Chapter TWELVE
WITH THE SCHOOL DAY OVER, TRACEY AND I WALKED TO THE SCHOOL gates to say goodbye to the Debbies, who, because they all lived in Liston, could walk home. I’d been looking forward to the end of the day, when I’d get a chance to see Amanda again, and had spent much of my time planning what I might say to her when I finally saw her again. Unfortunately, I needn’t have bothered. When we got to the school gates, Amanda was there with a couple of her friends, smoking and throwing back her head to blow long puffs of smoke into the air between bouts of giggling conversation. I tried to catch her eye and even wiggled my fingers toward her in a feeble wave, but despite my efforts she didn’t notice me. What finally got her attention was the harsh buzz of a motorbike coming down Liston’s main street. As soon as she heard it, she turned toward the sound. “Oh, look, it’s Stan,” she said, waving an outstretched arm.
I watched the bike veer around an elderly couple who were in the middle of the zebra crossing. The woman’s coat lifted visibly in the bike’s wake, and the man’s flat cap was blown from his head. “That’s Amanda’s boyfriend,” Tracey said, tugging on my sleeve. “Frankly, I have no bloody idea what he sees in her.”
I remembered the evening I’d first met Amanda and the boy in the Ford Cortina who’d yelled at her from across the street. I’d already decided I didn’t like him. Now that he seemed to be on his way to interrupt my opportunity to talk to her, I liked him even less. “Does he always drive like that?” I asked. “It looks dangerous.”
“Motorbikes are dangerous,” Tracey said with unrestrained enthusiasm. “Really dangerous. Last year Larry Kirk came off his bike and had to have both his legs amputated. He’s in a wheelchair now.” She said this with delight, as if Larry Kirk had won some sort of competition. “You might have seen him; he works at the newsagent’s. It’s a bit weird, him with no legs and that. Can’t help feeling sorry for him. But don’t worry, nothing like that will happen to Stan.” I was about to tell her that it wasn’t Stan I was worried about as I observed the elderly couple, pale and open-mouthed, apparently immobilized by shock or fear or both, standing stock-still in the middle of the street. But Tracey continued. “Stan’s not like Larry Kirk. He’s a really, really good driver.” This, clearly, was a matter for dispute.
With Stan rapidly approaching, Amanda waved vigorously, while next to me Tracey patted her hair, pinched her cheeks, and smoothed her hands over her skirt. As the bike came closer, its rider didn’t reduce his speed, and, for a moment, I felt relieved as I thought Stan planned to continue right by us. At the last moment, however, he steered the bike toward our little crowd outside the school gates, mounted the pavement, and drove at full speed toward us. It was hard to take it in at first, but it soon became apparent that he really didn’t plan to stop and would inevitably hit us. Simultaneously, all of us—Tracey, Amanda, Amanda’s friends, and I—let out high screams and began running away like a throng of panicked mice. We were a mess of limbs, fast breaths, and shrieks scattering in front of the bike when, at the very last second, it came to a halt right in the spot where we had been standing.
“Ha, that got you good and proper, didn’t it?” Stan Heaphy was laughing so hard that the black full-face helmet he wore jiggled unsteadily. It made him look like a baby struggling to support its big, lolling head.
I leaned against the school fence and tried to get my breath. My heart was racing so loud and fast, it felt as if it occupied my entire chest. I was furious. He could have killed us, or left one of us with no legs like the unfortunate Larry Kirk.
“God, you should’ve seen your faces.” Stan slapped his thigh with a leather-gloved hand and looked around at all of us. “I wish I had a camera, I really do.” He was still laughing as he took off his gloves, unbuckled his helmet, and eased it over his head to reveal his face, smooth-skinned and angular, with a straight nose and large brown eyes. He had glossy blond hair that was long enough to rest below the collar of his studded leather jacket. That night outside the Co-op I hadn’t been able to see him in the rain and I’d imagined him pimply and ugly. But now I could see that he was actually very good-looking. In fact, he might have seemed girlish, with his long eyelashes and full, red lips, but for his thick eyebrows and the way his mouth, as he laughed, stretched into a wide, arrogant sneer.
