Wasted (14 page)

“Nothing.” Jack shakes his head.

He looks thin, Jess thinks suddenly. She'd never thought he was thin before, but he is. Not weak-looking, for he has muscles on his arms, but the skin over them is fatless. And there are shadows on his face. His T-shirt is baggy and his jeans cover legs that are long and rangy. He looks like a nineteenth-century Romantic poet, she thinks. Full of angst and turmoil. Which is not how she's seen him before. Angst and turmoil are good, though – they push boundaries and Jess knows you have to push boundaries if you want to be free of them.

They return to their playing. They try, really they do. But half an hour later Jack throws down his guitar.

“Shit, this isn't working. Sorry, guys, I need a break.” And he hurries from the garage, leaving them staring at each other, the clang of his dropped guitar hanging in the air.

“Stay here,” says Jess. And she goes outside. Jack is walking round the back of the house. She follows him. He is hurrying towards a wooden garden seat. Kind of home-made-looking, green with age. It has roses rambling around it. White roses and wine-coloured ones. He sits on it.

“Jack?”

He looks up at her. “Sorry.” And he moves along to make space for her.

“What's the matter?

He does not reply except by shrugging his shoulders.

“Can I help?”

Shakes his head.

“Has something happened? You said you had a bad night. I want to help.”

“I know you do and I wish you could. But you wouldn't understand.”

“Thanks a lot, Jack! You don't know if I wouldn't understand. Try me.”

A pause. He could tell her or not tell her. He must surely have that choice. If he doesn't tell her, it will come between them. If he does tell her and she doesn't understand, it will come between them.

“I lost my coin.”

She is relieved and is about to say so when she realizes that it must not be so simple. If it was, he would not be like this.

“How? Can we maybe look for it?”

He turns to her and tells her what he did during the night. She feels cold. How could he do this? There is a fear deep inside her that this game is more dangerous even than it seems. But she squashes that fear because she cannot entirely understand it. So, like Jack, she focuses on the coin. She is in love with him and that means absorbing everything about him; it means being sucked in willingly. Loving isn't about doing what's sensible or right or ordinary, but letting go. Jess wants to understand and agree so much that she will allow her thoughts to be guided in any direction. Even the wrong and dangerous one.

“I thought you said that if you play the game you had to accept everything that happened? I thought that was the whole point? The deal.”

He stares at her. “Go on.”

She struggles to hold on to what she is going to say. “Well, just that you were going on about making your own luck but luck not coming into it? Luck just being what we call it? How everything has a cause and that if people did tiny things differently then there would be different results. But that you can't ever know what those things would have been. You said you have to make small decisions and go with the consequences. And you said that was what the game was.”

“Yes, but now I've lost the coin. The results might be different if I play with another coin.”

“Yes, but they might be
better
. Losing the coin and using a different one might be good. Might even be lucky. You won't ever know. But you have to go with it, if you're playing the game, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, seems to me you're not playing the rules of your own game. You've lost the coin, Jack, and maybe that was the price you had to pay. After all, what's a sacrifice if you don't lose something?”

“You may be right. I guess I'm tired. Guess I lost it there.” He sits up. You can tell from his eyes that he is thinking.

Jess speaks. “How about we test a new coin?”

“You got an idea? In particular?”

“The fair. Lots of opportunities to try your theories of chance and luck.”

“Excellent! Tonight – let's go tonight.” His face is alight now, the thin shadows gone. How easy life can be, she might think if she were thinking. But she's not, just feeling. She smiles too and believes that everything is suddenly all right now.

Lucky Jack. And lucky Jess.

Jack reaches towards her quickly and puts one hand around her neck, pulling her towards him, and their open lips come together. Blood rushes, skin flushes. While they kiss, he reaches for a rose and crushes the petals before sprinkling them on her head and they both melt together. It's very corny but there's nothing new about being in love and no new way of showing it.

Ella calls from the edge of the lawn. “Hey, you two. We've got a band practice, in case you'd forgotten.”

