Precocious Read online

  ‘It doesn’t make a difference,’ you’re saying. ‘Whatever it is you think you can do to me, to us … you can’t, you know. Or you won’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of … this.’ You wave your hand between us. ‘Because it’s Us. And it always will be.’

  And as usual, you don’t have to say any more. I know what Us means, I know what it feels like.

  ‘Believe what you want, but those will be the last words you ever say to me,’ and as I slam the door and go out into the night, I know this will only come true if I do something to make sure of it.

  nineteen

  I had heard about you, of course. You were Alex’s favourite teacher. He talked about you, said you were cool, at a time when everything bored him. Came home and recounted jokes you’d told. He sold the idea of you to me for three years before I even got there, so when I saw your name on the timetable I was given on Day One, I felt pleased.

  Day One, and this new place almost knocked me over with its strangeness, its size, its bustle. There’s not really a way around it, but moving from Top Class to Bottom Year is scary, especially when half of the ‘kids’ around look like adults. I felt small. Laura tells me now that they have days, even weeks, when year six kids can visit for ‘adjustment time’ before they join the ‘big school’. I’d laughed and dismissed it as mollycoddling, but thinking back now, I probably could have done with it.

  Day Two, jostled in the corridor, I dropped my things. I was scrabbling on the floor, picking up the yellow sheets of paper on which were printed my timetable and a map of the school, picking up my pencils and lip balm and hairbrush, when the crowd parted like the red sea and you were kneeling in front of me.

  ‘It gets easier, don’t worry,’ you said, and you smiled, and winked, and then you got up and were gone.

  I didn’t know it was you, of course, in that instant; I thought it might be, from Alex’s descriptions, but I wasn’t sure, until as you marched off and barked something I heard a boy taller than you stammer in response, ‘S-sorry, Mr Morgan.’

  Day Three I was in your class. At the end I was the last to pack up, and you looked at me and said, ‘See? You’ve settled in already,’ with that same smile, and I realised that from a sea of faces you’d remembered mine, and I blushed and nodded gratefully, and I fell a little bit in love with you there and then, that day, aged eleven.

  Within the space of three days I saw your name on my timetable and then I saw you, and I started to formulate a plan to get your attention. This is what I’ve told myself.

  But now I wonder, was it you who saw me? Saw my chewed nails, my one rolled down sock and grazed shin, saw my clumsily lined eyes and my freckles. Saw something that you liked, but more than that, something I might become.

  For three years from then, it was clever, it was gradual, but it was always me. I was different, alright.

  Memories don’t come back chronologically; they come in snatches. Flashes of colour, of feeling. Pieces of time.

  Some of these pieces, these movie clips, are so hard to watch that I try to switch them off as soon as they surface. They are unbidden, they’ll come when they will; if I try to summon them, all I get are fragments, like half-overheard scraps of conversation whose meaning is lost.

  But when it’s least expected, a replayed scene can scald you with its clarity.

  Three-and-a-bit years after our first meeting in the corridor, I found myself at your door in the middle of the night, in tears, and then in your bed, in the morning, everything I knew about to change.

  Everything was in shadow.

  I leaned into you and kissed your shoulder. Without opening your eyes you mouthed ‘Morning’ and pulled me closer. I kissed your mouth, and you didn’t stop me.

  I took your hand and placed it up inside the T-shirt.

  You kept kissing me, our lips glued grimly together.

  I opened my eyes and saw you in extreme close-up: your nose, your eyebrows. I closed them again and slid my hand under the covers.

  You put your hand over mine, and in a few moments we found our pace, and you made a soft noise, and I thought, That’s it, I’m affecting you, that’s what I want, and when you took your hand away and touched my face, it felt like trust.

  This was something I knew, this was something I could do. Lying alongside each other, our bodies straight lines, fingers fumbling and fiddling. I was practised in this. In fact for some minutes I felt I was showing you something.

  But when you rolled on top of me, the world shifted.

