by Julie Cohen
‘No!’ said Iris, and filled her chubby hand with the cereal. Little Os dropped onto Jo’s lap, onto the seat and the floor. The man sitting next to the window stared straight ahead.
‘Save some for your brother,’ Jo said.
‘I don’t like Cheerios. What does this button do?’ Oscar pressed the big red button on the post in front of him. It dinged. Delighted, he pressed it again.
‘Ten minutes till we get home!’ said Jo, though it would be more like twenty until they passed out of the cramped streets of Brickham town centre and into the broader leafy suburb. And then a walk through the park and down the street before they reached their house. Under her jacket, her armpits were damp, and her hair was bound to be a mess. ‘Not far now! Do you want to sing a song?’
‘The wheels on the bus,’ sang Iris through wet Cheerios.
‘If you don’t stop that bloody kid pressing that bloody button I’m going to stop this bloody bus right now!’ The driver’s voice came via a microphone and blared through the bus. The teenagers laughed.
‘Sorry,’ said Jo, her words lost, catching Oscar’s hand and holding it. He struggled to free himself. ‘You can’t press the button, Oscar, the man asked you not to.’
‘That man is rude,’ said Oscar.
‘Oscar loves riding on the bus,’ Jo said to the man sitting next to them. ‘And he loves pressing buttons. Any button at all. He keeps on changing the television settings. I’m hoping he’s going to be a computer programmer or an engineer.’
The man grunted and continued to look out of the window. They passed by the end of Jo’s old street, the one she’d used to live in with Stephen and Lydia. If she craned her head, she could see the brick front of their old house. And then up the hill, down the road, trundling into the suburbs, stopping to let more people on and off with a hiss and a sigh.
‘I’m really hungry, Mummy,’ said Oscar. ‘And I’m bored.’
‘Do you want to play with my phone?’ Oscar nodded vehemently and Jo let his hands go to reach in her pocket for it. ‘Oh, I missed that call. Do you think it was Lydia?’
‘No,’ agreed Iris, bouncing up and down on Jo’s lap and reaching for the phone, too. Iris loved talking to her big sister on the telephone. Jo held it up, squinting at the missed call number on the screen. A London code, unfamiliar number, message left.
‘Just a second, sweetheart, I need to listen to this first.’ Unease twiddled in her belly as she dialled the voicemail number.
‘Hello, Mrs Merrifield, this is Ilsa Kwong at the Homerton University Hospital. I wonder if you could return my call as soon as possible, on this number. Thank you.’
It’s Lydia. It’s Lydia. Taken the train into London, hit by a bus. Hit by a car. Assaulted by strangers. Why didn’t she call me herself, why did she go without telling me, my little girl, oh Stephen—
‘Mummy, I want to play Angry Birds.’
‘Just a second, Oscar,’ she said, disconnecting from voice-mail. ‘Mummy has to make a quick phone call.’
It couldn’t be Lydia. Why would it be Lydia? School had only just finished for the day Lydia would be walking home with Avril, pausing in the park to hang out and trade banter with the boys, but not too much, because she had to study. Jo was being silly, being a crazy mother hen. Still, she checked her phone to make sure there were no missed calls or messages from Lyddie.
‘But I want to play Angry Birds!’
‘As soon as I return this call, sweetie.’ Her fingers were shaking as she dialled. She squeezed Iris to her, smelling chocolate and child, remembering Lydia at that age, not quite two, sticky and precious.
The phone rang several times before it was answered – long enough for Jo to run through the entire scenario in her head: Lydia stepping off the kerb, in front of a bus, in hospital in a coma…’
‘Thomas Audley Ward, Ilsa Kwong speaking.’
‘Oh hello,’ Jo said into the phone, falsely bright, feeling the man next to them twisting with irritation in his seat. ‘This is Joanne Merrifield, I’m just returning your call?’
‘Joanne Merrifield … Joanne Merrifield. Just a moment, let me find my notes.’
Jo gripped the phone and held her youngest daughter tighter.
‘Mummy, owie,’ whined Iris.
