It's a Good Day So Far: Chapter Thirty Two: Surprise!

Chapter Thirty Two

I took my presents upstairs; I wanted to keep them to myself for awhile before I had to show everybody. Aunty Helen poked her head out of the kitchen. She asked me a dumb question about the time even though there’s a perfectly good clock on the wall in the kitchen. She only came out to see that I wasn’t sneaking Danny up to my room. What do they take me for?

I wanted to spend my birthday alone with Danny but it didn’t look as though we were going to be able to get away. When I came back downstairs Danny was standing.

‘Come on, let’s go out.’

‘I can’t. That lot in there will be upset if I leave. They obviously want me to be here. I suppose it’s important to them.’

‘Babe, I want you to myself for a bit. We don’t have to go for long.’ It was the first time he’d called me babe and I got this little tingle inside of me. Danny went over to the patio doors and opened them very quietly, ‘Come on, let’s escape. We’ll probably be back before they even miss us.’

‘I don’t know, Danny. I don’t want to upset my folks. It’s the first year that my mum’s—you know—and I think it’s important to them to make a fuss.’

I was part excited; Danny was in the garden holding his hand out to me to join him. I wanted to go and spend time alone with him but when I’d tried to sneak away earlier, Dad had looked so hurt.

‘Come on, Katie, you know you want to, just an hour for a bit of alone time. Please. I’ve got another surprise for you.’ He had that dopey expression on his face that makes him look about ten. I laughed and took his hand.

Then we were sneaking down the path at the side of the house. We had to crawl underneath the kitchen window like kids playing cowboys and Indians, I heard Mum trying to sing along to an Adele song on the radio, but she didn’t know many of the words. I don’t think I was born to be bad. There are bad kids and there are good ones and I think it’s in my genetic make-up to always do what’s expected of me. Today I was wearing a new genetic make-up, Rebel by Max Factor and my shade of eye-shadow was called Easily Led.

Danny had hold of my hand and we were running down the street and laughing. I felt free and happy. I’m always happy when I’m with him. But there was also a little niggle at the back of my mind. Would my family be angry when I got home? I didn’t want anything to spoil today. I felt a bit of disappointment in Danny, it wasn’t a big thing, I mean; we weren’t doing anything really wrong, were we? It’s understandable that he wanted to be alone with me for at least some of the time.

But it stuck in my mind that he’d pushed me to go against my parent’s wishes. Would he push me to do other things when he wanted his own way? And I don’t mean sex, well, I do, that’s exactly what I mean and it terrifies me. But I don’t just mean sex stuff. What if Dad tells me to be home by ten and Danny wants me to stay out until eleven? Or what if he wants to hang out on the Ormsgill Estate, I’m not allowed up there.

His brother has a car and he does donuts and stuff in the Munie car park. All the residents complain about the noise and it’s dangerous. Danny says he’s going to ask Karl, that’s his brother, to take us out for a ride one day. Karl’s only just passed his test and even I’ve seen that he drives like an idiot. He screeches down Market Street showing off. I don’t think my dad would want me getting in his car. When Danny said that he was going to see about it, I just smiled and I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. I don’t know what to do.

I’d been thinking about all these things and didn’t even notice that we were heading for the river. It’s nice down there. We walked along the riverbank for a bit and we were chatting all the time. We don’t have those long embarrassing silences between us now. I’m not as shy and we can talk normally. When we came to one of the boat jetty’s Danny moved towards it.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Down here?’

‘Why?’

‘To look at the boats.’

‘What do you want to look at old rowing boats for? You can see them from here. They are boats, wooded things, with oars.’

He was pulling me down the steps and a man walked towards us. ‘Number three, mate. Life jackets in the boat for you. Make sure you wear them at all times when you’re on the water or we’ll have to call you back in.’ The man sounded bored and turned away from us to talk to a lad resting against the ticket kiosk.

‘No way. You are not getting me in one of those things.’ I was laughing but a little bit scared at the same time. ‘Do you even know how to work one?’

‘Yes, of course I do. Well, what I mean is, it looks easy enough on the telly. That Oxford and Cambridge lot seem to manage okay.’

I groaned. I wasn’t sure about this at all. Danny had already jumped into the boat and was holding his hand out to me. You’d think the bloke in charge would have come over to help us in. I glanced back at him but he was talking to his friend and didn’t even look at us. ‘What about the life jackets? The man said—’

‘Oh, nobody wears them. He just has to give you the warning, like. Its health and safety, innit, he has to say it but no one takes any notice.’

‘Danny I want to wear a life jacket, what if we capsize?’

‘We aren’t going to capsize, are we?’ But he handed me the jacket and I put it on over my new clothes. ‘You look like a proper nutter in that. And there was me hoping that you’d be doing a bit of topless sunbathing on the deck.’

