Lifesaving for Beginners

by Ciara Geraghty

  Thomas shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘You didn’t have to tell me anything. We were only going out for a few months, weren’t we?’

  I say, ‘Twenty-three months,’ the way Thomas used to.

  He shrugs. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Wait.’ Suddenly I want to tell him everything. I want to go back. Start at the very beginning. Start again. Why didn’t I tell him? I know now, with the certainty that comes with hindsight, that Thomas would be a good person to tell. A great person to tell. He listens. He doesn’t just nod and say, ‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes.’ He listens. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t interrupt. He listens. Afterwards, he would say something. Something sensible. I’m nearly certain of it. He might have some questions. He wouldn’t dispense advice. But he might make a suggestion. I want to know what that suggestion is. I am desperate to know.

  Thomas says, ‘What?’ He seems tired now, his features rigid and drawn.

  ‘I should have said something. I should have told you. Ages ago.’

  He looks at me and then he says, ‘It’s all right,’ and when he says it, the features of his face relax and he looks like himself again and, for a moment, I think maybe it will be all right.

  Then he says, ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ and there is nothing to do but step back from the car and watch him pull away. He beeps the horn so that he catches Ed’s attention and waves at him.

  Ed waves back.

  The phone booth smells bad. Like one of Damo’s farts after he’s been eating pickled-onion flavour crisps. He’s mad about pickled onions.

  ‘Milo? Milo? Is that you? Oh thank God. I thought you were . . . I didn’t know what . . . Are you all right? . . . WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?’

  I can’t answer right away because Faith is crying really loudly. Even if I tell her, she won’t be able to hear me. I hate it when she cries. She usually does it quietly, in her room, so she thinks I can’t hear her.

  I say, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you DARE say you’re sorry. If anything had happened to you, I’d . . . I don’t know what I’d do. Aren’t things bad enough already without you pulling a crazy stunt like this?’

  I say, ‘I’m sorry,’ before I remember that I’m not supposed to say that. But I can’t think of anything else to say. I think it’s because I haven’t had much sleep.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Milo.’ She stops for a moment and I can hear her taking a puff of her cigarette, which is actually good because she might calm down a bit.

  Her voice is quieter the next time she says something but I don’t know if it’s because of the cigarette or maybe she’s a bit hoarse after all the shouting. She says, ‘Where are you? I’ve been worried sick.’

  ‘I don’t want you to go to Ireland on your own.’

  ‘What are you talking about? We’ve been through this. I have to go on my own. You know that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . . because . . . look, this is beside the point. Where the hell are you?’

  ‘You could take me with you. I won’t be any bother.’

  ‘Stop it, Milo. You’re not coming and that’s that. Now tell me where you are so Dad and I can come and get you.’

  ‘I promise I won’t be hungry all the time. I won’t eat anything. I won’t even go into your birth mother’s house. I’ll wait in the front garden. I promise.’

  ‘Jesus, Milo.’

  ‘And if you want to stay in Ireland with her, I’ll fly back on my own. I’m old enough, I reckon. You probably just have to sign a form or something.’

  ‘Milo, what are you—’

  ‘I could go and live with Ant and Adrian in London. I don’t want to live with Dad and Celia because they’ll be busy with the baby and Scotland is about a hundred miles away and I’ll miss my lifesaving exams and I won’t get into the intermediate class.’

  ‘Nobody is going anywhere, OK?’

  ‘But she might turn out to be really nice? The lady in Dublin. You’d want to go and live with her then, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t. I’m staying with you.’

  ‘But you might change your mind.’

  ‘I WON’T.’

  I have to hold the receiver far away when she shouts like that. When I put it back against my ear, there’s silence. Then she says, ‘Milo . . . look, it’s complicated. You’re only nine. It’s hard for you to understand. I haven’t explained it very well. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ll be ten soon.’

  ‘Milo?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not telling you unless you say I can come to Ireland with you.’

  I can’t hear what she says then because of the announcement. Something about a flight to Buenos Aires that’s leaving from Gate 32. The gate is closing in five minutes.

  Faith says, ‘Oh my God. You’re at the airport. Are you at the airport?’

