So I accuse my boyfriend of fancying her, all the way back to his place, but that is just to get him going — that’s just to clear out the memory of Billy coming back in after the phone call, saying, ‘No, no. Just the usual,’ and pushing his chips away. It is also to distract me from the fact that Natalie’s aversion to ‘fizz’ is not something reasonable, and considered and right; that what she is actually saying is, You don’t own Billy’s mother.
Dead or alive.
It was only a tiny moment, you know?
As I say, I really did respect Natalie for holding the line, and somehow we seemed to feel, all through that long winter, that if Natalie didn’t flicker, if she didn’t blink, and if we all stayed nice, and stayed separate, and only had emotions that were appropriate to our actual situation vis-à-vis Billy’s mother, then Billy’s mother would survive.
I just thought, What a great sense of decorum Natalie has — and God knows, there’s not much of that around. And I really admired her, that’s all. I began to see how beautiful she is close up and I started asking her advice on chip-proof nail polish, even though these things don’t interest me as much as I think they do. And that makes it worse, the fact that I don’t give a fuck about Rouge Noir, really, so a sort of wheedling, messy thing starts to happen, and it is a while before I realise that what I want is for Natalie to be my friend.
I say this to my boyfriend and he says, ‘She is your friend,’ which just shows how much he knows about these things. And after a while she does start to like us, though she doesn’t have a lot of choice, really. It can’t have been easy: her boyfriend up to ninety, and his mother lying on the sofa, and me gabbling on about some day, maybe, getting my legs waxed — I mean, Natalie just does things, she doesn’t talk about them first, and it seems that all those months were about getting nothing done at all.
Then, in the spring, Billy’s mother gets her hair back, and it has this amazing red glow that she had as a child, so we are all in and out of Billy’s kitchen again, returned from our months as refugees in the chipper, and Billy’s mother stays married, and she also stays as mad as she ever was, and also superbly happy, and I just admire her so much for all of this. The next few months are a blur for Billy and my boyfriend, because they both have their last exams, so me and Natalie hang out a little, and the thing about Natalie is, she is a really nice person. It’s like I’m making her out to be some kind of bitch or something, but she really isn’t. She is actually very cool, and nice.
In the summer, my boyfriend gets a job in the local garage so his clothes smell of petrol, and his hands smell of money, because the guy who owns the place hasn’t put soap in the toilets for three months, even though they serve coffees there as well. I say why doesn’t he take his own soap in, but my boyfriend just looks at me like I am trying to turn him into a queer.
He is saving for college. And I know that I will lose him, when he goes. So I am on the strictest possible diet, and I am talking non-stop to Natalie about the Dress; the one that I will wear to the debs dance. I mean, I know he loves me, but I will wear this dress and my boyfriend will take one look at me and he will realise that this is what he will lose. All this.
Billy has been accepted into two colleges in England, but I don’t think they have the money really, and with his mother still in remission he wants to stay close to home. September is Billy and Natalie’s first anniversary, and it is also the anniversary of his mother’s diagnosis, and it is the month of our last dance, before the boys go off to war. But I feel so grateful for the turn of the leaves, somehow. I walk through the woods and remember where we nearly did it one time, my boyfriend and me, and I think — a bit like Billy’s mother — that when we go, we will go down swinging.
I’m texting Natalie one day and she idly mentions that she has her dress already. ‘White! white! white!’ And it takes me about two years to spell out, ‘very Renee Zellweger!!!’
Eventually I have to bring my little sister into town with me — which feels like a sad-bastard thing to do, but actually she’s a demon when it comes to clothes, it’s like bringing the entire line-up of a girl band. Between us, we solve everything with a sub-Westwood, sub-goth bustier and my mother’s long silk skirt, and a gorgeous second-hand — or should I say vintage — lamé shawl.
Billy’s mother says we should go over to their house before the dance so she can frisk us down for naggins of whiskey, and besides, she says, she wants to see me in all my finery. And I say, ‘Mrs Casey, I can’t even take the smell of whiskey, vodka’s the only way to go.’
So when Natalie rings, I ask her to bring her hair straightener and she says, ‘Like, it’s sort of large.’
‘Not to the hotel,’ I say. ‘Just over to Billy’s before we go.’
‘Uh … OK,’ she says, like ‘whatever’. So I arrive at Billy’s with everything in a huge bag, and Billy’s father answers the door.
I don’t know where I got it from, this idea that we were going to do it all there: the fake tan and the fake eyelashes and the bow-ties and the zips. When I text Natalie, she just comes back with ‘???!!?’ and Billy’s da looks a bit embarrassed, because not even Billy is home. He shows me upstairs into his own bedroom, which is a funny place to be, and I sit at Billy’s mother’s dressing table, which is a sort of alcove in the fitted wardrobe, and I look at Billy’s mother’s stuff: lipsticks gone off and pressed powder with one of those pads that look sort of orthopaedic, and industrial-strength night cream. And I know I have to skip the tan for a start, there’s no one to do my back. I get a really glossy face on and then I just sit there, looking at myself in Mrs Casey’s mirror. After a while there’s nothing for it except put on the damn dress. Then I sit on Mr and Mrs Casey’s bed, and look at the wallpaper. The bed isn’t made. The sheets are a really dark green. I lie down for a moment — just for two seconds, I lie down. Then suddenly everyone’s arriving, so I jump up and stuff all the gear into my bag, and I make my grand entrance, sweeping down the stairs and into the hall.
Natalie jigs up and down and screams, and she hugs me from four feet away, not to muss. Then we go into Billy’s front room, and his father takes a picture, and then she’s there — Mrs Casey. I was wondering what the silence in the house was, but there she is, flattened against the wall. Actually she swings in round the door frame like a broken gate. She holds the door frame with one hand and slams the other one flat against the wall. Then she goes rigid, and looks to the left, as if there’s someone after her, and they’re in the hall.
‘Hi, Mrs Casey,’ I say.
She’s really drunk.
‘Hiiiii,’ she says.
‘What do you think?’ I do a pathetic little twirl and she lowers her head at me and gives a sort of grunt of approval, then she swings her head around to find Natalie.
She looks at the dress.
‘Hnnnn,’ she says — which is, actually, the way it comes out of her, quite a friendly and ironic sound. It’s a ‘White? Interesting choice!’ sort of sound, but Natalie just looks at her.
Then she picks up her white skirt with her Rouge Noir nails and ‘Billy!’ she says, like he’s a dog or something. She doesn’t look to the left or the right. She puts that nun’s smile on her face, walks past Mrs Casey and keeps walking until she is out the front door.
‘People die,’ that’s what Natalie said to me on the phone. Because of course, we had a big surge when we got to the hotel and the boys got really trashed. At least, I got really trashed so I assume the boys did too, and I ended up snogging — not Billy, thank Christ — but someone else altogether. There’s a little splash of puke on the back of my mother’s silk skirt, and I’m pretty sure the guy got sick over my shoulder, and Natalie must hear it in my voice on the phone, the way I blame her for all this. Because when she picked up her white skirt and walked past Mrs Casey, something broke. Something between the four of us broke, for good.