Robbie approached Kizzy’s room – with stealth.
She was at her desk when Robbie nudged her bedroom door open.
“Another round?” He enquired, eyeing the Form Photo. Kizzy was busy making detailed notes about everyone in her class. Everything she could think of. Thinking long term which ones she’d want as a sister in law, tolerate or couldn’t stand.
Robbie took the darts.
“You have your three. Work on them.” Kizzy said.
“But Cece, Helen, Donna, they’ve all said ‘no’.”
“No. Not at all.” Kizzy explained, “They said ‘not yet’. ‘Not now. ’ They’re not sure. Not here. Maybe another time. They’re not like flowers in a garden waiting for you to come along and pick them. They’re thinking about it too. For some of them, you might be the last person they want in their lives.”
Robbie looked again at the three girls who were supposed to be getting his undivided attention. Cece, Helen, Donna. It was obvious to him. Cece had her eyes on someone else. Helen was ‘cradle-snatching’. Donna has a boyfriend with plans, and he’s not going to get in the way of those.
Kizzy pulled out her copy of ‘Manwatching’. (The guide to human behaviour) There were page edges turned down, several bookmarks, and other places marked with Sellotape. Kizzy has been taking notes. She dangles her legs over the edge of her desk eager to quote directly to set Robbie straight where required.
Robbie looks at the Form Photo, there are multiple pin pricks from the darts and being folded up and stuffed into Kizzy’s jeans hadn’t helped.
“Here are some tips. Indications that things are moving in the right direction. Things to do. Here it says, ‘Postural echo,’” Kizzy reads aloud. “’When he likes her, he copies her. When she likes him, she lets him’.”
Robbie was listening and taking in every phrase, playing it through the way an actor might take notes from a director. He wanted it to work. Being without a girlfriend left a void. He felt incomplete. Not lonely exactly, just not fully a person without someone.
“‘The hair-touch,’” Kizzy continued referring to Desmond Morris’s book, “—‘mocked at first, then sacred.’ A bit like you and Cece at the disco. You did that, didn’t you?”
“Did what?”
“The offhand-jokey-finger-stroke. Like you’d just found a spider’s web in her hair and wanted to fish it out.”
That’s not how Robbie remembered it. He shook his head. “I took her elbow. We danced.”
Robbie glanced out into the dark through the side window. “I was aiming for casual.” He said, thinking he’d seen someone out in the garden. A light. Movement.
Kizzy snapped the book shut. “I read you.”
“It didn’t feel like a game plan,” Robbie said, “It felt natural, that whatever these stages Desmond Morris talks about are intuitive. For all of us. We all want it to work out.”
“So you’re doing ‘improv’: now?”
“Sort of,” he said, rolling a brass-tipped dart through his fingers, eager to have a few more shots at the Form Photo.
“You should be careful,” she said, hopping off the desk. “Once the head-touch starts, you’re halfway to monogamy.”
Robbie aims a dart.
Kizzy flicks through her notebook.
“We let the darts decide,” Robbie said, about to throw a dart.
Miss Rowbotham happened to be in the centre. She was like a bullseye. He took a breath, slowly exhaled and as the last of the air drifted through his nostrils, he threw another dart.
“Thwack!”
Kizzy went over to check the damage. It had grazed Miss Rowbotham’s right shoulder and had gone through India’s school tie.
“India Armstrong-Jones. ‘AJ” Kizzy declared, adding some detail. “Evasive. We’re all beneath her. Or a different species. Expelled from some posh boarding school in the Home Counties. Nicked the Headmaster’s car apparently to take a friend to a Blondie concert in Plymouth. So it goes.”
Robbie was impressed.
“So a hard nut to crack.” Kizzy declared
“The arrow has spoken. ‘AJ’ it is.” Said Robbie.
“‘India’ to start with. ‘AJ’ is a school thing, so don’t call her that, she’ll know I’ve briefed you.”
“I might like her.”
“You might indeed.”
Tracey, who was outside in the garden, had the measure of these two now. She’d like to get her hands on Kizzy’s notebook. Find out what she was saying about them all.
As she crept away, she knocked over a milk bottle. She cursed, then ran. She was down the drive when she saw the garage door swing open, and Robbie appeared, looking for the fox, or burglar, or whatever it had been.
A series of phonecalls, not to AJ, and Kizzy established that AJ would be at the Christian Disco in the Church Hall. Robbie would be there too. It had been ordained. His penance may be that he has to attend choir practice and church while at home.
Friday, 31st March 1978
The Christian Disco was held in the community hall of St Nicholas’.
The music was halfway between K-Tell and someone’s older sister’s mixtape.
The room smelled of polish and sherry.
Robbie had dressed up—or down, depending on your view of faith-based nightlife. No tie, hair tousled with Kizzy’s mousse, collar open to suggest rebellion or mild sinus congestion. He wore a crucifix. He didn’t know if that made him look godly or like Tom Jones. Not that he had a hair chest to show off. It had one hair. A lone strand. Curly and lost. Like him in this environment. Come to think of it, anywhere there were adults, or girls, especially girls, or children, was a foreign land when you’ve spent most of you life away at an all boys ‘posh prison’ boarding school.
