Vinny looks at me nervously, not taking the hint.
“So can I … like … stay with you? For a bit, at least.”
Vinny swallows. “O- kay … Right. I see. Well. Okay.”
It doesn’t sound very okay. “Is that a yes, Vin?”
“Ye-es. Sure. Yes. But now I reallyneed that coffee.”
“Serious? Oh, Vin!” The relief’s like a warm bath. I hug him. He’s sweaty. “You’re the best, Vinny. I was afraid you might not …”
“We can’t have a furry-purry sex kitten like you sleeping under a bridge now, can we? But really, Hol, I need coffee like Dracula needs blood, so—” He doesn’t finish the sentence ’cause I’m kissing him, my Vinny, my boyfriend who’s been to New York and shaken David Byrne’s hand, and my love for him sort of goes whoosh, like a boiler firing up, and I pull him back and we roll onto a lumpy hill of duvet, but the hill wriggles and my hand pulls the sheet away and here’s my best friend Stella Yearwood. Stark naked. Like I’m in a bad sex dream, only it’s not.
I just … gape at her crotch till she says, “It can’t look so verydifferent to yours, can it?”
Then I gape at Vinny, who looks like he’s shat himself but then does this spazzo giggle: “It’s not what it looks like.”
Stella, cool as you please, covers herself with the sheet and tells Vinny, “Don’t be dense. This is pre cisely how it looks, Holly. We were going to let you know but, as you see, events have overtaken us all. Fact is, you’ve been dumped. Not pleasant, but it happens to the best of us, well, most of us, so c’est la vie. Don’t worry, there are plenty more Vinnys in the sea. So why not cut your losses now and just go? With a little dignity intact?”
WHEN I STOP crying, finally, I find myself on a cold step in a little courtyard place, with five or six stories of old brick and narrow blind windows on each side. Weeds drilling up through paving slabs and dandelion seeds drifting around like snow in a snow globe. After I slammed Vinny’s door my feet brought me here, round the back of the Gravesend General Hospital, where Dr. Marinus got rid of Miss Constantin for me when I was seven years old. Did I punch Vinny? It was like I was moving in treacle. I couldn’t breathe. He caught my wrist and it hurt—still does—and Stella was barking, “Grow up and piss off, Holly. This is real life not an episode of Dynasty!” and I ran out, slamming the front door and hurrying as fast I could, anywhere, nowhere, somewhere … I knew the moment I stopped I’d break down into a sobbing, snotting jelly, and then one of Mam’s spies’d see me and report back and that’d be the cherry on her cake. ’Cause Mam was right. I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in, and not just anyone, but Stella Yearwood. My best mate. How could he? How could she?
Stop crying! Think about something else …
HOLLY SYKES AND the Weird Shit, Part 1. I was seven years old in 1976. It didn’t rain all summer and the gardens turned brown, and I remember queuing with buckets down the end of Queen Street with Brendan and Mam for water from standpipes, the drought got that bad. My daymares started that summer. I heard voices in my head. Not mad, or drooly, or specially scary, even, not at first … the Radio People, I called them, ’cause at first I thought there was a radio on in the next room. Only there never was a radio on in the next room. They were clearest at night, but I heard them at school, too, if everything was quiet enough, in a test, say. Three or four voices’d chunter away at once, and I never quite made out what they were saying. Brendan had talked ’bout mental hospitals and men in white coats, so I didn’t dare tell anyone. Mam was pregnant with Jacko, Dad rushed off his feet at the pub, Sharon was only three, and Brendan was a plonker, even then. I knew hearing voices wasn’t normal, but they weren’t actually harming me, so maybe it was just one of those secrets people live with.
One night, I had a nightmare about killer bees loose in the Captain Marlow, and woke up in a sweat. A lady was sat at the end of my bed saying, “Don’t worry, Holly, it’s all right,” and I said, “Thanks, Mam,” ’cause who else could it be? Then I heard Mam laughing in the kitchen down the corridor—this was before my bedroom was up in the attic. That was how I knew I’d only dreamt the lady on my bed, and I switched on the light to prove it.
