by Julia Bell
‘Like a lezzie,’ Maxine hisses.
‘Weirdo,’ Kelly says. She’s even learned to curl her lip like them.
I hiss at them, baring my teeth.
They huddle together, pretending to be scared.
‘Oooh, I think it farted,’ Paisley says. They all fall about laughing.
I run at them screaming, punching Paisley and scratching Kelly on the face.
‘Piss OFF! Piss off.’
Other girls have to pull me off, hold me back. The chant goes round the canteen. Fight, fight, fight. Kelly balls her hand into a fist and lands one on my mouth. I can hear my lip ripping. Warm blood dribbles down my chin. I suck it into my mouth, swill it round with my saliva and spit it back in her face. It lands on her neck, a dark shiny blob of it. Before she can retaliate, Miss Burton comes round the corner to break us up, her face red and thunderous.
Mum tugs her skirt down over her thighs nervously. ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ she says. ‘Makes me feel like a schoolgirl.’ We’re sitting in the waiting room outside the headmistress’s office. One of the school secretaries makes Mum a cup of tea which she leaves undrunk under her chair because it’s got full-fat milk in it.
The headmistress talks to Mum like she’s a child. ‘Not sending your child to school is a serious offence in the eyes of the law, Mrs Wiley. Carmen is already behind with her schoolwork and is going to struggle to catch up.’
‘We’re aware there have been family difficulties, Mrs Wiley,’ Miss Burton says. She’s loving this, I can tell, nosing into other people’s business. She doesn’t look like she’s got much of a life of her own. Sour old slapper. ‘We’ve already spoken to your, er, to Carmen’s father, about this. It’s not our policy to interfere with your personal life, Mrs Wiley, but we are quite concerned about Carmen’s welfare.’
Mum’s eyes narrow to slits and for a moment I think she’s going to freak out. But she tries another tactic. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s all my fault. But we’ve made a bit of a promise, haven’t we, Carmen, to try and get along a bit better?’
‘Er, yes,’ I say.
‘Now, Mrs Wiley,’ says the headmistress, ‘there’s no need to feel you must take all the blame. Like I said we’re here to help.’
‘Help,’ echoes Miss Burton, nodding vigorously. She’s loving this, nosy bitch. She looks at me. ‘We do understand,’ she says. ‘Teenagers can be difficult.’
They’re trying to turn Mum against me. I grab her hand and she lifts herself from her twisted position – legs crossed, arms crossed, elbows resting on her knees, as if she’s trying hard to keep herself upright.
‘I’m not sorry,’ I say, ‘they were provoking me.’
Miss Burton and the headmistress look at each other.
‘Well, next time perhaps you should take a deep breath and count to twenty,’ Miss Burton says.
They talk about fresh starts and clean slates. Mum gazes out of the window distractedly, while they tell me that I will have to make an effort to catch up and that I will be on report until the Christmas holidays. ‘A doctor’s note must be provided for any absences. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ we say in unison.
‘I’m a bad mother to you, Carmen,’ she says, lying on the couch looking at the exercise bike. She says she’s too tired to get on it tonight.
I don’t say anything, because I know that it’s true. I know that other people have nice mothers, mothers like Lisa.
‘Next week, when we move house, can we start again?’
‘OK,’ I say.
She starts crying, quietly and then louder, until she’s sobbing, her whole body shaking. ‘I’m terrible at everything,’ she says. ‘I never should have brought you here.’
Then she goes quiet. Curling herself into a little ball, tucking her hands around her head and staring through the exercise bike at the blank TV screen.
‘Mum? Are you OK?’
Her eyelids flutter as if she is just about to fall asleep. ‘Mmmm?’
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine, sweetheart, just fine.’ She sounds far away, like she’s on the end of a long-distance phone call.
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No, sweetheart, you go to bed. I’ll stay here and watch a bit of telly.’
‘But it’s not on.’
‘What?’
‘The telly. D’you want me to put it on?’
‘No no, you’re all right. You just go to bed.’
When I get up in the morning she’s still lying there, staring at the blank TV screen, eyes wide open.
Dad calls. ‘I got a call from school. Is everything all right, love?’
