This Is Not Forgiveness

by Celia Rees

  ‘Steady!’ Alan says as I bring the punt in too fast, jolting the elderly couple who stagger out, their clothes blotched with splashes. The man complains. Alan offers their money back. ‘What’s the matter with you? he says. ‘It’ll come out of your wages . . .’

  He goes on, but I’m not listening. I’m scanning the crowds again. It’s August now. More tourists. More people down by the river. I make excuses about a wrist injury. He puts me on the station, taking the money. That suits me fine. From here, I can watch all the time.

  Just when I’ve given up. There she is. I’m lying on my bed in my boxers, listening to music. I wouldn’t want anyone else hearing the mix – love songs on shuffle. I even raided Martha’s iTunes when she was out. I’ve got my earpieces in and I’m so deep in the songs that I don’t hear anything from the outside, even Martha hammering on the door. She comes in and touches my shoulder, making me jump a mile. She yanks my earpieces out.

  ‘Your girlfriend’s outside. Can’t you hear? She’ll have the whole street out!’

  She’s standing arms folded, glaring down at me. She looks like Mum. Sounds like Mum, too.

  I can hear the horn and I’m off the bed and at the window. There she is. She looks up at me and grins, beckoning me down to her. I grab some clothes, hopping round the room trying to ram my legs into jeans, pulling on a shirt, jamming my feet into trainers and I’m off down the stairs, through the door and down the path.

  When I look up at my window, Martha is there, frowning down at us, arms tightly folded. I give her a wave. I’m happy. I want to share it. She’s not even looking at me.

  Caro returns the stare, lowering her sunglasses, sketching a wave with a flip of her fingers. Martha’s frown deepens. I look from one to the other. It’s a hot night but I can feel the chill like a frost field between them.

  ‘What is it with you and Martha?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She looks away then to start the car. ‘What makes you think there is anything between me and Martha?’

  ‘Just a feeling. Didn’t you used to be friends, or something?’

  ‘Or something.’ She repeats my words, says nothing more.

  ‘Yeah. You were.’ I go on, prompting her. ‘You must have been to be invited to her birthday. She doesn’t invite just anybody.’

  ‘Maybe I was. I don’t remember a thing about it,’ she says it like it’s too boring to even think about and stares straight ahead, cutting the conversation dead. It’s as if she has turned herself off.

  I try a different tack, hoping to get her talking about something else.

  ‘How’s your day been?’ I ask, following up with a similar set of questions.

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Been anywhere?’

  ‘Done anything interesting?’

  Things like that. The last one sounds pretty lame, the sort of thing your gran would ask you. Her answers are non-committal or non-existent. I shut up then and we lapse into silence. In my head I’m hearing a parallel set of questions.

  Where have you been since I last saw you?

  Why didn’t you call me?

  Why didn’t you message me?

  Are you seeing someone?

  What did you do with them? The same as you did with me?

  These questions are there in my mind all the time, like mosquitoes, whining and insistent, but I don’t ask them. There’s someone else. I know. I can feel it. But I don’t ask her. I don’t say anything because she wouldn’t tell me. I’m learning about her. Not much, but some. She operates on a strictly need to know basis. She lies and doesn’t care if you know it. She doesn’t gossip and chatter. She doesn’t say much at all as a general rule, so what she does say counts. So does what she doesn’t say, which might even be more important.

  I sit back in the seat. Traffic is crawling through town. The temporary lights on the bridge slowing everything down. I wonder where we are going. She probably wouldn’t tell me, even if she knew. She’s not in the mood for talking, so while we are waiting, I let my mind drift back to the time she seems to be denying. The time when she and Martha were friends and she came to Martha’s birthday.

  It must have been Martha’s fifteenth. There was a big rumpus because Mum said she was too young to go out with her mates, so she had to make do with a film and a pizza. I wasn’t invited, not that I was bothered. Rob was home on leave and we watched the Villa in his room. They were coming back for a sleepover – cue for us to keep well out of the way.

  In the morning, I came down to find Mum talking to one of the collecting mothers.

