Growing Up Twice (26 page)

Exactly as Michael has just done.

‘But I …’ I sit up and look at him, think of how much I missed him in the bar last night, how much I wanted him from the first moment I set eyes on him this morning and how much I need him at the moment, need him to reflect the me I used to be before Owen ripped me up.

‘I do love you,’ I say. Not because I do, but because I don’t want to hurt him the way all of those various men hurt me.

Michael buries his head in my neck and I look down at the crown of his head and his strong fingers circling the tops of my arms, and I feel every one of the eleven years between us.

Fortune interrupts the silence by sounding the doorbell and I leap out of bed perhaps a little more quickly than is polite just after such a mutual revelation. I don’t especially want to see anyone right now, but I do want a break from the tension and pathos of the moment.

‘Hello?’ I enquire into the whistling feedback of the intercom.

‘Hi? Jen? It’s Ayla here.’ Her voice sounds very young and distant from three floors down.

‘Ayla! Hello.’ I’m surprised, I haven’t seen her since Mrs Selin cooked us dinner.

‘Um, can I come up?’

‘God, of course you can, sorry.’ I buzz her in and race back into my room to pull on a pair of jeans, a bra and a top.

‘Selin’s little sister,’ I whisper to Michael as I race out of the bedroom and pull the door shut behind me.

‘Hello,’ I say again as I open the door to her. She towers above me in her Nike Airmax and bends to kiss me on either cheek, brushing an ironed shiny strand of hair behind a multi-pierced ear as she stoops.

‘This is a nice surprise, fancy a coffee?’ I lead her into the kitchen and pick up the kettle to fill it.

‘No thanks.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘Got any juice or Coke?’ I check in the fridge, find some of Rosie’s organic apple juice and pour her a glass.

‘This is a really nice place,’ she says, looking around. ‘It must be great to have your own place.’ As she speaks she nods her head with quiet contemplative persistence. I make myself a cup of instant and settle down next to her.

Just as I wonder what the likelihood is of Michael making his presence known and beginning his new policy of outing our relationship, he strides into the kitchen. At least he had the good grace to get dressed first.

‘Hello, I’m Michael, Jenny’s … cousin.’ I can’t work out if his last-minute denial of our love was a general back-down or if he merely revised the status of his devotion to me when confronted with a beautiful girl much closer to his own age. The latter definitely figures if the long assessment he has bestowed on her person is anything to go by.

‘This is Ayla, Selin’s sister. We were just talking through girl stuff, weren’t we, Ayla?’ I say briskly. Ayla stands up again, her cheeks burning with the unexpected heat ignited by an unknown foxy boy in her presence.

‘I’m sorry, Jenny, I’ll go, I didn’t realise that you had company,’ she says, but I reach out and gently push her back into her seat.

‘Nonsense. Michael is just passing through. Michael, go and watch TV.’ He nods and backs out of the kitchen. ‘See,’ I psychically transmit to him, ‘I talk to you more like your mother than your mother does, and you think you love me!’

‘See you around then,’ he says to Ayla, treating her to one of his playground-special smiles and ignoring my telepathy. A few moments later we hear the theme tune to
Blind Date
blare out, switch briefly to
The Generation Game
and then back to the
Blind Date
tune again.

‘He’s pretty cute, your “cousin”,’ Ayla says with an impish smile; I can’t work out if she’s being sarcastic or not. I choose to ignore any possible undertones given that she’s sixteen.

‘Is he? I’ve known him since he was a kid, you know, so I don’t really look at him that way.’ I thank God for the first time that one thing Michael can’t give me is stubble rash. I hastily change the subject.

‘Well, how’s it going with that chap, thingummy?’

‘Jamie? He asked me out!’ Her voice rises in a little high-pitched squeal at the end of the sentence and her solemn face breaks into a grin.

‘Cool!’ I say genuinely impressed.

‘Yeah, but I can’t go out with him.’ Her face falls again. ‘Tamsin says she’ll break both my legs if I do.’

‘Tamsin? Isn’t Tamsin your mate who you went to Ibiza on a family holiday with in the summer?’ I can understand the tremulous tone to her voice. Ayla has had ‘friends’ turn on her before.

‘Yeah. But since term started everything seems to have changed.’ She drops her head so that I can see the hours of work that went into the perfection of her zig-zag parting.

‘But she was joking, right?’ I ask hopefully. For her to be involved in another incident like this could really knock her confidence for good.

