? The law assumed some gift of learning would make her suddenly robust enough for the new experience, resiliant in a way that was previously impossible. Rachel felt her words blur. The bird squawked again. ‘It’s far more complicated than that.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Even if she had already turned sixteen, it wouldn’t make a difference. Mr Webb is her teacher and he has abused that power.’ Rachel’s tongue felt clumsy in her mouth. ‘He’d be in trouble either way.’

  Aaron leaned forwards, placing his empty glass on the table. ‘She’s old enough to know what she wants, though. Shouldn’t we respect that?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s really about respect . . .’

  Mia leapt in. ‘I do. I think that’s exactly what it’s about. Respect. And how adults constantly demand it, but aren’t willing to give it to us.’

  Rachel inhaled slowly. ‘People are trying to protect Lily, to do what is best for her.’

  Aaron’s hands were on his knees, his elbows forming a cage. ‘Doesn’t she know what’s best for her, though? Maybe they’re really in love.’

  Mia snorted.

  Aaron turned to her. ‘What? They might be. People do fall in love. It might be real. They might stay together.’

  Mia looked stricken. ‘Mum? Do you think that’s true? Do you think they’re in love?’

  Rachel could barely lift her voice to be heard. ‘I think they might think they are.’