The Cut Read online

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Oo-er, missus. Why should I be bothered? We haven’t been caught before. No one’s on to us. What’s in it for me? If I let Marcie take the rap, she might just drop us all in it, when we’re all fresh-smelling and respectable.’

  And it’s true. No one suspects kids with decent clothes and trust funds. All those times we’ve lit fires down on the beach, or bunged up some exhausts just for the hell of it. Or when we got out of our trees on the promontory at sunset (some weird blue shit in a capillary inhaler thing that Damien’s brother’s mate got hold of in Glasgow). And now that the dares, the after-dark japes, have started to get bigger and better and bolder and more totally fucking irresponsible, the police just put it all down to Fallowdale kids, because some Fally or other steals a car every night and, usually, gets banged up for it. Ha-ha. Best place for them.

  ‘You went too far, Bel,’ says JJ almost casually, and flips himself up so that he’s sitting on the couch, legs dangling over the edge. He raises his eyebrows as if defying me to contradict him. ‘You smashed the car into one of the main shop-windows in town. Pretty soon, someone’s going to ask questions about the tyre marks on the beach, the Dettol, all those little clues. There’s twenty thousand people in the borough. You know that? It won’t take long before they start asking questions about who’s always out and about after dark.’

  He gets up and starts to make tea. He slams the kettle on to the gas hob, gets the tea out of its tin and gets the teapot down.

  Something’s made me sit up and listen, something that might give me a clue to why JJ’s bothered about all this.

  I wind back his speech in my mind. ‘The Dettol.’ That’s it, I’m triumphant. ‘You’re worried they’ll trace it back to you from the Dettol.’

  JJ doesn’t meet my eye. He’s shovelling tea into the pot, with a rather tense and jerky movement.

  I smile, and spin the chair round, stretching my legs and kicking off my shoes. ‘Ahhh . . . poor JJ! Have I blown your plan? That’s it, isn’t it? You thought you’d convince me I was in shit and get me to pay Marcie! I’m impressed. Well, I mean – if you weren’t my boyfriend and hadn’t just done an utterly bastardly thing, I might be impressed.’

  He’s stirring the tea-leaves into the boiling water, clunking and clunking the teaspoon against the pot. He’s looking surly. I laugh, come up behind him and encircle his waist.

  ‘There was one girl in the chemist,’ he says at last. ‘She was on the night shift.’

  ‘And which chemist, JJ, dear?’

  ‘The one in Eastbroome Rise. Next to the Catholic church. I went in, got the disinfectant off the shelf, paid. We didn’t say much. I don’t think she really looked up at me. She was blonde, about twenty. I think she smiled. Yeah, she smiled.’

  ‘Had you seen her before?’

  ‘No. She might have gone to your school. Certainly not mine. Didn’t really get much of a look at me.’

  ‘Well, then. You can relax.’

  ‘Not really,’ he says guiltily.

  ‘Why not?’

  He slams the lid down on the teapot. ‘I paid by Switch.’

  This takes a moment or two to sink in. ‘Ah. It’ll be on their copy. Your name and number, and what you bought. Brilliant.’

  He turns around. His soft, feminine eyelashes are quivering, bless him. The scent of bergamot fills the kitchen area as the Earl Grey releases itself into the water, making me realize how much I need a cup of tea. I lean up and kiss him gently. ‘Look, if it makes you feel better, we could find her.’ I giggle, press myself up against his body and pout. ‘We could threaten to pulp her head if she said anything. I’ve always wanted to do that.’

  ‘Bel, don’t –’

  ‘Or I could kill her for you. I mean, it would make more sense for you to kill her, but then they’d trace it easily. We could swap murders, you kill Cowbitch Kate for me, and I’ll do the Pharmacy Girl for you.’

  I’m excited by the thought, you know. I realize it’s wrong but I’m still thinking about the Cut.

  ‘Don’t joke, Bel. We could be in trouble if this gets out. Neither of us would ever go to university. Imelda might disown me, your parents would hit the roof.’

  ‘Does Imelda really care what you get up to?’

