by Doreen Finn
‘I think he was fishing.’ Daniel leaned towards me, confiding. ‘There was a jam jar of worms outside under the hedge. I bet he was at the canal.’ He lifted the lid off the Mason jar, put his hand inside. The ladybird tumbled across his fingers. ‘Mummy would go mad if she knew.’
‘You have to stop calling her Mummy , you know that. You’ll be ten at Christmas.’
Daniel sighed. ‘I know. But she likes it. I don’t say it in front of people.’ He gestured at me. ‘Except you, and you don’t count. I mean, you do, but you don’t mind.’
‘I know.’
Daniel did everything his mother asked. I think he felt responsible for her, and in some way he felt that if he was good enough to her, she wouldn’t think about his father and she wouldn’t be lonely. He didn’t even mind about the becoming-a-priest thing, and just smiled when she brought it up. It seemed as though he got better and better in increments, particularly if Stevie’s behaviour seemed to worsen. Daniel said he was always fighting with their mother and their sisters, sneering at Daniel’s insects. He had taken to slamming doors and stealing money for sweets. The only time he wasn’t in bad humour was when he was playing football with his friends in the park. And lately, when Beth was around.
I let my sketchbook drop to the ground. My eyes were strained from squinting, and anyway, it was too hard to concentrate when Daniel returned to talking about the ladybird.
‘They’re really important in the garden, did you know that?’
I didn’t know, and up to that point, I hadn’t particularly cared.
‘Ask Sarah. They eat aphids, which destroy plants.’ He trailed a finger down the jar. The glass squeaked under his skin. ‘I think I’m going to be an entomologist.’
‘A what?’
‘An entomologist. They study insects.’ He said the word carefully, his enunciation slow under the weight of the new word.
‘I thought you were going to be a pilot.’
‘I am. And then I’ll be an entomologist.’
‘What about being a priest?’
I heard the sneer in my voice, didn’t like how mean it made me sound, but I was irritated by Daniel, which was new for me. Daniel was my closest and best friend. He was part of me, like a limb. Shame prickled me. It gathered deep inside me and swelled. Daniel would never scorn me like that.
‘You know I don’t want to be a priest. It’s what Mummy wants.’ If he’d noticed the tone of my voice, he didn’t let on. Instead he explained the finer details of entomology, how it was much, much more than just keeping insects in jars.
My left leg tingled and I stretched it out in front of me. It was hot in the shelter, too hot and too cramped. The fuzzy heat of the hideout and the cobwebbed darkness were more than I wanted. I didn’t care about the ladybird in her jar, or about the other creatures that hid behind dried grass and broken twigs. The sounds of outside were muffled by the makeshift shelter. Traffic on the main road. The snorting of pigs. Sarah’s radio. Daniel’s sisters calling to each other, his mother’s voice over them. A dozen or more ordinary sounds that made up the background of my everyday life, things I paid little or no heed to. Suddenly they constricted me. It was all too normal, too bereft of anything new, anything different. Up to now, I had loved the predictability of my days, especially since the heatwave had begun, but somehow things were changing and other possibilities were drawing me out. The hideout was too cramped, too hot, the sun seeming to double the temperature under the corrugated roof.
I heard Beth somewhere outside and suddenly I longed to be out in the sunshine, where I could at least breathe properly and move without fear of knocking something over. A beetle meandered over the back of my hand, its shell shiny and black. I flicked it away. It hit the corrugated roof with a ping and fell back down. It lay on its back, tiny legs bicycling crazily. Feeling sorry for the tiny creature, I set it on its feet again and watched it scurry away, trauma probably forgotten already. Insects were lucky like that. They didn’t carry troubles around with them.
I crawled to the door at the side of the hideout. The murky heat inside was too much.
‘Where are you going?’ Daniel’s voice sounded alarmed. ‘I thought we’d eat in here. Mummy would make us sandwiches if I asked. And we could look at those new stickers I was telling you about.’
I brushed at the seat of my shorts. ‘No thanks. I’m boiling. I’m going outside.’
‘But what about the drawings?’
I turned back to him. ‘What drawings?’
