The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  I think boys aren’t meant to know if their mum is, you know, nice looking and that, but I did, somehow. Or maybe they can know but they’re meant to hate it. I saw the way men looked at her. It didn’t make me feel sick, or hate her. It was just the way it was. She was a person, I knew that, she wasn’t just mine. I don’t really get why boys find it so hard to think this way about their mums. She was a good mum, she made a great shepherd’s pie, she took too much interest in your homework, she had some funny sayings (‘Half the lies you hear aren’t true’), she wasn’t too strict, she was a good laugh. And she was still young, and nice looking with these very dark eyes, and I think she was probably a real looker at the point Dad met her and she didn’t change much over the years, not that you’d notice, anyway.

  I once brought a mate home, Jezzer it was, and it was school holidays, summer, and Mum was sunbathing in the garden in her bikini. Jez was the year above me in school and straight as a pound of candles; Mum wandered in from the garden to the kitchen to offer him a glass of Ribena with her freckled bare skin like really close and he sort of stopped in his tracks and blushed and Mum was just smiling and pouring water into the glass and the drink was pink and then deep-red coloured as she stirred it, just like Jez’s face. Really made me want to laugh, but I didn’t, because I could see that would make matters worse and that scalding kind of blushing’s a bit – well, it makes you feel sorry for someone, doesn’t it?

  Mum, Ruth Beamish, was descended from a Fen line too – her grandmother was one of the Ice Maidens, a champion Fen skater – that’s probably why she had such good balance. We used to walk to this barn in Farmer Martin’s field to try and spot the barn owl that lived there and there was a skinny plank sticking out over the ditch and she would always challenge me to walk it and she would do it, no trouble, but I’d get spooked by the owl, it would appear suddenly out of one black hole of a window like a ghost and sweep out over our heads, the exact same colour as a loaf of bread, making me wobble and hurry to the other side of the plank, looking like an idiot. That’s maybe her contribution, Mum’s bit of the DNA, good looks and good balance, but she could be snarky sometimes; liked her own company. Loving, yes.

  It started in Year Nine. Jo was a new teacher and I noticed her on the day of that first assembly, I noticed that she was bursting the seams of her pink fluffy jumper. Small with this head of blonde curls, like one of those cherubs in St George’s Church – and big grey eyes behind these sort of owl glasses – how could any boy not notice her? I didn’t know how old she was and I didn’t care; she just made me feel long-legged and hot whenever I walked past her, adjusting my tie or rolling up my shirtsleeves, swaggering, Beamish-style, you know.

  I towered over her already. That was a great feeling. At fourteen I’d shot up – five foot ten and counting, my feet way bigger than Mum’s dainty ones, I already took the same shoe size as my dad, and being able to look down on a teacher’s head, on a blonde, cute teacher’s head – seeing the little pink tips of her glasses frame through her hair, and how the ends curled, sort of tenderly around her ears – a new feeling, totally new, it made me stop in the corridor and want to think about it, what the—?

  I remember heat flooding me and a tightness in my chest and then whoosh – as if something was . . . I don’t know, swooping. When I came across Jo – when I saw the back of her dandelion head from across the playground, or her arriving in that funny yellow car of hers and climbing out, books, folders, flattened hard against her chest; when I looked up in class because I heard her snap open her glasses case and knew she was trying to disguise the way she was staring at me – it happened again. Like something had swooshed down and gathered me up, like when you see a marsh harrier swoop down on a mouse over the fen; nick it, lift it away. I almost wanted to look up, it was so totally weird. Was something falling on me? I couldn’t tell if it came from inside me, if I was making this feeling myself, or if it was – well, I know this sounds funny – if it was landing on me from somewhere, like a brick. I wanted to tell someone, talk to someone, ask Dad maybe. Well, I did and I didn’t. Dad might laugh. And . . . it was mine, this weird feeling, I didn’t want it spoiled.

  I thought maybe I could tell Jo. I somehow thought: Well, this is stupid, yeah, but not totally. I thought that she should be the one I should tell. So one day I saw these little earrings in Peacocks in Ely. Cheap. Cute. Little gold-coloured birds. Not real gold, of course, but sweet. I thought about her ears and the feelings washed around me again and I paid ten quid and they wrapped the blue cardboard box in yellow tissue paper.

