Moderate Violence (3 page)

Without hesitation she labelled Pascale ‘Explicit
sexual content’. Then she typed ‘Strong sex references’ next to Ed’s name. Immediately
her heart found its way to her throat and stayed there, pushing her blood
around so hard she could feel her temples throbbing.

“Grow up, you
child
,”
she murmured, sitting up. She typed Holly’s name below Ed’s.

What was Holly like? Teachers were always saying things
like, “That’s very sensible, Holly.” She
was
sensible, in a way, but the face she displayed to teachers was a
conscious one, learnt by heart. The unrehearsed version of Holly was much
harder to define. Jo’s fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment, and then
she typed ‘Fairly adult’ alongside Holly’s name. ‘Fairly’ was a suitably vague
word for Holly’s level of maturity. And of course, Holly did have ‘fair’ hair,
which made the sort of satisfying pun Mr Gerrard would enjoy.

God, this was stupid. Jo took hold of the mouse, ready
to delete the incriminating list before Trevor came in and read it over her
shoulder. But she didn’t do it. She looked at the names, and the scattered DVD
cases, and her reflection in the mirror behind the computer, and remembered how
Ed’s shirt had come out of his trousers when he’d been kicking a football
around at lunchtime, and she’d stood and watched him tuck it in again as if she
were a no-brain fourteen-year-old. But it was just that he’d had to loosen his
belt…

She pushed the keyboard away. Her head sank forward of
its own accord and landed among the DVDs. There were still tears inside her
somewhere, but they wouldn’t come. All she felt was embarrassed – at her own
behaviour, at Pascale’s, at Trevor’s. She wanted to disappear somewhere impossible
to reach. Heaven, maybe. Or space, or history. No one would miss her, or try to
bring her back. Not even Mr Treasure.

She stayed there for a long time, her breath dampening
her cheek as it condensed on the cover of
Knocked
Up
, her hair covering her nose and mouth. Her hair smelt of school,
and her breath was giving it a damp smell too. The smell of hairdressers’
salons. It made her feel enclosed in her own, physical self, as if her body had
been wound in a shroud and placed in a coffin.

She had to press her top teeth as hard as she could
against the bottom ones, to try to stop that thought. It always led to one
about worms eating her eyeballs.

She felt the edge of one of the plastic cases dig into
the bony part of her cheek. Without thinking she shifted and pressed harder. A
sudden stab of pain shot through her body.

It really hurt, but instead of releasing she just
pushed harder and harder until the pain enveloped her entirely, like a black
hole swallowing the Universe.

She sat up breathlessly. Her whole body was tingling. She
shut her eyes tightly and lived the electric moment. It didn’t last long and
when she opened her eyes, she saw the consequences. The mirror displayed an
L-shaped weal on her right cheekbone. She felt suddenly disorientated, and
gripped the edge of the dressing-table desk. Leaning closer to the mirror, she
saw that the DVD cover hadn’t merely imprinted its corner into her flesh, it
had torn it. In the crook of the L, a drop of blood was gathering.

She looked down at the pile of DVDs. The cover she’d
pressed her cheek onto lay open and empty. Jo picked it up and inspected it. It
wasn’t the corner of the case that had drawn blood, but the plastic prongs that
slotted into each other when the case was closed. The edge of one of them had
been broken, leaving a sharp point.

She dabbed the wound on her cheek with a tissue. It
wasn’t a big deal, but people would notice it, so she’d have to think of a lie
to tell them. Futile behaviour like sticking a DVD case into your face would
elicit bafflement from Pascale and a telling-off from Holly, and Jo didn’t want
to experience either.

The case was still in her hand. She fingered it,
feeling a lingering sense of shock. Such an innocuous object; such an
electrifying result of…what? Drawing blood? She studied her reflection, looking
for the reassurance in the sight of her own familiar features. But there was an
expression in her eyes that
wasn’t
familiar. She looked like someone in a TV news film who had just been rescued
from a capsized boat, or an earthquake, or a flood. Adrift, only half in the
world, and possessed of a sudden, unwelcome wisdom.  

Chapter Two

“
Wales
?”

“Yep,” said Trevor. He was sitting in the kitchen with
his feet on the table. “It’s a principality of some three million souls,
situated in the west of the British mainland. It enjoys a constant supply of
mountains, castles, rugby and rain, and is God’s own country. As every Welshman
knows, and so should you, Jo-girl.”

Jo put the teapot down quickly and sat at the table,
keeping her eyes on Trevor’s face. “Stop being such an arse. What will you do
there? Get a job?”

“I doubt it. I got some money from the firm. Fifteen
thousand.”
 

“Is that all?” Jo was surprised. No wonder Trevor had
felt the need to get off his face on gin. “So when that’s gone, what will you
do?”

It was Saturday morning, so Trevor wasn’t at work. But
he only had three more days to work anyway, because they owed him holiday time.

“Well, my little love,” he said, biting off a mouthful
of toast, “you remember Mord Davies?”

“No.”

