‘I don’t care who likes me, Poppy,’ Juno said calmly. ‘And now you have to get out of bed, at least to have a shower and wash your bedsheets. And when you get back into bed, I’ll do this again. And again until you clean out the disposal unit and catch up with your work.’
Poppy peeled off her saturated duvet and wiped the wet hair from her eyes. Her pale thighs were covered in goosebumps and she started to shiver. ‘I won’t forgive you for this,’ she said, getting unsteadily to her feet.
‘Hey,’ Astrid said, from the corner of the room. ‘That was really harsh.’
Juno turned to her sister, her brow knitted in fury. ‘Whose side are you on?’
‘No one’s,’ Astrid insisted, then glanced at Poppy’s dripping bedsheets. ‘She’s just sad.’
Juno kicked the empty bucket to the opposite wall and shouted, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’
Chapter 29
POPPY
21.09.12
TWO DAYS LATER, POPPY was still reeling from the fight with Juno. Her nerves still zinged with rage whenever she heard Juno’s clipped voice through the corridors of the ship. It had escalated, turned into a screaming match, Poppy’s heart still pounding from the shock of the cold and the other girl’s rage. She’d said every vicious thing she could think up, slinging curses and hurts at Juno, but her words had seemed to glance off her. Juno had simply stared back, her eyes so narrow they were nothing but darkness. She’d fired insults at Poppy like well-aimed darts, right into her ribs. Juno had always had a way with words and every blow stung. Even two days later, Juno’s accusations tormented Poppy. She had been forced to cede the battle, to leave the bed and catch up on the chores she had missed, as well as turn up for dinner promptly, choking down every bite of food she had no stomach for. Juno oversaw each task, mentally ticking off debts in her head: the dusty corners, unchanged filters, broken lightbulbs and the filthy disposal unit. Poppy had spent the time since the fight tending to them all.
By the time she was finished scrubbing the grease-blackened tiles by the side of the stove, she was full of hate and in need of a shower.
She entered the bathroom. Taking a shower on the Damocles was problematic. When the water didn’t surge out boiling hot, it was icy cold and, no matter how many knobs Poppy twisted, she could never seem to get the balance right. Climbing out of her clothes, she switched it on and reached a hand out to test it. The water spattered out with a hiss, then roared to full pressure, searing the skin on her forearm. She fought the urge to tug it out of the steaming jet and instead let the pain grow more intense, the stab of the burn radiating to her elbow.
It was a relief to feel something. This pain was something. Her anger with Juno was something. Better, she had to admit, than the hollowed-out numbness that had ached inside her for months.
‘Pops?’ came a voice.
She started, and snatched her arm out of the water. Steam curled off it, and the skin flamed red.
Someone was banging on the door. ‘Let me in.’
Picking up the towel with her nametag on it, Poppy covered her nakedness and opened the door.
Harry was standing on the threshold, grinning. ‘Hey, dirty girl. Figured you were taking a shower. Mind if I join you?’ He entered and closed the door behind him before Poppy replied.
‘You did a good job out there,’ he said. Poppy shrugged, looking down at her black fingernails. She knew what Harry wanted before he asked, and she dropped her towel and tried to smile, hoping it would feel good, like holding her hand under the hot water felt good.
Harry had been Poppy’s first. It happened only once before the launch, during a club night in east London called ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ The Smashing Pumpkins, The Kings of Convenience and, predominantly, The Smiths played on the loudspeakers. Clever songs that were not easy to dance to. By midnight, all of Poppy’s friends were slumping on the edges of the room in serious little female huddles of conversation – growing maudlin and slipping out into the brisk night air to give the sweat on their shins a chance to dry.
Harry was famous at Dalton. In the dining hall, on one of the oak-panelled walls, was a list of names, winners of various school tournaments and awards. Under the provost’s annual award for sporting attainment, the name Harrison Bellgrave blazed against the dark wood three years running. Poppy was star-struck by him. She liked to imagine what it was like to be him, crowned in his mother’s famous gold curls, surrounded always by friends whose names were printed on the backs of their jackets, friends who sat on the tables in the canteen and shouted to each other across the narrow hallways as if the school was too small for them.
He could have chosen anyone but that night he chose her. She had been feeling so rotten, so keen not to be left alone in her own skin, nursing a drink while she skulked near the bar, too self-aware to dance alone.
When he’d asked her to dance, she’d asked herself why not. When he’d kissed her under the disco ball, his mouth had tasted of grenadine syrup and rum. He’d hailed a taxi back to his empty townhouse and when Poppy had slipped her shoes off in the entrance hall the marble beneath her heels felt glacial.
When he brought the condom out between his fingers, pink and shiny and cheap as toffee, she said it out loud: ‘Why not? Why the hell not?’
Harry had been tipsy and slurring his words, his eyes bright, his face flushed.
It’s happening, Poppy had thought, waiting for the explosion inside of her.
It was nothing like she’d imagined. She’d hoped that sex would be the opposite of loneliness. Perhaps during all those nights spent staring into the gloom at Dalton or watching her mother sob into her coffee, perhaps what her empty body had yearned for was another body. Despite the bathroom stall chatter, Poppy hadn’t really believed that it could hurt. Not as much as it did. She would tell her dorm-mate later that, ‘it was like shoving a fist in your mouth.’ But even more of a surprise was that, otherwise, sex felt exactly the way she had feared it would. Like getting drunk for the first time, the giggly numbness, the sickening lack of control, the uneasy topple back to consciousness and the ‘is that all?’ Like turning thirteen, like turning twenty. It was a surprise that it wasn’t a surprise.
He could have chosen any girl but he chose her. This beautiful boy. This rich boy. The only part she’d liked had been the end, Harry’s eyes squeezing shut and then the sound he made, like a child almost, plaintive and soft.
When he’d rolled over afterwards she’d found that a barrier had dissolved between them. They talked about ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ and laughed about it.
They had both been disappointed by fragile mothers, and ignored by their fathers. They were filled with the caution that children of single-parent homes are heir to. If you ever watch the pavement yawn open and swallow whole all the idle pedestrians on the street, you might never stride along it with the same careless ease ever again. You’d never be certain it would hold you. Hungover and sleepy, they’d talked about that as the night slipped by. ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ They agreed they would never be sure.
She knew that it would end, but not as suddenly as it had. At school the following week he could barely look at her, and then he told the boys in her class that, inside, she felt like sandpaper.
It was only a year later, when they were both accepted into the Beta, that Harry approached her at the bus stop and suggested the arrangement. He’d tiptoed around the exact words, his lips hiding a smile in the twilight. ‘Twenty-three years is a long time,’ he’d said. ‘It’ll look good to the public. And since we’re both going, and we’ve done it before, and you won’t be able to get pregnant…’