4
The one time I want a school day to go slowly, it speeds up. Typical. I actually enjoy today because it’s normal. I can’t imagine where I’ll be tomorrow. I mean, I’ll wake up on a boat, and by night-time I’ll be at Enzo’s house in St Etienne, like the band. It’s a good name for a city. I like the band. So does Enzo. One thing in common! Maybe we can talk about other bands we like. For a week?
Every single part of me wants to stay at home.
I sit in registration and look at the photo Enzo sent me, of him and his family. He has thick black hair and dark skin. His brother looks like him, but taller, and his sister is small, hanging off his arm in the picture. His mother is white, his dad black. J’ai un frère et une soeur, I say under my breath, even though I don’t have a sister. They have a mother and a father like regular people. I’d better figure out how to say ‘my mum doesn’t live with us’ because that’s the kind of thing you have to get out of the way before it becomes too awkward.
I guess she must have been frustrated living a suburban life with a husband who was a circus performer when they met, but who has since channelled all that energy into looking after sticky toddlers. Dad can be annoying, and I guess Gus and I were too boring or irritating to keep her here.
I look at the photo of Enzo’s house. It’s big, and it has a garden with tall trees in it, and a tree house.
- Talk about music.
- Hang out in the tree house.
‘Hey,’ says Troy. ‘Wake up.’
I look around, blinking. It’s registration. You can tell at a glance who’s going on the trip tonight and who isn’t. The ones who aren’t are looking relaxed. Everyone else is tense. Or maybe that’s just me. Why am I jittery?
What’s happening to me?
I don’t feel like myself, so I try to be more me. What would Joe Simpson do?
I turn to Troy and flash a big stupid grin.
‘It’s school,’ I say. ‘How can I wake up when the whole point of it is that it’s boring?’
That is the lamest thing, but Troy laughs anyway. Our tutor, Mrs Dupont, is also the French teacher, so all she can talk about is the trip. This is her third year leading the French exchange and she’s raring to go. She isn’t French, but she’s married to a French guy and obviously knows how to speak it. She’s given us all laminated cards to carry with us in France. They say ‘Je suis perdu’ and have her mobile number on them. Lots of the guys say they’re going to keep that number.
Once, after a meeting about the trip, I hung around while Dad asked her all his supplementary questions. No, we won’t have to eat snails (I wanted to die). Yes, the coach driver is British, but he will remember to drive on the right. Then they moved on to chit-chat, and she told him she used to be a flight attendant, but had given up, partly because it was much harder work than you’d think, and also because air travel was bad for the environment.
Mrs Dupont, to be fair, looks like an air hostess. I can imagine her with her hair up and a lot of make-up on. I saw the way Dad was looking at her at that point and dragged him home. Dad was properly married to Mum back then! Mrs Dupont is married to the mysterious Monsieur Dupont! Jeez.
I shake my head. Stop getting distracted!
‘Joe?’ she says now, and I wonder how many times she’s said it.
‘Yep!’ I give her a huge fake smile. ‘How may I help you, Madame Dupont?’
She rolls her eyes.
‘Joe. You look jittery. Have you been on the caffeine?’
‘You know me, miss. Always with the Red Bull.’
‘Well, calm down and don’t worry. The French trip is always a fun experience.’
‘I’m not worried!’ Everyone laughs because it sounds like such a lie.
‘I stay with a family too, you know!’ she says. ‘I stay with the English teacher.’
‘Bet you crack open the wine, miss,’ says Troy.
I raise an imaginary glass to her. ‘Santé!’ I say. ‘Cheers to Madame Dupont boozing with her English teacher friend.’
I look round the room. Everyone’s holding up their imaginary glasses and toasting them.
‘Absolutely not.’ Mrs Dupont is laughing. ‘Or, if we do, it’s behind closed doors when we’re off duty.’
‘You’re never off duty, though, are you?’
‘Tell me about it, Joseph.’
The bell goes, and we scramble away to lessons.
‘Coming?’ says Troy. We’re standing outside the front of the school.
If I go straight back I’ll be home at ten to four. That will give me an hour and a half to sit on the bed being scared before Dad comes back, and then there’ll be another hour and a half of him trying to jolly me along.
Nope. Unbearable.
‘Nah,’ I say, and I struggle to find something else I can do. ‘I’m heading into town. Got to get a present for Enzo’s family.’
‘I’m going home because I haven’t started packing.’
‘See you later.’
‘Joe?’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘You haven’t seen my trophy, have you?’
‘Seen your …?’
‘The house-football prize.’
‘No,’ I say before I can stop myself. ‘Of course not.’
‘Cool. Not sure where it’s gone.’
