Читать книгу Come Clean - Terri Paddock - Страница 15

Pony Girl’s name is Gwen. I discover this at the same time I discover that this day isn’t going to get any easier. At the end of the drills, it’s roll and dole call.

‘Roll and dole!’ Dwight bellows and for a millisecond I think it’s a command. Like when our elementary school teachers – Miss Fawcett, Mrs Wolf, Mr Newhouse or whoever it was used to lead us through fire drills and they would shout out ‘Drop and roll!’ because that’s what we were supposed to do if we ever got engulfed in flames. We’d have to fall to the floor that instant and roll like logs to demonstrate that we could do it without thinking, even in a moment of crisis. We had no real problem dropping and rolling, except sometimes when Wayne Westbrook, before I put him in his place, used to spit in front of you so you couldn’t help but roll in the frothing speck of a puddle and get his cooties all over you. Then it was no fun.

But if ‘roll and dole’ is a command, no one else acts on it too sharpish. The phasers’ bottoms stay welded to their seats until Hilary pops off, reappearing with her clipboard which she hands to Dwight. He reels off names. ‘Anne A with Lisa M, Andy C with Greg A, Beth D with Jennifer J, Brad with Eric H.’ People are moving round me now, girls descending from the standing positions at the back to hook the belt loops of more terrified looking girls at the front.

I’m one of the last names to be called. ‘Justine Z with Gwen,’ Dwight shouts and here comes the ponytail again, loping towards me and grimacing. As she lifts my belt loop, Dwight plumps a hand on her shoulder. ‘I want you to take care of the shoes, Gwen,’ he says, lowering his forehead and fixing her with a disappointed look. ‘You should know better.’

His and hers mountains of winter coats are piled up en route to the back door and they put me in mind of the ownerless stacks of clothing torn from Jews on their way to the concentration camps, like in that documentary we watched once on PBS. I wish I’d agreed to let Mom sew a name tag into my collar like she used to do when we were little, because mine is just another black woollen coat, a needle in a haystack of black woollen coats and I doubt I’ll ever be able to find it again. Gwen makes it clear she doesn’t care one bit whether I do or I don’t. She hands me a coat from the top of the nearest pile – any old coat, someone else’s coat with a button missing and, I discover, pockets made useless by holes the size of fists – and she shuffles me on.

We exit through the back of the building where there’s a larger parking lot and a jam of cars and parents and kids being spirited round by belt loops. Gwen steers me towards an oatmeal-coloured four-door sedan and hustles me into the back seat; my head collides with the frame as I manoeuvre my body into place. There’s a man at the wheel who I assume is Gwen’s dad.

‘Buckle up,’ he says as we nudge our way into the stream of departing cars.

Gwen ignores him so I do too, but after a second she growls, ‘Didn’t you hear my father? He said buckle up!’ She stretches across me, whips the seat belt out and over my torso, fastens and tightens it as far as it will go.

About fifteen silent minutes into the drive, Gwen pipes up and orders me to relinquish my shoes and bra. My hands aren’t shaking so bad any more so I manage to unhook my bra from the back, but I make sure Gwen’s dad isn’t peeping before I slip it out via my sleeve. Gwen snatches it and my Mary Janes.

‘If you tell anyone about the underwire,’ she says as she rolls down her window, ‘if you breathe one word, I swear I’ll kill you.’

I hate it when people say things like that. People just say them like they were commenting on the weather – I’ll kill you, I’ll murder you, I could just die, I wish I were dead and buried – and they never think. Maybe Gwen does mean it, but I still flinch when she says it and she obviously means something pretty hateful by it because the next thing she does is launch my belongings out through the open window and into the passing traffic.

I can’t believe it when she does that and I’m so unprepared, I don’t do a thing to prevent it. Too late, I twist and watch as my things recede into the distance. The shoes tumble to the side of the road, one of them landing heel-up in a puddle while the bra seems to float on the car’s tailwind for a second and then gets sucked under the muddy wheels of a florist’s delivery van. I watch until I can’t see any of the items any more and suddenly I’m gripped by sadness. They were the last things, the very last things I had that were my own. I want to slap this Gwen person but then I remember I still have my day-old panties. Kind of gross after thirty-six hours but the thought calms me. I’ve still got something that’s mine.

Throughout this, Gwen’s father acts like he doesn’t notice anything; his eyes remain glued to the road ahead. I can’t imagine our dad wouldn’t have something to say on the matter. If only to holler, ‘You know the rule, Justine. No littering.’

In the evening’s gloom, I can’t see the house much when we arrive, except to make out that it’s two storeys and the driveway bends up and round to the back. And I’m none too pleased, as I step out with my bare feet, to find the path to the door lined with pebbles. I attempt to tread carefully but Gwen’s having none of that. I wince as she trots me across some of the sharper ones.

