Bluff, page 1
About the Author
Francine Toon’s debut novel, Pine, was a Sunday Times bestseller and number one Times bestseller. It won the 2020 McIlvanney Prize, was shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize and longlisted for the Highland Book Prize and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award.
Her poetry, written as Francine Elena, has appeared in the Sunday Times, The Best British Poetry 2013 and 2015 anthologies, and Poetry London, among other places. Her short story ‘Ghost Kitchen’ was published in the anthology Of The Flesh.
Also by Francine Toon
Pine
Francine Toon
* * *
BLUFF
For my children, who started life as this novel took shape
Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’, Higher English Reflective Essay by Joanie Sinclair, Hallow’s Hill Secondary School, 2012
I have an embarrassing confession to make. I am sixteen years old and I still use night lights. Each evening, when the sun goes down I have to switch three of them on in a particular order. The first is my favourite, a glass rabbit. Its long ears lie against its back and its body shines like a full moon. The star lamp is next, then a toadstool, dotted with light. I know they look childish in my teenage bedroom, alongside my band posters and makeup brushes, but I need them. The ritual started a year ago, when I became paralysed by the dark.
1
Joanie, June 2013
In this corner of Fife, summer nights meant parties on wind-blown beaches. Joanie and her friends would wrap themselves in hoodies and denim jackets, and pretend they weren’t cold in the stubborn evening light.
Tonight Joanie’s boyfriend, Adam, had told their classmates to gather at the hamlet of Boar’s Raik, its bay marked by a bulbous mass of sandstone. School was over and they were celebrating. The rock was known locally as Buddy, looking as it did like a squashed face, watching the beach. The June sky was clear and bright when the first match was lit. As was the ritual, they gathered in a circle around a heap of driftwood, debris and a small collection of textbooks and essays. Joanie scanned the small crowd. One lanky boy was wearing a sheep mask, its plastic face wobbling grotesquely as he danced a jig in the sand. No sign of her best friend, Cara. She was flying to Paris the next morning but had promised to show up.
Her boyfriend had climbed on to a boulder above the fire. ‘Here we go, folks!’ he yelled, while his friends cheered. He held a branch aloft, then stopped in his tracks. ‘Alright Cameron?’
The large, auburn-haired boy had joined the group silently, a carrier-bag of beer in one hand.
‘Don’t worry,’ Adam said, with a cruel smile as he set a branch alight. ‘Joanie’s safe and sound.’
A couple of people laughed. Joanie cringed. Everyone had seen the video by now. She was lying on the library floor, stage blood smeared on her face, Cameron kneeling over her, looking around in shock, before Joanie and the cameraman had corpsed into laughter.
‘It’s such a shame, though,’ one girl was saying, adding more school work to the fire. ‘I thought he was having a pure heart attack.’
‘Adam,’ Cameron said, from the edge of the circle, ‘just get on with it.’
‘Alright ya beetroot,’ Adam replied, throwing the burning branch into the firewood. King of the year group, he looked older than his eighteen years, his long, fair hair swept into a bun on top of his head.
Joanie knew he hated the video, probably more than Cameron. If he’d had his way she wouldn’t so much as smile at another boy.
They were still giddy from Friday’s Muck-up Day. Prank phone calls and conga lines and water bombs. Cara had drawn chalk outlines of pupils’ bodies in the car park, like a crime scene. One boy had gone from room to room playing Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ on the bagpipes. The video prank had been Tatey’s idea: Miss Scarlett, in the library, with a candlestick. He had hidden behind a bookcase, then filmed it on his phone.
Joanie believed that she and Tatey had stolen the show. Tatey in particular was already known for playing pranks, usually roping in Joanie and Cameron somehow, but the video had been shared so many times, she imagined the incident would become school lore.
Tiny lights bobbed in the distance, as more teenagers picked their way through the fields and down the steep, sandy steps towards the fire. It was too dark to see whether one of them was Cara. When Adam planned a party, people wanted to come. He had built his reputation by organizing Neuklear Fusion, a local Battle of the Bands. Adam would photograph Joanie for the flyers he made. Last time she had stood on a rock wearing a polka-dot prom dress and sixties eyeliner, a band of artificial roses in her hair. Cameron had posted ‘hot’ in a comment under the picture. Adam had been furious, even when Joanie had been adamant he had nothing to worry about.
