Crushed

by Kate Hamer

  There was a terrible aching silence in the car, worse this time. Even our awful conversation was better than this. At least it covered up the sense that this was dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. I imagined how it would be if someone we both knew spotted us.

  We drove through Walcot Street and I tried not to, but I couldn’t help looking up at the wall where the man’s body had been dragged like a butcher’s carcass. In this light I could almost see the sticky dark blood again. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe normally. My mind swooped precariously. Make something bad happen again, it said. No, no, no – I cancel that. I cancel it now!

  ‘Are you all right?’ His voice next to me made me jump.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. We’re nearly there.’

  Before the journey’s end I needed to get onto something more profound, more soulful, where a connection would be made but I’d run out of time. My mission seemed to have failed. I considered taking him around the block, or on a diversion, but guessed he would smell a rat.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Just down there.’

  ‘I’ll drop you on the corner,’ he said, and only afterwards I realised that meant he’d planned it all already and saying he was worried about me walking in the dark was just an excuse because he didn’t mind not seeing me to the door.

  The engine idled and stopped as he parked behind Orla’s mum’s car. The familiarity of her boxy Volvo looked strange in this situation.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said without moving.

  He stayed, impassive, in the driving seat and I felt a sick disappointment in my guts. The streetlights lit up the edges of his fine blond hair and his cheekbone was framed in the car window.

  ‘Here we are,’ I said. Then with mounting excitement I realised neither of us was moving. I could hear his rushed breathing in the car. I felt such a churning terror at what I knew was about to happen that a cold sweat covered the back of my neck like dew. But I didn’t budge. I remembered my wish at the wishing bowl and it all seemed fixed already. I felt I couldn’t move even if I tried. The Fates were practically sitting on me, pinning me down.

  ‘Phoebe,’ he said.

  And after all I found I didn’t want to move. The fear teetered into excitement and I felt alive and so powerful, as if I could take flight if I wanted to. For the second time that day I leaned forward to let the light fall on my face. I let it illuminate me as if I were on stage. I’d been charged by the baths inside and out and now my witch light was a-shining; that’s how much he really knew about the subject: he was under the influence of it himself without even realising.

  The next moment he moved forward too and his lips were on mine and his fingers were in my hair. The feeling of his mouth surprised me. It was soft and unexpectedly female too. I wondered how I always expected men to feel tough and hard but realised then that they have their many softnesses, just like us. Their delicacies, like Paul’s little fragile hand I touched by accident once. The kiss went on for longer than felt comfortable, as if he was choosing how to face me when it stopped, then something changed again, an abandonment, and I felt his wet tongue urgently in my mouth. When he finally withdrew I smiled at him to show him he’d done the right thing.

  ‘You are lovely,’ I said, and somehow it seemed to be just the right thing to say.

  He looked down, almost bashfully, and said, ‘Well, thank you. You are very lovely too. You know, I worry about you sometimes. You look so drawn and pale.’

  ‘Really?’

  It surprised me that anything showed on the outside.

  He nods. ‘Yes, but very lovely all the same.’ He brushed my cheek and smiled.

  I touched his arm as I let myself out of the car. I needed to be alone with this, to turn it over and examine it, because I was so scared and wired by this point I’d do something stupid and give myself away if I didn’t escape. I loitered by Orla’s gate until his tail lights were out of sight, then walked up and down the darkened street, my footsteps tapping in the dark like Blind Pew’s stick. What I was beginning to realise was that the waters had washed none of my female glitter away. The feeling of being clean and new, almost masculine, dry as seaweed blown by the wind, was in part false. I saw that reflected in his face when I put my own into the light. The glitter had remained intact through the boiling but I was wearing it differently. Now it was like an external skin, a wetsuit-like thing that skimmed over the surface. The waters had reached further than that. Bone-deep. They’d gone underneath that skin and cleaned out my marrow, lit a primitive fire in the hollows there that smouldered hotly while on the top everything appeared unchanged.

