Iarrived in an Oxford car park at the height of the 2006 heat wave, thirteen years old and pasty as a parsnip. A few hours earlier, I had been picked up at Heathrow airport by a middle-aged man in a Hawaii shirt, and he’d handed me one of the language school’s branded drawstring bags. The plastic rope straps were hard and rough, and soon enough they were digging into my shoulders.
It was muggy and the car park midges bit without pause. I stood in a huddle of weedy, foreign kids, each of us rolling dusty pebbles under our plimsolls and peering towards the entryway for the cars of our host families. After half an hour, only three of us were left. I joked that we would have to stay there and pitch a tent; I was proud of this verb, to pitch. The language school guy, who’d spent most of the wait prowling the car park perimeter wearing cycling sunglasses and talking into a Motorola, came back and told us he’d have to taxi us to our houses. We climbed back in the mini-bus and its stomach-turning atmosphere of rental car air freshener. The seat belt’s metal tongue nearly scorched me.
When we arrived at my host house, a woman with white-tipped nails and a blond ponytail was waiting in the drive. She wore a plush, pink tracksuit. The language school guy brought my orange suitcase out from the boot.
‘This her?’ she said to him, looking me over: my The Smiths band tee and black tube skirt, my hair that hung like a damp shower curtain down my back.
‘This is me,’ I said.
Her house was a large, detached property, situated in a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town. It shocked me by being fully carpeted except for the kitchen’s glittery tiles. This was cultural exchange, I thought, as I walked through the hallway and sank into the pile. I was installed in an upstairs bedroom next to her own. Everything in my room was lilac, even the satin-covered wardrobe hangers and the velveteen bedspread. My suitcase felt like such an aberration that I had to shove it under the bed.
‘So, can you tell me the difference between w-e-e-k and w-e-a-k?’ Host Mother said, watching me eat cornflakes in the kitchen-diner, a spotless white room full of baby-blue accents: toaster, kettle, an enormous American-style fridge-freezer. Two slices of frozen white bread were thawing on a plate on the counter. Who froze bread? I took it to be an English quirk, like the ever-present carpet. I’d mentally started a list of them; my parents would love such details.
‘One is seven days and the other is when you’re not strong,’ I said.
It was already hot and my bare legs slipped around on the seat of the dining chair.
‘Clever girl.’
She turned and put a slice of cheese between the stiff bread slices, wrapped the sandwich in cling film and transferred it to a large plastic bag that already contained a bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps.
‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘could I maybe have fruit instead of crisps, please?’
‘No. You can’t.’
Her back was straight as she tied a knot in the plastic bag and tightened it. She kept going, pulling till the knot became hard and white like an ice chip.
‘It’s just that at home I’m only allowed crisps on Fridays –’
She tossed me the bag and it slid over the dining table before settling next to my bowl.
‘You’re not at home anymore.’
My parents had gifted me the trip in lieu of the confirmation party I didn’t have, as seemingly the only atheist in my peer group. The brochure had pictured charming stone buildings with turrets and heavy wooden doors, but when I turned up, the school was actually housed in a squeaky-floored office block, the hallways of which smelt like highlighter pens. Our classroom was a cramped meeting room with a flip-chart easel in one corner. I sat down with heart-sinking disappointment; I’d never be able to tell my parents this.
‘Today is an exercise in clear, confident communication,’ said our teacher, a man with a muscular jaw and very small, narrow-set eyes. On the flip-chart, he wrote CLEAR & CONFIDE-NT in red permanent marker, overestimating his writing space. ‘I want each of you to give a one-minute presentation to the class about where you come from, by way of introduction. The only rules are that you cannot repeat yourself and you cannot say ‘uhh’ or ‘umm’ or any other filler sounds. Understood?’
‘What happens if you do?’ asked Marco, one of the Spanish boys.
‘I’ll count it as a point against you and the person with the least points at the end wins. Let’s go clockwise and start over here.’ He pointed at me.
I stood up, wafting at the collar of my sticky t-shirt. It was another band tee – the Cure – and they never came in small girl sizes; this one covered me to the mid-thigh.
