Body of Water (2 page)

"Orkney."

I shrugged. I'd never heard of it. I noticed the man with her then, tall and thin, bursting with nervous energy. "And I'm Alex." He thrust his hand towards me. I ignored it. He was a Southerner.

"Do you already have children?" I said to her.

"No."

"Are you sterile?"

"No." She looked so comfortable, so calm.

"So it's his equipment that's on the blink?"

Alex gagged.

"I'm just too lazy to have a baby." She widened her eyes in self-deprecation. "All that dreadful backache and eating coal."

"Have you fostered before?"

"Yes, eleven times. Ten children and one dog."

"The dog doesn't count."

"Well, another mother gave birth to her and then she was my baby."

"But you bought her."

"Actually, we rescued her."

"I don't need rescuing."

She considered this for a long time and a silence fell upon the room. "Don't you?"

Oh, she was good. I'd have to find something else to put her off. "I'm not nice."

"Who wants nice? Nice is boring."

"And you can't treat me like a fucking dog." That had to do the trick. Who wanted a nine year old who swore like a sailor? Ruth appeared anything but flustered.

Alex leaned over and whispered to me conspiratorially. "You might change your mind after you hear how she treated the fucking dog. Trust me; you'll get more attention than I do."

I liked them. Her more than him but he was funny. I could see why they were together. They cracked jokes and didn't take themselves too seriously. With her accent I would fit in if people didn't know us. They still needed testing.

Three months into my placement with them and they still hadn't cracked. I knew I should ease up but my compulsion to misbehave, to find out how much they were prepared to live with, was too strong.

I spat in my dinner if I didn't like it, then I spat in theirs. I lashed out at them when they reprimanded me. Most nights I sneaked out of my room to hang with the rough kids on Primrose Hill.

But Ruth seemed impervious to my wrongdoing. She regularly picked me up from the local police station, oozing charm and issuing apologies to all concerned. A quiet word with the sergeant and everyone would be smiling. We were usually on our way within a few minutes.

"What do you say to them?" I said the last time, my feet up on the dashboard of the car.

"I tell them what you're really doing."

"What's that?"

"You know what; now put your feet down."

How could she know me so well? We drove in silence then but she caught me looking at her a few times. She smiled at me and patted me on the leg. We didn't need to speak.

When we arrived home, we were greeted by an agitated Alex. Ruth kissed him and told him everything was fine, that I was exhausted and I was going to bed straight away.

Any potential unpleasantness between Alex and me waited until the morning but in the meantime Ruth smoothed things over.

Finally convinced of their love for me, I settled. I became popular enough at school with both sexes and that granted me a relatively easy time there. I worked hard to make up for a disjointed education and Alex employed a personal tutor to help bridge the gap.

The more praise Ruth gave me the harder I tried. Alex, although present and equally encouraging, seemed on the periphery of everything, spending much of his time at work.

Ruth seemed happy enough with the situation but I could see that she was happiest when we were all together. She called us 'my boys' and I, by the time I started secondary school, became Leven, a nickname representing the eleventh child they'd fostered.

Alex was hardly an absent father but he wasn't as close to me as Ruth. During his rare days off we would do all the things he thought a father and son should do. He taught me some basic woodwork, how to hang wallpaper, and he talked about sport.

Try as he might, by my late mid teens I still wasn't into sport but I became mesmerised should I flick through the television channels and see the men's diving. My heroes teetered on the edge of the board, their muscles flexed, launching into beautiful, impossible shapes before plunging into the water.

At first I felt nothing but admiration for them but, the older I became, the more I felt something else too. My face would flush when certain divers took to the board and I'd feel the heat creep down my body.

Later in bed I'd think of those particular divers and the heat would return while I wondered what they'd feel like to the touch.

I pleaded with Alex for diving lessons but he was swift to remind me that I couldn't swim and had little prospects of ever doing so.

"So get me some swimming lessons!"

"How many times must we go over this?" Alex said, his head in his hands. "Mum will never let you near the water."