Joanie wore the same flower crown now, standing in skinny jeans. Adam was speaking like a terrible music journalist, proclaiming that a new song could really ‘push the musical palette’ or that ‘The true genius of electroclash has never been fully acknowledged.’ Trying to get his attention, she looped her arms round his neck, mid-sentence, and gazed into his eyes, his friends watching.
Soon, other voices grew louder in the burning, salty air. Girls and boys ran in and out of the shadows, playing one last game before they had to grow up.
An elbow nudged her. ‘This is the last time we’ll ever be together like this,’ said her neighbour Graham, squinting into the firelight. He turned to a group of boys, holding his beer aloft.
‘Well, thank God for that.’ Cara’s voice, her face hidden by her tousled red hair, as she reached for a beer in the cool box.
‘You made it!’ Joanie squeaked, giving Cara a hug. The collar studs of her friend’s biker jacket grazed her cheek.
Cara smiled in scarlet lipstick. ‘Of course, babe. Come on. I was stuck at the garage with Doris. The worst timing.’
‘Doris!’ Joanie said, the name of Cara’s VW Beetle. The car had been the cornerstone of their social lives that year. If it was ever forensically tested, traces of Joanie’s vomit and makeup could probably still be found staining its back seat.
‘Doris is an old lady,’ Cara said, as they moved away from the boys, to talk in private. ‘I haven’t even finished packing yet and my flight’s literally at six a.m.’
‘Just pull an all-nighter,’ Joanie replied. She didn’t want Cara to leave her here. ‘Au pair or no pair.’ She rummaged in a nearby carrier-bag to fish out two more beers.
‘You’re kidding,’ Cara said, the firelight illuminating her hair. ‘My job starts as soon as I arrive. I wouldn’t be able to speak French, let alone look after three kids.’
‘What’s the name of the family again?’ Joanie asked. ‘The Fourchettes?’
‘The Fauchers,’ Cara replied.
‘Oh! Excusez-moi, Madame Fourchette,’ Joanie said, in her Advanced Higher French accent. ‘Je suis désolée, mais j’aime – uh – to party.’
‘Nailed it,’ said Cara, closing her eyes. In the crowd behind them, Cameron was glancing at them nosily. Monsieur Giroud, their French teacher, called him le Francophile. She wondered if he was still annoyed with her about the prank.
A couple of hours later, the crowd had swelled. Flames cast long shadows into the late-falling dusk. At some point in the proceedings, Adam, half-cut, jumped off the rocks with a roar. Joanie sighed and picked a strand of hair from her sticky mouth. She noticed some other girls in the crowd wearing flower crowns, cheaper versions. Sometimes classmates copied things she wore. She realized she would miss that, as she took a swig of vodka from a hip flask.
‘Tu me manques,’ Joanie said, making eyes at Cara under her flower crown, as Cara hugged herself for warmth. Her jacket barely covered her flimsy tea-dress.
Her friend shook her head. ‘Alright, Lana Del Rey, I’ve not even gone yet. You’ll be off hiking the Rocky Mountains with that guy.’ Cara jerked her thumb towards Adam, who was rolling about in the sand like a dog.
‘Hmm, more like waiting tables, at least to start,’ Joanie replied. The couple would be working at Gassy Jack’s, a restaurant run by Adam’s uncle in Vancouver. It would make a change from doing shifts in a gift shop. They had planned their itinerary while rearranging Viking helmets and multilingual guidebooks at a local visitor centre for the Isle of Maeyar.
‘We’re going to talk all the time, OK?’ Cara was leaning in close, carefully sober. Her faded red lipstick was smudged. Her fringe almost covered her eyes. ‘I hate this, but I have to go now. My dad’s insisting on picking me up.’
‘Lame!’ Joanie shouted into the sky. Her eyes stung and her nose started to run. She leaned into Cara, putting a hand on her friend’s shoulder to steady herself. She hadn’t eaten much today. ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Tatey?’ she said, too loud, stumbling over a beer can.
