The Opposite of Amber

by Gillian Philip

  ‘I abase myself,’ he yawned.

  I giggled.

  He squirmed and wriggled till he was lying behind me on the sofa and I was curled comfortably into him. I could smell his jumper and boy, was it good. I didn’t feel sleepy, but what was hypnotic was Foley stroking my spine with his thumb. After a moment of surprise, I let him get on with it. I rolled slightly on to my tummy to give him a better angle. Couldn’t see Spider-Man now and didn’t care. Bump, bump up my vertebrae. Bump, bump down again.

  After that I’m hard-pressed to remember anything, because I fell asleep.

  Fourteen

  He can’t have minded the endless frustration, because he kept coming back for more. We were still dancing round the issue in early September, on a lazy afternoon in the Provost Reid Park, when the trees weren’t even beginning to turn after the long warm summer. Cut N’Dried was shut on a Sunday and I deserved a break. I deserved to be where I was, curled up in the broad basket swing, lying half across Foley’s chest, absorbing sun-rays like a gecko as we swung back and forth. We were putting no effort into this. Mallory was pushing us, and she was already getting fed up, moaning that her arms were tired.

  ‘You better give me that fiver, Cameron,’ she whinged.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Course I will. Keep pushing.’

  His arm was round my neck, and he was holding my Cosmo up against the sun, shading his face and reading the sex advice at the same time.

  ‘Jaysus,’ he kept muttering, and ‘Feck,’ and ‘Holy shit. Is this for real?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I murmured, bored and superior. He was only making things worse for himself. If he was frustrated he had nothing to blame but his prurient curiosity.

  Mallory gave us a violent shove, so that we almost decapitated a toddler running in front of us. Its mother gave us a foul glare and swept it up. By the time we’d finished muttering apologies, the swinging basket had slowed almost to a standstill.

  ‘Oi, Mallory!’ barked Foley.

  We could see her skinny rear view in the distance, running in the direction of the petting zoo in the company of an unsuspecting boy. As Foley yelled her name again she flicked him the finger.

  ‘Jaysus. I hope the gerbils eat her.’

  ‘She’ll probably eat them.’

  ‘Oh well.’ He shrugged. ‘Suppose we can’t stay here anyway.’

  It was true that we were getting the evil eye from a growing posse of toddlers, not to mention their parents. We clambered down from the swing and wandered after Mallory.

  ‘Oh. Got you something on holiday,’ said Foley. He rummaged in his jeans pocket like he’d only just remembered, but I think he’d been picking his moment.

  He handed me a tiny tartan bag made of stiff paper, and I opened it nervously. The Foleys’ annual holiday revolved round dog shows like everything else did, and I didn’t know what he could have found in Ingliston or wherever that was worth having. A collar and lead set? Silver tick remover? I was already psyching myself up to look thrilled.

  From folded tissue paper I drew out a thin silver chain. I had to stop and peer at the little silver-and-enamel figure hanging on it. I laughed.

  ‘Were these being traded illegally or what?’

  ‘Aye. I had to meet a shifty guy round the back of the chemical toilets and pass him unmarked notes in a plain envelope.’

  ‘It’s very nice,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  I wasn’t lying. It can’t have been expensive but it looked kind of good. The cat was stretched in a frozen pounce, the slender chain threaded through a little loop on its collar.

  ‘Yeah, I liked it,’ he said.

  ‘You big rebel. Bet you didn’t show it to your parents.’

  ‘Too bloody right I didn’t. It’s real silver,’ he added anxiously.

  I slipped it round my neck as we walked. The catch worked smoothly, thank goodness. I didn’t want Foley to start helping me with it, because I’d remembered that moment when Nathan Baird fiddled with the catch of Jinn’s amber pendant. That was when it had all started. I shivered.

  ‘You cold?’ He sounded surprised, as well he might. It was baking hot.

  ‘Nah.’ I took his hand.

  Making my brain change the subject, I wondered if I should now return Foley’s scarf, the one he’d left at my house last January. Now I had a real proper gift to remember him by: a piece of jewellery, no less. Why, it was practically a ring. So I should let him know where his scarf was.

