A tap on her shoulder. She turns. Bel has stepped back a pace, is regarding her with the same mix of fear, curiosity and disgust that she feels herself.
‘Amber,’ says Bel. ‘That’s my name. Who I am. Amber Gordon.’
Kirsty takes a moment to find her voice, and is amazed by how steady it is when it finally comes.
‘Kirsty,’ she says. ‘I’m Kirsty.’
Noon
Jade is being Madonna. Everyone’s being Madonna this summer, though the older girls are finding bits of lace and fingerless gloves in dressing-up boxes to look the part more convincingly. Jade’s had to make do with wrapping a cotton scarf they’ve found, damp and slightly grubby, tied to the lychgate of the church, round her head, and hitching up her ra-ra skirt to show a greater expanse of thigh. She stands on the church wall and gyrates, flinging her hands above her head and clutching them together to flex her chest muscles.
‘Like a vir-gin – pooh!’ she pants, for the dance is energetic and her stamina spud-fed. She runs her hands up and down her body suggestively. ‘Fucked for the very first time.’
‘Touched,’ says Bel. ‘It’s “touched”.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ asks Jade. ‘Luh-ike a vur-ur-ur-ur-gin, uh-when yuh heartbeat’s nuh-nuh-nuh necks to mine.’
She wobbles, saves herself with a whirl of the arms. Kicks out one hip then the other, like a burlesque dancer. ‘Wuh-hoooo-uhuh-uh-woah-o-uh-woah-oh, woah-oh,’ she sings. Bel thinks for a minute, then climbs up beside her, strikes a pose.
‘No, no,’ says Jade. ‘Not like that. You’ve got to give it welly with the hips. Like you’re on a gondola.’
Bel’s not allowed to watch Top of the Pops, so she’s not seen the video. In fact she only knows the song from listening, transistor radio pressed to her ear on bottom volume, to the chart show on Radio Luxembourg after bedtime on a Sunday night. But she imagines what it would be like to be on a wobbly boat on an Italian canal, and thrusts her hips out as though trying to keep her balance. ‘That’s it,’ puffs Jade, and they both giggle.
The church door clunks open, and one of the Good Women of the Flower Committee, as Bel’s stepfather Michael calls them, steps out, carrying a pair of green-encrusted glass vases. She wears a Puffa jacket and tartan trousers, and her grey hair is clamped down by a silk scarf printed with snaffle bits and spurs. She tips the dregs from the vases into the church’s side-drain, straightens up and addresses Jade and Bel.
‘What are you girls up to?’
‘Nuffink!’ Jade employs her default response. ‘It doesn’t look like nothing to me.’ Her voice, adjusted to disciplining dogs in the open air, roars across the graveyard like a hurricane. ‘What are you doing on that wall? I hope you’re not damaging it.’
‘No, we’re not,’ says Bel in her plummiest tones. ‘We’re just dancing.’
‘Well, you can go and dance somewhere else. If that wall falls down, we’ll be expecting your parents to pay for it.’
Jade looks down at the century-old cross-stones beneath her feet. ‘We’ll take that chance,’ she tells her. ‘Don’t think it’s going to fall down for a bit.’
‘Don’t be cheeky!’ bawls the woman. ‘I know who you are, Jade Walker. Don’t think the whole village hasn’t got its eye on you!’
‘Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir,’ says Jade, and Bel sniggers. Girls in her world don’t talk to grown-ups like this. And if they do, they get sent to their rooms. Or, in her case, the cellar.
The woman tuts and heads back into the porch. Casts a parting shot over her shoulder. ‘I’m very busy or I’d be sorting you out right now, young lady,’ she says. ‘As it is, I’m going to finish these flowers, and by the time I come out I expect you to be gone.’
‘Or what? You’ll call the vicar?’ asks Jade.
‘Hunh,’ says the woman, and slams the church door.
‘Silly cow,’ says Jade. Crosses her wrists above her head and circles her hips suggestively. ‘Yuh so fine, and yuh mine.’
Bel copies the stance, joins in singing in her fine contralto. ‘Ibbe yoz, tuh the enduv tiy-yime-’
‘Woah,’ says a male voice. ‘It’s an itty-bitty titty committee.’
Bel starts, wobbles, clutches Jade’s arm for support. They hold balance for a couple of seconds then plummet together into the graveyard. Bel catches her thigh on a tilted gravestone as she falls, breaks the skin.
‘Ow!’ She looks down at the blood beginning to seep through the pink cotton of her shorts. Jade struggles to her feet and stands, arms akimbo, on a mossy box-tomb.
‘Piss off, Shane,’ she says.
Bel looks up. The eldest of the Walker boys stands on the pavement, a cut-price Martin Kemp in leather jacket and swooped-back hair, grinning blankly.
‘Who’s yer little buddy, Jade?’ he says.
‘Piss off, Shane,’ she says again.
Bel stares at him long and hard. She’s never had a chance to study him close up before; the general village policy is to scurry past when he appears, eyes averted. Shane, at nineteen, has a string of convictions for burglary and car theft: lacking his brother Darren’s street smarts and driving skills, he keeps getting caught. He’s only avoided prison because of his famously low IQ, but everyone predicts he’ll end up there sooner or later.
‘Think you’re the Human League, do you?’ he asks. His jaw seems to dangle from his skull as though its fixings have never been properly tightened, so that his lips have a wet, loose look to them.
Jade pulls a tuft of grass and earth out from by her foot, lobs it at him. ‘I said piss off, Shane!’
‘Going down the Bench anyway. Oh, and Jade?’
‘What?’
‘You been nicking again? Only our dad’s after your hide.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ says Jade, and sits down hard in the grass. Bel’s never met anyone who swears with such casual calm before, as though the words were simple adjectives. She’s impressed and unnerved at the same time by it. If she let the sort of words slip from her mouth that Jade uses without seeming to even register them, she’d be locked up for days. She gazes at her admiringly, her hand still clamped on her leg.
‘I hate this bloody village.’
‘Me too,’ says Bel.
‘Does it hurt?’ asks Jade.
‘Bit.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
Bel lifts her hand away and shows her. There’s a graze the size of a fist on her thigh, a bruise already forming. Pinpricks of blood seep into the wound, filling out, closing up.
‘Fuck,’ says Jade admiringly.
‘It doesn’t hurt. Not really,’ Bel says proudly.
Jade shoots darts of poison at Shane’s swaggering back. ‘Bastard,’ she says. Then: ‘You ought to wash that.’