Chapter TWENTY-NINE
AFTER A STAY OF SEVERAL DAYS IN THE HOSPITAL, I’D RETURNED home to a place that was completely different. Though there were still holes in the walls from my mother’s fit with the sledgehammer and some of the furniture had been clumsily nailed back together, all other evidence of her tempestuous presence was gone. In the mornings I slept late, until after my father had left for work. When I came downstairs, Grandma was cooking breakfast while her fiancé, Bill—an almost bald and jowly seventy-year-old who looked about as un-gigolo-like as I could imagine—filled out the crossword in the previous evening’s Hull Daily Mail. Our days were spent in a quiet routine punctuated by washing dishes, cleaning, and cooking. In the afternoons, we’d drink tea and listen to the play on Radio 4. If there was a cricket match, Bill would turn on the television to watch it, Grandma would pull out her knitting, and I’d get out a book. In the evenings, when my father came home, he and Bill would repair the various holes and cracks in the walls. Upstairs, I’d lie on my bed reading until I fell asleep. A couple of times a week, Malcolm and Dizzy would come over and we’d sit together in the kitchen, or, if the weather was nice, we’d go into the garden and talk until the long June evenings descended into dark. There were no highs, no lows, no screaming fits or pits of hopeless desperation. But during all this time the dread of returning to Liston Comprehensive hung there, a lurking menace in my mind. I could imagine it all so clearly—the trail of titters I’d leave behind me as I walked through the playground, the snarled comments in the corridors, the gangs of vicious, angry girls. I could clearly hear the choruses of “lezzie” and “loony” as I pushed my way through jostling crowds in the cloakrooms. Even the teachers would look at me with sneering pity—the pathetic case who’d written secret love letters to an older girl student, and who’d tried to kill herself when she was found out.
Finally, after I’d been at home for three weeks, my father told me that I had to return to school. “But I can’t,” I protested, unable to imagine leaving the refuge of our house. “I can’t go back.”
“You’ve got to, Jesse,” he said. “You’ve got no choice. The doctor only wrote you a sick note for three weeks, love. If you don’t go back, they’ll be sending the truant officer out.”
I WALKED ALONG the road into the village as if I were walking to my own funeral. For the first time since I’d woken at the hospital, I wondered if it might have been better if I had drowned. When I rounded the corner onto the high street, there was already a group gathered at the bus stop. I saw Tracey staring eagerly at me. The boys hovered around her, all elbows and knees, shoving and sputtering as they watched my approach.
“Hello, lezzie girl,” Tracey called when I was still several feet away. “Didn’t think we’d see you again. Heard you’d tried to walk on water. What, think you’re some kind of bloody saint? Too bad you didn’t realize that lezzies sink!”
The boys around her laughed, and one of them started chanting, “Saint Lezzie, Saint Lezzie.”
I’d been hoping that Dizzy would be at the bus stop, but more than anything I was also hoping to see Amanda. I’d been hoping to see her almost as soon as I woke at the hospital, hoping she’d show up among my little string of visitors. When Mabel swept into the ward, I’d peer around her, wanting to see Amanda in her wake. And when my father arrived I looked past him, wishing more than anything that she had tagged along. Even when Malcolm came to see me a second time, whisked into the ward by one of the silky-voiced nurses, I thought how perfect it would have been if Amanda accompanied him and I could lie there, basking in the attention of my newfound friend and the girl I still loved. After I’d been discharged, though I was soothed by the uneventful routine of my days, I kept looking out the window, yearning with an impossible ferocity for Amanda to appear at the end of our driveway and wave cheerily to me as she made her way to the house.
If she had come to see me, I’d know that she forgave me for writing all those things about her in my letters, that she cared that I had tried to drown myself, that, even if she didn’t return my feelings, she was glad that I was still alive. But, as the days and then weeks went by and I did not see her, I began to realize that perhaps she really did hate me for what I’d done. It was this I feared more than anything. When they came to visit, I wanted to ask Malcolm and Dizzy if they’d seen her, if she’d asked after me, but I couldn’t bring myself even to say her name. Now, as I approached our old meeting place, I felt hopeful once again. Even if she’d decided she hated me, I knew she would never be as cruel as Tracey.
