Nina hung back, looking at advertisements on a noticeboard. She looked over at Shaz and the man as often as she could without being spotted. Would Shaz welcome an interruption? Would a friend do that? Nina wished that she wasn’t wearing the stupid shoes. Every time she looked, Nina became more and more aware that there was something about the man she really did not like the look of. He made her feel shivery, and she remembered the signs of foreboding they had talked about in her Shakespeare class. Clouds, falling leaves, climate change, the setting sun – none of them were present in McDonald’s on a noisy evening in early spring. Instead, Nina could see squabbling children, tired mums and the odd courting couple. The feeling she got was foreboding, though; foreboding in great big bucket loads.
She was half reading an advertisement for a room in a shared house when Shaz tapped her on the shoulder. There was no sign of the man.
‘What the fuck?’ Shaz said. ‘I thought you were going to come back wearing the clothes? You’ve been ages, I didn’t know where you were.’
Nina had never heard Shaz speak so angrily before. Anger and something else – fear, Nina thought. Yes, Shaz was still scared.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nina said. ‘Are you OK? I was going to come over, when you were speaking to that guy, but I wasn’t sure—’
‘Keep your fucking nose out,’ Shaz said. ‘Nothing to fucking do with you. And you’re not even wearing the stuff I gave you. Look at you. You’ve kept your jeans on and the shoes look like you’re playing at dressing up with your mum’s clothes.’
Shaz stared at Nina as if she hated her. Nina was confused. She didn’t understand how things had escalated so quickly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nina said, ‘I kept thinking I should come and help you, with that man, whoever he was, and I should have only I didn’t know if—’
‘For fuck’s sake, what man? THERE WAS NO MAN, YOU STUPID BITCH.’
Nina recoiled. What was she doing here? she thought. With this angry, frightened, furious girl? Shaz bit her lip until Nina could see blood.
‘That is so not fair,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t help. And I’m grateful, honestly I am, but the shorts, they’re too, you know, you’d be able to see my bum and everything. And the bra, it’s not the right size. And those knickers,’ Nina lowered her voice, ‘Shaz, they’re ridiculous. They look really uncomfortable too, and I’d never get away with wearing them at the home. But thanks anyway, it was a lovely present and I’m sorry to be an ungrateful bitch.’
Shaz took a couple of deep breaths in an exaggerated way. She stepped back and sat on one of the brightly coloured chairs. Nina could see that she was trying to calm down.
‘Are you for real? I literally do not know what to do with you. Are you actually from this planet? Did you just talk about putting a thong like that in the wash in a children’s home? Oh please.’ Shaz put her head on the table and groaned.
‘Shaz,’ Nina said, ‘what, I mean, be careful, there’s some sauce on that table. You don’t want to get that on your top, it’ll never come out.’
‘Sit down,’ Shaz said, patting the chair next to her.
Nina sat. The chairs were bolted to the floor at a short distance from the table, and Nina found it tricky in her high heels.
‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’
Shaz looked miserable in a way Nina hadn’t seen before. She had seen irritated, angry, scared, grouchy and minimally happy, that was all. This kind of miserable made Nina feel unhappy. It reminded her of her mum.
‘I mean, I could maybe try them on again, I honestly didn’t mean to upset you,’ Nina said.
She reached out to pat Shaz’s arm but Shaz pulled away quickly.
‘Sorry,’ Nina said. She wondered what on earth she was supposed to do now. She tried to think of friendship rifts she had observed in the classroom but they seemed different when they belonged to other people. Smaller, although she knew how quickly they could escalate. Nina had watched several small arguments grow into huge ones, ones where people cried and screamed and stopped speaking to each other. The time that Ella, the red-haired girl in the school in Coventry, had thought that one of the other girls had taken her phone charger. Everyone knew she hadn’t, and the phone charger was found eventually, but by then both girls had been so angry and upset that when Nina left the school five months later they still couldn’t pass each other in the corridor without a shove. She didn’t want that to happen to her and Shaz. Nina could see how vulnerable and volatile Shaz was.
