The Good Girl (8 page)

We finished the cigarette. Jay slammed the window shut and carried his laptop over to the bed. He kicked a pair of crumpled underpants under his bed and I knew that this was all unplanned. He settled down cross-legged on a pillow and the springs of the mattress shrieked. There was a wooden box beside the bed that acted as a table, and I recognized the paraphernalia of
teenage boy, the spot cream, the crumpled tissues, the overlapping circular stains from coffee mugs like the potato prints that Ben used to do. He smoothed the duvet and plumped the pillows beside him and indicated that I should come and sit next to him. Apart from my brothers’, I had never sat on a boy’s bed before. This was his kingdom and I was being asked to enter it. I must have hesitated.

‘You can keep your boots on,’ he said, in case this was my dilemma. Then he added, ‘The sheets are clean,’ as if I might be worried about sitting on a tiny damp patch of sperm, which I was actually, because girls don’t make as much mess. I remembered Mum saying something about how if you feel uncomfortable with someone you should mimic their body language so I sat down cross-legged on the throne of pillows beside him.

‘Will you listen to something?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘I mean really listen and tell me what you think. You can close your eyes if you like.’

I nodded. A piece of music started playing. I didn’t recognize it. The first part was instrumental. A guitar, some drums in the background and sad strings, possibly cellos. I closed my eyes, glad to have something to focus on so I didn’t think about our proximity. A man began singing. I could hear the lyrics clearly. It started slowly. The first verse was about a man walking blindly through a wood. He was lost but unsure if he wanted anyone to find him. He wondered if he should give love a chance
to drive out his darkness. The singer had a mournful, gravelly voice. The bass guitar and drums built up in layers to the chorus, angry and passionate, but catchy, like something Deaf Havana might do.

You are the best of times. You are the worst of times.

And I know if you show me my better self then you will leave me.

There was a second verse. He had found love. The light had extinguished the darkness. They danced as though there was no one watching. Then the chorus again; this time it sounded more hopeful, like the coda to a romcom. The final verse was desperate. She had left him. He was alone again, hated for what he was rather than loved for what he wasn’t.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s beautiful, angry and sad, all at the same time. What’s the name of the band? Maybe we could go and check them out in Norwich?’

‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘I’ve never played it to anyone before. If you didn’t like it I would have destroyed it.’

‘It’s amazing,’ I said. ‘Is it about something that happened to you?’

‘Perhaps but not necessarily,’ he said. If I hadn’t been so distracted by the way his eyes were consuming me and wondering what this meant I might have saved myself a lot of heartache later. He looked away.

‘Shall we watch
Breaking Bad
?’

We settled on our fronts beside each other. He put on
the DVD and pressed pause at the bit where the charred pink and white bear floats in the pool. Jay rolled onto his side and leaned on his arm.

‘You know you have the blondest hair and darkest eyes I have ever seen,’ he said.

‘And you have the darkest hair and bluest eyes that I have ever seen,’ I replied, turning towards him. We were facing each other. Outside the wind howled. And at that moment it felt as if we were the last people on earth.

‘We’re like photographic negatives.’

‘My Armenian ancestry,’ he said. ‘My grandfather survived the 1915 massacre and migrated to the USA. He was the only male in his family to survive.’

‘That combination of black hair and blue eyes is a really rare genetic mutation.’

‘How so?’

‘You really want to know?’ I asked, because one thing I had learned about boys you liked was that being clever could count against you. He put out his hand and it drifted towards my face, lingering by the side of my cheek so that I could feel its heat. I tried not to think about what might happen next because from my limited experience of clumsy fumblings I knew that anticipation mostly beat the event. But he didn’t try to touch me and instead put his hand back on his hip.

‘I want to know everything about you,’ he said.

‘The genes for dark hair and blue eyes don’t usually travel together. They’re further apart on Chromosome 15.’

‘How
do you know this shit?’

‘I just do,’ I said. ‘My dad’s a scientist. He has an explanation for everything.’

‘Why don’t you ask him about your mum then?’

