In a Dark, Dark Wood(60)

‘Eat up now, pet,’ she says, with something close to tenderness. ‘You’re just skin and bone. Rice Crispies are all very well but they’re no food to get well on. You need meat and veg for that.’

I’m not hungry, but I nod.

When she’s gone though, I don’t eat. I just lie on my side, holding my aching ribs, and try to make sense of it.

I should have asked how Clare was, where she was.

And Nina, where is Nina? Is she OK? Why hasn’t she come and seen me? I should have asked all this, but I missed my chance.

I lie, staring at the side of the locker, and I think about James and about all we meant to each other, and everything I’ve done and lost. Because what I realised, as I held his hand and he bled all over the floor, was that my anger, which I had thought was black and insuperable and would never fade, was already going, bleeding out over the floor along with James’s life.

It has defined me for so long, my bitterness about what happened. And now it’s gone – the bitterness is gone, but so is James, the only other person who knew.

There is a lightness about that knowledge, but also a terrible weight.

I lie there, and think back to the first time – not the first time I met him, for that must have been when we were twelve or thirteen, younger perhaps. But the first time that I noticed him. It was summer term in Year 10, and James was playing Bugsy Malone in the school play. Clare was – of course – Blousie Brown. It was a toss-up between that and Tallulah but Blousie gets her man at the end and Clare never did like playing the loser.

I’d seen James before, in lessons, horsing about, flicking paper planes and drawing on his arm. But on stage … on stage he somehow lit the room. I had just turned fifteen, James was a few months off sixteen – one of the oldest in our year – and that year he had shaved a savage undercut into his hair, and twisted the remaining black curls on top into a little knot at the back of his skull. It looked punky and rebellious, but for Bugsy he had smoothed it down with hair oil and somehow, even at rehearsals in his school uniform, that simple thing made him look completely and utterly like a 1930s gangster. He walked like one. He stood like one, an invisible cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth so convincingly that I could smell the smoke – though there was nothing there. He spoke with a laconic twang. I wanted to f*ck him and I knew that every other girl in the room, and some of the boys, felt the same way.

I knew what Clare thought, for she’d told me, hanging over the row of chairs behind me, whispering into my ear, her pink Blousie lipstick tickling my hair.

‘I’m going to have James Cooper,’ she told me. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’

I said nothing. Clare usually got what she wanted.

Nothing happened over the summer holidays, and I began to wonder if Clare had forgotten her promise. But then we went back to school, and I realised, from a thousand tiny things – the way she flicked her hair, the number of buttons undone on her school shirt – that Clare had forgotten nothing. She was just biding her time.

The autumn term play was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, when James got cast as Brick, Clare got the part of Maggie. She gloated to me about the extra rehearsal time it would necessitate, alone in the drama studio after hours, but not even Clare could charm her way out of glandular fever. She was signed off for the rest of the term, and her part was given to the understudy. Me.

And so, instead of Clare, I played Maggie, hot, sultry Maggie. I kissed James every night for a week, fought with him, draped myself across him with a sensuality I didn’t know I even possessed until he called it out of me. I didn’t stammer. I wasn’t even Lee any more. I’ve never acted like that, before or since. But James was Brick, drunken, angry, confused Brick, and so I became Maggie.

We had a cast party on the last night, Coke and sandwiches in what we called the green room, but was in fact an empty classroom up the corridor from the hall. And then, later, Coke and Jack Daniel’s in the car park, and in the kitchen of Lois Finch’s house.

And James took my hand, and together we climbed the stairs to Lois’ brother’s bedroom and we lay on Toby Finch’s creaking single bed and did things that still make me shiver when I think about them, even here, in the hospital room, ten years on.

That was when James Cooper lost his virginity. Sixteen years old, on a winter’s night, on a Spiderman duvet cover, with model aeroplanes turning and wheeling over our heads as we kissed and bit and gasped.

And then we were together – that was simply how it was, with no more discussion than that.

My God, I loved him.

And now he is gone. It seems impossible.

I think of Lamarr’s soft, plum-coloured voice saying, And James – how did you know him?

What should I have said, if I were telling the truth?

I knew him so that if I touched his face in the dark, I would know it was him.

I knew him so that I could tell you every scar and mark on his body, the appendix slit to the right of his belly, the stitches from where he fell off his bike, the way his hair parted in three separate crowns, each swirling into the other.

I knew him by heart.

And he is gone.

I have not spoken to him for ten years, but I thought of him every single day.

He is gone – and, just when I need it most, so is the rage I have nursed all this time, even while I told myself I no longer cared, that it was a part of my past shut away and gone and done.