Sophie is a writer of short stories, centred around semi-feral adventures in Devon and beyond. She trained at RADA.

Email: sophiejames927@gmail.com

Double Bill

I stand with Mandy outside Steven Heath’s house. He’s eating dinner with his family. He’s got his back to me, so I get the nape of his neck. Outside, it’s a warm, fine evening, a Saturday. I have forgotten to thank Mandy for doing this, for standing with me, keeping vigil.

I lied to my mum about going to Saturday Morning Orchestra and instead me and Mandy cycled to Dawlish Warren which takes nearly an hour, most of it uphill. But the rewards are worth it; men shout nice things about my legs from their cars. My yellow pedal pushers are flattering. I bought them in a shop in Bilbao on a Spanish exchange trip.

Most Saturdays, me and Mandy lie in the dunes at Dawlish and eat ice cream. I can only afford a Mini Milk, not a proper cornet, but it still feels luxurious, just the two of us lying in the hot sun.

Steven Heath is in the fifth year at school, so he’s two years older than me, nearly sixteen. Occasionally, I chat to him. Not alone, he’s always with someone. We stand against the radiators in the school corridor. He’s polite, with pale brown hair, which is cropped at the bottom and then curlier higher up. He has a strong, fit back and shoulders and he’s medium height. When I spot him walking towards me, a feeling grips me. This is what makes it real between us. It takes it to a region that only we occupy. It doesn’t need to be discussed.

I see Steven pushing his chair back from the dinner table and then leave the room. I continue to stand outside with Mandy, who is not so much patient as numb. His bedroom light goes on and I know he will be getting ready to go out.

Getting this glimpse of him is enough, actually. Anything more would be too much. I haven’t kissed anyone yet. I love horses mainly, especially going downhill. You have to lean back in the saddle to help the horse out. I like the swaying motion, and the musky smell of its neck. I still muck out the stables at Pinhoe in exchange for riding lessons.

Steven’s twin sister Sam comes out of the house. What distinguishes her is her walk and her red wavy hair. She walks on tiptoe, a happy thing, and not like a ballerina. For a time I tried to copy this – bouncing on the balls of my feet – but it was too tiring so I dropped it. She has a habit of wearing tops which show off her shoulders and bare arms. I look up halter-necks in the catalogues because of her. I also learn the word tousled. She comes towards us out of the darkness.

Are you alright, standing out here? she says.

We’re fine, I say.

Awww, she says (she always says this, and ‘bless’).

Don’t stay out too long, will you? He takes ages getting ready. She smiles and carries on walking with her tote bag and her bouncing feet.

Mandy wants to get going now; she wants to get her Soda Stream working, eat her tea, and watch some telly. She says that Steven is probably waiting for us to leave. Mandy has fine, flyaway hair, which is blonde, whereas I’m brown all over (my dad says I am ‘swarthy’ meaning not great) and I’m slim for the first time.

Steven’s Saturday job is in a butcher’s in town, and he wears a red and white striped apron, which suits his complexion and his hair. I walk past the butcher’s window and give myself a moment to look in. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s out the back. If I’m feeling brave, I walk past again in the other direction. I then go to the cinema opposite, not Saturday Morning Pictures, which is exhausting with kids shouting over the dialogue, but actual films – a double bill on my own. Kramer vs. Kramer followed by The Elephant Man.

I understand that what Dustin Hoffman is able to achieve with the boy playing his son is real acting, beyond performance. I can tell they are improvising and this excites me. With the Elephant Man, when I watch Anthony Hopkins, I can see how little he needs to do for me to understand. Also, there is the moment when John Merrick slides against the wall and cries out, I am not an animal, I am a human being, I am a man! 

But I love Kramer vs. Kramer the most. I see it six times.

Dustin Hoffman in the courtroom, fighting for custody, looks at Meryl Streep and says to her with his eyes: you didn’t fail. Her face is so still. Everything in New York is muddy taupes and browns, and then pale silk blouses, which I love. And the brown paper grocery bags that they carry, always filled to the brim. Running, always running. Hair that is golden, and brunette, and hair that is wavy and hair that is up in a bun, closed with a pencil. Cheekbones. The dark brown coffee in the glass jug, the endlessness of coffee. And then the dialogue, which overlaps: Ted, I’m leaving/you. What is this some kind of joke? Well, you really pick your times to…I am sorry I was late but I was busy making/ a living, alright? I’m not taking him with me. I’m no good for him. I have no patience. He’s better off without/me. Joanna, please. And I don’t love you anymore. (The lift door closes).

Often I leave the cinema as the butcher’s is closing. Or it has already closed and Steven has gone.

