Luke Gale was born on 24 October 1975, during an episode of Fawlty Towers. In the year the Netherlands won the Euro-vision Song Contest, the year of Wombles, Pong, Ford Capris and the Bay City Rollers, Luke was a miracle child.
His mother Jean had, apparently, always been unable to conceive, and the adoption agency she and her husband Bill approached had ruled that Bill was away too much for them to effectively parent a child. It didn’t matter that half the women in the area were single-parent families with ten different men on the scene; Jean and Bill just weren’t good enough for a child. Bill was away so much because his firm, a big insurance company, sent him to different locations for one, two or sometimes three weeks at a time. In the end, the savings fund that was supposed to provide private education for the adopted child they never had ended up going towards Brazilian herbal fertility treatments for Jean. A couple of years later, Luke was born.
The first time Julie saw Luke was sometime in 1985. She was sitting in the removal van, half asleep. He was a face in a window that she at first thought belonged to a ghost. It was late – they’d been driving all day – and in the moonlight he’d looked pale, drawn and a bit deathly. Julie was ten at the time, and was going through a phase of thinking everything was a ghost and everything looked deathly, but there was something wrong about him even then. He wasn’t looking at anything. He was just looking. As they pulled up outside their new home, she realised that he was going to be her new neighbour.
‘I never thought I’d live in a cul-de-sac,’ laughed Julie’s mother.
‘What’s a cul-de-sac?’ Julie asked.
‘Like this,’ explained her father. ‘A road with a beginning but no end.’
The next day, after a night spent ‘camping’ in their new home, Julie’s father started his first day in his new job as a lecturer at the local sixth-form college, preparing for the new term when he’d be teaching art. At about three o’clock, after spending the day unpacking, Julie and her mother went to say hello to the neighbours at number 17.
At first, Julie couldn’t work out what was so weird about Luke. He didn’t seem like a ghost any more; he seemed more like a child you’d see on TV or something – she wasn’t sure why. When she thought about it a lot later, Julie realised it was because he had no scabs, no suntan, no insect bites and no dirt. He was the cleanest child she’d ever seen. They just stood looking at each other in silence, in what Julie later found out was the ‘guest’ lounge, in which she was never allowed again after that first day.
In the lounge, the funny-looking plastic blinds were drawn over the patio doors, although Julie didn’t think this was particularly strange. For a few minutes, while Julie and Luke stared at each other, the mothers made small talk about the area, and Julie’s mother, Helen, commented on Jean’s display case and collection of glass-blown animals.
‘I’ll go and make a cup of tea, shall I?’ offered Jean eventually.
‘Thanks,’ said Julie’s mum, smiling nervously as her daughter pushed her feet around the immaculate white shag-pile carpet, making little, meaningless patterns. ‘Why don’t you kids go and play outside?’ she suggested.
There was a funny silence, and then Luke sort of sneered. ‘Yeah, why not?’ he said sarcastically. Then he left the room.
Julie couldn’t believe that a child had been so rude to a grown-up. She was almost envious of the tone he’d taken with her mother; he’d sounded almost like a grown-up himself. Her mother looked at the floor and then fiddled with her earrings, the way she always did when she was nervous. She was wearing her clip-on dog earrings today, the ones she had bought on holiday in Cornwall last year. Julie suddenly felt cross with Luke for speaking to her mother that way and guilty that a few moments ago she’d thought it was clever. Stupid little boy, she thought, and wondered if he was a problem child like the ones on the estate in Bristol, near where she used to live.
‘Why don’t we go into the kitchen?’ suggested Jean.
Julie and her mother followed Jean through the door and down the hall.
‘Sorry,’ said Julie’s mother, who always apologised for everything. ‘I hope I didn’t say anything . . .’
Jean filled the kettle and put it on to boil in silence. Julie could sense a weird atmosphere in the room but tried not to think about it. Instead she wondered whether this was the sort of kitchen where you’d find Nesquik and Marmite, neither of which her mother bought, and both of which she’d always relied on getting at friends’ houses. She’d already noted that there was no Soda Stream, which she was pleased about. Luke was too horrible to deserve one.
It was clear that Julie’s mum was feeling uncomfortable.
‘Can I help with anything?’ she asked Jean.
‘No, no,’ said Jean, pouring water into the teapot. ‘That’s all right.’
‘Maybe we should leave you to it. Get on with the unpacking . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jean. ‘I’m sorry for the way Luke spoke to you.’
‘I’m sure it’s a just a phase,’ Julie’s mother said nicely. ‘You should hear this one sometimes.’ She pointed at Julie. This was something that really got on Julie’s nerves. Whenever another child acted badly, her mother pretended Julie did too, to make the person feel better. This was unfair, because Julie hardly ever got into trouble.
