That’s what it’s all about, having a boyfriend. I know it doesn’t sound exciting or romantic, but those moments when you and your pal come through awkward or embarrassing or scary things together and find them funny because you’re together, he’s on your team. All the things you do together bond you more . . . for as long as you’re in love. They become private jokes that you tell each other again and again, knowing that only you two know the story of you and him.
I didn’t have anyone on my team now, and I know this is nuts, but it felt like Sophie had somehow taken both of my boyfriends – first Ian, fair and square, then by being the girlfriend of the boy who was making trouble for my new boyfriend, she was guilty by association.
Back in Isobel’s bedroom, the conversation had moved on to – what else – the Moth Ball.
‘You’re definitely allowed to go,’ Finian was telling Josette. ‘There’s nothing on the tickets about the school you go to.’
‘I’m not sure if that’s true,’ Kim said. ‘What if a million people turned up?’
‘Well, they know how many tickets they’re selling, duh,’ Finian said. ‘They won’t go over capacity, and it’s for charity so they want to sell them all. Are you still not going?’ she asked me.
‘Of course I’m not going!’ I said.
‘Why not, though?’ Finian said. ‘Weren’t you going with Jonah?’
‘We didn’t even talk about it. I think, you know, Jonah can’t be doing with the rest of the sixth form.’
‘To be honest,’ Finian said, ‘from what I’ve heard over that religion stuff, I think they were in the right, and actually, I think they’re fantastic. I’m sorry, Cass, because you don’t want to hear that when he’s just dumped you, and I’m sorry, Isobel, because I know Ian thinks it was wrong, but what did they actually say that was wrong?’
‘What, apart from saying that no one had a right to be a Muslim?’ Isobel said.
‘What they said was that no one should be any religion,’ I said. ‘And I was there, talking to them about it, so I know that’s how they feel.’
‘Why, though?’ Isobel said. ‘My parents are Catholics. I would probably say I still am. What harm is it doing?’
‘It happens to still be responsible for most terrorism, war, civil war . . .’ Finian said.
‘Like in Northern Ireland,’ I said.
‘So all wars are about religion? Do you honestly think that’s what the entire situation in the Middle East right now is about?’ Isobel said, with the kind of impatience that was designed to let us know she understood more than us. I didn’t look at Finian because I didn’t want her to see that I didn’t know anything. ‘And anyway, that’s not the point with your friends. You must have heard how they seemed to have it in for Islam.’
‘I’m not getting into this,’ Finian said, ‘but it seems to me Muslims make trouble for themselves by not fitting in, so people think they are rejecting our culture because they hate us. I’m not saying that’s true, but that’s what people think. When they dress weirdly, they’re inviting people – maybe bad people, maybe racists, whatever – but they are encouraging people to be racist, because they look weird or scary.’
‘So they’re saying we should ban nuns, then?’ Josette asked. ‘Let’s rip the big dresses and funny hats off those poor, oppressed white women?’
‘Yes they are, though!’ I said. ‘That’s the whole point. And I’m not aware of us having any nuns in our school.’
‘How about goths? They look weird and scary and people beat them up for the way they look too,’ Isobel said. ‘Should we draw up the way people have to dress in parliament?’
‘So you’re okay with only women walking around totally covered up because guys apparently can’t control themselves so no one would blame them for raping us if we flaunt our sexy noses?’ I said, nearly shouting.
Isobel was also really loud. ‘I’m not talking about a burqa, I’m talking about any outward sign that you follow a certain religion, which seems to be what they have a problem with. Why shouldn’t someone be allowed to cover their hair? From what I heard, in Steveworld that would be outlawed.’
‘Oh, you’re just parroting what Ian tells you,’ I said, but I hadn’t known that everyone knew what Dee had told me about her brother’s friend Saira. It was horrible to be publicly associated with Steve, to be seen by people I knew as thinking like him, when in reality I couldn’t bear him now. And I didn’t want Finian to be on my side, either, because Finian was kind of an idiot. Frankly, I didn’t much want me to be on my side. It was Jonah’s side, and he was my ex who I was going to get over when I got round to it. And yet, that was where I found myself, angrily arguing something I had never cared about, because of him.
