He starts laughing before I do. ‘Oh God, I’d almost forgotten about her – she really was a nutcase!’ He sobers suddenly. ‘But the thing is – the thing is, I can’t – I really can’t.’
‘You keep saying that,’ I point out gently. ‘But you massively underestimate yourself, Lochie. I know you could read something out in class. Maybe not start off with a whole presentation, but perhaps you could agree to read out one of your essays. Something shorter, a bit less personal. You know, it’s like with anything: once you take that first step, the next is a whole lot easier.’ I break off with a smile. ‘You know who first told me that?’
He shakes his head and rolls his eyes. ‘No clue. Martin Luther?’
‘You, Lochie. When you were trying to teach me to swim.’
He smiles briefly at the memory, then exhales slowly. ‘OK. Maybe I could try . . .’ He shoots me a teasing grin. ‘The wise Maya has spoken.’
‘Indeed!’ I suddenly jump to my feet, deciding that on our rare day off a bit of fun is called for. ‘And in return for all this wisdom, I want you to do something for me!’
‘Uh-oh.’
I turn on the radio, tuning in to the first pop station I find. I turn to Lochan and hold out my arms. He groans, dropping his head back against the cushions. ‘Oh, Maya, please be kidding!’
‘How am I supposed to practise without a partner?’ I protest.
‘I thought you’d given up salsa dancing!’
‘Only because they moved the lunchtime club to after school. Anyway, I’ve learned loads of new moves from Francie.’ I push the coffee table out of the way, pile up the papers and books, and reach down to grab his hand. ‘On your feet, partner!’
With a dramatic show of reluctance, he obeys, muttering crossly about his unfinished homework.
‘It’ll restore the bloodflow to your brain,’ I tell him.
Trying not to look embarrassed and failing, Lochan stands in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets. I raise the volume a couple of decibels, place one hand in his and the other on his shoulder. We begin with a few easy steps. Even though he constantly looks down at his feet, he isn’t a bad dancer. He has a good sense of rhythm and picks up new moves more quickly than I do. I show him the new steps Francie taught me. Once he’s got it, we’re on a roll. He treads on my toes a few times, but as we’re both barefoot it just makes us laugh. After a while I start to improvise. Lochan twirls me around and nearly sends me into the wall. Finding this highly amusing, he tries to do it again and again. The sun is on his face, the dust particles swirl about him in the golden light of the afternoon. Relaxed and happy, he suddenly, for a brief moment, seems at peace with the world.
Soon we are breathless, sweaty and laughing. After a while the style of the music changes – a crooner with a slow beat, but it doesn’t matter because I am too dizzy from spinning round and laughing to continue. I hook my arms about Lochan’s neck and collapse against him. I notice the damp hair sticking to his neck and inhale the smell of fresh sweat. I expect him to pull away and return to his physics now that our moment of silliness is over, but to my surprise he just puts his arms around me and we sway from side to side. Pressed up against him, I can feel the thud of his heart against mine, his ribcage expanding and contracting rapidly against my chest, the warm whisper of his breath tickling the side of my neck, the brush of his leg against my thigh. Resting my arms on his shoulders, I pull back a little to get a look at his face. But he isn’t smiling any more.
CHAPTER NINE
Lochan
The room is plunged in golden light. Maya is still smiling at me, her face bright with laughter, tawny wisps of hair hanging in her eyes and down her back, tickling my hands clasped around her waist. Her face glows like an old-fashioned streetlamp, lit from the inside, and everything else in the room disappears as if into a dark fog. We are still dancing, swaying slightly to the crooning voice, and Maya feels warm and alive in my arms. Just standing here, moving gently from side to side, I realize I don’t want this moment to end.
