Careless

by Kirsty Capes

Genres: Coming of Age; Friendship

Synopsis

**Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022!**

A COSMOPOLITAN, BBC, STYLIST, DAILY MAIL, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING and GUARDIAN BEST BOOK PICK!

'Astounding. Heart-breaking but hopeful, and a fresh new voice' PANDORA SYKES
'Moving and beautifully written' LIBBY PAGE
'A rare new talent' THE GUARDIAN
'A book that deserves to be a huge hit' STYLIST
'The literary equivalent of gold dust' BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH

***

Sometimes it's easy to fall between the cracks...

At 3.04 p.m. on a hot, sticky day in June, Bess finds out she's pregnant.

She could tell her social worker Henry, but he's useless.
She should tell her foster mother, Lisa, but she won't understand.
She really ought to tell Boy, but she hasn't spoken to him in weeks.
Bess knows more than anyone that love doesn't come without conditions.

But this isn't a love story...

Release date: May 13, 2021

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter One

The long and short of it is this: it’s the kind of day where the heat sticks plimsolls to tarmac and I’m standing in the toilet in the Golden Grill kebab shop with a pregnancy test stuffed into my backpack.

I’m waiting for my best friend Eshal. The toilet is not a cubicle but a single room with dirty magnolia tiles that need regrouting and oily lipstick smears on the mirror. The metallic smell of periods is clogging the air and my forehead is damp with sweat. My face watches me from the mirror, distorted by the cherry-coloured imprints of puckered lips, my skin the colour of tiles, too much eyeliner smudged around my eyes and a thin sheen of moisture coating my upper lip.

The first thing I ever learned about my biological mother is that she was very into astrology. The zodiac. I have a pattern of freckles on my lower back, which, if you look at in a certain way, resembles the Big Dipper, and I wonder whether she has the same constellation on her own body.

When I was born, I was already dead. I left the womb with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. Had my mother hoped I would never come back to life?

I wonder whether or not it’s time to do the pregnancy test; whether I really counted the days right, whether I’m even late at all, or if this is some gross trick my brain is playing on me, addled by the smell of chip fat in the kebab shop. I turn the limescale-encrusted taps back on and splash water over my face.

I think about Boy. What he would think if he saw me now. Sometimes Boy drives us to Chertsey, one town over, and we climb up to the spot on St Ann’s Hill with the bricked-in observation deck, and we make bets about who can get down faster, and we run so hard I feel like my legs will swing out from under me and I’ll break all my teeth on the ground, and he always wins because his legs are so long and much stronger than mine, which are pudgy from too much sleep and too many kebabs. And when it’s autumn, he picks up leaves and twirls the stems between his thumb and forefinger before giving them to me. But we haven’t done that for a while now.

I rattle my backpack, listening for change, and realise that I spent the last of my money in the chemist’s, and now I have none for chips. The small frosted-glass window in the bathroom is open, and outside I can hear Bora, or one of the other guys, dropping a rubbish bag into the industrial-sized metal bins.

The time is 3.04 p.m., according to the Hello Kitty wristwatch I stole out of my foster sister Clarissa’s jewellery box at home. I unzip the front pocket of my bag and take out the long box I got from the pharmacy. I open it and one of the two plastic sticks inside clatters to the floor. I gather it up quickly, embarrassed despite my total aloneness. I ease my denim shorts down to my knees and wait as the build-up of liquid in my bladder streams out. I hold the pregnancy test that didn’t hit the floor between my legs, clumsily, dousing my hand in my own hot urine as I do so. I wonder whether it’s wet enough. When I pull it out from between my thighs, the applicator on the end is a stark artificial pink, the colour of kids’ toothpaste, pale yellow droplets discolouring the white plastic.

I think about pulling my shorts up, but for the moment it seems like too much effort. I think about my biological mother, how she might have found out she was pregnant. Her waters broke in the cinema, three weeks earlier than expected. She was watching The Karate Kid. I don’t think about my biological dad at all; I think he was a one-night stand. The social workers told me she never knew him. But I feel like these other things ought to be important: me, with the Big Dipper on my back. Her, watching The Karate Kid (Who was she with? A friend? Was she alone?). And then me again, deciding enough was enough and fighting my way out of her body, ripping her open so that while I was being resuscitated in intensive care, nurses violently rubbing my body, she was being stitched back together. She was so sure I would be a boy because a palm reader told her. After they sewed her up and took her to see me, in my little transparent plastic box, she asked them, tripping out from the gas and air maybe, where my penis was. The nurse who was with her gently told her she had had a girl. She didn’t believe I was her baby. She thought I’d been swapped.