  He shrugs. ‘Maybe.’

  I sigh. The options are narrowing.

  And what Marcie wants to do is interesting, to say the least. I want to find out what it is the silly little slut really wants.

  ‘Let’s talk to Marcie,’ I say to JJ.

  And why not? I was going to go around there anyway.

  On the TV, the camera swoops along flesh, as the two-dimensional Sapphic embrace is carried to a squealy and thumpy conclusion. The frames flicker, distorted, in the bright teapot. I grin, reach up to JJ and kiss him softly but firmly, letting my arms wander around his neck.

  In my mind’s eye, one of the two girls, the one underneath, is Marcie, and I’m poised above them with a scalding pot of tea.

  Chapter Six – Garden Zone

  As I said before, Belinda sometimes takes over the story. I feel she is a truly separate person at times.

  *

  In 1990, when Belinda was nine, the family moved from suburbia to the big house in the country.

  On the day that Belinda first saw the house, she learnt a wonderful word in school. She kept saying it quietly to herself as she trotted around on her nine-year-old legs, behind her mother and father who, a couple of feet higher up, were booming deep and important pronouncements into echoing rooms. It sounded a good word, and it sounded like the thing it described, like the banging of a wooden door in the wind – ram! – followed by the skittering of tiles on a roof and the scuttling of insects in the skirting-board – shackle shackle shackle!

  The house looked as if it had too much space. She couldn’t imagine how they were ever going to fill it all. She marvelled at the big windows with their fresh paint and their unmarked glass, and the expanses of scrubbed floors, tree-coloured, full of knots and undulating grain. In a couple of rooms she actually bent down to sniff the wood, and the house smelt like part of Nature, as if it had grown there.

  From outside, it looked camouflaged, wrapped in trees, and almost alive, as if it were about to toddle across the garden, spilling soil and tiles, chuckling ramshackle-ramshackle. The attic room, with its squinty blind and big, solid gable, seemed to be winking at her, seemed to be saying, come and play.

  Once the house started to fill up, it was as if its character had been stifled under layers of carpets, shrink-wrapped in paint, trapped under heavy wooden chests and clocks and vases and giant wickerwork linen baskets. Belinda helped to carry some of these things in, and she couldn’t help saying, ‘Sorry, house,’ every time someone knocked a corner or put something down with unnecessary force.

  After a while, the house seemed to stop speaking to her, especially once the weatherboarding had been given its fresh coat of white. For a year, the garden became her sanctuary, her personal playground. Her parents didn’t bother much with the garden. Jonathan Archard worked in town, at a property developer’s office, and put in hours and hours of overtime, while Emma, who was a freelance illustrator, worked on and off throughout the day, including evenings. She was so preoccupied with getting Nature right in two dimensions – book covers, magazines, the occasional piece of crockery – that she never gave a thought to bending it to her whims in real life.

  This suited Belinda very well. It meant she could spend hours crawling through the thick, tall grass at the perimeter, and emerge smelling sweetly of hay. She could observe the comings and goings on the terrace from her clump of goose-grass, and as she watched she would be imagining the tenacious little burrs as her personal armoury, tiny smart bombs studded all over her combat gear (black jeans and ‘Sit Down’ sweatshirt – unlike most of her classmates, she knew James were far cooler than New Kids). She would drop stones down the crumbling old well, imagining that they were gr
enades timed to repel the enemy, who lived down there in its dank depths. At least, she did so until Jonathan, worried to discover how deep the well was, had a piece of thick wire mesh put across it.

  Belinda was popular, but had little patience with most of the girls she knew at school. They all had dead-end, giggly obsessions with the likes of David Hasselhoff. Some of them even fancied Marc Almond, and when Belinda scornfully pointed him out to her father in a magazine, he laughed and said, ‘Him? He plays for the other side, love!’ Belinda liked this phrase – although unsure of its meaning, she repeated it in the common room, where it made the third-year girls shriek with laughter at her silly little classmates, and got her some new-found respect among the higher echelons of the school. Not that she wanted it, much.