“Yes you do. He’s my mother’s cousin, or nephew, or
something. Mordecai, his name is. Anyway, he’s been asking me for years, on and
off, if I want to go into business with him. Bed and breakfast, in this
farmhouse he wants to do up, see.”

“Good grief,” said Jo faintly. The thought of Trevor
and someone called Mordecai running a bed and breakfast establishment wasn’t
even funny. It was just ludicrous.

“So I think the time’s come to take him up on his
offer, don’t you?” said Trevor.

Jo tried to understand. “So if you go into business
with him, you’ll take half the profits, will you?”

“Mm,” nodded Trevor with his mouth full.

“So you’re going to put your fifteen thousand into
setting it up, then?”

As she said this, Jo could feel her heart doing
something weird inside her. She was sure, before he spoke, that Trevor wasn’t
going to do that at all.

“Nope,” he said. “Needs much more than that. I’ll put
in what I get from the divorce. Half this house, for a start.”

Jo poured the tea and they sipped it. She knew that if
she asked Trevor to take his feet off the table he wouldn’t, so she didn’t
bother. “So you sell a nice house in London and you use half the money to help
Mordi-whatever-his-name-is to do up a crappy old house in Wales,” she said
after a while. “What will Tess use her half for?”

“That’s up to her, Jo-girl. But if she’s got any sense,
which I doubt, she’ll invest it.”

“You mean buy another property?”

Trevor nodded, trying to look wise. He’d had a shower
and his hair was still wet on the top. He was wearing trainers and jeans and a
faded Guns ’n’ Roses T-shirt. “Well, she can’t live with her parents for ever,
can she?” He reached for the teapot. “Top up?”

Jo shook her head. “Trevor, half the money will only
buy half a house. A flat.”

“That’s right.” He looked at her with sympathy, or
almost-sympathy. “It’s that or Prattland, babe.”

Jo could see her face in the glass of the kitchen door.
She looked pale, the mark on her cheekbone showing dark. Her hair was
separating into strands and her shoulders were hunched. “Sit up
straight
,” Tess was forever saying, with
that funny ‘r’ sound that came from speaking French when she was a child, “or
you’ll grow up to be uglier than the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he was
ugly
.”

“Actually,” she said, cradling her mug, “it’s that or
begging on Victoria Station.”

Trevor had stopped listening. He’d taken his feet off
the table and picked up Blod, the tortoiseshell cat Tess had rescued then
neglected. “Come on, let’s get you fed, shall we?” He opened a can and put some
food in Blod’s bowl. Then he picked up his keys and jingled them on his palm. “You
know, love, I was bloody angry yesterday. I thought the world had come to a
freakin’ end, losing my job. They think I’ve got a drink problem, see. But then
I was on the phone to Granny Probert last night and she said Mord was still
open to offers, and it would be great if I could come back to Wales and be near
her and Dad, and I thought, why not? So things aren’t so bad after all.” He
gave Jo the lopsided look he thought was charming, and jingled the keys again. “Think
I’ll have a walk and buy the newspaper. What are you going to do with your
Saturday?”

Jo began to clear the table. Granny Probert, she
thought, should keep her mouth shut. “My interview’s today,” she said.

They looked at each other. Trevor’s face was blank.

“I told you,” said Jo. “It’s in a shop. They want
someone for the summer, then maybe permanently.”

“What sort of shop?”

“I
told
you. A clothes shop.”

“What about your exams?”

“It’ll only be on Saturdays until after
the exams. Then all week during the
summer. But the interviews are today.”

He opened the kitchen door.

“What time’s your interview?”

“Eleven thirty.” Jo looked at the clock on the cooker. It
was already five past ten.

Trevor took his jacket off the rack in the hall. “Well,
good luck, then.” Unexpectedly, he squinted at her. “What have you done to your
face?”

“Walked into a rose bush.”

“A
rose bush
?”

Jo was ready for this. Trevor hadn’t consciously seen
her yesterday. “It was sticking out from someone’s stupid garden, and scratched
me as I walked past on the way back from the bus stop. It bloody hurt, I can
tell you.”

Trevor grinned. “Try not to get tetanus.”

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“See you later, then.”

The front door crashed behind him. Jo topped up her mug
of tea and took it upstairs. After her shower she dried her hair, trying to
push it up a bit so that it looked like there was some air between it and her
scalp. But it just wrapped itself round her head and neck as flatly as a scarf.
Whoever interviewed her would wonder whether that branch of Rose and Reed could
risk giving a job to a girl with a scab on her cheek and such disappointingly
dull hair. Dull hair, dull brain, dull personality.

At least her jeans were clean, and she had one unworn
top left in the drawer. Once it was on and she’d done her eyeliner and put
concealer on her cheek she felt better. She even dug out a pair of earrings and
a belt that roughly matched the top, and put on her jacket with the stand-up
collar that kind of pushed the bottom of her hair up. The top of her hair just
sat there as usual, though.