‘I truly didn’t mean to upset you,’ she said. ‘I hope we can still be friends. Look, give me the bag again, I’ll go and try them on properly.’
Shaz held the bag of clothes in a firm grip.
‘Do you want to know what you should do?’ Shaz said. ‘You should go home, go home now. If you trust me at all, that’s what you should do. Here,’ she gave Nina her jumper and her trainers, ‘here put these back on and give me the shoes. Keep the top if you like. Go back to the fucking library. I don’t need you, honest, and you don’t need me either.’
All the times that Nina had sat in a classroom, watching other people have friends while she was ignored, all the lonely evenings in her room with Bilbo listening to music, all the Saturdays when she had gone to markets, round art galleries, anything to stave off the loneliness, all of it flashed through Nina’s head. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter, that Shaz was an odd one anyway and that they didn’t have anything in common. That the anticipation was better than the actual meetings, that she should really be studying for her exams, that she didn’t need friends, but none of it worked. Nina had loved having someone to meet, somewhere to go to apart from the library. She couldn’t bear the idea of it coming to an end, of being on her own again.
‘I’m sorry, Shaz,’ she said. ‘I’ve been a rubbish friend, I should have helped, I should have worn the clothes, I didn’t realise you’d be so upset. Honestly, I really am, I’m sorry, you’ve been good to me.’
Nina knew that what she should do to please Shaz was to wrestle the bag from her, take the stupid clothes to the toilet and put them on, but she couldn’t bring herself to, even now.
‘Aw, Nina,’ Shaz said, ‘you’re an odd one. Just go, can’t you? Take my word for it, you’d be better off without me.’
Nina wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard a break in Shaz’s voice. She wished that she knew what to do. Shaz stood up and turned towards the door, and Nina couldn’t believe that their friendship was over. Not over a bag of clothes, she thought, it must be something more than that. It must have something to do with the man, the man who really had been there, despite what Shaz had said.
‘Shaz,’ she said. She knew that what she said next would be important, and that she could easily make things worse.
‘Shaz, don’t be like that. Come on, we’re here now, aren’t you hungry? You told me you were always hungry, I don’t believe you’re not. Let’s just have a veggie burger and a cheeseburger like we usually do. Stop getting all stupid and emotional and stuff.’
‘Ha,’ said Shaz, ‘I’m not emotional, thank you very much. I was trying to offer you some advice, like go home now or you’re going to regret it. Does that make it clearer?’
It didn’t. Nothing was clear to Nina and she was torn. On the one hand, she would like nothing more than to go home. That man had looked scary and things were getting too weird here. On the other hand, she felt like a complete failure. Something had clearly happened to frighten and upset Shaz, and Nina had been a rubbish friend. Friendships seemed to be so easy for other people, everyone had them. Even Bilbo had a best friend at the special school he went to. His name was Craig but Bilbo called him Best, and he talked about him all the time. Nina couldn’t understand why there was no Best for her, why there had never been a Best.
‘I’d rather stay with you,’ she said. ‘It’s boring at home.’
Shaz looked at Nina with a very serious face. She looked different, Nina thought. No longer
the gum-chewing, slightly bored face she usually wore.
‘This isn’t something I usually do,’ Shaz said, ‘and I don’t really know why I’m doing it now. Fuck off, Nina, fuck off back to the residential care home. I’m saying it for your own good. There’s nothing for you here, nothing for you in this kind of place.’ Shaz gestured around the McDonald’s. ‘You’re a nice girl, but we’re never going to be friends. You’ve been had, mate, had good and proper, and if you listen to me, really listen, you’ll know that I mean it. I’m not kidding. Just go.’
Nina felt as if she was on a ride at a theme park, one of the ones that hurled a person into the air and then swooped them down, churning their stomach. She stood still, clutching her jumper and trainers and trying to think what to say. There really wasn’t anything. She reached down and pulled off the red shoes.
