Phosphorescence (10 page)

Of course she chose the geography project, and, weirdly, she
loves
it. She says I have a gift for creative writing. Mr Lascalles snarls when I tell him this.

‘You're not supposed to write creatively in geography.' He slams his fist on my folder. ‘Where are your facts, Lola?'

Search me. My main worry now is Mrs Bailey and her enthusiasm. She is out of control and tells everyone that I am a gifted child. Let me tell you, I am
not
gifted, nor do I want to be. Worse still, she has decided that she is going to read out some of the project in assembly next week. Not all of it, thank God, but the beginning. Little does she know that it is a patchwork of deceit, made up of things I found on the Internet, combined with some of my dad's reports on the birdlife at home. I quite often just substituted the word ‘plankton' for ‘tern,' as in ‘The migrating plankton return to our shores in April.' It looks good, and evidently Mrs Bailey doesn't know any more about birds or even plankton than I do.

‘You are to be congratulated, Lola. You have found a way of expressing yourself that will speak to all of your classmates,' she enthuses, and I can only bear to look at her face for a moment because her mouth is wobbling with excitement and her chin
seems to move freely from side to side beneath it without seeming to be attached to her jaw.

Mrs Bailey is the kind of teacher that you recognize by her smell and remember for the whole of your life. My first primary school teacher had the same thing – she was called Miss Lord and she smelt of some really nice soap. Mrs Bailey is more essence of violets or some such delicate flower, but the scent is distinctive, and nothing will ever stop me thinking of her when I smell it.

Mum is thrilled for me when I tell her the awful news about my project.

‘That is great, Lola,' she says, looking up from her newspaper for once.

She is sitting across from me, with her feet curled up under her on her chair. We are quite like a married couple from a sitcom in the way we have a routine for our lives. I love routine. It is such a relief after the chaos of moving and everything. I have always responded to routine; I often think it is because I lived by the sea, and the tide is the world's oldest routine, I guess – after the cycle of the moon and the sun.

Anyway, I usually do my homework before Mum comes back from the office. We cook dinner together, or rather, Mum cooks and I start to help, but then I have to go and put some music on, or call Nell or something, and by the time I come back Mum has made supper. Quite often it's stir-fry with cashew nuts, which I love. I would lay the table if we had one, but we don't. We have TV dinner, which is fine when there is something to watch.

It was really gross a few days ago, though, because they had a programme about plastic surgery on when we were eating. It is so mental to be cutting up chicken breast and posting it into your mouth while watching a surgeon slice into a woman's face and take out bits that look like meat from her cheeks. It made me want to be a vegetarian for about an hour or two. Anyway, I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm thinking about giving up red meat. Quite easy, as we never eat it anyway. Even easier to give up fish, actually, as I don't much like it, and I can say so now we don't live by the sea any more.

‘To have your project read out at school is so impressive.' Mum pushes her hand back through her hair and her silver bangles clank.

‘But it's not because it's good,' I have to point out. ‘It's not accurate or anything. In fact the geography teacher said it was a load of old rubbish.'

‘That was unnecessarily rude of him.' Mum has a purposeful look on her face, as if she might threaten to come into school.

‘No – I mean the thing is that the Director of Studies
likes
the way it's written, so never mind Mr Lascalles. He is so yesterday with his views.' I stumble over the words to get them out in time to mollify Mum. It works.

‘Well, I'm glad you have a strong voice already,' she says.

Mum looks completely different now we have left Dad. She has had a haircut, and they gave her a fringe, which secretly I think was a mistake, but also I do think that she looks quite young, which is good,
I suppose. She has also started wearing a lot more make-up, which actually makes her look a little older. The combination of the young hair and the old cosmetics leave her about where she was before, but groomed and polished instead of careworn and miserable. Her clothes are better too, and she wears skirts all the time.

