He washed the fish under the tap, then gave it to Dex, who turned it belly up on the chopping board and slit it with a knife from its tail towards its head. Then it was blood and guts all over the place as Dex spread the fish open with his fingers and dragged the entrails out. They were bulbous and glistening as he flung them into the open bin, strangely pastel-coloured too – cream, yellow and pink, like something that belonged to summer. Dex washed the fish again, scooping his thumb up and down its insides, getting rid of the blood along its ribs and backbone and nudging off the last of the scales.
‘We’ll keep the head,’ he said. ‘Some fish you cut off behind the gills, but not this one.’
The fish looked up at them coldly as Dex explained how its eyes should be bright and round, not dehydrated or sunken. Mikey half expected it to blink, or to open its mouth and complain about having all its insides showing and nowhere to hide. Dex slapped it on the draining board and picked up the next one from a bucket at their feet.
‘These aren’t for the pub,’ he said, ‘but for me and Sue later – a little peace offering from you, Mikey. Tell her you thought of it all by yourself and tell her you’re sorry.’ He winked at Mikey as he handed it over. ‘Here you are, keep going.’
Mikey held it at the bottom of the sink and scraped away with the spoon, the water numbing his fingers. Dex stood at his shoulder, encouraging him, explaining how a bit of thyme, a bay leaf, some lemon and salt could turn the fish into a meal. It reminded Mikey of the time he’d dug up potatoes at primary school – his surprise at discovering chips came from the ground and were once covered in dirt. Here he was, all these years later, his fingers sticky with fish scales, still learning about food.
‘Is there anything you don’t know, Dex?’
‘Not much.’
They grinned at each other and Mikey wondered what it would be like to have Dex as a dad – someone to be on your side, someone to show you stuff and advise you when you didn’t have a clue. He wouldn’t want Sue as a mum though. Here she was again, slamming into the kitchen – second time this morning and still furious.
‘What are you doing in here?’ she snapped, pointing a finger at Mikey.
‘Gutting fish.’
‘When I’ve got toilets that need cleaning and a bar about to open?’
‘My fault,’ Dex said. ‘The lad wanted to prepare a feast for you, Sue, to show you how sorry he is.’
She scowled at them both, as if it was bound to be a trick.
‘I encouraged him,’ Dex told her. ‘I thought it showed good heart.’
A shadow of a smile, which she quickly covered with a frown as she turned to Mikey. ‘I hope you know you’re only in a job because of my husband?’
Mikey nodded.
‘And you know if you muck me around again, I’ll fire you?’
He nodded again and she went for it, telling him how rude and ungrateful he was, how the previous day had been their busiest of the season and she’d had to turn customers away at the door because he hadn’t bothered showing up. She asked him why he couldn’t be more like Jacko, who was always reliable and cheerful and who, incidentally, had been given the morning off for good behaviour.
‘Maybe there’s a lesson for you in there, Mikey,’ she said.
It struck him that Sue was the third person to shout at him in less than twelve hours and he probably should be getting used to it by now, but he wasn’t. All the yelling seemed to be adding up to something that dragged him down.
Dex shot her a look. ‘Give the boy a break, Sue. I’ll send him through to you as soon as he’s done here.’
She took a few paces towards him, hands on her hips. ‘I don’t know what you want to turn him into, Dex, but to me, he’s a cleaner until he earns my respect. Now get rid of that fish, Mikey, and come straight out to the bar. I’ve got a floor that needs mopping after you’ve done the toilets.’
When she’d gone, there was silence. Mikey rinsed the fish under the running tap, laid it on the draining board, then washed his hands with warm water and soap. He used the scrubbing brush and took his time. Dex chopped herbs on a board. Warm midmorning light flooded through the window and splashed the floor.
‘She’s angry you didn’t tell her,’ Dex said after a while. ‘If you wanted a day off, you should have asked, that’s all.’
‘Something came up.’