  ‘Just went. Middle of the night. I was worried. You hear such awful stories.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Apparently. I called her mother. She had to go home.’ She dropped her voice to a murmur. All I caught was a bit of an accident and embarrassed. They got in a huddle, talking low: girls, that time, awkward.

  The other mother nodded as if she knew. I didn’t, so I sidled closer. Mum saw me and that stopped the conversation altogether. I got told to stop hovering and get my own breakfast. Mum spoke sharply, frowning at me as if I’d done something wrong. I was still wondering what kind of accident, when the penny dropped. This was some secret female thing that boys were not supposed to know about; that’s why they were whispering and glowering at me.

  I coloured up at the thought of it and got busy with the cereal packets. I didn’t know much about periods but what I did know made me glad that I was a boy.

  So she came to a sleepover and didn’t stay. Is that the source of the enmity between her and Martha? Could be. Martha can be very touchy. There has to be more to it. There always is. If there was a row, they were quiet about it. The girls round the table were as listless as revenants in the sunshine, not up to noticing anything much, but Caro’s departure was news to them. One of them asked ‘Isn’t she here?’ as if she might have crept under a piece of furniture or spent the night in the cupboard under the stairs. Girls are always falling out over something, the patterns of their friendships change, alliances shift. Friends are lost, new ones made, but usually not for ever, the kaleidoscope twists and before you know it, they’re back together. After that night she disappeared from Martha’s life altogether.

  Something happened that night. Something Caro doesn’t want to talk about.

  I expect her to drive out into the country. We are heading in that direction. Once she crosses the bridge, she takes one of the ribbon roads out of town. We’ve gone about a mile or so, when she suddenly turns the wheel and takes a left into an estate.

  ‘I feel like a night in.’

  She turns right, then left, then right again, screeching round corners, bouncing over traffic-calming devices following the maze of closes, slaloming through another Legoland development. It is quite a lot like ours, except the houses are bigger, posher – all detached with driveways and double, even triple, garages. The cars parked in the drives are Mercs, BMWs, a few Porsches, lots of SUVs.

  The roads are named after the trees that have been ripped up to make way for all these executive houses: Oak Close, Ash Road, Beech Avenue, The Limes. She lives on Cypress Drive. She stops and the electric gates swing open. She sweeps round a little, circular drive towards the porticoed front door. Her house is called ‘The Stables’ and is set slightly apart, bigger than the rest. It’s like a cut-down stately home.

  ‘Nice,’ I say.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s naff.’ She parks anywhere and swings her legs out of the car. ‘It’s somewhere to live. That’s all.’

  I walk in behind her. Everything is in various shades of beige and oatmeal. Very tasteful. I fight an impulse to take my shoes off. She takes me into the living room: cream carpet, huge leather sofas, smoked-glass coffee table. The room is wide and long with an L-shaped dining area, where there’s another smoked-glass table with high-backed chairs drawn up to it and a bowl of fruit set in the centre. A door leads to a conservatory.

  ‘It looks like a show house,’
I say.

  ‘It is. That’s why mother bought it.’ She gestures around. ‘Furniture. Pictures. Everything.’

  I stand in the middle of the room not sure what I should do. It’s like we’ve both arrived at a party and no one else has turned up.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ She presses a button in the sideboard. A panel slides back to show a bank of bottles. ‘There’s everything, really. Oh, except tequila. I seem to have drunk most of that.’

  ‘Got any vodka?’ I don’t really like tequila. Too oily.

  ‘It’s in the freezer. I’ll go and get it.’

  I walk over to a big cabinet which takes up one wall of the room. Inside it are lots of trophies. She comes back with a bottle of Absolut, the frost forming on it, and two glasses, misted and smoking with ice.

  ‘What are these?’ I tap the glass encasing the trophies. ‘They didn’t come with the house.’

  ‘They’re Trevor’s,’ she says as she pours two hefty shots of vodka.

  ‘Oh.’ I don’t ask her about her real dad. I don’t suppose she’d tell me, even if I did. Instead, I go on with the trophy conversation. ‘What did he get them for?’

