by Frances Vick
Soon Lisa started wearing the snake ring again, even after one of the ruby eyes fell out. But she didn’t speak about Tokki and Mo and Kirsty didn’t ask anything either. She only asked questions on the last day, that terrible last day when they’d argued, and Kirsty had run away and left Lisa alone in the park. If she hadn’t, Lisa would still be alive. It was Kirsty’s fault. All of it was her fault.
Four
March 1985
Kirsty didn’t notice that Lisa was crying until they were by the canal. It was only when she half turned to skip over something nasty, a weird skin-coloured, gelatinous thing that she squashed down on the path, that she saw Lisa’s wet, red face, her shuddering shoulders. She went to her, threaded one thin, hesitant arm around her waist and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’
Kirsty’s concern seemed to make Lisa sadder still. Soon she was crying too hard to talk, and they clung together under the bridge while her sobs carried on, her breath coming out in little spasmodic puffs. Kirsty found a cleanish bit of path, away from the dark, smelly water, and made her friend sit, patting her on her shuddering back, smoothing her soft hair. It was a long time before she could speak, and a long time before she made much sense.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ Lisa managed eventually. ‘About school. About not wanting to go to the same school as you.’
‘That was ages ago! I know you didn’t mean that!’ Kirsty answered warmly. ‘Don’t be daft!’
‘I’m sorry I was mean. I’ve been mean for ages.’ Her breathing was calm now, just the odd little twitch and hitch.
‘S’all right. You haven’t, but, you know, it’s all right—’
‘And we’ll live next door to each other, won’t we? Always?’ Lisa turned wet eyes on Kirsty. The mascara she’d taken to wearing was smudged and shiny clots stuck to her lashes, like mud on bicycle spokes. ‘And name our kids after each other, and… We’ll always be friends, won’t we?’
‘You’ll be living in Oman, though.’ Kirsty dared a joke. They hadn’t spoken about Harvest Festival or Tokki and Mohammed or any of that for months – after their humiliating fight on the sports field, there had been a careful, tacit detente.
Lisa answered flatly, ‘I’m not going to Oman. That was never going to happen. I made all that up.’
To hear the truth stated so baldly was unsettling. Something Very Bad must have happened for Lisa to abandon this fantasy and to be so honest about it.
‘What d’you mean, it’s not going to happen?’
‘Tokki thinks I’m silly.’ Her voice was flat with humiliation. ‘He told me he’d tell my mum if I carried on… chasing him.’
Huge, physical relief hit Kirsty hard. All the kissing and the cinema dates and the rituals and… it was all lies. She couldn’t help smiling.
‘Don’t laugh at me!’ Lisa said.
‘I’m not laughing. I’m sorry… I just, it’s… I’m happy, that’s all.’
‘Why’re you happy? I’m sad!’
But Kirsty couldn’t explain herself without spilling her own shame – that she was a little girl who didn’t want a boyfriend; that she was scared of growing up, that the idea of Lisa knowing anything about S.E.X. was kind of awful and frightening and it made her strangely sad. All she said was, ‘You don’t have to feel, like, embarrassed.’
Lisa stiffened, but Kirsty, drunk with relief, carried on, ‘And, well, maybe it’s not Tokki that’s really made you cry? Maybe it’s the making things up that made you sad?’ Lisa stayed stiff, silent, and Kirsty, stupidly taking that silence for acquiescence, carried on, warming further to her theme. ‘I mean, people know, you know? They know that you… tell stories and… when we go to secondary school, you have to be… well, if you get a bad reputation, you know, if people think you’re silly and you lie, then people will think that all the way until you’re sixteen and that would be awful, wouldn’t it?… So, I just think, maybe, it’s not a bad thing? Tokki saying this?’ She trailed off. There was a short silence.
‘You’re right.’ Lisa nodded, sighing a little melodramatically. ‘It wasn’t going to work out with Tokki anyway. We’re too different. And Bryan would kill him when he found out. He’s such a racialist.’
