What You Become

by C. J. Flood

  I looked at my feet, unused to hearing Ophelia talk like this. I wanted to say something so we could stay in this new world of openness, but everything seemed inadequate.

  ‘So . . . are you glad you came back?’ It wasn’t earth-shattering but it was real at least. Something I honestly wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, I was always going to come back. I was just angry with everyone. I wanted them to think we were dead, and feel sorry, and I was under Will’s spell. I’ve wanted to run away with him for so long! God knows why, he’s the most self-obsessed person in the universe . . . I think he only went out with me in the first place to piss off his mum and dad.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you came back.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. And I’m glad you gave me such a hard time about Ti too, because I deserved it, and I didn’t even know.’

  ‘Huh. Well. Maybe you were a good friend to her. I mean, in the end.’

  Ophelia’s eyes flashed as she looked at me, and I felt that mine were bright too.

  Fifty-five

  We were walking to our separate cars when a sharp voice I hadn’t heard in a long time called Ophelia’s name. Across the road a small, striking woman with a shimmering turquoise headscarf stood beside the river.

  Ms Chase lifted her hand, bright scarf flapping where the tails hung loose at the back of her neck.

  Ophelia ducked her head, as she walked over to meet her, and cars slowed to let her pass, which was lucky because she crossed the road without even glancing at the traffic.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ we heard her saying. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ and I was shocked at the emotion in her voice.

  Ti was near enough that I could feel the warmth of her arm through my cardigan, and I remembered how happy Ophelia had been when she was cast as the lead in West Side Story, and how brilliantly she’d played the part. Her nervousness at being on stage had come across as a tough kind of shyness, and for a while she had been Ms Chase’s indisputable favourite. They used to walk around together at break: Ms Chase, Ophelia and Will, talking about the best ways for them to bring their truth to the characters of Maria and Tony.

  ‘What do you think she’s saying?’ Ti asked.

  We were all silent, as we watched the two of them sit on the bench on the grassy verge opposite the courthouse: Ophelia turned towards her ex-teacher, while Ms Chase stared straight ahead.

  Ophelia was clearly thanking Ms Chase for speaking up for her, clasping her hands together, but what was Ms Chase saying? None of us could imagine. Ophelia nodded continually, and then Ms Chase reached round the back of her head, and I felt like I was creaking up the highest part of a roller coaster, about to cross the threshold before hurtling downhill at ninety miles an hour.

  With a flick of her wrist Ms Chase had tugged the turquoise scarf away.

  Her hair was short all over like a tough boy’s, and she turned in her seat to face Ophelia, holding herself very straight, sharp chin jutting out. She ran her palm over her bare head and Ophelia stared, then leaned forward. And as Ms Chase rested her hand between Ophelia’s shoulder blades, rubbing her old pupil’s back, I wondered what it was about her that we could so have hated.

  Fifty-six

  ‘No, let’s go to Daphne’s bench,’ I said to Ti. It was two in the morning on the first Saturday night after Ophelia’s sentencing, and we were making a special sandwich. The plan was to nightwander, but we couldn’t decide where. Getting up when the alarm went off had been difficult, but I’d forced myself.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Ti had grumbled, and I’d almost laid my head down again, but something had made me insist, and now we were in the kitchen, dressed in black, assembling a sandwich. Ham, cheese, tuna, mayonnaise, mustard, peppers, sweetcorn. It was a good one, and seeing it stand there, sliced diagonally to showcase its multicoloured layers, we were tempted to eat it indoors.

  ‘No. Let’s go to Daphne’s bench,’ I said, pulling tin foil from the drawer, and laying a sheet on the breakfast bar. I lifted the sandwich on to it, and Ti watched as I wrapped.

  ‘A present for us to share very soon,’ I said.

  The crinkling of foil was loud but Mum, Dad and Joey were asleep upstairs. The town slept all around us, except for next door’s new puppy, Chip the paranoid insomniac, and it was odd to be purposefully, effortfully awake, like we used to. As I handed Ti the parcel to put in her rucksack, and waited for the tea to brew, I could tell she felt it too.

