Five Winters(3)

I could imagine that. Grace and I had met only a couple of times, but she just didn’t seem the teacher type.

“What about you? Did teaching suit you?”

“For quite a while, yes. Then I got restless and jacked it in to renovate houses. More money in bricks and mortar than in Shakespeare.”

“You were an English teacher?”

“I was. Grace taught business studies. She was a big help when I was setting my business up. What about you? What do you do?”

“When I’m not attacking people with coleslaw? I’m a veterinary nurse.”

“Are you? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

I considered him. “Why’s that? Because I haven’t got a litter of puppies poking out of my handbag?”

“No, because you look . . . I don’t know, more glamorous than I’d expect a veterinary nurse to look.” He pulled a face. “That sounds a bit cringeworthy, doesn’t it? I’m out of practise at talking to pretty women, I’m afraid. Sorry, more cringe.”

I shrugged. “It’s okay. All this vanishes in a puff of smoke at midnight anyway. I’ll be out there on the dance floor in my scrubs and latex gloves.”

He laughed. “You’re funny.”

I could have told him I hardly ever got round to wearing makeup. That today I’d had a pressing need to look as amazing as possible. That my makeup was just like my banter and bonhomie—a self-defence. But I didn’t. I smiled instead. “I try.” I indicated his abandoned plate. “Look, don’t let me stop you eating. After all, you nearly died for that coleslaw. I’m just going to grab something myself.”

As I loaded up my plate, I risked a glance across the room. Mark was safely ensconced with Grace again. Good. If I could get through the evening without being alone with him, I might be all right.





2


It was Donna Baker who first woke me up to my feelings for Mark.

I was eleven years old, and I’d been in high school for six months. My Aunt Tilda was away for a few weeks, and I was staying with Rosie’s family while she was gone. It was winter—a bleak February morning just before half term, and we were in the girls’ changing room after hockey. I’d never been into sports and spent the whole time on the hockey pitch chanting inside my head: Don’t pass the ball to me. Don’t pass the ball to me. Fortunately, everyone knew how useless I was, so they rarely did.

If Rosie had been there in that changing room, she’d have alerted me to Donna’s approach—a nudge of the elbow, a hissed warning. But Rosie wasn’t there, because we hadn’t been placed in the same class when we started at the school. So no warning was forthcoming. I’d just looked up from trying to do up the buttons of my school shirt with my frostbitten fingers to find Donna in front of me.

Donna, who had the annoying habit of jumping up and down in front of the changing-room mirror to make her breasts bounce, turning all of us developmentally challenged girls into pools of inadequacy, usually kept to her circle of jeering, loud-talking friends. Together they focussed their attention on rolling up the waistbands of their skirts to see how much leg they could get away with revealing before one of the teachers “had a word” or sent a letter home to their parents. They certainly didn’t usually waste their time talking to the likes of me—a relative ant in the arena of their attention, and one Donna would have no qualms about squashing under her borderline regulation shoe if she felt like it.

I looked at her, my face reddening before she’d even said anything, my body as aware as my mind that anything Donna said to me wasn’t likely to be pleasant.

So her actual words took me completely by surprise. “Your brother,” she said, “is hot.”

For about a millisecond, I didn’t know who she was talking about. Then it clicked that she meant Mark.

“Mark isn’t my brother,” I said.

Something flickered across Donna’s face—the same expression an adult got when you gave them some backchat. “Adoptive brother, pretend brother, almost brother,” she said with a shrug. “Whatever he is, he’s hot. And I want you to give this to him.”

I’d been so busy dealing with the whole “adoptive, pretend, almost brother” thing that I hadn’t spotted the note clutched in Donna’s hand, but now she held it out to me.

“And make sure you get a reply.”

Her entourage were gathered nearby. One of them said, “Yeah, and make sure it’s the kind of reply Donna wants.”

“Yes,” Donna agreed. “Or else. And no peeking.”

The note was a hot ember in my schoolbag all day. I couldn’t concentrate on my lessons, not even science, which I usually loved. I kept picturing myself giving the note to Mark, watching him read it, his dark head bent over the words. Seeing a smile spread across his face as he reached the end. Then him looking up at me and saying, “Yes. Tell her the answer’s yes. I like her too.” And Donna becoming his girlfriend, being invited round for tea.

Or else, if his answer was no, Donna and her mates making my life hell for the rest of my time at school.

“Beth, have you written the homework down?” asked Mr. Dawkins, the biology teacher, and I quickly snapped my attention back to the room.

“Not yet, sir. Sorry, sir.”