“Looking for your little lezzie girlfriend, are you?” Tracey asked, apparently catching me glance toward the end of the street.
I’d been avoiding her eyes, but now I looked straight at her. She was simmering, energized. Her pupils shone like gleaming coals.
“‘Dear Amanda,’” she began, making her voice all soft and squeaky as she imitated writing in the air. “‘I love you soooo much. You are soooo wonderful. And sooo beautiful. Let me ride up on my big white horse and rescue your big fat beautiful arse….’” She turned to the boys and cackled. Then she put her hands on her hips and whipped back to face me. “Too bad you’re not going to see her again, isn’t it?”
I frowned. What was she talking about?
“Yeah, bet you didn’t know that, did you?” She flicked back her ponytail with a toss of her head. “Hah! So much for all your loveydovey-lezzie letters. She’s cleared off with Stan.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s left home. Buggered off. Gone.”
Surely Tracey was lying. It would be just like her to want to see me suffer at the thought of Amanda running off with Stan Heaphy. “I don’t believe you,” I said.
Tracey shrugged. “Believe what you want. See if I care. I’m sorry she broke your little lezzie heart, but what I’m saying’s true. She went on a school trip but she sneaked off, met up with Stan. Cleared off with him, she did. Left a note for the teacher, and another for my mum.”
I thought back to that enormous buckled suitcase Amanda had hauled to the bus stop, how she’d seemed so intense when she said goodbye to me before getting on the bus.
“I’m bloody glad she’s gone. She’s sixteen—she doesn’t need anybody’s permission. And, you ask me, she’d better not come back. If she does, my dad will give her a bloody good belting again. She never got on with him anyway, was always aggravating him. She thought she was badly done to, but you ask me, she deserved every bloody smack she got.”
As I looked at Tracey, her face jubilant and flaming, I remembered the first time I’d met her, standing in front of that neat little house among all those other neat little houses, the rows of identical windows, the brightly painted doors. I thought of Tracey’s mother in her apron, the smell of fresh-baked cakes, the glamorous photographs on the wall. And I thought of Amanda telling me there were a lot of things more important than appearances.
“Where did they go?” I asked.
“Timbuktu, for all I care.”
I imagined Amanda clinging to Stan on his motorbike, her enormous suitcase strapped on the back as they raced along an unwavering straight thread of narrow road. I imagined her helmetless, her bright blond hair streaming behind her, her chin leaning on Stan’s shoulder as she stared, unblinking, into the future, into what lay ahead. And I imagined myself standing at the roadside, watching as they became ever distant, until they disappeared into the landscape, until they were just a tiny speck against the asphalt’s gray.
“What, you going to cry now your lezzie friend has left you?” Tracey sneered. “Or maybe you should jump off a cliff, try to drown yourself again?”
Beside her, the boys continued giggling and shoving, but now I saw that they were only noise. And Tracey, though she could puff herself up until she was enormous and frightening, really, she was like a balloon expanding. I realized then that we were all like that, our skin only a thin membrane of protection for all the secrets we held inside.
I took a couple of steps toward her, so that I was only inches from her face. “Shut your face, Tracey,” I said. “I’m sick and tired of listening to the bloody rubbish that comes out of your big mouth.” Then I pushed past her and the little bevy of boys, to take a seat on the bench while I waited for the bus to arrive.
I SAT NEXT TO Dizzy on the bus and in most of my lessons. During break time and at school dinner, we met up with Malcolm, and the three of us sat together. It wasn’t easy to continue our conversations amid the laughter and whispers and occasional paper pellets, the insults tossed down corridors and echoing against the classroom walls. But somehow we managed it. And though the day passed with glacial slowness, the last lesson of the day came around.
“Are you all right, Jesse?” Malcolm asked me as we made our way to English, the only lesson that the two of us shared.
“I don’t know,” I said as I heard a group of third-year girls giggling behind us and a chant of “lesby-friend, lesby-friend” coming from a couple of boys peering out of an open classroom door.
