“You’re the Martenwood girl, right?”
“One of them.”
The silver car came to a slow stop on the road. Felicity Williams, a neighbor, sat in the driver’s seat. A Shih Tzu sat next to her on the white leather of the passenger seat, its white hair tied in a little red ribbon above its head, revealing uncoordinated, bulbous eyes. From inside the car, they both turned to look at us and I noticed our neighbor’s eyes had the same protuberant bulge as her dog’s. After a long moment she indicated the partially blocked road with an exaggerated show of exasperation, raising her hands in a slow mime, indicating the van and widening her eyes in disbelief.
“Christ,” Cox muttered, “you could get a fucking bus through there.” He stuck his van into reverse and a spray of gravel shot up from his tires as he pulled back on to the drive. Felicity Williams plus dog returned their globular eyes to the empty road, as if the act of driving a car at five miles an hour took every fiber of their joint concentration. The car slowly rolled forward as Felicity Williams moved her head in a slow, deliberate shake, moving not a single hair from its assigned position on the blond helmet of her head. She appeared to be speaking but it was impossible to hear her. She was hermetically sealed inside her car.
Ian Cox moved his van back alongside me.
“Waiting for your mum?” he asked. He glanced behind him, back up the drive, as if he half expected to see my mother appearing from the house.
I didn’t say anything.
“Interesting headgear.”
I looked at the interior of the van, at the folded copy of the Sun on the dash, the old coffee cups, crumpled drinks cans and bits of greasy paper that littered the passenger seat.
“Don’t say much, do you?” he said. He looked back up the drive. “All right, then. Tell your mum I’ll be at another job today, let the cement set. I’ve seen your dad.”
His eyes looked me up and down once more, from my gray turban to my black school shoes. I looked at his scruffy gray hair, his checkered red flannel shirt, the thrust of his belly against the steering wheel. He gave me something almost like a smile. I looked back up the drive.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
He gave me one last look. Then he revved up and took off fast down the road, the wheels of the van skidding over its speed bumps, black smoke billowing from the exhaust.
God, I thought, how incredible to have that freedom. To up sticks and go somewhere else for a day. To just drive away. I looked down the empty road. To the right was my known life, the walk that would lead me to a school full of girls who thought I was weird. Now they wouldn’t even recognize me. When I’d last seen them, at the end of the summer term, I’d had long hair. And flesh on my bones. The beginning of breasts. Now my uniform hung off me. It didn’t fit. Nothing fit. I didn’t fit. My entire life didn’t fit. I thought about the dull year ahead, the endless routine of classes and bells and homework and organized games. I thought about the half-curious questions my classmates would ask about the state of my hair, the sly, judgmental looks they’d exchange. They wouldn’t be unkind, at least, not directly to my face. All of them were nice girls, already well versed in ways of dealing with undesirables, and, once they’d satisfied their curiosity, they would simply close the gates of their exclusive friendships, leaving me on the outside. None of them would ever risk talking to me again. Everyone knows weirdness is catching. That’s just how it works.
I thought about Willa. She’d be nearly at school by now, walking fast, anxious about being late and seeing her shiny friends again after the long summer break.
I looked back at the house.
This was a life where I didn’t belong.
So instead of turning right, I turned left.
I walked down the empty road, slowly. I would take a day out. Just a day. No one would notice. A sickie. I could fill it however I liked. I could lie in the sun and read that book. I started to walk more quickly. I could hear my feet on the tarmac, carrying me along, as if they’d already made the decision to go someplace else by themselves. It was the first day of September, and the day still smelt like summer. I walked through puddles of warm and cool air. Above me, I could hear a bird singing a triumphant rising song, a victory song, that of a blackbird, perhaps. I pulled the jumper-turban off my head. I put my face to the sun.
I kept walking.
I hadn’t got a plan. I wondered vaguely if the school would contact my parents if I didn’t arrive. Willa would be busy in the sixth form center. It wouldn’t matter to her, and, anyway, she wouldn’t have a clue if I skipped a day.
In the distance I saw another large car glide out of a driveway and that was the moment I knew, with a clear and absolute certainty, that I didn’t want to be caught. Not today.
I nipped on to a pitted gray tarmacked drive and stood inside the deep shadows of an overgrown shrub. The car passed. Then I walked a little further up that drive. I’d always been slightly curious about that house anyway. It had a reputation, a mystery around it. First, it was the only house that couldn’t actually be seen from the road, and, second, people said it was genuinely old, or, as my father put it, “ripe for redevelopment.” Mostly people just called it the cat house.
I went slowly, picking my way along a drive that curved round beds of roses, until, at the last turn, I could see a tile-hung cottage with black metal window frames and thick ropes of ivy climbing up its walls.
