Hawthorn and Child (17 page)

They went to the National Gallery and spent a couple of hours wandering around. Stuart wasn’t scared of stuff that other boys were scared of. He stood in front of a picture of a naked man and said out loud to her that it was beautiful. He looked at another picture and wanted her to tell him whether it was supposed to suggest a vagina. She blushed and he didn’t. When she used a word he didn’t understand, he told her he didn’t understand it and asked her what it meant. She had to admit once that she didn’t really know what crescendo meant. He laughed at her and put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a little kiss on her cheek.

She told her mother that she and Stuart were sort-of-seeing-each-other now. Her mother took a couple of minutes to work out which of her friends she meant. Then she told her that he was welcome to come over to the house whenever Cath wanted. That made her laugh. She liked it. She
wondered
if he’d be allowed to stay the night. Maybe. In the spare room. She wondered if he’d even want to. She wanted him to. Sometime. For some reason. She wanted to see him first thing in the morning. She imagined bringing him a cup of tea in bed. She imagined him lying asleep in the spare bed in the spare room. She imagined it for ages.

*

Her dad was obsessing now about the crossing outside the café, near the school.

– Some kid is going to get run over one of these days.

– Why?

– ’Cos you lot never look. You just walk across. And cars come up that road too fast. There should be traffic lights. Not just a crossing.

She looked. Most of the younger kids were gone by now. There were a few people she recognized outside the shop on the other side. She’d never seen anyone even come close to getting run over.

– You should be careful.

She laughed.

– Don’t laugh. I worry about things like that. They may seem stupid to you but there you have it. I can’t help it, I’m your father.

He was in a mood.

– You need to be careful. The number of teenagers killed on the road in London is horrific. You know? Never mind knife crime and drugs and all the stuff you get warned about all the time. Well, do mind them, but you know about that stuff. It’s the traffic you might just forget about. Forget to look out for. You’re to be careful about that.

A group of uniforms passed the window. She looked up and saw Byron, who gave her a wave. And Stuart’s head appeared from behind him, smiling at her. Her dad looked.

– Your friends?

They walked on. Stuart looked back, still smiling. She found herself smiling and blushing.

– How’s the flat, she asked, to cover it.

– Do you have a boyfriend?

– Oh Dad.

He was smiling at her. She was so obvious. She was a cliché. Her cheeks burned.

– Which one? The black boy?

He was turned around in his chair now, looking after them. Stuart noticed and looked away, and then they disappeared.

– The one who looked back?

– They’re just friends.

– So why are you blushing like a berry?

She laughed.

– Like a berry?

– Like a strawberry.

– People don’t blush like berries.

– Which one was he then? What’s his name?

So she told him a bit about Stuart. But nothing like as much as she’d told her mother. He smiled at her and nodded but she could tell he was sad. Because she was growing up and all that clichéd crap.

She imagined walking from school one day and hearing a bang and a scream, and another scream, and seeing something happening at the crossing. She imagined running up, and as she got closer her friends trying to hold her back. She imagined seeing Stuart lying on the ground, pale, a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth. She imagined kneeling beside him and holding his head, and looking into his eyes and him looking at her with the most intense eyes that she had ever seen, and dying. She imagined a girl screaming and sobbing, and Byron crying and holding her hand, and she imagined her dad arriving with the two men from the coffee shop, and her dad helping her up and moving her away, and the
good-looking
black man and the other one trying to restart Stuart’s heart, and the black guy looking up at her dad and shaking his head, and Stuart being beautiful.

Then she imagined that she was the one hit by a car, and Stuart was holding her, tears running down his face. She preferred the idea of him dying. She laughed and wondered whether she could tell him about all this and knew that of course she couldn’t.

She told Byron that she’d met a gay cop.

– Cop’s a cop, he sneered. Then he remembered her dad, and smiled and touched her arm.

Byron told her that Stuart was really happy about, you know. Them. The two of them. Byron said it was a really good thing. He said they were two of his most favourite people, and he was made up to see them together. He said Stuart deserved some happiness. She laughed and asked him what he meant.

– Oh you know.

– More than me?

– No. Just.

– What?

– Oh nothing.

Stuart’s parents were still together, but his father was always away and his mother worked in the City and Stuart had the house to himself most of the time and she would go there and they would end up kissing – of course – and they would do various things, but they still hadn’t had actual sex. She
wondered
whether he was really only interested in sex. And was being really clever. And by not ever pressing her into stuff, he made her want stuff that she might not want if he suggested it out loud. Maybe he was devious like that and everything – all his niceness and his calm and the way he looked out for her – was a disguise for the fact that he was just a horny boy like other horny boys and that he was following some sort of Plan and every night he called his friends to bring them up to date about the progress of the Plan.

And even though he never blatantly pushed her into doing anything, he had a way of making her do stuff anyway, by getting the two of them arranged in such-and-such a way and leaving the opportunity open for her to do it if she wanted to, but to not do it if she didn’t want to. Which was how she ended up giving her first ever blow job for example. In her life. Which was something that even a couple of months ago she thought she would never do. But now she’d done it. And she had liked it. And it had been completely different to what she had expected, and it had not been gross or embarrassing or weird-tasting or any of the things she had thought it was going to be, and she was doing it even before she’d decided to do it, she was just suddenly doing it, because of the devious way Stuart had arranged their bodies on his bed, with both of them still mostly dressed and the CD by Micachu playing that he’d got for her and that she really liked. Stuart had to stop her almost as soon as she started. He gasped and wriggled and pushed her head away from him and came all over his T-shirt like he’d been shot, and she couldn’t help laughing, and then worried almost immediately that he would think she was some sort of
expert
. But all he could say was
wow
, and he laughed too, and they both giggled for a while and he kissed her, and then he took off his T-shirt and mopped up and they hugged and kissed under the covers and laughed at each other and chatted for ages.

