Doing It

by Melvin Burgess

  ‘You’ll have to keep an eye out in case people come,’ she said. I tried to stop her but – I don’t know, I just don’t seem to be able to say no. She always gets it her own way. It’s not fair.

  14

  mother love

  At first he thought she hadn’t heard the bell, but just as his finger was lifting towards the buzzer again he heard someone shuffling towards the door in such a way that set his heart beating fearfully, even though he knew that it wasn’t, say, a wounded water buffalo or a starving tiger that was coming towards him, but Miss. She opened the door to reveal herself, hair in a rumpled mess on the back of her head, face a crumpled mess on the front. The air stank of stale drink, tobacco smoke and polish.

  ‘Ben,’ she groaned. She held her hand to her head and turned away. He followed her into the flat.

  It was all wrong. For a moment he thought that he’d come by some impossible chance to the wrong flat and she happened to be in it – with a new lover …? But it wasn’t that. It was the flat itself that had gone crazy.

  Miss’s flat was always messy. She kept her clean clothes and her dirty clothes in separate heaps on the floor and didn’t touch the washing up until there was enough to bother with. Dusting wasn’t her thing, she was waiting to find a window cleaner, wiped the surfaces only when something sticky refused to dry out, and only did the kitchen floor when it stuck to the soles of her slippers. Every now and then she had a blitz, but what had happened here was something else. The place was spotless. More than spotless; it was sterile.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Ben, as she waved a despairing hand around, but he already knew the answer.

  ‘My mother gate-crashed my birthday party. Put the kettle on,’ she replied and shuffled back to the bedroom.

  There are many different sorts of mothers depending on what they make you do or feel. There are love-mothers and hate-mothers, guilt-mothers and sad-mothers, rage-mothers, glad-mothers, sleep-mothers, mania-mothers, laughter-mothers, fear-mothers, hit-mothers, tear-mothers, bore-mothers, sick-mothers, work-mothers and safe-mothers, to name just a few. It works for dads too. Alison Young had a lobotomy-mother. Whenever her mother visited her she spent the rest of the day walking around like a narcoleptic zombie.

  Ben had seen it before. He’d come round one Sunday a couple of months ago and found her like this, in bed with what seemed like a huge hangover because of her mother visiting. It looked at first as though she had a drunk-mother, but it wasn’t that. Her mother made her feel like a great lump of shit.

  He made his way into the kitchen to make coffee and found, just like last time, that the place had been totally rearranged.

  ‘Where have the cups gone?’ he asked.

  ‘Wherever that fat bitch put them,’ said Ali. So it was. The cups were where the tins had been, the tins were where the bowls had been, the bowls – who knew where the bowls were?

  ‘She pretends she does it by accident,’ murmured Ali, sipping her coffee a little later. ‘She empties everything out so she can clean in the cupboards and then puts them back somewhere else better.’ She leaked tears and leaned across for a tissue.

  Ben already knew a whole host of stories about Mrs Young. How she’d convinced Ali to have a fourteenth birthday party, swore she’d keep out of the way and then stayed anyway and forced everyone to play party games.

  ‘Blind Man’s Bluff. Postman’s Knock! Imagine being forced to play Postman’s Knock when you’re fourteen by your mother. Being locked in the cupboard like that …’ raged Ali.

  How, when Ali had her first period, her mother had taken her up to the bathroom to sort her out and then come back down and announced it to the whole family at tea. And for the week after, to anyone who happened to come into the house.

  ‘“She’s having her first period!” she’d say, and she’d point at my crotch. I swear it. And, of course, people would look down there for a second, just following her finger. I felt like they could see it!’ wailed Ali.

  This time, Mrs Young had travelled down to surprise her daughter on her birthday. Ali had had a few friends round. They’d gone out for drinks and then come back for more of the same.