  Or maybe not. I liked that scarf: it smelled good. It smelled of Foley, and I liked that smell. I took it to bed with me if I couldn’t sleep, which was a teeny bit pathetic, but even after all these months it could make me forget the stink of burnt sugar in the small hours.

  ‘I didn’t get you anything,’ I said apologetically.

  ‘You didn’t go on holiday.’

  ‘Neither did you, really.’

  He made a sound between a proper laugh and a snigger. ‘True.’

  ‘Ever considered poisoning those dogs?’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’ he said, and we both giggled.

  I touched the little cat, which felt bumpy against my collarbone. It reminded me sharply of that other cat necklace, and Marley Ryan who’d had it and was dead now. See the way memories come back and ambush you when you least expect them? I hate that.

  ‘Awfurfecksake,’ said Foley.

  We could see Mallory and her new pal inside the petting zoo gates – hadn’t paid, of course; she’d pulled her usual trick of sneaking in under cover of someone else’s chaotic family – and now they were perched on the rail of the pigpen. The pigs were short, hairy and unfeasibly disgusting: blotchy charcoal and pink. Mallory and the boyfriend were burping at them, violently and deliberately, the families around them shocked into awed silence. It had turned into a contest between Mallory, the boy and the pigs. Mallory was winning. Her belches were loud and happy and triumphant.

  ‘She starts a farting contest,’ said Foley, ‘I’m bloody selling her.’

  ‘She can’t do that. She can’t fart on demand.’

  Foley gave me a look that was nine parts pity, one part scorn. ‘I’m away to kill her. Talk amongst yourself for a mo.’ He marched through the entrance gate.

  I so did not want to get involved. I didn’t even want to go into the petting zoo. Relieved, I turned away and pottered as I waited, picking dead heads off a scarlet rhododendron.

  I heard somebody on the radio the other day saying your mind isn’t bounded by your brain, that it can kind of reach out beyond you, further than sight and smell. It feels. Your mind can reach out and touch, and it knows things that aren’t physical, it knows when it’s being touched by another mind.

  ‘That’s why,’ said the man on the radio, ‘we know when we’re being watched.’

  I could feel watching eyes right now, burrowing into my skin. I didn’t want to turn, not at all, but the sensation went on and on, tiny insects digging into my epidermis, and I knew fine that there was only one way to make it stop, and that was to turn round so that whoever it was would look away, embarrassed.

  The man did not look away. Our eyes met. It must have taken a huge amount of willpower not to flick his gaze away from mine, just by reflex, but he must have had it. Either that or he simply didn’t care. I held his stare for as long as I could, but in the end, I was the one who looked away.

  I had no idea what to do now. When I risked another glance at him, he was walking away, and Foley was emerging from the petting zoo, dragging Mallory by the sleeve.

  ‘I saw Tom Jerrold,’ I blurted.

  ‘Oh?’ Foley was still working at hanging on to Mallory. ‘Well, he lives in Glassford now.’

  ‘I know. But he was –’ I hesitated. What was he doing? Looking at me? Oh, call the armed response unit. ‘He didn’t say hi.’

  ‘You didn’t seriously think he would?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Think Alex told him? What I said?’

  Foley didn’t say anything for a minute. He
rubbed his nose and scratched the back of his neck. ‘Yeah. I think it was, like . . . I think it was, like, common knowledge.’

  Yeah. Of course it was. Enough people heard me. I forgot that sometimes. I even forgot Alex now and again, forgot he’d ever existed or that he still did. I forgot that for minutes at a time.

  I don’t suppose Tom Jerrold ever did.

  Fifteen

  Just as well Foley wasn’t staying the night; I’d have been mortified. It was so long since I’d seen Jinn at our house, I’d forgotten she still had her own key. I didn’t hear the door open because I was brushing my teeth, but I heard it do its delayed-slam thing, and nearly impaled my brain on an Oral-B.

  I stuck my head out of the bathroom door, my brush at my side dripping blue toothpaste-foam on the carpet.

  She still looked a bit huffy, and let’s face it, she had me at a disadvantage. I grabbed a towel and wiped my foaming mouth. ‘Hi.’

  We watched each other, half embarrassed and half wary. At last she smiled.

  ‘I’m just picking up some stuff. OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Yes. Um. You want a coffee?’

