Wasted

by Nicola Morgan

  Glances down. He’s touched the wrong bit of the screen. Tries again. The email opens.

  Hi, Dad, Mum said you …

  Back to the road.

  … phoned. Sorry I …

  The car in front of him is slowing, for some reason.

  … didn’t email you last …

  Traffic is thickening ahead. Roadworks, maybe.

  … night. Really …

  Lorenzo slows a little. Keeps his place. He’s a good driver.

  … busy – I’m singing …

  But now the car behind is too close. Way too close.

  … with the band that’s …

  He gestures angrily with his hand. God, there are maniacs on the road!

  … playing at the prom …

  A lorry in the middle lane is overtaking another. Racing, by the look of it. Stupid. Lorries can’t do that on hills. Everything else is slowing, cars all too close. If anyone makes a mistake now…

  He needs to scroll the screen. Feels with his fingers. Strokes it.

  Looks down.

  Car in front speeds up. Lorenzo too. Foot on accelerator. Passing the lorries now.

  Both hands on steering wheel. Presses horn angrily as he passes.

  Lorry driver laughing. One finger in the air.

  Idiot.

  so can’t see you

  Traffic is slowing, congealing. Amazing how fast the pattern of the road changes. He moves into the middle lane. Slows a little. That’ll annoy the lorry driver, but they’re all going too fast. Teach them they can’t rule the road. Size isn’t everything.

  … till Monday. Ok?

  Yes, Monday’s OK. She’ll be more relaxed.

  The lorry looms in the rear window.

  Can’t wait to …

  Grinning face.

  Can’t wait to what? See him?

  Cars to both sides of him. And in front. There’s nowhere to go.

  Heart speeding.

  Armpits sticky.

  Every muscle rigid.

  It’s like a computer game.

  But real.

  Every car looks in control. But the tiniest swerve…

  The smallest…

  CHAPTER 30

  TAILS

  AN hour and a half later, Jess’s father pulls up outside the hotel in central London and a valet parks the car while he walks into the hotel. He’s already read the end of Jess’s message. He hadn’t really expected that she was going to say she couldn’t wait to see him and sure enough she didn’t.

  Can’t wait to leave school. It’s all so weird now. Thinking of travelling with a friend and still maybe music college later but haven’t sorted it yet. Let me know if Mon ok.

  He’ll email her back soon. But first, that glass of wine. He’s tired and there’s a definite headache brewing behind his eyes. So, a glass of wine, a hot shower and then a meal. And an early night.

  There’s nothing wrong with him that a decent sleep won’t put right.

  CHAPTER 31

  TIME SLIDES

  TIME has slipped by, speeding up. The prom is only a couple of days away. Jack and Jess spend almost all their hours together. Jess dares feel excited now about the future. It has more paths than barriers, more sunbeams than shadows.

  Jack is teaching Jess to spin a coin. He says it’s all in the mind, not the fingers. You think it into the air. You trace the path with your eyes and your heart. You send your soul with it. It’s easy, he says, his eyes intent.

  It’s not as easy as he makes out, but Jess is happy enough for him to be so close to her, and laughing.

  For laughing seems not to come so easily to him now. Not since, perhaps, the fairground. Or sometime around then. Time has blurred into a shapeless thing and it is hard to remember what happened on one day or another.

  Jess needs Jack to carry on laughing. His face when she first saw it, around that music-room door, was wide and alive. Though how could she expect to know what dark currents ran beneath his surface? No one is only skin-deep. Although Jess senses that something is bothering him, she thinks it’s just that the prom is only a couple of days away. Natural nerves – it’s his band, after all, his passion. But Jess does not know that Jack is playing the game more and more now. From the moment he wakes till the time he goes to bed, he is snatching secret spins of the coin at every opportunity. He is hiding it from everyone: he senses that they would try to stop him, disapprove, laugh. But for Jack it is no laughing matter. It was never only a game for him, but now it’s an addiction.