Bandy Murden, Backie Jromley, Dara Tennis. It’s a pain when we do this at break-time if someone’s name begins with a vowel, because then we can’t swap the first letters round: Cheryl Euridge.

Jackie Bromley is our ringleader. She likes me because I crack her up, which is handy. Because she is into the Human League, she is called Human, which we shorten to Hume, then Oom. She has a curtain of hair over one eye because of the lead singer Phil Oakey, and this gives her a distant, sometimes wise look, unemotional at all times. But she tells us what to feel about things and we listen.

Mandy is my first best friend. There are not many similarities in our lives, except for the fact that neither of us has a dad at home. In her case, she decides to say, ‘I don’t have a dad’, but I find this strange because she does. He calls her Pigeon, and she loves it when he comes round, but there is no structure to it. Mandy has a tiny brother called Christopher, so the split must have happened quite recently. We sometimes listen to Barry Manilow in the back room (his song Mandy is our favourite) while the rest of the family sit in the front room. She lives with her aunt (who she has to share a bedroom with), her mum, her grandparents and Christopher. There is also an older sister called Heather, who is already filling her bottom drawer with practical things for the house she will one day live in. She has a serious boyfriend and they tell us the facts of life, including terms like ‘ball sac’, which I don’t feel ready for.

Every day the aunt is picked up in a van and taken to a day care centre. She doesn’t say much, but she likes making cups of tea which Mandy’s family drink constantly. Everyone is very polite to the aunt. They eat a lot of tinned food.

I live with my mum and brother, there are Renoir prints on the walls, and my mum is having an affair first with my brother’s maths tutor, a man called Victor from Ghana, then with a poet from Chile who was going to have his hands chopped off but they decided against it at the last minute. My mum thinks Mandy is ‘bright and full of promise’, but also ‘a bit common’. The worst thing is if my mum says that someone is ‘rather ordinary’. I know there is no hope for them.

I have free school meals but Mandy doesn’t. Her granddad is a caretaker. My mum is a supply teacher who used to be a dancer from Australia. She corrects Mandy’s mum’s grammar when they have a conversation on the doorstep:

We was just saying, Pam/ It puts the top hat on everything!

We were just saying.

Dustin Hoffman makes up a big pros and cons list which his lawyer says to do about his son Billy, regarding custody, and he writes in the cons list: NO LET UP. The list is long, and there are no pros. But then he gets up and goes into the bedroom and holds Billy in his arms. There are painted clouds on the wall.

My mum has decided I am ‘gifted’ so I go to workshops with children called Merlin and Joaquin and Clawson (it means sacrifice, apparently). We put on a play, which I ruin by forgetting to leave a prop on a chair (umbrella belonging to the murderer), which holds the key to understanding the entire plot. The director refuses to speak to me at the end. I join the cast of the Pyjama Game at the Northcott Youth Theatre but I hate it because it’s a musical (fake acting, singing suddenly) and I ruin the only line I have which is, ‘It cuts! It cuts!’ meaning, I think, that I’m upset, but I don’t understand and instead I say ‘It’s cuts, it’s cuts!’ which makes no sense.

Apart from Mandy Burden, I have one other friend, Tara Dennis. The only thing we have in common is that we can’t believe we’re alive. We stare at our hands and go: this is my hand!

*

It’s another Saturday and I walk past the butcher’s. I have been crying, mainly because of the end of The Elephant Man – the moment of the removal of pillows that signifies John Merrick’s end, that he can take it no more (if he lies flat he’ll die because his head is so big, and he knows this so he is effectively committing suicide).

At the precise moment I look through the butcher’s window, Steven looks up at me. He smiles and I smile back. He does a gesture, as if to say, ‘come in’. I walk into the butcher’s. Because I don’t know what to say, I ask for lamb’s liver. It’s our staple meat.

Steven slices the liver, and we both look down at the blood and fluid oozing onto the board. There is something weirdly sex-ish about it, his fingers are bloodied and it also reminds me of my periods, me vomiting and passing out every four weeks. I wish I’d asked for chicken wings or something.

How are you, Sophia, alright? he says.

Yes, fine.

Are you off out tonight, then?

No.

I notice Steven’s earlobes, which are attached to the side of his face rather than freestanding, and he also has two shaving nicks on his chin. He wraps the liver pieces in a plastic bag, and shoots it through a machine to close it. He seems different from school; more authoritative, older. People seem to have two personalities: a school one and an outside one. But I don’t know in what way I am different.

See you around, okay? he says.

He does a weird thing with the bag, threading it into a bigger bag (unnecessary) and then also does a kind of juggling thing with the change, and then our fingers meet, the copper pennies clink in my palm. His hand is pale because he’s washed it. The whorls of his fingers touch mine. He looks at me for a moment. I can’t figure out if I am smiling. It’s so amazing.

