Drowning Rose

by Marika Cobbold

  He shrugged and it was he who turned red. It was two stops to LAGs and three to the boys’ school. As I got off I turned and gave him a little wave. ‘See you,’ I said. I felt really light as I jumped down on to the verge. Not like me at all.

  Then it was the First Night party and the boys had smuggled in some raw spirit from the biology lab, adding it to the fruit punch.

  Julian was sick in the bushes at the far end of the car park and because I had followed him out I was there to help him clean up. That was when he kissed me. It was a bit gross because he tasted of sick but that wasn’t important. He’d kissed me; that was what was important. I walked with him to the minibus and as he was about to board I said, ‘If you want more you just have to ask.’

  It was easy to keep Julian and me a secret from the princesses because it simply would not occur to them in a million years that someone like him would be interested in someone like me. It was hilarious, actually. I would find them in one of their usual huddles talking all about the big romance between Rose and Julian. Only there wasn’t one.

  That didn’t stop them banging on about it, though, especially not Eliza. She herself fancied Julian’s friend David but actually she seemed far more interested in matching up Rose with Julian, analysing every look or word from the poor boy. My poor boy. Of course, Portia, being his sister, was the guru. She pronounced on her brother’s state of mind and how close he was to making a move. Rose simpered prettily and Eliza came up with suggestions as how to speed things up, typical Eliza ideas: ‘How about if you go riding and your horse bolts just as he walks past . . . Why don’t you go walking and when you get to LABs you fall and pretend to have hurt your ankle . . .’

  So although it was kind of funny it was also getting quite annoying. I wasn’t angry with Eliza, though, as obviously she couldn’t know that I liked him. But enough was enough. I decided I would have to talk to her. Tell her to stop trying to push Rose on Julian.

  We, Julian and I, did it in the meadowy bit behind the disused stables. I had told him to bring a picnic. I’d worked out exactly how it was going to be the first time. It would be perfect, like a dream or a film. We’d be sitting on a rug and he’d kneel in front of me and unpack the basket. There would be strawberries, of course, and cheese and bread and maybe some cold chicken and hardboiled eggs. No, maybe not the eggs. And some white wine. I would have loved it to be champagne but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. And napkins of course, real ones, not paper.

  In the event he arrived holding a rumpled paper bag. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, pulling my outstretched legs up under me.

  He grinned. ‘You said you wanted me to bring something to eat.’ He opened the bag and flopped down next to me opening the bag. ‘Danish. I got two.’ He gave me a look as if expecting praise.

  I had a split second to decide how I wanted the afternoon to go. I could smile sweetly and stretch back down on the rug or I could complain. If I complained he’d leave. I thought of Miss Philips and Miss Gower forever preaching about the importance of us ‘gals’ valuing ourselves and of not selling ourselves cheap. Well, that was fine for the princesses, for Portia with her endless honey-coloured legs and her easy sense of entitlement. And for quirky-cute Eliza with her auburn curls and showy artistic talent. And it was absolutely fine for Rose, who looked like a Snow White who’d just lost her dwarfs. But for a me, when it came to someone like Julian, it was selling myself cheap or not at all.

  ‘What?’ Julian was looking at me from under that dark fringe. God, I loved his hair, loved the way it curled behind his ears and into the nape of his tanned neck.

  ‘Oh nothing,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Yeah, of course it is.’ He reached out and then his hand pushed down inside my blouse, grabbing at my left breast. He was tweaking my nipple like it was the on button on my radio and it hurt. I tried not to but I couldn’t help flinching.

  ‘What?’ he said again but now his gaze was cloudy under half-closed lids.

  ‘What about our . . . our picnic?’ I felt close to tears suddenly. If we were actors we’d be in different films.

  His gaze cleared and he frowned. Then he said, ‘Sure. If you’re hungry?’ He picked up the crumpled greasy bag and chucked it in my lap. ‘Here.’

  I wanted to get up and run away. ‘C’mon. Have one,’ he said, and now his voice and his eyes were kind. ‘They’re really nice. And you don’t need to worry about calories. I like you the way you are.’

