I ONLY CRY a bit, and it’s shocked crying, not boo-hoo crying, and when I’m done I go to the mirror. My eyes’re a bit puffy, but a bit of eyeliner soon sorts that out … Dab of lippy, bit of blusher … Sorted. The girl in the mirror’s a woman, with her cropped black hair, her Quadrophenia T-shirt, her black jeans. “I’ve got news for you,” she says. “You’re moving in with Vinny today.” I start listing the reasons why I can’t, and stop. “Yes,” I agree, giddy and calm at once. I’m leaving school, as well. As from now. The summer holidays’ll be here before the truancy officer can fart, and I’m sixteen in September, and then it’s stuff you, Windmill Hill Comprehensive. Do I dare?
I dare. Pack, then. Pack what? Whatever’ll fit into my big duffel bag. Underwear, bras, T-shirts, my bomber jacket; makeup case and the Oxo tin with my bracelets and necklaces in. Toothbrush and a handful of tampons—my period’s a bit late so it should start, like, any hour now. Money. I count up ￡13.85 saved in notes and coins. I’ve ￡80 more in my TSB bankbook. It’s not like Vinny’ll charge me rent, and I’ll look for a job next week. Babysitting, working in the market, waitressing: There’s loads of ways to earn a few quid. What about my LPs? I can’t lug the whole collection over to Peacock Street now, and Mam’s quite capable of dumping them at the Oxfam shop out of spite, so I just take Fear of Music, wrapping it carefully in my bomber jacket and putting it into my bag so it won’t get bent. I hide the others under the loose floorboard, just for now, but as I’m putting the carpet back, I get the fright of my life: Jacko’s watching me from the doorway. He’s still in his Thunderbirds pajamas and slippers.
I tell him, “Mister, you just gave me a heart attack.”
“You’re going.” Jacko’s got this not-quite-here voice.
“Just between us, yes, I am. But not far, don’t worry.”
“I’ve made you a souvenir, to remember me by.” Jacko hands me a circle of cardboard—a flattened Dairylea cheese box with a maze drawn on. He’s mad about mazes, is Jacko; it’s all these Dungeons & Dragonsy books him and Sharon read. The one Jacko’s drawn’s actually dead simple by his standards, made of eight or nine circles inside each other. “Take it,” he tells me. “It’s diabolical.”
“It doesn’t look all that bad to me.”
“ ‘Diabolical’ means ‘satanic,’ sis.”
“Why’s your maze so satanic, then?”
“The Dusk follows you as you go through it. If it touches you, you cease to exist, so one wrong turn down a dead end, that’s the end of you. That’s why you have to learn the labyrinth by heart.”
Christ, I don’t half have a freaky little brother. “Right. Well, thanks, Jacko. Look, I’ve got a few things to—”
Jacko holds my wrist. “Learn this labyrinth, Holly. Indulge your freaky little brother. Please.”
That jolts me a bit. “Mister, you’re acting all weird.”
“Promise me you’ll memorize the path through it, so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness. Please.”
My friends’ little brothers are all into Scalextric or BMX or Top Trumps—why do I get one who does this and says words like “navigate” and “diabolical”? Christ only knows how he’ll survive in Gravesend if he’s gay. I muss his hair. “Okay, I promise to learn your maze off by heart.” Then Jacko hugs me, which is weird ’cause Jacko’s not a huggy kid. “Hey, I’m not going far … You’ll understand when you’re older, and—”
“You’re moving in with your boyfriend.”
By now I shouldn’t be surprised. “Yeah.”
“Take care of yourself, Holly.”
“Vinny’s nice. Once Mam’s got used to the idea, we’ll see each other—I mean, we still saw Brendan after he married Ruth, yeah?”
But Jacko just puts the cardboard lid with his maze on deep into my duffel bag, gives me one last look, and disappears.
? ? ?
MAM APPEARS WITH a basket of bar rugs on the first-floor landing, as if she wasn’t lying in wait. “I’m not bluffing. You’re grounded. Back upstairs. You’ve got exams next week. Time you knuckled down and got some proper revision done.”
I grip the banister. “ ‘Our roof, our rules,’ you said. Fine. I don’t want your rules, or your roof, or you hitting me whenever you lose your rag. You’d not put up with that. Would you?”
Mam’s face sort of twitches, and if she says the right thing now, we’ll negotiate. But no, she just takes in my duffel bag and sneers like she can’t believe how stupid I am. “You had a brain, once.”