  You were heavy; you leaned forward and my breath caught in my chest. I couldn’t let it out. I was pinned. Your mouth hot on my ear, ‘Are you okay?’

  But what could I say? My saying nothing was your permission, I suppose.

  Then suddenly there was pain in a part of me I didn’t know was there.

  I thought I heard myself say ‘no’, but it might have just been in my head. It’s such a small word, after all. Easily missed.

  And how could you hear it when your breathing was so loud?

  Everything that was you was bigger, louder, rougher, stronger than me. I felt tiny; as tiny as the word I now couldn’t muster. ‘No’. It was invisible. Felt myself dissolving.

  I willed the softness of the pillows, the mattress, beneath me to swallow me up, but they didn’t. They were beaten, by the hardness of your body, your mouth a gag over mine, your hands clamped to my wrists.

  Is this how it’s supposed to be? I wondered.

  And all the time a voice in me chanted Now I have you, now I have you, trying to soothe, trying to give me the one comfort, the one thing that would make it okay, but it didn’t stop the pain, and I didn’t really believe it.

  And when I closed my eyes, all I could see was your handwriting, in red pen, and the words: ‘It’s been done before; see me.’

  Afterwards, there were more tears.

  I waited. Well, of course I did; it was a waiting room, after all.

  The flowers on the reception desk were a bit too fancy, I thought. No wonder the place cost so much. They were those huge red ones that look plastic and have long protruding bits, like yellow tongues. I stared at them, almost expecting them to start singing, you know, like the plant in that film. It would have been a relief from the silence.

  The clock above the door had a second hand that seemed to spin round without stopping. Eleven o’clock came and went. A nice lady with a clipboard came out and said my name, and I just looked at her.

  ‘We’re waiting for someone,’ my mum said, and squeezed my hand. I can only remember her doing that two or three times, ever. I suppose she must have done it more when I was tiny, but I don’t remember.

  ‘You’re being very brave,’ she whispered, her head almost touching mine. I tried to smile, because I thought that’s what a brave girl would do, but my face wouldn’t follow my instruction. Mum went back to flicking through a magazine, it was full of pretty houses where the sofas matched the curtains, and from time to time she would point to something and say, ‘Ooh, that’s nice.’

  By quarter past eleven the lady with the clipboard was kneeling in front of us and saying something. Mum looked at me and said, ‘I think we should go,’ and for a second I thought she meant go, leave the building, go home, and I would’ve, I swear to God I would’ve thrown my arms around her neck and hugged her, and I would’ve flown from that place like a bullet from a gun, I would’ve run down the street, arms and legs pumping until I couldn’t catch my breath. But she didn’t mean that; she meant ‘I think we should go in’.

  So we did, we went into the room where I was to go behind a screen and take the bottom half of my clothes off, and they asked me to lie on a bed, and they gave me a small piece of material, a ‘modesty sheet’ they called it, and I had just enough time to think about how absurd that was, under the circumstances, before they put something over my face and asked me to count to ten, slowly.

  ‘One.’

  ‘Two.’

&nb
sp; ‘Three.’

  And while I was asleep, they made me not pregnant anymore.

  Only a few weeks before, because once the pin was out of the grenade, things moved at startling speed, I’d sat on a school toilet, skirt around my hips, trying to direct my pee onto an innocuous-looking white stick.

  I stayed in the cubicle while I waited three minutes as directed for the result. I left the stick face down on the cistern while I looked at my watch.

  And when the blue lines appeared, as I somehow knew they would no matter how much I willed them not to, all I could think of was getting through the day and getting to you. I fumbled through my lessons in a daze, watching the clock, occasionally touching the stick that lay wrapped in paper at the bottom of my school bag. When the final bell rang, I ran to your room, your office, on trembling legs.

  ‘You can’t be.’

  ‘Apparently, I can.’

  ‘I mean, we’ve been … careful.’

  ‘Not every time.’

  ‘Well, but … oh, shit.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  ‘You can’t be.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘This is bad. This is very, very bad.’

