Playing with the Grown-ups Page 21

  Rosaria's friends were sweet and warm. They clustered around Rosaria like chicks, shiny-haired and clean-skinned. Kitty stood and talked to Rosaria's mother, wanting to be a part of them.

  'You've got so glamorous, Kitty. You look like a woman,' Mrs Nivolla said.

  'Not really.' Kitty shifted her weight from one hip to another. 'Do you still make lasagne?'

  'God, I'd forgotten how much you used to love my lasagne. I'll make some tomorrow if you like. How's your mum?'

  'Oh, she's well. The same, but sort of different too. I can't explain,' Kitty said.

  'I think we all change a bit as our children grow up,' she said kindly.

  'So you're Rosaria's famous Kitty.' Marcus Chapman smiled at her. He had very straight white teeth and he smelled like the beach.

  'I suppose so,' Kitty said, smiling. 'We've known each other since we were little, but she was always cooler than me.'

  'She's pretty cool,' he said.

  'I feel a bit like I'm at someone's wedding. And I don't really know anyone.' She feared that he might think her a social leper.

  Instead, he took her around the room and introduced her as Rosaria's best friend from London. He was attentive and her glass was always full. He lit her cigarettes.

  'You shouldn't smoke,' he said.

  'I hate the word shouldn't,' Kitty said. 'It always makes me want to do the thing more.'

  'So you're a bad girl.' He grinned.

  She felt the lovely oozing warmth of alcohol trip down through her body. Everything felt soft and feathery, and she felt as though she were made from down.

  'How old are you?' he asked.

  'I'm fifteen,' she said.

  'You seem older.'

  'Thanks,' Kitty said sarcastically. 'Maybe it's because I'm bad. I seem older. Worn. I used to be good. But somehow now, badness just befalls me.' She thought she sounded like a fifties starlet from Shepperton Studios, bleached with innuendo. She disgusted herself. Why can't I have a normal conversation with a boy? she thought.

  'Aren't we meant to be leaving to go to the club soon? I have to find Rosaria,' she said desperately.

  'Come back. I'll be lonely without you,' he said.

  The club was cavernous, far bigger than anywhere she'd been in London. Girls danced in cages, their stomachs enviably taut like sailors' knots, belly buttons flashing with semi-precious stones. Rosaria was dancing slow in the middle of all of the fastness, and she was happy and drunk and beautiful.

  Kitty watched them from the floor above.

  Hands were over her eyes. It made her jump. Marcus Chapman stood laughing.

  'I want to kiss you,' he said.

  'I can't kiss you. Rosaria's my oldest friend,' Kitty said, her eyes still looking below to the dance floor.

  'So? I'm not, nor have I ever, gone out with Rosaria.

  She's a great friend,' he said.

  She thought about this. He was right. Rosaria had never even let him know her feelings. She had no prior claim to him. He was as much Kitty's as he was hers.

  'Fine,' she said, deciding. 'But kiss me somewhere secretly and promise you won't tell anyone.'

  'I promise,' he said solemnly.

  Her adrenalin started pumping with guilt and risk, but it was not an unwelcome feeling. She felt alive.

  He pushed her up into an alcove. They kissed, and she coursed with heat and want.

  'Come back to my house,' he whispered in her ear, pressing himself against her, hard. She thought that an imprint of him might leave itself on her skin like a scar.

  'I can't, I'm staying with Rosaria.' Suddenly she was sober. They were not star-crossed lovers, they were strangers, and she had stolen a moment that belonged to someone else.

  Guilt made her greedy. Kitty devoured a packet of digestive biscuits and sat on top of the Aga.

  'Did you have fun, Kit?' Rosaria asked dreamily, rubbing her feet where her shoes had bitten into them.

  'It was amazing,' Kitty said, avoiding her eyes.

  'Was the club all right? I know you're used to London clubs, but the DJ was really good, no?'

  'London clubs are rubbish,' Kitty said heavily. 'Everyone's too cool to dance. I promise, you had a great party, I could tell, everyone had a fantastic time.'

  'Oh good. Weren't we wild though, doing coke and everything?'

  'Wild,' Kitty said.

