by Fiona Neill
‘I’d like your sister to do my dirty work,’ said Stuart.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Luke.
Why did he want to hang out with such a loser?
‘I’m having a party, Romy. Come if you like,’ said Marley, in passing, as they were about to walk away. ‘You can keep Jay company.’
Becca kicked me under the table.
‘Can I bring a couple of girlfriends?’ I asked a little too quickly.
He paused for a moment, looking Marnie and Becca up and down as though he’d just noticed them for the first time.
‘Sure.’
They slouched away. I expected Marnie to be elated. But as she did up the button of her shirt ready for her next class I saw her big lower lip tremble in the way that it did when she was on the verge of tears. All Marnie’s emotions went to her mouth.
‘Result,’ said Becca, slapping Marnie on the back. ‘Let’s talk outfits.’
‘He didn’t ask me. Romy asked if we could come. It’s not the same.’
‘Five minutes ago, all you wanted was to be asked to Marley Fairport’s party. Now you’ve got the invite you’re even unhappier than you were before. Sometimes I don’t get you,’ said Becca.
‘He didn’t have to say yes,’ I pointed out. ‘That’s a good sign. He could have said no.’
‘Do you really think so?’ Marnie persisted.
‘You’re on his radar now,’ said Becca, looking at me for back-up. ‘You might even get to speak to him at his party.’
‘He asked about you at New Year,’ I said, remembering the comment about the freckles.
‘What exactly did he say?’
‘He said you reminded him of the night sky,’ I said.
Becca frowned at me disbelievingly. Marley Fairport had good ball skills. He could mend broken computers and talk to girls without being weird. But he wasn’t poetic.
‘Luke says he’s broken up with his girlfriend. So you’ve got as good a chance as any,’ I said. Luckily the bell rang and we had to go back to class.
Sometimes after school I walk home from the bus stop in the dark. It usually takes less than twenty minutes but Mum generally doesn’t like me going alone because there are hardly any street lights and the houses either side of the main road are set back behind rows of trees and super-size hedges. After the clocks changed in October it became non-negotiable. Either I had to walk with Luke, or Dad had to pick me up. Mum had found a story on the Internet about a twenty-year-old woman who had gone missing a few years earlier.
‘It was 2 a.m., she was a prostitute in the city centre and she was killed by a serial killer who was given a life sentence,’ said Dad in exasperation when she showed him the piece from the Eastern Daily Press.
‘She was still a real person,’ said Mum.
‘That’s not what I meant and you know it,’ said Dad. He put up his hands in defeat. ‘I accept it is my fate to be the family chauffeur. I’ll collect Romy.’
Mum calmed down. The following week Dad and I made an agreement that I could walk alone but we wouldn’t tell Mum.
‘Mum’s a bit overprotective at the moment,’ said Dad. ‘She’s had a lot to deal with. She needs to feel in control of things.’
‘She’s a control freak,’ I said, and he didn’t contradict me.
I thought it was nice of him, the way he wanted to shield her from worry. Over a cup of tea at our house on New Year’s Day, Loveday had teased Mum for having irrational fears about me walking home and jokingly asked if she was scared of the dark. She made the kind of noises kids make when they are trying to scare each other at Halloween and pointed out that no one had ever been mugged in Luckmore. Then she poked fun at Mum for locking the car and her habit of returning to the house three times to check whether the front door was closed properly. I wondered how she knew this and might have defended Mum had she not been such a psychopath the previous evening. I was convinced this was why Jay hadn’t come over with Loveday.
Instead of laughing it off, Mum had rounded on Loveday and said in her most haughty headmistress tone that parents of girls used a different equation to measure risk. I think it was a message aimed at me to try and explain her mad behaviour. Dad had quickly intervened with one of his theories about the reckless teenage brain, and Loveday was efficiently diverted, but I could see that Mum was riled and that Loveday either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
I assumed I could walk home with Luke but he had unexpectedly got off the bus with Marley and Stuart at the previous stop. Becca reluctantly trailed after them with Marnie. I called Mum to see if she could collect me but she had to stay at school for a teachers’ meeting. So I texted Dad and told him I was setting off on my own.