‘Here,’ she said, holding them out to Shaz, ‘take them, I can’t walk in them anyway. I’ll go and take off the top. Can’t do it here, I might get arrested.’
Nina managed to smile as if nothing mattered, as if she couldn’t care less. Her hands were shaking in the toilet cubicle as she removed the sparkly top and shrugged back into her old jumper. It felt familiar and comforting. Nina wished she could say hello to it like Bilbo did with his clothes sometimes when he was getting dressed. I’m a bona fide nutcase, she thought, and I’m rubbish at being friends. I’ll make my own way.
She hardly looked at Shaz as she gave her the top but even so she could tell that Shaz looked tearful. Serves you bloody right, she thought. Karma. What goes around comes around, and I hope someone is mean to you some time so you know what it feels like. The trouble was, Nina didn’t really mean it and Shaz looked as if she did know what it felt like anyway.
Nina thought about that when she was back in her own room. Shaz had looked so sad as Nina had left, as if something more had happened than two young people falling out. Nina thought about the friendship break-ups she had viewed from her desk in various places. It didn’t fit. Girls had looked angry or relieved or hysterical, but never, that she could remember, had they looked as tearful as Shaz had. Plain sad. It’s not my concern, she thought, she’s made that clear.
Bilbo knocked at her door.
‘Bilbo is not, Bilbo is not, what is Bilbo not?’ he asked from the other side of the door.
Nina opened it and he leapt in. He held out a picture he had made at school.
‘Bilbo is not barging,’ he answered himself. ‘Not barging, Bilbo is not barging in. Bilbo is,’ he ran outside and knocked again, ‘Bilbo is knocking. Knocking. Well done, Bilbo. Good boy.’
Nina laughed even though she didn’t want to.
‘Bilbo, you’re a star,’ she said without thinking. She then spent twenty minutes reassuring Bilbo that he wasn’t a star, he wasn’t in the sky, and repeating, no twinkle-twinkle.
Nina didn’t get a chance to think about what had happened until she was in bed. She usually read before she went to sleep, but tonight To Kill a Mockingbird didn’t work its usual magic. The words seemed to blur into each other as Nina remembered Shaz’s face, and how miserable she had looked. There was something else too, something Nina couldn’t quite put her finger on, something worrying. Something wrong. Nina was almost asleep before she thought of what it was. The man. The man with the toad neck. The man who had been speaking to Shaz earlier, while Nina was in the toilet. He was there, outside McDonald’s when Nina left in a blur of sadness. He was outside and he had looked as mad as hell.
Chapter Eight
Grace
Monday, 25 February
I’m not sure whether I should have left them, that poor girl and the white woman. I knew the girl was in trouble as soon as she came in the door. I can smell trouble, even after all these years. There’s a tang to it, something like seaweed after high tide, mixed with pain. I was always called fanciful when I was a girl in Jamaica and even though that girl is far away now, people don’t change. Not the inside of them, not the important part. The me of me, Nina called it. The soul of a person, that’s what some folk name it but I don’t know, that sounds too much like there’s a higher power involved. All that God stuff, all the stuff I used to believe in before I came here. Before these kind people explained to me about God being just another white man.
I could always smell trouble. At first I thought it was something I’d left behind, and that maybe trouble smelled different in this cold country. For twenty-five years I thought that. Even when my daughter died and it seemed like the whole world around me was collapsing like a black hole.
Whatever trouble came to my door I couldn’t smell it so I thought it was gone, my special power. Twelfth of January 1989, I knew better. I could smell it when I woke up that morning. I sniffed my clothes before I put them on, that’s how strong the smell was. I was like a tracker dog that day, hunting through the classrooms with my nose until I found him. In a class I was teaching. Dean Smith, a boy who sat at the back of my year eleven English Lit class and didn’t cause any trouble. I’m not saying he was a good student, he wasn’t, but there weren’t many who were in that class. A couple of girls who tried hard and about half the class were on course to get their GCSEs with a pass grade but Dean wasn’t one of them. I looked at his records afterwards, they all did, and he had given in a few pieces of homework in the autumn term, not particularly good grades but better than some of the kids in that class.
