Moderate Violence (15 page)

Jo tried to breathe evenly, calming her heartbeat. She
obviously wasn’t going anywhere with Toby tonight. And even if Holly’s
invitation didn’t solved the long-term problem he presented, it got rid of this
home-alone evening. “Why not?” she said. There was a tiny tremble in her voice,
but Holly didn’t notice. It wasn’t a very good connection. “Listen, Hol,” she
went on, “my dad’s just told me that he’s going away tomorrow and Tess is going
to be staying here till further notice.”

“OhmygodlittleJo!” Holly was understandably horrified.
Tess had once told her that she should get her tooth fixed, or she’d end up uglier
than the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Holly had avoided her ever since. “We’ll be
there in ten minutes.”

It was Holly who pressed the bell. Jo saw her from the
window, and opened the door. Ed was waiting on the path near the gate. He was
wearing a tight T-shirt with distressed seams, like the ones Toby had approved
of in Rose and Reed. It showed how flat Ed’s torso was. The thought flashed
through her mind that it must be weird, not having a chest that stuck out in
any way, that in fact was almost concave. She realized furtively that Toby,
with his contoured muscles, would have looked much better in the T-shirt.

Ed, who hadn’t seen Jo since the Summer Ball, nodded at
her. She nodded back.

“Hiya!” said Holly. “Oh, you’ve got my favourite
trousers on! I love that logo, the way the two Rs wind around each other. ”Will
you give them to me when you’ve finished with them?”

“Hol, you’re much taller than me.” Jo looked down at
the trousers with the Rose and Reed logo on the pocket, noticing they weren’t
very clean, and that she should have changed when she got home from work. She
still had her jacket on, too. But it was too late now. “You can put them in a
glass case and admire them, if you like, but you’ll never be able to
wear
them.”

Holly smiled her crooked-toothed smile and took Jo’s
arm. “I might wear them as cut-offs, if that didn’t make me look like my mum. Come
on.”

The garden at Press Gang was crowded for a Tuesday
evening. Jo, Ed and Holly ordered Frappucinos. Jo had a piece of pineapple
cake, too. There were no garden tables free, but they found an abandoned bench
with some spilt ice cream on it. Holly wiped it with a tissue and they sat down
in a row.

“How am I going to survive?” Jo asked them. “It’ll be
like Chinese water torture. Drip. A Levels. Drip. A Levels. Drip. A Levels.”

Ed looked bored. But Holly sipped, put the cup down
carefully and looked seriously at Jo. “Well, don’t bite my head off, but I
think your mum’s absolutely right.”

Ed started to say something, but Holly suppressed him.

“I mean,” she went on, “Sixth Form is so cool! You get
to be a prefect, and sit on School Council.” She turned to Ed. “You agree with
me, don’t you? Jo just
can’t
go
and work in that horrible shop while we’re swanning around at school being
fabulous, can she?”

Ed laughed. Jo thought he looked older since she last
saw him, only a couple of weeks ago. That couldn’t be, surely, but there
was
something different about him. “That’s
what you think Sixth Form’s like, do you?” he asked Holly. “Being fabulous? They
make you do this thing called
work
,
you know.”

“Oh, Jo won’t mind that,” said Holly, with enthusiasm. “She’s
really clever, except at Maths, but since she wouldn’t do Maths A Level anyway
– ”

“Can I speak?” interrupted Jo sulkily. “For a start, in
Sixth Form you’re still in prison, when you could be off doing something in the
real world. And also, if I do leave, I’ll still be friends with you all, won’t
I? After all this time, do you think I’d just abandon you two, and Pascale, and
Tom, and Stuart and everyone else?”

There was a pause, which Jo couldn’t quite read. She
nibbled a corner of the pineapple cake. It wasn’t embarrassment that was
silencing them, and it certainly wasn’t amazement at her brilliantly persuasive
argument. Ed was looking into his coffee and tapping his foot lightly on the
grass. It suddenly came to Jo that he looked different because there was no gel
on his hair. He’d stopped being a wethead.

Holly’s expression was as fervent as an evangelical
preacher. “Oh…
Jo
!” The words were
a long, strangled sigh, loud enough for the couple at a nearby table to turn
and stare. She lowered her voice. “Even if we
do
all stay friends,” – she saw Jo’s expression – “which we will, of
course, it won’t be the same without you. Look how great Summer Ball was this
year, and we’ve got two more to come! And when you’re in Upper Sixth you get to
be voted Kingsgrove or Queensgrove, and you might be chosen to be Head Girl.” She
noticed that Ed was grinning and Jo was frowning. “Only if you
want
to be, of course,” she added.

Jo could feel her spirits sinking. She put her plate
down on the grass. The cake felt like a stone in her stomach, and that thing
inside her was doing its theme-park ride again. “Holly,” she said as
unaggressively as her plunging mood would allow, “I don’t want to be voted
Queensgrove at next year’s Summer Ball, and I don’t want to be Head Girl. I
never want to see any of the teachers again. I don’t want to hear Tess and
Trevor moaning at each other on the phone about whose turn it is to go to
Parents’ Evening, or Speech Day, or the Christmas play, or the Carol Service.” She
watched Holly’s blank expression become animated again; she knew what she was
about to say, and stopped her. “And I don’t want to do a single freakin’ A
Level, and I
especially
don’t want
to go to freakin’ university!”

There was a silence. Ed, who had stopped grinning,
cleared his throat. “Are you going to eat that, Jo?” he asked.

Jo looked down at the unfinished slice of cake. An ant
was exploring the rim of the plate. “Help yourself.”

Ed picked up the plate and stuck the fork into the
creamiest bit of cake. “Thanks.”

During this exchange, Holly had evidently been
re-thinking her tactics. She looked sympathetically at Jo. “Look, we
understand, don’t we, Ed?”