‘Umm,’ I started and the teacher pivoted on the balls of his feet to draw a point against me on the flip-chart. ‘Sorry. Okay, so I am going to talk about the village where I live with my parents and my little sister. The village is way out in the countryside and super small: there are only about fifty houses and one church. We all know each other there. I used to be friends with the other children but we grew apart and they think I’m weird now, I think. It’s pretty boring – that’s why I’m here, to have an adventure and experience something. I have dreamt about coming to England forever and all my favourite bands are English. As I said, I just want to have an adventure.’ The teacher swivelled and drew a line. ‘Umm, sorry.’ Again he went, mechanically like he was an automaton on a striking clock. ‘So, yeah, we all know each other in the village.’
Four lines.
I plopped down on my chair and the teacher moved on.
The days passed in a hot slurry of soggy cheese sandwiches and word-connecting exercises. I burned my scalp at my parting and sweat through the sheets in my sleep. Every night, mosquitoes looped around the kitchen spotlights with their little stick legs dangling jauntily beneath their wings. I already had plenty of angry, scarlet bites, driving me senseless with their itching.
‘I’ve been meaning to discuss something with you,’ Host Mother said one evening. I attempted to wedge my fork into a clump of ketchup-covered, glued-together sticks of penne but it kept sliding off and hitting the bowl instead. Host Mother didn’t eat with me, she never seemed to; instead she was clutching a tall glass of something clear and fizzy. Her white tips had been exchanged for a set of hot pink nails and she was tapping one of them against the glass. ‘I can’t believe how much toilet paper you’re using.’
I managed to cleave off a small forkful of pasta.
‘Sorry, what?’ I said.
‘Toilet paper. The amount you’ve gone through in a week is ridiculous, this isn’t a hotel.’
‘Sorry,’ I repeated, embarrassed that she would bring up something like that. ‘But I have to use it, right? What can I do?’
At the neighbour’s house, a car rolled into the drive. We listened to it crush onto the gravel and for one of its doors to open and slam shut again. My bitten legs itched like mad and I rubbed my calves hard against each other.
Host Mother stood up, walked over to my side of the table and placed a hand in under my hair to the clammy back of my neck; her fingers were surprisingly cold and I froze. My face was level with her waist and a slither of bronzed skin peeked out between her tracksuit top and bottoms. Then she lifted her glass and began pouring the remainder of her drink into my pasta bowl. I stared at the tinkling stream. The fizz around the pasta clump crinkled and the ketchup drew a greasy, red trail through the liquid.
‘I’m sure you’ll be able to sort something out,’ she said, slid her hand off me and turned to put the glass in the sink.
‘But it’s just toilet paper.’
Host Mother left the kitchen without replying. I looked around the room, almost expecting to find someone to lock eyes with, but of course, there was no-one.
‘Sorry, can I go pee?’ I asked over the whirring of the two electric fans going full blast in front of the classroom window. It didn’t open and the blinds were broken, stuck halfway down. The light coming in below them was searing hot and it felt like it might burn a hole in my shoulders. For once I was wearing a strappy top, and it had been a mistake.
Today’s teacher, a woman with a very wide mouth, stopped writing the names of UK prime ministers on the flip-chart and turned around. ‘In English we say, can I please be excused.’
‘Okay, can I please be excused?’
It would’ve been another great item for my quirks list, but I was too distracted to care. I leant to the side, trying to move my shoulders into the shadow.
‘Miss.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Can I please be excused, miss. Teachers are called by their titles in England. And say pardon.’
‘Okay, but can I go pee? Please be excused? Miss, sorry? I mean, pardon?’
With her huge mouth compressed to a pinstripe, she wafted me out. I left the room with my drawstring bag under my arm and my shoulder blades hot and throbbing; could you burn through a window pane? In the brightly lit women’s toilet, a long mirror covered the opposite wall and reflected my hot tomato face. I kneeled down to check under the cubicles, hands to the deliciously cool floor: no feet.