This wasn’t how break-ups were supposed to go. The boy was supposed to find someone else. Or you were. Or something, but at least one of you was supposed to hate the other at some point.
I had a weird dream that night. I dreamed that I was going out with Ian and he was breaking up with me all over again and I was crying and trying to reason with him. Then we were kissing and kissing and it was wonderful, but when I woke up I realised that all through the dream the person I’d been calling Ian and thinking was Ian was Jonah, with Jonah’s face and voice, and even the way Jonah kissed. And I missed him so much. Jonah.
Pizza night at Isobel’s had made me realise there was nothing about my old life that I’d been missing as much as him. The girl talk had been lovely and warm and comforting, and then it had turned quickly, as girl talk often does, to something more like a competition. Call me a guy’s girl, but that didn’t really compare to girlboy things: warm hugs on cold days, secret kisses, feeling like the romantic lead in a movie rather than the lonely, sarcastic best friend. It would be simple to go back to school on Monday, find him and pull him into one of our old snogging hideaways and tell him that I did believe in him and trust him to be a nice guy. The trouble was, that wasn’t true.
It was uberdrip Lewis who told me that Jonah would be at the Moth Ball on Friday night. We found ourselves sitting together in the waiting area outside the school secretary’s office. I was there first, quite enjoying the dark silence and soft leather chairs that they’d installed to make any parents who might have to wait there think the school was quite posh. The main building, where the chief admin staff worked, still looked like the Victorian grammar school it had once been, while all the newer buildings were thin and plasticky, painted in various horrible greys and beiges.
Lewis lurched up, his trainers squeaking on the polished wooden floor, and sat down, sighing a lot. At first, he didn’t seem to have recognised me, or convincingly pretended that he hadn’t. He did the self-conscious things people do when they’re sort of nervous, rummaging through his bag, changing position too much, humming. I tried not to look at him, pretending that I hadn’t recognised him because I’d been preoccupied.
‘Ah, I didn’t see it was you!’ he said suddenly. ‘What you doing here?’ I told him (boring thing about updating my mum’s work contact details) and he told me (boring thing about moving outside school catchment area). He asked me how long I’d been waiting and I said a tiny girl with cornrows had gone in about ten minutes before, and I’d been waiting about ten minutes before that. After that, we both started rummaging in our bags again and I wondered if we’d be able to get away with not saying anything else until it was my turn to go in.
‘You going to this Halloween thing, then?’ Lewis said.
‘No.’ This seemed rudely abrupt, so I had to come up with something else. ‘You?’
‘Yeah, we’re all going.’
‘Are you dressing up?’ I asked.
‘Well, Steve was trying to get us all to go as something blasphemous, but Jonah and he had a fight about it, so now we’re not quite sure.’
‘They had a fight?’
‘Nothing big. I mean, they’ve been a bit . . . off with each other recently.’
‘Jonah’s not going, though, so why d
oes he care what Steve’s wearing?’
‘Yeah, he is going,’ Lewis said.
‘Oh, right,’ I said, embarrassed. It had only been a few days since Jonah and I had broken up, so I felt as though nothing he was doing should be surprising to me yet.
‘He’s maybe only just got a ticket, I think,’ Lewis said, as if he felt and understood the embarrassment. He scratched his pale, freckled nose. ‘’Cause when we were planning what to wear we didn’t talk about a costume for Jonah. I think I thought that was because he was going with you, so wouldn’t be coming with us, so wouldn’t be wearing what we were wearing, or whatever.’
‘Lewis, can I ask you something?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Why would you want to go in blasphemous costumes, knowing you’d upset people or offend them?’
‘It’s just funny,’ Lewis said, shrugging.