‘It always does.’ Dex stopped chopping and looked at him. ‘You’re a clever boy, Mikey, and you could be a great chef. Don’t waste your talent.’
Mikey couldn’t help grinning as he dried his hands on a towel. Did Dex really believe in him that much? He wanted to please him suddenly, to make him think he was worth all the trouble.
‘I’ll finish the fish later if you like,’ he said.
Dex looked at the fish on the draining board, the entrails in the bin, the three fish still in the bucket.
‘A kind offer, but Sue has plenty to keep you busy, I think. I’ll finish these off and tomorrow I’ll show you how to make a stock out of the trimmings.’ He patted his belly. ‘I’ll teach you bouillabaisse – the best French soup you ever tasted.’
They shook hands on it and Mikey had something to look forward to again, just like that.
In the toilets he called Ellie again – still no joy, and no reply from his mum either. He risked phoning Karyn, figured it’d be worth getting yelled at if he found out what was happening.
She picked up straight away. ‘What do you want?’
‘Just wondered how it’s going?’
‘Fantastic.’
She sounded like she meant it, which was worrying. ‘Is Mum up?’
‘Yep.’
‘Can I speak to her?’
‘No.’
A stab in his guts. ‘Why, what’s she doing?’
He strained to hear background noises, something that would tell him Mum was simply in the kitchen, stumbling about making her first coffee of the day, that Karyn was bluffing, that this would still be all right. But he heard nothing, except the sound of his sister’s breathing.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry for everything, OK? Just tell me what’s happening.’
‘Why, so you can warn your girlfriend?’
‘I don’t want her to be scared, that’s all.’
‘You think I give a toss about that?’
‘She’s on your side, Karyn. If you want to hate someone, hate her brother.’
‘I hate them both.’
Everything tightened inside him as he pressed the phone closer, struggling to find a way to get through to her. ‘Ellie wanted to believe he was innocent – that’s not so weird, is it? If I did something terrible, wouldn’t you help me?’
‘You’d never do anything like that!’
‘That’s what she thought about him. He’s going to hate her for grassing him up, so why do you have to make it even more difficult? Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on?’
It felt like minutes waiting for her to speak. Eventually she said, ‘I’ll get Mum to call you when Gillian’s gone.’
And then she put the phone down.
Mikey rammed out of the toilets, through the bar, out of the main door and across the car park. He left Ellie a message as he walked: Call me. Serious. Call me as soon as you get this. He tried his mum, but she didn’t pick up. He tried Karyn again. Nothing.
He should have gone over to Ellie’s house after dropping Holly at school, he’d been an idiot not to. Or before school even – last night when it all kicked off. He could have climbed the gate, shinned up the drainpipe, spent the night by her side and kept her safe.
At the harbour wall he sat on a bench and tried to calm down. OK, it was possible Karyn was winding him up and his mum was still asleep. But it was also possible that Gillian was at the flat right now, finding out all the details, organizing squad cars. Couldn’t you be charged with perjury for lying to cops?
He left another message: I’m sorry, Ellie, I’m so sorry, but I think something ba
d’s about to happen.
Fourth apology in twenty-four hours. He’d made such a cockup. He’d hurt Karyn, hurt Ellie, and he hadn’t meant to do either, not in a million years. He closed his eyes, tried to keep calm. If he just sat here, if he simply kept breathing, maybe it would be all right.
Thirty-eight
Good girls aren’t supposed to think of a boy’s velvet neck, or the tilt of his head when he smiles. They’re especially not supposed to think of these things when it’s their last study skills session for the non-calculator Maths exam.
Ellie blinked several times to erase all thoughts of Mikey.
‘So, that’s an example question,’ Ms Farish said. ‘Now please take up your notebooks, write down three criticisms of this method of estimation, and remember, as long as what you say is plausible and sensible, you should get the marks.’