  He leant forward and put his hand inside the bag, pulling out one of the pastries and biting into it with his even white teeth. I loved his teeth too. He had a gap – like Lauren Hutton – between his two front ones. He held the Danish out to me and I closed my lips around the same crumbling buttery sweetness as his lips had just embraced.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said giving him a hazy smile. ‘Lovely.’ I looked him straight in the eyes and stuck out the tip of my tongue and licked the crumbs off my lips the way they did in films, then, using my finger, I smoothed away the crumbs from his, that were dry and a little cracked but perfect just the same. I finished by licking the crumbs off my finger all the way, keeping my gaze on his. Everything changed in that moment. Suddenly I was the giver and he was the grateful receiver. I was the princess and he was my servant as I unbuttoned my shirt and slipped out of my skirt.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ he said, and his voice had gone husky as if he’d got something caught in his throat.

  In my moment of victory I felt a second’s impatience. Did he ever say anything over and above the banal and the expected? I shrugged the thought away. I loved him; that was all that mattered.

  He pulled his shirt off over his head. His torso was spare and tanned and smooth apart from the armpits and a line of soft fuzz running down from his belly button. I wanted to reach out and push my hand down the front of his boxer shorts but I stayed where I was, quite still, playing at being a goddess, waiting.

  ‘I really like you,’ he said, and that hazy, stoned look had returned to his beautiful eyes.

  I had power. I could get up and leave him there, shirtless and excited. Or I could give him what he most wanted in the world right now and that, miraculously, was me.

  He groaned and lunged forward and all at once I was sprawled on the rug with him on top of me.

  It was over in seconds. I was disappointed but only for a moment because he stayed in my arms, his face nuzzled against my neck, and he was trembling. I stroked his naked back that was damp with sweat and I started murmuring all kinds of things that made me blush when I thought about them afterwards. Above my head a swallow circled, then a second one joined. They warbled to each other and I smiled up at the sky.

  I don’t know for how long we lay like that but my legs were beginning to hurt. I didn’t mind, though. I could have stayed like that with him on top of me, inside me, for ever. But then he pulled out and he raised himself in a one-armed push-up as he pulled his pants and trousers up before rolling off and on to his back. I could feel him trembling again and I was about to pull him towards me when I realised that he was laughing.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What?’ And I giggled because I expected he was laughing with happiness.

  But he kept on laughing and it seemed like an ugly sound all of a sudden, like the rattle of the magpie that had driven away the swallows a few minutes earlier.

  ‘What?’ I asked again, my voice turning shrill. ‘What’s funny?

  ‘There,’ he pointed at my left breast. He was giggling now.

  My mouth had filled up with saliva and I could barely swallow as I looked down. My left breast and my right looked normal. Smallish but nicely rounded with average-sized nipples.

  ‘There,’ he pointed again and then I saw it, a curly red hair.

  I brushed at it. ‘It’s from my head,’ I said, my voice tight. ‘It’s just a hair from my head.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It just looks as if it’s growing from your tits.’

  Twenty-three


  Eliza

  I rose from the Underground, emerging into the twilight of the high street. It was Friday night and I had been to the ballet with Beatrice and our friend Katherine. My mind was still on poor doomed Giselle, who loved not wisely but too well and ended up a woodland spirit for her troubles. I had wept, as I always did, right through the bit where, turned mad by her lover’s betrayal, she danced herself to death in front of him and I had wept anew when that feckless lover pirouetted before the avenging Queen of the Willies, begging forgiveness, clutching his own breaking heart. As I rode home on the Tube, the music filling my head, I rewrote the ending, changing it to one where Giselle is released from the spell and lives happily ever after with her remorseful prince. It didn’t matter how many times I saw Giselle; I still always hoped that was how it would turn out. It was the same with Romeo and Juliet. Each and every time I sat there hoping, praying that the Friar’s messenger would reach Romeo in time. I never could figure out how that worked: what spell a story cast to make us think that each time it played out was the first, and that there might, after all, be a different, happier ending.

