The Race (18 page)

Especially the parts that hurt.

My body was mine and I wanted it back. I would not let him take it.

I watched the streams of white soap bubbles run down my legs, sudsing over my feet then disappearing into the plughole.

You have a new skin, I told myself. What happened in there just now is already over.

I towelled myself dry, then put on clean jeans and a T-shirt. I gathered up the wet clothes from my bedroom floor, stuffed them inside a supermarket carrier bag and chucked them in the dustbin. After that I went back upstairs to my room.

When I happened to catch sight of myself in the mirror above the wash hand basin I was surprised by how normal I looked.

~*~

The town of Hastings is set on two hills, the East Hill and the West Hill. Between the East Hill and the West Hill lies the Old Town. Eastwards from East Hill lies the village of Fairlight, then the Romney Marshes. There are no other towns of any size along the coast until you get to Folkestone.

To the west of West Hill you have the new town, the sprawl of Victorian terraces that were built when Hastings became popular as a holiday resort in the nineteenth century. Many of these houses are large, with attractive square bay windows and long back gardens. Some of them have been renovated in their original style, but others are in a bad state of dilapidation. Many of the gardens are not well tended, and so the town is blessed with a larger than normal abundance of wildflowers. In the spring there are bluebells, everywhere. In the autumn there are Michaelmas daisies. Their colour – a soft mauve – is unique among flowers.

In the centre of town there is a pedestrian precinct, characterised by smaller, badly stocked branches of the newer chain stores. Along Queen Street and the roads adjoining it there are more local businesses. Some of them have stood their ground for many years, others struggle on for a while and then fizzle out. There are half a dozen hairdressers, a tattoo parlour and tanning salon, an electrical repair store that also sells vacuum cleaners, three used furniture stores, two bakeries and a large number of charity shops and fast food outlets.

Along the seafront there are three competing amusement arcades, two doughnut stands, two fudge shops and five fish-and-chip restaurants. One of the fish-and-chip places, The Blue Dolphin, has an entry in the Good Food Guide. These local businesses cling to life like limpets to rocks, threatening to die each time the tide goes out yet never quite doing it.

Aleister Crowley spent his last years here. The serial killer George Chapman bought his arsenic here. There are plenty of people in Hastings who still believe in witches.

From time to time you might hear of a murder, but not so often that you would call it commonplace.

Walking in the town can be strenuous because of the hills.

~*~

My best friend at primary school was a girl named Cindy Rogers. We were kind of like sisters, or how I imagined sisters might be anyway, and always together. Then I was off sick with the ear infection and everything changed.

I was nervous about returning to school in any case, because I’d been away so long. It wasn’t like I’d just missed a day, it had been several weeks. I might as well have been a new kid, which was a fate worse than any trip to the headmaster’s study. I was especially nervous about seeing Cindy, because I knew even before I’d set one foot inside our form room that something was different.

At the beginning of my illness, Cindy sent me jokey little notes in pale pink envelopes, some of them delivered by hand but others sent through the post with actual stamps on, the new stamps with the garden birds, which Cindy knew I liked. Her letters came every other day at first, then less frequently, then finally not at all. I told myself that was all right, because Cindy knew I’d be back at school soon, so what was the point?

I knew I was lying to myself. Within five minutes of stepping into the classroom, I knew that Cindy had a new best friend, Samantha Ridgway, and that I was history. To do her credit, Cindy didn’t just dump me like some of the more ruthless girls would have – she made a big show of pretending to include me in everything they did. Even so, the situation was irreparable, and I was heartbroken. I didn’t want just to be included. I wanted my friend the way she had been before Samantha Ridgway, with her raspberry-scented lip balm and crystal monkey pencil sharpener.

