‘We’re going to be late to meet the twins,’ Leanne said crossly.
‘Sorry,’ said Julie, feeling stupid. The way Leanne spoke to her made Julie feel like she was stupid, big and clumsy like a monster or a sea creature.
‘This is Julie,’ Leanne said to Susie and Kerry, when they got to the next street.
‘Are you new?’ Kerry asked, looking Julie up and down.
Julie looked completely stupid compared to Leanne, Susie and Kerry. They had proper hairstyles – Susie and Kerry had French plaits and Leanne had bunches with proper bobbles. Julie had a boring ponytail that was already coming out.
‘She’s not allowed to walk to school on her own,’ said Leanne.
‘Why not?’ said Susie.
‘She’s scared,’ said Leanne. ‘Her mum told my mum.’
‘I’m not scared,’ said Julie.
‘Why don’t you walk on your own, then?’ said Leanne.
School was horrible. A small, south-facing modern building, with little Munchkin chairs and stupid exhibitions of pictures of fish created entirely with glitter, it was always too hot and gave Julie a headache every afternoon. Everything was supervised closely except playtime, which was supervised from a distance by a fat teacher in a long skirt with a bell. Leanne, Susie and Kerry turned out to be the most popular girls in the school. They spent a whole year calling Julie ‘scaredy-cat’, holding their noses when she went past and pretending she’d farted. The only time they left Julie alone was when they were playing gymnastics on the rail around the grass by the caretaker’s house. When they did that Julie could keep away from them, and they’d be too absorbed to follow her; hanging upside-down on the rail, gripping with their knees and constantly arranging their skirts so their knickers weren’t showing.
The boys were even worse. They all knew words that Julie didn’t understand. At playtime they would come up to her and say things like, ‘Do you know what fuck means?’ and Julie would get embarrassed. She knew that ‘fuck’ was a dirty word but had never understood exactly what it signified, just that you shouldn’t say it. When she said she didn’t know, they teased her even more. After a while, Julie started pretending she did know what the words meant, but the boys were ready for her, either calling her bluff by making her define the words (she couldn’t), or using made-up words in the first place so that when she said she understood them, they could laugh and say she was a smelly liar, and they knew because they’d made up the word.
All the kids at school loved The Young Ones and would spend the day after each episode quoting lines from the programme. But when Julie joined in, nervous and frightened of being laughed at, she got mixed up and said one of Rik’s lines in Vyvyan’s voice. No one laughed. No one said anything. No one even called her a flid or a joey; they just looked at her with this weird disbelief on their faces. How could someone be so stupid?
From her first day, she walked home alone but told her mother she walked with Leanne. Suddenly lying dead in the yellow fields didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
Julie lost herself in books about planets and animals and maths because what she learnt at school wasn’t very exciting. She became best friends with Luke. At eleven she moved up to the local comprehensive: a hard-gravel playground and sports field surrounded by cold Portakabins, bullies in miniskirts, Cancer Corner, spitting competitions and – the place where most humiliation took place and where Julie once had to do PE in her knickers because she left her games kit at home – the sports hall.
Julie instantly became one of those kids who joined clubs because it meant she didn’t have to go outside. She spent breaktimes and lunchtimes playing chess, doing chemistry experiments, playing Dungeons & Dragons, making models or, if there were no clubs running, doing her homework in a corridor or toilet somewhere.
If her homework was finished and there were no clubs, she would attempt maths puzzles set for her by Mr Banks, her maths teacher, involving challenges to trisect angles, square circles, double cubes or find the square root of – 1. Mr Banks was very small, clever and sadistic, and always seemed as if he wanted to simultaneously reward and punish Julie for being so interested in his subject. Almost all the puzzles he ever set her turned out to be impossible to solve, or they’d be famous theorems no one had solved yet. But he did tell her how to work out square roots without a calculator, and how, with logic and time, you could solve almost everything – or at least explain why something couldn’t be solved. Julie liked that. Everything was wrong or right; impossible or possible; unknowable or knowable. One or the other. You could be certain about maths.