All these stories told in therapy at the Family Centre, to make me feel as though I knew her my whole life. To pre-empt any signs of behavioural deficiencies, attachment disorders, sociopathic tendencies associated with early childhood trauma. The case file turned into fairy stories that would make sense to me in ways the truth would not.

The pregnancy test is positive.

I see the pink cross and I can’t see the off-white sink, the tiles, the slimy lipstick kisses, the permanent-marker love notes and pentagrams. I concentrate and strain my eyes until they burn and everything disappears from sight, except that little pink cross.

If I screw my eyes shut and open them quickly, the tiles make psychedelic patterns in purple and blue. I check my watch again and, impossibly, it’s only been five minutes.

In two months’ time, there’s going to be a total eclipse.

My skin is salty. I think about cockroaches surviving a nuclear winter by curling up into the foetal position in the mud. I tug my feet up to my knees, mindful of the puddles of urine and God-knows-what-else on the floor.

I wonder how I am going to survive a nuclear summer.

I wonder what on God’s green Earth I’m going to tell Boy.

My bum is stuck to the plastic toilet seat. I haven’t shaved the backs of my thighs and the hairs are poking into my skin.

When I was ten, I went through a phase of compulsively banging my head against the wall. When I was twelve, I tried my first cigarette and I was so ashamed of myself that I hit myself in the face until, I swear on my life, the shape of my skull changed, my forehead flattening, like one of those pre-homo-sapiens.

I wonder if I hit myself in the stomach enough this will all go away. Wonder if the shape of my body will change. Stupid of me, because of course it will.

I’m fifteen years old.

The test might be wrong.

It’s probably not wrong, though.

My muscles aren’t working properly. The pee stick slips from my fingers and clatters onto the floor by my feet. I pick it up, plus the second from the box, nestled in with the paper instruction leaflet. I take my litre bottle of Coke, which is perched on the windowsill, and finish off the dregs. I sit back down on the loo, manoeuvre the second stick between my legs. I catch sight of myself in the mirror, my arm awkwardly bent between my legs, my hair in a lopsided ponytail, long, ratty and full of split ends, in dire need of a cut. My eyes are tiny little black bugs in my steaming face, which has a different kind of shine to it now. A fearful shine.

I pull up my damp shorts, buttoning them so my stomach strains against the waistband. I recently learned what a muffin-top is, after hearing a group of girls at school talking about it in the changing rooms, comparing their non-existent belly fat with one another, each of them competing to have the biggest, the most obscene, pinching their flesh violently, leaving red marks, which turned slowly pink, their sing-song self-detriment so naked and fake in the dim strip lights. I could see all their hip bones. They took too long to put on their shirts to be ashamed, their lacy A-cup bras scooping their boobs together into artificial cleavage, and Eshal and I mocking them the next row of benches over, her prancing around on tiptoes, pressing her boobs together, rolling her hand at the wrist, high above her head, mimicking the royal wave. Me, snorting with scornful laughter, but being sure to button up my own shirt the quickest, untucking it to obscure the bulge brimming over the sides of my skirt. Now, here, in the Golden Grill toilets, it’s more pronounced than ever.

I cap the second stick, stuff it into the front pocket of my bag along with the first, without checking for the pink cross. I wash my hands slowly, taking time to lather the spaces between my fingers with the sliver of soap balanced on the hand dryer. I grab my bag and bike helmet and leave the bathroom.

Eshal has just walked in. And she is like:

Hey. All right? as she spots me coming out of the loo.

And I was hoping she wouldn’t see me.

Bora, the kebab shop guy, is peeling strips of meat off the skewer with a long double-handled knife. Fat particles steam up the air. I imagine that I can feel them landing on my face and burrowing into the pores of my skin.

Hey Bora, I shout across the shop. One of the pensioners from the Greeno Centre, enjoying a portion of chips at a yellowing table, looks up. I tell Bora, That’s got to be a health and safety violation.

What are you talking about? Bora shouts back over his shoulder. You know we don’t do that health and safety shit here, Bess.

I’m talking about Bora’s knife. He holds the knife like a bicycle handlebar, each hand firmly gripping either end of it, the wooden handles stained with fat and sweat. He lifts the knife high above his head and drags it over the meat, pulling it down and towards him in a practised motion. The knife gathers momentum under the pressure of Bora’s pull, and when it breaks free of the meat, it stops inches from Bora’s stomach, every time moments from slicing into his abdomen. Bora is lean, but I can see the sinewy muscles in his shoulders working under the strain of it. The blade of the knife is sharpened to a razor’s edge, but the colour is dull beneath the strips of meat it pulls away.