  It was a kind of marvellous trick.

  Once I’d crept into Orla’s bed the feeling stayed with me. I couldn’t help but hint at what had occurred she kept on at me so much. When I told her I’d seen Mr Jonasson and sworn her to secrecy she became very strange. She grabbed onto me in bed and held me so hard I thought I was going to break. It was almost like sex, I think, though I didn’t mind. I was just glad she’d gone back to loving me.

  14

  Orla

  This is the first time I do it and because of that I know it will also be the hardest.

  That thought is very precise as I stand over Mum’s handbag.

  The bag’s decorated, fussy – a little like her – with clinky beads and a gold charm in the shape of V for Veronica clipped on to the hinge. The clasp is not even shut properly and this gives me a moment’s guilty thud to the heart; that the level of trust is so high she leaves it around with the mouth slitted open. All the same, the moment passes and I discover the true meaning of the term ‘light-fingered’ as my hand does enter so very lightly there, barely touching the contents until I feel the bulk of her purse and I ease open the top of the handbag with the knuckle of my thumb, only to discover that the purse is lying casually open too. There are sounds of running water and banging saucepans from the kitchen on the other side of the wall, and it’s those everyday noises that bring a sudden flash of sweat to my back and temples.

  If I asked, she would give me the money, no question. No, that’s not right: there would be caveats, hundreds of them. Do you need anything? Take it, take it, get yourself a manicure, a new blouse, do you need any skin stuff? I’ve seen the sweetest tops in that shop we went to last week. Have you ever thought about a kitten heel? Have you ever thought about having a perm?

  ‘A perm?’ Phoebe shrieked when I told her. ‘Who the flip has a perm in this day and age? Go on, you should do it. I can’t imagine you all curly. That’s hilarious. You’d have to go to some weird old people’s hairdresser to have it done.’ Then she shook out her own beautiful dark natural curls around her shoulders.

  I know the seam of what lies beneath all this generosity of my mother’s, even if she doesn’t. She’s been grooming me – literally – for my future attraction to a mate as far back as I can remember. It’s so medieval it makes me feel sick. Deep down I know she doesn’t even realise she’s doing it. Her own mother did it to her. But if I asked for the money under these pretences, she’d want to see the badges of it being spent. Smoothed-out skin plump with artificial hydration. High-smelling bath bombs studded with real rose petals in paper bags. A new hair colour, hint of auburn perhaps, her own much lamented natural colour from when she was my age which she has never been able to properly reproduce in later life.

  I skin a twenty and then a ten off the roll that is pushed haphazardly in the change section, pocket the notes, skirt past my mother and go into the garden before she can say anything or try to read my face. I need the coolness. The summer has barely started but already there’s a fist of green and red blackberries hanging over the wall, waiting for the sun to turn them a deep autumn purple. It’s all so relentless. It’s like I need everything to stop just for a little while so I can just rest and think clearly. Sometimes I long to live by the sea. I crave the salt sting in the air, the lash of hair whipped around the face. The air here is so often sultry, brewed in a valley as it is. It begins to rain,
just a few drops, and I lean my face towards the wetness, and the feel of it on my face is something that is only a tiny taster, a shadow of what I need. Mum’s head bobs into view inside the house. She’s at the sink, washing dishes. The sight of her should make me feel guilty but it doesn’t. I simply feel disconnected from her behind her window.

  I can still feel Phoebe’s arms where she held me through the night. God, she’s so fucking beautiful. She has something about her that means you can’t stop looking. It’s almost biblical. Sometimes she stands with her square palms outstretched and she could be John the Baptist or one of the Three Wise Men or even Jesus. That’s the power of her. I can’t take my eyes off her. It was my other wish at the wishing bowl, to possess her, the silent second part of the wish to have someone only for myself, except I know when I’m thinking clearly that it will never be her, and that’s so painful it nearly kills me. I said it that day under my breath and it’s hard to think that something so powerful barely stirred the air as I whispered the words.