"It's not fair. Why do I have to pay the price for her parents being drowned in sodding-"

"Lev-"

"-frigging-"

"Leven-"

"-fucking-"

"Leven!"

"ORKNEY?"

"Sorry mate, it's just not happening. Why not try skateboarding?"

I stomped off up the stairs.

"And don't stomp off up the stairs. You know there's a dodgy bit of plumbing - oh Christ!"

I knew just the spot to hit to crack the pipe and keep Alex occupied with repairs for the rest of the day.

A few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, one of the girls at school had a party to mark the end of the school year. Her parents had given over the entire basement of their Georgian house to her and it had been converted into a self-contained flat.

Late in the evening, the drinking games started and she arranged us all into a circle, boy-girl, boy-girl.

"It's the ice cube game," she slurred as she fumbled with the trays to loosen the contents. "You put an ice cube in your mouth, right, and pass it around the circle."

Several cheers went up from the rugby team and several more groans from the girls sandwiched between them. A boy with braces looked mortified, made his excuses and went home.

Having never kissed a girl, nor wanting to, I felt mildly uncomfortable as the ice cubes came and went but it was clear that everyone else was having a great time.

Towards the end of the game, there were multiple cubes in play.

When the girl between me and the captain of the rugby team clamped her hand over her mouth, retched, and rushed to the toilet, a huge roar went up.

Expecting another girl to take her place, I swallowed hard when I saw an ice cube heading towards me. The rugby captain, someone called him Shaun, took it and leaned towards me. The roar was deafening when our mouths met.

But there was no ice.

He made a spectacle of passing it over, and I, in my innocence, searched for it with my tongue before I realised what I was doing. As I withdrew my tongue from his mouth so his ventured into mine.

It wasn't how I'd imagined my first kiss. It should, I thought, follow the private declaration of eternal love from my Olympic diving, gold-medal-winning lover, not a drunken rugby joker surrounded by a baying mob of his team-mates. As soon as the length of the kiss threatened to become obvious to even the most pissed observer, he pushed me away, laughing. His good-natured jokes diverted any embarrassment on my part.

He didn't avoid me afterwards. If anything, he seemed friendlier than ever, throwing his arm casually around my shoulder when I found myself sitting next to him on a wall while he had a heated, if slurred, debate with his friends about the distinction between tackling and rucking.

I didn't see him again that summer and, as the next school year began, found out that he'd transferred to a boarding school.

Months later, as spring breathed life back into nature, I saw a red-haired girl leave the house across the road. It wasn't her hair that caught my attention but the fact that she'd left the house at all. For over a year the house had been undergoing considerable renovation. I'd become so used to the activity over there that I'd missed her family finally moving in.

She dressed eccentrically. The cuffs and collar of an unremarkable jumper were stuffed with fluorescent netting. A short tartan skirt skimmed her hips and mismatched tights led the eye down to her platform trainers. She beamed up at me when she saw me at the window and I quickly stepped back, embarrassed that she'd seen me watching her.

A moment later I heard a knock at the door.

"Hello," a girl's voice said, as Ruth answered.

"Hello. Bethany, isn't it?"

"Yes. I was wondering if your little boy might like to come out and play? I saw him watching me."

The silence underlined Ruth's utter astonishment. To my horror she complied. "Just a moment, I'll ask him."

I groaned. Ruth was kind to a fault, always volunteering me to do some good deed that I had no interest in. Even as I had the thought I felt guilty. Why couldn't I be more like her? I might complain about doing the things that she volunteered me for but once I was doing them I always felt better about myself, and happy to have pleased her. I fought with these feelings on a daily basis.

"Darling," Ruth said lightly as she peeked around my bedroom door, her face contorted with trying not to laugh. "Bethany-"

"I prefer Beth, actually," yelled the girl.

"Sorry. Beth is asking if you'd like to come out and play." Ruth was enjoying this too much.

Incredulous, I groaned again. "Why? She's like, what? Nine?"

"I'm fourteen," the voice bellowed from downstairs.

