Skylarks

by Karen Gregory

  ‘I don’t know, Miss,’ I said, when she showed me a pile of prospectuses. I didn’t want to ask how Mum would get time off work to drive me, or where we’d get money from for petrol or train fares if I went on my own. Or what I’d even do at uni anyway.

  ‘Have a think about it. Perhaps we could chat again next week?’ she said. Her hopeful look, and thoughts of the prospectuses shoved at the bottom of the recycling box go on to my mental list of things to stop worrying about.

  I stand on the pedals again, pushing, pushing. The future is like that great white sky above me – I don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to write on it. What I’m allowed to. And then for some reason, the restaurant pops into my head. Jack’s face, the shock of that sundae going into my lap. It would’ve been funny if it had just been us lot. And that girl in the toilet …

  I’m coming up fast on a sharp bend when a car suddenly appears on my side of the road. I slam on the rusty brakes and swerve on to a patch of gravelly stones, the bike going out from under me. I hit the ground, pain jolting up my leg like a firework and wind up half in the hedge.

  I lie still as the car roars off behind me. Then I untangle myself from the bike, wincing at the hot throbbing in my shoulder and knee. I bend my leg a couple of times, decide it’s probably fine, although I’m going to have one hell of a bruise, and take a look at the bike.

  It seems OK – if there’s a new scratch it’s merged with the existing ones. The chain’s popped off, and I kneel on my good knee to push it back on, getting my hands covered with grease. I wobble the rest of the way to the library.

  Mrs Hendry’s car is already in the car park when I creak in, red in the face and puffing hard, leg still on fire and shoulder not much better. Next to her car is Dave’s blue transit, one back door open to reveal a stack of boxed donations. Someone’s scratched a pair of boobs into the dirt on the back. A couple of spaces down from it is a really posh Audi parked all wonky, paintwork gleaming like the shiny new Huntington Library sign with that weird little crest thing they put up a couple of weeks ago. I liked it better when it was just plain old LIBRARY in black letters. Above it, the clock reads ten past nine. I chain my bike to the railing and run up the steps.

  I bang through the double doors and nearly barrel right into Mrs H, who’s standing next to the desk.

  I jump back, still panting. ‘Sorry I’m late. I fell off my bike.’

  Mrs H’s irritated expression changes to one of concern. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

  ‘Bashed my knee, but it’s OK, I think.’

  ‘Well, good. I’ve been waiting for you to get here.’ Mrs H’s face takes on this satisfied shine. ‘I have some news. We’ve got a new helper starting today. She’s going to be with us for the next few months.’

  I frown; we can’t afford to pay anyone else. I’ve been doing this library job ever since I got the chop from the vets after Jazzy, our cat, got run down and we couldn’t afford to pay the bill. They fixed her for free and once the Huntingtons gave the library a load of cash, I managed to get my Saturday job here, at sub-minimum wage, obvs. But still, it’s a job and anyway I like it in the library.

  ‘She’s volunteering. To help with her university application,’ Mrs H says.

  ‘Oh right. Fair enough.’ I wonder who from school Mrs H has got in. No one mentioned it to me. I go over to the desk and turn on the second PC.

  ‘I want you to help her settle in,’ Mrs H says. She has this nervous smile on her face, like the time when the local MP came for a visit and it was in the Evening Gazette. I follow her gaze to where a tall girl is walking towards us holding two cups. The adrenalin that’s just started settling after my bike crash dials straight back up to ten as I take in her messy-yet-stylish ponytail, sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, her pristine clothes. The look of surprise on her face as she clocks me.

  ‘Ah, here she is!’ Mrs H says in an overly bright voice. ‘Annabel insisted on making the coffee.’ She turns to me. ‘Annabel, this is Joni. Joni …’ There’s the tiniest of pauses, as though Mrs H is about to make some important announcement. ‘Meet Annabel Huntington.’

  I bite back an exclamation that was probably going to end in a swear word.

  It’s only the girl from the restaurant.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Annabel Huntington. Blimey. And she’s going to be volunteering here? What for? Is it to keep an eye on us all for her dad? Then I remember Mrs H said about her UCAS or something. Surely any uni would let her in if her dad had a word in the ear of someone important – that’s how it works for people like her, isn’t it? Then I flash back to the restaurant, and her handing me my wrecked shirt, and I feel a flush pushing up my neck.

