The Opposite of Amber Page 6

  I had a month or so to go till I started work and my SVQ course at a proper salon, and I was almost wishing I’d done a fifth school year just to get away from Nathan for a few extra weeks. I’d decided to go straight to work because I’d found a salon that did training on the job and I couldn’t bear the thought of further formal education, but I’d have done just about anything at that point to get away from Nathan. I’d have gone back to playgroup.

  I stood in the kitchen and stared at his naked back as he yawned and scratched his shoulder. He was thinner than he’d been when he arrived, and his skin was sheened with sweat. I could smell him from across the room. It wasn’t a bad smell; some girls might even have liked it. But it was too male and too unwanted.

  ‘Well, hello.’ Nathan didn’t turn round; he just knew it was me because of the hostile silence. So much for the Air of Mystery I’d hoped I was cultivating.

  I took a breath, changed my mind, then sucked in a second breath. ‘We’ve got a shower. It’s right next to the toilet.’

  ‘How very daring!’ He gave me a mocking look over his shoulder.

  ‘You stink.’ I’d started so I might as well finish.

  ‘I ooze pheromones, darling. It’s not the same thing.’ He clicked on the kettle, then turned and came towards me. I was too surprised to react and besides, I was damned if I was going to back off.

  He propped a hand against the door frame and leaned over me. I could have drawn a finger down his freckled, sweaty chest, had I been so inclined. Instead I put my hands behind my back and glared up at him.

  ‘I just don’t fancy you, Rubes.’

  ‘What?’ I was going to have to do something about my loose jaw-hinge.

  ‘I mean, I like you fine. Just don’t fancy you. So you can stop feeling all threatened.’

  I wanted to put my hand against his ribcage and shove him hard across the room, but that would have involved touching his skin, feeling the warmth of blood and what there was of his muscles. His sweat-smell was all over the inside of my nostrils and I hated him for it, and for what he’d said.

  ‘Piss off,’ I snapped.

  ‘Your wish,’ he said. ‘My desire.’ Ever so slowly he eased himself away from the wall and pushed past me, leaving traces of himself on my clothes. It made me shiver, and that made me even angrier. The shower-room door slammed behind him and I heard the hiss of water. In turn I went into my own room and slammed the door, rather pointlessly. Good luck to him, if he wanted hot water at this hour.

  Why didn’t he get a job, anyway? Then he wouldn’t be taking showers at half past eleven and he wouldn’t have to be asking Jinn to steal sixpacks of WKD. I glowered at the small stack of bottles in the corner, glowing as blue as opaque jewels in the halogen spotlight. I wanted to take one of those bottles, smash it against the wall and glass him. And me a non-violent person.

  I doubted Jinn would approve of me glassing her boyfriend, so I texted Foley instead.

  Got M, he texted back.

  So what? He always seemed to have Mallory. She seemed to be some kind of chaperone. I wasn’t unhappy about it because I wasn’t sure I was ready to get in any deeper with Foley at the moment, and besides, she was a mascot. With a small child around I felt like the kind of human being who could be responsible for another one.

  But before I could text him back and tell him I didn’t mind about the brat, my phone bleeped again.

  Fd th dux?

  It didn’t sound like a bad idea and it didn’t cost anything. I went back to the kitchen and hunted around for some scraps, raking deep into cupboards, and suddenly felt my fingers sink into something cold and yielding.

  I yelped in disgust. When I pulled the thing out, it used to be a potato. It was still a potato. Its body was withered and squishy, and it was pushing out green and yellow tendrils like pustules, like the most satisfying zits you ever squeezed. They ought to be planted, but Jinn had forgotten potatoes, she’d forgotten goats.

  Nathan’s kettle had boiled. I lifted it and poured the water down the sink. Petty but satisfying.

  What to do with the dead potato, though? I picked scraps of newspaper off it, mentally apologising for its meaningless existence. Briefly I wondered if I could feed it to the ducks, but I might poison them.

  Briefly I wondered if I could feed it to Nathan Baird.

