The Opposite of Amber Read online

  I lay back against the dune and closed my eyes again, but annoyance had made me even hotter. And I was thirsty. It was stupid of Jinn to get warm cider I wasn’t strictly old enough to drink. I reached for the bottle, half-buried in sand, and took a swig of it anyway; as I expected, it gave me an instant throbbing ache in the back of my head.

  Sod it, I had to go and paddle.

  Neither of them took any notice as I stood up and brushed sand off my backside. They were too busy giggling and mock-punching each other. Boys turned Jinn into a chittering idiot, they really did. Especially Nathan Baird: he’d always had that effect on her. I’d have thought his two-year absence would have given her the wisdom of perspective. Rolling my eyes I stalked off – not easy in dry sand – and headed for the water’s edge.

  The water wasn’t cold in the shallows, just deliciously cool. I stood there and let the waves roll in over my feet and up over my ankles, sinking millimetre by millimetre in sand. Now I was woozy with pleasure. Even the cider-throb in my head had vanished. I glanced back at Jinn and Nathan, but they weren’t watching me. Doing a double-take, I screwed up my eyes.

  Their heads were close together but they weren’t kissing. He’d given her something and they were both examining it. As he drew back she reached behind her neck, fumbling with the something, till Nathan pushed her hands aside and fumbled with it himself. Chancer.

  I wanted to race back through the sand and demand to know what it was. Ten years earlier I could have done that. Ten years earlier, of course, she wouldn’t have left me to wander down to the water’s edge by myself.

  A shattering noise exploded in my right eardrum. Right beside me a dumpy toddler was screeching, because her idiot older brother and his retard pals were splashing her. Before I could drown her or them, the brother took pity, seized her small fingers and tugged her back to their mother.

  I was cross and deaf but it didn’t last, because I was ambushed by a tactile memory so vivid I had to stare at my own hand to reassure myself.

  No, it was fine, I hadn’t fallen through the space–time continuum after two mouthfuls of Woodpecker. What I had was the hand of a fifteen-year-old, tipped with turquoise nail varnish, but for an instant it had felt like a tiny hand folded in a larger one.

  The memory of the incident was so physical it left me breathless. It was my first memory ever, maybe that was why. A sea just like this one, in all the details: the colour of the waves, licks of foam on glassy ripples, easy to jump. I remembered the green stripy ball bobbing out to sea, and howling for it. I remembered the cold of the waves, and the fear of the sea out there where waves didn’t break, and my grief for the lost ball.

  And I remembered Jinn’s warm hand enclosing mine. I had no memory of her nine-year-old face, just my hand in hers as we jumped the waves together, Jinn laughing so that I started to stop crying. We’ll get it back, she said. Just a bit further. Don’t be scared.

  A pack of boys nearby were using a bodyboard to skim the shallows, but I wasn’t interested. It took all my concentration to jump the waves and it had become a very serious game, and I was biting the tip of my tongue. We were going to get the ball back, the green-and-white striped ball, but I had to hop clear of every wave, the way you’d never step on the pavement cracks. Jinn was helping me now because we’d gone deeper, and I was up to my fat little waist, and she was laughing as she lifted me high over each swell. I didn’t even shriek or giggle, because it was all so deadly serious, and if I stepped on a wave, something terrible might happen.

  And then it did. One of the bodyboard boys knocked into Jinn and she stumbled, and my hand slipped out of hers.

  It was such a loss, abrupt and awful. My hand without hers felt like it was adrift in space. I fell over just as a bigger wave tumbled in, rolling me over and lifting me. I didn’t know which way was up and I didn’t know where the shore was, what distinguished rock and sand and sea. I only knew that Jinn’s hand was no longer there, but it wasn’t me I was afraid for, it was Jinn.

  My mouth and nostrils filled with water, but we weren’t so very far from shore; it was just that I was little and terrified. When I was seized by Jinn and the boy together, I was howling with fear for her. I screamed and screamed for Jinn till her laughter and tickling fingers turned my wails into giggles.

  I never did forget the feeling of her hand leaving mine. I dreamed it on and off over the years. I’d never see it but I’d feel it, or rather I wouldn’t feel it. The emptiness in my fingers, and the loss, and Jinn bobbing away from me like a green-and-white striped ball.

