Someday Find Me (11 page)

The bar is dark. There are two empty glasses in front of me. There is one with a dark liquid in it in my hand. There is a man sitting next to me, and one sitting opposite me. We are all laughing. I don’t know why. One is wearing a trilby hat and an open-necked shirt and denim jacket. The other has long straight hair down to his shoulders, and a dark green T-shirt on with a band I don’t recognise on it.

‘You want another, Molly?’ the one with the hat says, and I realise he is talking to me. I nod, and drink the rest of the one I am holding. It tastes cold, and sweet and chemical, like medicine. I cough as it chokes me with cold heat. We all start laughing again.

‘We’re going to a party, you wanna come?’

The party is darker. There is concrete everywhere, uncovered walls and uncovered floors. I don’t know if the plaster has worn away or if it hasn’t ever been there; if it is a house or a flat or a warehouse. I sit on concrete stairs and smoke the cigarettes and the spliffs that are passed to me. The boy with the green T-shirt is sharing a bottle of red wine with me. I don’t even wish it was vodka.

Brick wall rough on my hands. Dress wet on one leg. I’m being sick. It’s red and it splashes my shoes.

The sun is coming up. We’re dancing out on a flat roof. The boy with the hat is holding my hands up in the air and we’re singing. A girl with blonde and brown hair is sitting on the edge of a chimney pot and staring at me. The boy with the green T-shirt asks if we want to do some lines. The boy with the hat says we should do a pill first.

Lying on the roof looking up at the clouds. Stretching our hands and legs out and curling our fingers. I can’t stop yawning. It feels as if my head might split all the way open if I yawn any more, but I still can’t stop. The boy with the hat says taking another pill will help. We touch each other’s hair and skin. The boy with the green top asks if I’m cold. I say no and we all laugh.

Toilet dusty with cement and dirt. Everywhere silent. I retch so hard I hit my head on the cistern. I laugh.

Walking through the deserted party to the roof. Everyone has left, just empty bottles and cans sleeping sadly on the floor. I find half a bottle of vodka and I swing it in my hand as I walk towards the sun.

The boy with the green T-shirt is being sick behind the chimney stack. The boy with the hat has his eyes closed. I close mine and drink.

Leaves in my face. Mud on my legs. A pill in my bra. Alone again.

There are certain things nice girls don’t do. Nice girls don’t swear. Nice girls aren’t sick in the street or on themselves. Nice girls don’t sleep with men they just met. Nice girls don’t tell lies. Nice girls don’t wake up in hedges with the sun high up above and no idea how they got there. Nice girls don’t deserve bad things to happen to them. Nice girls don’t end up on the news or on the side of buses. Nice girls should live happily ever after.

Sunlight shouting between the leaves burnt lines of white light across my face. In the distance I could hear the main road, and above, a sweet little bird that didn’t know there was nothing left to sing about. I reached into my bra before I opened my eyes and swallowed the pill whole.

Perhaps everybody in the world but me understood how a tiny sharp pain could cover a deep dark ache. Then, with twigs digging into my skin and the world swimming and my head screaming, I felt strangely light.

I clambered out of the hedge on my hands and knees, listening to the strains of song that were still circling in my brain. It was mid-morning, the sun almost high in the sky and people passing through in a slow, unemployed kind of way, all the school-runners and walk-to-workers long gone. I sat cross-legged in the grass and held my handbag in my lap. All the money was gone, but my phone remained: silent, quiet, blank.
It was, I thought, the best way to be. I watched a little dog running frantically across the grass, long hair blown back from its face in the wind, paws flying high in the air as it leapt over the longer tufts, and I clapped happily. The sun shone down on my face and the pill picked me up and took me away and I closed my eyes and felt life stand still beneath me.

After what seemed like a moment but might have been an hour, I opened my eyes and stood up on wobbly legs. The park loomed ahead, sparkling like an impossible jewel in what had only a few hours and a lifetime before seemed like the darkest place in all the world. I wandered through the creaking gate and sat on a swing, picturing the young lovers on the jungle gym and smiling happily. Holding the chains and leaning back, I let the phantom hair I could still feel weeks after I’d cut it hang down behind me. I lifted my toes and swung gently with my weight, watching the clouds sway softly back and forward.