I find myself marvelling at how pretty she is, standing here, leaning against me in her short-sleeved blue shirt, bare arms warm and smooth against my neck. Her top buttons are undone, revealing the curve of her collarbone, the expanse of smooth white skin beneath. Her white cotton skirt stops well above her knees and I’m aware of her bare legs brushing against the thin, worn fabric of my jeans. The sun highlights her auburn hair, catches in her blue eyes. I drink in every tiny detail, from her soft breaths to the touch of each finger on the back of my neck. And I find myself filled with a mixture of excitement and euphoria so strong that I don’t want the moment to ever end . . . And then, out of nowhere, I am aware of another sensation – a tingling surge across my whole body, a familiar pressure against my groin. Abruptly I let go of her, shove her away from me, and stride over to the radio to cut the music.
Heart slamming against my ribs, I withdraw to the couch, coiling into myself, groping for the nearest textbook to pull across my lap. Still standing where I left her, Maya looks at me, a bemused expression on her face.
‘They’re going to be back any minute,’ I tell her by way of explanation, my voice rushed and ragged. ‘I’ve – I’ve got to finish this.’
Seemingly unperturbed, she sighs, still smiling, and flops down onto the couch beside me. Her leg touches my thigh and I recoil violently. I need an excuse to leave the room but I can’t seem to think straight, my mind a mess of jumbled thoughts and emotions. I feel flushed and breathless, my heart hammering so loudly I’m afraid she will hear it. I need to get as far away from her as possible. Pressing the textbook against my thighs, I ask her if she could make me some more coffee and she obliges, picking up the two used mugs and heading off to the kitchen.
The moment I hear the rattle of crockery in the sink, I dash upstairs, trying to make as little noise as possible. I lock myself in the bathroom and lean against the door as if to reinforce it. I pull off all my clothes, almost tearing at them in my haste, and, careful not to look down at myself, step under an icy shower, heaving with shock. The water is so cold it hurts, but I don’t care: it’s a relief. I have to stop this . . . this – this madness. After just standing there for a while, eyes tightly closed, I start to go numb and my nerve endings deaden, erasing all signs of my earlier arousal. It stills the racing thoughts, relieves the pressure of the madness that has begun crushing my mind. I lean forward against the wall, letting the frigid water lash my body, until all I can do is shiver violently.
I don’t want to think – so long as I don’t think or feel, I will be fine and everything will return to normal. Seated at my bedroom desk in a clean T-shirt and jogging bottoms, wet hair sending cold rivulets down the back of my neck, I pore over quadratic equations, grappling to keep the figures in my head, fighting to make sense of the numbers and symbols. I repeat the formulae under my breath, cover page after page with calculations, and every time I sense a crack in my self-imposed armour, a chink of light entering my brain, I force myself to work harder, faster, obliterating all other thoughts. I am dimly aware of the others returning, of their raised voices in the hall, of the clatter of plates from the kitchen beneath me. I concentrate on tuning it all out. When Willa comes in to say they’ve ordered pizza, I tell her I’m not hungry: I must finish this chapter by tonight, I must work my way through every exercise at top speed, I have no time to stop and think. All I can do is work or I will go crazy.
The sounds of the house wash over me like white noise, the evening routine for once unfolding without me. An argument, a door slamming, Mum shouting – I don’t care. They can sort themselves out, they have to sort themselves out, I must concentrate on this until it’s so late all I can do is collapse into bed, and then it will be morning and none of this will have happened. Everything will be back to normal – but what am I on about? Everything is normal! I just forgot, for one insane moment, that Maya was my sister.
For the remainder of the weekend I keep myself closeted
in my room, buried in schoolwork, and leave Maya in charge. In class on Monday I struggle to sit still, jittery and restless. My mind has become strangely diffuse – I am possessed by myriad different sensations at once. There is a light flashing in my brain, like the headlight of a train in the dark. A vice is slowly tightening around my head, gripping my temples.
When Maya came into my room yesterday to say goodnight, informing me she had left my dinner in the fridge, I couldn’t even turn round to look at her. This morning I shouted at Willa during breakfast and made her cry, dragged Tiffin out of the door, allegedly causing him grievous bodily harm, completely ignored Kit and snapped at Maya when she asked me for the third time what was wrong . . . I am a person coming undone. I am so disgusted with myself I want to crawl out of my own skin. My mind keeps pulling me back to that dance: Maya, her face, her touch, that feeling. I keep telling myself these things happen, I’m sure they are not all that uncommon. After all, I’m a seventeen-year-old guy – anything can set us off; just because it happened while I was dancing with Maya doesn’t mean a thing. But the words do little to reassure me. I’m desperate to escape myself because the truth of the matter is that the feeling is still there – perhaps it always has been – and now that I’ve acknowledged it, I am terrified that however much I may want to, I will never be able to turn things back.