Unlike London, with its rows of identical terraces, the houses in our new village are all unique. Dad had given them names the first week to try and stem Ben’s tears when they walked together to his new primary school. There was Blue Jasmine, with its lapis-coloured tiles, turquoise shutters and creepers; Simon Cowell, a squat mock-Tudor pile with an overly neat lawn; Three Lions, with its moss-covered statues at the front gate. Before he even met the Fairports, he had christened their house the Trippy Hippy.
As I walked past these houses now, I thought about Dad and tried to work out what Mum might have meant when she said it was his fault that we had moved here. It was obvious now that I had been focusing on the wrong parent. I tried to remember the sequence of events last year when Dad first announced that he had resigned from work.
It was the end of the Easter term. Mum was sitting at the kitchen table, marking essays. Ben was reading a code-breaking book. Luke was making toast; Mum’s cooking by that time was too erratic to satisfy his enormous appetite. Luke had taken to buying his own loaf of white bread and pot of Nutella, which he kept in his room and refused to share with anyone. Dad came in and instead of his usual irritating greeting (‘What’s up, folks,’ said rhetorically in an American accent) he put his arms around Mum’s shoulders and told her that it was over. I remember noticing that from behind Mum’s shoulders were so bony that they resembled a coat hanger with oversized clothes draped on it. Maybe she had anorexia, I wondered, considering how embarrassing it would be to have a mother with an eating disorder. Mum didn’t move and I don’t think she said anything. Dad announced that he had resigned from his job. At the time his choice of words didn’t seem odd. He was weirdly matter-of-fact and seemed quite calm. He said it in a way that suggested Mum should be pleased, but she didn’t react. It didn’t occur to me that he might have been fired.
Luke’s toast popped up. ‘Well done, Dad,’ I said when no one else spoke. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to say. I felt sorry for him. He loved his job. But he didn’t seem upset. By this time I was definitely fed up with Mum’s retreat from the world. Mealtimes had become torture. I couldn’t bear the way she pushed food around her plate without really eating it. We had steak that night and she cut it into so many tiny pieces and left it for so long that it reminded me of the wood shavings at the bottom of the hamster cage. Ben anxiously asked if she wanted to test him on his eight times table; she agreed and then didn’t notice when he said that four times eight was thirty-six.
Now, as I walked past the house with the blue tiles and the turquoise shutters, I realized with certainty that at that point none of us had any idea they were thinking about leaving London or that Mum was going to apply for the job in Luckmore. Ben had asked if we would have less money. Dad said he had been given a small advance to write a book about the teenage brain from a neuroscience perspective. None of us pressed him for details. Luke said he hoped that the fact Dad would be around more didn’t mean that he would try and get more involved in his life. Dad promised not to. I asked if I could still go on holiday with my friend’s parents and Mum and Dad said I could. But they must have known because a few days later I found the estate agent’s details for the house where we now live beneath a pile of English essays that Mum was marking.
I was in a dark s
tretch of the path between Simon Cowell and Blue Jasmine. I put my school bag across my back so that my hands were free and walked light-footed like a cat, getting faster as the pavement ran out and turned into a dirt track. I began to run, lowering my head and closing my fingers to make myself more aerodynamic, feeling the shape of the ground beneath my feet. As I picked up speed and headed through the gate into our front garden I thought about how Usain Bolt reached a terminal velocity of 12.2 metres per second when he broke the world 100 metres record in 2009 and how much force he must have used to overcome the wind resistance. And in my mind Dad was Usain Bolt and Mum was the wind resistance holding him back and dragging him down.
The front door was unlocked and the lights downstairs were ablaze. Apart from Lucifer there was no one at home. The cat threaded himself in and out of my legs as I did an inventory of the fridge. There was nothing to eat apart from a jar of olives stuffed with garlic and the remains of yesterday’s pesto sauce. The kitchen counter looked promising but delivered a big nada: sumac, nutmeg, pine nuts, cumin, molasses. Why couldn’t Dad make a recipe with ordinary ingredients?