  'Did you have a wonderful time, my darling?' asked her mother innocently from the sofa. She was lying with her feet up, listening to old scratchy jazz records.

  'No,' Kitty said shortly. 'What was in that coke you gave me?' Her mother flashed a serene smile.

  'Crushed-up arnica tablets,' she said smugly. 'I was looking out for your health, and I didn't want you to poison little Rosaria Nivolla. Plus, because of its anti-inflammatory properties, you now have bruise-free insides.'

  'My insides are most certainly not bruise free,' Kitty said furiously, as she ran from the room.

  Her mother came to her bedroom later.

  'I'm sorry,' she said, sitting on the bed. 'It was a shitty thing to do. I should have given you twenty pounds like a normal person. I think Marianne is a bad influence on me. Did you have a horrible time?'

  'I had the most horrible time, and I'm the most horrible disgusting person in the world,' Kitty said, and she told her mother everything.

  'Oh sweetie pie, it's not the worst thing in the world. I understand your upset though. Just don't ever tell Rosaria. And don't do it again. The problem with life is, we often do things that will ultimately be self-destructive and make us unhappy, yet in that moment it seems like the best idea in the world. You have to be very careful of moments - they're very tricksy things.'

  'I wasn't a moment, was I?' Kitty asked after a while, as they lay in companionable silence.

  'My darling, you were, and are, a lifetime. Nothing momentary about you, I promise,' her mother said.

  'You bitch, Kitty! You utter bitch!' Rosaria's rage shot down the phone and pierced her. Marcus Chapman clearly did not believe in secrets.

  'Look, it was nothing,' Kitty said. 'We were both pissed. I kissed him for two minutes at the most. It really isn't a big deal. He didn't even like me, I could tell.'

  'It is a big deal. It's a huge deal. My best friend and the boy I've been obsessed with for six years. He's my next-door neighbour! Why did you do it?' Rosaria was crying.

  'I don't know,' Kitty said slowly. 'I'm sorry.' She didn't know whether she was sorry, or sorry Rosaria had found out. She decided both were true.

  'I can't speak to you for a while. I'm too angry. My other friends think you're a terrible person, and I would feel too stupid to speak to you. Do you understand?' Rosaria said.

  'Yes,' Kitty said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Alice's Wonderland was empty, it was Wednesday night. She sat at the bar and ordered a vodka and cranberry, hoping to look wistful and mysterious. Her hold-up stockings kept falling down, and she tried to adjust them surreptitiously. Her lips were red, sticky glossy red, and her dress, she felt, was appropriately coal black to match her character.

  The barman presented her with another drink.

  'I've still got one,' she said.

  'Yeah, I know, but the bloke over there sent you one.'

  Jake smiled at her from the end of the bar. He lifted his glass to her.

  'Who are you here with?' he said, as Kitty rearranged herself next to him.

  'Oh, my friends are late,' she said lamely. 'You?'

  'I had to see a man about a dog.' He winked.

  'Oh,' she said again, like she understood.

  'You look pretty tonight,' he said. 'Really pretty.'

  'Thank you,' Kitty said. Her hand trembled.

  'Do you want to come out tonight with me?'

  Trying to conceal her excitement, she reached into her bag and put on another coat of jarnmy lip gloss.

  'Yes, I would,' she said.

  'What about your "friends"?' he said mockingly.

  Smoke machi
nes, the tart taste of cranberry slicing against her teeth, her hands in the air,Jake's fingers finding the space where her stockings ended and her thigh began, his sharp intake of breath, drum and bass at Subterania hitting her in the groin, could this be love, everybody smiling, their teeth ivory white in the dark with the strobes, so the whole night is like a living breathing Polaroid picture.

  'I want to be an actor!'Jake shouted above the music.

  'What?!' Kitty couldn't hear or wasn't sure she heard him properly. He handed her a key, and together they snorted coke off it, right there in the club, right there in front of everyone.

