The rest of me tingles too. Skin. Bones. Blood. “I’m fine.”
Jack slows down as we approach school. He peers into the parking lot then drives straight past the entrance because Holy Crap he’s going to do it again, even though I’ve told him countless times it’s absolutely not allowed.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said when I held up the letter for him to read as he stirred a pot of some mysterious sauce because he’d swung by the organic shop after work to grab a selection of ingredients, totally at random. “Toss us the salt, Helen. This sauce needs a bit of bite to complement the sweetness of the plums. Strictly no cars allowed in the bus lot at any time. Mrs. Austin is a fantastic principal, but has she seen the parking lot? It’s always gridlocked. What does she expect me to do?”
“Obey the rules,” I replied, too quietly for Jack to hear, not that it would have made any difference to him. It’s not just recipes that are for other people, it’s rules as well.
He turns left then stops slap-bang in the middle of the bus lot because there’s nowhere to pull in. Anger floods my face, washing over my body in a red-hot tsunami.
“So, this isn’t bad, eh, Tessie-T?” he says, oblivious to the wave of fury moving in his direction. It’s going to knock him off his feet any second now, I swear to God. I wait for it to happen, but there’s not even the quietest splash. “Door-to-door service.”
He looks around for somewhere to drop me off. There’s still nowhere to pull in and no way of reversing out because there’s a bus behind us now, blocking the exit, so we stay where we are for a minute that feels way longer than sixty seconds.
When I was small, being in the car with Jack was up there with going to bed. I loved hiding under my duvet after school. It was a cave. A cocoon. And the car was the same.
“Our own little world on wheels,” Jack used to say, grinning at me in the rearview mirror as I sat with my legs dangling off the booster seat. He’d put on music and sing show tunes, even the female parts, to make me laugh. I’d give anything to hear that falsetto voice now.
At last there is a puff of exhaust fumes as a bus splutters into action. Jack sneaks into the space, ignoring the honk honk from the bus behind us. I go for the door the instant he puts the car in park.
“Zip up your coat, Tess.” Normally I would obey this sort of order no problem, but today I hesitate. “Come on. Look at that. It’s really starting to come down. You don’t want to sit in a damp uniform all day, do you? You’ll get a cold. We’ve got the play to think about. Opening night tomorrow. You and your old man, eh? You don’t want to come down with the flu and miss it,” he informs me as I picture myself sneezing and smiling about it.
I never wanted to be involved in the first place. Jack heard about the audition from his friend Derek, who’d been hired as the director, telling me about it as he plonked himself on the coffee table directly in my line of vision. I was watching Embarrassing Bodies and this just so happened to be the good bit where they were showing the intimate boil they’d mentioned at the start of the show. As Jack banged on, I slowly peered over his shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about it, hating myself a little bit for how much I wanted to see this thing, apparently the size of a swollen grape.
“The audition’s this Saturday,” Jack had said, but I wasn’t listening. The boil was more the size of a tangerine, I’m not even kidding. “Derek’s asked me if I want to be involved, and I said yes. Bit of a favor to help him out. It’s only an amateur thing. No money involved, obviously, not even for a professional. But it will be fun. I haven’t been in anything, theater-wise, since I played Hamlet. Last year of drama school, that was. Back in the eighties. I had long hair.”
“I loved your long hair!” Mum chimed in. “Long flowing locks and Shakespeare? My idea of heaven, but then I did have dyed red hair and a flower stud in my nose.” She started to laugh and Jack did too. “All those lines, darling. I don’t know how you did it. Remember Yorick the mascot?”
“A fellow of infinite jest and Scotch tape.” I loved the look they gave each other, my mum and dad, still together after all this time. “He was terrifying, but he was perfect. Where did you find him again?”
“Some market in Oldham where I had that awful teaching placement. God, those kids were tough. I was walking home after school. The play was on just before Halloween, do you remember? I couldn’t believe my luck. A plastic skull, right there! He was a little battered and broken, but we patched him up, didn’t we?”