‘Why do people feel they have to use their mobile phones on public transport?’ said the person sitting in front of Jo, one of the people who hadn’t offered her and her two young children a seat. ‘As if we all want to hear what they have to say.’
‘You just rang me five minutes ago?’ prompted Jo, for the first time thinking of Richard, driving too fast, talking on his phone in traffic. But they wouldn’t ring her if Richard was hurt.
‘Oh yes, here we are. Mrs Merrifield, we have your mother here, admitted earlier this afternoon.’
‘My mother? My mother is … oh, do you mean Honor?’
‘Honor Levinson, that’s right. She had a fall at home. She gave us your number to ring as her next of kin.’
‘I’m her daughter-in-law.’ Jo sagged in her seat with relief. Of course it was Honor. ‘Is she all right?’
‘She’s been admitted and she will probably need to stay in several days, but she’s stable. She’s resting comfortably.’
‘Good. She’ll need—I’ll—’ Jo paused, thinking ahead, planning as she always seemed to be doing. Her mind reshuffled circumstances and responsibilities.
‘Hungry, Mummy!’
Oscar was squished up against her, plucking at her sleeve. They weren’t at their stop yet, but they were close enough to get off the bus and walk. Jo punched the red button.
‘I want to press!’ Iris cried in her ear.
The nurse, or whoever she was at the end of the phone, was silent. Jo pictured her rolling her eyes, writing on paperwork. Multi-tasking.
She held Iris up so she could press the button, which she did with a little shout of glee. ‘You press it too, Oscar, it’s OK,’ she whispered, then said into the phone, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m on a bus with my children and we’re at our stop. Thank you for ringing; please tell Honor I’ll be in to see her today, as soon as I can get there.’ As she ended the call, Oscar was pressing the red button over and over. ‘OK, time to go, sweetie!’
Oscar hopped off her lap and trotted to the front of the bus, his ginger head bobbing. Jo carried Iris after him. The bus braked just as she leaned over to right the toppled pushchair and she staggered, banging her hip against the luggage rack.
‘Just a minute!’ she called, and for speed’s sake wheeled the pushchair towards the bus door without strapping Iris into it.
‘Thank you,’ Oscar trilled to the driver as he opened the door.
‘Thankoo!’ Iris trilled, being carried past.
Jo thought this more than sufficient, actually. She shoved the pushchair out onto the pavement, took Oscar’s hand, and stepped off the bus, balancing Iris on her hip. The bus hissed at her and moved off almost before they’d fully disembarked.
The pushchair fell over backwards.
‘Next time we are taking the car,’ said Jo, heaving it upright yet again and settling Iris more securely on her hip. ‘There are adventures, and then there are adventures. Shall we run?’
Oscar squealed and scampered off down the broad pavement, lined by neat gardens, towards the park. Jo ran after him, steering the pushchair with one hand. Lyddie would be home already, or in a minute, or maybe she’d see her in the park, and Jo could settle the children and take something out of the freezer, iron Lyddie’s uniform for tomorrow quickly, put away the shopping, brush her hair and teeth and jump into the car. With any luck she could be on a train to London before five o’clock. It would be rush hour on the Tube – would it be better to drive? What would the North Circular be like?
Her mind went to Honor as they ran. A fall. She couldn’t picture Honor ever falling. She could only picture Honor standing straight.
Chapter Three
Lydia
IT STARTED WITH yoghurt.
Does that sound dramatic, or dumb? The How To Write book I’m reading says that you should open your stories with a dramatic line, something to pull the reader in. The problem is, of course, what sort of dramatic line do you choose, when nothing really dramatic happens to you ever? Just a series of little events that cause way more worry than you would think, if you observed them from the outside?
Well, there was the one dramatic thing that happened to Dad. But I wasn’t there.
Anyway, it did start with yoghurt, so that’s how I’ll begin my story. I was in the lunch queue trying to decide between a strawberry and an apricot yoghurt. Apricot is vile, but it was low-fat, and the strawberry was full-fat. Personally, I do not give a flying monkey about whether a yoghurt is low-fat or not, but Avril is doing this thing where you check the package of everything you eat for how many grams of fat and sugar and carbs it has, and then you enter it into some app on your phone. Erin and Sophie and Olivia are doing it because they are the eating disorder girls, and for some reason Avril has taken it up too because of some imaginary cellulite on her thighs. It won’t last. She can’t resist Maltesers.