  She glanced at her watch, like she had forty appointments that day or something. ‘I can’t, Ruby. I got to go.’ She tossed back her hair and smiled properly. ‘Next time.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said, but she was already sidling into her old room.

  I’d have loved to know what she was hunting for, slamming drawers and creaking open cupboard doors, but I didn’t want to hover in the hall and be too blatantly nosy. I went to the kitchen and made a coffee I didn’t want, then leaned against the cabinet and waited. I could have gone out. I could have left her to it, let her lock up, but that felt sort of . . . inhospitable. Which was wrong and stupid when it was meant to be her house too.

  When she came to the kitchen she was carrying a plastic Tesco bag stuffed with clothes. ‘You haven’t messed with my stuff, Ruby, have you?’

  I felt my face go hot at the injustice. ‘No!’

  ‘OK.’ She half turned away, then. ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ I could get angry if she went on like that.

  She didn’t, though. She smiled with one corner of her mouth. ‘Good!’

  I glared.

  ‘So don’t!’ she warned me. ‘And I wasn’t here, OK?’

  My glare became a frown.

  ‘I wasn’t here, and you never touch my stuff.’

  She went out the front door and tried to slam it, except of course it wouldn’t slam, not on demand. As she tugged on it I giggled.

  It was nearly shut, but she stuck her head back round, and winked at me, and giggled in turn.

  ‘But you still don’t touch my stuff.’

  And then she was gone.

  Jinn’s new job, of course, didn’t last longer than the summer. They had a bonfire in September in the Dot Cumming Memorial Park, by the sea, where they burned fake witches made of mouldy pillows and the clothes even the charity shop couldn’t sell. That was the climax of the witch festivities and the end of Jinn’s job, though I saw her making the most of it, dancing round the blaze in her witch get-up, clapping her hands and scaring small children, feeling guilty and hugging them if they started to cry. She must have enjoyed it, even if the money was crap, because she looked high as a weather balloon, her eyes brilliant with the fun of it.

  Foley was busy that evening making sure Mallory didn’t immolate herself or any one of her pack of small boyfriends. Thank God fireworks weren’t in the shops yet; the little brute would have been throwing them at the witches both on the bonfire and off. I was bored with the whole thing, or pretending I was. Unaccustomed alcohol had made me melancholy. I’d had a few drinks – Molotovs, as it happens, but with vodka in – and I had a hankering to talk to Jinn. When words want out of me, boy, do they want out. If I didn’t corner Jinn and bend her ear, I was going to combust.

  She’d disappeared. I circled the bonfire three times (which in Breakness mythology probably means the Devil will appear in a puff of smoke and eat me) but could see no sign of her. I swear, in an instant of irrational terror I even checked the smouldering lumps of pillow on the bonfire, screwing up my eyes through the smoke to identify cheap clothing and green raffia wigs, but the burning witches were damp and mouldy, and not far gone enough to be unrecognisable. Jinn had not through some bizarre accident been mistaken for a witch-guy and thrown on the fire.

  I bought a poke of chips and nibbled on them as I edged through the crowd. It was quite a warm night and she should have been incredibly conspicuous in her get-up, but there was no sign of her. I backed away from the crowds and wandered back towards the edge of the park and the river where it spilled into the sea. There was a big wall there with a mural on it: witches (of course), and garish mermaids with fat lips, and skinny dolphins with heads way out of proportion to their tails. Mallory’s school had done it as part of a civic arts project, and I suppose it was better than blank concrete – just. The evening air was cool in its shadow, so I strolled out past it into the slanting evening sun. The mural wall screened this part of the river from the park and the bonfire, and it screened the rickety bridge too. That troll could be up to anything.

  Beyond the wall I sat down, dangling my legs over a high stone dyke that jutted over the river. From here I could see the rickety bridge, anchored in hard sand. With the tide out, its first two stanchions were on dry land, dry sand. In the furthest deepest shadows, where the tide would come last and the sand would be softest and driest, I saw a haphazard pile of black. You’d think it was a pile of black bin bags if you didn’t know what you were looking for, but it was most unlikely you’d look at all. It was only that I was searching for her, only that my eyes were peeled.

  Tulle and taffeta and lace, all bunched up and messy. Black hair askew, silver strands escaping like ribbons to match the river. White limbs all exposed.