  And she goes at once, pushing the box back at me, ‘Drew, I can’t take these.’

  And I’m a bit sad but I try not to show it, and just say, ‘Why not, Miss?’

  Funny to call her Miss. Doesn’t sound right. I’m almost sick with nervousness. Inside I’m shaking and spluttering but on the outside I’m all . . . I’m . . . I put my hand up to my chin, brush it against the little soft hairs while I wait for her to say something.

  ‘It would be—’ she goes and I know before she says it, I hear it – that fucking awful word: ‘inappropriate’. So I snatch the bird earrings. I shove the box in the back pocket of my school trousers and act like I don’t give a shit.

  But as I’m going out the door I say to her: ‘Thought your ears looked a bit bare, Miss, that’s all,’ and at that word ‘bare’ she blushes, and I stand there for like two seconds, looking at her. She’s biting her lip. She’s widening her eyes and making a funny little gesture, sort of lifting her shoulders up towards her ears like she’s trying to, I don’t know, disappear inside her own body or something. Whatever. She can’t hide that pink flush. So I grin to myself, turn my back. I’m safe. The swooping, the lifting, the feeling like I’m being carried off. I’m not on my own. It’s not as if Miss Lavender feels nothing.

  So then the next day, I try again. I leave the earrings in their yellow tissue and the little eggshell-blue cardboard box on her desk. Now she’ll have to go out of her way to give them back to me, look for me, after class. Single me out from the others and how will she manage that without it being . . . inappropriate? I spend all day thinking of her, imagining her bothered about it. And four o’clock, coming back to collect my tie from the classroom where I left it dusting the floor behind my chair, she says – as if casual, as if she hasn’t waited for this opportunity all day – ‘Oh! Drew, a word, please.’

  I come to her desk. I stand there. I’m so tall these days, like honestly from one day to the next I don’t know what size I’m going to be – a bit like my voice, will it come out high and squeaky or gravelly, low – so I just actually feel like I’m growing, stretching like a shock of wheat as I stand there. She looks at the door, which is closed. She does the hunching-shoulder thing again, like she’s trying to duck away from me, duck out of it. Then she lifts her chin and puts her hand on the box of earrings. She picks it up and pops the lid open and the gold birds sit there on their blue cardboard, beaks trained on us.

  ‘It’s very sweet of you. I’m – touched, to be honest. I don’t know if you knew – if you’d been told? I’ve just lost my mother – cancer – I’ve been feeling wobbly.’

  This I didn’t know, and didn’t expect. And there’s more –

  ‘And, well, I don’t know – I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but my divorce came through last week too. I’m actually – I’m really, you know, “Miss” Lavender again, though I know you all call me that in school anyway. I never took – his – Bob’s name.’

  She smiles. Small teeth. A real smile, very quick, though, and then back to seriousness. Squeezing at the place where her glasses usually sit on her nose with her fingers. Tired, she looks.

  ‘Anyway. So. I’ll keep the earrings, as long as that’s the end of it. No more presents, Drew, you know? It will get me into trouble. It will give people – the wrong idea.’

  The blue box is flipped closed; the birds in their dark nest.

  ‘Yes, Miss.’


  Innocence. All innocence. I just stare at her like I’ve no thought about what this ‘wrong idea’ could be. But I stare at her all over, if you know what I mean. Up, down and all around. I stare long enough to see if I can make her blush again. I stand there long enough to smell the perfume she wears, which is very faint but sort of silky and – feathery. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s pale. It tickles my nose.

  ‘Oh and Drew, Mr Roe said you didn’t hand your History homework in this week and you got detention? I – well – if the detention is Tuesday, I wanted to warn you, I’m supervising. I mean – just so you know.’

  Just so I know. Fuck me. What on earth is that about? To warn me? Sounds more like – somehow, preparing me for the fact that we’re going to be on our own in a small sweaty room together. Me, her and those hefty tits of hers. I mean, right away I picture them. The fluffy pink sweater, some kind of wool, I think Mum calls it angora, that sweater lifting over her head. A pink bra, the kind with little wires underneath that sort of force them up, in your face, really hard. A bra made of lace so you can see the dark nipples nosing through. Oh God. That’s the sort of bra she’d wear, I’m sure of it. She might as well be naked now – I’ve got a hard-on so fucking enormous it’s practically tapping on the desk.

