Kiss (3 page)

‘I think Carl’s down in his hut,’ she said.

‘Oh, great.’

‘Sylvie?’ said Jules. She paused, shaking the lettuce. ‘Is Carl OK?’

‘OK in what way?’

‘I don’t know.’ She picked a little slug out of the lettuce, shuddering. ‘Yuck!
Any
kind of way. He just seems a bit … quiet. You two haven’t had a row, have you?’

‘We never have rows,’ I said.

We
did
, but I generally gave in quickly because I couldn’t bear Carl being cross with me.

‘Maybe it’s something at school then,’ said Jules. ‘I keep wondering whether it was a good idea to uproot him and send him there.’

‘No it wasn’t!’ I said.

‘Oh, darling. I know it must have been very hard for you. For
both
of you. But you know what an old brainybox Carl is, and the grammar gets lots of boys into Oxbridge. He’s keeping up with the work all right, I know that, though he’s had a lot of catching up to do. Maybe he’s just tired from working so much. I don’t know though. He just sort of mooches about when he’s at home, like he’s got stuff on his mind.’

‘He’s always been a bit dreamy,’ I said uneasily.

I felt flattered to be asked about Carl, as if I was the one who had the key to all his secrets, but I knew how he’d hate to think I was discussing him with his mum.

‘Are you two still working on this book of yours?’ said Jules.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, though we hadn’t made up anything new since September, when I’d gone to the high school and Carl started at the grammar. I’d tried working on the book on my own but it wasn’t the same without Carl. I’d only written two pages and then decided they were so silly and sentimental I ripped them right out of the book.

‘When are we going to get to read it then?’ said Jules.

‘Oh, goodness! It’s kind of private,’ I said.

Jules shrieked as she found a truly gigantic slug. She dropped the lettuce in the sink, letting the cold water rinse it.

‘I feel I really should buy organic veg but, oh God, I hate these slimy slugs.’

‘Carl hates them too. He hates all creepy-crawlies.’

I had to be chief spider-catcher in the Glass Hut. Carl wanted to be a Buddhist and not kill anything but he wouldn’t have minded a holocaust of the insect world.

‘Tell me about it,’ said Jules. ‘
Last
time we had salad he found some little buggy thing on his plate and squealed a bit, just out of shock, I think, but Jake and Mick were merciless. He got teased for being a wimp the entire week, poor boy.’

Mick was Jules’s husband. He was a big broad man with a bit of a beer gut. He looked like a labourer in his scruffy T-shirts and sagging jeans but he was actually a lecturer in Politics at the university. He was always very kind to me but he teased me too. He called me Silent Sylvie because I barely said two words in his presence, and when I had my hair in plaits he could never pass me without pulling on a pigtail and going
Ding-ding
.

Carl said he sometimes couldn’t stick his dad.

I said Carl was lucky to still
have
his dad. That shut him up.

My dad isn’t dead. He just cleared off two years ago. I used to see him every weekend for the first few months, but when his girlfriend
had their baby he stopped bothering.

Carl and I had great fun making up two warrior kings in Glassworld, one a jokey buffoon and one an untrustworthy philanderer. They donned heavy metal armour and fought in time to heavy-metal music, sweating inside their visors as they hacked and whacked frantically with their silver swords. They fought all day and half the night without managing to inflict a single wound, and then died within a minute of each other of exhaustion and apoplexy.

Jules gingerly batted the lettuce from one side of the sink to the other. ‘Horrid little sluggery sluggers,’ she said. She paused. ‘Sylvie, you don’t think Carl’s being teased at school, do you?’

I stared at her. ‘Everyone looks
up
to Carl,’ I said. ‘Everyone was just desperate to be his friend.’

‘Yes, I know they made a big fuss of him at Milstead. But maybe it’s different at the grammar? All those boys … He says he’s got friends but he never really talks about them properly. I’ve tried asking him about it but he just clams up with me. You know, “I’m fine, Mum, just leave it.”’

‘I know,’ I said. He clammed up with me too.