I walk over. Bora sets the knife down on the counter and wipes his hands on his shirt. He reaches under the counter and hands me and Eshal a lollipop each. Mine is orange flavour. I unwrap it carefully.

I say to Eshal, I’ve got no money.

What, for chips?

I shrug. For anything.

And I feel so desperate. And I hold my breath and think of Boy, while she watches me, chewing on her lollipop.

That’s cool, she says, I’ll front you. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a fiver.

Inside my rucksack is the pregnancy test, fizzing against my back like a hot poker, and inside me is the feeling of being a cockroach, and the air is hazy and my lollipop sticks to my tongue, all sour.

I say, Nah, don’t worry. I was just leaving.

Are you fucking joking? I just got here. I’ve got money! She waves the fiver in my face, fanning me.

Sorry! I say. You were late, anyways! Turn up on time, dickhead, and maybe I’ll let you buy me chips. I’m trying to joke around, but Eshal notices the manic note in my voice.

Wait, what’s up, Bess?

I can’t look her in the face. I’m thinking about cockroaches and Boy’s dick poking into my back and the permanent-marker message on a broken sink tile in the Golden Grill toilet that said CARRIE IS A SLUTTY SKANK BAG and another one in pink that said CALL BELINDA FOR HOT SEX with a scribbled-out phone number and how the heat wobbles off cars and roofs and what am I going to tell my foster parents and, Jesus, what about Boy and everyone, and I think about being a baby in a plastic box in St Peter’s Hospital, being choked by my placenta. I think about all the water contained in separate concrete cradles across all of the Pits, the reservoir by my house hovering fifty feet above my head while I’m sleeping. If the reservoir broke its banks now, we’d be at the epicentre of the flood, like when stars implode and cave in on themselves.

I can’t tell Eshal. I can’t. I stare at her, trying to convey how serious I am without having to announce my situation to the whole of the Golden Grill. Then, I don’t know why, but I stick my tongue out at her. It seems to work.

Fine, she says, her eyebrows knitting together, just go. And as I’m leaving, Eshal turns back to Bora and I hear her ask him if he’s got any weed.

Chapter Two

The town where I live is cut up by the M3 and circumvented by the Thames. Shepperton is famous for its film studios and parakeets. I’ve lived here since I was four years old and I’ve never seen a film star. My house is on the Studios Estate on the edge of town. Not an estate like someone inherited it and there’s a mansion and acres of land; estate like council estate, and Studios because we’re on the edge of the film studios, with all the stage buildings looming over the houses. Wherever you go on the estate, you’re in the shadow of Stage H. Although it isn’t a stage like you find at the theatre; it’s a big old ugly warehouse with corrugated-iron walls and roof, the size of two football pitches end-to-end. Even so, they still guard it from us, the people who live on the estate. Just to get to any of the stages, you have to pass through three security gates and the fences are covered in barbed wire. My neighbour Billy has been trying to hop the fence for years.

I remember when I first arrived here, on Studios Estate, the social worker driving me to my new home pointed out the stone gargoyles on the roof of Stage H. My fingernails scratched at the seat belt as I watched them. Six of them along each side of the building, black silhouettes against the clouds, teetering on the lip of the roof as though the smallest nudge might push them to their deaths.

My foster mother Lisa tells me that the parakeets escaped from the film studios when they were filming The African Queen in the late forties. I don’t know whether that’s true, but I like to take photographs of them and imagine the escape. The whole world stretching out beneath them, a huge new openness in their ribcages.

From my bedroom window on the estate, I can see the park, with two big horse chestnut trees on the green where the parakeets roost. The parakeets have dark orange beaks, the colour of dried blood. I can also see Stage H. And the long sloping sides of the reservoir, just beyond the farmer’s fields, but none of the water inside it. If I climb out of the window and sit on the porch roof facing in the opposite direction, I can see the River Ash Woods, where everyone goes to fly-tip and inject heroin. And then the tin houses, which are what everyone calls the pre-fabs, from after the Second World War. The houses were supposed to be temporary but they were never demolished. That’s where the kids who are too poor for the Studios Estate live, the ones who come to school with holes in their trousers and scabby chins and stains on their shirts. Behind them are the Pits, which used to be gravel pits once upon a time, but I guess whoever owned them didn’t need the gravel any more because they’re all filled up with water and shopping trollies now, with mounds of the leftover gravel peeking out of the waterline and forming little brown islands overgrown with weeds. There are footbridges that connect the islands together and they’re so high up that when you jump from them into the water, your toes graze the bottom of the lake.

