Into the Water(18)

All the boys except Robbie, of course, who only had eyes for Nel. They’d met two years before, when he was seventeen and she was fifteen, and they were a regular summer thing now, even though they were allowed to see other people the rest of the year because it wasn’t realistic to expect him to be faithful when she wasn’t around. Robbie was six foot one, he was handsome and popular, he played a lot of rugby, his family had money.

When Nel had been with Robbie, she sometimes came back with bruises on her wrists or the top of her arms. When I asked her how that happened, she laughed and said, ‘How do you think?’ Robbie gave me a weird feeling in my stomach and I couldn’t help but stare at him whenever he was around. I tried not to, but I kept looking at him. He’d noticed it now and he’d started to stare back. He and Nel made jokes about it, and sometimes he’d look at me and lick his lips and laugh.

The boys were there too, but they were over on the other side, swimming, climbing up the bank, shoving each other off the rocks, laughing and swearing and calling each other gay. That’s the way it always seemed to be: the girls would sit and wait and the boys would mess around until they got bored and then they’d come over and do things to the girls, which the girls sometimes resisted and sometimes didn’t. All the girls except Nel, who wasn’t afraid of diving into the water and getting her hair wet, who relished the rough and tumble of their games, who managed to walk the tightrope between being one of the boys and the ultimate object of their desire.

I didn’t sit with Nel’s friends, of course. I laid out my towel under the trees and sat down alone. There was another group of younger girls, around my age, sitting a little way off and one of them was a girl I recognized from summers past. She smiled at me and I smiled back. I gave her a little wave, but she looked away.

It was hot. I longed, then, to go into the water. I could imagine exactly what it would feel like on my skin, smooth and clean, I could imagine the squelch of warm mud between my toes, I could see the warm orange light on my eyelids as I lay back to float. I took my T-shirt off, but that didn’t make me any cooler. I noticed that Jenny was watching me and she wrinkled her nose and then looked down at the ground because she knew that I’d clocked the disgust on her face.

I turned away from them all, lay on my right-hand side and opened my book. I was reading The Secret History. I longed for a group of friends like that, tightly knit and closed off and brilliant. I wanted someone to follow, someone who would protect me, someone remarkable for her brain, not her long legs. Though I knew that if there were people like that round here or at my school in London, they wouldn’t want to be friends with me. I wasn’t stupid, but I didn’t shine.

Nel shone.

She came down to the river sometime in mid afternoon. I heard her calling out to her friends, and the boys calling back to her from the top of the cliff where they were sitting, legs dangling over the edge, smoking cigarettes. I looked over my shoulder, watching as she stripped off and waded slowly into the water, splashing it up against her body, enjoying the attention.

The boys were coming down off the clifftop now, through the wood. I rolled on to my stomach, keeping my head down, eyes fixed firmly on the page, the words a blur. I wished I hadn’t come, wished I could slink away unnoticed, but there was nothing I could do unnoticed, literally nothing. My shapeless white bulk didn’t slink anywhere.

The boys had a football, and they started to have a kickabout. I could hear them calling for passes, the ball slapping against the surface of the water, shrieks of laughter from the girls as they got splashed. Then I felt it, a stinging smack against my thigh as the ball hit me. They were all laughing. Robbie held his hand up and ran towards me to get the ball.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he was saying, a wide grin on his face. ‘Sorry, Julia, didn’t mean to hit you.’ He picked up the ball and I saw him looking at me, at the red, muddy mark on my flesh, pale and marbled like cold animal fat. Someone said something about a big target, yeah, you couldn’t hit a barn door but you can’t miss that arse.

I went back to my book. The ball hit a tree just a few feet away from me, and someone called out, ‘Sorry.’ I ignored them. It happened again, and then again. I rolled over; they were aiming at me. Target practice. The girls were doubled up, helpless with laughter, Nel’s shrieks of mirth loudest of all.

I sat up, tried to brazen it out. ‘Yeah, okay. Very funny. You can stop now. Come on! Stop it,’ I called out, but another one was taking aim. The ball came towards me. I lifted my arm to protect my face and the ball slapped against my flesh, a hard, stinging blow. Tears pricking the backs of my eyes, I scrabbled to my feet. The other girls, the younger ones, were watching too. One of them had her hand over her mouth.

‘Stop it!’ she shouted out. ‘You’ve hurt her. She’s bleeding.’

I looked down. There was blood on my leg, trickling down the inside of my thigh towards my knee. It wasn’t that, I knew right away, they hadn’t hurt me. The stomach cramps, the backache – and I’d been feeling more miserable than usual all week. I was bleeding properly, heavily, not just spotting – my shorts were soaked through. And they were looking at me, all of them, staring at me. The girls weren’t laughing any longer, they glanced at each other open-mouthed, halfway between horror and amusement. I caught Nel’s eye and she looked away, I could almost feel her cringing. She was mortified. She was ashamed of me. I pulled my T-shirt on as quickly as I could, wrapped my towel around my waist and hobbled awkwardly away, back along the path. I could hear the boys starting to laugh again as I left.