The Edge of Me (3 page)

The ladder squeaks and crunches as I step up, the dry, sour smell from the loft coming at me. Blindly, I grope for the photo until I feel the cold silk of it on my fingers.

I snatch it down.

It’s an old photograph. The colours were once garish but fading now: a blank orange background and a child, I think a girl, but I can’t be sure. She can’t be more than two or three. She’s being held up to the camera. There are someone’s thick fingers around her middle.

The picture isn’t very clear because she’s moving. Wriggling. Her face is a blur of white and I can’t see whether she’s laughing or crying. But her eyes – it’s unmistakeable – they’re two points of colour: one is green and one blue.

On the back of the photograph, a name is scribbled in loopy handwriting, a name I don’t recognise:
Senka Hadžić,
and a date. And for a moment everything lags and stops.

A low wheezing tells me he’s coming back up the stairs and before I can do anything, a hand comes around my shoulder and snatches at the photo.

But I hold on.

‘What’s this Dad? Who’s this?’

There’s a moment’s pause and then he stretches his mouth into a kind of grin and points a grubby finger at the picture.

‘You.’ I stare down at it. After a moment he reaches and gently pulls at a corner. ‘It’s not important.’

He stuffs the picture into his back pocket, and I’m aware of my fingertips, hot and wet, where I was holding on to it. He’s halfway down the stairs when I remember the name.

‘But, Dad?’ He turns on the stair. ‘That’s not my name on the back.’

The little collars of sweat are still there in the folds around his throat. There are the pale seams of the scar. He pulls out the picture, turns it over, studies it for a moment and then pads back up to where I stand and puts a hand on my shoulder.

‘Senka Hadžić was your grandmother’s name. She was taking the photograph. Back home.’

‘So I’ve been there? Serbia? But you never told me …’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Just for a little time. To see your grandmother. Just a short time.’ He looks at me, his grey eyes wet and full. When he lifts his hand, I can still feel the weight of it like a bruise on my skin.

I make up my mind to get the picture back.

That night I dream about being held. I can’t see who’s holding me and I don’t know why. It starts as an embrace: something benign and loving but then the grip around me
tightens and binds and pinches until I can feel my lungs straining to breathe and my heart hammering in my chest. I wake up curled in my covers like some demented thing, and all around there’s a dense blackness in my room, a breathing dark of familiar things made odd and strange: a table leg, the dressing gown hunched on its hook, and a thin whisker of light under the door. It’s three o’clock in the morning.

I can hear noises: scraping, thudding, a sharp bark of wheel on wood, the press of stocking feet on the landing outside my room and the crunch of hinges on the ladder to the loft.

I lie there listening and under my skin, under the hum of blood, my bones freeze.

The next morning I sleep through my alarm and any careful thought that might have gone into choosing what to wear and how to wear it goes out the window because I’m late.

There’s no sign of last night’s activity, nothing to show that anything was moved or changed. Mum’s at work and Dad’s sleeping. I skip breakfast and head out the door.

Lauren’s waiting: ‘Oh my God what are you wearing? Did you get dressed in the dark?’ she says, pulling my T-shirt out over my jeans. She fumbles in her bag, pulls out a lip gloss and offers it to me. ‘Get some on Sand. You look like a bag lady.’

Meekly, I comply, and within seconds most of my hair is sticking to my mouth. She shakes her head, ‘Did I hear you were seen talking to you-know-who yesterday?’

I nod, teeth grinding like wheels in my head.

‘Well?
’
she says

‘Well.’

‘Well?’

‘He asked me out.’

‘
What?! No! Never!
Sand, that’s great!’

‘Er, no, basically it was a total disaster area. Total abortion. I just didn’t get it …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought he was asking me for help, you know… I just … Oh God.’

‘
Help?
’

I nod and pick strands of hair off my lips and suck at the ends.

‘But why would you think that?’ she says.

I shake my head. ‘I just couldn’t –
can’t
believe that someone like him might want to go out with me … d’you think it’s a joke?’

She eyes me and I know the look: pity and exasperation.

‘Why do you say that?’ she says softly.

‘Because in Joe-world I don’t exist.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘What?’ I say.