  Mrs Young marched in unannounced – Ali had no idea she’d got keys cut for herself. She didn’t look too happy, according to Ali, to find other people there, but she made the best of it by serving drinks and snacks. She didn’t do small talk. She left the ‘young people’ to it and went into the kitchen to begin her ritualistic clean. After she’d emptied all the cupboards onto the floor and made the kitchen impassable, she changed her mind and came out to begin on the living room, starting quietly by vacuuming in the corners but gradually moving into the middle until she’d achieved her objective, and people made their excuses and left.

  Ali had asked her if that was what she wanted and they’d had a huge, blazing row that she could bear for about five minutes before bursting into tears and rushing hysterically to her bedroom in tears while her mother mercilessly cleaned and shouted at her over the vacuum. It was so humiliating. Why couldn’t she stop her? Why did it get to her so much? Wasn’t she pathetic? Why did it have to happen to her?

  Ben listened in sympathetic amazement. Part of him was appalled, part of him was amused. Ali seemed a pretty effective sort of person – why so helpless with her own mother? It seemed all wrong. After she’d drunk her coffee, she flung herself sideways in the bed, pulled the blankets up and buried her face on the pillow. Ben stood by the edge of the bed feeling awkward.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ll be OK.’ But she didn’t look OK.

  ‘Are you going back to sleep?’ he asked hopefully.

  She glanced up at him. ‘You can give me a cuddle if you like.’

  Ben hesitated a moment. He wanted to say he had things to do, but she knew he hadn’t, so he slipped off his shoes and made to get into the bed.

  ‘Not like that, I want some skin,’ she complained. He pulled off his jeans and shirt and slid in next to her. She pushed her back up against him, and he put his arms round her and squeezed.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. He wondered if he was supposed to make love to her. Although he’d felt exhausted on the way round and had wanted to get back to bed, he felt wide awake now. He felt like getting up and rushing busily around. In a minute she turned round and nestled her head on his shoulder. ‘Mmm,’ she said again, and closed her eyes with a sigh. As he lay watching her he noticed for the first time two very straight, white scars running neatly from one side of each of her wrists to the other. Then he fell asleep.

  15

  nemesis rising

  The girl Dino knew as Siobhan was really called Zoë by doting parents whom she despised. When she woke up the night after the party in bed with Dino, she smiled with pleasure at the thought that she’d spent the night with a boy who thought she was someone else. Over breakfast, without thinking or caring why, she’d started to tell him more lies just to amuse herself.

  Her dad was a vet who specialised in reptiles. She was seventeen years old, the youngest of five. An accident, her parents didn’t want her. They hated and controlled her in equal measures. If they knew she was having sex they’d go mad. They’d probably kill the boy. It would be better for Dino never to call her at home.

  Dino believed everything.

  In fact, Zoë was only fourteen but she had for many years had an irresistible appetite for trouble. She loved it, lived it, was it. The imaginary father she conjured up for Dino wrestled with alligators with toothache and giant pythons with sore backs, trying to get them to take their medication. The real one supervised a production line in a yoghurt factory. He kept his hands so clean, the skin cracked through over-washing. He’d have run a mile at the sight of anything in scales. She thought of reptiles, partly because her father was one, but also because he’d gone ballistic only that weekend when she’d tried to sneak out of the house dressed only in a tank top and pair of skin-tight snakeskin pants.

  ‘It looks like something’s
swallowed you,’ he snarled, barring her way out of the front door.

  Zoë had run back upstairs shouting, ‘Is that rage or lust making your eyeballs bulge?’ She changed into her pink party dress, came down and threw the hot pants onto the gas fire. ‘I’ll never wear them again,’ she screamed. The hot pants shrivelled and stank and melted down the coals and Zoë zipped out of the door. Out on the street she ran down the road listening to her father’s bellows retreat as she turned the corner. She was furious with herself for letting her dad catch her dressed to kill and for throwing her pants away like that. She was so full of red hot life and danger it surprised her she didn’t just sizzle her way through the pavement all the way down to hell.