In the nearest cubicle, I yanked at the strip of toilet paper hanging out of the metal dispenser. The casing was loose and banged loudly against the wall as the roll spat out a long ribbon. The paper was the grey, industrial kind that feels like mid-grade sandpaper.
There were steps in the hallway.
I threw myself against the cubicle door and locked it just as someone walked in. My handball-sized roll of toilet paper would have to do. I stuffed it into my bag and hurried back to the lesson.
The air I woke up to a few nights later was completely still, cured like varnish around the curtains. From the weak droning sound, I knew there was an insect in the room and I could already feel a fresh bite on my arm, swollen and hard as though the bug hadn’t sucked anything out, but bored something in.
I needed to pee. Careful to be quiet, I slipped out of bed, found my bag and extracted a roll of school toilet paper. I took as little as possible.
On the landing, the sound of Host Mother’s breathing rose through her open bedroom door. I stepped forward and something stuck to the arch of my foot: a stack of Host Mother’s toilet paper. I bent down to pick it up. Four pieces in total, left out for me. Plush like her tracksuits, quilted on the diagonal and infinitely soft. After using the school’s paper, I’d almost forgotten how thick hers was.
I walked to Host Mother’s bedroom door and glanced in. The air was close with a heady perfume, like the spiciness of a jasmine bush at dusk. She had a window open but there was no breeze. Up on the main road, a siren sped past the cul-de-sac. Host Mother was on her side with the covers thrown off, facing away from me. Her top arm rose and fell with her breath, rhythmically pulling on the silk of her camisole. The bed was so close to the door that it would’ve been easy for me to step in, lean over and touch the vertebrae at the top of her neck, like she had mine.
I retreated and I went downstairs to the toilet.
The two slices of white bread were thawing on their plate. I was leaning forward on the chair to spare my shoulders, now the shade of cooked ham under my t-shirt; I was back to Meat is Murder.
‘Thanks for the toilet paper last night,’ I said.
Host Mother had her back to me, having just fixed herself a bright green smoothie in another expensive-looking, baby-blue kitchen appliance. It said Juicy on her bottom this morning, spelt out in glittering diamanté. I couldn’t help looking at it, unable to decide if it was very childish or very adult, though it was too specific to her to go on my list.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said and turned around, sticking a black plastic straw into her smoothie. ‘So, what’s the difference between b-r-a-k-e and b-r-e-a-k?’
‘The first means to stop when you’re in a car or on a bike,’ I said. ‘The other is a pause.’
‘And?’
‘Hmm.’ I considered. ‘I don’t know.’
She looked at me, taking the straw in between her glossed lips, her cheeks hollowing around it. Who even used straws at home? Then, slowly, as if teaching me the procedure of some important process, she picked up the two frozen slices of bread with one hand, opened the freezer with her foot and put the bread back inside. She closed the freezer and turned around to face me, blocking it with her body.
Her mouth let go of the straw. ‘Try a little harder.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you serious?’
She leant her body back against the fridge-freezer, closing up the gap between her and it entirely. A loud sucking reverberated around the room as she went back for the straw, pressing it down against the bottom of the glass.
‘Oh.’ I snapped my fingers. ‘To break is to ruin something. To make it fall apart.’
‘Clever girl,’ she said and re-opened the freezer.
The following weekend, I went on a day-trip with my class to Stonehenge. It was baking, and when they told us we weren’t allowed to touch the stones, I said I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway, because I liked my hands to be hands, and not fried eggs. Everyone laughed, which pleased me. Despite the monstrous heat, it was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long time. When I came home, Host Mother let me eat my pasta in the living room armchair. An episode of Come Dine With Me was on the TV.
‘… back with the hosts, and it’s the moment of truth for Sam’s terrine,’ said the narrator over cheerful violins. A loaf tin was turned out, revealing a pink brick of bacon. Sam’s wife smiled at someone off camera. ‘Thank God I’m a vegetarian,’ she said.
On the white leather sofa, Host Mother was dividing her attention between the TV and her laptop. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but she alternated between typing in bursts and biting her thumb. It was getting late. The show ended and the news began; there was a war going on in Lebanon.