She’s serious now. ‘Look, this is going to sound really bad and you know you’re my friend and all but the thing is you
won’t exist
if you can’t actually
say
things
.
Why can’t you be like you are with me with other people?’

I just look at her and we walk on and suddenly the photograph of the little girl pops into my head and I feel that tightening around my chest.

‘I’m going to try. I
am
going to try.’

‘When are you going out?’

‘Tomorrow night, Friday,’ I say and my teeth start buzzing again. I bite down on my lip.

‘Tomorrow?’

I look at her. ‘Lauren, I can’t believe he meant it. Why would he be into me? He went out with Camille for Christ’s sake.’

‘So?’

‘She’s so … so …’ I want to say “French” but I end up saying miserably, ‘Cool.’

‘You’re an idiot sometimes, Sand.
You’re
cool too.’

We’re at the gates now and there’s that familiar smell of cheap deodorant, and the thronging of coats and bags.

‘Cool? What are you
talking
about?’

She takes a breath and says, ‘You’ve got potential, that’s all. I mean I know
you
feel like you’re on the outside but that doesn’t always have to be like a bad thing. You’re out there. You know, people do
see
you,
they
think you’re cool, I don’t know … independent. You just
have
to stop apologising.’ She’s going but then turns and shouts, ‘Oh … and you’re thin. You eat what you like and you’re still thin.’

I stand there trying to take this in while Lauren’s absorbed into the crowd. I’m heading off towards the music block for first period when I see him. He hasn’t seen me. He’s standing near Reception with his ex, Camille, and witchy tart Zoe Palmer.

He’s laughing.

I stare at them and all my clever, quiet bedroom resolutions burst and dissolve.

I walk into the music block where Baroque orchestral music is on the agenda for this morning. From my place at the back, I can crane over heads and see them through the window.

When I get home, the house smells different. I walk into a sort of citrus fug that hangs over the hall. In the sitting room, Mum’s standing by the window smoking. She’s wearing a sheer black top with a high neck and she’s scraped her hair back into a thick knot. My father’s in his chair as usual but he’s wearing clothes. He doesn’t look up when I come in but keeps his eyes fixed on the floor. And opposite him, on the sofa, is another man. Which is weird in itself because apart from the guy who comes to read the meter, we never have visitors. He’s wearing a dark suit buttoned across his chest, and when he moves the little buttons tug at their holes. He’s almost as wide as the sofa but when he gets up, he’s shorter than me. Under his suit, he wears a thin grey turtle neck sweater, so tight that you can see the hairs on his chest curled and flat like tiny springs. His cheekbones jut like shelves under careful blue eyes.

He waves a fat hand at me. Mum says, ‘This is Andrija.’

‘Er hi. Hi. I’m …’

‘Sanda. This is Sanda,’ she says.

I give them all a cheesy smirk and begin to edge towards the door. Andrija settles himself back on the
sofa and the buttons on his jacket squeak and pull at their threads.

Everybody looks at me.

Nobody says a word. Mum bends to flick her ash into a saucer and I see the outline of her backbone like tiny pebbles under her top.

As I back out of the room, I see her look at Andrija and he nods and says, ‘
Cytpa,
’ which means
‘
tomorrow,
’
and then I hear Dad yell at her like I’ve never heard him before.

He’s saying, ‘No! You can’t do this! You have to stop! It’s enough! Just let it go! You knew this would happen one day.’

Then Mum’s throaty bark cuts across him: ‘You
listen
to me! You do what I tell you when I tell you! You will do exactly as you are told!’

Then come Dad’s low growls and his mumbled responses. She always wins. I think it’s because at the end of the day she doesn’t care about anything
but
winning and how can you fight that?

But what are they on about, and
what’s
going to happen tomorrow?

I run upstairs and slam the door. At first I fail to notice that my bedside table is missing and my chest of drawers has been emptied. My clothes are stacked in tidy bundles on the floor.

I go to the top of the stairs and call Mum but it’s Dad who appears. His face is ridged and mottled. Behind him, I can see the dark bulk of Andrija standing in the room.

Dad comes up the stairs and suddenly he’s standing too close to me, breathing hard. I hear a catch in his throat and he coughs it away.

‘Dad, what’s going on with my stuff?

‘I am going to paint your bedroom.’

