Moderate Violence (17 page)

It was Friday night. Jo, exhausted from the week in the
shop, was trying to eat a bowl of pasta she’d cooked herself for supper. She
wasn’t very hungry, and she suspected the half-used jar of pasta sauce she’d
found in the fridge had been there too long. “Tess, I haven’t even got my
results yet,” she said patiently. “I might fail everything.”

Tess put her load down on the kitchen floor. “No you
won’t,” she said airily. “And anyway, that’s irrelevant. They’ll take you back
whatever happens. Alan Treasure is a personal friend of mine.”

“Really? Poor him.” Jo’s mouth was full of spaghetti,
some of which landed back in the bowl when she said the ‘p’ on ‘poor’.

Tess’s voice took on an accusing tone. “You are such a
rude girl! Who taught you to be so rude? Not me, I’m sure.”

“Must have been Trevor, then.”

Tess took off her jacket, hung it on the back of a
kitchen chair and sat down. “Haven’t seen much of Tony recently. What’s up?”

“For God’s sake, Tess, his name’s
Toby
.”

“Cracking at the edges, is it?” asked Tess, putting her
chin on her hands. “How long’s it been? Couple of months? Well, time for a bit
of structural damage to show through.”

“It’s
two and a half
months.” Jo picked up the bowl and tipped the rest of the pasta into the bin. “You
don’t know anything about him, and you couldn’t care less. You can’t even be
bothered to remember his name.”

“Trevor says he’s a very personable young man.”

Jo slung the empty bowl into the sink. “I don’t care
what Trevor says. Or you, for that matter. I can see Toby or not see Toby
without sharing the information with
you
,
thanks very much.”

“Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss,” said Tess, with
exaggerated scorn. “When the wind changes your face will stay like that if
you’re not careful, and you’ll end up as ugly as…” She abandoned the sentence,
preferring to lean towards Jo with a listen-to-this look. “You know, my lunch
crowd were
very
interested to
hear that my little girl’s got a boyfriend. They can’t believe you’re so grown
up, darling!”

This, of course, was because Tess didn’t look old
enough to have a sixteen-year-old daughter. “Really?” said Jo from the sink,
clattering the plates. “Did you tell them I’m grown up enough to have a job in
a shop, too?”

Through the kitchen window she watched Blod stalking a
bird under the rhododendron bush. Life must be simple if you’re a cat, she
thought. You wouldn’t have to put up with Trevor going off to Wales and leaving
you with an incurable, ingrained, permanent, unchangeable
snob
. “No, of course you didn’t,” she
added lightly. “But you’ll have to tell them when I leave school and work there
permanently, won’t you?”

“You’re
not
doing
that!” Tess stood up. She picked up a tea cloth and twisted it between her
hands. “What would people say? Everyone I know sends their children to
university. None of my friends will ever speak to me again if you leave now.”

“Well then, you haven’t got to worry about what they’ll
say
, have you?”

Tess wound the tea towel tighter. “Oh, Jo, why are you
being so stubborn?”

 “I’m not being stubborn, I’m being practical. And if
you keep repeating the same arguments, so will I. How come the shop’s good
enough for Toby but not good enough for me? Because I’m cleverer than him? How
do you know how clever he is?”

“Don’t browbeat me, darling!” wailed Tess fretfully. “I’ll
get a migraine.”

“It’s all this moaning about A levels that’ll give you
a migraine,” replied Jo, unrelenting.

“Don’t be so disagreeable, darling,” pleaded Tess. “It
makes you look so horrible, and you can look quite nice when you try. I do wish
you’d smile more and not sulk so much.”

Exasperation surged through Jo. Tess was talking, but
she only heard a sort of bleating noise, underpinned by that strange ‘r’ sound
like the droning of a wasp. “Tess!” She slammed her fists down on the table. “Just
shut up, will you? Shut
up
!”

Tess stopped twisting the towel and looked at Jo in
astonishment. “You can’t speak to me like that!”

“I just
have
,”
said Jo, breathing heavily through her nose.

All the misery of the last few days gathered behind her
eyes. Her mother’s red lipstick, heavy mascara and bobbed hair blurred like a
reflection in a distorting mirror. Jo’s eyeballs burned, but the tears didn’t
fall. “Will you just
listen
?” she
wailed. “For the millionth time,
you can’t
make me do something I don’t want to do
!”

