LIGHTNOVELONLINE 24. Everything Must Go
Content warnings
This is quite a heavy chapter. If you have triggers, checking the content warnings is probably a good idea.
24. Everything Must Go
2006
New house. New town. New school. He screwed up, back in Cherston, and he knows it, and while both his parents promise it’s not the reason they moved, the timeline’s pretty clear: they completed the move less than two months after the incident in the school changing rooms. It’s obvious. His fault. Russ knows it, too, and won’t be mollified by Mum’s reassurances that it was just time for a new start.
No-one even liked the old house, anyway!
He was lucky the rocks got him mainly in the back of the head, Mum says, because the stitches, and the scars they’ll one day become, are mostly hidden, although as they’ve healed they’ve made the hair the doctors shaved off grow back funny. He’s been thinking of growing his hair longer, to cover the scars and make the parts that stick out at weird angles easier to hide. Like some of the guys in Mum’s music. Dad fought her on that, but Mum won. It’ll suit him, she says.
The cut above his eyebrow — the first one; a punch thrown, a thumbnail grazing — has healed already, almost invisibly. A shame, Dad says, because girls like a boy with a scar they can kiss. He said it over dinner, and Mum hissed, “Matthias! He’s eleven!” quietly enough that he doesn’t think he was supposed to hear her. The idea of it made him angry, like before, and he wanted to dare his father to say something about the other wound, the one his father carefully never mentions, the one healing at the same rate as the wounds on the back of his head; the one on his wrist. He couldn’t summon the courage.
He’s supposed to wear a watch over it. It’s angry raw red under the bandage, and it itches.
But he shouted and he threw things and he ruined dinner, so it was up to his bedroom with no dessert while Russell stuck his tongue out through a smirk. It didn’t matter. Dessert was just jelly, anyway, and Mum brought some up on tiptoes while Dad was watching his shows.
School starts in three weeks. Intimidating. But nobody knows him here, and Mum’s checked online: the old school made them delete the posts about him. There’s nothing left to follow him any more, except for the still-healing wounds on the back of his head and the nick on his eyebrow and his itching wrist.
New house. New town. New school. New start. All he has to do is not screw up again. And he’s getting a handle on it, on the bursts of melancholy that strike him from time to time, on the shakes, on the urge to just scream as loud as he can. He’s excused from PE until his stitches are judged completely healed, which might be months, the doctor says, and that’s for the best; being forced to get changed in front of the others was what started this whole thing in the first place.
He hadn’t meant to hit Vernon. Hadn’t meant to respond with such rage to his jokes. Even though, when he recounted them to Mum, days later, her face had darkened and she’d carefully drawn his shaking body into the most delicate hug she’d ever given him, and whispered, “You mustn’t believe those kinds of things about yourself. They’re not true.”
But they were just jokes. Vernon said so, and so did Dad.
After the first couple of days they visited him separately in hospital. Mum would cradle his wrist; Dad would ignore it. The onset of puberty can be a turbulent time for any boy, the doctor said. Especially a sensitive boy, Mum said.
Just ignore what the other kids say.
He wishes he could. It’s hard when they won’t stop saying it. Hard when you know it’s true. Eleven and broken already.
Everyone’s quiet now. He’s supposed to hide the jelly bowl until Mum can pick it up in the morning, so he stashes it in the second drawer of his desk where she’ll know to look for it. He ties his shoes, pulls the hood over his head, tests the bedroom door, and stops still to listen.
No-one reacts to the almost-sound, the near-silent creak of the spring inside the handle. It’s safe.
He moves through the house, balancing on the tips of his toes, avoiding as he goes the floorboards in the landing that creak, the stair near the bottom that wobbles, the threadbare patches of carpet in the hall that make footsteps artificially loud; he’s been testing them during the day, writing down his notes and hiding the pad under the wardrobe. Dad wants to ask the landlord about replacing the carpet, but they’re new tenants and Mum says it wouldn’t be wise to make waves, not yet. For now, he knows where not to tread.
He mustn’t be heard, and not just because he’s sneaking out; these hours are his, are the only time he gets any peace. Being seen, being spoken to, being around people, it all gets in the way. Makes the noise from the world muffle in his ears, makes the tinnitus take over, as if something inside him is so desperate to protect him from other people it does everything it can to block them out.
Around Mum, sometimes, it’s okay. When it’s just her.
The kitchen door into the garden opens silently, as it’s supposed to. A week ago everyone else went out for a whole day, and he waited for them to be gone before fetching the can of lubricant he stole from Dad’s toolbox over a year ago; the one that rode in the bottom of his school backpack when they moved out (he had to take his bag into the bath with him one night, to get the smell out). He ran through the same steps he had at the old place, spraying the lubricant liberally across the hinges and the handle and into the keyhole, and then propping the door open to let the wind dissipate the smell. By the time his family got back there was nothing left to notice, and his route out of the house was secured.
This is his first time testing it, though, and he’s relieved when it closes and locks as quickly as it opened. He pats his pocket, checking for the spare key, and hops down off the concrete step into the garden.
It’s a long garden, and damply messy.
They moved to the city without actually moving to the city. This whole place, Rectory Street and the ugly curl of residential roads to which it connects, comprises the outskirts of the outskirts, an old hamlet barely absorbed, clinging to the very edge of Almsworth and seeming to fade away as streets terminate into nothing. Their house, like every house on this side of the road, trails a thin garden down to a band of scrubland that, eventually, according to the map he looked up online, becomes woods, and he escapes into the dark, wending an experimental route through the undergrowth, hopping over the stream at the bottom of the shallow incline and leaving home behind.
The watch Dad makes him wear is an old one, digital, from the nineties, and the screen lights up when you press an indented button on the side. It’s practically busted, but the green glow is enough to see the time out here and he confirms: it’s Friday morning, 2am, and he doesn’t have to be home again, doesn’t have to be around his dad or his little brother again, doesn’t have to see himself in mirrors or windows or the eyes of his family again, doesn’t have to be Mark again, for hours.
2007
The stitches heal and the scars start to fade and he doesn’t get out of PE forever. He’s ready for it this time, though; the sensation that undressing around others forces into his belly and which works its way out through his throat, all bile and revulsion. He can swallow, he can breathe carefully, he can keep himself calm. And no-one gives him trouble in the changing rooms here. Maybe it’s because, a whole school year on, the other boys are more grown up, less apt to abuse someone for being too thin, too small, too unwilling to mess around the way the others do. Maybe it’s because it’s a much bigger school; he’s just one of over a hundred boys in his year, and there are other targets.
They don’t even mock him about his hair, even though it’s getting pretty long. One of the other boys, Gary, asks him about it after football one afternoon, and he answers mostly honestly: he has scars on the back of his head that make the hair grow out funny, and keeping it longer helps with that. The story he supplies, of falling through a glass coffee table, which he recalls on the spot from one of Mum’s books, is sufficiently gory to satisfy, and results in the other boys asking to see his scars and then showing off their own, complete with embellished and often gruesome reenactments. Football cleats through the palm; tripping on a rockery; losing a fight with a garden fork. Several of them got theirs from their brothers: younger ones who left toys on stairs; older ones who responded poorly to losing at some video game. They judge his scars to have the fifth best story out of almost two dozen.
It’s nice. Almost makes him feel like one of them. And he has an easier time at school, now he has people to sit with at lunch, people who will greet him by name in the corridor. At the old school, even before it all happened, he always felt the target on his back.
But it’s still a relief when the school year ends, the summer holidays begin, and the weight of people in his world reduces. He doesn’t have to be Mark quite so much, can be himself instead, the unnamed and shapeless something who looks out through Mark’s eyes, speaks with Mark’s voice, hides inside Mark’s skin; lets Mark take the bruises and the scars meant for him. He wonders sometimes what it would be like to be Mark for real, to be able to make real friends, share real thoughts, but he knows how dangerous that is; rocks thrown at his head.
Mark’s pretty good at football because he can run fast. Mark sits with the other boys at lunch. Mark’s fun. It’s not all bad, pretending to be him.
And then his parents announce a surprise holiday, a proper one — not just a trip to the beach or one of Mum’s museums — and they all pile into the car for the surprisingly short journey to Peri Park, which is where he meets her.
Shahida. She finds him on the barriers at the top of the water park and pushes her way into him, reaches for him with her smile and her hands both, drags him away from the drop and shows him everything. Peri Park has much to see and do, and she knows all of it, takes him everywhere, occasionally pulls out an annotated map in a waterproof sleeve to illustrate for him some element or other of the resort, all the time talking, asking questions, being interested, not just in him but in everything, but sometimes, he can’t help but feel, especially in him. He’s the first boy ever to intrigue her, she says, and she does so with such arch confidence he can’t help but be flattered. It’s scary at first, but she proves time and again that she wants to know him, and he decides, with care and some thought, to acquiesce, to open up, and she couldn’t be happier. And though when he’s with her he still uses Mark’s name, he’s not quite the same person around her as he is at school, and he finds himself wanting to spend time with her as much as she apparently does with him.
She’s also possessed of an independence which astonishes him. She checks in with her parents every hour on a mobile phone — stored in another waterproof bag, in another compartment of her hip pouch — and her parents, generously, pass on their location and their choice of activity to Mum; the compromise reached after the flaming row when he returned after his first long day with Shahida.
She’s very responsible, Shahida’s mum said. She’ll take care of your boy.
They spend most of their time in Peri Paradise; she considers a day without a dip to be a wasted one, and doubly so when there are flumes and rapids and heated pools to occupy her attention. But tonight, Friday, the second to last night, her family’s taking his out to dinner, and in a rare restriction to her usual freedom Shahida isn’t allowed to attend a restaurant smelling of chlorine. So they’re walking the trail at the perimeter of the park, taking in the sun — Shahida’s got a spray bottle of suntan lotion, and she applies it liberally to both of them, even persuading him to lift up his t-shirt so she can give a good coating to his chest and belly and back, insisting that thin cotton is not, Mark, the defence against sunburn you might assume — and enjoying the rustling quiet of the woods. There’s a viewing point, one of many spread around the edge of the park, and this one’s empty of people and thus perfect; she pulls on his wrist, takes him up the wooden steps and over to the fence at the edge of the outcrop. She leans over, toes extended, daring him with her eyes to join her, to risk it all, to turn belly-up over the forest below, nearly to fly over the countryside, and when she looks at him streaked with laughter and with watery eyes from the wind he knows that if they were to go over together, they might not fall at all.
The family dinner’s special. Dad’s glowering but Mum’s effusive enough for both of them and Mr and Mrs Mohsin-Carpenter are generous. It’s their treat! Try the chocolate cake! Shahida and Mark share a slice, giggling at their icing-smeared chins and at the scowl his dad’s wearing.
Two mornings later he runs over to her cabin and they exchange tearful goodbyes and email addresses. Her mum, Rupa, sits him down and tells him very seriously that if he or his charming little brother ever need help, they can give her a call, and Shahida shows him on her laptop that she’s already emailed him with all the relevant contact numbers.
Hugs all around. It’s hard to let go.
When he gets home the first thing he does is archive the email, saving it out to a USB stick like Shahida suggested, on the off chance that Dad looks on his computer, the way he’s always threatened. He doesn’t reply, though, until later that night, after the family meeting, because that’s when Mum and Dad finally tell him and Russ why they spent so much money on an extravagant holiday:
Mum’s sick. She’s sick and it might have been her last opportunity to go somewhere amazing and do something special. She’s sick and she promises her children it’s no-one’s fault, that it was always coming. She’s sick and they found it late, and there’s a chance it’ll all be okay but there’s a chance it won’t, and the two of them need to prepare for that.
She’s sick and she holds him in her arms and whispers her love for him and tells him that if the worst happens he needs to be strong, he needs to be the older brother, he needs to take care of Russ, and he needs to help her around the house; and he betrays her, thinks of himself instead, understands that now she’s looked into him and loved him and named him and given him a vital role to play that he can’t be anything but what she wants and needs from him, and that continuing to pretend otherwise would be selfish.
He’ll never be anything more, now, than the thing he’s been running from ever since he learned how to run. Because that’s what he needs to be from now on. Her precious boy. The man of the house. Her Mark.
So he writes to Shahida and tells her everything and he runs to the bathroom before his roiling stomach betrays him.
2008
If you’re going to vomit up most of your meals, you need to be careful. You need to have a plan. Stomach acid eats away at the teeth, and the body’s bad at subsisting on nothing at all, so he keeps the upstairs bathroom stocked with mouthwash and he hides sports drinks and cereal bars and vitamins and supplements under his wardrobe, behind the wooden slat you can take out. He knows not to brush his teeth immediately after purging; he knows to line his stomach if he can stand it; he knows to take collagen so his nails and hair stay healthy. There’s no such thing as safe purging, but his options are limited.
He’s still getting on well enough with the boys at school. They’ve accepted him into the periphery of their groups, but the more he talks to them, the more he listens to them, the less he understands them. They don’t hate the way they look or the way they talk; in fact, judging by the way they jealously compare themselves to each other, and the way they speak of this or that aspect of their masculinity, they’re proud of it all. He likes them well enough, but he can’t call any one of them a real friend; they’re too different from him in some fundamental way he can’t properly express. He’s been waiting for a teacher or a counsellor or one of the therapists he sees occasionally to chance upon the words that explain it all, that describe him, that he can use to identify himself and find others like him, but it never happens, and in the meantime he interacts carefully with people who joyfully inhabit a world he can barely comprehend.
He’s fourteen, growing taller and thickening and changing, and every new month seems to bring with it some new horror, some repulsive artefact of puberty. He can slow it, he’s read, by eating as little as possible, keeping the creature his body is trying to become from nourishing itself on his flesh; starving it. And he can hide it in the clothes he chooses, with sleeves to cover thin wrists and layers of t-shirts to conceal his frame. He hides from himself; he hides what he’s doing to himself from everyone else.
It’s because he’s weak, Dad says sometimes, when he’s drinking, when he dares to talk to his oldest son, when he’s quiet and lonely and his thoughts come up in mumbles and spittle, when Mum’s too tired to sit with him. Weak, soft, and too much like his mother.
Dad’s wrong. One of the few useful gifts his occasional therapists have given him is the understanding that there’s more to strength than physicality, and the responsibilities he’s taken on since Mum got sick are evidence of that. It’s Dad who’s the weak one. He never helps at all.
Besides, if they’re not going to allow him to leave on his own terms, if they’re going to snatch him up off the floor and knock the knife from his bloody hands like they did when he was eleven, if they’re going to make him into the person they need him to be and not the person he is, whoever that might have turned out to be, then he’s going to have to find his own way to survive. That’s strength. That’s resilience. Not ending each day at half past six, asleep on the sofa, drunk and useless.
And there’s a virtuous high that comes from hunger, from the knowledge that his body is trying to grow and change, and that he’s fucking stopping it.
At first, his methods for safer purging were gathered carefully online, with obfuscated searches — Dad’s got their internet provider sending him logs — but then he started babysitting for Jenny Yau. She recognised him as bulimic the first time he showed up at her flat, and agreed to keep the secret if he promised to follow her comprehensive guide to taking care of himself. “You’re Laura’s boy,” she said, “and that makes you special. It means I have a duty to take care of you. I also won’t have my babysitter fainting on the job.”
When, a few weeks later, she realised he’d spent almost all the money he earned on supplies, she started stocking him up for free, but the supplies came with a requirement: every Tuesday and Thursday, before her night classes, when he comes to sit for baby Ada — an absolute squish of a thing, a beautiful person in perfect miniature who likes to suck on his fingers and responds marvellously to raspberries blown on her belly — Jenny sits him down for a light meal. She shows him the calorie counts and describes the ingredients and what they do for his body and makes him promise to keep it down. He doesn’t want to disappoint her, and he needs the money she pays him, so he does.
Two good meals a week, and whatever he can manage in between.
Mum felt well enough to eat with them tonight, so he sat with her and talked and tried to eat as little as possible, and now here he is, standing up from the toilet, wiping the last fragments of dinner from his lips. He flushes, drinks his diet sports drink and washes out his mouth. He bags his trash and hurries back to his room to stash it under the wardrobe, to be pushed to the bottom of his backpack and thrown out on the way to school tomorrow.
Chatter from downstairs draws his attention. Oh yeah, Russ brought the kid from over the road home for dinner. A new friend. Russ insisted on them eating separately, in front of a DVD on the PlayStation in Russ’ room, because Mum and Dad would only embarrass him, but they were dragged back down to the living room after, to be nominally sociable.
He should say hi.
The kid, Stefan, is sitting on his own at the cleared-off dining table, books and papers spread out in front of him; Russ is watching TV with Dad. Stefan, Mum excitedly informs him, has a birthday within a day of his! She’s already making plans for them to visit each other’s parties next year, and even Dad’s joining in when the TV’s quiet. It makes sense: Russ has been pretty lonely, and this Stefan could become a close friend; his first since the move.
Stefan himself, it’s impossible not to notice, is uncomfortable under all the attention, pulling frayed sleeves down over thin fingers, knotting ragged fabric around knuckles, looking towards people but not at them, and saying little.
Too familiar.
Mark takes the chair next to him at the dining table almost on impulse, wanting to build a wall between the boy and everyone else. At least the dining room, even with the double doors open, gives them something like their own space, and if Mark can engage him in conversation, something private, just between the two of them, then everyone else will go back to watching TV.
Stefan’s been using the homework, Mark would bet all his money, as an excuse not to talk to the adults.
