A is for Apple

by Kate Johnson

  Ms. Williams was nodding too. “Right,” she said. “Books out, and I want you to make notes on victimisation. See if there is any depth to Sophia’s claim.”

  “It’s Sophie,” I said, but I said it under my breath. No need to annoy her. I might have made an ally here.

  I shared a book with the girl next to me and made notes on why I thoroughly despise Tess Durbeyfield. I’ve never come across a wetter heroine in my life. I wanted to shake her. Bloody Victorian melodrama.

  The lesson—a double, two hour episode—ended and the bell rang for break. You have no freaking idea how weird it was being back in a classroom, making notes on the same book I had when I was sixteen. I was more than a little weirded out, I can tell you.

  I went back to Ted, who was harbouring a Mars Bar and some normality for me, and as I got back out saw someone watching me.

  Marc.

  “Your car?”

  I nodded.

  “What a hunk of junk.”

  The Grease quote didn’t go unnoticed. “He—it’s a great car,” I said.

  “It belongs on a farm.”

  “It belongs on the Cool Wall,” I said without thinking.

  A flicker of interest. “You watch Top Gear?”

  Teenage boys, and a motoring programme. Go figure.

  “I subscribe to Top Gear,” I told him.

  He nodded. “Need to get that fender fixed,” he said, and walked off.

  I wasn’t sure if that meeting had gone well or not.

  I followed him, subtly, down to the corner where the Drama Studio dwelt. A black box with lino floors and baffles on the walls, it might have been a good space on paper. But the ceilings were too high, the seating rows inadequate, and there was no ventilation. This I knew because it was exactly the same studio as the one I’d done my A levels in. Put more than five people in there and it’d become an oven.

  Apparently we had a Drama class next, and apparently it was pretty much the same class as English. I could see why—half of the set texts were the same.

  We were put into groups to talk about how we’d stage a scene of A Doll’s House (oh good, more cheerful Victorian melodrama). I wasn’t grouped with Marc, but he was within eyesight.

  “God, he’s fit,” sighed one of the girls from my form group. She had a stripe of orange eyeshadow and thickly lashed eyelashes, and every time she blinked it was like spiders mating.

  “Good job growing up,” her mate agreed.

  “He used to come here, right?” I said.

  “First year. Then he left ‘cos his dad sent him to some mega expensive boarding school.”

  “Like Longford wasn’t good enough for him.”

  The first girl—I think her name was Amber, which fitted, with the eyeshadow and all—snorted. “S’not bloody good enough for anyone,” she said. “I can’t wait to get out of here and off to uni.”

  “God, me too,” said the other girl. “All those blokes. All that booze.”

  “All that work,” I reminded them, and they gave me dirty looks.

  “Anyway, what was that about in English?” Amber asked. “You got a degree in Hardy, or something?”

  “Oh, I did it at my old school,” I said. “Hated it. I hate Hardy.”

  “Can’t tell the sodding difference,” Amber’s mate moaned. What was her damn name?

  “At least it’s not that one who fancied his mother,” Amber said.

  “Lawrence?” I groaned. “Don’t tell me we’ve got him.”

  “You did D.H. Lawrence at your old school?”

  “I feel like I did bloody everything,” I said, and at that moment my phone started shrieking in my bag.

  Every head turned in my direction so fast there was a whoosh of air. I turned crimson and delved in my bag for my phone, which had suddenly become utterly tiny and slippery and elusive, and finally found it and switched it off.

  In the silence, I could feel the eyes of the trendy jeans-wearing teacher on the back of my neck.

  “Sorry,” I said in a little voice.

  “All phones off,” he said wearily. “Or at least on Silent.”

  I nodded meekly. A minute later the phone buzzed in my bag with a voice mail.

  “Okay,” I said. “Nora and Torvald. Where are we?”

  At the end of that lesson I had a free period, and then it was supposed to be lunch. This I had gleaned from Mr. Jones, or Uncle Todd as the class called him, I think with some kind of post-modern irony. Very impressive for seventeen-year-olds.