Julie didn’t have any friends, but she didn’t really need any, since she had Luke at home. No one at school believed in Luke. One time, Julie told the other girls that her best friend was allergic to the sun and that’s why he didn’t come to school but they said she was a liar, and that she didn’t have any friends – at school or anywhere else. They found her story doubly implausible: firstly, no one was allergic to the sun, and secondly, what boy would want to be friends with a girl?
School was shit. But it always is if you’re different. Julie never worked out why she was different, she just knew she was. Maybe the people who stared, called her names or refused to be friends with her knew what was wrong with her, but they never told her what it was. No one liked Julie and she didn’t know why; her best friend couldn’t leave the house because of an illness no one understood. Mr Banks’s puzzles, even the impossible ones, were a lot easier to work out than life was.
Chapter 3
The room is too hot. Luke switches on his fan. He’s never been allowed to open the window, not even at nighttime. There’s too much pollen, according to his mother, and moths, carrying poisonous dust on their wings, even in October.
Luke’s reading. When he reads, he almost feels like other people because he can read books in exactly the same way other people do, even if he does have trouble picturing some of the scenes. He’s never been able to play videogames, because all videogames seem to require you to travel on some sort of journey through vast improbable lands. Luke’s only experience of travelling has been to the other end of the house and back. The first time he tried to play a videogame he felt anxious and lost as soon as the character moved from the starting point. Luke’s never really experienced being lost and if being lost in the real world is as terrifying as being lost in a fictional one then maybe staying in this room isn’t that bad. But then again, Luke would still give anything to go out.
The book he’s reading now may as well be science fiction. It’s set in an office and Luke’s been having trouble creating the location in his imagination. Most of the time when he reads, he automatically places his most familiar image of, say, a house, or an apartment, or a field, into his imagination as required. But all his stock locations come from the TV or from films. If any action in a book takes place in an apartment, Luke’s imagination accesses one of the apartments in Friends. If anything takes place on a boat, Luke sees the inside of the Titanic. For Luke, there will always be several Titanics to choose from: an old black-and-white one, a Technicolor one with people in fifties clothes, one that keeps still like a photograph, and a huge Hollywood one with Oscars and celebrities. The idea that each of these images represents a real object that Luke can’t see – well, if he can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. There is no real Titanic, just the pictures. Or: there are several real Titanics.
Luke doesn’t use the word ‘real’ very often. He doesn’t talk about the real world or things being realistic and he doesn’t ever preface sentences with the words: in fact. Nobody really notices that he’s weird, though, or, at least, not more weird than other people they meet. Maybe Julie notices but she’s always been a bit weird herself. Luke thought for a long time that maybe other people didn’t read books the same way as him. When he asked Julie she said she’d never really thought about it. He mentioned some book they’d both read recently that included a scene set in a hospital. When he asked her to describe her image
of the hospital in the book, it was different to his. But when he asked if the image was similar to anything else – like, was it a hospital she’d actually been to, or maybe one from the TV or a film – she’d sort of gasped and said it was the set from Casualty, and she hadn’t even realised. So maybe Luke isn’t that weird.
Sometimes he dreams he’s left this room. But the place he goes is a world made up of TV fragments, like a photo-fit, or those TV-clip shows they have on ITV: TV about TV. And after all, what else is he going to dream about? He’s never seen the real outside, and you have to fill in the gaps somehow. If Julie ever played word-association with Luke and said the word ‘car’, he’d say ‘Knight Rider’, or ‘Christine’. He’d never say ‘street’, or ‘bus’, or ‘lorry’, or ‘motorbike’. So he dreams he’s escaped into the TV, which is no escape at all. That’s why he’s reading more books, and that’s why he wants to go out.
Julie once showed Luke a book that he couldn’t understand, of paintings by Escher. He couldn’t understand the outside world, or even his life; in the same way, he couldn’t understand Escher. Julie tried to explain to Luke that Escher’s paintings were ‘impossibilities’, or optical illusions, that stairs couldn’t really do that: they couldn’t really go up and down at the same time. Luke just thought, Why not? Why couldn’t stairs do that? Julie got very frustrated with him at the time because she couldn’t understand why he didn’t see the impossibility. But if it turned out that every staircase outside this house was like an Escher painting, Luke wouldn’t be surprised.
