Special, p.5
Special, page 5
‘That’s not fat. That’s normal. That’s muscle or something. Look at mine—that’s fat.’ Hen pinched the skin on her hip.
Jules could see the pale crescent nails biting into her skin. ‘You’re way too thin. You’re disgustingly thin. Look. That bit. That is no way fat. Just skin you’re pinching.’
‘Not.’
‘No, really. You’re dead skinny. Not normal skinny, weird skinny.’
Hen kept her face impassive. ‘I am not.’
‘You are. You know you are. You’re getting anorexic or something.’
‘I am not fucking anorexic. There is no fucking way I am anorexic. God, I wish I was.’
‘Well, you look weird,’ said Jules, offhand. ‘You don’t look normal any more.’
‘I do. I look completely normal. I look as completely shite as usual.’
‘You don’t eat.’
‘Course I don’t eat. Not that shite they give us. So gross nobody could eat that stuff.’
‘No.’ Jules looked suddenly unsure of herself. ‘Right.’
‘Order?’ said the waitress, coming over to them. She was a girl not much older than them, wearing too much makeup. They ordered coffee and, as Hen looked up at her, Jules considered Hen’s face. Her hair had been pulled out of its clip, making her widow’s peak more pronounced than usual. Something about the shape of her face made Hen seem more virtuous than she actually was. People—parents, anyway—spoke to her tentatively, as if she might look through them and see their sins. Jules felt it too. Sometimes she’d turn round halfway through a conversation and see a stranger looking back, a girl with a face like a church. And then Hen would say something in that odd cross-bred accent of hers and the sensation would go.
‘Jules?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘You know yesterday?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘What was wrong?’
Jules narrowed her eyes. ‘D’you mean?’
‘In gym.’
‘Nothing.’
‘But you . . . last night . . . were you all right?’
‘Yes.’ Abruptly. ‘Fine.’
The connection was gone. Hen, not knowing how to continue, hunched deeper in the chair. ‘Something to do with Naylor?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Was it Caz?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Frowning. ‘No.’
‘You would . . . you can say stuff. To me, I mean. You trust me, right?’
Jules pushed her chair back. ‘Where’s our fucking coffee?’ Hen bent her head slightly, paying penance for an unidentified crime. They sat in silence as the waitress watched them.
+
Fuck, thought Ali. Now I’m stuck with her.
‘Ought to go.’ Izzy clambered upright, picked up her stick and stood facing in the wrong direction. ‘How far is it?’ There was a childish note in her voice like a toddler stuck for too long in a car.
‘Dunno. Don’t know till we get there.’
They walked on. The track bent and twisted, widening in places where the tractors must have been and then receding back into grass again. The sound of cars came whispering through the wood, sometimes almost silent, sometimes so loud Ali wondered if they were only a few yards from the road. She felt the trees creaking above them, saw the refractions of the sunlight and thought that actually she didn’t much mind how long it took to walk. She was warm, the wood intrigued her and this felt like a kind of freedom. Even with Izzy. Who had started scratching her elbows after a few paces and was now trying to negotiate rearranging her backpack, keeping hold of the stick and scratching all at the same time.
‘There was a story once.’ Ali’s voice sounded small in all this space. ‘In a book I read. A book when I was younger. There was this boy called Edmund, and the other three were always getting pissed off with him. Edmund went off one day and got stuck in a dragon’s lair. The dragon had died but there were all these bits of jewellery, diamonds and pearls and stuff, lying around in his den. And Edmund thought this stuff was amazing, so he stuck one of the bracelets onto his arm. And then he went to sleep. And when he woke up the bracelet was biting into his arm and he realized that while he’d been asleep he’d become a dragon.’
She stopped. Why was she saying this? Izzy didn’t read. Not properly. Izzy’s idea of reading didn’t stretch much further than sleeve notes. When she read, her lips moved. ‘And he cried and he wailed and he banged his tail up and down and eventually he just gave up and waited. And eventually someone came along in a dream and told him if he wanted to go back to being a boy, he’d have to take his skin off. Like a snake. Shed it. So Edmund the dragon scrapes off one of his skins and he’s still like a dragon. And then he scrapes another one off and he’s still a dragon. And he keeps on scraping and scraping away at his skin and he still goes on being this dragon thing. And finally he gets so pissed off he takes a really big bite into his skin, right down deep, and peels this huge lump of stuff off of himself. And it really hurts—it’s like peeling himself from the outside in—but when it comes off, he’s a boy again.’
