It Ends At Midnight, page 14
I nodded. The moment that Linda was within a few feet of us, I jumped to my feet, pulling Tess up by the hand, and we walked away past her, one on either side. I almost brushed into her with my shoulder, so keen was I to show that she was nothing, no obstacle to me, but I balked at the move at the last minute, pulling away so sharply from her that I turned my ankle and nearly fell.
‘I wish she’d just leave us alone,’ I said.
We sat in the back of English while Mr Marsh explained the finer details of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to us. Normally I’d have been well into it, teasing the imagery and finding a way to relate it to my own life (oh yes, measured out in pints of Stella, so profound) but this time I couldn’t engage. I stared at the back of Stewart’s head so hard it was a wonder it didn’t explode there and then under the force of my gaze. We weren’t back together. He’d reassured me it was nothing, that Linda had taken advantage of his drunkenness. I was trying to believe him, but it was hard. Whenever I saw her, I got wound up again.
I needed to put it out of my head. I was missing him a lot, and my social life had taken a hit since we’d started going out. It seemed churlish still to be hanging onto the grievance.
Tess poked my arm and I became gradually aware that Mr Marsh was demanding my attention. ‘Sylvie, Sylvie,’ he was saying, ‘why does he fear to eat a peach?’ I snapped back into myself, pushing the thoughts of Linda away.
After the class, Tess took me to one side. ‘You need to get over this,’ she said. ‘You always look so miserable whenever you see Linda, but we’re not going to get rid of her, so it’s time to get over it. Come on, let’s go out Friday and forget all about it. I’ll look after you – it’ll be great.’
Eleven o’clock the next Friday night and Tess was being as good as her word. She’d been stuck at my side since the start of the night. She’d lent me her favourite skirt, made me up, done my hair, poured vodka down my neck and handed me a new fag the moment I put the old one out. We were sitting at the side at one of the tables, watching the dance floor fill up as Mudhoney came on the speakers.
‘I’m going to get a drink,’ I said, standing up, but she pulled at my arm.
‘I’ll get it,’ she said.
‘I haven’t bought a drink all night,’ I said. ‘It’s definitely my round.’
‘I want to,’ Tess said. I looked at her, eyes narrowed. She could be nice. But this was overkill.
‘Why are you doing all this, Tess? Why are you looking after me so much?’
‘I’m being nice,’ she said, shouting in my ear over the yelled refrain. Mudhoney were tired, I was tired too, the music resonating through me, shaking my core. It was the bass, cranked up to the max, and I shook in time to its beat. Maybe she was just being nice. It wasn’t that unusual. Even so, I stared her down and made my way over to the bar, ordering two pints of snakebite and black and two shots of vodka. The barman caught my eye and I knew he knew, but neither of us could be fucked with the dance of it, the question asked for ID that I would answer with a flourish of my laughable forgery.
The pints were full to the brim, the meniscus threatening to burst with an evil purple glow. I took a large slurp from each of them before picking them up, the shot glasses too, and carrying all four carefully I made my way back to the banquette where Tess and I were sitting. As I approached I saw she was no longer on her own, but that Campbell was sitting next to her, a proprietorial arm around her shoulder.
‘Sylvie, I was there too, you know. It was only a joke. But you got well into it. I mean, you got off with loads of people. I really don’t see why you can’t forgive Stewart,’ he said, yelling through the music.
Maybe it was the vodka. Maybe it was the hit of the snakebite. The room shifted, a crack opening up beneath my feet, and with it a fear that I was about to fall. I had to grasp hard onto the tabletop, the tacky metal surface the only solidity I could feel. That wasn’t what happened, was it? Perhaps I was misremembering? I looked at Tess, expecting her to shake her head, tell Campbell he had it all wrong, but instead she looked steadily back at me, her expression sombre, sad, as if she had looked into my soul and seen it for the wanting, pathetic scrap it was.