  ‘OK, Miss. See you Tuesday.’

  I stumble out the door somehow. I have the weirdest impression that she’s smiling about something; she could even be laughing. She’s so quiet, Miss Lavender, such a soft voice and a secretive way about her, it’s hard to know. In any case, I’m concentrating on swaggering out without bumping into any chairs. And thinking that I’d better try and get some fags before Tuesday so I can bribe Stokey – the other one with a History detention – not to turn up.

  The detention day, the longed-for day, comes at last, like a birthday. The days leading to that Tuesday I spend so long in the shower before school that Mum is banging on the door, shouting: ‘God’s sake, Drew, what you doing in there?’ Listening to the Plain White T’s on my iPod . . . Oh, what you do to me, it’s what you do to me . . . and picturing Miss Lavender, her little mouth with its small tongue, her perfect heart-shaped face, that tickling scent of her, the way it settles on me like something just breathing on my face, just as I fall to sleep. I love her! I whisper to myself. It isn’t a shock to me. I grew up under this and around it – I don’t know if my mates feel like this – for me it’s always filled every crack in our poky old house: the way Dad looks at Mum, the way she touches him – so here it comes: my turn, and though it’s powerful it doesn’t surprise me, it’s just my due.

  Why her, though? Why not Poppy Martin or some other girl in Year Nine? What is it about Miss Lavender and the grey ring-binder files she carries pressed against her chest, like someone’s out to prise them off her; or her little wrist with that slim gold watch that seems to swim around it, way too solid, too big for her; or that little yellow car of hers sliding between the school gates, nosing into its regular parking spot, and making me think about a tongue slipping inside a mouth?

  I don’t say anything to my mates. I don’t tell Stokey, though he must wonder why I want him to miss detention and no doubt earn himself a second one as a result. I don’t tell Ricky either, though he’d probably just make some disgusting joke about someone’s mum. Mature pussy’s the best, he’d say, trying to sound as dirty as possible and like he knows anything at all. The Mum thing is gross – especially when I think back to that day when Jez was in our garden and suddenly got all embarrassed about Mum in her bikini – but Miss Lavender’s younger than that! And she’s not even married and she’s nobody’s mother and – well, that’s just crap and no one really believes in it, do they – our English teacher, I remember him saying, and he was stuttering, you know, and blushing – his advice for finding ‘Freudian imagery’ in any text was: ‘If it’s longer than it’s round it’s a phallus and if it’s rounder than it’s long it’s a womb’ – A phallus? Like any of us knew that word! We just laughed. Threw paper aeroplanes at him. Says it all, though. If you fancy a girl in Year Seven you’re a paedo and if you fancy an older one you want to shag your own mum. Fuck off.

  I know mothers who are old boilers, dried old. I know boys who could never in their wildest dreams imagine their mother doing it – too disgusting to go there. But I’m not like that. I’ve seen her underwear, hanging on the line, she never bothered to hide it. Purple. Lace. I’m not saying I think about it, but you can’t avoid it either. Music. Underwear. Beer and smoking on the back step when he came in from the farm, him with his shirt off, her rubbing sun lotion on his shining brown back that looked like wood, like an oiled wooden tree – and her taking the cigarette out and resting it next to her beer, and saying, now, Billy, don’t do it tomorrow, don’t work all day without a shirt, what about skin cancer? Her hands all over his skin, after – what, twenty years together. I’m not stupid, that’s all I’m saying. I’ve got eyes in my head.

  So, Jo’s in the History classroom with the history books piled beside her on the desk and wearing her glasses firmly pushed up her nose, and there’s a smell in the room like Christmas. Satsumas. These neat little cups of peel beside her, one inside the other; and she’s popping the last segment into her mouth as I step in.

  ‘All right, Miss.’

  ‘Drew. You know what you have to do. Do you have the letter from your parents?’

  I hand over the letter that states that my parents know I’ve been given a detention and give their permission for me to stay after school. Mrs Ruth Beamish. Mum signed it. Best handwriting.