But right now they’re obsessed, and I knew that if I came back to the table with a full-fat yoghurt after eating my entire packed lunch, they would all watch every mouthful I took, imagining it appearing directly on my hips. Not that I care about what the Bulimia Buddies think. I eat when I’m hungry like a normal person.
But Avril. So I reached for the apricot.
‘Hey lezza, move your fat arse.’
It was Darren Raymond, standing ahead of me in the queue – I recognized the spots on the back of his neck, which are my pleasant view every Maths lesson. He was talking to someone standing in front of the service area. Tall, lumpy, holding her empty tray in front of her. That new girl, the one with the funny name.
‘Yeah, get moving, you’re holding up the whole queue,’ said another boy.
‘Some of us are hungry for something other than pussy.’
The queue erupted into laughter. The new girl’s face was bright red. Her eyes were searching for a grown-up, someone to say something, to tell the boys off for swearing, but the dinner ladies had disappeared.
‘I’m – I’m waiting for my lunch,’ she stammered. ‘I’m – it’s a special lunch, gluten free.’
‘It’s a special lunch, gluten free,’ mocked one of the boys, I couldn’t see which one. But I could see the girl’s hands on her tray: white-knuckled, and shaking. I didn’t know her name, but anyone could see how she felt.
‘And pussy-flavoured,’ said Darren, the wit.
‘Oh, grow up,’ I called at him. ‘You’re never going to know what pussy tastes like, Darren, except in your dreams.’
Roaring laughter. Darren Raymond’s spotty neck went pink. On the other side of the service hatch, a dinner lady showed up with a single plate of food, looking around, half-smiling, to try to discover what the joke was about. I squeezed up the side of the queue and went to pay for my yoghurt (and just for the record, £1.40 is way too much for a small pot of fruit-flavoured bacteria).
At the table, Avril was folding her napkin into a little crane. She perched it on my palm when I sat next to her: it was so light it barely weighed anything. Something about the tilt of its head reminded me of her.
‘That’s your best yet,’ I told her.
‘It’s for you. A little gift to celebrate your return.’
‘Why, thank you, darling.’ We traded a complicit look. It’s you and me against all the rest of these idiots.
Darling.
Erin was twisting a plastic straw into a gnarled shape. ‘I have no idea how you eat so much and stay so slim, Lyds.’
‘Witchcraft,’ I said, peeling the top off my yoghurt, though Erin didn’t mean it as a question. It doesn’t take a genius to know that I can eat a lot and stay slim because I run about a million miles every week. She just wanted to make me feel self-conscious, because that’s the way she’d feel if she ate anything more than a single apple at lunchtime. As if we didn’t all know that she ate her own body weight in Doritos every evening before chucking it all up in the toilet.
Anyway, I was taking the top of my yoghurt off and dipping my plastic spoon into it because they don’t trust us with proper cutlery – Mr Graham is always banging on about ecology, he should have a word with the school meals service and their plastic everything – when I noticed there was someone standing next to me.
It was that new girl, whatever her name was, something beginning with B. Her tray had a plate with some orange-ish mess on it; her cheeks were still flushed red. Or maybe that was the way she always looked. Her hair was short but it flopped into her eyes, because her fringe was long.
‘I just – I just wanted to say,’ said the new girl. ‘You know. Thank you.’
All of the other girls at the table were looking at us. I could actually feel them counting the seats, making a calculation: five chairs filled with people, one heaped with books and pencil cases and jumpers. The new girl’s parting was pale against her dark hair. Her jumper was too new and her skirt was too long, above white folded ankle socks.
I shrugged. ‘The boys were being stupid, and I wanted to get my lunch.’
The new girl nodded and paused for a moment, as if she were considering asking us to move the jumpers so she could sit down. But then she carried on walking. She found an empty table at the far end of the room and sat down.
