You Against Me

by Jenny Downham

  She shook her head at him, amazed. ‘I never knew that about you.’

  They pulled away from the bridge, down Lower Road, past the newsagent’s and Lidl and swung a right at the post office, then a sharp left. Space opened up quickly – fields, trees, hedgerows. Ellie opened the window. The verge was rich with wild flowers and swaying grass. She stuck her hand out and let the wind play with her fingers. Across the field a bird flew very fast in a straight line, then swooped down to the earth. This was great. Her and Tom off on an adventure. Like old times.

  As they got nearer to the coast, the sun began to look hazy and far away. Ellie knew it was something to do with the weight of the atmosphere at sea level. Advection, it was called, or sea mist. By the time they pulled into the car park at the harbour, it had substance to it and was hanging damp and heavy above them.

  They parked by the sea wall. Ellie had been to the harbour before, when it was busy with tourists – kids with crabbing lines and buckets, whole families trailing down through the car park to the beach. But today was a weekday and the weather was so dull now that the line between sky and sea was lost and the edges of the boats in the dock were blurred. Apart from a bloke fishing on the end of the jetty, the place was deserted. Even the souvenir shop had its hatches down.

  ‘So,’ Ellie said. ‘What are we doing here then?’

  Tom shrugged. ‘I like the boats. I’m not allowed into town and I’ve got a curfew, but I can come here whenever I want.’

  It was as if she heard it for the first time – what this meant to him, how hard this was. And she’d been all wrapped up in herself.

  ‘I’ve been here every day since they let me out. And you know what I do when I get here?’ He did a magician’s Duh-da! and pulled a tin from his pocket.

  ‘What is it?’

  He took out a small chunk of something wrapped in cellophane and danced it in front of his nose. ‘I’m trusting you with this, Ellie.’ He sniffed it. ‘Shame it’s only Rocky.’

  ‘Rocky?’

  ‘Moroccan. It’s a bit mild, but it’s all I could get hold of.’

  She knew he’d tried dope before – he’d been smoking it the night he brought everyone back. In the morning she’d buried the joint ends in the garden so their parents wouldn’t find out. But this whole chunk – soft and dark as fudge – was something else completely.

  She watched him lick the seam of a cigarette and strip the damp paper away. He didn’t even bother checking outside as he emptied the tobacco into a giant Rizla and began to carefully heat the dope over his lighter.

  ‘Watch and learn,’ he said.

  The car filled with sweet fumes. Ellie wondered if the smell would cling to her hair; if, when she got home, her dad would sniff and say, ‘Are you on drugs now, Eleanor?’

  Two women walked past in matching blue windcheaters and backpacks. They looked determined, solid. Ellie envied them.

  ‘Should you be doing this?’ she said. ‘I mean, what if the police give you a drugs test or something?’

  Tom sighed. ‘I have to have something to look forward to.’

  He crumbled the dope on top of the tobacco, then picked up the whole thing and rolled it with such infinite care it was mesmerizing. He twisted one end, then laid it on his knee while he tore off a small piece of cardboard from the Rizla packet and rolled it into a tube, which he stuck in the other end.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘A roach. It’s to stop your lip burning.’

  Her lip? Was he expecting her to have some?

  He lit the joint, inhaled hard and closed his eyes to exhale. ‘Every morning I look forward to this.’ He took several more drags, and just as she thought she’d got away with it, that he was going to keep it all for himself, he said, ‘So, now you’re officially hanging with your big brother, are you going to have a few draws?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You won’t even feel it. Just a little rush.’

  It felt awkward in her hand, as if it was a prop from a game. She had a sudden memory of her and Tom rolling leaves from a bush in the garden into a sheet of A4 and setting it alight. They must’ve been about six and eight years old and pretending to smoke cigars.

  She shot him a look. This was her brother. He always had been, always would be. She took a small drag and swilled the smoke around her mouth.

  ‘Take it right down,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it.’

  She tried to drag the smoke from her mouth into her lungs, but her throat tensed and she sent it straight back up again in a spluttering cough.

