by David Park
‘Listen, son, from now on when you think of Happy Meals think of something that’s not goin’ to put on the pounds. Think of fruit or …’ He struggles to continue his list. ‘Think of things that are good for you.’
Tom stares out the side window of the car. She leans forward, rubs the back of his hair but he moves his head away as if she’s hurt him. Three young woman parade along the pavement, dressed for going out. She watches them as they giggle and laugh, their linked-arm, precarious, high-heeled strut, their bare legs, make her think of children walking into the sea to paddle. Soon it will ripple and foam about their feet. Soon they will shriek with pleasure or pain at the cold. She thinks of her own feet, and they suddenly feel hot and sticky and the prickly heat begins to spread through the rest of her body, as if carried in the currents that course through her veins. She wants to walk into the sea, to let its salty brine cool and ebb it away. She wants to link arms with these three girls, to have the strength of the chain, the lightness of having nothing to do but flow with whatever tides of laughter and release the night will bring.
She opens her window a little and thinks of Rachel, envies her that even at this moment, she is on someone’s arm, her voice woven through others like thread that joins to make a pattern, a picture that can be coloured and shaded into anything that you want it to be. Envies her that everything is open and on the edge of becoming. The wind whistles and frets too loudly into the car and she closes it again. There is a pang of resentment now because she begins to think that Rachel will never know what it is to be as tired as this, that her feet will never carry such an ache. That she will never know what it is to brush food from a canteen floor, food that has been dropped or thrown, food that has been trampled and pressed into the vinyl tiles. She wants her to know – just for a few minutes – and then she will know what it means to have what has been given to her. Not ever to need to wait for luck to bring you something but to be able to work it with your own hands like clay, to shape it into whatever will be good for you. But she starts to feel guilty at wishing her daughter something bad, for however short a time, and tells herself that if it’s true that you can only have in life what you’ve worked for, then Rachel has earned everything that has come to her. She worked for the stars; night after night sitting in her room, getting all that stuff out of books and into her head. How did Rachel remember it all when sometimes she has trouble remembering the simplest of things? She thinks of all the times she has brought supper to her – a round of toast or a couple of biscuits and a piece of fruit. Pictures her daughter sitting at her desk, head bowed over the books, the light from the desk lamp bleaching the colour out of her hair where she bisects its arc. Herself pausing for a few seconds before setting the plate on the edge of the desk, just inside the shadow and wanting to touch her hair, gather it in both her hands like she did when Rachel was a child, and pull it behind her head for the brush to burnish the strands. But instead saying something like, ‘How’s it going?’ or ‘Would you like anything else?’ before she leaves again. As she goes down the stairs, she always touches her own hair, then tries to remember what her daughter’s once felt like.
*
Heidi climbs the mountains. Heidi helps the poor little rich girl to walk. How surprised her father will be, when he learns the mountains have the power to heal. She lifts the condom from the pages of the book and looks at it for a second. Will this be the night? Will this be one more test for which she must find the answer? She slips it into her bag along with her money, her make-up, her mobile phone, then looks at herself in the mirror and almost feels like a woman. Perhaps this is the last step that must be taken before she can finally become one. She smoothes, then tousles her hair, pulls a bra strap more securely on to her shoulder, before giving the stiff pout of her lips a final dab with lipstick. Sometimes she thinks she looks good, but mostly she catches her image as if by stealth, when it’s in the corner of her eye or the edge of her consciousness. Now, when she stands full-face to the mirror and the focus is unclouded, she sees more reasons for criticism and so she tries to spirit them away by narrowing her eyes. She wonders, too, if what she’s wearing will win approval, blend in with the other girls, and the more she thinks about the coming evening, the more she feels nervous about getting everything right, of passing the test.
There is the sound of a car horn; Clare’s arrived to pick her up. She quickly gathers the present for Kerry’s birthday and hurries down the stairs. In the car the other girls tell her she looks great, that her make-up really suits her, that she should wear her hair that way more often.