  After lunch should have been Art, but it was called off because of teacher absence. I thought this was a crappy show. After all, I’d turned up on my first day and it wasn’t as if I was getting paid for this…

  Oh no, I was.

  There was apparently a common room somewhere hidden in the maze of older buildings, but Marc followed his very new-found cronies down to the props room behind the stage, where someone put a stereo on and someone else opened some crisps and people sat around talking to each other and ignoring me.

  For something to do, I picked up my voice mail.

  “Hey,” it said, in Luke’s voice, and I was surprised. “Call me back, I have something to tell you.”

  That was it. No greeting. No apology. Oh, Jesus, was he breaking up with me?

  Again?

  Making a face, I stabbed the button to call him and listened to the ring tone, looking moodily around the dark little room, scented fetchingly with cheese and onion crisps and cigarette smoke. Eventually he answered.

  “Nice of you to pick up.”

  “I was in a class,” I said. “What do you need to tell me?”

  “You know those lovely chaps who tried so hard to kill you in New York?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, a bad feeling in my stomach.

  “They’re not in New York any more.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?”

  “They’re in—is that Atomic Kitten?”

  “What?” Oh, yeah, the stereo. “I’m behind the stage.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Where are they?”

  “Well, currently they’re mid-Atlantic. But very soon they’ll be at Heathrow. After that, it’s anybody’s guess.”

  “Mine isn’t too hard to fathom.”

  “Mine neither. Did you take Xander up to Angel’s?”

  “Yep.”

  “Was anyone there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Are there people listening in?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. Look, just be on your guard, all right? They’ll be landing at seven, which at least gives us some grace. They won’t be here before eight or nine, depending on traffic.”

  Great. So I had eight hours to live.

  “Okay,” I said. “I have to go. I don’t suppose you feel like being charitable, do you?”

  “Depends on the cause,” Luke said cautiously.

  “I have about a million books I need. I have some of them at home—can you get the others for me? I’ll text you the list.”

  “Read them out. It’s got to be quicker.”

  I got out the lists I'd been given and reeled off names and titles I’d hoped I’d never hear again.

  “I have some of those,” Luke said. “I’ll see you later, yeah?”

  And before I could ask whether that meant I was forgiven—or did I need to forgive him?—he was gone.

  I ended the call and looked around. Amber and Lucy were reading a magazine together, a skinny boy I think was called Laurence was reading the paper, and Marc was engaged in conversation with an earnest girl whose name I didn’t know. I think she was in my form group, one of the Amber/Lucy crowd.

  I sat and looked at them all for a while. All three were watching Marc, and trying to look like they weren’t. All three were skinny, and all three were pretty, but in different ways. Amber was quite tall and was clearly in love with herself. Her hair was short but she tossed it constantly for all it was worth. The girl sitting with her—Lucy?�
��was smaller and very sweetly formed. She looked vaguely familiar—I might have done ballet with her sister when I was tiny.

  Well, as tiny as I ever was.

  The third girl—the one who’d moaned about D.H. Lawrence—was different. She had her hair in pigtails and she wore glasses and bizarrely coloured clothes. She wasn’t unattractive, but neither was she conventional. I got the feeling that if she wore contacts and stopped plastering makeup on, if she sorted out her hair and wore normal coloured clothes (who ever, ever thought fluorescent pink, orange and yellow would look good layered together? She looked like a fruit salad on acid), she would be gorgeous.

  Marc didn’t look very interested in them. His body language was all wrong. He wore a dark shirt and trousers, his hair was slightly spiky, his shoes clean. I wondered if the blackness was in response to his father. How the hell did you bring something like that up in conversation?

  Eventually, just as I was trying to think of a way of insinuating myself into the group, Amber looked up and said to the pigtail girl, “Clara, you still on for bowling tonight?”

  Clara? What was this, 1903?

