The Damage Done, page 18
Automatic doors slid open to admit her to the shopping mall. Space and air enclosed her; glass panels soared above, letting in sky. The traffic noise was replaced the steady tread of feet on tiled floor, the clopping of high heels. She could walk more easily here. She fixed her gaze on the turn at the far end of the mall; Sounds Unlimited was there, past Tie Rack and Lush, Dixons and Schuh and Bravissimo. Ranks of summer shoes marched towards her, ties and knickers thrust themselves at the window glass. Stereos, Walkmans, a whole bank of TV screens all garish with the same picture that drew her eyes irresistibly: identical cricketers in identical formation against brilliant green that hurt her eyes. The screens blurred, became a shrieking dazzle.
Sickness was shoving her stomach up towards her throat. She was going to heave. She looked around desperately; where was the nearest toilet? Would she make it? She swallowed, tried to take regular, deep breaths. She closed her eyes and summoned her visual mantra, her image of smooth lawn, quiet lake, willows. If she fixed that image in her mind she could carry on walking, gulping down the sickness.
Walk. One, two, one, two. It was like pushing against a current that forced her back. Her own body was fighting her, protesting, making itself heavy and sluggish. Why had Dally made her do this? She felt a surge of anger towards him. He was playing with her.
But now here was Sounds Unlimited. A window display of grinning faces; a heavy, repetitive beat pulsing out of the open doorway. Kirsty hesitated, looking at her watch. Two twenty. Dally didn't wear a watch; he never knew what the time was. Was he really going to turn up?
Slowly she went inside. There were film posters, shelves of videos; people flicked through racks of CDs. Kirsty looked around wildly, her head full of the maddening electronic beat. No Dally. Her eyes were drawn to a beautiful dark-skinned boy behind the cash desk, serving a customer. He handed over change and receipt, and gave a dazzling smile; then he looked at Kirsty.
“Looking for anything?” he asked her.
“Yes. Yes.” Her voice was first too quiet and then too loud. “I'm supposed to be meeting someone. But he isn't here.”
“You mean Dally?”
She nodded, her heart leaping.
The boy turned and yelled through an open doorway behind him, “Dally! You're wanted!”
Feet clumped up a staircase and then suddenly there was Dally behind the cash desk. He looked at Kirsty without smiling, without speaking. His hair was tidy, cut shorter, and he wore a clean white shirt. The thudding in her chest became a tug of disappointment; he had turned ordinary. He was Ian Dallimore.
“Here I am,” she said.
“Yes. I was just unpacking some new stuff downstairs.”
“You work here?”
“Yes. Karim's brother's the manager. I used to help out on Saturdays and now I'm filling in here for a bit.”
“Is this the normal life you said you might get back to?” Kirsty asked, thinking of Ryecote Lodge, and the sad-eyed woman.
“Not exactly,” Dally said. “As normal as it's likely to get.” The Asian boy was watching with interest; Dally noticed, and said, “Karim, this is Kirsty. OK if I go out for an hour or so?”
Karim nodded and smiled. Dally pulled on his old black jacket and said to Kirsty, “Come on. There's a place near here where we can get coffee.”
I thought - I wanted - I didn't know - jostled for place on Kirsty's tongue, but she said nothing as she walked beside Dally through the crowded mall. He looked at her once and smiled, but said no more; he led the way out of the nearest glass door and down a narrow side-street. Kirsty, who had expected McDonalds or Pizza Hut, followed him into a small, tatty cafe with checked plastic table-cloths. A door-bell jangled; the air inside smelled of coffee and bacon. Two large men, side by side at the table nearest the counter, sat with elbows well out, eating great platefuls of egg, bacon and tomatoes. At the counter, a fat man with a tea-towel apron waved at Dally, who said, “Hi, Stan,” and to Kirsty, “Coffee?”
Kirsty nodded, and Dally ordered two cappuccinos. The aproned man got to work at a many-spouted machine. “I'll bring them over,” he told Dally, sliding his change across the counter.