  And seeing you come apart like that, I was suddenly terrified. I’d been weirdly calm, believing, no, knowing, that when I came to you, you would fix it, make it all alright, make me feel safe.

  I actually thought you would fold me in your arms, that you would smile, even, and be happy!

  I thought you’d have a plan. I thought you’d tell me not to worry, say okay, it’s not ideal timing but that you’d support me. We’d work it out, build a life together, and when the baby, our baby, was a bit older, I could go to uni as I was supposed to, as planned, and you would look after her (she was a girl, I don’t know why, she was always a girl, in my mind). You’d look after us both in fact, and it would be fine, better than fine, it would be wonderful.

  I thought you would kiss me and hug me and have a plan.

  So the sight of your face, crumpled and confused, scared the life out of me.

  I was suddenly aware I was in your office, in school, aware of the walls around us, the classrooms stretching out along the corridors, the bricks and the breezeblock and the roof crushing down on us. I saw us as though from outside myself, me in my school uniform, you in your shirt and tie, which you were loosening as though from the neck of a man who was choking.

  Instead of holding me, you were shrinking from me, repeating ‘this is bad’ and I sank to the floor, bowed by the grim dawning realisation of what you wanted me to do.

  I don’t know why I was so convinced she was a girl. I think I envisaged her as a little version of me, but better. She was mine, and they took her from me. You – you just paid for them to take her.

  You sold me an alternative future: university. Education, illumination, the joy of learning. In your version everything looked like Brideshead Revisited.

  In my (real) version I would live in a room with damp in the corner and let boys traipse one after the other through my door and under my bedclothes. It would never make me feel better.

  You’d amazed me by saying I had to tell my mum. It became clear later, of course, why: she could be recruited as my chaperone for The Thing That Needed To Be Done, as you came to call it.

  I asked her to come up to my room. She sat on the bed, fidgeting. We didn’t really do woman-to-woman chats. Her eyes scanned the room, and I followed them, over the bottles and pots that cluttered my dressing table, the records scattered on the floor, the book and mug on the windowsill. ‘You ought to keep things a bit tidier, you know,’ she muttered, frowning. I looked at her, wondering how to say these words to a woman I didn’t feel I even knew.

  In the end she said it for me.

  ‘What’s this about, Fee?’ she demanded. She hardly ever called me Fee. I said nothing. I was staring at her so hard I felt my eyes might burst. ‘You’re not going to tell me you’re pregnant or something, are you?’

  I made a sound like a gasp but no words came out.

  She was businesslike. ‘Have you missed two periods?’

  ‘Just one.’

  ‘Oh, well, you’re probably not pregnant, then. Periods are irregular at your age,’ she frowned. ‘I did say you should’ve gone on the pill.’

  She did, as well. Even offered to take me to the clinic. It was when she’d read my diary (she never admitted this, but it was obvious, there was no other reason she would have brought up such a personal subject, or even tried to speak to me on my own. She’d read some account of a party at Mari’s and jumped to conclusions; it had seemed ridiculous to me that she thought I was at any risk of getting pregnant. Yes, there were encounters in the dark, but we just kissed, touched, felt each other, sometimes we didn’t even undress. It was innocent, teenage stuff and I’d laughed when she’d falteringly asked me had I thought about contraception.)

  ‘Mum, it’s not like that these days. You can find out really early.’

  But in my mind whirred the thought, Maybe she’s right, maybe I’m not, even though the blue lines, clear blue lines, clear as sky, screamed Yes.

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Todd, of course.’

  I suddenly realised I had thought I could somehow have this conversation without mention of the other essential piece of the jigsaw: The Father.

  ‘I haven’t told Todd,’ I said, truthfully.

  It’s not as though I lied – in fact I did try to tell her it wasn’t him (‘you don’t have to protect him’ she kept saying, and I kept thinking, You’re not listening, you’re not listening), but I suppose when I didn’t offer any other names she carried on assuming.

  One thing was for certain, she wasn’t going to let me tell Dad.

