The Opposite of Amber Read online

  Second year at Breakness High and already I fancied him, hopelessly, pointlessly. To be fair, he couldn’t be expected to know I existed, since if I saw him coming I’d duck my head and put on speed and hope to God he wouldn’t see the colour of my face. Still, on a couple of occasions, quite meaninglessly, he’d opened a conversation with me. Just a sentence, you know? A hello, a how’s-it-going, a did-you-do-that-homework? Occasionally it was a little more profound and required some thought like: bloody hell, Mrs Carver has an arse-elbow identification problem, what do you think, Ruby?

  He would never get to find out what I thought, of course. He must have been mad to try and get a word out of me but I thought it was lovely and flattering that he kept trying. So my maniacal crush on him was not based solely on his jawline or the slightly-too-big nose that reminded me of some actor. I’m shallow but I’m not just a damp patch on the point of evaporation. I did actually like him because he was actually nice.

  So when I saw him giggling with Annette Norton I couldn’t help but treat it as a personal betrayal. Despite having shared all of two syllables with him so far I regarded him as mine, so it was a lance to my heart to watch his treasonous hand sneak into hers. Also, he whispered something to her and his tongue just about made contact with her eardrum. Also, he bought her a bag of Worcester Sauce crisps.

  Red with shame, horror and homicidal loathing, I couldn’t let him see me. I shoved my Worcester Sauce crisps back into the big cardboard box with the rest (how could I ever touch them again?) and turned my back on the pair of them. I don’t think they saw me as they left the shop: too wrapped up in each other, the tossers. And meanwhile I just stared and stared at the red tops in the newspaper rack, and after a while I got over myself a bit and wondered who the brown-haired girl in the photo was, the one with the stripy T-shirt and the vast smile, and because I had time to kill along with Annette Norton, I picked up a copy and read the story.

  And I know this is a very roundabout and self-centred way of remembering something, but give me some credit, at least I do remember it. I remember feeling almost as sorry for her as I did for myself.

  So this was the first of the girls. They had her on Page One because she’d been missing, they’d appealed for her return, her father had gone on TV and asked her to get in touch. So it was a bit of a story already, though it had gone right over my head.

  As it turned out, though, she’d been on the game. Which explained a lot. It explained why she’d been out so late, and why she would get into a stranger’s car; somebody had come forward and said they saw her do it but it was the outskirts of town, there wasn’t any CCTV and there wasn’t a record. Her father cried and said he hadn’t known, he hadn’t known, but she didn’t deserve it, she didn’t deserve this.

  She’d lain in a drainage ditch for a while, with the leaves of autumn drifting down on to her in layers of red and gold and brown, but it had rained a lot that September and the ditch flowed deep, so they only found her when the farmer went to clear it. They didn’t know who’d done it, they said, but he was clever, because the water had worked away the traces. He was clever and clued-up. Or maybe he was just, you know, very, very lucky.

  Four

  Small towns, eh? Funny how you can suddenly want to bump into somebody and you still can’t do it. From trying to avoid Foley I’d switched to hankering after him, but after that time at the petting zoo, I didn’t see him for days. This I blamed on Mallory. It was better than imagining the alternative, which crept up on my brain day after day: that I’d misread him, that he’d actually been bored with me that day and desperate to get out of my company. Still, I went over and over every moment in my head and I couldn’t forget the way his body stayed pressed against mine, even when the big scary peacock had gone.

  I clung on to that memory, screwed my nerves into a tight ball and walked over to his house. There was no way I could make this look casual or accidental because the Foleys’ house was at the end of a rutted track that didn’t go anywhere else. It was a seventies-style bungalow faced with fake stone, neat and tidy except that when you got closer you could see the doors were deeply scored with claw marks, as if the occupants had barricaded themselves in against werewolves. I hesitated with one hand on the gate, very nervous now and not quite willing to walk the minefield of dog turds.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mallory, one hand on the neck of a gigantic German shepherd, the other clutching a brush. She examined me with a critical eye. There was a delicious smell in the air: roasting beef and onions.

  I screwed up my courage to address a six-year-old. ‘Is that your tea nearly ready?’

