My feet rush me out of the building, across the quad, down the drive. Just as I get within sight of the gate I see McCandless on guard, feet planted squarely, haranguing someone clutching a packet of chips. I wheel right and head for the war memorial. It’s the only place I can get some peace, think what to do. And maybe sitting there, looking at the marble cross, reading the names of all the dead, might – I don’t know – give me some sense of perspective.
Or maybe not. Because as soon as I reach the gap in the hedge I see him there, sitting on the bench, his back to me. He’s drawing. Calmly sitting there drawing. My stomach clenches. He doesn’t turn round.
‘Aren’t you meant to be at history?’ My voice sounds clogged, as if I’ve forgotten how to use it.
‘Aren’t you?’ He sets his pencil back in his pencil case, selects another one.
I breathe in deeply. ‘Is it true?’
‘Is what true?’ He doesn’t even look up.
‘Did something happen with you – you and Jasmine?’
And now he looks up for the first time, his eyes guarded.
‘Just tell me, Luke.’ My breath shudders in my throat and I know Luke must hear it, but I force myself to speak. ‘Cassie says you – you forced her. She says Jasmine was in a terrible state – and she’s had to go home and –’
‘What?’
I’ve never seen the colour drain out of someone’s face before, but Luke’s face bleaches whiter than the pages of the sketchbook he lets fall out of his fingers. Without thinking I bend down and pick it up, smoothing back the crumpled pages. A detached part of my brain registers that he’s drawn the war memorial beautifully.
I hand him the book, and the fingers that reach out to take it are shaking. I look down at his hands – the long fingers, the squarish knuckles, the nails he says he’s going to stop biting. I know these hands in a way I’ve never known anyone’s. I’ve felt their gentleness, and their strength – and something about his hands tells me it’s not true.
Of course it’s not true.
It’s weird and sick and twisted and I don’t know why Cassie’s saying it, but I know this boy – and he wouldn’t.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ I go on, with a sudden surge of confidence. ‘They can’t go round saying that about you.’ For a moment I’m so indignant on his behalf that I’ve almost forgotten that I hate him. ‘You have to go and sort it out.’
Luke’s fingers close round the book. The knuckles are white.
He turns and walks away.
Luke
You have to go and sort it out.
I’ve walked out of school without really noticing, but if I go home at this time Sandra will fuss. So I walk. I walk into town and let the impersonal shop fronts distract me.
That night. I know now I was drunker than I realised. I read the small print on my drugs – may increase the effects of alcohol. But I wasn’t that drunk.
A Big Issue seller thrusts her magazine at me outside Castle Court and I shrug her off.
It’s ridiculous.
Esther’s face. Hurt and angry, but loyal and trusting. She knows me.
She thinks.
I walk past the Central Library, cross the road and go up to the cathedral. I sit on the steps. The cold stone under my legs feels real.
An old lady comes out of the cathedral. She holds on to the rail for support as she struggles down the steps, tucking her walking stick under her arm. At the bottom she half turns and gives me a whiskery smile. ‘Safely landed,’ she says.
I hug my knees and rest my chin on them. My mind forces itself back. Trees. Fairy lights sparkling in the rain. Panic and – yes, desire. And violence. I remember that.
She says you forced her.
True colours, eh, Lukey boy?
You knew it was going to happen.
It was always going to happen.
_____________
I eat as much as I can of Sandra’s dinner. I don’t want her getting suspicious, but every mouthful is harder than the one before. The chips graze my throat and each pea is an indigestible bullet. My throat spasms and I have to put my knife and fork down.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ she demands.
‘Not hungry.’
She humphs. Relations have been strained since Saturday night. ‘You know you need to make sure you eat properly.’
‘I’m tired. I might go to bed.’
She looks at me suspiciously. ‘It’s only half six. Are you coming down with something?’ Her voice softens. For a moment I’m tempted to say I feel sick – it wouldn’t be a lie – and I could stay off school tomorrow, and not have to face Esther and, oh God, Jasmine.