  Two

  If Jinn and I were changelings, as I sometimes suspected (neither of us seemed to have Lara’s genetic code), we were changelings from different eggs. Either that, or the exact same egg, and I got all the bits that weren’t Jinn.

  It wasn’t just the age gap. Jinn was quick and shining bright; Jinn was motor-mouthed and nurturing. It didn’t really matter that Lara was scatty and a bit flaky (and a bit of a tart, to be honest), because from the earliest I can remember, Jinn catered for my every need. Actually she catered for my every whim, to the point where she anti­cipated it, asked for it, spoke for me. There was never any need for me to speak, and I knew I could never say anything as well as she did, so I didn’t bother. I didn’t resent her or anything. I was proud to be spoken for by Jinn, sparky and bold. I was spoilt voiceless.

  Jinn had a distinctively pretty face: one that changed when she smiled, but not too drastically. She had the same pale northern skin as me, but her blonde hair was just the right degree of unruly. My hair was mouse-fair and not distinctive, so that’s why, as soon as I got up the nerve, I dyed it. To start with I went orange-ginger (‘Cinnamon’, it said on the box). I thought I’d never get the shade just right, till one day like a message from the follicle gods I saw the box with my name on it. I loved that dark dramatic burgundy, and it made me a bit recognisable, because I have one of those faces that people forget. Very ordinary eyes, non-specific cheekbones, a forgettable nose. Nathan Baird wouldn’t have known who I was without Jinn at my side.

  Which would have been fine by me.

  I didn’t like how close Jinn and Nathan were sitting when I trudged back to the dune, but when Jinn saw me coming she stood up abruptly and dusted sand off her cropped jeans.

  ‘I have to go to work.’ Unnecessarily she checked her watch.

  Good, I thought. I was hot and thirsty all over again, and I wanted a freebie from the mini-mart, and it was high time Jinn ended the conversation anyway.

  ‘I’ll walk you,’ said Nathan.

  Oh, bollocks, I thought.

  Nathan couldn’t walk if you paid him; all he could do was strut. No wonder, because I noticed Jinn was wearing a new necklace: a pebble of amber enclosing a surprised-looking mosquito. She kept lifting her hand to touch it. The amber was glassy-gold, pure and unflawed, bigger than the top joint of my thumb. The chain was thick links of silver.

  ‘Where did you steal that?’ I asked him.

  Jinn slapped my arm quite hard. Nathan said, ‘Oh, it talks,’ and then ignored me.

  I fell behind, sullen and jealous. This time Jinn didn’t wade through the river: too undignified in front of Nathan Baird, and I had the nasty feeling she was playing for time. Instead she took the long way round, across the rickety bridge. Trip-trap trip-trap across the rickety bridge. As I stepped off the end of it I looked down, like always, for the troll.

  No troll, but Wide Bertha was standing outside the mini-mart having a smoke. She stood in a little witch’s circle of tab-ends, arms crossed over her solid overalled breasts but one hand dancing in the air, flicking the cigarette, pulling it in for another deep drag. Beside her the man from Molotov Mixers was unloading his lorry. One crate on top of another; a crash like shattering windows every time. The noise of it reverberated off the pavement and the sun-baked walls and echoed into the sky but Wide Bertha didn’t flinch. She gestured her fag at Jinn.

  ‘You’re early, love.’ But she didn’t sm
ile the way she usually did. She gave Nathan Baird a hard stare.

  ‘That’s because I love my job so much,’ said Jinn. ‘I couldn’t wait to get here.’

  Crash went another crate. Bertha rolled her eyes and tapped her fag and resisted smiling. ‘Well, don’t let Kim leave early. You cover for her too much. She’s to finish her shift.’

  ‘Aye, no chance.’

  Bertha ignored Nathan entirely. Crash. ‘Hello, Ruby. How’s it going?’

  ‘OK.’

  Making a face like a bored bull mastiff, she rolled her eyes again. One day, I reckoned, Wide Bertha’s eyes would work loose and start rattling around in her head like lottery balls. ‘You want to curb that wicked tongue of yours, Ruby. Do you never shut up?’

  I looked awkwardly at the traffic. Crash.

