The Opposite of Amber

by Gillian Philip

  Jinn planned to grow vegetables too: you could pile up tyres, she said, and you could fill them with compost and they were easy to keep. She hadn’t got around to this yet but she’d collected a few old tyres that were dumped in a corner of the backyard and got immediate complaints from the grumpy old bugger next door, who said we were turning the place into a scrapyard. Jinn told him to eff off, and as the council didn’t give a toss about some old tyres (they probably didn’t give a toss about the G.O.B. either), we kept them. All the same, Jinn found an old blanket to throw over the tyres, pinning it down with bricks, and that seemed to mollify the G.O.B.

  ‘Who says you can’t be self-sufficient in a town?’ said Jinn that day, when she came home from work. Out in the hallway, the front door finally shut with an explosive noise. It always did that. It swung painfully slowly on its hinges, and then it slammed with a colossal bang. If we waited to close it quietly we’d die of boredom, but it still gave me a shock, every time.

  In the kitchen, Jinn upturned a plastic bag and shook it out. Wizened potatoes tumbled and rolled on to the Formica tabletop.

  I leaned on the worktop. ‘What are those?’

  She gaped at me and let her jaw go loose, like somebody really thick.

  I rolled my eyes. ‘I mean, what are they for?’

  ‘I’m going to plant them. In the tyres.’ Jinn opened the corner cupboard and started loading potatoes into the blackest depths. Pulling a newspaper apart, she tucked the pages around the potatoes, layer after layer. ‘They were only going to get thrown out.’

  ‘They’ll rot,’ I said. I rescued an old bit of paper that I hadn’t read. Dear Deidre was on one side, a missing girl on the other. I folded it up and started to read Deidre.

  ‘No they won’t. They’ll sprout and we can plant them.’

  I hoped she wasn’t contemplating goats again. Jinn contemplated goats regularly, and far too seriously. I reckoned the G.O.B. would have something to say about that.

  ‘Anyway, we’ll see. They’re not worth eating. Whatcha want? Macaroni cheese?’

  Jinn liked cooking and she didn’t use packets if she could avoid it, so she danced around the kitchen while she stirred and melted and got flour over everything. I set the table, blowing off its fine coating of flour-dust. We shimmied and boogied and snaked round each other as we worked, and Jinn kept turning up the volume. Tonight it was Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa, her favourite song. Jinn liked a lot of old music. She was crazy about Gene Pitney and Dusty Springfield and Johnny Darrell, about Motown and Phil Spector and cheesy country songs. If she wanted to wind me up she’d play Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town, singing along in a melodramatic voice. It didn’t wind me up, because I didn’t mind; I could see the people in the song, like watching a little movie, and those are the best songs.

  I wasn’t sure about my namesake though. Ruby didn’t seem altogether adorable and if her boyfriend was tempted to shoot her, frankly I didn’t blame him. She’d painted up her lips and rolled and curled her tinted hair, and I didn’t know how that would look. Because at first I thought she had tented hair I imagined you couldn’t see her eyes, like she had just a slit of an opening in the hair hanging down across her face. You’d never know what Ruby was thinking. You notice she never answers him, she just slams the door. Maybe she knows the thing about opening your mouth and letting the words out.

  When Alex Jerrold threw himself at my feet, all the way from the community centre roof, I’m not sure if I was surprised or not. Well, no, I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. I’d asked him to do it, so it shouldn’t have been as big a shock as it was.

  Take a running jump, I had said.

  Alex Jerrold couldn’t take a joke, that was his trouble. It wasn’t much of a joke, it’s true, and I wasn’t laughing at the time, I was kind of embarrassed and I just wanted him to go away. I’d laughed moments later though, because I’d seen Cameron Foley grinning and rolling his eyes and I wanted to draw his attention.

  After Alex jumped, after he landed, nobody looked at anybody but Alex. There was a small collective intake of breath – silent, but I felt it physically, as if the atmosphere had been displaced for a moment.