  Last night I was woken by a sharp patter on my window that took me a while to realise was a rain of stones. When I pushed up the sash, Phoebe was standing there below on the pavement just like that, with her palms turned upwards, and my heart started knocking so hard I could hear it in my ears.

  ‘Come down and let me in.’ It was a whisper but it drifted up to me like smoke because the night was so still. I think as long as I live I will remember that moment. Seeing her in the pool of streetlight, her face upturned. I put my hand to my mouth to stifle a laugh because it seemed such a comedy-sweet re-enaction of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene.

  I opened the front door with trembling fingers and she sauntered in. ‘Sssh, everyone’s asleep,’ I whispered. ‘Where have you been?’ I couldn’t bear for the moment to be broken by one of my family barging into it. It would destroy the atmosphere that seemed so perfect to my bleary senses.

  I was glad my bedroom was submerged in darkness so I couldn’t see it properly and be reminded of its revoltingness. Again, I resolved to rip it all apart as soon as I could. It was a dusty fairy tale; a story that had been told all wrong and threaded through with phoney facts all along. The remnants of years ago when I was trying so hard, everything in the room a staged diversion – the loops of lights in the shape of sunflowers wrapped around the cream iron bed-head. The pink striped rag rug. The glass vase of artificial sunflowers, now coated in a layer of dust in the corner. I remembered how, at about the age of twelve, my mother and I had decided that sunflowers would be my ‘theme’. It seems such a strange and pointless exercise in hindsight. It appears like childish vanity now – or worse, an attempt to pin me down before I’d had a chance properly to become so I’d be forever stuck inside a sunny whorl.

  We curled round each other in bed. She felt freezing, even in my borrowed pyjamas. Something had happened, I could tell.

  ‘Where were you?’ I asked. ‘What’s happened?’

  She wouldn’t tell me for a long time. She even pretended to be asleep for a while, but I knew it was fake stillness and I shook her out of it.

  ‘Tell me,’ I whispered fiercely into her ear. I even turned the light on to wake her up.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But first you have to promise me not to freak out or tell anyone.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, although everyone knows these promises are meaningless.

  She bit her beautiful bottom lip. ‘I’ve seen him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘No, our English teacher, of course.’

  I tried not to let the rising fury show in my face.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, I was out walking the streets and he pulled up in his car.’ Her eyes went round. ‘Do you think he might’ve been driving about looking for me? D’you think he’s that crazy over me?’

  ‘It does seem rather a coincidence,’ I said, though she didn’t seem to hear the coolness.

  ‘Well, after we drove around for a bit—’

  ‘You got in his car?’ I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice now.

  ‘Look, if you’re going to interrupt all the time I’m not going to tell you. We drove around for a bit. It was wonderful. We talked and talked for ages like we’ve known each other forever, and Orla …’ She sat up. ‘He kissed me.’

  I wanted to strangle her. How could she? How could she?

  ‘What sort of kiss?’ Hoping it might be a peck-on-the-cheek-goodnight kind.

  ‘It was a proper full kiss. Passionate, like we were tasting each other.’

  I switched off the light and grabbed onto her so hard our bodies felt almost painful against each other.

  ‘Promise me you won’t see him again,’ I said into her hair.

  She didn’t respond and she lay in my arms, still and silent, for the rest of the night.