I stopped. Standing on the edge of an oak-framed porch was a small elderly woman feeding a whole bunch of cats. There must have been eight or ten of them winding around her legs, their fat tails coiled into question marks, pink mouths open. The woman herself was wearing a tweed skirt, wellingtons and a thick brown jumper. I crept closer, keeping to a deep wall of shadow cast by overgrown plants, until I was near enough to see her fingers digging in a tin with a spoon. Her red knuckles were swollen, and her white hair was tied into a tiny scraggly bun at the back of her head. A black cat with yellow eyes looked me straight in the eyes and hissed. I froze. The old woman didn’t look up. A pigeon rose unsteadily from the trees, its papery wings crackling in the morning air.
Once the tins had been emptied of their contents, the woman scraped the entire contents of a plate on to the ground too. Then she went inside and pushed shut the door. Keeping to the edge of the undergrowth, I edged my way down the side of her garden, ready to dive under the bushes if I heard a sound. I kept my eyes on the door. Around the back of the house the gardens were divided into a maze of thin grassy pathways. I sat in a patch of sunlight and pulled some dandelions out of a bed of overblown dahlias. For a while I watched a tiny spider sitting quietly in its web. I rolled my blazer into a pillow and lay down. Above me the shifting shapes of the clouds became one thing, then another. I pulled out the book I’d taken from my mother’s bedside table. It had sat there for over a year, pristine and untouched since my mother had read the first few pages, declared herself more of a Jilly Cooper sort of girl and switched to Riders. I didn’t think she’d miss it. It was the cover that had caught my eye: a painting of two women in red robes and white caps dwarfed by a high brick wall. I began the first page.
I didn’t have a watch. When the light changed position, I did too. I read on; the book was really good. When I was hungry, I ate the plum. When I needed to pee, I squatted by a bush. I changed my pad and buried the old one in the earth. I slept too—I needed to. I hadn’t slept one wink on the Saturday night, curled up on the gritty concrete floor of the pool house. And then, in the middle of the night on the Sunday, I’d woken up with cramps and a strange wetness between my legs. I’d put my hand down and when it came up bloody and I realized I’d finally started my periods, I’d had to creep along the landing and drag Willa out of bed so she could show me where she kept all her sanitary bits.
In the bathroom she washed out my pajamas while I inspected my hair in the mirror. The cut my father had given me was an absolute shocker, a short, hard-edged, uneven bob with a fringe cut high above my eyes.
“It will grow,” Willa said.
“What, and let him cut it off again? Not a fucking chance. And I’m not having it like this either.” I grabbed the abandoned kitchen shears and held them toward her. “Cut it off. All of it.”
Willa froze. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, “you’ll be in such shit.”
“If I can’t have my hair the way I like it, I don’t want any at all. Do it.”
“Dad will kill you.”
I pushed the scissors into her hand. “Do it.”
***
Eventually violet-tinted shadows spread cold fingers across the grass, and the pools of sunshine faded into dusk. I put my jumper on, then my blazer, then drew my legs up and tucked my hands under my armpits. I wondered if there might be an old summer house hidden somewhere, or an unlocked shed. I wondered what time it was. I thought about going home. I thought about being a fly, letting myself in through an open window and landing on a wall, seeing my mother ask my sister if she’d seen me, calling the school, listening to its out-of-hours message; perhaps she’d call her friends. She’d worry. She’d have to tell my father. I thought about the bruises on my arms, their shifting edges and deepening blooms of color. Becoming one thing, then another.
I was cold, but it was thirst that got me in the end. Eventually I picked up my things and, keeping low, walked around the garden. I needed water—a hosepipe or an outside tap would do. But, as I neared the house, the front door opened and the old woman came out. I froze: she had to have seen me. Wearing slippers now, she made slow, unsteady steps toward a bird table with a tub of seeds and a handful of bread, and in the hazy light she walked straight past me. I’m already shapeshifting, I thought, into something else, a shadow, perhaps. A ghost. But the woman had her back to me now and the front door was open and, like some invisible robber-child, I slipped inside.
The dim, paneled hallway was hung with portraits, and ahead of me was a dark oak staircase. The first door on my right opened on to a small sitting room. Opposite an old TV was a deep green velvet sofa with a Chinese silk scarf thrown across its back and orange crocheted cushions; the entire room was stuffed full of books, some on shelves, others piled in great stacks on the floor. A tawny cat turned pale yellow eyes on me, and then opened its pink mouth into a yawn, showing small, white, pointed teeth. A carriage clock sat on a mantel above a tiled chimney place. It read 8:30, later than I’d thought. A small electric fire sat on a slate bed, two of its bars burning a soft red.