I’m going to ask my mum to give me the money back though, which she will forget to do. It’s worth it.

I have a recurring fantasy about being with Steven behind the sports hall. The wall is handy for pushing me against, and I also get some hardness down there from him. Mainly it’s no tongues, just little nips and pressure from his warm mouth and his body and being inside his arms. Our fingers interlace while we are kissing and there are NO ONLOOKERS. I’m not doing it in front of a crowd like Rosalie Reeve. We are like breathing horses nuzzling each other. I like it if he comes behind me and puts his arms around me, with his chin on my shoulder and I can look down at his hands on my tummy.

It is around this time that my mum goes back to Australia to say goodbye to her mum, our Nana, who is dying of cancer. My dad has come to stay, to look after us while she’s gone. He sits in the wicker chair by the Calor gas heater and lets our cat Smudge stretch himself the whole length of dad’s legs, as if he is wearing an extra trouser. Dad is away from Penny Emery, his girlfriend. This causes him to be distant. He cleans the flat so it’s properly neat and tidy for the first time and lets us have frozen beef burgers, but I see him walking on his own a lot with his head down.

Dustin Hoffman flirts with (crap actress) Margaret, who is Meryl Streep’s friend in the film. He kisses the side of her head in the park. In the kitchen, he looks at her and says: You’re a good mother. You’re a lousy dishwasher. And then he slaps her bottom, which if I was Margaret I would see as a come-on.

My mum comes back from Sydney after a month away, and my Dad goes back to Cornwall where he discovers that Penny Emery has been having an affair with someone in the village. So now they’ve split up and he comes to tell us it’ll be different from now on because he knows she was horrible to us, which was bad obviously.

My mum receives the call from Australia that Nana has died, and she has to go that day to Vincent Thompson to do supply teaching. I worry about her doing this. When she gets home she says she burst into tears in front of a gang of boys who were mimicking her accent, and then one lifted up her skirt. She said she cried and shouted my mother died today. That night I stand at the foot of her bed and she cries into her pillow, with her back to me.

*

I love brown so much. Dustin Hoffman is literally head to toe in walnut. The woman he sleeps with (Phyllis) gets out of his bed in the morning to use the bathroom, and her naked body is brown, with beige privates. She is the secretary at the firm where he works. She says to him: Yes, I’ll have dinner with you, before Dustin has even asked her (he acts surprised but delighted), so it’s fine to take the initiative but only if you absolutely know what the answer will be. Otherwise you should wait.

Steven Heath is waiting for me at the end of school. I first have to get past Mr Phillips, our headmaster, who insists on shaking every pupil’s hand as they leave and having a quiet word if necessary. There is no other way to go but in Steven’s direction because it’s my way home. Blanking people is very much the norm, but I can’t do this because we have clearly seen each other. The way he pushes himself away from the bus shelter tells me something sad and difficult is about to happen.

Hello Sophia, he says.

It’s like he’s forty, saying people’s names.

I just wanted to say that I know you like me and everything…and I do really like you, but only as a friend…Because you’re a bit young for me…Do you understand? (Me: nods) Yeah? (Me: nods) Right, okay then, take care of yourself. Bye.

Bye.

I carry on walking up Barrack Road.

I thought that feelings ran both ways.

That feelings are shared.

I want my son/You can’t have him. Dustin Hoffman smashes his wine glass against the wall. Meryl Streep’s hands fly up to her face and the words all overlap. Dustin Hoffman leaves the restaurant and then remembers his coat.

Me and Mandy split up. Because that is what friendship is like; as private and intense as an affair, and when it is over there is no going back. John Anscombe pokes her and this shocks me. She tells me they do this outside in a park, his hand in her pants, the cold wind on her face. She is good at painting a picture; he uses one finger, then two.

We are sitting on her aunt’s bed when she tells me this. She puts on some lip-gloss and then I say something I have always thought but never ever said:

It makes you look like a goldfish.

It’s because it does, her lips are too big for her face and the lip-gloss makes it worse. But I also can’t believe she let John Anscombe poke her when he only ever says to me: ‘You’re really pretty for your age, you know’. She then says something mean about my mum making burnt ratatouille and our flat being dirty. I know when I leave that it’s the last time. Her gran is standing on the doorstep to say goodbye, instead of Mandy, who she says has ‘gone in for her tea’.

My mum has also found out that I have been cycling to Dawlish with Mandy rather than going to Saturday Morning Orchestra. She gets Victoria Dunlop (it actually says VD on her door) the deputy head to get me out of French to discuss my behaviour even though it’s an optional club.