“Hi,” Stefan says. “You’re Mark?”
“That’s what they tell me,” he says, with aggressive honesty. It’s not funny, not even humour, but the kid laughs, and draws from Mark a genuine smile. He looks over the books spread out on the table. “What subject?”
“Oh,” the kid says. “Um, Science.” Hard not to laugh; at Stefan’s age, it’s just one subject, the marvels of the universe crammed into a couple of hours a week and simplified almost beyond usefulness.
“My favourite. You need help?”
He asks without thinking, but the offer’s genuine. Stefan, eyes wide, thinks for a second and then nods.
God, there’s so much about this kid that’s familiar: he’s withdrawn, almost hiding, every possible centimetre of skin down to his fingers and up to his neck covered twice over and pulled tight; he’s shy but, Mark quickly discovers, possessed of infectious enthusiasm that reveals itself the moment someone takes a genuine interest. It’s like looking into the past. Guiltily he thinks back just ten minutes, to throwing up his dinner, cleaning up, and all the methodical steps he takes both to break himself more completely and to conceal from others how broken he’s become, and he hopes like hell he’s seeing things in Stefan that aren’t there.
Still, maybe he can help. Stefan’s ten; a whole year younger than Mark was when everything in his life went to shit. Maybe Stefan’s path doesn’t have to be like Mark’s.
Stefan shows him the homework question and Mark sees immediately that it’s worded confusingly, so they go over the relevant pages together, in the process drawing Stefan further out of his shell: he starts moving his hands when he talks, smiling, making eye contact.
Another thing that’s too familiar: dark red spots on Stefan’s palm, wounded skin circling a central point, five times over. Whether someone else did that to him or Stefan did it to himself, ten years old is too young for that kind of wound. On Mark’s wrist the scar itches and crawls and he wants to take Stefan’s hands in his and promise him that no amount of blood will make anything go away unless it’s all of it, all at once, but only a monster would say something like that to a kid, so he pulls his sleeves tight, sits closer, and concentrates very hard on the work in front of them.
It’s good to have something to do, even if it’s something as banal as Key Stage 2 Science. He pulls out passages from the books, suggests conclusions that might arise from them, shows him how to build out an idea into an answer.
“The trick, Stef,” Mark says, and doesn’t miss the way the boy smiles at the diminutive nickname, “is to draw the stick figures first, and paint on the detail later.”
Stef nods like he gets it, and frees his fingers from his frayed sleeves, to make it easier to write. Mark finds himself looking at the boy’s wrists, checking for scars; nothing but clear, healthy skin.
A relief.
And then Russ is bounding back into the dining room, complaining about the content of whatever TV show it was that just finished, and Stef shuts down a little, returns to a slower and more considered and, now that Mark knows what to look for, less real version of himself, and Mark has to make his excuses and leave before bitter memory overwhelms him.
2009
For the last few months their tiny dining room has been a bedroom, and for the last few weeks Mum’s left it only to go to the hospital. Dad put curtains up over the glass doors, found the dining table a cramped new home behind the sofa, and with the help of Stef’s parents brought home a second-hand bed from the church’s supply of donated furniture.
It’s one of the safest places in the house. No-one wants to lose their temper and upset Mum.
She’s been getting weaker, thinner, and tires more easily, so Mark takes his hours with her when they can both find them, after school and at weekends. It’s a natural progression: last year he ran errands for her, helped her out in the kitchen, went to the supermarket with her to help carry home the groceries; this year he does all those things in the background, on his own, out of view, and gives his remaining time to her. And with exams coming up, the quiet, secluded room is a restful place to study.
If only he could concentrate.
“My boy,” she whispers, and he looks up from his book to find her awake and reaching out with a trembling hand, knuckles almost tearing paper skin. He takes, covers it, lends her his warmth. “My precious boy.”
“Hey. How are you feeling?”
“Crap.”
“Oh, Mum.”
“I feel,” she says, rallying, “like I’m a bucket of gourmet ice cream, and some bastard’s been scooping out my insides with a silver spoon.”
He laughs, because she needs to hear it — Dad hasn’t laughed at her jokes for a long time — but it’s an effort. She talked before, when she had more energy, about the curious sensation of being consumed from the inside, and the imagery’s been difficult for Mark to forget. The medication keeps her numb, but it can’t hide what’s been taken from her.
“Do you need anything?”
“Just you. Just you, dearest Mark.” And she smiles and more of the mother he remembers comes back, all impish charm and inappropriate glee. When he was a kid they used to bounce on the mattress together, daring Dad to have a problem with it. “I have a present for you,” she whispers, “but I need my hand back to get it.” She wiggles her fingers, and he releases her. She sticks out her tongue at him, a picture of adolescent rebellion.
“Was that the present?” he asks. “Your incorrigible rudeness?”
She grins at him and then, in one of the rapid mood shifts he’s become accustomed to, grabs at his wrist before he can pull it away and runs a thumb over his fading scar.
“Precious,” she says. “So precious.”
“I know, Mum.”
“Never again, Mark.”
“Never again,” he promises, and it’s her turn to release him, to allow him to take himself back and hide from her not only his scar but wrists that are almost as thin as hers. She’s seen them, there’s no doubt, but she’s not said a word. He’s wondered if she ever talked to Jenny Yau about his weight — she must have; they’ve been friends since forever, since long before Dad — but he hasn’t wanted to ask.
He looks away as she leans over on the bed and rummages in the drawer, swearing under her breath. She doesn’t like to be seen to struggle; doesn’t like to be the source of pain in other people’s lives, even as her own is coming to an end.
“Here,” she says, and he looks up again. She’s holding a box, about the size of a small notebook, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a powder-blue bow, and when he doesn’t immediately take it she shakes it, biting her lip, amused at his hesitation.
The bow he unties carefully and, borrowing a little of her cheekiness, ties it around his wrist, covering the scar. “Look, see?” he says. “Gone.”
“Brat,” she says, giggling. It turns into a cough, and he waits until she waves a hand: get on with it.
“Yes, yes,” he says, pretending everything’s fine, and pulls at the paper. Inside the box is—
Oh, Mum.
“It was mine,” she says. “Now it’s yours.”
“Thank you,” he whispers.
It wasn’t long after their vacation at Peri that the hospital visits started in earnest. Dad got her an iPod, the new one that could play video, and with Mark’s help she filled it with TV shows and, especially, her music, downloading some but ripping most of it off her piles and piles of stained and battered CDs. He even used the scanner from Dad’s computer to replace the normal album art with scans of her CD sleeves, many of which were covered in scrawled, colourful messages from old friends.
He smiles, remembering the first time they listened to her music together. “Your father doesn’t approve,” she’d whispered, dragging his head roughly over so she could whisper, “but what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.” It was all stuff from the nineties and the early years of the new century, and as she played it, one earbud each, she showed him pictures from her teenage years, all smeared eyeliner and dyed hair and sloppily customised t-shirts with spray-painted slogans like DESTROYED BY MADNESS and ANXIETY IS FREEDOM. Across the top of one page of the photo album lay a pair of polaroids depicting her and Jenny Yau posing in t-shirts which read, when they were standing next to each other, THERE IS NO TRUE LOVE / JUST A FINELY TUNED JEALOUSY. Mum’s cheeks were covered in lipstick stains.
He’s never understood why she married Dad. They’re so different. Jenny said once that when she went off to university and Mum stayed behind, Matthias was just there, and filled a void. “I told her,” Jenny said, “that leaving her alone was the biggest mistake of my life, and she said that if she hadn’t met your father, she wouldn’t have had you. Remember that, kiddo.” At least when they moved house they moved back near Jenny, and Mum got to see her again, before she got too sick to leave the house much at all.
Jenny’s not allowed over, not unless Mum wants Dad to make a fuss.
“I left all my music on there,” Mum says, tapping on the iPod’s scratched screen. “If Dad asks, I deleted all the rude stuff. He won’t be able to check; he never could work it.”
“Mum…”
“Turn it over.”
On the back, affixed so securely to the metal battery cover that it almost looks like it was fitted at the factory, is a sticker: a flower, ringed with the words, My Dearest Mark, Forget Me Not.
“Your birth flower,” she whispers, in a thick voice overflowing with tears. “Dazzling blue, like your eyes. Remember?” She’s losing her voice again, choking on the memory, but she repeats herself insistently: “Remember? Remember when we found the flowers?”
He’d been barely seven. He and Mum snuck away from a school trip she was helping chaperone to explore around the railway sidings and look for hidden places, and they found a huge flower bed, practically untouched. Carefully she pulled up one of the beautiful blue flowers and held it between them both: the colour of their eyes. Russ’ eyes, like Dad’s, are green; Mark is blue, and so is she.
“Of course I remember,” he says. “I remember the field; I remember hiding from the other kids; I remember the bollocking I got from the teacher the next day…”
He doesn’t cry. He hasn’t been able to for a long time. But as he crawls up onto the bed next to her and embraces her as gently as he can, he wishes as she shudders that he could cry, so he could share this moment properly with her. She doesn’t complain, though, doesn’t ask anything of him he can’t give, and slowly and with faltering grip takes his hands in hers.
She lingers for five more days, speaking little, and Mark takes every minute he can with her. On her last day, hours before the end, she whispers her last words to him, and has to repeat them three times before she can make herself loud enough to be heard.
“Forgive me?”
All he can do is nod and kiss her, and then it’s Dad’s turn to stay with her. He steals one last look, and runs upstairs to his room to listen to her music and wait for the end.
* * *
Shahida knows the potted history of Rectory Street. Almsworth, like most places in the UK, has a wiki and a rival wiki and a small website run by someone who’s at least ninety and who has access to all manner of otherwise-lost information — like black and white photos of the high street when it was used principally as an avenue for the transport of coal — and between them she’s assembled what is probably a reasonably accurate accounting of the last hundred or so years of the history of Almsworth and the tributary villages and hamlets it’s swallowed as it’s grown. Her own suburb, for example, is technically and for the most part just thirty-three years old, whereas the village of Aybury, which provided the raw material around here, was one of the oldest permanent settlements in the region when it was absorbed.
The local church is positively ancient, but she has no plans to visit; once you’ve seen one thirteenth-century stone church you’ve seen them all. Like the nearby university, it’s named after ‘Saint’ Almsworth (‘Arms-Worthy’, and she sure rolled her eyes when she read that), one of those hyper-local figures of myth who turn out, when you look into it, to be eighty percent fiction, five percent fantasy, and fifteen percent landowning legacy family.
It’s a decently sunny day and the walk to the suburb of Aybury’s been pleasant, but she’s starting to get sweaty and is looking forward to the shade provided by Mark’s house, which she’s never visited but which she’s seen in pictures, in the background of some of the photos Mark’s (very, very occasionally) sent her, and on the overhead map she found online.
The house at number 64, like all the houses on Rectory Street, has had many lives. Its most recent one began shortly before Mark’s family moved in. The new landlord modernised the structure by having all the interior walls on the ground floor knocked in, save one accent column in the centre, which was both in style and load bearing. To this fashionable open-plan layout he added extensions front and back for a cramped downstairs shower room, kitchen and dining room, and raised rents.
The renovations, which started in the late nineties and rippled slowly down the road as the years progressed, are technically still ongoing: Mark says Mrs Jessop at number 90 tied the landlord in red tape when she was asked to move out, so hers remains the only structurally untouched house on the street. The connecting road joins near the Jessop place, so Shahida makes a small detour to peer from a discreet distance through the open curtains. Comparing it to the other houses she’s seen into, it looks dark and unpleasantly wood-panelled, and she wonders if it’s sacrilegious to, on this issue and this alone, agree with a landlord.
Her mother and stepfather both have strongly held and regularly expressed opinions on landlords, which Edward attributes to his history as a tenant and her mother to having a functioning moral code. Should the family ever become rich enough to afford a second home as expansive as their current one, Mum says they’ll invest in something slightly more ethical than landlording, like flying killer sharks.
Shahida skips up to the porch of number 64 and prods at the doorbell. It plays an unpleasant rendering of the line In England’s green and pleasant land from the hymn Jerusalem, which mercifully is cut off almost immediately by the sound of a hand slapping at something on the other side of the wall. The hymn dies with a comical descending wail, the front door opens and Mark, red-faced and over-dressed as usual, greets her with a half-wave.
She hugs him. It’s been so long since they last saw each other in person, and things have been so shit for him lately.
“Hi, Ess,” he says, pretending to struggle against her iron grip.
“Hey, Em,” she replies, pulling back and presenting him with her toothiest grin. “Show me around?” She leans past him to take in the layout, to see how it matches the examples she found on the letting agent’s website for another place farther down the street, and it lines up perfectly. Despite the remodelling, the main room downstairs is still fairly small; after the extensions and the stairs have taken bites out of it, the living room struggles to accommodate a pair of ragged sofas, a reluctant television on a table by the front window, and a huge pile of cardboard boxes, piled up behind one of the sofas, sealed and labelled.
The boxes dent her good mood somewhat. They’re Laura’s stuff, waiting to be sold or donated or put into storage or junked, variously. She can’t imagine why Mark’s dad would be getting rid of so many of her things, so soon. Mark said he had to steal a couple of photo albums out of a box marked for the bin men.
Mark hasn’t answered, so she salvages her smile and adds, “Please?” in her most ingratiating voice. “I want the tour!”
“Sure,” he says, returning her grin after a moment, and stands aside so she can explore. It’s dark, despite the summer sun; the near-black curtains on every window are drawn almost completely and Matthias Vogel peers over at her from one of the sofas, where he sits surrounded by scattered papers.
“Hello, Shahida,” he says.
He doesn’t like her and she knows why but she greets him anyway, with the plastic smile and the empty words she reserves for people who could make her friends’ lives difficult if she makes a fuss. The implied insult she puts in a box with all the rest; trash. She wishes she could have seen Laura again, the way they planned in their sporadic communications, but first she was sick and then she was too sick and then it was all over.
“Hey,” Mark says, “you wanna come—?”
“She’s not allowed in your room, Mark,” Mr Vogel says sharply, and Mark flinches.
“The kitchen, Dad,” Mark snaps. “I was asking if she wants to come into the kitchen. For a drink. She’s hot; can’t you see that?”
“Oh, she’s hot all right,” another voice says, and Shahida finds Russell Vogel peering down at her from the landing halfway down the stairs. “Mark’s got a girlfriend.”
“She’s just a friend, Russ,” Mark says. Always disappointing when he says it, but perhaps she can change that today.
“Mark’s got a friend,” Russ corrects, without removing the leer from his voice. “You should feel privileged, Shahida,” he adds. “You’re the first. First one his age, anyway.”
“Ignore him,” Mark says, turning away from her and retreating into the kitchen. She follows. Like everything in this house, it’s small, and dirty at the edges. “Sorry about the mess. I’m trying to stay on top of it, but no-one helps, so…” He shrugs and she wants to hug him again, but she accepts instead the orangeade he offers, fresh from the fridge, in old-fashioned glass bottles. “We get them from the church. And they get them with the milk.” He shrugs again, meaning, who knows why? “You want to go for a walk?”
She doesn’t; she wants to stay here, see more of his home, maybe sneak up to his room, but Mark’s hunched up, shoulders turned in, making himself small, protecting himself, the way she remembers from years ago, at Peri, whenever he had to be around someone other than her or his mother, so she smiles and nods and lets him lead her out the back way.
“Home in an hour!” Mr Vogel yells from the living room.
“Jesus,” Mark mutters, straightening out and stretching. For a moment his long sleeves retract and she expects to see the scar on his wrist again, but it’s hidden under a blue bow. The wrapping for the iPod, she remembers; a remembrance of his mother, worn in such a way as to obscure the memory of the other worst day of his life. “I’m sorry about him. He’s got worse since… Well, you know.”
She shrugs, forcing indifference. “I’m used to people being weird,” she says.
He takes her down the garden but not through the woods — neither of them have the shoes on for it — and instead leads her across a rough path the neighbours have made with flat stones laid in the dirt, until two houses over they intersect with a passageway between gardens and return to the street, safely hidden from Mr Vogel’s eyes.
“That’s Stef’s house,” he says, pointing at an identical semi-detached on the other side of the road.
“Stef!” She giggles. “I thought he was a girl when you started talking about him.”
“It’s just short for Stefan.”
“I know!” she says. “I’m only teasing. You’re still tutoring him?”
They start down the street, away from both houses, towards the other connecting road that leads back to what would, in a larger suburb, be the high street, but which in this place is merely a conurbation of three shops, a cash machine, and the empty building where the post office used to be. If you live here and you need something you can’t get locally, you can walk to the big supermarket near the university. “It’s not really formal like that,” he says. “But yes. Every couple of nights. He’s a good kid,” he adds, with the grandiosity of a fourteen-year-old talking about a ten-year-old. And then she giggles at herself: he’s nearly fifteen and she’s barely six months older than him; neither of them has a vantage point from which to be pompous.
“You still worried about him?” she asks.
“Not really. Not any more. He’s come out of his shell a lot this last year. When I met him, he seemed so sad, you know? So I was worried. But I think he’s going to be okay.”
She hugs him, quickly looping an arm around his waist, bumping against him, and releasing him before he can tense up. “You really want to go home in an hour?” she asks.
“I really don’t,” he says. “I’m not sure I ever want to go home again.”
“Well then,” she announces, pulling him to a stop and moving to stand in front of him, “I have an idea.”
“Shahida—”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes?”
“Then forget this stupid place and your stupid brother and your stupid dad and come with me!”