  ‘No.’ I cup my hands round the receiver so she won’t hear anything else.

  ‘Christ, how did you get to the airport?’

  I’ve already decided that I’m never going to tell her about the taximan. When we’re on the plane, I’ll tell her about getting the first bus this morning from the bottom of our road into the main bus station. Then the airport express, which costs more than the normal bus but the poster said it was way quicker. It’s weird being on a bus on your own. There’s no one to ask if you’re there yet.

  ‘Is it Gatwick? Are you in Gatwick?’

  I say, ‘I’ll tell you, Faith. But you have to tell me first.’

  Silence then. I think that’s good. I think that means she’s thinking about it.

  Then, ‘I’ll be back in a few days, Milo. You’ll hardly notice I’m gone.’

  I say, ‘Mam said she’d be back in a few days.’ I don’t know I’m going to cry until I start to cry. The thing about Mam was that she always did what she said. If she said she’d be there to pick you up at three o’clock, then she would be. The only time she didn’t do what she said she was going to do was when she went to Ireland, because she never came back. Not really. It doesn’t count if you come back and you’re dead.

  Now I’m sort of crying and shouting at the same time, as if I’m not in the middle of an airport with millions of people all around. I say, ‘I will notice you’ve gone. I always notice when people are gone.’

  After a while, I get myself to stop crying but now I think that maybe I’ve pressed a button by accident because I can’t hear anything down the phone. I say, ‘Faith? Hello? Are you there?’

  Faith says, ‘I’m here.’ Her voice is a whisper, like she’s telling me a secret.

  I say, ‘Can I come with you? Please?’ I cross my fingers because Carla says it brings you luck. I cross my toes too, except I’m not sure if that brings you as much luck.

  And then she says, ‘OK.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘OK, I can come to Ireland with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I promise I’ll be good.’

  ‘You’d better be better than good.’

  I’m not sure how you can be better than good but I say, ‘I will,’ just in case she changes her mind.

  March 1987

  I’m seven months pregnant and I don’t even know. Fifteen years old and seven months pregnant. I haven’t got a clue.

  Minnie works it out, in the changing rooms of O’Connor’s Jeans in the Ilac Centre. I can’t get the Levi’s over my belly.

  I say, ‘Coconut snowballs,’ by way of explanation. I laugh when I say it. Minnie doesn’t laugh. She looks at my belly so I look at it too. I say, ‘I’m a bit bloated after the Big Mac.’ Minnie puts down the jeans she’s holding. She stretches her arm towards me. Puts her hand on my belly.

  She says, ‘It’s hard.’ She pokes it like she did with the frog we dissected in biology yesterday. Then she drops her hand and moves away
from me.

  I say, ‘What?’ Minnie doesn’t scare easy.

  She says, ‘It moved.’ She points at my belly and when I look down, I think I see something. A ripple along the skin.

  I say, ‘Oh shit,’ and I back up until I bump against the mirror of the changing room.

  Minnie says, ‘You’re up the duff.’ That’s what Minnie says about her mother when she’s pregnant. Up the duff. Minnie’s mother is always up the duff. Minnie hates how up the duff her mother always is.

  The minute she says it, I know it’s true.

  Minnie says, ‘You did it. You had sex and you never told me. We’re supposed to be best friends. We’re supposed to tell each other everything.’ Her face is flushed with shock and I don’t know if it’s because of me being up the duff or me not telling her that I’d done it.

  ‘I only did it twice.’ It doesn’t seem real. Even now.

  ‘Twice?’ She’s livid. We always assumed Minnie would be the first one to go.

  ‘Jesus.’ I sit on the stool in the corner of the changing room. All of a sudden. As if my legs have forgotten what to do with themselves. ‘What am I going to do?’

  Minnie shakes her head but hunkers in front of me. I realise how serious this is when she touches my hand and squeezes it. But then she shakes her head again. ‘How the hell can you be this up the duff and not know?’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And who the hell was it? You haven’t gone out with anyone since . . .’ She stops talking and looks at me. I nod.

  Minnie says, ‘Elliot Porter?’

  I say, ‘Yes.’

