February 2003

Natalie had been noticing lately that most people seemed to have the same conversation over and over again, like clockwork.  Every week or so they’d find themselves in a specific set of circumstances, and it would happen again, as if they’d forgotten all the times before.

Take Mum and Aunt Polly, whenever they went out for lunch:

 

“Oh, I shouldn’t really…”

“Go on, treat yourself!”

“Oh, alright, I will then.  You’ve got to have something nice now and then, don’t you?”

“Yes.  Otherwise, what’s the point?”

 

Take her little sister Stephanie and her best friend, whenever somebody in their class had annoyed them:

 

“At the end of the day, you know, I don’t really care what they think of me.”

“Yeah.  You’ve got to know who your real friends are.”

“Yeah.”

“Cause real friends don’t talk shit about you as soon as you turn your back.”

“Yeah.”

 

Take her dad and the guy at the newsagents, whenever he went in to buy a paper:

 

“I just think it’s such a shame when you see children stuck inside watching telly all day.”

“Yeah, kids need to run around a bit now and then, don’t they?”

“It’s just breeding a generation of couch potatoes.  You know, in ten years’ time, books won’t even exist anymore.”

“Mm.  It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“Sad.”

 

Natalie mentioned it to Amelia, and she laughed.  “It’s easier to talk than it is to think,” she told her.

“It’s not just that,” said Johnny, who was lying on the floor looking through Amelia’s videotapes.  Natalie had had a look through some of them earlier- half of them were old sci-fi shows, and the other half were films that Natalie had heard vaguely mentioned throughout the years but didn’t know anything about.  “It’s because they’ve fallen out of the habit of considering opinions different from their own.  Once you’ve done that, your mind starts to stagnate.”

Natalie nodded.  It made sense- once you’d forgotten any possibility that you might be wrong, all you could do was repeat the same opinion, back and forth, until the end of time.  “So if I really want to do my mum a favour, I should tell her that you don’t have to have something nice now and then?”

“Try it,” said Johnny, with an inscrutable smile, “You might be surprised.”

Natalie lay back on the bed.  Every time she came here, Amelia’s room took her breath away.  There was an awning along the top of her window designed to look like roses and thorns, as if they were all in a really odd version of ‘Sleeping Beauty.’  The walls were dark blue and covered in chalk designs of wolves and deer, as if it was the sky and they were some particularly vivid constellations.  There were boxes designed to look like treasure chests and little figurines designed to look like mutilated voodoo dolls.  There were more types of candles and incense than Natalie would have guessed existed.  And despite all of this, it was still only the second most spectacular room in the house.

Amelia nodded towards her videos.  “You know, there’s an episode of Armchair Theatre that has Gandalf from Lord of the Rings in it.  Do you want to watch that?”

Natalie shrugged.  “If you like.”

“Or we could go downstairs and see what David’s working on,” added Amelia, as if the two options had equal weight and they weren’t obviously going to choose the second one.  Gandalf in a murder mystery sounded like fun, but David’s work was something else entirely.

When David had moved back home after university, his and Amelia’s parents had spent a lot of money converting the cellar into a studio for him.  That had been last summer.  Since then, he’d filled it up with so much stuff that you couldn’t take all of it in.  It reminded Natalie of visiting Santa’s Grotto as a kid, and spotting a strange new detail everywhere she looked.

This time it took them a couple of minutes to find David- the studio was so packed that it became a kind of maze.  A lot of it was a series of paintings on giant canvases- naked people in blues and purples, giant claws reaching out to rip you to shreds- but there were bigger obstacles, too.  They found him at a table in between the mannequins made up to look like plague victims and the giant fibreglass flea.  He was reading the local paper, and looking crestfallen.

“They’re going to bulldoze half of Crowe’s Wood,” he said, without looking up.

Natalie and Amelia looked at each other.  “Crowe’s Wood?” asked Natalie, “That’s the big country park place near Waitrose, right?”

“Yep,” said David.  He sighed.  “They say they want to improve the roads.”  There was something about David’s face- even at times like this, when you could only see it in profile and in shadow- that seemed otherworldly.  As if it was too pale, or too smooth, or too clean… but none of those things really.  It was more like he always had one foot in another dimension.  As if his thoughts were so different from everyone else’s, he might as well have been a different species.

Amelia shook her head.  “Typical,” she said, her voice dripping with acid, “More progress.”

