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“What are you? Gay, straight, all-around horny, what?”
“Er, straight?”
“And are you sure that you’re straight? Have youliked a boy before?”
I actually haven’t. Ever. This is because I have a very low opinion of most people.
I look down. “All right then. I’ll let you know if I fall in love with a girl any time soon.”
Michael’s eyes twinkle, but he doesn’t comment. I hope I haven’t come across as a homophobe.
“Are you going to remember what you came to tell me?” I ask.
He strokes his sharply parted hair. “Maybe. Maybe tomorrow. We’ll see.”
Soon after that everyone declares that they’re leaving. I accidentally spent £16, so Lucas insists on giving me the extra pound, which I guess is pretty nice of him. Once we’re all standing outside the restaurant, he starts chatting earnestly with Evelyn. Most of the people here are heading to Lauren’s house for a big sleepover thing or whatever. They’re all going to get drunk and stuff even though it’s a Tuesday. Becky explains that she didn’t invite me because she knew that I definitely wouldn’t want to come (it’s funny because it’s true), and Ben Hope overhears her and gives me this kind of pitying look. Becky smiles at him, the pair momentarily united in feeling sorry for me. I decide that I’m going to walk home. Michael decides that he’s coming with me and I don’t really know how to stop him so I guess this is happening.
We have been moving in silence through the high street. It’s all Victorian and brown and the cobblestone road is sort of curved like we’re in the bottom of a trench. A man in a suit hurries past, and he’s asking someone on the phone, “Do you feel anything yet?”
I ask Michael why he’s walking home with me.
“Because I live this way. The world does not revolve around you, Victoria Spring.” He’s being sarcastic, but I still feel kind of put out.
“Victoria.” I shudder.
“Huh?”
“Please don’t call me Victoria.”
“Why’s that?”
“It makes me think of Queen Victoria. The one who wore black all her life because her husband died. And ‘Victoria Spring’ sounds like a brand of bottled water.”
Wind is picking up around us.
“I don’t like my name either,” he says.
I instantly think of all the people I dislike named Michael. Michael Bublé, Michael McIntyre, Michael Jackson.
“Michael means ‘who resembles God’,” he says, “and I think that if God could choose to resemble any human being …”
He stops then, right in the street, looking at me, just looking, through the pane of his glasses, through the blue and green, through depths and expanses, bleeding one billion incomprehensible thoughts.
“… he wouldn’t choose me.”
We continue to walk.
Imagine if I had been given some Biblical name like Abigail or Charity or, I don’t know, Eve, for God’s sake. I’m very critical of religion and it probably means that I’m going to hell, if it even exists, which, let’s be honest, it probably doesn’t. That doesn’t bother me very much because whatever happens in hell can’t be much worse than what happens here.
“Well,” I say, “I support the Labour Party, but people call me Tori. Like the Tories. If that makes you feel any better.”
He doesn’t say anything, but I’m too busy looking at the pale brown cobblestones to see if he’s looking at me. After a few moments: “You support the Labour Party?”
I realise then that I’m freezing. I’d forgotten it was the middle of winter and raining and all I’ve got is this shirt and jumper and thin jeans. I regret not calling Mum, but I hate bothering her because she always does this sighing thing where she’s all like “no, no, it’s perfectly fine, I’m not bothered”, but I can tell that she is most definitely bothered.
Silence and a faint smell of Indian takeaway continue all the way up the high street and then we take a right on to the main town road where the three-storey houses are. My house is one of these. Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, “Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?” and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself.
I stop when I get to my house. It’s darker than the others because the lamp post closest to it is not working.
“This is where I live,” I say and start to walk off.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he says. I turn back round. “Can I ask you something?”
I cannot resist a sarcastic comment. “You just did, but please continue.”
“Can we really not be friends?”
He sounds like an eight-year-old girl trying to win back her best friend after she accidentally insulted her new school shoes and got herself disinvited from her birthday party.
He’s wearing only a T-shirt and jeans too.
“How are you not freezing?” I say.
“Please, Tori. Why don’t you want to be friends with me?” It’s like he’s desperate.