  She’d liked Dino that morning. Once he’d stopped trying to throw his weight around he was undeniably sweet. And rather gorgeous. Dino was a looker all right, every bit of him was lovely, but she hadn’t forgotten either that he had tried to throw his weight around, or that she had unaccountably let him. The whole time they spent in bed, she was wondering whether or not to bite it hard or kick him suddenly in the goolies. She was quite capable of doing either. One thing she did know: Dino was going to suffer, no matter how much she liked him. Telling him a huge pack of lies was an amusing form of revenge, but it wasn’t enough. The poor boy thought he was using her. Sooner or later, he was going to find out differently.

  In the meantime, she was enjoying herself. They spent the morning romping about in bed like a pair of kids on a bouncy castle. She would have been happy to stay all day – she had nowhere better to go, certainly not home – but as soon as she found out that Dino’s friends were coming round to help him clean up, she remembered that she was going bowling. She jumped out of bed and was dressed before he really knew she was going. He just had time to make a date at the weekend with her before she was out of the door and gone.

  Zoë caught a bus into town and dialled a number from a phone kiosk.

  ‘Hi, Sam.’

  ‘So how was the party?’

  ‘I stayed all night.’

  ‘Zoë!’

  Zoë laughed at her friend’s scandalised tone. ‘I stayed with the guy whose house it was.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Gorgeous, very. You remember that one with the dark hair with little goldy bits in it?’

  ‘Him? Ohhh, nice.’

  ‘But stupid. I’m seeing him again. Or at least, he thinks I am!’ She roared with laughter.

  Sam roared too, uncertainly. ‘You’re a bad girl, Zoë Trent.’

  ‘No, listen. I told him the most monstrous pack of lies. You wouldn’t believe it. Wrong name, wrong age, wrong everything.’

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘I don’t know why, I don’t know why, I just did it!’ roared Zoë, who was certainly not going to admit that she’d been gate-crashed into sleeping with someone. ‘He thinks my dad’s a reptile doctor – no, really! He thinks my name is Siobhan. He thinks we have an indoor swimming pool and that my parents trust me so much, they let me have the house at weekends when they’re away.’ That wasn’t all true – she hadn’t actually told Dino the last two things, but the fact was, Zoë was an inventive and helpless liar. She just did it as she went along. ‘Not only that,’ she went on. ‘Listen; I got a bag full of money.’

  ‘Zoë!’

  ‘About sixty pounds.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Where’d you think?’

  But Sam wasn’t having it. ‘Zoë, that’s really tight, those people were at that party in good faith.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a whingebag. They’re all fat soft kids, they’ve got families and homes, they won’t miss it.’

  ‘Fat soft kids. You’re a fat soft kid!’

  ‘Not fat, not soft, not a kid, either. D’you wanna help me spend it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on! Sixty quid!’

  ‘I can’t today. What do you want to do that for, Zoë? Anyway, I’ve got loads of homework.’

  ‘Homework!’

  ‘Yeah, well, some of us want to have a life, you know.’

  ‘Sixty quid, Sam.’

  Sam paused. ‘Sixty quid, that’s a lot of money.’

  ‘Come on. We can spend it all. Every penny. Today. All in one go.’

  ‘OK. Right!’

  ‘Good girl! Down town. See you in Stred’s in an hour?’

  ‘I’m going to have to finish my homework first. I’ll be a couple of hours at least.’

  ‘Come on, Sam, I’m paying.’

  ‘Two hours. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ agreed Zoë grudgingly. It wasn’t fair. She was paying, wasn’t she? She wasn’t sure Sam had the right to say no, but that was Sam. She was prepared to be as mad as anyone, but only after she’d finished being sensible and only if she was certain she wasn’t going to get found out. She was a master of disguise, was Sam.

  Zoë put down the phone and stood looking up the streets. Two hours to kill. Boring. Boring boring boring! Why was life so boring?

