Page 38 of We All Live Here
“Violet likes him. So that’s…nice.”
“He’s probably teaching her how to roll a spliff. Hey, what happened with the hot architect? Any news?”
There has been frustratingly little news on the hot-architect front. Gabriel Mallory frequently employs a babysitter to collect his daughter,a young Mediterranean-looking girl in her late teens who seems to know Lennie well, from the way they immediately take each other’s hands and head out, chatting. Sometimes it’s a woman she assumes is his mother, brisk, gray-haired, formally dressed, with the capable, no-nonsense air of a senior nurse. On the couple of times he has been at school pickup he has said hi to Lila, but has arrived too close to turnout time to engage in any real conversation. Lila has started to feel a little foolish that she ever imagined a flicker of interest in her.
Daily pickup has become increasingly difficult anyway, with Marja’s growing bump. There is only one topic of conversation among the mothers when someone is visibly pregnant, and from her position on the other side of the playground, Lila endures the daily touching of The Bump, hears the conversations about scans, and sees the handing over of outgrown baby clothes. Every time she notices, something in her feels dead and cold. For the last few days, she has asked Bill if he will take over the pickup and excused herself. Instead she holes up in whatever part of the house is least full of angry old men or emotionally volatile teenagers and writes and writes, slowly shaping the three chapters that will get her out of at least one of the many messes that now make up her life.
•••
The message comesat nine forty-five one evening, when Lila is lying in a bath, noise-canceling earphones in, trying to forget about dinner in which Bill and Gene argued over the fact that Bill had moved Gene’s boxes from the hallway into the shed. According to Gene, there were pricelessStar Squadron Zerocostumes and other memorabilia in those boxes, and they shouldn’t be left in some damp beetle-infested outhouse, for crying out loud. According to Bill, Gene’s hands must apparently be drawn on: he couldn’t see any other reason why the man couldn’t just walk out to the garden, pick the damn things up himself and move them into his room.
According to Lila, this was all just frankly exhausting and she didn’t understand why she had suddenly acquired two more children as well as the ones she already had. According to Celie, she was not a bloody childactuallyand the fact that she was constantly being treated like one was half the reason she hated being in this bloody house anyway. According to Violet, there was no Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. But there was an empty carton and a spoon in Gene’s bedroom. This might have been the first point at which Violet’s warm feelings toward her new grandfather cooled a little.
Hey—I hope you don’t mind me taking your number from the school WhatsApp. Just hadn’t seen you at school lately and hope you’re doing okay. Gabriel
Lila stares at the message, then pushes herself upright in the bath, reading it again. She thinks for a moment, and then types:I’m okay, thanks. Usual chaos. Just had a lot of work on.
It’s a bit relentless this single-parent lark, isn’t it? Nice to meet a fellow soldier in the trenches.
Hah! I’m under constant artillery fire here. Hope you’re doing better.
All the better for speaking to you, he responds, and Lila’s hairline prickles with pleasure.
Well, likewise.
Hang on in there, comes the reply.Maybe see you tomorrow.
Lila writes two kisses in answer, then deletes them. For the rest of the evening, she wonders if she should have left them.
Chapter Twelve
Celie
Celie has been watching the back of Meena’s head for forty-two minutes. It is tilted permanently to the left, her long brown hair just visible through the two sets of seats in front of her. She is apparently gazing at China’s phone. Every few minutes they giggle conspiratorially and turn toward each other or explode into laughter. Every outburst makes Celie’s stomach clench, filled with the knowledge that they are either laughing at some private joke or, worse, that she is that private joke. Sometimes Ella and Suraya will get out of their seats and come to see what they’re laughing at, and join in with the laughter, until Mr. Hinchcliffe, his patience exhausted by a full-day school trip, yells at them to get back into their seats while the bus is moving. It has been the longest bus journey of Celie’s life.
The chill had descended by degrees these last weeks, but since shestayed at home instead of coming to the park to smoke weed the night her grandpa arrived, the atmosphere has become positively arctic. There is no sign of life on what used to be their friendship WhatsApp group. The last comment was on March 3, a plaintiveWhere are we meeting tho?from Celie that was never answered.
The girls have formed an impenetrable group that neither acknowledges her presence nor that anything is even wrong. The others smile blandly at her, say hi, but their eyes are blank and cold. Celie has no idea what she has done, or why they are doing it. She wears the right clothes, listens to the right music. Two months ago, she had tried a couple of times to message Meena privately and ask if something was up, if everyone was still talking to her. The reply was a simpleAll cool.Now she doesn’t dare, guessing that this, too, will be the subject of spiteful laughter. Celie has simply, in the eyes of the group she has been friends with for almost five years, ceased to exist.
