The More You Ignore Me (10 page)

Her
experiences with her mother flew out of her like one huge, cleansing vomit and
Mark sat listening, occasionally laughing, like during the story of her mum on
the roof, but not teasing or judging, both of which she’d feared.

‘Thanks,
Mark,’ said Alice about an hour later and she raised her cup towards his to
chink it. ‘You’re a good friend.’

Mark
took the cup out of her hand and put it on the floor. He grasped her shoulders,
his face looming towards her, and clamped his mouth on to hers.

It was
quite unlike anything Alice had ever experienced and tempted as she was to pull
away like a capricious heroine in a black and white film, she stuck with it to
see where it would go and what would happen.

Normally
I wouldn’t like this probing tongue thing, she thought to herself, but it’s all
right, it’s nice even, and she responded, so that their two tongues wriggled
around, encased by their mouths in a wet drunken dance. Mark pressed closer to
her so that his entire weight seemed to be on top of her. He took her hand and
guided it towards his trousers, and almost without thinking Alice started to
undo his zip. She’d never seen a penis before and was surprised at how big,
benign and funny it looked. She’d have been quite happy just to sit and stare
at it for a while, but Mark pushed her back and with the instinctive skill
necessary at these moments managed to remove all the clothes on her bottom half
in one move. As he slid on top of her, Alice realised she was going to lose her
virginity and an unwanted image of Morrissey came into her head.

‘What
are you doing here?’ she said, not realising it was out loud.

Mark
hesitated.

Oh
Christ, he found himself thinking uncharitably. Is she nuts like her mum?

But
Alice said no more and lay still, waiting for Mark to happen to her.

It
didn’t hurt, it was like being in a deep, hot well, out of which she looked up
to see his face, an expression on it she had never seen before and wasn’t sure
she liked. She closed her eyes and images whirled in her head — Mark’s parents
arriving home and finding them, people gossiping in the village shop, Wobbly
and Bighead grinning, Morrissey on a cross, her dad crying, a bull mounting a
cow, trees being thrashed by the wind, her mother shouting and running naked
through the garden, Marie Henty smiling shyly… and then with one great heave
Mark seemed to collapse into himself and lay panting on her chest.

And
then it was quiet. A voice on the television said, ‘And now for the weather,’
and they looked at each other and moved slowly apart until they were both
sitting up on the huge settee. They shifted along to create what seemed like a
mile-wide gap between them and looked down at the same time to behold an
enormous patch of wetness between them on the sofa.

‘Oh
shit,’ said Mark and jumped up, pulling Alice with him.

He hauled
the offending cushion off the settee and turned it over as Alice slowly began
to put her clothes on.

‘I
don’t know what to say.’ she said, ‘except it was lovely and I have to go.

Mark
said nothing.

Alice
snatched her coat which was lying on the table and let herself out of the door.
Her bike lay on the ground like a big metal spider and she picked it up, got on
and began the journey down the long, potholed track of the farm. In the
distance she saw some car headlights — Mark’s parents heading down the drive.
Not wanting to explain what she assumed was her very visible, changed status,
she jumped off her bike, threw it into the hedge and then lay on the verge
behind a rotting log as the car whooshed past her, spraying her with dirty
water from a particularly big pothole. Then she got back on her bike and rode
home.

She woke the next morning
and lay, eyes open, for a tiny period of time before the events of the previous
night came flooding back and her stomach lurched. She sat up in bed and twisted
to get her picture of Morrissey from under the pillow. He looked more
disappointed than he did yesterday and she wondered whether she should write to
him again, but having just posted the first letter the day before, perhaps it
might not be a good idea.

Alice!’

Her
stomach lurched again. It was her dad calling from downstairs.

‘Come
on, love, it’s eight o’clock. I’ve put some Sugar Puffs out for you. Come on,
they’ll get soggy and you’ll be late for school.’

‘Coming!’
Shit, Alice thought. School as well. How am I going to face that?

She
rose slowly, went into the bathroom and turned on the bath taps.

‘Alice!’

‘Yes?’
she shouted back.

‘You
haven’t got time for a bath. Come on, hurry up, love.’ I don’t want to go to
school with Mark’s sperm inside me, she thought. People will be able to smell
me. She let the taps run.

‘I’ll
be really quick!’ she called down and plunged into the warm bath.

She
really wanted to stay there all day but forced herself to have a cursory wash
of all the bits that might present olfactory evidence to her classmates. She
pulled on her uniform and slouched down the stairs, her head thumping and her
heart beating. Would her dad be able to tell just by looking at her? She felt
as though she was glowing like a hot coal but when she sat down at the table,
Keith glanced up at her and then back at his breakfast. ‘This Charming Man’ was
playing on the radio. Alice’s heartbeat quickened. What did this mean? Surely
it couldn’t just be a coincidence? Was it a message? She looked over at her dad
to see if it had had any effect on him.

Strangely,
he didn’t even seem to notice it.

‘Hardly
saw you last night,’ said her dad. ‘Did you have a nice time at Mark’s?’

‘Yes,
thanks,’ said Alice, her mouth full of cereal. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Still
in bed,’ said Keith, a phrase he used every morning and had done since Gina’s
first admission to hospital. ‘She’s going out to the shops with Nan Wildgoose
later.’