Host Mother glanced at me over her laptop screen.
‘Come over here,’ she said.
I put down my bowl and walked over to her on naked feet, enjoying the feel of the soft carpet beneath them. Through the window behind her, I could discern the wooden fence that ran on either side of the property. I sat down next to her and she turned the laptop towards me.
‘Look.’
On the screen was a grey pop-up window, divided into three. A white box for messaging took up the middle, but in the lower panel I saw my own face, poking in next to hers. My eye sockets looked cavernous with shade and it took me a second to realise that it was a webcam. In the top panel, someone was fondling a penis.
‘Oh,’ I said and jerked my head away from the camera, trying to laugh.
‘Isn’t he naughty?’ she said and turned the screen further towards me so that my face popped back in shot, now alone without hers. Her hand trailed over the sofa seat and onto my knee, her long nails sweeping over my skin. ‘Isn’t he just so naughty?’
I stared at the penis. The image quality was very poor. Weren’t aroused penises meant to be stiff? This one seemed feeble, like the stem of an under-watered plant.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very naughty.’
The hand on the screen started tugging on the penis. It didn’t look very pleasurable, but what did I know, then. On the TV, the news had moved on.
‘… the heat wave continues to ravage the continent, with hundreds of elderly people dying in the Mediterranean,’ said the newsreader. I took my eyes off the laptop screen, where the hand was still tugging and the penis had finally stiffened. Only at the very back of my mind did I register that the person attached to the hand must be looking at me, at my face. A colour-coded heat map of Europe flashed up on the TV and I found the outline of my country. It made me think of my parents – my real mother, my real father.
Trying to make the movement seem natural and planned, I slid out from underneath Host Mother’s trailing fingertips and wandered back to the armchair. Behind me, she straightened up, then closed the laptop. I pulled my feet up under me.
‘You cannot tell anyone about this,’ she said. Her voice was gentler than usual. The news was showing people fanning themselves in a sunlit train carriage. I could still feel her hand. ‘Do you understand?’
Looking at the TV, I nodded.
Every morning from then on, I woke up to find my lunch ready on the counter, next to my new daily allowance of Host Mother’s toilet paper. In the evenings I returned home to a portion of pasta with sauce, now with a chocolate bourbon biscuit on the side. But Host Mother herself I hardly saw until the night before I was due to leave.
I was already in bed, one leg sticking out beneath the lilac sheet I slept with, when she knocked and came in the room without waiting for me to answer. She was wearing her silk night set and the white-tipped nails were back.
‘You’re leaving tomorrow,’ she said.
A midge bite on my ankle burned and I hadn’t the focus to keep my hand from itching. My nail caught on something, pulled it off and wetness spread under my fingertip, smearing red.
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘I am.’
She stood at end of my bed. ‘You’re a special girl, you know. Mature for your age. I’m sure you have people telling you that all the time. Your English is very advanced.’
‘Thank you.’
She looked down to my exposed ankle. ‘Let me get that for you.’ I lay still and rigid as she sucked on her thumb, then bent down over my leg and stroked it across my broken skin till all the blood had wiped off. ‘There.’ She straightened back up. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Night,’ I said to the closing door.
The next day I dragged my orange suitcase out from underneath the bed and stood considering my branded drawstring bag. Was it worth keeping? I’d used it every day, it could be a memento. A honk came from outside; the guy with mini-bus was here. I made a quick decision.
Host Mother was standing by the open door when I came down with my suitcase, her hair pulled back into a ponytail that curled glamorously at the end. Out in the cul-de-sac, the mini-bus engine switched off. The language school guy got down from the driving seat, his vest already covered in dark plumes on his chest and back. He waved for me to come over, we had airports to go to, planes to catch.
In the doorway, I turned to Host Mother. ‘Bye.’
A fly was crawling up her arm, making its way through the fibres of her sleeve. It struck me how much like carpet it was.
‘Bye, darling,’ she said and squeezed my shoulder. I could feel them through my t-shirt, the white tips.
