Moderate Violence (13 page)

Jo tried to wriggle free, but Toby’s bra-arm was still
clamped around her, squeezing her against his chest.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.

“Why is it such a big deal?” he persisted. “I thought,
after what you said last night – ”

“Toby…” She had to stop him. The ‘If you loved me you’d
do it’ argument was too painful to hear. It made him sound like a
hormone-crazed fourteen-year-old. “Maybe what I said last night…I mean, people
say things…”

“So you didn’t mean it, then.”

She tried not to hear the petulance in his voice. “I
don’t know
what
I meant, Toby. I
was…look…it didn’t feel right.” Then she added something she wished she hadn’t,
“maybe you’re not…you know, the one.”

He slid his free hand under her cheek, lifted her head
and looked at her with exasperation. “Christ, Jo, who
is
‘the one’, then? One of those wetheads
at your school?”

“No, of course not!”

The taxi was crossing Waterloo Bridge. It was only two
more minutes to the station. Jo wished she could get out and walk.

“You just don’t fancy me, do you?” Toby had clamped her
head onto his chest again. His heart hammered against her cheek. “You’re saving
yourself for Mr Wonderful. Well, when you meet him, be sure to introduce me, so
I can be as dazzled as you are by his wonderfulness.”

Jo knew he was being mean, but felt too weak to argue. Pascale’s
theory was that if you did anything at all to bruise a boy’s ego, even
something as small as observing that your uncle’s got the same jumper as him
(this had actually happened to Pascale), the boy would get back at you by
equally small, but very noticeable acts of meanness. You had to feel sorry for
them, really. And how many times had Toby bruised
Jo’s
ego, without even noticing?

“Look, Toby…” Already, before she’d even got to the end
of the sentence, Jo was beginning to regret her next words. “My mother says – ”

“Oh, your
mother
!
How old are you? Twelve?”

Through her alcohol fuelled haze, Jo realized that Tess,
for all her shortcomings, understood about boys. Jo believed her when she said
that they can separate sex from love, but girls can’t because they don’t see
why they should. But it was impossible to say the L-word to Toby now. She
shouldn’t have said it in the first place.

“It’s all right, Tess doesn’t think I’m saving myself
for my wedding night,” she told him. “But she’s always said I should be really,
really sure before I commit myself.” What Tess had actually said was that Jo
must trust someone. But she couldn’t say the T-word to Toby either.

He seemed to be thinking about this. After a few
moments he let go of Jo’s head, and she sat up, looking at him warily. His face
bore no expression. He didn’t speak, but sat with his hands folded on his
stomach, as if he were watching TV, until the taxi stopped. He looked out of
the train window all the way to Kingsgrove, and they walked home in silence. At
her house they exchanged a chaste kiss. They didn’t arrange their next meeting,
and Toby didn’t say he’d call her. The effects of the wine were receding, but
Jo still felt helpless, unsure of what to do. She watched him walk down the
street for a few moments, then she put her key into the lock and pushed the
door.

Trevor was watching a movie, his armchair surrounded by
half-empty beer bottles, half-smoked cigarettes and loose pages from
The Guardian
. He put up his hand in case
she spoke. Jo could see that the film was almost over. She knew the last scene
of
Fight Club
pretty well. As
soon as the credits started to roll, she asked, “What’s happening with you and
Tess?”

Trevor gestured to the cooler beside his chair. “Want
one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mind if I do?”

“Are you serious?”

“All
right
.”
He opened another bottle of beer. “Tess is pissed off because I’m not letting
her have the house, that’s all.”

Jo looked around the living room, wondering how much
longer it would be hers, and Blod’s. “Well, do you
have
to sell it?”

“All my money’s tied up in it, Jo-girl, and I need
money to start this thing with Mord.” He glanced up, and when he saw her face
his expression softened. “Look, love, if Tess’s dad’s prepared to give her the
money to buy out my half, he’s welcome, and then you can go on living here.”

“With Tess, though?”

“’Fraid so. I’m going to be in Wales, where your mother
is always telling me I belong, and should never have had the presumption to
venture out of. But all I can say to that is…hah bloody hah!”

This struck him as intolerably amusing. Jo watched him
for a minute, shrieking and coughing, and fumbling for a cigarette and dropping
the pack and picking it up again, and then she went upstairs and sat down in
her computer chair.

She tried to make herself think. She wanted to work out
what had happened tonight, consider it and deal with it, like a sensible
person. But it didn’t happen. She sat there with her hands at her sides and her
legs stretched out under the dressing-table desk, and the movie that ran inside
her head folded into darkness, like the black screen at the end before the
credits roll.
That’s all, folks, go home now
.
There were no thoughts and nothing in her imagination. She was besieged by
first-take, un-edited emotions, on which her brain had no influence. Unnamed,
untamed, they twisted in her stomach, impossible to separate.

She pictured Toby’s watchful eyes, the way he looked at
his reflection in shop windows and fiddled with his hair, the space his long
limbs and shambling walk took up, the feel of his skin, the smell of his shower
gel. She remembered how his heart had practically jumped out of his chest when
she was kissing him in the doorway of the shop, and what she’d said, and her
eyes began to burn.