‘I’m fine. Just tired. I’ll go on up.’
I get undressed and into bed. Every time I close my eyes I smell the resiny bark of the trees and Jasmine’s perfume. And hear the voice. Louder in the dark.
There’s a small tap on the door. ‘Luke? Are you awake?’
I hold my breath. The door squeaks open a tiny bit and Sandra looks in. ‘I’ve a wee cup of tea for you if you want it?’
‘Thanks.’
I sit up.
She comes in and sits down on the chair and hands me the tea. ‘Are you sure nothing’s worrying you?’
I shake my head. Then nod. Not sure which is right. Sandra is soft and heavy and comforting and if there was something normal wrong I might tell her. But how can I say, A girl is saying I attacked her and I can’t deny it because it might be true? Bet she hasn’t got a leaflet for that.
‘Where’s Esther these days?’
I cup my hands round the mug. It’s yellow with a smiley face on it. She always gives it to me. She calls it Luke’s mug. I don’t really like it; when I make the tea I always take the blue china one, but she never notices.
‘We – sort of broke up.’
‘Och, no.’ She straightens the duvet cover a bit, then says, ‘Yous’ll maybe make friends again.’
I shrug. Some tea slops on the duvet cover.
‘Well, you know where I am, son.’
I’m not your fucking son. I wish I hadn’t said that. But it’s true.
The tea makes me even wider awake. I lie and listen to Sandra and Bill come upstairs. Their bathroom noises. Someone shouts in the street.
The voice in my head gets louder. It hasn’t let up much since Saturday night.
You’re disgusting.
I try not to look at the green glow of the bedside clock. Try not to work out how much – how little – sleep I’d get if I fell asleep now, at 12.43; at 1.13; at 1.29.
At 2.08 I get up and sit by the window. Jay stands in the garden, looking up. He yowls up at me, and I pad downstairs to let him in, but when I open the door he’s not there. I stand at the door for a bit, feeling the cold night air on my face. A siren blares from the main road. I wait until I’m shivering before I go back in.
Esther
Ruth hugs Mac and frowns over his furry face.
‘He didn’t deny it. That’s the scary thing,’ I say for about the tenth time.
‘But Esther – you’ve been going out with him for weeks. Surely you’d have noticed if he’d been a bit – well, you know, rough or whatever.’ She blushes, her cheeks clashing with her hair, and squeezes Mac harder.
I shake my head. ‘No. Definitely not.’ I think of the cool soft sketching of Luke’s fingers on my face. But then those same fingers, contracting into a fist –
And how strong his arm had felt.
But that was different – Dad had startled him; he was half-asleep and it definitely wasn’t sexual.
Totally out of control, Mum had said.
‘Esther?’ Ruth is looking at me in concern. She deserves more than this – I phoned her, blubbing so much she could hardly make me out, after Luke left me at the war memorial, and she’d said at once she’d come round straight after school. And she’s been sitting on my bed for ages now, listening to my very confused and incoherent story, and only interrupting occasionally. The lea
st I can do is be honest with her, no matter how embarrassing it might be.
So, with a kind of whooshing breath, I try to explain. ‘He was always a bit – you know. Awkward. Backward.’
She looks at me, her eyebrows drawn together as if she hasn’t a clue what I’m on about. ‘You mean – physically?’
‘We – we’d kiss – sometimes. But he never seemed to want to go any further.’
‘How far did you want to go?’
I shrug. ‘Just – you know. Normal.’ Far enough to feel I turned him on.
Ruth plays with Mac’s ears. ‘What’s normal? I’ve told you about me and Adam. We’ve decided we won’t sleep together –’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Hold on. That’s normal for us.’ She frowns. ‘I’m not saying it’s easy. Did you even talk to Luke?’
I bite my lip. ‘Not about that.’ Not until it exploded into that terrible scene at the party.
‘Esther!’ She sets Mac on her knee and shakes her head at me. ‘How could you not talk about it?’ She makes it all sound so easy.