There was nothing that qualified as a simple snack.
Beside the recipe book was a paper on brain neurotransmitters that he was due to deliver in London to a group of postgrad students at UCL the following week. I skim-read the introduction. ‘The brain has the consistency of firm jelly and is therefore protected by the thick, bony skull. It floats in 150 millilitres of cerebrospinal fluid.’ I imagined my own brain peacefully bobbing around inside my skull and considered how noisy my thoughts were when it must be so quiet inside my head. I thought about Jay’s comment about me being liquid and how in fact it was true. I wondered about the consistency of the cerebrospinal fluid, whether it was watery or thick like gravy and how it might taste.
A cross section of the skull followed. Dad loved his visuals. Images were recorded in a different part of the brain from words and were easier to remember, he said. I flicked through a few more pages with different headings highlighted in fluorescent pen (general comments about neurotransmitters, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, why Alzheimer’s patients have a severe reduction in nucleus neurons).
A paragraph caught my attention. It was about a brain amino acid called PEA that was apparently responsible for the ‘love-excitement’ of sexual attraction and emotional infatuation. ‘Levels are highest in the reward centre of the brain and spike during orgasm and ovulation,’ Dad had written. ‘An American study at the University of San Francisco has shown that lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.’ I oscillated between shock that my dad would talk about this in front of a group of students and intrigue over how it might be relevant to me. According to Dad, its chemical structure and the way it released endorphins meant PEA acted like a drug. There was also a quote from Pablo Neruda: ‘Love is so short and forgetting so long.’ This was another of his quirks, finding the science in poetry, he said. Although it was Mum who supplied him with ideas. But I didn’t want to focus on that because in the current domestic narrative running in my head Mum always played the role of the bad guy.
I went through into the sitting room to switch on some music. Nick Cave, ‘The Boat Song’, came on, and because Luke wasn’t home to question my taste and Mum wasn’t there to use this as part of her psychological profiling of me, I left it on. I went over to the huge sitting-room window where I had first seen Jay in the garden next door and was taken aback to see Dad, Ben and my grandfather all sitting round the Fairports’ kitchen table. Not for the first time, but never before on a school night. Ben was playing Uno with Wolf. Loveday was stirring a pot on the cooker. Dad was leaning against the sink beside her. My grandfather was halfway through a glass of red wine. They were all becoming friends.
There were also some adults I didn’t recognize. Jay grumbled that there were always different people turning up unannounced to stay with them. His dad had been brought up on a commune in California and couldn’t stand being alone, Jay said. He was always getting at him for spending so much time alone in his room.
I debated whether I should head over. Wolf and Loveday wouldn’t mind and their fridge would be full of food. I looked up and saw a familiar red glow through the window of Jay’s bedroom. He was probably doing homework and there was no guarantee that he would make an appearance downstairs. I suddenly remembered Mr Harvey’s hastily shouted instructions at the end of class to put together a ten-minute tutorial on the human heart ready for the following day. Becca had tried to negotiate a longer deadline but he insisted the pressure was good preparation for the real world and ignored her attempts to sidetrack him with a debate about the subjective nature of reality by reminding us to watch a Harvard Business Review online tutorial on how to do killer presentations. He was a good teacher. I’ll give him that. But only that. Because he played his role in all this.
I dropped pasta piece by piece into a saucepan and enjoyed dodging the boiling water that splashed back over my fingers. I planned the homework, how I would label the photographs taken during our dissection class, describe each section of the heart and draw the path that blood takes through the circulatory system. My palette would be shades of orange and red, and I would make the arrows move to demonstrate the flow of blood. It would look beautiful.
