Arthur
Even his email address was tragic: [email protected].
When I looked up, Paul smiled. If I were about ten years older, and could overlook his wonky tattoos, I think Paul the Porter and I would have made a great couple. Weird, but good. The kind of couple you meet and think, How did they get together? He shoved the drawer closed, made a note on his clipboard and sighed. ‘Take care, eh?’ he said, as though it were in any way under my control.
That afternoon, or several weeks later (who can really say?), New Nurse came to get me for my first scheduled above-board and totally legit trip to the Rose Room. I was going to meet people my own age – people Pippa had previously described as my ‘peers’. I didn’t actually know what that word meant, but in my mind they were a group of people higher up, more important, or cooler than me who would spend a lot of time peering down, from on high.
The Rose Room was almost empty when I came in and the sky outside the windows was the colour of nothing. Not grey, not quite white, just an indiscriminate thing hanging above us all.
‘Afternoon, everyone,’ Pippa said, sneaking me a smile as I sat down by myself at my usual table. ‘I’m Pippa and this is the Rose Room. The rules are pretty simple: spill something, please wipe it up, no diving, no horseplay. You can paint whatever you like, but I have some props that might inspire you, and sometimes we have themes. For example, this week’s theme is leaves.’ She held up a basket of brown leaves. ‘If you feel ill or need medical attention, please tell me, and … um … that’s about it?’ Pippa has the habit of making the end of every sentence sound like a question. It makes me feel the need to reassure her.
There were only three other members of the class that day. I was the only one in pyjamas.
On the table by the window, two girls who were around my age, wearing normal outdoor clothes and with shiny make-up, were laughing at something on the shinier girl’s phone. Opposite them was an older boy. He was chunky and wearing jogging bottoms and a matching T-shirt that looked both scruffy and expensive at the same time. He was resting his plastered leg on the chair beside him. Someone had drawn a massive penis on it in black marker pen.
Pippa asked the girls to put their phones away. They turned their phones over so they were screen-down, but didn’t put them away. They didn’t even notice when she put the leaves and paints on the table beside them.
The boy shook his head at the leaf Pippa offered him, pulled a biro from his pocket and started drawing.
Then Pippa came over to my table.
‘Leaf?’ she asked.
I nodded and she placed one in front of me. I was inspecting it, turning its crunchy self around to see which bit I wanted to draw, when I realized she hadn’t moved.
She mouthed something at me.
‘What?’ I asked.
She leant forward and mouthed something else at me. It seemed like she was saying ‘walk do hem’.
‘What?’ I asked again.
‘Talk to them,’ she whispered.
Then she went off and busied herself with something on her desk. I observed my peers at their table. The girls had picked up their phones again and were taking a photo of themselves holding up paintbrushes with open-mouthed smiles. The boy was colouring in blue biro so hard that the nib went straight through the canvas. From where I was sitting, he seemed to be drawing a knife.
I glanced back at Pippa. She had so much encouragement in her eyes that it almost hurt to look.
‘How did you hurt your leg?’ I asked. My words fell in the air somewhere between my table and theirs. And not one person acknowledged their journey.
I looked back at Pippa.
She nodded for me to try again.
I did. This time I knew they must have heard me, but nothing happened. In the end the shinier girl tapped on the boy’s canvas.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I think she’s talking to you,’ the girl said, pointing, with the same embarrassment for me in her voice that the girls I knew at school used to have. I would say something that made perfect sense and was actually quite funny and they would look at me, embarrassed. And we would wait for the moment to pass.
He turned and all three of them observed me.
‘Yeah?’ he asked me.
‘I asked how you broke your leg,’ I said.
‘Rugby,’ he said. Then he turned back and carried on colouring in the knife.
‘Where do you play?’ the less shiny girl asked him.
‘St James.’
‘My boyfriend just started playing there,’ she said.
‘No way! What’s his name?’
It turned out, much to everyone’s delight, that the less shiny girl’s boyfriend was one of the rugby boy’s favourite new team members. Naturally, they had to take a photo of them all together and post it online and tag the boyfriend with the caption ‘Look who we found!’
And then they moved, somehow, from that joyous discovery to the new series on Netflix that everybody was watching. The boy had already seen season two because it had leaked online, and the shinier girl screamed and put her index fingers in her ears because she didn’t want spoilers. But the rugby boy was determined to tell them about the character whose death they would literally lose their minds over. None of them looked back over at me.
I picked up my pencil and wrote FUCK in capital letters in the middle of my piece of paper.
Pippa came over to my table and sat down on Margot’s chair.
‘If you’re going to tell me to go over and sit with them and try again, I’m going to scream,’ I said.
Pippa’s face fell because that’s clearly what she’d been planning on doing.
I put my head down on my desk.
‘What is