Amy’s parents won’t be around, and it’s a lovely day, perfect for a dip in Amy’s pool. And Rachel’s bound to come join them if they make a thing of it. She smiles at Mark, willing him to agree, and when he nods she hugs him again, ignores his reticence, and holds him until he holds her, too.
* * *
“Ca-non-baaaaaaall!”
“How many times, Rachel?” Shahida says, flapping her hands in the air as if to ward off the splash. “If you keep diving in like that,” she adds, imitating Amy’s mother, “there won’t be any water left for swimming!”
From below the edge of the pool two fingers rise, and Rachel’s grinning face follows them. She inverts them, uses them to brush wet hair out of her eyes, and shouts, “Up yours, Mohsin!” But Shahida’s surname comes out distorted and bubbly, because Amy chooses that moment to sweep a wave of water right into Rachel’s face.
Beside her, Mark, the only person in the garden still fully clothed, laughs. Shahida turns, anticipating the smile on his face, but it looks pained, and he’s clutching his belly like his insides are going to fall out. They’ve been here almost half an hour already, and still he won’t join in. She’s been holding off on jumping in herself in an attempt to persuade him. It’s subliminal, or something.
“Em,” she says, “you should swim with us.”
“I don’t have anything to wear,” he says. They’re repeating themselves.
Shahida tries a new tack. “You can—”
“I’m not borrowing anything of Amy’s,” he adds quickly. “Unlike you, I don’t have the figure for it.”
Shahida giggles. When his humour comes through — and it does, sometimes, when he’s had time to relax, to become more like the person he usually tries to hide — she encourages it as much as she can. And mentioning her figure is the closest he’s ever got to flirting with her; she wonders what she can do to get him to do it again.
Softly, slowly, carefully. That’s been her approach. He’s not like any other boy she’s ever met.
“I was going to say,” she says, “you can swim in your boxers, can’t you? Take everything else off, swim in your boxers, and we’ll leave them out to dry in the sun when we’re done.”
He frowns, and he’s going to refuse, she knows it, so she steps closer and smiles again. She’s becoming familiar with the effect she has on him, and she knows she makes his heart beat faster and his cheeks redden. He’s very bad at saying no to her.
This is probably the biggest thing she’s asked of him, though. She guessed his body issues day one, when she saw him in that ugly t-shirt and those oversized swim trunks, up on the rise in Peri Paradise. She’s always wanted nothing more than to reassure him but she knows, from researching online and from watching minor disasters play out at school with some of the other girls, that the impulse to interfere can often be counterproductive, that to accidentally press too hard on someone’s triggers can be a cruelty in itself. So she waits, and watches, and hopes to glean a little more from him every time they talk.
“C’moooon,” she says, rubbing her shoulder against his. Amy, watching from the pool, laughs, and Shahida shoots her a warning glare. Mark’s not facing her, thankfully, so doesn’t see when she zippers her lips, nods in apology, and dives back under the water. Shahida doesn’t want him to know she’s treating him with kid gloves. She wants him to think that being around her is, for both of them, the easiest, most natural thing in the world.
“Maybe?” he says.
“Then come inside,” she says, calling that a victory and grabbing him by the sleeve and dragging him into the kitchen.
Amy Woodley, Shahida’s first real friend at the girls’ school, has a house far grander than Shahida’s. The oldest and largest in the suburb, it lays credible claim to the Tudor heritage the other houses merely appropriate, having been a minor country manor long before Almsworth crept up to meet it. Not that you’d know to look at it: after extensive renovations, extensions, and a whole new wing just for a garage, the Woodleys’ place looks as fake and tacky as every other house in the area and, if the sign over the game room door that says F**k English Heritage is anything to go by, the defiantly new-money Woodleys are proud of it. Their swimming pool — not quite Olympic-sized but still impressively proportioned and surrounded by weather-safe speakers and a covered barbecue pit and rugged electrical sockets and all the other amenities required to satisfy any whim that is possible to satisfy legally and safely in an English back garden — brings as many teens to the Woodleys’ house as their wine cellar brings upper-middle-class families; it’s debatable, Mrs Woodley says, which group makes the most noise and leaves behind the least mess, but at least the kids don’t make arch comments about how if one were to tear the wood-effect beams from the ceiling and throw them at the floor, they might bounce.
Today it’s just Amy and Shahida, their mutual friend Rachel Gray, who lives down the road in a house almost as large as Amy’s but attends Mark’s school — her parents claim to want her to get the kind of grounded teenage experiences one can only get at a state school, although she does, to her persistent dismay, also have tutors — and Mark, sweating in his many layers.
In the kitchen, he says, “I can’t, Shy. I can’t get undressed in front of them. I’m… I’m kind of…” He tugs lamely at a sleeve.
“Thin?” she supplies. He nods. “I don’t care. They won’t care, and they won’t be mean to you about it. Amy and I go to a girls’ school, remember? Half the girls there are—” she pauses for a second, takes care with her words, “—struggling with their weight. It’s normal.” She switches to a whisper. “And besides, I don’t think Rachel even likes boys that way; you could have a toast rack ribcage and she wouldn’t even notice. Then there’s Amy, who’s still lusting after that posh idiot Charles Carstairs — you don’t know him; be glad — so she’s not looking. Which just leaves me.”
She’s been watching his face the whole time; he’s been biting his lip and, she’s pretty sure, chewing on the inside of his cheek as she talks. But she’s got him.
“I’ll look after you,” she says smoothly, pressing into her voice every ounce of the authority granted by the six months she has over him. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”
He agrees to undress down to his boxers as long as she turns away, and when he’s done she wishes she hadn’t made the toast rack joke. She knew he was thin, thinner now than when they met — puberty seems barely to have touched him, aside from to deepen his voice — but she never expected… this. He’s not as bad as some of the girls at school, and if he were a girl she might not have such an extreme reaction, but there’s still next to nothing to him.
“Mark…” She reaches for his ribs, and realises her mistake when he steps back from her, his arms returning to their protective grasp of his belly. “Sorry!” she blurts. “Sorry. You’re just…”
“Thin.”
“I didn’t know.” A lie. She suspected. Nothing like this, but she suspected.
“I don’t talk about it.”
“Are you sick?”
“No,” he says. “Just thin.”
She’s been wearing a shirt over her borrowed swimming costume, and she takes it off and holds her bare arm up against his. “I’m thin, too,” she says, pretending for a moment that there’s no difference between toned muscle, shaped by an active lifestyle, and… whatever Mark has going on.
Wrong tactic. It works to reassure him, or he acts like it does, but he closes off the conversation. “Thanks, Ess,” he says. “And don’t worry about me.”
“I sort of want to worry about you, a little.”
“I’m just thin,” he repeats.
There’s more to it than that, obviously, but he’s said all he’s going to say, and the house is air-conditioned; it’s nippy in all senses of the word to be standing around in the kitchen, with him in his underwear — with a button fly, thank goodness! and she hopes he doesn’t notice her eyes flicking down to check — and her in her cossie, so she takes him back outside, not dragging him this time but holding out her hand and waiting for him to take it.
“Thanks, Shy,” he says, just before they step back into the sun.
She wants to kiss him. She stuffs the urge back down inside herself.
Amy wolf whistles as they emerge, and Shahida decides it’s meant for her, out in the garden without her covering shirt on for the first time. She curtseys, and she’s about to tell Rachel off for the burst of laughter until she realises that, next to her, astonishingly, Mark’s curtseying too, a wild smile on his face.
They take a moment to rub on sunscreen, after Mark attempts to demur but wilts in the face of three simultaneous lectures — although he does insist on applying it himself, accepting Shahida’s help only with the spot between his shoulder blades — and then they’re ready.
“Ca-non-ball!” Amy chants, splashing flat palms against the water’s surface. “Ca-non-ball! Ca-non-ball!” Rachel, sitting on the edge of the pool and kicking her feet in time with the chant, joins in, and moments later both Shahida and Mark are jumping in, legs curled up under their chins, making a mess.
When he surfaces, smiling and pushing off from her to swim a couple of carefree laps, stronger and more graceful than he’s ever been, Shahida buries her uncontrollable joy under the water, and races him.
Over the next couple of hours Mark’s phone rings a couple of times and plays the message chime over and over, but it’s muffled by the pile of clothes on top of it and Shahida’s pretty sure she’s the only one who heard it. Mark needs a good day, especially after the year he’s had, so she doesn’t tell him. The boy needs to make some positive memories for a change!
She watches him fondly: he’s sat cross-legged on one of the poolside plastic chairs, with Shahida’s shirt over his shoulders to protect against sunburn but otherwise apparently unconcerned about displaying his bare — and still terribly thin! — chest, eating microwaved hot dogs and chatting to Rachel about Physics, their mutual favourite school subject. It’s too bad he’s a year behind her, Rachel’s saying, because he knows everything he needs to know for the class she’s taking; she suggests he look into being advanced a year, and he shrugs and says he’ll think about it, but he has his hands full at home so it’s helpful to be able to coast a bit at school.
Amy, who keeps shooting Shahida meaningful looks, makes sure Mark gets a second round of hot dogs, and they both watch him eat. They’ll be talking about him all night, speculating, worrying; he’s either starving himself or, worse, he’s purging.
Maybe it’s grief, Amy suggests in the kitchen, as they fetch a four-pack of chocolate fudge cups from the fridge. Maybe they shouldn’t interfere. Maybe they should let it run its course, and decide to worry again this time next year if he’s still having problems. Shahida chews her lip and can’t decide.
He eats the chocolate fudge pudding, though, and doesn’t shy away when she links cautious hands with him.
The sun’s going to be up until at least nine, and today’s forecast to be one of the hottest days of the year, so none of them want to go inside when finally they’re done swimming. Instead they reapply sunscreen and Amy brings out a laptop with a DVD drive, a pile of movies, and a basket of snacks. They lie on the grass together, Shahida and Mark spread under her shirt, shoulders touching, watching bad movies they can barely see on a laptop that’s probably dangerously close to overheating despite the umbrella balanced over it, and it’s exactly the sort of thing she wants to be able to do with Mark every day. She wants an endless summer with him, to have him open up to her a little more each time they meet, to coax from him secrets he might not even know himself. And, damn it, he’s just fun to be around, and he gets on well with Amy and Rachel, and even if she wants more from him than she will ever get, she wants him with her and her friends, away from his rude little brother and his ugly mess of a father. She wants some normal for him.
She leans into him, nudges him with their joined shoulders, and he laughs and nudges her in return, and they share a look and then they’re back to watching the movie and waiting for the sunset.
For now, at least, she can do this for him.
* * *
He gets the bus home with borrowed money — although Amy insisted he doesn’t have to pay her back until 2020, and she doesn’t charge interest; “Think of me more as a public cooperative than a bank. An extremely sexy public cooperative, who you want to tell all your eligible male friends about.” — after getting dressed at the end of a long afternoon and finding several missed calls and a litany of unpleasant text messages. He shot off a quick reply to the most recent one, exchanged reluctant goodbyes and group text invites with Amy and Rachel, and set off for home, and consequences.
And, on the way, borrows some of the spirit of rebellion from Shahida and her friends, decides that consequences can go screw themselves. He got to spend a whole day feeling almost normal for the first time since Mum died — since a long time before, probably — and whatever punishment Dad has planned for him can do nothing but spoil it. So when he steps off the bus at the top of the road he starts planning how he’s going to sneak into the house. If Dad wants to tell him off, he can do it in the morning.
He gets as far as the landing on the stairs before he’s spotted.
“Mark!” his dad yells, standing from where he’s been sitting on the top step, waiting for him, phone grasped in his fist. “What the hell did you think you’re playing at? You can’t just run off like that! I said one hour and one hour only!”
He wants to shout back at him, but he can’t. He’s never been able to, not with Dad. Not with anyone. And as he gathers his breath and thinks about how to respond, Russell sticks his head out of his bedroom door, eyes red like he’s been crying.
Shit. Naturally, with Mark not around, Dad’s anger earthed itself on the other easy target.
Selfish. Stupid. Short-sighted.
“I didn’t run off,” he says quietly. “I was with Shahida.”
“Yes,” Dad says, “and for the last time.”
“What? No! You can’t control my friends.”
“I’m not having you pal around with that— that—”
Oh, fuck him. “That what, Dad?”
“—that girl, especially not if you’re going to stay out all day without permission, ignore my calls, ignore my texts—”
“I’m almost fifteen,” Mark says, standing straighter, raising his voice as much as he dares. Going back down a step. Behind Dad, Russ winces.
“Don’t you take that tone with me, young man!” his father roars. “And don’t you walk away from me!”
“I’m not,” Mark insists, backing away, taking the stairs down two at a time as his father advances. Dad’s always had a temper, and managing it’s become habit, but this is new; he’s never seen him this angry.
“Stay right where you are!” Dad’s following him now, down the stairs, seeming to take up all the space up to the ceiling.
“I just need to—”
“Mark Vogel, you will stay right where you are!”
He’s at the bottom of the stairs now, on safe and level ground again. Dad’s still coming, but at least Mark, shaking with adrenaline, is no longer in danger of falling. Dad out-masses him by some insane degree, he knows, so right now his best option is to placate him. He starts running through arguments, justifications and promises he might make, his thoughts made quick by fear.
Dad steps down off the last stair and Mark takes another involuntary step backwards. As he does so his hand goes wide and hits the top box on the pile behind the sofa. In slow motion it wobbles, it falls, and the sound of breaking glass echoes through the house.
“How dare you!” his father shouts. “Those are your mother’s things!”
Russ, watching from the landing, can’t stop looking at the fallen box.
“Then why are they out here,” Mark yells back, “in boxes, waiting to be got rid of? Do you even care that she’s gone?”
His father’s slap is open-handed, and Mark feels the impact of the wedding ring most of all, the hot scrape of it against his cheekbone. The blow knocks him almost off his feet, and he collides bodily with the central column. He steadies himself on it, stares up at his father, almost unable to believe what just happened. It felt like the whole house shook.
He’s never hit either of them before.
“Mark,” his father says, hesitant, no longer shouting but entreating, “I’m…”
He rubs the back of his hand against his cheek and it comes away bloody. His dad moves as if to grab him, corner him, keep him where he is, say whatever stupid justifications he’s come up with for hitting him. Fuck that. He summons every last bit of energy he has, screams, “Get the fuck away from me!” and runs around his father, up the stairs, past Russ, into his room. The thunder of his father’s pounding feet follows him, and he gets the wooden chair under the door handle just in time. As the handle rattles he pulls the bed away from the far wall, struggling and sweating as it protests against being uprooted from the grooves in the carpet. He switches to pushing it, swearing under his breath as it lumbers across the room in ungainly, sudden starts.
He gets the end of the bed against the door just as the chair dislodges, and with one last shove beats his father’s attempt to get in, forcing the door closed again and pushing with all his strength until it blocks it completely.
His father gives up trying to get in and starts banging on the door, and it doesn’t take long for his apologies to turn back to anger when Mark refuses to reply. The only thing to do is block him out, so Mark retrieves his mother’s iPod from the bed, presses the earbuds in as far as they’ll go, and turns the volume all the way up. As the music plays and his father rages, he stares at the open window on the other side of the room and wonders what would happen if he just walked straight out of it.
* * *
2010
The uniform code at East Almsworth Community School had been, up until recently, blessedly lax, requiring in practical terms only that students’ trousers or skirts were suitably dark and that shirt colours were reasonably close to white. Officially, a pullover with the school logo was required; in practice this was unenforced, and most students, Mark included, wore hoodies or jackets. Ties were most generally found in pockets, or left at home. The only exception was for official visits from the government. In the week before an OFSTED inspection one year, the art department put up posters around the school which read, ‘The government is coming! Hide your contraband, look pretty, and behave!’ and then, after the inspectors left, held a vote to decide which of the posters had been defaced most creatively.
Mark always appreciated the leeway, the official permission to dress more or less how he wanted for school. But they’ve been tightening up lately. Rumours abound: they’re chasing funds to refurbish the sixth-form facilities and open them up to adult learners; they’re planning to become a technology college; the new headmaster has a fetish for ties. Whichever; hoodies and non-approved pullovers have been banned outside the coldest winter months, and Mark stands at the bottom of the driveway, watching the stream of students walk up to the row of bus stops, exposed and uncomfortable in his shirt and tie.
He turns the blue ribbon round and round on his wrist. He doesn’t get shit for it, even though it’s not exactly masculine; everyone knows his mum gave it to him, days before she died.
Rachel found him again today.
She means well, she really does, but since the start of the spring term she’s repeatedly ‘just happened’ to be in the corridors outside his classes, or visiting a friend near his house and thus getting the same bus to school in the morning, or passing by his lunch table, and she’ll have a spare sandwich or a bag of crisps or an apple or a whole packed lunch she doesn’t need or doesn’t want, and would he like it? And he’s forced to eat it in front of everyone or she’ll make a fuss.
She means well.
He’s been seen often enough with her that the boys at school have started asking about the hot girl from the year above: has he kissed her yet? has he seen her in her underwear? and why him, anyway? He hasn’t told them Rachel doesn’t even like boys.
She gave him a cheese sandwich today, and his stomach twists uncomfortably around it. She looked for him after school, too — at lunch she gave him a look that spoke of how worried she and Shahida and Amy are about him — but this place around the side of B Block is secluded, and he watched her shrug and head for the buses.