The language school guy took hold of my suitcase and lifted it to the bus. I was the last kid to be picked up so he put my suitcase on top of everyone else’s. Before he closed the boot, I caught a glimpse: It looked like a colourful game of Tetris. Inside the bus, Marco the Spanish boy was telling a story about how his host family had made him try a kind of fungal jam. He said it tasted like old socks.
‘No way,’ I said and added it to my list of curious things to recount when I got back.
When we arrived at my host house, a woman with white-tipped nails and a blond ponytail was waiting in the drive. She wore a plush, pink tracksuit. The language school guy brought my orange suitcase out from the boot.
‘This her?’ she said to him, looking me over: my The Smiths band tee and black tube skirt, my hair that hung like a damp shower curtain down my back.
‘This is me,’ I said.
Her house was a large, detached property, situated in a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of town. It shocked me by being fully carpeted except for the kitchen’s glittery tiles. This was cultural exchange, I thought, as I walked through the hallway and sank into the pile. I was installed in an upstairs bedroom next to her own. Everything in my room was lilac, even the satin-covered wardrobe hangers and the velveteen bedspread. My suitcase felt like such an aberration that I had to shove it under the bed.
‘So, can you tell me the difference between w-e-e-k and w-e-a-k?’ Host Mother said, watching me eat cornflakes in the kitchen-diner, a spotless white room full of baby-blue accents: toaster, kettle, an enormous American-style fridge-freezer. Two slices of frozen white bread were thawing on a plate on the counter. Who froze bread? I took it to be an English quirk, like the ever-present carpet. I’d mentally started a list of them; my parents would love such details.
‘One is seven days and the other is when you’re not strong,’ I said.
It was already hot and my bare legs slipped around on the seat of the dining chair.
‘Clever girl.’
She turned and put a slice of cheese between the stiff bread slices, wrapped the sandwich in cling film and transferred it to a large plastic bag that already contained a bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps.
‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘could I maybe have fruit instead of crisps, please?’
‘No. You can’t.’
Her back was straight as she tied a knot in the plastic bag and tightened it. She kept going, pulling till the knot became hard and white like an ice chip.
‘It’s just that at home I’m only allowed crisps on Fridays –’
She tossed me the bag and it slid over the dining table before settling next to my bowl.
‘You’re not at home anymore.’
My parents had gifted me the trip in lieu of the confirmation party I didn’t have, as seemingly the only atheist in my peer group. The brochure had pictured charming stone buildings with turrets and heavy wooden doors, but when I turned up, the school was actually housed in a squeaky-floored office block, the hallways of which smelt like highlighter pens. Our classroom was a cramped meeting room with a flip-chart easel in one corner. I sat down with heart-sinking disappointment; I’d never be able to tell my parents this.
‘Today is an exercise in clear, confident communication,’ said our teacher, a man with a muscular jaw and very small, narrow-set eyes. On the flip-chart, he wrote CLEAR & CONFIDE-NT in red permanent marker, overestimating his writing space. ‘I want each of you to give a one-minute presentation to the class about where you come from, by way of introduction. The only rules are that you cannot repeat yourself and you cannot say ‘uhh’ or ‘umm’ or any other filler sounds. Understood?’
‘What happens if you do?’ asked Marco, one of the Spanish boys.
‘I’ll count it as a point against you and the person with the least points at the end wins. Let’s go clockwise and start over here.’ He pointed at me.
I stood up, wafting at the collar of my sticky t-shirt. It was another band tee – the Cure – and they never came in small girl sizes; this one covered me to the mid-thigh.
‘Umm,’ I started and the teacher pivoted on the balls of his feet to draw a point against me on the flip-chart. ‘Sorry. Okay, so I am going to talk about the village where I live with my parents and my little sister. The village is way out in the countryside and super small: there are only about fifty houses and one church. We all know each other there. I used to be friends with the other children but we grew apart and they think I’m weird now, I think. It’s pretty boring – that’s why I’m here, to have an adventure and experience something. I have dreamt about coming to England forever and all my favourite bands are English. As I said, I just want to have an adventure.’ The teacher swivelled and drew a line. ‘Umm, sorry.’ Again he went, mechanically like he was an automaton on a striking clock. ‘So, yeah, we all know each other in the village.’
