Don't Get Me Wrong (2 page)

I
can't see her,” said Kim.

Outside in the hot July sun, all the parents stood shoulder to shoulder, laughing and talking like guests at a wedding. The women wore pink silks and cream linen, the men pale gray suits. Gold bracelets shone. Diamonds caught the light, sparks of electricity. The new graduates in their black gowns stood out like crows.

From the top of the stone steps, Kim searched the faces below. All through the ceremony, she hadn't been sure.

“She'll be here somewhere,” said Izzie.

But would she? Eva was never on time for anything. Kim took a deep breath. Don't think about it. Keep your mind blank.

Next to her, Izzie started waving. Kim looked down the steps, and the crowd parted, and there beneath them was a creased-looking man with a red face supporting what seemed to be a large floral sofa.

Izzie's eyes widened.

“All right, pet?” said the red-faced man, leaning up to kiss her.

“That was lovely,” said the floral sofa. “I cried all the way through.”

Izzie's dad seemed half-strangled by his collar. He kept jamming
a finger behind the top button, straining his neck like a football fan who can't see the pitch.

“So you got here OK,” said Kim, to break the growing silence. “From Newcastle.”

“No problem at all,” said Izzie's dad. “Just a bit of trouble round Alnwick.”

“Mam,” said Izzie, finding her voice, “where did you get that dress?”

Her mother looked down, as if pleasantly surprised by the view. “I made it. What do you think?”

“Did you bring a coat?”

The crowd swayed against them. Izzie's mum rolled sideways, gliding on castors.

“Shall we go and find a cup of tea?” said Izzie desperately.

Kim shook her head. “I can't go yet.”

The noise of the crowd was getting louder.

“You're waiting for your parents?” said Izzie's dad.

Kim shook her head. That feeling of desolation was creeping up on her again, like a cold mist. She wasn't expecting her parents. Her mother wouldn't dream of traveling all the way from the South of France. And her father, living in Leicester with his new wife and small sons, didn't even know the date of her graduation. “No,” she said. “For my sister.”

“So how about a few photos?” said Izzie's dad, taking out a battered camera in a brown leather case.

Kim felt embarrassed. She didn't want to get involved in someone else's family mementos. Izzie had been her friend since the first year, but that didn't meant she wanted to end up in a silver frame on a telly in Newcastle. She was just shuffling
sideways, taking small steps so that no one would notice, when there was a shout to her left and a small explosion, like a firework. Somebody shouted, “Watch out!” way too late, and Kim found herself sprayed at close range by a magnum of cava or prosecco or, for all she knew (this being Edinburgh), vintage champagne. She blinked and spluttered as someone said, “Oh, sorry!” and then found herself, dripping wet, in the middle of a crowd, mobbed by people anxious to help, dabbed at with tissues, urged to take off her sodden rented gown. A tall woman in a bright blue fascinator kept saying over and over again, “Poor girl. Look at her. Look at her! Like a drowned rat.” And then, in the midst of it all, shaking champagne from her hair, she heard a voice she knew.

“Kim?” said Eva.

With a rush of joy, Kim looked up. There was her sister with her white-blond hair, her fine-boned face, that same, ever-present look of slight surprise. And in the exact moment that she recognized her—as the familiarity of the person she loved more than anyone else in the world brought her truly alive again, from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers—Kim realized with a jolt to her heart that Eva was not alone.

Next to Eva, smiling, was Harry.

Kim narrowed her eyes. “What the hell,” she said to her sister, “is he doing here?”

•  •  •

The hand basins were tiny. Every time someone turned on the taps, water hit the white enamel and sprayed all over the floor. As a result, the tiles underfoot were treacherous, like ice.

“I hate him,” said Kim.

“I know. You've told me. Many times.” Izzie's Newcastle accent was stronger than usual. Her parents had reactivated it, like sugar on yeast.

“She should never have brought him. Not without asking me.”

“What would you have said?”

“What?”

“If she'd asked you?”

Kim lifted her chin. “I would have said no.”

