Last night, as Audrey and I got ready for bed, their giggles floated out of Grace’s open window and in through ours. It made my annoyance flare up all over again; the fact they were being congratulated for something I’d be punished for. Audrey didn’t seem to get why I was so fed up, which irritated me even more.
‘Would you rather lots of yelling and fighting?’ she asked as she peeled back her duvet and climbed into bed.
‘At least it would be appropriate to the situation,’ I grumbled.
Audrey just smiled this sad sort of smile and turned out the light. She hates conflict, regardless of who started it in the first place, which is weird because when she’s swimming she’s so insanely fierce. Yep, if Grace and I are two warring nations, then Audrey is most definitely Switzerland.
‘I can’t believe she got a cake with a sparkler in it,’ Stella says later that morning as we walk arm-in-arm to English. ‘That is just so effing weird.’
‘Thank you!’ I cry. ‘Finally! Someone who gets it!’
I should have known I could rely on my best friend to back me up on this one.
‘What happened to your parents being really mad?’ she asks.
‘God knows. It’s like they’ve been brainwashed. All I know is, if it was me who’d gone out and got herself pregnant, it would be like Armageddon in our house right now. Instead they’re treating Grace like she’s made from spun sugar or something.’
‘I still can’t believe she’s having a baby. It’s like the Virgin Mary, but in real life.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ I say. ‘Since Grace isn’t a virgin.’
Grace lost her virginity to Dougie on her seventeenth birthday, and by all accounts it was romantic and perfect – rose petals on the duvet and Ed Sheeran on the iPod.
‘You know what I mean,’ Stella says. ‘She’s just so not the sort of person who gets caught out like that. I mean, how did she get pregnant in the first place? Wasn’t she on the pill?’
I shake my head. ‘The pill makes her insane. She took it for a bit when she was with Dougie and it turned her into a total crazy bitch. No, she reckons the condom broke and she and Sam didn’t realize. Dad’s already drafted his letter of complaint to Durex.’
Stella snorts.
The classroom is hot and stuffy. When we arrive Mrs Poots is opening all the windows with a long metal pole with a hook on the end. As she stretches, her slip shows beneath the hem of her tweed skirt.
‘Ah, Mia,’ she says, noticing me as I sit down. ‘I saw the most wonderful documentary on Ancient Greece last night and it reminded me to ask if you’ve heard from Grace recently.’
Mrs Poots is one of Grace’s biggest fans. She cried actual tears when Grace opened her envelope on A-level results day last year.
‘She’s already home actually,’ I say.
Mrs Poots’s eyes light up. ‘Really? How lovely. And how is she? Is she well?’
‘Oh, you know,’ I say, keeping my voice purposefully casual. ‘Six months pregnant.’
‘Pregnant?’ Mrs Poots repeats uncertainly.
‘Yeah,’ I say, unloading my folder and books onto the desk. ‘You know, up the duff, got a bun in the oven, knocked up, with child …’
Mrs Poots gapes at me.
‘It’s true,’ Stella confirms. ‘With some guy she met in Greece. Broken condom apparently.’
Biting my lip hard to stop myself from laughing, I poke her in the ribs. She pokes me back.
‘And Cambridge?’ Mrs Poots says, her voice trembling with fear.
Grace is Queen Mary’s first Oxbridge-bound student in over five years.
‘Oh, don’t worry, she’s still going,’ I say. ‘She’s going to take the baby to lectures in a papoose.’
Mrs Poots’ cheeks are very red, her eyes drooping with disappointment. She looks devastated. She looks how my parents should look.
‘I’ll tell her you say congratulations, shall I?’ I suggest brightly.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Poots stammers. ‘Yes, please do, Mia.’
Next to me Stella shakes with silent giggles.
Mrs Poots is distracted throughout the entire lesson, stumbling over a Yeats poem and giving out the wrong homework, and I leave the classroom with the feeling that by lunchtime the entire staffroom will know that Amazing Grace is perhaps not quite so amazing after all.