  The sky was clear above the empty terrace, and without agreeing our strides grew longer. We headed for the coast path. Below, the boats made knocking sounds as they rocked in the harbour. The ever-present seagulls swept through the blackish blue, and as we left the sprawl of the town, all reluctance vanished, and the freedom feeling grew.

  The coast path wasn’t wide enough for two, and I increased my pace. I wanted to show how unafraid I was. How unnecessary torches were with night vision as powerful as ours. Laughter rose from the beach, students round a fire, and I thought how sad that sound would have made me when I was marching this stretch alone.

  ‘I’ve got an interview for St Anne’s on Monday,’ Ti said, as we began to climb. Below us, the beach turned to reef, then cliff, and I thought of Sophie’s car tumbling over; of Will, pale-faced, lying in the woods; and Ti and Ophelia, breathless and heroic, getting rained on. Of poor unlucky Emily and Amelia.

  ‘That’s brilliant!’ I said, but it sounded false. Ti attending a different school while I was at Fairfields still made me squirm.

  ‘I’m going to work so hard,’ Ti said. ‘And then I’m going to go to the marine college.’

  I tried again. ‘That’s really, really brilliant, Ti.’

  The muscles in my thighs ached, but I pushed on. It felt good to be outside and awake while everybody else wasted their time unconscious. Like we knew a secret. The turn-off to Daphne’s bench was ahead, and the old feeling of anxiety fluttered in me, though Ti walked metres behind.

  She told me how Ophelia refused to talk about what Ms Chase had said to her, as though it were too precious to share, except that it was partly Charlie who had convinced her to make a statement.

  ‘She must have felt really guilty,’ Ti said.

  We walked in silence for a while, and I wondered if Chase had always been good, and we had just misjudged her, or if she’d become a better person because of everything she had been through.

  Arriving at Daphne’s bench we unpacked our sandwich, and the night broke and soared and glittered around us. There was something I needed to know, and it was difficult, but I had to ask.

  ‘Ti . . . was your statement true? About Ophelia?’

  Ti didn’t look at me, and her expression was grave, curly hair blowing across her face.

  ‘I don’t know. I mean . . . how do you set fire to a building by mistake?’

  We stared into the dark, and something thrilled through me, starting in my stomach and spreading up my ribcage and then running down my back, because she trusted me again, now I knew. I took a bite of my sandwich and leaned against her, paying attention to the peace all around me, and the warmth of her, right there.

  ‘Did you leave the penny for me to find?’ I said. To use its full title, the Penny of Old, seemed suddenly embarrassing.

  Ti smiled at me, and her cheeks were even bigger than usual as she chewed.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when you found it. I felt like a crazy person, turning it over. I was sure Ms Chase was going to die, and either me or Ophelia were going to have to go to prison, and I needed not to be caught if our plan was going to work, but I saw the Petrified Lady when I was walking and I couldn’t resist. I felt like George in Five Go Adventuring Again, except I was also the villain, a big babyish villain.’

  ‘Did you ever tell Ophelia?’

  ‘Course not,’ Ti said, laughing. ‘She’d have killed me. I just said you had had a hunch.’

  We weren’t identical twins, we weren’t even blood sisters, but what we were was better, because we ha
d chosen it. We were best friends, and we had secrets of our own, and if I needed her to she would lie for me, like she might have lied for her sister, like I would have lied for her.

  The sea at Durgan far below reflected the moonlight prettily and underneath the little white peaks of thousands of waves, bladderwrack floated and jellyfish drifted and seahorses did their daily dance, a whole world under there, that I, up here, could only imagine.

  You can’t tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.

  He wasn’t even sixteen, but his coffin’s the same size as a man’s would be.

  It’s not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did: that’s what the faces here say.

  I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can’t bear the thought of him being cold.

  And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?

  It was three months after Mum left that the gypsies moved in. They set up camp in the paddock one Sunday night while we were asleep. My brother Sam was excited when he saw them.

