Grow Up (15 page)

34

7:23 a.m. My head is warm and aching. The room is filled with weak light and the air is heavy like glass. I turn to my left. Georgia Treely's head is next to my head. It looks like the nicest head in the world. She looks a bit dead. I hope she isn't dead. I wonder if this is a joke. If someone has put a fake Georgia Treely head in bed next to me so that I wake up and feel very happy until I try to kiss it and realise that it's plastic. I poke the head. It isn't plastic. I drop a kiss onto her forehead.

Some women only look beautiful to certain men at certain times of the morning in certain light. Georgia Treely is not one of them.

Then I remember what happened last night.

It looks like I may have raped her. I mean she wanted to but she probably didn't want to want to. It was the drugs that made her want to. In court, I'll say I had no idea. In court, I'll cry until they let me go.

I slide out of the bed. I feel very dizzy. Someone has left their clothes on the floor. I pull them on and quickly leave the room. I am escaping from the scene of the crime.

A girl sprints past the doorway as I am leaving. She disappears down the staircase and out of the house. Her face is the face of someone who has narrowly escaped death. Jonah emerges slowly from the room with a duvet held around his shoulders.

‘What the fuck was that?' I say.

Jonah waves an empty packet near my face.

Catholic condom.

I laugh, hard.

‘It seemed funny,' he says. ‘I don't know.'

‘Funny doesn't last that long,' I say. ‘A baby lasts for ages.'

‘I know. It was stupid.' He presses his hands against his eye sockets. ‘I'm going to sleep now. Night, Jasper.'

‘Night night.'

He throws up the duvet so it covers his face and he stumbles back into the bedroom.

There are people asleep in the hallways and on the stairs and on the floor downstairs. Two boys from Baccant High are still awake and smoking a joint in the kitchen. One of them nods at me. I go to sit outside.

The sky is wide and white, with a wash of early morning mint-green. Pink clouds push together and mate. They move in slow teams across the edge of the fields. Everything is very quiet. The quietest quiets always fall after the loudest louds. This is because the quiet can put its arm around you and gesture at the loudness right behind it and say, ‘Look at that thing compared to me.'

I walk round to the side of the house and find Tenaya sat crosslegged on the bonnet of Ping's car. She is smoking and cradling a cup of tea. I climb up next to her.

‘Morning,' she says.

‘Yea,' I say. She passes me the teacup and I take a sip then pass it back. ‘Last night was—' is all I manage to say next.

‘I know,' she says. ‘We were both scared and sad and drunk. Let's talk about it later.'

She smiles at me.

‘Everything's fine,' she says.

‘Yea.'

‘So what happened afterwards?'

I gulp. ‘Um,' I say. ‘Nothing.'

‘Go on.'

‘Fine.' Tenaya is always able to make me admit everything. ‘I think I may have raped Georgia Treely.'

Tenaya laughs. ‘I don't think you raped anyone, Jasper.'

‘Well, I gave her lots of drugs then had sex with her.'

Tenaya laughs again. ‘That sounds like most of the sex most teenage girls ever have.'

‘I'm not sure, it seems bad.'

‘Don't be stupid.' Tenaya finishes the rest of the tea in one long swallow. ‘Now can we go find Ping and get out of here?' she says.

‘Yea,' I tell her. ‘I'm fucking starving.'

We wander around the house a while before finding Ping and Ana asleep in a large cupboard full of socks. We wake Ping for a lift home because neither of us wants to do the walk back to Jonah's car. Ping swears a while when we shake him awake but he realises that he's hungry, too, and agrees to take us back.

The café Ping drives us to is a plastic, kitcheny type of place, with stained mauve tabletops and badly laminated menus. The waitresses are all foreign. They talk in hurried landslides of hard letters. It is sexy when pretty girls speak ugly languages.

‘I'll have the Earlybird Breakfast, please,' I say to the waitress.

‘Ze vat?'

‘Uh, the Earlybird Breakfast?'

‘Vat?'

‘UHR-LEE-BURD.'

I hook my lips around the words as though I'm giving head.

‘EH? I no undersan'.'

It's not so sexy any more.

I flap my arms like wings then gesture with my hands toward my mouth. She smiles. Jonah and Tenaya laugh. In the end, I point it out on the menu.

We eat quickly and in silence. When Ping drops me off outside my house, I am only thinking about sleep. Mum isn't thinking about sleep. Mum is stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

35

The police interrogation room in which I am sat smells of old wood and coffee. It smells like a room that people do not like to go into. Even the paint on the walls is trying to leave. I want to leave.

‘I want to leave,' I say. ‘I'm really tired.'

Opposite me is a man who says his name is PC Holloway. PC Holloway has a very faint moustache and large blue eyes. His hands are clasping each other on the table. He is looking at me. The look he is giving me is a neutral one. I am having trouble reading his body language.

‘You need to understand that this was a serious waste of police time,' he says.