‘What happened?’ Avril asked. ‘Why was she thanking you?’
I told them about it. Avril laughed, and the other girls giggled and glanced at Darren Raymond and his table, who were all throwing bits of bread roll at each other by now. Darren is a straight-up geek, maths and computer nerd, and spotty to boot. The type of person who needs someone to pick on to hide how socially inadequate they really are.
‘God, they are so ignorant,’ said Erin, sighing elaborately. ‘Anyone can see that she’s not gay.’
‘Really?’ I said, licking yoghurt off my spoon. I couldn’t really taste it. ‘How can you tell?’
‘She doesn’t look anything like Georgie and Whitney.’
‘I’m not really an expert, but I don’t think that all gay girls look exactly like each other,’ said Avril.
‘It’s a weird name, though,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s a boy’s name.’
‘And that haircut,’ said Olivia. ‘She could do with some make-up.’
‘And losing a couple of stone.’
‘Just because she’s ugly, it doesn’t mean she’s a lesbo,’ said Erin. ‘Georgie and Whitney aren’t ugly. Well, Whitney isn’t.’
‘Ooh, you fancy Whitney,’ tittered Sophie.
‘Shut up.’
‘I would hate to be called a lesbo,’ said Avril. ‘I’m still hungry, Lyds, can I have some of your yoghurt?’
I slid the container over to her. ‘Have the rest of it. I’m not hungry any more.’ I picked up the paper crane she had made.
The new girl sat alone, eating her gloppy lunch. I didn’t look in her direction but I knew she was there. I could feel her, and I’ve kept on thinking about her, for the rest of today, which is why I’m writing about her now.
It was a stupid thing to do. I’ve forged a connection between us, and now I’m going to notice her everywhere, when up till now I’ve been blissfully ignorant. I’m going to notice how the new girl doesn’t have any friends; how her white socks look nearly the same colour as her legs; how people whisper and turn their backs. I’m going to notice the sniggers when teachers say her weird, boy-name. Which isn’t even that weird, it turns out. Someone told me after; her name is Bailey. Girls have boys’ names all the time. Nobody picks on Tyler, or Billie. If the new girl were cooler, she could totally pull it off.
But she’s not. She lugs that name around with her like she lugs her extra weight, her make-up-free face, her gluten-free lunch. And those little-girl socks.
God, if you could just tell these people. Blend in. Watch, and copy. It’
s so much easier. People are looking at you all the time. They’re making up their minds about you. It’s better to decide yourself what they’re going to see.
But you can’t say that. Not to someone who doesn’t know it instinctively. Not to someone with no sense of self-preservation.
I sat at that lunch table today, twirling the crane in my hand, feeling Avril beside me eating from my spoon, feeling the others surrounding me with their chatter and security. A bubble, as fragile as a paper crane.
I stroked my finger against the crane’s wings, slowly, one carefully folded wing then the other, watching them bend under my touch.
I still have it. It’s sitting on my desk right now, looking at me.
Does that sound dramatic, or dumb?
‘Go on, Lyds, give us a picture,’ said Harry Carter. He was lounging against the wall as if he were posing for the cover of a boy-band album.
Lydia would have kept on walking, but the corridor was narrower there and she had to slow down because of the Harry Carter effect on passing traffic. She stopped and struck a pose. ‘Sure, take one now,’ she said.
He pouted. ‘You know that’s not the kind of picture I mean.’
‘Oh hi, Harry,’ said Avril.
‘I know exactly what kind of picture you mean,’ Lydia told him. ‘Do I look like the stupid kind of girl who would give you a picture to share on the internet with all of your pathetic friends?’
Harry’s smile got wider. He had very white teeth, straight and even like a pop star’s, and a dimple that half of the upper school were desperate to touch. Sophie had written his name at least a thousand times in the back of her notebook.
‘I heard what you said at lunchtime,’ he said. ‘You told Darren Raymond all about your pussy.’
‘What I said was that he wouldn’t get near mine, or anyone else’s, in a thousand years.’