‘Thank God he’s got you for his friend, Sylvie. But I wish he’d make
more
friends. He just holes up in his room or down in the hut. I wish he’d get
out
more.’

‘Well, I’ve come to invite him to a party,’ I said.

‘Really! Oh wow, great,’ said Jules, suddenly so happy she threw the soaking lettuce up in the air, showering herself with water drops.

‘I don’t think he’ll
go
though,’ I said. ‘I don’t think
I’m
going. It’s this girl at school and she’s so grown up and scary – goodness knows what they’ll get up to at her party.’

I wanted Jules to come the heavy mother and forbid Carl and me to go now, but she still looked eager.

‘You and Carl are sensible kids. You won’t do anything too silly. And if it’s at this girl’s house I suppose her parents will be there keeping an eye on things.’

Miranda seemed to come from such an alien world I couldn’t even imagine her
having
parents.

‘Don’t get too excited, Jules,’ I said. ‘You know Carl isn’t really a party kind of boy.’

‘Go and ask him!’

‘OK, OK!’

I went out of the Johnsons’ kitchen door into their back garden. It was the twin of ours, but Jules had been imaginative with all sorts of colourful plants and weird painted statues and shrubs. Wind chimes tinkled from every tree as I walked down the garden, right to the bottom behind the yew hedge, where the Glass Hut was.

IT LOOKED LIKE
an ordinary large garden hut at first glance. It was made of planks of pale wood with a latched door and two small windows. They each had a stained-glass roundel of white-robed angels with gold wings gliding across a ruby glass carpet. I stroked them gently, my finger following the black lead outline, our little ritual ever since Carl bought them with his Christmas money last year.

I knocked at the door, our special knock, Morse code for
glass
. Carl was supposed to knock right back. I waited. The Glass Hut was silent.

‘Carl?’ I called.

I heard a sigh.

‘Is that you, Carl?’

‘Not just now, Sylvie. Sorry. I’m doing my homework.’

‘I need to talk to you,’ I said, and I opened the door and went inside.

Carl wasn’t doing his homework. He didn’t even have his books out of his school bag. He was lying back on the old velvet sofa, hands behind his head, staring up at the chandelier.

It was a real cut-glass Victorian chandelier, a little one with twelve droplets, though three were broken, and the chandelier itself didn’t actually work. Mick wouldn’t let Carl have the hut properly wired for it, so the only light was from the naked bulb sticking out of the wall. Carl had painted it with rainbow swirls so that it looked slightly more decorative.

There were five shelves running round two of the walls, originally meant to hold flowerpots and seed trays. Carl kept his glass collection here, in glowing colour-co-ordinated rows: little glass animals on the top shelf, then drinking glasses, then vases, then ashtrays and paperweights, and then his precious pieces. The Glass Boy stood in the middle of the special shelf, tranquil, dreamy, his thick hair brushed forward over his forehead in strands of glass. He didn’t wear any clothes but he didn’t look remotely self-conscious. He stood staring at some distant horizon, his arms loosely hanging, his legs braced. Maybe he was watching for something, waiting for someone.

Carl’s Great-aunt Esther had called him her Cupid, but he wasn’t a baby and he didn’t have little wings or even a bow and arrow. Carl had
fallen in love with the Glass Boy on a visit to his great-aunt when he was five. She had fallen in love with this serious, angelic little nephew, so different from his harum-scarum brother. At the end of the visit she presented Carl with her ‘Cupid’.

Carl’s parents thought this a bizarre gesture. Even Jules was sure Carl would play with the Glass Boy and smash him into glass splinters. But Carl kept him on a shelf and simply treasured him. When he was six he asked for a glass animal for a birthday present. He started looking for glass vases and ashtrays and ornaments in jumble sales and summer fairs as he got older. His collection grew too big for his small bedroom so one summer he quietly started converting the garden hut.

I helped too, and went on all his glass-hunting expeditions. I couldn’t get properly interested on my own behalf. I liked dangling crystals with their rainbow sparkles, but I couldn’t see why all the other glass stuff meant so much to Carl. Still, I was very happy to be included in his glass world. I knew all about Murano glass and planned for us to go on a special trip to Venice one day – maybe for our honeymoon!