  It was all a bit of an anticlimax. I might have thought (if I thought at all) that he’d spend longer in the air. I might have thought that he’d drift down like a snowflake, or a skydiver. But he didn’t do anything so elegant, and he never got near the sky. Alex Jerrold fell through the space between buildings, the space between roof and tarmac. He jumped and landed, and there was no time between the two.

  He didn’t land quite at my feet, of course – he was maybe ten metres away. We had to stand back and stare up, you see, and there were people yelling at him to jump – silly beggar, all mouth, doing it for effect, never have the balls for it. There were other people there with their hands over their mouths, holding painful breaths, but I didn’t take any of them seriously because I was looking at Cameron Foley and he was kind of smiling at me, kind of curious. He wasn’t really interested in Alex. He’d just thought he was funny for a moment.

  And then Alex stopped being funny. He tipped forward and his hands flailed out to break his fall and the air caught him and then the truck did. He couldn’t even aim and hit the tarmac; he missed the great wide continent of it and hit a truck roof. But he still landed like a bag of meat. He didn’t bounce.

  Cameron Foley stopped laughing, and he stopped looking at me.

  That’s when the sirens started.

  That’s when I ran.

  So much for impressing Foley. Hell for leather, lickety split, and I was still running six months later. I wasn’t even an elegant runner: I ran, naturally enough, like a girl.

  It’s amazing how even in quite a small town you can avoid people. Outside of school I hadn’t seen Foley since that day, and I hadn’t spoken to him anywhere. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. He’d been there too, after all. He’d stood in the community centre car park, shielding his eyes at the white sky and the roof and the boy caught in between, ogling it all like some reality TV show. Foley watched Alex Jerrold jump and land and he didn’t catch him any more than I did.

  I’d been crazy about Foley for months if not years. I’d hung around the car park that day not for Alex’s sake, not to save him from himself, but because I wanted Cameron Foley to notice me. I wanted to be able to think of something smart and short to say, I wanted the moment to kick-start a beautiful relationship, and Alex was no more than scene-setting, a backdrop. (Backdrop. Bad choice of word.) I’d told Alex to Take a Running Jump because I wanted a clear run at Foley, and Alex was in the way.

  So when you consider all that, when you consider how my adoration of Foley contributed to the rejection and the leap and the whole damn thing, it’s ironic that I was now trying to avoid him.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t still like him; it was more that he reminded me. And I didn’t know what he thought. And I was ashamed.

  The petting zoo at the Provost Reid Park up in Glassford was not the most romantic place to bump into him again. And I didn’t think he could still take my breath away, but that’s what he did. I was holding it, because I’m not keen on the smell of goat shit, but when his voice behind me said, ‘Hello, Ruby,’ it knocked the held breath out of my body.

  I was forced to take another goat-scented lungful of air. ‘Hi.’

  The goat enclosure was rank. I wrinkled my nose and looked doubtfully at Foley’s little sister. Mallory was six years old, mouse-haired and so skinny her supermarket jeans were falling off her. Foley had knotted a pink belt round the waist to try and hold them up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  I nodded at Jinn. ‘She likes the goats.’

  ‘No accounting for taste.’

  I laughed.

  Jinn and I got into the petting zoo for nothing at the weekend, because the boy on the gate fancied Jinn and because she brought all the tired out-of-date fruit and veg from the mini-mart (except for the potatoes, obviou
sly: she brought those home to keep the gargoyle company). Her original excuse for the petting zoo was me (I suspected that like with the ice cream, I was an excuse). Like some bored dignitary she’d pay duty visits to the dilapidated aquarium and the chickens and the guinea fowl and the pot-bellied pig. But she’d always end up with the goats, playing staring games with the evil-looking male.

  ‘Look, Ruby. It’s like he’s human!’

  No, it wasn’t. The billy goat had a smirking grin and slitted pupils sunk in sulphur-yellow eyes, which certainly made him expressive, but if I ever met a human with that goat’s expression, it would be lickety-split all over again. The nanny was if anything worse, with her wicked aggressive face. Jinn loved those goats.

  ‘I’m going to keep goats,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m going to keep these goats.’

  I didn’t know what her idea was. I hoped the lifespan of a goat was short.