  ‘Shooting.’

  ‘Shooting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With guns?’

  ‘No, pea-shooters. What do you think?’

  ‘Does he have any here? Guns, I mean.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What kinds?’

  ‘All kinds: hunting rifles, a shotgun, a couple of handguns – a Glock 9mm and a Colt M1911.’

  ‘It’s illegal to own handguns,’ I say. I know that because Grandpa had to turn his in.

  She shrugs. ‘That’s why they’re kept locked up.’

  ‘What is he? Some kind of gangster?’

  ‘No, he’s an estate agent. He just likes guns, that’s all. He collects them.’

  ‘Can you shoot?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not a bad standard.’ She might have been talking about Grade 8 on the clarinet. ‘My mother doesn’t like it. That’s why I do it.’

  ‘Doesn’t she like guns?’

  ‘No, not so much.’

  When she comes back, I pull out the cigarette case Cal found in a junk shop and take out a couple of joints. These are some I rolled earlier. I’ve been raiding Rob’s stash. She has no objection, rather the opposite, but we go into the conservatory. She doesn’t like the smell of smoke in the house.

  I prefer it in there. The floor is shiny cream tiles and I’m not so afraid of spilling anything. It’s full of rattan furniture and plants. Some of them are big – tree size. There’s a water feature running down into a pond. I catch a flash of colour. It has fish in it.

  She sets the bottle down on top of a copy of House & Garden.

  ‘Where are they, your mum and stepdad?’ I ask.

  ‘Gone away,’ she says, eyes narrowed as she lights a rollie, touching the lighter flame to the twisted end. She inhales, then blows out a thin stream of smoke. ‘We’ve got a place in France. They’ve gone there.’

  ‘Leaving you on your own?’

  ‘I’m eighteen, not eight. Anyway, they think I’m going away to Cornwall with friends.’

  ‘Like Martha and her mates?’

  ‘Yeah. As if. Can you see me in a caravan in Newquay? Shows how much my mother knows about me.’

  She takes another toke on the spliff.

  It might be the weed, it might be her mother, it might be the thought of Martha and her mates that’s making her frown and bite her lip.

  ‘We could go away if you want,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a tent. Well, I know where I can get one.’

  Wrong thing to say.

  ‘I don’t actually want to go anywhere,’ she says, speaking slowly and very clearly, as if I’m a bit dim or hard of hearing, or possibly both. ‘I made up the story for the benefit of my mother. She doesn’t have to feel guilty then and will leave me alone. Suits her anyway, she doesn’t want “the children” there. It would cramp her style.’

  ‘What about your brother?’ I ask, trying to change the direction of the conversation. I don’t want to piss her off. It’s not a good thing to do if you’re hoping to have sex with someone. I know that much.

  ‘Stepbrother,’ she corrects. ‘She’s packed the poor little sod off to some kind of fat camp.’ She throws the spliff away and comes over to sit astride me. ‘So I’m on my own.’

  The rattan proves kind of fragile. There’s a crack that sounds like the cane is splitting. We both fall about laughing and move to the living room, leaving our clothes behind us. Next we move to the kitchen.

  She wants to have sex in every room in the house and it is a big house. We end up in her room, where I pretty much pass out.

  When I wake up, she’s not in the bed with me. I’ve no idea what time it is. It feels very late or pretty early. It’s hard to tell. I turn the light on and look around. She must have gone through a Goth phase. Her room is very dark. The walls are painted purple and the blinds are black.

  One wall is all pictures. There are faces looking down, faces I don’t recognise. They are good-looking enough to be film stars, but I don’t think they are. They look young, but the photographs are all in black and white, like they were taken a long time ago. The scenes could be contemporary: demonstrations, police on the streets; a bomb-damaged car, just wheels and twisted metal, and people climbing over rubble, bodies and carnage, like from a war zone, but these are images from another time, not now. In the middle is a symbol that I don’t recognise with the letters RAF on it but I don’t think it’s anything to do with the Royal Air Force. Their emblem isn’t a red star and a Kalashnikov.