They had just arrived at the restaurant to celebrate their new graduate status. As the others took their seats, Kim, still seething, had grabbed Izzie's hand and raced her upstairs. Rage bubbled inside her, red-hot, like molten lava. She had visions of erupting like a volcano, turning everyone around her into stone. Years ago, Eva, briefly excited by homeopathy, had said that Kim's constitutional type was Phosphorus. This meant she was like a match—quick to light, and just as quick to burn out. It didn't help, knowing this. Kim would rather have been calm and saintly like Gwyneth Paltrow.

“You know, from the outside,” said Izzie, “he seems quite normal.”

Izzie had great admiration for people who fitted in. She didn't quite know how you did it. She pored over magazines, making lists of magical beauty products and books on self-improvement. She listened carefully when people raved about yoga or goji berries or learning Japanese. She worried that her hair was too wild, her thighs too fat, and that no one else found bassoons funny. “You look at someone like Kate Moss,” she'd
say, “and she doesn't seem to follow any of the rules. But everyone loves her. So what are you supposed to do?” Kim found this strange. Let people think what they like. What else can you do but just be yourself?

“He was talking to my dad about Michael Owen,” said Izzie.

Kim looked blank.

“Newcastle United. Knee injury. World Cup.”

“But that's exactly what Harry does,” said Kim in a burst of irritability. She was leaning against the hand dryer on the wall, while Izzie—her foot jammed against the cubicle door to keep it open—sat on the closed lid of the nearest toilet. “Finds out what you're interested in and gets you talking.”

“That's not a crime, is it? Being a bit chatty?”

The main door banged back against the wall, and a roar from the restaurant below rushed in. “Oh, sorry,” said a woman with bright red hair and a green dress.

“Don't mind us,” said Izzie. “We're just hiding from Harry.”

The woman lunged forwards, skidded on the wet floor, and crashed headlong into a cubicle. They heard a small cry of pain.

Kim tried again. “He charms people. Gets them to like him.”

“You don't like him.”

“I see through him.”

Izzie put her head on one side. “So you're saying it's all fake?”

“You can see it in his eyes. He's not straight.”

“Not straight?”

“Hiding something,” said Kim impatiently.

“We all hide something.”

“You don't.”

“How do you know?” Izzie raised her eyebrows.

Kim shifted position. The hand dryer turned itself on. Blasted by lukewarm air, she shouted, over the noise, “He's bad for her.”

“For Eva?” Izzie waited for the racket to stop. “She can look after herself.”

No, she can't. You have no idea. She's not as strong as she seems on the surface.

“Some people might say she's done well for herself,” said Izzie. “He's rich. He's good-looking. There isn't a woman here who'd turn him down.”

He's like toilet paper stuck to the sole of her shoe.

“What's he done that makes you hate him?”

Kim's head was spitting with so much fury she couldn't think where to start.

Izzie sighed. “I know. She's your sister. No one's good enough. But if he's the one she wants, you're fighting a losing battle. You're just going to make yourself miserable.”

The toilet flushed in the next cubicle.

Izzie stood up. “It's like the serenity prayer. Change what you can, put up with what you can't, and be wise enough to know the difference.”

This made Kim cross. Maybe you should follow your own advice, she thought, and stop trying to change yourself into what you think other people want you to be. But then she felt guilty. Izzie was only trying to help.

Back downstairs, deafened by shrieks and crashing cutlery, they were flattened against the wall by a waiter carrying a silver tray. “Do you want to swap places?” shouted Izzie. “I could sit next to him if you like.”

It wouldn't make any difference, thought Kim as she followed Izzie through the crowded restaurant. Even if he was at the other end of the table. It's that oozing self-confidence. That conviction he's right. It seeps into the air like fog. He laughs at everything I care about. He makes me feel small and insignificant—as if I'm scurrying about like a tiny black ant while he strides about like God. The very first time I met him, he blocked out the sun. What was I—thirteen? Lying in the back garden in tatty old shorts and a crop top, the grass long under my fingers, soaking up the first hot day for weeks. Christine next door said the TV weather map had turned completely orange. I could feel my skin burning, tiny prickles of heat.
Always stay out of the sun
, my mother used to say.
So aging.
My one act of teenage rebellion—sunbathing.

