The Scrapbook by Carly Holmes

cried out. The imprint of your fingers stayed on my skin long after you’d dropped me home and left me once again.

5
    I was sixteen when I fell in love with the guitarist of the school’s rock band. I was sixteen when I got pregnant.
    He was sat outside the science lab, guitar across his lap and notepad on his knee. As I walked past he began to pluck at the strings of the instrument, humming a tune. I knew he was watching me. I fumbled with the straps of my book bag, slowing my pace until I was stood before him, and then I dropped the bag and began to dance. We stared at each other as I stepped back and forth, swinging my hips to his song, and then he jumped up and came over to me, wrapped his large palms around my upper arms and pulled me against him. His dark hair pooled against my cheek, tickling the corner of my mouth. It smelt of Love Hearts. I shuddered and leaned into him, and finally understood what kept my mother waiting at the living room window day after day.
    He knew my reputation; the crow chasing and the compulsive counting. He wrote anguished poetry in clumsy, stumbling rhyme that tortured the ear (‘I gasped and flailed / under the stab of your eyes / You laughed as I swayed / You told nothing but lies.’) and he was looking for a muse. He’d been born on the mainland and his otherness set him apart from the other boys, the islanders .
    By the end of that day I’d skipped my first maths, English literature and geography classes, and I’d stolen my first bottle of wine from the off-licence near the park, the one that my mum never went into. By the end of that day I knew how it felt to slot my naked hipbones against another person’s. The gentle scuff and scattered goosebumps as delighted skin crept across delighted skin, and then the hard press of the skeleton beneath.
    Again! And again! And again!
    Two bodies curling up and stretching out and winding around each other. Two bodies grasping and clutching and cradling. He was the oak tree that guarded my home, and I the honeysuckle that clung and gripped, that scaled his body until he was completely covered by me.
    His parents worked and so he had a key and the house to himself for a couple of hours each day after school. After we’d tugged our clothes back on and opened the windows to release the moist tang of each other, he’d read me his poetry or sing one of his songs and I’d listen and smile, watching his mouth, shivering with the need to feel his weight upon me again. He begged me to stay on past six, to meet his mum and dad, but I always refused. I didn’t want to see him as somebody’s son, as existing apart from me and away from me. Just sixteen, and I was already an echo of my mother, carving out a private world for me and my love, working to separate it, and him, from the realities of meal times and laundry and all those other domestic routines. And besides, I’d then have to return the favour and there was no way I was going to let him anywhere near my shabby home or my mother’s gin-soaked breath.
    I was fascinated by his house, by its tidiness and its lemon-zest smell. I looked through the cupboards while he dozed and discovered furniture polish and special cleaners to apply to metal and leather. I’d collect the brass ornaments that were crowded on the mantelpiece and spread them out across the dining room table, anointing and buffing them until they gleamed, and then carefully replacing them. I wonder if anyone ever noticed. I sprayed my shoes with the polish every day so that I’d take some of that clean smell home with me, and there I’d walk from room to room, stomping my feet, and imagine it drifting off onto the carpets and rugs.
    The refrigerator was filled with food that I had never tasted: avocados and olives and soft French cheeses. I sampled each new flavour, my fingertips leaving crescent-shaped grooves in the Camembert. In the bedrooms I would tread carefully