“Why do you want to be friends with me?” I shake my head. “We’re not in the same year. We’re not similar in any way whatsoever. I literally do not understand why you even care about—” I stop then, because I was about to say “me”, but I realised midway through that that would be a truly horrific sentence.
He looks down. “I don’t think that … I understand … either …”
I’m just standing there, staring.
“You know, it’s said that extreme communism and extreme capitalism are actually very similar,” he says.
“Are you high?” I say.
He shakes his head and laughs. “I remember what I was going to tell you, you know,” he says.
“You do?”
“I remembered it the whole time. I just didn’t want everyone to hear it because it’s not their business.”
“Then why did you come and find me at a busy restaurant? Why not just find me at school?”
For a second, he genuinely seems to be offended. “Don’t you think I’ve tried?” He laughs. “You’re like a ghost!”
It takes a lot of willpower not to just turn round and leave.
“I just wanted to tell you that I’d seen you before.”
Jesus Christ. He already told me that.
“You told me that yesterd—”
“No, not at Higgs. I saw you when you came to look round Truham. Last year. It was me who took you round the school.”
The revelation blossoms. I remember exactly now. Michael Holden had shown me attentively round Truham when I was deciding whether to go there for sixth form. He’d asked me what A levels I wanted to do, and whether I liked Higgs very much, and whether I had any hobbies, and whether I cared much about sports. In fact, everything he’d said had been utterly unremarkable.
“But …” It’s impossible. “But you were so … normal.”
He shrugs and smiles and the raindrops on his face almost make him seem as if he’s crying. “There’s a time and a place for being normal. For most people, normal is their default setting. But for some, like you and me, normal is something we have to bring out, like putting on a suit for a posh dinner.”
What, now he’s being profound?
“Why did you need to tell me this? Why did you need to track me down? Why was it that important?”
He shrugs again. “It wasn’t, I guess. But I wanted you to know. And when I want to do something I usually do it.”
I stare at him. Nick and Charlie were right. He’s absolutely insane.
He holds up a hand and sends me a slight wave.
“See you soon, Tori Spring.”
And then he wanders away. I’m left standing under the broken lamp post in my black jumper and the rain, wondering whether I’m feeling anything yet and realising that it’s all very funny because it’s all very true.
SIX (#ulink_06753b2a-fb9c-59eb-adda-28aa2d3d8e54)
I HEAD INSIDE, go into the dining room and say hello to my family. They’re still at dinner, as usual. Well, except Oliver. Since dinner’s kind of a two to three-hour job in our house, Oliver’s always allowed to leave the table once he’s done and I can hear him playing Mario Kart in the living room. I decide to join him. If I could swap bodies with someone for a day, I would choose Oliver.
“Toriiii!” As soon as I enter, he rolls over on the futon and stretches his arm towards me like a zombie rising out of the grave. He must have got yoghurt all down his school jumper today. And he has paint on his face. “I can’t win on Rainbow Road! Help me!”
I sigh, sit down on the futon next to him and pick up the spare Wii remote. “This track is impossible, bro.”
“No!” he whines. “Nothing’s impossible. I think the game’s cheating.”
“The game can’t cheat.”
“It is. It’s cheating on purpose.”
“It’s not cheating you, Ollie.”
“Charlie can win. It just doesn’t like me.”
I produce a large and exaggerated gasp, springing up from the futon. “Are you suggesting that Charlie is better at Mario Kart than moi?” I start to shake my head. “Nope. Nuh-uh. I’m the Mario Kart Empress.”
Oliver laughs, his fluffy hair waving around atop his head. I fall back on to the futon, lift him up and sit him on my lap.
“All right,” I say. “Rainbow Road is going down.”
I don’t keep track of how long we’re playing for, but it must be quite a while because, when Mum comes in, she’s pretty irritated. And that’s extreme, for her. She’s a very emotionless person.
“Tori,” says Mum. “Oliver should have been in bed an hour ago.”
Oliver doesn’t seem to hear her. I glance up from the race.
“That’s not really my job,” I say.
Mum looks at me, expressionless.
“Oliver, it’s bedtime,” she says, still looking at me.
Oliver quits the game and trots off, high-fiving me on the way. Even when he’s gone, Mum doesn’t stop looking at me.