‘No.’ She lifts her face to look at me and her beautifully lined eyes are full of imminent tears.

‘I’m in big trouble, Jen,’ she whispers and the first big fat tear runs down her face.

‘Oh, darling,’ I say, dragging my chair next to her and flinging an arm around her shoulder. I’m thinking teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, shoplifting ring?

‘It’s Tamsin and the others. They h-hate me.’ Her tears break into full-blown sobs now and her head drops to her forearms. I hand her a piece of kitchen roll.

‘I’m sure it’s not that bad, if you’ve just fallen out. They’re probably just miffed because all the boys fancy you and you don’t get spots. Ever. Do you?’ I have always wondered what genes the Mehmet family carries to avoid any type of teenage acne whatsoever, not even the sort of outbreak I’m still prone to from time to time – and I’ve got six grey hairs.

‘It’s worse than that.’ She looks at me again and takes a couple of deep breaths. ‘When I first met them, right, they were really nice to me and like, that lot, Tamsin and Aisha and everyone, they are the coolest in the year. So I was really chuffed when they asked me to hang with them. Lots of the other girls didn’t like them, but I thought they were just, you know, jealous.’ I nod as she speaks, recognising a scenario from my own school life, but with more expensive trainers on.

‘Anyway, after I’d known them a while they started messing around with the juniors, teasing them and that. And then they started to nick their dinner money off them and threaten to beat them up if they didn’t pay. I did too. I was there. We’d go and spend it on lipstick and fags. I don’t smoke though!’ she adds quickly in an attempt to negate the rest of her confession.

‘Ayla!’ I cry, unable to repress my dismay. This is exactly the kind of behaviour that has ruined so much of her school life recently. I can’t believe someone as sweet natured as her would inflict the same thing on someone else. Not little Ayla who wanted to marry Gary Barlow when she grew up and used to trail around after us suffering in turn our adoration and annoyance with her toddler devotion.

‘Yeah, I know. It’s the worst thing I can do, isn’t? But they were my mates, you know. My only mates.’

I keep silent and let her talk.

‘Well, then there’s this girl in our year, Lucy, she’s nice and that, but she’s almost deaf, you know, got a hearing aid, she talks a bit funny. She’s a bit overweight, not much, but a bit. Well, they just started laying into her every day. Calling her names, writing stuff about her in the bogs, spreading rumours, saying she was a slut. That she’d give any boy a blow-job for a quid. At first I thought it was just messing but yesterday I was with them when they caught up with her in the park. They hurt her. They made her bleed. I’m not like that. I told them I’d had enough of it. Tamsin said I’m a stuck-up cow anyway, she called me a slag. She said if I talked to anyone I would be next. I took Lucy home. She says she’s not going to tell.’

‘
You
have to tell someone,’ I say firmly. ‘You can’t stand by and let that happen to someone else.’

She shakes her head. ‘Yeah, but they
carry knives
, Jen, and Tamsin is a real psycho. And I don’t know anyone else. No one else in that school is going to be my friend now. And Tamsin said she’d cut me if I told.’

My blood boils when I think of some jumped up little bitch, with a penknife trying to lord it over kids like Ayla. There’s no excuse for kids like Tamsin – her parents are working, they live in a nice Victorian semi on Lordship Lane. They go to a time-share villa in Ibiza every year.

‘Ayla, why haven’t you talked to your mum and dad, or Selin?’ I’m touched that she came to me, but her family is a close one.

‘Because they’d bloody kill me! After everything I put them through, with the old school and the doctors and that. Can you imagine how let down they’ll be if they find out what I’ve done? And they’re really busy with everything right now and I hardly see Selin at the moment, what with everything she’s got going on. And Josh would just go round there and he doesn’t really get it.’

I can’t imagine Mr and Mrs Selin not having time to talk things through with their own kids, they have each taken time to talk things through with me in the past. But I can imagine how hurt they will be when they find out about this. I can see how difficult it must be for Ayla to tell them.

‘You have to tell them, Ayla, at some point.’ I can’t get involved in covering this up from her family.

‘I know. I know what I have to do. But I thought maybe if I could sort it out before I told them, they might not kill me so much?’

I bite back a smile and nod. ‘Go to the head, face out Tamsin and the girls. If they’re carrying knives they’ll be expelled for sure.’

‘Excluded. And I don’t think that will make much difference to how they feel about me.’