‘So?’
‘So,’ said Ali lamely, ‘it’s like you.’
‘Me?’
‘Listening to you at night. Scratching and scratching. You sound like Edmund. You sound like you’re trying to take off your own skin.’
Izzy stopped. ‘I can’t help it. One of the symptoms of eczema is scratching. It’s medical. It all comes up like blisters and then you scratch it and then it goes away. Sometimes.’
‘Didn’t mean that. I know it’s medical.’
‘It’s not my fault.’
‘I didn’t say—’
‘It’s got nothing to do with books.’
Ali just stood there, waiting. She’d known it was pointless telling Izzy that story. She knew it as soon as she’d started talking. But she kept on, hoping—really, stupidly hoping—that someone one day would understand what she meant. That one day she’d have a proper conversation with someone instead of just a series of audible misconnections.
Izzy whacked the stick against the ground. They walked on again. This time the silence between them seemed less easy to shift. Ali felt the flicker of the breeze up her sleeves and studied the sharp colours of the leaves, the way they could turn six different shades of green just by rotating slightly in the wind. But it didn’t work any more; it couldn’t work with Izzy plodding resentfully along beside her. The best thing was not to say anything, just walk along pretending it was an easy companionable sort of silence. Izzy started whacking the ground again. Step, whack, step, whack, step, whack.
Ali could feel Izzy’s scowl without even looking. She turned. ‘What is it?’
‘Jules and Hen hate me.’
‘They hate most people. They hate most people who aren’t blokes or Caz or them. Does it matter?’
‘If I knew why, it might be different.’
‘It wouldn’t be different. It would be the same. They don’t hate you for anything you do, they hate you—us—because they’ve got to hate someone. It’s just the way it works.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t know. There’s a theory in some book . . .’ She reversed. ‘There’s a theory that people need scapegoats. You have a group of people and there’s a leader and there’s a good person and there’s the sort of person who everyone ignores and there’s someone who they all . . .’ She had been about to say ‘hate’ again, but decided that Izzy might regard theory and reality as one and the same. ‘. . . someone they all make into a scapegoat. Always like that. Been like that since we started.’
‘But why?’ It came out as a wail, high and unanswerable.
‘I don’t know. It just is.’
‘I would like . . . I would really love, one day, to be someone in a group.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you want to be in one, just once?’
The question irritated Ali. She wasn’t sure why. Partly because it was its own confirmation. It sounded so childish, so Izzy-ishly needy, that Ali wanted to shout, There! See! That’s why people get so annoyed with you, because you ask questions like that! And partly, when she thought a bit further, because she wasn’t in anyone’s group or gang and she never had been. She was out on her own. But there seemed some enormous significant difference between knowing it and saying it. ‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘No point.’
‘It’s different for you. People know you’re not a groupy person. People think you’re a weirdo. They leave you alone. People are scared of you.’
‘I’m not weird.’
‘All that going off on your own. Climbing trees and stuff. People think it’s weird.’
Ali found herself becoming angry. ‘It’s not weird. It’s just what I like to do. They’re the weird ones.’
‘They’re not. They’re normal. It’s us who’s weird.’
‘Well, if that’s normal, then . . .’ Ali was having difficulty with Izzy’s use of the word ‘us’. She started walking faster.
‘But you must.’ Izzy stumbled to catch up. ‘Must want to belong somewhere. Just once.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Well, I do. I want to belong somewhere.’
‘Yeah? Who are you going to get to join, then?’ Ali was almost running now.
Izzy subsided, panting. ‘Don’t you want it? Just to see what it’s like?’
‘Doesn’t happen like that. None of it happens like that. I’m fine.’ Her words trailed out behind her. ‘Fine, OK?’