Cara rolled her eyes. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because you looove him?’ Joanie said.
‘Go easy on those jazz cigarettes,’ said Cara. It was something they said to make each other laugh. Joanie couldn’t remember what had started it. ‘Hey!’ Cara turned and stalked over to Adam, her ankle boots kicking up sand. ‘That’s me off. Make sure your girlfriend doesn’t fall down a ravine, OK?’
‘I’ll miss you, Nutjob,’ replied Adam, going in for a hug.
Cara winked at Joanie over his shoulder. ‘Don’t get too messy,’ she called. They had never spoken about a drunken, tearful night a few weeks ago when Cara had told Joanie she needed to break up with Adam. She was wrong, of course. It had just been a bad argument. All couples had
2
Cameron, December 2023
When I finally managed to fall asleep on the late-night train to Edinburgh, I entered a strange, claustrophobic dream. I saw my feet on the stone steps of my old school library. My early-lunch pass was in one hand. When I pushed open the royal blue door, the warm air was infused with the smell of plastic dust jackets.
The library was empty. A couple of books were strewn on the floor. Then I saw her feet, sticking out from one of the aisles. It was my old friend Joanie, lifeless but still beautiful, blood staining her mouth. I fell to my knees, scared to touch her fragile body. Her eyes stared blankly at me. I grabbed her wrist to try and find a pulse, and that was when I noticed she was holding a brass candlestick.
The train jolted me awake as it hit a bump. Fields sped by in the darkness of a Scottish morning. Soon we’d reach Edinburgh and I’d board an early train to Fife. A ghost of my face stared back at me in the glass. It was Christmas Eve and I was almost home.
Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’ by Joanie Sinclair, 2012
It happened the night Mum and Gary, her partner, visited Judy, my step-granny, Gary’s mother. She was excited to meet Elise, her new grandchild. I was invited too, but I didn’t want to go. I wanted to spend one night without being woken up by my tiny, colicky sister. I had to promise Mum I wouldn’t have a party while they were gone. I also had to promise her that Cara, my best friend, would stay over to keep me company. That day, of all days, Cara started throwing up before she reached my house. Never trust supermarket sushi. I should have told my mother that Cara wasn’t coming, but I didn’t.
3
Joanie, June 2013
Ignoring Adam, Joanie swivelled towards the huge rock and noticed a head poke out from a long gap in the middle. The person, a girl she recognized from her year, waved a joint towards her, as a question. Joanie looked back at Adam, who was rough-housing his friends, then strode over to join her. Someone, long ago, had carved steps in the middle of the rock, which continued down the other side. Teenagers now filled the space, bringing bravado and uncertainty with them.
‘Daniel,’ she said, with mock-formality, to the lanky boy who crouched at the top of the steps, rolling another joint one-handed. Everybody called him Tatey. The sheep mask was perched on top of his long, dark hair. If he wasn’t an idiot, he would be kind of good-looking. That was what she told Cara, whenever Cara talked about him. Space was created for her to sit next to him. ‘I thought you were dead,’ someone said, joking about the video in the library.
Tatey shrugged. It wasn’t just Muck-up Day: he, Joanie and even Cameron had started pranking each other in primary school. To everyone else at their secondary, Adam included, it didn’t even make sense that they were friends. Tatey was an undeniable slacker, Cameron hung out with the geeks in the library, and Joanie was now with the kids who hosted parties. The popular people.
On the rock, a marker pen was passed from person to person to write goodbye messages on clothing. Tatey wrote a whole sentence on the long sleeve of Joanie’s surf T-shirt. ‘In Heaven,’ Tatey wrote, ‘all the interesting people are missing.’ The pen pressed against her arm. He caught her eye and something passed between them. Cara, she thought. Cara would hate me.
‘Seriously, though.’ Another boy was speaking beside them in a rush of smoke. ‘Do you ever think there’s, like, a simulated universe? The multiverse?’