Tess put her hands over her eyes. Her small nose, pink
with emotion, protruded from between them. A shock wave passed through her
gym-toned, expensively dressed body, and she began to shake. Standing there,
drawing quivering breaths, striving for control, she looked like an abandoned
child. She sobbed quietly for a few moments. Then she wiped her nose on the
towel. “I just can’t bear the thought of you throwing away your chance to…” She
sighed heavily. “It’s such a
waste
.”

Jo breathed in, held her breath for a moment, and let
it out again. “Tess, there is nothing more to say.” She stood up. “I’ll be
upstairs if you want me.”

In her bedroom, she opened the DVD labels file and
looked at Tess’s ‘Moderate horror’ description. She wondered what sort of
daughter goes upstairs and judges her mother as if she were a silver disc
slotted into a machine. The same sort of daughter who inflicts pain on herself,
and likes it, while loathing herself for it at the same time? The sort of
daughter who has a panic attack in her boyfriend’s house, in front of his
mother?

Stupid, stupid,
stupid
.

She deleted ‘Moderate horror’, and studied the empty
space beside her mother’s name. Suddenly, she felt hot. From the depths of her
brain, or perhaps her heart, came a spurt of vitriol. The shininess of Tess’s
shopping bags, the pinkness of her nose, the fatuousness of her attempts to
engage Jo in girl-talk – all of it enraged her beyond endurance. She began to
flip through DVD cases.

Here was a good one: ‘Strong, violent horror’. She
typed it in, half-wishing it could be ‘Weak, violent horror’, which described
Tess better. But part of the game was using
real
DVD guidelines, not made-up ones, and she had to stick to the rules
she’d made for herself. That was what it was all about – being in control. She
sat back, satisfied.

But in the next instant her satisfaction vanished. Regret,
as futile as Miss Balcombe’s French lessons, took its place. Venting her fury
on Tess had achieved nothing. She thought about the slow-to-heal wound in her
groin. Had that achieved anything? Really, tangibly improved anything, except
her reluctant, recurrent, ever-rising desperation? She was still confused about
Toby. Trevor was still a drunk. Tess was still Tess. The computer screen still
stared back at her. And she still felt desperately, incurably useless, as if
everything she did seemed OK at first, but then wasn’t.

Sighing, she pushed the keyboard away. If her life was
a movie, she decided, the audience would have left by now.

Chapter Eleven

In the cinema, Jo put her hand on Toby’s leg
as a sort of experiment. He was so deep in concentration on the film that he
didn’t notice. She pressed her hand into his thigh a bit harder, and he put his
hand over hers. But after a few moments, when both their hands got sweaty, he
took it off again. Feeling a fool, she did the same.

“Hello lovebirds!” trilled Tess when they got back from
the Indian restaurant. She was sitting at the kitchen table with half a bottle
of wine in one hand and a full glass in the other, while Blod circled her
chair. “I’m as drunk as a skunk, and as happy as a hatstand!”

“I thought you were going out,” said Jo, opening the
fridge. “Toby wants a beer. Did Trevor leave any?”

“Hello, Toby darling!” called Tess, raising her glass
to him as he stood in the doorway. Jo almost laughed at how embarrassed he was.

“Hello, Mrs Probert,” he muttered.

“Mrs Probert? Who’s she?” Tess’s voice rose to a near shriek.
She leaned closer to Toby. “My name is Therèse Pratt, Tess to my loved ones,
and that includes
you
.”

“Um…” said Toby.

Jo retrieved a bottle of beer from the back of the
fridge. While she searched the drawer for the opener she tried again to make
Tess talk sense. “Why aren’t you out?”

“Little me on my little ownsome tonight,” said Tess.
She gulped down the glass of wine without taking breath and poured another. “We
decided not to go.”

“Who’s we?” asked Jo, raising her eyebrows at Toby as
she handed him the beer.

“Me and my friend.”

“Who, Erica?” asked Jo. To Toby she said, “The one with
the lilac sports car,” and he smiled. He still looked self-conscious, though.

“
Not
Erica,” said Tess decisively. “
Definitely
not
Erica.”

“Oh Tess, have you fallen out with her?” asked Jo in
mock-dismay.

“None of your business, Miss Nosy Parker.” Tess had put
the bottle and the lipstick-smudged glass down, and was pushing herself up from
the table. “I’d better make myself scarce, hadn’t I?” She picked up her handbag
and slung the strap over her shoulder, but left her high-heeled shoes where
she’d discarded them. As she passed Toby in her bare feet, she didn’t even come
up to his shoulder. “Nighty night, you two,” she said. “Don’t do anything I
wouldn’t do!”