Kizzy spotted AJ standing next to a trestle table, sipping something from a polystyrene cup – it was vodka and orange juice. She wore red cord trousers. Every other girl in the place, including Kizzy, wore a dress. Her hair was perfectly crimped. Her arms were folded. Her guard was high.
Parents lined the side tables, murmuring about skiing holidays and exam results. Girls, stiff in velvet or tartan skirts, hovered like moths near the radiators. The DJ had been given a safe playlist. Nobody expected David Bowie.
Then, India walked in.
She wore red corduroy trousers so tight they defied the laws of physics, a white ruffled shirt that looked as though it had been inherited from a glam rock cousin, and an expression of amused detachment. She didn’t walk; she prowled.
Robbie noticed her before the first bassline dropped. He was already lingering near the squash bowl, half-wishing he was somewhere else—a rugby club disco, a rehearsal, a different version of himself. Then she arrived. The only girl in trousers. The only girl worth watching.
When the first “Rebel Rebel” bars rang out, India took the floor like she owned it. The other girls hesitated. India didn’t. She danced like it meant something. Not for attention. Not for boys. Just because the rhythm told her to.
Robbie found himself walking towards her before he realised it. His outfit was mismatched—Marc Bolan shirt from the Kard Bar, denim jacket, drainpipe trousers, cowboy boots—but the look worked, somehow. He looked like someone who’d just stepped out of a confused dream about Top of the Pops.
India clocked him. Noted the earring, the boots, the way he didn’t flinch when she moved close. He didn’t try to lead. He just kept time with her.
She turned. Scowled. The boy’s face looked familiar. Someone’s brother. They were always someone’s brother.
“Kizzy’s brother,” he said.
She knew Kizzy. Quirky. The male version may be equally intriguing.
They danced.
They danced until parents whispered, and the vicar’s wife complained. They danced until someone changed the track to something safer, something slower.
They didn’t.
Outside, later, she lit a cigarette. “You go to Eastfield?” he asked.
“Not usually.” A grin. “Temporary exile.”
She smoked in silence. She didn’t offer him one, and he didn’t ask for one. Her voice was low, amused, and had a touch of West London.
“You don’t belong here either, do you?” she asked.
“No.”
She exhaled. “Good.”
After that, there was constant banter and laughter about being away at school, something they both had, or had had, in common.
He learnt how she had ‘borrowed’ her housemaster’s car to take some friends to the Blondie gig in Portsmouth the previous May.
That’s what Robbie appreciated: feeling something and acting on it, doing something, rather than just dwelling on it. Act now, not later. Act impulsively, rather than overthink it, or think about it at all. He thought back to the rules set by Kizzy:
You must speak to her. He was doing that.
You must make her laugh. He was doing that too.
You may kiss her — but only if it feels right. That would come, surely.
This was too easy. Speaking to a girl was straightforward, Robbie decided. You could ask whether she had better suggestions for the music being played or compliment her by highlighting a specific detail of her attire, such as her hair, necklace, watch, or shoes. These had all been carefully chosen. To make her laugh, you had to listen, understand what she had said, and ask for more. But once you had her trust, she’d offer all kinds of gems where you could see the funny side: her situation, her siblings, her parents, something on TV, favourite children’s programmes, and the kiss? If it felt right? That might require an evening of listening; the slow dance would help.
No prying eyes were a bonus.
With India, he desired to smoke outside. Others smoked; some of the parents smoked, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with them or be anywhere around them if she could help it. So they wandered off and found the church doors unlocked.
They discovered a corner by the font.
The kiss felt right. But Robbie couldn’t help but reflect that this was where he had been christened nearly 17 years ago, where his parents had got married six years before that. Then Indi said she was going to live with her mother in London.
After that, the kisses became something of a ‘‘why bother, it’s not going anywhere; I’ll never see you again’.
He had until Friday the following week.
And then it was over. She said she had to leave. She set off on foot. He offered to walk her home. She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Okay.”
Her father lived in a block of flats that looked out onto the Town Moor.
He should come around the following week. Thursday, they’d have the place to themselves.
Saturday, 29 April, Kizzy and Momo Debrief Kizzy’s Room
“So… a kiss by the font. Bit symbolic.” Momo said.
“She told him she was leaving.”
“That was her goodbye kiss.” Momo Said. “Is he writing to her?”
“I doubt she gave him an address.” Kizzy.
“I liked her. I mean—dangerous. But real.” Momo.
“She made the rest of us feel provincial.”
“Do we mark it as a win?”
Kizzy turns to Robbie’s Diary. She thumbs through to Thursday, 6th April. She doesn’t read it out, but shares her conclusions with Momo.
“All a bit one-sided, according to his diary. They weren’t talking an awful lot. She joked about teen pregnancy. Says it all. Robbie said nothing much had happened; that was his perspective. Either way, she’s out of the game, and so Robbie is back to square one. As it were.
“Three ticks?” Momo asked.
“Yes,” Kizzy said.
“A win?”
“N,” Kizzy said emphatically. “Are there winners and losers? Isn’t everyone just dipping their toes in the water?”
That got a raised eyebrow from Momo.
“There’s been a lot of dipping, and it wasn’t toes.”
“We’re not talking ‘happy ever after at our age, for goodness’ sake,” Kizzy said.
Kizzy digs around in her drawer for a zipper. She takes a pin and sticks it into Indi. Sums her up, she thought. “All zippers and no knickers”
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