‘By the deck, do you mean the bit of floor in-between those two benches that’s three inches deep in dirty water.’ All the while we were talking I was still standing on the jetty fastening my jacket and Danny was still standing in the boat wobbling about.

‘Come on, our time’s running out, I’ve paid for an hour and I’ve got a surprise for you.’

I was scared. I had to step from the jetty into the boat. Danny had untied it from its mooring and was holding onto the walk with one hand to keep it in place and holding the other one out to me. I just knew that when I had one foot in the boat and one on the jetty the boat would move and I’d end up doing the splits into the water. I didn’t trust Danny because he was wobbling about all over the place. And apart from all that I had my new boots on, and although they didn’t have massive heels they were very slippery. I sensed disaster looming. Danny saw the expression on my face.

He looked at me, ‘Babe, don’t be scared. Give me your hand and trust me. I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.’

I reached for him and carefully put one foot into the rickety old rowing boat. I imagined myself going into the freezing cold, dirty, river and all my new clothes and my hair and make-up and everything being ruined. The boat wobbled. It tipped towards me and I got my other foot off the jetty and into the boat quick. I wasn’t being brave, I just knew that with one leg in and one leg out I was more at risk than being proper in the flipping thing.

But then I was proper in the flipping thing and Danny had hold of me round my waist. The boat was wobbling like crazy and I just knew that we were both going into the water. I was screaming my head off and I saw the men at the kiosk laughing at us. Danny didn’t have his lifejacket on and the man in charge of the boats didn’t say anything. Danny was right; he didn’t care if we fell into the water and drowned.

‘Kate, sit down, you’re making the boat wobble.’

‘I can’t, the seat’s all wet.’

‘Look, you’re going to have us in the water. Will you sit down before you get us both killed?’ I thought this was a tad melodramatic. After all, we were only at the edge of the river, not in the high seas of the mid-Atlantic. He pushed me backwards onto the seat as he shouted at me. I was still screaming when my bum plopped down in the puddle on the seat. I decided that getting in and out of boats was not a ladylike thing to do. We were both laughing.

Danny struggled to get the oars in the holders at either side of the boat. Then with him facing into the river he made his first stroke. The oars skimmed the top of the water sending up a great spray of water that covered me from head to toe. One of the oars was ripped out of Danny’s hand and he fell backwards off his seat and into the small space at the back of the boat. The boat lurched and rocked wildly and I grabbed out at both sides of the boat to try and steady it. Danny grinned at me as he climbed back onto his seat. I was going to be mad at him for getting me all wet, but when I saw his face I started laughing and we were both giggling like mad as we doggy paddled with our hands to get the missing oar.

‘It isn’t as easy as it looks,’ he said.

‘What about that Oxford lot. They seem to manage it all right?’

He stuck his tongue out at me and splashed me with even more water. When he’d got the oar back in, he tried again. He did get the hang of it, sort of. We went round in circles a lot at first and he got really mad because he said he wanted to get to the little island in the middle of the river but the boat wouldn’t go where he wanted it to. He’d get a little bit closer and then he’d hit the wave of somebody else’s boat and ours would start going round in circles again. It was really funny. I could see that it was really hurting him and he had to keep stopping a lot to rest. ‘I thought this was going to be easy,’ he huffed.

Finally we got to the island; we didn’t so much as dock beside it as crash-land into it. I didn’t want to get out of the boat because that would mean having to get into it again. Danny said that if I didn’t get out, he was going to turn the boat over and tip me out. I stepped into the squishy, sandy-muddy stuff chased him up the small banking. Then we walked through the trees into the clearing in the centre of the island.

When we saw it, I felt so sorry for Danny. He was dead upset and I was really mad, too. He’d set up the most amazing surprise for me. He’d laid out a table cloth and had done me a picnic. How romantic is that? I couldn’t believe it. But somebody, kids probably, had got there before us. Danny said that he’d paid the man extra to set up the picnic and tell people that the island was closed this afternoon. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t. Perhaps somebody had rowed around to the blind side of the island and had come onto it that way. It was only a bit of grass and a little wood smaller than a football pitch in the middle of the river.

I could see how pretty it had been and I told him not to be upset. It was a lovely thought and I told him that it was one of the nicest things that anybody had ever done for me.

‘One of?’ he asked, coming out of his mood a bit.

‘Oh yes, only one of them. It’s not the most romantic thing of all. You see. I had this boyfriend who once risked getting his head caved in by a gang of bullies when he jumped in to protect me.’

Danny led me over to the cloth and we sat down on it where somebody else had already sat. There were crumbs everywhere. The two plastic glasses lay on their sides in the grass. At least there was still half a bottle of pop left, they hadn’t drunk it all. He took the top of the bottle and held it out to me to drink first. I took a sip and the bubbles went up my nose. After me, Danny gulped it down as though he hadn’t had a drink for a week. ‘Thirsty work that rowing lark,’ he explained. The two sandwiches had been eaten. The thieves hadn’t even disposed of the rubbish carefully. The processed Asda packaging was thrown onto the ground to be pecked over by birds. It was the same story with the two empty crisp packets and the container that had once contained two-strawberry tarts.