I tell him that everything’s fine, that we’re moving into a new house next week. I try to sound cheerful, happy. Mum watches me while I talk to him, wiping her eyes with toilet roll.
He says he might come down and give us a hand with our moving. That he’s pleased Mum’s doing so well. ‘Sounds like she’s really pulling it together down there,’ he says. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘I miss you,’ I say, before I can stop myself. I sound like a right sap.
‘You too, sugarpuff,’ he says, but his voice is distracted, far away. I’m embarrassed. I know he’s only saying it. He’s not even my real dad.
He rings again after the weekend to say he’s sorry he can’t get down. Too much on at work.
‘See?’ Mum says, when I tell her. ‘See what we’re up against?’
I go to school. Turn up every morning at eight-thirty with my form for the headmistress. Paisley and Maxine and Kelly call me names when they see me. I ignore them. I eat apples for lunch and drink chocolate milk that I throw up later, before the bell for registration.
I sit at the back of class and don’t answer any questions. I write Fuck on the cover of my maths book, and Everybody’s Weird when we’re supposed to be doing fractions. It’s the human body in biology: I missed the heart, the lungs and the liver. They’re doing the skeleton and the nervous system now. Miss Burton shows me the thick wedge of textbook pages that I’ve missed.
She gives me some question-and-answer sheets. ‘I’m so pleased we’ve been able to sort all this out,’ she says. ‘I’m sure things will settle down for you soon.’
Lisa offers me a manicure. Black with silvery rhinestones on each nail.
‘’S all right,’ I say, ‘I can do my own now.’
‘I had to tell her, Carmen. She’s your mother and you don’t want Social Services getting involved.’
‘Better than school,’ I say.
‘No, Carmen, it’s not.’ She sounds irritated. ‘Once Social Services get involved you never know where you’ll end up. I’m family and I care about you.’
Yeah, right. Wanted rid of me more like.
‘I didn’t want to be a nuisance,’ I say.
‘Oh, sweetheart.’ She lifts my chin with her hands, makes me look her in the eye. ‘You’re not a nuisance. I love having you around the place. It’s just that you’ve got to go to school. It’s the law. Sod’s law maybe, but still the law. Do you want to end up in a home?’
I shake my head.
‘You can still come and hang out on Saturdays and after school if you like.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
I offer her my hands.
25
Billy comes over in the Steers van. I help him load up while Mum packs our boxes and suitcases. We have to dodge between showers; the rain has been heavy since first thing. There isn’t much to take. The exercise bike and the bench press are the only bits of furniture we’ve got. Everything else belongs to Billy.
It’s the same van he used for Lisa’s shop. There are flecks of glitter on the floor from one of Lisa’s packets that split.
‘Can’t get rid of the bloody stuff. Everywhere I go I keep finding bits of it stuck to me.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘You women and your bloody sparkles,’ he says.
I flash my nails at him. ‘Exactly,’
he says. ‘Bloody sparkles.’ Then, as if he’s worried about offending me, ‘Looks good on you, though.’
There’s Asda bags in the back full of food. Frozen pizzas, milk, marg, eggs, fruit and veg, tea bags, toilet rolls even a strip of KitKats.
‘Lisa went shopping yesterday,’ he says. ‘But don’t tell your mum. I’ll pretend it was me, else she’ll throw it away. You know what she’s like.’
Mum is paranoid about forgetting stuff. ‘Honestly, at the moment I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on.’ She has to go back upstairs to doublecheck three times before she’ll let Billy drive off, even though he has told her she can fetch anything she’s forgotten whenever she likes.
‘There’s no one else moving in, you can hang on to the keys as long as you need to,’ he reassures her.
The third time she comes down with an earring. A silver teardrop that Dad gave her for Christmas. ‘See?’ she says, showing it to us. ‘I would have been upset if I’d lost that.’
Billy puts music on in the van – The Buzzcocks Greatest Hits – he sings along like a howling dog.
‘What do I get? I don’t get yooooou.’
‘Do we have to listen to this?’ Mum says, covering her hands with her ears.