  Tom laughed. ‘You’re such a rookie. Come on, you’re not going to get stoned, you’ll feel warm and a bit happy. Don’t give up so easily.’

  Under his instruction, she took a deeper drag and tried to pull the smoke right down. Her lungs burned, her brain swung sideways and the smoke came hacking out again.

  Tom took the joint from her then, and inhaled ridiculously deeply, as if showing her how to do it properly. He blew the smoke out towards the windscreen. It bounced straight back at them in a pungent cloud.

  He smiled dreamily at her. ‘You’ve joined the dark side of the force now. You know that, don’t you?’

  She slunk down in her seat, embarrassed. She’d never in her whole life bunked school, smoked dope or kissed a boy whose name she didn’t know, and yet in the last few days, she’d done all these things. This was what it must be like to have control of your own life. This is what it would be like at university – she’d do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. No questions asked. No surveillance. Maybe she’d even get into smoking. It was quite nice after the initial rush.

  Tom looked happier than she’d seen him for days, sitting there with a joint in his hand. She smiled at him. He was her brother. They were bound.

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Did you like Karyn McKenzie once?’

  He turned to her, surprised. ‘Do we have to talk about this?’

  ‘I know you hate her now, but before all this happened, did you like her?’

  Tom opened his window, stretched his arm out and flexed his fingers. ‘She’s a slut.’

  ‘So, why did you invite her round?’

  ‘I didn’t – she followed me home.’

  ‘But you gave her a lift from the pub. You stood in the garden with your arm round her.’

  ‘You want this to be a love story?’

  ‘I just want to know.’

  He sighed. ‘You saw what she was wearing. You think I should go to jail for saying yes when she offered herself to me on a plate?’

  ‘Did you send her threatening texts when she said she was going to the police?’

  He looked at her sharply. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Is that why they didn’t give you bail straight away? Dad said it was the rubbish lawyer, but it wasn’t, was it?’

  Tom licked the edge of his mouth with his tongue. ‘When you saw her the next morning, when she came downstairs and you were in the kitchen, what did she say to you?’

  This again. She hated this. This was like the police station. ‘I already told you: she asked me for some orange juice and directions back into town.’

  He nodded. ‘Exactly. She didn’t look hassled or anything, did she? She wasn’t crying and she didn’t say anything about being attacked, did she? She drank a glass of juice and left the house and went home. She didn’t even bother going to the cops for hours.’ He tossed the joint end out of the car and shut his window. He put the Rizla packet and the dope back in the tin. ‘I sent her texts because she was about to stitch me up.’

  This is what grief is like, Ellie thought. It had a shape in her mouth like an O.

  ‘If I said I didn’t want to be your witness, what would you do?’

  He looked genuinely alarmed. ‘You can’t bail out on me!’

  ‘I’m scared of going to court.’

  ‘We’re all fucking scared!’

  ‘But they’ll ask me questions
and what if I get it wrong?’

  ‘How hard can it be? Just say you don’t know anything.’

  ‘I did tell you Karyn was only fifteen though.’

  ‘And I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘We had a whole conversation about it on the landing.’

  ‘So now you want me to go to jail because I’m hard of hearing?’

  She turned to him, her cheeks burning. ‘How do you know she wanted you? How do you really know? She was so drunk she couldn’t even walk.’

  He leaned towards her, his face only centimetres from hers. He spoke very quietly. ‘If you pull out, the cops will think I’m guilty.’

  She shook her head, heart thumping. ‘They won’t.’

  ‘They’ll haul you down the station and ask you tons of questions. Then they’ll get a witness order and force you to court, whether you want to go or not. They’ll put you in the witness box and cross-examine you for hours. They’ll think it’s really suspicious that my own sister can’t be bothered to defend me.’

  Ellie blinked. She knew what would happen next. He’d withdraw all the warmth and replace it with coldness. It would be brutal, like the sun going in and sheet ice covering the sky. It had always been this way with Tom.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘It’s ironic, I actually thought you were old enough to hang out with. But you’re worse than Dad.’