He gestured towards my pencils, lined up neatly. ‘The insects. The ones you said you’d do. For my album.’
‘I’ll do them later.’
Something in his eyes, I couldn’t quite read it – disappointment? Rejection? – flared briefly, then he returned his attention to his jar. A shrug of his thin shoulders. ‘All right.’ His pencil continued its scratching across the page of his notebook.
Beth was bouncing a yellow tennis ball on a racquet in the back garden, her eyes fastened on the ball, her lips forming words. Eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five. When she saw me, she stopped. The ball rolled away and disappeared behind the green stairs. The bougainvillea was an explosion of colour, its vines wrapped firmly around the handrail, winding its way upwards. Its long life was a gardening miracle, Sarah often said. The plant was older than my mother, and almost as beautiful. Now, Beth scrabbled among its flowers, trying to locate her ball.
‘How many can you do?’ she said when she finally found it and placed it on the strings of her racquet.
I shrugged.
‘You have to try. Here.’ She handed me both, then watched as I faltered with the first attempt. ‘The trick is to keep your eye on the ball. The rest will follow. Always watch the ball.’
I did as she instructed. Soon I was up to forty-three. Beth was generous with her praise, and I bloomed in the light of her encouragement. This was better than being cooped up in a ramshackle hideout with only Daniel’s insects for company. Then I instantly regretted the thought.
Yet it was so different being with a girl, an older girl. I watched Beth bounce her yellow tennis ball, her shiny chrome racquet catching the sunlight. I’d never seen a metal racquet before, only wooden ones. The only racquet I had was Gemma’s old one, a chipped affair with two broken strings. Beth had lots of shiny things and more clothes than I had imagined anyone could have.
‘Let’s go to the park,’ Beth announced. ‘There are tennis courts there, right?’
There were, but I had never gone without an adult. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be allowed.’
‘Sure you will. We’ll just say we’re going. Do you have a racquet?’
‘I do, but I’m not sure where it is.’
Gemma’s old racquet was finally located in a box of junk under the stairs. I dragged it out. It was heavy, the paint peeling, broken strings curling in stiff spirals.
‘Yikes! It’s ancient!’ Beth’s laughter wasn’t mean, but I burned.
‘I don’t have anything else.’
‘Whatever, it’s fine. Let’s just go.’
I walked from the hallway into the kitchen. Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table, peeling apples. The peel came off the big cooking apples in long green strands, like streamers. I caught one before it fell off the table onto the floor. It was bitter on my tongue, then the sweetness broke through. I reached for another one, but Sarah stopped me.
‘Too much will make you sick.’
The heat in the kitchen was overwhelming. On the stove, a huge pot of loganberries simmered. I pushed the wooden spoon through the dark berry liquid. About twenty jars, all sterilised and sparkling, were lined up beside the stove. Sarah had cut out discs of waxed paper to be placed on top of the jam when it had cooled in the jars. These she would then store, or sell.
Sarah dabbed her forehead with a clean tea towel. Minuscule beads of sweat popped up on her nose. She smiled.
‘I never thought I’d hear myself wish for a b
it of cold weather, but I do.’
‘We’re going to the park,’ Beth said from the doorway. She lounged against the door frame, her racquet slung over her shoulder. She reminded me of an advertisement for sportswear that I’d seen on the back page of a magazine. ‘We’ll be back by lunchtime.’
I was amazed by how she spoke to Sarah, as though they were equals. She presented our plans as a finished whole, not something to be interfered with or altered by a third party. No room for discussion.
‘Does your mother know?’ Sarah asked Beth.
Beth looked out at the garden. ‘She won’t mind.’
‘That may be so, but you’re surely not going off out without telling her, are you?’
A graceful, insolent lifting of one shoulder.
Sarah pointed at the stairs. ‘Go down now and ask her if you can go. Megan can wait up here with me.’
Beth was back within a minute, a small bag in her hand. ‘She says it’s fine. I have to bring some water and a sandwich.’
‘Good idea. I’ll make you one too, Megan, that way you don’t have to rush back.’
