Moderate Violence (20 page)

Pascale sighed. “Actually, I’m not sure I can help this
time.”

Jo’s heartbeat quickened. She put Blod down on the
carpet. “Why not?”

“Well…” Pascale looked sheepish. “I can’t seem to sort
my own boyfriend out, let alone yours.”

“Has something gone wrong with Ed?” Jo managed to ask.

Pascale looked into the middle distance and screwed up
her nose. “Not sure, to be honest. I think he’s gone off me.” She smiled
knowingly at Jo. “But I’m not going to dump him just yet.”

“Never throw out dirty water until you’ve got clean?”
said Jo. The beating of her heart was actually making her voice shake.

“You’re learning, little Jo.”

“Anyone on the horizon?” Surely
this
would make Pascale blush?

“Well…” Pascale didn’t blush. She picked up Blod and
held the cat on her chest, ready to bury her face in its fur if she needed to
hide confusion. Jo almost admired her. She really was a professional. “I
shouldn’t really talk about it, but yes, there is someone.”

Jo felt ill. Pascale’s nerve was more than astonishing;
it was nauseating. “Is it anyone I know?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” said Pascale decisively. “I mean, it’s no one
at school.” She was still clutching the cat. Jo could hear Blod’s contented
purring. “In fact, I think I’ve given up with schoolboys,” added Pascale. “I’m
going to go for someone older in future. Ed can be such a
tosser
sometimes.”

So can older boys, thought Jo. Her stomach was still
trying to climb into her throat.

Swallowing, she tried to make her tone neutral. “So am
I allowed to hear about this other guy you’re interested in? Or am I the person
you
especially
can’t tell?”

Pascale stared at her. Jo could hear the muffled sound
of the radio Tess had left on in the kitchen, and Blod’s purring. “What?” asked
Pascale, frowning. “What have
you
got to do with it?”

“Stop pretending to be so innocent!”

“What?” asked Pascale again. She was gazing at Jo in
bewilderment, her hair spilling around her suntanned face and her eyelashes
spread out. “Jo, are you sure you’re all right?”

When she thought afterwards about what
happened next, which she did often, events always fragmented in Jo’s memory and
refused to put themselves into a recognizable order. In fact, the whole episode
seemed irrefutably, irredeemably mad.

She put both her feet against the coffee table and
pushed with all her strength. The table slid across the thin carpet and struck
Pascale’s shins very hard. Pascale’s face expanded with shock. She let out an
eardrum-shattering shriek which sent Blod scurrying for cover behind the
curtains.

Pascale couldn’t move. The edge of the coffee table was
pinning her legs against the sofa. With Jo kneeling on it, it was immoveable. She
began to cry.

A tsunami of fury unleashed itself over Jo. She grabbed
Pascale by the shoulders, pushing the squashy flesh of her upper arms backwards
until her head landed with a thud on the back of the sofa. Pascale tried to
defend herself, but rage made Jo strong. The tsunami had been gathering for a
long time. It was unstoppable. And that’s when the madness really started.

Jo’s most vivid memory afterwards was Pascale’s teeth. When
Jo demanded the truth, Pascale’s weeping turned to sobbing. She protested that
she didn’t know what Jo meant. When Jo, forced to make things plain, said, “Who
are you cheating on Ed with?” Pascale seemed to lose control of her face. Her
teeth showed white against the squared-off ‘O’ made by her lipsticked mouth,
forced open by the paralysing grimace of hysteria. “No one you know,” she
gasped, breathing noisily. “I swear, Jo, no one you know. Please, please don’t
tell Ed!”

But Jo didn’t give in. “What about the card tricks?”
she demanded without sympathy.

Pascale’s hair was plastered to her face by tears and
spit. She still couldn’t close her mouth, and her nostrils quivered as her
lungs tried to draw in enough air. Jo, staring at those teeth and that damp,
blotched face, knew she was inflicting a greater punishment than she needed to.
But knowing this didn’t make her stop. Now that the usual power balance between
her and Pascale was reversed, her superior position intoxicated her. She grabbed
Pascale’s chin and tried to push her lower jaw up. She couldn’t stand to look
at those white, lipstick-smeared teeth any more. “Just admit it, will you?”

Pascale’s eyes, wide with fright, rolled back and
looked at the ceiling as the pressure of Jo’s hand forced her mouth shut. Her
chest heaved. Her features were so swollen with crying that she didn’t look
like Pascale any more. Jo let go.

“Please, Jo,
please
,”
implored Pascale as soon as she could speak. Her voice was croaky. “What have I
done?”

“You know what you’ve done!”

“No I
don’t
!
Why won’t you believe me?”

“Because no one ever tells me the truth!”