  She’d ruined it between them now and it had been so perfect.

  ‘Get out of the car.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘I’m meeting Freddie.’

  ‘Can you take me home first?’

  ‘Mum’s there. You want her to know you’re not in school?’

  ‘So, what will I do all day?’

  ‘I don’t know, it was your idea to bunk. Why are you going on at me all the time? There’s a bus back into town.’

  So, she was stuck, the same as last week. Only then she’d had her anger and the river and the gatecrasher, and today she was dizzy from the dope and was being dumped in the middle of the harbour in a mist.

  She closed her eyes, tried to get back to the anger. She wanted something to hold on to.

  ‘Do you have any money?’ she said.

  He sighed, reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins, counted out five pounds and handed them to her. ‘You’ve got to trust me, Ellie.’ His face was still and his voice was very certain. ‘I mean it.’

  And then she got out of the car.

  Sixteen

  ‘Simple things have great weight,’ Dex said as he laid out butter, milk and flour on the work surface in front of Mikey. ‘You ever think how these three ingredients make a basic white sauce, but once you have that, you can make so many other things? Mornay, for instance, or soubise.’

  This was what Mikey liked about cooking – you started with something simple and you added another simple thing to it and you ended up with something new and complicated. Alchemy, Dex called it, which was something to do with magic if you were French.

  Dex had asked him to make a béchamel sauce for the lasagne. It was Mikey’s favourite meal – all that pasta and cheese, and he knew Dex rated his sauce. He’d even swapped jobs with him and was now scrubbing out baking trays at the sink.

  ‘I made lasagne for my mum once,’ he told Dex. ‘You should have seen her face.’

  ‘She was proud?’

  ‘She was gobsmacked. She didn’t know I could do stuff like that.’

  ‘You have a gift, Mikey. It’s what I’m always saying.’

  Mikey put butter in a pan and watched it soften, shifted it about with a wooden spoon for a bit, then sieved in an equal weight of flour and stirred. It formed into a greasy ball, slippery and hot in the pan. He added hot milk, slowly moistening the roux with it.

  It was great not to have to worry about anything else but what was happening on the stove. Mikey knew that a good roux should be stiff and pull away from the sides of the pan, that an onion stuck with clove added flavour to the milk. Simple things he’d discovered.

  ‘I think one day you will be a saucier,’ Dex said. ‘You know this is the highest position of the station cooks?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to make sauces all the time. I want to be a sous-chef, in charge of the whole meal from beginning to end.’

  ‘Well, you must work hard then. You must practise and listen well and when the time comes, the food will tell you what your specialism is.’

  Mikey laughed, because the idea of food telling him anything was amazing and ridiculous all at once. Dex chuckled too. It was great standing there together laughing.

  Jacko came in then. He was carrying a pile of salad boxes and gave them both a puzzled look. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Mikey is perfecting the art of the roux,’ Dex said, and he waved the dishwashing brush at Jacko like a wand. ‘He is whisking and whisking and ignoring the ache in his hand.’

  ‘Well, it’s really busy out there, you know.’

  ‘We know,’ Dex laughed, ‘which is why we are hiding in here.’

  Jacko banged the boxes down. ‘So, am I supposed to chop these lettuces all by myself?’

  All morning Jacko had been edgy and Mikey knew it was his fault. He’d been late for work every day last week and Jacko had covered for him. Today, he’d even lent him the car. Mikey had thanked him, promised him a game of pool and a pint after their shift, but maybe that wasn’t enough.

  ‘Come and have a go, Jacko,’ he said. ‘This needs attention for a while. You do the whisking, I’ll do the lettuce if you like.’

  ‘No, ta.’

  ‘You might love it.’

  ‘Why would I? I don’t want to be a chef.’

  Dex frowned. ‘What finer ambition is there?’

  ‘Plenty. There’s a whole world out there.’

  ‘And yet you’re still here, the longest-serving kitchen assistant we ever had.’