I hated Samantha, or not Samantha exactly, but the space she occupied. I also hated myself for hating, for admitting to myself that I was upset. I was nice to Sam and Cindy – I even sat with them sometimes at break time, the way they wanted. Then finally I had a huge crying fit, right in the middle of the playground at the end of lunch hour. No one knew what was wrong and I refused to say. Eventually I rubbed the tears away with my fists and went in for double English as if nothing had happened. I arranged my books across my desk like a crash barrier, which I suppose they were.

Four years later, Cindy Rogers was one of what I thought of as the eye make up girls, girls with boyfriends off the Hawthorne estate and who wore tights in American Tan instead of socks, girls so different from me they might as well have been beamed in from another planet.

I think Cindy might even have had sex with Derek at some point. I never asked her.

After Cindy, I made a pact with myself not to be taken in again. I made new friends, or pretended to anyway, girls I hung around with at break time or sat next to in class. I came to know the scent of their skin, the precise conformation of pencils and broken jewellery and make up items they liked to carry in their pencil cases. I knew the number and timbre of the silver bangles that drooped from their wrists, the bizarre particularities of their most common spelling mistakes. I never let these things matter to me though – not the way they had mattered with Cindy Rogers.

After Cindy it felt less of a risk not to have friends at all.

~*~

Tim Leverson was in the year above me. He was tall, and very thin, with wavy dark hair. We both wore the same kind of glasses. Tim was a library monitor. I was spending more and more time in the school library, over lunchtimes especially, and as Tim was usually there as well I suppose it wasn’t surprising that I began to notice him. I liked the careful way he handled the books. He moved cautiously and spoke quietly, the opposite of Derek.

It was ages before we actually spoke, months probably. In the end I had to dare myself to go up to him and say something – it didn’t matter what, just so long as I addressed him. It was the only way I knew of defeating my shyness. In the end I went up to the library counter and asked him if the library held any books by Doris Lessing. I knew the answer to my question already, but that wasn’t the point.

“I think we do,” he said. He took me over to the ‘L’ section, where there were two Lessing books on the shelf,
The Golden Notebook
and
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
. I decided on
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
because I liked the title better. I took the book over to the counter, and Tim stamped it out. When I returned it a week later he asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with him after school in Castle Meadow.

“Come for supper too, if you like,” he said. “My mum won’t mind.”

I said I couldn’t go for supper because my dad would be expecting me back but I could go for a walk. The thing was, I was scared to go inside Tim’s house. It seemed a long time since I’d been anywhere that wasn’t Laton Road, and I was afraid I might have forgotten what the rules were. I felt safer in Castle Meadow, or out on the cliff path. It was on the cliff path that Tim and I first kissed. We’d been sharing a packet of crisps, and so Tim’s mouth was dry and salt-tasting. I liked that taste, and also the feel of his teeth, pressing down very softly on my upper lip. I felt giddy inside and had to step back. It was the end of June by then, and butterflies were rising and falling on the thistles.

The thistles were a deep purple colour, like amethyst crystals. Some of them had already started to go to seed.

~*~

Briefing for a Descent into Hell
was about a man with amnesia. The doctors thought he was mad and tried to treat him with drugs, but inside the mind of Charles Watkins, something completely different was going on. First he was at sea in a rowing boat. Then he made landfall in an empty country with an alien city. I loved the world inside Charles Watkins’s head, and felt angry with the doctors for trying to take it away from him. Once again I found myself captivated by the idea that the landscape of a place might be altered just by imagining that it was. Or that a make-believe place could become more real inside someone’s mind than the outside world. I tried to imagine myself as a traveller like Charles Watkins, coming to the town of Hastings for the first time. The new Hastings was almost the same as the old one, but not quite. The best comparison I could think of was the way things looked when you took two photographs of the same street, a few seconds apart. At first glance the two would seem identical, but once you examined them more closely you’d see that they weren’t the same at all, that there were dozens of tiny differences that when you added them together made two completely different versions of the same reality. In the first photo the street is empty. In the second a woman appears suddenly – you couldn’t see her before because she was outside the frame. You probably moved your hand or changed position between photos, so the second image shows more of the houses to the right of the post office. The sun’s behind a cloud in the first picture, not so much in the second. Stuff like that.