‘Because I was frightened that he – that it was me …’
She cocks her head on one side. ‘I don’t get you.’
‘That he didn’t fancy me,’ I mutter.
‘So why would he be with you?’
‘Because he thought I was the best he could get? Because he wasn’t confident enough to go after someone like – someone better?’
Ruth hurls Mac at me. ‘Don’t be daft! You’re gorgeous. He was lucky to have you.’
‘It isn’t daft!’ I dismiss the compliments. ‘I thought at first – that he was just shy. But he can’t have been so shy with Jasmine, can he?’
Ruth is silent for a long time. ‘Esther – there’s a bit of a jump between not being shy and actually forcing yourself on someone. And you don’t really know much about him – I mean, his background –’
‘Don’t be so snobby!’
‘I’m not. But kids aren’t taken into care for no reason. Maybe there’s violence in his background.’
I pick Mac up from the floor and smooth his fur. There’s a bit on his cheek that I rubbed so much when I was young that it’s worn away to a weave of threads.
My voice is very small and desperate. ‘Cassie’s not the most reliable. She’d do anything for drama.’
‘And what about Jasmine?’
‘I don’t think she’d exactly lie,’ I admit.
‘Was she drunk?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But – she does drink a lot,’ I tell Ruth. ‘At the results night party she was a complete mess. Cassie was hopeless, so I kind of had to deal with Jasmine – hold her hair out of her puke, stay with her when she passed out.’
‘Ew. I hope she was grateful.’ Ruth speaks with the confidence of someone whose friends never need their hair held out of their puke.
‘Jasmine doesn’t do gratitude.’ I try to think back to the party. Jasmine was drinking champagne – was she drunk? Not that I remember. But even if she was –
‘Ruth? Are you saying if she was drunk she’d have deserved –’
‘No! Of course not. That would be worse. If he took advantage of her. I just think you need a clearer picture of what happened.’
‘How? Luke just walked away from me. I can’t trust Cassie.’
‘So ask Jasmine.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You’re scared of what she might tell you.’ It’s a statement, not a question.
And I know she’s right.
Luke
I pause outside the English room with my hand on the doorknob, and breathe in. I don’t exhale until I’ve given my late slip to Mr Donovan, and walked the long, long path to a seat at the back. I keep my eyes fixed on the Shakespeare poster on the noticeboard.
They’re staring at you. They know what you are.
Esther doesn’t look up from her copy of Othello.
Cassie rubs Jasmine’s arm. I don’t speak to anyone, except Toby when he turns round and tells me what page we’re on. His face is pinker than usual.
I look down at Othello. The print blurs. Sweat breaks on my forehead. I don’t know how I’m going to survive a double period, and then economics and then history, and then lunchtime, and then the afternoon, and every afternoon. For the first time ever, I wish I could have a seizure, just to escape from this. A bad one. I could hit my head and be unconscious for hours. Days.
As Donovan drones on about leitmotifs, I let my sweaty fingers bleed into the pages, and fantasise about it. It could happen. I haven’t taken my meds since Sunday.
Esther won’t look at me.
I can’t look at me.
From my seat I can see the back of Jasmine’s head. She leans over to whisper to Cassie and her hair parts on her neck. There’s a vivid scarlet mark at the top of her nape. Like a thumb print. Like someone pressed really hard.
Horror surges through me like a wave of nausea. The air around me solidifies. My skin turns to ice.
I scramble out of the room. Don’t know where I’m going, don’t know where I can go. I’m falling, dying, can’t breathe. My face burns; the skin’s peeling off. I gasp for air but my throat’s sealed. Panic slams me against the corridor wall; cold wall sliding down my back, head exploding, fighting to breathe, not a seizure, I’m dying, and maybe it’s better –
Definitely better, Lukey.
‘Luke? Luke! Are you all right?’
Someone stops. A man’s voice tells me to breathe slowly. ‘In and out, that’s it. Slowly.’