“Kim? This is Harry.”

The world went dark. An eclipse.

Eva said, “We're going to buy ice cream. Do you want some?”

I couldn't speak. Half-asleep, dazed by heat, I couldn't say a word.

“No ice cream?” A deep voice. A posh boy voice.

I looked up. But I couldn't see his face—just shadow, like a cliff, against the glaring white light.

“Are you always this talkative?”

“Oh leave her, Harry. She just wants to enjoy the sunshine.”

I put up my hand to shield my eyes. And now I could see his expression.

“Harry?”

Laughing at me. His whole face creased up, grinning from ear to ear, as if I was one huge joke.

“Harry? Come on.”

Then he moved, and the sun blinded me. I sat up, and the world was washed out, like someone had bleached it. I kept staring as they sauntered back to the house. He was a head taller than Eva but thin. Nothing but bones, as Christine would say.

At the top of the concrete steps, he stopped. “So that's your baby sister.”

I waited, very still.

“You know, she could look quite pretty if she smiled.”

The hurt. The rage. You'd think the years would make a difference. But they don't.

He spent most weekends in our house when I was a teenager. Taking up space. There was no one to stop him. Dad had walked out. Mum was floating about in a cocktail dress and a cloud of Chanel, happy to spend the evening (the week, the weekend) with anyone who asked her. You wouldn't know Mum had been born above a chip shop in Torquay. From her voice, you'd think she'd grown up in Kensington—in one of those grand white houses with black iron railings and nannies with prams like Cinderella coaches. Mum loved Harry.
Like a young Montgomery Clift. You know, darling? All those films from the 1950s.
She said he fitted so well with Eva—tall and dark against Eva's blond fragility.

That's all that mattered to Mum. The way things looked.

So Dad had gone, and Mum had gone, but Harry was always around. I'd walk into the living room to watch TV and there he was, lying on the sofa—head one end, feet the other, taking up all the seats. If he wasn't on the sofa, he was upstairs in Eva's room. I'd be sitting at the kitchen table, my GCSE maths book open in front of me, staring at the misshapen rectangles, and I'd
hear them laughing, and then thumping sounds, like things falling down, or off, or over, and music all the time, the old 1960s stuff Eva liked—the Mamas and the Papas, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. The Byrds, their voices twining in and out like textiles. Eva said one of their songs was written by King Solomon. It was in the Bible. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. (If something isn't working, there's no point jumping up and down, getting all stressed. That would be like banging your head against a brick wall.) A time to be born and a time to die. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to love, and a time to hate. A time of war and a time of peace.

A time for calculating areas and perimeters.

I drew a small mouse in pencil on the corner of the book. It had a pointed nose, two big ears like satellite dishes, and a long thin tail.

There was no more thumping. They must have finished having sex. I colored in the mouse's ears.

I heard the bedroom door open. Maybe it was still the Byrds. But it might have been Bob Dylan. The noise of feet coming down the stairs. I pulled up a piece of paper to hide the mouse.

Harry came into the kitchen. He was almost as tall as the door frame. Black shiny curls, like a cocker spaniel. A white shirt, half-unbuttoned, making his skin look even darker. He always wore a white shirt. Like he never left the office.

“Doing your homework?”

I didn't answer.

Harry glanced down at the table. “Maths.”

This didn't seem to need an answer either.

“Eva says you find it hard. You don't like it.”

I wouldn't look up.

“It's not difficult. Give me five minutes and I could explain it to you.”

So superior. Because you went to a private school. The thought of sitting with Harry looking at a maths book made me feel sick. I bent over my rectangles. I listened to him clattering about, making tea, dropping a spoon in the stainless steel sink.

At the door, on the way out, he stopped. I could feel him standing there, just watching me. Then he said, “You know where I am. If you change your mind.”