  I didn’t want to deal with the potato so I shoved it back in the cupboard with its friends. One day, I thought. One day she’d remember the sodding potatoes and the tyre garden and then we’d be happy again. One day, when we were back to being us.

  The ducks at the Provost Reid Park in Glassford were fat and overfed and uninterested. Ducks were spoiled these days. Not like when I were a girl. Oh, I remembered feeding ducks that were actually grateful for your mouldy crusts and the hard fairy cakes out of the shop, and the ingratitude of this lot aggravated me. They didn’t even care that the screaming gulls were having a gang fight because gulls didn’t know the meaning of ‘overfed’. They just sculled fatly around the pond, while the gulls teemed overhead like something out of a Hitchcock movie.

  Mallory must have been having the same thoughts as me, because she’d given up on the ducks and had started forming little pellets of bread, squeezing and rolling them till they were like ball bearings, then hurling them at the gulls. She was not a bad shot. She actually hit one, hard, on its beak, making it wobble off balance and shake its white head and shriek with rage.

  ‘You keep it up and the council might give you a job,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it talks,’ said Mallory, echoing Nathan Baird.

  ‘The mouth on you.’ Foley flicked a bit of crust at her. It missed, and Mallory fired back a pellet of bread intended for the gulls. It smacked him right on the eye.

  ‘Ow! Ah, ya wee –’

  She took evasive action, dodging her bum neatly away from his swinging palm and making a run for the playpark. We followed, Foley swearing blue murder at her and rubbing his eye.

  ‘Thank Christ she’s got school tomorrow.’

  ‘You and all.’

  ‘Yeah. What are you going to do with your time now that you won’t have my scintillating company?’

  ‘Me? I was thinking of getting a life.’

  This was true in only one sense. Frankly, I was panicking at the prospect of getting a life. I knew a few others who were leaving school and going to college in Glassford but nobody else was starting at the salon. Nobody else was starting actual work. And now that the moment was upon me I was a lot less sure about leaving school for the big bad world. I’d have choked on my pride and gone back to school after all, but it was too late now. Imagine tongue-tied Ruby trying to talk herself out of what passed for a decision. Not a chance.

  I’d have liked to explain all this to Foley but I was still awkward around him, for different reasons now. I couldn’t stay away, but sometimes I couldn’t think what to say to him, or if I did think of something to say, I didn’t want to say it. And yet we were a sort-of couple, and had been right through the summer. Well, a threesome if you counted Mallory, which we had to.

  Foley was now paying me all the attention I’d ever wanted, but my contrary brain (or some part of my ­anatomy) had gone whoa. That didn’t mean I wasn’t still hauled by some mysterious magnetism into his company. There was definitely an attraction in the fact that he didn’t feel the need to talk, and didn’t feel the need to make me talk either. It saved my tongue from getting knotted and stuck to the roof of my mouth like Velcro.

  So after a bit of nervous coughing and throat-clearing, and turning to each other at the wrong moment, and bumping shoulders too hard and muttering apologies, Foley and I finally got our movements coordinated enough for a decent snog.

  It was maybe three weeks after Mallory stunned the gull. I think it helped that Foley had been back at school for a bit and here I was, never having to go back again. That couldn’t help but give me a slight superiority. It definitely helped that we were Mallory-free: she had some kind of after-sch
ool activity (Art Club, I think, which if I knew Mallory would involve drawing coded rude bits on pictures that the teachers wouldn’t recognise but her evil little boyfriends would). So we were going to go and meet her out of school, but in this downpour the brat could wait.

  Yes, the weather gods had aligned themselves in my favour too. Usually the weather got finer after the schools went back, but this year it was the other way round.

  I was kicking my heels till my job started. Wide Bertha could give me a few hours’ work at the mini-mart but she couldn’t afford to give me a regular gig at the moment, not with summer over. September had turned nasty, in a dull wet way, and Foley and I were sheltering under the concrete arches of a little shopping arcade in our estate (arcade and estate are excellent, beautiful words but they are not honest. If you say ‘I have an arcade on my estate’, it conjures up an arch of clipped privet, framing sunlit parkland that hazes into blue distance. This is not what I’m talking about).

