by Helen Walsh
I sprint across the slab of lawn that separates Literature from Sociology and a gardener with a browbeaten face and a cigarette hanging from his mouth shouts over at me to use the path. I flick my tongue at him and plunge into a jam of students walking in the same direction. A few of them I recognise as second year students of Dad’s – Marxists and Socialist workers. I hate their type with a passion. You see them marching through town on a Saturday afternoon accosting innocent shoppers, preaching the evils of globalisation and exploitation of labour in third world countries. It’s not that I disagree with what they’re saying it’s just the hypocrisy of it all. You just know that ten years down the line, most of them will be carting their GAP kids around in their Renault space mobiles, all munching away on McDonalds Happy Meals. And they’ll be throwing dinner parties for their pals, who have all ended up working for big fuck off global corporations. Dad says I get unnecessarily wound up about it all. And just because a lot of them abandon their beliefs in the aftermath of Uni, it doesn’t detract from the fact that they’re very real at the time. All part of the identity process.
Bollocks.
Fucking hypocrites and that’s the end of it.
Dad is in his study looking debonair and gorgeous. He’s wearing that blue Paisley DKNY shirt I bought him last Christmas. The top two buttons have been left undone. My eyes settle in the milky hollow of his clavicle and I feel a twinge of something in my loins. Pocahontas, who can blame her hey?
‘Something happened?’ he says, eyes pinned to his computer screen.
‘Why do you always suspect the worst? Can I not drop in because I love you?’
A smirk tiptoes across his face. He consults some papers to the left of him and drums furiously into the keyboard.
‘Grant dried up already, has it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Come on Millie, hit me with it. How much d’you need?’
‘A couple of grand would be nice but that’s not why I’ve come to see you.’
‘Oh?’
He puts his pen down and swivels round. Dwarfed in his black leather chair, he looks donnish and important. I feel proud and protective of him.
‘I was wondering if you wanted to grab some lunch or something?’
‘What – today?’
‘Yes, in a bit. I’ve just got my…’
‘And everything’s fine, you’re not in any trouble?’
‘NO DAD! I’ve just got my loan money through and I thought I might treat you to a bowl of soup at the Number Seven?’
His face softens into a warm smile. Into Dad.
‘That’d be swell. Shall we say 2.00 then?’
He swings back round, throws his eyebrows together and observes the writing on his screen with suspicion. My eyes zig zag around his study. It’s so Dad. Methodical yet careless. His books – and there are shelves and shelves of them – are arranged by theme. There is not a trace of dust on his desk, yet there is a platoon of empty cups strewn around the room, with week old tide marks. And the air hums with exhaled tobacco. Marlboro Reds.
‘Haven’t you got a Classics lecture to go to?’ he says, glancing at my timetable which is pinned to the wall, above his computer.
‘I s’pose.’ I sigh and pull myself up reluctantly.
‘Toddle along then.’
‘You should tell her you know. She’d get far more out of us if she got that handlebar muzzy whipped off. It’s outrageous, inflicting that on her students.’
‘Excuse me?’ He turns round and removes his glasses. ‘Don’t you dare speak about my colleague like that.’
A grin snakes my face. I feel about four.
‘My deepest apologies, Dr O’Reilley.’
‘Out!’ he smirks. ‘I’ll see you at two.’
I sigh dramatically and spot a book lying on the table. ‘Sexual Deviance in Post-war Britain.’
‘I saw that Millie. Don’t you be losing that – it doesn’t belong to me!’
‘I won’t,’ I say, closing the door behind me, both of us knowing full well that I will.
Jamie
I’m sat here in the window of the canteen staring up at the sky. It’s fucken beautiful, la. Big and moody and sombre as fuck. It’s a manic depressive’s sky that. I pull her name up on the screen of my mobie. I’ve got to sort this. One of us has to. It’s getting silly. My forefinger hovers over the green button but then strays over to the red. I can’t do it. Haven’t got the arse for any more of her shite. I takes a big mouthful of pie which is all pastry and no meat, slump back in my seat and abandon myself to the sepulchral pull of the sky. Fucken Millie. Doing my head in, she is.
I picks up the phone and scrolls down to her number again.