  When she was fourteen, Belinda started smoking, but unlike many of the other girls, she had the intelligence to suck peppermints and wash her hands to keep it a secret from her parents.

  With hindsight she can see that, while they would not exactly have approved, their reaction would not have been standard outrage. Jonathan and Emma were young parents. They were twenty-one in 1981, when Bel was born, thanks to some drunken post-finals celebrations on the campus at York. Among the incisive electro-beats of the pre-Aids eighties, they had abandoned caution. They liked to think that they were liberal, and perhaps they were.

  *

  The garden remained hers. No other girl ever entered her domain, and her parents would hardly try to make her share her games with others if she didn’t want to. She seemed stable, and happy, and she had friends with whom she went to art club and choir and gymnastics, and who sometimes came home to tea.

  They couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling, though, that Belinda had read up on how little girls were supposed to behave, and that she would often make token gestures just to keep her parents happy. They knew she was intelligent and creative, and because they had the money to indulge her, they did, however strange her desires seemed. Even at the age of ten, she was spurning Malory Towers and the Chalet School in favour of Robert Westall, Point Horror and, a couple of years later, Virginia Andrews. She used words like ‘tragic’ and ‘destiny’.

  In 1990, her father found her slumped on the sofa watching Citizen Kane on video. This seemed a bit much, even for Bel. If it had been something like Driller Killer, even he would have firmly directed her away from it, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do about finding his nine-year-old daughter watching a seminal classic of cinema. So he sat and watched the end with her. Good, isn’t it? he asked her hopefully. Oh, yes, she said, nodding. I like the documentary technique, but I guessed about Rosebud.

  She very rarely wanted to buy tapes – in fact, she listened attentively to stuff from her parents’ collection like Pink Floyd, Gary Numan and Gen X – but when she did get something of her own, it was not exactly to be found in the pages of Smash Hits. One day in 1992, Emma, sitting in the garden and painting, heard for the fifth time in as many hours the chugging riff of something which, she had discovered, was implausibly called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. She remarked to her husband that their daughter had gone punk, either fifteen years too late or five years too early. He smiled and, flicking through his flip-charts, told her not to worry. It was called grunge, and the extent of its rebellion was big boots and tousled hair. He had been reading his Q attentively.

  *

  The garden got smaller and less forbidding as she grew up. It could no longer be a jungle for the eleven-year-old Bel who listened to Nirvana, but she learned to appreciate it in different ways – the feel of the moss on the stones was sensual, like velvet cushions, and some of the pungent grasses smelt of sex.

  It would return to her, that smell, in years to come. Creeping up on her and dragging her back into childhood.

  Something else happened in the garden, too, and indirectly, it made her change her life. But that was later.

  Chapter Seven – Topology of a Ghost City

  The house crackles with the negative energy of a drinks party.

  Kate organizes drinks parties. It’s primarily what she is for. That, and sex, I assume. My father, of course, has to go along with her, because he claims to love her, and if he didn’t do what she said, then the cracks might start to show.

  She is the sort of person who is especially proud of matching. The serviettes and the cloths. The curtains and the carpet. The clothes and the make-up. All her friends are similarly anal-retentive. They’re all masked behind their greasepaint and their designer dresses, ’cos they’re all women with things to hide from their pasts, too. Hiding from the buzz of gossip that echoes in the Mzzz of their titles. Hiding from dry-squeezed husbands, from past men who’ve faded to just a name on a cheque. Maybe this preoccupation with order, with matching pastel shades, is a way of convincing themselves that they’ve got structure to their lives, and that it’s not just an endless round of church fetes and dinner and trips to Harrods, and that little extra from the Child Support Agency for Tommy’s school fees.

  Look at them. Plastered in cake-icing foundation and cherry-red lipstick, hair spray-sculpted. Maybe they know that the way to a man’s cock is through his stomach (so always knife downwards, ha-ha). And they make themselves good enough to eat. They’re gingerbread-women, high on E-additives. They’re cake decorations made of ersatz icing sugar.

