Chapter 4
The Court, the biggest and best shopping centre within walking distance of Kilda’s and Colm’s, the wrapping of every moment in the world that doesn’t have some sour-faced adult looming over it ready to pounce. The Court pulls like a towering magnet and everyone comes. Anything can happen here, in the sparkling slice of freedom between classes and teatime; your life could lift right off the ground and shimmer into something brand-new. In the dizzying white light all the faces glimmer, they mouth words and crack open in laughs you can almost catch through the cloud of sounds, and any one of them could be the heart-stopping one you’ve been waiting for; anything you can imagine could be waiting for you here, if you turn your head at just the right second, if you just catch the right eye, if the right song just comes spinning out of the speakers all around you. Sugar-smell of fresh doughnuts drifting out from the kiosk, lick it off your fingers.
It’s the beginning of October. Chris Harper – scuffling with Oisín O’Donovan on the rim of the fountain in the middle of the Court, mouth wide in a laugh, the other Colm’s guys around them whooping them on – has a little over seven months left to live.
Becca and Julia and Selena and Holly are on the opposite rim of the fountain, with four open packets of sweets in between them. Julia has one eye on the Colm’s guys and is talking fast and snappy, telling some possibly mostly true story about how this summer she and this English girl and a couple of French guys blagged their way into a super-fancy nightclub in Nice. Holly is eating Skittles and listening, with one eyebrow at an angle that says Yeah right; Selena is lying on the battered black-marble edge of the fountain with her chin propped on her hands, so that her hair drapes over her shoulder almost to the floor. Becca wants to lean over and cup it in her hands, before it touches the grime and the ground-in gum.
Becca despises the Court. Back at the start of first year, when the new boarders had to wait a month before they were allowed off school grounds – until they were too worn down to run away, she figures – that was all she ever heard about: oh the Court the Court the Court, everything’ll be so fab when we get to go to the Court. Glowing eyes, hands sketching pictures like it was shining castles and skating rinks and chocolate waterfalls. Older girls trailing back smug and sticky, wrapped with scents of cappuccino and tester lip gloss, one-finger-swinging bags packed with colours, still swaying to the dazing pump of glossy music. The magic place, the shimmering place to make you forget all about sour teachers, rows of dorm beds, bitchy comments you didn’t understand. Vanish it all away.
That was before Becca knew Julia and Selena and Holly. Back then she was so miserable it astonished her every morning. She used to ring her mother sobbing, huge disgusting gulps, not caring who heard, begging to come home. Her mother would sigh and tell her how much fun she’d be having any day now, once she made friends to chat with about boys and pop stars and fashion, and Becca would get off the phone stunned all over again by how much worse she felt. So the Court sounded like the one thing to look forward to in the whole horrible world.
And then she finally got there and it was a crap shopping centre. All the other first-years were practically drooling, and Becca looked up at this windowless nineties lump of grey concrete and wondered whether, if she just curled up on the ground right here and refused to move, they would send her home for being crazy.
Then the blond girl next to her, Serena or something – Becca had been too busy being wretched for much to stick in her mind – Selena took a long thoughtful look up at the top of the Court and said, ‘There actually is a window, see? I bet if you could find it, you could see half of Dublin.’
Which it turned out you could. And there it was, spread out below them: the magic world they’d been promised, neat and cosy as storybooks. There was washing billowing on lines and little kids playing swingball in a garden, there was a green park with the brightest red and yellow flowerbeds ever; an old man and an old lady had stopped to chat under a curly wrought-iron lamppost, while their perky-eared dogs wound their leads into a knot. The window was in between a parking pay-station and a huge bin, and adults paying their parking tickets kept giving Becca and Selena suspicious looks and in the end a security guard showed up and threw them out of the Court even though he didn’t seem sure exactly why, but it was a million kinds of worth it.
Two years on, though, Becca still hates the Court. She hates the way you’re watched every second from every angle, eyes swarming over you like bugs, digging and gnawing, always a clutch of girls checking out your top or a huddle of guys checking out your whatever. No one ever stays still, at the Court, everyone’s constantly twisting and head-flicking, watching for the watchers, trying for the coolest pose. No one ever stays quiet: you have to keep talking or you’ll look like losers, but you can’t have an actual conversation because everyone’s thinking about other stuff. Fifteen minutes at the Court and Becca feels like anyone who touched her would get electrocuted.