  ‘Gypos!’ he shouted.

  Sam used to have a gypsy in his class: Grace Fitzpatrick. She’d been famous at school because she could do as many things with her feet as with her hands. She could even write her name with them, which was funny because she couldn’t read. Sam, who’d sat next to her in assembly, said she smelt like cat piss and fire smoke.

  ‘They live off barbecues,’ he told me as we watched from Dad’s bedroom window.

  I thought it sounded brilliant.

  There was a caravan and a clapped-out car and, a few metres away, a fire with a pot hanging over it.

  ‘Be bloody hundreds of ’em by the end of the day,’ Dad said, emptying sawdust from his overall pockets onto the floor.

  ‘They’ll probably tarmac the field while we’re asleep,’ Sam said. ‘Try and make you pay for it.’

  Dad made a growling noise. ‘Be a nightmare getting rid of them, that’s for bloody sure.’

  He left us leaning on the windowsill.

  Sam made dents in the wood with his fingers while I wondered what Dad was going to do. This was exactly the sort of thing Mum would have sorted. She’d have been best friends with the gypsies by breakfast, had them falling over themselves to make her happy, even if that left them without a home.

  ‘Look at all those dogs,’ Sam said. ‘Bet they fight them. Tie blades to their paws.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Seen it on the telly,’ he said.

  ‘What, on kids’ telly?’

  He dug his elbow into me until I squirmed.

  Two greyhounds bounded round the paddock and I tried to imagine them snarling at each other, blades flying, but it was ridiculous, and then the caravan door swung open, and a tiny black dog scurried out.

  A woman appeared in the doorway. Tall and thin, with red hair falling over one shoulder, she looked beautiful. She lifted her arms above her head and stretched, revealing a stripe of tanned belly beneath her green vest. Behind her the white caravan seemed to sparkle.

  ‘Prozzie,’ Sam said.

  The woman spun round suddenly, and a teenage boy in rolled-up jeans leaped from the caravan, laughing. He’d obviously startled her. The three dogs ran over to him, the tiny black one lagging behind, and he bent down to tussle with them. They licked at his bare chest.

  Sam didn’t have anything to say for a second. The boy looked about the same age as him. He was clearly the woman’s son, tall and thin like her, but with lighter, ginger-blond hair that flicked out above his ears and curled on the back of his neck.

  ‘Bet he don’t go to school,’ Sam said.

  ‘Come on, Iris,’ Dad called up the stairs. ‘You’re going to be late.’

  ‘Aw, shame,’ Sam said, because he was on study leave.

  Still, I couldn’t help staying a minute longer, watching as the red-haired woman filled a bucket with water from the pot above the fire and began scrubbing her steps.

  Dad left the house at the same time as I did. With fists clenched, he headed towards the paddock.

  I couldn’t wait till the summer holidays. Everyone at school was getting on my nerves. Especially Matty. At registration, when I told her about the gypsies, she told me this story about her second cousin’s boyfriend’s brother: he was on his way to the newsagent’s to buy a magazine when a gypsy girl burst out and cracked him over the head with a golf ball in a sock. For no reason. I told her we didn’t have any girls, only a boy, and described the way his hair flicked out, but she curled her nostrils at me.

  ‘Pikeys are gross, Iris,’ she said. ‘You’d get gonorrhoea.’

  Matty was always name-checking STDs. She thought it made her look sophisticated.

  At dinner time, we watched the boys play football.

  ‘Your socks are odd,’ Matty told me. ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  I took my shoes off and folded my socks down so their oddness was less obvious.

  ‘That’s your problem, Iris,’ she sighed. ‘You think that makes a difference.’

  Before maths, next lesson, I nipped into the toilets and took them off.

  Matty had moved to Derby from Guildford four years ago with frizzy black hair and too-big glasses which left red dents on her nose, but every new term she got prettier. Today her black frizz was tamed into long waves that she twisted round her little finger. Her glasses had shrivelled to contacts, and to make matters worse, her boobs had gone from a size nothing to a 32B in the last six months. As far as Matty was concerned, she was a fully mature woman.