‘You used to love it,’ Billy says, turning it down a fraction, tapping his ring on the steering wheel. ‘All that ravey-davey rubbish you listen to now, it’s spoiled proper music.’
‘At least it’s got a melody.’
‘And your mother wants to know what all those stains are on your jeans, You’re an orgasm addi—’
‘For God’s sake, Billy,’ Mum says, leaning forward and pressing the tape out of the machine. ‘We’re not teenagers any more.’
‘Aren’t we?’ Billy asks arching his eyebrows and looking at her from the corner of his eye. ‘I’d give anything to be Carmen’s age again.’
When we get to the new house she tries to pick up her box of diet books but it’s too heavy. She staggers a little, holding her head.
‘Steady there, Maria.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she says, suddenly angry. ‘Don’t take the piss.’
Billy ignores her and goes inside.
‘Mum, he’s only being nice.’
She rubs a hand across her forehead fiercely. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ she says, almost mumbling. ‘You got any mints, love? Polos or something?’
‘I’ll ask Billy.’
He’s staring out of the window. ‘Mum says she needs some sugar,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Once a selfish cow, always a selfish cow.’ He says. ‘I know she’s your mother, but sometimes—’ he fishes half a packet of Extra Strong Mints out of his pocket. ‘Tell her not to eat them all at once.’
The house makes me sneeze. When Mum puts the heating on the air becomes thick with dust and the smell of new carpets.
Billy has already broken into the shopping, helping himself to some KitKats and a few slices of bread and marg. There is nothing in the lounge apart from the TV, a few boxes and Mum’s exercise equipment. She has ordered a new suite on five years’ interest-free credit – ‘You’ll have left home by the time I have to pay it back’ – but they’re not delivering until tomorrow.
‘It’ll be nice when you’ve got a few bits to go round,’ Billy says. ‘Snug as bugs. Place heats up lovely.’
It is already getting dark. The builders’ lorries roar and sound their horns. Hammering, muffled by the double glazing, has been going on all day. The other houses won’t be ready until after Christmas. Out the back of ours there’s a freshly turfed lawn, a cleanly creosoted fence and a brand-new whirligig washing line.
When Billy’s gone she looks at the bags of shopping. ‘He needn’t have bought all that,’ she says. ‘What did he do that for?’ She picks out the strip of KitKats and bites her lip, looking at me coyly. ‘I suppose we could treat ourselves, couldn’t we?’
Her hands shake while she pours the water for tea. Some of it spills in hot splashes on to the side. ‘Oh, my dear, my nerves,’ she says.
She breaks a KitKat in half, gives me one half, puts the other by her mug.
She eats it crumb by crumb, breaking off tiny pieces of chocolate and wafer with her nails. She sucks each piece, closing her eyes while she does. ‘Mmm,’ she says, ‘aren’t I a pig?’
I don’t eat mine to see what she will do, leaving it on the arm of the chair. She notices straight away. ‘Don’t you want yours?’
I shrug. ‘Not hungry.’
‘Oh.’
When I look again, it’s gone, she’s got her mouth full of chocolate. When she sees me looking she nearly chokes. She spits it out into a tissue, chocolate dribbling down her chin.
‘I just wanted the taste of it in my mouth,’ she says.
Later she bins all the food that Billy brought over, only keeping the coffee and tea. ‘There’s no point in keeping it in. It will only throw us off track.’
Nana turns up in a taxi.
‘Oooh, isn’t it airy?’ she says, opening all the doors. ‘Aren’t you doing well for yourself?’
She touches my hair. ‘All the rage now, is it?’ she asks. ‘Our Lisa used to have her hair like that.’ I stroke my hair, it’s not as spiky as it was now it’s started growing back.
‘Looks like a toilet brush,’ Mum says. ‘Lisa has a lot to answer for, putting ideas in her head.’
Nana gives us a box of Roses. ‘A housewarming present,’ she says. ‘I know it’s not much.’
Mum puts them down the side of the sofa, hides them under a cushion without even saying thank you.
I eat like a machine. I can put two in my mouth at once and swallow them almost whole. The house is too hot, sneezy. I can’t taste the chocolate, only the new carpets, the paint fumes. It takes ten minutes to eat the whole box, including the ones with hard centres.
