by Jane Brittan
‘What are you doing down there?’ All I can see are her legs.
Joe gets up quickly and I follow, hitting my head on a table.
‘Pens,’ he says with a kind of yawning cough. ‘We … I dropped a load of pens.’
I slope up behind him and drop them into their box.
‘Out,’ she says.
I pick up my things and follow him out into the corridor. ‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘What for?’ He’s looking straight at me, smiling. His dark hair falls forward onto his face. He’s growing a scrubby beard and it suits him. He looks way older than sixteen. I lean against the wall and straighten myself up to face him, then deciding this is too out there, I fall back again into what I hope looks like a nonchalant pose. Then my trainers go and make an ugly farty squeak on the lino.
I grin and snort a laugh. I’m an idiot.
‘Just for … you know …’
He waits, shakes his head; looks up and down the corridor. Message received: he wants to leave. I make it easy. I say, ‘Well … I’ll … I’ve got …’
But he’s not ready to let me go.
‘The Wasteland. Crap isn’t it?’ he says.
Now I love poetry and I think TS Eliot is pretty cool but of course I say, ‘Huh! God Yeah! Shit.’ Again I manage a desperate piggy snigger.
He looks at me for a minute while I force myself to face him with what I hope looks like a normal expression.
‘Wow,’ he says, ‘I just noticed: your eyes.’
I look at him, waiting for an ironic laugh or a smirk. Nothing. He looks back with an intensity that completely takes me by surprise.
I struggle to fill the silence, ‘Oh. Yes. I … most people think they’re odd.’
He smiles his surprised smile. ‘No. No. They’re good. Different. I mean different good … you know …’
Long pause while I try to look casual. I look at the notice board on the wall. Apparently the girls’ toilets on the third floor block are out of use this week. Interesting. I see him shuffle a bit and I wait for him to leave but he doesn’t.
Instead he says, ‘Um … Are you free Friday night?’
2
I need time. It’s like I need a whole ten minutes before answering. I mean what does ‘free’ mean? Of course I’m free, I’m always free, but does he mean ‘free’ for him? To do something with him? Together?
I decide to play it cool. ‘Friday night? Er … yes … I … I think so. Um, is it your band?’ Lifeline. Maybe it’s just a gig – some hall to fill. I’d be making up the numbers.
He looks sideways at me frowning. ‘No.’
‘Are you …?’ I don’t even know what I’m going to say next. And my teeth start chattering entirely of their own accord, beating out a tiny tattoo in my head.
‘Are you OK?’ he says.
‘Mmm,’ I squeak.
‘So …?’
I wrestle with my mouth and finally the words fall out of me like vomit and magically arrange themselves into a wormy little sentence.
‘Yes, I’m free Friday.’
‘Cool.’
‘Shall I …? Do you want me to …?’
He looks at me, leans in, ‘Sanda,’ he breathes, ‘what is it with you? I don’t want you to do anything. I’m asking you out. Is that OK?’
I swallow air. My throat is dry.
‘Where do you live?’ he says.
‘Um – 35 Durham Road,’ I rattle.
‘Can I take your number?’
The rest of the afternoon is a blur. I go to registration. I think I have a conversation with Mr Hall about Geography homework and sunspots but I can’t be sure. Real Joe is filling my head, squeezing out dream Joe. But I’m not sure I want the real one. Not the one with the ex-girlfriend, who by the way, is French which makes her at least two hundred billion percent more interesting and sexy than anyone else on the planet. Not the Joe who, for all I know, may be a part of some mass class joke on me. I want the old Joe back, my Joe: the one where I’m in charge. I doze through French and leave school feeling sick with apprehension.
There’s no wind and the sun hangs low in the sky as I walk home. The vomity feeling is replaced by something like a lorry-load of evil little midges wriggling and burrowing under my skin, biting and stinging me all over my body. I feel so hot that when I get in, I go to my room, take off my clothes and stand in front of the mirror in my underwear. I run my hands down my sides. No fleshy softness, no curves, nothing a boy like Joe would want to hold on to. What I see, what I feel, are bones that jut and scrape. Even in the laciest undies, even bending and arching my back and tossing my hair, I’d still look like a fourteen-year-old boy.
