The Night Ferry

4

Hospital waiting rooms are useless, helpless places, full of whispers and prayers. Nobody wants to look at me. I have tried to clean Lindsay’s top in the bathroom, scrubbing it under the tap with hand soap. I only managed to spread the stain around.

Doctors and nurses wander in and out, never able to relax. One patient on a trolley looks like a fly caught in a web of tubes and wires. The skin around his mouth is puckered and dry.

I have never really thought about death. Even when I was lying in hospital with pins holding my spine together, it didn’t occur to me. I have faced off suspects, pursued cars, charged through doorways and walked into abandoned buildings but have never thought that I might die. Maybe that’s one of the advantages of having little self-value.

A nurse has taken down details of Cate’s family. I don’t know about Felix. His mother might still be alive. Nobody can tell me anything except that Cate is in surgery. The nurses are relentlessly positive. The doctors are more circumspect. They have the truth to contend with—the reality of what they can and cannot fix.

In the midst of an ordinary evening, on a quiet street, a couple are hit by a car. One is dead. The other has horrific injuries. What happened to Cate’s other shoe? What happened to her baby?

A policeman arrives to interview me. He is my age, wearing a uniform with everything polished and pressed. I feel self-conscious about my appearance.

He has a list of questions—what, where, when and why. I try to remember everything that happened. The car came out of nowhere. Donavon yelled.

“So you think it was an accident?”

“I don’t know.”

In my head I can hear Donavon accusing the driver of running them down. The policeman gives me a card. “If you remember anything more, give me a call.”

Through the swing doors, I see Cate’s family arriving. Her father, her mother in a wheelchair, her older brother, Jarrod.

Barnaby Elliot’s voice is raised. “What do you mean there’s no baby? My daughter is pregnant.”

“What are they saying, Barnaby?” his wife asks, tugging at his sleeve.

“They’re saying she wasn’t pregnant.”

“Then it mustn’t be our Cate. They have the wrong person.”

The doctor interrupts. “If you’ll just wait here, I’ll send someone to talk to you.”

Mrs. Elliot is growing hysterical. “Does that mean she lost the baby?”

“She was never pregnant. She didn’t have a baby.”

Jarrod tries to intervene. “I’m sorry but there must be some mistake. Cate was due in four weeks.”

“I want to see my daughter,” demands Barnaby. “I want to see her right this minute.”

Jarrod is three years older than Cate. It is strange how little I can recall of him. He kept pigeons and wore braces until he was twenty. I think he went to university in Scotland and later got a job in the city.

In contrast, nothing about Cate is remote or diffuse or gone small. I still remember when I first saw her. She was sitting on a bench outside the school gates at Oaklands wearing white socks, a short gray pleated skirt and Doc Martens. Heavy mascara bruised her eyes, which seemed impossibly large. And her teased hair had all the colors of the rainbow.

Although new to the school, within days Cate knew more kids and had more friends than I did. She was never still—always wrapping her arms around people, tapping her foot or bouncing a crossed leg upon her knee.

Her father was a property developer, she said: a two-word profession, which like a double-barreled surname gave a man gravitas. “Train driver” is also two words but my father’s job didn’t sound so impressive or have the same social cachet.

Barnaby Elliot wore dark suits, crisp white shirts and ties that were from one club or another. He stood twice for the Tories in Bethnal Green and each time managed to turn a safe Labour seat into an even safer one.

I suspect the only reason he sent Cate to Oaklands was to make him more electable. He liked to portray himself as a battler from “Struggle Street,” with dirt under his fingernails and machine oil in his veins.

In reality, I think the Elliots would have preferred their only daughter to attend a private school, Anglican and all-girls rather than Oaklands. Mrs. Elliot, in particular, regarded it as a foreign country that she had no desire to visit.

Cate and I didn’t talk to each other for almost a year. She was the coolest, most desirable girl in the whole school, yet she had a casual, almost unwanted beauty. Girls would hang around her, chatting and laughing, seeking her approval, yet she didn’t seem to notice.

She talked like someone in a teen movie, smart-mouthed and sassy. I know teenagers are supposed to talk that way but I never met anyone who did except for Cate. And she was the only person I knew who could distill her emotions into drops of pure love, anger, fear or happiness.

I came from the Isle of Dogs, farther east, and went to Oaklands because my parents wanted me educated “out of the area.” Sikhs were a minority, but so were whites, who were the most feared. Some regarded themselves as the true East Enders, as if there was some royal Cockney bloodline to be protected. The worst of them was Paul Donavon, a thug and a bully, who fancied himself as a ladies’ man and as a footballer. His best mate, Liam Bradley, was almost as bad. A head taller, with a forehead that blazed with pimples, Bradley looked as if he scrubbed his face with a cheese grater instead of soap.

New kids had to be initiated. Boys copped it the worst, of course, but girls weren’t immune, particularly the pretty ones. Donavon and Bradley were seventeen and they were always going to find Cate. Even at fourteen she had “potential” as the older boys would say, with full lips and a J-Lo bottom that looked good in anything tight. It was the sort of bottom that men’s eyes follow instinctively. Men and boys and grandfathers.