  There’s a Palestinian flag hanging down and recent pictures taken off the Internet of people marching through the streets of Cairo, fighting in Libya and Syria, demonstrating in Gaza and on the West Bank. Propped in a corner of the room are a bunch of placards with a police riot helmet hanging like a trophy from one of them. Above that are colour photos torn from newspapers: people marching through London, smashed windows, fires in the street. In the centre is a blown-up press picture of Caro wearing the helmet, visor up, yelling, giving the finger.

  She’s got lots of books. Shelves of them. There are a couple on art, some poetry, novels, and quite a few on politics and philosophy – Nietzsche, Karl Marx . . . Heavy stuff. Others I’ve never even heard of, like Bakunin, Carlos Marighella. I’ll have to check them out on the Internet. If she wants to do Politics at uni, she’s certainly getting a head start and if I’m going to stand a chance of understanding her, I’ll have to do some homework.

  I scout the room for more clues. There are no personal photographs of her with her family or with friends on a night out, none of the girly knick-knacks that Martha has in her room. She must keep her make-up and stuff in the bathroom. There’s nothing on the dressing table except a bottle of Chanel perfume. On her desk is a laptop. I’m tempted. That could be more revealing. I listen out. The shower is running. I open it and power up. I don’t get past the screensaver. Red star and Kalashnikov.

  ‘Naughty, naughty! That’s private.’ I didn’t hear her come in and start, guilty at getting caught. ‘Not that you’d get any further. Everything is password-protected.’

  ‘What’s the screensaver?’

  ‘RAF. Stands for Red Army Faction.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Were. Known erroneously as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.’ She says it like she’s giving a lecture. ‘They were active in Germany in the Seventies.’

  I look blank. ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They were urban guerrillas. They robbed banks, kidnapped, killed people, bombed buildings. Anything to disrupt the system. That’s them up there on the wall.’

  I look up at the young faces in the old black-and-white photos.

  ‘Who’s that? The one on the left?’ She’s pretty, her dark hair cut just below chin length. ‘She looks a lot like you.’

  ‘That’s Petra Schelm.’ She comes over
and shuts down the laptop. ‘Seriously, Jamie. It’s not OK to pry.’

  ‘OK. OK.’ I swing round on the chair. ‘Just curious.’ I point at the photo of her in the policeman’s helmet. ‘You are very photogenic.’

  She nods, as if that is a given. ‘It was in all the papers at the time.’

  ‘I’m bored. Distract me.’ I make a grab for her but she pulls her bathrobe round her and she shakes her head.

  ‘No. Time for you to go.’

  ‘But you said your folks were away.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Then why?’

  I get up and go over to her. I can’t believe she’s about to throw me out. It was not just about having sex. I want to sleep with her. Spend the whole night together. In a bed.

  ‘I don’t like sleeping with people,’ she says. ‘I have to sleep on my own. It’s not to do with you.’

  I go over to the window and part the blinds. The sky is paling at the margins, somewhere near a bird has started to sing.

  ‘It’s nearly light.’

  ‘Time you were off, then.’

  I play for time, picking up some stones I find scattered along her windowsill.

  ‘Leave those alone.’

  I turn them over, examining the markings. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Rune stones.’

  ‘No shit!’ I shake them in my cupped hands. ‘What do you use them for?’

  ‘I don’t use them for anything. They’re just painted pebbles. Put them back where you found them.’

  I let them fall.

  I don’t know what makes me hang around. I go to the end of the road and turn back. The gates are shut. No chance of re-entry, the alarm light is blinking, and I’m facing a long walk across town, but I can’t go yet. I look through the bars. No lights in the house. No movement. I look around, suddenly nervous at the idea of CCTV cameras – this is just the kind of estate that would have them looking out for suspicious characters loitering about just like I am now. My first instinct is to throw my hood up, but that would look even more suspicious, they would be down from the station in a minute. I can’t make myself walk away. I sit on a nearby wall, light a spliff and wonder about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Being near her is not enough, but it is something, I guess.