  “Yeah, sure,” Clara said, and immediately flicked her attention back to Marc. “You want to come? There’s a bunch of us going. We always do something on our first night back.”

  Since when? I wondered. I bet probably none of them had cars, or could even drive.

  Marc shrugged. “Where?”

  “The place next to the cinema in town. You know it?” He shook his head. “It’s quite new. Do you know…” And she launched into a complicated set of instructions that would have been a hell of a lot simpler if she’d just said that it was opposite the station.

  Eventually Marc shrugged again and said he’d see them at eight.

  “Hey,” I broke in, “I love bowling.” Liar.

  But it didn’t matter, no one paid any attention.

  “And that new place is really nice. They have pool tables too.” Or is it snooker? Hell, like I can play either of them.

  Still, no one was biting.

  “Do you have to book?” I asked.

  “No,” Laurence said, taking pity, “I think you just turn up. But you have to have at least two people for a lane.”

  So not pity, then.

  By the time I got home, after Clara had got a lift and taken Marc with her (“Oh! You live right near me!” Fancy that), I was feeling pretty uncool. I was feeling like I used to feel when people would hand out invites for a party where I wasn’t welcome right in front of me, and never even pretend about it.

  Luke called while I was trying to decide between chocolate and crisps, or maybe both. “You feel like coming and cheering me up?” I asked in a small voice.

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “I hate school. It sucks. I thought I was free of it all. I’ll have nightmares for years now.”

  “Explosions and gunfights don’t trouble your conscience, but going back to school gives you nightmares?”

  “Blegh,” I said.

  He laughed. “What sort of cheering up were you thinking?”

  “Whatever kind you like.”

  He was at my door in five minutes.

  “Okay,” he said. “Phone off?”

  I switched off my work mobile and my private mobile, went over and checked the answer machine was on. I even silenced the ringer.

  “Door locked?” I asked, and Luke turned all the catches.

  “Where’s Tammy?”

  “Out.”

  “Lock the cat flap,” he said. “No distractions. I don’t care if the building falls down—”

  “It never stopped you before,” I said, remembering, and Luke took advantage of my nostalgia to pull me close against him and kiss me silly.

  And then he took off my blue top. And then he led me into the bedroom. And then he—

  Mmm.

  Later, lying there feeling much, much better (if only I’d had a Luke when I was at school, eh?) I told him about my day.

  “School hard?”

  “Yeah, school hard,” I sulked. “Although I kicked ass in English.”

  “Do you know you have Elizabeth Jennings on your set list?”

  I made a face. “I know. I hate Elizabeth Jennings. If you’re depressed you take Prozac, you don’t write poems to torture schoolkids.”

  “I don’t think that was her intention. Or Shakespeare’s, before you start on him.”

  “Shakespeare I can cope with. Shakespeare I quite like.”

  “Mmm.” Luke stroked my shoulder. “So apart from the horrors of the English language, how was your first day at school?”

  I got the feeling he was strongly resisting calling me “pumpkin” or something else stupid.

  “Crappy. The cool kids don’t like me.”

  “Probably because you argued with the teacher about Hardy. Which, by the way, I find incredibly sexy.”

  “You do?”

  He bit my shoulder. “I do. What about Shapiro’s kid?”

  “Shouldn’t he just be Shapiro now? After all, it’s not like there’s a daddy.”

  “Did the cool kids like him?” Luke persisted, sensibly ignoring my ramblings.

  “Yeah. They invited him bowling. They didn’t invite me bowling,” I said moodily. “Now I need a drink.”

  He laughed as I got out of bed. “It’s four in the afternoon.”

  “So?”

  “You alkie.”

  I pulled a face at him and padded out into the kitchen. “You want anything?”

  “Any beer?”

  I cracked open one each and was about to take them back in when I heard Tammy scratching at her cat flap and went over to unlock it for her. But the lock was stuck, so I checked the peephole and opened the door instead.

  And then I nearly died.