  The damp roughcast walls were even damper than usual, because the wind had swung round and was ­driving the rain at us. I could hear it pattering on the metal shutters down over the Chinese takeaway, which didn’t open till early evening. The Fu Ling restaurant sign had been vandalised again. Predictably enough, this happened a lot. The owner would haul out his step­ladder at least twice a month and climb up patiently to scrub out the spray paint. I don’t know why he bothered. I thought he should change the name to Golden Dragon or something, but when I suggested it he just smiled and nodded and didn’t do anything about it. I could talk to this guy because he was even more taciturn than I was. There was a chance he didn’t even speak English but you’d never know either way. It was his tiny wife who did all the talking when we got a takeaway. She never shut up. I liked Mr Fu Ling; we were comrades in the world of the monosyllabic.

  Anyway, there were Foley and I leaning against the Fu Ling shutters, waiting for the rain to ease off a bit so we could go and meet Mallory (though I reckoned she’d be safe walking home on her own; God help anybody who tried abducting her). In contented, dripping silence we people-watched: pasty old guys with yellow fingers going into the bookmakers with the boarded-up window; old ladies shuffling into the Co-op, ground down to half their original size but still up for a long gossip with the woman at the till, while the teenagers behind them huffed and fidgeted and stuck stolen gum and sweets into their pockets out of sheer boredom.

  There was no sign of the weather giving us a break, and I think Foley must have come over melancholic at the sight of all that rained-on human mortality, because he sighed a huge unexpected sigh and turned and kissed my left ear. This time he didn’t get awkward and jerk his head away when I turned. This time he didn’t shut his eyes. This time, when I turned, his face stayed where it was, gazing right into mine.

  We were a good height together and he had incredibly watchable eyes. I smiled. He smiled. I was not about to risk puckering up if he was going to blush and pull away at the last moment, because I have a very low embarrassment threshold and I had a feeling the relationship, such as it was, would not survive another missed kiss. I remembered a different incident with Alex Jerrold, after all. I remembered that like it was yesterday.

  So I put my hand up to Foley’s head. His hair was quite short – certainly compared to Nathan Baird’s unkempt straggle – and it had a nice silky feel. He was vain enough to use conditioner, then. I had a closer look at it, now that I had him still, deciding I liked the softness of it through my fingers. And since he really did have excellent movie-star eyes, and that nose, and his lips weren’t bad either, I gave him a hesitant kiss.

  He gave a little start, like I’d electrocuted him or something, but swiftly grounded himself, and kissed me back. Interesting. The current came whizzing back through me. Foley was a good kisser. I congratulated myself on my taste, and was about to hunt for his tongue when his found mine.

  Words. Who needs ’em?

  All the same, after that interlude, we found them easier. I’m not saying Foley and I had had a silent relationship for the previous four months, but it wasn’t endless chat. We both liked it that way: casual, intermittent conversation and laughs more frequent than the talk justified. A good snog loosened both our tongues. He got into a habit of startling me with his conversational openers, a habit which might have been deliberate. He didn’t even refer to the kiss, but he started with the left-fielders then and there.

  ‘Imagine Alex trying to top himself. I always thought he’d be the one that killed people.’

  I had to do a swift reorientation: of my nerve-endings, my leaping innards, my brain. ‘What?’

  ‘Alex Jerrold. I thought he’d stock up high-powered rifles and handguns and then he’d come into school and shoot seventeen people and a teacher.’

  ‘That’s eighteen people.’

  ‘Right, yeah. You know what I mean.’

  Well, I did. You could imagine the stunned townsfolk blinking into the camera and going, ‘He was a loner, you know. Quiet. Odd, now you mention it.’

  He’d have done it for effect. Or we’d have assumed so. ‘Alex Jerrold does it for effect,’ everybody at school said. The whole silent, strange, oddball thing. I saw aspects of Alex that were a lot like me, which was partly why I enjoyed the baiting he got and did nothing to discourage people.