The panic drained from Pascale’s eyes. Still
tear-filled, they gazed at Jo with tenderness. It was such a familiar
expression that it overrode the wreckage of her face and made her look like
Pascale again. “How can you say that? I’m always straight with you. You’re my
best friend.”

Suddenly, Jo wanted to cry. She wanted to be a little
girl again, who could cry and cry until things got better. But there wasn’t any
point. No amount of crying could make this awfulness better.

She was still kneeling on the coffee table with her
T-shirt round her armpits. Pascale must have grasped it during their struggle. Pascale
half sat, half lay on the sofa, exhausted, and gazed at Jo with sorrowful eyes.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked, her voice trembling. “How did you turn into
someone who can do this?”

Jo didn’t move to comfort her. Someone who can do this,
she thought. Commit violence against Pascale. Commit violence against Toby. And
Pascale didn’t even know about the violence against Jo’s own flesh. What would
she say if she did? She’d look at Jo with that mock-innocent gaze and say, “You
know you’re a
whole basket
short
of a picnic, don’t you?”

Pascale pushed the coffee table away and stood up. Without
looking at Jo she collected her jacket and the bottle of wine, sobbing and
sniffing. Then she half-walked, half-stumbled out of the front door and pulled
it shut behind her.

Jo pulled down her T-shirt and looked out of the
sitting room window. It was getting dark. Only half way through August, and the
summer seemed almost over. She thought about the results coming out next week. She
thought about the sharp nails on her right hand, the short-bladed scissors in
their china box and the compass in her pencil case. She must have used these
things on purpose, though she didn’t know it at the time, to preserve her
secret. If they had been razor blades, people would have found out, because
there would have been more blood than she could hide.

She sat down, closing her eyes against the bright,
hammering light in her head. Inside her, intolerable rage stirred again. She
clenched her teeth, grinding them into each other, making her jaw hurt. But the
rage didn’t go away.

 Her phone said 20:26. Incredibly, it wasn’t even half
an hour since Pascale had rung the doorbell. Through the open door she could
see Blod in the kitchen. She watched the cat’s tiny pink tongue lapping the
water in the bowl. Everything was silent. As Jo walked through the house it was
so still that she felt as if she were walking through a painting. The corners
were full of shadows; the dusky light made a square of dark blue between the
sitting-room curtains; the air bore the heavy scent of lilies from the vase in
the hearth. Tess wouldn’t be back for hours.

She couldn’t stay in this creepy, silent house, with
its memory of Pascale’s tears and snot and spit, and her own vicious jealousy. She
couldn’t do any more about getting the truth out of Pascale and Holly. But she
could get the truth from Toby. Now, tonight.

Chapter Thirteen

Toby’s house was dark and blank-faced. Disappointment
gnawed at Jo as she approached. But then she saw that the bathroom window at
the side of the house was open. Of
course
,
the rooms at the front, where the curtains were open, were the sitting-room and
Toby’s mum’s room. Toby’s mum was away, and Toby himself must be in his own
bedroom at the back. Jo pressed the bell.

Nothing happened for a few moments. Jo pressed the bell
again. She heard it ring inside the house, but still nothing happened. She
cupped her hands around her face and looked through the glass panel. Darkness. All
the doors off the hall were closed. It was pathetic, but tears tore at the back
of her throat again. Was
nothing
going
to go right, ever again?

 There was a noise from inside the house. At first Jo
couldn’t identify it. She put her ear to the glass and listened carefully. It
was coming from the back of the house. The ground floor, maybe the kitchen. There
it was again. Suddenly she recognized it: someone was banging something hard.

Without allowing herself to think, she set off down the
side of the house, under the open bathroom window and round to the back, her
trainers making no noise on the path. When she looked through the glass panes
of the kitchen door, the sight she saw was not the one she expected.

Holly was standing on a chair in the centre of the
room, looking up at the ceiling. In one hand she held a sweeping brush. She was
wearing jeans and had her hair in a ponytail like she sometimes wore it to
school, and looked exactly like the usual Holly. But on her face was an
expression Jo had never seen there before. Deep, desperate panic covered her
features like a mask. Her eyes had almost disappeared under her tightly-drawn
eyebrows. Jo could see her sticky-out tooth, along with the other top ones,
chewing her lower lip. The hand that wasn’t holding the brush was flailing
beside her in a gesture of impatience. She was muttering something which Jo
couldn’t hear. Again and again, she hit the ceiling with the end of the brush
handle.

A hot feeling, as if all her blood had rushed to her
head, came over Jo. Holly was here, just like last night, and she was doing
something very suspicious. “Holly!” she called, knocking very hard on the glass
of the kitchen door. “Where’s Toby? I want to talk to him!”