  'You're a good girl, do you know that? You're a good girl. I'm the same as you - I can see it in your eyes. We're not like the rest of this scum. I think your mum and Con are wrong, but we're not going to talk about that because it makes me feel strange, we're going to talk about what's real and now, what's important. I'm going to get the hell away from all these people and I'm going to live on the beach in California, breathe the sea air, and make everything right. I've done some bad things, that aren't really me, and I need to get away. Did I tell you I think you're a good girl?' He ruffled her hair.

  'Yes,' Kitty said. 'I think you're good too.'

  He introduced her to everyone he knew, all the fast, sharp-suited night people, and they seemed to think she was funny, and they flirted with her, and Jake looked proud, with unfocused eyes, proud to be with her, and she spun with delirious happiness.

  The Soho flat was cold and empty, but they were high on drugs and drink and each other so it didn't matter, nothing mattered.

  She fell with him for what seemed like miles, cocooned in laughter, whispers and clumsy apology down on to the stained futon.

  'I'm a virgin,' she said, but she wasn't frightened like she'd always thought she would be.

  He reached over her, kissing her neck, and took a condom from a drawer. When he entered her it hurt, a searing pain right through her, like she was breaking in half, but she did not tell him. She just said I love you, and when she looked at him it was as if Kitty was seeing him for the first time.

  Con and her mother were laughing on the sofa, and they didn't move away from one another when she walked in.

  'Where are Sam and Violet?' Kitty asked angrily. It was half term; Nora was visiting her family in Ireland. Her mother giggled girlishly.

  'They're outside playing cricket with Con's friends.'

  'Have they had tea?' she said.

  'Yes, Kitty, they've had tea.' Her mother rolled her eyes at Con.

  'Jake said to say hi.'

  Con laughed, and her mother followed. They were spectacularly annoying. Kitty hated them.

  'Con is going to take a photograph of all of you for my birthday,' her mother said, as though this were reason for great celebration. 'He's a very talented photographer, you know.'

  'Well, I'm not going to be in it,' Kitty said. 'You can put a blank space where I'm meant to be. Can I talk to you in private, Marina?'

  'Oh OK,' her mother said. 'Though I don't see why we can't share things out in the open.' She followed Kitty into the hall.

  'I don't think you should let Violet and Sam be around these people, I don't think it's good. Please make them go home,' Kitty said.

  'Darling, I think you're overreacting. They're having a lovely time with Con's friends in the garden. We're all just having a relaxed Saturday afternoon. Stop being such a control freak. Come and sit with us - I feel like I haven't seen you for ages. Come and tell us what you've been up to.' Her mother took her hand. Kitty snatched it away.

  'Since when have you and Con Brown become an us? I don't want to sit with you and Con Brown and tell you what I've been up to. I hate Con Brown. He's using you -can't you see that? He's got no money, and he'll use you until he gets bored. Even Tommy hates him; he won't come over any more because of him.'

  'They're your friends,' her mother said.

  'What?' Kitty took a step back.

  'You brought them into my life. I would never have come across them if it wasn't for you. They're your friends. Maybe you're a bit jealous.'

  'I hate you,' Kitty said.

  Shrugging, her mother walked back into the sitting room.

  She calls Mark from her mother's bed. Violet and Sam are downstairs, sitting on the sofa looking at old photograph albums, friends again.

  'It's me,' she says.

  'Hey, you. How's it going?'

  'All right. We haven't seen her yet; we're going in a minute. Tell me something funny.'

  He proceeds to tell her about a conversation he's had with a Romanian poker-playing, carp-fishing, ex-lawyer taxi driver on the way to work.

  'His name's Eugene. He's invited me to be his first mate in the Massachusetts shark tournament. I've got his email; I think we should fix him up with my cousin. Great guy. . .'

  'Mark, I'm frightened,' she says.

  'I know, honey. I can tell. You have your wobbly voice.'

  'I don't know how to be. I know how to be for Sam and Violet, I know how to be for everyone else, because I can be myself; I don't need amour. But I don't know how to be for her. It's like I've built a wall and I'm numb, and I can't remember any more.'

  'Kitty, I will never know entirely what this is like for you, because it hasn't happened to me. I know an inch of it from loving you, and understanding through that. The only thing I can say is just try to remember that above all your mother is sick, she has an illness. You've done your best, you need to know that. It's like that poem, shit, how does it go? What will abide with us is . . . Fuck, what is it . . . ?'

