Immediately, I wanted to gather up everything I’d just said and stuff it back into my mouth. But once you’ve said stuff, you can’t unsay it. Your words are out there, aren’t they? Buzzing around in the quiet of the room so you can hear them echoing back at you, and all he could do was just stand there, and I had this horrible feeling that the anguished expression on his face was because he agreed with everything I’d said.
Then he straightened out the creased piece of paper that he’d crumpled into a little ball and looked at it again. “They have a new guidance counselor,” he said tonelessly, and I waited for him to go into his own rant about self-indulgent, middle-class parents treating therapy as another designer accessory. It didn’t happen. “I’m booking you an appointment as soon as possible.”
There was a lot of door slamming after that. Plus swearing. The swearing was my contribution to the discussion about how I wasn’t going to see any counselor. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. Fuck you, you patronizing bastard.
He shouted. No, he roared, his face an angry red contortion of open mouth and narrowed eyes. Then he smashed a glass down so heavily on the draining board that it shattered and he cut his hand, and I was glad. I was also glad that he couldn’t do the cool, sarcastic thing anymore. That he wasn’t superior to the rest of us. He was just as messed up.
The only thing that stopped The Biggest Row We’ve Ever Had Since the Day of the Funeral™ was Felix leaning on the doorbell. Which was my cue to storm upstairs and slam my bedroom door so hard that the coat hook fell off.
I stayed up there for hours, occasionally putting my ear to the door to see if the coast was clear enough to slink downstairs and get to the answerphone. I wouldn’t have put it past Dad to erase the message in a fit of pique.
But eventually, I had to emerge because my bloody allowance was contingent on feeding other people. While the grill was heating up, and I’d made sure that Dad was sulking in his study and, no doubt, getting me measured up for a straitjacket, I marched into the lounge with pen and paper and played back the message to the accompaniment of Felix trying to work my very last nerve.
“Oh, our little girl’s becoming a woman,” he taunted as we both listened to Smith’s garbled explanation for his phone silence, which seemed to involve a trip home to pick up some mystery object.
“Shut up, or I’ll spit on your lamb cutlets,” I snarled, while I tried to scribble down the number, pausing the machine to swipe ineffectually at Felix’s hand, which was ghosting toward my arm in a Chinese burnlike motion. “And stop trying to attack me. Jesus! What is wrong with you?”
“ ’Ooh, Smith, I love you, I want to have your babies,’” Felix crooned in a high-pitched falsetto that didn’t sound anything like me.
I really wanted to listen to the message again and again, especially the bit at the end where Smith gave this throaty chuckle and said, “So, I really hope you’re going to give me a call even if you’re being monosyllabic ’cause, well, I’d like to see you again,” but it was impossible because Felix had this shit-eating grin on his smug little face and was making kissing noises.
After dinner, which was eaten in stony silence, and ten minutes of cajoling and threats to get Felix to load the dishwasher, I was finally free to curl up on my bed and tap in the number, which seemed to have taken forever to get.
Smith answered the phone on the first ring with a sleepy, “Hey?”
“It’s Isabel.”
I could hear a rustling noise like he was sitting up, and then his voice, more alert, and maybe I was imagining that he sounded pleased to hear from me. “Oh, hey! Hey. How are you?”
“I’m okay. Got your message—well, obviously, I got your message, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to call you.” I smacked myself on the forehead for pointing out the painfully obvious.
“And now I’ve got your number so we shouldn’t have any more communication problems,” he said smoothly. “You missed me, then?”
I wasn’t expecting that, and it seemed to violate some kind of relationship etiquette, like we weren’t in a place to miss each other yet.
“I guess,” I ventured after a moment. “So . . . you went home?”
“Yeah, had to go back to Southport and pick up, well, something. It’s a surprise.”
“What kind of a surprise?” He sniggered softly and I rushed on. “Don’t you dare say that if you told me, it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore. That’s so predictable.”
“Well, it wouldn’t! And it’s the kind of surprise that’s more show than tell,” he said.
My mind flashed on all sorts of possibilities, most of them with at least a 15 certificate. “I hate surprises. They usually turn out to be the bad kind.”
“Oh, this is the good kind, I promise,” he purred in a way that did nothing to revise my earlier opinion.
I made a skeptical little grunting noise, which was deeply unattractive, and I heard him shift again.
“It’s nothing scary. And I can put you out of your misery . . . let’s see, what are you doing tomorrow?”
Being dragged into school by my overbearing father to see a guidance counselor, which had been the last threat hissed at me before I was uncharacteristically saved by Felix.
“Tomorrow’s kinda difficult. Maybe the day after, Saturday?” And that seemed like I was being really pushy. It was the weekend and he probably had a ton of exciting things to do with his rock ’n’ roll friends instead of hanging out with me.
