‘I don’t have any on me. You’ll have to have a shot instead.’ Ciara’s eyes were wide and impetuous.
Steve was powerless against her. That’s how they get you. Your peers. By being friendly spiced with crazy eyes.
‘A shot of what?’ Steve asked.
‘Syzmon has a GREEN drink. It tastes like applejacks.’
‘Green drink? But what about pink and blue?’
‘I have decided green is also acceptable,’ said Ciara wisely.
‘Fine.’
‘Fine?’
‘Come on, before I change my mind.’
‘You are the bestest, Prim. I love you.’
‘Love you back, silly girl.’
Ciara says things like ‘I love you’ like it is not a hard thing to say or to feel. I didn’t say it back to her the first time she said it to me. But now I do occasionally. Just so she knows that I think she is amazing. It’s weird, saying it to more people. I say it to Joel and sometimes Ciara. Rarely Dad. He knows I love him, though.
Anyway, back to Steve. Our goblin friend had a little bit of the apple drink and it was quite nice, but she didn’t want to get drunk and something her mother had said when she was little came back up through her brain like the things she drank would later do in her mouth and oesophagus. Oh, goblin Steve, you are a silly goblin. Sometimes you make the right choices swiftly followed by the wrong ones. And then find yourself pants-less and sorry.
Ciara wanted to dance. She seemed really happy, almost like she was working at it. She was vivacious in a way I hadn’t really seen before. She was having a good time so people would see her having a good time and know that one was being had. I’m very good at spotting underlying misery. So is Steve. Steve wanted to help Ciara, to be a good friend. Steve also enjoyed fun, because what goblin doesn’t?
Then Kevin the troll walked in, with his girlfriend Siobhán the elf. Siobhán had been on holidays with her family earlier in the summer and she was all tanned and golden, like a statue or a girl from an ad for expensive T-shirts. Steve hated Siobhán the elf. She hated her pointy ears and her gossamer wings and her stupid little laugh. Most of all she hated the way she acted around Kevin the troll. Like she owned him. Like he was the most fascinating slave in the world. ‘You can’t own a troll, Siobhán,’ Steve wanted to exclaim. ‘And anyway, I had him first. He put his mouth on my mouth several times. Several times, elf.’
Steve refrained from exclaiming anything at anyone. For the moment. Later, there would be a marginal amount of exclaiming. I think. When faced with a troll who you used to do kissing with, a goblin must be very brave indeed. You don’t need a sword or anything. But you do need to be quite friendly. So the troll won’t suspect that you are hurting. It isn’t that Steve still liked the troll, mind you. Nothing like that. It’s just that Steve liked to be good at things. To win. And in the game of who-can-be-the-troll’s-favourite, he had lost big. So Steve nodded and said ‘Hi’ and ‘How are you?’ and asked Siobhán about her stupid holiday, like his heart was made of sinew instead of muscle soft as mollusc, maybe softer.
Laura the queen of the fairies entered at this point. She did not have her queen’s consort with her, and this made Steve the goblin feel relieved and also sad. The queen’s consort was every inch as beautiful as she and quite as regal. But his father had slain the little goblin’s mother with a big sword made of car, and Steve the goblin did not like being reminded that he still existed. Steve was of the opinion that people should be able to disappear, to puff out like smoke if you hated them hard enough. It would have made Steve’s life a good deal easier were that the case.
Steve chatted to the queen of the fairies for a while, but everyone wants to chat to fairy queens and she was bundled off by other people, which made Steve happy. Because no matter how much Steve liked the queen of the fairies, the business with her boyfriend’s father hung between them in the air like a bad smell. Worse than a bad smell. A stench. Like a painful stench was how it hung and it was hard for Steve to pretend that the stench wasn’t there when it so clearly was. Steve had another drink. It is at this point, in retrospect, that Steve should have stopped drinking, the drunken man who killed his mother like a lesson for him. But goblins are not known for their wisdom, and so Steve drank and looked around the room, and spotted Felix. He was there with several of his friends and also Ella. Steve went over to Ella.
