Precocious (26 page)

‘I love you.’ Only the second time ever you’ve rolled out the magic words, and there’s more, ‘No one will ever love you like I do.’

‘You’ve hurt me. You don’t hurt people you love. That’s Rule One of loving them.’

‘That’s not true, is it? Come on, Fee, you of all people know life isn’t like that. Life isn’t all black and white.’

‘Sometimes it is.’

‘Okay then.
How
have I hurt you, exactly?’ Two words unsaid, underneath: ‘prove it’.

‘What, just like that, put it into words, define it? What do you want, exact times, dates? It’s about feelings, for fuck’s sake. I can’t put it all into logic because if I do, you’ll say something more logical and you’ll beat me down. And you’ll lie, and I’ll believe you, because I want to, desperately. Anyway,’ I lower my voice, try to keep it steady, ‘I’m not just talking about now. I mean then. You hurt me
then
.’

‘Ha!’ Not the reaction I expected. ‘I gave you the attention you needed, right when you needed it. I looked after you. I gave you what
you
wanted, remember?’

‘No! I don’t remember, not really. That’s the problem. I remember pieces … and some of them are great, and some of them really hurt. The past … you can’t just forget it … it’s there, it’s in us. All the time.’

‘Past, past. A million years ago! Is this because of Jean?’ I start; Jean? Who? Oh, the woman from the disco … so that was her name. You go on, ‘Christ, Fee, so I had female friends. Friends my own …’ (you stop yourself saying the word ‘age’, but I hear it, I hear it). ‘
You
were running around with that Todd boy and God knows how many others, and I never said anything.’

‘No, because you didn’t give a toss.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Anyway I’m not talking about
Jean
. That’s not it. You … you took advantage of me.’

You start to laugh, a horrible, clanging laugh like pans being knocked together.

‘Oh, spare me. You came after me, and you got what you wanted.
That’s
what happened.’

Suddenly there isn’t enough air in the room; it’s as though your laugh has consumed it all. I have to sit down. I suddenly feel very tired.

‘And the … you know. You
know
what. You weren’t there for me.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? Just say it. Go on, say it out loud.’

I shake my head violently. You know I can’t.

‘You weren’t
there
,’ I say quietly, ‘and after that … I had a shelf life, didn’t I?’

‘What?’

‘I had an expiry date.’ I look at you, my eye a challenge.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I saw your diary!’ The words burst from me, and you look genuinely shocked, and in an instant I realise that you possibly
don’t
know what I’m talking about, that maybe you haven’t been obsessing over every detail the way I have for all these years, and whether that’s because there were others or not, maybe that’s the problem. You don’t know that I’d picked up the navy leather-bound book from your desk, in your office, and flicked through it, thrilling to the sight of your handwriting, as I always did, and shivering when I saw my initials. I’d been excited that you were making plans with me, until I saw what you’d written.

Still, I continue, ‘You marked my time.’

‘Fee, I really don’t …’

‘“17 January. FP 16th birthday. 25 May. FP last exam.” Ring any bells?’ You shake your head. But in my head, swimming before my eyes, your handwriting, and next to each of these entries two words, and a question mark: ‘The End?’

‘I didn’t make it that far though, did I? I didn’t even last past Christmas. The thing is, Morgan, what I don’t get is, if you were planning, if you were
diarising
, the end of my usefulness to you … what am I doing here? Now?’

‘You really don’t know?’

‘No. I really don’t.’

You sigh, and you suddenly look like an old man.

‘Then I guess you choose which messages you read.’

I rattle round the house picking up the things I’ll need. It’s a standard collection, could be anybody’s: toothbrush, phone, purse, underwear, contact lenses, old letters. I picture my possessions shrinking with each house I leave; picture all the things that are still at Dave’s, then all the things I might leave here, a pyramid of belongings and me, at the top, without them. Next time I leave somewhere, I think, I’ll probably just be in the clothes I’m standing up in.

I head for the door.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ you say quietly. ‘That’s it, you just walk away?’

‘I have to.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ your voice thick with scorn, ‘back to your easy little life, back to normality. Back to
sleep
. Is that really what you want?’