No, that’s ridiculous. My problem is that I need someone to focus my attention on, some object of desire, some girl to fantasize about. I look around the class but there is no one. Attractive girls – yes. A girl that I care about – no. She can’t just be a face, a body; there has to be more than that, some kind of connection. And I can’t connect, don’t want to connect, with anyone.
I send Maya a text asking her to pick up Tiffin and Willa, then skip last period, go home to change into my running gear and drag myself round the sodden periphery of the local park. After a glorious weekend, the day is grey, wet and miserable: bare trees, dying leaves and slippery mud underfoot. The air is tepid and damp, a fine veil of drizzle speckles my face. I run as far and as hard as I can, until the ground seems to shimmer beneath my feet, and the world around me expands and retracts, blood-red blotches puncturing the air in front of me. Eventually pain courses through my body, forcing me to stop, and I return home to another freezing shower and work until the others return and the evening chores begin.
Over half-term I play footie out in the street with Tiffin, attempt to strike up conversations with Kit and play endless games of Hide-and-Seek and Guess Who? with Willa. At night, after my mind shuts down from information overload, I rearrange kitchen drawers and cupboards. I go through Tiffin and Willa’s bedroom, collecting outgrown clothes and discarded toys, and haul them off to the charity shop. I am either entertaining or tidying or cooking or studying: I comb through revision notes late into the night, pore over my books until the small hours of the morning, until there is nothing else to do but collapse on my bed and fall into a short, deep and dreamless sleep. Maya comments on my boundless energy but I feel numb, utterly drained from trying to keep myself occupied at all times. From now on I will just do and not think.
Back at school, Maya is busy with coursework. If she notices a difference in my behaviour towards her, she doesn’t mention it. Perhaps she too feels uncomfortable about that afternoon. Perhaps she too realizes that there needs to be more distance between us. We negotiate each other with the caution of a bare foot avoiding shards of glass, confining our brief exchanges to practicalities: the school run, the weekly shop, ways to persuade Kit to take over the laundry, the likelihood of Mum turning up sober on parents’ evening, weekend activities for Tiffin and Willa, dental appointments, figuring out how to stop the fridge leaking. We are never alone together. Mum is increasingly absent from family life, the pressure of balancing schoolwork and housework intensifies and I welcome the endless chores: they literally leave me with no time to think. Things are beginning to improve – I’m starting to return to a state of normality – until late one night there is a knock on my bedroom door.
The sound is like a bomb exploding in an open field.
‘What?’ I am horribly jumpy from an overdose of caffeine. My daily coffee consumption has reached new heights, the only way to keep up my energy levels through the days and late into the sleepless nights. There is no reply but I hear the door open and close behind me. I turn from my desk, biro still pressed against the indentations in my fingers, my borrowed school laptop anchored amidst a sea of scribbled notes. She is in that nightdress again – the white one that she has long outgrown and that barely reaches her thighs. How I wish she wouldn’t walk around in that thing; how I wish her copper hair wasn’t so long and shiny; how I wish she didn’t have those eyes, that she wouldn’t just wander in uninvited. How I wish the sight of her didn’t fill me with such unease, twisting my insides, tensing every muscle in my body, setting my pulse thrumming.
‘Hi,’ she says. The sound of her voice pains me. With that single word she manages to exude both tenderness and concern. With just one word she conveys so much, her voice calling to me from outside a nightmare. I try to swallow, my throat dry, a bitter taste trapped in my mouth. ‘Hi.’
‘Am I disturbing you?’
I want to tell her she is. I want to ask her to leave. I want her presence, her delicate, soapy smell, to evaporate from this room. But when I fail to reply, she sits down on the end of my bed, inches away from me, one bare foot tucked beneath her, leaning forward.