“And he worked. That show got brilliant reviews.”
“You got brilliant reviews, you mean.”
“I’ll have to try to find him,” Jack said. “He must be in the attic somewhere.”
“It will be good to see you onstage again, darling.”
“Yeah, I am looking forward to it, actually. Especially if it’s a little quiet on the work front. I bet you fancy it too, eh, Tess? Peter Pan? You and your old man? Onstage together?”
He expected me to say yes so I put on my happy face and nodded. That’s how it worked. Jack suggested something and I agreed to it because I had a vow to honor, a vow I’d made when I was eleven years old with music from a school dance ringing in my ears. I’d made a promise to a fluffy white dog to be a better kind of girl, a more perfect kind of daughter for my perfect dad, so I chiseled away at myself, trying to become a chip off the old block, but no matter how much I shaped myself, I never quite got it right.
And now I know why.
“I won’t say it again, Tess. And don’t look at me like that, please. You’re the one who chose to wear a skirt in this weather. It’s ridiculous. It’s not exactly skirt weather, is it, and besides, it’s”—he stops dead and clears his throat—“it’s a bit too short for my liking.”
I look at my skirt. It almost comes down to my knees.
“Did you take your salad?” he asks, proof that it’s the tightness of my skirt, not the length of it he’s thinking about. “I don’t want you going hungry!”
Usually I’d be appeased by this lie, but today I see it for what it is—manipulation, pure and simple, because he does want me going hungry, that’s the whole point of giving me salad rather than sandwiches.
He smiles. “I put some pineapple in it.” Pause. He clears his throat again. “It’s just that, well, kids can be mean, can’t they? They can say things. That skirt. I don’t want you standing out, that’s all. Becoming too much of a target.” I snort loudly at his inconsistency. “What?”
I can’t be bothered to explain.
The rain doubles in force. It’s spectacular, the noise it makes on the roof of the car and the amount of water on the windows. We both fall silent and watch it for a while, letting the awkwardness fade between us, and then I zip up my coat before Jack can tell me again so that it’s absolutely my decision to do it.
“Remind me what classes you’ve got today. Geography first, is it?”
“Yeah.” I don’t want to talk but my mouth isn’t obeying my brain.
“You enjoying it?”
“Yeah,” I say again, even though I’m not.
“Good. That’s good.”
There’s nothing good about it, and I long to be in London rather than stuck outside school. Twenty minutes from now, I am going to open my notebook and write down the date as if this is just an ordinary Friday morning rather than the very first day of the rest of my life. I need a new timescale because there’s a before and after now, and if the Christians were allowed to invent a new calendar after the birth of a baby in a stable, so am I after the rebirth of myself, Tess Turner, a Pluto in the solar system of life, who no longer needs to impress Jack or answer his questions, as I have to keep telling myself, because it’s going to take some getting used to.
“Still on volcanoes?”
“No. We’re starting a new topic today.”
“Precipitation by any chance?” He elbows me in the ribs. “Don’t need to study precipitation when we have a first-class example like this. Put up your hood, Te
ss. What is it then? Footpath erosion? Tourism?” The rain’s not going anywhere so I open the door without looking at him. “Glaciation?”
I get out of the car, biting my lip to keep from answering.
“Tessie-T?” He sounds baffled because I am leaving without saying good-bye. “Sweetheart?”
I spin around. “Oxbow lakes, okay?”
“Ah, my favorite! Enjoy, Tessie-T. Have fun with Anna—though not too much fun, mind. I know what you girls are like. You’re at school to work, remember? Ask her if she wants tickets for tomorrow. And ask your flute teacher about sitting for those exams, okay? Right. You got everything? You sure? Good. See you tonight then,” he says, and I nod resignedly because in all likelihood he will.