‘I never want to see an oilskin garment again,' she said when we were packing to move. And it is as though she has completely turned her back on the life we had in Norfolk. Mum never even looks out of the window, never mind goes outside. She just floats around wearing glossy tights and heels and silky skirts with little tops. I feel galumphing and huge next to her, because she seems so small and slight. It's as if the shabby outer casing of her when she wore big jumpers and had manky-looking hair has been shaved off, and inside is a shiny new little jewel-like mum.

‘So, is it being read out for its literary merit or because it's a good project?' she asks.

Sighing, I zap the TV silent and continue to stare at the screen.

‘Not sure.'

A man with purple sunglasses opens and closes his mouth like a goldfish. Losing the sound has always been the best way to watch bad music acts.

‘Actually, Mum, I'm not so keen on the geography project being read out at all.' I prefer not to look Mum in the eye when I am disagreeing with her, even if the disagreement is only tiny, like now. ‘It will make me feel a bit of an idiot to hear what I wrote,
and I hate the idea of everyone else knowing it. It's like being naked or exposing myself or something.'

Mum laughs, another new form of expression for her, and I zap the sound back up because the bad song has finished and the next band on are quite good. Mum doesn't seem very bothered by anything I do. She hardly ever tells me off, and she's more likely to laugh if I do something wrong. It's weird. Come to think of it, she doesn't often ask me about my day, or what I had for lunch, but I tell her anyway, because after all the years of her asking me, ‘How was school?' it is automatic to give her an edited version of my life.

I almost did it when I got back from the weekend with Dad, but I saw a barrier go down behind her eyes, so I stopped myself and said, ‘Oh, well, you know, it was just like it always is there. Nothing happening to no one.'

Mum smiled, gratefully I think. She said, ‘I'm glad Jack's recovering.' But actually she didn't sound any more glad than she would have been if someone on
EastEnders
was getting better from an illness. Now she lets the subject of my project drop and goes back to tapping information into her Palm Pilot. She reminds me of a nine-year-old kid on a PlayStation.

Nell and I discuss her, late at night when I am in bed with the duvet over my head and the phone sneaked from its cradle in the sitting room while Mum is having a bath. She has now had enough of my extended conversations and is beginning to be a real pain about the phone bill.

‘I didn't ask to move to London away from my
life and my friends,' I pointed out to her, when she started psyching out just because she couldn't get through trying to ring me from work for a measly half-hour. That shut her up for a while, but tonight I want to keep things simple, so Nell and I talk quietly, and I absolutely won't be on the phone for hours.

‘You know what, Nell?'

‘What?' Nell yawns. She is in bed too, but not hiding because she doesn't need to. I was the one who called, and anyway, Nell's mum hardly ever gets in a psych. She's really cool.

‘I think my mum is in love.'

‘Is she?' Nell's surprise makes my toes curl up and something shrivel in my stomach.

I'm only fourteen. I shouldn't have to deal with my mother being in love.

‘Well, she laughs a lot, she doesn't eat much any more. She looks amazing and she isn't at all interested in me.'

‘I don't think that's love,' says Nell. ‘In fact it sounds like the opposite. Most people in love look ghostly and are always hanging around the phone. Does she do that?'

I think for a minute and realize I have hardly ever given Mum a chance to be on the phone because I am always using it.

‘Er, no,' I concede, cautiously.

‘Sounds as if she's happy,' says Nell. ‘It would be a bit weird of her to fall in love so fast. You've only been in London six weeks.'

‘Yes, but maybe she already knew the person and that's why she left Dad.'

As I speak these words I realize that this has been the shadowy thought in the back of my mind all along. Saying it is a relief, particularly when Nell laughs down the phone.

‘Don't be daft. How was she ever going to have met some swanky London person when she never went anywhere? Your mum never left Staitheley. My mum says that was the problem. She didn't have enough to do and she got bored. Now she's busy and she's happy. End of story.'

‘I know . . .' There is a click as the bathroom door opens. ‘Sh for a minute,' I whisper, holding my breath. There is a waft of scented air as Mum comes out of the bathroom. She pauses by my door and then a moment later I hear her own door creak and close. ‘Are you still there, Nell?' I whisper.