What you’re actually looking at is two different worlds, a moment apart. Sometimes, when I walked across town to meet Tim or to visit the library I secretly pretended that I was going out into the streets of my imagined Hastings instead of the real one, and the more I imagined it, the more I was able to lose myself in this unreality. I talked to Tim about books whenever we met, but I never told him about my private version of the town and the people who lived there. I was afraid he might think I was as mad as Charles Watkins.

I began to keep a diary instead, a journal of my secret town and what I did there. I found I enjoyed writing things down and making things up. Both seemed much easier when there was no teacher looking over my shoulder.

I never thought of myself as a writer, though, not then. The idea seemed crazy.

~*~

Tim had has name down for the Oxford entrance. I wasn’t completely sure what that involved, only that at the end of it, Tim would be going. He was a year ahead of me, in any case. Whether he got into Oxford or not, he would still be leaving.

“It won’t make any difference to us,” he said. “I’ll write to you every week, and you can come and visit.”

“You’ll forget all about me once you’re actually there,” I said.

“Of course I won’t. Don’t say that.”

It was the closest we ever came to having a row and it made me feel stupid and ashamed and empty. I wondered if things would be different if we’d had sex already. There were times when I almost wanted to, but whenever I thought about actual fucking I felt myself freeze. I remembered the rain coming down in a torrent, and of soaping myself between my legs until I was sore.

I thought of Derek threatening to kill me if I ever told anyone.

I’d never paid that much attention to my body before, but now I hated to take my clothes off, in the school showers especially and even in my bedroom at night. I found I could never stop thinking about how Derek was only downstairs watching TV, or in his own room just a couple of steps away along the hall. I would step quickly out of my jeans, then slip my bra off under my T-shirt and slide into bed.

So long as Dad was in the house I felt safe, only never quite.

I learned to touch myself, but it was never Tim Leverson I thought of as I did it. The idea of him looking at or handling my body made me shrink up inside.

I think I was afraid that as soon as anyone touched me they would turn into Derek.

I thought of the girls from my favourite novels instead, Marian from
The Unicorn
by Iris Murdoch, or Sophie Wender from
The Chrysalids
by John Wyndham, her body grown hard and strong from her life in the Fringes. I imagined Sophie’s knee thrust between my legs, her grubby fingers pressing down firmly in the centre of the pink wet swollen flower-bud of my clitoris. I thought of her pushing her fingers inside me and then I came, in a rush, like falling downstairs in the dark. This fantasy of Sophie was a secret, joyous thing that had nothing to do with Tim or Derek or anyone but me and Sophie. It felt so different from any of the crap about sex that got shown on TV.

Afterwards I liked to read, on and on into the small hours. I liked to think of Sophie asleep in the bed beside me, turned on her side with her back to me, the tangled strips of her long brown hair falling between the jutting angles of her shoulder blades.

The stars above the house, like antique earrings on a velvet backcloth.

~*~

Tim won a place to read English and Philosophy at Jesus College. In the final month before he left, I considered telling him what had happened with Derek, but when it actually came to it I found I couldn’t. Telling him would have meant explaining so many other things. Why I’d never invited him to our house, for instance, or that my mother wasn’t really dead, but only missing. Why I’d left it a whole year before telling him anything in the first place.

Derek was the kind of person Tim instinctively avoided – a sullen, silent youth with yellow hair, on the surface not so different from the wasters who hung around in the Gateway supermarket car park, swigging cans of Fosters lager and overturning the shopping trolleys. Those guys were losers, anyone could see that, but they didn’t look like most people’s idea of a rapist and neither did Derek.

I thought that if Tim didn’t believe my story I might die. Or just stop, like the old Mickey Mouse alarm clock I’d had since I was six and that suddenly and inexplicably gave up working.

Mickey now stood permanently lopsided at twenty past five.