Moderate Violence (16 page)

“Jo!” Holly was horror-struck. “It was
me
she told, not Mum. It came up by
accident. Liz was at our house and we were just talking, and when I heard where
she works I asked her if she’d known a boy called Toby Ferguson. I had no idea
what she was going to say – I was as shocked as you are. He was expelled two
years ago, when he was sixteen. Before he even took his GCSEs.”

Jo felt weak. He had never done his exams. No wonder he
hadn’t got very far into art school, or fashion buying. “What was he expelled
for?”

“Liz didn’t know. Or maybe she did know, but she
realized by then that she shouldn’t have said anything.” Holly slid Jo a
nervous glance. “I know she was wrong, and maybe I was too. But I’m just so
worried about you.”

“I bet you are.” Jo couldn’t help sounding mean. She
felt like a world class dickhead. She began to walk back up the riverbank. “Thanks
for your concern.”

“Jo…” Holly hurried after her. “Wait a minute.”

Jo stopped, and the two girls faced each other. They
were near enough now for people to hear. Holly was almost crying again. “Please,
little Jo,” she pleaded. “You can shoot the messenger if you like – I don’t
care how angry you are with me. But for your own sake, just do what’s right,
will you?”

Chapter Ten

Trevor loaded his car with as many of his
belongings as he could, and he and Jo stood self-consciously on the pavement
beside it. Suddenly Trevor lunged forward, grabbed Jo’s shoulders and kissed
the top of her head like he used to when she was little.

“Be good, now, Jo-girl,” he said, his breath damp on
Jo’s scalp. “Don’t let her get to you.”

“I’ll be fine,” Jo reassured him. “Don’t worry about
me.”

He stood back and looked at her. The late afternoon
sunshine showed the colours in his hair, and the criss-cross lines beside his
eyes and mouth. Jo wondered if, when he was eventually free, some other woman
would make him happier than Tess had.

“Send me a text or something?” he asked.

“Course,” said Jo. Tears nearly came, but she stopped
them, and flapped her hands at him. “Go on, just go, before this gets like the
last scene of
The Return of the King.
”

“What happens in the last scene of
The Return of the King
?” he asked, opening
the car door.

“They’re saying goodbye to each other,” explained Jo. “You
know, the hobbits. But it takes so long, most people have left the cinema and
are half way home before the credits actually roll.”

Trevor laughed. “Edited by Joanna Probert – ruthlessly.
That’s a credit I’d like to see.”

“Maybe you will, some day,” said Jo. Producer,
screenplay-writer, director, actress, editor. And finally, censor.

Trevor drove away, honking the horn and probably
waving, though there was so much stuff in the car Jo couldn’t see what he was
doing. Jo waved anyway, then she went back into the house.

Tess was leaning into the mirror by the front door,
painting her lips with a lip brush. “Has he gone?” she said to Jo’s reflection.

Jo nodded.

“Well, he’ll soon be back. His little enterprise is
guaranteed to go belly-up.” Tess stood back and scrutinized her handiwork. “Is
this colour too dark for me?”

“Nothing’s too dark for you,” said Jo.
Moderate Horror
.

“It’s just that this make-up has got to last all
evening, but I don’t want it to look too…you know…”

“Tarty?” suggested Jo.

“…showy. I mean, it’s only teatime now, but I won’t
have the chance to take off my daytime face and put on my evening one, so I was
just wondering…” – she pursed her lips, as if she were about to kiss the mirror
– “…if it’s a bit OTT.”

Jo felt as if she’d walked into the wrong studio in the
multiplex. What was going on in front of her was so banal, so inane, and so
wrong, wrong,
wrong
, it should
never have got the funding in the first place. And now that it had, why was she
wasting precious eyesight watching it? “It’s fine,” she told her mother.

“Right.” Tess seemed satisfied. She put the lipstick
and brush in her make-up bag and closed it with an emphatic click. “I’ll just
get my shoes on, then I’ll be off.”

“Where are you going?”

“Oh, here and there,” said Tess, starting up the
stairs. “You can get your own supper, can’t you, darling?”