The ceiling in my bedroom is speckled with loads of tiny puckered nipples of paint. I wake up and count them, look for faces in them. I do this all the time. It’s like the faces are watching me, waiting for me to pick them out.

We’ve been out of school for four weeks already, on study leave. I’ve just finished Year 11; I’ve had my last exam. And now when I wake up, I forget for a moment that I’m done with school forever, and I listen to the washing machine downstairs. The window is open and the air is like cold milk on my skin.

And for a moment, yesterday doesn’t matter – the Golden Grill, Esh, the pregnancy test – and the whole summer is stretched out before me in the sky outside my window. And one of the houses across the road has a rusty old swing in its front garden, someone’s dumped it there. And it’s like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and I’m thinking maybe today me and Esh can steal that swing and paint it, or maybe throw it into the Pits. Or I could find Boy and see if he’ll drive us to St Ann’s Hill and let me put my head in his lap and pretend to sleep and he’ll stroke my hair and then I’ll pretend to wake up and kiss him long and hard and he’ll fall in love with me again. And then I remember that I’m pregnant and I look out of the window and there’s a dead fox in the road and my foster dad Rory is scraping it off the concrete with the metal shovel that my foster mum Lisa uses to dig weeds out of the gaps in the patio slabs.

I should tell someone. I can’t tell them. Rory and Lisa. I can’t tell my social worker Henry, who is useless. I ought to tell Eshal, and probably Boy. I climb through the open window onto the porch roof with my Pentax, the K1000, one of the most reliable manual cameras commercially available, roll a cigarette, and shoot my neighbour Billy (two years below, collects Pokémon cards) as he tries to throw the rope of a tyre swing over a low-hanging branch of one of the horse chestnuts on the green, but fails because he’s too short to reach it. The shadow of Stage H looms over him from behind the barbed-wire fence.

I shower quickly, and watch myself in the mirror while I wash. I stand so my reflection is in profile, the water running over me. There are so many parts of my body that could be better if I just tried a bit harder. I could have a body like Hannah Barrington’s if I stopped eating chips all the time. And now I’m going to get even fatter, this thing growing inside me. My belly button is going to turn inside out.

I wonder how many weeks I am. I don’t even know what that means. It’s just something pregnant women say.

I practise saying it.

I whisper it: I’m pregnant. I’m having a baby. I’m with child. I’m expecting. How far gone am I? I’m not sure. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that I am pretty far gone. No one can save you now, Bess.

I wander downstairs and Lisa is hoovering the living room. She turns off the vacuum cleaner as I enter, strands of her blonde hair stuck to the sides of her face, her earlobes red.

Afternoon, she says.

Funny, I reply.

The lunchtime news is on the TV. The picture is showing a crudely put-together diagram of how exactly the total eclipse is going to happen. And how, soon, NASA’s going to land the Lunar Prospector on the moon and find water. Guaranteed.

Let’s hope we all survive the end of the millennium.

What are you doing today? she asks me, but not in a conversational tone.

Mum has this habit of fluttering her hand to her neck when she’s nervous, and on her upper arms she has these little chicken-skin bumps, called keratosis pilaris, where the protein molecules get stuck in the hair follicles.

She says, Can you get your shoes off the carpet, please.

I take my shoes off and put them on the table.

It’s bad luck to put shoes on the table. Not to mention disgusting.

Wow, thanks, Lisa, I reply, and she touches her neck in that nervous way, her eyes pale and liquid, because she hates it when I call her Lisa.

Now she’s saying something about keeping the house clean because she has a student she’s tutoring coming over in half an hour.

I’m not listening to her. I’m looking at the fridge magnet with a picture of Rick Astley on it and wondering whether Boy has been fucking someone else.

Mum goes: Bess.

Everything in our house is pink because that’s her favourite colour. She says pink is the colour of luxury. I always thought it was the colour of femininity and sex and weakness. Purple is the colour of luxury, because it’s royal.

She is still trying to dislodge me from the kitchen. Clarissa, my sister, joins us and pours herself a beaker of squash. Clarissa says, in her know-it-all voice, It’s only bad luck if it’s new shoes.

We both give her blank looks, Mum’s hair falling across her face.

On the table. Shoes on the table. Only bad luck if it’s new shoes.

There you go, I say, looking at Mum.