‘Luke hasn’t been outside since 1976,’ Jean said. ‘He isn’t usually so rude. I am sorry. He’s having another assessment soon.’
Julie’s mother seemed shocked. ‘Assessment?’ she repeated.
Julie wondered if Luke was a mad person.
‘Yes. He’s allergic to the sun,’ explained Jean.
For the next half an hour, while the grown-ups carried on talking, Julie considered this. What did being allergic to the sun involve? She was allergic to wasp stings and swelled up whenever she was stung. Last time she was stung, she had to go to hospital for an injection in her bottom. She imagined Luke swelling in the sunshine, eventually exploding in a ball of yellow pus. She was aware of her mother making the sympathetic noises she always made when other adults told her their problems, which were usually something to do with an illness or ‘trouble at home’. This time there were a lot of medical terms Julie didn’t understand – apparently Luke was suffering from something called XP and various other allergies. Julie couldn’t follow what the grown-ups were talking about and eventually started picking an old scab on her finger.
‘He just watches TV in his room all the time,’ said Jean. She looked at Julie and then back to Julie’s mother. ‘We got it for his birthday last year. Since then all he does is watch it, and we don’t know what to do. He doesn’t even read books any more – and he used to get through so many books.’ She sniffed. ‘It’ll be nice for him to have someone of his own age to play with. Get him away from that box, anyway.’ She’s been crying a bit, and apologising a lot, like Julie’s mum does sometimes.
‘Has he got a TV in his room?’ asked Julie. She had never heard of anything more glamorous in her life. No one she knew had TVs in their bedrooms, not even moneybags Joanna who’d had a bouncy castle on her birthday.
‘Julie,’ said her mother, embarrassed.
‘What?’ she said indignantly. ‘I was only asking.’
Her mother gave her a look, and soon, after some fidgeting, sighing and more scab picking, Julie was taken home.
‘That poor little boy,’ Julie’s mother said to Julie’s father later that night, over dinner.
They were eating fish and chips in the half-unpacked sitting room. Julie’s father had just been talking about his preparations at the college, and Julie’s mother had been talking about all the reading she still had to do before her degree course started at the polytechnic. Now they were talking about that weirdo Luke. Julie was curled up on the brown sofa reading Smash Hits and pretending not to listen.
‘What did you say he had again?’ asked her father.
‘XP,’ said Julie’s mother uncertainly. ‘I can’t remember what it stood for.’
‘XP. Hmm. Never heard of it.’
‘It’s very rare, apparently.’
Julie’s father flicked the TV on to BBC2. Julie held her breath. The Young Ones was about to start and if she held her breath there was a chance she wouldn’t be noticed and would be able to watch it all before being told to clean her teeth for bed.
‘She is a seriously odd woman,’ commented Julie’s mother. ‘Crystal brandy glasses and a guest lounge,’ she muttered to her husband and they both giggled before turning their whole attention to the TV. Just before bedtime, Julie overheard her father say something to her mother she didn’t understand. It was about there probably being a lot of wife-swapping parties around here. It made them both laugh a lot, but it sounded very dubious to Julie. Who would want to swap their wife? She thought about the fat woman next door with her podgy fingers and gold rings and wondered if her husband might want to swap her. He probably would. That’s probably what they meant. Smiling, having finally got the joke, she put on her My Little Pony nightie and went to sleep listening to her parents having sex.
Julie’s school was a ten-minute walk from her new house. Compared to her last school journey, this was seen as too far for her to go on her own. Especially with Stranger Danger, and the industrial estate and the big fields that seemed to be the best shortcut to the school. The fields near the new house were yellow with tall grass and you got there by going down an overgrown alley next to a tyre factory. Julie enjoyed playing there. She found she could hide herself in the tall soft grass and make a little womb-like den where no one could find her. Then she overheard her mother telling her father that she was sure some kid would be found dead in those fields at some point. The next time Julie went there she lay in the yellow grass, perfectly hidden and still, and imagined being cold, pale and dead. Suddenly she didn’t want to go there again.
She ended up walking to school with Leanne, the girl from number 12, after her mother went over and asked Leanne’s mother if Julie could walk with her. Leanne already walked to school with Susie and Kerry, the twins from the next street. After some coaxing from her mother, she agreed to walk with Julie as well.
The night before the first day of school, while Julie was getting ready for bed, she’d seen Luke looking at her from his window. She knew his bedroom faced hers – they both looked down on the twin garages and driveways that separated numbers 17 and 18 – but he’d never actually looked at her before. When their eyes met, he’d made a funny face and she’d laughed. Then he’d smiled. Maybe he wasn’t that horrible after all.
At 8.15 the next day, Julie found Leanne sighing and rolling her eyes at the end of the road. Julie was five minutes late.
