402

“Grandam, how are you feeling today?”

“Much better, thank you, Jason.  Not nearly so tired and worn.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Well, I don’t know.  Do you have to work, today?”

“I work in the afternoon and at night, at the bar.  But I’ve taken today off.   I’ll have to work tomorrow, though.”

“Work is good for you … but surely you could contact …”

“… No.  It was the money that … with Brent.  I … if …”  He gulped.  His eyes were shiny with tears.

“It wasn’t just the money my darling boy, you know that, so much more, but people like us have a duty you know to make a difference …”

“…like mum does?”

“Oh your mother …”  Most unusually, Lucasta could think of nothing to say.  I don’t want to turn him against her but truly she is so silly and she puts her children against her without trying and makes such a fuss about unimportant things really I wish I could think of something to say to him poor dear boy so much pain and no way to undo the damage.

In the end, she kissed him on his cheek, and said, “Whatever you want to do, my dear boy.  I am at your disposal.”

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Majorca Flats 401

She worked harder than ever at her schoolwork.  Her imagination could take her away from her life.  Books, geography, history, French, even maths, seemed magical to her, faery doorways to enchantment and forgetting.  She wouldn’t just do what was set in class or for homework.  She’d read up about whatever interested her, fit the new information into the sketchier picture provided by school teachers and school books.  She was a model student. 

She thought about killing herself often.  But she wanted to be sure.  She didn’t want to survive and face questions.  She’d learnt that the hard way.  The first time. 

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400

When she went back to school the next day and told Sean she couldn’t after all go out with him, she hadn’t told him why.  When she tried to say even something as simple as ‘my father won’t allow it,’ she’d choked up.  She’d almost wept at the way the light went out of his eyes as he realised what she was telling him.  She hadn’t been surprised when he’d avoided her after. 

But it hadn’t stopped her dad.

Her one friend was Luke, a geeky gay loner in her class.  He was fat and embarrassed by it.  No one liked him, and the rugby players and the macho handsome sporty types made his life a misery, plastering his locker with dog shit, cuffing him as he walked past, calling out softly and then in a rising crescendo as he approached, “Beware homo!  Beware homo!  Lukie fagpants.”  She never took him home.  She knew better than that.  But they would meet at the shopping centre, and have an ice cream shake.  Sometimes it was the only thing she ate all day, though it wasn’t the only thing he ate.  Part of her was wryly intrigued that her response to misery was to eat nothing while his was to eat everything, all the time.  Her dad had once found a fold of fat on her while he was fucking her and twisted it hard and called her a fat lesbo fuck and after that she had stopped eating.

Aside from Luke, she had no other friends.

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399

“Let’s go home,” suggested Luigi to Cody, after they’d finished helping with the clean up after breakfast.

Home? thought Cody.  Where is that?  But he didn’t speak.

“Your medical certificate might have come.  The doctor said he would send it to my address.”

“Maybe ….”

“What?”

“Maybe I should just … resign.  I dunno that I can face them if the truth comes out.”

“Is it a good job?  Pay and stuff?”

“It’s all right.  Not a fortune.  But enough.  Phillippa”— he swallowed and looked away—“she … the house was given to us by her parents … so we …. There was enough money.  Even though I didn’t earn a lot.”

Luigi wondered how to put what he was going to ask next.  “Will she ask for maintenance?”

“She’s  very … yeah.”

“Will you fight that?”

“No.  Not for the kids.  My kids.  I … I want to be …”  He broke off, unable to speak.

Luigi waited, patiently.

“I want to be part of their life.  Just because …. You know … and I love them.  And … well … maybe I can trade, you know, maintenance for access.”

Luigi was quietly angry.  Not against Cody.  Against society.  Cody had a right to see his children, to love them.  Just because Cody was gay, didn’t mean that he’d lost that right.

“Well, let’s go and see whether the medical certificate is there and then we can think about phoning your work.  One step at a time.  We’ll make it.”