  I stepped out on to the corner of the high street and turned left without looking, so I didn’t notice the long jeans-clad legs stretched out on the pavement until I stumbled over them. I steadied myself and looked down. The legs belonged to a teenage girl slumped across the doorway of an art gallery, a grubby rucksack and a can of Red Bull next to her. I muttered an apology, stepping round. She didn’t reply and I was about to walk on when it struck me she might not be stoned or drunk, but unwell, in need of medical attention. I might walk on by only to wake in the morning to the news, no doubt delivered by Archie, that a young woman had been found dead in the comfortable heart of the Village. There would be the comments by the police, made more in sorrow than in anger, that it appeared that the poor young girl had been lying there dead, or at the very least dying, and no one did anything to help. In fact one person, a woman, early middle age, grey dress, brownish reddish hair, actually stepped right over her yet did not bother to check if the girl needed assistance . . .

  So what could I do but kneel down by the slumped figure and put my hand, lightly, on the sleeve of her arm. The girl gave me a hazy look under half-closed eyelids. I asked her if she was all right. Which was a pretty stupid question when directed to someone slumped in a doorway in the middle of the night. ‘I mean, do you need help? Are you sick?’

  The girl didn’t reply.

  ‘Are you hurt? Shall I call an ambulance?’

  The girl’s eyes snapped wide open. ‘No. I’m fine.’

  I wanted to walk away. But she didn’t look fine. She didn’t smell fine either.

  ‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ I said. I was about to get back on to my feet when my wrist was grabbed by a grubby hand. ‘I said no. If you do I’ll only walk away.’ All at once she was crying. ‘I’m all right,’ she said again, in between sobs.

  ‘I can help you to get home?’

  ‘No. I had a fight with my boyfriend. He threw me out.’

  ‘Have you nowhere else to go? What about your parents? How old are you?’

  The expression in her eyes as she looked back at me said I was just as clueless as she had expected me to be. ‘Seventeen. And that was my home.’

  ‘Oh.’ I shifted my weight from one knee to the other. ‘What about your parents?’ I asked again. ‘Are they not around?’

  ‘Ha,’ she said. ‘Ha’, and nothing more.

  ‘How about a hostel? We can call the police and ask them where the nearest hostel is?’

  ‘Just go away, will you. Leave me alone. Go home.’ The word ‘home’ sounded like a reproach. As well it might. I had a home. She didn’t. I didn’t deserve mine. I expect she didn’t deserve not to have one. I got to my feet and then I reached down and took her by the wrist. ‘Come on. You can stay the night with me and then we’ll see what to do in the morning.’

  I regretted it the moment I had said it. But it was too late to take it back. The girl was looking at me now, and she was actually smiling. The smile made her look about twelve. ‘You mean that?’

  I nodded. ‘Absolutely. I live just around the corner.’ I had to force the words from my mouth because by now all I wanted to do was run off. I mean, what was I thinking of, asking a stranger into my home at night?

  ‘Nice place,’ the girl said. She had dropped the rucksack on the hall floor and was looking around her.

  ‘I’m very lucky. It’s a bit of a mess still, though. The builders have only just finished.’ I switched the light on and smiled at her. ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Chloe,’ the girl said.

  ‘I’m Eliza. Would you like something to eat?’

  I scrambled some eggs as Chloe slumped on the kitchen chair. It felt quite normal; the kind of thing people did, scrambling eggs for a monosyllabic teenager in the middle of the night. In fact it felt great. I thought of the J.B. Priestley play, An Inspector Calls. I thought about no man being an island. I thought of the Big Society. The more I thought, as I scrambled the eggs, the more pleased I felt.

  ‘What do you do?’ Chloe asked me as I put the eggs and toast in front of her.

  I joined her at the table. ‘I’m a ceramic restorer.’

  ‘Right. What about your husband?’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  Chloe looked around her, chewing on her food. ‘Right,’ she said again. ‘Boyfriend?’

  I knew the answer should be ‘that’s personal’ but it would sound rude. I just shook my head.

  ‘So you live here alone.’