So I carry on down the stairs to the ground floor.
Above me, her voice tightens. “What about school?”
“You go, then, if school’s so important!”
“I never had the bloody chance, Holly! I’ve always had the pub to run, and you and Brendan and Sharon and Jacko to feed, clothe, and send to school so you won’t have to spend your life mopping out toilets and emptying ashtrays and knackering your back and never having an early night.”
Water off a duck’s back. I carry on downstairs.
“But go on, then. Go. Learn the hard way. I’ll give you three days before Romeo turfs you out. It’s not a girl’s glittering personality that men’re interested in, Holly. It never bloody is.”
I ignore her. From the hallway I see Sharon behind the bar by the fruit juice shelves. She’s helping Dad do the restocking, but I can see she heard. I give her a little wave and she gives me one back, nervous. Echoing up from the cellar trapdoor is Dad’s voice, crooning “Ferry ’Cross the Mersey.” Better leave him out of it. In front of Mam, he’ll side with her. In front of the regulars, it’ll be “It takes a bigger idiot than me to step between the pecking hens” and they’ll all nod and mumble, “Right enough there, Dave.” Plus I’d rather not be in the room when he finds out ’bout Vinny. Not that I’m ashamed, I’d just rather not be there. Newky’s snoozing in his basket. “You’re the smelliest dog in Kent,” I tell him to stop myself crying, “you old fleabag.” I pat his neck, unbolt the side door, and step into Marlow Alley. Behind me, the door goes clunk.
WEST STREET’S TOO bright and too dark, like a TV with the contrast on the blink, so I put on my sunglasses and they turn the world all dreamish and vivider and more real. My throat aches and I’m shaking a bit. Nobody’s running after me from the pub. Good. A cement truck trundles by and its fumy gust makes the conker tree sway a bit and rustle. Breathe in warm tarmac, fried spuds, and week-old rubbish spilling out of the bins—the dustmen are on strike again.
Lots of little darting birds’re twirly-whirlying like the tin-whistlers on strings kids get at birthdays, or used to, and a gang of boys’re playing Kick the Can in the park round the church at Crooked Lane. Get him! Behind the tree! Set me free! Kids. Stella says older men make better lovers; with boys our age, she says, the ice cream melts once the cone’s in your hand. Only Stella knows ’bout Vinny—she was there that first Saturday in the Magic Bus—but she can keep a secret. When she was teaching me to smoke and I kept puking, she didn’t laugh or tell anyone, and she’s told me everything I need to know ’bout boys. Stella’s the coolest girl in our year at school, easy.
Crooked Lane veers up from the river, and from there I turn up Queen Street, where I’m nearly mown down by Julie Walcott pushing her pram. Her baby’s bawling its head off and she looks knackered. She left school when she got pregnant. Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and it’s a scientific fact that virgins can’t get pregnant. Stella told me.
BUNTING’S STRUNG ACROSS Queen Street, like it’s for Holly Sykes’s Independence Day. The Scottish lady in the wool shop’s watering her hanging baskets, and Mr. Gilbert the jeweler’s putting trays of rings into his front windows, and Mike and Todd the butchers’re offloading a headless pig from the back of a van where a dozen carcasses are hanging from hooks. Outside the library a bunch of union men are collecting money in buckets for the striking miners with Socialist Workers holding signs saying COAL NOT DOLE and THATCHER DECLARES WAR ON THE WORKERS. Ed Brubeck’s freewheeling this way on his bike. I step into the Indoor Market so he can’t see me. He moved to Gravesend last year from Manchester, where his dad got sent down for burglary and assault. He doesn’t have any friends and shows no sign of wanting any. Normally that’d get you crucified at our school, but when a sixth-former had a go at him Brubeck punched his nose out of shape, so he’s been left alone since. He cycles by without seeing me, a fishing rod tied to his crossbar, and I carry on. By the games arcade a busker’s playing funeral music on a clarinet. Someone lobs a coin into his case and he bursts into the theme from Dallas. When I get to Magic Bus Records I peer inside. I was looking at R for Ramones. Vinny says he was looking at H for Hot and Horny and Holly. There’s a few secondhand guitars along the back of the shop, too. Vin can play the intro to “Stairway to Heaven,” though he’s never got past that. I’m going to teach myself to play Vin’s guitar while he’s at work. Vin and me could start a band. Why not? Tina Weymouth’s a girl and she’s the bassist in Talking Heads. Imagine Mam’s face if she goes all, “She’s not my daughter anymore,” then sees me on Top of the Pops. Mam’s problem’s that she’s never loved anyone as deeply as me and Vin love each other. She gets on okay with Dad, sure, though all her family in Cork were never crazy about him not being Irish and Catholic. My older Irish cousins enjoyed telling me that Dad got Mum pregnant with Brendan before they were married, but they’ve been married for twenty-five years now, which isn’t bad going, I s’pose, but still, Mam’s not got this amazing bond with Dad like me and Vin. Stella says me and Vin are soul mates. She says it’s obvious, we’re made for each other.