The dinner table is set. There are sloppy joes, sweet corn and salad, and Gwen’s mom, dad and a sulky little sister who eyes me suspiciously. Ten or eleven, I’m guessing. Gwen’s dad is thin, dark, weary-looking; her mom has red hair like Gwen’s but it’s paler and permed into tight frizzy curls. And she’s a horrible cook. I’ve never liked sloppy joes and these are the worst. Too gunky and juicy, soaking up the buns until they turn into nothing but mush that clumps under your fingernails.

I’m so thirsty. The sloppy joes make it worse as they’re on the spicy side. I wish I had a frigging glass of water. ‘Could I have a glass of water?’ I ask Gwen’s mom.

‘Did anyone say anything to you?’ Gwen snaps. ‘You’re not supposed to say anything until someone says something to you. Got it?’

‘I just—’

‘Shut up already!’

‘It’s OK, Gwennie,’ the mom interjects, ‘I can get her a glass of water, it’s no bother.’

‘Do you mind, Mother. I’m handling it.’

‘But—’

‘Milk. There. Drink!’ Gwen screeches, slamming a too-full glass on to my place mat so that the milk splashes on to my plate, wrists and the sleeves of my polka-dot tunic. I wipe the back of my wrist dry with my napkin and then everyone watches me as I sip at the milk. It’s whole milk and has been sitting out; close to room temperature, it tastes like cream to me. Our family only ever drinks skimmed milk and only ever ice cold and usually only with cereal anyway. I sip some more and the milk curdles on my tongue and makes me even thirstier. I shovel a forkload of sweet corn into my mouth.

Gwen waits until all mouths are full and bulging before announcing, ‘Family rap!’ Her parents exchange wholeheartedly unenthusiastic looks. ‘Whose turn is it?’

‘I don’t know, Gwennie,’ her mom says, lowering a soggy crust from her lips. ‘Is it yours?’

‘You wish. No, I think it’s Dad’s actually.’

‘Not tonight, Gwen. It’s been a long day,’ says the dad.

‘All the more reason. And it’s your turn.’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Tonight, tomorrow night, every night, Dad.’

‘Burt, maybe you should make an effort,’ urges the mom.

‘Hell, whaddya want me to say?’

‘Tell us what happened to you today.’

‘You don’t want to hear about that.’

I have to say, I really don’t want to hear about that and it doesn’t look much like Mom or little sis do either. But Gwen forges ahead and manages to wheedle an appetite-numbing story out of her father about some small humiliation from his too-long day. From what I can gather, Gwen’s dad’s a section manager at some manufacturing plant and today he tells his team they can have fifteen extra minutes for lunch because they’ve been hammering or welding or sawing away so hard, but then the big boss shuffles down at the end of the usual lunch hour and sees these guys hanging about, drinking from their Thermoses and chomping on apples and whatnot, and he says to Gwen’s dad, ‘Hey, what the effing eff are these guys doing hanging about.’ So the big boss overrules Gwen’s dad, sends the whole team back to work and docks them five minutes apiece off their next break.

‘How did you feel about that, Dad?’

‘How do you think I felt?’

‘I don’t know, you tell me.’

‘I felt like an asshole. All my guys think I’m a sorry, good-for-nothing asshole.’

‘That’s great, Dad, that’s really great,’ says Gwen, squeezing his knuckles in encouragement. ‘Thanks for sharing.’

‘Can I watch Happy Days tonight?’ asks little sis as she pulps the remains of her sloppy joe bun with her fork.

‘You know you can’t.’

‘I wanna watch Happy Days. Mom, why can’t I watch Happy Days?’

‘No TV, not while we’re in the house,’ Gwen reminds her, jerking her thumb in my direction. ‘And stop saying that name.’

‘It’s not fair. I never get to watch any of my shows any more. Dad, it’s not fair.’

‘Them’s the breaks,’ declares Gwen.

‘I wanna watch Happy Days! I wanna watch Happy Days!’

‘Trish, I’m warning you, you’d better shut up and you’d better stop saying that druggie name or I’m going to report you and you’ll hear about it in the next sibling rap.’

‘Quiet, Trish,’ pleads the mom, all hushed and hurried.

‘No TV,’ Gwen bangs her knife on her plate like a gavel. ‘And you’d better not turn that radio of yours on either. Don’t think I don’t know when you do that. I can hear it through the wall.’

‘It’s not fair.’

‘Quiet, Trish,’ says the mom.

Directly after dinner, Gwen says it’s time to get ready for bed. She leads me into the bathroom for my ablutions – one of your all-time favourite words because it sounds like a body sneezing and burping at the same time, you used to say – and I wait for her to leave but she doesn’t. She squirts Colgate on her toothbrush, which she sticks in her mouth as she also drops her pants and plops down on the toilet.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ she says through a mouthful of foam, ‘we haven’t got all night. There’s a spare toothbrush on the counter. The blue one.’