‘Oh. OK. What colour?’

‘Mmm?’

‘What colour are you going to paint it?’

‘White. White.’

I breathe. Something isn’t right here. It’s hurting my head.

‘Who was that guy?’

He stares at me and blinks slowly. He looks tired. Exhausted. And I think then that like me, he’s somehow flattened himself, hemmed himself into chair covers and lampshades.

‘He is from Serbia. He worked with your mother a long time ago. He is helping us.’

‘With what?’

‘With …with immigration forms. There is problem with our …with our … status here. The police are making problems.’

‘But I thought …?’

Suddenly he jerks forward and takes my hand in his and then just as suddenly lets it go.

I stare at him and he looks away. ‘It’s not a problem. Not a problem.’

But somehow I can’t believe him. And very slowly I feel my breath starting to thin and my rib cage squeeze.

‘What’s happening tomorrow?’

‘Eh?’

‘What that man said … he said “tomorrow” like it was important.’

‘That’s when he’s going to help us. Yes. Tomorrow.’

‘So why were you and Mum arguing about it?’

He leans to one side and picks at a raised freckle of paint on the bathroom door.

‘Sanda … I, we … I want to…’

‘What?
What is it?’

He sighs. I’m aware of Mum, now standing in the doorway of the front room below, clicking her tongue. Andrija is behind her.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

‘Dad?’ He turns. ‘Can I have that picture? The photograph?’

‘No.’

He goes back downstairs and closes the door.

3

I know life isn’t always going to be this way. I mean practically everyone leaves school and grows up and passes their driving test and meets someone and has babies and a job and stuff. School is just school. It’s just part of a long life and I bet when I’m forty-seven and I’ve got grey hair and bunions, I’ll have forgotten all about it and the walk up the corridor into double English where I know he’s sitting. But right here, right now, it’s the hardest thing in the world, and if it weren’t for Dad waking me at six o’clock in the morning to clear my room for painting, I don’t think I’d have come in at all.

But here I am. And I’m supposed to be going out with Joe tonight and the only remotely comforting thing on the horizon, as far as I can see, is that it’s half-term next week. So when the inevitable happens, when I learn it’s all been some twisted joke and when the humiliation Geiger Counter racks up to eleven, at least I can go to ground for a week.

He’s there and I walk past him to my table and because everyone’s looking at me and I’m sure everyone’s in on it, I don’t look at him. But the air around him is buzzing, and I walk through it and I breathe him in, and a little Hope Fairy dances in front of me for a moment, then disappears in a puff of smoke.

I sit down in my place at the back.

Minutes pass. The smell of text books and floor polish.

He turns once to look at me, catches me looking at him, and a rosy flush spreads itself across my cheeks. I look down at once and scratch at a mole of gum on the desk with my nail. Zoe’s answering a question in her fake husky rasp, David Moger, next to me, raises his hand and I get a choice whiff of sweat from his armpit.

I blank out.

The photograph I found comes into my head. Blurred and faded, washed out. It’s funny – when I think about my childhood – about me in it – it’s always like that: worn and bleached. It shifts and slips away from me when I try to reach it. A car journey; a doll with its hair cut off; picking blackberries on a railway line. The images are strung out in my brain like a bone necklace, joined by fraying threads. And the bones clatter and sing against each other but they never connect.

I’m breaking. Sometimes I think I’m breaking.

After a while, I’m aware of Miss O’Brien watching me.

‘Are you with us, Sanda?’

I look up at that and so does everyone else. Zoe laughs, then everyone starts. Joe turns in his seat and I can’t read
him but at least he’s not laughing. Not yet anyway.

Miss says, ‘Get on with your work everybody.’

She comes over, puts a veiny hand on my paper, and I can see the rub of a wedding ring long gone on her left hand. She says gently, ‘Are you all right, Sanda?’

I will myself not to, but as usual I don’t do what I’m told, and my eyes start to prickle and fill.

‘Um … I just … Can I …? Sorry.’

I push my table forward, haul myself out of my seat and leave the room and all the gushing and the gasping and the looks, and I walk. Long strides and I’m breathing hard and swallowing air. The corridor’s empty and at every step I can hear the rise and fall of voices from the other sides of the doors.