‘Hello, Steve the goblin,’ said Ella.
‘Hi, Ella,’ said Steve the goblin.
‘I am not drinking but I still slightly want to kiss Caleb,’ said Ella.
‘That is not a good idea,’ said Steve. ‘You will hurt his feelings’
‘I won’t. I’ll only kiss him. I won’t say anything mean. Everybody else is kissing people and it’s like when it’s sunny and everyone has ice-creams and even though I’m not a fan of ice-cream I want one too.’
‘Don’t eat ice-cream, Ella.’
‘The ice-cream is a metaphor, Steve,’ said Ella. ‘Also, I brought Felix for you. He thinks he’s minding me and drinking things, but I am going to set the two of you up and it will be delightful.’
‘No it won’t. Robb with two bees is coming.’
And it was true. The two-beed knight was approaching on his horse even as Steve spoke. He brought a smile and a brown paper bag filled with little hotel bottles of drink. They were for sharing. Apparently his parents were always getting them in hampers and never kept proper track. Or something. Steve the goblin was suspicious. Steve was always a little suspicious when people offered her things. What will you want in return? the little goblin thought. Is it something I’m prepared to give you?
The goblin looked at Felix. Felix looked back and he did that thing with his eyebrows that means ‘Hi’ and ‘Are you OK?’ in equal measure. Steve nodded and approached the two-beed knight.
‘Looking well, Steve the goblin,’ said Robb the knight. He put his hand on the small of Steve’s back and the goblin hoped that Felix hadn’t seen and Kevin had. She kind of wished that Felix wasn’t there so she could do pointed kissing with Robb on a variety of sofas.
‘Hi, Robb,’ said Ciara.
Ciara had not met Robb before. But she knew about the kissing.
‘Hi, Robb,’ said Ella, who had also heard about the kissing.
Steve introduced her friends to Robb and he gave them little bottles of drink as presents. Ciara was enchanted with hers. Ella put hers in her handbag. ‘I do not drink, but I am going to put this bottle beside Mr Cat and take some photographs. For the laugh.’ She said ‘for the laugh’ the way another person would have said ‘for the purposes of important scientific research’ and her brow furrowed a little with the planning.
Sometimes Steve’s small goblin’s heart glowed with love for Ella.
Suddenly, there was a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning and the whole room filled with brimstone and sulphur. A carriage driven by a headless horseman pulled up and the devil herself emerged, clad in a little silken sheath and a push-up bra that made the devil’s boobs look like a threat. Steve the goblin’s stomach did a flip. She hated the devil. The devil was always causing trouble.
‘I am going to go to the garden,’ announced Steve, ‘to get some fresh air.’
And so she did.
In the garden, Steve encountered the devil’s ex-girlfriend Nora the person. Nora was upset. She glared at Steve, as though Steve were a more disgusting goblin than he actually was. The kind that gobbles children.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Steve. ‘I don’t know if I ever said a proper sorry to you. For what I did to Karen.’
Steve had not announced anything about Nora to the whole school over the intercom, but Nora’s eyebrows seemed to be asking for something. Something Steve had got increasingly used to giving people over the past year. Steve the goblin was very good at apologising. The world was a place where he was increasingly at fault.
‘You don’t need to apologise to me,’ said Nora the person, but if Steve had looked up that se
ntence in a thesaurus he would have found ‘You totally do’ and ‘You are a terrible person’ sitting beside it like friends.
‘I just …’ said Steve. ‘I just really hate the devil.’
‘You mean Karen,’ said Nora.
‘Yeah,’ said Steve, ‘I do. She’s so mean. And not mean like she can’t help it. Mean like it’s a hobby and I’m sure that she was perfectly nice to you but she was mean to me about my mum. My mum died when we were in primary school and Karen said some things and also some things about Ella and she’s just mean and I don’t like her, so that was my motivation for doing the thing that I did. Which was wrong and also mean as well and I am sorry.’
‘Mam calls that “sinking to her level”,’ said Nora.
‘Dad does too. It’s not supposed to be a good idea, but what else can you do?’