Ellie sighed, and opened up her notebook. If she couldn’t concentrate on statistics and probability, she could at least do something useful. She turned to a blank page and wrote Revision, then she drew a table with twelve columns and divided up the weeks until the main GCSE exams began and gave the table thirty-five rows. She’d revise for three hours every night when she got home from school. She’d eat dinner (half an hour), then she’d revise for a further two hours until bed. At weekends, she’d revise for ten hours a day and would reward herself with a DVD. She’d get seven hours’ sleep a night. She tried to work out how many total hours’ revision she’d given herself and how many hours’ sleep she’d get, but this was a non-calculator study session and she couldn’t get her head round it. Instead, at the bottom of the page she drew a green snake with a red tongue.
Beyond the classroom window, sun glittered on the playground. The edge of the playing field was just visible and the grass looked very friendly waving at her. Ellie thought of the river, just out of view. She liked the fact she couldn’t see it, but that she knew its freezing sparkle would be making bright patterns on the fence.
The probability of something which is certain is one. The probability of something which is impossible is zero. Taking off her clothes and jumping into the river on that Wednesday afternoon when she should have been at school was definitely in the second category, and yet it had happened. How did mathematics explain that?
Statement: A girl and a boy jump into a river. The boy swims over to the girl and says, ‘God, it’s cold.’
Question: What’s the probability they will kiss?’
No, she mustn’t think of Mikey! She especially mustn’t think of kissing him yesterday – his kisses, soft and insubstantial at first, hardly there at all, and yet enough to make her blood leap. She mustn’t think of how the kisses built – becoming desperate, as if they were both searching for something.
She snapped her attention back to the classroom. Her plan was to work hard and make up for all the study sessions she’d missed, and there was no time in that regime for Mikey.
‘So,’ Ms Farish said, ‘let’s remind ourselves of different ways to represent data diagrammatically.’
Ellie wrote down, Horizontal axis, Vertical axis. She listened as Ms Farish described how to group data into classes. But when it came to drawing a graph, she drew a cottage instead, a fire, a boy, a zip. She wrote the words I’ve never felt this with anyone before. And bolded them, boxed them in. Wrote them again in capitals.
No one else seemed to be having trouble concentrating. She looked around at all the heads bent over tables, at all the pens feverishly scribbling. Statistically, there were kids in this room who cried themselves to sleep because of exams. They were exhausted, they had terrible headaches. They woke in the mornings feeling they’d had no sleep at all. Their eyes were itchy, their stomachs ached. These were her classmates, thirty of them, and she barely knew them at all.
What was it she’d said to her dad? None of us knows each other.
Question: If a room has thirty people in it, how many secrets are in the room?
Answer: Infinity.
She had a sudden and overwhelming desire to stand up and confess her own, like some kind of truth Tourette’s. She’d march up to the front of the class, knock Ms Farish out of the way of the interactive whiteboard and write: I made love with Mikey McKenzie in front of a roaring fire and I never imagined love could be so good. Inspired by her bravery, everyone would share their secrets. Ms Farish would tell them why she left her previous school, Joseph would show them the cuts on his arms and explain his compulsion, Alicia would give her reasons for spending every lunch break in the toilets. On and on, round the whole class. Maybe she’d even get a second turn. She’d write: My brother is guilty. Ellie wondered if you would use a bar chart, a pie chart or a histogram to describe the data you gathered.
Outside, spring clouds bowled along, the grass continued to wave, the river flowed as it always had. She wrote a poem: We are naked. You are tender. Your hands know exactly where to be. She ripped it from her notebook, crumpled it into a ball and put it in her pocket. Ms Farish came over and stood at her table.
‘Problems?’ she said.
