Jubilee (22 page)

‘I’b horry,’ he told her, as she looked from him to the scones. ‘I drusht couldn’t holp it.’

When her mum had finished with him, Mandy took Satish back upstairs. On the landing she reached out for his hand and pulled it towards her. She gave him little squeezes – at his wrists, on his thumb – then turned it, palm-up. From behind her back she produced the scone and lowered it onto his hand.

‘You can have the rest,’ she said. ‘You’ve earned it.’

He said they should stop the game now, but Mandy told him: ‘No, you have one more go. Truth or Dare me.’

‘No. Let’s do something else.’

‘Just one more. Then we’re evens.’

He sighed. ‘Truth or Dare?’ The scone was good, that slight fizziness coming through.

‘I don’t mind. A big truth or a big dare. You choose. I’ll do anything: trip up Paul Chandler, say Fuck to my dad, run down the street in my nuddie …’

‘Truth.’

‘Right. What truth? I’ll tell you anything.’

He thought of some of the things he could ask. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Tell me … tell me something no one else knows.’

She went quiet, so that the only sound was Satish chewing, the scone rolling stickily in his mouth.

‘OK,’ she said. She pulled him into her room, shutting the door behind her. Then she opened her wardrobe door and hauled out a basket. It was brimful of cuddly toys: penguins and giraffes, teddies and pandas, which she unloaded by the handful. When she had excavated the last one, she took out something else and held it behind her back.

‘I will tell you something no one else knows,’ she said. ‘But this is something properly, properly secret. You cannot. Tell. Anyone. OK?’

‘OK.’

She laid it in front of him: an old toffee tin, navy blue, with silver bits that were flaking off in places. There was a picture on it of a man in knickerbockers and stockings and big-buckled shoes, and there was a dent on the top left of the lid, right next to his hat.

‘If you tell, Mum’ll kill me. If you tell I’ll … honestly, I’ll …’ Her face had taken on the same hard focus that he saw in Cai when his friend was hell-bent on something. It was like a trick of the light: she had caught his look completely. Disconcerted, Satish moved to reassure her.

‘Hang on. I won’t tell anyone. You won’t have to do anything. I promise.’

‘OK.’ She levered up the lid with her thumbnail and pushed the open tin towards him. Inside were girls’ things: a leather pendant on a thong, decorated with a rainbow design; a glass vial of Miners’ lipgloss (peppermint flavour); a pack of hairgrips. Two-and-a-half white chocolate mice nested in the bottom on pale dust from their own eroded edges.

Satish had no idea what he was meant to say. He didn’t know how to connect these very ordinary things – the sort of things you’d see in her room most of the time anyway – to Mandy’s hissed injunctions. He examined each object at length, handling them all except the white mice, looking at them from different angles. He hoped she would say something soon, something he could pick up on so he wouldn’t seem stupid.

‘Do you know why they’re secret?’ she asked.

‘Umm …’

‘It’s not because of what they are. It’s because of
how I got them
.’ Mandy looked at the door and leaned in closer, beckoning him nearer in turn so that they were face to face. ‘I got them because I
stole
them.’

‘You – ?’ He drew back to look at her. She was biting her lip.

‘All of them. I stole them.’ And when he frowned in disbelief, she said a bit louder: ‘I did! I took them from the shops up the road. Wavy Line, the chemist, Valerie’s.’

‘Mrs Weston’s?’

Mandy paused. ‘Yeah,’ she told him. ‘Yeah, I did.’

Mandy going into a shop, saying
hi
to the shopkeeper because she knew each one by name, they all did. Mandy pretending to look for something while she slipped something else into her pocket, something small she hid all the way home. The shopkeepers of Bourne Heath puzzled by the absence of that small something the next time they checked. Mandy keeping it in the bottom of her wardrobe.

‘You steal them? Then you put them in there?’ He pointed at the tin, which lay between them. ‘Is that what you do?’

‘Mostly.’ Mandy replaced the items and pushed the lid back on. ‘Sometimes I give people things. I’ve given Sarah a few things. She doesn’t know I took them.’

He watched Mandy covering her tracks, piling the soft toys back into the basket, moving the basket into the wardrobe. After she’d shut the door she turned to him.

‘I’ve never given you anything I’ve taken. Never. And I won’t, OK?’