On the bus she re-read the letter. It wasn’t very
businesslike, even though it had the shop’s familiar Rose and Reed logo at the
top, with the two capital Rs entwined. It was printed in bright blue ink except
for ‘Dear Miss Probert’, which was in untidy round handwriting. It was
obviously a standard letter sent to all the candidates, of which there would be
hundreds. Five pounds an hour. For a Saturday, forty pounds. For six weeks in
the summer, over two hundred pounds a week. It was more money than Jo could
envisage.

She thought about how long an hour was. An hour of
Computer Studies felt like five minutes, but an hour of Biology, or History, or
especially French – oh Jesus, French! – seemed much, much longer. The hours at
the job she’d had last year, in the pet shop, had gone at a sort of jogging
speed, rather than serious running. So what would an hour selling expensive clothes
feel like? Waterskiing? Or doing a marathon with blisters on her feet?

There weren’t hundreds of other interviewees. There
were only two. One was a girl who was older and had much better hair than Jo,
and the other was a good-looking boy.

“Now,” said the man whose identity tag said Gordon
Ritchie, Manager, “I’ve asked you all to come at eleven thirty so I can show
you round the shop together before interviewing you separately. That OK? Oh,
and there are two vacancies today.”

Jo considered making an excuse and leaving. She could
have handled being one of a hundred rejects. But the humiliation of spending
time with these two nice-looking people, even chatting to one while the other
was interviewed, then being the only candidate left unemployed at the end of
the morning was just too great.

“Welcome to Rose and Reed! Do you wear our clothes?” the
manager said as he led them up the stairs. “My name’s Gordon. I’m the branch
manager. I thought we’d start with Menswear.”

Gordon had a Scottish accent, tight trousers and
expensive pointy shoes. He talked a lot during their tour of Menswear, then
Womenswear, then Lingerie, without leaving them a space to answer any of his
questions. Jo was relieved. Older-Better-Hair Girl could obviously afford to
shop at Rose and Reed, and Good-Looking Boy was too good-looking for it to
matter. She wished she was at home with Blod on her stomach, watching Saturday
morning TV.

“Joanna Probert!” Gordon consulted his list and fixed
Jo with his rather bulbous eyes. “You don’t mind going first, do you, darling?”
His fingers closed around the arm of a passing sales assistant. “Oh, Eloise.
Get some coffee for our intrepid interviewees, please.”

“Black for me,” said OBH Girl. “I mean, black coffee.” Eloise
was black. OBH Girl went red. Eloise smiled.

“Can I have a Coke?” asked GL Boy.

“’Fraid not,” said Eloise. “Coffee or tea?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

Eloise turned patiently to Jo, still smiling. Jo wanted
to smile back, but found that her smiling muscles wouldn’t work. “White,
please,” she mumbled. “One sugar.”

“Now…” Gordon took Jo into the office, guided her to a
chair and sat on the desk. “Have you worked in a shop before?”

“Yes, a pet shop. It says it on my CV.”

“Have I got your CV?” He moved some papers around on
the desk. “Doesn’t look like it.” He smiled brightly. “Sorry! So what goes on
in a pet shop that might be relevant to working with fashion?”

Jo still wanted to run away. But she persevered,
telling him that she had learnt about stock control and knew how to work the till,
and understood what customer relations were. “People don’t know how to treat
pets, you see,” she pointed out. “So they’re always bringing them back and
complaining that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to.”

“Like the Monty Python sketch!” exclaimed Gordon in
delight. He put on a face. “This. Parrot. Is. No. More!” Jo smiled patiently.

Eloise came in and put Jo’s coffee on the desk beside
Gordon’s thigh. As she left the room she gave him a look that Jo wasn’t
supposed to see. It said, “Get on with it, Gordon, it’s Saturday out here.”

“Well, yes,” continued Jo. “You hear quite a lot about
that Monty Python sketch when you work in a pet shop. And the other thing about
animals is that people often buy them for other people, and the people they’ve
been bought for don’t like them, and want the shop to take them back, and of
course they haven’t got any proof of purchase, and one gerbil’s very like
another, so – ”

“When could you start, if you get this job?”

“Next Saturday?”

“The pay’s five pounds an hour. All right?”

Jo tried to remember the questions she’d lined up. Always
ask the interviewer at least one question, people said. It makes you look
interested. “Yes, thank you. Would I get a discount on the clothes?”

“Certainly. Twenty percent.”

“Oh…well, good.”

There wasn’t anything more to say. He hadn’t read her
CV or her reference from Mr Piper at Piper’s Pets. He was trying to get rid of
her. Jo picked up her coffee. But it was too hot, so she put it down again.

“I’ll phone you by Wednesday,” said Gordon. “What’s
your number?”

“It’s on my CV.”

The frog gaze landed on her face again. “I’ll just
write it down again, shall I?”

She dictated the number and took two sips of scalding
coffee. Then she picked up her bag. “Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye, er…” – he checked his notes – “Joanna.” They
shook hands. “Thanks for coming.”

As she opened the door she almost flattened GL Boy. “Sorry!”
she said without looking at him.