“Do you have something to say?” I ask.
Apparently, she doesn’t. She turns round and leaves. I get in a quick round of Luigi Circuit before heading to my own room. I don’t think my mum likes me very much. That doesn’t really matter, because I don’t really like her either.
I put the radio on and blog until the early hours. The radio is playing all this dubstep crap, but I’ve got it on quietly so I don’t care too much. I can’t be bothered to leave my bed except to make at least five trips downstairs for more diet lemonade. I check the Solitaire blog, but there’s nothing new. So I spend ages scrolling down all my favourite blogs, reblogging screencaps of Donnie Darko and Submarine and The Simpsons taken out of context. I write a couple of whiney posts about I don’t even know what and I almost change my display picture, but can’t find anything where I look normal, so I fiddle around with my blog theme’s HTML for a bit to see if I can remove the gaps between each post. I stalk Michael’s Facebook, but he seems to use it even less than I do. I watch a bit of QI,but I don’t really find it interesting or funny any more, so instead I watch Little Miss Sunshine, which I didn’t finish yesterday. I never seem to be able to finish watching a film on the same day I start it because I can’t bear the thought of the film ending.
After a while, I put my laptop by my side and lie down. I think about all the other people who were at the restaurant who are probably now pissed and getting off with each other on Lauren’s parents’ sofas. At some point I fall asleep, but I can hear all these creaky noises coming from outside and something in my brain decides that there is definitely some kind of giant and/or demon stomping around in the road so I get up and close the window just to make sure that whatever it is cannot get inside.
When I get back into bed, every single thing that you could possibly think about in one day decides to come to me all at once and suddenly there’s a small lightning storm inside my head. I think about Solitaire, and then I think about Michael Holden and why he said we should be friends and what he was really like when he was at Truham. Then I remember Lucas and how embarrassed he was, and I wonder why he made all that effort trying to find me. Then I remember his Hawaiian shirt which still enormously irritates me because I hate to think that he’s become some indie band wannabe. So I open my eyes and wander around the Internet to take my mind off it all, and, once I feel relatively okay again, I fall asleep with the glare of my blog home page warming my face and the hum of my laptop soothing my mind like crickets at a campsite.
SEVEN (#ulink_eecc76f3-0570-57b6-8203-69a9ba78da7f)
WE DIDN’T EXPECT anything more from Solitaire. We thought the one prank would be the end of it.
We were quite a way off.
On Wednesday, all the clocks magically vanished and were replaced by pieces of paper reading ‘Tempus Fugit’. It was funny at first, but after a few hours when you’re midway through a lesson and you can’t check your phone and you have no way of finding out what the time is – well, it pretty much makes you want to scratch out your eyeballs.
On the same day, there was hysteria in school assembly when the tannoy started playingJustin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’, the most well-received song of the Year 8 Higgs-Truham disco, as Kent walked up the hall stage stairs and the word ‘SWAG’ appeared on the projector screen.
On Thursday, we turned up to find that two cats had been let loose within the school. Apparently, the caretakers managed to get one of them out, but the other cat – an underfed, ginger thing with massive eyes – evaded capture all day, strolling in and out of lessons and through corridors. I quite like cats, and I saw it for the first time at lunch in the cafeteria. I almost felt like I’d made a new friend, the way it hopped on to a chair and sat with Our Lot as if it wanted to join in our gossip and offer its views about celebrity Twitter rows and the current political climate. I noted to myself that I should probably start collecting cats, seeing as they are very likely to be my sole companions in ten years’ time.
“My spirit animal would so be a cat,” said Becky.
Lauren nodded. “Cats are Britain’s national animal.”
“My boyfriend has a cat called Steve,” said Evelyn. “Isn’t that an excellent name for a cat? Steve.”
Becky rolled her eyes. “Evelyn. Dude. When are you going to tell us who your boyfriend is?”
But Evelyn just smiled and pretended to be embarrassed.
I peered into the dark eyes of the cat. It met my gaze thoughtfully. “Do you remember when some lady got caught on camera dumping a cat into a brown bin and it made national news?”
Every single prank so far has been photographed and displayed on the Solitaire blog.