‘We’re going to be late to meet the twins,’ Leanne said crossly.
‘Sorry,’ said Julie, feeling stupid. The way Leanne spoke to her made Julie feel like she was stupid, big and clumsy like a monster or a sea creature.
‘This is Julie,’ Leanne said to Susie and Kerry, when they got to the next street.
‘Are you new?’ Kerry asked, looking Julie up and down.
Julie looked completely stupid compared to Leanne, Susie and Kerry. They had proper hairstyles – Susie and Kerry had French plaits and Leanne had bunches with proper bobbles. Julie had a boring ponytail that was already coming out.
‘She’s not allowed to walk to school on her own,’ said Leanne.
‘Why not?’ said Susie.
‘She’s scared,’ said Leanne. ‘Her mum told my mum.’
‘I’m not scared,’ said Julie.
‘Why don’t you walk on your own, then?’ said Leanne.
School was horrible. A small, south-facing modern building, with little Munchkin chairs and stupid exhibitions of pictures of fish created entirely with glitter, it was always too hot and gave Julie a headache every afternoon. Everything was supervised closely except playtime, which was supervised from a distance by a fat teacher in a long skirt with a bell. Leanne, Susie and Kerry turned out to be the most popular girls in the school. They spent a whole year calling Julie ‘scaredy-cat’, holding their noses when she went past and pretending she’d farted. The only time they left Julie alone was when they were playing gymnastics on the rail around the grass by the caretaker’s house. When they did that Julie could keep away from them, and they’d be too absorbed to follow her; hanging upside-down on the rail, gripping with their knees and constantly arranging their skirts so their knickers weren’t showing.
The boys were even worse. They all knew words that Julie didn’t understand. At playtime they would come up to her and say things like, ‘Do you know what fuck means?’ and Julie would get embarrassed. She knew that ‘fuck’ was a dirty word but had never understood exactly what it signified, just that you shouldn’t say it. When she said she didn’t know, they teased her even more. After a while, Julie started pretending she did know what the words meant, but the boys were ready for her, either calling her bluff by making her define the words (she couldn’t), or using made-up words in the first place so that when she said she understood them, they could laugh and say she was a smelly liar, and they knew because they’d made up the word.
All the kids at school loved The Young Ones and would spend the day after each episode quoting lines from the programme. But when Julie joined in, nervous and frightened of being laughed at, she got mixed up and said one of Rik’s lines in Vyvyan’s voice. No one laughed. No one said anything. No one even called her a flid or a joey; they just looked at her with this weird disbelief on their faces. How could someone be so stupid?
From her first day, she walked home alone but told her mother she walked with Leanne. Suddenly lying dead in the yellow fields didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
Julie lost herself in books about planets and animals and maths because what she learnt at school wasn’t very exciting. She became best friends with Luke. At eleven she moved up to the local comprehensive: a hard-gravel playground and sports field surrounded by cold Portakabins, bullies in miniskirts, Cancer Corner, spitting competitions and – the place where most humiliation took place and where Julie once had to do PE in her knickers because she left her games kit at home – the sports hall.
Julie instantly became one of those kids who joined clubs because it meant she didn’t have to go outside. She spent breaktimes and lunchtimes playing chess, doing chemistry experiments, playing Dungeons & Dragons, making models or, if there were no clubs running, doing her homework in a corridor or toilet somewhere.
If her homework was finished and there were no clubs, she would attempt maths puzzles set for her by Mr Banks, her maths teacher, involving challenges to trisect angles, square circles, double cubes or find the square root of – 1. Mr Banks was very small, clever and sadistic, and always seemed as if he wanted to simultaneously reward and punish Julie for being so interested in his subject. Almost all the puzzles he ever set her turned out to be impossible to solve, or they’d be famous theorems no one had solved yet. But he did tell her how to work out square roots without a calculator, and how, with logic and time, you could solve almost everything – or at least explain why something couldn’t be solved. Julie liked that. Everything was wrong or right; impossible or possible; unknowable or knowable. One or the other. You could be certain about maths.
Julie didn’t have any friends, but she didn’t really need any, since she had Luke at home. No one at school believed in Luke. One time, Julie told the other girls that her best friend was allergic to the sun and that’s why he didn’t come to school but they said she was a liar, and that she didn’t have any friends – at school or anywhere else. They found her story doubly implausible: firstly, no one was allergic to the sun, and secondly, what boy would want to be friends with a girl?
School was shit. But it always is if you’re different. Julie never worked out why she was different, she just knew she was. Maybe the people who stared, called her names or refused to be friends with her knew what was wrong with her, but they never told her what it was. No one liked Julie and she didn’t know why; her best friend couldn’t leave the house because of an illness no one understood. Mr Banks’s puzzles, even the impossible ones, were a lot easier to work out than life was.