  ‘She’s going through a phase,’ said Jinn, ruffling my burgundy hair like I was a kid. ‘A fifteen-year phase.’ I shook her off, and she laughed and blew a kiss at Nathan Baird and went into the shop.

  Bertha sucked on her fag, giving Nathan the evil eye, but he grinned and sauntered off.

  ‘What’s Jinn doing with him?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘He’s a bad lad.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So does your sister, the silly cow.’ Bertha pinched out the end of her half-smoked fag and tucked it carefully back into its box, studying the big black letters: SMOKING KILLS. ‘What’s he doing back here? They should have kept him. Thrown away the key.’

  I watched his swaggering back view. I wondered why he’d been in prison, and what he’d done. I wondered if it was something terrible, like murder, or something romantic, like robbing a bank. Or a bit of both. I could imagine either, and against my own wishes I decided he’d look good doing it.

  Whatever he’d done, he’d done it down south, where he’d moved with his father. So I’d never asked, because I wasn’t interested, and now it was too late to ask without looking fantastically ill-informed. I had a vague recollection of why they’d gone south in the first place: something to do with an ill-judged swindle and a gambling debt and old man Baird getting on the wrong side of some bloke up in Glassford. Nobody had thought they’d ever come back. I wondered if old man Baird was dead, knifed in some bar brawl in Sheffield or wherever they’d gone. Nathan’s mother was alive (as far as he knew) during his Breakness days, but she’d gone off when he was ten years old so she could be dead by now, just like ours.

  Two more fighter jets split the sky; it was such a beautiful day they were non-stop enjoying themselves. As the racket faded the Molotov man wiped his forehead on one bare arm, transferring sweat to sweat, then tucked his damp polo shirt and his protruding stomach back into his waistband. He was pink-faced with effort, but he was always a bit pink-faced: smooth-cheeked, dark-haired and slobbishly handsome, with those long beautiful lashes and sad eyes that some men are blessed with. Wide Bertha said he looked like George Clooney, which was stretching truth till it snapped, but if you inflated George Clooney with a bicycle pump there might have been a passing similarity. At any rate, Bertha fancied the pants off him.

  Bertha was married, of course, to a pallid housebound man with disability benefits and a Sky subscription, but Molotov man was only in the neighbourhood once a fortnight, and I don’t think their flirtation ever actually came to anything. There was no harm, said Bertha, in looking.

  And no accounting for taste, says I. But only in my head.

  She pulled out her fag packet and offered him one, blocking the half-smoked one with her thumb. He tucked his newspaper under his arm and lit her cigarette first, then his own. She’d selected a new one for the occasion.

  ‘Awful about that girl,’ said Bertha.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her.’ Bertha jabbed at his newspaper, dislodging it from his armpit. I angled my head as he shook it out, catching sight of half a blurred face, half a bright smile, one eye glowing red in the flash of a camera.

  ‘Awful,’ he said. ‘Makes you think.’

  ‘Makes you think what?’ asked Bertha.

  He shrugged. ‘You ought to be careful, Bertha. Walking home at night and that.’

  ‘Like he’d want to rape and murder me!’ She roared with laughter, then seemed to decide that was in bad taste. Pressing her lips together, she humphed. ‘You needn’t worry. Nothing that exciting ever happens in Breakness.’

  He gave her a serious look, touched her hand. ‘All the same.’

  ‘Kirkcaldy, that’s another planet. Aw, look at her, she had a kid.’ Bertha smoothed out the paper and flipped a page. ‘Two years old. The wee soul.’

  ‘You locking up the shop and taking the money at night and that. You watch out.’

  ‘I’d like to see anybody try.’ Wide Bertha flexed her biceps. Somewhere under the blanket of fat, muscles shuddered. ‘Anyhow, he’s not after money. She was a working girl. Like the one that got killed last year in Cambuslang. You don’t kill prostitutes for money.’

  ‘No,’ he said, frowning at the paper. ‘Young. Look at her.’

  ‘And I’m an old bat. It’s the likes of Ruby need to be careful.’

  I shrugged and returned her smile.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Inflatable George the Molotov man. ‘She’s right, Ruby.’