‘Sylvie, you were so out of it,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to say that it was all Stewart’s fault, you know. As Campbell says, you definitely looked like you were well into getting off with everyone. I agree with him – I think it’s time to let go of it. He’s going to join us soon. Why don’t you give him another go?’
My certainty was slipping. I’d been so sure, but maybe I’d got it wrong. Maybe it was easier to blame Stewart than face up to the fact that I’d been keen, too.
‘No one’s judging, Sylvie,’ Campbell said into his pint. ‘We all love a slapper round here.’ He reached his hand down Tess’s top and grasped hold of her right breast, squeezing hard enough that she gasped before slapping his hand away.
‘Speak for yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m no slapper.’
Her words stung, but perhaps she hadn’t meant what she said to be an attack on me. I washed the sting down with the last of my snakebite before swallowing what was left of my pride.
At that moment, Stewart came over. He looked at me with one eyebrow raised. I could have resisted but I didn’t want to. I wanted my life back to the good version again, the one where I was going out with the most popular boy in the school, where I had status when without him I had none. I nodded. He sat down and took my hand.
It was as if nothing had ever happened.
‘You’re back together then,’ Linda said, pushing past me in the pub toilet. I jumped – I hadn’t seen her come into the pub that night, otherwise I’d have made sure not to be in the same place as her. At least I wasn’t on my own. Tess was with me. It was a month after I’d been persuaded to get back together with Stewart, and by now I knew exactly what to believe about what had happened between him and Linda on Hogmanay.
‘What’s it to you?’ I said, not meeting her gaze, shouldering my way up to the mirror to apply another layer of black eyeliner.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I didn’t take you for such a pushover, though.’
‘Pushover? What the fuck are you saying?’
She shrugged, found her own space by the mirror, and taking out some lipstick, painted her mouth a vivid shade of red. Her voice was steady, her hand less so, and the lipstick skated off up the side of her lip. It should have been funny but something about it caught at my throat, crimson rising in her cheeks as she tried to wipe off the residue. Only once she’d cleaned it up did she turn to me.
‘I wouldn’t have forgiven him so easily,’ she said. ‘I’d have run a fucking mile.’
‘You weren’t fucking running anywhere, that was the issue,’ I said. ‘If you’d just left him alone, there’d have been no problem in the first place. You could see how drunk he was – if you hadn’t been all over him, none of it would have happened.’
Linda shook her head, rubbed her front teeth with her index finger to ensure the lippy hadn’t got there, too. ‘Is that what he told you?’
‘It’s what I saw,’ I said. ‘He looked hammered when you let go of him.’
‘Oh, Sylvie,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He’s done a real number on you.’ She turned back to the mirror, straightened her hair. I glared at her reflection, Tess too. She might be the year below but she couldn’t have seemed less bothered by it. ‘Is that seriously what you think you saw?’
I opened my mouth to reply but the certainty I’d felt just a moment before ebbed away from me. If anyone had been hammered that night, it was me. I had seen the two of them together, that was for sure, Linda with her back against the statue, Stewart close in front of her, his dark head bearing down on hers. I had seen him turn, tell us to fuck off. Linda had pulled away, I remembered that too, pulling at her clothes. But after that, my mind was blank. I’d started to throw up, and after that wasn’t aware properly of my surroundings for a long time.
‘Stewart told me,’ I said. ‘Tess backed him up. Tell her, Tess. They’re not lying to me, Linda. I know it was you who tried it on with him. Everyone knows you’re a complete slag.’
She laughed, and a chill passed across my scalp, all the hairs tightened for a moment.
I looked at her, mute with disbelief. Defiance, too.
She shook her head from side to side, hard lines etched down from the corner of her mouth. I could see then how she’d look in twenty years, a heaviness to her movements. The look passed and she was young again, her lips trembling as if she was about to cry.
‘Believe what you want, Sylvie. There’s nothing I can say will get through to you, you’re so sucked in by them all,’ she said, turning away from me as if to leave the bathroom, but then she took three steps and stood right up in my face, hand tight on my shoulder. I could smell her breath, thick with fags and booze. I stepped back but she kept hold of me.