Dally led the way to a table at the back of the room. There was a vase with one plastic flower in it, salt and pepper in plastic pots and a bottle of tomato sauce; a dog-eared cardboard menu, propped up between them, was headed Chez Stan.
“I didn't know this place existed!” Kirsty said, sitting down.
Dally sat opposite her. “I like it. It's where the market-traders come, and the lorry-drivers. Thought you'd prefer it to McDonalds. I do.”
“I do too,” Kirsty said. There was no loud music in here, there was space. She smiled at Dally.
“Most girls,” he said, “would have turned up a bit late. A quarter to three, three o'clock. Just to show it's not that big a deal. You came early.”
“It is a big deal, “ Kirsty said. “And I'm not most girls.”
“No, you're not.”
“I thought you never bothered with time?”
“When I'm working I have to,” Dally said, and pushed back his left sleeve to show her a watch on his wrist. A sturdy, expensive-looking one, with several different dials. She thought of Ryecote Lodge, of Ian Dallimore who was wanted by the police. There were too many questions.
“Why did you make me come into town?” she asked him. “You know I hate it.”
“It was a test,” Dally said, looking at her from under his eyebrows.
“Was it? Have I passed?”
He nodded. “You've done it, haven't you? You came. You've proved it to yourself. Proved you can do it if you want to. Now you can do it again.”
“But I don't want to do it again.” Kirsty fiddled with the edge of the menu, and read: Stan's Scrumptious Snacks: Fill that gap with a doorstop bap.
“You might. Now you know you can.”
“Aren't you going to tell me anything?” Kirsty burst out. “I've gone through this awful struggle to get here - and you knew! - and now you're going to sit here talking in riddles as usual?”
Stan walked up slowly, whistling, with the two cups of coffee. He grinned at Dally, at Kirsty, placing the cups down carefully. The little finger of his right hand was missing; there was just a fat pink stump. Kirsty stared at it, then tried not to.
“How's things then?” Stan asked Dally, propping himself against the edge of the table, settling for a chat. Kirsty's heart sank. Dally's hour would be up at this rate and she would know no more than she did already.
“Fine, thanks,” Dally said. Then the door-bell jangled and an old man in a raincoat came in and stood inside the doorway, looking puzzled. Stan went back to the counter.
Kirsty leaned forward. “Now tell me! Please tell me! Why are the police looking for you? Where are you living?”
“OK,” Dally said, smiling at her impatience. He ate the sugared biscuit that had come with the cappuccino. Then he said, “I promised to tell you about the clay girl. The model you saw.”
“The one you took with you? The Ophelia girl?”
Kirsty felt herself wilting with disappointment. She thought: he's going to tell me he ran away to be with that girl. He's living with her now. That beautiful, elegant girl. Why's he bothering with me? It's not fair -
“Yes,” Dally said. “My sister.”
“Your sister? I thought - ”
“Yeah, I know. But she was my sister. Marianne.”
“Was? You mean she - ”
“Was. She was three years older than me. We didn't really get on all that well while she was at home, we were always squabbling and arguing like people do, but - well. She used to play the violin, she wanted to be a professional musician, in an orchestra. I used to hear her practising in her room. Sometimes I'd go in and watch her and listen. I'd pretend to be looking through her books or her CDs, but really I was listening. She was good, but not good enough. She told me that, though she always sounded pretty brilliant to me. Her ambition was to be a soloist, to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto. She used to play it on CD in her room, all the different versions – Nigel Kennedy, and Ann-Sophie Mutter, and the brilliant Chinese one…”
“What happened to her?”
“Our parents.” Dally's voice became hard-edged. “They didn't see that she'd ever have any sort of career as a musician. They pushed her and pushed her. She had to be an academic success. She'd be letting them down otherwise. She worked and worked for her A-Levels till she nearly had a breakdown. She gave up playing her violin, she was studying every minute there was. She got her three As, though it nearly killed her. She got a place at Oxford. But that only made it worse.”
“Why?” Kirsty said, starting to guess.