  When they’re not food, they’re puppets. They waggle their glasses of Beaujolais in the air when they want to make a point. They get redder and louder the more they drink of it. I come round, dispensing it with the sweetest of smiles, because I enjoy giving them stupidity ammo.

  ‘I hear your husband’s in property,’ says one of the darlings, a woman with sponge-blonde hair and sugar earrings. Kate smiles indulgently.

  There are only certain types of job you can be ‘in’, aren’t there? No one talks about being ‘in’ supermarket checkouts or roadsweeping. Nope, you can only have inverted commas if your job’s introverted and comatose. Oh, piss off out of here, Bel, you’re getting a social conscience again.

  *

  Jeff, Damien’s father, is ‘in’ property too. And, like my dad, he’s in development, and in employment creation. (Oh, look at Bel! Losing the oh-so-ironic inverted commas! Does this mean she’s been absorbed by the establishment, hired by the hierarchy? No, I just take the irony as read, right and true.)

  Interesting, being in employment creation. It involves a lot of things, very few of which are to do with putting people to work. Most of them are to do with making money. Fine by me. I like my dad’s money. I spend his money. I don’t feel guilty. This is a free market. Sure, there are Fallies living in council flats, but they all buy frigging satellite dishes, don’t they, and they’re always down the pub, and spending ten quid a week on cigs and booze and the lottery, and bringing up kids who think burgers and chips are gourmet food, and reading the fucking Sun and believing every word of it, and caring, yes caring, what the hell happens to that bunch of losers on EastEnders. So why should I feel guilty for having money?

  What was I saying? . . . Yeah, interesting, being in employment creation. There are ways of creating employment, quick ways. You create a cycle which needs constant renewal. Like toothpaste. Follow? Toothpaste, that’s right. Everyone knows they made the perfect tooth-paste years ago – protect your teeth for life, it would. If it were allowed to go on the market. And it never will, because of the industry. Same with the common cold. Of course they’ve found a cure, but the research was sponsored by the major pharmaceutical companies whose cold-relief tablets and lemon drinks and lozenges would become obsolete overnight. It’s just so frigging obvious that I can’t see why no one’s said it in public yet.

  And another way is to use cheap road surfaces. They have some great stuff in Germany these days, elastic tarmac that expands and contracts without cracking. Mr Henson told us about it in German lessons. One of the few times I listened. And they’re quite happy to use it in Germany, because they’re not afraid of change. Here, we use stuff
that’s meant to crack, because if we didn’t, we’d have thousands of road-menders on the dole.

  You see my point. Employment creation. All makes work for the working man to do.

  *

  Anyway, Damien’s dad. Jeff. You see, he works with my dad. I found myself with them one evening when they were discussing a new, important project.

  I’m getting a lift into town, under protest. We have to go somewhere first. We’re in my father’s car and I’m huddled into the seat, hiding in my biker’s jacket, underneath the lapels and zips. Trying not to be seen. Encased in sticky leather, on the seat and in my jacket.

  They take the car past the wasteland in front of the metal skeleton that will become Asda. It’s a sea of mud, ringed with cones and fences and clogged by old wrappers and packets.

  Now we’re climbing high above the town. Jeff is talking about Total Quality Management targets. My own father has slipped effortlessly into his jargon, and they’re chattering away happily in their code.

  We drive up into brown roads which are bordered by cliffs of pub and kebab shops. Below us, the glass city shines, the hollow towers of the dream still intact. But up here, borders start to be defined not by walls of brick and glass and steel but by shoddy, hastily erected trappings. There are chain-link fences which sieve the landscape. Ranks of cones. Blind, boarded-up shops. A scrawny dog shambles out in front of the car, not seeming to care for its own life. I twist around and see, out of the back window, a boy in shorts running after the dog and sitting in the road to cradle it.

  The light is fading, and we’re driving into the heart of Fallowdale.

  We stop the car on a corner. They get out.

  My father slips on his sunglasses, as the sun is shooting a last, yellow burst over the town. He stands with hands on hips, nods sagely at the scrubland before us. It falls away towards the town, bile green and burnt brown.