I’m unsettled by it. Mum’s world is even smaller than mine: She lost her job after Dad left and her dependence on alcohol began in earnest, and never bothered to get another one. She did well out of the divorce—though this was more, I suspect, due to lingering guilt from Dad than any particular skill from her layabout lawyer. She hasn’t had to work since, and she’s stingy, with no perfect daughter to buy presents for. She receives one Sainsbury’s delivery a week of canned goods, ice cream, oranges, vodka, and cigarettes, and for anything else she pops to the local Tesco. The cashiers and I are the only people who know she exists. She has no friends. So her absence feels significant.
I call up the stairs for her—just in case—but there’s no response. My voice reverberates around the empty walls. Maybe she’s died.
It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that she’s lying bloated and blue just beyond her door. Vodka and cigarettes are a famously unfortunate coupling. I doubt it, though. She’s too noxious to go in such a banal way, without some final retribution aimed at reminding me what a disappointment I’ve been. Still, I can’t deny the sympathy would be nice.I’d have a new story for group next week; it would be an entirely original performance. Plus, if Mumhaddied, Jack would have to talk to me.
It doesn’t take long to conduct my search. I try every room in the house before I find myself standing outside her bedroom door. Even now, I’m not immune to the memories that come flooding forth. Memories of me hovering in this very spot, listening to the sounds of her breaking heart. When she decided, in no uncertain terms, that I simply couldn’t replace the daughter she’d lost. It was a tough pill to swallow. Before that—before my relationship with Marcie went sour—we used to pile in here on a Sunday and read the comic strips that came in the papers.
I push the door open and wrinkle my nose. Her scent is everywhere. That nasty, slightly sweet smell of old, unwashed sheets. I reach into my back pocket for the sanitizer and edge farther into the room. If my room is a shrine to Marcie, then this one is a shrine to Dad. All these years, and a pair of his slippers is still tucked neatly beneath his side of the bed, his pj’s folded on his pillow, a tray of his trinkets atop the dresser. So much respect for a man who didn’t have the decency to even attempt to help her through her grief. I did. Or, at least, I tried.
Marcie’s here, too. In the corner of the room is a cluster of photographs. Mum and Dad on their wedding day, looking adoring and entirely unsuspecting of the way their marriage would break down. There’s a family photograph taken the year before Marcie died. I’m standing slightly apart from the rest of the family, who are clustered around the Christmas tree, smiling so widely they look like they might break with happiness. It’s the only one of me here. There are two more of Marcie. A generic school photograph with a grayed-out background. She spent hours at the mirror that morning, applying liberal amounts of eyeliner. She looks sensational. I don’t know what happened to mine. The other is a shot of her and Mum, arms flung round each other, beaming. They were so close. So happy in each other’s company. I’mreminded, once again, of exactly where I stand in the pecking order of our little family unit.
I see it as I turn to leave. A glint of silver on Mum’s bedside table. My pulse spikes. I thought I’d lost it. I haven’t seen it in years. After Marcie died, I was sure I’d hidden it between my mattress and the bedframe, but, when I went back to check before I moved out years ago, it had gone. I looked for it, tore the room apart, but it was nowhere to be found. Mum’s had it all along. I move to the bedside table, slip it into my pocket.
It’s mine now. Mum has no business with it.
Nineteen
Just like that,Billy consumed my every conscious thought, and even many of my unconscious ones. I’d been waiting for this moment for years—that special connection so often chronicled in novels and films. That connection Marcie claimed to have with every boy who crossed her path. Now, age sixteen, here was my very own.
He was perfect. Tall and handsome, he had what Mum would callpresence. The type of person who instantly draws all eyes in the room, whether they mean to or not. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life.
And so what had promised to be the start of yet another boring school year gained a different focus altogether. I watched Billy at every opportunity—in class, and at sports, and in the library, and at lunch—and I grew to learn his routine. Without ever talking to him, I learned he preferred brown bread over white, blue Biro over black, football over athletics, white coffee over black. I learned—by eavesdropping on idle gossip—that he thought school was a waste of time, that he only came to use the art facilities. I learned that he felt painting was a form of self-expression, and I spent hours in the art block, poring over his creationsin the hope of gleaning some small, secret nugget that would suggest he felt the same way about me. If it was there, I couldn’t find it.
