by Lisa Jewell
Luckily for Joy, Kieran never asked her for her virginity. He’d treasured Joy’s virginity almost as much as Joy had been baffled by it; had held her hand in his while his eyes welled up with tears when she told him that she’d never had sex with anyone. As far as Kieran was concerned, Joy’s virginity was such a precious jewel that no one in the world, least of all him, should be allowed to take it away.
They’d split up after two years when Joy had got to the end of her tether with the incessant hours of unful-filling canoodling on Kieran’s single bed and had realized that ending the relationship was the only way to make it stop. He’d cried so much that snot had bubbled out of his nose, but been otherwise dignified. He’d brought her yellow flowers and a nylon bear on her birthday a week later, then she’d never seen him again.
On her first day in the sixth form, Miranda, one of the school bullies, took a sudden shine to her. She plied Joy with cigarettes and spliffs and little blue pills until one autumn evening, two months into their new ‘friendship’, sitting on the banks of the M25, watching the setting sun and halfway through a bottle of Wild Turkey, Miranda had suddenly pinioned Joy to the grass and stuck her tongue down her throat.
Joy allowed Miranda to explore the inside of her mouth and the contours of her teeth, to her heart’s content. She even allowed Miranda to pull up her T-shirt and lick her nipples, but as neither of them really had any idea what happened next in an encounter of this kind it never really went any further. The friendship had fizzled out when Miranda met a proper grown-up lesbian at half term who taught her how to do things properly and since then Joy had remained completely untouched.
Joy didn’t really understand the concepts of sex or desire. She’d never in her almost eighteen years met anyone with whom she could contemplate having sex; never felt her loins stir or tingle. The idea of being penetrated felt alien to her, like swallowing a hardboiled egg whole, or threading a piece of string through her head, from ear to ear. She’d had crushes on pop stars and actors, and she’d had crushes on the unattainable boys from the grammar school down the road, but she’d never, ever felt pure carnal desire in her life.
Up until now.
She watched Vince walking back towards her, across the pub, clutching two pints of lager. She liked his hair, thick and light brown, curling naturally into a soft quiff at the front, military short at the back and sides. He was wearing a black Fred Perry tucked into black gabardine peg-fronted trousers. His neck was heavy and smooth, and his shoulders were wide and strong. His big, handsome hands made the pint glasses look insubstantial. He was the man she wanted to lose her virginity to. From nought to sixty. Just like that.
‘So,’ she said, breathing him in as he sat down next to her, ‘tell me about the scars.’ And that was the other thing about this Vince person – he made her feel as if she could say anything she wanted.
He smiled and touched them. ‘Aah,’ he said, ‘the scars. Do you really want to know?’
‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded.
‘OΚ. Well, I had some surgery. A year ago. I had some bone taken out of my jaw, pins put in, that sort of thing.’
‘What – really? How come?’
Vince shrugged. ‘To de-ugly me,’ he said.
Joy laughed. ‘What do you mean, “de-ugly”?’
‘I mean, I was weird-looking. I had an underbite, like this… ‘ – he pushed his lower jaw out a little to show her – ‘and it was affecting my eating and my teeth and everything, so I had corrective surgery That’s where they went in to get to the bone.’ He pointed at the scars.
Joy winced. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘God, yeah. It was fucking agony. I couldn’t eat properly for months after – lost loads of weight. I was under ten stone by the time they took the braces off. Looked like a skeleton. It was like hell, you know, couldn’t talk, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t move my jaw. All I did for a year was take painkillers and listen to music. It was a total nightmare.’
‘God, you poor thing. Is it OK now?’
‘Yeah. Well, sort of. It still aches a bit, still feels stiff when I wake up in the morning, and yawning and stuff can be quite uncomfortable.’
‘And did you… were you… I mean how ugly were you, exacdy?’
‘Well, the kids at school seemed to think I was pretty hideous. Melonhead, they called me.’
‘Melonhead? Why Melonhead?’