“Because she was convinced she'd be a failure. At school, OK, she was one of the brightest. She did it by hard grind, but she could do it. At Oxford, well, everyone was brilliant. Marianne knew she'd work her socks off and still there'd be people better than her. And if she failed - ”
“Did she?”
Dally looked at her. “She didn’t get to the point of finding out. She drowned herself in the river Cherwell, half-way through her second year.”
He gave Kirsty a pleading look, as if she might deny it. Her mouth opened soundlessly.
“And I knew why,” he went on. She told me. She used to tell me everything. In the holidays, she'd come home and pretend everything was great, to our parents. She was having a fantastic time, she told them – great friends, great tutors, good marks. And then she'd go up to her room and play the Beethoven Violin Concerto on her stereo, and cry. And she'd tell me, I can't do it. I just can't do it.”
“What did you do? Say?”
Dally looked at her. “All the wrong things. I told her of course she could, she'd done brilliantly in her A-Levels, hadn't she? She'd be fine. What I should have done was tell Mum and Dad to lay off, stop expecting so much. Let her play her violin and have a good time being a student. Did it really matter a flying fuck what kind of degree she finished up with, as long as she was alive and happy? She couldn't see past it - what sort of return our parents would get for their investment. She walked down to the river that night thinking she was a failure.”
Dally looked at his coffee cup, picked it up and drank; Kirsty heard him swallow effortfully. She saw his eyes shiny with tears.
“Ophelia,” she whispered.
“Yes.” He put the cup down. “How cold the water must have been in February, how icy cold. I keep thinking that. As if it made any difference. As if warm water would be nicer to drown in.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Kirsty whispered, not knowing what else to say.
“I know. It was their fault. Our parents. They killed her. They killed Marianne.”
“No.” Kirsty wanted to reach for his hand across the table, but didn't; he would only shrug her off.
“They did. And they didn't even realise it. They blamed everyone else - her tutors, the college, even her friends - everyone except themselves. They didn't realise they'd done it to her.”
“They didn't mean to.”
“No, but they did it all the same. They couldn't let her just be. They had to make her into something they wanted. And she let them, that was the terrible thing. She was going to be a lawyer, because that's what my Dad is, because she would have failed otherwise. You've got the ability, you've got all the advantages, that's what they said to her. Even the music – she couldn't just play it and enjoy it, they had to put her through all the tests. As soon as she'd passed grade five, they'd start talking about grade six, then seven, eight - whatever she did, it wasn't enough. There was always another hurdle, another test she'd have to pass or fail. They've got enough money to give her everything, and they did - clothes, skiing holidays, a horse of her own, they were putting her through university. They gave her everything except what she needed. She was the girl who had everything, that's what the papers said when she died. Looks, brains, boyfriends, a plushy home, a bright future. She had everything except any sort of belief in herself. It's like walking a tightrope, that's what she told me. I keep taking steps, struggling to keep my balance, but I'll always be wobbling and looking down to see how far I'll fall. And one day I will. That's what she said.”
“You must have thought about her,”Kirsty said, “every time you swam in the lake. Is that why?”
Dally didn't answer. He drank more coffee, put his cup down and rubbed at the corners of his eyes.
“She was buried,” he said. “They put her in the ground. In the earth. Marianne. Can you imagine that, Kirsty? Someone you love, being put in the ground to stay there forever?”
“No,” Kirsty whispered.
There seemed no more to say. She looked down at her own living hand, skin, knuckles, nails, and imagined Marianne's skilful, violin-playing fingers lying limp in a coffin. She looked across at Dally, not knowing what to do if he really broke down in tears. Being Dally, he probably would if he felt like it.
“I'm not going to be buried,” he said. “Cremation's better. Still horrible, but done, finished. They're not putting me in the ground.”
“Did they try to push you the same way, your parents?” Kirsty tried. “Is that why you left?”
He snatched a paper napkin from the metal holder and blew his nose on it, then stuffed it in his jeans pocket. “You're a bit like her,” he said. “I don't mean in looks. I mean you're on the tightrope. You're putting on an act.”