“Oh, Stan, you’re such a joker,” Tracey said, laughing and flipping back her ponytail. “You really had us going there for a while. I thought you were going to run right into us.” I stared at her, astounded. Surely she didn’t think being terrified like that was funny.
“Christ, Stan,” Amanda snapped, “what did you have to go and do that for? You could have bloody killed somebody with an idiot trick like that.” Around her, Amanda’s friends, still breathless, nodded in agreement.
“Ah, come on, Mandy, I was just having a laugh,” Stan said as he dismounted his bike and balanced it on the kickstand.
“Oh, I knew that, Stan,” Tracey said, beaming in his direction.
“Shut your cake-hole, Tracey,” Amanda said.
“Shut up yourself,” Tracey mumbled. Then she turned to smile at Stan again. “You all right, then, Stan? Got a job yet?”
“Job? What do I want a f*cking job for?” Stan said, moving past her and swaggering over to Amanda. He put his hand on her shoulder. “How was school, then? Boring as ever? Teachers still a bunch of wankers?” I noticed that the back of his leather jacket was decorated with studs and clumsy, hand-painted letters that read BLACK SABBATH RULES across his back. I remembered Tracey’s story about the vandalism in the Midham church. Surely the vicar must be a complete fool not to have found the culprit. The evidence was literally written on him.
“Get lost,” Amanda said. I watched her, delighted, as she shrugged his hand away.
“Oh, don’t be like that, Mandy. Like I said, it was just a laugh.”
“I told you I don’t like being called Mandy. And I don’t like being almost run over by your bloody motorbike, either.”
Silently, I egged Amanda on. Stan was clearly an idiot, and she was clearly far too good for him. It was ridiculous to imagine that she’d want him as a boyfriend. The sooner she sent him on his way, the sooner I could talk to her.
“Is this a new motorbike, Stan?” Tracey asked. “It’s a Suzuki, isn’t it? God, I just love Suzukis.” She spoke in the same dreamy tone she usually reserved for her pronunciations about David Cassidy.
Stan ignored Tracey and put a hand on Amanda’s arm again. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said, his tone more conciliatory now. “Really, I didn’t mean to scare you. It was just a laugh, that’s all.”
I watched, eager to see Amanda push him away again. Instead, I was surprised to see her let him rest his hand there, and even more surprised when, a second later, she turned to him. “Just don’t do it again, all right?” she said, her voice softer now. “You scared the living daylights out of me. Really, you did, Stan.”
“Come here,” he said, wrapping his arm around her waist. For a moment, Amanda stiffened and pulled back a little, then she let Stan ease her toward him. He took the cigarette she’d been holding, placed it in his mouth, and took a drag. Then he blew the smoke out sideways, tossed the cigarette to the ground, and, in a move that made my heart beat even harder than when he’d been pursuing us on his motorbike, leaned into Amanda to deliver a chomping kiss.
I wanted Amanda to push him away, to slam her arms against his chest and declare that she couldn’t stand him. I wanted her to yell at him, the way she’d yelled at Tracey and the boys who’d teased me that morning. Instead, she closed her eyes, leaned into Stan, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him back. As I watched this, I felt first a jolt of utter outrage, but, within moments, I was surprised to feel my anger melt, replaced by another heat that filled my body and made my face burn. While Stan pressed himself against Amanda, I imagined myself standing there in his place, my arms wrapped around Amanda, kissing her on the mouth.
“MUM,” I CALLED AS I stepped into the house after walking home from the bus stop. “Mum.” I pushed open the living-room door. “I like my new school, Mum.”
“Not now, love,” my mother said. “I’m watching this.” On the television screen a group of three- and four-year olds were dancing in a ring around a grinning, wide-eyed woman. My mother was watching Romper Room.