‘That’s my name. My surname. Well – the “melon” bit, anyway.’
‘Your surname is Melon?’
‘Uh-huh. With two ls.’
‘No way’
‘Yeah. Mellon. Could have been worse. I could have been a girl with enormous tits.’
‘I think it’s a beautiful name.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. It’s pretty.’
‘Hmm. I never thought of it like that before. I even thought about changing it after Chris and mum got married – changing it to Chris’s surname.’
‘Which is?’ ‘Jebb.’
‘Oh, no.’ She frowned and shook her head. ‘Mellon’s much nicer.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Oh, God, yeah. I’ll swap with you, if you like.’
‘Why? What’s yours?’
‘Downer. Nice, eh?’
‘Oh. It’s not so bad. Especially with your first name. They kind of cancel each other out.’
Joy smiled. ‘I guess so,’ she said. ‘But the therapists had a field day with it.’
‘Therapists?
‘Yes. Therapists.’ Joy breathed in. She wanted to tell him. She wanted him to know her. Τ suppose it’s only fair for you to know that you’re sitting in a pub with a nutter.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘No, seriously. I spent four weeks in hospital earlier this year. I had a nervous breakdown.’ She stopped and smiled tightly, waiting for his reaction, knowing already that he would understand.
And then she told him everything – all the things she’d vowed never to tell anyone because they were so sordid and so seedy. She told him about the day she’d got back from school and found her father sitting on a chair in the kitchen with his trousers around his ankles and Toni Moran from across the road sitting astride his lap and how Toni Moran had carried on pumping up and down obliviously for a full five strokes after she’d walked in, while her father stared at her in mute horror over her shoulder.
She told him about how her father had given her £500 in crisp £10 notes not to tell her mother and how she’d spent it all on clothes from Kensington Market which she’d taken back the following weekend because she’d felt so guilty and how she’d then hidden the £500 in a shoebox in the bottom of her wardrobe and how for weeks afterwards she’d had to watch her mother kowtowing to her father, cooking his dinner, polishing his shoes, rubbing his feet on the sofa at night, in the full knowledge that he was still conducting his affair with Toni Moran. She told him how much she’d wanted to tell her mother but hadn’t dared, too scared of the repercussions which she could only imagine would impact harder on her mother than on her father, and how she’d learned to recognize the smell of Toni Moran on her father when he came home from the golf course or a committee meeting.
She told him about the awful sense of complicity that her father had tried to foster between the two of them, as if the duplicity was some great adventure they were sharing and how instead of getting easier it had become harder and harder to keep the secret locked away inside.
It had all come to a head while she was going through the stress of university interviews, dragging a twenty-pound Α1 portfolio around the country in the middle of an unseasonal heatwave, sitting outside offices with a dozen other candidates, knowing that they were all better than her, wondering why the hell she was even bothering.
She began to get this unsettling, panicky feeling all the time, as if her body was nothing to do with her. She’d forget how to walk, sometimes, how to make her legs move. And other times she’d forget how to breathe properly and her heart would stop,
then start racing, then stop again. She spent so much time focusing inside herself, existing inside a strange, tinny little bubble of self-obsession, that she became absent-minded and distracted to an almost comical extent. She left things everywhere she went, forgot entire conversations, and failed to turn up for prearranged appointments. But she didn’t know how close she was to falling apart until one spring afternoon when she turned up for an interview at Chelsea School of Art – without her portfolio. She didn’t realize she’d left the portfolio at home until the interview panel had asked to see it, at which point she burst into tears and ran from the room. She got on the wrong train at Fenchurch Street and ended up in Norwich. She didn’t have enough cash on her to buy a ticket back to London, so her mother had driven all the way from Colchester and brought her home.
The following morning the postman delivered not one but three letters of rejection from her top three choices of university, and Joy decided that it would be better for everyone if she wasn’t around. This revelation cleared her head for the first time in a month, and it was with an amazing sense of clarity that she sat cross-legged on her bed and ingested twenty-three paracetamols and a third of a bottle of peach schnapps.
