6:30 p.m. Canteen. We witness the disorder parade: anorexics pushing their food around with redundant forks, taking a still-full tray up to the counter when the matron looks away; socially anxious girls sitting alone at a table for thirty or looking self-conscious behind a DIY fringe; a morbidly obese girl having double doors opened for her, sweating under the buffet lights—getting upset when told she can’t have seconds.
We sit with our friends. They are talking about Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, their voices refracting off plates, glasses, and tables; booming surround sound. We imagine ourselves covered in egg cartons, like the bedroom of a rock star before he is a rock star, with holes cut for our nose. If the voices were muffled, would they be more bearable?
It doesn’t help that we can’t eat—can’t look at our plate without imagining all the food it has ever had on it: a swarm of mashed potato, vinaigrette, bolognaise, gravy, and macaroni cheese. Six hundred people eat in this room three times a day. It is inconceivable that our plate has not previously been used by someone with poor personal hygiene.
How reliable is the school dishwasher?
How many people have sucked on this spoon?
Had those people ever given a blowjob? If so, when, and did they brush their teeth in the morning?
The plate teems with wet pork, beans, and saliva.
We shake our head. It’s just a plate.
No use. It is dirty, lethal, overused. Somehow we are standing up and gripping our tray. “Everything okay?” Georgia asks, her face a map of concern. We nod dumbly and run to the used tray counter. The smell of half-eaten food and used spit makes us gag. We try not to breathe, but the queue of girls handing in their trays to the women on the other side is too long, and inside we’re jumping up and down. We’ll need air soon.
We’re at the counter with our tray. A woman is on the other side, wearing an apron and blue latex gloves, scraping food juices into the bin. Her gloves are covered in it—beetroot, chicken, ketchup, mayonnaise up her arms.
She looks like she has just delivered a child.
A crash. Smashing glass, clattering cutlery. Our tray is on the floor, our hands splayed like starfish. We are momentarily frozen. Silence, heads turning, then clapping; the standard boarding school response. We should laugh it off, get a mop, a dustpan and brush, anything—too late.
We are running from the canteen, double doors swinging behind us as we head out into the night.
We’re happy when half term rolls around. We are spending the week at home, and Ella, who has survived two and a half years without us checking that she hasn’t died in her sleep, is grinning on the doorstep when we pull up in the car with Mum.
The three of us shuffle through to the kitchen and catch up over big mugs of sweet tea. Ella fills us in on events of the term—her main part in the upcoming school play; the new friendship group she has fallen in with; the geography teacher she doesn’t like. On the whole, then, things are going as well as they could be.
That is, until we meet with the thought that changes everything. Uninvited and entirely dark, it arrives on the back of some very bad news. When Ella goes upstairs to learn her lines, Mum tells us her best friend Gemma has cancer, and that the doctors have said it is probably terminal.
This is what we say out loud: “Oh, no. That’s awful. I’m so sorry, Mum. You must be really sad. . . . But Gemma is so full of life. She’s got more energy and fight in her than anyone I know. If anyone can make it, it’s her.”
But in our head this is what is said:
This thought stops our world, makes us shake, demands we acknowledge that nothing will be the same again.
“Are you okay, darling?” asks Mum. “I know, I know. It’s awful. I feel the same.”
The thought bounces from one corner of our brain to the other, like a teenage miscreant who is too old to be on a bouncy castle but who won’t get off. The thought that this is wrong is like the castle’s furious owner forced to clamber onto it to remove the adolescent, stumbling and swearing. The delinquent squeals: “Catch me if you can, old fucker, catch me if you can!”
It would be comical if it wasn’t horrific.
Why is this happening? I ask my friend. And why is it my thought and not our thought? How did you get off so easily?
She replies: I don’t know.
What can I do? I ask.
She shrugs. I never knew you were this bad, She replies, sounding at a loss.
More than anything, we want to ask Mum why this is happening, but we can’t. She loves Gemma. She’ll think we’re a murderer, and then she’ll remember what happened with cousin Tom. How could she live with herself, knowing her child is so evil?
She couldn’t.
A few days later, Gemma comes over to see Mum for a cup of tea.
Normally we like seeing Gemma, but this is torture.
The bad thought has been booming around our head, swelling to an indefinite magnitude. We’ve accidentally added it to certain things like pens, radiators, and trainers, so that every time we see those, the thought instantly returns. We’ve hidden all our pens and our trainers so that they won’t trigger the thought—but we can’t pull the radiators off the walls. We try to think of anything else, but it doesn’t work.
We make an excuse and leave the room, running up the stairs two at a time to our bathroom. We curl up in a ball and rock backwards and forwards. Normally the cold tiles make us feel better, but today they don’t.
We hear Mum asking Gemma how she’s holding up. Their voices drift up the staircase.
Those are the voices of honest, good-hearted people. They are the voices of people who are fundamentally different from us.