‘But you could get in trouble with the school, couldn’t you?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Is this all about pissing people off?’
‘Course not!’ Lewis said. ‘Well, I don’t know. For Steve it is, Dom just likes being outrageous, it gives him a kick.’
‘What about Jonah?’
Lewis shrugged again. I slightly wanted to slap him. I was feeling weird and energised, realising that my heart was making decisions and my brain hadn’t caught up with them yet. I had to go to the Halloween party and see all of this play out. Make him nice, Sam had told me. I didn’t know if I could do that. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t that nice myself. But I couldn’t just carry on wishing for him and with my heart beating only for him and with him not knowing anything about it. Even if I just stared at him and hoped he’d read my mind and it didn’t work and I went home alone, I had to do something to let him know I’d come back for him. I had to be there.
Chapter 13
The Joker is nervous. He has a small flat bottle of vodka held within the elastic of his underwear. There’s a cradle of masking tape around it to stop it falling. But how careful are the searches going to be? He might get sent home. But it looks like it’s just bags and coats. Joker hands his coat over and smiles at Catwoman as they hold hands again and walk in together. They find their friends, a Batman and a Riddler.
The Devil, a nun and Jesus are looking out of an upper-floor window, rating the sexiness of all the girls heading towards the building. Three girls get the thumbs up: a zombie Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Marilyn Monroe swinging a bag stuffed with fake sleeping pills, and Eve, as in the first woman. Marilyn Monroe gets delayed for a long time in the bag search.
A handsome priest steps off the bus, runs his hand through his shiny black hair and fiddles with his dog collar. His heart is beating as he heads towards the school, but he’s not sure why. His phone chirps with a text.
We’re upstairs. Come n find us.
He’s disappointed.
Zombie Michael Jackson, Elvis, Sid Vicious, and a John Lennon with an oozing bullet hole are dancing together downstairs in the main party area. They nudge each other when the priest comes in, but keep dancing. One of the dead rock stars clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes, yelling next to his friend’s ear so his joke can be heard above the music. When Thriller comes on, they cheer. All the dancers in the room try to do the right moves, and some are better than others, but this is the first song of the night that gets everyone there really excited, with the dance floor jam-packed in seconds. The building throbs in time with the music and the stamping and jumping. It’s a full house tonight.
Some teachers with whitened faces and black eyeliner stand in a group by the entrance, making funny remarks about the costumes as they come in, laughing at their own jokes, being a bit ruder than they usually would be to pupils. The pupils are a lot ruder than they usually would be back. This makes the teachers laugh even more loudly. They take it in turns to go off in twos to check everyone is behaving – one of the pair goes upstairs, the other stays down and does the circuit, weaving through the dance floor to the kitchen, where those people with tokens are swapping them for two weak alcoholic drinks and water is forced on anyone who looks a bit tired. It’s a school party, after all.
The priest goes upstairs and finds the Devil, Jesus and the nun. He sticks around to talk to them as they carry on looking out of the window, but he’s leaning over the balcony on the other side, looking into the main hall where people come through on their way to the dance floor. There’s a big staircase connecting this balcony to the ground floor, and it’s already covered with snogging couples. It looks mad: werewolf hands groping a vampire virgin in a long white nightdress, a naughty witch getting off with an unmasked Spiderman.
‘I am soooo having a piece of Marilyn Monroe,’ says the nun.
‘You lesbian,’ says the Devil.
The priest turns round. He gives a hollow laugh. ‘You haven’t got a chance,’ the priest says. ‘That’s Ian’s sister’s mate. They think we’re dicks.’
‘Nah, she looked at me,’ the nun says. ‘I know that look.’
‘Think you might be sticking to that vow of celibacy a bit longer than you think, Sister,’ says the Devil. Everyone laughs except the priest.
A couple of hours later and everyone is louder, or kissing. The Joker and Catwoman are kissing and drinking his vodka in the small stock cupboard behind the kitchen, where they have gone under the pretext of getting another box of crisps.