‘Got your dancing shoes on, girl?’ Andrea says, in the tone she always uses with her, which is on the edge of patronising, as if she thinks that someone with so many brains can’t live fully in the real world. She’s smoking and is wearing a pink T-shirt printed with the words ‘Beware: this bitch bites.’
‘Definitely,’ she answers and then thinks that her answer sounds wet. She glances at Andrea’s face through the thin drift of smoke and wonders if the top is a piss-take or if she really thinks it looks good. ‘Do you know the definition of indefinitely?’ she suddenly asks the girls, avoiding their eyes as they look at her, perhaps thinking of calling her Professor or Mastermind. But there is only a second of puzzled silence. ‘When his hair touches your hair,’ she says quietly. Then the car is raucous and squealing with laughter and as they give their contorted faces to her, she looks out of the window and allows herself to smile.
In the bar of the club they join up with about a dozen other girls from school and a few others she doesn’t know. Everyone is excited, complimenting each other, pecking each other’s cheeks, handing over their birthday presents with gestures of mock flamboyance. They start to order drinks and she asks for a white wine, doesn’t even recognise what some of the girls have asked for. The girls tease the waiter, compete in flirting with him but he just smiles and takes the order.
‘Rachel,’ Andrea calls, ‘tell him your joke about indefinitely.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she answers. ‘He’s not old enough.’ Then as the waiter walks away, says, ‘Nice bum, though.’
‘You’re a bit of a dark horse, Rachel,’ Jennifer says. It’s a compliment and she’s pleased by it, accepts it silently by making her eyes wide and innocent. The way she sometimes does with her father.
‘Can you see my nipples through this?’ Andrea asks as she pushes her breasts up and forward with the squeeze of her arms, then feigns disappointment when they shake their heads. ‘Everyone has to pull tonight,’ she demands, ‘but here’s the plan. Get them interested, get them horned up, let them have a bit of a snog and then when they’re gagging for it, tell them to piss off. It’s girl power tonight. All the girlies together.’
The drinks arrive and a toast is drunk to girl power. The laughter and jagged shards of their voices attract the attention of guys standing at the bar. She sees they hold their bottles of beer in a way that signals both their maleness and their insecurity. One raises his bottle to his mouth and drinks from it as if kissing its mouth. The youngest-looking of them leans back with an elbow on the bar and smiles at her but she turns her eyes away and doesn’t answer it. The light from the bar sheens the close shave of his hair into a shiver of blue and glints the row of earrings that fasten his ear lobe. She watches as he turns away again, drapes his arm over the boy standing next to him, then whispers in his ear something that scrunches their shoulders into laughter. She thinks again of Laertes and smiles. Young men desperate to protect the honour of their sisters, desperate to make whores of everyone else’s. But she can’t take her eyes off them, knows that they give off something that both scares and attracts her.
‘See anything that you like?’ Jennifer asks.
‘Not yet,’ she says, sipping at the wine that she thinks is the vilest thing she’s ever tasted. She hopes that Andrea doesn’t do what she’s done before and introduce her as the girl with ten A-stars. If she does, she might as well say that she has a baby a
t home, or an infectious disease, because she knows already that boys don’t want anyone they consider smarter than themselves and the ones who do see it as a challenge to light the fire of someone they think knows nothing other than books. And so they’ll come with their charm, their sex, and rescue her from her sad nun’s life, show her things that she’s never known before. Thank God she doesn’t wear glasses or else they’d act out those cringing embarrassments of scenes in films where men remove the glasses from bookish women before they kiss them and bestow the instant blossoming of unfettered passion and beauty. Maybe she should get a top like Andrea’s or one that says ‘Babe’ or ‘Hustler’ in glitter across her chest.
Andrea’s talking to two of the guys. She goes into one of the corner booths with them and out of sight.
‘So do you think you’ll go to Oxford then?’ Joni asks. She has four peanuts in her palm which she eats slowly and mechanically, one at a time, with exactly the same rhythm and time interval. The dark stain of her lips is speckled with the light shimmer of salt.
‘I’m not sure,’ she answers, trying not to grimace at the bitterness of the wine on her tongue. She doesn’t want to talk about it but knows it’s the standard topic people feel is appropriate. The one they touch upon because they can’t think of any other.