‘Ignore it.’
‘They ALWAYS say that, don’t they?’ said Steve. Nora nodded. ‘Ignore it and they’ll get tired and go away.’
‘Like they were toddlers.’
‘Toddlers don’t work like that,’
‘Oh. I wouldn’t really know. I haven’t been a very successful babysitter. There was an incident.’ Steve had besmirched the honour of a family baby and had not been let babysit by himself since.
Nora had an undercut and little eyes that were an orange kind of brown. Her nail polish was chipped and one of her ballet flats had a bit of sock poking through it.
‘I babysit all the time. I have, like, twenty cousins.’ Nora passed Steve a brown paper bag. It had a bottle in it.
‘I always like to drink out of a brown paper bag,’ said Nora. ‘For effect.’
Steve took a drink from Nora’s magic bottle. It tasted like potion. Not very nice, but you can tell that it is going to do something to you and that makes it palatable.
‘Karen and me were together for three months,’ said Nora. ‘Like, not officially. But then kind of officially. And then we weren’t. She didn’t even break up with me. She just stopped being my girlfriend and I was all, “I don’t know what I’ve done,” and “Tell me what I did,” and I texted and emailed and messaged and she blocked me on the things, on all the things. And I don’t know what I did.’
‘Maybe you did nothing.’
‘But that’s nearly worse,’ said Nora, who was surprisingly wise for someone who had dallied with the devil in a sexual manner. ‘Because, if I did nothing, it means she just got sick of me. And I do not want to be a thing you can have too much of and then get sick of. I don’t want to have, like, an expiry date. And she’s kissing boys again now. And probably girls as well, but those are harder to find than boys – the ones who’ll kiss you, I mean. And she’s beautiful and scary and powerful and I liked her so much. I think I properly loved her, even. And now she’s out there, looking like she looks, and I am sitting on the ground, talking about her, which I know that she can sense, and she doesn’t care and my shoes aren’t working and please have another drink of this, Steve the goblin. Because if I drink it all I’m going to puke.’
Steve took another drink of the potion, which apparently was some sort of emetic.
‘Have you considered pink and blue drinks at all?’ he asked Nora.
Nora hadn’t. And so the goblin and the person sat, and Nora talked some more about the devil. And the goblin spoke of Kevin and his ways and means and suggestive throaty laughter which bubbled from within and made Steve cross. Because it isn’t nice to laugh when you are a bad person.
‘Bad people should not be allowed to enjoy themselves,’ said Steve the goblin.
‘Karen’s not a bad person, though.’
Steve looked at Nora.
‘Not entirely. I mean, she really helped me deal with certain things. She listened. I came out to my parents because of her. Because of what happened at school. And they were great. I mean, they’re really supportive and everything. I’m not allowed to tell my nan, though.’
‘Why not?’
‘They don’t think that she has very long left, and they don’t want her last years on earth to be spent reconciling her religious beliefs with her lesbian grand-daughter.’
‘Oh. That seems like it should not be their decision to make.’
‘Well, I’m their child so I get to do what they tell me.’ Nora sighed. ‘Wish me luck. I’m going in.’
Steve the goblin took off her shoes and gave them to Nora. Their feet were the same size, which was lucky because over-sized shoes would have been equally as ridiculous as holey ones.
‘Thanks, Prim,’ said Nora to Steve the goblin.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Steve.
The sky was the kind of dim it is when day is making up its mind whether to go to bed or not. Steve felt like he had made, if not exactly a new friend, then definitely a new not-enemy. Which was almost as good, and maybe even better. It was nice to have fewer enemies, thought Steve, walking barefoot into the party like an old-timey tramp.
Steve walked back into the party. Ciara grabbed her arm. ‘OK. I have had a mad idea. And it might be too mad, and it might make you mad at me, but it might actually be good for both of us.’
‘Hmm?’
‘So, you know how you are conflicted about whether or not you like Robb?’
‘I’m fairly sure I don’t like him. I just keep kissing him. I mean, he’s grand. I don’t mean I don’t like him. I just don’t …’
‘Want him?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, so.’ Ciara took a swig of pink drink from a little plastic cup like they have at children’s birthday parties. ‘I think I should kiss him.’
