Page 16 of The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up
‘And, will you come back?’
She nods, and I know what that means. She’s trying to hold back tears. She leans forward and gives me a kiss on the cheek, and the smell of her is so familiar that it calms me. Floral and light. She smells like home.
‘Tomorrow,’ she says. ‘Or the next day. Soon.’
I wait until she’s gone before repeating that word back to her. ‘Tomorrow.’
I lie there, thinking about David for a while. How he wasn’t the first man to hurt me.
10
THEN
The first time Mick hits me, my overriding reaction is to be surprised that he didn’t do it sooner. I am sixteen, in that strange, in-between space between childhood and adulthood. Old enough, according to the law, to have sex, to smoke, to leave education, to get married with a parent’s permission. Old enough to make some very adult decisions, then. But not legally an adult. Like every teenager that went before me, I think that everything is unfair and that the world is conspiring against me.
I am in my room, the radio turned up loud. I am experimenting with my hair, which is long and thick, and which I spend a lot of time plaiting in elaborate ways. I am trying to decide whether or not to lose my virginity to Mark Riley, who I’ve been seeing for about a month. Annabelle says I should, that he won’t wait around much longer if I don’t, and I know that’s probably true but there’s a part of me that wants to save this for someone who would wait around. And for someone I would find it impossible to keep waiting. There’s nothing wrong with Mark Riley, per se, but I recognise that he is a school boyfriend, that whether we have sex or not, we will not stay together more than a couple more months at most. When we first got together, atsomeone or other’s sixteenth birthday, he pushed me up against a tree and told me he’d fancied me for weeks and I was flattered. And drunk. When he kissed me, I liked the laziness of it, the way he took his time, when other boys I had kissed were in a hurry and lacked any kind of technique. And that is enough, at sixteen, for the two of us to be a pair. But is it enough for me to do this huge thing with? I know that I will always remember the name of the person I lose my virginity to. Do I want it to be Mark Riley?
When Annabelle comes in, I jump.
‘Sorry,’ Annabelle says, but straight away she negates the apology with a shrug. ‘I knocked. You’ve got this too loud.’ She crosses my room and turns the volume down a few notches. She doesn’t like the same kind of music I like. I know that after one or two more songs, at most, she will bossily put a CD on.
‘Who let you in?’ I ask.
‘Mick.’ Annabelle makes the face she always makes when we talk about Mick.
She knows I can’t stand him but I haven’t told her why. Not the full story, anyway. If she knows, she’s pieced it together herself, because I have never said out loud that Mum is regularly assaulted by her boyfriend. If I told someone, wouldn’t it seem strange that I hadn’t done anything about it? I have wanted to do something about it. But what? I am powerless.
‘I didn’t know he was here,’ I say.
Mick is usually at work at this time on a Friday. He’s a hospital porter and he works long days, comes home wanting a fight. By the time he does, I’m usually long gone. To Annabelle’s, or another friend’s, or out somewhere, like the Bells, which is the only pub in town that doesn’t seem to care how old you are when you go in and try to look as grown up as possible and ask for a vodka, lime and soda.
‘Is tonight the night?’ Annabelle asks, sitting down on the edge of my bed and looking at me in the mirror as I unravel one tiny braid after another. ‘With Mark?’
The addition was unnecessary. This is Annabelle’s favourite question, has been for weeks, ever since Mark and I got together. Sometimes I wonder why Annabelle is quite so invested in my relationship. She has a boyfriend herself. He’s called Tom and he’s a couple of years older. When he is around, Annabelle rolls her eyes a lot, as if the rest of us are way too immature for her and she doesn’t know what to do about it. Tom is doing A Levels in Business and PE and Annabelle gets really sniffy if anyone asks why he’s only doing two, and I have kept it to myself but I’m not sure what kind of career that might possibly lead to.
‘I’m not going to tell you when it’s going to happen,’ I say, reaching for a pair of tweezers and attacking my already-thin eyebrows. ‘It’s gross. I’ll tell you after.’
Annabelle sighs, flops backwards. ‘You need to get a move on, Shelley, because…’
‘I know. He won’t wait around much longer. Tell me again. It’s so romantic.’
‘Your problem is, you expect life to be the way it is in films and books, and it just isn’t. Chances are, your first time will be pretty shit, but at least it will be over with then.’
‘You know, you’re really not selling this,’ I say.
I wouldn’t admit it to Annabelle, but I do expect a bit of romance. For it to feel natural and right. Last time I was with Mark, in his bedroom while his mum did the ironing in front ofCasualtydownstairs, he had stuck his fingers inside me and asked me whether I liked it. And I hadn’t known how to say that I didn’t. That it had come as a shock, and been a bit painful, and hadn’t made me feel special at all.
No, I think, shuddering at the memory. I will not sleep with Mark. I will finish things instead. I know Annabelle won’tunderstand, because she seems to think that any boyfriend is better than no boyfriend, but I have not yet given up on the kind of love we used to see in Disney films, before everything got so complicated.
Annabelle gets up and puts a CD on without asking if it’s okay. She chooses Beyoncé and it’s not my favourite but I sing along to ‘Crazy in Love’ anyway, and by the end of it, I feel sort of giddy, and I’m not sure whether it’s the song or the decision I’ve made.
And then I hear it. Mick’s voice, loud and low. How long has he been shouting for? I go to my door, open it, and move towards the stairs. He is in the hallway, hands on hips. Clearly furious about something.
‘What makes you think you can just ignore me?’
‘I wasn’t ignoring you. I… I didn’t hear you.’
He hates being contradicted; I know this. It doesn’t matter who’s right. It’s safer to just go along with what he says.