In fact—despite our best efforts—Billy didn’t seem to take notice of any of the girls. He drifted between classes with the tortured, faraway expression of a misunderstood artist. So wrapped up in his own creative sphere, he failed to lift his head and take note of the twenty potential muses lining up for the privilege of dating him. For the first time in my life, I was gunning to be number one.
And yet, whenever I was around him—whenever I engineered an opportunity to talk to him—I found the words wouldn’t come. My newfound confidence in the face of Marcie’s strange subservience vanished whenever I opened my mouth. My body began to betray me: hot red flushes that rose in my cheeks, trembling hands, forehead dotted with sweat. None of these highly embarrassing symptoms had been in Marcie’s magazines. Since I lost the power of speech whenever I was in his vicinity, I realized I’d have to find another way. And then it came to me: my own art. But my drawings were rudimentary at best. I had a lot of work to do.
And so I threw myself into my drawing with the sort of feverish passion you only read of in articles about child prodigies. I used every waking hour testing out new techniques, spent everything I had on supplies, new pencils, different paper types. I stopped following Billy to the library and went straight home instead, where I hunched over our small single desk as I drew and drew and drew.
I took my eye off the ball. I can admit it now. What happened next was, in part, due to my own negligence. I won’t ever let it happen again.
For the best part of a year, Marcie had been a model student, a model daughter, a model classmate. She kept her head down, worked hard, and kept a close group of sensible friends who preferred coffee dates to seedy warehouse raves. I thought she’d changed. It had been so long since I saw the “real” Marcie that I became complacent. I thought thisquieter, nicer, smarter, more natural (yet still astonishingly beautiful) version was who she was at her core. I forgot her moods. I pushed the incident at the farm far to the back of my mind. It was years ago now.
I’ve thought a lot about what must have been going on in Marcie’s head during this fallow period. And the conclusion I’ve come to is this: Marcie understood better than I ever did that it takes twenty years to build a reputation, and only one misdeed to ruin it. So when Mum and Dad pulled her to the side that evening and told her what I’d told them, she realized she was being talked about in all the wrong ways. She liked the attention, yes, but it had to be the right kind. She realized that the empire she’d painstakingly built up was beginning to crumble around her. People didn’t know who she was anymore.
Marcie’s reputation was the most precious thing she had. And so she rose like a phoenix from the ashes and set about trying to rectify her mistakes, and it worked. She was the exception to the rule. When she was spoken about now, the talk focused on her achievements, her kindness, her studiousness. Marcie defied all the odds. She rebuilt her reputation in a year alone. She no longer actively ignored me, but nor did she pull me close. She seemed, on the whole, entirely indifferent to me, even at home. It suited me just fine. I had bigger fish to fry.
I completed the drawing after six long weeks of working on it. I was thrilled: It captured him at his best. I’d pinpointed that often-dreamy expression he wore, the slight pout, the rumpled hair. He would have to notice me now.
Giving it to him was another matter altogether. I was not nervous per se, but I knew I had to get it right, this first moment of contact. I practiced what I’d say in the mirror: “Hi, Billy, I’m Iris. I thought you made an interesting subject, so I drew this of you. Hope you like it.” I perfected the casual tone, as though drawing pictures of people without their knowing was something I did every day.
But every time the opportunity arose to give it to him, I faltered, thewords dying in my throat. I stowed the drawing in my bag each morning with a renewed sense of determination, but each evening, after another failed attempt, I concealed it back under the pile of books on the desk Marcie never used.
Eventually, one night, desperation prevailed. I turned to Marcie as we lay in the dark.
“If you wanted to give a boy you like a present, how would you do it?”
The words sounded too loud in the quiet room. We rarely spoke beyond over-polite, forced conversation at the dinner table.
She was so quiet I thought she’d fallen asleep.
Then, “Who are you talking about? Who do you like?”
I should have foreseen this. “No one,” I replied quickly. “Hypothetically.”
“There’s got to besomeone. Otherwise you wouldn’t ask the question.”
“It’s for a friend.”