  What was I doing telling her these things? I shouldn’t have said anything. I most certainly shouldn’t have told her I lived alone. I wondered if it were too late to invent a housemate. A man. A man who played rugby. Or practised karate. I could slip it in. I could look at my watch and say, ‘Steve should be home from karate any minute now. I’m so proud of him now he’s a black belt.’ Chloe interrupted my thoughts. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

  I got to my feet. ‘Of course. Sorry. What would you like?’

  ‘Orange juice or milk or something like that?’

  I hurried across to the fridge, feeling shabby and cross with myself. I was being prejudiced, judgemental, instantly assuming that this poor girl was up to no good just because she was on the streets. I was being the kind of person who was lampooned in television satire and possibly even beheaded come the revolution. ‘Here you are.’ I smiled as I handed her a large glass of orange juice.

  ‘Thanks,’ she smiled back and her pale drawn features lifted, making her almost pretty. Her gaze was clearer too. If she had been stoned, she was coming down. ‘You’re pretty amazing, asking me in like this?’

  I felt ridiculously pleased. ‘Oh, I’m only doing what anyone would have done.’

  ‘I’ve been on the streets before. This is the first time anyone’s bothered.’

  ‘Really. That’s too bad.’ I was beginning to warm to this helping business. ‘Well, if one’s lucky enough to have a lovely home,’ I gesticulated round the kitchen. I was pleased with how it had turned out. The walls were the colour of crème anglaise (not custard, as I had explained to Uncle Ian, custard being too yellow, but the soft sunshine-on-cream colour of its French cousin) and the wooden kitchen units painted in two shades of fresh green that might have clashed as one contained yellow pigment and the other blue, but somehow didn’t.

  ‘It’s really pretty. Colourful,’ Chloe said.

  This was cosy, the two of us at the kitchen table talking interior decor.

  I lent Chloe a pair of pyjamas and made sure she had a glass of water by her bedside. Once I was in bed myself I lay staring at the birds flying free across the tattered yellow wallpaper of my room and I felt happy. Who knows what might have happened to that girl out there on the streets, if it hadn’t been for me.

  A little later I got out of bed and walked up to the door, turning the key in the lock. Just in case. After a
few minutes I got up once more and unlocked it.

  Twenty-four

  I was woken by the insistent ringing of the doorbell. I checked the time. It was half past six but somehow I still felt perky. Half past six, I thought, glancing out of the window, and a sunny day in North London. The doorbell rang again; two short bursts and one long one, the kind where the ringer had a finger pressed hard against the bell and a pissed-off look on his or her face. I threw on my dressing-gown and hurried downstairs. I was halfway down when I remembered the guest in my spare room. The din must have woken her but being a teenager she had most probably just rolled over and gone back to sleep. I’d check on her in a moment, perhaps even bring her a cup of tea in bed. She was most likely not used to being spoilt.

  Bang bang bang!

  ‘Who is it?’ I shouted through the door.

  ‘It’s Archie from Number 4.’

  ‘It’s six thirty in the morning, Archie,’ I said as I opened up.

  ‘You take a look outside.’ He flung his arm out, gesticulating towards his house and the two either side.

  I looked. It took me a moment to take it in but then I saw it, the graffiti scrawls across the doors and brickwork. I turned back to him. ‘Goodness.’ I was about to step outside to check the damage done to my own place when Archie held his hand up in a policeman’s stop. ‘Nothing on yours.’ He looked severe. ‘For obvious reasons.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I pulled the dressing-gown closer round my neck. Spring was dragging its heels and it was a chilly morning.

  ‘Seeing it’s the handiwork of that young guest of yours? I saw you both coming back last night as I was closing my shutters.’

  Again? I thought. That man was always closing his shutters. I frowned at him, disappointed by his attitude. ‘Why on earth should that,’ it was my turn to gesticulate, ‘be her handiwork? Did you see her do it? Anyway, even if she had managed to sneak out without me noticing she wouldn’t have been able to get back in without a key. The poor girl is asleep upstairs. Exhausted, no doubt, from having been thrown out on the streets by an abusive boyfriend.’ My voice was rising with my mounting outrage. What chance did young people like Chloe have when everywhere they went they were treated with suspicion? I myself had been guilty of it last night. Why should misfortune make someone more prone to bad behaviour, I wanted to know.