Donavon cornered her one day during fifth period. He was standing outside the headmaster’s office, awaiting punishment for some new misdemeanor. Cate was on a different errand—delivering a bundle of permission notes to the school secretary.

Donavon saw her arrive in the admin corridor. She had to walk right past him. He followed her onto the stairs.

“You don’t want to get lost,” he said, in a mocking tone, blocking her path. She stepped to one side. He mirrored her movements.

“You got a sweet sweet arse. A peach. And beautiful skin. Let me see you walk up them stairs. Go on. I’ll just stand here and you go right on ahead. Maybe you could hitch your skirt up a little. Show me that sweet sweet peach.”

Cate tried to turn back but Donavon danced around her. He was always light on his feet. On the football field he played up front, ghosting past defenders, pulling them inside and out.

Big heavy fire doors with horizontal bars sealed off the stairwell. Sound echoed off the cold hard concrete but stayed inside. Cate couldn’t keep focused on his face without turning.

“There’s a word for girls like you,” he said. “Girls that wear skirts like that. Girls that shake their arses like peaches on the trees.”

Donavon put his arm around her shoulders and pressed his mouth against her ear. He pinned her arms above her head by the wrists, holding them in his fist. His other hand ran up her leg, under her skirt, pulling her knickers aside. Two fingers found their way inside her, scraping dry skin.

Cate didn’t come back to class. Mrs. Pulanski sent me to look for her. I found her in the girls’ toilets. Mascara stained her cheeks with black tears and it seemed like her eyes were melting. She wouldn’t tell me what happened at first. She took my hand and pressed it into her lap. Her dress was so short my fingers brushed her thigh.

“Are you hurt?”

Her shoulders shook.

“Who hurt you?”

Her knees were squeezed together. Locked tight. I looked at her face. Slowly I parted her knees. A smear of blood stained the whiteness of her cotton knickers.

Something stretched inside me. It kept stretching until it was so thin it vibrated with my heart. My mother says I should never use the word “hate.” You should never hate anyone. I know she’s right but she lives in a sanitized Sikh-land.

The bell sounded for lunchtime. Screams and laughter filled the playground, bouncing off the bare brick walls and pitted asphalt. Donavon was on the southern edge in the quad, in the shadow of the big oak tree that had been carved with so many initials it should rightly have been dead.

“Well, what have we here,” he said, as I marched toward him. “A little yindoo.”

“Look at her face,” said Bradley. “Looks like she’s gonna explode.”

“Turkey thermometer just popped out her bum—she’s done.”

It drew a laugh and Donavon enjoyed his moment. To his credit he must have recognized some danger because he didn’t take his eyes off me. By then I had stopped a yard in front of him. My head reached halfway up his chest. I didn’t think of his size. I didn’t think of my size. I thought of Cate.

“That’s the one who runs,” said Bradley.

“Well run away little yindoo, you’re smelling up the air.”

I still couldn’t get any words out. Disquiet grew in Donavon’s eyes. “Listen, you sick Sikh, get lost.”

I rediscovered my voice. “What did you do?”

“I did nothing.”

A crowd had started to gather. Donavon could see them coming. He wasn’t so sure anymore.

It didn’t feel like me who was standing in the playground, confronting Donavon. Instead I was looking down from the branches of the tree, watching from above like a bird. A dark bird.

“Fuck off, you crazy bitch.”

Donavon was fast but I was the runner. Later people said I flew. I crossed the final yard in the beat of a butterfly’s wing. My fingers found his eye sockets. He roared and tried to throw me off. I clung on in a death grip, attacking the soft tissue.

Snarling my hair in his fists, he wrenched my head backward, trying to pull me away but I wasn’t letting go. He pummeled my head with his fists, screaming, “Get her off! Get her off!”

Bradley had been watching, too shocked to react. He was never sure what to do unless Donavon told him. First he tried to put me in a headlock, forcing my face into the dampness of his armpit, which smelled of wet socks and cheap deodorant.

My legs were wrapped around Donavon’s waist. My fingers gouged his eyes. Bradley tried another tack. He grabbed one of my hands and uncurled my fingers, pulling my arm backward. My grip broke. I raked my fingernails across Donavon’s face. Although he couldn’t see anything from his streaming eyes, he lashed out, kicking me in the head. My mouth filled with blood.

Bradley had hold of my left arm, but my right was still free. In a family of boys you learn how to fight. When you’re the only girl you learn how to fight dirty.

Spinning to my feet, I swung my hand at Donavon’s face. My index finger and forefinger speared up his nose, hooking him like a fish. My fist closed. No matter what happened next Donavon would follow me. Bradley could break my arm, drag me backward, kick me through the goalposts and Donavon would come with me like a bull with a ring through his nose.

A moan was all I heard escape from his mouth. His arms and legs were jerking.