Clarissa is ten and the sparkling, legitimate, blood-related daughter of the family. When Lisa brought her along to the Year 10 parents’ evening at my school, Our Lady of the Assumption, no one could believe that, with my dark hair and moony cow face and beetle eyes and her dusty blonde ringlets and brown eyes the size of UFOs, she was my sister. Well, not really my sister. But she kept trying to hold my hand and introduced herself loudly to all the teachers as my sister.

I’m the Other Child.

Mum and Rory had Clarissa about a year after they fostered me. I am their first and last (so far) foster child. I think they felt a bit guilty thinking about the prospect of putting me back into care after Mum got pregnant with Riss. Maybe they were worried I would have attachment issues. Foster kids get that sometimes, because they haven’t been nurtured properly in their early childhood development. I read that in a pamphlet Mum left in the loo once.

Rory’s not too bad. He tends not to talk too much, which suits me fine. He doesn’t make me call him ‘Dad’, like Lisa does with ‘Mum’, which I must admit is a big relief. I’m sort of indifferent to him, and he is to me. He has just come in from scraping the fox up and Mum is telling him off for washing the fox guts off the shovel in the kitchen sink. I catch Clarissa’s eye and she is trying not to dry-heave, I think.

Mum is saying, Can you not do that with the hose in the garden, for Chrissakes? I’ve got a student over any minute.

Yeah, Dad, it is pretty disgusting, Riss says.

Which student? Rory asks Mum, ignoring her thing about the shovel.

Mum answers that it’s Hannah and I say that I’m going out.

There’s a surprise, she responds.

Can I come? Clarissa asks.

I shake my head, just as Mum says no.

I traipse back upstairs with my shoes to grab my bag. While I’m up there, I call Eshal from the house phone. I hear the doorbell go. Mum opens it and Hannah Barrington’s voice fills up the hallway, bouncing off the walls, which are in a shade of pink called ‘crêpe’.

Hannah is in the year below, half Spanish and very thin. Fun fact about Hannah Barrington: when I was in Year 8, she cut a chunk of Eshal’s hair out with some child-safety scissors during assembly. Then, in November last year, Eshal and I bumped into her and her sister Mary Beth on the bridge by the golf course. Mary Beth is four years older and apparently Eshal had slighted her in some way or other because she dragged Esh through the fence onto the eighteenth hole and beat the shit out of her. Mary Beth held her face into the grass long enough that she made Eshal’s limbs spasm and twitch because she couldn’t breathe. Hannah was there too. She held Mary Beth’s stuff while she kicked Esh so hard in the stomach she coughed blood for a week afterwards.

Mum tutors Hannah for Maths and English, and a couple of other kids from the year below, when she’s not working at the opticians. So, I get to see Hannah in our dining room once a week looking for the hypotenuse.

I try to sneak out the back door. My stupid clunky boots echo off the walls in the stairwell.

Mum’s all like, Bess, where are you going? Are you actually going out wearing that?!

I ignore her.

Mum tells me to bend over. She wants to see if she can see my bum in this skirt. This is the test. If she can see my bum when I bend over, I have to go and change.

I look at Hannah, who is smirking.

She’s still saying bend over, I need to see if your bits are on show.

Nahhhhh.

Mum says, For crying out loud, just do it, Bess.

I tell her to stop objectifying me.

She waits. I bend over, pretending that Hannah Fucking Barrington isn’t in this room and isn’t going to tell all her gal pals about how much of a joke my life is. I want to punch my mum in her stupid face.

Mum’s like, Bess, I can see your ovaries from here, put something decent on before you go out please.

Are you fucking joking, Mum (I don’t say this out loud, just in my head). And I turn around and I can see her looking at me, her eyes all watery-pale and her jaw square and her neck mottled pink, and I plonk back upstairs and change into a pair of jeans. I stash my skirt in my bag.

Halfway down the woods, on my way to meet Eshal at the pub, I dip into the undergrowth, propping my bike against a tree, and change back into my skirt.

I stick my headphones on and press play on my Walkman. The song is ‘Strawberry Letter 23’ and it makes me feel invincible. My neighbour Billy rides by on a bike. He lets out a low wolf whistle, except because he hasn’t quite mastered it, it comes out a bit pathetic. I say, WHY ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME, loud enough to make him pedal faster. I spit at him and miss.

I cycle towards the high street, which is a mile to the east of my house, over the motorway bridge and onto the other side of the M3. The Pits are to the south, behind the Studios Estate. The further east you go in Shepperton, the posher it gets because it’s closer to the river. On the actual riverbank, near Manor Park, the houses are worth millions of pounds and the grass is always mown in neat straight lines like a cricket pitch. There’s n. . .