When she’d gone Jo picked up Blod, who miaowed
discontentedly. “She didn’t feed you, did she?” she murmured into the cat’s
fur. As it was Saturday, Jo had been at work all day. “Why didn’t you scratch
her with those lovely claws of yours?”

Toby watched while Jo put down food and water for the
cat. Then they went into the sitting room and put the TV on, and Jo went round
drawing curtains and putting on lamps. No-one had used the room this evening. Tess
obviously
had
been out, and come
in earlier, and more in need of alcohol, than she’d intended.

“Your mum’s scary,” said Toby from the sofa.

“You think?” Jo thought about the ‘Strong, violent
horror’ label. On Results Day, she might have to change it to ‘
Extremely
strong, violent horror’.

Toby seemed to have read her mind. “I was wondering
about something. After your results, shall we go away?”

Jo’s insides leapt. She stopped tugging at the stubborn
curtain over the French windows. “On holiday, you mean?”

“Ye-es,” he said with a little frown.

“Tess would never let me go.”

“Because of the money?”

“No, not because of the
money
!”
Abandoning
the curtain, she flopped down beside Toby on the sofa and put her chin on his
shoulder. She could feel his collar bone, and the pad of muscle where his neck
began. She could smell his shampoo, the curry he’d eaten and the beer in the
bottle he held. She could see his chest moving up and down as he breathed. In
her head, she strove for the truth. When she had it, she smoothed it, so that
Toby wouldn’t be hurt by it. “She’d say I don’t know you well enough to go on holiday
with you, and I’m too young anyway.”

“Oh,” was all he said.

Between his body and Jo’s an unspoken message was being
transmitted. What do people do on holiday? They spend the day on the beach then
they go back to the hotel room and make love. Then they go out for dinner and
come back and make love again. They even make love in the morning before
breakfast. They’re miles away from parents, work, husbands, wives, whatever
they want to get away from. What they do in that hotel room is a secret between
them, to be remembered for years – perhaps forever. But she and Toby weren’t
going to do any of that.

“I’m always forgetting you’re only sixteen,” he said,
and took a mouthful of beer. When he’d swallowed it he squeezed Jo more tightly
against him. “You act older than me most of the time.”

Jo sighed. “I get a lot of practice,” she told him,
“with parents like mine.”

“But they’ll still refuse to let you go on holiday with
me?”

“Of course.”

He finished the beer and set the bottle on the floor
beside him. Jo thought he’d start to kiss her, but he disentangled himself and
stood up. “Think I’d better get going. Work in the morning.”

Jo stood up too, somehow feeling relieved. She wondered
if it was relief that he hadn’t started to put his hands on her – she was wearing
her new skirt again, and she
didn’t
want his fingers to encounter the plaster at the top of her leg – or that she
wouldn’t be going on holiday with him. “You’re not working Sunday again, are
you?” she asked. “That’s about four weeks running.”

“Gordon needs the help.” At the front door, he bent to
kiss her. His lips felt wet and tasted of beer. “And I’ll get Tuesday and
Wednesday off.”

Monday was Jo’s day off. “So I won’t see you in the
shop till Thursday, then?”

He blinked. “Guess not. Take care.” And before she
could reply he turned and strode to the gate.

Jo shut the door behind him and leaned against it.

Guess not
?

Her breathing felt shallow, and she noticed that she
was trembling a little, like she sometimes did in the winter when she was waiting
for the bus in her blazer and skirt. It wasn’t cold in the hall, though. In
fact, it was hot. It was
shock
that was making her tremble – shock that Toby could ignore her hint even more
blatantly than she’d dropped it.

Thursday was five days away. Why didn’t she have the
courage to ask what he did on his days off, or insist he took her out more
often than Saturday nights? If Pascale, who at this moment was doubtless being
drooled over by some flashy-looking Spanish boy, had witnessed that throwaway
Guess not
, what would she have done?

She pushed herself off the door and went back to the
sitting room. It was gloomy, full of shadows, the people on the silent TV
screen mouthing pathetically. Jo lunged for the remote, and suddenly,
overwhelmingly, an intolerable weight began to press on her from every
direction. She collapsed on the sofa, clutching her stomach. What the hell was
this?

