Ralph was no longer laughing. He walked away from Sadie and Kristin, two statues on the landing. He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, took off his trainers. He pulled his walking shoes out of the wardrobe, the ones Sadie hated, and put them on. Through the bedroom window he could see his friends and his parents in the garden below. Some of Stanley’s friends were dancing, or maybe they were Arthur’s friends. Beverley was in the middle, swaying about with her eyes closed. She looked strange and desperate, twenty years too old for the circle around her. If she had been a man, and the teenagers girls instead of boys, someone would have asked her to stop. They would have used words like predatory and sad. But Beverley wasn’t a man and the teenagers weren’t girls and she was dancing in the middle, eyes closed.
Ralph spotted Carol, walking through the garden by herself. He picked up his wallet and phone and went downstairs to find her, ignoring Sadie and Kristin as he passed.
“Carol,” he said, out of breath. “Can we talk?”
On two wooden chairs beneath the apple tree, they drank whisky and ate peanuts.
“I’ve been confused,” Ralph said. “I’ve felt sedated, like I can’t get hold of my thoughts. I wondered if Sadie was drugging me.”
“Why on earth would you think that?”
He shrugged, catching sight of Kristin stepping out onto the decking. “I walked into a garden gnome once,” he said.
Carol pictured him knocking over a tiny gnome. Inconsequential. Odd.
“And I’m leaving.”
“Are you?”
“In five minutes.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know, but don’t tell Sadie, she can’t be trusted.”
“Why not?”
Kristin arrived at the apple tree. “You two look cosy,” she said, her face flushed.
Ralph finished the last of his whisky and stood up. “There’s no need to worry,” he said.
“He’s drunk,” Carol said.
“I’m the sharpest I’ve been for years. Sharp as a stranger.”
Carol and Kristin glanced at each other.
“I’m a fucking stranger. That should feel awful shouldn’t it? Bloody awful. But it doesn’t. It’s a relief.”
Ralph spotted his guitar leaning against the wall. He walked past his friends, his mother and father, Beverley and the teenagers and the nondescript neighbour whose name he could never remember. He picked up the guitar, walked along the garden path, opened the wooden gate, marched down his driveway into the street. He could hear laughter and conversation and ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ by Madonna, all coming from a party that was for him and never for him.
Sadie Swoon @SadieLPeterson
Sometimes all you can do is listen to the Smiths and hope it all ends soon
Jilly Perkins @JillyBPerks
@SadieLPeterson What’s up babe?
Sadie Swoon @SadieLPeterson
@JillyBPerks Do I know you? Have we met?
Jilly Perkins @JillyBPerks
@SadieLPeterson I’m sharing a black russian with my dog
Ralph kept walking. He walked through streets half lit and streets in darkness. He walked past empty shops, a queue outside a nightclub, people smoking outside pubs, urinating on walls, waiting for buses. He looked away from kisses fast and deep. He remembered standing at a bus stop with Julie Parsley, back when they were teenagers. She was leaning against a wall, her face lit by a street lamp as she offered to sing him a song, any song, all he had to do was name it. He pictured her standing on stage in the local pub singing ‘The Look of Love’. That performance made everyone wonder what on earth Julie had been getting up to. She laced the song with violence, sang it so slowly, so mysteriously, as if the words had her crawling along a filthy floor in a torn nightdress. She revealed everything and nothing, it was eerie and irresistible. Julie Parsley was not like other girls—everyone understood this but no one knew why.
“You be careful around that Julie,” his mother said. “I find her a little unnerving.”
“What do you mean?” Ralph said.
“Well, she’s not like you. She’s different.”
Ralph stared. He took a cola cube from a paper bag and put it in his mouth.
“She’s stony.”
“What?”
“There’s something sordid about her. Dirty.”
Ralph laughed. This was not the way to put a teenage boy off a girl.
And yet it did.
His friend had already told him that Julie was out of his league. Maybe it was true. He was inexperienced, shy. He ate cola cubes and read comics.
“You’ll find a good woman when you’re older,” his mother said. “Don’t you worry. And when you do, everything else will take care of itself.”
Ralph walked across a meadow and along a footpath until he came to the woods. He looked at his watch. It was coming up to half-past eleven, the time of his birth, thirty-seven years ago in a hospital in Norfolk, right in the middle of his parents’ holiday by the sea, right in the middle of Brenda’s annual treat—highlights and a supercurl at Tiffany’s Salon. He had emerged from a woman whose hair was curly on one side and straight on the other. Welcome to your mother. Welcome to your father. Welcome to the world, which is curly on one side, straight on the other.
He resisted the urge to cry as he entered the woods.