What I want is to trust you. What I want is to wrap myself in your arms and never surface. What I want is for everything in the world that isn’t you and me to just not exist. But I don’t say any of these things.

‘It doesn’t make a difference,’ you’re saying. ‘Whatever it is you think you can do to me, to us … you can’t, you know. Or you won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of … this.’ You wave your hand between us. ‘Because it’s Us. And it always will be.’

And as usual, you don’t have to say any more. I know what Us means, I know what it feels like.

‘Believe what you want, but those will be the last words you ever say to me,’ and as I slam the door and go out into the night, I know this will only come true if I do something to make sure of it.

I had heard about you, of course. You were Alex’s favourite teacher. He talked about you, said you were
cool
, at a time when everything bored him. Came home and recounted jokes you’d told. He sold the idea of you to me for three years before I even got there, so when I saw your name on the timetable I was given on Day One, I felt pleased.

Day One, and this new place almost knocked me over with its strangeness, its size, its bustle. There’s not really a way around it, but moving from Top Class to Bottom Year is scary, especially when half of the ‘kids’ around look like adults. I felt small. Laura tells me now that they have days, even weeks, when year six kids can visit for ‘adjustment time’ before they join the ‘big school’. I’d laughed and dismissed it as mollycoddling, but thinking back now, I probably could have done with it.

Day Two, jostled in the corridor, I dropped my things. I was scrabbling on the floor, picking up the yellow sheets of paper on which were printed my timetable and a map of the school, picking up my pencils and lip balm and hairbrush, when the crowd parted like the red sea and you were kneeling in front of me.

‘It gets easier, don’t worry,’ you said, and you smiled, and winked, and then you got up and were gone.

I didn’t know it was you, of course, in that instant; I thought it might be, from Alex’s descriptions, but I wasn’t sure, until as you marched off and barked something I heard a boy taller than you stammer in response, ‘S-sorry, Mr Morgan.’

Day Three I was in your class. At the end I was the last to pack up, and you looked at me and said, ‘See? You’ve settled in already,’ with that same smile, and I realised that from a sea of faces you’d remembered mine, and I blushed and nodded gratefully, and I fell a little bit in love with you there and then, that day, aged eleven.

Within the space of three days I saw your name on my timetable and then I saw you, and I started to formulate a plan to get your attention. This is what I’ve told myself.

But now I wonder, was it you who saw me? Saw my chewed nails, my one rolled down sock and grazed shin, saw my clumsily lined eyes and my freckles. Saw something that you liked, but more than that, something I might become.

For three years from then, it was clever, it was gradual, but it was always me. I was different, alright.

Memories don’t come back chronologically; they come in snatches. Flashes of colour, of feeling. Pieces of time.

Some of these pieces, these movie clips, are so hard to watch that I try to switch them off as soon as they surface. They are unbidden, they’ll come when they will; if I try to summon them, all I get are fragments, like half-overheard scraps of conversation whose meaning is lost.

But when it’s least expected, a replayed scene can scald you with its clarity.

Three-and-a-bit years after our first meeting in the corridor, I found myself at your door in the middle of the night, in tears, and then in your bed, in the morning, everything I knew about to change.

Everything was in shadow.

I leaned into you and kissed your shoulder. Without opening your eyes you mouthed ‘Morning’ and pulled me closer. I kissed your mouth, and you didn’t stop me.

I took your hand and placed it up inside the T-shirt.

You kept kissing me, our lips glued grimly together.

I opened my eyes and saw you in extreme close-up: your nose, your eyebrows. I closed them again and slid my hand under the covers.

You put your hand over mine, and in a few moments we found our pace, and you made a soft noise, and I thought,
That’s it
,
I’m affecting you, that’s what I want
, and when you took your hand away and touched my face, it felt like trust.

This was something I knew, this was something I could do. Lying alongside each other, our bodies straight lines, fingers fumbling and fiddling. I was practised in this. In fact for some minutes I felt
I
was showing
you
something.

But when you rolled on top of me, the world shifted.