  I reckon Annabel’s having similar thoughts, but she recovers fast, puts the coffees down and holds out a long, pale hand, which she’s clearly expecting me to shake.

  I give it a stiff up-and-down, wondering how hard you’re supposed to hold on. Her fingers are cool, but it seems like mine heat up as she says, ‘Lovely to meet you again,’ and looks right into my eyes.

  Something weird happens in the vicinity of my stomach.

  ‘Er, yeah, me too. I mean, you too … likewise.’ I look down, which is enough to see she has amazing legs, ending in what even I can tell are designer sandals. I snap my eyes back up to her face, feeling my own go redder, if that’s even possible.

  Likewise?! For God’s sake, Joni.

  She smiles. The sort of self-assured smile that makes me feel like I’m about twelve again, with a crush on Miss Narayan, my old Geography teacher.

  My face forgets to smile back.

  I drop her hand suddenly, see her eyes go to my fingers, which are still coated in grease and for bonus points there’s a whacking great grass stain and a smear of mud up my jeans leg, so that makes twice I’ve met this girl while covered in muck. Brilliant.

  ‘Uh … I’ll just go and sort myself out,’ I say, and make a dash for the toilets.

  I give my jeans a quick rub down with some toilet roll, which gets the worst of the mud off, but does nothing for the grass stain. I wash my hands and tell myself to get a grip. So she’s working here, it’s not a massive deal. I bet she lasts a couple of weeks, tops, before she gets bored. Can’t imagine someone like her sticking about for too long. I’m still red in the face when I come out and see Annabel and Mrs H relaxing with their coffees in the two chairs by the desk. I hover, scanning my brain for something to say and ignoring the too-rich smell of the coffee. Mrs H clearly cracked out the posh stuff you have to make in one of those pots with a plunger, but I’ve never liked the smell – it’s too loud somehow.

  I realise Mrs H is waiting for me to reply to something she’s just said, but I don’t have a clue what it was. Annabel arches her perfect eyebrows.

  Luckily, Dave barrels through the doors at that moment with a massive box in his hands and plonks it on the floor. ‘Where do you want all these?’ he asks the room in general. I notice he’s avoiding looking at Annabel, like he’s shy of her. Dave lives on our estate and does painting, decorating and various odd jobs.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ I say and follow him out. Anything to get away from the two of them in there. Dave’s admiring the Audi, which must belong to Annabel. As I come up beside him he gives a low whistle.

  ‘That’s top of the range, that,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah?’ I say and I’m surprised to hear a hard Jamie-like edge creeping into my voice. As I heft up the first box, I realise the prickling feeling in my stomach has intensified into something approaching anger. I’d just got settled in the library, liked it, as far as a job goes, and now I’m going to be stuck with Annabel Huntington. What am I going to say to her? The library, with its threadbare carpets and ancient PCs, isn’t exactly her sort of place, is it?

  Or maybe it’s way more her sort of place than mine.

  I remember when I first used to go in the library. Mrs H would give me wary looks from behind her desk, assuming I was with the kids
from school who used to hang around. They never did anything much, maybe smoked a few fags outside, left a couple of crisp packets lying about, but the main thing they were guilty of was just being there. It got so that people only had to sit in a circle at the edge of the car park after school before the woman who lives in the old Victorian house at the end of the road was calling up the school or the local council to complain. Eventually, everyone moved on and it was only me left. I’d sit in the corner of the library, next to the radiator doing my homework, or reading. Still took weeks before Mrs H properly chatted to me and a good while later until she asked me if I was interested in a job. And someone like Annabel gets that straight away, because of who she is, or at least who her dad is. Suddenly it strikes me as totally unfair.

  Just like Jamie always says.

  The thought makes me plonk the box down extra hard when I’ve heaved it inside, like I’m having a go at squashing it flat. I don’t want to be angry all the time like my brother. I give a sigh. Mrs H is watching me from behind the computer. Annabel seems to have disappeared already.

  ‘You will be nice, won’t you?’ Mrs H says, her voice aiming for jokey but coming out with a warning bite to it.