My head subsides. Someone is breathing, harsh, ragged.
It’s me. I’m not dying at all.
The man beside me, telling me I’ve had a panic attack but that I’m fine now, looking at me with eyes that, magnified by their glasses, are brown and warm, like his daughter’s, is Wilson.
We’re both mortified. He asks me if I want to go and sit somewhere quiet for a bit. I say no, I’m fine to go back to class, and he nods and walks away. When he’s turned the corner at the end of the corridor I just walk out of school and keep walking until it’s time to go home.
_____________
Someone’s in the room. All this time I thought he was dead but I was wrong.
You thought you’d got away with it.
You thought you’d got away from me.
In my bed, twisting round my legs like a snake. I writhe and kick but it’s not enough. The voice gets nearer; warm breath on my neck. The space round me gets smaller and smaller; walls that are soft to the touch but every time I push them away they billow back and smother me.
When it gets to my head I’ll die.
You don’t deserve to live.
I struggle, gasping, into consciousness, scrabbling at the monster pressing down on me, kicking at the snakes round my legs.
It’s the duvet.
I’m in bed, awake, drenched in sweat, with the duvet tangled round me. My mouth is so dry I can’t swallow. I grapple for the bedside lamp. My hand slips and falters on the tiny switch but at last I snap it and soft light turns the room back into my familiar bedroom. I check my phone. 3.24 a.m. I choke down some water from the glass beside my bed, and lie back down, heart pounding, breath shuddering through me. It’s not real.
Except it is.
I can’t go back to sleep and risk that again. I’ll have to stay awake. I drag myself into a sitting position and look round for distraction. Tender is the Night is beside the lamp. When I first lived with Helena I used to get nightmares. ‘Always keep a book by the bed,’ she’d say, standing in my bedroom doorway. ‘Nothing like it for taking your mind off things and getting you back to sleep.’
I was eleven, and it worked. It doesn’t work now. The words dance around and tease me, and even when I force myself to concentrate on them, they only penetrate the very front of my brain. The rest of it lurches from the memory of the dream to the non-memory of the party.
You wouldn’t do that.
Come on, Lu
key; you know you want to.
You don’t deserve to live.
A quieter voice tries to be heard. You know where I am, son. Sandra’s next door. I could go and wake her.
But then what? What would I say?
What could she do?
What can anybody do?
Maybe I wouldn’t feel so weird and panicky if I’d taken my meds. That’s why I can’t sleep, why I feel like I’m falling, why this nightmare is waiting to seize me every time I do manage to close my eyes.
I’m kidding myself. I know what the nightmare’s about.
But I get up and open the drawer of the bedside table. There they are in the senile-old-man box Sandra got me, all counted out, two for each day. Sunday night, Monday and Tuesday are still in their compartments. It’s Wednesday now. Or does it still count as Tuesday? I take Tuesday’s, but then Monday’s look wrong, forsaken, so I take them too. And Sunday night’s. Maybe they’ll knock me out until morning.
There isn’t one moment when I decide to take them all.
Wednesday.
Thursday.
I walk to the window and lean my head against the cool glass. I don’t know how long for. The street is quiet. When I close my eyes the street lights still wink in my head.
Street lights. Fairy lights.
Friday.
Throat itches.
Saturday makes me gag. Need more water. I stumble into the bathroom. A new red spotty towel hangs on the rail. Sandra brought it home today. It doesn’t go with the green tiles but she said it was cheerful. The spots dance.
I bend over to fill my glass, and a rush of nausea hits me. It must be starting, this must be what it feels like. I breathe in as slowly as I can.
The water splashes in. The red spots dance, all different colours now.
My head’s going to explode.
Need to get to my room. Lie down. Out on the landing a knife in my guts splits me in two. My hand squeezes the glass. The landing stretches for miles. I can’t make it.
Pain bites harder, doubles me over –
Top of stairs –
Falling –
Grab for the handrail but hand jerks madly, a flopping fish, doesn’t connect.
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