He should ask her to stop. He should ask them all to stop worrying about him, to stop wasting their time on him. It’s not like he hasn’t had the opportunity; they visit him after work most Saturdays, and they text each other and talk on the computer all the time. But they’re his only real friends, and he’s scared of alienating them, scared of making them realise how much better off they’d be without having to worry about him all the time. Scared of accidentally letting them glimpse the anger that boils away inside him all the time. Scared they’ll realise he’s not like them; that he’s not like anyone.
Scared they’ll see the bitter jealousy he feels when he looks at them.
The last bus pulls away, with the last student running to jump on before the doors close, and Mark steps away from the wall, slings his backpack up onto both shoulders, and starts the journey home. Better to walk alone than brave the bus on a day like today, when the anger and the envy feel dangerously close to the surface, when any random interaction might cause him to break and ruin everything, the way he did years ago. They can’t afford to move house again. Dad wouldn’t do it, anyway.
The walk isn’t so bad. He’s sweating and aching by the time he finally pushes open the front door at number 64, and that’s good: he’s read that exercise wears away at your muscles, that they have to rest and repair themselves after, and even if his work today will be undone by the natural mechanisms of his body — ever his enemy — it’s nice to think that, for a little while, he’s pushed it hard enough that it wilts. And if people are going to insist on feeding him in places where he can’t safely purge, he’ll take anything he can get.
He showers with a towel over the bathroom mirror and luxuriates in the fizzing in his muscles. Imagines himself melting away, coming apart, sluicing in bloody pieces away with the shower water.
Can’t stay in here forever, though.
Mark Vogel doesn’t have a life; he has a schedule. Things he must do, people he mustn’t let down. Shahida and Amy and Rachel; Stef; Jenny Yau and little Ada; his job at the Beachway; even Russ. He cycles through them, one after another, each of them a reason to live another day.
Tonight, his reason is Stef.
His hair’s still damp when he goes over, but he’s tied it up and it’s not dripping, so it’s fine. Mrs Riley lets him in, happy to see him as always — Stef’s teachers have been thrilled with his work — and notes what a shame it is that he arrived just after dinner. He politely declines the offer of leftovers and heads upstairs to Stef’s room, accepting from the boy the nervous hug he always gets, and settling down with the books and the laptop and Stef’s rapt attention.
It’s fun, tutoring Stef, even if the role Mark occupies has mutated into something more like a big brother than a tutor. They study, they chat, Stef seeks advice, they watch a show or play a game on Stef’s PC; Mark is reliably terrible at the games, so Stef considers it a challenge to find one he can be good at, or which they can play together. It’s very different from the time he spends with Shahida and their other friends — for one thing, the only person trying to feed him is Stef’s mother, and she’s much more easily dissuaded — and Mark treasures these evenings.
Sometimes a reason to live can become something more.
Back home, Russ is on the PlayStation again, and yells a distracted greeting through his half-open door as Mark ascends the stairs, and Dad’s locked in his room, doing whatever the hell it is he does in there. Mark washes up, says goodnight at each door and shuts himself in his bedroom, putting on his music and closing his eyes.
It’s been like this for a long time. All of them shut away in their own worlds, in their own lives. More like roommates than family.
Probably better that way.
And then the weight of the day collapses on him.
There’s something that’s like crying, but isn’t; it’s what your body resorts to when you can’t cry, when everything is so wrong and distorted and broken that crying is beyond you; it’s catharsis without relief, self-injury without pain, death without release.
He curls up in his bed, head under the covers and arms around his belly, and soundlessly shrieks.
* * *
She gets the call early afternoon and picks up immediately. No-one calls any more, not unless it’s her mother, or someone trying to sell something, or an emergency; Rachel’s ringtone is therefore cause for extreme concern.
“Rach,” she says, ignoring the fuss Ms Fuentes is making about one of her girls answering her phone in class, “what’s going on?”
“It’s Mark,” Rachel says, and that’s all it takes for Shahida’s heart to skip, for her head to feel heavy, for her to slump forward, elbows jammed against the edge of the desk. She doesn’t even feel the pain. There’s a part of her that’s been waiting for this call, and now all she can do is catalogue her mistakes: she should have helped him more; she should have pushed him less; she should have done something! It takes a good few seconds for Rachel to break through and convince her Mark’s not dead, just missing.
Mark, apparently, was ‘being disruptive’ in class, which in Rachel’s opinion means he probably just zoned out, the way he does sometimes, but today the teacher singled him out, yelled at him for a good couple of minutes, and ignored the objections of a couple of the other boys in Mark’s class. The teacher, frustrated with the way Mark just sat there and took his bollocking, slammed a fist down on the desk right in front of him, and that was when Mark suddenly stood up, yelled back, packed up his shit and left the classroom. The teacher followed, and there was a minor tussle in the hallway, with the teacher grabbing Mark’s arm, Mark trying to shake him off, falling, and scrabbling away when the teacher let go of him.
“And he just legged it out of school. They’ve been trying to find him ever since. It’s all anyone’s talking about; I heard about it from some of the girls in his year. They all know I talk to him, see?”
“Yeah,” Shahida says, trying to control her panic. Running off isn’t the worst thing he could do — she thinks, as she often does, of the scar on his wrist — but it’s up there. “Did anyone call his dad?”
“Probably. Which, petrol on the fire, y’know?”
“Okay. Thanks, Rach.” She ends the call. “Hey, Ms Fuentes?” she says, addressing a teacher and class who’ve been watching her warily. “I’m sorry for the disruption. I have an emergency situation to deal with. Can you tell the dean I’ll pick up all my homework tomorrow?”
“Of course, dear,” Ms Fuentes says. The dean’ll call her parents about this, but Mum and Edward will back her up on the phone and grill her about it later. It’s fine. And even if it wasn’t fine, would it matter? It’s Mark.
She shovels all her books out of her backpack to make space; she has an idea where he’s gone, and she’ll need to pick up a few supplies on the way. Thankfully she had PE today, so she’s got trainers in the bottom of her bag. She kicks off her school shoes and drops them on the table next to her books. With a quick nod she acknowledges one of the girls scraping her things into a carrier bag and promising to give them to Amy to take home for her, and then she’s out of the classroom door and calling for a taxi.
Mark’s been keeping busy lately, and between her and her friends, his babysitting, the kid Stef, school and work, he’s scheduled most days. But some of the Saturday shifts at Beachway don’t start until early afternoon, and he likes to go for walks, likes to get away from people, likes to disappear into the woods or up to the north, by the railway tracks. She’s the only one who knows where he goes.
And she wouldn’t tell his dad for a million quid.
North of the university the countryside gradually gives way to a long stretch of woodland which becomes, at various points along its length, a wildlife park, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and a nature reserve, and Mark’s been walking off the paths there for the last few months. He’s shown her his annotated map — rather, a grainy photo of his map, taken with his antique phone — and talked of showing her around someday. Privately Shahida’s always believed he was showing her so it would be her who brought him back, should he one day disappear.
Today’s the day, then.
The taxi drops her off at the north end of the nature reserve, and she sets off, thanking her lucky stars she remembered to charge her phone. It takes her a few minutes to figure out the GPS — she’s never had occasion to use it — and the map isn’t especially detailed, out here in the middle of nowhere, but it’s enough.
It still takes over an hour to get to the bridge.
The passenger and freight rail lines both run around the westernmost edge of the nature reserve, fenced off on the reserve side, and local law requires bridges every few hundred metres, and a ramped, disabled-access bridge every kilometre. She walks the length of the line, checking bridge after bridge, and finds him at the third one, leaning over the railing.
He watches her approach. He doesn’t call out so neither does she. She joins him instead, resting her arms on the railing, mimicking him. It’s a memory: the two of them atop Peri Paradise. She stands closer now, though, and when the next train goes by underneath and she sees the look on his face she loops an arm around him and pulls him tight.
“Twelve,” he says. “That’s train number twelve.”
She doesn’t say anything. After a little while he leans his head on her shoulder; he’s still slight, still shorter than her, and she tightens her grip. He’s not going anywhere. She can, if necessary, probably overpower him.
The days are getting longer again, and warmer, and it wouldn’t be so bad, just standing here with him, her arm around his waist, if she could stop herself thinking about why he came here. Mark’s delicate, he’s vulnerable, he has difficulty with the things other people take for granted; all of it’s been obvious to her since they first met and all of it’s only become clearer now that they spend more time together. And she knows why he has that scar on his wrist. But she never seriously thought he’d try again.
And now here he is, in the place he comes to look death in the face.
Another train. They watch it rumble past underneath them, feel the rhythmic thump of the wheels crossing sections of track, struggle to keep their footing against the shaking of the bridge. It makes her feel connected to it; she wonders how it makes him feel.
She risks another glance. No, she doesn’t have to wonder. She can see it in his face, the fear and the longing, and she knows he doesn’t have it in himself to stay up here forever. Sooner or later, despair will win, and he’ll throw himself joyfully over.
“Em,” she says, and pulls at him. “Have you eaten?”
“Ess—”
“Have you?”
“Fuck,” he whispers, and kicks at the bottom of the railing. “Fuck. No. No, I haven’t eaten.” He looks at her for the first time since she joined him, and his shoulders slump. “Dad’s going to go mental, I know it.”
“Forget your dad,” she says, still pulling him, dragging him away from the edge and down the steps and back into the nature reserve, with the tracks on the other side of the fence and her bag sitting in the grass where she left it. “I have food.”
“I’m not hungry,” he lies.
“You walked for miles,” Shahida says, “and so did I, and I’m hungry, and I had lunch, which I bet you didn’t. Come on.” She lets him go, half-afraid he’ll run right back to the bridge, but he doesn’t, so she starts unpacking her stuff. “I stopped at the shop on the way, and got some—” and she has to stop because he’s laughing. There’s a hysterical edge to it, but he’s laughing, and it might be the most beautiful sound she’s ever heard.
“You—” he says, and chokes on his words, doubling over, coughing and holding his belly. “You— you brought a picnic blanket?”
“Yes?” She pauses in the act of laying it out and examines it. It’s a little cheesy, a little clichéd, with the classic red and white squares and the frilly edges, but it was all they had. “I stopped at the shop,” she repeats, confused.
“You brought a picnic blanket,” he wheezes, “to a suicide intervention?”
It’s a shock to hear him say the word, and it has an instant sobering effect on them both. She rushes over to him, guides him with hands on his shoulders to sit down on the blanket, brushes loose strands of hair out of his face, and when he’s stilled she finishes unpacking. It’s good to keep doing things; good to keep moving. Because he said the word, and even if they’re not going to talk about it right now, it’s out there, and nothing’s ever going to be the same.
Mark came out here to die.
“Only you, Shahida,” he says, and when she looks over he’s smiling, red-cheeked and exhausted and so, so thin, but he’s smiling, and her self-control breaks and she cries, leans forward and cries into his lap while he holds her and gently strokes her spine.
* * *
They don’t talk about it. Not yet. They eat egg and cress sandwiches out of a cooler bag and they sit on her absurd picnic blanket and they probably look like something off a postcard in the nature reserve’s gift shop, and they don’t talk about it. Shahida tells him about her day, instead, about getting the call from Rachel in the middle of class, about fielding panicked texts from Amy while she was in the taxi, about the man behind the counter in the petrol station shop who leered at her. She tells him about Amy’s dad falling in the pool last night while he was skimming it and Amy’s mum laughing too hard to help. She tells him about her aunts visiting a few days ago and how ecstatic Rachel was to meet them and how bad she is at pretending to be straight around Shahida’s parents, who wouldn’t care anyway; Mark has to point out that she can’t be that bad at it, because no-one at the school they share can possibly know about Rachel’s sexuality or they wouldn’t constantly ask him if they’re together, and they talk through it, both of them grateful for something to discuss, and in the end they decide that straight people must just assume everyone else is straight until proven otherwise, even to the point of absurdity.
Not all straight people, though, Shahida insists. Just the ignorant ones. Not us.
It’s the ‘us’ that makes him laugh, the aggrieved innocence, the irritation at their fellow straights. And she keeps doing it, making him laugh, again and again, drawing from him a humanity he sometimes doubts he even possesses, making herself his reason, for today and perhaps for every day.
He wants to rub the tear tracks from her face, but they dry on their own in the afternoon sun.
On the way back, in the taxi, he turns his phone on again, ignores every missed call and text and types out a reply to the most recent one, but before he can hit send Shahida snatches his phone and alters the message:
Mark Vogel: I’m safe. I’m staying over at Jason’s tonight. I’ll be home after school tomorrow.
“Who’s Jason?”
Shahida shrugs. “No-one. But you’re not going home tonight—”
“—I’m not—?”
“—and I don’t want your dad showing up at mine, making demands of you. Or of me. So, wild goose chase. And I checked; there’s no Jason in your year, so there’s no way he can just barge in on some rando guy.”
“God, I hope not. Wait; how did you check?”
She pulls her iPhone out of her bag and wiggles it. “You can get the internet on phones now.”
“Ha ha.”
The taxi drops them off at the end of Six Oaks Estate, nowhere near Shahida’s house, and Mark asks why.
“Two reasons,” Shahida says, holding out her hand and waiting for him to take it before she continues. “One, this is going to be your first time seeing my parents since you were, what, twelve? I want you to have some time to psych yourself up. And two, it’s best not to show strangers exactly where you live.”
“Really?” The thought had never crossed his mind.
“Call it an overabundance of caution, if you like,” she says, leading him down the road.
He’s never been to Six Oaks, but he’s visited the area before. Six Oaks itself is a little less grand than the street Amy and Rachel live on, but all the houses, Shahida’s included, could swallow his twice over. She’s told him about her family’s circumstances, of course: they’re not exactly rich, but two decent incomes plus a fully paid-for house is, to Mark, close enough that it makes no odds. It’s not as if she’s not generous with her money, though; Mark’s room hosts a half-dozen gifts from her, and she’s promised him her phone when she inevitably upgrades. His can barely even take photos.
“Ready?” she says, on the doorstep. He nods and she lets them in, standing aside with her arms stretched out and announcing, “Welcome to Chez Mohsin!”
The inside’s surprisingly normal. After Amy’s open-plan borderline-mansion, with the huge central stairs up and the half-dozen miscellaneous rooms of mysterious purpose — especially to Mark, who runs out of names for downstairs rooms after ‘kitchen’, ‘dining room’, ‘living room’ and, at a stretch, remembering something he once saw on TV, ‘drawing room’ — an ordinary hallway with doors open to rooms on either side is almost a shock. He peers through the nearest one and finds a large but still very comprehensible living room.
“Shahida,” a voice calls from upstairs, “is that you!”
“Ye-es!” Shahida responds in kind. “I’ve brought a friend in need, if that’s okay?”
“Of course! Who have you—?” Rupa Mohsin-Carpenter reaches the banister at the top of the stairs and peers down over her reading glasses. “Mark! It’s been so long! Have you eaten?”
“He’s eaten,” Shahida says, squeezing his hand.
At the bottom of the stairs, Rupa reaches for Mark with both hands, and Shahida releases him so he can be inspected. “Are you sure?”
Screw it. He never was much good at resisting peer pressure. “Well,” he says, “I did only have sandwiches.”
Rupa — she asked him when they first met, back at Peri Park, not to call her ‘Mrs Mohsin-Carpenter’ or anything else equally unwieldy — needs no more prompting to drag him by the wrist into a warm kitchen, arranged around a worn but sturdy wooden table.
The food is amazing.
“Should we expect anyone?” Rupa asks, as they eat.
Shahida shakes her head. “Probably not. His dad’s… his dad, you know? It’s hard to guess whether he’s going to go completely bananas or just ignore the whole thing, but it doesn’t matter; he thinks his son’s staying with a completely different person, who doesn’t exist.”
“He does know about you, though,” Mark says. “He might still come here.”
“True. But it’s a long journey to make on a guess.”
“If he calls,” Rupa says, standing up from the table, “I won’t tell him you’re here. And if he shows up, we’ll pretend ignorance and send him away. Excuse me; I should let Edward know.”
When they’re done eating — Shahida doesn’t say anything about the food he leaves on his plate, bless her — she gives him the quick tour, which includes poking their heads into the upstairs suite to say hi to Shahida’s gran, who waves at them from a rocking chair, and eventually terminates in her room.
“Wow. Big room.”
“Yeah,” Shahida says, throwing a half-dozen cushions from the bed onto the floor. When they’ve both made themselves comfortable — Mark arranging himself carefully around a stomach that feels bloated but which is, he knows, just full the way it ought to be — Shahida fixes him with a serious look and asks the question.
* * *
“What’s wrong?” she says.
The boy — and she’s never felt as much older than him as she does now; he looks frail and tired and young, and she wants more than ever to find a way to place herself between him and whatever it is that hurts him — squirms uncomfortably, skittish centrepiece to an explosion of cushions, and doesn’t look at her.
“Mark— Em. When Rach called today, when she said your name, I almost blacked out. She had to reassure me, promise me, that you weren’t dead. And I realised, right then, that I’ve been waiting for that call, that I have been all along. That I’ve been waiting to hear you’ve died.” His eyes flick up to hers when she says it, and she smiles, gathers him into her with all the warmth she has. On his cushion he blinks at her, but a tiny echo of her smile appears on his lips, just for a moment. “Seeing you up on that bridge, large as life—” he snorts cynically at that, “—was the greatest relief I’ve ever felt, but I need to know, Em; are you going back there tomorrow?”