He pats my back and walks off, leaving me guilty and confused. Why did I take it? And why did I just lie? I’m so strung out I can barely breathe. I can’t go home. I want to keep moving. I should be hungry, but I’m not. I could get a Coke at Beachview, and hope the caffeine sharpens me up because, in spite of what I said to Mrs Dupont, I have not, in fact, had any caffeine today.
It’s stopped raining and feels warm for March. I want to take my coat off, but then I’d have to carry it, so I don’t. The pavements are shiny with rain. I add a swagger to my step and iron the weirdness from my face. Everything is normal. Everything is fine.
The Beachview Mall does not have a view of the beach: you might see the sea if you stood on the roof of the upstairs pub. It is secretly, however, one of my favourite places. It’s all contained. This is a small, knowable universe where you can buy stuff. The shops are exactly as you’d expect them to be: there’s a branch of every low-level high-street shop in there. There’s Smith’s, a tiny but handy H&M, a health-food shop. And so on. It is boring but nice. My favourite thing, though, is a secret room I found a while ago. You just go round a couple of corners behind Boots, and push a door and it opens. Then you’re in a tiny room with a row of pegs and a bench in it, and no one else is ever there.
I go to a stall to buy a can of Coke and, as I turn round, I walk right into a man. He’s tall and thin and I had no idea he was behind me.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’ I step out of the way.
‘Fuck’s sake!’ he says, moving sideways to block my path.
‘Excuse me,’ I say. The anger flows all the way through me. I’m a volcano. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t know you were standing behind me, did I?’
He glares as if he actually hates me.
‘Fuck you,’ he says, and I am pleased to find that I’m feeling something. This is better. I feel more alive now than I have all day. I decide to laugh at him like I do with Lucas.
‘Fuck you,’ I say, and I walk away, still laughing like (I hope) someone very cool who will make him feel stupid, rather than a pantomime baddy. I hear him shouting behind me so I go and sit in the little room where he won’t find me, and attempt to talk some sense into myself.
Mum went to do a course to become a yoga teacher. I’m pretty sure she’s in India now because she always said she needed to learn proper yoga over there. I think I’ve known for a while that her leaving has messed with my head in all sorts of ways. I can barely remember some things from before she went. I’m not even sure how long it’s been. A month? A year? Maybe a year.
I have no problem with anyone doing a yoga course that lasts maybe a year, but my own mother could have waited until we’d left home. Three years from now she could have done whatever she wanted. Three years must be a really short time when you’re fifty. It’s a tiny fraction of your life, whereas for me it’s a lot.
One day when things were going weird with Marco I left school through the back hedge at lunchtime and came into town to try to work out what the fuck was going on. I got a cheap hoodie at H&M so I didn’t look like I was truanting and tried to find a place to sit where no one would see me. I was about to head to the beach when I thought I’d try a passage around the back of the mall, which I’d never noticed before. The passage went along for a little way, with pipes and a cleaning trolley, and then there was a door that was slightly open. I pushed it and there was my secret room. I sat inside for ages.
At that point it became my place to go whenever I secretly needed to think. I keep a blanket in there, a pink fluffy one that Mum used to use for yoga. It’s a comfort blanket. No one can ever know.
I push the door now and it swings open again. I wrap myself in the blanket and lean back against the wall, and find that I’m gasping and sobbing. I wipe my eyes with my sleeve and shout: ‘PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!’ I yell it at the top of my voice. It echoes round the tiny room. I try to hold on to my anger at that man, but it’s already gone. I’m back to being numb to almost everything, and filled with unnecessary dread about the trip.
It’s only a week in sodding France. I do my best to talk myself down. We live about an hour from Plymouth, so the first part of the journey will be fine. I’ll sit with Troy, at the back of the coach. It’ll be fun. I’ll give him back his stupid trophy, straight away, so that won’t be a worry any more.
Then we’ll sleep on the ferry. Four of us are sharing a cabin, and I like everyone, so that’ll be brilliant.
Tomorrow we’ll drive through France. That’s great too. I have no idea why I feel panicky about the whole thing. Every atom of my body is braced, tense, feeling dread. I want to run away, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to run away from the trip so I can stay at home.
Lamest. Runaway. Ever.
I sip my Coke and work on breathing properly and talking sense into myself. It will be OK. The only way to get past it is to get on with it. This is a blip, a wobble. Things always come easily to me. There’s no reason for me to struggle.
I’m having to work very hard to keep that image up right now.
I put on my headphones and try to make myself feel better with some music. I only have one album with me, but it’s Different Class so that’s OK. I press play and relax into ‘Something Changed’.
After a while the door opens.