Minutes later, we descended the front steps. A wrapped sandwich and a glass bottle of water rustled in a paper bag in one hand, Gemma’s ancient racquet in the other. As I listened to the slap and scrape of our rubber soles on the pavement, I thought of Daniel in the hideout, the insects in their jars and his mother inside praying for him. It was a relief to be out in the world, away from what I knew. Pollen stung my eyes and made my nose itch, the sun burned my bare arms, but our pace increased the further we got from home.
We had almost reached the park when Beth nudged me. ‘I’ve worked out a way to open the door.’ Without waiting for my reaction, she told me. Last night, after everyone was in bed, she and Stevie had managed to wiggle a wire into the lock. The door had opened without resistance. ‘And get this,’ Beth continued, ‘this is the best bit of all.’
She paused for dramatic effect. Beth loved to drop extraordinary news.
‘We found a tap in the lane. It’s old and rusty, and I wouldn’t drink the water from it, but it works. It works!’
She must have seen how mystified I was, how uncomprehending.
‘We can fill the pool! We can fill it, Megan!’
She danced on ahead of me, miming swimming and diving. I ran to keep up with her, but she got in front of me again, still swimming, her tennis racquet and sandwich bag clutched in her hands.
14
The chestnut trees in the park were laden with cones of pale flowers. It was impossible, in the grip of heat, to imagine the fruit ripening and falling to the ground around the time when school began. It seemed as though life had become suspended, caught in the amber of the heatwave. Dictated by water usage, safe times to be outdoors, fear of overheating, the danger of dehydrating, I was beginning to chafe at the imposition of the heatwave, at how my very existence was becoming defined by it.
Beth loved it, of course. New York is like this all the time, only hotter, she enjoyed telling me. This is nothing.
She wasn’t like anyone else I knew. The girls in my class were like me, caught up in their own lives, their own families. Routines were punctuated by swimming lessons, a trip into town, visits to cousins. No one took buses around the city while their parents thought they were somewhere safe. They didn’t slip out at night, or smoke cigarettes with boys they had just met. They didn’t address adults as though they were equals, or argue their points till the adults conceded defeat.
Beth was the first girl I had known with the power to entrance boys. Before she arrived, boys had just been boys. They were brothers, cousins, friends. They lived next door or down the road, we either played with them or we didn’t. But boys weren’t for impressing. They didn’t exist for our amusement. Boys weren’t a sport that we had to excel at. They were just people. They didn’t matter more than anyone else.
Until Beth arrived. Beth, with her linen hair, her endless legs in denim shorts, her array of clothes. Beth, who made boys stop their games of football or tennis just so they could look at her.
The boys playing doubles on the court next to ours kept laughing, but it wasn’t because they thought anything was funny. They just didn’t know what else to do. Beth ignored them, sent ball after ball sailing from the shining chrome of her tennis racquet, over the net, past me. I stood at the baseline and waited, ran forward each time, and usually missed. She flicked her hair, pinned off her face with a shiny red clip, picked up another yellow ball and started all over again.
It didn’t bother me, the fact that I wasn’t as good as Beth. Tennis wasn’t something I played particularly well, but I did want to get better. Maybe if I improved, Gemma could come here with me. I could impress her with all I’d learned. Before she had me, Gemma had played a lot of tennis. She’d even won competitions in school.
An ice-cream van played its music out on the road. Beth ran to it; once she reached it she called me.
‘Want one?’
‘No money.’
She gestured impatiently. ‘I’ve got money. What do you want?’
Pocket money was a luxury in my childhood, something noted more for its absence than anything else. Sometimes Gemma pressed a coin in my hand, if I’d helped her tidy her paints, or stack her pictures on the shelves in the attic. Other times, Sarah dropped fifty pence in my pocket, but these were rewards for helping more than an allowance that I expected with regularity. Older girls got pocket money, older girls who shortened their skirts, tossed their hair, sucked on lollipops or coloured ice pops. Girls like Beth.
I waited on the court so we wouldn’t lose it to the older girls who were waiting to play. We still had a bit of time left. On the adjoining court, the boys stopped their game of doubles. Their laughter stopped too. I scraped the wood of my racquet along the tarmac. The paint that marked the lines of the courts needed touching up and the nets all sagged in the centre. I picked up a ball and bounced it.