Her mother found her half an hour later and rushed her to Colchester General, where they pumped out her stomach with salty water until she felt like a wrung-out flannel.
In retrospect, Joy knew that she hadn’t really intended to kill herself. She’d known her mother would find her; she’d known she hadn’t taken enough. She just wanted to go home and forget that it had ever happened. But everyone involved took it very seriously – seriously enough to do something about it. She was admitted to a psychiatric ward the next day.
The day after that she received a letter from Bristol University offering her a place on their Graphic Design BA degree course. Her mother wrote back on her behalf to explain why she wouldn’t be able to take it up.
She couldn’t really remember much about the next few weeks. It was a blur of pills and questions. Somewhere along the line she must have told someone about her father and Toni Moran because by the time she finally came home, four weeks later, her father was a in a state of high contrition and everything felt different. Hence this holiday. Hence the atmosphere of forced geniality that hung over everything they said and did.
It was Alan who’d put Joy in hospital. Alan owed them. And Alan was paying the price.
When the pub closed at eleven-thirty, they instinctively turned in the opposite direction to the Nelson’s and the Seavue Holiday Home Park, and headed towards the seafront instead. ‘Word Up’ blasted from the open windows of a spartan nightclub over an arcade on the promenade. They crossed the road and passed the open doors of the club. Hard-faced girls in sunbleached denim stood outside, smoking full-strength Marlboros and drinking half-pints of cider. Burly boys in nylon bomber jackets drank beer from plastic cups and sneered at each other.
They wandered across the soft, manicured grass of the seafront promenade, past the neat pavilion and towards a bench facing out towards the sea. A few shadowy seagulls circled overhead, their angry cries merging with the ghostly din of Cameo still echoing from the club. The beach was completely empty.
They sat down in unison and breathed in the fresh sea air, and as the brine hit Joy’s lungs she felt herself swell up with happiness. She’d drunk too much and life had taken on a golden, blankety feeling she’d never thought possible. For the first time in her life Joy felt… normal.
She was no longer daunted by Vince’s good looks and brooding aura. Vince wasn’t what he appeared. He wasn’t cool and moody. He wasn’t intellectual or hard. He wasn’t intimidating.
He was interesting and kind and funny.
He was human and generous and thoughtful.
He was awkward and a misfit.
He’d missed out on great big chunks of his youth.
He was just like her
Joy had never met anyone just like her before. She’d spent her life trying to bend herself to fit to other people’s shapes. For years she’d contorted herself into tricky positions, like those people who could fold themselves into boxes, but walking out of the Nelson’s that evening with Vince had felt like stretching her legs after a long journey, like rolling her head on her shoulders after too much studying. She didn’t have to pretend to be cool, pretend to be clever, pretend to be interested, pretend to be aroused, pretend to be anything. It was a relief.
‘I think you’re great,’ she said, bringing her knees up to her chest and turning to smile at Vince.
He started, and a shy smile spread across his face. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. You. Really’
She pulled his hand off his lap and, without even a moment’s hesitation or awkwardness, brought it up to her lips and kissed it.
‘I think you’re great, too,’ he said. He smiled again, picked up her hand and brought it to his lips and, as his mouth connected with her flesh, Joy’s whole body tingled like a sneeze.
And then they both laughed, reached for each other’s faces and kissed to the distant sound of teenage Hunstanton girls singing along to ‘Venus’ by Bananarama.
Five
Vince was awoken the next morning by the sound of wood pigeons cooing from the trees.
He wiped away the thick condensation that covered the letterbox-shaped window, and as the view came into focus he considered the mist fogging the corresponding window of the next-door caravan. Was it the sweet, tangy morning breath of Joy Downer? Was it the visual accumulation of her night’s dreams, thoughts and movements, every droplet a moment’s sleep? Was she there now, on the other side of the brown aluminium siding, murmuring gently in her sleep, one leg outside the covers maybe, bent slightly at the knee? Or maybe she was just waking up, rubbing her eyes, stretching her arms, tousling her silky hair with bunched-up fists?