‘I’d go if I got the chance,’ Joni says, turning a gold bracelet on her wrist. Her bare arms are thin, the bracelet looks like the ring on the leg of a bird. ‘You could get set up for life. Loads of rich hunks, loads of princes and sons of famous people.’
She wonders if Joni has used her condom yet. Every time she sees her, her body looks thinner. As if sex would hurt it, snap it in two. She wonders how much the first time will hurt, if she will bleed. All the more reason to find someone who isn’t Laertes, who won’t think of it as his sword or lance. Someone who won’t spear her with his greed and selfishness.
Andrea returns and summons their group to follow her to the toilets. Six of them troop after her like her gang. She feels a little stupid, remembers how much she hates gangs, but pleased she’s been included. It feels like a girlie thing, like they’re going to talk about boys and who’s just been dumped, or share make-up. Maybe it’ll be Andrea’s final team-talk, the plan of campaign, maybe she’s about to share her knowledge about boys, about how to ‘horn them up’. But as they stand in the empty toilet Andrea says nothing at first, only stares at their faces as if one of them is a traitor she’s about to unmask. And then she smiles and pulls them close as if it’s a sports huddle in which they’re all going to make a pyramid of their hands. But when she looks at Andrea’s hand extending into the circle, it is tightly clenched and it hangs there until she slowly opens it, finger by finger, like a magician revealing a card trick.
Some of the girls squeal, others shush them. She doesn’t understand. The tiny sachet is closed again inside the hand. She thinks it must be condoms, for a second almost goes to say that she’s already got one, but something stops her. Instead her eyes flick to the mirror that runs the length of the wall and she sees the thin bangled arm of Joni resting on the shoulder of Jennifer who in turn links to Lorna and Lisa. The hand opens again and now she knows it’s not condoms.
‘One for each of us,’ Andrea says, taking the first one herself and funnelling the others carefully into her palm. ‘Put on your dancing shoes,’ she tells them and her voice is a parody of a little girl’s. Hands pick the tabs – she’s not sure whose, doesn’t want to stare at faces. In the mirrors there is the sudden jerk of arms as if two sets of people are present. Then there’s one left and it’s offered to her and this time she does look and in Andrea’s face she sees the challenge, the test she’s setting. The tablet is white, imprinted with a dove. ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ Lisa says and she nods her head as she takes it in her hand. She’s never failed a test in her life, never, never. Someone hands her the bottle of water and it’s suddenly cold against her skin. In the mirror she sees the circle is still tight and linked and is she going to be the one to break it? For a second she wants to push them aside and see herself clearly in the glass, to talk to herself, to know the right answer before she lifts her pen and writes.
‘It’ll be cool, Rachel,’ a voice says.
‘We’ll look after you,’ Jennifer says.
‘Nothing is this good,’ another says.
They feel nearer, she can’t see herself in the mirror, only the closing faces of these girls who are her friends. Friends who know better than her what is cool, who will take care of her and hold her tight. Someone strokes the back of her hair.
‘No pressure,’ Lorna says. ‘Don’t do anything you don’t want to.’
‘No pressure,’ Andrea repeats. ‘Don’t do anything that might hurt that brain of yours. Someone else can have it. No worries.’ She holds out her hand for its return.
Mount Fuji above the lightning. She thinks of the great splintering forks that tear open the sky, feels them flash and rage about her now. How can she survive the storm, raise her head high above the tumult, the constant tumble of uncertainties? She’s never found the answer in books and suddenly all their contents feel like dust-filled husks, like so much dust she wants to shake from her soul. No worries. No more pressure. And maybe it’s time for her to step outside the covers of her books and live in herself. To be the same as everyone else. So without taking her eyes from Andrea’s, she puts the tab in her mouth and swallows. Swallows the little dove. Someone says ‘Indefinitely’ and hands are patting her on the back and laughing, stroking her cheek and the back of her neck. Now they’re all together and it feels good as the excited chorus of voices pipes louder and seems to merge seamlessly into its own indivisible harmony. But as they file out of the toilets, their hands touching the shoulders of the person in front, like a team making its way down the tunnel towards the arena, she lingers until she is the only one left. Then she walks back to the mirror and stands with her face close to the glass. She wants to reach out to herself, to reassure herself, but doesn’t know how and instead stretches her hand to touch its reflection moving towards it. The fingertips meet in a little whorled cloud on the glass.
‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,’ she says to herself, thinks that just maybe she was right when she thought the things that are meant to scare you, are the very things that will take you in their arms, hold you more tightly than anyone can. And now she tells herself that the time to be sad is gone and she must find her friends and begin to dance. Dance more fully than she has ever done before.
Before long there is a rush inside her, a surge that carries her on the stream of its flow. There is a stone inside her chest and it’s tumbling down the slope in a free fall, quickening in speed and other stones are joining it and it’s an avalanche rolling into the freedom below. She kisses Joni on the cheek and is kissed on the lips in reply. As she dances she watches Joni’s gold bangle fall down the thinness of her raised arm, almost to the elbow. All the girls are around her and she knows now that she finally belongs and the knowledge seeps through her in a course that calms and soothes her but also leaves her untrammelled, unburdened, finally free to give herself to the music. So she closes her eyes and her swaying arms caress and shape the air and the music comes from within, running through the nerve ends and sense organs, curling like a garland of pretty flowers round her head.
When she opens her eyes she thinks the lights are beautiful. The blues and greens bleed into each other, spread through the other colours like liquid. She feels more open than she’s ever felt and if she’s a book, it’s a book with its pages turning for everyone to see and every page is coloured by the love she feels. She thinks of one of her books lying on the ground, the wind fanning the pages, of the little books they made in school with a slight variation of a drawing on each page and when the pages are flicked the picture comes to life, animated, by the spin of the holder’s fingers. So long to make, but so alive. Running, moving with the flick of the music’s fingers. That’s the way she is in this moment and it does
n’t matter any more who sees each page because there’s nothing to hide in her life and only the quickening rush she feels has any meaning.
Lisa comes to speak to her, she’s shouting in her ear but she struggles to make out what’s being said, so she nods in agreement and holds her hand for a second before releasing it again. Everything is falling away. She’s stronger than she’s ever been, so strong that it is the pulse of her own being that drives the music and her body is seamless, not made up of different limbs but an undulating oneness that encompasses the space around her, and subsumes the people all about her. She sees the group of boys hanging on the edges of the dance floor and feels sorry for them, sorry that they’re trapped in their maleness. Sorry that their honour is pricked, that the world slights them in ways that must be defended. Her arms contour her shape in the air, her self portrait that she colours with beautiful tints, the parts of herself that no one’s been allowed to see before. Sorry that their honour is in their pricks, that the tip of their swords must be ‘envenomed’. She laughs, then shouts in a burst of air from her lungs. They, too, can be loved, know how good it is, if only they will throw away this stupid, paralysing sense of honour, screw their doddering, bumbling father’s advice. Let their sister look out for herself.
She wants to go over to them, pick one out and lead him into the dance, until he, too, is carried naked and clean in the flow. But it is the girls – her friends – who are all around her now and they brush and touch each other with the sway and movement of their bodies. They are a flock of white doves which fountains into the clear canopy of sky. And for the first time there is space inside her head, as if she’s brushed it clean, and when she goes home she’s going to clear everything out of her room – all the things that restrict and constrict who she is. Everything will be clean and open, and like the bangle that dances on Joni’s arm, nothing will tighten or pin her down and in the books she’ll colour the pictures, add her own drawings. So much space just waiting to be claimed. She feels like the child her father took to the museum one Sunday morning when it was closed to the public and she had the whole place to herself. So much space, so many things to see and the freedom to run everywhere and see everything. Everything exists just for her, is open to her touch – it’s as if she owns it all, owns all these beautiful objects – and there is so much space in the empty galleries and corridors that the skipping clack of her heeled Sunday shoes claims everywhere for herself, leaves the indelible print of her true self on everything.