Jo didn’t even bother answering this. She thought about
Trevor heading for the motorway with the window open and the fan full on,
because Tess wasn’t there complaining about her hair getting messed up, or
demanding to know why he didn’t have a car with air conditioning like any
normal person. He’d probably be singing, too. ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, or, if he
was especially pleased with himself, ‘Copacabana’.

Her throat constricted. This was
stupid.

Tess clonked downstairs in very high heels. “If you go
out, remember to lock up the house,” she instructed Jo, giving herself one last
inspection in the mirror. “And feed Blod.”

Jo knew there was no point in mentioning that for
months and months
she
was the one
who had managed the locking up of the house and the feeding of the cat, along
with many other things, while Trevor had been in the pub. She didn’t say
anything. She didn’t even nod.

Tess whipped round. “Are you sulking?” she asked
sharply. “Because if you are, let me tell you, young lady, that cuts no ice
with me. Trevor’s gone and that’s that.”

Jo still didn’t speak.

“I mean it!” After she’d said this Tess set her mouth
in a shiny line, checked she’d got her keys, opened the front door, strode out
and slammed it behind her.

“
I’m
sulking!”
said Jo to the space where Tess had stood.

Into her mind came an image of the nail scissors, which
hung there, glittering, like the ghostly dagger in
Macbeth
. She saw Holly’s blue eyes, pleading with her to be
sensible and weeping when Jo had refused. And she saw Toby’s grey eyes, getting
darker and darker as he stood there lying to her.

It was insanity, but it
worked
. In that split-second of relief, the little spurt of
blood, the mark on her skin, everything would disappear. Trevor’s desertion. Tess’s
uncomprehending unkindness. Toby’s fingers grasping the top of the lacy
knickers she’d so knowingly put on, fumbling for the secret place, filling her
with panic and revulsion. The little scissors would cut out her pain.

She pictured the scarred, scary girl she’d seen in a
scandal-mag Pascale had brought into school. The patch on Jo’s arm where she’d
picked and picked the flesh, destroying the scab every time it formed, had
already scarred, quite noticeably. It was a secret scar though, hidden by all
but the shortest sleeves.

Jo didn’t want to look like the girl in the magazine. She’d
stop before it got anywhere near that. But not now. She grasped the banister
she could no longer see, hauling herself up, step by step.

The scissors were in their place. She opened them and
stared. Two blades. More pain, more relief. It had been a hot day, and she was
wearing a short cotton Rose and Reed skirt. She caught hold of the hem to pull
it up, then paused. Would two points cause twice the bloodshed of one? It was
Wednesday today; Sylvia the Chinese Cleaner was due tomorrow. She wouldn’t have
said anything about a tissue in a bin, especially not to Trevor, but if she
found a larger bloodstain in Jo’s room, on the window seat cushion, or the
carpet, she would wonder what it was, and perhaps mention it, cautiously,
anxiously, to Tess.

Jo remembered with relief that she was alone in the
house. She didn’t have to hide in the bedroom. Clutching the open scissors,
aware that their points were digging into her palm, she went downstairs.

The garden lay under the low light of a warm,
early-August evening. Jo remembered the white brightness that had drenched
Toby’s garden, obliterating everything in it. Her behaviour that day had been
unforgivable; she hadn’t encountered Mrs Ferguson since, and didn’t know what
she would say when she did.
If
she did. But what she’d felt was panic. Desperation, like you’d feel if you
were drowning, or someone was trying to strangle you.

But this numbing, half-blind compulsion was a different
desperation. She just
had
to do
it.

She went down the path and plunged into the green gloom
under the bushes near the shed, ducking as a pair of wood pigeons flapped
indignantly away. No one could see her. Her heart pumping hard, she pulled up
her skirt and the edge of her knickers, tensed her leg and stuck the twin
blades into her groin. Then she pulled them out again and sank to her knees on
the leaf-strewn earth under the laurel bush. Eyes closed, she knelt there, breathing
softly and regularly until she calmed. She opened her eyes, her wounded flesh
burning, and inspected what she had done.

