CHAPTER NINE
‘An actual proper kiss?’ Anna skips sideways beside me as I push the wheelbarrow across the stable yard. We’ve had this conversation about five times already. The thing is Anna is desperate to keep the feeling of the party going, and I don’t have the words to tell her that I need to switch my brain off. It happens.
People – even the best kind, like Anna – don’t really get that I need downtime. But I was on high alert in the lead up to the party, and even sleeping in a strange bed meant that there were loads of new sounds and smells and noises to deal with, and the people and the – well, the everything. Not to mention the actual proper kiss.
I need to be quiet, somewhere, and just let myself settle, like a snow globe. But it’s hard to make people understand that.
So I sort of brace myself and just get on with it, like I’m balancing on a high wire with a basket on my head. Someone ends up adding another thing to the basket, and I can’t form the words to say no, so I just grit my teeth. The thing is I love Anna, so I want to be with her. She’s beside me in a pair of borrowed jodhpurs and my old wellies, skipping with excitement, clueless about what she’s supposed to be doing. The wheelbarrow wobbles sideways. It’s heavy, and I’m tired, and the acrid ammonia smell is biting at my nostrils. The cold of the metal in my hands is familiar, though, and comfortable. Anna is chattering away and I don’t think she even realizes I’m not listening. Last night used up everything I have, and even my brain is tired.
Despite all that, though, I can feel a weird swooping feeling inside when I think about it, so I turn to her and say yes.
‘An actual proper kiss.’
I feel the nerves kicking in again. It’s like someone’s shooting electric shocks down my legs and I can hear my heart thumping in my ears. Because when I think about the feeling when I walked out of the room, and everyone was looking at me and Gabe, it felt as if something secret and magical instantly flipped over to a dark side of something dark and horrible and unnerving. Holly Carmichael had said, loud enough that I could hear as I walked past, ‘Probably the only time freaky Grace will get a snog between now and when she’s about thirty,’ and I’d felt myself go all prickly with embarrassment.
I hadn’t looked Gabe in the eye all through the rest of the game. I just looked at the floor and fiddled with a piece of straw, and felt my cheeks prickling with a scarlet that didn’t stop. Anna took great pleasure in nudging me every time that Holly didn’t get chosen, right up until Charlotte’s parents had appeared at 1 a.m. and their huge driveway was filled with car headlights and parents looking bleary eyed in the darkness and – in what felt like moments – the spell was broken and the party was over.
I dump the wheelbarrow contents by the muck heap and start forking it up to the top of the steaming pile.
‘Eww,’ says Anna, wrinkling her nose. ‘Do you have to do this bit?’
I pause for a second, the metal of the fork tines scraping on the concrete. When I’m tired like this, everything is sharper and louder and harder. I don’t mind mucking out stables. In fact, I quite like it. I like the way that every day at the stables is the same. I think that won’t make sense to Anna, though, because who would like shovelling horse shit?
‘Nearly done,’ I say, because I think that’s what she wants to hear, and – feeling guilty – I sort of shove the last bit into the edges with my boot.
‘Can we get a coffee now, then?’ Anna’s walking backwards beside me as I trundle the barrow back up and put it in place. She gives a twirl, crashing into the yard broom and knocking it over with a clatter.
Polly emerges from her horse Hector’s stable next door.
‘You lot making enough noise?’
Anna, who is a bit nervous around Polly, flushes pink and steps back again, knocking against a shovel, which sets off a domino effect until all the yard tools are lying in a heap on the floor.
‘Sorry,’ she says, trying to gather them up.
Hector, who is a huge bay dressage horse with Bambi eyes, pops his head out of the stable door to see what all the fuss is about. He’s got strands of hay hanging from his mouth and he gives a sigh, as if to suggest that we’re interfering with his weekend, and disappears back inside.
‘When you’ve quite finished,’ says Polly, who is definitely joking – she’s like a one-person sarcasm training school, ‘if someone’s putting the kettle on, I’d love one. I’m dying of thirst here.’
‘So what happened last night?’
I’m curled up on the sofa in the tack room, surrounded by the smell of saddle soap and leather, with warm, stinky stable rugs hanging overhead. I could live here quite happily. In proper winter, when it gets cold, Jill, who owns the stables, sometimes lights a fire and then I think I could stay forever.
Polly is warming her hands on a mug of coffee, and Anna is perched on the arm of the chair. She flicks me a sideways look.
‘I saw that,’ says Polly. She takes off her beanie hat, rubs her white-blonde hair. When it’s squashed flat like this, she looks younger. Less spiky, somehow.
And I let Anna tell the whole story, because she’s still bursting with it, and I’m on the verge of running out of words. I can feel my batteries going flat, because I’ve had to negotiate people this morning when usually I just potter around the yard and it’s my safe place. The thing is that it sort of feels as if it’s not my story now, anyway. It’s something that happened in a tiny little bubble, and nobody is ever going to know about it – well, besides me and Anna and now Polly – and normal service will resume at school next week. I’ll be Grace who is on the periphery of things, and Anna will be Anna who is accepted by the cool people and the swots and everyone in between, but chooses to be friends with me, and Gabe will carry on being the boy everyone fancies, and –
Polly pokes me with the toe of her boot, stretching out her leg.
‘So are you going to see him again?’
‘Hardly,’ I say, giving her A Look.
‘Well, he kissed you. That suggests an element of interest.’ Polly cocks her head sideways, looking at me directly.
I look down at the knees of my jodhpurs, which are pretty disgusting, even by my standards. She carries on.
‘You like him, right?’
‘I don’t know him,’ I say reasonably.
‘Grace,’ says Anna, snorting. ‘This is Gabe Kowalski we’re talking about.’
‘OK,’ says Polly, and I see her and Anna exchanging glances. ‘So you are physically attracted to him. And kissing him was not an unpleasant experience.’