It’s three weeks since that morning she was lobbing stones at my window. I should’ve gone to her and that, but what could I do? I’ve got Anne Marie there, the house is upside down from the do – just weren’t on, asking lil’ Millie inside. I watched her go. Felt last, I did. Seen her walking off down the street with her head hung low and her hands clamped in her pockets and I did, I felt a cunt. I went back to bed and I just lay there, thinking about me and Millie and how it’s all gone wrong. There’s been periods when the pattern and rhythm of our friendship has altered. Like when she was going through the trauma of her Mum and Dad splitting up, but there was always that sense of constancy between us which guaranteed we could take off from the exact last moment of departure. Our friendship was inviolate. Suddenly, it feels almost as though she’s fallen out of love with us. Like, she’s grown up and realised that what we had was nothing more than a big mad teenage love affair. Just like I did with Sean five years ago. And instead of severing it, you just keep it at a safe distance and hope that destiny or geography will widen the chasm and the demise of the friendship won’t be attributed to anything unpleasant. It’ll just be logged as one of those harmless, we just drifted apart type things.
I don’t want to drift apart just yet. Not now, not ever if the truth be known. There’s too much behind us and too much in front. I fucken miss the little waif, I do. Got to fucken sort it.
I pulls her name up on the screen again. I squash the green button with my forefinger and lift it to my ear with a big mad lump in my throat.
It rings and rings. I can picture her staring at the screen, hoping that the next ring’ll be the last, hoping that I’ll just kill the call. One more ring and that’s what I’ll do. Kill the fucken call.
‘He-llo?’
Sounds like a kid, she does – all small and frail and what have you. Makes me feel like going right round there and hugging her. I swallows hard.
‘Hiya babes – it’s your big pal here. I’m just about to go into a meeting and that so I’ll keep it short. I was wondering like – well, I haven’t seen you in ages. D’you fancy a bevvy tonight or something?’
‘With you?’
‘No babes, with our fucken Billy! Seems like he’s the new fella in your life…’
A short silence follows. I’ve blown it. What a soft fucken jealous-arse thing to say!
‘I’d love that, Jamie. You don’t know how much…’
Thank fuck. My heart practically lurches with relief.
‘Right then – I’ll pick you up at six bells.’
‘And thanks for remembering, Jamie.’
Remembering what? I’m grappling for clues, but she goes right on.
‘Six whole years hey? Mad isn’t it? Seems like a whole lifetime away – that morning I turned up at yours.’
Fuck! Is right!
‘I know babes. Does done it? I’ve been racking my brains, thinking of how we should celebrate. I was thinking we should go down to the docks, and just sit off. Me, you, a six pack and some ciggies. River’ll be moody as fuck tonight, la. Or we could do what we did last year – just fuck off into Wales and…’
‘Yeah! Let’s do that. Don’t think I could face the city tonight.’
‘Ok then, let’s see. What time you got to be in Uni tomorrow?’
&
nbsp; ‘I haven’t.’
I don’t believe her, not one bit, but there’s no way
I’m pulling her up over it. Not today.
‘Right, that’s that sorted then kidder. We’ll go pop a pill on top of Snowdon shall we?’
‘Ah, Jamie! I’m so excited!’
‘I know. See you six bells?’
‘Can’t wait. Oh and Jamie, you seen that Joy Division sky?’
‘Thought you’d never mention it. It’s fucken breathtaking, la. Almost got half a lob on looking up at that you know.’
I put the phone down, heart still doing flips. Job’s a good ’un.
Millie
I snub the bus and walk home, happier than I have been at any moment this year and by the time I reach Seffie Park, I feel dead excited about the future and at ease with the past. I’ve even mapped out a structure in my head for the overdue essays and am actually looking forward to writing them. Well, the one for Jacko anyway. It involves re-writing any passage from Romeo and Juliet in the style of a contemporary author. I haven’t yet decided which chunk of Shakespeare brilliance to pervert, but I’m definitely going to take the guise of Kelman. Early Kelman too. Around about the time he wrote The Burn, a collection of shorts which is one of Jamie’s favourites. He gave me a copy for my fifteenth birthday. I hurled it to the back of a cupboard at page nineteen. Having been reared on a diet of Bronte and Austin, I found Kelman dull and pointless. Dot to dot Dostoevsky. Then, a year later Jamie introduced me to Selby. I was dazzled. He urged me to dig out Kelman and give him a second chance. I started reading on the bus to school and stayed on right past the school gates and all the way to Bootle shopping centre. Each and every page was cardinal and ripe with meaning. Kelman became a genius.