  ‘They don’t need a lot of space,’ she said.

  They needed more space than we had.

  She was reaching over the fence now to scratch the billy goat between its eyes. I caught a glint of clear gold: her new amber pendant, bouncing against the hollow of her throat. I’d forgotten about it, and the shock of seeing it again made my heart trip. I swallowed reflexively. I didn’t like that necklace and I didn’t like Nathan Baird. Anyway, I felt sorry for the mosquito. I could imagine it having a hot happy mosquito day, landing for an instant on liquid amber resin, and thinking its last thought: Oh shi—

  Mallory ran to the goat pen and Jinn picked her up, looking, I thought, as if she was about to feed the child to the goat. Instead she lifted her high enough to scratch the animal’s head. I could picture Jinn as a mother; it was perfectly feasible, but the mental image made me kind of jealous. So I leaned on a fence and watched the guinea pigs instead, and the peacock that strutted inside the fence like Nathan Baird, then flapped ostentatiously on to the fence to perch and preen. I remembered how Jinn had once persuaded me to scratch the goat’s head. It was so hard, like rubbing a rock beneath a thin covering of hair. I remember not thinking it was real.

  ‘You can eat every part of a goat,’ said Foley.

  I said, ‘That’s pigs.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I liked the way he was finding words difficult, but you can always tell if that bothers a person or not. He couldn’t think of much to say, but he wasn’t saying stupid things to fill in the spaces. He couldn’t think what to say, so he said nothing. When I realised he wasn’t planning to talk, and he wasn’t going to try and make me talk either, a funny shiver ran across my scalp and my whole body seemed to breathe out and relax, like Jinn taking the lid off Lara’s old pressure cooker.

  We watched the guinea pigs for maybe five minutes, which could have felt incredibly awkward, but didn’t. Under all that fur the things were probably the size of voles. Shrunken little men in velvet and ermine.

  At last Foley said, ‘Not a lot of eating on those.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  And for the first time in ages, I felt I wanted to add something. I wanted to make one of those slender word-chains that kept a person at your side. I wanted to make a rope out of words and loop it round his wrist, invisibly, so he wouldn’t get bored and walk away. Words look fragile, insect trails of ink, but they’re strong. Words bind people together or bludgeon them apart. Words are a grappling hook, flung skywards to yank a boy off a roof. What I wanted was the daisy-chain words, but unfortunately I couldn’t open my mouth except to lick my lips.

  It was very frustrating. I could think of several semi-smart things to say but I wasn’t quite sure of them, so I couldn’t get them past my throat. I kept expecting Foley to sigh or whistle under his breath or stand up and edge away, but he didn’t.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see the peacock wobbling towards him, but I was too busy fretting over my next slice of wit to warn him. It was practically at his arm before it let out a tooth-buzzing, ear-ripping screech.

  Foley would have leapt into my arms if I’d been ready to catch him. As it was, he crashed sideways into me and I had to grab the fence and him to stop us both falling in a heap. He staggered upright, swearing impressively, but he didn’t loosen his white-knuckle grip on my arm for at least two seconds. It was worth the circulation loss. When he realised, he let me go, but he didn’t move away because the peacock was still perched there, a metre away, looking pleased with itself. Foley eyed it. I could feel the warmth of his body pressed against mine and I could see his pulse beating hard in his throat. If he pressed any closer our skins would fuse.

  ‘Jaysus,’ he said, making a wild swing at the bird till it flapped down.

  I noticed he still didn’t move away. He stayed in body contact, biting his thumbnail as he watched the peacock swagger off. He shivered. He cleared his throat and shook his head and said ‘Jaysus’ again.

  I sniggered – couldn’t help it – then turned it into a cough.