  Saying his name is enough to bring me right back to that sick, heady, dizzy, delirious feeling. It is like a hollow, the feeling. Right inside you. A hunger pain that no amount of food can ease.

  Elliot. Elliot Porter. Right from the start, Mrs Higginbotham calls him ‘an unsuitable boy’. He doesn’t introduce himself at the front door. Nor does he take his hands out of his pockets. She has a thing about men’s hands and their pockets. Elliot Porter walks up to my front door, knocks on it and, when Mrs Higginbotham opens it, he says, ‘Is Kat in?’ like he’s been at the front door millions of times, except he hasn’t. He’s never been at the front door before. He’s never said, ‘Will you go with me?’ so I’m not sure what the story is. He kisses me. Twice. Behind the changing rooms at school, where we smoke at lunchtime. A couple of days after our first conversation, which happened to be about the Smiths. He liked that I liked them too. He wasn’t even talking to me. Not really. He was talking to one of his gang. His herd, Minnie calls them. About a bootleg recording of a Smiths gig in the SFX the previous May. I say, ‘I was at that gig.’

  He looks at me, and I know for a fact that, up till now, he was not aware that I was there.

  He says, ‘You?’

  ‘Me and Minnie.’ I don’t tell him that we went with Minnie’s dad, who was given tickets because he happened to be the insurance broker for the SFX at the time. Instead I say, ‘We went backstage. Morrissey signed my ticket.’

  He says, ‘FUCK OFF!’ before he walks over to me and offers me his cigarette. I take a drag, give it back to him.

  I’m in.

  I make him laugh. I can’t remember how but I remember the sharpness of his Adam’s apple, jutting against the pale skin of his throat, as if it might cut through. He says, ‘You’re funny.’ The next thing you know, we’re walking through St Anne’s Park and then he’s got his arm round my shoulder and somehow – I don’t know how – we end up kissing in the Rose Garden. The next day, at school, there’s a new rumour doing the rounds and it’s about me and Elliot Porter. We’re going out.

  No one can believe it. Especially me.

  I doodle his name in the margins of my homework notebook. Surround it with lovehearts and cupid’s arrows and wedding bells and bubbles of champagne spilling from the tops of long, narrow flutes. I write my name too. Underneath. But only in the faintest pencil, which I rub out immediately.

  Mrs Katherine Porter. Ms Kat Kavanagh-Porter.

  Of course, I don’t tell him any of that. I’m in love. But I’m careful. You have to be careful with a boy like Elliot Porter.

  I don’t tell Ed. Ed is not good at keeping secrets. ‘Kat’s in love,’ he would have told my father. ‘But she made me promise not to tell anyone so don’t tell anyone, OK?’

  Instead, when Ed asks what’s wrong with me, I shake my head and say, ‘Nothing,’ and he asks me to play Snakes and Ladders and I let him win and then Mrs Higginbotham makes us mugs of chicken soup and we watch Gidget on the telly – with the sound down low if Mum is working in the attic – and I stir the soup round and round with a spoon and think about Elliot Porter.

  Elliot Porter is not an easy boy to be in love with. He is moody. Unpredictable. He mitches off school. He smokes cigarettes lifted from packets of blue Rothmans his father leaves lying around. He fills SodaStream bottles with mixtures of brandy and gin and vodka and whiskey, filched from the drinks cabinet in his parents’ front room. He washes it down with cans of Coke, in the fields behind his house. He steals things from shops. Things he doesn’t need and will never use. He has long black hair and wild navy eyes that never settle on any one thing for long.

  And then there’s the sex. Elliot Porter is keen to have sex. He’s done it before. Loads of times, I’d say. He assumes I have done it too. I don’t tell him the truth. I think he won’t be interested in me if he realises the extent of my experience, which is Bressy Dolan putting his hand up my T-shirt and – fleetingly – cupping one breast through my bra last summer.