Bryan was Lisa’s brother, a wiry skinhead of sixteen who was already something of a local menace. Kirsty felt something in her harden. Bryan didn’t even live with Lisa anyway, Denise had thrown him out when he stole the gas money. He lived in one of those creepy houses by the train station with a bunch of other weirdos. Bryan held no sway with Lisa, so this star-crossed-lovers narrative she was working up, hot on the heels of one moment of actual honesty, was just silly. Not just silly, but infuriating, insulting! Lisa was already turning from fact and romancing herself back into her comforting fiction. The small window into truth her tears had opened, was closed.
‘People are so against mixed marriage in this country. Maybe we should elope? We could go to America? People are more open-minded there. When Bryan heard I was engaged he went mad! He tried to take my ring! That’s how one of the rubies fell out.’
Just a second before, Lisa had hinted Bryan didn’t know about this supposed engagement, and now she was saying he’d known for weeks! A month ago Lisa told her that one of the snake’s eyes fell out when she was in the bath, and now here she was claiming that Bryan had damaged it in a fit of racist violence. Did she hear herself? Kirsty felt a cold weariness, an adult fatigue. She got up and started to walk away.
‘Where’re you going?’ Lisa demanded.
‘I’m going home.’
‘I’m telling you about Tokki though!’ Lisa scrambled up. She sounded angry. Kirsty still didn’t turn round. ‘It’s important!’
‘It’s not true,’ Kirsty managed. To her surprise she was almost crying. ‘You’re just making things up again like you always do. And it doesn’t even make sense!’
‘Kirsty!’ Lisa’s voice was peremptory. ‘Wait!’
Just then a sudden wind blew through the tunnel, strong enough to dislodge the squashed jellyfish-type thing stuck to the walkway. It blew onto Kirsty’s school shoe. She knew what it was now, and it definitely was something to do with S.E.X. It was a – what were they called? A condemn? Cordon? Something like that, and, ew, just looking at it now and knowing what it was was… awful. She could see something leaking out of the top like pus, and it threw her into a sudden panic. She kicked her foot wildly, trying to dislodge it, giving a little whimper. Lisa was laughing at her now. Finally the thing unstuck, fell into the canal, and floated there like something dead.
‘I bet you don’t know what that is!’ Lisa crowed from beside her.
‘Yes I do,’ Kirsty muttered.
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s one of those condor things,’ Kirsty muttered.
Lisa’s laugh was sudden and very loud. ‘A condor!’
‘Well, whatever they’re called.’ Kirsty’s cheeks burned hot with humiliation.
‘CONDOR!’ Lisa shrieked. ‘God! You’re such a baby!’
Kirsty started to walk away again, just like her mum had taught her. Walk away, don’t get into a fight. Walk away. She made it as far as the gate to the park before she heard Lisa running behind her, telling her to wait up.
‘What time is it?’ Lisa asked.
‘Don’t know.’
‘I need to know the time! I’ve got a date.’
‘No you haven’t!’ Kirsty yelled, all Mum’s advice forgotten. ‘You haven’t! You’re such a liar! And your lies are stupid! Everyone think so and that’s why you don’t have any friends any more except me! You… you lie like a rug.’
Lisa dropped the pout, narrowed her eyes. ‘I’ve got lots of friends,’ she said quietly.
‘No you don’t! You’ve only got me because everyone thinks you’re stupid! And you are!’ Never in her life had Kirsty said anything like this to Lisa, or to anyone else for that matter. Throughout their whole friendship there had been a tacit agreement that, while they were equals, Lisa was the most equal.
Lisa’s eyes were going a bit red again. She looked like she was going to cry. Still, she tried to summon up a supercilious smile. ‘You’re jealous ’cause I’ve got a boyfriend and you haven’t.’
‘I’m not,’ Kirsty told her. ‘I’m really, really not. I don’t want a boyfriend, and if I did? It wouldn’t be someone like Tokki ’cause he’s weird and Mo is weird and… you made it all up anyway! That ring’s from Argos!’
‘It’s from OMAN!’
‘It’s from ARGOS!’ Kirsty screamed. ‘You probably bought it yourself and it’s ugly anyway and so are YOU!’
Lisa was weeping now, making noises that might have been words. The wind howled, blew rubbish around her ankles. Kirsty relented, came forward.
‘You’re not ugly. That was mean.’
Lisa snuffled, kept her face down.
‘But the other stuff? About the lying? I’m just saying what’s true, Lise. You’ll get into trouble if you carry on like this, you know you will. And what if something does happen – something bad, and nobody believes you ’cause you lie so much?’