She stares at her phone, pretending to look at something, but seeing nothing. Sometimes her eyes fill with tears but she is frightened that someone on the bus will see them so she blinks them back furiously, or surreptitiously wipes at them with her sleeve. She is the only person sitting alone on the bus. She has walked the whole way around the zoo alone, a few feet behind Meena and Ella and Suraya and the others, her collar zipped high over her mouth, not willing to be seen to be completely abandoned, yet conscious that her classmates will be able to see her shameful isolation. She wakes up feeling sick, and she goes to sleep feeling equally sick, knowing she has been cast out, and never sure what has caused the estrangement. A couple of times she has simply bunked school—it feels easier not to go—but since Mum found her smoking, the teachers have been more vigilant, so she has no choice but to turn up at each lesson, to sit alone at the back, afraid to answer any questions in case this makes her a swot, afraid to say nothing in case it is apparent that she has been shamed into silence.
“She is, though, isn’t she?” Another burst of laughter from two seats ahead. She stares at her phone, scrolls blindly through Instagram, trying to focus on the words. She had eaten lunch alone at the zoo, in the loos for half of it to disguise the fact that she had nobody to sit with, until Miss Baker came to find her, asking her if there was a problem.
No, Miss. There’s no problem.
What could she say, after all? The other girls aren’t talking to me? Or they sort of are but it’s different? What school is going to legislate for that? They’ve had the talks about online bullying at school, the warnings about how cruel, how horribly effective it is. But this isn’t that, is it? Sometimes she wishes one of them would just hit her, so she would understand what this was, have something solid to push against.
She remembers Charlotte Gooding, a sweet, solid girl who used to be in their group until year seven: someone once noticed that Charlotte made an odd noise when she ate lunch, a kind ofmmm-mmmthat she didn’t seem to hear herself. The noise was noted, and then it became the only thing everyone noticed about Charlotte. Every time she sat with them at lunch Celie remembered the silent glances passed between them like a baton, the barely suppressed mirth. The way that this one small noise meant that other terrible things were noticed about Charlotte: the way she always double-tied her shoelaces, the way she sometimes had sleep in her eyes (didn’t she even wash?), the stupid color she painted her nails on Own Clothes Day. In the hothouse atmosphere of school, Charlotte’s crimes against humanity were marked off, one by one, until there was no room for her at the lunch table. She was left hanging vainly on the outside of the group, so nobody who might have liked Charlotte actually said anything to her, terrified that they, too, might end up tarnished. Charlotte slowly became a ghost and eventually switched schools altogether. Celie remembers this and her toes curl with shame and fear. Because it’s her turn now. There will have been some small thing, and nobody is going to tell her what it was. Her whole body radiates anxiety,every movement self-conscious, every mirror-check of her appearance a desperate scan to see what has marked her out. The only time she feels even a bit normal now is when she smokes weed, which relaxes her and makes her forget the truth of what is going on. But Mum makes constant excuses to come into her room and she has a pretty good idea she searches it for drugs when Celie is out so that isn’t even an option just now.
There is no point in telling Mum what’s going on. She’d just tell her to find other friends—They can’t be your real friends if they’re being mean to you, lovey—or get upset and ring up the other mums, telling them to get their daughters to be nice to Celie. Which wasreallygoing to help. Or, worse, she would blame herself and get even sadder about Dad and the divorce and the new baby and make it all about her.
There’s no point in telling anyone. It just makes her sound like an idiot. There is no actual evidence of anything, after all. It’s like battling fog. Just an absence, vague whispers, a never-ending sense that something is badly wrong. This is the wall she keeps butting up against. She is not the girl this happens to. So how can it be happening to her?
Celie realizes she has been staring at her phone for too long. She feels suddenly nauseous. She checks the time. There are still twenty-five minutes of the journey to go before the coach arrives back at school. She looks up, but everyone is on their phones or talking to each other. She is the only person beside an empty seat. A wave of nausea washes over her and she is filled with the clammy certainty that she is going to throw up. She never normally looks at her phone in a car: it always makes her ill. Her hairline prickles, and she feels sweat blooming across her skin. She screws her eyes shut, wishing desperately for the feeling to recede.Please not here. Please not now.The coach goes over a bump and she feels something foul and acidic rise into the back of her throat.Oh, God, it’s going to happen.She opens her watering eyes and takes a moment to focus. In front of her is a printed paper bag. She stares at it, then looksup. It is being held out by Martin O’Malley, the pale, red-headed boy who got picked on in year five. She meets his eyes, which contain a kind of sympathetic shrug, a knowledge that he knows where she is and she has to get on with it. Another wave hits, this time unstoppable. It is all unstoppable.
She snatches the bag from him and vomits.
•••