6
A large man with blond hair and brown eyes is who I am searching for, so I check every male teacher in the hallway. If I’ve lost my old dad then I need to find a new one is the main feeling in my heart, pumping with adrenaline. Mr. Stevens from Design Technology is too thin, and Mr. Crosland, my English teacher, is too red, with his red hair and red face and red ink always covering his red hands, especially after marking one of my essays.
Numbers are more my thing. Life is confusing and the only place where two plus two ever equals four is in math class. Even when things look complicated, actually they’re pretty straightforward. My math teacher, Mr. Holdsworth, creates chaos on the whiteboard with x’s and y’s and none of it makes sense until he makes it make sense, and the chaos becomes simple and the mess transforms into a neat answer that he circles twice in green marker pen.
He’s weaving his way through the crowd with a coffee in the yellow mug not the blue mug this morning. He’s dark not blond, thin not fat, but that’s okay because I’d rather be his wife than his daughter if there’s a vacancy going in his family. As we pass in the hallway, I twist my hair round the fourth finger of my left hand then swipe my card to get through the security gate in the library.
It is an understatement, the fact that I am pleased to see her, my one friend, the only person on planet Earth who I can now trust: Isabel. She’s been my happy secret for two years and I intend to keep it that way. So I’ve made sure she’s never met my parents. Jack would never understand her appeal, but she is the most interesting person I know, and the bravest too, because who else would sit in a packed library at an empty table, completely at ease with her solitude, is what I am pointing out to myself as overwhelming evidence of my friend’s brilliance.
She’s leaning on the bulky case of her cello, mousy head resting on upturned palm as she reads with squinty eyes, totally engrossed in The Lord of the Rings. I hurry over and touch her arm. She startles then grins.
“Greetings, Gandalf the Grey. Or should that be Gandalf the White?”
I have seen the movie so I stoop over my imaginary staff and say with great wisdom, “I have returned.”
“Nice skirt, Gandalf. Seriously. You look wizard.” She waggles her eyebrows as I sit down, glad to take the weight off my achy legs. I glance at the clock behind Miss Dyson’s desk. Isabel’s going back to her book so I grab it and put it to the side because there isn’t a lot of time. “Hey! I’m at a really good part!”
“Listen. I need to talk to you. I did something crazy last night and—”
“Gandalf’s back!” She pats the book with all this affection as if it’s a living, breathing thing. “He’s back. The Balrog is defeated. I’m going to write one into my story tonight.” She gestures at the notepad she carries everywhere but never lets me read. “It’s going to be epic. I’ve got it all planned out. Rather than Gandalf, the mysterious but beautiful elf Isawynka will destroy it. Me.” She beams. “I am going to”—she swishes an imaginary sword—“and then”—she spears an imaginary beast—“to save the day.”
“Good. Good, I’m glad.” I raise my arms in mock celebration. “Go, Isawanka.”
“Isawynka.”
“Whatever. Woo, elf.” I lean in close, lowering my voice to practically a whisper. “I need to tell you something.”
Isabel’s eyes narrow to slivers of pale blue. “Is this about Mr. Holdsworth because I swear, Tess, you’re getting obsessed, and it’s a waste of time because, unfortunately for you, Mr. Holdsworth doesn’t strike me as a pedophile with a penchant for teenage girls.”
“A what?”
“A penchant. A proclivity. An inclination for underage females.”
“No. It’s not about Mr. Holdsworth. Though I have just seen him in the hallway.” Isabel pretends to yawn, but it is good-natured. Despite everything, I smile, grateful for the normality of our conversation. “He was looking particularly fine.”
“Yellow or blue?”
“Yellow.”
“Curious.” She means it too.
“That’s what I thought. It was blue last Friday.”
“He’s obviously trying to keep you on your toes.”
“Do you really think so?”
“No, Tess. I don’t. Luckily for you, I don’t think Mr. Holdsworth is aware that you keep a tally of his cup choice in two carefully drawn columns in the back of your agenda book.”