“Don’t touch her. Don’t touch her,” he pleaded. “Just let her go.”

Bradley loosened his grip on my left arm.

Donavon’s eyes were swollen and closing. His nasal passages were turned inside out by my fingers. I held him, with his head tilted back and his lower jaw flapping open as he sucked air.

Miss Flower, the music teacher, was on playground duty that day. In truth she was having a cigarette in the staff room when someone came hurtling up the stairs to get her.

Donavon blubbered on about being sorry. I didn’t say a word. It felt like none of this had happened to me. I still seemed to be watching from the branches of the tree.

Miss Flower was a fit, youthful, jolly-hockey-sticks type with a fondness for French cigarettes and the sports mistress. She took in the scene with very little fuss and realized that nobody could force me to let Donavon go. So she adopted a conciliatory approach full of comforting words and calming appeals. Donavon had gone quiet. The less he moved, the less it hurt.

I didn’t know Miss Flower well but I think she got me, you know. A skinny Indian girl with braces and glasses doesn’t take on the school bully without a good reason. She sat with me in the infirmary as I spat blood into a bowl. Two front teeth had been ripped out of the wire braces and were trapped in the twisted metal.

I had a towel around my neck and another across my lap. I don’t know where they took Donavon. Miss Flower held an ice pack to my mouth.

“You want to tell me why?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I don’t doubt he deserved it but you will have to give a reason.”

I didn’t answer.

She sighed. “OK, well, it can wait. First you need a clean uniform. There might be one in lost property. Let’s clean up before your parents arrive.”

“I want to go back to class,” I lisped.

“First you need to get those teeth fixed, dear.”

Finding an emergency dentist on the NHS normally meant promising your firstborn to the church but I had family connections. My uncle Sandhu has a dental practice in Ealing. (He’s not really my uncle, but every older Asian who knew my family was referred to as uncle or aunt.) Uncle Sandhu had fitted my braces “at cost.” Bada was so pleased that he would make me smile for visitors, showing off my teeth.

Mama rang my sister-in-law Nazeem and the two of them caught a minicab to the school. Nazeem had the twins and was pregnant again. I was whisked off to Uncle Sandhu who dismantled my braces and took photographs of my teeth. I looked six years old again and had a lisp.

The next morning was fresh and bright and possessed of an innocence so pristine it made a lie of the previous day. Cate didn’t come to school. She stayed away for two weeks until we broke for the summer holidays. Miss Flower said she had pleurisy.

Sucking on my glued teeth, I went back to my classes. People treated me differently. Something had happened that day. The scales had fallen from my eyes; the earth had rotated the required number of times and I said goodbye to childhood.

Donavon was expelled from Oaklands. He joined the army, the Parachute Regiment, just in time for Bosnia. Other wars would turn up soon enough. Bradley left during the holidays and became an apprentice boilermaker. I still see him occasionally, pushing his kids on the swings on Bethnal Green.

Nobody ever mentioned what happened to Cate. Only I knew. I don’t think she even told her parents—certainly not her father. Digital penetration isn’t classified as rape because the law differentiates between a penis and a finger, or fist, or bottle. I don’t think it should, but that’s an argument for fancy defense lawyers.

People were nicer to me after my fight with Donavon. They acknowledged my existence. I was no longer just “the runner” I had a name. One of my teeth took root again. The other turned yellow and Uncle Sandhu had to replace it with a false one.

During the holidays I had a phone call from Cate. I don’t know how she found my number.

“I thought maybe you might like to catch a movie.”

“You mean, you and me?”

“We could see Pretty Woman. Unless you’ve already seen it. I’ve been three times but I could go again.” She kept talking. I had never heard her sound nervous.

“My mother won’t let me see Pretty Woman,” I explained. “She says it’s about a whore.”

I protested that Julia Roberts is a hooker with a heart, which only got me into trouble. Apparently, it was OK for her to use the term “whore” but I wasn’t allowed to say “hooker.” In the end we went to see Ghost with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore.

Cate didn’t say anything about Donavon. She was still beautiful, still clear-skinned, still wearing a short skirt. Sitting in the darkness, our shoulders touched and her fingers found mine. She squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers.

And that was the start of it. Like Siamese twins, we were. Salt and pepper, Miss Flower called us but I preferred “milk and cookies,” which was Mr. Nelson’s description. He was American and taught biology and protested when people said it was the easiest of the science electives.

Through school and then university Cate and I were best friends. I loved her. Not in a sexual way, although I don’t think I understood the difference at fourteen.

Cate claimed she could predict the future. She would map out our paths, which included careers, boyfriends, weddings, husbands and children. She could even make herself miserable by imagining that our friendship would be over one day.

“I have never had a friend like you and I never shall again. Never ever.”

I was embarrassed.

The other thing she said was this: “I am going to have lots of babies because they will love me and never leave me.”

I don’t know why she talked like this. She treated love and friendship like a small creature trapped in a blizzard, fighting for survival. Maybe she knew something then that I didn’t.