“No,” he says quickly, and reaches down with his hands to gather up knots of cushion in his fingers. As anchors go, Shahida’s semi-ironic My Little Pony pillow isn’t the best, but it’s all she has to offer. Apart from herself, and as much as she aches for him, it has to be Mark who chooses that. “No, I’m not going back. It’s too much.” She allows him the silence, gives him the time, watches him knead the cushion fabric. “Too tempting,” he adds in a whisper, and Shahida stills herself completely lest she leap at him, grab at him, hold him down and never let him go. She imagines some vital part of herself straining, bleeding with the effort of holding the rest of her in place. “I’ve been going up there, through the reserve, for months now. Following the tracks for weeks. But that bridge… It would be so easy. I went up there three weeks in a row. Just stood there. Watching the trains. And at first it was only a fantasy, you know? Because I have people. You. Stef. Amy and Rach. Jenny and Ada. I’d think of you, all of you. I try to think of what it would be like for you all, after. At my funeral, or whatever. But I don’t get that far. I drop in front of the train and it goes dark and it’s the end. An end I don’t get to have.”
“Em—”
“It’d be so cruel. So selfish. I read a thing online, ages ago. A driver, a truck driver. He hit someone. Not an accident; the guy stepped out in front of him. Deliberate. He had debts or something. But the driver… He talked about what it was like to be complicit in someone’s death. To be made complicit. He said he’d lost someone before in an accident, someone close to him, and he used to obsess over the things he could have done different, the ways he could have saved him. Coincidences he could have engineered, if he had his time over again. But he didn’t have that with this guy. Not because he didn’t know him. But because it was inevitable. That man was always going to kill himself. And it was fate, the driver said, that he chose him. He was almost happy about it, glad that it was this sixty-year-old guy and not some kid who got made responsible.” Mark’s voice sounds painfully dry; a practical part of Shahida’s mind tries to remember if she has any water bottles left in the drawer under the bed, or if she’ll have to go downstairs and bring back a glass. “The driver died, too. There was an update on the article. He died. Not long after. Deliberately. Closed up his garage, sat in his car. Sent a timed text to the police so no neighbour would have to find him. So only someone trained would have to deal with him.” He looks at her, eyes steady. “When you die, when you choose to die, you make a dangerous choice. And you don’t necessarily make it just for yourself. On that bridge, I wasn’t thinking of my funeral, of crying relatives; of you, grieving. I couldn’t get that far, not in the immediate future. But I managed to make myself think months, years down the line. Think of someone else facing it. Someone else… going dark.” He breaks eye contact, breathes heavily, frees a hand from the pillow and massages his chest, like his lungs need the help. “There’s no such thing as a clean death.”
His voice is cracking and she can’t stand it any more, so she leans back, rummages in the drawer under the bed, finds two unopened bottles of water and passes one over. She takes the excuse to shuffle her cushion closer to his. He thanks her, cracks his bottle open, drains half.
Again they sit in silence; again she allows it. For a while.
“Em,” she says, “I’m glad you’re not going to do anything — I’m so glad I feel like bloody dancing — but you have to tell me why. What’s wrong that you want to do that in the first place? What makes you starve yourself? I want to help, and I’ve been waiting to help almost since I met you, but I can’t if I don’t know what’s wrong.”
He laughs. It’d be inappropriate if it didn’t sound so hollow, like there’s nothing left inside him but whatever this is.
“I can’t tell you,” he says, cradling the half-empty bottle in his lap, “because I don’t know. I’ve never known. It’s like there’s something everyone else has that I don’t, something that makes them able to live in their bodies, to stand being looked at, being touched… being called their name. I mean, that’s why you call me Em, right? Because you saw how much I hated being called Mark.”
She nods, grateful for something she recognises. “When someone says it, it’s like they’ve zapped you with a live wire.”
“It’s part of why I used to worry about the kid. About Stef. He lit up when I shortened his name, and I ended up calling him Stef enough that almost everyone in his life calls him that now, at least some of the time. But I think I was wrong about him. I think he just likes having a nickname. Like it’s proof someone cares enough about him to bestow one on him. And that’s good, Shy, that’s so fucking good. I’m glad he was just lonely, and not… like me. Because I don’t know what ‘like me’ even is.”
“When did it start?”
“Years ago. Around the time of this.” He raises his wrist and pulls back his sleeve; Shahida knows what she’s going to see before she sees it, before he pulls back the pale blue knot of fabric he wears there: his old scar, faded and pale, like it’s been rubbed clean over the years, like it wants to disappear. “I saw a counsellor, you know, right after? Three sessions. That’s all the NHS would pay for. You know what he told me? That a bit of turmoil was perfectly normal, and puberty should sort me out.” He laughs again. “It emphatically did not. It made it worse. So much worse.”
“And that’s why you don’t eat.”
“Oh, I eat. I just—” he mimes sticking a finger down his throat. “But responsibly. It’s why my teeth still have enamel.”
“How long have you been purging?” Not an image she enjoys contemplating.
“Since I was… shit. Thirteen? That’s when I started doing it properly. People notice when a twelve-year-old starves themselves. But I eat in front of people — even more so, these days, thanks to Rachel — so I think people tell themselves I’m just a—” it’s like he chokes on the words; he coughs, swallows, and tries again, “—just a growing boy. They’re all waiting for my growth spurt.”
The wry smile on his face makes her giggle. He’s taller now than he was last year, but so’s she, and she still has her height advantage over him. She wonders then if he wants to be small, not just so thin she worries for his health, but as short as he can be, given his genetics. His dad’s somewhere over six foot, and while she doesn’t remember his mother very well, she knows she was taller than her mum and Edward both.
How tall might Mark be now, if he hadn’t been starving himself since thirteen? It’s hard to imagine; he’s always been delicate.
She’s missing something, though. He’s describing symptoms, not causes. Not because he’s hiding anything from her; he doesn’t know. And that’s most devastating of all: how can you be so miserable that you attempt suicide as soon as you start puberty, and not know why?
“Ess?” he says. “You’re staring.”
“Sorry. Did you ever see anyone else about this? Other than the useless counsellor guy, I mean.”
He nods. “My GP is ‘concerned’ about my weight, and every time a new financial year starts, I get a handful of sessions with some new therapist.”
“And none of them have been able to tell you what’s up?”
“What’s to tell? I’m a fifteen-year-old boy with depression and anxiety, I dissociate, I have nightmares; I have an eating disorder I don’t tell them about but which they can definitely guess. There’s a million of me. The therapists all say the same thing, that I really need long-term assessment, and then my GP does the referral, and then we wait. I’m waiting now, actually. Usually, it comes up that there’s nothing in the budget.”
She shuffles closer, takes his hands, which are still clutching the bottle in his lap, in hers, feels the contrast between the lukewarm plastic and his fingers, which seem to be radiating pure heat. “I want to help,” she says, stroking his knuckles with her thumb.
“Why?” His question comes out too quickly, and he winces, like he wants to take it back.
“Because you’re my friend, and I love you,” Shahida says, squeezing his hand in rebuke. “Because I don’t want to see you hurting, and if I do have to see that, if there’s nothing either of us can do to stop it, then I want to help you manage it. I want to help you find ways to survive it. Because, Em, if you died, it would hurt so bad. I’d never forgive you.”
She’s worried for a moment that she’s piled on a little too much guilt, but he smiles at her and she decides, fuck it, now’s the time. She half-stands, pivots onto the cushion next to his, and takes him by the shoulders, pulling lightly on him so he can, if he wants, fall into her. He resists, but only for a second, and she drags him into an awkward sideways hug.
“I know things are hard at home,” she whispers, “and at school, and everywhere. But here — my house, my room — will always be safe. You can always come here. Whenever you need. Come here, come to me, and you’ll be safe.”
He breathes deeply and she waits for him to say something but it’s just the prelude to the shattered exhale of a good damn cry, so she loosens her fingers, intending to reach out for the box of tissues, but his composure’s gone and he leans completely into her, pulling on her physically for maybe the first time ever, reciprocating and not just accepting her affection. She leans back, lets him find his comfort and holds him as he shakes, as he cries in heaving, airless shudders.
It’s almost as if he’s never cried before.
2011
It’s strange being back in his house again. Only her second visit, after his father’s hostility, but she doesn’t get a chance to look around properly because Mark’s dragging her up the stairs and into his room so they can get a second lockable door between them and Mr Vogel.
Except there’s no lock. Shahida realises this when Mark drags a sturdy length of wood out from under the bed and wedges it under the door handle. It’s dirty and old and in deference to these facts he’s wrapped it in plastic, with pillow cases at the top and bottom to give it traction. With a start she realises what it is: a sleeper from the railway tracks up by the bridge.
She doesn’t mention it.
“There,” he says. “Privacy.”
Shahida flops onto a bed she’s seen only in grainy video chats. “Your dad’s still at the party, though, right?”
Mark frowns at her. “How long do you think that’ll last when he realises you showed up and, half an hour later, we skipped out together?”
She hadn’t intended to stay at all, had meant to just show up and grab him, but it was her first time meeting Stefan — Stef — and it didn’t take her long to be charmed by the kid. Thirteen now, officially, today, and railing against his parents’ wishes for him to dress smart and be respectful at their staid little party with mostly church guests in attendance. With Mark and Shahida’s encouragement he’d taken off the tie he claimed volubly to hate, and thrown it over the fence.
Plus, there was cake. And little hot dogs.
“I tried to tell you,” she says, flipping up the corner of the duvet to inspect the sheets (white) and casting around the room for anything else interesting she might have missed (a corkboard behind his computer, covered in photos, mostly of her and the girls, and Stef), “he fell asleep after his third beer. Mrs Riley put a sun hat on him.”
She realises that at least two of the photos on the corkboard are group shots Mark was definitely present for, and that he’s folded them over so he’s not visible. She covers her reaction with what is, on reflection, a terribly faked cough.
He doesn’t seem to notice. “Oh, he’ll love that.” He sits down backwards on the dilapidated office chair and spins it around until he’s facing her. “So! Why did you pull me away from the party of the year?”
He’s leaning his chin on the backrest and drumming his fingers on the plastic. He’s cute. Always so cute. Why does he hate himself so much?
“I pulled you away,” she says, “for a much, much better party!”
“What? Really?”
She giggles. “Well, much better might be overselling it. Rach’s parents are away and her kid brother’s throwing a thing for one of his mates who just had a birthday. It’s going to be pretty tame, because they’re all fifteen and sixteen—”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Sure,” she allows, “but in six-and-a-half hours you’ll be seventeen. What I mean is, it’s going to be chaperoned — you know what her parents are like; they’d never leave the house if they didn’t live in the safest suburb in the south of England — but the shaps are Rach’s older brother and a couple of his friends. Who are, you know, still young enough to be okay. And Rach and Amy’ll be there, but no-one else you know, which is, I feel, pretty key.”
“Pretty key for what?”
“For getting you to have some bloody fun!” she says, forcing as much enthusiasm as she can. Mark’s been doing better, as far as she can tell, but he keeps himself so busy that, between school, work, tutoring and babysitting he has basically no time to himself. It’s been difficult to see him this year, and every week without him has been frustrating. A little scary, too; despite his improvement, Shahida dreams regularly of finding him on the railway tracks. “Now, you need something to wear.”
He gives her an exasperated smile and waggles the loose sleeves of his hoodie at her. “I have something to wear.”
“Nope. Nope. Absolutely not. It’s ragged; look!” She reaches forward and pokes a finger through a gap in the fabric at the elbow; he evades her, covering the hole like a wounded limb.
“Everything I have is basically like this, though.”
“Well,” she says, “I don’t believe that for a second.”
She hops up off the bed and opens his wardrobe, rummages through, finds, yes, mostly battered hoodies and loose jeans and school clothes and very little else, just as he claimed. Her toe pokes a panel under the wardrobe, knocking it out of position, and he reaches down to pop it back into place.
“Is that where you keep your… stuff?” she asks. She knows all about his mitigation strategies, his methods for ‘safer’ purging. She also knows he’s not supposed to be doing it any more, after they agreed a calorie-counted regimen, tracked daily on his phone; her old one.
“Yeah.”
“How long’s it been?”
“About six weeks.”
“Em!” she squeals, turning around and lunging at him. So much better than she expected. From what she’s read, most people relapse way more often, especially early on. “That’s amazing!” He mumbles thanks into her elbow and she releases him; the angle was awkward, anyway, with him sitting down and still, despite everything, shorter than her. “But you’re right; I give up. There’s nothing in this wardrobe. And you’re not going as you are.”
“I could just… not go?”
“Absolutely not. Your party tomorrow is going to be Stef’s little kiddie party, version two, with more expensive cake.” Mark’s dad, nominally cleaned up and promoted at work, has been throwing the money around a bit more lately, magnanimously letting Mark off the hook from having to help with rent, and leasing a new and rather ostentatious car. “Okay,” she says, spinning around again and extracting the least awful things from the pile of clean clothes at the bottom of the main shelf, “you can get changed at mine. I have something you can borrow to go with this.” She waves the mid-grey tank top she found at him.
“What? Ess, no; I’m not wearing your clothes.”
She giggles. “I don’t mean a skirt or anything, you perv. I just have a couple of shirts that’ll look nice on you and should go with that tank top; nicer than that bloody hoodie, anyway.”
“Shahida…” he says, unable to mask his exasperation.
“Mark…” she says, matching his tone, and then slaps a hand over her mouth. “Shit. Sorry, Em.” He waves away her apology. She’s still not clear on exactly why he doesn’t like his name — neither’s he, seemingly — but she takes care not to use it anyway.
“I didn’t even know I had this…” he mutters.
“Well, it’s about the least awful thing you own.”
He rolls his eyes, stands up from the chair, which rattles as it pushes away behind him, and accepts the clothes she’s holding out. “I’ll put it on here,” he says, in a tone that dares her to disagree, “and I’ll wear a hoodie to yours. If — and it’s a big if — you have something I like, I’ll wear it.”
Shahida wants to hop on the spot. The boy needs to come out of his shell, and if he’s not going to do it himself, she’ll bloody well yank him out.
She starts sorting through the stack of trousers.
* * *
The tank top she found is heaven only knows how old, and clings uncomfortably to his chest. She told him not to worry: it looks good and it’s not actually all that tight; he’s just been wearing clothes that are two sizes too large for so long he’s forgotten how it feels to wear something that fits.
Still, he pulled his hoodie back on for the taxi ride to her place. He agreed to the trousers she picked out, and to wear the tank top, and all the time she looked so happy, so pleased with his compliance that he swallowed his objections and smiled for her.
It’s been so fucking hard to be around her lately. With every passing year she’s more beautiful, more driven, quicker and funnier and sharper and so much more clever, and he’s… stuck. Unchanging by design. A bundle of failing coping mechanisms in clothes that don’t fit. And he lied: it’s been just a week since he last purged. An achievement, absolutely, even though the food he chokes down keeps him awake at night, and when eventually he does fall asleep it finds him there, too, in nightmares of a thickening body, of becoming tall, of filling out.
He grew over an inch in the last year alone. It’s like puberty is finally catching up with him, inflicting wound after wound, tearing at his flesh, and with every month it becomes harder to resist the urge to starve himself until there’s nothing left.
He has other things he can do. He works weekends and one night at the Beachway. On the tills, rather than the position at Cycling he applied for, because there was a shortage of cashiers, and because learning to repair the bikes had been easy but lifting them onto the clamp had been almost impossible. Owen, the dickhead from Automotive, likes to call him one of the ‘checkout girls’, and the derision in his voice is one of the many things that drives him, after his shifts and on his weekend lunch breaks, to hide out in the men’s staff toilets and hurt himself.
He shouldn’t purge any more, and he doesn’t cut. But no-one questions bruises. Even if Shahida raised an eyebrow at the discolouration on his upper arm and his thigh. He could have gotten those anywhere. He could have fallen. All very explicable.
She asked him to tell her everything and he promised he would, and he lies.
“So?” she says, spreading her hands out in front of her, gesturing at the shirts she’s lined up on her bed like game show prizes.
“Uh…” He doesn’t know how to have an opinion on this. He doesn’t even really know why he agreed to this in the first place, why he didn’t insist on keeping his hoodie on, except she smiled when she asked, and despite the static hiss in his ears and the light-headedness that comes on when he’s around her, he wants to please her more than anything. “Maybe you should choose.”
She hums to herself, looks from Mark to the shirts a couple of times, and mumbles, “Blonde hair, blue eyes, very pale skin…” before yanking a checked shirt off the bed and throwing it at him. “That one,” she says.
He catches it. “It won’t be too small?” She’s so graceful, so thin, and he’s—
“Em,” she says sharply. “I’m bigger than you! In every direction,” she adds, grinning and jutting her chest out, and giggling when he looks away and busies himself with putting it on. She’s been doing that more lately, emphasising the way her body’s developed, and it’s one of the most difficult things to bear.
The shirt’s comfortable, with a soft lining that feels wonderful against the skin on his arms and shoulders. He dithers with it, unsure whether to wear it open or button it up, but before he can make up his mind, Shahida bats his hands away.
“Wear it like that,” she says, fluffing it out and then standing back to take a look at her handiwork. She’s frowning as she looks him up and down and Mark wants to ask what’s wrong, and then it’s too late because she’s right back in his face again, standing way too close and grinning all the while, and he freezes because she’s right there and he should say something! And then she tugs at his hair, pulls out the rubber band keeping it in a short ponytail, and starts brushing it with her fingers.
“Um,” he says, “Shy?”