  Jack is losing it. He is a boy who has clutched on to control ever since his second mother died, and he has needed to feel that good luck would follow him because of his actions, that nothing was chance, only a strange mix of fortune and reason, and now it’s slipping away, the control, everything. Into somewhere very deep and very dark. He cannot explain why. All he knows is that what was once a deadly serious game is now just deadly serious.

  Maybe it’s something to do with facing the future, all this leaving school and childhood behind. He and Jess have talked about backpacking together in India, or somewhere, and that seems so exciting and yet so … huge, unanchored, full of too many possibilities. Or maybe love has simply knocked him upside down. And the more he understands how he so nearly didn’t meet Jess, the more the idea terrifies him; the idea of all those infinite worlds of unknown possibilities has made him dizzy. He is falling into space.

  Space is not far above us but everything is different there. There is no wind to carry you along and no one can hear you scream.

  And so Jack continues to spin his coin and the people close to him notice only that he’s perhaps a little thinner; there’s darkness beneath his eyes; and his movements sometimes are jerky.

  But still he laughs enough with Jess and touches her and loves her, so she will ignore the shadows and the sudden tiny absences, the times when she sees him staring into nothingness and his fingers become stone-still. We see what we want to see and Jess prefers not to see Jack falling into space.

  She is ignoring her friends too. They have mostly returned from the courses or trips they’ve been on; and finished their exams, all of them now. She’s had texts and emails and phone calls, which she’s answered briefly. Yes, she’s told Chloe and Farah that she’s going out with Jack, and they will have told others, and yes, she’s told them something about him, but we’re talking the odd sentence or two and then Gotta go – band practice! Her friends are all talking about what to wear at the prom, but obviously Jess won’t be wearing that sort of dress, though she’s planned her outfit too. In fact, she bumped into Chloe and some of the others in the shopping mall, and they hugged and chatted and laughed but she felt strange. They messed around, joked about lurve and asked her to Tell us everything and we mean everything. But Jess found that as she started to tell them what Jack was like she couldn’t properly explain him or what she felt. She’d always thought she’d want to tell her friends everything but now … well, where do you start and how do you find the words? So she looked at her watch and pretended she was late.

  She’s had a bit of an email conversation with her dad too – and Monday is all sorted. She won’t tell her mum this, but she’s even, oddly, looking forward to seeing him. Especially as he seems to be encouraging the backpacking/India/music-college idea. She hadn’t planned to tell him so much so soon but there was a late night when she was fired up after band practice and couldn’t sleep, so she’d gone online, found an email from him and replied; and he’d been online at the same time, so the reply came straight away, and it had kind of gone from there. In the darkness of her room, she had felt briefly disloyal to her mum, but she’d pushed that aside. She was doing nothing  wrong.

  Jess is beginning to believe that the future could hold all that she wants – Jack, music, everything. The strings that tie her down are loosening.

  Sylvia, frankly, is falling to pieces. She was never particularly together in the first place, of course, but now she is quickly crumbling. Control
is slipping from her like autumn leaves. Her husband is coming, no doubt insinuating his way between her and her daughter; he will unfold himself coolly from some sleek car and his eyes will trail over her body as though he is wondering what he ever saw in her; he will be wearing an expensive shirt and chinos, and shoes in soft brown leather; and she will look into his chocolate eyes and see Jessica and the past.

  Added to that, her only daughter is going out with a boy who is stealing her heart and time. Her daughter is leaving school soon, which, as Sylvia knows – but is trying to forget – may change everything. No, let’s face it, will change everything. Jess has occasionally used the words gap year and travelling in the past and Sylvia has had a clutching feeling in her throat every time. Even India and backpacking were mentioned the other day and Sylvia has a horrible intuition that a boyfriend may well make those words more likely to come true. They are such faraway words but yet they feel very close.