  I didn’t want to stand here shaking my head and muttering about some dead prostitute in a ditch two hundred miles away. It depressed me, mostly because my moral meters were badly calibrated right now, and I didn’t know what to say. It was another good reason not to say much at all. What could I talk about? I felt sorry for the girl in the ditch and her sad dirty end, but I couldn’t do anything for her and it wasn’t my place to be indignant. What did she expect, anyway? That’s the kind of thing that happens when you do that kind of thing.

  Jinn came out of the shop and into the brightness, tilting her face to the sun, half-closing her eyes, I didn’t like the way a light had gone on inside her skin since Nathan Baird had cast his shadow across the day.

  ‘Five minutes.’ She blinked at Bertha and smiled.

  ‘Ten. Let Kim do extra. She buggered off early yesterday and she thinks I don’t know it. Do you girls want a Molotov?’

  I hesitated. I wanted a drink, but I’d rather it was a colour found in nature.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ said Jinn.

  ‘There’s cold ones in the fridge. Make a note, will you, love?’

  It didn’t mean we were paying for them, just that Bertha liked to keep things orderly. Wide Bertha was a great believer in writing everything down, but it wasn’t as if she was mean with the occasional drink, or a bag of crisps here and there.

  Anyway, since I was getting the Molotov for free, I could hardly complain. Maybe they tasted better with vodka, the way Jinn drank them in the evenings. I wished I liked the taste of alcohol more: maybe it took the edge off the chemical sweetness. Molotovs came in colours rather than flavours, all of them practically radioactive: Last Mango, Blue Lagoon, Pink Flamingo and Mellow Yellow. Jinn had brought me a pink one because they were the least offensive, but a flamingo in that shade of fuchsia would need shooting. I tipped it down my throat and tried not to notice the taste. At least it was wet and cold. Other people liked them. If they didn’t, Inflatable George wouldn’t get to come up and see Bertha so often.

  Jinn kept looking up the street, the way Nathan Baird had gone, but at last she drained her Molotov and disappeared back into the shop. I didn’t hang about after that; it wasn’t as if I wanted to chat. I left Bertha and George leaning together, bums against the warm stone wall, heads close together over the tabloid, flirting glumly over sudden death.

  Three

  Jinn and I lived in a grey stolid house at the end of a row. It used to belong to all three of us – though of course it really belonged to the council – and after Lara died, they let us stay on because Jinn was nineteen years old and just terrifyingly competent. The social workers and the housing department people kept coming by for about three months, and then
they shrugged and smiled and left us alone.

  Inside it wasn’t much to look at. Beds, chairs a bit too big for the room, a TV, occasional tables. A few photos, candles on a shelf, a china horse with a chipped ear. What else can I say about it? Embossed wallpaper in outdated pastels. A dead wasp on the windowsill. It was a house in a million and it wouldn’t have stood out from any of them. But there were two bedrooms and there was all the space we needed, because if we needed more we went outside. A little garden clung to the front and side of the house, where Jinn grew easy things like nasturtiums and snapdragons and Livingstone daisies: the kind of plant you buy in trays, three for a fiver at B&Q.

  We had the most colourful garden in the street. Jinn would stick shiny windmills in the soil that glinted in the smallest sunlight, and she’d buy odd-looking plastic frogs and rabbits and an occasional fairy. She hung up wind chimes and forgot to take them down when gales raced in off the sea, so the chimes got all tangled and wouldn’t ring till she’d unravelled them. There was one little stone gargoyle who looked as if he had something stuck in his throat and was about to throw it up. He’d made Jinn laugh out loud in the garden centre, laugh so hard that people stared. She said he couldn’t stay in the garden centre after that, it wouldn’t have been fair; people would have laughed at him all the time and as he clearly had no sense of humour, he’d be hurt. (She actually meant all this. Go figure.) So even though he was expensive, and made of what felt like real stone but was probably concrete, the ugly little git had to come home with us.

  Jinn got the gardening bug from Lara. Lara used to spend ages in the garden, pulling out straggly weeds and then frantically trying to push them back into the soil when she found a faded label and realised they were flowers. She never did anything very constructive. After Lara died and Jinn took over, the garden exploded into colour. Not a hundred per cent natural colour, it was true, with the poison-green plastic frogs and the rainbow windmills whizzing in the breeze, but it glittered and sparkled like a funfair at the end of the grey row. Little kids liked to peer over the low hedge till their mothers tugged them away. I was proud of it, and very proud of Jinn.