“Yes?” Too innocent.
“Why?”
“Because!” she says, and sticks her tongue out at him. He glares at her but she just laughs and says, “I wanted to see what it’d look like. You keep your hair long but you always just tie it back and shove it into your hood. And — wow! — what a waste!”
She steps around him, takes him by the elbows, turns him slowly until he’s facing the full-length mirror on the back of her door, the one he’s been avoiding. He feels her satisfaction when he takes a sharp breath, but whatever she thinks he’s feeling, he wishes she’d tell him, so he could have something to guide his own response; the experience of seeing himself in that moment is just… baffling.
He doesn’t look like himself. She’s teased out his hair so it falls around his face, and with the open shirt and the high-necked tank top underneath, worn over slightly oversized trousers, he looks—
Fuck. No. No, no, no. He’s too veiny; he’s too tall; he’s too angular; he’s too broken. The image in the mirror comes together again, reassembles itself into him, into his flaws, into his sharp edges, into all the pieces that are pressed together wrong, and his stomach heaves and the stupid hot dog and the sickly slice of cake force their way up into his mouth.
* * *
He’s hugging his belly again and looking around nervously as they cross from Six Oaks Estate onto Rachel’s road, appallingly named The Dell, and she wants to grab his hands, pry them away from his body and put them around hers. But she doesn’t, because he still stiffens when she touches him, and if she really is going to get him out of his shell it’s going to have to be gently, one step at a time, and always leaving him the option to step back, should he need to. Resolutions to be firm and decisive always seem to crumble when he gets that look on his face.
But he did agree to keep the shirt on rather than go back to hiding in the hoodie. And it was definitely just nerves that made him rush to her ensuite to throw up. Nerves and that rich death-by-chocolate cake on a near-empty stomach. Still, it had been unsettling to help him deal with the aftermath: they followed his rules together, finding mouthwash in her parents’ bathroom and cereal bars in the pantry; he even ate a couple of slices of toast, complete with peanut butter, to line his stomach.
And wow, he looks nice, with his hair down and with the shirt open. He looks healthier, more filled-out than usual; despite his protests and especially in combination with the shirt, the material of the tank top is thick enough to imply a slightly bulkier upper body; if she could get one thing through his skull it would be that loose clothing can be more revealing than clothing that fits, given that what he’s trying to hide is just how underweight he is. He still looks thin, sure, but the shirt sleeves cover his narrow wrists and the bases of his palms, leaving only his slender fingers on show, and the slightly oversized jeans lend his lower half a little weight. He’s never looked so good, so much so that when he glances at her for reassurance she finds herself biting her lip as she nods.
She’s such a cliché. Confident and outspoken girl, attracted to boy, becomes suddenly shy and flirty. What’s next? Will she start laughing too loud at his worst jokes? Already she keeps making mistakes around him, keeps speaking before she’s quite thought through what she wants to say — keeps doing stupid shit, like encouraging him to eat the bloody birthday cake that he threw up in her bathroom — and as someone who’s always thought of herself as being pretty together and in control, it’s distressing to realise that all it takes is one pretty boy (one pretty boy she’s known since they were both barely teenagers, one pretty boy she’s grown into adulthood alongside, one pretty boy who’s always needed her) to go to pieces.
“Nearly there?” he asks, his voice pleasingly steady.
“Nearly there,” she says, holding out a hand for him to take. He does so, and to disguise her delight she points with the other hand to the house on the end of the cul-de-sac. “That’s Rach’s house. Chez Gray.”
He giggles and squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back and thinks in her most private mind, What if tonight’s the night?
Rachel’s house is unusual for the area. If Amy’s house is the blueprint for most of the faux-Tudor piles in the surrounding streets and Shahida’s house is a perfect exemplar, Rachel’s is the odd one out. Another place that predates the estates, the Grays’ house has been extended in all directions, embedding the farmhouse it once was inside a large and lazy capital L, with a two-storey main building facing the road and, trailing into the back garden, a single-storey tail which once had been stables and other associated outbuildings but which now is a contiguous and grandly high-ceilinged brace of rooms with the original timber intact. Shahida’s been here many times over the years, and leads Mark around the side of the house and into the garden, where the party’s still getting started. The rooms on the rear extension have all had their double doors propped open — with the exception of Rachel’s bedroom suite, which will no doubt be locked up tight — and the kitchen and hall of the main building are both also directly accessible.
“Does everyone have a massive house except me?” Mark whispers.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Shy!” Rachel shouts, and they both look over to see her advancing on them from the kitchen. She’s cut her hair short — she’s been threatening it — and she’s dressed similarly to Mark, except her shirt’s tied around her waist. She’s pink-cheeked, like she’s already been drinking. “Heeeeey,” she says, as they meet by one of the wooden benches in the middle of the garden, and Shahida experimentally smells her breath when they hug; yes, she’s already started. “And hey, Ems,” Rach adds, pulling Mark into the hug. “You look really nice.”
Rach and Amy have both in the past year picked up on Shahida’s preferred nickname for him, and both have modified it appropriately. Mark, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind, which is a relief, because redirecting Amy in particular from a nickname she’s grown fond of would be an effort doomed to failure.
“Hi, Rach,” he says. “I like the hair.”
“I know, right?” Rachel breaks the hug and runs a hand through it. “I’m fucking hot, yes?” Shahida smothers a laugh and Mark, clearly struggling with how to respond, merely nods. “Yeah, well,” Rachel says, flicking at Mark’s hair, “so are you. Come inside! Amy’s still getting ready upstairs.”
‘Upstairs’ means Rachel’s second bedroom. Technically her first, but she colonised the guest bedroom in the downstairs extension as soon as Tom, her older brother, moved out. He’d been rather annoyed to return from university to find all his things crammed into the comparatively small spare bedroom; even more annoyed to find his sister had stolen his treadmill and free weights. ‘But look at these guns,’ was not, he insisted, adequate justification for theft.
“Birthday boy!” Amy squeals, when they bundle through the door into Rachel’s second bedroom. Mark’s spared a hug because she’s still finalising her makeup, perched on a plush little stool at Rachel’s vanity, and it’s probably a good thing, because every time Shahida looks at him he seems more overwhelmed. He suffers through a little more enthusiasm from Rachel and Amy before Shahida takes him by the sleeve back out into the hall.
“How are you doing?” she asks. “I know I dragged you here, and I want you to have fun, but say the word and we go. Back to mine. Or back to yours. Or anywhere.”
He shakes his head, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m okay,” he says, with more confidence than Shahida expected. “It’s a nice change, you know? And I haven’t seen much of you — any of you — in a while.” He smiles, and relaxes his shoulders. “I’ve missed you. I’m glad to be here. It’s good. It’s fine.”
“Good,” Shahida says, and before she can talk herself out of it she leans over and kisses him quickly on the cheek. He doesn’t seem put out, he doesn’t stiffen up and he doesn’t recoil; and why would he? It was just the sort of kiss she might give Amy or Rach. Just a kiss between friends. “Love you.”
* * *
There are more people here than just Rach’s younger brother’s friends, Shahida knows that much, and she wonders if word got around at the kid’s school. But it’s nice; it lends the party a more anonymous feel. Amy and Rach are leading them both down the stairs and straight to the kitchen; Rach’s losing her buzz and Amy’s looking to find one.
“We have lager,” Rachel says, walking backwards and counting on her fingers, “and cocktail tins—” she makes a face; not her favourite, “—and a whole load of different types of chemically fruity things. All alcoholic, naturally. Shy? Ems? Better make your choice now, because we’re going to jump the queue.”
“I could drink a chemical fruit thing,” Mark says.
“Boom,” Rachel says. “Done. Good. Shy? Amy?”
“Fruit thing,” Amy says.
“She’s more drunk already than I thought,” Shahida whispers to Mark, and he nudges her with an elbow in response.
Well. That’s more voluntary physical contact than she usually gets out of him!
Rach leads them past a queue of younger teenagers — some of whom complain until she points out that she lives here, she’s bigger than them and she’s probably much meaner, too — and up to her older brother, Tom, who is leaning against the counter while one of his friends guards the fridge.
“Hey, Tommy,” Amy says, stepping in front of Rachel with a grin. “What are the rules?”
“Four for you.”
She puts a hand on his, linking their fingers. Amy’s always had a thing for Tom; Shahida’s never seen the appeal. “How about an extra drink or two? You’d look the other way, just once, for an old flame, right?”
Tom pushes her hand away. “We kissed once,” he says flatly.
“But it was so good,” she insists, pressing herself against him. “I still think about it.”
“Once,” he repeats. “And then,” he adds loudly, for the benefit of the watching teenagers, “someone told me how old she really was.”
Amy plays this game with him every time, dancing around his discomfort. Shahida privately thinks it’s in bad taste, but Tom seems to handle her well enough. Perhaps he knows she and Rach will step in if Amy ever tries to take it beyond a joke. Perhaps he knows he could pick her up and without much issue carry her bodily to somewhere she can take a cold shower.
“I’m old enough!” Amy insists, attempting a sultry expression. “Three years is nothing.”
Tom brings their hands together so he can unpick her fingers from his, one at a time. “It’s more like four years, and it was a lot when I was almost nineteen and you were fifteen—” Amy’s smile widens as he pauses, “—and it’s just as much now.”
“If you’re not careful,” Amy stage-whispers, standing on tiptoes to be closer to his face, “you’ll lose your chance with me.”
Tom pushes her back down onto her heels, hands on her shoulders. “I’ll find a way to live with it.”
“Well, fine,” Amy play-pouts. “I have a boyfriend now, anyway.” It’s a lie; Amy barely knows any boys except Mark and that dickhead Charles Carstairs. The perils of attending a girls-only school. Not that Shahida minds, particularly.
Tom’s smile broadens. “Good for you! Now you definitely get only four drinks.”
“Bastard!” Amy laughs.
“Give Greg over there your wrist so he can stamp it, and take your pick.” He points to where his friend is guarding the fridge. “And don’t flirt with him,” he adds.
Amy wiggles her bottom at him as she walks away. “No promises!” she calls.
“Amy,” Shahida says, as they link up again, “that was just sad.”
“Yeah, mate,” Rachel says, “have some dignity.”
“Oh, lighten up,” Amy says, and presents her forearm to Greg. She waves her other hand, and, eventually getting the message, Shahida, Rachel and Mark raise their wrists. Shahida checks, and finds Mark’s got his other wrist, the one with the ribbon still wrapped around it, worse for wear but carefully washed, held behind his back.
“Hi, girls,” Greg says, and then stands up straighter to yell over their heads. “Hey, Tom! How old are they?”
Tom points at each of them in turn. “Seventeen. Seventeen. Seventeen. But her, I don’t know.”
There’s a moment’s confusion and then Shahida, not entirely sure she’s thought this through thoroughly enough but convinced she has a better response ready than anyone else, puts a hand on Mark’s shoulder and says, “Seventeen tomorrow. It’s why we’re crashing; her actual birthday’s going to be boring.”
Mark shoots her a look; Shahida rolls her eyes, hoping the message gets across: Just go along with it. Better to be mistaken for a girl in front of two guys he’ll probably never see again than make a scene in front of a kitchen full of people.
He shrugs.
“Okay,” Greg says. “That’s fair. Four all round.” He picks up a white stamp from the sideboard, presses it once against each of their wrists, and opens the fridge. Amy lunges inside, grabs four bottles in assorted colours, and leads Amy, Shahida and Mark out of the kitchen, pausing to make a kissy face at Tom, who pretends to dodge it.
“You girls keep an eye on Amy!” he says.
“We will!” Rachel shouts, as they exit through the double doors into the garden.
* * *
A wall of heat hits them as they step out into the garden, and it’s briefly confusing until Mark spots the bonfire someone’s been building out at the end of the garden. He remembers Rachel saying something about there being a large shed full of timber, garden trash and debris from the orchard, all of which build up and need periodically to be burned. He looks down the length of the garden, which meanders off into the dusk and terminates in a fence dotted with gates. It certainly looks like a garden that could plausibly connect to an orchard.
“Hey,” Shahida says, as they walk in formation down the garden, past where someone’s setting up a pair of speakers on a wooden table, “Em, are you okay?”
“Um, yes?” he says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“He thought you were a girl!” Rachel whispers.
“And Shahida covered for you!” Amy says.
He shrugs. “It happens. Why do you think I tie my hair up?”
It’s not the reason, actually, and it doesn’t happen all that often, not any more, as a genuine mistake and not just Owen from Automotive being an arsehole, not since the growth spurt made him almost one-seventy-one centimetres. Besides, he’s generally bundled up in hoodies and padded with extra t-shirts, with his hair tied up at the nape of his neck; for someone of such indeterminate shape, gender is uncertain, and thus defaults in most people’s minds to man.
“You don’t mind?” Shahida says.
“Not really?” Not entirely true. It makes him feel obscurely ugly whenever it happens, which is why he tries to avoid it, but it doesn’t insult him, which is what she’s probably getting at. “I have my hair down and it’s not exactly lit up in that kitchen; I’m also dressed exactly like Rachel. I wasn’t surprised. In those situations I mostly just try not to say anything.”
“Jesus, Em,” Amy says.
“You really don’t mind?” Rachel asks. As one, they’ve stopped by one of the benches, close enough to the fire to feel the warmth but not choke on the smoke, close enough to the speakers to hear the music but not be deafened.
Their insistence on talking about it is starting to make him feel uncomfortable, and he’s about to say something when Shahida catches his eye and takes over the conversation, deflecting onto the story of how Amy first met Rachel’s older brother, how she added years to her age with makeup and low lights and a lot of lying, how when he found out he simply got up and walked away from her, returning to his friends.
“It was only one kiss,” Amy whines.
“Friends don’t make friends’ brothers into cradle snatchers,” Rachel says. “And if you didn’t keep flirting with him whenever he comes home, we wouldn’t bug you about it.”
“Whatever. I’ll get him sooner or later. When does a three-year age gap—”
“—it’s four years, Amy—”
“—become not weird any more? When I’m eighteen?”
“Twenty,” Rachel says. “At least.”
“Twenty?” Amy fake gasps. “I can’t wait that long, Rach! He might find someone!”
“Which is a good thing,” Shahida says. “You want him to sit around lonely for four years, waiting for you? Anyway, by then you’ll have realised it’s just a little baby crush on someone you barely know.”
Amy pokes at her. “Hey! I know him fine.”
“Oh yeah?” Rachel says. “What’s his favourite food?”
“Me!”
Mark laughs. The alcohol’s settling in his belly, warming him, and as the mild evening sets in he welcomes it. He even agrees to go back to the kitchen with Shahida and Amy for more rounds of drinks, and doesn’t complain when Amy insists on calling him ’Emily’ in front of Rachel’s brother and his friend. Shahida teases his hair out even more, tries to give it volume, and sprays it to hold it in place. He draws the line, though, at letting them put makeup on him and having him try to seduce Greg, but by that point he’s drunk enough to find anything funny — three colourful bottles on a near-empty stomach — and he, Shahida and Amy collapse in giggles at the thought of it when they get back to the table Rachel’s grudgingly holding for them.
A few more of Tom’s friends have started to trickle in by this point, and the music’s been turned up, and Mark’s had enough to drink that when Shahida takes him carefully by the hand and leads him shyly farther up the garden, closer to the music, he leans into her and they dance, lazily and hopelessly out of time with the music, lost in their own world together.
* * *
The stamp system breaks down, as it was always going to, and no amount of preparation — stocking the fridge with (X multiplied by Y) plus Z bottles and no more, where X is the anticipated number of attendees, Y is the anticipated average permitted consumption (Shahida would guess at a value of no more than 3.4, given that the age spread at the party is heavily biased in favour of Rach’s little brother’s friends) and Z is an amount sufficient to guarantee enough slack to account for unplanned guests, such as Shahida and Mark; say, forty — could have prevented all the little squirts from drinking more than they were supposed to. Rachel, spotting with a practised eye the exact moment her older brother’s vigilance breaks down, recruits Amy to help her liberate another three bottles each before anarchy seriously ensues, spiriting them away to the mini fridge in Rach’s downstairs kitchenette and relocking the door.
Anarchy, it turns out, consists mostly of the handful of boys who drank more than their tolerance throwing up in bushes, on benches, and into the dying embers of the bonfire, Amy jeering at the lightweight kids from her vantage point behind the CD player she’s taken over, and Mark lying on his back on a nearby picnic table, singing along to the music in a voice Shahida could listen to for as long as he has breath.
Eventually the party empties out, with most of the boys setting up camp in a forest of sleeping bags in the rec room on the other side of the house. Rachel, who out of all the people who live here is definitely the most together, organises a few of them to stamp on the embers before they retire, and hauls a tarp out from the shed to cover the music system. And then the four of them are dragging each other sleepily into Rach’s downstairs bedroom and cracking open a bottle each from the supply stashed barely an hour earlier.
Shahida’s been here before, many times, but Mark hasn’t, and Rachel shows him her treasures: not just the exercise equipment she liberated from her brother, but a huge DVD and VHS library, two televisions — a modern kind with a flat screen and an old and terrifyingly heavy tube TV — and a handful of old game consoles.
“Before it was Tom’s room it was Dad’s playroom,” she says, “and I kept everything.” She shuffles through NES cartridges and selects one, holding it out to Mark. “Here; blow.”
“Why?”
“Have you never used an old game cart?” she asks. He shakes his head, frowning, and she giggles. “You have to blow on the contacts before you play.”
