beside Johannes, following his progress through New York’s underworld.
Johannes bought a game called Tekken 4 and an extra handset. They played against one another. Little Japanese girls and cartoon monsters. Teresa was not without talent; she knew exactly what to do and sometimes won. But she only enjoyed it for a short time. Johannes could carry on for hours.
When Teresa was leaving, Johannes’ mother would often come rushing in with a hand-held vacuum cleaner to hoover up the biscuit crumbs before Teresa had even got through the door. She would walk the two hundred metres to her own house, and sometimes she felt as if she wanted to cry. But she didn’t cry.
One day in May, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Teresa was standing in her garden with no idea what to do. Her bike was directly in front of her, leaning against the wall of the garage; the path leading to Johannes’ house was on her left, the drive leading up to the main road was on her right, and her own house was behind her. She didn’t want to go in any of those directions.
She stood there on the lawn, arms dangling at her sides, and the only directions that held any appeal were up and down. To sink down into the earth, or fly up among the clouds. Both routes were closed to her. She wished she was an animal, she wished she was someone else. She wished she had the ability to pretend.
She must have stood like that for five minutes, motionless. As she stood there a very clear thought formed in her mind and crystallised into words. She repeated them to herself over and over again.
She swayed on her feet. She considered allowing herself to fall forward with her arms held at her sides to see if the ground would open up. She knew it wouldn’t, so she didn’t do it. Instead she turned her body to the left and forced her legs to move. She left the path to Johannes’ house and went and sat in the cave. She looked at the rough walls, tried to remember when she and Johannes had had their collections of various objects in there. It just made her feel sad.
The words refused to leave her, they went round and round and wouldn’t let her think about anything else. Enveloped in the words she went back to the house, kicked off her shoes in the hallway, went to her room and closed the door behind her. She took out an empty notebook she had been given as a present for her eleventh birthday, and wrote the words right at the top of the first page:
I have nowhere to go.
Immediately more words appeared in her mind, and she wrote those down too:
There is no road.
She sucked her pen and looked at the words. She was able to think again, and tried to find a sentence that fitted with the other two. In the end she chose:
And yet I must go.
She put down the pen and silently read through what she had written. Then she read it out loud.
I have nowhere to go.
There is no road.
And yet I must go.
It sounded good. It almost sounded like a real poem. Somehow everything seemed easier when she had written it down. As if it wasn’t about her anymore. Or rather it was about her, but in a better way. As if she was part of something big when she stood there not knowing what to do.
She flicked through the notebook. It was a lovely book, with a leather cover and at least eighty empty, cream-coloured pages. Her stomach flipped as she thought of those pages being filled. With her words, her sentences. After sucking her pen for a while she wrote:
There must be someone else.
Then she carried on with that thought until she reached the bottom of the page. She turned over and carried on writing.
The summer between years 5 and 6 was different from the previous one. Teresa had begun to develop breasts, and tufts of downy hair were visible in Johannes’ armpits. If they cycled to a remote spot to swim they were embarrassed when they had to change in front of one another, and Teresa hated that. It was so unnecessary.
One day when they were drying off in the sun on a rock by the lake, Teresa wrapped her arms around her legs, drew her knees up to her chin and said, ‘Johannes. Are you in love with me?’
Johannes opened his eyes wide and looked at her as if she had asked in all seriousness whether he came from Saturn. He answered very firmly: ‘No!’
‘Good. Because I’m not in love with you either. So why are things so strange between us?’
Teresa had been afraid that Johannes would dismiss the question, say that he didn’t know what she meant, but instead his eyes narrowed in concentration. He looked out across the water and shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
Teresa looked at his pale, slender body with its prominent knees and elbows, his sharp chin and high forehead. His full, girlish lips. No. He wasn’t her type of boy. Against her better judgment she thought those hairy, slightly loose-limbed boys were the most attractive.
She asked, ‘Do you want to kiss me?’
‘Not really.’
‘But will you do it anyway?’
Johannes turned to look at her. He scrutinised her face searching for signs that she might be making fun of him, but found none. ‘Why?’
Teresa shrugged her shoulders. She looked at his soft, rounded lips and felt a tingle in her stomach. She really wasn’t the slightest bit in love with him, but she wanted to know what those lips felt like.
Johannes gave an embarrassed smile, and he shrugged too. Then he leaned forward and placed his lips on hers. The tingle in Teresa’s stomach grew stronger. Their lips were as dry and warm as the crust on a freshly baked loaf of bread. Then she felt his tongue between her teeth and pulled her head back.
‘What are you doing!’
He couldn’t look her in the eye, and his cheeks flushed deep red. ‘You said you wanted us to kiss.’
‘Yes, but not like
‘But that’s what you do.’
‘When you’re in love, yes, but I mean we’re not in love, are we?’
Johannes curled up into a ball just as Teresa had done and muttered, ‘Sorry.’
Teresa also started to blush, but mostly because she realised she had been stupid. She was about to place her hand on Johannes’ shoulder, but gave him a playful punch instead. ‘Doesn’t matter. It was my fault. OK?’
‘You said you wanted us to kiss.’
‘Listen, can we just forget this now?’
Johannes looked up from his cocoon. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This whole thing. Can we forget about it now?’
Presumably Johannes understood what she meant. All of it. The whole boy-girl thing. He said, ‘I suppose so.’
Teresa rolled her eyes.
In October, Johannes’ father disappeared. One day he came home and said that he had met someone else, that it had been going on for a long time, and that he now intended to start a new life and
This was what Johannes told Teresa the following day as they went for a walk to see if the sheep were still there. Johannes walked along with his hands pushed deep in his pockets, staring straight ahead as he talked. When he had finished, Teresa asked, ‘Is it hard?’
Johannes stopped and looked at his shoes. ‘It would be hard,’ he said, ‘if he came back.’ He looked up and smiled even more unpleasantly than the man in the GB ice cream ads. ‘It would be absolutely fucking fantastic if he
