Is she taking the piss? “I could’ve handled him.”
“You don’t half remind me of me, Holly.”
How do you answer that? “Up the Junction” by Squeeze booms from the ghetto-blaster. Gwyn stoops. “Look, Octopus Boy dropped his ciggies.” She lobs them my way and I catch the box. “Hand them back or keep them as compensation for harassment. Your call.”
I imagine Gary’s version of this. “He’ll hate me now.”
“He’ll be scared shitless you’ll tell everyone what a horse’s arse he made of himself. Rejection makes lads like our Gaz feel four feet tall and two inches long, full size. Anyhow, I came to say I borrowed a sleeping bag off Mrs. Harty for you. God only knows how many previous owners it’s had, but it’s been washed so the stains aren’t sticky at least, and the barn can get chilly at night. I’m turning in, so if I’m asleep before you, sweet dreams. The hooter goes at five-thirty.”
July 2
MY PERIOD’S ONLY A FEW DAYS LATE, so I don’t see how I can be pregnant, so what’s this belly doing, or this blue-veined third boob pushing out below my normal two, which Vinny named Dolly and Parton? Mam is not taking the news well and doesn’t believe that I don’t know who the father is: “Well,
Everyone starts chanting,
“Ask it, then,” hisses Mam.
So I ask it, “Who’s your dad?”
We wait. It swivels its head my way and speaks in a badly synched-up voice from a hot place:
· · ·
… and the dream caves in. Relief, a sleeping bag, brothy darkness, I’m not pregnant, and a Welsh voice is whispering, “It’s okay, Holly, you were dreaming, girl.”
Our plywood partition, in a barn, on a farm; what was her name? Gwyn. I whisper back, “Sorry if I woke you.”
“I’m a light sleeper. Sounded nasty. Your dream.”
“Yeah … Nah, just stupid. What time is it?”
The light on her watch is mucky gold. “Five-and-twenty to five.”
Most of the night’s gone. Is it worth trying to go back to sleep?
A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.
I feel a stab of homesickness for my room at home, but I stab my homesickness back.
“You know, Holly,” Gwyn’s whisper rustles the sheets of the dark, “it’s tougher than you think out there.”
That’s a weird thing to say and a weird time to say it. “If that lot can do it,” I mean the students, “I bloody know I can.”
“Not fruit picking. The running-away-from-home deal.”
Quick, deny it. “What makes you think I’ve run away?”
Gwyn ignores this, like a goalie ignoring a shot going a mile wide. “Unless you know for a fact, a
I keep my voice calm. “I’m not running away.”
“Then why the false name?”
“My name
“And mine’s Gwyn Aquafresh. Fancy a squirt of toothpaste?”
“Aquafresh isn’t a surname. Rothmans is.”
“That’s true enough, but I bet you a pack of Benson & Hedges it’s not yours. Don’t get me wrong, a false name’s clever. I changed mine often, in my first few months away. But all I’m saying is, if you’re weighing possible trouble ahead against the trouble you’ve left behind, times the ‘ahead’ trouble by twenty.”
It’s appalling she’s seen through me so easily. “Too early for Thoughts for the Day,” I growl. “Good
The first bird of the morning starts twittering.