? ? ?
OUTSIDE NATWEST BANK on Milton Road, I run into Brendan. Moussed-back hair, paisley tie, and his blazer slung over his shoulder, you’d think he was off to Handsome School, not the offices of Stott and Conway. Bit of a heartthrob is my older brother, among my friends’ older sisters—pass me the vomit bucket. He married Ruth, his boss Mr. Conway’s daughter, at the town hall with a flashy reception at the Chaucer Country Club. I wasn’t a bridesmaid ’cause I don’t wear dresses, specially dresses that make you look like a Gone with the Wind collectible, so Sharon and Ruth’s nieces did all that stuff, and loads of our Cork relatives came over. Brendan’s Mam’s golden boy and Mam’s Brendan’s golden mam. Later they’ll be poring over every detail of what I say right now.
“Morning,” I tell him. “How’s it going?”
“Can’t complain. All well at the Captain?”
“Fine. Mam’s full of the joys of spring today.”
“Yeah?” Brendan smiles, puzzled. “How come?”
I shrug. “Must’ve got out on the right side of bed.”
“Cool.” He notices my duffel bag. “Off on a trip, are we?”
“Not exactly. I’m revising French at Stella Yearwood’s—then I’m staying overnight. It’s exams next week.”
My brother looks impressed. “Good for you, little sis.”
“Is Ruth any better?”
“Not a lot. God only knows why it’s called ‘morning sickness’ when it’s worse in the middle of the night.”
“Perhaps it’s Mother Nature’s way of toughening you up for when the baby arrives,” I suggest. “All those sleepless nights, the arguing, the puke … Needs stamina.”
My brother doesn’t take the bait. “Guess so.” It’s hard to imagine Brendan being anyone’s dad but, come Christmas, he will be.
Behind us the NatWest opens its doors and the bank clerks start filing in. “Not that Mr. Conway’ll fire his son-in-law,” I say to Brendan, “but don’t you start at nine?”
“This is true. See you tomorrow, if you’re back from your revision-a-thon. Mam’s invited us over for lunch. Have a great day.”
“It’s the best day of my life already,” I tell my brother and, in a secondhand way, Mam.
One flash of his award-winning smile and Brendan’s off, joining the streams of people in suits and uniforms all going to work in offices and shops and factories.
ON MONDAY, I’LL get a key cut for Vinny’s front door, but today I go the usual secret way. Up a street called the Grove, just before the tax office, there’s this alley, half hidden by a skip overflowing with bin bags smelling of bubbling nappies. A brown rat watches me, like Lord Muck. I go down the alley, turn right, and now I’m between Peacock Street’s back-garden fences and the tax-office wall. Down the far end, the last house before the railway cutting, that’s Vinny’s place. I squeeze through the loose slats and wade through his back garden. The grass and weeds come up to my waist and the plum trees are already fruiting up, though most of the fruit’ll go to the wasps and the worms, Vinny says, ’cause he can’t be arsed to pick it. It’s like the forest in Sleeping Beauty that chokes the castle when everyone’s asleep for a hundred years. Vinny’s s’posed to keep the garden neat for his aunt but she lives up in King’s Lynn and never visits and, anyway, Vinny’s a motorbike guy, not a gardener. Once I’m settled in, I’ll tame this jungle. It needs a woman’s touch, that’s all. Might make a start today, after a session teaching myself the guitar. There’s a shed in the corner half hidden by brambles, with gardening gear and a lawnmower. Sunflowers, roses, pansies, carnations, lavender, and herbs in little terra-cotta pots, that’s what I’ll plant. I’ll make scones and plum pies and coffee cakes and Vinny’ll be all, “Jesus, Holly, how did I ever get by without you?” All the magazines say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. By the rainwater barrel a fingery purple bush is swarming with white butterflies, all confetti and lace; it’s like it’s alive.
? ? ?