  ‘Nah. It’s Apache and Mojave’s.’ She pronounced it like it looked: Moh-jave.

  I didn’t ask which one she was brushing. They looked the same to me. ‘Is Foley in?’

  The critical eye turned sly. After a thoughtful pause she said, ‘Cameron?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I caught myself blushing. I forgot his family would call him by his first name. He’d always been Foley to me and everybody else at school, except the teachers.

  Mallory was still sizing me up. ‘How much is it worth? Ow!’

  Foley, who had just turned up, clipped her ear. ‘Hello, Ruby.’

  ‘When I grow up I’ll sue you,’ said Mallory.

  ‘If you grow up it’ll be cos I’m a feckin’ saint,’ said Foley.

  Mallory jerked her head in my direction. ‘Is she coming in or not?’

  ‘No, I’m going out with her.’

  ‘So I’m coming too.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘I am. You can’t leave me here. Apache and Mojave haven’t had their tea.’

  ‘What, like they’re going to eat you?’

  Mallory gave her brother a trembling, sweet smile. ‘Won’t they?’

  ‘You’d choke them.’ He rolled his eyes, shot me an exasperated look, but he was weakening. ‘You haven’t had your tea either, Mal.’

  ‘It’s only frozen pizza and it hasn’t even got pepperoni. You can get me a better one at the chip shop.’

  I sniffed the beef-scented air again, puzzled.

  ‘Apache and Mojave have got a show next week,’ Mallory told me, in a talking-to-a-retard voice. Just as she said it, the door of the bungalow opened and the enticing smell drifted strongly into the garden.

  ‘MALLory! Have you got MOH-jave?’

  The German shepherd rose and stretched, then padded unhungrily towards Mrs Foley.

  ‘I’m putting on the pizza, kids,’ she shouted. ‘Be ten minutes.’

  Foley looked at Mallory, who whimpered pitifully. He rolled his eyes.

  ‘S’OK, Ma,’ he called. ‘We’re going out.’

  I don’t know why, in summertime, we wanted to hang out on the ice. I don’t know why anybody did, but the rink was always packed. I suppose it’s something you can do without holding a long conversation. It’s where you can get a pizza without having to stand in the chip shop queue while the smell of fat sinks into your clothes. And what’s more, you can entertain a small girl for hours on an ice rink, without actually having to, well, entertain her. Mallory didn’t give her brother and me a backwards glance, just shot out on to the ice, small, slick and immortal.

  Annoyingly enough, her brother was almost as cocky as she was. He was showing off, I thought, as he raced three times round the rink to warm himself up, swerving easily, flipping into reverse and dodging elegantly backwards around the tottering beginners. When he passed me the third time, he skidded to a graceful halt, throwing up a fan of ice.

  ‘Miss Torvill,’ I said.

  He smiled.

  He had his own skates, unlike those of us who had to wear the clunking plastic rink-hire ones, which were only tangentially the shape of a human foot. I couldn’t skate for more than half an hour in them. Foley could skate for ever. He could skate for ever backwards. Sometimes I could hate the boy.

  All the same, I smiled back.

  His hair had grown a couple of centime
tres since I’d sat behind him at the exams in June. I liked that, even though bits of it were a mess and half-obscured his dark eyes. He offered me a hand.

  ‘I’m not going to fall over,’ I said.

  ‘I never said you were.’

  God, I could win awards. I could be Miss Gauche in the All-Time Gaucheness Contest in Gauche County, Awkwardsville. The boy wants to hold your sodding hand, Ruby. Get on with it.

  I don’t want to give the impression I’d never had my hand held by a boy before. I’d never had my hand held in Cameron Foley’s, that was all. And as I may have mentioned, I couldn’t think of anything to say around boys, so I got so fixated on the contact of a hand, my own would start to sweat, which of course made me even more self-conscious and tongue-tied. This was such a vicious circle, my hand would slip out of his simply through the laws of friction and traction and whatever the physics term is for sweaty palms.