The blue one’s gnarled and obviously used, but I don’t want to risk asking for another. As I lean down to wet the toothbrush beneath the tap, Gwen spits into the basin. I close my eyes and brush.

And I hear Dad reciting the dental care mantra in my head, like he used to do when we were little and he’d stand at the bathroom door to make sure we were doing it right. Up and down, up and down, to the back then to the front then to the back and up and down. Then, don’t forget, kids, floss is your friend. You always hated flossing, it made your gums bleed; so sometimes, when Dad wasn’t watching, we’d skip that part. But I wish I had some floss now. With so much foulness passing through my mouth today, I could do with a good floss.

Gwen’s a brisk brusher – oh how Dad would disapprove – and she gives her face only the most cursory scrub with the washcloth and one pump’s worth of hand soap from a sink-side container. I’m hoping she’ll beat a quick retreat after that but she doesn’t, not even when it’s my turn for the toilet.

Our bedroom, which I’m marched into next, is not technically a bedroom because there’s no bed. There are two mattresses and a neat stack of sheets and comforters against one wall, but no other furniture to speak of. It’s a room as empty as the day you move in. Gwen doesn’t even call it a bedroom.

‘Inspecting the phaser room!’ she bellows as she hands me and my belt loop over to her dad. Then she drops to her knees and rakes through the bare carpet with her fingers. She crawls from one corner of the room to the other tearing into the synthetic weave, poking down the sides by the skirting boards, getting eye level with the windowsills. She checks the door to what I assume is the closet and seems satisfied to find it locked. Turning her attention to the mattresses, she peeks to see what’s sandwiched between them (nothing) then lets them plop down on to the floor and leaps on them, one springing step each, like a trampoline. One of the mattresses, the one with the deepest sag in its belly, is kicked into the corner farthest from the door. Next Gwen shakes out each sheet, each frilly comforter, each sad pillow, and tosses them in equal measure on to the separated mattresses. As she makes her way back towards me, her eyes remain on the floor, scanning each step, each inch.

‘All clear!’ she reports. Her father rolls his eyes and backs away without a good night.

The mattress in the corner is my bed for the evening. Rammed in the corner like that, it makes me feet like a dunce, like I should forget how to spell and sit on my own till teacher calls time, like I should wear a big pointy white cap.

Gwen undresses, twisting off her Velcro-strap sneakers as she yanks down the bottoms of her sweat suit. I avert my eyes from her rolls of blubber, trying not to think how unpopular she must be with the boys, even if it does give me some pleasure. Still, I can’t help but notice her nipples which are the size of Franklin Mint special edition silver dollars and wonder how you get nipples like that.

‘Get ready for bed,’ she orders, stepping into a pair of oversized men’s boxer shorts.

‘What should I wear?’

‘What have you got?’

‘Nothing. You know I haven’t.’

‘Watch it, dirtball, don’t you get sassy with me.’

‘I—’

She groans then pelts me with a wadded up T-shirt with UNICEF stamped on the front where a pocket would have been. ‘Don’t get anything on it.’

The T-shirt is too small – I think it must belong to Trish – and the stitching on the label causes the back of my neck to itch, but I squeeze myself into it. Gwen snaps the lights off before I’ve finished folding up my clothes and the room is darker than I expect it to be. I grope my way towards my dunce’s mattress.

‘And don’t even think about crying,’ Gwen hisses from her mattress. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s fucking cry babies keeping me up all night.’

I pull the covers up to my chin and try to imagine that I’m in our rollaway, which is similar in its proximity to the floor.

After you left, I found myself sleeping in the rollaway more and more, just like when we were little. I didn’t plan to. Grandma came so I gave her my room and Mom made up the couch in the TV lounge for me. That was the official sleeping arrangement. But I kept tossing and turning out there on the couch, my butt wedging itself into the space between the cushions. About midnight one night, I got up to walk around and passed your door, slightly ajar, the glow from your old Mickey Mouse night-light you never bothered to throw out silhouetting the frame. I kneed the door open, maybe hoping to find you, and there was your room, just as you left it. Except for the rollaway. It was wheeled out from its hiding place beneath your proper bed and jacketed with a sheet now coated in dust. I didn’t mind, didn’t stop to think twice. I yanked the pillow and bedspread off your bed, crawled into the dust and fell asleep at once.

Mom found me like that in the morning and started bawling all over again. She said I oughtn’t be sleeping in your room. Grandma Shirland massaged the small of Mom’s back, little circular motions interspersed with pat-pats, calmed her down, changed her mind, bless Grandma. She said if it helped me, what was the harm. ‘Trust me,’ Grandma Shirland told Mom. ‘It’s OK.’