‘Wait,’ said Izzy. ‘Please. Wait.’
But Ali fled on alone.
+
‘Look!’ Jules jabbed at Hen’s arm. ‘Look! Over there. Men! Live, free-range men!’
Hen turned round in her seat and followed Jules’s finger. Walking past the cafe down the lane she saw a red-haired woman tugging at a scratchy toddler and a man with a spaniel on a lead. ‘What?’
‘Duh.’ Jules poked her tongue into her cheek. ‘Challenged. Over there, retard.’
Hen looked again. Opposite the cafe was a record shop. Its facade was painted black, but some of the gloss had chipped off with time and the pale undercoat now leaked through. There was a large spinning disc in its window and the word ‘DiVinyl’ in Gothic lettering above the door. Inside she could see figures moving about and a man by the front window flicking through a crate of old LPs. When the coffee machine in the cafe stopped grinding, Hen could hear the thud of a deep bass beat. As she watched, two more figures appeared in the doorway and began to walk off down the lane. One of them had a plastic bag in his hand and was peering into it. The other was talking animatedly.
Jules grinned. ‘Nice one. Let’s go.’ She took a gulp of her coffee, whacked a couple of coins onto the table and got up. ‘C’mon.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. Now. Come on.’
Hen put her hand up to her hair, put it down, squinted into the mirror and got up. Then she sat down again. ‘But I’m all hot and red and crap.’
‘Come on.’ Jules began to giggle. ‘Stop fucking fussing.’
‘Haven’t paid.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Stop staring at yourself.’
‘Coming. Just wait.’
‘God’s sake.’ Jules raised her voice slightly, so the rest of the cafe could hear. ‘If you weren’t so bloody vain . . .’
‘Not vain.’ Hen hurled the rest of her stuff back into the rucksack and swung it over the chair, rattling the coffee cup in its saucer. She snatched at Jules’s rucksack. ‘Not fucking vain, right?’
‘Right,’ said Jules, giggling frantically now. ‘Only a little bit vain then.’
‘Not vain! Take it back or I won’t come with you.’
‘So? How vain is that?’ Through the corner of her eye, Hen could see the waitress looking up from her magazine.
Jules yanked herself away and pulled the door open. They bundled out onto the pavement, tugging at each other and laughing. It felt to Hen like the squelched sort of laughter she sometimes got in parents’ meetings.
‘How could you do that? In the cafe. Saying I was vain.’
‘You are.’ Jules assumed a caring expression. ‘Just need to get in touch with your vain side.’
Hen made to kick her on the shin but she dodged. ‘I’m not the one with twenty-seven lipglosses, am I? And the make-up bag so huge it takes a fork-lift truck to pick it up, and the sneaky mirror in your pencil case . . .’ She ran across the road, giggling. They barged through the door of DiVinyl, shrieking, intoxicated.
From the moment they walked into the shop both of them were struck dumb. The shop was smaller than Hen had thought it would be, just one room divided at the back by a counter and painted black. Coming from a street full of light and movement, it seemed to Hen as if they had stumbled into polar winter. Each aisle was lit only with a couple of spotlights and the posters on the walls made the place seem dingy. Most were cheap photocopied fliers advertising spare guitar parts, band placements, sorry-sounding gigs. Hen stared at one of the sheets on the door. Succubus plus Special Guests Sold Out, it said, over a picture of a man and a woman wearing chains and looking away from each other. Some weird music came banging through the walls. It sounded like a Japanese man talking very fast over the sound of trains departing.
This, thought Hen, was a mans place: run by men, frequented by men, meant for men. Girls didn’t come here. Girls weren’t meant to come here. She nudged Jules in the back. ‘Perhaps we . . .’
Jules ignored her and walked over to the corner furthest from the door. Soul, R&B, Dance Compilations A–G, said a sign on the wall. She put down her bag and began going through the stacks, feigning interest.