I feel myself go icy hot and cold all over in a rush. No, it was not unpleasant. It was so not-unpleasant that I even forgot that it was happening and I kissed him back and didn’t accidentally lick his nose or bang teeth or fall over or any other horrors, which, frankly, wouldn’t be that unsurprising given my track record for doing ridiculous things when under pressure.
‘Grace?’ Anna reminds me that meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, they’re waiting for an answer.
‘I’ll see him next Monday, I imagine, when we go back to school.’
Polly shakes her head, then tears open a packet of custard creams.
‘You girls need to take the power back.’ She stuffs a biscuit in her mouth, whole, and continues through a muffle of crumbs. ‘If you’re interested in him, why don’t you ask him out?’
I don’t even know where to start with this one, so I just drink my coffee and pull a face and Anna doesn’t say anything either. Polly picks up an old edition of Horse and Hound and starts looking at the back pages, and we all sit there in a silence that might be awkward but might not be. I can never quite tell.
It’s nothing to do with Gabe being a boy that stops me contacting him. It’s just – being me. I don’t imagine Polly hesitated for a second before asking Melanie out, either. She’s just the sort of person who does things. I’m the sort of person who thinks about doing things, then goes home and eats toast instead. Not just that, but the potential mortification factor is so high that it’s off the scale. Holly Carmichael has already got me in her sights, and the rumour mill’s so efficient at school that I’m already feeling sick at the thought of going back next Monday.
‘Is she always like that?’ Anna whispers later, from over the top of Mabel’s back. We’re in the stable and she’s tucked up for the night – Mabel, that is, not Anna – and we’re waiting for Mum to come and pick us up.
‘Polly?’ I whisper back. ‘Yes.’
‘I want to be like her when I grow up.’ Anna fiddles with a fluffy piece of hair at the end of Mabel’s mane. She’s not much good with horses, but she likes Mabel.
‘Me too,’ I say, but I know that the chances of it ever happening are non-existent. I’m too busy balancing and trying to work out what everyone else is doing and saying and thinking to be able to be my own person like Polly.
Sometimes I think I don’t even know who my own person is.
Thank God there’s no Eve when I get back. We’ve dropped off Anna (I’m slightly worried my spare jodhpurs will be fumigated by her mother and might never make it back to my house, but I’m trying to be zen about it) and I am super tired and I feel all spacey, like my feet aren’t quite making contact with the floor.
The kitchen’s all messy, which is weird, because usually Mum’s stressing about everything being put away at this time of day and us pulling together and all that stuff. I pull out the dishwasher to find a clean bowl, but it’s dirty, and full, and nobody’s switched it on. I tip a heap of cornflakes into a plastic mixing bowl – it’s roughly the same size and shape, and there’s nothing else – and pour the last of the milk on top.
The kitchen table is spread with coffee cups and a half-unwrapped copy of a Sunday newspaper. I suspect I’ve missed today’s Eve visitation, and for that I am glad.
‘So,’ says Leah when I walk into the sitting room to find my laptop, ‘how was the party?’
She’s sitting there with a bowl of cereal watching the Disney Channel with her hair in a ponytail and she looks about nine. The fire’s lit and it’s all warm in there and I’m tempted to stay, but I’ve reached the point where the noises in the house have separated and I can hear each one individually. And at the same time I can hear them all together – it’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m trying to process what’s going on and I can’t filter anything and I can’t think at all.
‘OK,’ I say. And Leah opens her mouth to ask more, and I feel guilty because I get the feeling as I pull the door shut that she looks like she wants to talk but I can’t. I just can’t.
‘Grace, honey,’ says Mum as I’m heading upstairs. ‘Phone. For you.’
She thrusts the handset at me as I’m shaking my head. No, I can’t do Grandma on a Sunday night.
I shake my head again and put my hand out, palm towards her, as a no, no. No.
‘It’s your father,’ she says, which is a strange way of saying it’s Dad.
The line is sort of echoey and he sounds as if he’s miles away, which he is.
‘Hey, darling,’ he says, and a moment later a little echo says, ‘Hey, darling.’
‘Hi, Dad,’ I say, and I suddenly feel weirdly homesick even though I’m at home, and it almost knocks me sideways and I shut it down, because I’m too tired to deal with that feeling right now. ‘Shot any good penguins recently?’
‘Polar bears,’ his echoey echo voice comes back. ‘Not penguins.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘It was one of those joke things I hear are popular these days.’
And I sit down on the landing halfway up the stairs and listen to him and watch my cornflakes turn into orange mush beside me and he talks about what he’s been doing and how he can’t wait to get back. It’s weird because he sounds as if he wants to be there as much as he wants to be here, and I can understand that feeling. It’s how I feel about most things.
I miss him.
‘How’s home?’ he asks.
And I think about how home is. I think about the fact that bloody Eve seems to have imprinted herself everywhere and Mum is weirdly distant and Leah’s never off her phone. And the place is untidy and not like it normally is and it feels like a wrinkled sock in your shoe that worries away at you all day, making everything feel not quite right so you can’t concentrate on anything properly. And I think about how I miss him being here in the office editing and showing me bits he’s done.
‘Fine,’ I say. And then in a few moments I say goodbye and take the phone downstairs to Leah, and I forget to pick up my cornflakes, which lie soggily in their bowl on the landing.
I’m just getting into the bath when I hear my phone beep in the bedroom, and I almost don’t answer it. But I know that instead of lying there in the quiet water I’ll be wondering who it was, so I wrap myself in a towel and pad through to have a look.
It’s a number I don’t recognize.
Hi Grace. Do you fancy going out sometime?
And as I’m standing there looking at the screen wondering if it’s a joke it beeps again.
It’s Gabe, btw. :-)