My phone buzzed. Marnie’s number flashed up. I couldn’t face another conversation about Marley so I let it drift to voicemail and then felt guilty. Dad called to see if I had got home and I went over to the sitting-room window and told him to turn round. He waved at me to join them. I was tempted to go purely because it would annoy Mum. Instead I waved my Biology textbook at him. But he had already turned back to Loveday.
I headed up to my room, switched on the light and tipped the contents of my school bag onto the unmade bed. The picture of the two cats floated onto my pillow. A small speech bubble came from the mouth of the feral cat: ‘Take a walk on the wild side.’ I went over to my window and saw Jay standing at the window opposite. We each stood centre frame, face on. We stared at each other as though we were children playing a game of chicken and the first one to look away would lose. He nervously ran his hand through his hair a couple of times. I wished I were with him so that I could wrap my fingers around those wild curls and pull him towards me.
He smiled slowly, more tentative than I had seen him before, and for a moment remained completely still, as if poised on the edge of something, like a surfer about to stand on his board. Then suddenly he took off his T-shirt. Backlit by the orange light above, his upper body seemed to glow. He swallowed a couple of times as he gave me time to trace a line from one shoulder to the other, taking in the contours of his arms, the breadth of his chest and finally the shadow of soft black hair that trailed from his belly button into the waistband of his black trousers.
I pulled out my white shirt from my black skirt and circled the smooth edges of the bottom button between my fingers for a moment without looking away. He smiled encouragingly. Random thoughts collided in my head. Some people have a phobia of buttons. The Amish aren’t allowed them because they are too worldly. My grandmother had a jar of them. I undid the first one. Jay didn’t blink. The next button was missing, and my shirt billowed open so that I could feel the cold from the window lick my stomach. I shivered and ran a hand across from one hip bone to the other.
Jay stepped forward. No ambiguity now. He was so close to the window that his breath clouded the glass. He rubbed the cloudy patch slowly with his finger until it cleared. He is in thrall to me, I thought, understanding for the first time what this really meant. I fumbled with the buttons at the top of the shirt until it was completely undone and waited for a moment before taking it off and letting it fall to the floor. My hand drifted to the zip at the side of my skirt. He gently shook his head and his eyes moved back to my breasts. He nodded at me, a slight tilt of the head, and I understood.
I wished I was wearing a different bra, one that you could pull over the top of your head; inst
ead I awkwardly stretched my arms behind my back, leaning forward slightly as I fumbled for the clasp. Jay watched unblinkingly, and when finally I undid it and pulled the straps off my shoulders, he moved even closer to the window. I pressed myself against the pane so that my breasts were compressed against the glass without worrying whether they were too fat or my nipples too pink. The cold was a relief. I heard a noise, a soft animal moan, wondered where it came from and realized it was me.
Jay moved. He put a hand up on the window, fingers splayed, and I wondered for a moment if I had got this wrong and he was telling me to stop or if he was trying to signal a desire for more proximity, like when Ben used to make Mum kiss him goodbye through the window at nursery. Then I realized that he was using the window to steady himself as he unzipped his trousers and pulled out his dick. It slapped inelegantly against his stomach and he clasped it in his thick fist as if to try and tame it. His hand began moving slowly up and down. I stepped back.
There was a flicker of something in his eye and I knew he didn’t want me to look away. He smiled at me again, looking for reassurance, and I smiled back. The moon came out from behind a cloud and shone its approval upon us. His rhythm quickened.
I touched my breasts and pushed them together. Then I put my hand inside my skirt to touch myself. ‘Yes,’ I saw him mouth. He leaned forward until his forehead touched the glass and I could see his face was taut with desire. The tendon in his arm bulged with tension. His hand moved faster and faster until suddenly his eyes orbited, his mouth hung open and it was over. There was a moment of grace. He looked at me reverently. I went away from the window and lay on the bed and finished what he had started. My phone buzzed and I knew it would be him. u slay me, the message read.
There are events in life that come to define all others, and although I didn’t realize it at the time this was one of them. When we met again years later Jay told me it was the same for him. Everything was measured against this moment.