Keith Ridgway - Hawthorn & Child

*

Her dad was obsessing now about the crossing outside the café, near the school.

— Some kid is going to get run over one of these days.

— Why?

– ’Cos you lot never look. You just walk across. And cars come up that road too fast. There should be traffic lights. Not just a crossing.

She looked. Most of the younger kids were gone by now. There were a few people she recognized outside the shop on the other side. She’d never seen anyone even come close to getting run over.

— You should be careful.

She laughed.

— Don’t laugh. I worry about things like that. They may seem stupid to you but there you have it. I can’t help it, I’m your father.

He was in a mood.

— You need to be careful. The number of teenagers killed on the road in London is horrific. You know? Never mind knife crime and drugs and all the stuff you get warned about all the time. Well, do mind them, but you know about that stuff. It’s the traffic you might just forget about. Forget to look out for. You’re to be careful about that.

A group of uniforms passed the window. She looked up and saw Byron, who gave her a wave. And Stuart’s head appeared from behind him, smiling at her. Her dad looked.

— Your friends?

They walked on. Stuart looked back, still smiling. She found herself smiling and blushing.

— How’s the flat, she asked, to cover it.

— Do you have a boyfriend?

— Oh Dad.

He was smiling at her. She was so obvious. She was a cliché. Her cheeks burned.

— Which one? The black boy?

He was turned around in his chair now, looking after them. Stuart noticed and looked away, and then they disappeared.

— The one who looked back?

— They’re just friends.

— So why are you blushing like a berry?

She laughed.

— Like a berry?

— Like a strawberry.

— People don’t blush like berries.

— Which one was he then? What’s his name?

So she told him a bit about Stuart. But nothing like as much as she’d told her mother. He smiled at her and nodded but she could tell he was sad. Because she was growing up and all that clichéd crap.

She imagined walking from school one day and hearing a bang and a scream, and another scream, and seeing something happening at the crossing. She imagined running up, and as she got closer her friends trying to hold her back. She imagined seeing Stuart lying on the ground, pale, a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth. She imagined kneeling beside him and holding his head, and looking into his eyes and him looking at her with the most intense eyes that she had ever seen, and dying. She imagined a girl screaming and sobbing, and Byron crying and holding her hand, and she imagined her dad arriving with the two men from the coffee shop, and her dad helping her up and moving her away, and the good-looking black man and the other one trying to restart Stuart’s heart, and the black guy looking up at her dad and shaking his head, and Stuart being beautiful.

Then she imagined that she was the one hit by a car, and Stuart was holding her, tears running down his face. She preferred the idea of him dying. She laughed and wondered whether she could tell him about all this and knew that of course she couldn’t.

She told Byron that she’d met a gay cop.

— Cop’s a cop, he sneered. Then he remembered her dad, and smiled and touched her arm.

Byron told her that Stuart was really happy about, you know. Them. The two of them. Byron said it was a really good thing. He said they were two of his most favourite people, and he was made up to see them together. He said Stuart deserved some happiness. She laughed and asked him what he meant.

— Oh you know.

— More than me?

— No. Just.

— What?

— Oh nothing.

Stuart’s parents were still together, but his father was always away and his mother worked in the City and Stuart had the house to himself most of the time and she would go there and they would end up kissing — of course — and they would do various things, but they still hadn’t had actual sex. She wondered whether he was really only interested in sex. And was being really clever. And by not ever pressing her into stuff, he made her want stuff that she might not want if he suggested it out loud. Maybe he was devious like that and everything — all his niceness and his calm and the way he looked out for her — was a disguise for the fact that he was just a horny boy like other horny boys and that he was following some sort of Plan and every night he called his friends to bring them up to date about the progress of the Plan.

And even though he never blatantly pushed her into doing anything, he had a way of making her do stuff anyway, by getting the two of them arranged in such-and-such a way and leaving the opportunity open for her to do it if she wanted to, but to not do it if she didn’t want to. Which was how she ended up giving her first ever blow job for example. In her life. Which was something that even a couple of months ago she thought she would never do. But now she’d done it. And she had liked it. And it had been completely different to what she had expected, and it had not been gross or embarrassing or weird-tasting or any of the things she had thought it was going to be, and she was doing it even before she’d decided to do it, she was just suddenly doing it, because of the devious way Stuart had arranged their bodies on his bed, with both of them still mostly dressed and the CD by Micachu playing that he’d got for her and that she really liked. Stuart had to stop her almost as soon as she started. He gasped and wriggled and pushed her head away from him and came all over his T-shirt like he’d been shot, and she couldn’t help laughing, and then worried almost immediately that he would think she was some sort of expert . But all he could say was wow , and he laughed too, and they both giggled for a while and he kissed her, and then he took off his T-shirt and mopped up and they hugged and kissed under the covers and laughed at each other and chatted for ages.

He said that no one had ever done that before.

He said that Byron had offered, but that was all.

He said that he and Byron had kissed once, and he had liked it, but he had stopped because he didn’t want to do anything else and Byron did, and Byron had sulked for a while, but they were OK again now.

He said Byron was his best friend. Him and Byron talked about everything.

He said she was a better kisser than Byron.

He said he loved her skin and he loved her breasts and her neck. He said he wanted to hold her every time he saw her in school. He said he’d wanted to kiss her from the first time he’d met her. He said that he had never done anything because she seemed uninterested in him, in that way.

He said he really wanted to have proper sex with her, but there was no hurry.

He said he wasn’t a virgin. But he’d only had sex once before and it had been a real mess, a disaster, and he wouldn’t tell her who it was, and she didn’t know her anyway, and they had both been drunk and it was all a sort of horrible blur of bad memory.

She told him that she was a virgin. He asked about other boys and she told him about some of them. He stroked her hair and smiled at her and they wrapped their legs around each other under the duvet.

She liked him so much that she couldn’t do any work.

Her dad came to the house on a Tuesday. ‘To speak to your mum’, he said, which made her instantly suspicious. Something was up. Something had happened. They talked in the kitchen, and she couldn’t hear a thing. It was good, she supposed, that they weren’t shouting at each other. But it was creepy too. There wasn’t a sound. She tried to work out what it was. He had seen her with Stuart and didn’t approve. He was worried that she wasn’t doing as well as she had been, at school. Maybe it wasn’t about her. He had lost his job. He couldn’t afford to pay maintenance any more. He was leaving London. He had prostate cancer. She sat on the stairs and thought about Stuart having cancer.