  I thought she was dead. Then I thought, no, not yet, but he was killing her.

  That’s what I thought before age and experience and my brain kicked in. They were only twenty metres away but the sun was lowering and the shadows were deepening and it was so hard to see; and I was on my own, and angry, and afraid, and I thought she wouldn’t do what she was doing, so I that’s why I thought he must be killing her. My legs wouldn’t work for a little while – and I was too busy staring – and then I stood up so fast, she saw my movement.

  Jinn didn’t stop straight away. I saw her head turn, and her eyes darken, but they didn’t spark with rage, they didn’t spark with anything. You know, I can’t really have seen all that, can I? Not at that distance. I suppose I only felt it, her dull resentment battering at me.

  She didn’t let on to the man grunting and bumping on top of her. When I realised she wasn’t going to stop, and he wasn’t killing her, I put my hands over my eyes so I wouldn’t see. When I dared to look again, she was standing up and dusting off the sand, and straightening her black tulle skirts and tucking something into her bodice; and the man was hunching his shoulders and walking away.

  It wasn’t Nathan Baird. That’s why I lost my temper. She’d given me up for him, and now she was shagging someone who wasn’t him at all.

  She caught up with me at the mural wall as I clambered up the rocks. Everybody in the whole town was watching the bonfire. Nobody was interested in a catfight.

  ‘It’s none of your business, Ruby!’

  ‘Where’s Nathan?’ I yelled. ‘Doesn’t he mind?’

  She took a step back then. At first I thought she was angry, then I realised it wasn’t that. She was confused, that was all. Like she’d thought I was on to her, and abruptly realised I wasn’t.

  I blinked.

  She said, ‘Listen. You wouldn’t understand.’

  Then we stared at one another again, for quite a silent while. I could hear myself breathing but I couldn’t hear Jinn.

  ‘I love him,’ she said.

  ‘So why . . . are . . . you . . .’

/>   My voice trailed into nothingness because my slow old brain had finally answered my own question. A pair of fighter jets screamed past, then faded into a sonic boom. And silence.

  ‘I love him,’ said Jinn. ‘You don’t love him.’

  ‘If you loved him,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t help him . . . get . . .’

  God, my brain was doing some catching up.

  ‘What happened to your pendant?’ I said.

  She touched the black leather thong, stroked a fingertip across the gothic cross.

  ‘It’s at home,’ she said.

  ‘You can come home,’ I said. ‘Please come home, Jinn.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can bring him.’ There was a hideous edge of desperation in my voice.

  ‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘I won’t have him round you. Him and his shit. And the guys, his old friends. He still owes them. I don’t want them coming to the house and I don’t want you having to deal with them. When we pay them off, then we might come back.’

  I blinked my blurring eyes. ‘You love him more than you love me.’

  ‘No. I love him as much as I love you and I won’t have you around those people.’

  ‘Stop him doing it,’ I said, like a petulant toddler.

  Jinn just laughed.

  I begged, ‘Just bring him home and stay home.’

  She laughed again. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She sucked her lip and shut one eye. ‘Look, Ruby, it’s cool. It’s not a problem.’

  ‘It’s a problem, it is, it is.’ Tears pricked like needles under my eyelids. ‘Jinn, why are you doing this?’

  ‘Ruby, shush. I didn’t get in his car. See, if you don’t get in a car, it’s safe. It’s easy money and it’s safe. I’ll – look, I’m in control.’

  I stared at her. I couldn’t speak. What’s new?

  ‘I’m sorry, Ruby. I’m sorry. It’s just the way things are.’

  And then she fell silent. There’s an irony, because for once I went the opposite way. Actually I couldn’t shut up, not once I started.

  I don’t even remember what I screamed at her. It wasn’t anything sisterly. I couldn’t stand the way she was standing there taking it. I didn’t think she should. I wanted her to howl at me, scream back. I wanted her to hit me. I wanted her to slap my silly face and bring me to my senses and tell me it was an optical illusion, a hallucination, a dream. Instead she just watched me, her face a pallid mask of remorse and guilt. I had never seen that expression on her face, never, and I decided it was something to do with the crappy foundation and the God-awful scarlet lipstick, so I flew at her and tried to wipe them off. I tried to wipe off the make-up, and her grim miserable expression, and her whole face.