Girl Unknown

by Karen Perry

  He sat down on the bed opposite her. ‘Promise you won’t tell?’

  Her eyes became alert. He liked the way she was watching him, concentrating while he told her about his mum’s affair, how it was with the father of this other kid in his class and how the whole school knew about it. That the teacher he’d bullied was the one who’d spilled the beans.

  ‘That’s awful!’ she said, when he’d finished. ‘It must have been so shit for you in school.’

  He had lain back and looked up at the ceiling. He wasn’t thinking about the stuff the other kids had said – the taunting and the abuse. He was thinking about the moment he’d stepped towards Miss Murphy, the shot of pure adrenalin rushing through his bloodstream as he put his hands up to her chest, knowing he was going to push her. ‘The other kid – Jack – he changed schools. But Mum and Dad left me where I was.’

  ‘Why?’ She shook her head, not understanding.

  Robbie had never told anyone why but he believed, privately, that it was his father’s way of punishing his mother. It was the way he did things, Robbie’s dad, conducting long, slow, patient campaigns. His mother liked to get things out in the open, have the row, clear the air and move on. But there was a quality of patience in his dad, stubbornness. He wasn’t going to let her sweep it under the carpet, what she had done. He’d make her pay for it with three more years of parent-teacher meetings, school plays, sports days, prize-giving ceremonies, end-of-year Masses. He’d make her go to them all. A three-year sentence was her punishment. Robbie knew that his dad loved him. But he also knew that his dad had blind spots and this was one of them. He couldn’t see how much it hurt Robbie, using him as a pawn just to get at his mother.

  He didn’t say so to Zoë, though. He was beginning to regret how much he had already told her. ‘They thought it would blow over,’ he said instead.

  Something in his voice must have sounded forlorn, even though he didn’t mean it to, because she reached over and took his wrist, giving it a squeeze.

  Steadily, they grew closer. In the weeks after she moved in, his life had seemed to rearrange itself around her, points in the day shifting around the axis of her presence, her company. His mother took him aside and told him that she was concerned about how much time he was spending with Zoë – she worried it was interfering with his studying. He had his Junior Certificate coming up and it was a Big Deal. How to explain to her that the exact opposite was true? His happiness made him not only diligent but benevolent too, prepared to think better of everyone. He believed then, as he does now, that those weeks were the happiest of his whole life.

  He would have forgiven her anything. Even the lies she had told them about Linda. So what if she had been adopted? He couldn’t see why his mum and dad got so worked up about it and after Zoë had disappeared with that dipshit, Chris, Robbie had lain awake in the dark, worrying that they had frightened Zoë away for good.

  Some time after midnight, her step had come on the stairs. The softest rap on his door and he sat bolt upright. ‘Come in,’ he whispered.

  He didn’t dare turn on a light. His curtains were open anyway and light thrown by the halogen street lamp cast the room in an orange glow.

  ‘Do you hate me?’ she had asked.

  He was out of bed by then, on his feet, standing within touching distance of her. Between them, a metre or so of charged air. Every cell in his body had seemed alive to her, to this, whatever this was.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he’d told her, his voice clear, not bothering to whisper. ‘I don’t care about any of it.’ He’d realized he was trembling.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I just don’t ever want you to run out on us again.’

  He’d said it, and he meant it.

  Quickly, she stepped towards him, her arms around his neck, his brain about to explode. Slowly, cautiously, he hardly dared to do it, he brought his hands up, put them to her back and clasped her to him. Her hair was hanging loose and his hands sank into it. He lowered his head and felt her hair brush against his nose – the ticklish softness of it. In the back of his mind, a niggling voice whispering: What does this mean? The same DNA ran through their bodies. These conflicting sensations – he was at once excited, and also at peace.

  The atmosphere in the house grew heavy. Not everyone was as easy about Zoë’s presence as he was. His mother, for one, seemed increasingly stressed, although he thought that might have something to do with work. There was tension between his parents: they were spending less and less time in each other’s company. As for Holly, there was no love lost between her and Zoë. That much was obvious.

  ‘She has it in for me,’ Zoë told him, well before the incident with Holly at the quarry – his mother’s hysterical overreaction.

  He tried to tell her not to worry, but his mum remained cool and Zoë began to spend more and more time out with her friends, and the creep of doubt came back to him, the feeling she was pulling away. He’d wondered had she a boyfriend but any time he asked she became coy and evasive. Some nights she didn’t come home and his mind went reeling in all directions. In school the following day he could hardly concentrate on anything. She’s my sister, he repeated in his head, like a mantra.

  His parents didn’t seem to know anything. They were so wrapped up in their own problems. They were fighting more and more, these days – not outright fights, but sniping and sulking. He felt the thinness of his family around him, like at any moment it might snap.

  Eventually he found out. And even though he had suspected there was a boyfriend, he felt a wave of revulsion and an almost overwhelming urge to grab her by the neck and shake her when he discovered it was Chris and that she was moving in with him.