We were back where we started. And that’s how it usually worked with boys. You talked and thought you were getting somewhere, and then they retreated because they thought they’d invested enough time on the preamble. From previous experience I knew this was the point he might suggest half jokingly that I might want to blow him. The Internet had reduced oral sex to a form of extreme kissing, and even though most girls refused, enough said yes to make it worth a punt. But Jay didn’t follow the script.

‘You know our bedrooms face each other?’ he said, suddenly biting off the head of the reindeer.

‘I didn’t until today.’

‘Why do you close your curtains during the day and open them at night?’

‘It’s much darker here at night than in London. I get scared.’

‘I really like the way you dance and pretend your hairbrush is a microphone,’ he said. ‘I like the way you move. So fluid. Like you’re made of liquid.’

‘You’ve been watching me!’

‘It made me feel less lonely.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘I feel like I’ve got to know you without the pressure of getting to know you, if you know what I mean.’

‘I
think so.’ Actually that part I didn’t understand. And by the time I did, I was in too deep. But according to my dad, when you meet someone for the first time and you really like them there’s a part of your brain which switches off your response to anything that might make you feel uncomfortable.

‘Why don’t you have anything hanging on your walls?’ he asked. ‘It looks like you could pack up your room and disappear without a trace in less than ten minutes. We were wondering if your family was in some kind of witness protection programme. Are you living in a safe house under an assumed identity? Might you just disappear one day without telling us?’

‘It’s because none of us really wants to accept that we’ve moved here,’ I explained. ‘It’s the same with Mum and Dad’s room. Only Ben has made everything exactly the same as it was in London. Luke hasn’t even bothered to put his clothes in drawers. He keeps everything in boxes and bags on the floor.’

‘Luke sleeps with a lot of girls,’ said Jay.

‘You think that’s why his room is a shit hole?’

‘My room is a shit hole and I haven’t got lucky.’

I laughed to give myself time to analyse his response. Were we both equally inexperienced? Because boys do Sex Ed on the Internet, which makes them long on knowledge and short on experience. In which case sex could be reminiscent of the Biology class when we had to put the condom on a banana and Mr Harvey messed
it up by peeling it first and then apologized ‘for the cock- up’ with no sense of irony.

Or did he mean he had slept with other girls but just not as many as Luke? It was a more intimidating thought but might prove a better outcome. I hadn’t seen him hanging out with any girls at school, so maybe he was talking about girlfriends at his old school in Ibiza.

‘That’s not enough of a sample group to draw any conclusions or do you have more empirical evidence?’ I asked, doing a pretty good imitation of Mr Harvey.

‘Judging by his disastrous condom technique, I would say Mr Harvey’s bedroom is pretty tidy,’ said Jay, lobbing a pillow at me. I caught it and tried to throw it back but Jay was too quick for me. We tussled over the pillow for a moment and then suddenly he was on top of me, straddling my hips and pinning down my arms with his hands. ‘What do you think? Can you elaborate?’

‘I would say the empirical evidence suggests that was his first relationship with a tropical fruit,’ I responded. We laughed. Really laughed. Jay let go of my arms and I could feel the weight of him on top of me, his thighs squeezing my hips.

‘If you want to start
Breaking Bad
some time this year, you better start soon,’ said Jay, staring down at me. He leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. And then suddenly Mum was in his bedroom. I still can’t work out how she actually got there and why we didn’t hear her come in. Afterwards Jay joked about her being a
shape-shifter but I didn’t laugh. She stared at us for a moment, her eyes darting from me to Jay.

‘What the hell is going on here? Downstairs now.’ Her face was bright red. Even the tip of her nose and her earlobes. I focused on the earlobes because she was wearing the pair of yin and yang earrings that I had given her for Christmas and I thought that if she remembered them she might pull back from the brink. They were meant to bring harmony but she looked angrier than when Luke told her that he’d done an essay on how magic mushroom omelette was his favourite meal in his GCSE English, angrier than when Grandpa got drunk at Granny’s funeral and asked the caterer if she would come and live with him, angrier than when Dad told her a few weeks ago that he had been offered a part-time teaching post at his old university, which meant he’d have to go to London once a month.

Jay threw himself off me and sat straight-backed on the edge of the bed. After all Mum was his headmistress.