‘Yeah, I'm going to have to go in a second, but I've got to tell you – you'll never guess – Josh is going out with Fay Bullock. They were snogging at the sixth-form disco. D'you remember her? She's got huge tits and a kind of flat face.'

Oddly, it is not the nature of the information Nell is passing on that freaks me out, it is the way she obtained it.

My heart is thudding as I ask, ‘How do you know? You weren't there. Year Tens aren't allowed to go to the sixth-form disco unaccompanied.'

Nell answers hesitantly, ‘Well, I was there actually. And I wasn't unaccompanied. I went with Jason Dawes.'

‘Oh
my God
, you—'

The door spins open and Mum is there in the
block of light from the landing, doing her most icy, no-nonsense whisper.

‘Give me the telephone.'

Mum holds her hand out and I pass the phone like a small and unsuccessful relay baton.

I can't bear it. Nell had a date, she went to the dance with a sixth-former, she
must
have kissed him in the slow dance at the end, and now I am the only person left of my age who hasn't done proper snogging. Or ever been out with someone. The evils of the geography project are nothing to this.

Assembly is a big deal at my school. It doesn't happen every day, but when it does happen, everyone has to go, and there is a register on the way in to make sure we are all there. Sometimes we have a guest speaker, sometimes a class takes over and runs the show. It is always too hot, and the floor smells of polish and shines and squeaks beneath your shoes.

Assembly is most boring when the usual members of staff are doing the usual thing of leading the prayers and talking, so on the day that Mrs Bailey stands on the platform with my project, everyone is glazed over with the tedium of it all when she gets up to speak. She puts on her glasses, stuffs one hand in the pocket of her sensible long cardigan and coughs, looking over her glasses at the rows of pupils.

‘This morning I am going to read to you from one student's work. I have chosen this opening part of a project because it displays energy and clarity, it is poetic and lyrical, and because it opens a door in the imagination. The pupil who wrote this is in Year Ten.'

Oh no. My face, burning since she started waffling, bursts into clammy perspiration and everyone in my year group turns to look at me. The
whisper and the movement goes through the whole school, and I swear there isn't one person there who doesn't know that I am the author when Mrs Bailey begins to read.

‘
Phosphorescence means shining in the dark; luminous without combustion. In August in Norfolk, the sea warms to a point where the algae become phosphorescent. If you swim at night in moonlight, you become luminous, the water droplets around you sparkle green fire, your skin drips light like sequins, and you seem to be made of glittering scales.
' Mrs Bailey pauses and looks around at all of us. There is an ungodly silence which makes me want to faint, if only I bloody could. She carries on. ‘
You are a mermaid when you swim in phosphorescence. And you glow in the dark.
'

There is a small silence as she finishes, then a shimmering giggle which starts at the front and surges back through the room.

Surely she could have left that bit out? It is so unmerciful, so blistering to read out something that was never meant to be heard by anyone. Mr Lascalles seems to be the only person who shares my view. On the platform behind Mrs Bailey he is sitting sideways on a chair, one hand over his eyes as he shakes his head.

I hadn't thought much about what it would be like after the project was read out, and if I had, I would have imagined even more people avoiding me than normal and a lot of sniggering. But what actually happens is really surprising. I am on my way back from the science block after physics, texting Dad to
tell him about substituting terns for plankton. A group comes towards me on the covered walkway and, without looking up from my phone, I pause to let them pass.

‘Hey.' There is a scuffle of feet as the group stops next to me, galumphing a bit like the elephants in the
Jungle Book
cartoon. Harry Sykes, whom I have never spoken to before, but who is still the fittest boy in the school in my view, is grinning at me. My hands become solid lumps, nerveless, and I drop my phone. He picks it up and hands it back to me.

‘It was your stuff in assembly, wasn't it?' His eyes are blue and his hair is the colour of wet sand, but I can't stop looking at his mouth, his teeth white and straight in his smile.