All the Good Things

by Clare Fisher

  Even the Chuckle Sisters would bitch about this: ‘It’s like, not fair?’

  ‘Yeah, because that time I stopped serving popcorn to answer the phone and she had a massive go at me?’

  ‘I know! It’s like, she can just do what she likes. Because . . . I don’t know why.’

  ‘Because she’s Chantelle, dumbo,’ I’d say. Say what you want about her but she knew what came first: not taking popcorn orders and answering questions about seats and running times, but people. She had so many people, they were always wanting to talk and laugh and eat Maltesers with her, and watching them walk in and out of the Odeon, it was hard to remember they weren’t my people; that her life wasn’t my life.

  Often, I’d follow her round Lidl at the end of the shift. ‘Oh my days, they don’t have none of those potato smileys Sharina likes. They only got these ones, and she won’t eat them, says they look like clowns! Guess we’ll have to eat potato-shaped potatoes. Tssh.’ I’d grab things from the bottom shelves and when her trolley got too full, I’d carry stuff for her, like bog roll. Sometimes, I’d follow her all the way home, and whatever she was making for dinner, I’d eat it too.

  ‘Is Beth our aunty?’ Sharina asked one evening, after I’d persuaded her to eat her clown potato smileys by making the clowns ‘talk’.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Chantelle, grinning at me. ‘Course she is.’

  Jayden, her son, who reminded me he was seven and three-quarters every time he saw me, sat up straight and banged his fork on the table. ‘Can you tell that to Miss Campbell? Because, we had to do this thing where we said how many uncles and aunties we had, and when I said, she said I’d done it wrong, because Aunty Shazz ain’t my aunty by blood, and neither is Aunty Felicia or Uncle Paul or BJ or Ahmed. She didn’t get how there are two types of aunties and uncles – the blood ones and the, the other ones – the ones you see because they’re fun . . . Like Beth!’

  I liked watching the Chantelle show, but what I liked best were the moments, like when the kids were in bed and we were drinking white wine on the sofa, and she’d wrinkle her nose and look me up and down, like I’d just arrived in the room, and ask me a question, like, ‘Hey, where did you say you lived before this?’

  ‘Somerset.’ The blood rushed to my cheeks.

  ‘Somerset? Is that, like, west London?’

  ‘Nah. Country.’

  ‘Oh. Country.’ She said this word carefully, as if it were foreign. ‘What’d you do down there anyways?’

  ‘Just. School. And stuff.’

  ‘Why’d you leave?’

  ‘This is where I’m from, in’it?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Her eyes flickered and she opened her mouth, and my stomach clenched because I could tell she wanted to say something like, so where’s your family? Where are your other friends? Thankfully, she swallowed, and then she moved back to the familiar topic of, ‘You got a man then?’

  ‘I already told you no. Not interested.’

  ‘You like girls?’

  ‘I don’t like anyone. Not like that. Not after . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I put my ear to the wall. ‘Is that Sharina? She crying?’

  Chantelle punched me on the leg. ‘Don’t try distracting me.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You are. I clocked you. You had a man down there, in’it?’

  I gulped. My time in Somerset churned through my body, like a big dinner I still hadn’t digested. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Spill.’

  I didn’t want to but I did. And I’m glad, because, as Erika says, it’s the things you don’t want to talk about that you really should.

  His name was Dale. He clung to the edge of the group of boys in the year above who, for reasons I never 100% understood, the girl group I clung to the edge of had decided was cool. I first noticed him one Friday night at the park; the whites of his eyes shone at me through the dark. I was squashed at the end of the girls’ bench; he was squashed at the end of the boys’. When he saw me looking back, he smiled. He was looking at me like I was important – more important than the popular girls, more important than our jumbo bottles of White Lightning, more important, even, than the stars, which were so big and twinkly compared to the permanently purple sky in London.

  We didn’t get around to talking to each other until our groups pushed us behind the bins so I could give him a blow job. He was going to give me 50p in return. I didn’t want to do it but all the other girls and boys had so I thought I had to. When the others were out of sight, he didn’t pull his trousers down; he just stared.