"She has an older brother. He's about your age. Maybe if you went over there you might make a new friend?"

"I don't want to make a friend." That much was true. I liked this little world we had here.

"All right, darling. I'll tell her."

Ruth was barely half-way downstairs when my inner struggle began. I had no friends outside of school, that much was true. What hurt would it do if I just went over there and had a look around? I'd explored every inch of this place and although I loved it here, a part of me was curious enough to go and find out.

Just as Ruth got to the door, I pushed past her and ran down the steps onto the pavement.

"Come on, then," I said. "Let's go."

"Darling," Ruth called after me. "Have you got your...?" She tapped her chest.

I tapped my chest to confirm that I was wearing the pendant she had given me, insisting that I wore it at all times.

Ruth and Alex's house was beautiful inside, classic in design, but warm and inviting. Beth's house was something else entirely.

Palatial didn't quite cover it. Marble floors stretched ahead of us and the most gigantic glass chandelier I'd ever seen hung over us, suspended from a chain that looked too feeble to carry its massive weight.

"Do you like it? Mummy just redecorated with her friend Lawrence. He dresses a bit like a pirate." The way Beth said his name made it perfectly clear that she disapproved.

She talked me all the way through the ground floor but I heard nothing. Every new space we stepped into seemed grander and more opulent than the last. But the house felt cold to me, as if its heart had been buried deep under the shiny surfaces.

Beth seemed pleased to have my company and continued the tour to the upper floors. Beautiful bathrooms with unusual fittings looked more like museum showpieces than the places a family used on a day-to-day basis.

She hurried past one door without opening it.

I stopped. "And what's in there?"

"That's Mummy's room. I'm not allowed in there when she's asleep."

I checked my watch. "It's two in the afternoon."

"She has one of her heads."

Beth's room was on the top floor, at the back of the house. Just as I had expected, it was as oddly decorated as Beth herself. She threw herself onto her bed, and then peered under it for something, pulling it out and presenting it to me.

"What's this?"

"It's a gift. I made it for you."

I hoped she wasn't harbouring a crush for me. I opened the little blue box's lid tentatively and took out the tissue paper on top. Inside a papier-mache figurine rested on more tissue.

"It's a merman," she said happily. "I'd already made the top half and then I heard Daddy say that he thought you looked fishy."

"He said that about me?"

"Don't take it personally. He doesn't like anyone."

"Sounds charming."

"My brother says he's a wanker," she said matter-of-factly. "What's a wanker?"

"You'll find out when you start dating," said an unexpected voice.

A woman who I assumed to be Beth's mother stood in the doorway, dressed only in a nightgown and clutching an empty crystal tumbler. She was everything Ruth wasn't. Ruth didn't wear jewellery to bed, and she certainly didn't drink alcohol during the day. This woman looked immaculate but dangerous.

"We're out of ice," she said testily. "Who on Earth are you?"

"Hello, Mrs...um... I'm Leven." I thrust my hand out just like Alex would and then snatched it back just as quickly.

She raised a pencilled eyebrow and pinned me in the blazing spotlight of her glare. "What sort of a name is that?"

"It's a nickname."

Her sudden disinterest was almost audible. "Sounds rather odd to me."

Beth broke the tension. "Leven loves his present, don't you?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "It's really great."

"Then expect to be inundated with them," said Beth's mother. "Everyone else loathes them. Who wants a lump of paper and glue as a gift? I'm going back to bed. Bethany, call your father and tell him to bring home some ice." She disappeared, albeit unsteadily, as quickly as she'd appeared.

"Your mum is-"

"A. Drunk. B. Horrible. C. A complete cow. My brother always goes for C." She paused. "So does Daddy, come to think of it."

"She doesn't need ice with a personality that cold. How old is she?"

"I have no idea. That's terrible isn't it? She's off to Switzerland soon for some serious work."

"And your brother, how old is he?"

"He's just turned sixteen. What school do you go to?"

"The Grammar."

"My brother went there but he's at Ellesmere now on a sports scholarship."