The park is gorgeous. It smells of autumn – air scraped raw over damp grass and leaf mould and a savage wind which tastes of winter. Up by the lake, I spot Reg, who owns the video shop at the bottom of our road. He’s yanking conkers from a tree, splitting them open with a penknife and collecting them in a plastic bag. I yell over to him but the wind snatches the breath from my mouth and flings my words back and behind me. The lake and gardens have been badly neglected over the summer. Everything is wild and unkempt. If Mum were here she would purse her lips in disapproval and mutter to herself. Dad would give an acquiescing nod, but silently he’d love the overgrown grass and the tousled hedges and the paths that lure you west then throw you east. He’d adore the chaotic glamour of it all.
Patches of voices swim through the wind. A man shouting, a noisy altercation between two dogs and the hollers of school girls, playing football or rounders perhaps. I light a cigarette and walk with a spring in my step, past the decrepit coffee shop, past the duck pond and up towards the Palm House. I stare at its shimmering perfect wholeness. It’s too intact, too pristine. I pick a big shiny conker from the floor and hurl it at a big flat pane. It misses by ages.
I take an offbeat path that runs parallel with a fast-flowing stream up as far as the playing fields to the north of the park, where it vaults off at right angles towards the main lake. I have been walking with my head hung low, deliberating my essays, gently snug and content. When I look up again I see a field seething with the lunge and surge of adolescent limbs. Girl’s limbs, naked and delightful. I sidle closer. Fourteen to sixteen year olds in airtex t-shirts and navy gym slips, about to start a game of hockey. I find a safe spot from which to observe – a bench which is damp and encrusted with pigeon shit. The bulk of them are undeniably average looking girls, who will grow up to be average looking women, but all of them, even the fairly hefty red head, carry that hypnotic sexual potency that belongs exclusively and exquisitely to the genre of teenage girls. Two of them are loitering at the side of the pitch. Reserves. The smaller of the two is standing akimbo, swaying her hips from side to side. Her face is plain and pretty. An open canvas, no history. The other has her back to me. Her legs are long, bronzed and sculpted and her arse is full yet narrow. The t-shirt she is wearing is two sizes too small for her, accentuating the dramatic dip of a wasp waist and a strong powerful back. The way she holds herself – it’s effortless, it’s dangerous, it’s salacious. It’s cruel. She knows she’s got it, and with that she holds the potential to rip your heart out and shred it to pieces. I sit and gape and hope for a glimpse of her face.
An unexpected blast of white winter sun leaks out from the sky and she twists her head round to meet its glare. She shadows her face with a hand. The sky snatches the sun back again and she drops her hand, but now a drift of wind trails her hair across her face. She fingers it back into place and turns away. Fuck. I sit there for a further twenty minutes, willing her to turn round, feigning interest in the game, my eyes like caterpillars, eating two holes in her arse. Increasingly, I hope that her face is not as spectacular as her body and poise imply.
The temperature drops a little and the sky sags and bloats and suddenly I feel foolish sitting here, but the need to see her face has consumed me. Fuck it. I’m going right over. I scrape my hair back in a messy bun, light a cigarette and swagger round to the opposite side of the field. A blur of eddying bodies separates us. I was good at hockey when I was in school. It was one of the few sports I would willingly participate in. Everything else I hated and managed to avoid through a combination of injuries, brutal periods and making myself so unpopular that no captain would pick me.
A throb of high-pitched screams presage the violent clang of hockey sticks and the ball is freed. A small Asian girl grabs it and hares towards the goal post, dragging the mirage of bodies with her. My girl holds back though, and suddenly, I am looking straight into a face that is too perfect for words. I smile and she smiles right back at me. I stand there smitten, overwhelmed by weird, clumsy emotion. But her side scores and the moment is shattered.
She runs over to her team-mates, punching the air wildly and lunging into a clumsy cartwheel. The temptress becomes a normal teenager. I am both relieved and distraught.