  I give her an I-don’t-know-what-you-mean look, eyes wide. Then, to wind her up, I say, ‘Where’s Madame got to anyway? She hasn’t gone home already, has she?’

  I don’t mean my voice to sound so hopeful.

  ‘Not quite.’ I turn around to see Annabel lugging in a gigantic box. We’ve done all right with donations this month.

  I stare and then she says, ‘Would you take the other end, thank you.’ It doesn’t come out as a question, more of a command. I feel like Jazzy when he spots next-door-but-one’s huge scraggy ginger cat in our garden. If I had a tail it’d be puffed out like a bog brush right about now, getting ready to fight if I’m cornered.

  I grab the other end and almost pull the box out of her hands, so that she staggers a step, then lets go as I swing it down on top of my own box. We straighten and I catch her eye, my eyebrows raised in a ‘yeah?’ expression as if she’s about to start on me. Annabel’s face takes on a flush which probably mirrors my own; apparently neither of us wants to be the one who looks away first.

  Mrs H’s voice breaks into the stand-off. ‘That was the last one, wasn’t it? Well then, you girls can take these to the storeroom to sort through them together, yes?’ She doesn’t wait for a response. ‘Wonderful.’

  Annabel’s face seems to be saying the same thing that’s going through my mind, which is something along the lines of oh yeah, wonderful.

  Completely, totally, wonderful.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘So then she opens up a box and lets out this little shriek, seriously, like a proper girly shriek, and looks at her nail to see if she’s chipped her manicure,’ I say in the pub later on that night. The whole gang is here: tall, skinny Pete, looking at Kelly with hopeful eyes, me, and Ed and Stacey who’ve been a thing for a few months now. Stace is sat on Ed’s lap in the corner, while Pete’s kicking my arse in a game of pool. Kelly’s leaning against the pool table, a drink in her hand. The Crown always lets us in, as long as we stick to soft drinks. My knee’s still hurting and my arms feel like I was doing press-ups for the last four hours, courtesy of lugging boxes about half the day. And I’m knackered from the effort of trying to be polite to Annabel and find things to say to her; one day has already shown me we have literally nothing in common.

  I think about Mrs H giving Annabel the ‘grand tour’ of the library, and the community hall which is through a linking door, and the way Annabel looked at everything with this totally inscrutable face so you couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I could probably join a few of those dots up, seeing the place through her eyes; the windows with their flaking paint and the scuffed-up floor in the hall, the worn patches on the carpet and our motley donations lining the shelves.

  Kelly’s got one eyebrow up like she knows I’m enjoying my rant a teensy bit too much, but I’m on a roll. ‘Honestly, she’s so annoying. I don’t ’spect she’ll last too long though.’ I lean over and crack the pink into the top left-hand pocket with a satisfying – and to be truthful, fairly rare – thwack.

  When I look up, Kelly’s pinching her chin between her finger and thumb, her eyes narrowing in the way they do when her brain’s on overdrive. There’s a small smile on her face, which I pretend not to notice, conscious I may have neglected to mention Annabel actually looked at her nail because she’d broken it down to the quick. I felt pretty bad when I saw that as it happens. I even said, ‘That looks nasty – do you want me to get you a plaster?’ but she drew herself up and said, ‘No, thank you, I can manage,’ like me offering to help her was an affront or something. The version I told fits better anyway. And don’t ask me with whose idea of her. It just does.

  ‘Come on, maybe you should give her a chance,’ Pete says.

  ‘I would, but she’s –’ I break off. What is Annabel like? She has this thing about her, like some sort of invisible protective bubble – you can see it in the way she moves, how she looks at things. I don’t know exactly what it takes to get that sort of shine, but I’m guessing it’s easier when your family aren’t exactly short of a fortune or two. ‘… annoying,’ I finish up, my voice sounding lame even to me.

  ‘I can’t believe her dad’s the Mr Huntington. They’re minted,’ Stace says from Ed’s lap.

  ‘Do you remember that thing in the paper, with the ball?’ Pete says. He’s talking about this massive charity ball the Huntingtons put on last Christmas at the Town Hall. They even got the High Street shut off. Mum got caught in the resulting traffic jam.