  When Zoë left, Robbie had stood at the door watching her go, not speaking to his mum. Afterwards, back in his room, he had felt the house around him plunge into sudden quiet, and the anger roiled inside him. It wasn’t just that it was Chris – although the idea of them naked together made him want to retch – it was the deceit. That she had kept it from him all along. Fed him titbits of information without ever revealing much at all. He felt toyed with, used, as if he was something she could amuse herself with and discard when she’d grown bored. He imagined her telling Chris about him, about the things she’d told him, the two of them lolling around in bed, laughing at Robbie’s innocence, his foolishness. All those weeks when he’d thought there was something between him and Zoë – a closeness – and all the time she had been making a mockery of him. He thought of this and felt the rage inside him, filling his brain, like a swell of music he couldn’t contain. His cello case was lying open on the bed and he slammed it shut, then slammed it again with the flat of his hand. Over and over, he hit it, drawing his hand up over his head then bringing it down with as much force as he could muster. The pain shot up through his wrist and into his arm, yet still he kept at it, feeling past the pain, making himself numb to it.

  His rage came and went over the next few weeks. Sometimes it erupted in spurts of indignation and boiling fury. At others it was like a slow, seeping pool of acid in the pit of his stomach. It was exhausting being angry all the time. It left him mentally and physically drained. He could hardly stay awake at school. His cello seemed heavier than ever and he began to dread having to lug it up the stairs and into the hall for rehearsals. At home, when he was supposed to be studying for his exams, he would instead crawl into bed and try to sleep.

  Something had happened to him – he knew that. Something cataclysmic. She had come into their family as if wielding a gorilla bar, wrenching it open, changing its shape to accommodate her. But the shape that it became was skewed – sharp and angular. There were no curved surfaces. He no longer recognized it. He felt that when she had shoved the bar in, looking to gain purchase, it had anchored deep inside him, changing something within.

  Chance is everything. A set of circumstances coming together, merging at a particular time. Sometimes, when he is lying awake in his cell at night, Robbie plays the What If?
game in his mind. What if they had never gone to France? What if Zoë and Chris had not got engaged? He could go further back. What if he’d never known Zoë existed? But that’s not interesting to him. She’s so deeply embedded in him now, even though she’s dead – especially because she’s dead – that he cannot imagine his life without her in it.

  Months have passed, but still he can summon an image of her that day in her bikini standing by the pool, the way the water skimmed down her body in rivulets, the outline of her nipples beneath the wet fabric, another triangular outline of hair between her legs. He believes that was the moment when it had started to build inside him. Agitation like a drone in his brain. It kept building and growing and it didn’t stop, even after the debacle in the restaurant when Chris left and Zoë stayed. The thing inside him was like a stone that gave off an electronic hum, like a generator, or an electricity pylon. It just wouldn’t stop. It frightened him. He didn’t understand it, didn’t want it, couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through the night. He slipped away from the others, back to the room he shared with Holly. Exhaustion was clawing at him and he nearly cried for want of sleep.

  When he had crawled into bed that night, the whir was loud in his brain, only this time he recognized the trills and sweeps within it, the swaying movement of waves, the pitter-patter from droplets of sea-spray. How many times had he heard that music? How many hours had he spent rehearsing it? Debussy’s La Mer – a piece of music he had loved but now he felt infected by it, the score trickling out to occupy every pocket of his brain, soaking it. And yet it was not quite right, the sound slightly skewed, as if one of the instruments was out of tune, or one of the musicians fractionally out of rhythm. There was no pleasure to the music now, only annoyance and irritation. It scratched around the rim of his thoughts, and he turned over in bed, tried to find a cool spot on the pillow, but the music clung to his brain, the strains of the cello in the third movement like bows scratching across razor-wire.

  ‘She’s not even our real sister.’

  Holly’s voice had skimmed above the pool of his thoughts. He turned and saw her lying on her side, her bed tucked under the window. How long had she been lying there? The jittery third movement was in his head and he tried to silence it as he pulled himself up to a sitting position. ‘What?’

  ‘I found out yesterday, before the dinner. Dad had a DNA test done.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘It’s true. I saw the letter myself. She’s not our sister.’

  ‘You’re lying. He would have told us.’

  ‘He wanted to keep it to himself.’

  ‘Why?’

  What she said next was too outrageous to believe. Disgusted, he pulled back the covers and left the room.

  The house was quiet, empty, no sign of either of his parents. He felt the heat of the previous day continue to linger within the stillness of the rooms, a smell of burning in the air. The doors to the garden were open and he could see Zoë on the sun-lounger next to the pool, perched on one edge, her head balanced on one hand. Crazy, the hope that bloomed in his heart. If Holly was right about the DNA test, then that changed everything. On the other hand, could it be true what Holly had said about what she had witnessed? It was too repulsive to think about.

  She turned to look as he stepped out on to the terrace. Her phone was in her hand, like she’d been texting someone.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he told her.

  ‘Me neither,’ she said, and gestured for him to sit next to her. ‘It’s so lonely in there, in that bedroom, on my own.’

  He sat close to her, as close as he dared. It was still night, although it could not be long before dawn. He could feel the heat of her thigh next to his. She was smoking and he watched her put the cigarette to her lips, heard the soft puckering sound of her lips on the filter.