  The phenomenon didn’t seem to be a problem with Foley. My hand felt perfectly comfortable in his, as comfortable as the silence between us. My fingers were linked through his fingers and so long as he didn’t go too much faster, I might get through several circuits without falling on my backside. I hoped so, because I wasn’t sure I could untangle my hand to break my fall. It seemed too firmly locked in his.

  I was already too attached.

  Again he did that confident skid-to-a-halt-in-a-fan-of-ice thing, and as he switched direction he caught me, folding his arms across my body. Natural enough, then, to fold my arms over his. We leaned against the battered barrier and watched the other skaters. There was a girl in the centre of the ice, spinning and dancing and whirling. I watched her, bewitched by envy, as she gripped one foot behind her own head and pirouetted impossibly.

  ‘Hey,’ said Foley, and nodded.

  I tore my eyes away from the ice dancer and looked where he was looking.

  Well, there was a surprise: Jinn tottering on to the ice with Nathan Baird. Usually Jinn would only go to the ice rink in winter, and then under duress. She used to take me because I insisted, but she herself was rubbish at it. I didn’t take lessons, I just practised not falling over, and eventually I got better. Jinn didn’t even bother with that. She was happy to sit up on the metal chairs overlooking the rink, which were almost as comfortable as the skates, and watch me circle the ice, style-free but more or less sure-footed.

  Jinn didn’t like getting cold and however energetic and wrapped-up you were, cold rose from the ice like an invisible mist. So she’d sit there and shiver, watching and smiling at me. I told her she’d be warmer skating, but of course she said if she fell – and she would – her bum would freeze to the ice.

  But there she was now, doing her damnedest to stay upright in front of Nathan Baird, struggling along in the clumsy skates that gave you verrucas. She could hardly walk in them, let alone skate, so she was almost breathless with laughter.

  I never knew Nathan Baird could giggle as well. Jinn was arse over tit as soon as she let go of the barrier, and Nathan tried to help her up, only to join her in an inelegant heap. They tried to get up, holding on to each other’s arms, but then they collapsed again, weak with hilarity.

  ‘Will I go and help?’ came Foley’s voice in my ear.

  I shook my head, bringing my ear into brief, tantalising contact with his lips. I liked him right where he was.

  And it was funny, but I didn’t want him to help them. He’d only get in the way. I wanted Jinn and Nathan Baird to go on fooling around for ever.

  I couldn’t even watch the ice dancer any more; I couldn’t see anything but Jinn. She wasn’t wearing a flirty skating dress or a glittery hair tie but she had a rhinestone sparkle that came out of the inside of her, and her shrieking laughter was like frost crystals scattering. Her pale hair glittered with ice where she’d lain flat on her back, corpsing, undignified but beautiful.

  Beside her, Nathan, laughing too, looked bloody awful. Awful. That wasn’t like him. But however bad and hung­over he looked, he was laughing and he was happy. You could tell that too: sparkling happy. Inner rhinestones. He must have caught them off Jinn. Like verrucas.

  Five

  ‘Hey, Ruby Red,’ said Nathan Baird.

  God’s sake. I was thinking seriously about changing my hair colour again. He was standing in the narrow aisle of the mini-mart, idly picking up cans and packets, reading the contents lists, blocking the way. He wore a black T-shirt with a faded Batman logo. I hadn’t bothered with a basket, so my arms were full of a loaf and a two-litre bottle of semi-skimmed and a six-pack of Coke. I hovered, glowering at him. He knew I was still there but he didn’t move.

  I couldn’t be bothered trying to shove past; I knew he’d make it difficult for me. Backing off, I went down the other aisle. But by the time I got to the checkout, Nathan had got there first. He was leaning on it, picking up gum and turning it in his fingers, waiting for the last customer in the queue to take her credit card receipt so he could flirt with Jinn. When she didn’t move fast enough, he practically elbowed the woman out of the way. Jinn gave him that scowl that wasn’t angry enough to be real. He leaned on the counter, smiling his shit-eating smile.

  The smile was still good, but I thought he wasn’t looking so well these days. His skin had a sweaty look and the whites of his eyes weren’t so white. I was hoping Jinn would go off him now that he’d lost the vivacious sexiness, but Nathan Baird was one of those guys who looks good sleazy.