‘Hey!’ Then I heard it again. ‘Hey! You with the ball!’
I glanced around. The biggest of the four boys beckoned me. He wore a red T-shirt with a faded picture of a guitar across the front. His long hair was dark and his eyes strayed over my shoulder. I stayed where I was. ‘So listen, is your sister coming back?’
‘She’s not my sister. She’s my friend.’
‘Wardy’s looking for her.’
‘Who’s he?’
One boy threw a tennis ball at the speaker’s head. It struck him, then fell away to the side. They all laughed again. Their mirth was self-conscious, loud, and in it I heard them assert themselves, jostling for superiority in the eyes of the American siren. They looked about fifteen.
By the time Beth came back, the boys had started their game again. She handed me a cone, the heat already melting the pink ice cream.
‘Hey, blondie! Wardy wants to go with you!’
Beth removed her hair slide, shook her hair and pinned it back again. Finishing her ice cream in a few quick mouthfuls, she picked up her shining racquet and stalked to the baseline. Without pausing, she picked up the yellow ball, threw it in the air and smashed a serve that flew by me while I licked melted ice cream off my fingers, my racquet lying on the tarmac. One of the boys whistled as Beth did it again with another ball.
‘Go on, blondie!’
Beth merely smirked.
When our time was up and the man in charge had called us off the court, Beth walked by the boys. One of them whistled, a long, low sound. ‘Hey, blondie, next time leave your little pal at home.’ He had a checked shirt with the sleeves cut off, his arms skinny and white.
Beth tugged at my T-shirt. ‘Stop staring at them. Keep walking.’
But I wasn’t staring at the boys. I had no interest in them. The cat and mouse games of attraction held no meaning for me. My sandwich was long since eaten, the water finished by Beth, and the heat had settled on me like a blanket I couldn’t shrug off. Suddenly, I wished Daniel was with me. N
o one would have noticed us; there would have been no catcalls or remarks.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
‘I need water first.’ Beth rattled her empty bottle.
We took a detour by the water fountain and refilled our bottles. Beth splashed me and I squealed, the cold drops a shock on my hot skin. We threw water at each other, free to do so without anyone warning us of water shortages.
The sun had bleached all colour from the day. A dusty haze lingered. Couples lay in patches around the park. Someone had a transistor radio and it played a song Gemma liked. The boys are back in town, the singer said, the boys are back in tow-ow-ow-ow-ow-own. The afternoon was heavy, soporific.
We were just at the park gates when a low whistle distracted us. Two of the boys from the courts were standing nearby, half hidden by the enormous chestnut trees. The one with the guitar T-shirt and another one, who wore sprayed-on jeans. His hair had been shaved off. Shaved Head had his fingers in his mouth, and he used them to whistle.
‘Hey, blondie.’
I turned away, moved closer to Beth. ‘Come on, ignore them.’
Beth turned to the boys. I sensed a change in the air, something mean and cruel surrounding us. I tugged her arm but she shook me off.
‘Come here, blondie.’ Shaved Head beckoned her with his finger.
Beth took a step towards them. The people lying on the grass were too far away from us, too absorbed by the heat and their music and each other to notice.
‘Wardy wants to go with you.’
The boys’ greedy, piggy eyes scared me, and they were bigger than we were, stronger.
‘Beth, stop. I want to go.’
‘Then go.’
I hung onto her arm but she shook me off again.
‘Come on, blondie. We won’t hurt you.’ The boy whistled again. ‘Or are you just a prick tease?’
Beth, for all her independence and self-belief, couldn’t see that the boys were up to no good. She was like a mouse walking towards the claws of a cat. She went to the chestnut tree, leaned one shoulder against the ancient trunk, twirled a long strand of hair between her thumb and forefinger. I picked up her racquet from where she had dropped it on the ground. Part of me wanted to stay, another part wanted me to leave her there. I counted to ten and then twenty. I told myself that if I counted to one hundred and Beth still hadn’t come back I would go and get her.