Gina’s
mum often took her to the shops either in Ludlow or Leominster in an attempt to
interest her in the surface paraphernalia of the everyday woman, but most of
the time Gina dragged listlessly behind her, eyes downcast, not showing the
slightest bit of a spark in anything that passed before her.

Alice
must have looked in the mirror twenty times before she left for school to check
whether her appearance was in any way changed. She still looked the same, the
expression one she had seen on many mornings, and her hair messily drawn back
into a fat ponytail. The frayed jumper with its bobbly surface still hung around
her small chest like a rag and drooped to her thighs. The shiny, pleated skirt
looked nothing like the neat, short mini skirts the other girls in her class
hitched up once they got on the school bus, and her make-up-free face had a
scrubbed and pink appearance.

She
stood waiting for the school bus at the end of the lane and it drew up on time
as usual. The doors wheezed open and she took a deep breath in anticipation of
the children on the bus recognising and commenting upon her recently achieved
adult status.

But
nothing was different; the low-level buzz, rising in an occasional crescendo,
was the same and so she began to look forward to the next ordeal, which was
seeing Mark and gauging how their friendship stood.

She
didn’t have to wait very long. As the children were regurgitated off the bus
and, as one, started the short walk through the school gates, Mark sailed past
on his bike. Normally he stopped and got off his bike and walked in with her
and Karen. But there was no sign of Karen this morning and Mark disappeared
through the gates without even turning his head towards her. Alice opened her mouth
to shout after him but the words faded and came out as a small squeak.
Embarrassed by this, she stared hard at the ground and continued to walk.

She had
double French first which Mark didn’t do and so it was at break time that their
second encounter occurred.

On the
scruffy patch of grass outside the main block, Alice spotted Mark coming
towards her. He seemed outlined by a thick black pencil as he dodged between
other figures who immediately faded against his strong outline. Alice saw with
some relief that he was grinning at her.

‘Hello,’
he said. ‘You all right?’

‘Fine,’
she said, feeling a raging heat illuminating her face. ‘Mark…’ Alice began
but was interrupted by Karen pushing in between them and grabbing them both by
the arm.

‘All
right, you two?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’
they said together.

‘What
did you do last night?’ asked Karen. ‘I nearly phoned for a meet-up but my mum
made me help her with clearing out the garage. God, it was fucking boring. Did
you go out?’ She looked at Alice.

What
can I say? thought Alice. Should we tell her now? Should I wait until I’m on my
own with her?

As
these thoughts ran round her head, she realised Mark had said, ‘She came round
to my place, we just watched telly. talked about bloody Morrissey for ages and
had some cider.’

‘Oh,
you lucky buggers,’ said Karen. ‘Wish I’d been there. ‘The bell rang and the
crowd in the playground began to move towards the building.

‘Can we
talk later?’ Alice said to Mark.

‘Ooh,
what’s this?’ said Karen, sensing something out of the ordinary.

‘Oh
nothing,’ said Alice. ‘I just want to ask Mark something about my maths.’ This
was dull enough to throw Karen off the scent.

All
right,’ said Mark. ‘I’ll see you after school. You can walk back with me if you
want.’

They
walked into the building and became consumed by the crowds heading for lessons.
Alice sat through geography trying to work out what she would say to Mark.
This was difficult because she really had no idea what she thought about it
all. The cider they had consumed had given the whole incident a surreal veneer
and Alice kept trying to imagine that it hadn’t really happened. But she knew
it had and she wanted to establish the old familiarity with Mark before they
drifted in different directions and became embarrassed by each other’s
presence. Or did she want to do it again? She wasn’t sure. She loved the wild uncontrolled
element of it all, because over the years her inner turmoil had disabled her
from being what she felt was her true self. To her peer group and teachers she
was distracted and monosyllabic, to her friends this layer was peeled off to
reveal a sardonic sense of humour and a cynicism unusual in a
fifteen-year-old. To her dad she was quiet but sweet, helpful and domesticated,
always available to help with work in the house or keep an eye on Gina when her
normally controlled mental state wobbled a bit. Alice wanted to be herself with
someone and she was on the brink of doing that with Mark or with Morrissey. She
didn’t know which.

Mark
seemed the obvious choice but Morrissey was so much safer. He wasn’t liable to
criticise her, to harass her, to make her fall in love with him and then leave
her. Her head whirred with the possibilities.

After
school, they met at the gates, Mark with his bike, and walked along the verge,
one in front of the other much of the time as cars buzzed past them. This made
it hard to talk.

The
broken conversation that they managed to conduct amazed Alice who had gone over
in her head what the various possibilities might be. She had predicted that
Mark would either wish to be friends, or have a relationship with her, or break
off their friendship altogether.

It
seemed that none of these was the reality. Mark told Alice that for some years
he had thought he might be gay and that although he had not had any physical
relationships with men or boys, it was something that had sat constantly in his
head since he was ten.

Alice
thought, then what were you doing with me?

So she
said it.

Mark
thought for some time.

‘I
really don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been one of my best friends. I love
being with you, you’re so different from all the other girls and you talk
sense, you make me laugh, and I suppose I wanted some way of showing you and I
got carried away’ He didn’t say that sometimes he thought she was like a boy.