  ‘Have you heard from Chris?’ He nodded at her phone, and she answered no.

  ‘It’s over,’ she said, and he should have felt happy. It was what he wanted, after all. But instead he felt confused, dissatisfied, his brain still reeling from all that Holly had told him. He was so desperately tired and the music kept rising in his brain, then falling back again, little teasing eddies.

  ‘I knew it wouldn’t last,’ she told him. ‘Nothing ever does.’

  She sounded deflated, a little forlorn, and he put his arm around her shoulders, felt her bare skin soft beneath his fingertips.

  ‘Some things last,’ he said quietly.

  She turned her face to him. ‘You’re the only one, Robbie. The only one who understands.’

  His heart was beating madly in his chest. He felt his courage rise. If it was true what Holly had said, then it would be all right, wouldn’t it? Her skin was so soft beneath his touch. Slowly, he ran his fingers down her back.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, nerves in her laughter but she didn’t move away, didn’t tell him to stop.

  He wanted to tell her but didn’t dare speak the words. Instead he felt the nubs of her spine beneath his fingertips, the rounded curve of her buttocks on the hard plastic of the lounger.

  ‘Robbie …’ she said and he heard it all in her voice, the fear at what they were about to do, the undercurrent of excitement. It was like they were embarking on the greatest adventure of their lives and no one could know about it but the two of them. Their little secret. And as he leaned in to kiss her, he imagined he heard something – the rustle of leaves, the low breathing of a third party, someone watching them.

  ‘Don’t,’ he heard her say but he pressed his mouth against hers anyway, knowing she didn’t mean it, recognizing it as a last defence against what they both knew was inevitable.

  ‘Stop,’ she said and he felt her hand against his chest, pushing him away.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, and he saw the confusion on her brow, realized she was angry.

  ‘I thought …’

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘That you wanted it too.’

  Her expression was horrified. It left him cold.

  He opened his mouth to say something more but her phone buzzed on her lap and she glanced down at it.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ he asked, unable to help himself, although part of him screamed that he should ignore it, stay in the moment, see where it might take them. Here they were, on the cusp of something amazing, the start of the first true passion in either of their lives, and he had to go and ask about some stupid text message.

  ‘It’s Philippe,’ she said, getting to her feet.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know. From the restaurant?’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘There’s a party,’ she replied, reaching down for her bag, slotting her cigarettes back in.

  ‘You’re not going?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer, just stood up and smoothed down her skirt. She was still angry with him.

  ‘Are you going to fuck him?’ He surprised himself with the sharpness of his words.

  She stared at him, her forehead creasing into a frown. ‘I see,’ she said, frost coming into her tone. ‘Like that, is it?’

  He shrugged, pressed a finger to the corner of his eye.

  It didn’t matter what she said. He knew she was going off to fuck that guy. He was sure of it, and the sureness of that knowledge made the thrum in his head louder, the creaking strains of the string section sawing through his inner ear. And he was tired, so very, very tired. If he could only sleep …

  ‘What would you know of it anyway?’ she went on. ‘You’re just a child. What experience have you got?’

  ‘Plenty.’

  She laughed. ‘Please, don’t bother lying. It’s so obvious you’re a virgin. You’ve probably never even been touched by a girl.’

  ‘Bullshit. I’ve had plenty.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Name one.’

  ‘Claire Waters,’ he said – the first name that came into his head. Poor baldin
g, anorexic Claire, with her viola balanced on her bony little shoulder. Debussy in his head again, the relentless press of the sea.

  ‘And what did Claire Waters do for you?’ she asked, taunting him now. ‘Did she hold your little pecker? Did she take you in her mouth?’

  The thought of Claire’s spidery fingers gripped around him made him shivery and nauseous. That and the viciousness in Zoë’s voice fired up the symphony inside him, cymbals crashing in his head. He flung himself back against the headrest of the sun-lounger, forearms over his face so she couldn’t see how much she’d hurt him.

  ‘And as for that pathetic attempt just now …’

  ‘Don’t,’ he warned her.

  ‘Coming on to me. Your own sister.’

  ‘You’re not my sister,’ he said, petulance creeping in as he tried to cover up his humiliation.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not. I know you’re not.’

  He couldn’t make her out but he knew, somehow, that she was smiling. When she spoke again, it was in a low whisper, but he felt her voice coming close to him, knew that she was leaning in. ‘You thought one little piece of paper could clear the way for you, did you?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘All this time I thought you were being nice to me because you’re my brother but, actually, you’ve had a crush on me – fantasized about me.’ She said this in a kind of amazed voice, but there was detachment, too, as if it didn’t really affect her. It was not shock she was expressing but amusement. Everything was just a joke to her – even his love, delicate and shy, was something to be kicked around with hilarity.

  ‘That’s pretty sick,’ she whispered, her mouth close to his ear. ‘Sick and twisted. I think that’s even worse than what your dad did to me.’

  He would never forgive her for this. Never. Whatever she had meant to him before, however much he had loved her, it could never be the same between them again.