  Mikey watched Jacko stumble for words. He knew he’d gone to the job centre loads of times in an effort to get away from the pub. He hated peeling and chopping vegetables, said the smell of cooking got under his skin. But all he’d been offered was a job stacking shelves, and the woman at the job centre had said there was competition even for that. Mikey felt sorry for Jacko suddenly, and upset to see him blushing.

  ‘Maybe you’ll meet a girl,’ Mikey said, ‘and she’ll look after you.’

  It was meant to be kind. It was meant to make Jacko smile, so that everything could be all right between them again, but the look Jacko shot him said he hadn’t taken it that way.

  ‘Talking about yourself, Mikey?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘’Cos you always meet plenty of girls, don’t you?’

  Mikey stopped whisking. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Jacko stepped back, hands raised as if Mikey was about to shoot him with the whisk. ‘Just saying we had a plan, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘And you asked me to help you. But then you let a girl get in the way.’

  ‘It’s not quite that simple, is it?’

  Jacko shrugged. ‘She didn’t tell you anything useful and now you’ve let another five days go by. She’s not the solution, Mikey. It seems pretty simple to me.’

  ‘I was busy last week.’ Mikey spoke very slowly, so Jacko would remember his mum had been AWOL and he’d had to cope with Holly and Karyn alone. ‘And I had a meeting this morning, remember? Or maybe you think I should’ve gone round his house before the meeting and kicked his face off in front of his parents?’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  ‘Are you nuts?’

  ‘Boys, boys!’ Dex said. ‘Look, now you’ve brought the boss in with your noise.’

  Sue stood there, arms folded, looking the three of them up and down. ‘I need a waiter.’

  ‘And every day I tell you, you’re looking at chefs,’ Dex told her.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I am looking at one chef, on
e kitchen assistant and one dishwasher.’ She took a step in and tapped Mikey on the shoulder. ‘And I think you know which of those three you are.’

  Mikey shook his head at her. ‘I’ll be a rubbish waiter.’

  ‘You’ll get tips.’

  ‘I’ll drop stuff.’

  ‘I’ve got a shirt that’ll fit you and those trousers will have to do.’

  ‘But I’m in the middle of making a sauce.’

  ‘I’ll do you a trade. You do some waiting and I’ll turn a blind eye to your time-keeping.’

  Jacko laughed as Mikey snatched the shirt and went off to change in the toilets. Sue hovered outside the door waiting for him, then took him into the bar and got him a name badge.

  ‘You’re called Tyler today,’ she told him.

  There were loads of people in the bar area – tourists disappointed with the weather and holed up in caravans and chalets; this would be their day’s main event. One couple had wet hair from the mist, sitting together like a pair of seals, sleek heads bent over the menu. Such ordinary clean lives. It made Mikey feel entirely crap.

  He wondered about his mum, whether she was awake yet, if Karyn had managed to sober her up, if Holly was enjoying school. He envied his little sister suddenly – all that glitter and finger paint and sitting about with your mates.

  Sue took him with her as she went to greet a family loitering in the doorway. ‘Table for four, is it? Follow me, please.’

  She led them to the back of the eating area – mum, dad, a couple of kids. Mikey trailed behind. He wondered what it would be like to be their son, their big boy, coming out with them for his lunch. But the fantasy only lasted until they’d sat down, when Sue turned to him and said, ‘I’m only going to say this once, so listen up.’

  She gave them the speech about how they should help themselves from the starter bar, then go up to the carvery to get their main course and veg. ‘Tyler will look after you,’ she told them. ‘He’ll get you drinks and desserts and anything else you need.’

  Mikey stood there watching them settle themselves down. They completely ignored him. The little kids fought over the free pencils and drawing booklet, the woman folded their wet coats onto the backs of their chairs and the bloke kept checking his mobile. Mikey smiled at the woman, wanted her to see he knew what an idiot her husband was. He didn’t want to be there, it was obvious. The woman smiled back. ‘What’s at the starter bar?’ she said.