But I can’t make Gwen’s dunce mattress feel the same. The sheets are icy cold, they feel faintly wet and smell of chlorine. I scissor my legs to warm up. It doesn’t have much effect and I wish I had some socks. I wish that eternity ago that was this morning I’d taken the time to run upstairs and root out my thickest, warmest pair of black woollen tights. Not that they’d probably still be with me even if I had taken the time. Without my tights or a good pair of ski socks, I’m sure my feet will become frozen little approximations of appendages by morning, like the marbled and immovable chips of Greek statues they display in museums.

My dunce pillow has lumps in funny places and no matter how I plump it, my head feels like an eggshell, fragile and lopsided. I plunge my nose into the pillow’s innards hoping to come up with that smell of you that’s lulled me to sleep in the past. I love to sink into that smell. Sorta musky, still fresh nearly and…something. Not a bottled thing, not just a combination of sweat and salt and anti-dandruff shampoo and deodorant. You asked me once, ‘How do I smell?’ and I leant in and ran my nose across you like a dog would and I thought about it, really tried to capture it but all I could say was, ‘Wonderful, you smell wonderful, Josh.’

You pressed me, ‘Yes, but what’s it like? Describe it.’

I answered, ‘You smell like you.’

But the dunce pillow doesn’t. It smells of piss, mildew and other people’s dead skin cells. There’s no way I can drift off to never-never land with my nostrils full of this. There’s no way I can sleep at all. I listen as Gwen tosses once, twice, three times. She smoothes her bedspread then punches it away from her. She grumbles and lashes out at someone. ‘I know that,’ she retorts to the empty room and then her breathing grows heavy, punctuated by an occasional piggy-like snuffle.

I should have peed more. I couldn’t let go, not fully, when we were in the bathroom earlier, not with her standing over me like that, toothbrush in hand. But out of nowhere, the need hits me. My bladder’s about to burst.

I can hold it, no problem.

I try not to think about it, I count sheep, think of drifting off, think of you floating on a raft in the pool on a summer’s day with the sun beating down and the radio playing our favourite Duran Duran songs from the table on the patio.

I listen to Gwen sleep. I don’t know how long I listen to her but it feels like a very long time indeed as I tauten my privates, grit my teeth and envisage miles of sandy desert and no swimming pools at all: what a silly idea, no water, no waves, none of that. I count her snuffles – one, three, five, seven. I figure they’re at least two to three minutes apart. She hasn’t moved in, what, fifteen minutes.

I decide to take a chance.

I creep towards the door, thinking myself weightless while simultaneously trying to gird my bladder. It’s working. I always was the best at hide and seek because I could be so quiet. I knew the places you’d gravitate to, sure – under the sink with the Audrey Hepburn rubber gloves, behind the garbage cans in the garage, under the bed in Mom and Dad’s room, beneath the tattered tarpaulin shrouding the barbecue out back or under the cushions for the poolside chairs – but that wasn’t my real advantage. Though you were the one hiding, I was always the one who had the element of surprise on my side. I’d sneak up behind you, soft like a whisper, and tap you on the shoulder as calm as you please, as if all I hankered for was the time of day, and you’d jump out of your skin, startled and scared and packing your heart back into your chest every time. You’re half Indian, you’d tell me, and I’d say, you’re half not. And we’d laugh.

I’m at the door. Nothing has stirred and, as long as my pee doesn’t splash too loudly, I’m certain I’m in the clear. My fingers close over the doorknob…

And the place erupts.

The doorknob sets off a siren that rips through the house and maybe the whole neighbourhood. Gwen leaps out of sleep like it was last year’s fad and lunges for me, screaming, ‘Escape, newcomer trying to escape!’ With an elbow to the chest, she tussles me to the ground and hefts herself on to my strained bladder. Footsteps come running up the stairs and down the hall, coming from all directions.

Gwen’s mom arrives at the door, her robe slouching off one shoulder, her husband out of breath behind her and sulky Trish, looking rather uncharacteristically delighted, weaselling in between them.

I blush. What must I look like to them, what with Gwen on top of me, my body spread-eagled on the floor with nothing but a too-tiny T-shirt and two-day-old panties on to cover up my shame?

‘What the hell happened?’ wheezes the dad.

‘She was trying to escape.’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘I caught her red-handed, literally. She thought I was asleep but I wasn’t. I caught her.’

‘I just needed to go to the bathroom,’ I protest.

‘A likely story.’

I admit it doesn’t seem very likely that I should have to pee, given that I haven’t had a single drop of real liquid for the entire day – whole milk notwithstanding. But nevertheless, the need’s there and rather urgent. ‘It’s true.’

‘You went before we came to bed.’

‘I needed to go again.’

‘Stop lying!’ screams Gwen and she jounces up and down on my prostrate body for emphasis.

This, as I’m sure Gwen herself comes to agree, is not a smart move, for my bladder, after a valiant effort, finally succumbs to the inevitable – all over both of us.