He was just saying it to hurt me. He had to be. I grabbed the chains of the swing and tugged him close. “Will you just look at me?” I pleaded. “You have to look at me, Smith, please.”
And finally he was looking at me and I had to force myself to stay still and meet his frostbitten eyes head on. “It got out of control,” I admitted. “And I wanted to tell you the truth, really I did, and there were so many things I wanted to share with you and I couldn’t because all the lies kept getting in the way. You’d kiss me and hold me and you did things to me that you’d never have done if I’d told you how old I was. And even though I’d lied to you, I was glad because the way you made me feel was worth it. It was the better end of the deal.”
For one second, I thought I saw his face soften and his lips tremble, and I thought I’d reached him. Made him understand. But it was just a trick of the light.
“I don’t need any more of your bullshit. I never want to see you again,” he said, and I wished he would shout and scream and throw his hands in the air, but I just got this dull-eyed Smith-bot who waited for me to let go of the swing and step back, before he stood up and started to walk away.
I watched him go, his shoulders hunched against the wind, which was whipping up the waves and rattling through the boarded-up kiosks.
Let'sGetLost
Let's Get Lost
21
It got dark and I was still sitting on the ground, back propped up against the metal posts of the swing frame. Even I knew that I should be crying. Because Smith wasn’t mine anymore. Never had been. Or I should be plotting the most blood-curdling revenge I could think of on those so-called friends of mine. But I couldn’t feel anything, bad or good.
I got to my feet, trying to ignore the cramp in my calves after huddling into a tiny ball for so long. I staggered back to Montpelier Villas on autopilot because if I stopped to think about it, I’d have ended up spending the night fighting crack-heads for a comfy cardboard box and a well-appointed spot under some bushes. And even I wasn’t that stupid.
Our house looked so homely and inviting. Chinks of light showed through the curtains in the front room and, if you walked past, you’d think that a normal family lived there. My fingers were doing a good impersonation of icicles, but I managed to stab at the doorbell and listened to the chime, listened for the sound of footsteps, the inner door opening, and his shadowy outline looming behind the frosted glass.
He had to let me in. It wasn’t like he could phone Social Services and tell them to take me away. Maybe he’d make me sleep in the porch or . . .
“Isabel,” he intoned in his most stentorian voice. That means loud, powerful, or declamatory. He managed all of them in the space of three syllables.
I opened my mouth to say something, God knows what, but he held up his hand warningly.
“Give me your phone,” he ordered, which was kinda random but I showed willing, rummaging in my bag and hoping that he wasn’t going to call Smith and bawl him out for deflowering me. But he just tucked it into his shirt pocket. “While you’re in this house, you will speak only when you’re spoken to. You’ll refrain from lying and swearing. You’ll stay in your room and be allowed down for half an hour in the evening to make yourself something to eat. In the morning, I will drive you to school and then you will come straight home and go upstairs. You will not see your friends or talk to them on the phone, and you’re absolutely forbidden from seeing that boy. Do I make myself clear?”
I nodded dumbly, staring at the polished tips of his black brogues and only forcing myself to look at his frigid face when he coughed. “Yes, that’s all clear,” I mumbled.
“Very well, you may come in,” he said magnanimously, holding the door open for me.
The central heating was going full blast and I allowed myself just the tiniest shiver as I connected with all that warm air. “I’ll go to my room, then.”
“Have you eaten?” He was standing there, arms folded as he watched me unbutton my coat with fingers that didn’t want to cooperate.
“I’m not hungry,” I said, because it would have killed me to be granted permission to shove two pieces of bread into the toaster. I was actually so starving it felt like my stomach was about to eat itself, but he tersely inclined his head in the direction of the stairs.
The first thing I noticed was that the lock had been taken off my door. Fine. What did he think I actually did in there? But whatever it was, I couldn’t do it anymore because he’d obviously whiled away the afternoon by removing the TV, the DVD player, and my stereo. The computer was still intact, but the DSL cable was missing. Must have had to get a man in for that complicated procedure.
Okay, all privileges had been taken away. Bet he’d stopped my allowance, too. None of it really mattered, anyway. The only thing that had meant anything to me had removed himself of his own free will.
I made an executive decision that having a bath didn’t involve getting any forms signed in triplicate, and after I’d scrubbed every inch of myself so my skin was practically raw, I dragged on my pajamas and crawled into bed.
It seemed like I’d never be warm again. And every time I shut my eyes, they’d snap open again because the voices would start . . .
“Grade-A pain in the arse . . .”
“I was prepared to cut you some slack because she also told me about your mum . . .”
“I never want to see you again . . .”
But it wasn’t enough just to have the audio, no, I had to replay that look on Smith’s face before he’d walked off. Like, he’d been smelling curdled milk or bad eggs. Like, I was a plate of food suddenly crawling with maggots. Like, I was, well, nothing good. And all because I’d stretched the truth so far out of shape that it didn’t even resemble the truth anymore.