And sure enough nobody was there.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the lady, “but I’m as real as you are.”
I didn’t scream or freak out. Sure, I was shaking, but even in my fear, I felt it was like a puzzle or a test. There was nobody in my room, but someone was speaking to me. So, as calm as I could, I asked the lady if she was a ghost. “Not a ghost,” said the lady who wasn’t there, “but a visitor to your mind. That’s why you can’t see me.” I asked what my visitor’s name was. Miss Constantin, she said. She said she’d sent the Radio People away, because they were a distraction, and hoped I didn’t mind. I said no. Miss Constantin said she had to go but that she’d love to drop by soon because I was “a singular young lady.”
Then she was gone. It took me ages to fall asleep, but by the time I did, I sort of felt I’d made a friend.
WHAT NOW? GO home? I’d rather stick pins in my gums. Mam’ll make me steaming shit pie, dripping in shit gravy, and sit there smug as hell watching me eat every shitty morsel, and from now until the end of time, if ever I’m anything less than yes-sir-no-sir-three-bags-full-sir, she’ll bring up the Vinny Costello Incident. Okay, so I’m not living in Peacock Street but I can still leave home, at least for long enough to prove to Mam that I’m old enough to take care of myself so she can stop treating me like I’m seven years old. I’ve enough money to feed myself for a bit and the hot spell looks set to last, so I’ll think of it as my summer holiday beginning early. Screw my exams, screw school. Stella’ll twist things round so that I was this hysterical pathetic Clinging Ivy who just couldn’t face the fact her boyfriend was tired of her. By nine A.M. on Monday morning, Holly Sykes’ll be the Official Windmill Hill High School Laughing Stock. Guaranteed.
An ambulance siren gets closer, more urgent, echoes round the courtyard and stops, like, in mid-sentence … I rejiggle my duffel bag and get up. Right, where now? Every runaway teenager in England makes a beeline for London, imagining they’ll get picked up by a talent scout or fairy godmother, but I’ll strike out the opposite way, along the river, towards the Kent marshes; if you grow up in a pub you overhear exactly what sort of scouts and fairies pick up runaway teenagers in London. Maybe I could find a barn or an empty holiday chalet to stay in for a bit. That might work. So, off I set round the front of the hospital. The car park’s full of windscreens flashing in the bright sunshine. In the cool shady hospital reception area, I see rows of people smoking and waiting for news.
Funny places, hospitals …
HOLLY SYKES AND the Weird Shit, Part 2. A few weeks went by, I must’ve turned eight, and I began to think I’d only dreamt Miss Constantin, ’cause she’d never come back. ’Cept for the fact I didn’t know that word she’d called me, “singular” … I looked it up and wondered how it’d got into my head if Miss Constantin hadn’t put it there. To this day I still don’t know the answer to that. But then one night in September, after we’d gone back to school, I woke up and knew she was there, and I was more glad than I was scared. I liked being singular. I asked Miss Constantin if she was an angel, and she laughed a little, saying, no, she was human, like me, but she’d learned how to slip out of her own body, and go visiting her friends. I asked if I was one of her friends now, and she asked, “Would you like that?” and I said, Yes, please, more than anything, and she replied, “Then you shall be.” And I asked Miss Constantin where she came from, and she said Switzerland. To show off, I asked if Switzerland was where chocolate was invented, and she said I was one of the brightest buttons she’d ever known. From then on she visited me every night, for a few minutes, and I’d tell her a bit about my day, and she’d listen, and sympathize or cheer me up. She was always on my side, like Mam or Brendan never seemed to be. I asked Miss Constantin questions, too. Sometimes she’d give me direct answers, like when I asked her her hair color and she told me “chromium blond,” but as often as not she’d sidestep my questions with “Let’s not spoil the mystery quite yet, Holly, shall we?”