back, after Paul salvaged it from his office. I got him to paint it black for me, because I was going through a phase, Mum says. I say I’m still going through it. There are bits where I’ve chipped the paint, and there’s the old cheap wood veneer poking through.
Mum glances at my drawers – the tape drawer is open, boxes crammed in, tapes threatening to unspool under the pressure – and I picture the drawer I crammed the bill into popping open, a jack-in-the-box, and the letter flying up into the air, the pages of the bill – many, many pages of itemised phone calls – showering down around us.
‘Are you all right?’ She asks this every day. I think she’s hoping that, one day, she’ll hit the jackpot, and she can say, See, I can always tell.
‘I’m fine.’ I don’t say: I really am not fine; I’ve got a phone bill in my drawer that incriminates me to the tune of nearly a hundred and fifty quid, and you’re going to go absolutely bloody mental when you find out.
‘School was all right?’
‘Same as always.’ Mum nods. She rolls her tongue around the front of her mouth, between her teeth and the inside of her lip. This is what she does when she’s thinking about something. Or, when she’s thinking of whether to say whatever it is she’s trying to stop herself from saying. Weighing up whether the potential argument’s worth it or not.
Today, it’s not. ‘Okay,’ she says instead, and she backs away. I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. Not a word, just this curious hum of some song I only slightly recognise; and then the click of the television they have at the end of their bed coming on, the theme tune to Neighbours.
I time the slam of my door to the end of the song.
I can’t deal with the BT bill yet, in case she comes back. She’s got a habit of doing that. Knowing when something’s up, and surprising me a few seconds later, like she’s trying to catch me in the act. I take my clothes off, put them on the radiator. Pull joggers on, a Bluetones T-shirt I wouldn’t really wear out of the house any more. I turn on my computer, and I think about going online, dialling into AOL and getting on with more of my Organon project. But I can hear Mum muttering something, and I can hear Madge and Harold talking on the telly, and I know I wouldn’t get away with it, not right now. Fingers on the home keys, waiting for something. Not yet.
After dinner – leftovers, because it’s Monday, and every Monday is leftovers – Paul tells me to wait a minute, to stay where I am. Not in a nasty way. He couldn’t do anything in a nasty way, because he’s Paul. He’s just Paul. Anyway, he says, ‘We have to have a talk about this.’ And he pulls out a BT bill. Not the one from my drawer; this one, the envelope’s been destroyed. A ravenous animal tearing at a carcass. He slides it onto the table in front of me. It’s addressed to him at work, not here.
‘What is it?’ I ask. I tell myself to stay cool. I don’t know the details. I’m ignorant. An idiot, when it comes to things like this. I absolutely definitely don’t know that awful number right there at the end of it. The last few that went missing were blamed on the postman, and Paul got angry about the amount BT charged him, so they were looking into it. He must have had a copy sent to him at work or something.
Clever old Paul.
‘This has got to stop, Laura. Your mother and I—’ Every conversation where he tells me off, he invokes my mother, because her permission gives him the right to say whatever it is he’s going to say – he’s been living with us for five years now, and he’s still not comfortable being That Guy – so he looks at her, and she nods, and then he says, ‘we really need you to curb the phone use. Ten minutes every night. Nothing more than that, okay? Because this is the most expensive bill yet, and we haven’t made these calls. We barely even use the bloody thing.’
‘It’s just too much,’ my mother says.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I reply, which feels natural enough. Denial, first; always.
‘You’re making the calls, Laura. So it kind of is your fault, actually.’ Paul doesn’t really get angry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him even close to furious. Just this quiet steaming, where his face goes puffy and red because of what he’s choosing not to let out. ‘We’re not going to ask you to pay us back, but we have to put an end to this.’ Mum doesn’t meet my eyes this whole time. She either looks at him or down at her food, which she’s barely touched; because she never eats leftovers, which makes me wonder why the hell I have to. ‘And then there’s the Internet,’ Paul says.
‘Yes,’ I say. I don’t say: You are correct, there is the Internet, it is indeed a thing that now exists. I don’t want this conversation going apocalyptic.
‘It’s really ridiculously expensive, Laura. So, from now on you’re allowed to use it at weekends only, when it’s cheap, and even then, only for an hour.’
‘An hour?’ The room goes silent, like a TV that’s been muted, because he doesn’t get it; he doesn’t get what that is to me, not right now. He keeps talking even though I’m not hearing him. No tears, I tell myself, because it would be so stupid to cry over something like this; but I have to bite them back. Under the table, jelly legs.
‘Can I go?’ I ask, even while he’s talking, and my mother nods and does this dismissive little wave thing with her hand, not even really looking at me; and she obviously knew how this was going to go, because they’d already spoken about it. Even the way I’d leave the conversation. In advance, like: Just let her go.
I run upstairs, actually run, feet thumping into the wood underneath the carpets, and I go to my computer and I open up AOL, and I wait. I’ve wrapped the modem in a jumper already to mute the noise of it. It’s so whiny and stuttering. It sounds like hesitancy, and I always think: How come this thing that’s so amazing sounds so desperate and choked and sickly when it’s actually working?
I remember my father – my real father – bringing home a computer when I was really young. A Spectrum, with a tape deck. And you’d put the tapes in to load a game, and while they loaded, they made a noise like the modems now do, only screechier, more in pain. Oh God this hurts this hurts, and then suddenly there’s Rainbow Islands on your screen.
‘Come on, come on,’ I catch myself saying. Jittering. Like anticipation mixed with anxiety, a ball of tension in my gut and a pain in my head and every part of me slightly tingling. Every time the same, and I don’t know how bad it’s going to be until I reach the point where necessity means I’m dealing with it. I open the drawer I stuffed the bill into, take it out and put it into my rucksack, inside a geography textbook that nobody’s ever going to look inside. Then, I’ll walk through the park on the way to school, and I’ll go behind the big tree that fell over in the hurricane of ’87, and I’ll burn it. It’ll be as if it never existed.
I take out a mixtape I made for myself – or, that I made for Nadine, but hers was a copy of mine, really, because the songs degrade each time you copy them over, and I wanted the perfect version to listen to, the original, or as close to it as you can get – and I put it on. A mixtape is like a piece of art in itself. Making something where the tracks play off each other, the flow and the pace and the narrative; because they all have a narrative. While the first song is playing – You’ve got a gift, I can tell by looking; and I half-shout the words along with the song, under my breath – I pull out the box of matches that I keep at the back of my tape drawer, behind the cassettes that don’t even have boxes. Like unloved pets, waiting for new homes, for me to put Sellotape over the holes on the top of them and record over them. I pluck one of the matches out. Safety matches, the box says. Not the way