You were heavy; you leaned forward and my breath caught in my chest. I couldn’t let it out. I was pinned. Your mouth hot on my ear, ‘Are you okay?’

But what could I say? My saying nothing was your permission, I suppose.

Then suddenly there was pain in a part of me I didn’t know was there.

I thought I heard myself say ‘no’, but it might have just been in my head. It’s such a small word, after all. Easily missed.

And how could you hear it when your breathing was so loud?

Everything that was you was bigger, louder, rougher, stronger than me. I felt tiny; as tiny as the word I now couldn’t muster. ‘No’. It was invisible. Felt myself dissolving.

I willed the softness of the pillows, the mattress, beneath me to swallow me up, but they didn’t. They were beaten, by the hardness of your body, your mouth a gag over mine, your hands clamped to my wrists.

Is this how it’s supposed to be?
I wondered.

And all the time a voice in me chanted
Now I have you, now I have you
, trying to soothe, trying to give me the one comfort, the one thing that would make it okay, but it didn’t stop the pain, and I didn’t really believe it.

And when I closed my eyes, all I could see was your handwriting, in red pen, and the words: ‘It’s been done before; see me.’

Afterwards, there were more tears.

I waited. Well, of course I did; it was a waiting room, after all.

The flowers on the reception desk were a bit too fancy, I thought. No wonder the place cost so much. They were those huge red ones that look plastic and have long protruding bits, like yellow tongues. I stared at them, almost expecting them to start singing, you know, like the plant in that film. It would have been a relief from the silence.

The clock above the door had a second hand that seemed to spin round without stopping. Eleven o’clock came and went. A nice lady with a clipboard came out and said my name, and I just looked at her.

‘We’re waiting for someone,’ my mum said, and squeezed my hand. I can only remember her doing that two or three times, ever. I suppose she must have done it more when I was tiny, but I don’t remember.

‘You’re being very brave,’ she whispered, her head almost touching mine. I tried to smile, because I thought that’s what a brave girl would do, but my face wouldn’t follow my instruction. Mum went back to flicking through a magazine, it was full of pretty houses where the sofas matched the curtains, and from time to time she would point to something and say, ‘Ooh,
that’s
nice.’

By quarter past eleven the lady with the clipboard was kneeling in front of us and saying something. Mum looked at me and said, ‘I think we should go,’ and for a second I thought she meant
go
, leave the building, go home, and I would’ve, I swear to God I would’ve thrown my arms around her neck and hugged her, and I would’ve flown from that place like a bullet from a gun, I would’ve run down the street, arms and legs pumping until I couldn’t catch my breath. But she didn’t mean that; she meant ‘I think we should go in’.

So we did, we went into the room where I was to go behind a screen and take the bottom half of my clothes off, and they asked me to lie on a bed, and they gave me a small piece of material, a ‘modesty sheet’ they called it, and I had just enough time to think about how absurd that was, under the circumstances, before they put something over my face and asked me to count to ten, slowly.

‘One.’

‘Two.’

‘Three.’

And while I was asleep, they made me not pregnant anymore.

Only a few weeks before, because once the pin was out of the grenade, things moved at startling speed, I’d sat on a school toilet, skirt around my hips, trying to direct my pee onto an innocuous-looking white stick.

I stayed in the cubicle while I waited three minutes as directed for the result. I left the stick face down on the cistern while I looked at my watch.

And when the blue lines appeared, as I somehow knew they would no matter how much I willed them not to, all I could think of was getting through the day and getting to you. I fumbled through my lessons in a daze, watching the clock, occasionally touching the stick that lay wrapped in paper at the bottom of my school bag. When the final bell rang, I ran to your room, your office, on trembling legs.

‘You can’t be.’

‘Apparently, I can.’

‘I mean, we’ve been … careful.’

‘Not every time.’

‘Well, but … oh, shit.’

‘Yes. Thanks.’

‘You can’t be.’

‘I am.’

‘This is bad. This is very, very bad.’

And seeing you come apart like that, I was suddenly terrified. I’d been weirdly calm, believing, no,
knowing
, that when I came to you, you would fix it, make it all alright, make me feel safe.