  I couldn’t sleep. The memory of our year-old kiss flared up and plagued me. It had happened in the little park down from her house, shrouded in trees and full of dinky little Victorian touches that makes it slightly dreamlike and wonky like an illustration in a children’s book. It’s on a hill with the paths cut into it and we used to call it ‘the slanting park’ in the way we had of naming everything like that. We were sheltering from the rain – carrying an umbrella wouldn’t have occurred to us – and there was something so stirring about the sheets of rain, the rumble of approaching thunder, as if the world was being realigned in a new and exciting way, that sent shivers down my arms. The dish-sized leaves caught the rain above us and funnelled it down in a complicated pattern so it sprayed over the edges of the tree and left us dry. Phoebe felt the excitement too; I know she did. She hooked her little finger inside my curled palm and drew me close. I didn’t need any more encouragement. I held her chin with my other hand and kissed her. It felt perfect. Wet but not slobbery, and soft and hard at the same time. Her mouth even seemed to have a tang of the salt that I craved. That’s what I’ve held onto since Eleanor. That wasn’t my first kiss, I want to tell that bovine face each time I see her. I’ve kissed somebody who is truly astoundingly beautiful and special, and that specialness has touched even the stupid uncouth person I am.

  The moment was like an exquisite perfect musical note hanging in the air before dissolving.

  Though even as our faces were moving apart I heard something to my right and turned just in time to see a young mother dragging a child away and pushing a pram with her other hand. She was huffing her disapproval. Her back was stiff with it.

  I turned back to Phoebe. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

  And my heart twisted painfully. I could tell by the evenness in her voice that she was neutralising what had just happened. Not a hint of excited breathiness, whereas I could barely breathe. She was preparing the way for ignoring this – or worse, pretending it had never happened. She left me there alone under the trees and I watched her getting drenched as she walked away, the rain darkening the back of her blue coat in a triangle.

  The kiss has stayed unacknowledged, although she comes to me when she needs to be held, like last night. I watched her impassive face in the semi-darkness. She seemed unnaturally still. I must’ve fallen asleep myself at some point. Perhaps when the dawn was creeping through the layers of lace curtains with tiny shells stitched onto their hems, so they tinkle on the painted boards when drawn aside with a sound like shingle being dragged along by the sea. When I woke she’d gone. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and froze as I opened the bedroom door. I could hear her downstairs talking to my mother. I tied my dressing gown tightly and went to join them.

  ‘Glad you had a good time last night,’ my mother said, brightly gesturing with her coffee cup in the shape of an owl, its little nubbed ceramic beak standing out in a vaguely obscene manner. I startled at the weirdness of her statement, until she added, ‘Makes me less guilty about going out with the girls,’ and I realised Phoebe must’ve somehow extracted that information, then p
ersuaded her we’d had the evening in together, watching movies or trying on make-up or some other thing that we’re supposed to do.

  In the background my two brothers raucously foraged breakfast, knocking over cereal packets and cramming juice back in the fridge without looking to see if there was space in the door shelf. Phoebe smiled at me through the steam of her own cup, rabbit-shaped.

  ‘You just wait till your father’s home.’ My mother addressed the boys’ backs grimly. ‘Then you’ll see what’s what.’

  ‘Thanks, Veronica,’ Phoebe bobbed her head in the direction of my mum. ‘Better go now.’ Mum never minds that Phoebe calls her by her first name. I think it makes her feel like ‘one of the girls’.

  My mouth rounded in a childish O of disappointment. ‘But if you wait we can walk together.’ I knew I sounded petulant and needy.

  ‘No, I must go. I need to get some things for school.’

  ‘I could come with you.’

  ‘No time to wait. Got to go.’

  She had that hunted look in her eye, the need to flee stamped there, like she’s about to be suffocated. She’s always flitting like that at a moment’s notice. She’s like water. She grabbed her coat. ‘Bye then,’ she said awkwardly before ducking out of the room, leaving the little family tableau behind, my mother chewing ruminatively on a corner of toast as she watched her go.

  The garden feels like a relief.

  *

  It’s my last day of school before term ends because Mum has got rid of the boys and booked us both into some awful spa break and then Dad will be back. Everything changes, I tell myself.

  Already school has that carnival feeling of the end of days. The noticeboards have been ripped clean. Builders are there, sizing up the back windows for repair over the summer. Somehow it makes the building seem like there’s more light flooding in, the parquet showing up pale and honeyed, because all the old familiar patterns have been peeled away.