  The sex turns out to be brief and messy. The first time, in his house, when his mother goes to the tennis club. Her white tennis skirt strains against her waist. She says, ‘You two behave yourselves, OK?’ She winks at us. Blows Elliot a kiss. His father is away again. Malta, I think. Or Tunisia, maybe. A business trip. There are no brothers or sisters to worry about. We do it in the room they call the sunroom, which is a small room at the back of the house. He lowers the blinds. Turns off the telly. Pulls me by the hand onto the couch. We are still in our school uniforms when it’s finished. I pull my skirt down, say I have to go to the bathroom. Wipe at the cold white dribbles running down my legs with a piece of toilet paper.

  The second time is a few days later in my house, during the fifteen minutes between Mrs Higginbotham leaving the house and my father arriving home from the lab. Elliot sends Ed to his room. Tells him he’s hidden a surprise in his room. Sweets. Tells him not to come down until he finds them.

  ‘That’s not nice,’ I say. ‘You haven’t hidden any sweets up there. Have you?’

  Elliot says, ‘Don’t worry. We won’t be long.’ He smiles his beautiful smile. He pulls my T-shirt up, undoes my bra. He calls my breasts tits. He says, ‘Your tits are gorgeous.’ He takes a nip out of each of them. Then undoes the button on my jeans, pulls the zip down. He is right. It doesn’t take long.

  I say, ‘We have to use johnnies the next time, OK?’ I don’t care about the next time. I’m glad the sex bit is out of the way. Now I can concentrate. On being in love. This is where the good stuff is.

  But there is no next time. The next day at school he looks away when I catch his eye in history. The day after, in the canteen, I say, ‘Hi!’ as I walk past the table where he is sitting with his friends. He ignores me and his friends snigger, as if I have something on my face. Ketchup, maybe. Or mayonnaise. I go into the toilets. Check myself in the mirror. There is nothing. Nothing on my face.

  After school, I walk home with Minnie. She says, ‘Nicola Moriarty told me that Porter’s after dumping you. True or false?’

  If Nicola Moriarty said it, then it must be true. I nod my head. ‘I think so.’

  Minnie punches the top of my arm with her fist in a rare public display of affection. ‘At least you didn’t do it with him, right?’

  Humiliation burns like acid. I think of Elliot Porter telling his friends. Telling them everything.
Laughing at me. I wish I were dead.

  I say, ‘No, of course not.’ I want to tell her. But I can’t. She’ll feel sorry for me. I know she will. And if Minnie Driver feels sorry for you, things are bad.

  Two weeks later, he’s going out with Melissa Hegarty, a sixth-year doing a roaring trade in fourth-years, and a reputation for being ‘fast’.

  Minnie says, ‘How could you not know you’re up the duff ?’

  I sit on the stool in the cubicle in O’Connor’s Jeans in the Ilac Centre. I shake my head. I have no idea.

  In my bedroom, I play the Scorpion’s ‘Still Loving You’ from their Love at First Sting album, over and over and over again, the needle scratching deeper and deeper into the groove until you can nearly see the tip of it poking out the other side. I wear baggy Frankie T-shirts that fall to my knees and hide the safety pin that now strains across the waistband of my Levi’s.

  Sometimes, in the gap between Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood and Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, Minnie asks the question: ‘What are we going to do?’ She says ‘we’. I am pathetic with gratitude. I am not alone.

  We don’t say much during those two months, Minnie and I. We spend a lot of time together. Even more than usual, I mean. We listen to music, we smoke out of my bedroom window, we play Snakes and Ladders with Ed.

  Ed notices. He says, ‘You’re fat, Kat. You’re really fat.’

  And Mum, not looking up from her notebook, says, ‘Edward, that’s rude. You don’t tell ladies they are fat.’

  Ed says, ‘But what if they are?’

  She doesn’t answer. Just sighs and returns to her office. Dad sits in his study. I pop corn in a hot, oily pot and me and Ed sit on the couch like puddings, with the bowl of popcorn between us, watching Mork and Mindy.

  Ed says, ‘You’re going to get even fatter now, Kat,’ nodding at my hand on its way to my mouth with its cargo of warm, buttery popcorn. I nod and Ed smiles. He is not rude. He is right.

  I skip school, citing innocuous ailments that need no formal medical intervention: sore throats, period pains, a cold, headaches. I vary them, so nobody notices.