‘OK. Great.’ He sensed this was a compliment of some kind, but he was floundering badly. Did all girls do stuff like this? Was this normal?

‘Do you … Why do you do it, Mandy?’

She considered. ‘Well, it’s exciting. It is – you should do it, just once!’ He started to decline, muttering, but she talked over him. ‘You go in, and they chat with you about school or something, and you dare yourself to do it, and you can do it in different ways, depending on how brave you feel. When they can’t see you at all, or when they’re just turning away. Or, one time, I did it when the Wavy Line woman was actually next to me, putting more Black Jacks in the box!’

‘Why do you keep everything in the tin?’ he asked.

‘Don’t know.’ There was a pause. ‘I look at them again and I think about when I took them. I remember what it felt like.’

Satish nodded sagely although he was none the wiser.

‘OK. So, why do you give them to people, then?’

Mandy looked straight at him. She was biting back a grin. ‘Honestly, Satish, it’s funny. Sarah, especially. I give her stuff and she sort of likes me more! It’s just stuff, but if she’s being a bit funny, it works on her. It’s so easy. You just give her things.’

Satish thought of Sarah, and he knew that what Mandy was saying was nasty, really nasty. But she was right: it was funny, too. He thought of Mandy feeding Sarah stolen goods like she fed her cat, to keep him close by, and he sniggered, then Mandy did, too. They both put their hands over their mouths to hide the naughty laughter, but they laughed anyway, guilty and delighted.

There’s nothing else she wants to keep hold of from that day. It can all go to hell. She holds a memory of Satish, and one of her mum, and that’s all she wants.

She’d fancied Satish for ages. Everything else – Cai, the mucking around with Sarah – it was just a bit of fun, practice. Satish she really liked. There was something held-back about him. None of the other boys held back. It was all action, talk, showing off. Satish watched, and he listened. She knew she could say anything to him: he’d never tell. Satish kept his cool: about her dad’s bedroom, about the stuff she took. He never corrected her when she said the wrong thing. He never laughed at her.

She was pretty sure he didn’t fancy her, though. Certain of it, until Jubilee Day, up in his room. That morning, things felt different. He stood close to her a lot, touched her. He was even quieter than usual. Then, very suddenly, he was looking at her in a different way and stepping towards her, holding her arm and coming close to kiss her. She’d imagined it often, but not like this. In her daydreams he would burst into her classroom, public and unashamed, and they’d run away together, or they’d meet by coincidence on holiday and sneak away from their parents and kiss on a beach. Instead here they were, in his room, and it was really happening.

She offered her face to him, tilting it upwards and closing her eyes. Later, accused by Sarah, she told the truth – he didn’t smell horrible. He did smell different though, gloriously alien and boyish. His lips pressed her skin firmly, leaving a wet trace, a hair’s-width of coldness that soon warmed and disappeared. When he moved away from her, she waited just a beat to see if he would come near again. He didn’t, so she grabbed his hands and stroked the backs of them with her thumbs.

‘Mandy,’ he said quietly, and she could tell: he didn’t know where to put himself.

Before she could get nervous she stepped right up to him, enjoying the luxury of his height, the necessity of leaning up, and anchored his hands so he’d have to let her kiss him on the lips. His mouth was trembling and he didn’t open it, but he let her stay there for a few seconds, and she wondered if he was breathing in her smell, as she was his. I love him! she thought. I really love him!

She was moony and dreamy for the rest of the morning; the kiss had changed everything. She’d kissed two boys and loved one of them and it was a secret. Things went slowly, because she stopped a lot, trying to re-live the moment. When she first knew he was going to kiss her! When he stepped towards her! The way he said her name! Sarah’s visit nearly wrenched her out of that, almost transformed them so they were just two kids snogging, but then Mandy remembered how it had felt, and she took a minute to let it all fall into place again. Sarah might be trouble, though. Mandy should warn Satish; it was a good reason to see him. She wrote the word on the back of a poster and held it up to her window: TROUBLE. She waited for him to come to his window and see it.

Later, when it was time to put out the food Mandy was commandeered by her mum: ‘Can you open the door, Mands? It’s all a bit wibbly-wobbly!’ There were four plates of fairy cakes, thick with icing, piled artfully in pyramids of red, white and blue. Her mum took a platter in each hand, fixed her eyes on her cargo and stepped gingerly out of the front door. She sent her feet out first, nosing for danger with the tips of her shoes before trusting each step.

