by Julia Gray
I have no intention of going into this in any great detail, because this is not a story about that, but for the next year or so (my timeline is patchy), Evie went about the slow, steady business of drinking herself to death. She acquired a set of new, loud friends; this was unusual, for as far as I could remember the only friends my mother had ever had were Petra and my father. The friends seemed to shuffle and reshuffle; their faces changed, but not their raucous voices. I mistook Evie’s merriment for joy; at first, this was easy to do, but her day-after aches and sorrows seemed to magnify whatever silent sadness had gone before. The flat smelled sweet and sour; bottles multiplied outside the door; I caught the neighbours staring at me and Nana, some mornings, on our way to school.
I will report a single, final incident. A turning point, if you like.
A Sunday morning. Nana had taken the bus to church, packed into her floral-sprigged blouse and tweed suit, her stub-heeled churchgoing shoes. I was alone in the flat. I did not know where Evie was. (By the way, I don’t want, at any point, for you to try and feel sorry for me. You’ll see that I don’t deserve it. Also: I hate pity.) I decided to make scrambled eggs. Nana’s excessive fondness for sweet things left me craving, at other times, savoury salty foodstuffs. Stilton, Marmite. A plate of eggs on toast: that is what I wanted. I must have been nine, nearly ten years old. There was no bread for toast, only some rather stale crispbread. I beat two eggs into a bowl; I took from the kitchen drawer a box of long Swan matches. And here I paused.
I was terrified – terrified – of lighting the gas.
No wraith in Nana’s stories inspired as much fear in me as the prospect of a sticky ball of methane, swelling unchecked like some solar flare until it self-ignited in a burst of sudden fury, taking me and the rest of the flat with it. I had no doubt that it was possible, even likely.
I depressed the lower-left knob and twisted. At once, that sinister hiss started up, almost tuneful. I could not bear it. I twisted the dial back, so sharply I could have wrenched it off completely. I tried again, and again was thwarted by the sound of it. I struck a match and blew it out. I was hungry, and I could have cried for disappointment. And then it came to me, with total suddenness: I wanted my mother. Not Nana, and not even my dead father, who would be no good to me in his present state. I wanted my mother.
Just then, there came a loud knock on the door.
‘Alison! ¿Alison, estás aqui?’
It was Mrs DeAndrade. She lived a couple of floors down from us and was on friendly terms with my grandmother. It was only my insistent hunger that took me to the door; I was extremely shy as a child and I did not like to speak to people, even people I knew. But Mrs DeAndrade would be able to light the gas. She might even stay with me for the duration of my egg-scrambling, so as to turn it safely off again.
‘Aliénor! Are you there, chiquitita?’
I went to the door. The flats in our building overlooked on the inside a large interior courtyard where, some twenty or thirty metres below, a play area and a thin crescent of pinkish flowers provided the only break in an otherwise grey landscape. The vast silhouette of Mrs DeAndrade waited against the railing. I opened the door, and she rushed in, talking at first in Spanish in her excitement, and then, realising that Nana had gone to church, in English.
‘Your mother is in the river.’
Down the fire escape we went, for quickness. It was a stark, bleak day, though I can only guess at the month. Mrs DeAndrade, ever cautious, made us cross at the crossing, something Evie never did, since it was a fair way down the road. And now we came to the concrete wall on the other side of the road that separated the pavement from the drop down to the Thames.
‘La pobrecita,’ Mrs DeAndrade kept saying. ‘La pobrecita.’
Poor thing. I didn’t know whether she meant me, or Evie.
Evie was not in the river; that was lost in translation from Spanish to English, or else Mrs DeAndrade was merely skipping ahead, and predicting that sooner or later she would be. Evie was next to the river, at its very edge, on the narrow stretch of pebbles and piled-up driftwood, of stray plastic bags and discarded bottles. She had drawn quite a crowd of watchers; we had to push our way through them, to ask them to clear a space at the railings which Evie must, somehow, have climbed over in order to get down there. Her leather trousers, sleeveless vest, jacket, bra and knickers were folded neatly on the ground. Evie stood, naked, not unlike a marble statue, with her back to the audience, facing the tide. In one hand, she held a box of Tesco wine. Slowly, she put the box down.
