ZOE

When Aunt Tess has gone downstairs I’m alone in the sitting room once more and I think about everything, mostly about how I’ve stuffed things up again because you shouldn’t just scream.

‘Screaming might feel like an outlet to you,’ said Jason, ‘and of course it is in a way, but there are other ways we can channel feelings. We can leave the room, we can ask for a timeout, we can point out that what’s being said is making us feel very uncomfortable or anxious rather than just displaying it. These are better strategies than screaming.’

‘What about howling like a wolf?’ I asked him.

Jason smiled but he didn’t run with it, not that I thought he would, but I liked to try to make him smile.

‘Let’s talk about what you could do instead,’ he said, and he started to try to teach me, yet again, how to be a functional human being.

It’s funny, I thought I was one before I went to the Unit, but by the time they’ve counselled the hell out of you, you understand just how freaky you are.

The night I went to Jack Bell’s party I didn’t feel freaky, I felt as though I was about to enter the realms of the Popular.

What happened in the bedroom with Jack is something that I’ve had to talk about a lot with Sam, my solicitor, and at the trial, but that was really all about alcohol levels and issues of (new word I had to learn) culpability.

I didn’t ever get to remember that bit of the party as something that might have been nice for me.

When Jack came back to the bedroom at the party, he brought me a pint glass full of Coke, which I told him was overkill and that made him laugh.

Jack handed me the glass and I took a big long drink, swallowing and swallowing until I made bug eyes and the bubbles tingled my nose, just to make him laugh.

‘You never do anything by halves, do you?’ he said.

‘Is that Diet Coke?’ I asked him. ‘It tastes funny.’

‘What are you?’ he said. ‘Some kind of Coke connoisseur? Yeah it is, so it tastes different. Do you want me to get you another one?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. I like it.’

He sat very close to me, and he put his hand over mine, and pushed his fingers between mine.

‘I’ve never heard you play piano,’ he says. ‘I should one day.’

I didn’t really know what to say to that. Piano is, and always has been, a private thing for me, although it makes me a public person, and the sight of his fingers on mine suddenly brought to mind my mum’s hand, placing my fingertips on the keys, pushing them down, in the days when her hands were much bigger than mine, when my hands were far too small to stretch to an octave.

Jack interpreted my silence as coyness, as flirtatiousness. ‘Perhaps I’ll come to a concert next time,’ he said, ‘sit in the front row…’ He leaned towards me and ran his fingers from just under my ear all the way down my jawline to my chin. ‘Or would that put you off?’ he asked, and he leaned in even further then, and put his mouth on mine and his hand dropped to my chest.

I pushed him away a bit, because the intensity of the thrill was sort of frightening, and Jack was older than me and bigger than me.

‘I heard you play like a demon,’ he said. ‘Like you’re possessed or something.’

That made me laugh. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, but inside I thought that maybe I did, sometimes, when I was really into the music. You don’t really know how you look when you’re playing well, because the concentrating and listening is everything.

It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody without sounding weird, so I drank some more of my Coke to cover up how awkward I was feeling, and Jack’s eyes were on me all the time, even when he downed his drink all in one go.

‘What are you drinking?’ I asked him.

‘Cider. Do you want to try? I can get you some.’

I shook my head.

‘It’s good,’ he said, and he took my Coke from me and put it on the bedside table, and put his drink beside it, and then he sort of climbed on top of me a bit and pushed me back on to the pillows, ever so gently, and he started to whisper something into my ear, words that you dream of, when there was a knock on the door.

‘Shhh,’ he said.

‘Zoe?’ It was Gull.

‘I have to,’ I said.

‘Don’t,’ he told me, ‘I want you.’

But I couldn’t abandon Gull; it just wasn’t something I could do. Jack saw it. He rolled away and on to his back with a grunt of irritation.

‘Gull,’ I said.

I went to the door. It was locked, although I hadn’t noticed him do that, but the key was there so I opened it, to find her slumped against the wall.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she said. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere.’

She looked disorientated and her voice was slurred.

‘Sorry,’ I said, as she leaned heavily on me. ‘Gull? Are you OK?’

And she puked, all over the floor.

‘Oh fuck!’ said Jack. ‘Get her to the bathroom.’

He kind of manhandled Gull down the corridor. I sat by her as she threw up, again and again, into the loo. Jack went to clear up the mess on the floor, and I realised quickly that I should have locked the door to the loo because before I knew it Eva Bell was standing in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder with best friend Amelia Barlow, and both of them were looking at us with absolute disdain.

‘Should have stayed in the library, girls,’ she said, ‘if you can’t take your drink.’

I heard once that Eva and her friends bought mixers to drink while they were getting ready for parties just in case there’s not enough alcohol when they get there.

‘Shut up,’ I said, but my heart wasn’t in it because Gull was puking so hard it was making her cry.