The bathroom is right next to Mum’s room. I run the tap full on so the water squeals and I try not to retch too loudly. I am getting good at this. The box of Roses slides back up, silently, obediently.
She’s bought a new picture for the lounge. A huge framed print. The Bridge, by Salvador Dali. It’s a weird, mustard-yellow colour, a desert landscape full of wreckage, a bridge to nowhere in the middle. Walking over the bridge are thin, skeletal figures; sad-looking women draped in blue cloth. As they walk higher their shapes get thinner, more shadowy, until they are just pale outlines floating up into the sky.
Mum looks at it when she’s hung it, just behind the TV, so big that it takes up nearly the whole wall. ‘That’s what I want to be like,’ she says, touching one of the figures. ‘Made of air.’
26
Victoria is stopping the night. Mum’s made me do up my bed. Sheets fresh out of the packet, knife-edge creases in them. She’s sending me round to Nana’s for the night in a taxi, but it’s late and Victoria has arrived first. ‘Oh, Victoria, lovely to see you,’ Mum says when she arrives. ‘Carmen was just leaving.’
I sit on the uncomfortable new DFS sofa bundled up in my bench coat while they twitter in the kitchen over their fruit teas. Ginseng and vanilla with two tabs of Candarel. I pull my hood up so Victoria won’t say anything about my hair.
‘Hello,’ she says, standing awkwardly in the lounge doorway, her eyes not meeting mine.
I nod at her, pretend to be reading Mum’s OK! magazine.
She gets on the exercise bike, turns a few cycles. ‘Your mum use this often then?’ she asks.
‘Three times a day,’ I say.
Her mouth makes a little O and she starts cycling a bit faster, kicking off her shoes to get a better grip on the pedals. ‘I usually do four,’ she boasts. The bones in her hips are jutting out of her trousers, her joints click against each other.
After a few minutes, she stops abruptly, folds her arms over the handlebars and hangs her head. ‘Oh,’ she says, gasping for breath. ‘Oh, would you just get me some water?’
As I stand up, the doorbell goes. ‘Sorry
,’ I say, ‘got a taxi waiting.’
On the way to Nana’s the driver goes really fast, bombing down the dual carriageway. He doesn’t talk to me, though I can see him watching me in his rear-view mirror. I wish this drive would never stop, just go on and on and on, carry me off somewhere, anywhere, different from here.
Nana’s watching Blind Date. She loves Cilla. ‘Had her type at the Butlins,’ she says. ‘Voices like tannoys, all flat and booming, but everybody loved them because they did all the songs.’
I don’t take my coat off and sink into the sofa, even though with Nana’s gas fire on full blast it’s suffocatingly hot.
She’s had the council round again she says, about the hedge. ‘They’re going to fine your Grandad thousands if he doesn’t get rid of it, but he won’t listen to me.’ He runs off down the pub, she never talks to him these days. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I’ve been thinking I might get a divorce. Why should I bother sticking with him now? What do I get? No one comes to visit any more.’
Even though I am sitting behind her I can see her shoulders are twitching. She sniffs. ‘There’s a packet of Gypsy Creams on the side in the kitchen. Bring them in for us will you, love?’
Halfway through the Lottery programme the doorbell goes. Nana’s sat with her tickets clutched in her hand. Ten pound a week she spends on them. She says the first thing she’s going to do if she wins is pay someone to cut the hedge down.
‘Get that will you? If it’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses tell them we’re heathens.’
When I open the door it’s two men, one much younger than the other. Father and son, I reckon. They look like each other, same ears and smarmy, menacing smiles.
‘It’s Next Door,’ the older one says, ‘come round about the hedge. Are you alone? Only we wanted to speak to your grandparents. About the hedge.’
‘There’s no one in,’ I lie.
They grunt. ‘You sure?’ They look past me suspiciously. Next week they say, next week they’re going to chop it all down and send us the bill. It’s driving everyone round here nuts. They’ve even written to the telly about it.
When I tell Nana who it was and what they wanted she sighs.