After school I’m not in the mood to go straight home so I persuade Stella to walk into town with me instead. We try on nail varnishes in Boots, painting each nail a different colour, then sit in Starbucks, trying to make our frappuccinos last as long as possible until all we have left at the bottom are a couple of centimetres of milky water.
As usual we’re on the Right Move app, looking at flats for rent.
‘Check this one out,’ I say, thrusting my phone under Stella’s nose. ‘It’s got a Jacuzzi bath!’
She squints at the screen. ‘The second bedroom is tiny though,’ she points out.
I don’t tell her I’ve already earmarked that one as hers.
After we finish our A levels next year, Stella and I are going to get jobs and move into a flat together, like Rachel and Monica in Friends. We’ve already registered our details with half the estate agents in Rushton, and folded down the corner of dozens of pages of the Ikea catalogue.
‘How about this one then?’ I suggest, clicking the next link. ‘It’s even got a little garden, look. We could have barbecues.’
A sun-drenched picture of Stella and I holding an epic barbecue pops into my head. In it everyone is laughing and drinking and having a good time, marvelling over what brilliant hosts we are.
‘Do you even know how to light a barbecue?’ Stella asks.
‘No,’ I admit. ‘We can learn though. Or get a load of those disposable ones.’
‘Do you reckon we’ll really be able to afford somewhere like that?’
‘Course we will. We’ll have jobs, won’t we?’
‘I suppose,’ Stella says, prising the plastic domed lid off her drink and tipping a couple of ice cubes into her mouth.
My phone vibrates in my hand. It’s a text message from Mum asking if I’ll be home for dinner. I haven’t seen her since she said a sharp ‘goodnight’ on our return from the restaurant last night. By the time I dragged myself out of bed and down to breakfast this morning, she’d been gone for over two hours, down at the pool with Audrey.
‘Stells,’ I say, putting my phone away.
‘Yeah?’ she says.
‘What’s my thing?’
‘Your thing?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know. Like Audrey’s thing is her swimming, and Grace’s is being really clever, and Kimmie’s is her jewellery …’
Kimmie makes her own jewellery and sells it on Etsy.
‘Oh, OK,’ Stella says, nodding. ‘I get it.’
‘So?’ I ask. ‘What’s mine?’
Stella chews on her straw as she thinks. ‘You’re really good at hair,’ she offers eventually.
I slump back on my seat. ‘Is that it? Being able to use a pair of GHDs? Wow, thanks.’
‘Hey, don’t knock it! People are always going to want to have their hair look nice.’
‘It’s not very impressive though, is it? It’s not going to make me famous or anything.’
‘I suppose not,’ she admits. ‘Unless you become one of those celebrity hair stylists with their own shampoo brand, like, I dunno, John Frieda or Trevor Sorbie or something … Why are you even bothered anyway?’
‘It’s just something stupid Sam said last night. He was asking me what my thing was and I didn’t know.’
‘Well, maybe you don’t have one. Maybe some people just don’t.’
‘Maybe,’ I mutter.
There’s a pause.
‘Do you think you have one?’ I ask.
‘What? A thing?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Of course I do. I’ve got my photography, haven’t I?’
&nbs
p; Stella’s hobby is relatively new. The last time she saw her dad he gave her a really fancy camera and she’s been learning how to take photos with it via YouTube tutorials. She uses me as her subject sometimes, lying on her belly and barking out instructions like she’s David Bailey, stopping every few shots to fiddle with the settings. I didn’t realize she was serious about it, though.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks, tilting her head to one side. ‘You look annoyed.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yeah, you do.’
‘Only because you’re looking at me like that.’
‘Fine,’ Stella says, rolling her eyes and pulling her phone out of her bag. ‘Then I’ll stop.’
‘Good,’ I say, taking mine out too.
9
I get home to discover the entire family sitting on the living-room floor, the family photo albums open on the rug in front of them. It’s rare we’re all at home at once so I’m a bit overwhelmed by the number of bodies spread across the sofa and armchairs and carpet.
‘Oh my God, Mia, I’ve just found the most hysterical photo of the three of us,’ Grace says from where she’s sitting on the floor, her legs stretched out in front of her. ‘Come look.’