  It was gone eight o’clock on Sunday evening by the time Zoë got back home. They’d had a great time. There wasn’t a penny left. They’d seen a film, gone bowling, eaten a mountain of crisps and sweets and bought a CD each. Zoë had to leave hers round at Sam’s because her parents searched her room regularly. She hadn’t been there since Friday evening.

  Her parents popped out of the front room like a pair of armed badgers before she even had time to close the front door.

  ‘You just don’t care, do you?’ yelled her dad. ‘We’ve been worried sick and you don’t even care.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’

  ‘It’s not fair!’ he yelped.

  ‘Darling, what makes you behave like this?’ cried her mother, the waterworks already coming on. Her eyes glistened, but her father put out his hand to silence her.

  ‘You have absolutely no regard for anyone else. You don’t think about anyone else, you don’t have any feelings for anyone else. It’s just you you you all the time. Well?’

  Well, what could she say? It was true, every word. The thing was – she didn’t care. She really truly did not care. She felt like the princess in the fairy story who had been brought up by strangers. She just didn’t fit. Her parents weren’t so bad to her. They had their faults, sure. Her father was high-handed and obviously didn’t like kids; her mother couldn’t understand her and rather pathetically never gave up trying to. Even when Zoë was a little girl, her mum used to hide outside the door for hours listening to her playing dolls with her friends to try and work her strange, elfin daughter out. She’d tried, you had to give her that. No, it was quite clear, it was Zoë who was the problem and no one else. She made herself feel like shit, the way she went on. She just couldn’t stop.

  Her mother stood staring at her, flaunting her tears like the Crown Jewels, but Zoë refused guilt of any kind. Was it her fault she had caring parents? No. She stamped upstairs.

  ‘I ought to have had a couple of thugs, you two are bloody wasted on me,’ she shouted downstairs. She went into her bedroom, then came out again. ‘Stop making me feel guilty!’ she yelled.

  ‘Zoë, all we ask is that you let us know where you are. You’re only fourteen, we need to know you’re all right. We’re responsible …’ said her mother.

  ‘Yes, responsible, responsible, remember about being responsible?’ bawled her dad. ‘But I don’t suppose that word means very much to you, does it?’

  Zoë slammed the door. ‘Weaklings,’ she growled. It was true. Her father blustered and her mother wept, but neither of them had the slightest clue how to keep their daughter in check. Inside, she prowled around her room. Why did she have nowhere else to go? Why was she so abandoned and alone in her own home? Why didn’t her father come up and knock her about the place, when she treated them like shit?

  ‘Pants! Shit! Cunts!’ she yelled downstairs at them, but answer came there none. She crept downstairs. Her parents were watching a quiz show on TV and eating nuts
as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Zoë wanted to murder them, but all she did was run upstairs and weep on her bed instead. She couldn’t kill them, but someone was going to have to die, and soon. It was just a question of who.

  16

  happiness is a full binbag

  Sex? No prob, bruv! He was a natural.

  I’m good at that, thought Dino. That girl … he’d almost driven her mad with pleasure. Jackie didn’t know what she was missing. He felt so pleased about it, he was almost willing to forgive her. In fact, he probably would have if it wasn’t for the fact that he didn’t have to. He had a new girlfriend now.

  About half an hour after Siobhan left, Jackie rang him, full of apologies. She was horrified at herself. She couldn’t understand how, or why she’d run off. That sick had just offended her so much, she was out of the house before she knew what she was doing.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything to say.’

  ‘I do want to sleep with you.’

  ‘Well, someone else did last night too, so just … don’t bother,’ he’d said, and he put down the phone.

  Jackie was history.

  Dino was so relieved at having successfully lost his virginity that he had no idea how unhappy this new situation made him for all sorts of reasons. For starters, he didn’t trust Siobhan as far as he could throw her. His behaviour at blackmailing her into having sex with him had left a very nasty taste in his own mouth and badly dented his self-esteem. Jackie had rejected him yet again, which hurt very much indeed. Finally, even while he was busy congratulating himself on having chucked her, he was terrified at the thought of losing her.