Ed, munching, made no response.

“I mean, we’ve
all
just done exams. We’re
all
fed up
with Miss Balcombe’s attempts to be a teacher. We’re
all
glad to see the back of the National Sodding Curriculum.
But we’ve got the summer to forget all that, and we can start again in
September with courses we’ve
chosen
.”

Jo sipped her coffee silently.

“No Triple Science?” encouraged Holly, squeezing Jo’s
arm. “No PE?”

Jo sipped a bit more. “I’m not going back, Hol.”

Holly drew breath to protest, but she was stopped by
the sound of Ed clanging the fork onto the empty plate. He held it down with
his thumb and picked up his coffee. “Sounds to me like Jo’s made up her mind,”
he said, with no approval or disapproval, or judgement, or irony, or loading of
any of the words.

Jo could feel her neck going pink. Ed understood. No-nonsense
Ed, willing to obliterate every argument Holly had mustered with one sensible
stroke.

It was too much for Holly. “Oh,
Ed
, what’s the matter with you?” She
seized Jo’s right wrist, pinching it uncomfortably “Come on, Jo, let’s go down
to the river and look at the ducks, shall we? Just you and me.”

“I don’t want to look at the ducks,” protested Jo. “What
about my coffee?”

“We’ll be back in a minute.” Holly was raising and
lowering her eyebrows like someone in a sitcom, trying to send a silent
message. Jo knew she wanted to talk about something not for Ed’s ears.

“Let me finish my coffee first,” she insisted.

Over the rim of the cup Jo caught Ed’s eyes. They were
smiling. “What if I just don’t listen?” he suggested to Holly. “I’ve got my earphones
with me.”

“It’s all right, Ed,” said Jo before Holly could speak.
“I haven’t seen those ducks for at least a month.” She drained her cup. “Lead
on, boss.”

She followed Holly between the parties of drinkers down
to the riverbank. The water was low, and most of the ducks were sitting on the
grass hoping for scraps from Press Gang’s customers. They usually only got
cigarette packets and chocolate wrappers, but being ducks, they never learnt.

Holly pulled Jo out of earshot of everyone except the
ducks. “Now
listen
,” she said
sternly. “You’re not going to want to hear this, but I’m going to say it
anyway. Ready?”

Jo didn’t have time to respond.

“This stupid nonsense about leaving school is all
because of Toby Ferguson, isn’t it?” demanded Holly, frowning so hard that the
open-eyed prettiness she usually displayed had disappeared completely. Her face
was one big mass of concern.

Relief made Jo want to hug her. “Jeez, Holly, is
that
what you think? It’s
ages
since I decided I was going to leave
– long before I met Toby!” Around the time Tess left, she thought. The
fifteenth of February. By the end of that month Jo’s mind had been made up. She’d
mentioned it to Mrs Bull, who had tried to persuade Jo to consider A Level
Computer Studies, and Mrs Bull had obviously told Mr Treasure.

“But when you
did
meet Toby,” continued Holly, undaunted, “and he started showing off about
having his independence, and getting a car, and being a fashion buyer and all
that, you thought you could do the same, didn’t you?”

Jo was offended. “I don’t want to be a fashion buyer,”
she said, though she knew this wasn’t what Holly had meant. “I just want to
leave school.”

“And do
what
?”
persisted Holly. “I mean,
has
Toby
got his independence?
Has
he got
a car?
Is
he a fashion buyer? Well?”

Holly’s eyes looked shiny. This was really important to
her. Her chest was going up and down as she tried to control her breathing. Her
anxiety as she waited for Jo’s words was certainly flattering. But somehow, it
was annoying, too.

“You know he hasn’t,” said Jo coldly.

Holly’s tears, precariously balanced on her lower lids,
escaped. She was looking pretty again, though, even with her nose going pink. She
sniffed. “Exactly. Without decent GCSEs you can’t do anything – everyone knows
that, which is why people never shut up about it, and get slaughtered on vodka
and God-knows-what on Results Day. But you
will
get decent GCSEs, because you worked hard for them.” Her eyes filled with more
tears, and she sniffed again. “But why do all that work, Jo, then throw the
results away, because of a
boy
?

“It’s
not
because of a boy!”

People nearby turned to see who was shouting. Jo didn’t
know she had shouted. With an effort to calm herself, she lowered her voice. “I
couldn’t give a toss what Toby has or hasn’t done,” she told Holly. “But at
least he made the decision to leave school when he was sixteen, and did it. And
if I want to, so will I.”

Holly looked stricken. She wiped her cheeks with her
palms. “Right.”

Jo thought for a moment that she’d won, and Holly had
given in. But the word wasn’t a surrender; it was a decision. Holly had one
more round of ammunition to fire. She wiped her nose with her fingers and
raised swimming eyes to Jo’s face. “Has Toby ever told you exactly
why
he left St Bede’s?”

Jo’s heart began to jerk about. This wasn’t fair. This
was a blow below the belt.

“What’s this about, Hol?” she asked suspiciously.

“He was expelled.”

“
What
?” Jo
wasn’t prepared. She’d had a few seconds to prepare a scene involving a job
offer he couldn’t refuse, or terrible GCSE results. But she hadn’t considered
this.

“It’s true, Jo, I promise.”

“And how do you know?” asked Jo indignantly.

Holly looked very uncomfortable. “I found out through
my mum’s friend Liz.”

Jo was so surprised she felt her mouth slacken. She
knew she was staring at Holly, but couldn’t stop. “And how the bloody hell does
this Liz know anything about Toby?”

“She’s the school nurse at St Bede’s.”

Jo struggled to digest this. Some phrase like
‘professional confidence’ hovered in the back of her mind. “And she’s been
gossiping to your mum? What a bitch!”