‘Maths?’ she asks, glancing down at my sheaves of paper.
‘Yeah.’ I return my gaze to the textbook, pen poised.
‘Hey—’ She reaches out for me, making me flinch. Her hand misses mine as I jerk away, and comes to rest, loose and empty, against the desk’s surface. I train my eyes back on my computer screen, the blood hurting my cheeks, heart paining my chest. I am still aware of her hair, falling like a curtain around her face, and there is nothing between us but torturous silence.
‘Tell me,’ she says simply, her words piercing the fragile membrane that surrounds me.
I feel my breathing quicken. She can’t do this to me. I lift my eyes to stare out of the window, but all I see is my own reflection, this small room, Maya’s soft innocence by my side.
‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ Her voice continues to puncture the silence like an unwanted dream.
I push my chair away from her and rub my head. ‘I’m just tired.’ My voice grates against the back of my throat. I sound alien, even to my own ears.
‘I’ve noticed,’ Maya continues. ‘Which is why I’m wondering why you carry on running yourself into the ground.’
‘I’ve got a lot of work to do.’
Silence tightens the air. I sense she is not going to be brushed off so easily. ‘What happened, Lochie? Was it something at school? The presentation?’
I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you, of all people. Throughout my life you were the one person I could turn to. The one person I could always count on to understand. And now that I’ve lost you, I’ve lost everything.
‘Are you just generally feeling down about things?’
I bite down on my lip until I recognize the metallic taste of blood. Maya notices and her questions stop, leaving in their place a muddy silence.
‘Lochie, say something. You’re frightening me. I can’t bear seeing you like this.’ She reaches again for my hand and this time makes contact.
‘Stop it! Just go to bed and leave me the fuck alone!’ The words fire from my mouth like bullets, ricocheting off the walls before I can even register what I am saying. I see Maya’s expression change, her face freeze in a look of incredulous surprise, her eyes wide with incomprehension. No sooner have my words slammed into her than she is moving away, flicking her head to hide the tears pooling in her eyes, the door clicking shut behind her.
CHAPTER TEN
Maya
‘Oh my God, oh my God, you’ll never guess what happened this morning!’ Francie’s eyes are bur
ning with excitement, the corners of her cherry-red lips drawn up into a grin.
I drop my bag on the floor and collapse on the seat beside her, my head still echoing with Tiffin’s yells as he had to be dragged to school this morning after a furious row with Kit over a plastic Transformer at the bottom of a cereal packet. I close my eyes.
‘Nico DiMarco was talking to Matt and—’
I force my eyes open to cut her off. ‘I thought you were going on a date with Daniel Spencer.’
‘Maya, I may have decided to give Danny a chance while I wait for your brother to come to his senses, but this has nothing to do with that. Nico was talking to Matt this morning, and guess what he said . . . guess!’ Her voice spikes with excitement and Mr McIntyre stops screeching his pen against the whiteboard for a moment to turn and give us a long-suffering sigh. ‘Girls, if you could at least pretend to pay attention.’
Francie flashes him her toothy smile and then turns back round in her seat to face me. ‘Guess!’
‘I have no idea. His ego got so big it exploded and now he needs surgery?’
‘Nooo!’ Francie clatters her non-regulation school shoes against the lino in a tap-dance of excitement. ‘I overheard him telling Matt Delaney he was going to ask you out after school today!’ She opens her mouth so wide I can actually make out her tonsils.
I gaze at her numbly.
‘Well?’ Francie shakes me brutally by the arm. ‘Isn’t this huge? Everyone’s been after him since he broke up with Anorexic Annie, and he’s gone and picked you! And you’re the only girl in the class who doesn’t wear make-up!’
‘I’m so flattered.’
Francie throws back her head dramatically and groans. ‘Aargh! What the hell’s the matter with you these days? At the beginning of term you were telling me he was the only guy at Belmont you’d ever consider snogging!’
I heave a sigh. ‘Yeah, yeah. So he’s hot. But he knows it.