Anyway, all I own are jeans and T-shirts. Mostly from charity shops. I’ve been buying my own clothes forever. Mum doesn’t do shopping – not for me. I certainly don’t own anything that says come get me tiger, which is just as well really because Friday evening – if it happens at all – is probably going to be humiliating enough without me dressing up like some Beverley Hills hooker.
You see.
I’ve never kissed a boy.
I know what you have to do. I know all that. But the thought of it, of how to be with him makes my stomach turn.
All I want to do is hide. All I ever want to do is hide.
I do a lot of hiding; in fact I’ve made a bit of an art of it. I lie on the bed with the duvet pulled up over my head, my arms flat against my sides and my hands clenched into fists so tight that my knuckles crack and my fingernails cut into my flesh. I slow my breathing until the covers are barely moving and the space around my body is a warm orange bloom like a rind on cheese.
I need a rind, a shell, something to crawl into when the going gets tough. And yeah, I know I’m not Vin Diesel: I don’t have to blow up a train or cross Niagara Falls in a waste-paper basket. I just have to be with people and talk to them. And what’s so wrong with me that I can’t even have a proper conversation with a boy I like? That I’m too congenitally fucked up to just say, Yeah, I’d love to go out. Pick me up at eight?
The thought of it shrinks me like a slug in salt.
I’m frying now and I shift and curl and push the covers onto the floor. I stand up and look at my reflection in the mirror again: drawn and rigid and scared.
And that’s when I know I don’t want to do this any more.
If it is real, if it’s not a joke, then what am I doing?
Either I’m going to get an Xbox or take up online chess and effectively check out of the human race altogether, or maybe, just maybe, if I can actually stop feeling sorry for myself, then I can do this.
I practise my smile. I’m in the corridor, nonchalant, preoccupied, super-cool: ‘Hey Joe.’
I say it a few times.
Fuck.
I think about texting Lauren but I’m not ready to have the conversation, not ready for her to get inside of it and tell me what she thinks.
I’m pulling on my clothes when I hear a scratching sound coming from the ceiling: like the sound of fifty pigeons on the march, then a thud and silence. I go out of my room onto the landing just as Dad’s coming down from the loft, the ladder trembling under his weight. He’s holding a great bundle of papers wrapped in a manila file and tied with string. He’s still in his pyjamas, and the creases in his face bubble with sweat. I don’t know what it is but there’s something different about him. He seems distracted somehow – bothered.
He looks at the wall behind me, nods and hurries down to the hall where Mum’s working the spray polish like a little Gatling gun. They snap and grunt at each other like a couple of seals then I hear the door to the sitting room bite.
Above me the black space in the ceiling yawns. I go to push the ladder back into place when I see something at the top. A wink of colour catches the ceiling light. A tooth of white in the dark hole: a photograph.
The ladder squeaks and crunches as I step up, the dry, sour smell from the loft coming at me. Blindly, I grope for the photo until I feel the cold
silk of it on my fingers.
I snatch it down.
It’s an old photograph. The colours were once garish but fading now: a blank orange background and a child, I think a girl, but I can’t be sure. She can’t be more than two or three. She’s being held up to the camera. There are someone’s thick fingers around her middle.
The picture isn’t very clear because she’s moving. Wriggling. Her face is a blur of white and I can’t see whether she’s laughing or crying. But her eyes – it’s unmistakeable – they’re two points of colour: one is green and one blue.
On the back of the photograph, a name is scribbled in loopy handwriting, a name I don’t recognise: Senka Hadžić, and a date. And for a moment everything lags and stops.
A low wheezing tells me he’s coming back up the stairs and before I can do anything, a hand comes around my shoulder and snatches at the photo.
But I hold on.
‘What’s this Dad? Who’s this?’