I walked over to her and dropped my satchel to the floor. It fell with a heavy thud. It was full of new exercise books, textbooks, my new timetable, and the year’s school dinner schedule. It contained a map of my life for the next ten months. I wanted to tell her about all of it. I wanted to talk to her about my day—Mr. Davies and his oversized stomach, Miss Nutall and her boring history lectures, my outstanding performance in maths, and, of course, the fascinating Ms. Hastings. But my mother didn’t care about any of this. She was more interested in watching children’s television.
“I made some new friends, Mum,” I persisted. “I had my school dinner with them, and we sat together in every lesson.” I wanted her to care, at least, that I was safe, that she didn’t need to worry about me the way I always needed to worry about her. But my mother said nothing. She lay across the settee, her face squished asymmetrical, pressed half flat against a cushion as she stared steadily at the jovial bustle on the television screen.
I stood over her, the solidity of my body blocking her view. “I said, I like my new school.”
Her lips parted slightly, she took in a breath, her eyelids quivered. Then she closed her eyes and exhaled. But she said nothing.
I felt the anger in me flare, like one of the brilliant fizzing fireworks set off on Bonfire Night. Dazzling, incandescent against the wintry darkness. “Say something!” I yelled. She opened her eyes, but still she remained silent. “Why can’t you even act like you bloody well care?”
I watched her face carefully, eager for her reaction, for a twitch of her lips, a jerk in the muscles under her eyes, a clenching fist, a hiss of fury as she rose to strike me. I wanted her to leap up, yell in my face, slap my arms and legs and cheeks, pull my hair until my scalp was burning. Then I could scream and cry and yell back. Pummel her flesh, feel the clash of my knuckles against her bone. Bruise her, mark her. Make her feel my anger instead of feeling nothing. Instead of lying there, dazed and utterly limp, a pathetic excuse for a mother.
But she didn’t jump up, nor did she hit me, nor did she yell. Instead, she turned her head, achingly slow, like the cogs in a flagging clockwork toy, until, after an age of waiting, her eyes finally met mine.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice a whisper in her throat. “I’m doing my best, love. I know you can’t tell. But, really, I am. And I’m sorry.”
The blistering conflagration inside me died, sputtering to nothing. It was as if I had been gearing up for a fight and my opponent had gone running down the road, out of sight. The least she could do was stand up to me, meet my anger with her own, let me have the satisfaction of battering myself against her.
I stared down at her. And I knew that the same loathing and disdain burned in my eyes that I had seen in the eyes of the children who had taunted me after she’d been taken to the hospital, who had mocked my pathetic lies about her cruise. “I don’t care if you’re sorry,” I said. “I don’t give a bloody damn.” I drew out the words, wrapping my lips and tongue around them, pushing all my energy into those long, wide sounds. I pulled back my foot, balancing one-legged for a moment as I imagined the hard, sharp toe of my shoe slamming into her cheek, knocking her head loose and unresisting against the cushions of the settee. Then, I let my foot fly, landing a fierce and almighty kick against my satchel. It skidded across the room, the unbuckled flap flying open and my new books and pens and pencils scattering over the floor like a body blown apart by an explosion. Then I turned on my heels and marched toward the door. When I looked back, my mother was staring at the television, expressionless again. I pulled open the door and let it slam behind me, hoping the shock of the noise penetrated her insides and took her breath away, the way a punch to her stomach would.
LATER THAT EVENING, I sat on my bed. Downstairs, I could hear the melodic rumble of the news announcer’s voice and then my father’s thunderous yells. As I sat there, my father’s voice reverberating through me, I understood his feelings of anger and futility, knowing that they were also my own. There was so much to rage at: the entire unfairness of the world. For my father it was the royal family and rampant inflation, factory closures, unemployment, the killing of innocent people in places like Northern Ireland and Vietnam. For me it was this ugly house, my mother’s utter inability to be the normal mother I longed for, and the fact that Amanda had spent her time after school snogging the awful Stan Heaphy.