I looked everywhere for a glass
girl
, but so far hadn’t found one. I invented the Glassworld Chronicles instead. They started off as a fairy story about a boy and a girl cast out into such a wintry world that they froze and turned into
glass. We elaborated and expanded until together we’d invented an entire glass world and a cast of hundreds. My glass boy and girl became the King and Queen of Glassworld. They had family, friends and bitter enemies. There were a host of servants, some treasures, some treacherous. They had a menagerie of exotic pets: penguins and polar bears, a pair of hairy mammoths, and a stable of white unicorns with glass horns and hooves.

They were all so real to me that I actually shivered inside the hot little hut, living it all so vividly. Nowadays I was on tenterhooks with Carl, wondering if he’d play properly. I didn’t know what tenterhooks
were
, but whenever he made fun of me I felt little stabs in my stomach as if I’d been caught like a fish on a hook.

‘Sylvie, I’m not in the
mood
,’ said Carl, his eyes closed.

He was stretched out like a marble effigy on a tomb, not moving. I looked at his beautiful face, his long lashes, his slim nose, his soft lips. I wondered what would happen if I subverted the traditional fairy tale and woke Carl with a kiss.

I giggled nervously. Carl opened one eye.

‘
What?
’ he said. ‘Just run away and play, little girl.’

‘Don’t you
little girl
me. I’m only two months younger than you. And I don’t want to play. I’m here to pass on a party invitation.’

‘Oh God,’ said Carl, closing his eye again. ‘Please don’t make me go to Lucy’s party.’

‘It’s not Lucy’s party. It’s Miranda Holbein’s party.’

‘Who?’ said Carl. ‘Miranda? I don’t know any Mirandas.’

‘Neither do I, not properly, but everyone knows about her. I told Jake she’d asked us to her party and he was dead impressed, you could tell. I’m sure I’ve told you about her, Carl. She’s just amazing. She’s the girl everyone wants to be but wouldn’t dare. Goodness knows why she’s invited us.’

Carl lay still as a statue but both his eyes were open now.

‘I don’t get this
us
bit,’ he said.

‘Well, I was going on about you a bit in the girls’ toilets. Miranda and the others thought I was making it up but Patty Price was there and she started on about you too.’

‘So I’m the chief topic of conversation in your girls’ toilets?’ said Carl.

I was scared he might get cross. It was a huge relief when he started chuckling.

‘So there they all are, the fresh young damsels of Milstead High School, each locked in her lavatory cubicle, seated in splendour, calling to each other like demented doves:
Carl, Carl, Carl, Carl, Carl, Carl!
’

I started giggling. I sat on the edge of the sofa, by his feet.

‘Scrunch up a bit, Carl. OK, Milstead Pin-Up Boy. What shall I say to Miranda?’

‘When is this party of hers?’

‘Like,
tonight
. She decided just like that.’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Imagine us suddenly announcing to our mums, “Right, I’m having a party tonight. Provide all the food and drink and music and stuff and make yourselves scarce.”
Do
they have food at proper teenage parties? And will they have real drink, do you think – wine and beer and vodka or whatever?’

‘Well, we’ll find out,’ said Carl, sitting up.

I stared at him. ‘We’re not really going to
go
are we? I mean, it’s such short notice we could easily get out of it.’

‘Why don’t we go if she’s such an amazing girl?’

‘Well. Because … I’ll feel so shy and stupid.’

‘I’ll be there, silly.’

‘And I don’t have the right sort of things to wear. I know they all wear the most incredible stuff out of school. Miranda looks at least eighteen. I
wish
I didn’t look such a total baby.’ I tugged at my plaits. ‘Look at my hair, for God’s sake!’

‘You can brush it out and wear it loose. It looks great like that,’ Carl said encouragingly.

‘I could wear my black skirt and hitch it right up. Do you think that would look … sexy?’