“It’s the way of the world,” said Johnny, keeping a neutral expression.

David finally looked up.  He was probably looking at all three of them, but to Natalie, it seemed like he was making direct eye contact with her.  Which, of course, drew her into making direct eye contact with him.  Natalie couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone with eyes as deep a blue as David’s were.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” he said, “Sometimes it actually, honest-to-God hurts. Just to know that beautiful things can be destroyed right under our noses, and we’ll never be able to save them all.  You just don’t know where to start.”

Natalie thought about the rainforest.  What was it people always said- an area the size of a football pitch destroyed every… hour?  minute?  And it seemed to go on happening no matter what anyone did.  Every day, more species became extinct, more medical breakthroughs became impossible, and the air became harder and harder to breathe.  You couldn’t think about it without feeling totally powerless.

David continued.  “The people who decided to destroy Crowe’s Wood… they didn’t think of all the wild creatures and plants that live there.  They didn’t think of all the happiness it’s brought to people, or how important it is to have a little oasis of peace in the middle of all the concrete.  All they thought about was their bottom line.”  His hair fell in his eyes, partially hiding them from view.  He looked defeated.  Crushed.  You wanted to burst into tears just looking at him.

Natalie heard herself say, “We’ll do something about it.  We just need to come up with something.”  And why not? she thought, The rainforest’s three thousand miles away, but Crowe’s Wood is just down the road.  It’s within our reach.

David looked right at her and smiled. In that moment, she felt as if she could have single-handedly saved the rainforest too.

(To Be Continued)

January 2005 

They were sitting in the Wimpy, weighing up the merits of Suede and The Tears, when Amelia’s eyes went wide with horror.  “Natalie,” she said, through gritted teeth, “Please tell me that girl’s trousers don’t say what I think they say.”

Natalie turned around.  There was only a short wall sealing off the Wimpy from the rest of the shopping centre, so it was easy to look around at passers-by as you ate.  And walking past New Look, absorbed in her phone, was a girl with the word “JUICY” embroidered, in gold, on her arse.

“I’m afraid so,” Natalie told Amelia.

Abbie Chamberlain and Daisy Sparrow (sitting next to Natalie and Amelia respectively), craned their necks to try and see the JUICY girl, but she’d disappeared into one of the nearby shops.  Amelia made a hissing, spitting sound, like a cat coughing up a hairball.  “God!  What is it with young people these days?  I mean, do they seriously think that looks good?”

Abbie laughed.  “Amelia, you’re not even eighteen ‘til next month.  You’re ‘young people these days.’”

Natalie tried to work out whether the JUICY girl had been their age or younger.  She hoped younger.  If you got to the age of eighteen and still thought dressing like that was a good idea, there was probably no hope for you.

Amelia shook her head.  She was wearing a white shirt that looked like something a jockey might wear, and her hair (the kind of brown that made Natalie think of cinnamon sticks) was so perfectly brushed that it looked like a solid mass, with every strand moving in unison.  She was easily the most stylish of the four of them.  “The more I see of this world, the more I understand why David lives like he does.”

Natalie nodded.  A few months ago, David had moved out of his and Amelia’s parents’ house, and bought a little place, not much more than a cabin, in the woodland on the edge of town.  He said it was so he didn’t have to deal with people, but luckily, “people” didn’t include Amelia, Natalie and the others, so they were up there all the time.  If you wanted somewhere to drink and listen to music where no-one would bother you, David’s cabin was the place.

Daisy was still craning her neck.  The JUICY girl was long gone, but Daisy was a natural optimist.  “It’s irresponsible!” she announced to the rest of the table, a decibel or two louder than she really should have.

“What is?” asked Abbie.

“Going round with something like that written on your clothes.  You might as well just get ‘up for it’ tattooed on your arm.”

Abbie grinned, resting her chin on her hand.  “It could just mean she really likes orange juice.”

Daisy didn’t acknowledge this.  “I think it’s very irresponsible,” she said, still looking over her shoulder, “especially considering that syphilis is on the rise.”

And something about that- maybe the strangeness of the situation, maybe Daisy’s outraged voice, maybe the thought of the trousers giving the girl syphilis on their own, by magic- made the other three dissolve into giggles, slowly collapsing onto the table as they tried to regain control.

(To Be Continued)