“It’s lucky,” Amy says. She’s pulling the couch at the end of the room apart and arranging cushions on the floor.
“It’s to clean it.”
“It’s a myth,” Shahida says, “and it’s bad for the cartridge. I looked it up.”
Rachel ignores her. “Blow!” she insists, and Mark complies, still confused, blowing on the cartridge like it’s a birthday cake. She performs the best version of a chivalric bow she can while crouching on the carpet, and rams the cart into the NES; a Kirby game boots up on the old TV, bathing the four of them in flickering light.
Shahida, sitting heavily on one of the couch cushions and shuffling closer to Mark, ignores the game, ignores Rachel and Amy teaching it to him — “It’s the perfect introduction to platform games; you can’t die! You just float over everything!” — and watches him instead, watches his careful fingers find a comfortable way to hold the angular NES controller, watches, fascinated, as the tendons in his wrists react to his button presses. The borrowed shirt’s been falling off his shoulders all night, and in response he’s pushed up the sleeves, which hasn’t helped, and now she can see his forearms almost up to the elbow and his shoulder where it’s loose. She smothers a laugh, feeling like a prudish Victorian, obsessed with a few visible inches of ankle, but she can’t stop looking. At some point he borrowed a hair tie from someone and put his hair up, but it’s not in the messy, deliberately unshowy ponytail he usually wears; it’s high up, pulling most of his hair back from his face but leaving a few locks loose. She wonders who did that. Not him, surely? Amy, almost definitely.
He’s beautiful. It’s struck her before, repeatedly over the years, but never so powerfully. He’s so fucking beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful person she’s ever seen.
His Kirby falls out of the level.
“How are you bad at Kirby?” Amy demands. “How is anyone?” She attacks him with a pillow and he acts to rescue his half-finished bottle before it spills and the moment’s gone, and yet Shahida can’t stop thinking about it, not even after Rach hands her the controller and Mark settles down with his head by her feet and his legs all curled up and she can feel his breath on her calves, and she turns out to be terrible at Kirby, too.
Amy calls him Emily a couple of times, like she did in the kitchen, to get a reaction, but she stops when he doesn’t give it to her, and Shahida wonders why he doesn’t protest until he needs help to stand and get to the ensuite so he can pee and she realises just how drunk he is. She turns her back while he sits on the toilet and berates herself for missing the obvious: yes, he’s at least a bottle behind the rest of them, but it’s not like he’s had much to eat at all and he’s probably unused to alcohol. She, Amy and Rach are always around each other’s places, always sneaking bottles out of various pantries and spending cold suburban nights giggling drunkenly in front of terrible movies, and Amy’s family in particular crack open a bottle of wine with practically every meal, but Mark’s not only a year behind them at school, despite being only six months younger than Shahida — your school year, she’s noticed, has more influence on the perception of your maturity than your age — he also spends most of his time busy: running what remains of his family, keeping the house clean, doing the laundry; working or babysitting or studying or attending school; squeezing in time with Shahida and Stef in the hours he has free. He simply hasn’t had the opportunity to get acclimated to alcohol.
She helps him up off the toilet and they wash up together.
Rach gets the message with one look at him and starts pulling ingredients out of cupboards in the kitchenette, and before long they’re all — peer pressure — eating soft cheese sandwiches. Bread’s good; it’ll help soak up the alcohol. He rather spoils it by cracking open another bottle straight after, but at least he has something more in his stomach now.
When they’re flagging badly and no longer able to play even the simplest games, Rach and Amy unpack extra sheets and pillows and rearrange the floor cushions into a makeshift mattress for the two of them. Shahida and Mark take the bed, Shahida with her back to the wall, and Rach puts on a DVD, something dumb, at an almost inaudible volume.
The girls murmur to each other while Mark sleeps.
Later, when Amy and Rach are both snoring quietly, wrapped around each other the way they have at sleepovers since they were kids, and Shahida’s reading a book on her phone, Mark snorts, wakes himself, and rolls over in the bed.
He’s so close to her.
“I forgot to say,” she whispers. “Happy birthday.”
“Hmm?”
“It was midnight hours ago. Welcome to being seventeen.”
He smiles the loose smile of the still drunk and presses a hand to his mouth a moment later to cover his laugh so he doesn’t wake the girls, and the proximity of him, his levity, his openness, it’s all so overwhelming. He catches her eye and looks away, blushing, still quietly laughing. She’s never seen him like this, and she wants nothing more than to give him this calm, this joy, this freedom every night of his life from now on.
She was wrong before. Now, with his hair loose and messy from the pillow, with the soft light from the lamp playing across his face, and with just the tank top on and with one of its shoulder straps escaping to the side, he’s the most beautiful person she’s ever seen.
She kisses him.
And wonders for a moment, a horrifying, endless moment, if she’s just screwed everything up, but then he returns her kiss and it’s sloppy but it’s wonderful. She finds the small of his back under the covers and pulls him closer, presses their bodies together, and he responds with a hand on her cheek and another kiss, one that he initiates this time, showing her that, yes, he chooses this, too. His other hand on her back; her other hand under his top, moving upwards, tracing his taut belly, suddenly still, and his smooth chest—
Mark lunges away from her. Falls out of bed. Barely misses landing on Amy, who jerks up and pulls away from him. She’s looking at him, betrayed, like he’s done something, and Shahida wants to say he hasn’t, he’s fine, they were just kissing, but his eyes are wide and his lip is bleeding and she replays the last few moments and realises that when she put her hand under his top he froze, froze the way he used to when she hugged him, when she got too close.
He’s scared. No, not scared. He’s hurting, and not from when he bit through his lip; it’s like he’s hurting all over, like every old wound opened up at once. He turns away, wraps himself in the shirt, covers himself. He can’t look at her, and foolishly she reaches out for him.
He recoils, bolts for the door, and by the time she’s disentangled herself from the sheets, he’s gone.
2012
Almost six months. That’s how long it’s been since the party, since he ran away from her, since her horrible, stupid mistake. She showed up at his front door the next day, to return the phone he left at Rachel’s, to apologise, to see him, and his little brother turned her away.
“Sorry,” Russ had said, suddenly grown up and serious, “but he’s upset. Really bad. And Mum says, when someone’s so upset they can barely talk, you drop everything and you keep them safe.”
“But—”
“He’s been like this before.”
“Russ—”
“He’ll let you know when he’s ready to talk.”
He never did.
Amy and Rachel have both been by a couple of times to talk to him, and either they’ve missed him or he’s pretended not to be home because they came up empty. So here she is, against his wishes — or his wishes as expressed by his little brother — to try again.
She doesn’t even know if he’s going to be home. But it’s the start of the summer holidays; his dad will be at work and Russ will still be at school. He probably won’t have got his summer hours at work yet; he should be home.
Shahida worries at her lip, and then stops, wipes her mouth dry. He bit through his lip that night, trying to control himself. Trying not to react. Because she touched him. The image won’t leave her.
She rings the bell. Same old tune. But when Mark opens the door she can’t control her reaction. He’s thin again. Really thin, like he used to be. The dark circles are back under his eyes, his cheeks are too sharp, his knuckles are too taut, and his belly’s visibly emaciated even under the loose shirt he wears.
“Hi, Shahida,” he says. He sounds so tired.
“Hi, Em.”
He stands aside to let her in. “Mark is fine.”
Inside the house is the same as it was when she last saw it, and that feels perversely like a violation; it should be a wreck, it should reflect his deterioration! But she sees why when he leads her into the kitchen: there’s a pair of yellow gloves on the edge of the sink, and dishes soaking. He’s still cleaning. He’s wasting away and he’s still fucking cleaning.
“Tea?” he says.
“Um. What? Oh. Shit. Yes, please.”
She’s silent while he runs through the tea ritual, passing him a pair of mugs from the cupboard over the kettle, pointing when he holds up the box of breakfast tea and the box of Earl Grey.
Her mug gets milk, his doesn’t.
“You didn’t reply to my texts,” she says, walking into the main room and expecting him to follow.
“No. Sorry.”
She sits down on the armchair, the one facing the biggest couch, so he doesn’t feel like he has to sit next to her. Again, from this vantage, the place is unchanged, like the whole house has been excavated from her dreams; except for Mark, gaunt, enervated, no longer himself, taken from her nightmares.
“I’m sorry,” she says, concentrating very hard on the ugly carpet. “I made you come to that party, I made you wear different clothes, I kissed you—”
“Shahida,” he says sharply. He breathes deeply, closes his eyes, puts his mug down on the table, clasps his hands together. When he speaks again, it’s in the same monotone as before. Shahida would prefer he yell at her. “You did nothing wrong. You gave me a wonderful night. It was me who wrecked it. Because I wasn’t in control of my shit.”
“And you are now?”
“Yes.”
“Does that mean you’ll start talking to me again?”
“No,” he says. “Sorry.” It could be a recording of the same words he said earlier; he’s on a loop. How can she break through to him?
“Em—”
“It’s Mark.”
“Whatever!” she snaps, and takes it back with a gasp. “Shit. Sorry. I’m just… You’re purging again, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got it under control.”
“Will you ever talk to me again?”
“Maybe.” He reaches for his mug, sips at his black tea.
“I’m worried about you,” she says.
“You don’t need to. Really. I promise. You don’t need to worry. I just need time.”
“Time,” Shahida says, but she can’t remember what she was going to say next, because he’s drinking his tea again, and raising the mug pulls back the sleeves of his shirt, exposes his forearms, and even if he still wore the ribbon it wouldn’t have been able to hide the second scar on his wrist, slashed scarlet through the first, a crucifix in torn skin.
It has a twin on his other wrist.
She has to get out. She has to get out. Just looking at him is painful now, and in his automaton movements and controlled speech there’s nothing left of the boy she loves. Nothing left of the boy she hurt, over and over again, with her idiot insistence on helping him her way, bringing him into her world, when she should have tried harder to step into his, tried to understand him on his terms.
She kissed him and she ended him.
She’s stammering, she realises, and he’s watching her blankly.
“Em— Mark,” she says, swallowing to take control of her voice, “I should go. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have disturbed you. I should go. Just. Call me. Or text me. Or email me or whatever. When you’re ready. When you want to talk. I’ll be there. I promise.” She’s at the front door and he’s halfway out of his seat, paused, waiting to see what she’ll do, if she’s really going to go, if she’s really going to hurt him and run from him.
What’s left of him in there? Is there anything?
“Forgive me,” he says, sounding like a shadow of himself, and she almost runs from the house, with its awful stippled cream walls and its threadbare carpet and the injured boy she failed to help. She ducks into the alleyway he showed her once, a place overlooked by no-one, the only place she can be properly alone until she gets back to her room, and kicks at the wooden fence until her feet hurt.
2012 November 4
Sunday
It’s all too much.
He didn’t mean to push that girl.
Didn’t even know she was there.
Rushing like always.
Staying up too late and rising too early and drinking too much and showing up late to lectures.
Like always.
And she looked at him like he meant to do it.
And she shouted at him and for the briefest moment he wanted to tell her it wasn’t fair.
Bullshit.
You know what wouldn’t have been fair?
If she’d fallen.
If she’d died because of his carelessness.
He deserved every word of her anger.
He should have looked where he was going.
Should have thought.
But he doesn’t think.
Never does.
Never thinks; still makes it all about him, all the time.
She was just the latest to get hurt.
Well.
She’ll be the last.
He hurt Shahida.
Amy.
Rachel.
Stopped talking to Stef.
And then it was just him and Russ until Russ stopped talking to him.
Shouldn’t have screamed at him that Mum died years ago.
Shouldn’t have begged him to stop talking about her like she’s alive.
Shouldn’t have shouldn’t have shouldn’t have.
His little brother.
Wounded and still walking for so many years.
And he didn’t even see it.
So self-absorbed.
So self-obsessed.
So broken.
Selfish, stupid, short-sighted Mark.
Yeah.
The name’s a fucking bomb.
The name and everything that goes with it.
It’s a bomb and tonight it goes off.
No.
Not a bomb.
Never again a bomb.
Tonight he goes, but he goes quietly.
Too late.
Too late not to have hurt so many people.
But better now.
So he can’t hurt anyone else.
Should have walked onto the railway tracks.
Should have cut deeper.
Should have swallowed those pills and not spat them out.
Should have pitched over the railings.
Can’t hurt people if you’re not around.
Stupid.
Always a reason.
Always a reason to delay the inevitable.
No such thing as a clean death.
Too many people to hurt.
Well.
No-one left now.
Just him.
Just Mark.
* * *
The girl’s been there all night. The same one who’s been in the corner of his vision for weeks. The same one who interviewed him when he first started at Saints, who seemed interested. He shut her down, of course; the last thing anyone needed was to be interested in him.
His new start hadn’t been going all that well.
Abigail. That’s her name. She’s around campus a lot, and he goes out to this shitty club in town and there she is again, like she’s following him, but when he decides to confront her she’s gone.
Doesn’t matter. It’ll all be academic soon.
He doesn’t bother collecting his coat — why would he need it, where he’s going? — but when he leaves the club she’s there, on the pavement, waiting for him, wrapped up in a parka and with his coat folded over her forearms. She holds it out for him and he puts it on.
“Are you drunk?” she asks.
“Not really.”
“High?”
“No.”
“Would you like to come with me?”
“Why?”
“Because, Mark, I think I can help you.”
He considers just walking away, going to the river like he planned, but what can possibly happen? If she thinks she can help him, she’s welcome to try; Shahida couldn’t, and he certainly couldn’t help himself, but he’s the very definition of someone with nothing to lose. Even if this is a kidnapping, even if she’s taking him somewhere to kill him, at least he won’t die alone.
He follows her up the hill, to the grounds of Almsworth cathedral. It’s some ridiculous hour of the morning so obviously the gates are locked, but she knows a place where the trees have warped the fence enough that if you bend the branches aside you can get through. She holds them up for him; he shrugs and ducks through the hole. She takes him to a bench at the back of the grounds which overlooks another part of the city, away from the major built-up areas, where terraced houses describe interlocking semicircles, like a chain made from brick and pottery and thrown at the hillside. It’s almost like looking at home.
“It’s pretty up here,” she says.
“Cold, too.” He’s shivering inside his coat.
“Do you remember me?”
He nods. She’d be memorable even if he hadn’t kept seeing her lately; she’s beautiful. “Abigail,” he says.
“Abby,” she says. “Abby Meyer.”
He watches their breath mist and combine in front of them, watches it temporarily haze out the view of the city. “Why are we here, Abby?”
“I can help you. Like I said. I’ve been keeping half an eye on you, Mark, since we met; since the interview. Because I have connections to an organisation that helps people, and you… you seem very much like you need help.”
“What kind of organisation? What kind of help?”
She doesn’t answer straight away. She leans back on the bench instead, smiles at him. “They helped me,” she says. “I was a lot like you. Angry. Lost. Alone. And alone because I’d made myself alone, because I’d made mistakes and dealt with them poorly. No friends left, and I didn’t feel like I could ever face my family again. I was just marking off time on the calendar, waiting for the day it all got too much and I either took myself out, or did something stupid enough that someone else did it for me.”
“What changed?” he asks.
“The sisters found me.”
“The sisters? Are you a nun?”
She laughs. “Emphatically not.”
“Then what are you? What’s this organisation? Who are the sisters?”
She reaches out for his hand, and he lets her take it. “I can take you to a place,” she says, “where you can change. Grow. The same way I did. All the holes in you, Mark, all the missing pieces you see when you look at yourself, we can help you fill them in. We can show you a new life.”
“Are you from a cult?”
She pauses for much longer than he likes. “No. We’re not organised around a god, and we don’t have an absolute leader or anything like that. But we do have rules, and we do have secrets. If you come with me you’ll be committing to abide by them and keep them.”
He waits for her explanation to continue; it doesn’t. “That’s all you can give me?”
She looks at him for a long time, the suggestion of a smile on her face. She’s thinking, he can tell, trying to work out what she can say, and he has all night — it makes no real difference if he dies tonight or tomorrow or next week — so he waits quietly for her decision. He watches her in return: she’s beautiful, and the way her jaw moves when she thinks is charming.
“If you come with me,” she says eventually, “you’ll be committing to changing yourself entirely. To becoming someone new. You’ll still be you — we’re not talking brainwashing or anything! — but it’s like you’d be… another version of you. A you with the broken bits mended, or mending.”
“What if I don’t come?” he asks. He doesn’t really mean it, but he wants to test her.
She breathes out heavily. “Some of my sisters — most of them, actually — would force you to come. I don’t want to be like them, even though I understand why they do the things they do. If you say no, I’ll walk away. I’ll leave you up here on this cold bloody bench, even though I’m pretty sure if I do that I’ll never see you again. Except as a face in a newspaper, maybe.”
He nods. What would be the point of denying it?
“You should know,” she says, her voice firming, “that if you decide to come with me, we’ll make you change. It’ll be hard, and sometimes you’ll hate it, and sometimes you’ll hate me, the way I hated my sponsor sometimes.”
“But it works?”
“It worked on me. It worked on my sisters. It works.”
He nods again. She’s still holding his hand, so he stands up, tugs on it. “Where do we go?” he asks.
He has nothing to lose. And if it’s awful, if it doesn’t work, if it’s just more misery upon misery, he can always leave.
