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7 The past

Jodie Danforth had a ton of homework to do. But she wasn’t able to concentrate. Instead she sat cross-legged on her bed, barefoot in jeans and a Blur T-shirt, holding her diary in her hand, sobbing, in her perfectly untidy bedroom upstairs in her parents’ perfect house. It was a square, white-painted mock-Georgian villa, with green shutters, set in an immaculate garden, still bathed in late-evening May sunlight, in a tree-lined street of almost identical houses on the outskirts of Burgess Hill, a town a few miles to the north of Brighton.

Everything was always in its place. Her mother cleaned the house obsessively. Her father cleaned their cars obsessively, and proudly. Out at the front on the drive sat her father’s immaculate new black Jaguar and her mother’s Saab convertible. Perfect parents, with one perfect daughter — her elder sister, Cassie. And one big embarrassment. Their problem daughter. Herself.

Posters of Jodie’s icons were on her bedroom walls. Madonna; Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise; Kylie Minogue; Take That; Blur and Oasis. All of them perfect, too. With perfect noses.

Unlike her own.

Through her tears, she wrote in her diary:

Everywhere I go people are pointing at me and laughing, because I’m so ugly. Telling me I’m a freak. My nose is ridiculous. I watched my reflection in the window of the bus taking me to school this morning. It’s not a nose, it’s a great big hooked beak. A snozzle. A snout. Some bitch left a picture of the aeroplane Concorde on my desk this morning, with a Post-it note attached, on which she had written that my nose was like the front of the plane. Hooked and dipped.

My eyes are too big, also. When I look in the mirror they are all swollen — and it’s not just from crying. They’re too big for my face. Fact. And my lips are too fat — like someone’s punched me in the mouth and made them swell up. And my ears are too big. It’s like someone put my face together using all the wrong parts. Like they took them from the wrong box.

And my breasts are ridiculous. I’m flat. I’ve got a chest like a boy’s. Cassie’s, of course, are perfectly formed.

Earlier in the day in the English class everyone had to stand up and read aloud to the class a Shakespeare sonnet they had chosen. Trudy Byrne read out one, staring pointedly at me all the time.

‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.’

And so on. So bloody on.

It’s true. My hair is like a bunch of black wires. They sprout all over my head like pubes or a scouring pad. Why don’t I have the same blonde straight hair that my bloody sister, Cassie, has?

I’ve just been dealt a really shitty hand.

Dad dotes on Cassie. She is always playing around and joking with him. But when he looks at me I can see the disappointment in his face. Like, I’m not really his daughter at all. Not the second daughter he always promised himself. Not much of a substitute for the son he was really hankering for. And if he couldn’t have a son, at least he could have had a second stunner of a daughter.

Instead he got me.

Mum and Dad are arguing again downstairs. I can hear their voices above the sound of the television. Dad’s angry because he’s worried about losing his job. They’re making a lot of redundancies in his company, although Mum assures him he’s too important, they could never let him go. Sounds like he’s been drinking again. That’s not unusual. He gets drunk most nights. He’s worried about money. About the mortgage payments on this house. The finance on the fancy cars. That at fifty he’s over the hill and might never get another job.

Jodie heard a slam. The front door? Often when her parents argued her father went out and down to the pub. She listened for the sound of his car starting, but heard nothing. Maybe he was being sensible for once and walking.

She opened her bedroom door to listen, and could hear music coming from her sister’s room. She could talk to her mother. She wanted right now to curl up on the sofa in her mother’s arms and maybe watch some television with her. Her mother was the only person who ever told her she was beautiful. Even though Jodie knew that was a lie. The television was on, loudly. An American couple shouting at each other.

She made her way downstairs, then stopped shortly before the bottom as she heard another slam. Her father coming back in?

‘That bloody cat!’ he shouted. ‘Why can’t it shit in its own garden?’ He looked up at Jodie coming down the stairs as if it was her fault.

She stared back at him as he stormed into the living room.

Her mother said something Jodie could not hear above the din of the television. It sounded like she was trying to pacify him.

‘How great is that? All I’ve got in the world is a neighbour’s sodding cat that uses our garden as a toilet, a wife who drives me to drink and one daughter who’s a total nightmare!’

The television was suddenly muted and she could hear both their voices clearly.

‘You’ve got to realize she’s going through a difficult time of life,’ her mother said. ‘Mid-teens is hard for girls.’

‘Bollocks — Cassie was never like this.’

‘Ssshhh! Keep your voice down! You dote on Cassie because she’s pretty. Jodie can’t help her looks. She’ll blossom in a couple of years.’

‘It’s not just her looks, it’s her attitude — she’s a miserable little cow.’

‘Maybe she’d be less miserable if you tried a little harder with her.’

‘I have tried. If I give her a hug she shrinks away like some slippery reptile. Which she is.’

‘Alastair! That’s no way to speak about your daughter.’

‘If she is my daughter.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘She doesn’t look like you, and she sure as hell doesn’t look like me. So who were you shagging to get pregnant with her? Someone from a travelling circus freak show?’

Jodie heard a thud, like a slap, followed by a howl of pain from her father.

‘You bitch!’ he shouted.

‘Don’t ever speak about our daughter like that. Do you hear me?’

‘She’s a freak and you know it. Hit me again and I’ll tear your bloody head off.’

‘Take it back or I will hit you again, you bastard. Jesus, what did I ever see in you to marry you?’

‘She’s an embarrassment. She’s fat, she’s ugly and she’s got an ugly mind. If she was something I’d bought in Poundland I’d take her back and demand a replacement. Too bad we can’t.’

‘Alastair, I’m warning you. She’s already got a complex, poor kid, always living in her sister’s shadow — and whose fault is that? Yes, we both know she’s got unfortunate looks. Give it a couple of years, I really do think she’ll blossom,’ she snapped.

‘See that, out of the window?’ her father said.

‘See what?’

‘That pig out there — flying across the horizon. That pig’s prettier than our daughter.’