Lisa was still crying. Kirsty took her arm. ‘Come on. Let’s go home.’
But Lisa didn’t want to go home. She swiped angrily at Kirsty’s hand, shook herself upright and shouted, ‘Fuck you!’
No-one said the f-word. Even Marc Maclean in their class didn’t say the f-word – and it was rumoured that he had Something Wrong with Him. The only person Kirsty had heard use the f-word was Bryan and he definitely Had Something Wrong with Him. She waited, her mouth a little O of shock, for her friend to blink, to realise that the f-word was Going Too Far.
But Lisa didn’t do that. They stood, metres apart, the air cooling, the long-threatened rain starting to fall. Then Lisa said it again, softly and with great malice, and Kirsty shouted, ‘I hate you!’ and she meant it. She hated Lisa’s silly face and her crooked teeth and her scary sex talk and her lies and her… She started to run away.
‘Kirsty!’ Lisa called from behind her. ‘You don’t hate me! We’re Best Friends Forever!’
But Kirsty, shocked, pained, full of rage, kept running and didn’t look back.
It was raining hard by the time she got home. Mud had oozed into her school shoes. It clung to her insteps and between her toes and she’d run so hard that her sides were aching – a cruel, crushing pain like a too-tight corset. In the walkway to her back door, she paused, bent over, bracing herself against the pebbledash, and retched. Mum was sure to ask questions, and it would be awful.
Fortunately for Kirsty, Sarah was too preoccupied to notice the state she was in. Baby Vicky (still a baby at three) had been a nightmare all day, the washing machine was still playing up, and she was still waiting, with a wailing Vicky clamped under one arm, for The Man to arrive to fix it. With every passing minute, she made mental leaps back and forth from distrust that The Man could fix the washing machine, to outright rage at his future failure. She was so distracted that she didn’t ask why Kirsty was so late, or notice how muddy her clothes were.
Kirsty had her bath, scrubbed herself, washed her hair three times and lay for a long time in her bed reading old Enid Blyton books until she felt better. Then she watched The Secret Garden while eating a salad cream sandwich. Later, as she was helping Mum load the (apparently fixed) washing machine, the phone rang. It was Denise, Lisa’s mum, which was strange, because Sarah and Denise didn’t really know each other well, and Denise didn’t even have a phone. She must be calling from a phone box or a neighbour’s house.
‘No, Kirsty got back here at normal time,’ Mum was saying, twisting the phone cord around one thin wrist, looking anxiously at the stuttering washing machine. ‘Maybe she’s at Bryan’s place? Kirsty? Did Lisa say anything about going to Bryan’s?’
‘No,’ Kirsty told her truthfully.
‘And she walked back with you, didn’t she? Through Marne Way?’
‘Yes,’ Kirsty lied.
‘Kids,’ Sarah said into the receiver. ‘They don’t think, do they? She’s probably at Bryan’s, isn’t she? I bet you she’ll be there. All right. All right. Bye-bye.’
* * *
It was two days later, on Sunday, and they were halfway through dinner when Denise called again, and Kirsty could tell from Mum’s face, from how hard her hand gripped the receiver, how her throat flushed red as if it was draining all the blood out of her face, that something was wrong. Lisa hadn’t come home all weekend. She wasn’t at her dad’s and Bryan hadn’t seen her. Denise was at the police station now. Could she talk to Kirsty?
Gingerly, Kirsty took the phone from Mum. Denise’s voice sounded far away, as if she was at the end of a draughty tunnel. It felt strange to talk to Lisa’s mum on the phone, because she’d barely spoken to Lisa’s mum in person. Kirsty very rarely went round to their house, and when she did Denise was almost always at work, and Stuart, Lisa’s stepdad, would be the person who let them in and then leave them to do whatever they wanted. There was something a bit frightening about that lack of supervision; maybe it was that that had led to Kirsty half-believing all those wild tales about the Omani lodgers…
Denise’s voice was whispery, hoarse, as if she’d been shouting. ‘You don’t know where she is, do you, love?’
‘No,’ Kirsty answered truthfully. ‘I last saw her in the park.’