There was one piece of homework he did on To Kill A Mockingbird, a newspaper report. The kids in his class had to pretend to be reporters, and write for the local paper about the trial. Present the facts clearly, that sort of thing. He did well in that, something sparked his imagination and he got a good mark. That often happens with the boys, they can do what they think of as proper writing, newspaper reports and so on, but they’re not so good at what they see as the girlie stuff. Stories, creative writing, poetry. Anything with emotion in it.
So I looked at him that morning and there was something I didn’t like, something I couldn’t make sense of. He kept blinking. I could see that he was trying not to cry. I hate to see anyone try not to cry. It takes me straight back to Eleanor. My darling Eleanor rubbing her knuckles into her eyes and then wiping them on her dress. So I looked at Dean that morning, my heart already heavy with the familiar thought of my girl, and he suddenly looked more like six than sixteen.
‘Is everything OK?’ I said to him.
You have to be careful with the lads in that age group. They’re like half-grown puppies, they can turn bad on you if they think they’re cornered. So I didn’t ask him until most of the others had left the room, and he was packing his big shoulder bag up. It looked full enough for a three-week mountain trek.
‘What?’ he said.
He looked at me as if he hated me, as if I was the most loathsome thing he had ever seen crawling on the floor. It was a look that made me flinch. Black people get used to those kind of looks. They get used to them but for me, at least, I think it’s fair to say that I never expect them. Not now and not then. Who could expect a look like that? I always get taken by surprise. OK, I thought then, OK, Dean, we’ll play it your way, suit yourself. I went over to my desk to pick up my books and the register. I was trying to stop worrying about him, I remember that clearly. It had annoyed me, it had hurt my feelings to see him look at me like that so I tried to switch off any concern I felt. I tried to think about the cup of tea I was going to make in the staffroom with the other teachers, and what I was going to watch on the TV that night. I didn’t realise for a moment or two that everyone else had gone, and that there was just Dean and me in the room.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘what’s your next lesson? You’ll be late.’
I looked at him again. I didn’t want to because there was such a high chance of another upsetting look from him, but all the emotion seemed to have been wiped off.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
I didn’t even ask him what it was he couldn’t do.
‘Of course you ca
n,’ I said.
I’m sure I didn’t use an unkind voice. Maybe a little abrupt but nothing unpleasant, I’m sure of that.
‘Come along now.’
That stock teacher phrase.
He pushed the desk away and stood up. There were tears in his eyes, I was sure of it. Real tears. He ran out of the room before I could think of what to say next. Here’s the strange thing, though, that smell of trouble, that seaweed and steam or whatever it was, that smell got stronger for a moment. As if my nose was the only part of me that was working properly, the only organ that knew what trouble was.
I’ve smelled it since, never quite so strongly, but I smell it sometimes and when I do I stay indoors. Feels like a warning to me or to someone else that there’s trouble on its way and I’m old enough to want to keep out of the way of any trouble. I’ve seen enough of it. But there was something about Nina this morning. I’m not saying she looked like Dean Smith because she didn’t, but she had a look that worried me. She had a look that said, I can’t, and I could see she was at the end of her tether, the very end. And I wanted to get involved, I wanted to jump right in there and get my hands dirty so I did, and nobody made me. I made myself. So I can’t blame the other women, that lovely frightened Daphne with the clothes that make her look like she lives on the street, or the dizzy one who’s frightened of her own shadow and everyone else’s. I got my own self involved and I’m going to see it through. There’s something bad, and that usually means someone is behind it, and I think that someone must be toad man. The man who came into the café, for all the world like a no-neck toad up to no good.
A Beginner’s Guide to Murder Page 7