‘Get the fuck off me,’ I said, but she didn’t let go.
‘Just you wait,’ she said. ‘One day it’ll be you. You’ll be shitfaced and he won’t wait for you to say yes, either. He’ll be on you whether you like it or not. Let’s see what happens then.’
‘Is that what happened?’ I said, unable to hold the question back.
‘Ask Campbell. He was at the flat Stewart took me back to when I could hardly stand up. After we saw you. He took me back and fucked me on the coats still left on the floor. I was so out of it I let him. But I never said yes. And I didn’t want it to happen. Not that way.’ As she said it, she let go of me, stumbling backwards on her heels.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.
‘Of course you don’t,’ Linda said. ‘Of course you fucking don’t.’ With that, she stalked out of the bathroom. The door shut behind her.
‘Do you believe her?’ Tess said.
‘No. Stewart wouldn’t do that.’
‘Well then. We’d best get out. They’ll be worried about us.’
‘I’ll just finish putting on some eyeliner.’
‘Well, get a move on,’ she said, moving in close to me. ‘Don’t let that Linda upset you.’
‘I won’t,’ I said. I was touching up the flick on my left eye as I spoke, not looking at Tess’s reflection, but it seemed like her eyes flickered and something passed across her face. I didn’t ask, though, and she said no more.
‘Babe, baby,’ Stewart said when I got back from the toilets. ‘Where have you been for so long? You shouldn’t leave me on my own like this. Someone might try and snap me up.’
I sat down next to him, pulling my chair close to his. Shambles was packed. We were right at the back of the bottom section, the room full of sixth formers spilling over into the upper areas too. I looked around, trying to see where Linda was sitting, but she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she’d left. I hoped so. I didn’t want to see her again, didn’t want to have to worry about whether what she said was true or not. I looked around the table, Tess and Campbell holding hands, Stewart with his hand on my thigh, his voice at my ear, a warmth beating from him. This was right, this was good. I wasn’t going to let anyone spoil my perfect set-up.
22
Gareth messaged me during the night so it’s the first thing I see when I wake, far too early on Saturday morning, and check my phone.
You sound miserable. Come and see me. I’ve got an event so I can’t get down but you could get on the train and be here by lunch. I can help you with social media shit xxx
At first I smile at the thought but dismiss it. Scotland – it’s miles, I don’t have time, a myriad of excuses. Then I think about the number of times that Gareth has trekked down to see me. On a National Express coach, too. He’s right – I can jump on a train at King’s Cross and be there before I even know it. I look around the flat, the pile of washing-up, the bigger pile of laundry, the detritus of the week. I consider my options. Stay here and clear it up, fighting off all the anxiety I’m feeling about Tess, her health, the way she’s acting, or escape for a couple of nights, leave all this behind.
It’s not much of a choice. I go straight for my overnight bag and throw some clothes into it, stopping only to change out of the suit I’m still wearing and into my jeans. I know I should wash but I can’t be fucked – maybe Gareth and I can shower together when I arrive, soaping each other languorously before falling into bed together. I shake my head, knowing fine well I’m being ridiculous. More likely we’re going to spend the afternoon squashed together over the screen of my laptop going down wormholes looking for the biggest mistakes of my past.
Still, anything has to be better than the desolation I felt last night. I clean my teeth quickly, scrubbing away the film of red wine still left from the glasses I sank with Marcus. There’s acid in my stomach but the thought of the journey north is neutralising it, the sour taste vanquished by a quick shot of espresso before I run out of the door. I’m on the Northern Line up to King’s Cross before I remember I haven’t even told Gareth yes.
As soon as I’ve bought the ticket I message him and then I hover by the announcement board waiting for the platform number to come up. It’s the first time I’ve come to King’s Cross since the renovation works. I remember it differently, a modernist block of concrete, low roofed, an air of squalor seeping around it. Now the glass ceilings are high, daylight streaming in rather than the yellow fluorescent glow it used to be. Then the most sophisticated food available was from Upper Crust, if you didn’t want a Maccy D’s. Tess and I had always wanted the Maccy D’s.