He said that no one had ever done that before.

He said that Byron had offered, but that was all.

He said that he and Byron had kissed once, and he had liked it, but he had stopped because he didn’t want to do anything else and Byron did, and Byron had sulked for a while, but they were OK again now.

He said Byron was his best friend. Him and Byron talked about everything.

He said she was a better kisser than Byron.

He said he loved her skin and he loved her breasts and her neck. He said he wanted to hold her every time he saw her in school. He said he’d wanted to kiss her from the first time he’d met her. He said that he had never done anything because she seemed uninterested in him, in that way.

He said he really wanted to have proper sex with her, but there was no hurry.

He said he wasn’t a virgin. But he’d only had sex once before and it had been a real mess, a disaster, and he wouldn’t tell her who it was, and she didn’t know her anyway, and they had both been drunk and it was all a sort of horrible blur of bad memory.

She told him that she was a virgin. He asked about other boys and she told him about some of them. He stroked her hair and smiled at her and they wrapped their legs around each other under the duvet.

She liked him so much that she couldn’t do any work.

Her dad came to the house on a Tuesday. ‘To speak to your mum’, he said, which made her instantly suspicious.
Something
was up. Something had happened. They talked in the kitchen, and she couldn’t hear a thing. It was good, she supposed, that they weren’t shouting at each other. But it was creepy too. There wasn’t a sound. She tried to work out what it was. He had seen her with Stuart and didn’t approve. He was worried that she wasn’t doing as well as she had been, at school. Maybe it wasn’t about her. He had lost his job. He couldn’t afford to pay maintenance any more. He was leaving London. He had prostate cancer. She sat on the stairs and thought about Stuart having cancer.

He wouldn’t tell her what it was about. He seemed
impatient
. He wanted to be gone.

– See you Saturday?

– Yeah.

– It’s not about us. Ask your mother what it’s about. She can tell you if she wants. Up to her.

So she had to nag. Her mother was sitting in the kitchen looking at the wall. She had put out mugs but she hadn’t filled them. She didn’t want to talk about it. Cath whined at her.
What? What’s going on?

– Someone died.

All Cath’s breathless wondering stopped. And then restarted.

– Who? What happened?

– Misha. You don’t know her. She used to … I was at uni with her.

– What happened?

– I don’t want to, Cath.

And her mother started crying.

She didn’t know what to do. She gave her a sort of hug. She got her a box of tissues. She made a pot of tea. She sat at the table and listened to the story. She caught herself
wondering
if it was made up. Invented by her mother and father together to warn her of how badly wrong everything could go. Because it was
that
story. About the pretty, clever girl who everyone knows is going to turn out to be a genius but she starts to drink, and then she meets the wrong people, and she drinks too much, and she starts taking other stuff, and before anyone knows what’s happened she’s living in a junkie squat somewhere in King’s Cross and she’s got a string of arrests and all her old friends and her traumatized parents are really just waiting for the police to show up at the door to say she’s dead. Then she goes away and disappears. She goes to Spain. Years pass. She comes home and she’s OK. She’s sober and she’s done some courses, and everyone thinks that she’s better, she’s through it. She’s not the same, but at least she’s not a mess any more, and even if she is a bit fragile, a bit pathetic, she can hold down a sort of office admin job and she can pay rent and it’s OK. But she’s never what she was. And she’s never what she might have been. And they notice that she’s
probably
still drinking. Secretly. And eventually – after everyone stops thinking about her and she has become just a sad friend who doesn’t have much of a life and who they never see unless they have to – she hangs herself in her kitchen.

Her mother choked and spluttered on all her guilt and her grief, and she banged the table and cried so loud that Cath was terrified and called her father, but she couldn’t reach him, and left an angry message accusing him of being a
heartless bastard
. And her mother might have overheard, because she hugged Cath then and told her
sorry sorry sorry
, she was just
so sad. So sad
. And she went to bed, and Cath could hear her still, wailing, as if she’d lost everything and had nothing left, not even Cath. And then Cath was crying.

She called Stuart. He wanted to come over but she wouldn’t let him. She tried to be cold about her mother. She tried to tell him that she was being stupid, but he didn’t fall for it, and soon she was crying, and he told her he was coming over, and she told him not to,
thank you,
but she’d prefer if he didn’t, because it was her mother, her mother’s privacy, and he said OK.

Her dad called. He didn’t say anything about being called a heartless bastard, but he didn’t apologize either.
She’s bound to be upset
, he said.
She’ll be OK
. She accused him of not caring. That it was easy for him, it wasn’t his friend who had died. And then he was quiet for a minute and told her that actually it was his friend. That he’d known Misha as long as he’d known her mother. That they’d dated a couple of times. And that he’d seen more of her in the last couple of years than anyone else. Cath apologized, and for no reason that she could understand other than having a dig, her father told her that he loved her.

Then there was someone at the door. It was her mother’s friend Heather, and then everything was OK. Heather gave her a hug, and went up to her mother. Then their other friends Sean and Lillian arrived. And then everyone was in her mother’s bedroom, and coming and going with cups of tea and she even heard laughter.

She called Stuart again. To say sorry. To tell him that
everything
was OK now. They talked for an hour, each of them lying on their beds. She wrapped his voice around her and made him promise that he wouldn’t let her become a junkie. He laughed. OK, he said. I promise. He thought it was a joke. But she knew they would remember it always, that it was a promise to look after her, and that it was made now and could not be retracted, and that even if they did not stay together there were things between them that would never be between her and anyone else. And that wasn’t being stupid or romantic or saying that it was
special
or anything. It was just the truth.