“Three carefully drawn columns. There was the Morning of the Random Red Mug, remember?”
“How can I forget?” She smirks. “It was momentous. So, what’s up? What do you have to tell me?”
I look at her raised eyebrows and then at her cello and then at the bookshelves, trying to think how to say it out loud, the unspeakable truth that Jack is not and never wanted to be my dad. The stark reality of the situation hits me harder than it did on the streets at three o’clock in the morning when I was tiptoeing through the moonlight that made everything silver and surreal, only half-there so only half-true.
When Tess finally emerged after two hours of pushing, all I felt was revulsion, and I could no more easily pretend to love the peculiar creature in my delighted wife’s arms than hide the resentment that burned inside. It wasn’t my daughter. It was her daughter—hers and some sperm donor’s I had never met, but what could I do? She was here and she was my wife’s and—
“Tess?” Isabel says, sounding shocked. “Are you crying?”
“No.”
“You are!”
“I’m okay. Honestly,” I say dishonestly because I don’t want to cry, not here, not at school, and besides Jack’s not worth it I tell myself angrily. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. What is it?” She clutches my hand over the top of the cello case, our arms making a wonky bridge that I long to cross, but it is impossible. I sit, not so much lost for words as full of words that can’t be spoken. “Tess, come on. You can tell me,” she says, but I don’t know how to explain the past few hours of my life, and how I ran away from Jack last night, only to return this morning to eat porridge with him.
It’s ridiculous.
I’m ridiculous.
I’m relieved to hear the bell. There’s something reassuring about the prospect of my life being divided into predictable fifty-minute portions for the next seven hours at least. I start to leave but Isabel doesn’t move, grasping my fingers as I try to pull away.
“We’ll be late for homeroom,” I tell her.
“I don’t care.”
“You do. What about your perfect attendance record?”
No one else in Year Eleven cares about this, but Isabel’s been turning up for homeroom bang on time every morning since September because the reward for getting a term’s worth of attendance stamps is a fifty-pound book coupon.
She steels herself. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Yes, I am,” she squeaks, standing up suddenly. She shoves her things into her bag but packs her notepad carefully, hiding it in a discreet side pocket. “I want that coupon. I’m sorry. I have to get it. There’s an illustrated Complete Works of Tolkien that I’m dying to have.” She gives me a quick one-armed hug that turns into a long hug because I don’t let go. “Talk properly at lunch?”
“Absolutely,” I say, but I don’t believe the words. There is a cold, slithery sensation in my stomach—the truth burying down, worming its way into my guts. “You run.” I pump a fist. “Go get that stamp.”
7
Mr. Gledhill’s hair is precisely the right shade of blond. It catches the light of the projector, flickering on an image of London during World War II. He points a ruler at a burning building, asking us to imagine in great detail the shocking annihilation of everything we hold dear.
“Picture the devastation,” he says so I do, thinking of a porridge bowl cracking in half as family photographs rattle on the walls then smash to the ground. “How would you survive?” I am not sure of the answer to that one yet. “How did England defend herself? Anyone? Lola? Ahmed? Tess, how about you?” He comes a little closer, surveying me with a pair of blue eyes so I cross him off my list that stretches to the ends of the Earth and contains every single white man on the planet.
The world is too big and I am too small, just one girl searching for a stranger in a population of billions. I feel it, swirling around me, vast as the ocean, a sea of faces I don’t recognize. My lungs tighten. I’m drowning, struggling to breathe, trying to hold on to something, anything, solid. But there’s nothing. My whole life has been a lie, every birthday and Christmas and Father’s Day and average Tuesday and ordinary Sunday, eating dinners around the kitchen table, nearly always chicken because I don’t like beef.
“How can you not like roast beef?” Jack said, just a week ago. “I don’t know anyone who’s not a vegetarian that doesn’t like roast beef. A nice pink joint of meat?” He laughed as I winced, and I glowed with pleasure because amusing my dad is pretty much my favorite pastime.