  A is for Apple

  Chapter Eight

  Standing there looking at me with an indefinable expression was someone I hadn’t seen since I accused him of trying to kill me, shot him twice and threw him in a cell, then stole his car and got it blown up.

  “Hi,” I said, in a rather strangled tone of voice. “I’m not wearing anything, am I?”

  He shook his head. I felt my whole body blush.

  “I—I’m going to go and put something on…”

  I scuttled back into the bedroom, where Luke was frowning. “What’s going on? No one’s allowed to see you naked but me.”

  “Docherty,” I said, feeling faint. “I opened the door for Tammy and he was there.”

  “You didn’t see him? He doesn’t look much like Tammy.”

  Indeed he didn’t. Docherty looked like God, in a sulk. “He must have been lurking.”

  “Ah, yes, I know how he likes to lurk.” Luke got out of bed and pulled some clothes on. “Are you going to get dressed? Or is this an Emperor’s New Clothes thing?”

  I snatched up my kimono and pulled it on, following Luke out into the sitting room. Docherty was sitting on my sofa, looking like a Bond villain, stroking Tammy who was doing her best to look fat and white and malevolent. She failed on the first two counts, but was making up for it with the third.

  “Hey,” Luke said, and Docherty looked up, amusement flickering across his fine-featured face (do I know how to alliterate, or what?).

  “No need to ask what you two have been doing.”

  “No,” Luke agreed. “No need.” He picked up the beer I’d left on the counter and took a swig in a rather proprietary manner. “What are you doing here?”

  Luke and Docherty go way back. Apparently. Although neither speaks much of the other—actually, Docherty hardly speaks at all, unless spoken to—they’re both very well thought of in what you might call our business. Docherty is more freelance, and a couple of months ago we hired him to look after Angel, who was in some danger. And then Harvey came along, and I jumped to certain slightly erroneous conclusions about Docherty, and, well, a lot more stuff happened.

  Tall and dark and Irish and very good-lookin
g, Docherty’s one of those people about whom you’re desperately curious, but never ask any questions. Not if you want to keep various body parts. The last time I saw him he was driving an Aston Martin Vanquish (yes, that Vanquish). I wanted to know what he was driving now, but all I could see through my window was Ted, and Luke’s Vectra.

  “Thought I’d pop by. See how my favourite sharpshooter’s doing,” he raised an eyebrow at me, and I blushed.

  “She’s doing fine,” Luke said, and added pointedly, “Nice of you to drop by.”

  Docherty looked between us.

  “Did you want to see my new car?” he asked me idly, probably remembering how flustered I’d got over the Vanquish.

  “What is it?”

  He gave a very elusive smile. “Come and see.”

  And, like a little girl going to the devil, I followed him, Luke trotting behind me to keep me out of trouble.

  It was sitting in the middle of the small car park, looking magnificent. Long and low and powerful, like Luke doing push-ups. It was black and shiny and had a weird central cockpit. Damn, Docherty actually is Batman.

  I checked surreptitiously for a badge, but didn’t recognise it.

  I glanced at Luke, but he was frowning too.

  “It’s familiar,” he said, “but I…”

  Docherty was grinning—well, the closest he’d ever get to grinning. Which is to say, not very. But he was amused.

  “You want to know?”

  “Yes!”

  “Koenigsegg.”

  I searched my petrolhead memory and came up with a Swedish supercar that nearly killed the Top Gear driver. Fast, dangerous, and utterly unpredictable, just like Docherty.

  We stared some more. Then Luke shook his head. “Damn,” he said. “I’m impressed. Stay the hell away from my Vectra.”

  Even Ted looked nervous. Poor Ted.

  “Is that all you came for?” I asked, and Docherty shrugged.

  “There was one other thing.”

  “What?”

  He beckoned me closer. I stepped towards him, and he leaned down and said very quietly in my ear, “You owe me an apology.”

  I shivered, and it wasn’t because I was wearing a satin kimono and nothing else in September. I knew precisely what kind of apology he was after. And I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about giving it to him, even if it wasn’t for Luke.