‘The park?’ Mum broke in. ‘What were you doing in the park? You’re not meant to go through the park! I told you…’
Kirsty kept her eyes closed, but tears still spilled. ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
Denise again: ‘Where were you in the park? Kirsty? Tell me, no, listen, don’t tell me, tell…’ She took her mouth from the receiver. ‘What’s your name again? Shay? Detective Shay. Talk to him, will you? Tell him everything?’
The policeman was on the phone now. He asked to speak to her mum. Mum listened to him, her mouth set in a tight line, and when she put the phone down, she lit a cigarette, something she rarely did in front of the children.
‘You’ve got to go to the police station now. They’ll come and get you.’
They’d come and get her? Kirsty had read the phrase ‘frozen with fear’ before and always thought it was a bit silly. Now though, that’s exactly what she was.
‘Are they going to arrest me?’ she managed.
‘What? God no!’ Mum said. ‘No, they just want to ask you about the park. What were you doing walking through the park anyway? I told you never to walk through the park.’
‘It was only this once,’ Kirsty lied.
‘Why though? Was it Lisa’s idea?’
Kirsty nodded. ‘Yes.’ It was the truth.
‘And why didn’t she walk home with you?’
‘She said she had a date.’ This was the truth too – Lisa had said that, but it was a lie. It had to be, hadn’t it? Kirsty’s armpits began to trickle. Her chest shuddered.
Mum looked very serious. She pulled Kirsty closer, leaned into her face. ‘What did you say?’
‘She said she had a date,’ Kirsty whispered, ‘but I don’t think it was true.’
‘A date? Like meeting a boy?’
Kirsty nodded.
‘Shit.’ Mum never swore in front of the kids either, normally. Her face was pale.
‘I’m sorry—’
‘Never mind that, Kirsty. Are you sure about this? If you are you’ve got to tell the police, OK? Who was the boy she was meeting?’ Mum asked urgently.
‘I don’t know. She said she was going to marry Tokki? One of the lodgers? But then she said it was a lie and then she said it wasn’t and—’
‘Jesus Christ, Kirsty! Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Mum shouted. Baby Vicky, startled, began to wail. ‘This man? Tony?’
‘Tokki. He’s from Oman—’
‘Tokki. Tell the police all about him, all right? Everything she said, tell them!’ She was dialling Dad on the phone now, Dad who lived with his new girlfriend on the other side of town; Dad who they rarely saw any more, who Sarah only re
ferred to as ‘That waste of space’. Now she was telling him he had to come over right now and take care of the baby… ‘I don’t care, Dave, you’ve got to have her. Why? Because I’ve got to go to the police with Kirsty, that’s why!’
Later, Dad and baby Vicky stood at the window, watching as Kirsty and Mum climbed into the police car.
‘Nice trip! Nice trip!’ the baby bellowed, and hit at the window with one sticky fist.
Five
Nowadays, a ten-year-old girl would be questioned with their parent, or an appropriate adult. Nowadays, a child would be spoken to in a more informal setting, perhaps with a female officer, but this was 1985, there were no local female officers, and no-one thought to talk to Kirsty in her own home. In the brightly lit reception area, Detective Shay – a large, ruddy man – took her away. He explained to Mum that it would all be fine – ‘Just a few questions’ – and he smiled, gaze drifting down from Mum towards Kirsty, and almost, almost focusing on her face, but not quite. Mum didn’t ask to go with her. In the bright light, under the vague gaze of Detective Shay, her mum seemed to shrink. There was something awful about that – Mum was tough, no-nonsense, she didn’t-suffer-fools-gladly and gave-as-good-as-she-got, and here was some man treating her as if she was semi-invisible, as if she already had no say over Kirsty, no power at all. Mum hesitated, smiled, patted Kirsty on the head like a puppy and told her to be a good girl and she’d be waiting out here for her, OK?
Kirsty felt panic well up in her then, and she grabbed at her hand, not wanting to let go and trying not to cry.
‘I’m not that bad, am I?’ Detective Shay said. ‘I’m not that big and scary, am I? Eh? Look, look!’ He pushed up Kirsty’s chin, and did something inexpert with his face – pushing his nose to make it look as if it had made his tongue stick out, pulling one ear lobe to make the tongue go away. He must think she was a baby. Again his eyes didn’t focus on her. It was as if he was watching himself on a TV screen just over her head.