Hen stood paralysed by the doorway. If she moved, she’d have to push past one of the boys. He was fat, or if not fat then he gave the impression of bulkiness. He had dark hair and a T-shirt with ‘HARDCORE’ written across it. From where Hen was standing, she could see the little black bristles on the rolls of flesh at the back of his head. But if she went the other way, down the Pop/Rock N thru’ Z aisle, she’d have to pass the other boy. All she could see of this one was the back of his shirt and a bit of indeterminate blondish hair. There was something unfriendly in the set of his shoulders and the way he slouched so assuredly among the covers.
Hen felt the blood pulsing in her ears. She wondered for a second if she was going to faint. She wasn’t ready for this. She hadn’t had time to think about it. If Jules hadn’t skittered off down to the other end of the shop, she would have left immediately. She walked down the Pop/Rock aisle until she was standing a couple of paces away from the blond boy. Put down her backpack and stared at the little signs above the CDs. OASIS, OFFSPRING, OMD, ORBISON, ORB, ORBIT, ORBITAL, ORTON, OXALIS, PAGE, PARLIAMENT, PAVEMENT, PEARL JAM, PIXIES, PRETENDERS, PRIMAL SCREAM, PRINCE, PROCLAIMERS, PROCUL HARUM, PROJECT 2, PROPELLERHEADS, PUBLIC ENEMY, PULP. Oh God. She’d only heard of two of them. Perhaps those two were useless. Perhaps the blond boy would see her and know she knew nothing about this stuff. If she started looking through the Oasis section he might look over and think, what a loser. She picked Procul Harum, the one with the most obscure name, and began flicking through it, hoping it looked as if she knew what she was doing. It seemed to be a standard rule of musical appreciation that the weirder the band’s name, the better they were considered to be. Was she looking dismissive enough? Did it look as though she knew anything about music? She rarely bothered buying stuff. She either taped other people’s CDs, if she liked them, or she was forced to listen to the obscure shite that her brother bought: bands with names better than their songs, like Slipknot and Penetration. Maybe they’d get thrown out if they didn’t buy anything. Maybe the shop owner would get so irritated with them just standing around that he’d tell them to go. That would be the final humiliation—kicked out of a record shop for not knowing anything. It’d be like walking around with a sign on your back: Hen is Thick. Hen is Thick as Mince. Hen Couldn’t Tell a Guitar from a Root Vegetable. She imagined herself on Princes Street on a busy Saturday, doomed to bang up and down forever wearing nothing but a sandwich board. She’d be like the sad men advertising golf sales, or the Hare Krishnas in their pink nighties. She put down the Procul Harum and yanked out one of the Oxalis CDs. It had a swirly graphic on the front like the rat’s innards in biology textbooks. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Jules saying something to the fat bloke.
Hen turned slightly and saw the third boy, the one she’d seen from the cafe going through the box of LPs. All she could see of him from this angle was a pair of elaborate black and orange trainers and a few wisps of pale hair on his right arm. The trainers made him look as if he was wearing hamburgers on his feet.
The arm reached over and took the CD out of her hand.
‘Like them?’ He was skinny with a pale, girlish complexion and scary white-blue eyes. He had the fairest hair Hen had ever seen, as fair as her sister’s white rabbit. She wondered if he might be some kind of mutant albino freak. ‘Yes. Cool.’
‘They’re crap.’ He dropped the CD back into its place. ‘No originality, crap sampling, lousy tunes. Can’t even dance to them. Just sit there and listen to them tossing off for twenty minutes.’
Hen burned.
‘Just rip off other people’s ideas. Totally derivative.’ He had a little white spot just under his chin. It was almost ready for squeezing.
‘That,’ the boy said, picking out a disc and waving it at her, ‘that is serious music. Get that.’
Hen took the CD. It was evidently so hip it didn’t bother with titles or track listings. I don’t want it, she thought miserably. I can’t even play it. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘Can’t take it. No point. Friend’s already got it.’
‘Cool, isn’t it?’
Hen nodded, speechless.
‘You got their other stuff?’
He took her gulp for a nod. ‘Which ones?’
‘God, can’t remember. Got so many. Really difficult to keep track of them all’
‘Yeah, right. I know.’
Hen watched his spot go up and down. Pop it, she thought. Go on.
