Junk - Melvin Burgess [36]
We never talked about it but we both knew I’d nearly gone, and we both knew I could do it again, any time. He was very tender and loving. I suppose he thought he could make me want him like that but of course I hadn’t nearly gone off because he wasn’t nice enough.
I put my torn tights and skirt and stuff away. It was party gear, you know? Maybe I’d wear it at the housewarming, maybe it just wouldn’t be that sort of do. But I was going to wear it again, some time. Some time soon.
Chapter Nine
Vonny
My feeling was it was important to get her back home before she really took off. You could see that she was going to go over the top. Just walking down the street, you could see her peering over heads at anyone she thought might be interesting, fighting her way to a shop that looked her sort of place. Poor old Tar didn’t stand a chance in hell to find out what sort of person he was, of course, and he was the one who really needed to.
That’s what really annoyed me. She had all the time in the world. She didn’t have problems, not real ones. Tar had lived in that horrible family for so long, he was so open, he was trying so hard. Now that he was out of it he needed a bit of space. But you didn’t get any space when Gemma was around. She filled it all up.
But I did like her. I just wished I’d known her ten years further on, that’s all.
I was furious with her when she came back from that bop dressed in leather and all the rest. We’d been feeding her, paying her bills, we’d even been supplying her with fags.
She said, ‘It’s my party clothes,’ and went into this model-girl pose. I was obviously supposed to be charmed but I wasn’t. I was on the dole. I was paying out of my miserable thirty quid a week so she could eat, drink and smoke and all the time…
‘This isn’t a party,’ I told her. ‘And I’m not your mother.’
She pulled a face.
The trouble was, she obviously needed one. A mother, I mean.
Jerry of course was totally useless. He liked having a young girl around to get stoned, that was about as far as it went. Actually, she really brought things to a head between me and Jerry. All he wanted was to enjoy himself, nothing else meant anything. Not even me when it came down to it. Well, I like to have a good time but I just think there’s more to life than that.
Richard knew she wasn’t doing anyone any good, certainly not poor Tar. The trouble with Richard is, he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. He was responsible, you know, but he thought somehow it all ought to be fun. As soon as the hard decisions had to be made he’d pull a face and go, ‘Politics.’
Tar was important. He was in trouble. People had one of two reactions when they met Tar: you either wanted to mother him or fleece him, usually both – just like his real mother had. Gemma did it too. She wasn’t exactly manipulating him, she wasn’t that sort of person. But she was just so full of herself, she might as well have been.
After she got herself punkified she thought she’d found The Only Way To Be. Of course, being Gemma, she got right in it up to her eyeballs. She came home that night with a ring in each ear and two in her nose. She had three more two days later. She’d got Tar to do it with a sterilised needle. She borrowed the needle off me.
‘I can never go home now, I can never go home now,’ she kept crowing. She was going to get her tongue pierced as soon as she could afford it. Yuk. Although, come to think about it, she might have just been shocking me.
Then it was Tar’s turn. She shaved his head except for a really long Mohican stripe in the middle. Then she dyed it green and red, and used loads and loads of gel to make it stick up. It was hilarious! We were all laughing, but it was cruel, because it didn’t suit him at all. He was prepared to try anything once, or even twice. Come to think about it, Tar was willing to try anything as long as it kept coming, but this really didn’t suit him. He’s this long gawky-looking kid, and there was this long skinny