Girl A(52)

Late in spring term, Evie and I waited on the school grass for Delilah and Gabriel. Going-home time had long passed; the last few parents were dispersing, holding school rucksacks and tiny hands.

‘Maybe they’ve gone,’ I said.

‘Why?’ Evie said. ‘They always wait.’

‘So – do we go and look for them?’

She was spreadeagled in the grass, squinting into the sunshine. ‘You’re closer.’

‘You’re younger.’

She threw a handful of grass in my direction. ‘You’re grumpier.’

She glanced away from me, then, over my shoulder, and straightened her face. ‘Lexy,’ she said.

The headmistress was coming across the playground. She stopped at the edge of the grass, stranded by her heels, and beckoned us.

‘There’s been a serious incident,’ she said.

The incident was this: the night before, Delilah had packed Father’s Authorised Hardback Holy Bible with Cross-References and Notes in her school rucksack. During afternoon playtime, she had retrieved the tome from her peg in the cloakroom and approached the cruellest of Gabriel’s tormentors. ‘Read this,’ she said, and brought the book down across the boy’s face. A corner had ruptured the globe of his eye. Teeth were loose. Father was on his way.

We waited for him on the chairs outside the headmistress’s office, which were usually populated by the very worst children in school. Gabriel’s hands were clutched in prayer, a gunge-nosed supplicant. Delilah sat with her chin up and shoulders back, the way Father liked us. ‘What did you do?’ I said, as soon as the headmistress had closed the door, and she snapped to face me.

‘Drive out the mocker, and out goes strife,’ she said. I wondered if she had shared this with the headmistress, too.

You heard Father before you saw him. His footsteps were heavy and unhurried, and each brought him closer than you expected from the last. When he arrived at the threshold, Delilah stood to meet him, offering herself for whatever punishment he might have derived on the drive. He would take his time with that, too. He stepped around her and handed me the keys, and rapped on the office door.

‘Get out,’ he said.

We walked in quiet procession to the van, and sat inside in silence. A few minutes later, the school door opened. Father picked his way across the playground, past the climbing frame and the little children’s benches. He closed the door behind him and took the wheel, but he didn’t start the engine.

‘Next time,’ he said. ‘Leave the vengeance for God.’

With that, he started to laugh. He roared with it. He slapped the wheel, and the whole car quivered. Delilah smiled, first tentative and then wider. She had been suspended for a week, and she was to write a formal letter of apology, but at home she paraded around the house like a small, triumphant angel of justice. Raguel in miniature. In her days off, she was allowed to varnish the cross for the Lifehouse, while Father stood over her, telling Jolly the story.

The children woke me, bursting into the garden, and I was at the hospital early. Gabriel was at breakfast, no visitors permitted, so I waited in the chair at his window. His room looked out to the car park and was entirely absent of decoration. Little acts of preservation dulled the place. Every corner was rounded, and the furniture was bolted to the floor. A little band of children passed under the window, escorted by nurses. One of the girls was holding a bear in one hand and pushing an IV trolley with the other.

‘There’s a children’s ward,’ Gabriel said. He left the door open and settled himself on the bed. ‘This was the place for us,’ he said, ‘right from the beginning. That way, we might have stood a chance.’

‘We weren’t crazy,’ I said.

‘Oh, come on, Lex. How could we have been anything else?’

‘Is Oliver coming today?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘Does he come every day?’

‘He needs me. You don’t understand, Lex.’

‘So, OK. I don’t. Explain it to me.’

So began the happiest years of Gabriel’s life. Even now – even knowing how they would end – he was grateful for them. Oliver introduced Gabriel to his friends, a ragtag troupe of outcasts, who lived across the city in dark flats and industrial communes. Blake owned a photo studio in Soho. Kris was the girl who had been crying in Oliver’s waiting room when Gabriel first travelled to London. ‘God,’ she said, when they were reintroduced, ‘that was a terrible day.’ Pippa had been on Big Brother; ‘Season six,’ she said, which meant little to Gabriel. Many of them had worked with Oliver in the past, Gabriel noted, but none of them did so now.

They collided on nights which fast became their own folklore. There was the time when they ended up in Blake’s studio in the early morning, prancing for his camera in outfits prepared for a leather magazine shoot later that day. There was the time when Gabriel careened into Delilah as the clubs were throwing them out, stone-cold sober and handing out water bottles, of all things. He had faint memories of trying to discuss with her what had happened to them – all of his memories from this time were faint – but each time he did she would hold a finger to his lips and shush him: ‘Let’s not talk about that right now,’ she said, and left her number in his phone. There was the time when, still awake at Sunday lunchtime, they drove up the M40 in Oliver’s Audi and raided Ethan’s house. Sighting Gabriel outside – Ethan’s television in his arms and his hair Gracie-white in the summer sunshine – a neighbour waved, and Gabriel nodded back. Each of them offered their unique perspective on this moment on the way home, bawling with laughter.