From what Grace told me, sex is like magic. It makes you like that woman who steps into the box and disappears to this other place, where only one other person in the whole entire world knows you’re there. Because they’re the one that sent you.
I’d disappear if I could, but I can’t.
‘I should go,’ I say, but my words are an echo and his room is a cave with its closed curtains and the bedside lamp suddenly switched off by his swift fingers, which somehow turn to fire in the dark, spreading wild across my body so I can no longer tell which bit of him is where because the whole of Jacob is on me, against me, burning itself into me as my echo presses into what might be his chest but could be his shoulder. Whatever piece of him is so close to my mouth, it melts my ability to speak, any words I try to summon seeping into a wet patch of nothing on his shirt.
‘You like that, huh?’ Jacob says, cos maybe my damp echo wadded with his collar or his sleeve sounds like pleasure. ‘Izzy Chambers,’ he says, and his voice isn’t mean. It’s just somewhere else, in the film on his computer maybe, with those girls who are all ‘yes’s and groans and loving whatever it is the man does to them.
I hate him. Him and all those words he’s drawling into boa constrictor shapes around me, and his eyes as heavy a weight upon my chest as his hands.
‘Let’s get a picture.’ One of his hands comes away from my hip to snatch his phone. ‘Cheeeeeeeese,’ he says, like his bed is a monument, like we’re tourists, or friends.
And he’s laughing, but this is no joke. Because here I am now, on Jacob Mansfield’s monument bed, with Jacob Mansfield undoing my flies, fingers digging at my knickers like he’s playing Tetris and flipping shapes to fit them in a hole, those Monster knuckles inflicting tiny punches against my pubic bone, which kind of shrinks back into me, as I tell Jacob Mansfield’s chest or shoulder, ‘Wait.’ Only Jacob Mansfield’s chest or shoulder isn’t listening, cos Jacob Mansfield’s mouth is making these other noises, these grunts like the howler monkeys we heard when Daniel took Mum and me on our first ‘family date’ to the zoo.
‘Izzy Chambers,’ Jacob repeats now, and I wonder if, like me, he can’t quite believe that I’m here.
Isn’t this what I wanted? A boy and his hands and his mouth saying my name?
‘You OK, yeah?’
I must have known this was what I was coming for, right? When I climbed up the stairs of Jacob’s house and into his bedroom with the door pushed to? When I sat on the bed while he ate his Monster Munch? When I shook my head no to the crisps and said nothing when he kissed me? Isn’t this what I expected when Jacob pushed me gently on to the pillow and reminded me of our deal?
‘Izzy,’ Jacob says.
And I wonder if this is it, if this is the moment when he’ll offer to stop so I don’t have to come up with a yes or a no, but all he says, as he slips the condom from the packet with these fingers so delicate you’d think he actually cares, is: ‘Don’t say I don’t look out for you, yeah? You ready?’
But before I can answer, Jacob Mansfield has taken my virginity as easily as he took that photo with his phone.
SEVEN
There was this book Mum got me about feelings when I was a kid. She was paranoid, I reckon, that I was gonna be messed up, by not having a dad maybe, or the fact that my grandparents still refused to acknowledge that I was around. She didn’t come right out and say it and obviously she tried to sweep all that bad stuff under the carpet, but kids aren’t stupid, right? No matter how thick the surface, they feel the bumps in things. I could read it on Mum’s face, when we’d write her parents a Christmas card each year, and she’d lift the post off the mat on those Advent mornings, how the pain she felt at their lack of reply was like treading on Lego bricks. It eased off after Daniel came – he filled a hole, I guess, told us it was their loss and we didn’t need them anyway. ‘Just the three of us,’ he’d say, and we’d huddle in, welcoming the barrier he was shaping against the outside world and gratefully edging in.
The feelings book had come before then, when it was Mum perhaps who needed the reassurance, when she’d pause on the page that described loneliness, hug me a little tighter and then later, when she thought I was sleeping, whisper to her friends, who were finishing uni by then or moving in with their boyfriends and forging careers, plus all that other stuff ‘normal twenty-somethings’ do. And though she’d have died a little if she’d known she was letting me in on her secret, it was clear I was the thing that separated her from normal, that the catch of being sixteen and pregnant didn’t stop with her giving birth. So I was her hangover, I s’pose. Not the kind her mates had – theirs were a day at most – whereas Mum has been stuck with me for a lifetime. I looked at the book, but that mix of regret and shame I was feeling, not for anything I’d done, just for living – well, there was no page for that.
Mum seemed less bothered by what the normals were doing once she met Daniel. And that, along with all the other benefits of their relationship – a bigger bedroom, a bridesmaid’s dress, a holiday once a year – made me love him like crazy too because I could really believe Mum didn’t love me less for everything I’d stolen from her. It was Daniel’s idea to cut the happiness from the book and frame it, hang it on the wall so it was the first thing we saw when we got in.
So obviously that’s what I see now, when I come home from whatever just happened with Jacob, already wondering what it is that I’m feeling, whether it’s relief that it’s done or just a big fat sack of shame. I don’t know where the rest of the book’s got to, all those other pages like ‘sadness’ and ‘confusion’ and ‘guilt’. We weren’t expecting any of those once we had Daniel so we had no need to keep them, I guess, but I tip my room over anyway, hoping maybe I’ll find them and pin them to my T-shirt so they might seep into me, make me feel something, which has got to be better than the blank page I turned into once Jacob was done with me.
‘That was all right, wasn’t it, Izzy?’ he’d said after, more of a you can be off now then than an actual enquiry into how I’d found it. Whatever it was.
And he’d just shrugged his shoulders, like, what?, when I started to cry and kind of mumbled it wasn’t him, it was me.
But was it? Me, I mean? Or was it him? Or the two of us? Or something else I don’t have a name for?
Whatever it was, I wanted my mum. Pathetic, right? But I wanted her to be there when I got home, acting like some normal paranoid parent who thinks her daughter might be up to no good. Waiting up for me because I hadn’t told her where I was going and it was dark outside and she was worried. ‘What is it? ’ she’d say, this imaginary mother of mine. ‘You can tell me,’ she’d say. ‘I just want to help you. To protect you.’ And she would.
But she wasn’t and she didn’t and she won’t. Because she’s sleeping. Keeping the ten o’clock bedtime Daniel insists she needs for her beauty sleep, cos it’s so obvious, right, how Daniel’s rules are so much more important than me.
I change into my pyjamas. Could I burn the clothes? The knickers I’ve balled with the rest of them shoved beneath my bed because I swear I can smell it, that whatever it was that just happened is stuck in the fabric, not just of the underwear and jeans and T-shirt but of me. What I need is a wash, a scrub, a way to grow new and untouched skin. But a shower would be too loud, too risky, so I make do with changing into my pyjamas and am climbing into bed when —