There’s a moment’s pause and then he stretches his mouth into a kind of grin and points a grubby finger at the picture.
‘You.’ I stare down at it. After a moment he reaches and gently pulls at a corner. ‘It’s not important.’
He stuffs the picture into his back pocket, and I’m aware of my fingertips, hot and wet, where I was holding on to it. He’s halfway down the stairs when I remember the name.
‘But, Dad?’ He turns on the stair. ‘That’s not my name on the back.’
The little collars of sweat are still there in the folds around his throat. There are the pale seams of the scar. He pulls out the picture, turns it over, studies it for a moment and then pads back up to where I stand and puts a hand on my shoulder.
‘Senka Hadžić was your grandmother’s name. She was taking the photograph. Back home.’
‘So I’ve been there? Serbia? But you never told me …’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Just for a little time. To see your grandmother. Just a short time.’ He looks at me, his grey eyes wet and full. When he lifts his hand, I can still feel the weight of it like a bruise on my skin.
I make up my mind to get the picture back.
That night I dream about being held. I can’t see who’s holding me and I don’t know why. It starts as an embrace: something benign and loving but then the grip around me tightens and binds and pinches until I can feel my lungs straining to breathe and my heart hammering in my chest. I wake up curled in my covers like some demented thing, and all around there’s a dense blackness in my room, a breathing dark of familiar things made odd and strange: a table leg, the dressing gown hunched on its hook, and a thin whisker of light under the door. It’s three o’clock in the morning.
I can hear noises: scraping, thudding, a sharp bark of wheel on wood, the press of stocking feet on the landing outside my room and the crunch of hinges on the ladder to the loft.
I lie there listening and under my skin, under the hum of blood, my bones freeze.
The next morning I sleep through my alarm and any careful thought that might have gone into choosing what to wear and how to wear it goes out the window because I’m late.
There’s no sign of last night’s activity, nothing to show that anything was moved or changed. Mum’s at work and Dad’s sleeping. I skip breakfast and head out the door.
Lauren’s waiting: ‘Oh my God what are you wearing? Did you get dressed in the dark?’ she says, pulling my T-shirt out over my jeans. She fumbles in her bag, pulls out a lip gloss and offers it to me. ‘Get some on Sand. You look like a bag lady.’
Meekly, I comply, and within seconds most of my hair is sticking to my mouth. She shakes her head, ‘Did I hear you were seen talking to you-know-who yesterday?’
I nod, teeth grinding like wheels in my head.
‘Well?’ she says
‘Well.’
‘Well?’
‘He asked me out.’
‘What?! No! Never! Sand, that’s great!’
‘Er, no, basically it was a total disaster area. Total abortion. I just didn’t get it …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought he was asking me for help, you know… I just … Oh God.’
‘Help?’
I nod and pick strands of hair off my lips and suck at the ends.
‘But why would you think that?’ she says.
I shake my head. ‘I just couldn’t – can’t believe that someone like him might want to go out with me … d’you think it’s a joke?’
She eyes me and I know the look: pity and exasperation.
‘Why do you say that?’ she says softly.
‘Because in Joe-world I don’t exist.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘What?’ I say.
She’s serious now. ‘Look, this is going to sound really bad and you know you’re my friend and all but the thing is you won’t exist if you can’t actually say things. Why can’t you be like you are with me with other people?’
I just look at her and we walk on and suddenly the photograph of the little girl pops into my head and I feel that tightening around my chest.
‘I’m going to try. I am going to try.’
‘When are you going out?’
‘Tomorrow night, Friday,’ I say and my teeth start buzzing again. I bite down on my lip.
‘Tomorrow?’
I look at her. ‘Lauren, I can’t believe he meant it. Why would he be into me? He went out with Camille for Christ’s sake.’
‘So?’
‘She’s so … so …’ I want to say “French” but I end up saying miserably, ‘Cool.’
‘You’re an idiot sometimes, Sand. You’re cool too.’
We’re at the gates now and there’s that familiar smell of cheap deodorant, and the thronging of coats and bags.
