LITMIR.BIZ

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off peaceably, but it had left Lucy with a sour taste in her mouth. While she had succeeded in extracting money from her father, the victory had come at a price. Things between her and Mum were quietly strained, even more so than usual. Neither had mentioned the quarrel of the previous week, but Mum didn’t need to say a word for Lucy to know exactly what she thought. Her thin lips and toneless civility conveyed more disappointment than any words could. Once, when watching TV, she’d caught her mother staring at her so sadly, she had to get up and leave the room.

      ‘No more arguments over money then?’ said Dad, as he pulled into the outside lane, feeding the steering wheel through his hands like a rigid, circular rope. He glanced over and smiled conspiratorially. Lucy returned the complicit smile he expected, but she felt bad. She knew in her heart that winning didn’t make it right. At first, she’d been filled with rage by her mother’s refusal to give her more money. But later she’d thought, with grudging respect, that her mother had been right.

      ‘No, money wasn’t mentioned,’ she said, hiding her shame by staring out the window at the watery view of floodlit, low-rise industrial buildings backing onto the motorway. Some were clothed in bright graffiti, the talented handiwork of kids who should’ve gone to art college but never got the chance.

      After the fallout with Mum the week before, Dad had been like putty in her hands. Through tears, with nothing left to lose, she’d confessed how much money she needed. And to her surprise, he’d pressed a big wad of crisp twenty pound notes into her palm. He did not ask a single question, so pleased was he to gain the upper moral hand, as he saw it, on Mum. As she’d closed her fingers over the money, the feeling of relief was so intense, she’d thrown her arms around his neck and sobbed once more.

      ‘Now you just let me know any time you’re short, love,’ said Dad, bringing her back to the present. ‘University should be the best time of your life. I don’t want you to be worrying about money. Or missing out.’

      ‘Thanks.’ Dad had always been greatly concerned that Lucy didn’t ‘miss out’. What he actually meant was ‘I will give you whatever it takes for you to fit in.’ He’d pushed her to do ballet and drama classes because that’s what the other, pretty girls in her class did. As a teenager, he made sure she had the trendiest fashions and the latest gadgets (You want to be cool, don’t you?). He’d nagged Mum into taking her to the best hairdressers in Belfast, in the failed hope that they could do something presentable with her thin, greasy hair. And he quizzed her about her social life, wanting to know where ‘all the kids hung out’ and who ‘her mates’ were. To please him, she’d talked about the popular girls at school as if they were her friends. Sometimes she was tolerated on the fringes of this ‘in crowd’; more often than not, told to get lost, or worse. It must’ve been clear to her father from a very early age that she was different. But, terrier-like, he persisted in his mission to transform her from ugly duckling into swan. He was a conformist.

      The car accelerated away from the lights at York Street, joining the two-lane Westlink that skirted the city centre and connected eventually with the M1 on the south side of the city. ‘So how’s the studying going?’ said Dad.

      ‘Great,’ she lied.

      ‘You’re a bright girl, Lucy,’ Dad said confidently. He had never so much as brushed shoulders with self-doubt. ‘If you put in the work, you’ll be fine.’

      Lucy gnawed the nail, already bitten down to the quick, on her right thumb. She’d lied about her first-year results. Mum and Dad were under the impression that she was on track for a two-one, maybe even a first. But the way things were going, she’d be lucky to graduate with a third, or worse. And there was always the awful possibility that she’d flunk altogether.

      In choosing Applied Mathematics and Physics, she’d thought she was making a logical choice. In a world where popularity was decided on something as capricious as appearance (and a whole shed-load of other, shifting criteria, too subtle for Lucy to comprehend) maths was a solid bedrock of evolving logic and reasoning. She buried herself in numbers that appeared to deliver unequivocal answers.

      But her judgement had proved flawed. Now in second year, she struggled to keep up, and the more she studied maths the more she came to realise that it didn’t have all the answers. It was no less fickle than the friendship of her peers. No amount of calculus or geometry could answer the questions that preoccupied her mind, nor ease the iron grip of isolation.

      Driving south, they crossed the junctions at Divis Street, where the road widened out to three lanes. Not long now. Lucy felt the muscles in her stomach tighten. Dad rested his elbow awkwardly on the narrow sill and asked, ‘So, any boyfriends in the picture, Lucy?’

      Lucy jolted and looked at him in astonishment. Did he know her at all? Was he blind? No man – or boy – had ever so much as looked at her. ‘No.’

      ‘Oh, come on, there must be someone,’ he teased.

      ‘Honestly Dad, there’s not,’ she said firmly and folded her arms across her chest.

      He glanced over and said chirpily, as if her single status was something she actually had control over, ‘No, you’re quite right. You don’t want to be tying yourself down just yet. Plenty of time for settling down later. Meanwhile just enjoy being young, free and single.’ He grinned happily, content in the knowledge that Lucy was having the time of her life at uni. She couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in his face if she owned up to being what she was – a social outcast, a freak.

      At the Broadway roundabout they turned onto Glenmachan Street, eventually joining the Lisburn Road heading north, back towards the city centre. They were almost there. Lucy put a hand on her stomach, hard as a nut, and took a deep breath to quell the nausea.

      On Eglantine Avenue she racked her brains for a way to get into the house without him coming too. Too soon, they turned into Wellington Park Avenue, lined on both sides with gardenless Victorian terraced houses. Dad pulled up outside a red-brick house with bay windows on the ground and first floor – and peeling white paint on the windowsills. Lights blazed in every window. Her heart sank – everyone must be back already.

      ‘Here we are then.’ Dad turned off the engine and took the key out of the ignition.

      Lucy quickly unclipped her seat belt and cracked open the car door. ‘Oh, don’t bother getting out, Dad. There’s no need for both of us to get wet, is there?’

      He gave her an indulgent smile and, completely ignoring her, put his hand on the door handle. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lucy. Your bag weighs a tonne. I’ll carry it in for you.’

      He got out of the car to open the boot and Lucy had no choice but to follow him. While he’d seen the house, she’d so far managed to avoid him meeting her housemates.

      When he ran up the path with the bag she grasped its handle and tried to wrench it out of his hand. ‘I can take it from here, Dad,’ she said firmly but he simply pushed past her with, ‘Don’t be silly, Lucy. Let’s get out of this awful rain.’

      She stumbled into the hall and watched in horror as he dumped her bag on the sticky floor – she was the only one who ever cleaned anything in the house – and headed straight for the lounge from which pounding music, and the sound of female voices, issued forth.

      ‘No!’ she cried out, desperately. ‘Don’t leave my bag there. It’s in the way. Let’s take it upstairs.’

      But though he must’ve heard her, he paid no heed. He disappeared into the lounge. She crept to the door, moving silently like a cat, and peered into the room. Four of them were there, in the process of preparing to go out, competing sounds blaring from someone’s iPod docking station and the TV. Fran was putting make-up on in front of a magnifying mirror balanced on top of the slate mantelpiece, the only original feature left in the house after its butchery of a conversion. Vicky, swaying her hips to the music, held a pair of hair straighteners in her hand. Bernie knelt in front of the coffee table, measuring Tesco Value vodka into a pint glass. A rag bag assortment of glasses, made cloudy by too many cycles in the dishwasher without dishwashing tablets, salt or rinse aid, littered

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