The feeling increased. It wasn’t panic, or confusion,
or despair. It was something wilder than any of those; something violent. She
thought about the sticky flesh under the plaster on her arm. Then she stopped
thinking about it. Mastering this new, crushing opponent needed more than an
assault on the scratch-patch. But there was no time for, and no possibility of,
going upstairs and getting out the nail scissors. Jo sat there, her eyes roving
the room, searching for a weapon.

On the table lay her school pencil-case, a legacy of
those far-off days when she used to sit here and revise while Trevor was in the
pub. Jo hauled herself up and seized it, rummaging with purposeful fingers
until she found her compass. She couldn’t wait the few seconds it would take to
pull her skirt up and her tights down to expose her upper leg where she’d
driven the scissors in on Saturday night. She had to do this
now
, or the enemy, whatever it was, would
overcome her.

She was still wearing her jacket. There was no time to
take it off. She pushed up the left sleeve with her right hand. It wouldn’t go
any further than halfway up her forearm, but that would have to do. Holding her
breath, she drove the point of the compass into the fleshy part just above her
wrist. She drove it in hard, much harder than with the scissors.

There was quite a lot of blood. Swallowing, striving
for control, she stumbled into the downstairs toilet and grabbed a handful of
paper. She had to flush several gory wads away before she could return to the
sitting-room, her jacket sleeve hiding the toilet-paper bandage, her heartbeat
slowing. In her right hand she still held the compass.

She looked at it carefully, turning it over and over in
her hand as if it were a cherished object. It
was
a cherished object. It was a trophy, evidence of a conquest. She suddenly felt
light-hearted, as if nothing could ever matter, in the whole world, for the
whole future. She knew that all these people – the ones she had secretly labelled,
as if they were movies – couldn’t just trample over her without causing actual,
running-down-the-arm bloodshed.

A noise, a kind of buzzing, started in her head. She sat
down shakily at the table, wondering if this was, at last, the onset of
insanity. Then she realized that it was the sound of her phone, ringing in her
handbag. Grabbing it untidily, she managed to answer it before the caller rang
off. There was no caller ID, just a number. “Hello?” she said warily.

“Jo? It’s Ed.”

“
Ed
?” she
repeated inanely. “Ed Samuels?”

“Yeah, same old Ed.”

What was Ed doing, phoning her? He didn’t even have her
number. She was too nonplussed to speak.

“Look, can I meet you somewhere?” He sounded nervous. “Tomorrow?
I just need to talk to you about something.”

Jo’s brain began, slowly and wearily, to work. “What
about that coffee shop on the corner? With the awning?”

“Gino’s?”

“That’s the one.”

“Eleven?” suggested Ed. There was relief in his voice. “I’ve
got to be at work for twelve.”

“See you then,” said Jo.

“Thanks, Jo.”

He hung up. Jo stared stupidly at the phone for a
moment. Gino’s, with its plastic plants and grubby striped awning, was a place
no one from school ever,
ever
went. That’s why she’d suggested it, and why Ed had been relieved at her
suggestion. Obviously, as Pascale was in Spain, he didn’t want anyone to see
him with someone else. But why did he want to see her at all?

* * * * * *

He was sitting at the corner table farthest
from the door. When Jo saw his expectant, embarrassed face, the feeling she’d
had when they were dancing at the Summer Ball revisited her. He was just so
straightforward; he wore his insides on the outside.

She sat down opposite him. “What is it?”

“I expect you can guess.” He really
was
embarrassed. His face, and what she
could see of his neck above the collar of his Burgerblitz shirt, had gone
perfectly pink. He pushed back his hair, which since he’d stopped gelling it
fell over his forehead in a clump. “It starts with a P.”

“Ah.” Any boy who risked going out with Pascale, even
if he lasted as long as Ed, had to accept that he’d eventually suffer for it. It
was a natural hazard of life. “Look, I’m not sure I can help much,” said Jo,
beginning to be embarrassed too.

He pulled his unzipped jacket closer around his body,
twisting sideways on his chair so he wouldn’t have to look at Jo. He planted
his feet and stared between them at the floor. “I think she’s seeing someone
else.”

The milk-frothing machine suddenly began to roar. At
the same moment, a girl with a notepad appeared at their table and looked at Jo
expectantly.

“Oh…a latte, please.”

Ed’s coffee was only half drunk, but he ordered
another. He probably had to stay awake, flipping burgers until midnight. Jo
waited for the noise to end, then she said, “Ed…why are you telling
me
this?”