‘My mum’s going to kill me,’ she said, and I gathered her hair up and held it back from her head.

‘She doesn’t have to know,’ I said.

‘I want to go home,’ said Gull. She grabbed hold of me unsteadily. ‘I need to go home. It’s my birthday tomorrow.’

‘What have you been drinking?’ I asked her. I didn’t tell her it was that late it was already her birthday, because that probably would have made her more upset.

‘Somebody spiked my drink. I swear, somebody spiked it.’

We had cycled to the party, sharing Gull’s bike. It was four miles, mostly downhill. The plan had been to walk home with the bike but I could see that that wasn’t going to happen. Gull was pulling herself up on me now and I didn’t think she could even manage to walk.

Jack said, ‘I can drive you home.’ He was looking a little nervous now, as if vomit and neediness weren’t on his agenda tonight.

Amy was right beside him, hanging off him a bit like Gull was off me only her body was pressed against his, and when he said this her eyes and Eva’s shot lasers at me. Amy was not very drunk, or if she was, she was holding it well.

‘How much have you had?’ she asked Jack. ‘Why don’t you let them walk home? She lives nearby, doesn’t she?’

Amy was right. Gull’s family had a small, modern home in Hartland where the washing-up was never done and even the dogs didn’t bother licking the grease off the floor. Her mum and dad were the warmest people you could meet, it’s just they didn’t care about that kind of stuff. They cared about Gull. Every penny they had, every ounce of love and effort, went to her.

‘She runs like the wind, our girl,’ her dad would say, ‘like the wind,’ and my dad would mutter, ‘He used to run like the wind too, Gull’s got it from her dad.’

Gull’s real name was Linda, but her parents, surprised by a baby when they’d given up hope of having one, began to call her Gull when, as her dad said, ‘she squawked like a gull at all hours, what else were we supposed to call her?’ ‘We used to laugh,’ he said, ‘she squawked so loud. You’d have thought we was throttling her, not getting her a meal and cleaning her ladyship up.’

Gull didn’t like people to know where she lived, because of being a scholarship girl like me. We didn’t live in big houses like Jack and Eva Bell and Amy Barlow and the other kids at our school. We lived in normal houses where there was mud, and stuff was old, and animals lay beside fires and there was single glazing.

‘She can’t stay here,’ Jack said. ‘My parents are coming home first thing in the morning.’

‘I’m not drunk,’ I said. ‘If I can borrow a car I can drive her home.’

‘You can’t drive,’ Amy said.

‘My dad taught me how.’

Jack had a look in his eyes suddenly. ‘We could drop Gull home and then go to the lighthouse,’ he said, ‘have you ever done that?’

‘No,’ I said, but I was suddenly seduced by the glint in his eye, and I said, ‘but I’d like to.’

Amy said, ‘That’s a stupid idea, Jack. Let her drive Gull home and bring the car back. Then she can go home on the bike.’

Jack ignored her. ‘It’s very cool,’ he said. ‘You can climb up to the top. I know a way. We could take my dad’s car.’

And I got this incredible idea of the lighthouse, with its strong beam of light raking the waves below, and I heard powerful music in my head, classical music, rising like the spray on the rocks. I knew there was a shipwreck there too, which you could see when the tide was low, basking on the stony shore like rusted orange skeleton bones abandoned after a violent death.

‘You should go with them, Ames,’ slurred Eva. She was drunk, definitely. ‘Make sure Jack doesn’t cop off with piano girl. He’s pissed enough he just might.’

‘Shut up,’ said Jack.

A boy called Douglas appeared behind Eva and slipped his hands around her waist and buried his head in the back of her neck.

‘You coming too then, Eva?’ Amy said to her.

‘Somebody needs to hold the fort,’ she said, ‘if Jack goes off. You go, make sure he behaves himself.’

She turned to Douglas, and her body seemed to slide up his and they kissed so long and hard that I was totally embarrassed, and in that moment it seemed that it had been decided that I would drive Gull home.

And I remember finishing my drink while me and Gull sat on the bed waiting for Jack to find the car keys, one arm around her and the other holding that pint glass of Coke. And I remember Amy glowering as if she would rather be anywhere else but with us, but didn’t know what else to do.

And I remember helping Gull to the car, and helping her in, and then getting into the car myself and starting the ignition, and I remember how it felt powerful and smooth, quite unlike the truck I’d driven on the farm.

But I shut down the memories there, because this is the bit where it gets painful for me.

I think about how I’m in the sitting room on my own, again, and I wonder if I should go downstairs and apologise for screaming like I did, because ‘apologies are always good and always necessary’, but I think my mum might want me to stay away so she can keep things smooth.

Lucas lingers in my mind: the kiss, the fact that he knows. How does he know? I wonder. Why hasn’t he said? His request that I read his email comes back into my mind. I remember where my phone is, and I dig down under the sofa cushions and find it.

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