THE BACK DOOR’S never locked ’cause Vinny’s lost the key. Our pizza boxes and wineglasses’re still in the sink from last night, but no sign of breakfast—Vinny must’ve overslept and raced off to work, as per usual. The whole place needs a good tidying, dusting, hoovering. First a coffee and a fag’s in order, though—I only ate half my Weetabix before Mam started her Muhammad Ali act on me. I forgot to get any ciggies on the way up—it flew out of my head after meeting Brendan—but Vinny keeps some in his bedside table, so I pad up the steep stairs and into his bedroom. Our bedroom, I should say. The curtains are still drawn and the air’s like old socks so I let the light in, open the window, turn round, and jump out of my skin ’cause Vinny’s in bed, looking like he’s cacked himself. “It’s me, it’s only me,” I sort of gupper. “Sorry, I—I—I—I thought you were at work.”
He claps his hand over his heart and sort of laughs, like he’d just been shot. “Jesus, Hol. I thought you were a burglar!”
I sort of laugh too. “You’re … at home.”
“Cock-up with the rota—the new secretary’s bloody hopeless—so Kev phoned to say I’ve got the day off, after all.”
“Brill,” I say. “That’s great, ’cause … I’ve got a surprise.”
“Great, I love them. But put the kettle on first, eh? I’ll be right down. Shit, what am I saying? I’m out of coffee—be a sweetheart, pop out to Staffa’s and get a jar of Gold Blend. I’ll pay, uh, you when you get back.”
I need to say this first: “Mam found out ’bout us, Vin.”
“Oh? Oh.” He looks thoughtful. “Right. How did she, uh …”
Suddenly I’m scared he won’t want me. “Not great. Went a bit apeshit, actually. Told me I couldn’t see you again and, like, threatened to lock me in the cellar. So I walked out. So …”
Vinny looks at me nervously, not taking the hint.
“So can I … like … stay with you? For a bit, at least.”
Vinny swallows. “O-kay … Right. I see. Well. Okay.”
It doesn’t sound very okay. “Is that a yes, Vin?”
“Ye-es. Sure. Yes. But now I really need that coffee.”
“Serious? Oh, Vin!” The relief’s like a warm bath. I hug him. He’s sweaty. “You’re the best, Vinny. I was afraid you might not …”
“We can’t have a furry-purry sex kitten like you sleeping under a bridge now, can we? But really, Hol, I need coffee like Dracula needs blood, so—” He doesn’t finish the sentence ’cause I’m kissing him, my Vinny, my boyfriend who’s been to New York and shaken David Byrne’s hand, and my love for him sort of goes whoosh, like a boiler firing up, and I pull him back and we roll onto a lumpy hill of duvet, but the hill wriggles and my hand pulls the sheet away and here’s my best friend Stella Yearwood. Stark naked. Like I’m in a bad sex dream, only it’s not.
I just … gape at her crotch till she says, “It can’t look so very different to yours, can it?”
Then I gape at Vinny, who looks like he’s shat himself but then does this spazzo giggle: “It’s not what it looks like.”
Stella, cool as you please, covers herself with the sheet and tells Vinny, “Don’t be dense. This is precisely how it looks, Holly. We were going to let you know but, as you see, events have overtaken us all. Fact is, you’ve been dumped. Not pleasant, but it happens to the best of us, well, most of us, so c’est la vie. Don’t worry, there are plenty more Vinnys in the sea. So why not cut your losses now and just go? With a little dignity intact?”
WHEN I STOP crying, finally, I find myself on a cold step in a little courtyard place, with five or six stories of old brick and narrow blind windows on each side. Weeds drilling up through paving slabs and dandelion seeds drifting around like snow in a snow globe. After I slammed Vinny’s door my feet brought me here, round the back of the Gravesend General Hospital, where Dr. Marinus got rid of Miss Constantin for me when I was seven years old. Did I punch Vinny? It was like I was moving in treacle. I couldn’t breathe. He caught my wrist and it hurt—still does—and Stella was barking, “Grow up and piss off, Holly. This is real life not an episode of Dynasty!” and I ran out, slamming the front door and hurrying as fast I could, anywhere, nowhere, somewhere … I knew the moment I stopped I’d break down into a sobbing, snotting jelly, and then one of Mam’s spies’d see me and report back and that’d be the cherry on her cake. ’Cause Mam was right. I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in, and not just anyone, but Stella Yearwood. My best mate. How could he? How could she?
Stop crying! Think about something else …