‘You look so beautiful,’ Joker says. ‘You’re the most beautiful girl here tonight.’
‘Hardly,’ says Catwoman. ‘You saw Eve, didn’t you?’ Joker smiles. ‘All right, all right!’ Catwoman says. ‘You don’t have to look so delighted by the memory!’
‘She’s not like you,’ Joker says. ‘You’re naturally beautiful. She’s all fake eyelashes and bleach and bra padding.’
‘Meow!’ says Catwoman, and he laughs and kisses her.
The nun and Marilyn are giggling together. The Devil is leaning closer to Eve than Eve would like and agreeing loudly with things he thinks she’s said (but she hasn’t, really), while staring hard at her chest. She’s looking past him over the balcony for zombie Dorothy, and wishing she’d stayed with her. Jesus is looking around quite desperately, too, as if he would rather be anywhere else in the world. He has taken off his beard, and his face looks tired and childlike. He catches the eye of Michael Jackson and starts slightly. Michael Jackson seems to spot the fear and a few minutes later, the dead rock stars have moved closer to the blasphemers and the two groups can hear each other.
‘Oh, that’s brave,’ says Michael Jackson loudly to his friends. ‘It’s really brave. I wonder why they didn’t attack any Muslim figures, given that they seem to have such a problem with Islam.’
The nun breaks away from Marilyn. ‘Why do you think?’ he says, talking directly to Michael Jackson now.
Michael Jackson raises one eyebrow. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
The priest has been to the bathroom, and taken his time getting back to his friends, because he had nothing to say to them and didn’t want to hear anything they said either. He’s been hanging around downstairs for a while, leaning against the wall by the dance floor with his eyes closed, feeling the thrum thrum of the music, like a motorbike revving up somewhere down his spine. He doesn’t notice how many girls are staring at him, particularly the younger ones, or realise how moody and beautiful he is, with his angsty fine-boned face. He’s just thinking about the girl, one girl. His girl. But she’s not his any more. He’s hot and his collar is tight and he needs some air. He walks through to the entrance hall, looks up at the staircase that’s messy with snogging couples smearing their waxy make-up on to each other’s faces, and he spots his friends, still on the balcony, not joining the real party. They look stupid. And he looks stupid for agreeing to dress like them. It’s pathetic. No one is shocked, they’re just stuck telling the same bad joke all night.
Then he notices they’re squaring up to the dead rock stars. The nun is getting in Michael Jackson’s fac
e, pointing at him with an aggressive finger. The priest wants to just leave them to it, but he knows he has to stop them. He thinks about the girl, and how she’d want him to stop them. As he pictures her face he forgets to breathe, and his brain starts chattering with excitement and sadness and love that’s so fierce it frightens him. He runs up the stairs as fast as he can, accidentally kicking a snogging person in the leg and treading on another one’s cape.
The Joker is watching the boys on the balcony, too – he’s waiting for Catwoman to finish chatting with her friends. He’s the level of drunk that makes him feel good about himself now, and he thinks it’d be a good idea if he stepped in and told all the guys arguing upstairs to chill out. So he heads towards the stairs too, making the kissers even angrier, so that some of them stop kissing and press themselves against the edges of the staircase to let him through, while swearing at him.
Finding themselves together, they stop at the top, the priest and the Joker, and look at each other. They are very close.
‘You’re on your own this evening, Father?’ the Joker says, and he can’t keep the smile off his face or out of his voice. The last time he met the priest, he was scared, although he didn’t admit that to anyone. This evening he’s not scared at all. He’s even angry that he was ever scared. The priest looks pathetic, smaller and stranger, as if he hasn’t slept in a month and he’ll scream like a girl if you shout at him.
‘You’re a bit too interested in my love life, aren’t you?’ says the priest. ‘Oh, but I forgot – you’re still a bit obsessed with my girlfriend.’