Two blades hadn’t caused twice as much damage, or twice
as much blood, as one, but they had made an untidier cut. She’d forgotten to
bring a tissue. As the blood oozed up, startlingly red and thick-looking, like
cheap jam, she pulled off some laurel leaves and pressed them to the spot. Her
hand clamped to her groin, she crept into the darkness of the shed. Gratefully,
like an animal finding a place to give birth, she sat down on a stack of
rodent-ravaged newpapers in the corner, her back against the wall, dizzy with
still-hot pain.

Through the open shed door the house looked abandoned,
uninhabited except for a prowling Blod. Later, when it was too dark for any
neighbours to notice her blood-streaked leg from an upstairs window, Jo would
slip furtively across the lawn, and let herself back into the empty house.

* * * * * *

The next morning, Jo turned from the
cupboard in the Staff Room, her identity tag dangling round her neck, to find
Toby blocking the doorway. He stood with his hands in the back pockets of his
jeans, his shoulders hunched. It was a while since he’d got his hair done, she
noticed suddenly, and it sprang up in tufts. Her heart was stirred by the
apprehension in his eyes. “Hello,” she said.

They still hadn’t spoken since their uncomfortable
exchange on Tuesday morning. Neither had called or texted the other. Jo had
thought Toby would come in this morning, ignore her and go straight up to
Menswear. But here he was.

“I can’t stand this” he said.

He came towards her, giving her a modified version of
The Look, with more sexy and less funny. She could hear Eloise greeting Sophie
upstairs in the shop. They’d come down soon. Whatever Toby was going to do,
he’d better do it quick.

 He rubbed the tops of Jo’s arms with the palms of his
hands. “I just couldn’t go on with the ‘I’m offended’ act.”

“Me too,” said Jo. Wondering if this was the truth, she
decided to say something she had no doubts about. “I mean, I didn’t do so great
myself on Saturday. I must have sounded like…I don’t know, some sort of – ”

“Some sort of
you
.”
He gave up on The Look, gathered her to his chest and put his face in her hair.
His heart beat steadily underneath her right ear. “That’s the thing about you,
Jo. You can’t be someone you’re not.”

His words resonated through Jo’s skull. In a sudden
rush of understanding she realized that she liked him putting his chin on her
head like this, simply because it was something he did. If she could be some
sort of
her
, then he could be
some sort of
him
.

She felt relieved, and grateful to Toby that he’d been
the one to give in. It didn’t matter what he’d been doing in that club. It was
all childish and distant now. Now, it felt right to be squashed between him and
the cupboard door, with her arms round his waist and her head on his chest.

He took a breath and released it. “Would it help if I
said I know I acted like an idiot, and that’s the reason I went out clubbing
and got too drunk to know my phone was being nicked?”

“It might,” said Jo.

Toby took hold of a strand of her hair and began to
wind it round his finger. “Are we cool?”

“We’re cool.”

He kissed the top of her head. “I thought you’d dumped
me.”

“No, you didn’t.” Jo smiled, though he couldn’t see her
face.

“Shall we go out on Saturday? For a curry?”

“I’d rather go to a movie.”

He stepped back and looked at her with his head on one
side. Jo gazed at his arms coming out of his short sleeves, and his wristwatch
nestling among the hairs on his wrist. He was so familiar that she couldn’t
remember a time when she didn’t know him. It seemed like hundreds of years ago,
in some ancient, forgotten time. BT. Before Toby. “Come on,” she coaxed. “I
promise I won’t criticize the editing, or the direction, or the writing. And
you’re
the one that always criticizes the
clothes.”

He smiled a proper, toothy smile. Jo hadn’t seen the
smile for so long it sent a jolt of pleasure through her.

“All right, then,” he agreed. “But only if we can go
for a curry afterwards.”

* * * * * *

Tess came in the back door, weighed down
with yellow and purple plastic bags from Oxford Street stores. Without saying
hello, she gave Jo a look. “So have you been thinking about which subjects to
take next year?”