  ‘What’s wrong,’ I said. ‘You gay or something?’

  He shook his head, then grabbed my hand and said, ‘I want to. I wanted to since I first saw you, like. But not like this. I wanna chat to you first.’

  The person I’d pretended to be crumpled. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘We could . . . hang out, like, another time? Without them?’

  I said nothing until he suggested a place – the fields beyond B&Q at the bottom of town – and even then I did the world’s smallest nod.

  ‘Great,’ he said. Then he stood up. ‘Will you do me a favour? Can you tell them it was massive? Like, you couldn’t fit it in your mouth?’

  ‘OK.’

  He pressed a 50p into my hand. ‘Thanks.’

  *

  That first ‘date’, we walked and talked through the fields until our mouths ran out of words and our feet ran out of steps and our lips moved towards one another and there was nothing we could do about it. We lay down on some splintery old door and looked up at the sky and then we rolled on top of each other and kissed until our lips bled. We’d both kissed people before but not like this. Not like we might kiss our way to some other world. It was only when the rain slopped down our necks and our backs and into our pants, and we had to slosh our way back to town through the grass, ready to face the respective adults in our lives, that we remembered we were still in this one.

  And that was it; we were hooked. Obsessed. Horny. In love. Whatever. He’d get up extra early just so he could meet me at the end of my street and walk me to school. He’d hold my hand so tight that I could see the outline of his fingers on mine for the whole of my first lesson. This meant that I didn’t do much work in my first lesson, or any lesson; at last, I wasn’t at the edge, but at the centre; I didn’t need good grades, or anything else.

  The only problem was where to hang out: we couldn’t go to his house – his dad and both brothers were ‘alcoholics who tried to hump anything that moved’, or so he put it – and my foster parents had a strictly no-boyfriends rule. But it was OK because cross country had taught me the best routes up into the hills from school. As we climbed, Dale would sigh and moan, but when I told him to shush, it would be worth it, he would, and when we got to the top of the hills, when we found a good rock to sit on, when he saw all the fields stretch blue-green and misty across the Levels below, when he’d gasped his breath back into his lungs, he’d squeeze me tight and say, ‘You were right. It is worth it. And so are you.’ And I’d tell him he was worth it. No, no, not as much as you, he’d say, nuzzling his words into my neck. Then I’d nuzzle his neck and so we’d go on, not caring if we were being gross or cheesy because we were a long way from other humans, and as for the grass and the sky and the irrigation ditches and the cows and even the stinging nettles, they don’t judge.

  I’d have been happy to hang with Dale and no one else, but he wouldn’t let go of his boy group. Our first proper argument happened when it was raining; I wanted to hang out in this barn we’d found, but he said it was too cold, too damp, and anyway, a ‘thing’ was happening at Tom’s house. Tom was the most popular member of the boy group he was almost-but-not-quite part of.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Tom and that lot don’t even care about you. They use you and then they dump you. Let’s go somewhere we can snuggle just us.’ I slipped my hand under his shirt but he threw me off.

  ‘I’m going. You can come w
ith or you can go somewhere else. It’s up to you.’

  ‘Great. So you don’t even care about me.’ I made a sad face and slouched off.

  ‘Beth!’ As I predicted, he came after me. He slipped his hand in mine. His face softened. ‘Course I care about you. But it’s fucking freezing. And I miss hanging out with the guys. Besides,’ he gave my almost-boob an almost-squeeze, ‘Tom’s house is massive and his parents are never in. There are, you know, rooms we could go.’

  So we went to Tom’s house. It was big and cluttered and the walls were either dark brown or green or a puke-coloured yellow, and if you moved anything, a spider or a beetle would be guaranteed to scuttle out from underneath.

  ‘This isn’t no house for girls,’ he said, when he saw me, so I stuck my chest out and told him I wasn’t a girl, I was a woman. He laughed. Then he handed me a spliff. Pretty soon, we were sitting on these saggy old beanbags, bodies buzzing with smoke, and I didn’t have to worry whether Dale liked me a little less than before, I didn’t have to worry what my foster parents would say when I got home, or where my mum was, or whether I’d see her again, or whether I’d win my next cross country race, or how difficult I now found even English, it had been so long since I paid attention; not one little worry could get through the buzz.