Four lines.
I plopped down on my chair and the teacher moved on.
The days passed in a hot slurry of soggy cheese sandwiches and word-connecting exercises. I burned my scalp at my parting and sweat through the sheets in my sleep. Every night, mosquitoes looped around the kitchen spotlights with their little stick legs dangling jauntily beneath their wings. I already had plenty of angry, scarlet bites, driving me senseless with their itching.
‘I’ve been meaning to discuss something with you,’ Host Mother said one evening. I attempted to wedge my fork into a clump of ketchup-covered, glued-together sticks of penne but it kept sliding off and hitting the bowl instead. Host Mother didn’t eat with me, she never seemed to; instead she was clutching a tall glass of something clear and fizzy. Her white tips had been exchanged for a set of hot pink nails and she was tapping one of them against the glass. ‘I can’t believe how much toilet paper you’re using.’
I managed to cleave off a small forkful of pasta.
‘Sorry, what?’ I said.
‘Toilet paper. The amount you’ve gone through in a week is ridiculous, this isn’t a hotel.’
‘Sorry,’ I repeated, embarrassed that she would bring up something like that. ‘But I have to use it, right? What can I do?’
At the neighbour’s house, a car rolled into the drive. We listened to it crush onto the gravel and for one of its doors to open and slam shut again. My bitten legs itched like mad and I rubbed my calves hard against each other.
Host Mother stood up, walked over to my side of the table and placed a hand in under my hair to the clammy back of my neck; her fingers were surprisingly cold and I froze. My face was level with her waist and a slither of bronzed skin peeked out between her tracksuit top and bottoms. Then she lifted her glass and began pouring the remainder of her drink into my pasta bowl. I stared at the tinkling stream. The fizz around the pasta clump crinkled and the ketchup drew a greasy, red trail through the liquid.
‘I’m sure you’ll be able to sort something out,’ she said, slid her hand off me and turned to put the glass in the sink.
‘But it’s just toilet paper.’
Host Mother left the kitchen without replying. I looked around the room, almost expecting to find someone to lock eyes with, but of course, there was no-one.
‘Sorry, can I go pee?’ I asked over the whirring of the two electric fans going full blast in front of the classroom window. It didn’t open and the blinds were broken, stuck halfway down. The light coming in below them was searing hot and it felt like it might burn a hole in my shoulders. For once I was wearing a strappy top, and it had been a mistake.
Today’s teacher, a woman with a very wide mouth, stopped writing the names of UK prime ministers on the flip-chart and turned around. ‘In English we say, can I please be excused.’
‘Okay, can I please be excused?’
It would’ve been another great item for my quirks list, but I was too distracted to care. I leant to the side, trying to move my shoulders into the shadow.
‘Miss.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Can I please be excused, miss. Teachers are called by their titles in England. And say pardon.’
‘Okay, but can I go pee? Please be excused? Miss, sorry? I mean, pardon?’
With her huge mouth compressed to a pinstripe, she wafted me out. I left the room with my drawstring bag under my arm and my shoulder blades hot and throbbing; could you burn through a window pane? In the brightly lit women’s toilet, a long mirror covered the opposite wall and reflected my hot tomato face. I kneeled down to check under the cubicles, hands to the deliciously cool floor: no feet.
In the nearest cubicle, I yanked at the strip of toilet paper hanging out of the metal dispenser. The casing was loose and banged loudly against the wall as the roll spat out a long ribbon. The paper was the grey, industrial kind that feels like mid-grade sandpaper.
There were steps in the hallway.
I threw myself against the cubicle door and locked it just as someone walked in. My handball-sized roll of toilet paper would have to do. I stuffed it into my bag and hurried back to the lesson.
The air I woke up to a few nights later was completely still, cured like varnish around the curtains. From the weak droning sound, I knew there was an insect in the room and I could already feel a fresh bite on my arm, swollen and hard as though the bug hadn’t sucked anything out, but bored something in.
