Black Heart Blue (6 page)

‘She had an accident.’

‘Terrible that.’ He paused and I made for the door, not wanting this chat to go any further.

‘Well, if you want a job delivering papers after school, then let me know, I’ve got a space,’ he called as I hurried off.

‘Thanks.’ I didn’t dare ask the pay but guessed it couldn’t be much. Leaving the shop I felt a little more cheerful though. I was returning to the vicarage with more than I’d set out with that morning: a job offer and
Middlemarch
in my bag. I’d decided to take the risk and smuggle the contraband home. If Hephzi could get away with sneaking out night after night for clandestine meetings with her lover then I could at least risk reading under the covers. And, even if The Father did find the book, I doubted he could find anything in it to complain about. Why he thought books would corrupt us, I don’t know. In some of his sermons he preached the evils of reading, especially anything really good. I watched the congregation shift awkwardly in their pews. Some of them didn’t agree with what he was saying, but the crazy ones nodded and zealously acted on his words. They were the
type who banned Mickey Mouse, the type who threw party invites in the bin, the type who saw something satanic in the carving of a pumpkin. Parents like Hephzi and I had. Crazies who dressed in normal clothes, who smiled and raised
money for charity, crazies who got down on their knees to pray, then, once they were safely behind closed doors, peeled off their masks and let the poison erupt.

Granny had got hold of the first few Harry Potter books at the charity shop near where she lived and I’d devoured them, reading all night long under the covers, knowing I couldn’t take the book home and unable to countenance leaving without reaching the end. But I’d never betray Granny and I’d never let on what she’d allowed us to do – if The Father knew even half of it he’d dig her up and kill her all over again. I know it was him who did it, even if no one else thinks so – he hated her and she had to pay.

But I learned a lot from Granny and if I ever have children I know how I’ll raise them, safe and happy and free. I’ll invite their friends over for teas of pizza, chips and homemade cupcakes. We’ll have snowball fights in winter and splash in a paddling pool in the back garden in the summer when it’s hot. I’ll buy them presents and tell them how wonderful they are. We’ll have a puppy and go to Disneyland on the holiday of a lifetime. I’ll tell them I love them and that they’re perfect in my eyes, beautiful and unique. That’s what I’ll do, if I ever get the chance. My children will never cry themselves to sleep at night or lie quaking in bed afraid of what the darkness holds.

So I took the job. I didn’t confess to The Parents but instead told them I was staying late at school for extra Maths coaching. Maths was my weakest point, or maybe it
was Physics. Whatever. They didn’t like it but so long as I did my chores when I returned and kept out of the way, they let me live the lie. I wore a hat pulled low over my forehead and tramped the streets with my heavy sack of free papers twice every week. The bag weighed a ton and often I felt faint with tiredness and hunger but I persevered. It paid ten pounds a week. I knew I’d only just have enough to pay for the place at the summer school but I’d posted the application form off regardless and was trusting that somehow, some way, something would go right and The Mother would eventually persuade The Father to allow me to go to church camp. I guess I was stupid to believe they’d never catch me at it, stupid to think
no one would see me and report back. After all, I’m kind of unforgettable in the looks department.

I’d saved up forty pounds by the time they found out. Thursday night was delivery night and I’d finished my round by half past six. The nights were getting lighter and even though the March wind whipped up the rubbish on the streets and flapped the papers from my hands, the usually interminable task of posting each paper through letter boxes which closed like traps on my fingers hadn’t seemed quite as bad as usual. I was looking forward to adding the crisp ten-pound note to my stash, to going to bed with my book and holding my secrets safe. I talked to Hephzi as I made my way round the village, telling her about the course and asking her for ideas about how to get enough money in time. Her advice was to steal it,
to creep into our parents’ bedroom and empty The Father’s wallet while he was asleep or dead drunk. I shouted her down.

‘Too risky, Hephzi, what if he caught me? What then?’

How else will you do it, idiot? You’ve got to get out.

We argued like that the whole way round and she’d almost convinced me by the time I got back. For her sake this time I walked down to the estate and on to Craig’s road on the way home and paused to see if we could spot him. I didn’t like doing it any more, I was afraid someone would report me because I’d been there so often, but I felt sorry for Hephzi. She had to rely on me now for her social life and frankly I’m not much of a joiner. It had been nice spending time with her, but she disappeared as soon as she saw The Father standing outside the vicarage, arms folded, legs akimbo. I knew he was waiting for me.