‘Cool? What are you talking about?’
She takes a breath and says, ‘You’ve got potential, that’s all. I mean I know you feel like you’re on the outside but that doesn’t always have to be like a bad thing. You’re out there. You know, people do see you, they think you’re cool, I don’t know … independent. You just have to stop apologising.’ She’s going but then turns and shouts, ‘Oh … and you’re thin. You eat what you like and you’re still thin.’
I stand there trying to take this in while Lauren’s absorbed into the crowd. I’m heading off towards the music block for first period when I see him. He hasn’t seen me. He’s standing near Reception with his ex, Camille, and witchy tart Zoe Palmer.
He’s laughing.
I stare at them and all my clever, quiet bedroom resolutions burst and dissolve.
I walk into the music block where Baroque orchestral music is on the agenda for this morning. From my place at the back, I can crane over heads and see them through the window.
When I get home, the house smells different. I walk into a sort of citrus fug that hangs over the hall. In the sitting room, Mum’s standing by the window smoking. She’s wearing a sheer black top with a high neck and she’s scraped her hair back into a thick knot. My father’s in his chair as usual but he’s wearing clothes. He doesn’t look up when I come in but keeps his eyes fixed on the floor. And opposite him, on the sofa, is another man. Which is weird in itself because apart from the guy who comes to read the meter, we never have visitors. He’s wearing a dark suit buttoned across his chest, and when he moves the little buttons tug at their holes. He’s almost as wide as the sofa but when he gets up, he’s shorter than me. Under his suit, he wears a thin grey turtle neck sweater, so tight that you can see the hairs on his chest curled and flat like tiny springs. His cheekbones jut like shelves under careful blue eyes.
He waves a fat hand at me. Mum says, ‘This is Andrija.’
‘Er hi. Hi. I’m …’
‘Sanda. This is Sanda,’ she says.
I give them all a cheesy smirk and begin to edge towards the door. Andrija settles himself back on the sofa and the buttons on his jacket squeak and pull at their threads.
Everybody
looks at me.
Nobody says a word. Mum bends to flick her ash into a saucer and I see the outline of her backbone like tiny pebbles under her top.
As I back out of the room, I see her look at Andrija and he nods and says, ‘Cytpa,’ which means ‘tomorrow,’ and then I hear Dad yell at her like I’ve never heard him before.
He’s saying, ‘No! You can’t do this! You have to stop! It’s enough! Just let it go! You knew this would happen one day.’
Then Mum’s throaty bark cuts across him: ‘You listen to me! You do what I tell you when I tell you! You will do exactly as you are told!’
Then come Dad’s low growls and his mumbled responses. She always wins. I think it’s because at the end of the day she doesn’t care about anything but winning and how can you fight that?
But what are they on about, and what’s going to happen tomorrow?
I run upstairs and slam the door. At first I fail to notice that my bedside table is missing and my chest of drawers has been emptied. My clothes are stacked in tidy bundles on the floor.
I go to the top of the stairs and call Mum but it’s Dad who appears. His face is ridged and mottled. Behind him, I can see the dark bulk of Andrija standing in the room.
Dad comes up the stairs and suddenly he’s standing too close to me, breathing hard. I hear a catch in his throat and he coughs it away.
‘Dad, what’s going on with my stuff?
‘I am going to paint your bedroom.’
‘Oh. OK. What colour?’
‘Mmm?’
‘What colour are you going to paint it?’
‘White. White.’
I breathe. Something isn’t right here. It’s hurting my head.
‘Who was that guy?’
He stares at me and blinks slowly. He looks tired. Exhausted. And I think then that like me, he’s somehow flattened himself, hemmed himself into chair covers and lampshades.
‘He is from Serbia. He worked with your mother a long time ago. He is helping us.’
‘With what?’
‘With …with immigration forms. There is problem with our …with our … status here. The police are making problems.’
‘But I thought …?’
Suddenly he jerks forward and takes my hand in his and then just as suddenly lets it go.