Then, with the air of a pleased tourist on a sun-kissed beach, she waded in.
I have no doubt at all that if she’d got very far into the river, she’d have drowned. The crosscurrents of the Thames are mighty and fearful, and Evie was no swimmer. Mrs DeAndrade always called me, as indeed she had done that morning, chiquitita. It meant ‘little girl’, but was taken from a television programme about orphans, she’d told me once. That stone-cold Sunday was the closest I came, probably, to orphanhood.
Two policemen in reflective jackets got to my mother before the tide did.
I waited until the evening before going in to see her. Her room was a crypt of unwashed clothes, of Pepsi cans and beer bottles and loose coins. A deck of playing cards was spilled carelessly on the bedside table. Evie was sitting up in bed. She was wearing her Victorian nightgown, and I thought: here we go. Back into the vault. Another wall of silence, to replace the wall of noise. She wasn’t crying; Evie didn’t cry much. With one hand she kept twisting at a jewelled ring in her left ear, as though she were trying to unlock something inside herself. She looked up when she saw me.
‘I thought you were going to die,’ I said, which was a long sentence for me, and a true one. And then: ‘I want some scrambled eggs.’
She pulled me down next to her and hugged me, reaching all the way around me, holding onto me for warmth, but trying to give warmth back at the same time.
‘I don’t want to die,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’
Had it not been for Nana, who’d swept in to claim me from the police station with all the force of a miniature hurricane in a tight tweed suit, I might have been taken away from Evie. And she knew that. She cut up her Victorian nightgown, saying she’d spent too long in it, but marvelling at the delicacy of the stitching as she did so. She lit the gas burner and she made scrambled eggs for all of us. She drained the flat of alcohol, pouring it all down the kitchen sink till there was nary a drop to drink.
A fortnight later, she sent in her application to college.
10
‘Nora,’ said Jonah Trace. ‘You heading to the tube?’
It so happened that I was one of the last students to leave the studio after Life Class. Only Megan Lattismore remained, lacing her trainers in the corridor leading to the stairs. It was the first week back after half term. A row of pumpkins, relics from Halloween, carved by the girls in Year Seven, squatted on the windowsill. Had Jonah Trace been more observant, he might have perceived warnings in their toothy snarls. It is not appropriate to offer to walk to the tube station with a student. He ought to have known that. It is not appropriate to hold her hand, however briefly, when crossing the road. And it is not appropriate to ask her out for coffee, which he had already done, once before.
What he was about to do was inappropriater still.
We went to a branch of Costa – not the usual one, frequented by Lady Agatha girls on their way home, but a smaller one in a shopping complex ten minutes away. We talked, as we usually did, about football and science fiction, mostly the Alien films, since we knew we had these very much in common. We talked about music and art. His favourite artists were Lichtenstein and Pollock. Teaching, for him, was more of a temporary measure; what he really wanted to do was work in special effects, though he had a fuzzy idea of how this might be achieved. And although his flatmate was called Helen, and she was indeed a teacher of French and Spanish, she was not his girlfriend, and had never met his parents’
cat. He had decided to make up a girlfriend, he informed me, in order to protect himself from the advances of love-struck teens. He thought this was very amusing.
Jonah Trace was drinking a cappuccino. I had a hot chocolate, which he insisted on paying for.
‘Hot chocolate, that’s very French,’ he commented, rather inanely. ‘Your dad was French, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘When did he die, if you don’t mind talking about it?’
‘Ten years ago,’ I said. ‘It was an oyster. He loved oysters, my dad. Half a dozen, with lemon juice and rock salt, eaten in seconds. They reminded him of his childhood.’
I paused, then continued.