‘Look, Ayla, excuse me for saying this but girls your age are all mouth and no trousers. Girls
my
age are all mouth and no trousers. They won’t really hurt you, not if you show them you’re strong. And I bet Jamie will still be your friend, won’t he, hey?’ I nudge her gently in the ribs with my elbow and a tiny smile softens the tense line of her mouth.

‘Yeah. Jen?’

‘What, honey?’

‘Will you come with me, Monday morning? To see the head?’

‘Of course I will,’ I say, with no idea how I’m going to explain yet more absence from work. ‘And then later I’ll bunk off work a bit early and come and meet you from school, OK? Then we’ll both go and tell your mum and dad about it. They can kill us together.’

‘All right, thanks.’ She delicately dabs the end of her nose with the kitchen roll. If I remember correctly it’s hard to be sixteen. You look twenty-five but inside you’re still just about twelve. I’ve always thought that I haven’t changed inside since my eighteenth birthday but looking at her I can see I have, I’ve changed a thousand times, like a butterfly constantly cocooning and emerging. Maybe I don’t have to be stuck in a rut after all. Maybe I’m changing right now.

I watch Ayla walk down the stairs and give her one last wave as she turns on to the next landing before I shut the door. Striding back along the hallway I push open the living-room door and look at Michael spread out over the entire sofa.

‘Right, Cousin Mikey. I’m starving. Go and get us some fish and chips.’

As soon as I open my eyes I am wide awake, despite the fact that it is Sunday morning and my alarm clock says it has only just gone 7.00. I wish some big-bearded astrophysicist-biochemist person would explain why this early-morning alertness only happens on weekend days next time they’re making mind-blowing discoveries about the universe in a lab in the middle of the Arizona desert.

I roll over and look at Michael’s back. His broad shoulders and the faint heatwave given off by his body prove tempting and I scooch in behind him and wrap my arms around his chest, tucking my knees into his. He stirs a little and one hand reaches back to squeeze my thigh before he drifts back into deep sleep. One thing about being eighteen; you never suffer from insomnia.

This weekend we have had the chance to become properly close. We have had the hours and the space to become intimate. We have talked about music (he’s a lost cause), books (he doesn’t read real books but is quite partial to graphic novels), football (he supports Chelsea and wishes he could play like Zola, I support Arsenal and wish Tony Adams had been my dad), and after a brief (very brief) discussion about sexual politics I had teased him about the possibility that he might be a bit homophobic.

‘Homophobic?’ he replied with horror. ‘I’m not scared of the fuckers!’ We laughed but I’m not entirely sure he was joking.

And we even discussed our futures briefly. I asked Michael what he wants to be when he grows up. A rock star. He asked my why I told his dad I want to be a journalist.

‘Because I do, one day,’ I’d said.

‘You don’t reckon you might have left it a bit late then?’ he asked cheerfully.

I changed the subject.

Late last night after I’d taken an excursion to the kitchen to down a glass of cranberry juice he asked me how many men I’ve slept with.

‘I’m not telling you!’ I replied, horrified by the question.

‘Why not?’ he asked, grinning but perfectly serious.

‘Because. Because haven’t you seen those films or read those books where the bloke persuades the girl to tell him how many men she’s slept with and then he feels jealous, sexually inadequate and secretly thinks she’s a slut?’ In fact I didn’t have to watch any films or read any books to garner that piece of experience, I’d fallen into that trap many a time myself. Even Owen, who increased his bedpost-notch tally
during
our relationship, had thrown a tantrum when I finally told him.

‘It’s a lot then, is it?’ Again he adopted this jokey but edgy tone.

‘See! See! It is
not
a lot but it is more than you, OK? It doesn’t go into double figures. OK? Subject closed.’ Of course it does go into double figures, but frankly it’s none of his business. In fact, it’s about fourteen, assuming that I haven’t forgotten anyone (and let’s face it, some of them deserve forgetting). Fourteen that I’ve had actual sex with. People I’ve kissed? That could run into three figures frankly, I’ve always been a fan of kissing. Fourteen sexual partners is not a huge number given that I started doing it twelve years ago. Fractions aren’t my forte but it is a lot less than two a year. Girls are prettier than boys, sex is more available to us, so in my experience no matter which girl you are, if you’ve had more than one partner you are likely to have shagged more people than your current squeeze. The golden rule is
never tell him the truth
.