  And Sylvia needs a drink. This needing a drink is odd – it’s not like hunger or thirst, but a nagging in her mind, a pulling and tugging of her body towards wherever the drink is. It’s like being a puppet on strings. Anyway, she’d found herself buying a bottle of gin from the supermarket, at the same time as picking up some of Jess’s favourite foods – she plans to surprise Jess with a nice meal when she gets back from the boyfriend’s house.

  Sylvia’s hands are shaking as she fumbles for her key. While she is opening the door, she doesn’t even notice the haze of sweet peas and roses that tumble around the frame. There was a time, and not long ago either, when she couldn’t walk past flowers without wanting to bury her face in the drowning scent of whatever was in bloom. Now, she just wants…

  In the hall, Sylvia takes the bottle from her bag.

  She looks at it. There is an ugly need in her. It has crept up on her, this need, over many months and maybe years, slowly and invisibly, and she does not exactly know when it turned from desire to need. It has played “grandmother’s footsteps” with her mind. She wishes she could pour the contents of it down the sink but her fingers and feet will not allow her to do it. She knows that. It’s the knowing that’s the ugly bit. The drinking is the beautiful bit. How it floods over her like a warm wave and she can let herself sink into it and she forgets that anything matters.

  The answering machine winks at her. She presses the button as she kicks her shoes off. It’s Jess. Love snatches at her heart as she hears the voice. “Hi, Mum. Sorry but I won’t be back till later. I’m eating at Jack’s and then we’ll probably practise some more. See you maybe about ten. I’ll text you when I’m on my way.”

  Sylvia lets out a small noise. Ohhh! And suddenly fear and loneliness threaten to engulf her and stop her breathing. For a moment she thinks she could just sit there on the stairs and cry. But she does not. She stumbles towards the kitchen and opens the bottle. A quick swig settles her.

  Jess, meanwhile, in Jack’s bedroom, has just managed a very impressive spin of the coin. She plucks it from the air as it falls, closes her fingers over it and slaps it down on the back of her hand. Triumphantly.

  “Heads or tails?” she asks.

  “You haven’t asked it a question.”

  “Yes, but heads or tails anyway?”

  “But there’s no point without a question.”

  “It’s just a game though – a guessing game. It doesn’t make any difference to anything.”

  “You’re not taking it seriously.” He frowns, not looking at her.

  “Maybe you’re taking it too seriously. You can’t let it rule your life. God, Jack, we might as well believe in Farantella the Fantastic Fortune-teller! It’s that stupid!”

  He looks at her now. Seems about to say something. Takes her hands, slipping the coin from between them. He holds it in one hand, her hand in the other. He holds it up between her face and his, so he can see both: it is as though he does not know whether to look at her or the coin.

  “But it does rule our lives, don’t you see? And isn’t it so much simpler that way? People say life’s a lottery. But you don’t know what you can change unless you try.” He waves his hand towards the wall with all those newspaper stories. He carries on. “Life is serious and if you don’t take it seriously it can creep up on you and…”

  He pauses, looks away. Something plays across the muscles of his face. He swallows. Grabs her hands again, both of them. “You have to stay with me, Jess.”

  She is startled. “What’s the matter? You look really weird.”

  “Thanks.” And he smiles. At last, he smiles. “I love you, and I don’t want you to go.”

  “I’m not going,” she says, and she’s not. Certainly, at that moment, she has no intention of going anywhere. Few people can resist being wrapped in love when it’s offered. All dangers become invisible.

  There’s a shout from downstairs: Jack’s dad. “Come and lay the table in five minutes. OK?”

  Jack calls back that they’ll be down. And then turns to Jess. “I have to tell you about my mother, how she died. Actually, twice, but I mean the second time.” And he does. It is shocking and it brings tears to Jess’s eyes. She hears it in silence, wanting to hold his hands, but they are clenched and white and she does not. He says it all while looking at a space above her head and then he looks at her.