  We hung at Tom’s more and more after that. There’d always be smokes, often drink, and sometimes Tom would hand me baggies of weed and tell me to hand it to so-and-so at the end of the street. Other times, he’d get me weighing and bagging it up while the guys killed zombies on the PlayStation. At first, I was happy to be needed. Then, I started to get bored. Why was I always the one to do the bagging, not them? Was I their slave? Was I invisible? I’d pretend to be more fucked than I was and I’d stand up and start dancing around or say I was hot and unbutton my shirt. At last, their eyes would move from the PlayStation zombies, to me. They’d laugh and cheer me on, and Dale’s eyes would narrow, and he’d tell the others to stop perving on me, and then he’d take me upstairs.

  Upstairs, we’d kiss and wriggle and rub against each other. We’d lie under the duvet and wrestle each other’s clothes off. Then one day he said, do you want to do it, and even though I was happy just wriggling, I said yes. And so he pushed it into me. It hurt. It really, really hurt. Afterwards, I didn’t feel like a new or bigger or more grown-up person; I just felt empty and sore. It wasn’t so bad the second time. After that, there were times when it wasn’t bad at all; the only problem was that often, just as I was feeling all tingly and good, he’d press his hand against my throat or jerk me into a new position, or he’d come. Other times, we’d be drunk, and we’d knock against each other and whether it was good or bad I never knew because my body felt fuzzy and far away. When it was over, we’d lie in a sweaty pile, and he’d kiss me and say he loved me. I love you, too, I’d whisper. For about two minutes, it would feel just like before. Like how you were meant to feel when you were in love. But when I went back downstairs and squeezed on to the sofa next to him and the other boys, I’d feel so invisible, that if there hadn’t been a spliff going round, I’d have cried.

  Those minutes after we fucked – they were enough for me to cling to when grown-ups started to worry. When social workers and teachers and my foster mum and dad were constantly wrink-ling their foreheads at me and saying things like: You’re a bright girl, Beth. You’ve got real talent but you won’t get to use it if you don’t apply yourself. What are you even getting out of the way you spend your time now, anyway? Why don’t you apologize to the P.E. coach and see if they’ll have you back on the cross country team? I tried and tried to find the Beth who could nod and say yes, she was sorry. Yes, she’d made a mistake. Yes, she was upset. And she cared. I looked all over my school and Tom’s house and Dale’s body and my body and my foster family’s house. I looked up the hills and down on the Levels. But that Beth was gone. Lost.

  The few times I did try to do school work, the words jumped about on the page; I hadn’t paid attention last week or the week before or for months before that, and the questions, the books, the answers, they were too difficult, too far away. Easier was to go to Tom’s. To wait until Dale led me upstairs. When Tom said, could I do him a favour, he’d pay me for it, I said yes. Then he’d put some weed in my hand, tell me to stuff it down my bra, then he’d tell me which address to take it to. When I got back, I’d get a share of the money. It was usually a quid or two per trip but it was more than I’d had before, which was nothing. Plus, I liked walking. It wasn’t as good as running, but it was good to move.

  Tom’s got raided about two months before I was due to take my GCSEs. When I got back from my walk, there were police vans in the front garden. Tom, Dale and the others got Community Service. I got a caution, which I didn’t care about, because Dale ended it with me. He didn’t even do it to my face; he did it in a text. I DON’T LOVE YOU. YOU ARE ANNOYING. DON’T COME NEAR ME AGAIN. I GOT TO SORT MY LIFE OUT AND YOU CAN’T BE IN IT. SORRY.

  Looking back, I can see how hard my foster parents tried. Hear their soft-soft voices asking were there any other revision books I needed and would I like something special to eat while I was revising? I can see the hurt in their eyes as I pushed their snacks away, shrugged my shoulders and mumbled that I wanted nothing.