  ' "What will survive of us is love?" '

  'That's the one.'

  'Thank you,' she says.

  The damp, which she has forgotten after living in America for so long, seeps into Kitty's bones. She shivers. Violet notices and puts her scarf over Kitty's shoulders. They walk through the car park towards the hospital, which is lit up like Harrods at Christmas. There is something comforting about the antiseptic glaring light. They are walking into a world of the orderly, of timed meals, temperature-taking, lukewarm baths and honest-faced nurses.

  Kitty looks at Sam and Violet. She takes a deep breath.

  'Ready?' she says.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The doorbell rang long into the night, and soon the sitting room was filled with the sharp reek of weed, which even her mother's scented candles couldn't dissipate. Sam and Violet were asleep, in their bunk beds, a storyteller tape speaking of lions, witches and wardrobes as they slept.

  Downstairs they were playing spin the bottle, and Kitty sat to the side, smoking, one cigarette after another. Con had many people with him, boys that she didn't recognise, men really, with expressionless faces, and coats that they kept on. The girls were dressed in black, had tiny skirts and tiny handbags. They kept passing round a tray of coke; it was one of her mother's painted trays from the kitchen, one that Kitty remembered her painting in the studio at Hay long ago, when life was not so complicated. She wanted to scream at the intruders to stop it, and explain who her family was, not this, and what that tray meant, but her voice had gone away.

  'Kitty, truth or dare?' Con was looking at her and smiling.

  'I'm not playing,' she said.

  'You have to, you're in the room.'

  'Come on, Kitty,' her mother said. 'Everyone else is playing. It's fun.'

  Marina didn't look like her mother any more, Kitty thought. A stranger had come and taken her away. Her silver eyes, Kitty's eyes, were black, and they frightened her.

  'Truth,' she said.

  'Did you or did you not screw my cousin?' Con asked in a silly falsetto voice.

  Everyone laughed, the faceless men boys too. She looked at her mother in appeal, and she wanted to lie, but Con's smile froze her like a deer in headlights.

  'Did you, Magpie?' he repeated.

  Kitty moved away from her nickname sliding with ease from his lips.

  'Did you?' her mother asked, and she sounded su
rprised, and a look went over her face that was something like hurt.

  Kitty looked down at the floor. It needed to be cleaned. Precious could have used her magic orange polish on it, she thought.

  'I think we can take that as a yes.' Con leaned back, satisfied, his hand on her mother's thigh.

  'That is so sweet,' her mother said. 'Darling, we should open some champagne.'

  Kitty shut her eyes.

  'Oh my God!' Con guffawed. 'He really did, didn't he? I was guessing! He wouldn't tell - prides himself on some fucking old-fashioned gentleman's code. My cousin popped your daughter's cherry! This is all just so fucking modem! Let's call Jakey. You can speak to him. Pass me the phone.'

  'Don't! Please don't!' It was the first time Kitty had spoken, and her voice sounded loud and thick.

  'Come on, Con, don't tease Kitty.' Her mother spoke tenderly, as if they were siblings.

  'I didn't answer your question. Give me a dare,' Kitty challenged him.

  'Your non-answer was the answer, my dear,' Con said.

  'I didn't say anything. Give me a dare.'

  'Take your clothes off and run down the street naked.'

  His brown eyes swept over her dismissively.

  'Fine,' Kitty said.

  She kicked off her jeans, and the pink cashmere jumper that she loved, the one that her mother had been given by Bestemama when she was born. She shed them on the ground like skin that she had no use for.

  She stood in her bra and knickers in the room full of strangers.

  'I'll take the rest off by the front door,' she said to Con.

  'You'll never do it. You're a prude. A babyish prude. You hadn't done anything until you met us. You were a loser, always. I've seen the pictures of you when you were little - you had glasses. You wouldn't do anything.'

  Kitty smiled at Con, at her mother, who was silent.

  'I will,' Kitty said.

  She welcomed the dark and the cool air, which slid against her nakedness like song.