  As far as I was concerned he was a drama queen, which was exactly what Jinn used to call me. A drama queen with no dialogue. ‘Ruby, you’re such a drama queen!’ That was when I was sulking, which was when my quietness grew palpably more malevolent. ‘Get over yourself!’

  Which was precisely what I was trying to do. Get over myself. When I was small, I was not endearing. If I capered adorably, adults would give me a quizzical look, either pitying or slightly alarmed. This was how I got to know that I was short on the charisma stakes.

  Jinn had all the charisma a family could need, but I wasn’t jealous of her. I was glad there was someone in the family who gave good vibes. My vibes were like bacon that’s been left in the fridge that tiny bit too long and has a strange, frightening aftertaste. My vibes were like music that’s so slightly off-key you don’t know why it’s wrong. I was proud of Jinn for being the exact right chord, and I was grateful that she drowned me out.

  I knew that if I tried to be loud and outgoing I’d get it wrong, so I stayed quiet, hoping it would give me the alternative gift, an Air of Mystery. All it gave me was an Air of Extreme Gaucheness, but it was better than making an arse of myself. I kept words in my head, good ones, but all for me. Alex Jerrold, the silly bugger, let his loose. He wasn’t shy, or gauche, or awkward. He was Aloof. He was a not-very-talkative tosspot who thought he was different. Well, he was that all right.

  Secretly – very secretly – I quite liked Alex Jerrold. Not in a romantic way, I hasten to add, but we could have been mates. I was aware that after Alex, I was possibly the second-weirdest and second-least popular person in school.

  So I could either befriend the boy, or join the majority and have my safe second place secured by the more extreme dorkiness of Alex. Loathsomely enough, I went for the latter. I knew all along that if I was mates with Alex that would make me the same as him, which was out of the question. Even though I liked him, he was everything I hated about myself. And the fact was, he was an irredeemable twat, whereas I had an Air of Mystery. We weren’t in the same category.

  And of course, in the end, I told him to jump off a roof.

  Not that I said anything, as he hesitated up there, blinking at space. I didn’t want to make things worse by saying another word, and I was perfectly sure I’d get it wrong anyway. So I let the others taunt him and I let him fall. I let him jump.

  It comes to the same thing in the end.

  I knew I ought to go and see Alex. I should go and ring his doorbell and face the cold wounded eyes of his mother, the reproachful stare I’d last felt when I passed her in Glassford High Street six months ago. I had this inkling that if I got through and talked to him, he might
start to forgive me, and I’d start to feel better enough to forgive myself.

  I wasn’t ready to forgive myself. And to be forgiven, by Alex Jerrold, was a more mortifying prospect than I could bear. I imagined it would be like one of those Victorian paintings, with me kneeling at his sickbed in a pool of yellow light, pressing his limp, forgiving hand to my tear-stained face.

  I got as far as the end of the road that led to the smaller road that led to his house, then chickened out. I never did get further than the big copper beech on the corner; once past it, I’d be a lot more visible, and pale Alex, reclining on his Victorian sickbed, might by some magic of mirrors and weird angles catch sight of me. So I turned on my heel, like I always did, and went to the library instead.

  Spinal injury websites and I were old friends. I liked reading about new research and new possibilities, but even when it was all Renal Complications and Survival Rates and Outcomes After Ten Years, I couldn’t look away. The scratch of guilt’s jagged claw across my guts made me feel better, paradoxically. I should be feeling guilty, I should be feeling bad. And you never knew, I might find something the doctors, his parents, the consultants and the physiotherapists had somehow failed to spot. I went back to those websites as a dog returneth to its vomit, which is an expression that has always appealed to me.

  The librarian, who was part of my penance even on a good day, gave me the evil eye as I pushed open the doors. Oh, yeah. I pulled my phone from my pocket and switched it off. Last time I was here she’d thrown me out because it had gone off and she had her period or a bad hair day or something. I didn’t like being snapped at; I wasn’t used to it and I wasn’t good at answering back.

  I like how you can lose yourself on the Net: one more click, and another, and another. I didn’t notice how late I was till it was getting dark. The clocks hadn’t gone back yet, so that was pretty late even in September. I had to log out and grab my jacket and run for home.