“Saturday’s good,” he said immediately. “We can make a day of it, and I’ll have you back home before you turn into a pumpkin. Did you get a major bollocking the other night?”
“I’m still dealing with the fallout,” I muttered.
“I’m sorry. Way to get off on the wrong foot with your dad.”
And there he went again, acting like, I don’t know, he was my boyfriend or something. “All you have to do is breathe around him and you get off on the wrong foot with my dad. It’s a whole thing—we don’t get on.” There was nothing else to say. I traced a pattern on the quilt with my finger. “So . . . Saturday? Shall I come around to you?”
Smith gave another laugh. “Anything to avoid your dad! See you at eleven?”
I could feel my mouth curving into a smile. It felt strange and unusual. “Eleven, cool.”
“Good,” he said abruptly. “Look I have to go so I’ll see you then.”
And before I could tie myself up in knots worrying about whether I should say good-bye and who was going to hang up first, there was a gentle click and he was gone.
Let'sGetLost
Let's Get Lost
13
I don’t think there are many things more humiliating than being frog-marched down the school corridor by your father who likes to really rack up the torment by barking at the top of his voice, “Stop dawdling Isabel, I don’t have all day,” and giving me a not at all gentle shove at the precise moment that we passed a gaggle of Year Thirteens, who—judging by their titters—were going to have my shame broadcast around the school before the first bell.
I was formulating a cunning plan to lead him around to the back of the art block and hit him over the head with an easel when we bumped into Mrs. Greenwood, who exchanged icy greetings with dad. If they’d been two dogs they’d have been straining at their leads and trying to bite each other.
“Isabel seems to be experiencing some difficulty in finding the guidance counselor’s office,” he gritted out. “We must have been up and down this particular corridor at least three times.”
Mrs. Greenwood patted me on the shoulder and bared her teeth in what she fancied was a comforting smile. “I’m sure Isabel’s looking forward to her first session.” She gave a braying laugh. “I wish I had the luxury of sitting down and talking about myself for an hour.”
Dad and I shared a rare and beautiful moment of bonding as we stared at each other in disbelief. “Indeed,” he said heavily, and then he froze her on the spot with his iciest look, until she
gave an uncomfortable wriggle.
“It’s just a little further down and the last door on your left,” she said at last. “Mrs. Benson is very experienced. I’m sure she and Isabel will get on wonderfully.” And on that note of hope in the face of overwhelming odds, she all but scurried off. Sometimes having my father around can be helpful.
“I can take it from here,” I assured him, trying to hurry off, but his long legs caught up with me in no time.
“I’ll just see you to the door,” he insisted. “And introduce myself to Mrs. Benson. She really did seem very nice on the phone,” he added, as if that made the slightest bit of difference.
Mrs. Benson wasn’t very nice. She was every cliché of a guidance counselor rolled into one. She opened the door after Dad’s peremptory knock and I was confronted with the poster girl for tie-dye. Or the poster middle-aged woman for tie-dye. She was wearing these revolting dung-colored trousers and a shirt that looked like an explosion in a paint factory. The ensemble was accessorized with these hokey wooden beads that people in the Third World got paid about five acorns an hour to make for overprivileged women who think they’re all down with fair trade. Did I mention the hair? It was the exact same shade of orange as this old ginger cat we used to have. It had looked much better on the cat.
She stared at me for a while and I was sure she was trying to psych me out with all the eye contact, so I just raised my chin and held her gaze until she suddenly held out her arms to me and said breathlessly, “Isabel, welcome. Please call me Claire.”
That’s what I hate about these people. Like I was going to let her hug me.
Now he’d delivered me in one piece, Dad couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He gave me another fierce poke in the direction of Claire’s outstretched arms. “Off you go,” he said without a shred of sympathy, even though I’d caught the way he’d shuddered when he’d clocked her hippy hangover ensemble. “I’m sure you’re going to have a very . . . useful chat.” And he was gone in a whirl of charcoal wool.
I sidestepped Claire. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked me in this carefully modulated voice, as if I was going to get skittish from any high-pitched noises.
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to make this easy for her. She was getting paid to do this, I wasn’t.
“I have some lovely homemade black currant cordial if you’d prefer,” she said brightly, and beamed at me. “And some oatmeal and raisin cookies.”
I shook my head again. Even though there hadn’t been time for breakfast and I was so hungry that I would have eaten the rattan furniture, given half the chance.
I had to sit in this chair opposite her. There was a low table between us, with a box of tissues perched on it because all these people ever want to do is to see you cry. I think they must be on commission from Kleenex or something.
In the end, she had to do all the talking while I just sat there and stared at the Klimt print behind her.