It all kept chasing around and around in my head while I thought about how if I’d just said this or touched him like that, it would all have been different.
Just when I was verging on the wrong side of sane and had about six miniature versions of Smith all looking at me like I was dirt, I heard a scrabbling at the door.
I poked my head out from under the duvet, just in time to see Felix creep in, like a little kid in a slasher movie. He kept looking over his shoulder as he very slowly shut the door, then timidly approached the bed on tiptoe.
“What do you want?” I asked him tonelessly, but he was already hurling himself at me.
Normally, Felix coming right at you is a cue to run as fast as hell in the opposite direction, but I was tangled up in the quilt and couldn’t evade him. Turned out all he wanted to do was clutch his arms around my neck and burst into tears.
It was very disconcerting. At first, I thought it was a Felix Evil Trick™, but the sobs increased in volume and density until I had no choice but to wrestle a hand free and gingerly pat his quaking shoulder.
“There, there.” I really needed to work on my sympathetic voice. Not that Felix seemed to mind. At my first touch, he began to cry even harder, burrowing against me like he was tunneling through to Australia as I groped for the box of tissues on the bedside table.
Felix smooched his face into my neck, making my skin soggy, until I grabbed the collar of his jumper, gently tugging him up so I could mop at his cheeks. “I hate it,” he wailed.
“Hate what?” I brushed the sandy hair back from his miserable face.
“Everything,” he burst out. “Nothing is fun anymore and I miss her, Is, and there’s no one who cuddles me or kisses me, and you and Daddy are always arguing and it makes my tummy hurt and I’m so unhappy . . .”
And I went from not being able to hug him to having my arms full of him, squeezing him so tight that rib breakage was a distinct possibility. But Felix just clung to me, as I rocked him back and forth.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed, kissing his hot, damp cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I don’t know how long I held him, long enough that his sobs died down to the occasional hiccup, but when I tried to let g
o, he moaned piteously and I had to keep on cuddling him.
“You have to get ready for bed now,” I whispered in his ear. “Otherwise Dad will come looking for you and there’ll be another row.”
I felt him nod, and then he was struggling free and wiping his snotty nose on the sleeve of his jumper.
“Ewwww, that’s disgusting. Use a tissue.”
Felix smiled ruefully. “I wish you weren’t so mean to me all the time,” he confessed. “Then I’d like you more.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re going to have to get to the back of the queue on that one. And you give as good as you get, Monkey-boy.” I sighed, propping myself up on the pillows. “So, what’s been going on today then?”
There was a shrug and some lip biting. “Nothing.”
“Pretty tearful sort of nothing,” I said casually, and he went into this long, garbled explanation that was hard to follow without subtitles. The general gist of it was that he dropped the famous diorama on the way home from school and Dad had thrown fifty fits about it.
“And he made me eat broccoli,” he finished in an aggrieved tone, pulling a ‘yeuch’ face like he could still taste it. “Then he was on the phone to Granny Hampstead for ages about you and how you were uncontrollable and he was thinking about boarding school, and then he laughed and said there must be one that wouldn’t send you home for the holidays.”
Yeah, bet that must have really tickled his funny bone, the thought of shoving me into some lockdown educational establishment where he could just forget that I ever existed.
“I don’t want you to go,” Felix said, getting up on his knees to give me another fierce hug. “Couldn’t you just tell him you were sorry?”
That was such a loaded question. There were things I should apologize for that I couldn’t even begin to think about. And then there were the other things, like Smith, which I’d never say sorry for because it would have been a lie, and I was never going to tell another lie ever again. I was going cold turkey on the whole untruth issue.
“It’s not that simple,” I said, reaching forward to cup Felix’s pointy chin in my hand. “We’re beyond sorry now. And you’re beyond bedtime, so you’d better scram.”
Felix slid off the bed, then paused. “I brought you this,” he said, pulling something out of the pocket of his jeans. “I think it’s melted a bit.”
The Snickers bar had melted quite a lot and didn’t even begin to make inroads into my empty stomach. I curled myself into a ball, licking the chocolate off my fingers and settled down to wait for morning.
I was wandering around a supermarket and everything was hyper-real and saturated with color, cartoonlike.
She was pushing the trolley around, humming under her breath as she dropped tin after tin on the floor, kicking them out of the way when they got stuck under the wheels.
I tugged at her sleeve because people were staring, and she looked down at me with a distracted smile.
“You know your father won’t eat tinned food, sweetie.” She shook her head sorrowfully. “You never listen, do you? We must have had this conversation a hundred times.”
We turned the corner and now she was sweeping jars of jam off the shelves, letting them drop to the ground in an explosion of glass as they shattered. When I looked behind us, there was a trail of strawberry jam that looked exactly like blood.