Holly’s face seemed to collapse, as if she had no
strength in the muscles needed to keep it looking like beautiful Holly. It
didn’t look beautiful. It looked very troubled. She climbed off the chair and
came to the back door. “You can’t!” she called through the glass. “I’m sorry,
but you can’t!”

“Open this door or I’ll get a stone and smash the
glass!” threatened Jo, with the conviction of someone who knows they’re being
lied to. Then, as Holly’s face began to crumple, she relented. “It’s all right,
Hol,” she said more quietly. “But I
must
talk to Toby.”

Holly leaned against the inside of the glass door. She’d
managed not to cry, but her face was pale and her eyes were red. “I’m sorry,
but I can’t let you in. It’s beyond my control. I just can’t.”

Realization flooded over Jo. What Holly had said in
Toby’s hallway was true – she
had
come round to tell Toby about something. Something she couldn’t say on the
phone or by text. Well, now Jo knew why. With desperate, breath-shortening
certainty, she knew that Holly was standing guard while Toby and Pascale were
upstairs in his bedroom. A secret like that was too big to risk it being
recorded by an electronic device. That incriminating
Inbox
, that
Received
Calls
list; the downfall of any plotter who underestimated the power
of the mobile phone.

“Christ, Holly, how
could
you?” Jo could hardly speak; the words were scarcely above a whisper.

Holly shook her head. The tears came, but Jo had no
sympathy. When she had rung the doorbell, Holly had started pounding on the
kitchen ceiling to warn Toby and Pascale. At this very moment, they were
probably tiptoeing down the stairs and out of the front door, marveling at the
stroke of luck that had sent Jo round the back.

It was like a comedy film. But it wasn’t in the
smallest bit funny. Everyone Jo had trusted had betrayed her. In comedy films,
things like betrayal didn’t come into it. But in real life, farcical situations
like this weren’t comic, they were tragic. “
Please
open the door,” she implored Holly. “They’ve probably gone by now,
anyway.”

Holly, her eyes brimming, stared at Jo for a long
moment. Then she seemed to make a decision. She unlocked the door, flung it
open, caught hold of Jo and hugged her tightly. “I’m so sorry!” she blurted. “I’ve
been so miserable! You don’t know how awful this has been, and it’s been going
on so long, and I didn’t know how to make it go away once it had started.”

Jo let her cry a little longer, then gently unwound her
arms from her neck. “It’s gone away now,” she said. Her voice seemed to be
coming from somewhere far away, like an echo in a cave. She felt as if
everything she had ever learnt, understood, memorized, valued, believed or
defended had fallen in a heap in the middle of Toby’s mum’s immaculate kitchen,
and lay there like an unlit bonfire, waiting for destruction. “You don’t have
to worry about it any more, Hol.”

Holly drew breath to speak, but at that moment there
was a thud in the room upstairs, and the sound of a door opening.

They both froze. Jo didn’t know what to do. She longed,
overwhelmingly, for everything to be out in the open at last, but she didn’t
want to experience the moment when that happened. She didn’t know if she wanted
Toby to kneel and beg forgiveness, or just disappear somewhere very far away,
so that she never saw him again. And although she couldn’t avoid seeing Pascale
again, before she did she needed longer to have passed since their last,
violent meeting.

“I’d better go,” she said to Holly. “I
really
don’t want to see them.”

But it was too late. Jo heard masculine laughter in the
hall, and the kitchen door opened. But it wasn’t Toby who stood there. Framed
by the kitchen door, wearing his usual tight jeans and T-shirt, and carrying
his pointy-toed shoes in one hand, was Gordon.

Close behind him came Toby, without his shoes or his
shirt, smiling. “What was that – ” he began. Then he saw Jo, and stopped. His
smile vanished. “Shit,” he said.

Jo’s body felt suddenly electrified. The sudden
realization of what was going on struck her like a million tiny flashes of
lightning. She could hear Holly sobbing miserably. A tremor went down her legs;
she felt as if she might collapse. She lurched against the worktop, her heart
shuddering like a pile-driver. It was hard to speak, but she knew she was the
one who must. And suddenly, she found her voice.

“
Shit
?”
she repeated, fixing Toby with the most venomous stare she could muster. She wished
Mr Gerrard, who hadn’t chosen her for Lady Macbeth in the Year Nine Mini-
Macbeth
because he said she didn’t look
evil enough, was there to see it. “How about ‘Sorry’?” She let go of the
worktop and advanced on Toby, registering dimly that she’d never seen him
without his top before. Their amateurish attempts to be lovers had never
reached that level. “Do you realize you’ve never apologized to me, ever?” she
demanded. “Even when you were the one deeply,
deeply
in the wrong?”

No one spoke. Out of the corner of her eye Jo saw
Gordon perch wearily on a stool at the breakfast bar, still minus his shoes,
and put his head in his hands.