He brought his own fist to the window to wipe away the new layer of condensation he’d created, and as he did so the curtain opposite shot open, a meaty hand cleared the opaque mist from the window and a large, greasy face appeared, squinting into the morning sunshine.
Barbara.
Vince pulled his curtain closed and let his head fall upon his pillow, shuddering gently at the terrifying image left lingering in his mind’s eye.
He got out of bed and wandered through to the living area. Chris was eating freshly baked bread spread with thick peaks of peanut butter, and Kirsty was still in her dressing gown, suggesting that Chris had been up first to do the breakfast run. There was a fresh pot of tea on the side, and Vince poured himself a mug and sat down. Half the curtains at the far end of the caravan were still closed against a dazzling sun that cast a dank orange light through the interior, highlighting the clouds of smoke from Kirsty’s cigarette. Radio 1 was on, some overexcited DJ shouting about the wonderful weather and introducing ‘Living Doll’ by Cliff Richard and the Young Ones.
‘Bread?’ said Chris, reaching for the bread knife.
‘Nah,’ said Vince, eyeing the crusty loaf and finding it strangely unappealing.
‘Lovesick?’
‘Eh?’
‘Lovesick,’ Chris repeated, nodding at Kirsty.
Vince tipped a teaspoon of sugar into his mug and grunted.
‘So, what time did you two crawl back last night, then?’
‘I dunno. One, two, something like that.’
Chris laughed. ‘One or two, my arse! Three-thirty – that’s what time it was. What the hell did you two find to do in Hunstanton until three-thirty in the bloody morning? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘We just talked – that’s all.’
‘Aaaah,’ said Chris, gouging another large knifeload of peanut butter from the jar and flopping it on to a slice of bread. ‘Talking, eh? That’s the ticket – best way into a girl’s drawers, that. Up all night talking – you’re halfway there, mate.’
Vince watched Chris’s peanut butter merging with the oily yellow butter already pasted on to his bread a
nd felt his stomach wriggle. ‘It’s not like that,’ he muttered.
‘Course it’s like that.’
‘It’s not. Honest. Joy’s – she’s not that kind of girl. We’re just friends, that’s all.’
Chris shook his head and laughed wryly.
Vince caught the vibration of a look being thrown across the table from Kirsty to Chris. Chris closed his mouth against his next comment and dropped his gaze. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Friends. That’s grand, that is.’
A moment passed in silence, save for the hysterical babble of the Radio 1 Roadshow and the crackle of Kirsty’s tabloid as she peeled apart the pages.
‘So,’ began Chris, ‘your new “friend”. D’you think she’d like to come to the beach with us today?’
‘I don’t know,’ snapped Vince, beginning to lose patience. All he wanted to do was sit here and ruminate on the exquisite perfection of last night. He didn’t want to have to reconcile it with the reality of his circumstances. He didn’t want to consider the practicalities of his parents and her parents and the banality of making plans and arrangements. He just wanted to drift around in this state of rapture until he somehow floated his way back into her company again. Was that too much to ask?
‘I’ll ask her, if you want,’ said Chris.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake – just drop it, will you?’
‘Oh, come on, Vince. Don’t be like that. Don’t you want to see her in a bikini?’ He threw him a raised eyebrow and Vince cracked a smile. ‘Leave it to me. I’ll sort it.’
*
Great, thought Vince a couple of hours later, as he peered into the rear view mirror of his mum’s Mini.
A poker-straight Alan sat behind the steering wheel of his shiny Jaguar, negotiating the treacherous speed humps of the dirt track to the beach with strange, diagonal swooping motions. Next to him, barely visible above the dashboard, sat the overly radiant Barbara, mopping at her brow with a handkerchief and wearing some kind of hat. And there, in the back, pinioned against the door by the sheer volume of an oversized picnic hamper, sat Joy.