I turn on my heels and head towards home with a clear image of that moment instilled in my mind. When the temptress caught my stare. Before she became a normal fourteen-year-old again.
Rain clouds tear and split as I approach the bottom of Rose Lane, and the glow of Jamie’s phone call fades along with my spirits. The episode with the schoolgirl has dragged me to a place I’ve never been before and by the time I reach the house, that grim and queasy foreboding has locked into the dead grip of tristesse. As soon as I get in, I go out into the yard and roll myself a joint. I sit cross-legged on the concrete floor and inhale hungrily, chasing streams of smoke into the lugubrious vault. And it’s then that it pricks me. This cold weight in my tummy. I know what it’s about now. It’s the realisation that I was once fourteen and carefree. That I was once a kid.
I run a bath, deep and hot, and pour myself a glass of JD. I put PJ Harvey’s One Line on at full volume, slide into the bath and watch the world grow dark. With Dad’s classy razor, I shave my legs and pits of my arms but avoid the groin area. Since those sores materialised last week, I’ve fallen out of love with my cunt. I’ve refrained from trimming, shaving and moisturising her and I’ve started wearing knickers. Period knickers. As from last Wednesday, my cunt functions only to dispose of piss. Sex and masturbation have been put in abeyance and in a strange way the abstinence has brought about a sense of self-satisfaction. For each night I go to bed without masturbating about whores, I feel richer and better for it in the morning. I know though, that once prostrated by the evils of alcohol I will crave them like a drug.
Dad has moved the shampoo and conditioner from the side of the bath to a shelf above the sink. I make steps towards retrieving them, but my legs are heavy and uncooperative, so I wash my hair with soap instead. I loaf in the bath ’til darkness seizes the room and the cold evening pours in through the window and after the music dies, there is a long stretch of silence scarred only by the distant wail of an ambulance. Only the gradual sensation of too-cold bathwater brings me out
of my trance.
As I haul myself out of the bath the realisation that I’ve stood Dad up sinks me. Shite! His little face when I suggested lunch, as well – he just lit up. I leg it downstairs and punch his number into the phone. The answer machine kicks in. His voice sounds gentle yet serious, then two bleeps and it’s over to me.
‘Hi Dad, I was just ringing to…’
Unable to say whatever I think might make it better, I kill the call. I stand in the hallway, shivering, and wait for the right lie to enter my head. Formulating untruths has not always been a forte. I was a hopeless liar as a kid, but I was happy and well behaved, so there was never any need to lie. I had no deviant pathways to pursue. I start drying my hair, trying to visualise the young Me. I laugh out loud for an instant, cocking my head back as I picture myself – all attitude and braces. But then something sinister fingers the back of my neck and silences me. She has the same hair and the same face but it is someone else that inhabits this skin now. Time has poisoned out all the goodness. If you put all my school and Uni photos in chronological order you can see the savage and gradual build-up of filth and deceit. I swear, I look in the mirror sometimes and I’m terrified of the girl lowering back at me. I don’t know her and I don’t like her.
From next door the sound of plates clicking together as they’re stacked into a dishwasher cuts through the silence. It gives the hallway an empty, gutted feeling and the absence of Mum crashes in on me, transporting me back to our old house. I’m up in my room, reading. I hear the crash of crockery on the kitchen floor so I go downstairs and sling my head over the banister. I see Mum crouching over a mountain of broken plates and cups, clutching her skull, fragile female tears heaving from her chest. Dad’s face appears at the door of the cellar. His face is white and alarmed. I see his gaze fall upon Mum and I wait for his familiar raucous laughter. But his face remains frozen. He kneels down beside her, slips an arm around her and hangs his head. There’s a tightening in my guts, a lurid foreboding, and then the roar of blood to the eardrums as Mum’s coiled fist leaps from nowhere and slams full force into his face. He’s never raised so much as his voice to her, Dad, but I’m expecting him to hit her right back. He doesn’t even restrain her. He just lets her lunge out at him again and again and when she’s limp and exhausted and flecked in his blood he cradles her whole and rocks her. I can forgive her for that though. And I did. The death of her sister trampled her. What I can’t forgive her for though, is not letting me say goodbye. I fucking loved Aunt Mo as much as she did.