Ellie shook her head. Ms Farish went away. She tried aversion therapy. Every time she thought of Mikey, she pinched the soft skin on the back of her hand. Concentrating on the whiteboard now, she wrote down the words dependent variable, independent variable as instructed, and began to draw a graph using the data supplied. Within five minutes her hand hurt so much from pinching that she had to stop drawing. She tried to think of horrible things about Mikey, but she couldn’t think of any, and in realizing there were none, she realized how much she wanted to see him again. But if she saw him, she’d have to do something about Karyn. She’d have to get a lawyer like Barry had suggested, make a new statement, get a new family to live with, because hers wouldn’t want her any more.
She drew a cold shower. A shoe. A car crash. She chewed the end of her pen for a minute, then started a new list, Being good. It entailed revision (a lot of it), not eating anything with sugar in it, being nice to her family, dressing virtuously and not contacting Mikey. This immediately made her think of all the opposites – no revision, undressing. Calling him …
Yesterday, on the rug in her grandparents’ cottage, she’d traced kisses along the base of Mikey’s spine and told him, ‘I’ll always have seen you naked.’
He’d turned over to smile at her, his eyes never leaving hers as he mapped a line from her belly to her breasts. He said, ‘I can feel your heart.’ His fingers marked her pulse. He said, ‘Now, now and now.’
How had she ever thought she’d be able to forget him?
She sank her head onto the desk. Images swam into her mind – her mum fanning herself at breakfast and saying I can’t breathe in this house, her dad’s weary smile and barely concealed irritation, the constant fear in Tom’s eyes, the way her mum wouldn’t meet her gaze in the car on the way to school when Ellie said, Shouldn’t we talk about what I said in the garden?, Mikey’s cigarette lighter hidden in her school bag, the knowledge of Karyn McKenzie wounded on a sofa …
‘Ellie?’ Ms Farish stood over the desk frowning. ‘You all right?’
She nodded, startled. Everyone around her was gathering their stuff together and heading out of the door.
Ms Farish said, ‘You can stay here if you want, Ellie, but I suggest you take the opportunity to get some fresh air and come back after lunch for part two.’
The corridors were crazy, as usual. At break time, the teachers disappeared into the staffroom for sugar and caffeine and left the kids to roam like wild buffalo. This was the time of day you were likely to get casually shoved against the lockers, to get your phone nicked, your bag rifled through, chewing gum chucked at you, your dinner money hijacked. The boys gave each other brutal and meaningless thumps. It was survival of the fittest, and the trick was to keep your head down, look no one in the eye and walk purposefully.
At least Ellie wasn’t the centre of attention any more, not since Keira in Year Ten had got pregnant and the gossip machine had
turned its attention to who the dad was and if Keira was keeping the baby and why hadn’t she got the morning-after pill in the first place, blah, blah.
It was warm outside and quieter. Ellie walked the edge of the playground looking for somewhere to sit. Her favourite bench had been commandeered by Stacey ever since she realized it was the place Ellie liked to be. She waved at Ellie now, as she did every time she saw her.
‘Hey, bitch.’
‘Leave it, Stacey.’
‘You leave it.’
‘I’m not doing anything.’
‘So you say.’
It was ridiculous that they did this every day. Maybe they’d even miss it if one of them forgot. It was something they both understood, almost routine.
Ellie found a place to sit on the low wall by the fence and turned her face to the sun. Vitamin D was most easily absorbed through the eyelids and Vitamin D was the one that made you happy. She had forty-five minutes to get there.
Thirty-nine
Mikey opened one eye to Jacko, crunching across the gravel towards him. He had his arms up, palms flat, like he was surrendering. It wasn’t funny.
‘I’m sorry, man,’ he said when he got close. ‘About last night, I mean. Serious, I didn’t think it would blow up like that.’
Mikey shook his head and looked back down at the sand, at the boats marooned down there.
‘I had to tell Karyn before someone else did.’
‘Who are you kidding?’
‘It’s true. When I came to pick you up and saw you get on that bus, I knew I wouldn’t be the only one who clocked it. Imagine if some random stranger told her. Imagine how that would feel.’
You Against Me Page 24