He pinched the back of my neck hard as he propelled me into the house. From a distance no one would notice his hand on me, no one would ever see the mark underneath my hair.

‘Where have you been?’

‘At school.’ The words came out as a whisper and I knew my lie convinced no one. Lifting me by the hair, he picked me up and threw me against the wall. My head clipped the ancient mirror hanging there and brought it crashing down, banging my shoulder painfully as it went.

‘Don’t lie to me,’ he threatened, his fist poised. I smelled the whisky on his breath, saw the red eyes and florid
cheeks. Cowering, my arms over my head, I waited for the next blow.

‘Where have you been?’ he demanded again. ‘The truth of it.’

‘At a friend’s house.’

‘Liar!’ he screamed and I braced myself for the blows.

I needn’t have bothered with the fabrications. He knew I didn’t have friends and he knew all about my job, one of the local busybodies had spotted me and spilled the beans, and my pathetic attempts to worm my way out of trouble saw me tumbling in the force of his rage; drowning, wheeling, caught by a wave elemental in its power. I could only wait for the tide to abate and trust that I would soon come up for air. When he’d finished with me I crawled up the stairs. He’d hit me in all the places where bruises can easily be hidden: my torso, upper arms, chest, buttocks and thighs. And he knew I wouldn’t scream. The whole thing was silent, almost balletic, the dance so familiar now that I knew how best to crouch, how to move a shoulder to deflect a blow aimed at my breasts, but most of all how to hold back the tears. At least this time he hadn’t had his strap. Hephzi had always said she would hide it
and maybe that had been her last gift to me.

Earlier he’d ransacked my room and found the money I’d saved from the job and hidden under Hephzi’s mattress. So he relieved me of today’s ten-pound note too and emptied the edition of Eliot’s poetry out of my bag, grinding it with his foot on the floor, just to make sure I
learnt my lesson. I crawled under my bed, shuddering, and then started to hum a quiet tune, deep down in the back of my throat. If I filled my head with that noise I wouldn’t remember anything else, I could force the pain away and become invisible. He’d knocked my hearing aid off the screw attached to the side of my skull and I was glad that everything was even more muffled now, as if I were swimming underwater. I lay under the bed with the dust balls and odd socks and imagined drowning. The carpet dissolved and I let myself sink, further and further, deeper and deeper, just as Hephzi had on the day
she’d died.

Before

Finally I make it home from the pub. I’ve run all the way from the bus stop and I’m out of breath, but Reb has been watching for me and opens the front door to let me in, at no small risk to either of us, as she tells me in her best bossy-boots voice. I tell her to shut it and we scamper up to bed fast. I decide not to bother telling her what a horrendous night I’ve had when I see her scowl.

‘What are you wearing?’ she asks, dropping her mouth open, in horror, I suppose.

‘Stuff of Daisy’s. Why?’

‘You look like a slut.’

‘Shut up! You sound like Mother.’

‘No, I don’t. And you do look like a slapper. Admit it.’

I nearly laugh hearing Reb say that word, she’s obviously picked up something about how to be normal at last.

‘Don’t you dare laugh! Don’t you realize how risky all this is?’

We’re hissing our argument, she’s sitting there in her bed, a little ball of malice, and I’m trying to get out of the
clothes fast before someone comes in and I’m rumbled. I stuff them under the mattress, my heart still skipping from the run home from the bus stop and the sneaking upstairs. If he’d caught me I’d probably be half dead by now.

‘I’m not doing that again.’ Rebecca won’t shut up.

‘Doing what?’

‘Lying for you. Sneaking around, opening doors in the middle of the night. You’ll get caught and we’ll be in so much trouble.’

‘Don’t be so bloody pathetic. Nothing’s happened, has it?’ I leap into bed and pull the covers up to my nose, the thudding boom of my heart still crashing in my ears. It feels so good to be back in my room. I never thought I’d say that.

‘Anyway, what was it like?’ she asks eventually into the silent dark. I’d had my eyes closed but was nowhere near sleep. The night’s events flash through my head, stills from a crazy film: me puking, Daisy dancing with Craig, the bus journey home.

‘All right.’

‘Only “all right”? All that trouble for “all right”?’

‘Oh, shut up. Mind your own business. Come next time if you’re that interested.’