I hesitate before flopping onto the sofa behind her. Grace passes me up the album.
I immediately recognize the photo. It was taken outside Rushton Town Hall. I must have been about five at the time. I’m sitting on the edge of the fountain wearing a Hannah Montana T-shirt and eating a chocolate ice-cream cone. It’s smeared round my mouth and dribbling down my chin and wrists. I don’t seem to care though, grinning with both sets of teeth, half of which appear to be missing. Next to me, eight-year-old Grace is perched demurely, her ice-cream cone perfectly intact. Whereas I’d always eat mine in about a minute flat, Grace would make hers last for what seemed like hours, taking delicate little licks, never getting any round her mouth or on her chin. Even Audrey, aged eighteen months and sitting in her pushchair to the right of us, is making neater work of her cone than me. It isn’t just the ice-cream, though – everything about me looks wild, from my tangled mass of hair, to my battered and bruised legs and scuffed sandals. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was the odd one out, even then.
‘Oh gosh, Mia, look at your hair,’ Mum says, shaking her head. She turns to Sam. ‘Mia never was terribly fond of having her hair combed when she was growing up.’
‘You look almost feral!’ Grace adds, giggling.
I make a face at the back of her head and resist the urge to give her smooth hair a sharp tug.
‘Let’s have another look,’ Sam says, clambering up onto the sofa next to me. ‘Aw,’ he says, beaming at the three of us in turn. ‘You guys were the cutest.’
He slides back onto the floor and kisses Grace on the top of her head. She positively glows. It’s vomit-inducing. She turns the page, pausing on a photo of her as a baby. She looks like a doll with her plump pinky lips and saucer-round eyes.
I looked nothing like a doll when I was born. I looked like a baby rat.
‘Oh, look at this!’ Dad says, turning the page of the album he’s holding.
He’s pointing at a yellowed newspaper cutting, marking the one and only time my name has appeared in print, compared to Audrey (eleven times), and Grace (a whopping twenty-two).
I was born six weeks premature. Mum was at the supermarket when her waters broke. It must have been a light week for news because the story made page five of the Rushton Recorder. A few days later the supermarket sent Mum and Dad a hamper filled with talcum powder and baby wipes and nappy-rash cream. They often wonder what they might have been given had Mum actually given birth right there in the store, in the middle of the fruit and veg aisle, Kevin the trolley boy holding Mum’s hand and urging her to ‘breathe’ and ‘push’, instead of Dad.
Dad turns the page again to reveal a set of photographs of me in the incubator where I spent the first six weeks of my life, hooked up to various wires and tubes, sticky white pads holding them in place. I’m pale and hairless, my eyes squeezed shut, a too-large knitted hat on my head. In one of the photos, Dad is lifting up Grace so she can see me. One of her chubby hands is splayed against the plastic cover of the incubator, the other reaching in through the hole in order to stroke my impossibly tiny fist. Compared to me, she looks huge – solid and healthy. Mum and Dad just look knackered; all dazed smiles and dark circles under bloodshot eyes.
‘Causing us sleepless nights from the very beginning,’ Dad jokes, not for the first time.
Mum is flipping through another album. ‘Here we are!’ she says, holding it up for us all to see.
It’s a photo from the day Audrey was born – the five of us crammed on Mum’s hospital bed. I’m refusing to look at the camera, pouting into my lap instead because Dad had just told me off for blowing a raspberry at Audrey, showering her big bald baby head with saliva.
‘Our little family complete,’ Dad says, smiling.
Mum flips back to a photograph of me when I’m about six months old. ‘Oh, Mia, what a grumpy chops!’ she says, laughing and passing the album to Sam, who is doing a very good impression of actually being interested.
I’m bigger in this photo, and less rat-like, the beginnings of my Afro sitting on the top of my hair like a mound of sooty candy floss. I’m glaring at the camera, my forehead all knots and wrinkles. I had a reputation for being a difficult baby, refusing to sleep through until I was over a year old, and catching every bug and infection going.