  ‘He’ll make you tell him who it is,’ she said gravely, ‘and if you told him, he’d …’

  She’d looked into the distance with a strange expression that told me that her ellipsis would lead to something so fundamentally un-Dad-like that she couldn’t picture it. Maybe violence, even, against the boy (man!) who’d taken his daughter’s innocence. Something in her eyes made me think she would actually like that. Drama, action. A reaction. In a way, I felt the same. My dad as hero – imagine: however misguided, however much I would have hated to see you hurt, would have railed and screamed and sworn I’d never forgive him, the image of Dad-Hero was something so exotic it was impossible not to find it captivating.

  You never actually said you would come, but I sort of assumed you would. I made sure you knew where and when it would be, like planning an event, a show, a rendezvous, not the ending of a life. Date and time. Venue. Be there or … don’t.

  I knew it was risky, but I also knew Mum wouldn’t make a fuss, not there in the clinic. Mum cared what people thought of her, especially doctors and, funnily enough, teachers. She always put on a special posh voice when she spoke to them.

  But you didn’t come.

  It was weird because you were attentive, afterwards. You called me every day for a week. I didn’t go to school and Mum didn’t push it, but nor did she talk about what had happened. She made me tomato soup with little pieces of buttered white bread floating in it, the way I liked it.

  On the phone, your tone was light and friendly. You regaled me with school stories: the cringe-inducing assembly with third-year pupils playing faltering guitar; the teacher–pupil football game featuring a controversial sending-off.

  ‘Mr Dawson was hilarious,’ you laughed, ‘he swore very loudly, then off he flounced, taking his headband with him.’

  ‘Great,’ I said.

  You didn’t ask me how I was.

  ‘I’d like to see you,’ you said during the last of these calls.

  ‘Okay.’

  You picked me up in the car and pulled in only a few streets away. This time you weren’t bothering to take me anywhere pretty. A back street, I thought, this is what I’m worth, now. You left the engine running and I listened to i
t hum and rumble. I sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, perfectly still. I felt like an ice sculpture, hard, cold and brittle. I felt like if you touched me, I would shatter. But I knew, somehow, that you weren’t going to touch me. You took a deep breath.

  ‘We should cool it for a bit. Let the dust settle.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can be friends.’

  Friends?

  ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘Look, this …’ you gestured vaguely in the direction of my middle, ‘this was a wake-up call. A sign, maybe. Things have gone … too far.’

  I looked around the car, scene of so many kisses, conversations, hurried un-fastening and fastening of buttons, jokes, hands on knees, cuddles, even tears. This enclosed space with its smell of leather and air-freshener, once a magical place to me, a place that meant nearness to you, a canopy, a shelter, a safe place, was now just a car. Determinedly impersonal, no trinkets, no tapes or empty wrappers, not even a speck of dust. Everything clean and empty. No traces of evidence.

  ‘What’s done can’t be undone,’ I said quietly, wondering how many times I’d thought that and not said it aloud.

  ‘I know, but we can make it right, from now on.’

  ‘By not being together.’

  ‘Well, by … I mean, we’ll still see each other.’

  ‘At school?’ I said through gritted teeth.

  ‘I haven’t done right by you,’ you said in a low voice. ‘Let me try, now. For once. Let me be a decent man, for once, please.’

  ‘Do what you want.’ I won’t beg, I told myself, I won’t, but the threat of tears stung my eyes and burned my throat and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘It’s not what I want, Fee. It’s about doing what’s right for you.’

  In the shadow of the car I could see tears, or maybe sweat, something on your face that you brushed away with the heel of your hand, and in that moment I wanted to reach for you, but I feared being brushed away just as easily.

  I was also brimming with anger and couldn’t trust what I was going to say or do, so I sat in my stifling silence and just let the tide of rage wash over me, drown me, until finally the struggle subsided and I was floating and numb and blissfully indifferent to everything. For just a split second, a heady, wonderful second, I didn’t care, didn’t give a blind fuck about any of it.