I needed to pee. Careful to be quiet, I slipped out of bed, found my bag and extracted a roll of school toilet paper. I took as little as possible.
On the landing, the sound of Host Mother’s breathing rose through her open bedroom door. I stepped forward and something stuck to the arch of my foot: a stack of Host Mother’s toilet paper. I bent down to pick it up. Four pieces in total, left out for me. Plush like her tracksuits, quilted on the diagonal and infinitely soft. After using the school’s paper, I’d almost forgotten how thick hers was.
I walked to Host Mother’s bedroom door and glanced in. The air was close with a heady perfume, like the spiciness of a jasmine bush at dusk. She had a window open but there was no breeze. Up on the main road, a siren sped past the cul-de-sac. Host Mother was on her side with the covers thrown off, facing away from me. Her top arm rose and fell with her breath, rhythmically pulling on the silk of her camisole. The bed was so close to the door that it would’ve been easy for me to step in, lean over and touch the vertebrae at the top of her neck, like she had mine.
I retreated and I went downstairs to the toilet.
The two slices of white bread were thawing on their plate. I was leaning forward on the chair to spare my shoulders, now the shade of cooked ham under my t-shirt; I was back to Meat is Murder.
‘Thanks for the toilet paper last night,’ I said.
Host Mother had her back to me, having just fixed herself a bright green smoothie in another expensive-looking, baby-blue kitchen appliance. It said Juicy on her bottom this morning, spelt out in glittering diamanté. I couldn’t help looking at it, unable to decide if it was very childish or very adult, though it was too specific to her to go on my list.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said and turned around, sticking a black plastic straw into her smoothie. ‘So, what’s the difference between b-r-a-k-e and b-r-e-a-k?’
‘The first means to stop when you’re in a car or on a bike,’ I said. ‘The other is a pause.’
‘And?’
‘Hmm.’ I considered. ‘I don’t know.’
She looked at me, taking the straw in between her glossed lips, her cheeks hollowing around it. Who even used straws at home? Then, slowly, as if teaching me the procedure of some important process, she picked up the two frozen slices of bread with one hand, opened the freezer with her foot and put the bread back inside. She closed the freezer and turned around to face me, blocking it with her body.
Her mouth let go of the straw. ‘Try a little harder.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you serious?’
She leant her body back against the fridge-freezer, closing up the gap between her and it entirely. A loud sucking reverberated around the room as she went back for the straw, pressing it down against the bottom of the glass.
‘Oh.’ I snapped my fingers. ‘To break is to ruin something. To make it fall apart.’
‘Clever girl,’ she said and re-opened the freezer.
The following weekend, I went on a day-trip with my class to Stonehenge. It was baking, and when they told us we weren’t allowed to touch the stones, I said I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway, because I liked my hands to be hands, and not fried eggs. Everyone laughed, which pleased me. Despite the monstrous heat, it was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long time. When I came home, Host Mother let me eat my pasta in the living room armchair. An episode of Come Dine With Me was on the TV.
‘… back with the hosts, and it’s the moment of truth for Sam’s terrine,’ said the narrator over cheerful violins. A loaf tin was turned out, revealing a pink brick of bacon. Sam’s wife smiled at someone off camera. ‘Thank God I’m a vegetarian,’ she said.
On the white leather sofa, Host Mother was dividing her attention between the TV and her laptop. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but she alternated between typing in bursts and biting her thumb. It was getting late. The show ended and the news began; there was a war going on in Lebanon.
Host Mother glanced at me over her laptop screen.
‘Come over here,’ she said.
I put down my bowl and walked over to her on naked feet, enjoying the feel of the soft carpet beneath them. Through the window behind her, I could discern the wooden fence that ran on either side of the property. I sat down next to her and she turned the laptop towards me.
‘Look.’
On the screen was a grey pop-up window, divided into three. A white box for messaging took up the middle, but in the lower panel I saw my own face, poking in next to hers. My eye sockets looked cavernous with shade and it took me a second to realise that it was a webcam. In the top panel, someone was fondling a penis.