Panic rose. Her right hand closed around her left
elbow, but then she released it again. The scratch-patch wasn’t what she
needed. She tried to breathe. The room was full of light. It shouldn’t be – it
was the middle of the night – but Jo stood up and walked into the brightness,
conscious suddenly of what she
did
need.
She sat down on the window seat that ran around the bay window. Her make-up lay
all higgledy-piggledy in a glass tray on the window-sill. Beside it stood her
make-up mirror. And beside that, in its usual place, was the little china box
she’d brought back from Delft.

The china box contained her eyebrow tweezers and
hairpins, as well as something that looked perfectly innocent, but would be
confiscated at an airport. Jo knew it was there, underneath the hairpins and
the tweezers, small, but powerful enough to be considered a threat to air
passengers. She thought about it
hard
.
She shut her eyes and rocked backwards and forwards, eyes shut, humming softly
to herself, letting the thought possess her. When she was sure the thought had
become
her, and no longer existed as a
thought at all, she opened the lid of the china box.

Her fingers closed around the tiny pair of nail
scissors. Each blade had a point like a little knife. Without needing to open
her eyes, Jo carefully ran her fingertips over one of the blades.

She could do it, she was sure. She could do it in her
leg, high enough for her knickers to hide. Toby would never know. No one would
know. And in that nanosecond of physical pain, the endless mental pain he had
made would recede.

Still blind, she took a tissue from the box on the
windowsill, pulled up her skirt and the side of her knickers, and stiffened the
muscles of her leg. First there was the cold of the metal, then a bright heat.
Jo gasped. The moment of release. And then there was warmth, and the wetness of
the little spurt of blood.

She opened her eyes. Perfect. Not too much blood to
cause a fuss, not too little to fail to do the job. And it
had
done the job. Instantly, unlike the
scratch-patch method, and more sensationally, with a more exquisite stab. She
pressed the tissue to the wound. It hurt a lot now.

Her heart thudded, fatigue deadened her limbs, her body
felt weak. But she got up, and, still pressing the tissue to her thigh, went to
the computer chair. She deleted Toby’s ‘Suitable for all’ label, and examined
the white space it left behind. Tentatively, as if the keys were burning her
fingertips, she typed ‘Scenes of sex or violence’ in it.

The digital clock by the bed read 00:36. She stuffed
the bloodstained tissue into the crisp packet and put a plaster on the wound. Then,
too feeble to undress, she lay down on the bed.

She would have to live with tonight for ever. It would
never go away. Many nights from now, perhaps years and years into the future,
the picture of herself and Toby tangled up on a taxi seat, and the sound of her
stupid little-girl voice saying, “I just don’t think you’re the one,” would
rise up and hover in her brain. And Jo would let out a little yelp at the
memory.

But tonight, the scissors’ tiny point had put the pain
in its place.
She
was in control.
She pulled the duvet around her ears and put out her bedside light. And very
soon, with a peace all around her more profound than any she had felt since
Tess had left Trevor, she fell asleep.

* * * * * *

When she woke up she lay in bed for a long
time, looking at the frame of light around the curtains, thinking about last
night. She also thought about the exam results.

The trouble was, if she did really badly no one would
employ her, maybe not even Rose and Reed. Though of course if she did really
badly, how would she show her face in Rose and Reed or anywhere else? After the
build-up Mr Gerrard, Miss Balcombe and even Mr Phipps, who considered her an
also-ran as far as the race for grade A Maths was concerned, had given her, the
humiliation would be intolerable. The vultures would pounce, stabbing her with,
“Oh, you must be so disappointed, Jo! After that essay you did that Mr Gerrard
thought was so
brilliant
”. Or,
“Aren’t you supposed to be quite good at French?” And as they gloated, Jo would
remember that she was better at almost everything than almost all of them, and
want to kill them.

But there was another even worse scenario. If she did really
well
, the pressure to do A Levels
would become intolerable. Different vultures – Trevor and Tess – would stab her
repeatedly. Peck, peck, peck. And because of her good results, her case against
staying on would be in danger of collapse.

She tried to remember the English exams, the Maths, the
French. She’d worked hard for them, and all the other subjects, except Art,
which she hated with the white-hot hatred only a project involving wire, glue,
bits of net and dry leaves could induce. Why had she worked so hard, and bent
for hours over a too-small desk, her wrist stiff, her head throbbing from lack
of air and late nights?

Because she couldn’t let herself down. And that was the
whole point, surely? To do her best because she
could
, not because she had to in order to achieve some goal
involving anybody else.

She stripped off the lacy knickers and inspected them
for bloodstains. They seemed OK.

She put them and the matching bra in the laundry
basket. She’d probably never wear them again. Then she spent a long time in the
shower, washing again and again. She shampooed her hair three times, too. Then,
still wearing her dressing gown, she put a fresh plaster on her leg and sat
down at the computer.

It was Sunday. Toby’s day off was Monday this week, so
he’d be at work today. After work, though, maybe he’d call her. Or maybe she’d
call him. And if neither of them called the other, she’d see him when he came
into work on Tuesday. By that time, surely something would have to happen.

Jo didn’t know what she
wanted
to happen, though. If this was Toby’s opportunity to
dump her, and he took it, would she care? If she dumped him, would he? If not,
why were they together in the first place? And if they
did
split up, how would they go on working
together in the same shop, day after day for the rest of the holidays, or longer?

She studied her reflection for a few moments, then she
got dressed in jeans and an old top. After sitting on the edge of the bed for
five minutes, fingering her phone, she called Pascale.