‘So one evening he was out with my mum, at some bistro in Paris, and he ordered oysters. But one of them must have been bad – wrongly stored, I guess, and infected with this rare bacterium called Vibrio … Vibrio vulnificus. It didn’t just make him sick. It got into his bloodstream, which can happen sometimes. He got these ulcers that opened up on his arms and legs, really terrifying … they were taking off bits of his flesh – debridement; I don’t know the English word – horrible – and then they started talking about amputating his right arm, and my mother was crying, all wild and irrational, and saying, “But he needs it for his work!”’
‘Jesus.’
‘My dad was ambidextrous, like I am, so maybe he’d have been able to use his left … but it was too late, by that point. He went into shock. And then he died. The whole thing took less than thirty-six hours; it didn’t feel real at all. We scattered his ashes on the Left Bank, by moonlight. Just me and my mum.’
All the time I’d been speaking I’d been looking down at the toggles of Jonah Trace’s duffel coat; now, I looked up at him. I hoped I’d got it right: the balance of gruesomeness and pathos. I’d chosen Obscure Illness on account of Jonah Trace’s obsession with horror films: as well as Alien, he was an aficionado of Cronenberg films like Shivers and The Fly. I thought he’d appreciate the gore, although I didn’t lay it on too strong. I thought he’d be moved.
‘You poor, poor thing,’ said Jonah Trace.
He really did have very good teeth: I pictured a sunlit, rural childhood, full of milk and Cornish butter.
‘I think you’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met.’
‘I don’t feel that brave,’ I said.
‘You’ve got low self-esteem,’ he said seriously. ‘It’s been hard for you. You haven’t had things easy. When you think of … I dunno, someone like Annabel Ingram, in the year above you. You know who her parents are, right?’
I shook my head.
‘Her dad’s Anton Ingram. He’s a cult producer. Made some incredible movies. And her mother was an actress, a really famous one, though I can’t think of her name just now. She’s probably loaded, Bel. She can do what she likes. She’s privileged.’
I listened to this with interest.
‘Bel’s cool,’ Jonah Trace went on. ‘But she’s never had to deal with anything much, has she? You, Nora … you’re a proper survivor. I know I shouldn’t say this, but … I like you. I really, really like you.’ He laid his hand – a sweaty and solid weight – over mine. He was waiting, I knew, for a response.
I could freeze this frame, for a second. The art assistant sitting opposite me, a film of milk foam on his upper lip. We could be a couple of characters in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Coffee-drinkers babbling in the background; the hum of machinery.
What did my face show, at that moment? Surprise, intrigue, disgust?
I had a choice – of what to say next – and I made it.
‘Jonah,’ I said. ‘I like you too.’
A couple of days later, he kissed me for the first time, as we sat on his duffel coat in a shady corner of Clapham Common. I had my back to a tree; he had his back to the park. Every now and again he would look around, with little, darting glances, for Lady Agatha girls, or people he knew. It was windy, but not too cold, not yet. They were building a bonfire for Guy Fawkes Night; a man was selling hot chestnuts, and their sticky-sweet scent travelled over to us in the wind. There was a woman walking a motley collection of dogs, one of them not unlike the Rat.
The art assistant leaned forwards, towards me. He drew – he traced – a fingertip around my birthmark.
‘My father always said that it looked like France. My mother said it looked like a starfish,’ I told him.
He was tentative about hugs and kisses, as well he might have been – and he continued to stress that he knew that what we were doing was totally against school policy. He was very aware of that. He’d never be able to work again, he kept saying, in my school, or in any other, if we got caught.
‘But we won’t,’ he said. ‘Not here.’
He pulled me into his arms (cheap aftershave warred with Marlboro Lights), and we embraced.
I stroked his gel-greased hair tenderly, thoughtfully.
With both hands.
Other kisses followed this, and other parks, and other cafés. For several weeks, it went on like this. But he was gone by Christmas, as you know. And Jonah Trace was right: he would never work in another school again.
