“Me?” He motioned through to the living room, where he could hear the squeak and repetition of children’s television. “Why can’t one of the Billies help you?”
Hamish was going through the kitchen cupboards. He was looking for something sugary to eat, and for something electrical to pawn. “It’s a guid opportunity for me and you to spend time the gether. I telt ye, I’m gonnae show ye how to be a proper man. I’ll no have ye embarrassing me.”
“But I was going to help Missus Campbell on Friday.”
“Jesus Christ.” Hamish was shaking his head. “Friday!” It had an underlined finality to it. His top lip curled back in distaste. “An if I have to come searchin’ fur ye, ye’ll be fuckin’ sorry.”
* * *
Jodie was having a difficult time concentrating over the cackling of the seagulls. She had spread her homework over the folding table, and knew she had only thirty minutes before her man would return with the fish supper, and she would have to hide all the childish reminders of herself. Only thirty minutes before the folding table would retract into a hard, uncomfortable bed and he would pull a fitted sheet over it.
Who cared about “the fatal mistakes made by the Italians while governing their colonies in Africa” anyway? Half the pupils in her class couldn’t find Edinburgh on a map.
There was the crunch of tyres on gravel and she swept her school-work back into her bag. Like usual, they sat together, shoulder to shoulder on the top step of the caravan, and looked out over the Irish Sea. West Kilbride was the furthest Jodie had ever been from home. It was only forty-five minutes from Glasgow but it felt like a world away. The caravan park sat in a farmer’s field and looked out over the slate-grey horizon. House-proud Glaswegians rented the caravans for the season. They covered the windows with net curtains and filled old car tyres with potting soil and forget-me-nots. They came with hopeful deckchairs and cars loaded with drink, happy to leave the drabness behind for a few hours of streaked sunshine.
It was cold here, much windier than the city, but Jodie loved how fresh and untouched everything smelled. Every breath felt crystalline, scrubbed clean with sea salt. They ate their fish suppers outside in silence, and while she watched the sea, he studied the side of her face, struck with a sense of luck that this bonny, tenacious girl could be his. When their lips were greasy with fat Jodie took the last of the charred batter and threw it high for the swooping birds. For a while, he held her cold hands in his, then he took her back inside, and folded the table into a bed.
When they were finished, he slept. He turned his pale back to her and she watched the curly black hairs on his shoulder blades dance in the breeze. It had already lost the excitement of the unexpected, was becoming too much of a routine. He would collect her in his car. They would come to this caravan. He would go alone to buy some food, and then he would sweat on top of her for four minutes and fall fast asleep. Jodie already knew that he would wake soon and get dressed quickly. He would tickle her bare feet and tell her he loved her. But already he would be looking at his watch, thinking about his own children and the roast chicken he needed to collect for their dinner.
At first he had promised he would leave his wife. But the more Jodie let him do his sweaty things to her, the less he seemed to promise that. She was surprised to feel so relieved.
Jodie lay there and carefully counted the blemishes on his back. Then she broke them into categories, separating the brown age spots from the blood-red skin tabs. She didn’t want to come here anymore, but she felt compelled. He had bought her fourteen fish suppers, and being a bright girl, she knew the exact cost of it all. She lay behind him and spoke it quietly: “If a man buys a girl fourteen fish suppers at two pounds twenty-five a time, how long till the girl gives up? Show your working.” It was a trick question, because she didn’t know how much the girl also owed in petrol money.
She was smarter than that, after all. He had been the first to tell her of her potential. “Jodie Hamilton, if you apply yourself you could go all the way. How on earth have you been hiding in Hamish’s shadow? It’s like finding a diamond under a turd.” He was smiling at her over the heads of the other fourth-years.
Boys her age didn’t seem to notice her. Most of them knew the legend of her brother and would not dare. Other’s didn’t like the way she would question the answers they gave in class. It was easier for these boys to latch on to one of the hubba-bubba girls and finger her around the back of the swimming baths than it would be to handle bossy wee Jodie of the famed Hamilton scum.
She rolled on to her back and looked at the panelled ceiling. She wondered if she was looking for a father. No, it was more than that: she wanted respite from pretending to be Mungo’s mother. She felt tired all the time now. It was a transaction – she knew fine well – but for the three short hours that this man would take care of her, she could set aside all the burdens that were not hers. Three hours of peace in exchange for four sweaty, dirty minutes.
He didn’t care anymore if she enjoyed it or not. At the beginning he would have asked if she was okay, worried that her tightness caused discomfort, but now he was delighted when it did. He would lie on top of her and look into her eyes with lust, and a kind of fear. He looked afraid that she would pull her knees together and ask him to get off. Please let me finish, his grey eyes seemed to say, and she could tell this was one of the best things that ever happened to him by the way he repeated “thank you, thank you, thank you” as he slipped in and out of her. She had liked that at first. Now he didn’t ask her if he was hurting her, even as he thanked her over and over. He just did as he pleased and then kissed her, once, on the forehead. The greasy mark of it felt a bit like a red tick at the bottom of a test.
The man was awake again. He sat up. Mr Gillespie was tickling the bottom of her foot. He was missing all the teeth on the upper left side of his mouth and she wished he wouldn’t smile at her over the crook of his shoulder like that.
When Mr Gillespie was first manoeuvring her into position, he took her to the Ayr fairground. With a crisp fifty-pound note he paid for her to go on all the rides: screaming, rickety rollercoasters, the heavy, pendulous pirate ship, and her favourite, the whizzing, spinning waltzers. The lights, the sugary candy floss and sweet peanuty smell of popcorn had made for a dizzying night far from home. Jodie could picture him now, paying for all the rides, and standing nervously in the shadows, like a divorced father, while she had her seventy-five seconds of fun.
There was another time he had brought her to West Kilbride. It was a damp evening in September and marked the first time she had kept her knees together from shame and from spite. Her bad mood had begun in his steamy Sierra. Mr Gillespie hadn’t realized he had been talking too much about his own daughter, who went to Hutchesons’ Grammar and was a shoo-in for Edinburgh University. She was jealous to see him boastful and proud of Gillian. It stung to think that no one felt that way about her.
“Do you think Gillian does something like this with her Modern Studies teacher?” she’d asked as his hand worried the loose thread at the bottom of her school skirt.
The look of disgust on his face had pushed her deeper into the leather seat. Gillian Gillespie would never sink so low. Jodie had bitten her bottom lip, but she laughed anyway. “Haaah-ha.”