Girl A(62)

There were days when I noticed her glancing across the pages to my lunchbox, and the tweak of one eyebrow. Who survived the day on two pieces of bread and a film of jam, or cold soup cooked the evening before? In turn, I examined the contents of her lunch. There were so many different components: a salad or a stuffed sandwich; fruit or vegetables, preserved in their own bright Tupperware box; a cylindrical tub filled with chocolate biscuits. My mouth opened before I could determine whether or not to ask it: ‘Would I be able to have one?’

Cara was generous the first time, and less generous each time afterwards. A few weeks into term, as she opened a tub of three Jaffa Cakes – that smell, of dark chocolate shot through with orange – she turned to stare at me, and tucked the container closer to her chest.

‘You’ve got to stop looking at my food,’ she said. ‘It’s freaking me out.’

The week after that, approaching the hall, I saw Cara sitting with another girl, Annie Muller. Cara patted the ground on the spare side of her, and I sat down beside them, although my stomach had already started to drop. Annie was mid-monologue as I arrived, and though she waved, she didn’t stop talking to greet me. Her lunch consisted of peanut butter sandwiches; Doritos (Cool Blue); and a banana sealed in a banana-shaped container.

‘They basically just don’t get it,’ she concluded. ‘They don’t understand it at all.’

‘Annie’s parents are being weird about getting her ears pierced,’ Cara said.

‘You don’t have yours done, right?’ Annie said. She leaned over Cara, chewing furiously. ‘So are your parents as crazy as mine?’

I unwrapped my two slices of bread – just margarine, today – and peeled off a crust to eat first. ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

Annie left us just before the bell, and once she had run for the lockers, I looked to Cara for an explanation. She was rummaging in her bag for the afternoon’s textbooks, and it was a slow few seconds before she would meet my eye.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Just because you hate everybody else doesn’t mean I have to.’

I felt a dull heat rise out of my collar and across my cheeks, and it made me cruel. ‘But I’m in History with Annie,’ I said. ‘And she’s stupid.’

‘A bit,’ Cara said, ‘but at least she invites me to her house.’

The discipline of the summer paid off. By late autumn, Mother was pregnant. Father started touching her again. At dinner, they sat side by side, reciting Psalm 127 and smiling over our conversation. They kept having to drop their cutlery to hold hands. When I looked at my siblings, frailer around the table, it seemed like they’d taken a little flesh from each of us, and made something new.

JP selected a wine bar called Graves, two blocks from my hotel. ‘It’s a pretty morbid name,’ I said, when he suggested it.

‘It’s an area of Bordeaux, Lex.’

‘Like you knew that.’

‘Since visiting their website – of course.’

I arrived first. I had spent the previous hour in the bath at the Romilly, with a carafe of red wine, reading Bill’s guide to planning applications. There was a wooden tray which slotted over the bathtub, provided for this specific purpose.

An evening off.

Graves was at the bottom of a black metal stairway, beneath the ground. Bankers’ lamps set in the centre of each table. I held the menu to the dim green light and ordered cognac and champagne. I was halfway down the glass when JP walked in. First I recognized the walk of him, stooped, tilted forward, and then his trench coat, which he had bought because it made him look like a secret agent.

I had loved JP in all of the ways that it’s unwise to love another person. Dido on the pyre. Antony in Alexandria. Bitch in heat. Before I left for university, Mum sat on my bed and tried to explain some matters of the heart, one of her hands stroking the cover over my legs. She seemed confident that I would already know about the sex side of things. Love, she had decided, might be a different matter. I was hot beneath the bedding, and aware that I couldn’t kick it away without her thinking that I was embarrassed.

‘The key thing,’ she said, ‘is that you never lose your self-respect.’

On reflection, this was sweet, and useful for a while. I had been too much of an oddity at high school to attract much attention – OK-looking, but so fucked in the head – but at university I was interesting enough. I could hold court on literature, or, with credit to Mr Greggs, countries that I’d never been to. I studied Olivia’s humour and Christopher’s optimism. I studied The Sartorialist. I wore tight, dark clothes, and a smile that I’d practised. Despite the showers and the CK One, I stank of somebody who might need saving, and men liked that best of all.

Sometimes I recall them: the odd pageant of men who tried to save me. They tried to save me by making love, or dinner, or, on one stilted, final date, a Build-a-Bear. Clever men from solid schools, destined for great things (or good things, at the very least). They parade through my head, with their tentative hands and concerned frowns. They ask why I’m reticent about my family. They touch my surgical scars, deliberately, to demonstrate that they’re not afraid. They come bearing handwritten letters, or handcuffs with fur – with fur – on a special occasion. They lick the wrong parts of my skin and dip their fingers inside me like they’re testing my temperature. They try to convert me. Lie still, they say, it will be different with me. This is always inaccurate. Ultimately, they’re angry and disappointed. Maybe I’m not that mysterious, after all. Why must you request such strange things; why would you ask that I hurt you; why won’t you tell me what happened to you? Maybe I’m just a bitch.