  Out of doors, in the sunlight, he was diminished, but somewhere as restricted as the mini-mart he had the sort of presence that makes your heart go faster and your stomach lurch. Reluctant magnetic attraction and fear all mixed up together. Charisma, Jinn called it. I didn’t trust it or him. He was nervous about something, too; his fingers trembled.

  Also, I didn’t like him always being at our house.

  I don’t know quite how that happened. I only know I came out of my room one day because I heard the music from the iPod dock in the kitchen, and I thought Jinn must be starting to cook and I’d go and help, like always. Good Vibrations usually meant tacos or pasta with chilli: something summery and hot.

  But when I went through to the kitchen, Jinn didn’t see me. She wasn’t cooking; she hadn’t got past picking up the wooden spoon, which she wielded like a lady with a fan. Nathan Baird was dancing with her, doing the shimmying boogieing thing in my place, and her arms snaked round his neck, and she beat the spoon lightly against his taut butt in time to the music.

  She laughed.

  Cold dread trickled from my breastbone down into my guts. I thought about what Wide Bertha said, about Nathan Baird being no good. I thought about what he’d been doing all the time he was away, what got him put in prison that I didn’t want to ask about. I hoped he was going to leave soon so that Jinn and I could go back to being Jinn and me.

  Draping his arms loosely over Jinn’s shoulders, he danced her in a semicircle so that he was looking right at me. It took him a few seconds to smile, and I didn’t like it when he did. He gave me a slow wink.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

  He didn’t take his eyes off me, but I saw them open wider when Jinn smacked his backside with the spoon.

  ‘The children are hungry, Mr Baird.’

  Distracted from me, he became more human. His eyes lost their hostile focus, his smile softened. Jinn lifted his arms and dropped them gracefully off her shoulders.

  ‘Aw,’ he murmured at her ear. As they walked past each other, her to the cooker and him towards the door, he raised a hand so that it caught strands of her hair that flickered through his fingers. He was looking at me again.

  ‘I’ll help,’ I told Jinn.

  ‘No, I’m fine. Go and sit down till it’s ready.’

  Reluctantly I went through to the lounge, feeling Nathan behind me like a big bundle of electricity. I sat down right in the middle of the sofa and splayed my hands out at my sides. I didn’t think he’d try and sit with me, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

&nb
sp; He gave me an amused grin, as if he could read my motives, and slumped into the swivel chair beside the TV, one leg hooked over the chair arm. He tossed the remote control up and down in his right hand, then clicked the screen on, but it didn’t make any sound. He did nothing about that, just went on looking at me.

  ‘I like your sister,’ he said.

  I shrugged, staring at The Weakest Link, at mouths opening and shutting in silence, the sneer on Anne Robinson’s face, the curl of her lip. Nathan’s twin.

  ‘I like your sister,’ he said again.

  Stung, I snapped, ‘Me too.’

  ‘Are you jealous?’ he grinned. ‘Ruby Red.’

  I made a face that I hoped was contemptuous.

  ‘You haven’t changed since I was at school.’ Yawning, he stretched his arms above his head. I wanted to snatch the remote control off him but I didn’t dare. ‘Do you still not speak? Do the teachers know you’re there? They used to talk about you – I heard them. They felt sorry for you. Not sorry enough to do anything about it, of course, but they thought you were dead weird. Just as well you had your sister, eh? Don’t know what you’d do without Jinn.’

  I stood up. ‘I’ll go and help her.’

  ‘Tom Jerrold’s back as well.’

  That made me sit down again, because my knees wouldn’t keep my legs straight. My jaw had gone slack as my knee joints, which wasn’t a nice thing to be aware of in the face of Nathan’s jeering, but I couldn’t think for a minute how to rearrange my face. At last I swallowed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Work. He’s got a junior partnership in Roscoe Geddes. Wants to be near his family, now his brother’s out of hospital.’ Nathan was watching me out of the corner of his eye as he played with the remote. Suddenly he pointed it at me. ‘Click! Put your jaw back.’