And at least back when they were twelve they just put on their coats and went. This year, everyone gets ready for the Court like they’re getting ready for the Oscars. The Court is where you bring your bewildering new curves and walk and self so people can tell you what they’re worth, and you can’t risk the answer being Nothing zero nothing. You like so totally have to have your hair either straightened to death or else brushed into a careful tangle, and fake tan all over and an inch of foundation on your face and half a pack of smoky eyeshadow around each eye, and supersoft superskinny jeans and Uggs or Converse, because otherwise someone might actually be able to tell you apart from everyone else and obviously that would make you a total loser. Lenie and Jules and Holly are nowhere near that bad, but they still redo their blusher four times and check the mirror from twenty angles, while Becca fidgets springy-footed in the doorway, before they can actually leave. Becca doesn’t wear makeup to the Court because she hates makeup and because the idea of spending half an hour getting ready to sit on a wall in front of a doughnut shop makes her brain short out with stupid.
She goes because the others do. Why they want to is a total mystery to Becca. They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.
Today she’s even more electric than usual, checking the time on her phone every two minutes, shifting like the marble hurts her bones. Julia’s already said to her twice, ‘Jesus, will you settle down?’ Becca mutters, ‘Sorry,’ but a minute later she’s shifting again.
It’s because like two metres down from them on the fountain-edge are the Daleks. Becca hates everything about the Daleks, in detail. She hates them separately – the way Orla’s mouth hangs open, the way Gemma wiggles her bum when she walks, Alison’s poor-ickle-scared-baby look, the fact that Joanne exists – and as a unit. She hates them extra today because three of the Colm’s guys across the fountain have come over to sit with them, so the Daleks are even more everything than usual. Every time one of the guys says something, all four of them have to shriek with laughter and pretend they’re almost falling off the fountain so the guys will catch them. Alison keeps lolling her head right over to one side to look up at this blond guy, and sticking out the tip of her tongue between her teeth. She looks brain-damaged.
‘So,’ Julia is saying, ‘Jean-Michel points at me and Jodi and he’s all, “This is Candy Jinx. They just won the Irish X Factor!” Which was kind of smart, because since that doesn’t exist it’s not like the bouncers were going to know the actual winner, but not that smart, because I could’ve told him exactly where this was going to fucking go.’ Julia is trying out swearing. It still only sort of works. ‘And yeah, surprise, the bouncers are like, “OK, let’s hear them sing.”’
‘Uh-oh,’ Becca says. She’s trying to ignore the Daleks and concentrate on Julia. Julia’s stories are always good, even if you have to subtract ten or twenty per cent and Becca’s never completely sure she’s subtracting enough.
Julia’s eyebrow shoots up. ‘Thanks a bunch.’
Becca flinches. ‘No, I just meant—’
‘Chillax, Becs. I know I can’t sing for shit. That’s the whole point.’ Becca blushes, and goes for another handful of Skittles to hide the blush. ‘So I’m like, we’re so fucked, what are me and Jodi even supposed to sing? We both like Lady Gaga, but what are we going to do, say Candy Jinx’s first single is “Bad Romance”?’
Selena is laughing. The Colm’s guys are looking over.
‘Luckily, though, Florian is smarter than Jean-Michel. He goes, “Are you joking? They’re under contract. If they sing a note, we’ll all get our arses sued off.”’
Holly isn’t laughing. She looks like she hasn’t heard. Her head’s tucked sideways, listening to something else.
‘Hol?’ says Selena. ‘You OK?’
Holly nods backwards, at the Daleks.
Julia leaves the rest of her story for later. The four of them pretend to be fascinated by picking out exactly the right sweets from the packets, and listen.
‘He is,’ Joanne says, and nudges Orla’s leg with her foot.
Orla snickers and cringes her chin down between her shoulders.
‘Look at him. He’s so into you, it’s pathetic.’
‘He is not.’
‘OMG, he so is? He told Dara and Dara told me.’
‘No way does Andrew Moore like me. Dara was just messing.’
‘Um, excuse me?’ Joanne’s voice has an instant cold edge that sets Becca shifting on the fountain again. She hates being this scared of Joanne, but she can’t stop. ‘You think Dara’s going to make an idiot out of me? Hello, I don’t think so?’
‘Jo’s right,’ Gemma says lazily. She’s lying with her head in one of the guys’ lap, with her back arched so that her chest sticks up at him. The guy is desperately trying to look like he’s not trying to look down her top. ‘Andrew’s totally drooling over you.’
Orla squirms delightedly, bottom lip sucked in between her teeth.