Luke’s mind’s still searching for an image of an office. The best it can do is the one from some American TV show about a lawyer, an open-plan mêlée of secretaries and computers and intrigue and people dressed in thin designer skirts. But it doesn’t fit properly with the book and the chapter therefore feels uncomfortable, as the action fails to fit the location. The next chapter is set in a factory. Luke gives up. What’s a factory? He can see big nineteenth-century furnaces and smoke and women in hairnets with cigarettes and children dressed in rags. Where would that image have come from? It’s not right, anyway, so Luke closes the book. He’ll look up factory images on the Internet tomorrow.
Yawning, he decides to go to bed. But before he does, he checks his e-mail. Apart from some of the usual crap, there’s an e-mail from someone called Ai Wei Zhe, who says he’s a healer staying in Wales. Luke’s e-mailed Internet healers before, but he doesn’t remember sending his details to this one. Maybe he’s responding to one of Luke’s newsgroup messages. There are lots of Luke’s cries for help floating around out there on newsgroup servers, but it’s very rare for someone to respond to one of them. This one says he may be able to help Luke.
Luke sends an e-mail straight back. Then, feeling suddenly more awake, he checks one of his newsgroups. While he’s doing that, a second e-mail comes through from Ai Wei Zhe. He asks for Luke’s phone number and for Luke to tell him when would be a good time to call. Luke immediately sends back a message with the number. He says he’s awake now if Ai Wei Zhe would like to call him. Shaking slightly, Luke disconnects from the Internet and waits. Nothing. He goes to clean his teeth and change into his pyjamas, still shaking and still not feeling particularly tired. He checks he really is disconnected from the Internet and that his phone’s not somehow engaged. Then it rings.
‘Hello?’ says the person on the end of the line. ‘Is that Luke?’
‘Yes, it is,’ Luke says. ‘Is that Ai Wei Zhe . . .?’ He has trouble pronouncing the name and makes Wei Zhe sound like Wednesday. ‘I hope it’s not too early or anything . . .’
‘No, Luke. Don’t worry. I always get up at dawn,’ the voice says. ‘And call me We i .’
‘OK.’
His accent sounds half American, half Chinese. ‘You have an unusual problem?’
‘Yes,’ Luke says. ‘I’m allergic to the sun.’
‘The sun is yang. The sun gives life.’
‘Not to me.’
‘No.’ Wei laughs. ‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Yes. A long time ago.’
‘But not recently?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just haven’t. I um . . . I don’t like the doctors, but that’s not why.’
‘Then why?’
‘I don’t know. They just haven’t come. They stopped coming a while ago. I guess it’s because this thing I have – XP – is incurable, so there’s not much they can do apart from telling me to keep my curtains closed. This doctor my mother knows – he updates my medical certificates, but apart from that, nothing happens.’
‘I see. And you’ve always been like this?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve never heard of this . . . XP before, but perhaps it’s just terminology. I have heard of cases where people can’t be exposed to sunlight, however; but I have not ever actually met anyone with this condition.’
‘Can it be healed?’ Luke asks.
‘We will soon find out.’ Wei laughs again. ‘Perhaps you are too much yin.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, being allergic to yang. This is fascinating.’
‘Uh, yeah, I guess so.’
‘Sorry. It probably isn’t that fascinating for you, huh?’
‘No.’ Luke smiles. How can he put this? ‘I want to dance in the fields,’ he says.
‘You do, huh? Then we must try to heal you.’
‘You think you can?’ Luke asks again.
‘I don’t know. If the problem is in your body, maybe. If not, well, maybe.’
‘Oh. I think it is in my body.’
‘Well, we’ll see. Look, do you have a fax machine?’
‘Yeah,’ says Luke. ‘Well, a scanner and . . .’
‘Fax your medical documents. You have them?’