The platform comes up – number 5 – and I head over, memories of the last time I did this journey starting to come up now that I’m out of the new part and back in the bit I recognise, the Intercity 125 not so dissimilar from the ones of my youth. I’m in First Class, though, a sop to age and hangover, not like the orange-seated smoking coaches of the couple of journeys that Tess and I took together when we were still at school.
I sit down and wait to be given a coffee, a bottle of water, and marvel at the luxury, unthinkable then. We were just seventeen, the last trip we took during the May half-term before the end of sixth form, the party at the beach, and the death which changed everything. I remember it now as if it were yesterday as the train pulls out of the station and makes its way through north London. The Arsenal stadium might be different, new and fancy with its Emirates branding, but the tower block for the University of North London is still there, still lowering grey as we move beyond Holloway Road and up until we’re out of London and heading towards Peterborough.
The carriage is nearly empty. It’s eight o’clock, too early for the stag and hen dos, no business travel needed today. I pull out my phone and take a selfie against the antimacassar emblazoned with the operating company’s logo. I’m on the train. I send it to Gareth and lean back with my eyes closed, tired now from the exertion that’s got me here.
After the trial, my parents moved away immediately from Edinburgh, unable to cope with the flickering looks of the people they knew as they passed them in the street. Not that I’d done anything wrong, let’s be clear, but the association itself was bad enough. I moved with them, an incomer to Bath, cruelly similar, the beauty the same, but empty of all my friends, my foundations of history. Once I escaped to university I never went back, nor north of the border to the only place I really called home, until Sylvie’s wedding, and then only the one trip.
My trip up to the conference at which I’d met Gareth was the first time I’d returned on my own since I was in my teens. Perhaps that’s why I was so open to him, emotionally receptive as my defences were assailed by nostalgia, memories. The journey didn’t have the same impact as this, though, arriving on a plane, going straight into a taxi to the conference centre at the Sheraton. It could have been anywhere. This train ride, though . . .
The rocking motion of the train and my own exhaustion combine and I fall asleep, head slumped against the side of the seat, and it’s only as we’re approaching Berwick on Tweed that I jolt awake, my timing perfect. I’ve deliberately chosen a seat on the right of the carriage, and I watch the coastline unfold beside me, the quick sighting of the little ruined house on a tiny inlet, the island of Lindisfarne far off in the distance. We had a school trip there once, carting down in a coach with a packed lunch and a pack of Capri Sun. That was before I had any friends, when the evil duo of Carole and Caroline, queens of the hockey pitch, bullied me and wouldn’t let anyone sit beside me on the way home.
Tess had saved me from all of that. She took me, a girl still scarred from the bullying of the all girls’ school, and built me up into someone with confidence, who could attract boys and talk to anyone in the room, rather than someone who hid away and avoided any confrontation. Sure, she’d been a little cavalier in her methods sometimes, but she was right, I was over-sensitive. I’d taken all those relationships too seriously – Stewart, Campbell, all of it – too much to heart.
The fear I felt the night before is now gone, replaced by bravado. I’m not scared that confronting the whole Linda situation is going to fuck up my career prospects – she doesn’t really know anything. Nothing she can prove, anyway. It was such a drunk night, everyone was so confused about what was happening. She doesn’t need to know how much of a lie I told. I can fudge it, make sure she only knows that maybe I wasn’t as sure as I told the court I was about what I saw. If I tell her I’m sorry, it’ll be OK, I’m sure of it. It was so long ago.
Gareth meets me off the train and we walk down to his flat in the New Town, not far from where I used to live with my parents. The past has me in its grip – I’m seventeen again. I stop him on Dundas Street and run into a newsagent’s to buy a pack of cigarettes, hit by an urge I haven’t felt in years. I light one up as we walk down the hill, Fife in the distance over the Firth of Forth, and I turn to Gareth and laugh.
‘I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve been here,’ I say, ‘though it feels like no time at all.’