*

Dustin Hoffman looks down at Billy whose eyes are swollen from crying. He is in bed after a big fight about chocolate chip ice cream (I hate you!/I hate you back, you little shit!). He tells Billy why he thinks Meryl Streep left: underneath she was very sad. She didn’t leave because of you. She left because of me. There is no music telling you what to feel. It’s just his face and his eyes on Billy’s face.

The last time I see Steven Heath’s twin sister Sam, she’s in a pencil skirt coming out of music class with Mr Greenham, doing her lilting walk. She smiles at me and her face has little ginger freckles. Then she gets cancer of the nose and everyone thinks it’s strange and embarrassing. People’s noses are generally off-limits, unless it’s a particular standout like a button nose. Sam Heath remains in hospital and the cancer spreads. She dies quite quickly. Jackie Bromley says that Steven ‘just has to get on with it’.

The last time I wear the yellow pedal pushers is when my mum hits me over the head with a clothes brush. It’s long and made of wood, with natural bristle. I have four hours of violin practice every Sunday with a man called John Holman who refuses to blow his nose when he has a cold and drinks boiled water with ‘a splash of milk’.

On this particular day, I don’t know why I’m saying no; he’s almost at the house. I’m in my bedroom with the long blue velvet curtains and the Victorian sink. My mum holds the clothes brush over her head and brings it down hard. I am not aware of pain, just a singing sound in my ears. Then the warm wet feeling of blood running through my hair. It feels like what we do to each other at school – cracking an imaginary egg on a person’s head and then gently tickling the hair to simulate the yolk running down. Everyone loves it.

My brother takes me to the sink and washes the wound. Blood covers my pedal pushers, deep crimson. He seems to know what to do, and everything happens quickly. My mum stands in the room at the hospital where I get my stitches (6). I can feel the miniscule tugs on my scalp as the lady works quietly, I can feel her breathing. My mum speaks.

Well, you know that if you had agreed to practice your violin, Sophia…none of this would have happened.

I feel the tugs as if they are coming from inside. I lie on the table and the lady breathes, and there’s the sound of metal instruments, and for a moment it’s really calm. There’s someone else in the room, which is good. I have a different parting from normal for a while. I tell everyone I hit my head on the side of the house.

*

Dustin Hoffman kneels in a drift of autumn leaves and Billy cries in his green and orange Parka.

Because I no longer have a best friend it’s clear I also don’t really have any friends, because Mandy was all I needed. Tara Dennis is obsessed with her new baby brother, who’s called Daniel. We no longer talk about being alive or our hands.

I come back from school and watch episodes of Harold Lloyd on BBC2, then Countdown on the newly launched Channel 4. It’s around this time I am called ‘slag’ and ‘hippy’ by bullies at school. One girl tells me that Mandy is ‘relieved’ we’re not friends anymore. I start to come home at lunchtime, but given how long Barrack Road is, I have to turn round and walk back to school as soon as I’ve eaten.

In The Elephant Man, John Merrick is pulled along by a savage, drunken man and locked in a cage with monkeys. John Hurt does this thing with his body; light and human as he stumbles. I can’t stop thinking about it.

I see Steven only one more time out of school. He’s in town with another boy and has a dog on a lead. He’s wearing a vest and his arms are like rope; strained with muscles and veins. The dog seems too powerful for him. He says my name and looks at me. I’m sorry about Sam, I want to say. I’m sorry she died. But he’s gone already and I imagine I can smell him; a mixture of Brut, underarm sweat, and his skin. He looked okay, quiet and friendly as usual. When I tell Jackie Bromley she says, ‘He’s stopped washing his hair though. That’s always a sign.’

*

The bit at the end of Kramer vs. Kramer is clever and sad: Billy’s toys and clothes are all in a heap, ready, and they both sit waiting for Meryl Streep to pick him up as she has won custody. They sit in silence, then the doorbell buzzes and they look at each other. Billy is wearing a tie. He has the scar on his cheek, which he got from falling off the jungle gym in the park and the explosive scene when Dustin Hoffman is running through the streets, clasping Billy to his chest, blood everywhere.

But I like the moments of silence, and Dustin Hoffman’s nod, as if they are equals. Meryl Streep says to him on the entry-phone to come down to the lobby. Her face is so still. Silent tears fall and she wipes them away. It’s mainly about the clouds on his wall that she painted, she says, and that she knows he is already home. They hug. She gets in the lift to tell Billy he is staying where he is. How do I look? she asks Dustin Hoffman and as the doors close, he says, quietly, you look terrific.

It’s Dustin Hoffman’s film. I want to be an actor.