“Do you know what ‘deeply in the wrong’ even
means
?” Jo asked Toby. She could hear her
tone getting spiky. She must control it. She mustn’t start to sound like Tess. “Or
have you never actually bothered to found out?”

Gordon and Holly both began to speak. Gordon proved the
stronger. “Jo, he
is
sorry. He’s
given me hell this last few weeks, moaning about how bad he feels.” He looked
at Toby, who was leaning despondently against the sink, his head down, his arms
folded across his naked torso. “In fact, he was going to tell you tomorrow,
weren’t you, Tobe?”

Holly leapt at her chance. “That’s what I was going to
say, Jo!” She was sobbing and sniffing so vigorously, Jo almost didn’t
understand her. “We were talking about it earlier tonight, and I said he had to
tell you, after you came round last night and found me here. I felt so bad, I didn’t
know what to do, I – ”

“
You
felt
bad!” Jo practically spat the words at Holly, then turned on Gordon. “Toby’s
been giving
you
hell!” The same
rage that had made her kick the coffee table into Pascale’s legs – poor,
innocent Pascale, whose latest conquest, whoever he was, certainly wasn’t Toby
– possessed her. “What about
me
!”

At last, Toby raised his head. In his face Jo saw
anguish. It was the scene, about ten minutes before the end, when everything
hangs on a tough decision. The actor emotes, his eyes doing the business. The
actress, transfixed by the enormity of his sacrifice, wails, “No! Don’t do it!”
But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

Toby pushed himself off the work surface and stepped
towards her. He didn’t touch her. He just stood there, the same old Toby with
his thin-lipped almost-smile, his neat hair, his far-apart eyes with their
watchful expression. But not the same old Toby.

“You can hate me if you want,” he said solemnly. “But
listen, I always really liked you, and I still do. And if things hadn’t been
the way they are with me, you’d have been…” He paused, and drew a breath as if
he was going to say more. But then he let it out again, and without looking at
anyone, opened the kitchen door and went out. A moment later, Jo heard his bare
feet padding up the stairs.

Holly had started crying again. Over and over, she
mumbled, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

Jo felt as numb, and as dumb, as a doll. “whatever,
Hol,” she said. Then she looked at Gordon. “I’d like to hand in my notice,” she
said. “I don’t want to come back to the shop any more.”

She opened the door into the garden. While she’d been
in Toby’s house it had got a lot darker outside. She slammed the door behind
her and began to run.

* * * * * *

When she got home, breathless and sweaty,
Tess was still out. Jo turned off her phone and sat in the dark at the side of
the house by the dustbins, where Tess wouldn’t see her when she came in.

Blod came round the corner, padding across the concrete
path, inclining her head, beseeching Jo with yellow eyes. Jo picked her up and
crouched at the bottom of the wall, the cat draped against her chest. She could
feel Blod’s bones beneath her fur, and her tiny wet nose nudging her cheek. The
cat began to purr contentedly.  

It didn’t matter what Toby, or Gordon, or anybody said.
It was all Jo’s fault.
She
was
the one who had told Toby, stupidly, that she loved him, and then, equally
stupidly, that he wasn’t ‘the one’.
She
was the one who had quizzed him fruitlessly about his friends and his
ambitions, but was too spineless to demand to know why he’d been expelled from
school. The fact was Toby had never really wanted to be her boyfriend at all. He
was just playing some lunatic game with himself, using her to show himself,
once and for all, that he only liked men. He’d more or less admitted this. “If
things hadn’t been the way they are with me…” he’d said. Well, things
were the way they are with him
, weren’t
they? And because of Jo, he knew it, once and for all. And all the time he was
playing his sordid little game with her, he was going clubbing with his friends
in London. He was sleeping at Mitch’s place, but not on the floor, of course. And
the reason he wasn’t having sex with Jo was very simple. He was having sex with
Gordon.

Gordon
. Jo was back in what-the-hell’s-Holly-doing territory. Blod
squawked and struggled, so Jo set her down. She watched the white underside of
the cat’s tail disappear into the darkness, remembering how Holly, such a
so-called loyal friend, had evaded her questions and patronized her suspicions
about Toby. But that had been
ages
ago, on the day of their last exam. Jo had hardly known Toby then, but even so,
Holly had refused to discuss him in more detail than her casual “how’s it
going?” enquiry had demanded.

Had Holly known something Jo didn’t know?

Why hadn’t Jo
seen
it? It was obvious that Gordon was gay, so why not Toby? The ‘friends’ in
London. The clubbing. The clean-shaven chin, the neat clothes and sharp
haircut. The prospective career in fashion. And what jobs had he done before he
was a shop assistant? A waiter, and a hairdresser, for God’s sake! She
unclasped her hands and covered her face with them.