‘They’re in the house. I’ll find them.’
‘Fax them to me and we’ll speak again on Monday.’
Chapter 4
The Edge is totally dead. Apart from the three members of staff – Julie, David and Heather – the only person in the restaurant is an electrician who’s come to mend the electronic tills. Because the tills aren’t working, it’s impossible to take any orders. If there were customers, it would be a good idea to shut the shop, but since there aren’t any it seems best to stay open.
Julie’s topping up the salad bar with salad that David’s just chopped up. In the evenings the chefs are too busy to make salad. There’s usually some student washing dishes – too ugly or uncoordinated to be a waiter or waitress – and they do the salad then. Today Julie notices that the onion rings have less skin hanging off them than in the evenings and that there are no brown rotting bits in the tub of lettuce.
After the salad bar is done, Julie goes outside to write the ‘specials’ on the blackboard on the wall by the entrance. It’s the same every lunchtime: all you can eat from the salad bar plus unlimited pizza slices for £6.99.
Along with some other shops – B&Q, Comet, Currys, Blockbuster, Staples and Homebase – The Edge is stuck a few miles outside Brentwood on a retail park. There, the big shops sit like fat kings with carpark courtyards, and their peasant subjects arrive in Ford Fiestas and Japanese people-carriers. At some point, some town-planning graduate must have created this concrete kingdom on a piece of paper, drawing the shops, carparks and of course the traffic-calming measures: voluptuous humps, little concrete kerbs (just like on real streets), a single mini-roundabout and various miniature hairpin bends.
Between the facing rows of carparking spaces there are concrete squares with off-green saplings growing in them. These prevent customers driving from their parking space into the one in front. The retail park is enclosed behind a wall made of browny-pink bricks and beyond that is the A12: twenty-four-hour noise and fast nighttime headlights. Beyond it are flat, scratchy-looking fields growing pale-yellow cereal crops.
The A12, a vast spectrum of greys, sits there as if a worm crawled on to an Ordnance Survey
map and died with its head in London and its tail in Great Yarmouth. The section between Colchester and East London has more accident black spots than anyone can count, and the towns around it form the heart of Essex: Romford, Brentwood, Shenfield, Chelmsford and, further away, off the A127 or the A13, Southend, Pitsea, Basildon and Braintree. In each of these towns are houses with half-finished conservatories and patios; sunbeds, microwaves, satellite dishes and lock-ups where eighteen-year-olds fit huge stereos in their Ford Cosworths, Scorpios or XR3is. Inside the houses are bedrooms in which little girls learn how to do perfect French manicures and get thin like their friend Mandy or Danielle, and try to forget that for ten years any female who appeared on TV and said she was from Essex would get a raised eyebrow and a muffled, knowing giggle from the audience.
What’s the difference between an ironing board and an Essex girl? It’s easier to get an Essex girl’s legs open. How does an Essex girl turn the light out after sex? She shuts the Cortina’s door. What’s the difference between an Essex girl and the Titanic? You know how many men went down on the Titanic. What does an Essex girl put behind her ears to make her more attractive? Her ankles. Julie’s an Essex girl, but she’s never had casual sex. Or is Julie an Essex girl? She’s been here fifteen years. Is that enough?
Essex has a train line officially referred to as the Misery Line, and a regional accent – Estuary English – that no one thinks is remotely beautiful, lilting, romantic or edgy and that people all over the rest of the country put on when they want to imply that someone’s thick. Julie speaks like that even though her mother used to tell her off for it. She probably speaks like that because her mother told her off for it. When you have only one identity available to you, you reach out and grab it, don’t you? Whatever it is.
Before Julie writes today’s specials on the board she has to rub off the specials from last night. Spunk pizza, Gobble bread, Magic mushrooms, Fuck cunt. The nighttime chefs and waiting staff always say it’s the kids who skateboard on the retail park at night who change the specials board. But where would they get the white chalk? Without really thinking about it, Julie wipes the word ‘Magic’ off the board and replaces it with the word ‘Garlic’.