March 2005

Mischa Lewis had skin cancer.  The Year Thirteen form tutors had broken it to them this morning.

To Natalie, it felt as of she’d been slapped.  She tried to remember the last time she’d seen or spoken to Mischa.  Last Tuesday, probably, when they’d all been talking about dystopian fiction in English.  She’d seemed fine.  She’d probably seem fine if you saw her right now.  You’d never know that, underneath, there was something poisonous eating away at her, something that didn’t want to stop until it had completely finished her off.

She didn’t know Mischa that well, but she’d always been there.  Around.  Today it was as if there was a cold, empty spot in the whole fabric of the school.

In the common room at break, though, it turned out that Johnny had a different opinion.  “It’s so disgusting,” he sniffed, “She gets sick, and suddenly we’re all supposed to act like we’re her best friends.”

Abbie made a little agreeing noise, and carried on eating her sandwich.

“I mean, God, it’ll be treated easily!” said Amelia, “She just needs to go to the hospital and get the mole removed!  She could even get a boob job while she’s at it!”  She looked around at the others, waiting for a laugh.

She got one from Daisy.  “I’m sorry she’s ill and everything, but most of the things she says just make me want to smack her.”  She smacked the table to demonstrate.  “When she said, Oh, we’re seventeen, we can act as stupid as we like now and leave being intelligent for when we’re older…”

“God…”  Amelia rolled her eyes.

“To me, that’s like saying she’ll do porn for now as a means to a serious acting career later!”  Daisy said this with a flourish, breaking into a laugh on the last word.  La-ha-hater!

“Well, she’s supposed to be quite good at hockey…  I mean, if we’re going to comment on her ball control…”

Natalie was still thinking over that conversation after school, when she looked up Mischa Lewis’ address in the phone book.  She was still thinking about it when she went into town for a Get Well card, and she was still thinking about it when she knocked on the door and Mischa’s dad opened it.

Mischa’s dad was tall and thin, and looked down at her through thick glasses.  Natalie almost lost her nerve.  What could she have to say to him or Mischa that wasn’t completely inadequate?  She had no idea what they were going through right now.  How could she do anything other than interfere and make everything worse?

Don’t be an idiot.  She swallowed and said, “Hi, Mr Lewis?  I’m Natalie Clements- I’m in Mischa’s class at school.”

Mischa’s dad nodded.  “Oh yes, Natalie…” he said thoughtfully, “I’m sure Mischa’s mentioned you…”

“She might not have,” said Natalie quickly.  She could see him starting to worry that she’d been round their house three or four times, and he’d just forgotten about her.  “We don’t really hang out much.  But, um, we’re all worried about her, and I’ve got a…”  She looked down at the card in her hand, and imagined Mr Lewis saying, Oh, you’ve got a card for her!  Well, that makes it all better, then, doesn’t it?  “Well, I thought she’d want to know we were rooting for her.”

That sounded pathetic.  In fact, everything she’d said so far had sounded pathetic.  But every time she wished she hadn’t come, she remembered what Amelia had said.  She can even get a boob job while she’s at it.

“Um, I remembered…”  She looked back up at Mr Lewis.  “Sorry, nothing I’m saying sounds like what I actually mean.  Is Mischa around?”

“Of course,” he said, sounding as relieved as she was, “I’ll try and track her down.”

Five minutes later, Natalie was in Mischa’s room, marvelling at how tidy it was.  There was nothing on the floor and barely anything on the surfaces- a tissue box and a couple of gossip magazines on her bedside table, but that was it.  Everything else was neatly packed away into drawers and cupboards.  The walls had a pink-and-white rose pattern around the edges, and there was a faint smell of perfume in the air.  The whole room looked a bit like a display in a furniture shop.

“The doctors say it’s probably not too bad,” said Mischa.  She was sitting opposite Natalie in her desk chair, ankles crossed as if she was posing for a photograph.  “I’m getting it removed next week, and then they’ll see if it’s spread. But they reckon they can usually cure it… Treat it, I mean.”  Her expression wavered, and Natalie thought about the massive gulf between the words “treat” and “cure.”  One was definitely good news; the other could mean just about anything.

“That’s good,” Natalie replied.  She couldn’t help looking at Mischa’s hair.  It was dark and shoulder-length, with the fringe cut straight across like Charlotte Church.  Natalie tried not to wonder how long she’d keep it.

“It’s just the waiting, you know?”  Mischa shrugged, trying to look nonchalant.  “All this time in between one bit and the next, and all I can do is think too much and panic.”

Natalie forced a smile.  “Well, if you want me to bring you your English homework tomorrow…”

“See, you’re joking, but that would actually be really great!”  Mischa let out a nervous laugh.  “It’d give me something to think about that isn’t… you know, terror.”

Natalie tapped her fingers on the bedside table.  “Alright then- I will.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  Your house is on my way home- I’ll drop it in.”  Natalie thought for a moment, feeling a little bit of weight ease off her shoulders.  “What other subjects do you do?”

“Um…  French and RE…”

“I’ll see if I can get someone to pick up homework for them, too.”  She glanced back at Mischa, worried that she’d taken things too far.  “Wait, unless you think that’d be too overwhelming?”

Mischa put up her hands.  “No, no, that’s be great!  I mean, I don’t know how much energy I’ll have once the treatment starts, but right now, I just need something to do.”

Natalie smiled.  “I understand.  Completely.”

(To Be Continued)

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)