  ‘Yep, minted,’ Ed says.

  ‘So what?’ I take another shot and miss.

  Pete takes the cue and starts cleaning up the table.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind her money though,’ Stace says. She’s still on Ed’s lap, one leg hooked behind his. ‘They’ve got a massive mansion out by the Downs, don’t they?’

  I shrug, as if I don’t already know this.

  ‘If I was rich,’ Stace says on a sigh, ‘I’d do some serious shopping. And get extensions.’

  ‘You don’t need them, you’re gorgeous already,’ Ed says, to a general chorus of sick noises. Stace winds one arm around his neck.

  I watch them for a moment, how natural they are. How they seem to be really happy together. A tiny part of me wants that; to have someone sitting on my lap, my arms around them.

  I spot Pete giving Kelly a swift look, all open and longing, and her pretending she hasn’t noticed. Most of the time Pete’s crush on her isn’t awkward; she’ll laugh it off or say, ‘Stop trying to get into my pants,’ if Pete says something nice to her, but it’s never in a mean way.

  He gives his head a little shake and then looks at me. ‘If I was rich I’d travel, go to China. See the Great Wall,’ he says. ‘What about you?’

  I pause, listening to the jukebox blaring, and the babble of voices. What would I do if I had a shedload of money? Get Mum and Dad a house, for starters, so Mum stops worrying about her evil boss and getting shifts, and Dad stops having to mainline painkillers for his back. But that’s a bit sad, so I take a deep breath of beery air through my nose and say, ‘I don’t know. Get some driving lessons?’

  ‘Boring,’ Stace says. I know she’s just joking, but I feel a flicker of annoyance; Stace’s parents got her driving lessons for her seventeenth a couple of months ago.

  Pete cracks in the last ball and turns to me with a smirk. ‘I’ll have another Coke, please.’

  Loser always gets the winner a drink. I go to the bar and wave at Nic. She was a couple of years above me at school and has a younger brother who Kelly dated for a bit a while ago. Everyone knows everyone else, or at least us townies do. The posh kids have their own places to hang out, I guess.

  Nic’s got stunning skin. It has this warm glow about it, unlike mine which seems to break out on a monthly basis. Bloody periods, excuse the pun. Her
skin reminds me of Annabel’s; she’s not got a spot in sight either. Then I shake my head, annoyed I’m still thinking about her.

  Kelly appears. She leans over the bar to grab a straw, then twirls it between her fingers before looking up through her long fringe at me. ‘So Annabel. I take it she’s a hottie?’ She taps the straw against her mouth and grins.

  ‘I haven’t really thought about it,’ I say, aiming for breezy and totally missing, which makes Kelly grin even more and say, ‘Mm-huh?’ with a waggle of her eyebrows.

  ‘No, Kelly. There will be no mms or huhs,’ I say in my sternest voice.

  ‘OK, OK. Was just saying.’ Kelly laughs, then turns to Nic and says, ‘Can I have half a cider, please?’

  Nic rolls her eyes. ‘You’ve turned eighteen since last week, have you?’

  Kelly shrugs. ‘Worth a try. Lemonade then. And one for Joni too.’

  I open my mouth to protest, but Kelly says, ‘Don’t bother.’

  I get this warm rush of affection for her; trust Kelly to know I’ll stand my loser’s round, but I’ve only got enough cash left for one drink.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  While Nic pours our drinks, Kelly stretches her arms up to the ceiling, showing off a dark stomach where her top’s ridden up, and yawns. ‘God, I’m knackered. I think I’ve been to every shop on the High Street. I’ve probably got blisters.’ She pulls off a shoe to look at her heel, then wafts her leg in my face. ‘I have as well, look.’

  I push it away, laughing. ‘You get no sympathy from me.’ I think about Kelly’s room – with its heaps of clothes on the floor, piled on her chair and spewing out over the top of her tall chest of drawers – and shake my head.

  Kelly takes a sip of her drink, then says, ‘So … back to this Annabel girl.’

  ‘Oh my God, stop, for the love of …’ I cast around for inspiration, ‘shoes.’ I’m grinning, but for once Kelly has a straight face.