But what was I expecting, really? My mother had never been the mother I wanted. And Amanda was far out of reach. Even if she decided tomorrow that she didn’t want to go out with Stan Heaphy, she’d doubtless take up with some other boy she’d kiss outside the school gates. She’d hardly start wanting to be my friend. She might like me enough to defend me from Tracey’s teasing, but she didn’t even want to sit with me on the bus ride to school. I was simply a girl she’d felt sorry for when she found me out in the rain and whose name she couldn’t remember, a girl she could order to rub suntan lotion over her back. It would make so much more sense if I could make myself stop thinking about her, if I could be infatuated with David Cassidy or one of the Bay City Rollers, if I could be like all the other girls. But clearly, and now more than ever, I knew that I was not.
I had finished my homework, doing my maths first because Tracey and the Debbies were relying on me to get the answers to them the next morning so they could copy them before the lesson later that day. And I had finished the assignment that Ms. Hastings set us, a story about ourselves, because, she’d told us, she wanted to know her students better. At first, when she’d told us about this homework, I’d been eager to get home and write about my interests in world exploration and all the fascinating things I’d discovered during my research on my mother’s cruise. But on the bus ride home, when I’d mentioned the assignment and Tracey declared that anyone who wanted Ms. Hastings to know them better was probably trying to be teacher’s pet, I’d lost my initial enthusiasm and had instead written a couple of careless pages about our move from Hull to Midham, a story that bored me even as I wrote it. Now I had nothing to do but brood.
Then I had an idea. I might not be able to tell Amanda how I felt. And she might not even care how I felt. But I could write her a letter. Of course, I would never actually give it to her. Like all that correspondence between me and my cruise-taking mother, it would remain un-sent. And, having learned my lesson about sharing those letters with other people, I would keep this letter completely to myself. But I wanted to write to her—I felt compelled to. I was so filled with bursting emotion and confusion that somehow I needed to get it out. So I found an empty notebook on the table beside my bed and began to write.
“Dear Amanda,” I wrote, “the first thing I want you to know is that you are the most beautiful person I have ever known. The second thing I want you to know is that Stan Heaphy might be good-looking but underneath he is ugly and you deserve someone much better than him. The third thing you should know is that even though I know this is probably wrong, I love you and I would do anything for you. In fact, from the moment I met you outside the Co-op on that rainy night, I loved you. I think you are the nicest person I ever met in my entire life.” I sat back, looked at those few sentences, and felt an immediate urge to cross them out. Once the words were on the page, they seemed ridiculous, and I knew anyone reading them would think so, too. But no one would ever read them. Ever. Whatever happened, I was determined to make sure of that.
And so I continued. I recalled our first meeting, telling her how I’d been utterly miserable there in the rain until she invited me under her umbrella and everything had changed. I wrote about how wonderful it had been to discover that she was Tracey’s sister, how stunning she’d looked out there on her sun bed in her garden, how much I admired her pretty little house and her parents’ photographs, and how if she ever dressed up in a glittery ballroom dress like one of her mother’s she’d look far more glamorous than any film star I’d ever seen. I wrote about how grateful I was that she’d stopped Tracey and those boys from teasing me, how she’d changed my life by saving me from a terrible fate.
As I continued, I felt my embarrassment at my words fall away. It started to feel good, cleansing almost, to get it all out there on the page. Though I knew it was terribly wrong to want to kiss another girl, when I wrote about wanting to take Stan Heaphy’s place, to wrap my arms around Amanda, it made me feel calm, less troubled, as if putting my desires in writing took the shamefulness out of them, transformed them into sentences made up of nothing more than words.
When I finished my letter, signing it “All my love, Jesse,” it was several pages long and the time was after ten o’clock. I tore the pages carefully out of the notebook, folded them, and looked around the room. For a moment, I considered hiding them under my mattress, but I decided that might not be such a good place. Despite my mother’s current apathy, there was always a chance she’d find some new frenzied energy and take it upon herself to clean the bedrooms from top to bottom, single-handedly turning the mattresses on all the beds. After giving it a few minutes’ consideration, I took one of the books down from my bookshelf, pressed the letter inside its pages, and put it back on the shelf. Though in a sudden fit of housework my mother might dust off my books, she was very unlikely to look inside. Then, my confession made and hidden away, I changed into my pajamas, climbed into bed, and promptly fell asleep.