Taking Cody’s hand he led him through to where Eleanor was sitting.

“Mrs Cumberledge, we’re off now.  Thank you for the party last night and breakfast this morning.”

“Oh, do call me Eleanor, Luigi.  ‘Mrs Cumberledge’ sounds so formal.”

He smiled at her.  “All right.  Thank you.  And thank you for … your support.”

Cody looked at her and said, all at once overcome with shyness, “Yes, thank you.  I … it helped.”

She took the hand Luigi wasn’t holding and squeezed it.  “Do come again, Cody.  Soon. You’re very welcome here.” 

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398

She’d come home so happy.  His name was Sean.  He was cute, with brown hair and blue eyes and a smile which made her heart flip.  He was shy, and asked if he could walk home with her every day.  She watched him with amused affection as he built up his courage to ask her out.

He’d found out.  She didn’t think she had to keep it secret.  When he found out about it, he’d beaten her, calling her slut and whore and bitch and then he’d fucked her brutally and left her to cry herself out afterwards.  The next day, at breakfast, he’d been quite ordinary, almost more loving and friendly than usual.

After that, their sex had never had even the pretence of love.  She started making up stories about how she’d fallen down the stairs, or slipped on a wet pavement, or tripped over the edge of the carpet and hurt her eye.  She could see the doubt and disbelief in the faces of her interlocutors.  She was too ashamed to tell the truth.  I deserve it, she thought.  I tempted him.  This is what he’d told her.  And when she turned her face from him as he thrust into her, he’d ask, so reasonable, don’t you love your daddy? And then he’d hit her hard.   Smile at me, bitch, he’d say.  Smile, you fucking whore.  You unlovable trollop. Smile.

But she couldn’t.

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397

The autumn sun was warm, but the air felt like champagne, sparkling and full of light.  Luigi, Cody and Jason sat in the garden chairs on the back verandah and chatted with Lucasta and Eleanor.  It was peaceful in the sun.  In the distance, there was the grumble of lorries on the main road, the clang and ping of trams.  From neighbouring gardens there came the indistinct mumble of people chatting, of washing machines going, of some energetic soul mowing.  The world felt right.

Even Cody felt some peace.  His life was in ruins; worse, he had ruined Phillippa’s life.  Well, there was nothing he could do now.  He had to start again.  From scratch.  And his grief and humiliation and terror still howled deep inside him.  And yet, on this autumn morning, with people who didn’t judge him or who at least had suspended judgment, he had hope.  He could start again.  He wasn’t dead, murdered by a demented pervert.  His life was in front of him.  And into his head came the renewed vow, that he would make his life worthwhile, and do something to pay back Fate or God or Life for his good luck.

And he wasn’t alone.  He had friends.  Luigi and maybe Jason.  And Eleanor and Lucasta.  Perhaps he could get a room here.  So he wouldn’t be a burden on Lou and piss him off.  If he still had a job.  If.

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396

She pressed the razor blade into the muscles of her forearm.  The sting brought her immediate comfort.  She watched the blood swell and trickle down her skin.  She was mesmerised by the rich burgundy discharge.  You shouldn’t do this. It’s not healthy.  She didn’t know where the voice came from.  It wasn’t her mother or her father.  But she ignored it anyway.  She made another cut parallel to the first, a little deeper.  She hissed at the pain and closed her eyes.  As always, a kind of peace came over and she floated over the memories.  She always cut herself up in the fat part of her forearm.  It wasn’t really bad, she comforted herself.  She’d never cut her wrists, except the once.

The first time he’d come to her, he’d said it was time to show her how to be a woman.  She’d adored him. It didn’t seem wrong.  Not till later.  When he’d told her it was their secret and she should never tell mum.  With the instinctual insight of children, she’d felt it wasn’t right, though she didn’t know how or why.  Just that it felt off.

The violence had only begun later. When she started going out with a boy from her school.  

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