A girl answered in a voice that set Joanie’s teeth on edge: ‘I don’t believe in the simulation hypothesis. But I’ve heard there’s evidence of a multiverse now.’
‘Come again?’ Tatey asked.
‘They discovered our universe is like a bubble,’ the girl continued. ‘A bubble that got kind of bruised by other bubbles. It’s been proven.’ It was Mia speaking; of course it was. A girl who could have been pretty if she had given it some thought. Instead, she had just received the ultimate nerd prize: the school Dux for Sciences. Her name would appear in gold Gothic lettering on a plaque in the assembly hall. Something likely to be filmed by a documentary crew in a few years to come, when she had won the Nobel science award, or whatever it was called.
‘Wow, Mia. Go easy on those jazz cigarettes,’ called Joanie, her voice cutting sharply through the dark. The bodies around her started huffing with a laughter that grew wild against the roar of the sea.
Mia rose and started to pick her way unsteadily down the stone steps to the beach, turning her back on them all in her awkwardly shaped denim jacket.
Joanie tilted her head up, pretending not to notice. There was something comforting about this tangle of teenage arms and legs, a beached sea monster. The stars shone down through the gap in the rock. Joanie looked up at space for what could have been minutes or hours. Bruised bubbles? She was pretty sure that was bullshit. There were no other worlds. And this one was too frictional to be a simulation.
When Joanie finally crawled out of the nook in the rock, the nervy anxiety that plagued her day to day had stopped, like the absence of white noise. Back on the beach, the wind hit her in the face. The party was in full swing. She scanned the crowd for Adam. Their school was big and word had spread, it was clear. The bonfire towered above them, sending a flurry of embers into the sky, like backwards, hot rain. Stumbling between the dark knots of adolescents, she couldn’t find her boyfriend. She didn’t recognize many of the shadowy faces. She started to feel sick.
When she moved out to the coolness of the dunes, she spotted Cameron again. He hadn’t yet noticed her, as he talked to a girl with a mousy face. Joanie reached up behind him and covered his eyes with her slim, cold hands. ‘Guess who?’
She could tell he was blushing in the dark, his shoulders tense. ‘I think I know,’ he said. ‘I think I know who this is.’
She enjoyed this pretend flirting, partly because it clearly irritated the other girl. ‘Aw, Cam, you know I’m only teasing you.’ She asked him to write on her dove grey T-shirt. He looked even more awkward than usual. The other girl gave him a meaningful look. Joanie had interrupted something.
‘We were just talking about uni,’ Cameron said hurriedly. His face was pinched. ‘I’m studying French. What are you doing again, Joanie? Oh, you’re taking a gap year. I forgot.’
‘Then I’m doing English at Aberdeen. Why are you speaking like that, Cam?’ Joanie asked. ‘Have you seen Adam? I can’t find him anywhere. The bastard.’
The mention of Adam’s name seemed to alarm Cameron further. The girl gave an exasperated look and turned to light a cigarette in the cold Fife wind. Joanie tried to place her in the hierarchical seating arrangements of the school canteen, but came up with nothing. There was a brief moment of silence, filled by the endless shush of the sea.
This was weird. ‘So, let me know if you see him …’ Joanie said, turning to leave.
‘Yeah, I know. I know,’ the girl said, rubbing the back of her neck. Cameron looked irritated.
‘What do you know?’ Joanie’s speech was slower than normal, numbness creeping in.
‘What I mean is, I know Adam,’ the girl said.
Joanie did recognize her after all. She was Mia’s friend. She had done something different too, a haircut or contact lenses, trying to change herself into a grown-up. At school she sat at the table for the school-newspaper geeks.
‘Have you heard of the multiverse?’ Joanie asked. The weed was having an effect. She tried to pull herself together. ‘Maybe Adam got lost. This party’s a lot bigger than we had actually planned so I need to find him and …’ Her voice was hoarse.
Cameron grabbed Joanie’s arm tightly. ‘Wait a sec, OK?’ he said. Cameron knew exactly where her boyfriend was.
‘Yeah,’ said the girl, reluctantly. ‘Hang with us. Whatever.’ She was masking something. Joanie looked around her, convinced she was being watched.