2019 December 11
Wednesday
If she didn’t have the scars on her arms, faded almost to nothing but still visible, still perceptible as the slightest of bumps on her skin, if the fingers interlocked with his weren’t almost exactly the same size and shape, if she didn’t speak with absolute conviction, if she hadn’t cried when she described the things that were done to her, Aaron wouldn’t have believed her. Even with everything that’s happened, even with what he’s seen happening to Steph, to himself, to Adam and the others, he wouldn’t have believed her.
But she’s so certain, and she tells him her story in such detail and with such sorrow, that he can’t maintain his scepticism.
Kept in a dungeon, ancestor to this place, and tortured for fun.
They took her from outside her home. On her way back from the fucking shops. Small family, struggling to make ends meet. No bother to anyone. But the police got the son on some petty theft charges, really petty, and he got six weeks in jail after a guilty plea, and he was barely home a week when they took him. When they took her.
They took her and they kept her in the dark and they changed her.
They took her and when she refused to be what they wanted they killed her family.
They took her and she told him everything and he held her as she did, feeling his comfort and company entirely inadequate but all he had to offer. And she smiled and wiped her eyes and thanked him for listening, and he nodded in silence and tried to return her smile, and she kissed him on the cheek. It’s still warm there, he thinks.
She’d been a man, and they took her and changed her and she fought back by choosing to accept it, embracing a womanhood as radical to them as any violence could ever have been.
Who would do something like that to her?
“This is where the lies end, Aaron,” she says. “All of them. And this is where trust starts. Now my secret’s yours to keep.”
It takes him a while to find his voice; he hasn’t spoken in what feels like hours. “I can’t tell anyone?”
She squeezes his hand, lets go, takes a long drink from the bottle of water by the bed. “I can’t stop you. I won’t stop you. But it’s best the other boys learn the truth at their own pace; your timetable is not everyone’s timetable.”
“Does Steph know the truth?” he asks, and she laughs and he wants desperately to disbelieve her story because no-one who laughs like that should be so hurt.
“I said ‘the other boys’, Aaron,” she says. “Unless you think she’s—”
“No.” Maria, Pippa, Monica, Tabby, all of them… And now Steph, too. “No,” he repeats, shaking his head. “She’s… not a boy. Not any more.”
“Are you?”
He snorts at that, holds out his arm as if to inspect it, as if he can find something of use there, not just the afterimages of his imagination, the echoes of the cuts inflicted on Maria by some grinning sadist. And then it hits him; the absurdity.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“The kind you’ll have to answer for yourself,” she says, closing her fingers around his forearm, pressing it down into his lap. She’s being so fucking gentle with him and once again the desire rises to throw it all back at her, to mock her kindness, but such impulses have never helped him.
Wait… Does Maria mean that Steph knows…? “How long has Steph known what I know now?”
Maria nods to herself, like he just passed or failed some test. “She’s being briefed right now,” she says. “Pippa’s with her. By the time you see her next, she’ll know everything you know.”
“Is that because you’ve judged her ready? Or is it because I am, or you think I am, and you know I’ll tell her, no matter what promises I make to you now?” Careful, Aaron; that was a little too honest.
She leans against the wall and he follows her, both of them nesting in the pillows she put in place. “Loneliness kills, Aaron. It’s as true down here as it is up there. So we like to see people form bonds. You and Steph. Will and Adam. Ollie and Raph, sort of, although we’re having to encourage that a bit. Sometimes it’s groups of three or four. Occasionally it’s the whole bloody basement. But mostly it’s twos. So, mostly, you’re briefed in twos.”
“What about Martin?”
“Pamela’s getting close to him at the moment.” She shrugs. “Sometimes it has to be the sponsor; sometimes bonds just don’t form, otherwise.”
“Pamela?”
“His sponsor. Ella.”
“Oh. By bonds, you mean—?”
“Friendships.”
“Right. Friendships.” He kissed her. He fucking kissed her. Yeah, it was intended to be the last action of a dead man, but—
He bursts suddenly into laughter, has to clutch himself to keep from hurting, because it squeezes the breath out of him and pinches at the small of his back, in the sore spot.
It really had been the last action of a man.
“Aaron?” Maria asks, a hand on his knee.
Everything he knows tells him she has to be lying. Everything he knows about her tells him she’s telling the truth.
“You promise you’re not shitting me with this?” he asks.
“I promise. I was like you. Not entirely like you — different selection criteria — but I didn’t choose to be a woman. I, too, had womanhood thrust upon me. Hormonally. Surgically. And… via other methods. Methods we will not be employing.”
There’s only one reasonable question to ask. “Why? If it was such torture, then why continue? Why not just pack up the whole place after you ran this Grandmother bitch out of town? Why do this to Steph? To me?”
“Because it works, Aaron. I was a product of the old regime, yes, but all the other women here, all of them, transitioned under my supervision. All of them were men on destructive paths, all of them too twisted up to change without radical action. All of them happier now than they ever were before.”
“You are absolutely positively definitely shitting me, Maria.” Steph was quite pretty when she got here, now that he looks back with an appropriate eye, and she’s looking better all the time, and from what Maria says they have access to the kinds of surgeries needed to smooth out the little bumps and things that mark her out as someone who spent twenty-one years on the other side of the gender divide. But he’s… him. What seems feasible for Steph is ridiculous the moment he tries to apply it to himself. He is what he’s seen in the mirror, when he cares to look: a boy/man/whatever. No matter what else changes, it’s stamped all the way through him. Indelible. Like a stain.
“I’m not. Ask Pippa.”
“I’m a fucking man. That’s not going away, no matter how many injections you give me, how much you cut off—”
“I’ll help you. Every step, I’ll be here. For the next three years, I’ll be here. I’ll teach you how to walk; I’ll teach you how to talk; I’ll teach you how to dress; I’ll teach you how to live, Aaron. Being a man, in the way you’ve been taught, has done you terrible harm. You can just… leave it behind. Like old clothes.”
“I’m not a girl. I can’t be a girl. Maria, I’m me.” Barely a breath left in him. “I don’t understand how that can change.”
“I’ll look after you. And so will Steph; you know she’ll help you. You can change, Aaron. You can be someone new. We don’t take in people who can’t do it. We don’t.”
“But—”
“The voice inside you,” Maria says, leaning closer, “the one that says you can’t do this, that you’re a man, and men can’t change, men don’t change, that it’s weak and pathetic even to consider it, the voice that’s been telling you that you’re better off dead than as a woman… It’s the same voice that tells you to hit back when you’re hurt, to cause pain to stop feeling it, to isolate yourself instead of seeking help. Has it ever, in your life, been right? Or has it just brought you more misery?”
Well?
Has it?
“Uh…” he says, but he has nothing.
There’s a knock at the door and it swings open almost immediately, and he’s going to protest but it’s just Steph, with Pippa’s thumb on the lock, letting her in. On her face is nothing but concern and, shit, the red cheeks and bloodshot eyes of someone who’s been crying, and he wonders if they’ve told her everything, everything including what he asked of Maria, and he’s afraid she’ll hate him, despise him for almost leaving her alone down here, but she crosses the tiny room with quick steps and before he knows it he’s standing, locked in her embrace, arms all around, and she’s crying again and so’s he, and he knows now that he can’t leave, that he’s missed his chance to end himself, because this girl — yes, this girl — is someone he can’t bear to hurt like that, and damn him for ever considering it.
Maria quietly closes the door on her way out.
2019 December 12
Thursday
It’s long after midnight and she has work in the morning but she can’t sleep. Everything’s running together in her head: from Zach’s breezy attitude at work — and the way he ‘educated’ her about trans issues; the way she had to pretend to know nothing — to the calls from the sponsors and, finally, to Abby. Always Abby.
And before, when she was still Mark, or Em, or Emily, or Stef’s best friend, or Russ’ absent brother, or his mother’s son. When he ran from Shahida after she touched his chest and he felt a new and even more bitter revulsion for his body than he’d ever felt before and couldn’t stop feeling afterwards no matter how much he starved himself, no matter how much he hurt himself. When he lay on his mother’s bed and couldn’t cry as she lay dying. A hundred nights when he walked into the woods or up by the railway tracks or out into the wilderness or along the back roads, most of the time not willing to take into his own hands the responsibility of ending it, but not exactly bothered if he might happen to slip on a log crossing a river or get stuck on the railway tracks or get hit by a car without its lights on.
Abby leading him back down the hill from the cathedral, back to the university. All the way through campus, past the Student Union Bar to that girls’ dorm, the one rumoured to give out the special grants. Through the front doors, through the kitchen and down into the dark while she whispered reassurances and promises that things would get better, as if he wasn’t numb to it all, as if he’d been capable of feeling anything.
She’s got her phone awake with the last call screen open. Abby’s name, Abby’s number. It’s past two in the morning but she could call and Abby would be there for her, the way she always promised. Hers for life, she said.
The first two weeks at Dorley had been bewildering. He came to understand quite quickly what the place was, what it did, and the types of boys it brought in, and he was angry with Abby for days. The boys were hateful and stupid and he dedicated himself to avoiding them.
But then they put him on the estradiol and everything changed.
It was as if a screeching noise he’d been hearing all his life had ceased. As if dust occluding his vision had been washed away. As if limbs made heavy and clumsy by fatigue were suddenly energised and capable. He asked Abby what exactly it was she’d injected him with, and she made him promise secrecy, made him swear on his life, and then she sat him down and explained what it was, what it did, and what effects he could expect.
And Melissa understood.
God, she understood, suddenly and completely.
The anger didn’t go away. It intensified. The idea that this simple chemical was all she’d been missing her entire life, that none of the so-called doctors or mental health professionals or even her friends had ever raised it as so much as a possibility… it was almost too big a failure to comprehend. And the idea that this sudden peace, this ease, was what normal people felt like all the time had been truly staggering.
She’d known a little about trans people. Everyone did. You saw them on TV occasionally; glamorous girls on talk shows having their pasts revealed to titillate the audience. But they never felt real. They never felt like someone you could turn a corner on the street and bump into. Never felt like something she could be.
She turned her anger inward, the way she has since Dad hit her, since she learned never to speak her mind, never to admit her thoughts. The others of her intake decided she was unjustifiably aloof and intensified their verbal attacks on her; the pussy, the emaciated boy who wouldn’t look them in the eye, became the snob, the little prince who thought himself too good for them. The boy who was to become Nell cornered her a few times, never physically hurting her but threatening it, making her aware that he was capable of it, that her every step should be taken with the knowledge that it could end abruptly and in pain. It took until disclosure, until their understanding caught up with hers, for the insults to stop. One of them, months later, even apologised, although most didn’t properly come around until the second year. She remembers Nell waiting for her outside her room, a lengthy apology written on notepaper, and the frustration the new girl had difficulty controlling when Melissa closed the door in her face.
Only Abby came close to understanding her, and even then Melissa kept from her the depths of her relief and the exhilarating highs of the vicious rage that still took her from time to time, made her silent and unmoving. Lying to the people who cared about her was second nature, a habit impossible to break, especially in such an environment. But she was a friend, a confidante, and a lover of terrible old movies. They said they would tell each other everything.
Abby told Melissa everything; Melissa, as was her habit, lied.
The sponsors and the other boys-become-girls read her refusal to engage with the rest of her intake as quiet compliance, which was for a while privately amusing, especially considering the way the others fought amongst themselves. Even after disclosure, even after some of them had been significantly reshaped, still occasionally they would fight and be punished, separated, put in cells or sent to their rooms, and Melissa would return to her own room, to an environment she could control.
Stuck up, snobby little prince.
But she didn’t need them. She didn’t need the other sponsors, either, or the other Sisters. It was deliberate, and better that way: she would keep her head down, learn everything from Dorley there was to learn, and get the hell out. Friends? She could make friends after graduation, back in the real world, away from the madness.
And then she fell in love with Abby.
Abby…
They should never have done anything. But Melissa found herself in the role she finally understood had been Shahida’s, that of the infatuated girl denying her crush. And she resolved it in much the same way: in her second year, in a nicely decorated room on the first floor that was starting to feel almost like home, after an evening spent watching movies and hitting the wine, after shutting the door in Nell’s face and then seeking her out to accept her apology, her hug, her meek little cheek kiss, after the whole damn place seemed to soften around her, she leaned in and kissed her sponsor.
Abby pushed her away. Asked if she was sure. And Melissa, never sure, didn’t answer, leaned in again, kissed her again, took Abby’s hands and placed them on her developing body, writhed under them, kissed her again and again, testing her final hypothesis, waiting for the disgust and the revulsion to take her away from Abby the way they took her from Shahida; they never came. Undeniable confirmation that, yes, this was what she’d been missing. This was who she was.
All her life she’d been a girl and no-one told her. No-one even thought to raise it as a possibility. Sometimes a joke, sometimes a mistake, occasionally an insult; never real. Until Dorley fucking Hall.
Abby tried to put a stop to their relationship the next day, but Melissa pushed. What they had was important, she insisted. Abby said to her one day that she, the older girl, the sponsor, should have said no, and Melissa agreed that she, the younger girl, still becoming a woman, shouldn’t have asked, but neither of them had been strong enough to walk away.
Until Melissa, one day, did.
She moved to Manchester, she got a job. They still saw each other. They were still together, sort of. They were still happy, mostly. And so, obviously, like with everything else, Melissa had to break it. Her obsession, growing in the time they spent apart, that she could have a life completely disconnected from Dorley, that she could be absolutely free, and her suspicion that despite her feelings her love for Abby might have been misplaced, encouraged by the programme, unreal after all, made her tear herself away. First she started seeing other people. Not enough. So, then, disturbed anew by how happy she’d been when Abby last visited, she cut off contact altogether.
Stupid, selfish, short-sighted. Always.
And the other girls she’s dated? Disasters. Mistakes. Always wary of getting close. Too scared of doing something wrong, of being revealed as an unreal girl, a construct. The scars on her labia are so faint now as to be almost invisible but they’re there, and if you know what you’re looking for you might recognise them. Abby’s always insisted they’ll fade to nothingness, like hers, but Melissa’s long since stopped betting on the best outcome.
Fuck.
She turns her phone over and over in her hands, thumb hovering over the call icon.
No, Liss. Leave her be. Haven’t you hurt her enough?
She locks the phone, yanks her laptop’s charging cable out, dumps it onto the bed and logs onto the Dorley intranet. She gets only the graduate version up here, heavily disguised and with very little actual information, but it’s enough. She calls up her intake and laughs when Nell’s first on the list. She’s prettier than she used to be, more put together, and it’s kind of nice to see. It took the girl a long time to get her anger under control.
Melissa used to envy her ability to turn her rage outward, to not have it fester inside.
There’s Autumn, pictured in a formal dress, holding hands with some tuxedoed man and surrounded by beautiful people in beautiful clothes. A charity fundraiser, according to the caption, hosted by someone credited only as ‘Elle’.
And here’s Tash. Name officially shortened from Natasha, pronouns updated to they/them. Like Autumn, they’re pictured with a partner, but the event looks much less reputable; much more fun. Tash had been another quiet one when they’d all been together in the first year, but integrated themselves into the group better than Melissa ever could. Another one to envy.
Ah, she’s next. Melissa. She snorts at the surname ‘Haverford’ the way she always does; it might be hers, officially, but it’s never felt all that comfortable. Mind you, neither did ‘Vogel’ when that was her name. Doomed to fail to fit in wherever she goes.
She scrolls her profile, amused to note that it’s been kept relatively up to date, probably by some duty sponsor doing file maintenance to stave off boredom on the graveyard shift. Her job is noted, but the picture is one from before she left Dorley. Strange that Abby didn’t give them something more recent.
She wonders, suddenly, how Russ and her father are doing, how Stef and Shahida and Amy and Rach are doing, but there’s no way to find that on here; she’d have to call up and get a new secure password — unfeasible for this time in the early morning, or at the very least deeply embarrassing, depending on who’s on duty — or go digging through the packets they still send her, the ones she files straight under the bed.
Never mind. She can satisfy her curiosity in the morning. She scrolls down, finds their names under ‘Pre-Transition Associates’. Shahida and Amy are there, unchanged; Rachel’s got a double-barrelled name now; Russ and Dad, still there. Stef—
Stephanie R. [placeholder surname]
Oh no. Oh fucking no.
It can’t be.
There has to be another explanation!
Would the Stef she knew transition of his own free will? Possibly. But, she realises, ‘placeholder surname’ can mean only one thing: Dorley Hall has him. No-one else has placeholder surnames. No-one else spends three years minimum in limbo, unnamed, unmanned, legally dead.
A quick search doesn’t find any notices of his death or disappearance, so she expands the search parameters, plugs in everything she can think of, every gambit she saw employed in the service of invisibly kidnapping people, and eventually she finds a tweet from someone dated just two months ago, complaining about his roommate leaving suddenly to ‘find himself’. Scrolling up, she finds another tweet from the same man mentioning a Stef, and another, praising his new roommate Stefan for bringing home free cake from work.
They have him.
They have him, they’ve renamed him, and they’re not done with him.
Why didn’t Abby tell her? Probably not her fault. Probably ordered not to. Beatrice can be scary as hell when she wants to be, and the ever-present hints about powerful backers — not to mention the way the washouts just disappear — always made it clear that if Bea asks something of you, you don’t say no.
Shit. Abby. What did she say when Melissa asked how she was? She said she had things to tell her but most of it was classified. Shit. Shit! Was that Abby trying to tell her something? Was it a warning?
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Okay.
December. It’s only December, and this is his first year in the programme. That’s, what, a couple of months on estradiol? And no orchi yet. There’s still time.
Still time for her to go back down there and get him out.