‘So I don’t kiss Syzmon. It would, like, break us up definitively. Once and for all.’ She eyed Robb, who was going through the DVD shelf like he owned the place. He might have been alphabetising. He was definitely up to something.
‘Why does everyone want to kiss everyone else?’ Steve wondered.
‘Because we are teenagers,’ said Ciara, ‘and only get let out on occasion. Things build up.’
‘You only broke up with Syzmon a week and a half ago.’
‘I know. But I’ve been with him for three years, almost. Oh my God. I’ve only ever kissed one boy. I could like DOUBLE my number.’ She eyed Robb again. ‘And he’s quite cute.’
Steve the goblin shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you go for that sort of thing.’
‘The ridiculously hot thing?’
‘No. The dissolute-younger-son-of-an earl-who’s-probably-going-to-knock-up-the-scullery-maid sort of thing.’
‘You read too much. Am I allowed to kiss him?’
‘Of course you are, but I am worried about your heart and Syzmon’s. I am worried it will be a bad move.’
‘It might be.’ Ciara adjusted the waistband of her skirt so it sat exactly right. ‘But if you don’t move you stagnate and stagnation is death. We are like sharks, Prim. Like sharks.’
‘Um?’
‘I just want to make sure, though,’ said Ciara. ‘That I won’t be hurting your feelings. Because your feelings are important to me because you are my best friend in the whole world. I know Joel is your best friend, but you are my one.’
‘Oh, Ciara.’
‘So, is it OK?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, but are you sure?’
But she was already gone. Steve the goblin looked after her.
Ella grabbed Steve’s arm. ‘Come out to the garden! I have news!’
The garden was obviously the place where news got told. Steve and Ella passed two other huddles, deep in conversation. Things were happening. Dynamic, world-shattering things.
‘So. I asked Caleb if he wanted to do kissing with me and he did. And we did kissing.’
‘Oh. Where?’
‘Prim! Mostly on the face and neck.’
‘No, I mean – in the garden? Where is the kissing place?’
‘We used Syzmon’s parents’ en-suite bathroom. It was pretty romantic. They have a skylight and little furry toilet-seat covers.’
‘I know, right?’
‘Ciara asked me if she was allowed to kiss Robb with two bees.’
‘She’s not allowed to kiss Caleb. We’re back together.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I asked him if he would be my boyfriend until the twenty-ninth of August.’
‘So, it’s like a short-term thing?’
‘Yes. I have plenty of spare time at the moment and I can help him with his ferret and we can go on lovely dates and things. And then, once school starts I’ll be busier and I won’t want a boyfriend any more.’
‘Right. And he was OK with that?’
‘He was. He likes having me to talk to and hang out with, and we’re friends anyway, so it’s like we’ll just hang out way more and also do kissing.’
‘That sounds really nice.’
‘I know. I’m pretty pleased I thought of it. Anyway, Mam is coming to pick me up in half an hour. So if you want to make a sexy move on Felix, now would be the time.’
‘Ella!’
‘What?’
‘Does it not gross you out that you are basically trying to, like, pimp me to your brother?’
‘No. It would only be gross if I were, like, going to watch or something.’
‘That would be gross.’
‘Very.’
Steve and Ella took a moment to process how disgusting that would be.
‘Steve?’
‘Yes, Ella?’
‘I sometimes wish I could bring Mr Cat to parties. I wish that was, like, a normal thing to do.’
‘I used to wish the same thing about Roderick. Particularly just after Mum.’
‘Do you miss him?’
‘Yes. A lot.’
‘And her as well?’
‘Yeah. I got her diaries on my birthday and I’ve been reading them, but a diary isn’t the same as a mother. It’s smaller and full of writing instead of life.’
‘I wish your mum hadn’t died.’
‘Me too.’
‘I wonder if we’d still be friends if you hadn’t moved in with your dad?’
‘I think we would. I’m fairly sure. Maybe not as close, though.’
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