‘Oh,’ I said and jerked my head away from the camera, trying to laugh.
‘Isn’t he naughty?’ she said and turned the screen further towards me so that my face popped back in shot, now alone without hers. Her hand trailed over the sofa seat and onto my knee, her long nails sweeping over my skin. ‘Isn’t he just so naughty?’
I stared at the penis. The image quality was very poor. Weren’t aroused penises meant to be stiff? This one seemed feeble, like the stem of an under-watered plant.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very naughty.’
The hand on the screen started tugging on the penis. It didn’t look very pleasurable, but what did I know, then. On the TV, the news had moved on.
‘… the heat wave continues to ravage the continent, with hundreds of elderly people dying in the Mediterranean,’ said the newsreader. I took my eyes off the laptop screen, where the hand was still tugging and the penis had finally stiffened. Only at the very back of my mind did I register that the person attached to the hand must be looking at me, at my face. A colour-coded heat map of Europe flashed up on the TV and I found the outline of my country. It made me think of my parents – my real mother, my real father.
Trying to make the movement seem natural and planned, I slid out from underneath Host Mother’s trailing fingertips and wandered back to the armchair. Behind me, she straightened up, then closed the laptop. I pulled my feet up under me.
‘You cannot tell anyone about this,’ she said. Her voice was gentler than usual. The news was showing people fanning themselves in a sunlit train carriage. I could still feel her hand. ‘Do you understand?’
Looking at the TV, I nodded.
Every morning from then on, I woke up to find my lunch ready on the counter, next to my new daily allowance of Host Mother’s toilet paper. In the evenings I returned home to a portion of pasta with sauce, now with a chocolate bourbon biscuit on the side. But Host Mother herself I hardly saw until the night before I was due to leave.
I was already in bed, one leg sticking out beneath the lilac sheet I slept with, when she knocked and came in the room without waiting for me to answer. She was wearing her silk night set and the white-tipped nails were back.
‘You’re leaving tomorrow,’ she said.
A midge bite on my ankle burned and I hadn’t the focus to keep my hand from itching. My nail caught on something, pulled it off and wetness spread under my fingertip, smearing red.
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘I am.’
She stood at end of my bed. ‘You’re a special girl, you know. Mature for your age. I’m sure you have people telling you that all the time. Your English is very advanced.’
‘Thank you.’
She looked down to my exposed ankle. ‘Let me get that for you.’ I lay still and rigid as she sucked on her thumb, then bent down over my leg and stroked it across my broken skin till all the blood had wiped off. ‘There.’ She straightened back up. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Night,’ I said to the closing door.
The next day I dragged my orange suitcase out from underneath the bed and stood considering my branded drawstring bag. Was it worth keeping? I’d used it every day, it could be a memento. A honk came from outside; the guy with mini-bus was here. I made a quick decision.
Host Mother was standing by the open door when I came down with my suitcase, her hair pulled back into a ponytail that curled glamorously at the end. Out in the cul-de-sac, the mini-bus engine switched off. The language school guy got down from the driving seat, his vest already covered in dark plumes on his chest and back. He waved for me to come over, we had airports to go to, planes to catch.
In the doorway, I turned to Host Mother. ‘Bye.’
A fly was crawling up her arm, making its way through the fibres of her sleeve. It struck me how much like carpet it was.
‘Bye, darling,’ she said and squeezed my shoulder. I could feel them through my t-shirt, the white tips.
The language school guy took hold of my suitcase and lifted it to the bus. I was the last kid to be picked up so he put my suitcase on top of everyone else’s. Before he closed the boot, I caught a glimpse: It looked like a colourful game of Tetris. Inside the bus, Marco the Spanish boy was telling a story about how his host family had made him try a kind of fungal jam. He said it tasted like old socks.
‘No way,’ I said and added it to my list of curious things to recount when I got back.
Filippa N. Johansen mainly writes short fiction. She lives in London, UK, but frequently sets her stories among the beech trees of her native Denmark. Her work has previously appeared in an anthology by small leaf press and been long-listed for the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize.
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