‘No thanks.’

‘So what are you going to do, then? Live here for the rest of your life with them?’

For a long time she doesn’t answer, then her words surprise me.

‘No way. I’m getting out of here. First I need my exams and then that’s it. I’ll be gone.’

I can’t believe that she’s finally realized that we can’t stay like this forever. It’s about time too. I’ve never heard Rebecca talk like this before; she’s the quiet one, the one without opinions or ideas about the future. I’ve always led and she’s always followed and I wonder where on earth she thinks she’ll go and what she thinks she’ll be able to do.

‘I’ll go where no one knows me, where I can find a job.’

‘Yeah, right. And where will you live?’

‘I’ll find a flat. Or rent a room.’

‘In your dreams.’ I don’t know why I have to be mean and stamp on her hopes but I just do. ‘You’ll never get a job, Rebecca. You’re too boring. Boring
and
ugly. Who’d want to have to look at you all day?’

She doesn’t reply then and I mouth a silent sorry into the room and lie awake for a long, long time, watching her wrestle with some private demon – the one who makes her cry nearly every night.

I’m dreading going to college on Monday morning and, for the first time since the first day, I sit next to my sister at registration. I doodle on my notepad, not looking up or around in case they’re all laughing at me. Rebecca is quiet too and for a second I think I know how she feels here almost every day. But then she nudges me hard and I look up. Craig is standing by the desk and I
feel the hot flush on my cheeks before I can do anything about it.

‘All right?’

I nod. Swallow. Smile, sort of.

‘What happened to you Friday night, then?’

‘Oh. Um. I was there.’

‘Yeah, you disappeared.’

I don’t answer, just shrug. This is the longest conversation we’ve had. I keep waiting for him to walk off but he doesn’t.

‘I was looking for you. We all went on clubbing at Chequers.’

‘Yeah?’

I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say.

‘I thought you might be there.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

He shrugs, shoves his headphones back in and wanders off, and I turn to Rebecca, who’s looking like she might vomit. I elbow her in her side and she sucks in her breath and buries her head back in her Maths textbook.

So I’m not finished, not yet anyway. Even if Daisy did tell him about me puking up maybe he wasn’t bothered. There might still be a chance. I spend all day looking out for him but he must have bunked off again because I don’t see him anywhere.

This is my sixth day at this college. So far I’ve learnt a lot.

I’ve learnt not to look bothered if a boy talks to you or smiles at you.

I’ve learnt to make my voice rise at the end of some of my sentences.

I know how to use a computer, just about, and how to check my emails and Facebook account in the college IT room.

I’ve learnt that flicking my hair is quite sexy, although I think I’d got that one on my own.

I’ve also learnt the names of characters in
EastEnders
and more or less what’s going on in the storylines, just by listening carefully. I’m quite proud of this actually.

I know who Cheryl Cole is, and all the characters from
Glee
.

I know the people here are probably not my BFFLs.

I know never to repeat a single word I hear in the vicarage.

I know that I’ve got to lie every day and that I can never invite any of my new friends home.

It’s pretty exhausting spending every moment of every day lying to someone or other. I’m either pretending at college or pretending at the vicarage. The only time I get to relax is in bed at night and even then Rebecca could easily ask me a question that might catch me off guard. The only thing that she doesn’t know about me though is that my life is as crap as hers. That I find it all as hard as she does. Maybe she’s guessed but I don’t think so, she thinks it all comes so easy for me, that I’m Little Miss Normal. God, how could anybody growing up in this place with parents like ours turn out normal? That’s what
I’ve been hoping college might teach me, instead of all the stupid Maths and stuff, and I wish Rebecca would work a bit harder on her normality skills too. I watched her walk past me in the corridor today, her backpack heavy on both shoulders, bent over and
muttering to herself, her trousers too short and those awful bright-green socks emerging from her clumpy shoes. I wanted to run over and push her behind me, hide her from the stares. I see people sniggering all the time, I’ve had to watch it all my life and for a long time I think it hurt me more than it ever hurt her. I want to yell at them to get lost, to leave her alone, maybe shove them or hurt them so they’ll know what it’s like to be picked on. But Rebecca, it’s like she doesn’t even notice and doesn’t even care, so that’s why I’ve given up on her and I leave her to get on with it now. She can embrace Weirdsville all she likes, but she’s not taking me down with her.