“I think perhaps they had,” says Tommy. Chris wolf-whistles.

And the rest of the day dissolves in music. The sun blazes down on the garage roof and their sweat fills the closed air. They do not know, any of them, what is happening outside this garage. And even if they could follow the infinite possible movements of myriad particles around the world, they would still be no better at predicting the effects of any of them. If they knew absolutely everything, and the position and state of every atom in the world, they still would not know the future, even if one thing does lead to another.

Because nothing is until it is and until then everything is possible. Which is both scary and also reassuring.

Meanwhile, the fairground awaits Jess and Jack, and fairgrounds contain mysterious darkness. Spirits walk behind the masks and puppets and tricks and deceptions. You can give yourself up to the candyfloss magic in the air and you can laugh with the clowns if you want to. Be careful, though: amongst the fairground lights and their enticing eyes, devils may lurk unseen.

JACK
drags Jess towards the fairground.
Drags
suggests that she is unwilling, but she is not: she has simply almost lost her shoe. She laughs as he pulls her along. She has forgotten his earlier shadowy mood because such things are easily forgotten. In a summer's sweat you cannot remember the feel of sleet.

At night the fairground is a riot of noise and light. Loud and tasteless. Lines of coloured bulbs are looped loosely from every tree, lamppost, fence, caravan, marquee. Rides and stalls are neon-drenched. There goes the giant swing, with a shriek from the passengers as it scoops them skywards. More shrieks from the spinning top and the Ferris wheel.

A man on stilts swallows a glowing sword and the smoke he breathes is red. The crowd
oohs
, though one man shouts that
It's a fake
and
Can't you do it with real fire
? Well, of course it's fake: there's health and safety to consider. Two miniature women are juggling knives – the knives must be plastic but they glint as though they are not – and a queen with no head passes by, dipping her bloody neck towards them.

The music has taken a new tone now that night has fallen. It has darkened, richened, thickened. No longer does it tinkle with childhood games – now is the time when young children are in bed, tucked up, bathed, hair-brushed, kissed and storied. Beneath the grinning puppets, masks and clowns, there is a sinister side to fairs, and when that side begins to walk, small children had better not be there, in case they realize that the clowns are not really laughing.

“Where first?”

“Roller-ghoster?” Jack is pointing to a doorway surrounded by painted ghosts and giant jaws dripping blood. A skinny man dressed as a skeleton is taking money from the small queue.

“Crooked Cottage?” Jess went in this last year: nothing is straight and the senses are disorientated. Harmless fun.

“Toss you for it?”

“So you've chosen a new coin then?”

“Head or tails?” he says, his face doing something impossibly between serious and blue-eyed smiling. His hair is back to its gravity-defying swoops, just as when she first met him. And she knows that really she doesn't care whether it's Roller-ghoster or Crooked Cottage because nothing really matters except being here.

“Tails,” she says.

He balances, flicks, spins, catches, covers, slaps and reveals. Grins. “You lose. So, it's definitely my new ‘lucky' coin. That proves it.”

Jack pulls her towards the Roller-ghoster and they join the queue. He pays the skeleton but pockets his coin carefully. He will not lose it again. Puts his arm around Jess's shoulders and melts inside with the closeness of her.

But wait. This is an important moment. We almost did not notice, as Jack and Jess have not noticed. They have just passed a
what if
moment.
If
the coin had landed the other way and they had gone to the Crooked Cottage, they would not have been waiting outside the Roller–ghoster for two minutes – they'd have been inside the Crooked Cottage, which has no queue and is mostly hidden round another corner. If they'd been inside the cottage, Kelly, Charlie and Samantha and three skinny lads – all six with bottles pretending to be water in their hands – would not have seen them. And events would have turned out differently.

But no one knows this. That's the point. You don't. If you did, it would drive you mad.