  ‘Remember, Iris,’ she’d taken to saying to me, ‘my birthday’s in September. Really, I’m in the year above you. Really, I’m a Year Ten.’

  Every day, after school, I watched the gypsies. They hadn’t listened when Dad told them they weren’t welcome, and much to his annoyance were getting on with their lives. As well as the teenage boy, the dogs and the red-haired woman, there was a man, a baby and four little girls.

  The boy spent a lot of time with his mum. He got in her way while she was cleaning, and made her laugh. Sometimes she grabbed him and ruffled his hair. They reminded me of how Mum and Sam used to be.

  The gypsy boy was good to his sisters. They were all loads younger than him, but he still played hide and seek with them, and picked them up when they cried. I couldn’t imagine him getting mad at them for something as silly as borrowing his socks.

  In the evenings, they all sat around the fire, or on the grass nearby, until it was time to eat whatever their mum cooked in the pot, or their dad brought home in the car. Later on, when the mum had put the little ones to bed, the gypsy boy went to lie underneath the caravan by himself, and I felt as though I understood him completely.

  Dad shouted if he caught me watching from his bedroom window.

  ‘It’s not a game, Iris,’ he said, and so I kept my spying to when he was out.

  One night, I left my curtains open so the sun could wake me. I wanted to see what the gypsies did first thing. It was well before six when I crept upstairs, past Dad sleeping with his head half under the pillow, to my usual perch on his armchair by the window. He didn’t notice. Mum was the light sleeper – the snorer too. She used to make herself jump in the night.

  Underneath the early white sky, the paddock was dotted with poppies, and fat wood pigeons in the tall poplars surrounding the yard called to each other. The boy got up first. He jumped down the caravan steps and did a lap of the field with the dogs. Occasionally, he stooped to pick up sticks, or tugged dead branches from the hedgerows.

  By the entrance to the paddock was a huge pile of logs that Dad and Austin, his apprentice, had cut down over the months – a year’s supply at least. Reaching it, the boy stopped. He glanced tow
ards our house, and I ducked behind Mum’s rose pincushion cactus. I peered round its spiky dome, which was flowering purple, and watched as he added a couple of long, slim branches to his pile.

  Back at the camp, he knelt to build a fire. By the time the door to the caravan next opened, he was fanning the flames with a sheet of cardboard. His mum emerged carrying a stack of bowls, the baby wrapped to her back, and the boy changed position to direct the smoke away from them.

  ‘Eye?’ Dad lifted his head. ‘That you?’

  Dad called me Eye, as in ball. Sam had started it. Mum used to tell Dad off for joining in, back when they still talked to each other. ‘She’s named after the flower,’ she’d say, but she didn’t mind really. It was just something they did.

  ‘What you doing?’ Dad said now.

  ‘Need some socks,’ I said, pretending to rummage in the unsorted pile I’d been sitting on.

  The plastic of Dad’s alarm clock creaked as he looked at it. ‘S’not even seven,’ he groaned. ‘Go back to bed.’

  I watched the boy put on a rucksack, pat the baby’s head, and walk to the far end of the field where the paddock dropped into the brook. He reappeared on the other side of the water, and then disappeared into the cornfields, and I wondered where he could be going.

  I was sad to be leaving science for the summer. Biology was the best, not only because I got a break from Matty. I was in the top set, and she was in the bottom, and I paid extra special attention when Mrs Beever talked about the parenting traits of various birds. Apparently both male and female swans help build the nest, and if the mother dies (or drives off in a van to Tunisia) there’s no need to spaz out and call the RSPB. The male swan is completely capable of raising his cygnets alone. I almost wished Matty was sitting next to me when I heard that.

  All afternoon we bickered, but choosing sweets in the shop after school she still invited me to sleep over at hers that night. ‘We can do a fashion show with my new clothes,’ she said. ‘Mum’s making spag bol.’