I hesitate as Sam peers at the hairy infant staring defiantly back at him. He looks up at me. ‘You have almost exactly the same expression on your face in this photo as you do right now,’ he says, smiling.
Everyone else turns to follow his gaze. I feel like a zoo animal.
‘I’m going upstairs,’ I say, standing up abruptly.
I’ve had enough nostalgia for one day.
‘Don’t go too far,’ Dad replies. ‘Dinner’s in the oven.’
‘What are we having?’
‘Salmon en croûte.’
Otherwise known as Grace’s favourite.
‘OK,’ I murmur, slinking away, leaving them to it.
I need a fag. Urgently. At dinner Grace and Sam held hands the entire time, forcing Sam to use his left hand to shovel food into his mouth. I kept trying to catch Audrey’s eye across the table so I could pull a face and share my horror, but she didn’t seem to notice me.
I rifle in my handbag for the lone cigarette I know is in there somewhere. I find it at the very bottom, covered in fluff. It’s a bit crooked but will have to do. I push open my window and climb out onto the roof.
Although Grace and Audrey have access to the roof, they obey the rules and rarely venture out here. As a result I’ve come to think of the view – not that it’s anything special, just the back garden and houses beyond – as mine and no one else’s.
‘Hey,’ a male voice says, making me jump.
Sam is sitting outside Grace’s window, his arms resting on bent legs, his face illuminated by the soft glow of light behind him.
‘Jesus, you bloody scared the life out of me,’ I say.
‘God, sorry. Are you OK?’
‘Yeah. Luckily. I could have fallen off the roof and sued the shit out of you.’ I sit down, annoyed I’m not going to be able to smoke my cigarette in peace.
Sam lifts a cigarette to his lips. The tip burns orange.
‘You smoke,’ I say. ‘But you’re going to be a doctor.’
‘I know, I know,’ he says, smoke seeping out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Do as I say and not as I do and all that jazz. For what it’s worth, I’m giving up. I’m down to two a day now.’
‘From how many?’
‘Used to be a whole pack, a pack and a half some days.’
‘Jesus,’ I say, fumbling for the lighter I keep hidden under a plant pot. ‘That’s loads.’ I straighten my cigarette out the best I can and light up.
‘I plan to be down to zero by
the time Bean arrives,’ Sam says.
God, I wish they’d stop calling it that.
The sky in front of me is hazy and starless and the colour of scorched toast. My eyes trace the fuzzy silhouette of next-door-but-one’s cat slinking his way across the top of our fence.
There’s a pause. I notice Sam’s cigarette has burnt down. I offer him the plant pot. He thanks me, tossing his cigarette butt in. For a few seconds I think he’s going to go back inside and leave me to it. Instead, though, he angles his body towards me, so his knee is almost touching mine, forcing me to scoot backwards, the edge of the window frame digging into my shoulder.
‘Can I ask you a question, Mia?’ he says.
‘You can ask,’ I reply. ‘No promises I’ll answer, though.’
‘Fair enough. It’s just about your reaction to the baby.’
‘What about it?’
‘The fact you pissed yourself laughing. I’m curious as to what you found so amusing?’
It’s funny; he doesn’t seem angry or annoyed about it, more intrigued.
‘Are you kidding me?’ I say. ‘Grace is like the last person on earth you’d expect to get pregnant by accident. How else was I supposed to react?’
Sam cocks his head to one side, like he wants more of an explanation.
‘Look, it’s just kind of how I roll,’ I add. ‘Totally inappropriate stuff comes out of my mouth sometimes, end of.’
‘That must make life interesting.’
‘Ha. Not everyone thinks so.’
‘Who’s everyone?’
‘Who do you think? Mum, Dad. Grace.’
Especially Grace.
‘Baby,’ a female voice calls from inside. ‘Are you coming to bed?’
Speak of the devil.
‘A-ha, the lady hath spoken,’ Sam says, standing up. He pauses, one foot resting on the windowsill. ‘For what’s it’s worth, Mia, and I know I’m a terrible example seeing as until very recently I smoked like an absolute chimney, but you’re far too young and beautiful to partake in such a thoroughly filthy habit.’