Danny was really upset but I wasn’t. It didn’t matter to me that some thieving scum had taken our food. Well, it did a bit, but I wasn’t going to let anything spoil our day. Danny’s only a kid like me, and he’d arranged all of this stuff for me to make it special. It was amazing.

He picked up the little posy of flowers, ‘These were supposed to be laid beside your plate.’ He said. I took them and kissed him. As we kissed he pushed me backwards until I was lying down. Then he kissed me really hard and his tongue went in my mouth and then, after a few minutes of really full-on kissing, he rolled on top of me. He moved my shirt to the side and started kissing my neck and all the time he was making these grunting noises.

It was going too far and it was all happening too fast. I wanted him to stop. He was really heavy and I couldn’t breathe. He was squashing me. Almost as soon as he’d climbed on top of me I pushed him off. ‘Danny stop.’

He stopped straight away and as I rolled him off me he kind of rolled himself off, too. He came into a sitting position with his elbows on his knees and he put his head down. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He said, and between each sorry he gasped out a load of breath as he struggled to calm down. ‘I don’t even know what I was doing. I just felt all excited and wanted to, you know.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said, scared by the feelings because they’re too big for me. I put my arm around him and pulled him towards me. I lay back down bringing him down with me. ‘Just slowly, okay?’ And then we were kissing again and I was stroking his face.

He stopped and leaned on one arm, looking down at me. ‘I don’t want to push you, Kate, you know that don’t you?’ I nodded. ‘I don’t ever want to do anything that you don’t want to.’

‘I’m just not ready yet, that’s all.’

‘That’s okay, neither am I? I wasn’t going to go any further. I mean, I didn’t want to—’ He stopped talking and I believed him.

‘We’d better be getting back, or matey will think we’ve robbed his boat,’ he said. ‘It’d serve him right after letting that happen to our picnic. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him who ate the food. I’m starving after all that rowing.’

‘Come back to mine and I’ll ask if you can stay for dinner. I don’t know what Dad’s making, but if I can eat it, you should be okay. You’ll eat anything.’ And then I had to get back into that horrible boat again. At least this time I got into it on land. Danny pushed it into the river with me inside it and it took him awhile because he’s not very strong. He’s a bit of a dweeb really.

He pushed me out into the river and then he had to walk out to his waist in all of his clothes. When he grabbed the side of the boat to drag himself in I thought we were going in the water for sure. I was really glad to get out of it at the other side. Danny told the man about the stolen food and the man just shrugged. I pulled Danny away because whatever had happened, it didn’t matter. It was still the best day ever.

I told him that we’d better go back to mine, but he was dripping wet and said that he needed to go to his house first to get changed. I wanted to go home and meet him back at mine later. But he grabbed me and pulled me to him. He said that he didn’t want to be apart from me for a single second and persuaded me to go with him. I was a bit worried about upsetting my folks, but my dad would understand.

I was scared about meeting Danny’s family but he told me that they were all out. I thought he was just going to go in and get changed and then we’d get the bus back to mine. But he insisted on making me a coffee. I don’t even drink coffee. And then he wanted to introduce me to Barney, his dog. Then I had to listen to this new single that he’d downloaded. Finally we were ready to go but Danny said that he had to make a quick phone call. He went into the kitchen and I wondered who he was calling. I couldn’t hear much, just something about being somewhere in half an hour.

When he came back I told him that I really had to go home and couldn’t go anywhere else with him. He looked disappointed but shrugged and said okay. I was firm with him. I shouldn’t have come out without telling my Dad in the first place. He walked so slowly to the bus stop that we missed the six thirty into town. I was getting annoyed. I love being with him but I didn’t want to get into trouble at home. They like Danny and I didn’t want him getting the blame for anything and them stopping me from seeing him. That would be awful.

When we got to my gate he pulled me to him and kissed me. All thoughts of home left me and it was just me and him, kissing and feeling good with each other. ‘I love you, Kate.’

It was only a whisper. I didn’t even know if I’d heard him right.

‘What?’

‘You heard me,’ he said, blushing. Then he dragged me up the path and we went in. He said he loved me. I’m sure he did.

I opened the living room door and noticed that the curtains were drawn, that was funny. It was all in darkness. I reached for the light, and suddenly there were people everywhere. Party poppers were going off all over the room; streamers were landing on my head.

‘Surprise,’ everybody shouted. The room was decorated with banners and balloons. All my friends were around me, all wishing me Happy Birthday, and my boyfriend, who loves me by the way, was holding my hand.

Dad came up and shook Danny’s hand. ‘Good Job, Danny Boy.’

Danny let out his breath in a whoosh, ‘You have no idea how hard it was keeping her out until seven.’