When we were children, there were too many of us for the swings. Swings in parks come in twos – two alone or two big and two little. We were three, Bluebell just a pinhole in a condom in my mother’s distant dreams. Just three, Ella, Anjelica and me. And somehow I was always the only one on the swings. Ella and Jelli liked to be moving, always, running up and down the climbing frame with the slide and the fireman’s pole and down again and on the see-saw and across the monkey bars and back again. They’d swing but only for the shortest of times, jumping off at the highest point and running away again. I stayed there for hours and hours, or so it seemed, swinging back and forth. What they didn’t realise was that you could get so much further in that one spot, further than your legs could ever take you, higher and higher until you were flying. I’d swing and swing until the rusty chains left orange crowns on the palms of my hands.

There aren’t many places where you can really lose yourself, but the few there are will always be in a still space, a silent spot. In a chair with a book, on a swing, in bed next to the person you love more than anything in the world. You can be taken away further than you’d ever dreamt just by staying still.

There will always be something that brings you back to earth. Like a low wolf-whistle cutting through the warm air.

I turned my head, the ground lurching back and forth beneath me as the swing slowed. And then I saw him.

Kay was leaning against the railings.

The swing creaked to a stop and my eyes were trapped in his. Waves of the ecstasy were still rolling over me but the goose-bumps on my skin had turned to ones of chill. He lifted the cigarette he was smoking and took a long drag, blowing it out slowly. I stood up, leaving the chains shivering, and staggered a few limp steps towards the gate. He watched me go without moving, just kept smoking. I wondered if he was really there at all.

The gate loomed in front of me and I reached my hand for it two or three steps before I was close enough to touch it. I didn’t look back, just opened it with stiff fingers and wobbled out into the park. As I went, I got faster, leaving him further and further behind, tripping on the uneven ground and letting the strap of my dress slip off my shoulder.

And then he was walking alongside me.

‘All right,’ he said, looking at the cigarette between his thumb and finger. ‘That was a bit rude.’

I didn’t say anything, just kept walking, trying to keep putting one foot in front of the other and feeling as though I wasn’t moving at all.

‘Not very friendly today, are you?’

We were nearing the main road, and suddenly I could hear the sounds of the rest of the world through the straggly trees. The thin dirt path that led through them seemed to glow in the
grey shadows. Kay flicked the cigarette away from him. Things were going slowly now, my body heavy and dragging, and as I broke into a stumbling run, he grabbed me in a flash.

‘Ah ah ah,’ he said, his fingers tight around my arm. ‘Stick around a bit. Let’s be friendly, shall we? Neighbour.’

So much is hidden from people driving past a place. Trees and buildings hide the layers and layers of people and lives that are being and happening at any given moment. In one short stretch of road, you can be passing happiness, sadness, fear. Things forgotten, things lost. Lights on, fires burning, people left out in the cold. People at the end of the road.

He held me up against the trunk, one of his knees forcing mine apart. His breath was hot on my face.

‘You stink,’ he said. ‘Dirty bitch.’ He was fumbling with his jeans. ‘Now, how much do you owe again? Let me think.’

The day it happens is a Sunday. We’re sitting in a caravan in a tiny terraced back garden with a plastic bottle of cider in the middle of the table and the Top Forty on the radio. Lick is holding my hand. I have never had my hand held before. I feel very special. He isn’t the best-looking boy in year eleven but he is in year eleven and that’s really quite old. Even Quin says so. I think Quin is going to be jealous squared when he finds out Lick has held my hand. I look at Abby, sitting on the other side of the table. She’s a good friend. She found me Lick. Spoon isn’t holding her hand but it’s his caravan so he has to pour the drinks. Abby and me have been drunk before. At least, we think so. But this must be what being really drunk feels like, warm and cosy and lovely. I wonder when Lick will actually ask me to be his girlfriend properly. Having a year-eleven boyfriend – I don’t think anybody else has done that yet. They will probably all want to be my friend. I know that Quin will still be my best friend, of course. Things like that never change.