  “And that’s why. Because it so shouldn’t have happened and so nearly didn’t. And if I’d kicked the ball differently or not asked her to play or whatever, then… And all of life’s like that, Jess. All of it. Everything could be different. If only we did something different. Small things change everything.”

  She doesn’t know what to say. She shakes her head, because it seems so wrong somehow. But she cannot see why.

  He is still talking. “I so nearly didn’t meet you. And now … now…”

  “What?”

  “Something really bad could be about to happen.”

  “Or something really good could be about to happen.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “Can’t we just focus on the things we can control?” Jess asks.

  “Exactly! That’s why I toss the coin. I can choose to do it. I can’t control the way it lands but I can control whether I’m in the game. But now I think … it’s controlling me. I’m doing it all the time. More than you think.” He bites his lip.

  “So stop playing it, Jack! Just stop doing it! If it’s screwing you up.”

  “But…” And he looks at the newspaper cuttings again. “What if I stop and something terrible happens?”

  “This is stupid. We don’t know what’s round the corner and, if we did, what would we do about it? Like Oedipus in that story. Trying to escape the prophecy he ends up doing exactly what the prophecy said. He can’t escape.”

  “Yeah, I know – had to do an essay on it in philosophy. It tangles me up – like, if he’d never been told he was going to kill his father and marry his mother, he’d never have done it, and yet it was only trying to avoid it that made it all come true. If he’d ignored it he’d have been fine. I hate that story. It’s … I don’t know … cruel. It gives us no power or choice at all. Just makes everything pointless. But that’s not what I’m talking about – I’m not talking about knowing what’s round the corner. I’m talking about the fact we have to decide which corner to walk round. That’s what the coin does.”

  “Yes, we have to decide, not some coin. You’re handing your life over to a coin – Christ, Jack! You have to stop this.” And as she says it, she knows it is true.

  Jack takes a deep breath, shifts his thoughts into gear.

  Remember, Jack has equilibrium. Push him however far and he’ll spring back. He’s not the sort of person to go to pieces, though anyone can crack a little now and then. Besides, you can paper over cracks and sometimes that’s enough. There is a moment, a seesaw point, where he may tip over, and then, “Better watch out for things beginning with ‘w’, hadn’t we?” He grins. “Come on – we need to lay the table. But fi
rst, how about you take the coin? Then I can’t use it any more. Keep it with you. Don’t let me have it back.”

  “I think that sounds like a very good idea.”

  He spins it one last time, catches it behind his back, one-handed, without looking.

  “Show-off!”

  Jack hands her the coin. It is warm from his hand. She looks at it, puts it in her pocket. He flicks hair from his eyes. “OK? Let’s go. After you.”

  She leaves the room before him and does not see him take one long look at the newspaper stories before he follows her.

  A few minutes later, they are chatting over lasagne with Jack’s father. Laughter and stories, stainless steel and granite that sparkles, warm lighting, steaming bread and shining faces. At some point, they get on to the subject of what they’re going to do next. The backpacking to India thing comes up and Sam takes a deep breath before smiling. “God, I’m jealous of you two: your whole lives ahead of you. And you’d leave an old man like me to hobble towards my pension?”

  More laughter.

  They cannot know what is round the corner, or which corner they may soon walk round. Because at the moment there is nothing round the corner; there is not, yet, even any corner. Just possibilities.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE DAY BEFORE THE PROM

  THE night of the prom is approaching fast.

  Jess brushes everything else into a corner of her mind – her mum, her friends, what to eat for breakfast. Even the idea that she is about to leave school does not seem real – it is as though she left ages ago and she is somewhere else already. She is another person, and her cells breathe differently. The future holds fewer fears now that she is not standing on the edge alone.

  The band, the prom and Jack. When she sings with them there is nothing else to think about.

  Jack does not mention the coin now, seems to have forgotten the game. He has not forgotten: he is just hiding it. But he is hiding it well. Perhaps, if he can avoid playing it for long enough, the patterns of his thoughts may change and the desire fade.