11
They appointed a new art assistant to replace Jonah Trace. This time it was a woman. She arrived midway through January. Her name was Sharon Alexis; she had a no-nonsense way about her and wasn’t shy to tell us if our work was substandard (Annabel’s third painting, of a purplish flowering tree, was turning out all the better for her suggestions, I noticed), but to my knowledge she had no interest in looking down the front of our shirts. This was, without doubt, an improvement.
I was never sure exactly how many people knew what had happened to her predecessor. Those who paid close attention to such things might have noticed that a jacket of his remained behind the door to the office in the art studio. There was no mention of him in the Farewell section of the fortnightly newsletter. But the presence of Sharon Alexis made it clear that he was not merely on holiday. The staff, presumably, would have all been told. My form tutor, Sarah Cousins, knew. I had not said anything to anyone else, but I was pretty sure that Fred and Sangeeta and Perfect had guessed that something had happened. By the mathematical laws of gossip-diffusion, the chances were that each of them might have informed, say, two or three people, who in turn would have done, over time, the same.
Nobody asked me about the Trace Incident directly until Lori Dryden cornered me, a couple of weeks into the spring term, in the library. Normally to be found sitting on the bench in the corridor with a tin of Pringles and a copy of Heat, as though school were just one big dentist’s waiting room, Lori reminded me of a rotund fairy. Her main interest in life was in figuring out – from large, pore-exposing before-and-after shots – which celebrities had succumbed to plastic surgery. It was hard to tell whether she thought it was a virtue or a vice to reshape one’s body at will. Though she seemed derisive, she once told me she had a secret bank account, which would eventually pay for a nose job. No one diffused more gossip than Lori, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she sought me out.
‘Tell all,’ she commanded, having steered me out of the library and into the disabled toilets, where she made herself comfortable on the floor and motioned me onto the closed seat. It wasn’t my venue of choice, but a seasoned narrator will make do with whatever her surroundings.
I said, ‘I don’t really like a lot of people knowing. It makes me feel bad. Guilty, you know? Like I did something wrong.’
‘But you didn’t do anything wrong,’ she said. ‘Go on. A problem shared.’
So I told her, and it was – pretty much – what I had told Sarah Cousins in December, only for my form tutor I used a muted watercolour palette, while for Lori it was spray paint and glitter.
‘At first I thought he hated me. It was the way he talked to me, in Life Class. Like I was useless at art, which I’m … well, I’m not one of the best, but I’m not terrible either. It was, like, he’d made up his mind, he had to have g
irls he liked and disliked, like that was OK for a teacher.’
All that Lori was missing at this point was popcorn. She goggled up at me from the disinfected floor. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘And I suppose I started paying attention to him, in the way that I do with people if I get a vibe that they don’t like me. It’s like I want to make a special effort, if I can. So I noticed the way that he was in class, with the other girls. And with some of them … he’d look at them oddly. A bit twitchy, if you know what I mean. Like he wasn’t sure if he could control himself. I saw him touch a couple of them, a couple of times. Just on the arm, you know. The shoulder. Megan Lattismore …’
‘Massive tits,’ interjected Lori.
‘Massive,’ I agreed.
‘So the guy was a total perv,’ said Lori Dryden, keen to advance to the moral of the story.
‘But whatever I’d thought,’ I continued, ‘I never expected him to … choose me. Not after the way he’d spoken to me. Then I thought, you know, perhaps he picked on me because he didn’t really fancy me. Anyway … it was maybe three or four weeks later that I realised he always seemed to be leaving school to walk to the tube exactly when I was, even if it was different each time. He used to bring a moped to school, but he stopped. It was as if he was, like … waiting for me. He always seemed to be there, taking the same route to the station – you know how there’s like two different ways you can go – and he started talking to me. Which is totally fine, of course. He’s a teacher. But he never talked about school, just his life, and his girlfriend …’
‘Inappropriate,’ said Lori, flexing a wrist to inspect her gelled nails as she trotted out the word.
‘And he asked me about my life too. My dad. What I did on the weekends. Sort of harmless … but sort of nosy too. If you know what I mean. Oh – and complimenting me. On the way I looked. My hair, my eyes.’