Abby and Spoon are going to get cigarettes. I’m practising liking smoking. I hope it doesn’t make the caravan spin like it did the time Abby and me tried it in her sister’s wardrobe. Abby is laughing at something Spoon has said, and they’re all looking at me and laughing. I smile back but I haven’t heard what they said. My head feels floppy and my fingers are lovely and warm in Lick’s hand. The door shuts and I can hear Abby giggling all the way down the garden path. Lick asks me if I’m okay and I say yes and he says good. Then he kisses me. He sticks his tongue in and pokes it about and pushes at my teeth. My face gets wet and his breath smells of cider. He moves his hand, which is still holding mine, down to his legs and he lays my hand on his zip. He puts both his hands round my head and squiggles at my hair with all his fingers at once. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my hand so I give it a little pat and then I squiggle like he’s doing, my face going all hot and pink. He makes a funny noise and then he pushes me hard onto the cushions and he starts squiggling his fingers under my skirt, which I only made yesterday from an old pair of jeans and it looks pretty cool, it really does, but the sewing isn’t very good and I hope it won’t rip. He starts poking at the crease between my leg and you-know-where with his finger and I don’t think that’s where he means to be poking but I don’t want to say anything, in case he does and I just don’t know anything at all. He’s still making noises and getting my face wet and when he pulls down my knickers, which aren’t even the nice pair I got for Christmas, and pulls down his jeans I say, ‘no’ but it’s lost in all the wet and the teeth and the lips so I say it louder I say, ‘NO’ but his face is buried in my hair and he doesn’t hear me and he pushes in anyway and so I look up at the dirty ceiling and I wonder if he’s my boyfriend yet.

I was frozen, only the rough bark at my back holding me up. In my head I had already drifted away. And then, somewhere, from deep in my heart, I thought of Fitz, and I thought that somewhere, in some tiny place, I mattered now. I had someone
waiting for me. I brought my knee up hard into Kay’s soft crotch, and as he doubled over, I brought it up again, harder, into his face. And then I ran.

I ran through the trees until everything was blurred, until I thought I was dead and everything was disappearing. I ran in the wrong direction, so that when I finally came through the trees, I was halfway down the road. And then everything really was disappearing. And then everything went black.

‘You okay, love? That’s it, open your eyes. Easy does it.’

The sun was on my face again, and there were stones digging at the back of my legs. Somebody with soft hands was pulling my dress down carefully.

‘Get the water out of the car, Jo.’

I opened my eyes. I was lying on the pavement, cars driving past with their wheels turning softly on the sharp grey gravel, some slowing to catch a glimpse of the misfortune that had this time missed them. There was a red car parked beside me, hazard lights flashing, and a man kneeling beside me, rolling up a sweatshirt. He put it gently under my head.

‘Keep still. You’ve fainted.’

The car door shut and a woman came back with a plastic bottle of water. She smiled at me kindly. ‘Here we go. Such a hot day.’

I sat up and the world turned sideways and then changed its mind. The man unscrewed the cap and handed the bottle to me. I took a deep swig and sicked it straight back up on the woman’s lovely shoes, clear and still tepid. I tried to say sorry, but she knelt down next to me. ‘Here,’ she said, taking the bottle. ‘Small sips, that’s it.’ And she held it to my lips, once, twice, again, waiting while I swallowed. In the car a toddler pressed his face to the window. A fat baby sat strapped into a car seat next to him. The car’s windows were rolled down, the radio playing faintly out into the warm air.

‘Feeling better, sweetie?’ the woman asked, screwing the top back on the bottle. I nodded. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you up. We’ll take you home.’

I let them lift me onto my feet. I looked at the two little babies in the back seat. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk.’ And I walked away, leaving them standing on the pavement behind me.