Kelly holds her hand up. They stop. It's like a scene from a gangster film. Does she think it's Chicago or something? There she is with her tight white jeans and silly new shoes, her face glossy, lips glistening, nipped waist like Barbie. She is every tacky plastic cliché; she is in many ways ridiculous. You can sneer at her if you want, yet she has a power. And she knows it.

Jack and Jess do not see them. Well, how would they? They are wrapped up in themselves, and everything else recedes into the night air. They are pressed together as Kelly and her friends watch. Samantha starts to speak: “Why, if…”

“Shh,” says Kelly. “Let's wait.”

And so they wait. They see Jack and Jess go through the entrance to the Roller-ghoster. They do not see what goes on inside, though they can perhaps imagine. Jack and Jess are in the dark, along with a few other people who mean nothing to them, and the screams are of laughter. It's not a frightening ride; it's not meant to be. Fronds of wet stuff brush their faces but they know it's only cloth recently soaked in water and they scream merely because it's cold and wet. Spider webs touch them, of course – how could you have ghosts without spider webs? But they know it's cheap frothy mesh from the market. Plastic skulls glow green and there's a cackling witchy laugh that anyone could do with a bit of practice.

They are sitting in a cart thing and it rattles and shakes their bones, but the track it runs on is hardly of terrifying height. It's all a bit of fun. Not worth the money but no one really cares. It's just one of the things you do, to enter into the spirit of it. And so, very soon, the ride has finished and the cart comes to a rest. One more wet cloth in the face, one more
woooooooo
and they are done.

It's the sort of thing that makes you hungry though. “Fancy a burger?” says Jess. And they walk towards the nearby burger van.

“Don't look round,” mutters Jack, as they approach.

She looks, of course. It's them: the Kelly Gang and three skinny lads. Jess's heart sinks and she draws close to Jack, pretending not to see them. It will be no use pretending and they probably know it.

They continue to walk towards the burger van. One customer is in front of them and they stand behind him. Kelly and the others are behind them, talking in silly loud voices.

“Hey, Jack,” says Kelly.

He ignores them, though Jess can see his jaw tightening. Jess and Jack catch each other's eyes and smile. They don't feel like smiling. It's a defence mechanism, making out they don't care, even though they do.

“Two burgers please,” he says.

“No problem, mate,” replies the burger-seller, stirring onions and flipping two burgers that are already sizzling.

“Ignoring me, are you, Jack? Quite right too. Need to keep a better eye on your girlfriend, I'd say. Heard she overdid it on the old booze the other night.”

Jess stiffens. Feels her heart racing. Still Jack does not turn round. If he did, he would see Kelly's eyes narrow to slits as she gets no reaction.

“Everyone's talking about it, Jack. Everyone.”

“Leave it,” whispers Jess, feeling tension in his arms, sensing him take a breath to speak.

“That'll be four-fifty. Help yourselves to ketchup.”

Jack hands the money over.

Jess takes her burger. Squirts some ketchup onto it. Puts the roll back together.

Jack begins to do the same.

“Actually,” says Kelly, “we've been a bit worried, haven't we, guys?” Mutterings of agreement from her friends, though they don't know what she's talking about. “You see, we heard – 'cos everyone's talking about it… Well,
we
heard that it was drugs. Shouldn't get into stuff like that, you know, Jessica. It can mess with your mind.”

Jess will never forget the look on Kelly's face as Jack spins round, ketchup bottle in hand, and a trail of the bright red sauce slices straight down her body, from cheek to thigh.

Kelly gasps, eyes blazing.

“Oh, how careless of me,” says Jack, coolly.

“DO something!” screams Kelly. “DO something!”

Samantha turns to the boys with them. The boys are smirking but they soon stop. “What are you waiting for?” she snarls at them. “Are you going to let him get away with that?”

“Run!” says Jack and he pulls Jess with him.

THE
three skinny lads should have dumped their so-called water bottles instantly. If it had only been water, perhaps they would have. But a few seconds of dithering give Jack and Jess a crucial head start.