It wasn’t just the taunting. It was the stunning knowledge that Amanda was gone, and that while I’d been writing letters filled with ridiculous fantasies of rescuing her she really had needed to escape. Now she had left with a stupid, horrible bully. I just hoped that Stan treated her better than her father had. My only consolation was that at least she’d left before she could learn about my letters, that I wouldn’t have to see her turn around and hate me like almost everyone else. I could still hold on to her warmth, the kindness of her smile.
“I don’t know if I’m all right,” I said to Malcolm. “But I think I feel strong.”
“You should,” he said.
“I should?”
“Yeah. I mean, the sea ate a whole bloody cliff, but you, it spat you back up.”
“JESSE, CAN I SEE you for a minute?” Ms. Hastings said.
It was the end of her lesson, and though I was itching to leave now that the school bell had sounded I’d rather enjoyed sitting in the back of the classroom between Malcolm and Dizzy, while the class talked about Lord of the Flies. I’d even raised my hand and made my own comment during the discussion, and, despite scornful looks from Tracey and the Debbies, I liked what I said. Now, though, with Ms. Hastings looking at me solemnly and asking me to stay behind, it was obvious that I must have done something wrong.
“I’m not quite sure how to say this, Jesse,” she said as soon as she’d closed the classroom door after the last student. I dropped my eyes to the scuffed-up floor. “It’s just that I’m very surprised at you. Shocked, really.” She was standing a few feet away from me. I could see her big leather boots and the jagged hem of her pale cotton skirt. “You see, I took down those letters you wrote that someone put on the school notice board.”
My stomach plummeted. I was suddenly hot. I focused on Ms. Hastings’s boots.
“I know they were private, Jesse. And I’m sorry that they were stolen from you, but I have to confess that I ended up reading those letters myself.”
I wanted to dissolve into the floor.
“Like I said, I was very shocked. Jesse,” she continued, taking a step closer so that her boots and skirt filled my vision. “What you wrote, it was remarkable. Beautifully written. I’ve never seen you produce anything like that in my lessons. If I didn’t know your handwriting, I might not have believed those letters were written by the same girl.”
I let my gaze flicker upward, so that my eyes rested on the bright stripes that zigzagged across Ms. Hastings’s blouse.
“Young woman, you really are quite a talented writer.” She paused, and when I lifted my eyes to her face she was looking at me intently. “Do you realize that?”
I knew that she expected an answer, but I was flabbergasted. Those letters were nothing more than my absurd imaginings. They were ridiculous. Everyone at Liston Comprehensive thought so.
“I’m perfectly serious about this, Jesse Bennett. I’m not sure why you’ve been handing in such mediocre work in my lessons when you’re clearly capable of so much more. But I won’t stand for it any longer. Really, young woman, if you can produce such wonderful stories outside my lessons I don’t see why you can’t start doing the same here. Am I making myself clear?” She folded her arms across her chest.
“Yes, Ms. Hastings.” I studied her face. She was completely serious. She really thought my writing was good.
“Good. I’m glad we understand each other.” Then she turned away from me and walked over to her desk, where she picked up a sheaf of creased paper. “I believe these are yours,” she said, returning the little stack to me.
It wasn’t all of my letters to Amanda, but from its weight I guessed it was a good portion of them. “Thank you,” I said, taking them from her tentatively.
“That’s all, Jesse. Now go on—I know your friends are waiting for you.” She tipped her head toward the little window in the door. Malcolm’s and Dizzy’s heads were bobbing about as they peered through the glass.
“Yes, Ms. Hastings,” I said, my body surprisingly light as I turned toward my desk, gathered my things, and hastened across the classroom. As I put my hand on the door handle, she called to me.
“Jesse.”
I turned around.
“There’s nothing wrong with what you said in those letters. Nothing you should feel ashamed of. No matter what anyone else says, Jesse, I want you to know that.”
For a moment, I looked at her. Hands planted firmly on her hips, legs astride, in the swell of her flared skirt and sturdy boots, she looked so solid, so full of certainty, a dark X in the middle of the quiet room.
“Yes, Ms. Hastings,” I said, before darting out the door.