It was blood. I could see it staining her hands, smearing on the handle of the trolley and dripping down her white skirt. “I must have cut myself on the glass,” she said with a laugh, stroking my cheek, her touch wet and sticky. “I told you not to drop all those jars.”
That wasn’t true, but it didn’t seem right to point it out when I couldn’t speak and her face was getting paler and paler. . . .
“That’s it! I’m waking up,” I said out loud as I forced myself out of another dream that was going to end in exactly the same way as all the others.
I fumbled for the lamp switch and grabbed my copy of Bonjour Tristesse from the nightstand. Sleep was overrated, anyway.
Let'sGetLost
Let's Get Lost
22
The new regime kicked off bright and early the next day. I ate two bowls of cereal and a banana, with Dad’s steely gaze doing its level best to ruin my appetite before we set off for school.
I thought that once Felix had been dropped off with a cheery wave and a note about the diorama in his blazer pocket, we’d move seamlessly into whatever chapter of the row we were on. But the rest of the journey was accomplished in a tense silence. As we pulled up outside the gates, I had the door open before he’d even finished turning off the engine. But his hand clamped around my wrist in an instant.
“I’m coming in with you,” he insisted. “Mrs. Greenwood and I have a meeting.”
He was spending so much time at my school, he should have set up an office in one of the supply cupboards. I kept my eyes straight ahead, not looking left or right, or listening to the giggles that accompanied us as he kept a deathly tight grip on my arm.
The meeting with Mrs. Greenwood was like this exercise in abject humiliation. After briefly recounting my many crimes— and no one should ever have to bear witness to one’s father and headmistress discussing your sex life—I think she even started to feel sorry for me. But all she could do was flail her hands as he went through this list he had in his briefcase.
There was a lot of guff about my grades and homework, which she managed to deflect by showing him my spotless academic record, and then it got nasty. From this moment forth I was:To spend the lunch hour supervised by a member of the staff to make sure I didn’t leave the school grounds.To be put into detention every afternoon until such a time as he could come and collect me.To sign up for some extracurricular activities, including the debating team, the school newspaper, and the loser squad who did do-gooding in the local community.
It was only when he started on the thorny topic of locker searches that Mrs. Greenwood dared to interrupt.
“I understand that Isabel could benefit from some additional discipline, but the school has a very strict policy about pupils’ rights to privacy,” she said sternly, peering over her glasses at my father who cocked an eyebrow and looked distinctly unamused.
“Of course, Mrs. Greenwood, I understand,” he said mildly. “If you can’t provide my daughter with the adequate supervision that she requires maybe I should look into removing her from the school.”
Mrs. Greenwood gave me a sympathetic look before she could stop herself. “I would very much advise against disrupting Isabel’s education at such a critical time,” she said tentatively. “Continuity of care is a quality I feel we’re able to provide, and if Isabel would only attend the counseling sessions that . . .”
“I want her locker searched,” he said baldly. “I must insist.”
He got his way. Of course, he did. And as luck would have it, the bell was ringing for morning break just in time for most of the school to witness the ceremonial unlocking of my locker. The only incriminating pieces of evidence were an empty cigarette packet and a couple of overdue library books, but by then it was too late. I was no longer, Isabel, the unrivaled queen of all she surveyed. I was Isabel, the biggest geek in the school, who had her dad bawl her out for smoking in front of everyone.
That was the high point of the day. Even having to eat my lunch with a bunch of Year Nines who all shifted their chairs away from me, couldn’t come close.
The truth was that nothing could touch me anymore. Hurt is all relative. It’s, like, if someone jabs a knife in your heart, then you’re not going to notice a paper cut. So all the stuff at school was just bells and whistles.
The Trio of Evil didn’t seem to have got that memo, though. It took them all day to get me on my own without a teacher hovering to make sure I didn’t skip out. But even members of the faculty couldn’t come to the loo with me.
I was washing my hands and composing version five of the letter to Smith, which would miraculously make everything okay be
tween us, when the door opened and they trooped in. I was as cool as a refrigerator full of cucumbers, as they gathered around me in a little semicircle. My hands didn’t even shake, as I tore off some paper towels and eyed their reflections in the mirror.
“So, Is, how have you been?” Nancy finally broke the silence, and I turned around so I could lean back casually against the sink.
“Peachy.” I summoned up a faint smile. “On top of the world. Everything’s great. How about you?”
Ella moved forward. “We’ve been really worried about you,” she said, eyes wide. “Rushing off like that the other night . . . so we had to call your dad, it’s what friends do.”
I knew they had this whole scene planned out. They’d probably had a dress rehearsal. Nancy and Ella couldn’t quite quell the cat-that-got-the-cream smiles, but it was Dot I couldn’t take my eyes off. She looked different. Like, she’d got taller or prettier.