  ‘Don’t suppose they were very pleased, were they now?’ she says, in her teacherly way.

  I shrug. ‘Dunno, Miss. They know I’m OK. They don’t worry ’bout me.’

  ‘OK, well, sit down.’ She’s sort of flapping one hand in front of her the way you shoo the coopy hens, as if to say, go then, go away from my desk. It pleases me just to stand there. To put my hands on the desk and stand over her, looking down at her and forcing her to look up at me. And then I see it. See them.

  ‘You liked the earrings then, Miss.’

  Her hand flies up to her ear, as if she wants to cover it. She’s all panicky. She’s frowning and her big eyes, the pupils inside them darken, sort of filling up the grey colour with a deep dark black.

  ‘Look—’ She glances towards the door of the classroom like she’d like to escape. The door is firmly shut. The backside of a poster blocks the glass. We’re safe in here. No one can see us. Oh, that’s if you don’t count the window to the school field, which is behind me.

  A beat starts up, a drum-tap, fingers tapping on a table while I wait for her to right herself again.

  ‘Yes. Thank you. I do actually – I really like them.’

  A smile. A rare smile and I notice she has this tiny thread of satsuma resting on her blouse. Resting there just above – just in that awesome place where I really shouldn’t be staring. Her T-shirt is black, so it’s hard not to notice. I could pick it off and see if she slaps my hand away? This would be my most daring act so far, a make-or-break gesture, should I risk it?

  ‘Go and sit at the desk, Drew. Don’t hover round me.’ She glances down at herself, her eyes following mine. Picks off the thread of white. Grins. ‘Shoo! Sit down! Get on with – whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.’

  ‘It’s about John Bellingham, Miss. I need some help.’

  ‘Well. Bellingham? Is that what you were working on? You know that – that really is my topic. I actually work in a museum over at St Ives on a Saturday – I’m in the local history society. Don’t get me started, Drew, I’m afraid I’m rather obsessed.’

  And that’s how it goes and that’s how it begins. She slaps me down if I act out of order. But she’s friendly and smiley and the feeling I have around her is just of that, of friendship and easiness and like there isn’t the usual screen there, the teacher–pupil screen that makes you feel there isn’t a person behind it that they really want you to kno
w. OK, I have a massive crush on her and she knows it. But we sort of agree to ignore it. It’s impossible not to know that she likes me right back. She can’t help herself.

  One time she says, ‘You’re a very unusual boy,’ and I grin and grin, and later, another time, she says, out of the blue as if thinking it through to herself, ‘You’re a very popular boy, Drew, you’re lucky. I felt very lonely when I was in school.’ Another day she laughs, really laughs at a joke and covers her mouth with her hand and says that she hasn’t laughed like that in years and it’s weird watching her, I mean she doubles up, she really laughs, her eyes are watering. I can’t even remember what I said, I’m embarrassed by then at the sight of her, at the – lack of control – it’s just odd. And she pushes her hair away from her eyes and her hair is all messy and she suddenly sobers up and says: ‘God, I think I’m cracking up.’

  One time she says: ‘You’re so clever, Drew. You should think about A levels. University.’

  ‘University. Is there one in Ely?’

  She laughs at this. ‘No, you’d have to go further afield. There’s Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge. That’s where I went.’

  ‘Cambridge? I can’t imagine it, Miss. I just sort of picture myself on a tractor like my dad.’

  She comes close to me then and takes her glasses off to clean them. She picks up a bit of her T-shirt to do this. Does she do this deliberately? My eyes go straight to the little place above her waist where I can see flesh, pink flesh.

  ‘That’s the hardest part, Drew. The imagining part. Picturing it. My mum was a hairdresser. I do know exactly what you mean. I’m just saying that you’re clearly very bright. Your life could in fact be quite different.’

  I picture Dad then, while I’m staring at that patch on her tummy, while she’s speaking. I once stood in a field with him, after he’d let me sit up front in the tractor while he ploughed it, and he jumped out and picked up a clod of earth and put it under my nose and said: Smell that, Drew. Rich as chocolate, it is. Doesn’t it make you want to lick it? Do you know only five per cent of the land in this country is classed as first-class agricultural land – but all of ours is!