It’s a lasting memory of the day: her mum stepping stately away from her and out into the street, Mandy’s shift of focus as she caught a movement in the background, on the other side of the road: two fleeting figures running out of Cai’s side gate. Satish was just in front, pelting towards home, and behind him, Cai. It looked as if Cai was reaching out to grab Satish, as if Satish was fending him off, but it was over so fast. As they disappeared her mum turned towards Mandy and tipped her a wink. She smiled back, suddenly unsure whether she’d seen the boys properly after all.

Satish is with Colette, and she’s hungry. They sit at the back of her favourite café in the unseasonable April heat. It’s sweltering, but he’s been denied the luxury of air conditioning because she doesn’t like the other places in town. She says they’re faceless, corporate, bastions of globalisation and cultural imperialism that leach money out of the local economy and so they’ve come here, where the Lebanese owner flirts with Colette and slips extra baklava onto her plate. Satish can appreciate the upside, but he’s still sweating into his T-shirt and thinking he’d probably be flexible about the cultural imperialism if it bought him a little air-con.

‘Hell in a handcart,’ Colette’s saying. ‘This feels like July, or August. Imagine what the real summer will be like! You’ve heard all the findings on climate change? They say it’s moving quicker than expected. God, I’m starving.’ She shoves a piece of baklava in her mouth.

Satish watches Colette for the signs of addiction: Is she excessively talkative? A tough one to call. He’ll bide his time, drawing her out.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘Asha’s been coming home from school full of it, too. I think they have global warming lessons, or something.’

‘Good,’ she says, chewing. ‘They should. Maybe they’ll do better than we have.’

‘Are you really worried by this?’

‘Are you not?’

‘Well … I …’ In truth, he’s not. Or maybe he would be, but what’s the point of trying to fix the future when there’s enough to do just to make the here and now bearable? But he knows how inadequate this will sound, and he tails off.

‘My friend Harry says we’ll all be dead in twenty-five years,’ she tells him.

‘Your friend Harry’s unbalanced.’

‘Still, though.’ Her coffee has come with a thick head of foam, and she leans towards the mug, tilting it towards her, and slurps the foam off the top. He can see what she’s doing, trying to harvest it without disturbing the coffee underneath.

The other people in this café are overheated, too. They’re dressed in clothes pulled early from storage, or in winter gear stripped down to make do. Their legs are white and tender, their faces flushed. At a nearby table, a man holds a toddler on his lap. The child twists in discomfort, settling, then fidgeting, then settling once more, and her father supports her lightly, maintaining the minimum of contact between them.

Colette is barely clad on top – Satish notes his faintly paternalistic disapproval – wearing little more than underwear, really. He can see her bra strap (black), and there’s a sort of vest thing on top of that. She puts her coffee mug down and he checks the inside of her arm for tracks. There are none.

‘Are you enjoying your tea, Satish? Are you sure you won’t have anything to eat?’

‘No thanks, I’m fine. The tea’s fine.’

There’s a pause. There’s something about the way she organised this get-together, friendly but with a bit of grit to it. When she rang to set the date it felt less like socialising, and more like being called to a meeting. He wonder what’s on her agenda. He knows what’s on his.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘So, here’s the thing: Sarah’s mum – you know she still lives in Cherry Gardens? – she’s been doing research about the photograph. She’s taken it up as a kind of project. Been trying to trace people from back then, so they can be in it.’

He can imagine it – Mrs Miller, ever the Bourne Heath hostess. He thinks of her with her clipboard and her impeccable organisation. He wonders how frantic she’s been about her sick grandson, whether this new project was something to take her mind off him.

‘She’s got in contact with people?’

‘She’s tried to. She’s tracked down Miss Walsh – you remember her?’

‘The teacher?’

‘Yeah. The teacher. She had long hair.’ Colette trails a hand down her throat. ‘She wore these big pendants. God, I had such a crush on her. When the rain came on Jubilee Day she let me shelter in her house. Her boyfriend was there. I couldn’t nail it at the time, but there was this sexual charge around them. I remember the sense that there was something going on I wasn’t part of.’