“Not with you, I'm not,” Kirsty said. “With everyone else, but you don't let me. What about you? Are you up there as well, on the high wire?”
“No,” Dally said. “I'm not playing. I’ve packed my bags and said goodbye to the circus. D’you know that old kids' song about Nellie the Elephant?”
Kirsty shook her head, and Dally hummed a snatch, tapping the rhythm with his spoon. Then he stopped and looked at her seriously. “You can get help,” he said. “You think you're all on your own, but you needn't be. I mean, once you stop keeping it all to yourself, you find out lots of people are like this. A doctor would know exactly what you're talking about. There are symptoms, just like there are for measles or flu. There are ways of making it better.”
“How do you know?”
“I read books. I found things out. I talked to Marianne's best friend at Oxford, her flat-mate. All too late to be any use - ” Dally's voice wavered; he bit his lip, looked away. “She used to have panic attacks, she'd wake up in the middle of the night and be terrified of nothing, she'd hear voices in her head. If only she'd gone to a doctor or a counsellor she'd have found out it wasn't really all that peculiar. It's what happens to people like her and you. Sensitive people. Intelligent people. People under pressure.” He looked at her. “You don't have to think you're going mad. You're not. It’s just being alive.”
The cafe door opened with a jangle of the bell and a gale of laughter from outside; two men in overalls came in, sharing a joke, greeting Stan noisily.
“I think I'll be all right,” Kirsty said. “Now. I'm not going to drown myself, honestly.”
“All the same. If it keeps happening, the panic attacks, you should see someone. A doctor. You shouldn't think you're all on your own.”
“What about you?” Kirsty asked again. “Leaving home, leaving your parents?”
“I'm OK. I'm not letting them get to me, that's all. They killed Marianne but they're not getting me.”
“But the police? What if they find you, take you back?”
“They can try. They've already been to the shop, looking for me, but that was while I was still at Mrs Hendy's. Karim covered up, told them he hadn't seen me for weeks. They might come again, I suppose. But I'll be eighteen in three weeks, then I can do what I like. I might go home and tell them, my parents, what I'm doing and why, but I'm never going back. Not to stay.”
“Mrs Hendy knew all the time, where you were,” Kirsty said. “She could have told them but she didn’t.”
“Yes, I know. She’s OK.”
Stan came down the aisle in his waddling unhurried gait, cleared cups on to a tray, glanced over at their table. “You two want anything else? Another coffee?”
“We're fine, thanks,” Dally said. Kirsty had hardly touched her coffee. She drank some. Dally finished his and Stan took the cup away.
“You've left school as well?” Kirsty asked. “Were you meant to go to Oxford too?”
Dally shook his head. “I wasn’t going to try. They couldn’t make me. They wanted me to be an architect, that's what they wanted me to be, ‘cos art and design was my best thing at school. As long as it was something that earned me lots of money, and something they could tell their friends. Oh yes, our son's an architect. Doing frightfully well,” Dally said in a posh voice. “That's what they want. Our son's a dropout doesn't give them quite the same kick.”
“You weren't at my school, were you? Wolverton Park?”
“No.” Dally smiled. “Can you see my pushy parents sending me to the local comprehensive? I was at King Edward's. So was Karim, that's how I know him.”
“The posh boys' school? The private one?”
“That's right. Why have me educated by the state when they could fork out thousands a year to see me go off every morning in a poncey black blazer? I dropped out of year twelve. I'm finished with school.”
“What will you do now?”
“Stay on with Hassan for a while - Karim's brother. He lets me sleep on his floor. Work at the shop. Do more sculpting. Maybe rent a room of my own, if I can find one cheap enough.”
“You're not going away?”
“Away from where?”
“Away from here. Away from your parents. I mean, you easily could.” Kirsty dropped her eyes. “There's nothing to keep you here any more, is there?”
“You,” Dally said. “There's you.”
She looked up, unable to read his expression. “Do you mean that?”