“I can see from your school records that you’re a very bright girl,” she said, shuffling all the colored bits of paper that were my school career. “There was even some discussion of condensing your A-levels into one year last term, but your parents were concerned about you being so much younger than the rest of the class. How did you feel about that?”
I shrugged because when in doubt, shrug. And I tried to drown out the memory of all the screaming rows from last year about how pushing me up to the next class would just make me even more bratty.
Claire gave a polite little cough to let me know that she didn’t appreciate my glassy-eyed trip down memory lane, and I fixed my gaze back on her horrible ankh pendant.
“Gifted children can find it very difficult to connect with people their own age,” she continued, pausing like she expected me to get all riled up when she called me a child. “I notice that you don’t participate in any extracurricular activities, though Mr. Wells says you’re an excellent writer. Have you thought about joining the school paper?”
I shook my head because it seemed rude not to, but restrained myself from telling her that the school paper was run by a bunch of journalist wannabes who thought that exciting editorials about whether low-carb options should be available in the canteen would get them an internship on Vogue.
But all this interest in my ginormous brain was just softening me up. Trying to break down my defenses so that she could start in on all the juicy stuff.
“I talked to your father last night, Isabel. He’s very worried about you. Everyone is. I can’t imagine how you must feel, losing your mother so suddenly. Having her taken away at a time in your life when you need her so much. I know there’s been a lot of anger,” she said at last. “A lot of anger and loss and pain. You’re hurting, aren’t you, Isabel?”
She was starting to really piss me off. But shouting and screaming and saying “fuck” a lot doesn’t really get your point across. Sometimes silence is the most violent option to choose. It makes people uncomfortable, which is, like, my superpower or something.
But only a direct hit from a weapon of mass destruction would have paused Claire’s yapping for a nanosecond. “There’s no right or wrong way to grieve,” she told me, like I hadn’t heard that a thousand times from well-meaning relatives and the stupid books they’d thrust at me. “Sometimes you want to shut down emotionally because the things you’re feeling are overwhelming. ”
She finally shut up and decided to try and do the mind-meld thing by staring into my eyes. I’m sure she thought she was being perceptive and that she was looking deep into my soul, but I was actually counting down from one thousand, backward.
“Do you want to tell me how you felt when your mother died?”
“No.” Her eyes opened wide, and I realized I’d said it out loud. “No,” I repeated. “I don’t want to tell you anything. I’m not anorexic. I don’t cut myself. I’m not suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. I’m a straight-A student. That’s it. That’s all you need to know, because I’m not coming back. And even if Mrs. Greenwood and my dad tie me to this chair every Friday morning, they can’t force me to open my mouth and make me talk to you, so I suggest you tell them that and spare us all the bother.”
And I stood up, calmly hitched my bag over my shoulder, and walked out while she bleated about how we still had twenty minutes left.
Let'sGetLost
Let's Get Lost
14
I could smell the damp earth of autumn just starting to creep in as I strolled over to Kemp Town. The sun wasn’t really warming anything and there was a stiff breeze, which made me glad that I’d invested in a pair of red woolly tights, which went perfectly with her black dress. Was it creepy to walk around in a dead person’s clothes? And would it be weird if I had sex with Smith again and he unbuttoned my dress, which used to belong to my dead mother?
And just as his name popped into my head, my phone started to ring as I turned the corner into Edward Street.
“I’m only five minutes late,” I said by way of a greeting. “I didn’t have a thing to wear, you can fill in the rest yourself.”
“And good morning to you, too,” he said silkily. “How far away are you? You sound out of breath.”
“Hill,” I explained shortly. “I’m just getting to the bottom of your street.”
And there he was, phone to his ear and waving to me. I stretched out my fingers to show willing and switched off my phone. It was far too much like a dumb rom-com cliché to walk toward him while we were talking on our phones. Didn’t run into his arms, either, I just sent a silent prayer to whichever genius had invented sunglasses and took what felt like forever to get to his side.
“Hey,” I muttered, but the sound never left my mouth because his lips were on mine and then gone before I had time to register the baby brush of his kiss.
He looked different—twitchy and springy, like Felix when he’s had too much sugar, but that wasn’t it.
“You’ve cut all your hair off!” I gasped, reaching up my hand to
scrub at the dark brown fuzz. It was soft but bristly at the same time, and he bent his head as I rubbed my fingers down toward the back of his neck and then snatched them away because . . . well, it was like tickling a dog behind his ears. Any second now, his foot would start thumping against the pavement in ecstasy.
Smith gave me an arch look. “I wouldn’t have had you down for public displays of affection.”
Once again I’d never been gladder of the masking effects of sunglasses, though it was a pity they didn’t cover my entire face. “I wasn’t being affectionate. I just wanted to . . . did you know you have this bony bit at the back of your skull? It looks majorly weird.”