  What I couldn’t explain to my foster parents or my teachers, what I started to realize as I told this story to Chantelle and am realizing more right now, is that the inside of me was already messing up. My body was too heavy to move, my mind too jumpy to sleep. Food felt 100% wrong. When I opened a book, it was like I’d forgotten how to read; like my brain had forgotten how to do life. All I could do was sit or lie or shuffle here and there. They thought I was being moody and bad but I wasn’t; I was depressed. That’s what it was.

  Chantelle was silent for an unusually long time when I finished this story. Then she kicked out her legs, balanced her feet on that huge cuddly duck Sharina won at some fair and said, ‘Shit, girl. That’s tough.’

  That’s tough. Those two little words made me feel a lot better. Like maybe it wasn’t all my fault that I’d failed my GCSEs, then had to spend the time I could’ve been doing A-levels retaking them. That maybe, given everything that had happened in my life, I wasn’t doing too bad.

  ‘But don’t let that dickhead ruin love for you,’ Chantelle said, as I finally put on my shoes and my coat to leave. ‘There are plenty of other dickheads in the world, but plenty more who aren’t. There are some that are even safe. At least, I hope so, I’ve got to, otherwise, like, what’s the point?’

  We shared one last squeezy hug before I left.

  Telling Chantelle about Dale had reminded me that the end wasn’t the whole story; there was a beginning and a middle and a lot of it was good. Suddenly, there were couples everywhere. On the bus, on the street, at the bank, at the cashpoint, in the newsagent’s. Orange Wednesday was the worst. They’d be feeding each other popcorn before they’d even paid. It was the worst. When Chantelle left me to do it by myself so she could go eat Nando’s with some guy she’d met at her sister’s birthday, it was hard for me to smile and nod like she expected me to.

  ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What’s up? Come on. Tell me. Tell Aunty Chantelle.’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Whatever.’ She kissed her teeth at me. ‘You best not have that attitude when I get back, or just you watch.’

  Then she swaggered out to eat Nando’s in her tightest newspaper print leggings. Loads of people were off sick and it was the first time I’d done the tills alone; the queue soon stretched right back to the doors, and the faster I tried to put in people’s codes, the more I messed up. Almost every person who came to the till gave me the evils for making them wait so long. All I wanted was to get down on the Fanta-soaked floor and curl in a ball until everyone got that I couldn’t handle Orange Wednesdays; I couldn’t handle anything; I couldn’t handle grown-up life. Maybe Dale was the only one for you after all. Mayb
e the social and the police and your foster parents and even those bitches at school who came and tried to warn you in the toilets – maybe they were all wrong.

  Somehow, I kept punching tickets, and just when every couple and group of friends and couple of couples had disappeared into a screen, this guy glided up to the counter. I’d never seen anyone glide before, and I’d never seen anyone like him in the Odeon; wavy brown hair without an ounce of gel in sight, suit and waistcoat, and he made eye contact right away, smiling at me as if, already, we were in on some secret.

  ‘I’ve got an Orange Wednesday,’ he said, flashing an iPhone with a picture of a woman and boy with matching round chocolate-smeared cheeks on its screensaver, ‘but there’s not much point, is there, seeing as I’m by myself?’ He laughed too loudly.

  I didn’t find what he’d said even 1% funny but he was the first person who’d said something other than ‘This is my code’ or ‘You best not give me a bashed-up Magnum’ all night, so I laughed too.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘That was more tragic than comic, wasn’t it?’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I always miss the mark. But thanks for laughing anyway.’

  I’d made him happy. And that made me feel like maybe I could do life, and Orange Wednesday, after all.

  I leaned across the counter and whispered, ‘I can put it in for you half price.’

  I’d watched Chantelle give her friends and her friends ‘special promotions’ enough times to know how.

  ‘Oh, that’s really nice, do you know that? Nice things like that never happen these days.’

  Again, with the too-loud laughter, but I didn’t mind; it was like getting high; it blocked everything else out.

  ‘These days? Who am I?’ he said. ‘I sound ancient.’

  I liked how he was wrapped up in this constant battle with himself – just like me. The difference between us was, he wasn’t scared to admit it. He could make it funny. Sexy, even.