He is talking about Keith. About how Keith isn't really a murderer and I got it wrong because sometimes I think too much and too hard and for too long. A way of explaining it might be to say that my imagination is a fast-running river and my body is a boat in the river and the boat is just being carried by the current but it has to learn not to. My head hurts.

‘I understand,' I say. ‘And I am very, very sorry.'

He stands up. I stand up.

‘Sit back down,' he says.

I sit back down.

‘Only joking,' he says.

PC Holloway has a very good sense of humour. Some of the funniest people in the world are men. His wife is a very lucky woman.

He leads me to the police station doors and ruffles my hair.

‘Be good,' he says.

I wish PC Holloway was Mum's husband.

I find Mum sat on the steps leading up to the police station doors. She is smoking a cigarette. I sit down next to her.

‘Mum?' I say.

‘Yes, Jasper.'

‘Cigarettes contain tar, which will make your lungs turn black and eat themselves,' I inform her.

‘Yes, Jasper,' she says, crushing out the cigarette. ‘Thank you.'

‘You shouldn't take up smoking again. I know you are stressed but cancer is more stressful, I expect.'

‘I know.'

‘Okay,' I say, standing up. ‘Can we go home now?'

‘Yes, we can.'

Mum is angry at me for getting her husband arrested but she still loves me because I am her son.

36

8:30 a.m. I wake up. Radio 4 is still playing. A man and a woman are discussing the future of 3D cinema. I climb out of bed and walk through to the bathroom. In the shower I cough and shiver. My lungs have been ruined by the graffiti of cheap, foreign cigarettes. The water warms. My head clears.

I am very confused.

I feel hollow.

I feel unfulfilled.

But I had sex with Georgia Treely?

Okay.

Georgia Treely is pretty. Georgia Treely is sexually attractive. A court of anthropomorphised animals ruled that I should have sex with Georgia Treely. I had sex with Georgia Treely. Sex is all. Sex is for billboards and magazines. It is not for making major life decisions with. Sex should be a by-product of something else. Georgia Treely is a cow I have killed for leather. You should only kill cows for meat.

What does that even mean? Doesn't matter, at least I'm not going to be a Dad.

I dry my body and dress and go downstairs. Keith is sat at the kitchen table, reading
The Sun
. He looks up.

‘Hello,' I say.

‘Morning.'

When we got back from the police station, Keith told me that he had forgiven me. He is a man of exceptional moral fibre. He has, however, stopped using his patronising, friendly names on me. I will have to work hard to regain his trust, so that he calls me buddy again.

I pour myself a glass of milk and carry it down to the shed at the end of the garden. I take my notepad out from behind a leaning spade and recommence work on my novel. My novel is almost finished. It is the story of a young man blessed with great charisma and wit, trying to work out what he is supposed to do and how he is supposed to do it. It has everything that I wanted: a sort-of rape scene (sorry again, Georgia), a sort of revelation (sorry again, Keith), and some sort of lesson. I don't know what the lesson is yet, but there is definitely going to be one.

I am Holden Caulfield, only less reckless, and more attractive.

37

3:28 p.m. I am sat with Tenaya in her garden. The sun is huge and close. The chickens are singing. There is a pot of tea between us.

Her mum comes out of the French doors. She is wearing a t-shirt with ‘BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS' printed on it. She is holding a plate of custard creams.

‘Thanks, Mum,' Tenaya says. She is as confused as I am.

‘Thanks, Mrs Enright.'

‘Dad's gone, Ten,' her Mum says.

‘I know.'

‘He's going to stay with a friend for a while.'

‘I'm seventeen, Mum. You and Dad are getting a divorce.'

Her mum's eyes half-close and fill with tears. They burst and tumble down her cheeks.

‘I'm sorry,' Tenaya says.

She stands up and pulls her mum into a hug. I stand up and hug Tenaya's mum from behind. Her buttocks press against my groin. We are a Tenaya's-mum sandwich. This is not the time for erections. I think of Terry Wogan, naked, doing Judo, with Louis Walsh.

After a couple of minutes, she disentangles herself from us. She ruffles my hair.

‘You're better off without him, Mrs Enright,' I say.

Tenaya's mum ambles back into her kitchen. We sit back down and watch her taking down pans from hooks on the tiled wall. The smell of frying onions leaks out into the garden.

I put my hand on Tenaya's hand, in a sexy way.

‘Jasper,' she says, ‘what are you doing?'

‘It's for my novel,' I say. ‘It needs character development and resolution.'

‘Oh.'

‘Can I write that we kiss?'

‘If you want,' she says.

‘Okay.'

We kiss.

Ben Brooks was born in 1992 and lives in Gloucestershire. He is the author of four other books, Fences, An Island of Fifty, The Kasahara School of Nihilism and Upward Coast & Sadie. Brooks' work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in the Dzanc Best of the Web anthology.

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