‘We’re just watching
Breaking Bad
, Mrs Field,’ said Jay politely. ‘Romy said she’d watched the first series so I figured you wouldn’t mind. It’s an American series. Won loads of Emmys.’

‘I thought you were outside with the others,’ Mum said.

‘I was cold so I came back in. Please, can you stop acting so weird?’

Then Loveday was in the room, asking if everything
was fine. We all agreed that it was even though it wasn’t, and Jay and I fled downstairs. Mum looked shocked but I think it was with herself rather than me.

Back in the kitchen Ben was taking photos of the meal with Mum’s old iPod Touch. Dad had given her a new iPhone for Christmas that she hadn’t even bothered to take out of its packaging. Everyone was circling the table with plates and cutlery, piling up food, completely unaware of what had just occurred upstairs. I didn’t feel like eating any more. I followed Jay around the table, taking whatever he took, and then sat down beside him opposite Marley and Luke.

‘What’s up?’ asked Luke.

‘Mum’s gone mad,’ I said, trying to muster a smile.

‘Old news.’ Luke shrugged.

‘This is amazing,’ said Rachel, who was now more than slightly drunk. A pomegranate seed was stuck to her cheek.

‘Wolf cooked it all,’ said Loveday.

‘It’s good for a man to know how to cook,’ said my grandfather. ‘I wish I had learned.’

‘Three and a half whiskies,’ I heard Dad whisper to Rachel. He gestured to my aunt to pour water into my grandfather’s glass but she ignored him. Then Dad tried to pull off the pomegranate seed but she swatted his hand away.

‘I’ve existed off Weetabix and baked beans since Georgia died,’ said my grandfather. ‘Plus the odd raw
carrot that I’ve pulled out of the garden. It’s played havoc with my lower intestine.’

‘At least it’s low fat,’ I said, hoping to distract him from talking about his bowel movements.

‘There’s a chicken pie in the freezer that Georgia made, but I can’t bear to eat it. Otherwise I’ll never eat anything cooked by her again. The day before she died I threw away half an apple pie that she had made just because the crust was a little stale and I knew she’d make another one. I regret that now. Just as I regret that our last conversation was an argument. Her last words to me were that I was a cantankerous old fart.’

‘She was right of course,’ said Rachel. Everyone laughed.

Mum came into the kitchen. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked a little puffy. She didn’t look at me. Dad piled food on a plate for her and she sat down beside Wolf.

‘Are you all right?’ Dad asked her. And that’s when I knew she wasn’t because parents only ask each other if everything is all right when it isn’t.

‘We would have been married fifty years in October,’ said my grandfather.

‘That’s an amazing achievement,’ said Wolf.

‘None of us thought that Mum would go before Dad,’ said Rachel. ‘There was no forewarning. Just a little tiredness. We didn’t factor in the stress of living with Dad for half a century.’

‘Rachel,’ warned Mum.

‘Would
you boys like some beers?’ Wolf asked Marley and Luke. They waved half-empty bottles in response. ‘Romy?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said.

‘Romy’s not a big drinker,’ said Mum.

‘It’s so annoying when parents think they know you better than you know yourself, isn’t it, Romy?’ said Loveday, smiling at me. At that moment I felt she knew me better than Mum. Or that at least her version of me was closer to who I was than Mum’s version.

Then Loveday got up and put on the radio. Big Ben rang out midnight. I realized I no longer missed London. We all stood up and cheered, champagne was opened, and even though I didn’t like the taste, I had a glass to prove Mum wrong. Loveday and Rachel shrieked and embraced and then pulled apart, uncertain what to do next. Ben fired a party popper in Luke’s face and burned his cheek. Jay expertly slit open the leaf of an aloe vera plant that was sitting on the windowsill and rubbed the juice on the burn. Dad headed towards Mum, but she put up her arm and he ended up awkwardly shaking her hand as though they had come to the end of a business meeting. Grandpa wiped away a tear and made a weak joke about a man called Wolf giving him a bear hug. Jay and I turned towards each other. I waited for a gesture, a quick hug, his hand on my hand or even a high five. We stared at each other and then he looked away.

‘It’s time for a game,’ announced Loveday, clapping her hands to get everyone’s attention.