  Foley made a face. Then he wrinkled his nose.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  Jinn was perfectly happy to be left with Mallory and Mallory felt the same way. We left my sister giving Foley’s sister a lecture on goat husbandry, and sauntered out of the petting zoo and into the main park. Pooling our resources at the burger van, we bought two hot dogs, a Mars bar and a large Coke, then sat on the dilapidated roundabout and ate. Foley still didn’t seem inclined towards idle chat. He pushed on the ground with one foot so that we creaked round a hundred and eighty degrees. Now instead of trees and colour-coordinated shrubs we were looking out across the rugby pitches, where thirty kids from the Academy were trying to kill each other, egged on by a Bruce Willis lookalike in a blue tracksuit. The sun was hot on the back of our necks. I felt positively blissful.

  Foley popped the ring pull on the Coke and passed it to me. ‘Did you think he’d jump?’

  I just about spat in the Coke can. ‘Who?’

  ‘Alex Jerrold,’ he said, taking the Coke back off me. ‘Did you think he was going to jump?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Seriously?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Seriously no.’

  I thought he’d say something else then, but all he did was turn the can in his fingers and kick us round in a half-circle again so we were watching the kids on the swings and the sun was back in our eyes.

  ‘I didn’t think he’d jump,’ I said again. ‘I never thought he’d jump. Not while we were all there.’

  Silence again. It pressed against my ears like something physical.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  Foley turned the can upside down: empty. He shook it, and a few drops scattered. Methodically he squeezed the sides of the can, turned and squeezed, turned and squeezed. He did it over and over till the Coke can had a waist. Then he squashed it hard, top to bottom, flat hand to flat hand.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Maybe I did. I was the other way round though. I thought he might jump because we were all there. I thought I should go away, cos there were too many of us there. I thought if I went away he might not jump, but if we all stayed he might.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘one of us had to be right.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to laugh,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I hope that didn’t make him jump,’ he said.

  I looped a short lock of hair round my finger, tightened it, tugged it. ‘No. No, I’m sure it didn’t.’

  He dug his heel harder into the ground, jolted us round again. Back to Bruce Willis and the rugby match. The roundabout creaked and groaned.

  ‘Did you ever see him?’ asked Foley. ‘Since then, I mean?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘No more than anybody else, anyway,’ added Mister Frigging Tact. ‘Nobody made him jump.’

  I tightened the loop of hair again, till it hurt. I twisted it, and again. I felt the roots give. I felt stra
nds of hair start to come out of my scalp.

  ‘I laughed too,’ I said. ‘Didn’t mean to, but I did.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was funny. God knows why, but it was funny. Right up until.’

  He stopped pushing the roundabout and hitched himself up on to it, so I did the same, hugging my knees. We sat peaceably, watching boys scramble and collide as Bruce Willis bellowed in frustration. I did like this Foley. I liked this boy who didn’t feel he had to talk.

  ‘He might have jumped anyway,’ said Foley at last.

  ‘Don’t suppose he’ll ever tell us,’ I said.

  ‘Got to live with it,’ said Foley. ‘Got to live with it.’

  That night I saw Alex Jerrold jump again and again. I couldn’t get to sleep without him jumping off the high shelf of my mind and plummeting on to the truck roof of my dreams and waking me up with the shock of it. After a while I lay with my eyes shut, watching him jump over and over, waiting for immunity to kick in. I don’t think immunity did, but after a while sleep did. I knew I was asleep, I could sense it, so I wasn’t properly out of it. It was that semi-conscious state when you think you can control it, you think you can manipulate your dreams, and that makes it worse when they’re stronger than you are. You’ve been fooled all along, you’ve been lulled into passive complacent dreaming and you don’t mind watching.

  So when I saw the figure leap into thin air, when I saw it miss the truck and hit the tarmac and collapse in on itself, and I saw the dead face wasn’t Alex, it was Jinn, I woke up screaming till my throat hurt, and still no sound came out.

  counting games

  You remember news stories for funny reasons. I do, anyway. I usually remember some pointless conversation I was having when it came up, or some party I was at, or some song that was playing on the radio, or the hairstyle of the checkout girl when I read the paper in the queue at Tesco. I wouldn’t have remembered the first girl – because heaven knows you can’t remember every name and every killing – except that I’d gone out during the school lunch break to get myself a sandwich and a bag of Worcester Sauce crisps, but when I walked into the newsagent, there was Foley standing at the counter with Annette Norton.