by Amy Beashel
It’s like riding a bike, I guess, that ability to feel safe again: all you need is the vehicle and your body remembers the rest. The muscles relax, the heart slows and the trust, in your mum and in yourself too, unravels from that tight knot in your stomach and unwinds its way, like cotton, to your Mum’s hands, which hold just enough of your weight that you let yourself believe you won’t fall.
Like I say, everything went back in the suitcases that went back to Daniel’s, but that trust? I’m not sure where it is any more.
TWENTY-THREE
‘Did Daniel ever hurt you, Izzy?’ Mum’s voice from where she lies on the bottom bunk is like her fingers on my neck when she’s searched for sore and swollen glands. All those tender tentative prods.
I think of that woman earlier, how her face was like a map of someone’s cruelty. ‘Not like Kate.’
‘There are different kinds of hurt.’
I’m not sure I’d known what it was before, that fear that became like smoke, how it was almost invisible when it started, all soft and wispy, and you could pass it off as something else because the fire was masquerading as something different too.
‘He never hit me.’ And that’s true. Daniel did all sorts of things to my mum, but the hands he laid on me were another kind of intrusion.
‘Was there anything else though? Because sometimes…I don’t know. I just wondered if he ever…’
What do I say to that? She knows how Daniel works. How the things he did before he kicked or punched her were way too subtle to explain. How they could so easily be a misunderstanding. How his eyes on my chest were because I’d stained my top with toothpaste. And he was only helping, wasn’t he, when he licked his fingers and tried to rub it clean. How his hands on my shoulders were a stress-relieving massage and his mouth on my ear was Chinese whispers. A game.
‘I had to get you out,’ she says, like maybe this flight for destination moon is about more than Daniel and Mum. Maybe it’s also about Daniel and me.
‘It was…’ But I don’t know how to tell her that it felt like he was laying foundations, building up to something so awful it might black out the sky.
‘But he never —’ she presses.
‘He didn’t actually —’
‘OK.’ But it doesn’t sound it. Like she thinks this is OK, I mean.
I put all our unfinished sentences in the chest of drawers with the stuff I unpack from my bag.
‘It’s almost one, Izzy,’ she says. ‘We can sort all of this in the morning.’
‘Where did you put my sunshine?’
I hadn’t noticed Mum had drifted off until she startles with the question.
‘Mmmm, what?’ And there it is, that fraction of a second when she isn’t sure where she is, or how dangerous the thing that made her jump might be.
‘My sunshine, Mum. I can’t see it.’
She’s sitting up, but there’s no urgency to her movements, this expression on her face like, look at the mess you’re making, but doesn’t she get it? That there’s a reason I’m pulling everything from the bags? That I’m looking for a glimmer of light?
‘I need it.’ And I say it like she knows how every night I take one bead from the jar and put it beneath my pillow.
‘Oh god, Iz, I’m so sorry,’ she says, shifting to stand.
I say, ‘It’s fine’, even though we both know it isn’t.
I want it to be true. That it’s fine, I mean. Because in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a jar of beads, right? But some things aren’t just the things they seem to be: they’re the feel of something that was, and the promise of something that could have been too.
I’d worn those yellow string necklaces my dad had for me in the boot of his doomed car almost every day for nearly nine years. Even when uniform ruled them out during school hours, they became part of my bedtime routine, clattering against my chest beneath my pyjamas, my fingers counting the bumps of them as Mum read me Harry Potter until my eyelids began to droop and she’d close the book then lift them over my head, careful, careful because their sunshine was even more delicate in the dark. When the bedtime stories stopped, I wore them just the same, ignoring Mum’s warnings and falling asleep in them sometimes, because if I pretended hard enough the indentations they made on my skin burnt a direct path of sunshine to my heart.
Daniel said it was an accident. Of course he did. Just like he said sorry too, not just once but maybe five or six times, as he chased the hundreds of yellow balls across the floor. Mum said we’d find another one, and we probably could have done, cos they weren’t special, just cheap plastic and gaudy yellow, the kind of thing you’d pick up in a pound shop. But the point was, my dad’s hands had held them. It wasn’t only those beads that were connected by the string.
I knew not to cry by then, that tears were like rubbing salt in the wound of Daniel’s temper. ‘It’s OK,’ I said and wrapped them in tinfoil, repeating how it was an accident when Grace appeared singing ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ and bearing a jam jar with a screw-tight lid.
The Jar of Sunshine sat on my shelf between a stack of Mum’s old Judy Blume novels and a photo of Grace holding my cat Sinitta like it was a baby.
‘That thing looks so morbid,’ Daniel said, when he came in to check I was working to the revision timetable he drew up for me last year, ‘like an urn.’
I hid the jar inside the wardrobe then, not because it was morbid but because nothing seemed safe any more.
I wonder if Daniel’s found it. If he searched for Mum and me when he realised we’d gone, trawling for clues through cupboards and drawers, pulling at their contents as hard as he’s pulled at Mum’s hair sometimes, mindful not to catch his nails on her skin.
I know there are worse things in the world than leaving a jar of beads.
But.
‘Are you stupid or what?’ And it might be a mutter, but the room is a box.
‘There was barely any time,’ Mum says, and what I hate most is it’s the voice she uses when Daniel’s on the brink, when she and I will both go over-the-top calm so as not to stir anything else in him.
‘But the jar, Mum. It’s…It’s…’ I can’t say what it is. What it means. And all those inadequate words mash into some kind of growl so hard it hurts my throat, before I quickly pull it back in again, not wanting to spit my emotions on the floor.
It’s something like shame, the way she won’t look up from her nails as she picks at the surrounding skin. She used to wear this bright varnish. ‘Happy hands,’ she’d say, waving her freshly painted fingertips like finger puppets, until one December afternoon, after he’d lit the wood burner and dished up his home-made carrot and coriander soup, Daniel pointed at a photo of some celeb in Heat and scoffed at their ‘trashy neon nails’, said how he’d stick them straight in the magazine’s circle of shame. He didn’t mention Mum, or look at her even, but those blues, yellows and pinks of hers – well, they were gone.
None of these things seemed to matter much at the time, but looking back, I reckon comments like those were Daniel’s own red pencil, each scratching a tiny part of the circle of shame he was drawing around my mum.
‘I’m sorry, Iz,’ she says, sliding under the duvet even though she’s still in her jeans and that tartan shirt I haven’t seen her wear since, like, forever. ‘I only had an hour to get our stuff together so we could leave. I couldn’t do it when Daniel was there.’ That red circle Daniel drew around her is like barbed wire sometimes; it cuts just to think of her climbing out. ‘You know how tricky he makes things.’
How tricky he makes things? Tricky?
‘Algebra’s tricky,’ I feel like shouting, but she’s closing her eyes again so, obviously, like always, right, I say nothing at all.
TWENTY-FOUR
Although the pillow’s not my pillow and the bed’s not my bed, it’s easier to lie in this room in this refuge in this dark. I don’t say this to Mum, maybe because she might already be sleeping, but maybe cos there’s this streak of me that doesn�
�t want to tell her she’s done some good. Because maybe she has – done some good, I mean – but she could have done it sooner. Before the lying down and taking it from Jacob. Before the deal was struck. Before the fingers photo. Before the party. Before Daniel even started on the eyes and the hands on me. Before he even thought of coming to my room most nights, sitting on the edge of my bed and telling me how much he loved me. How I was the reason he stayed, how it wasn’t Mum he was here for, cos hadn’t I noticed how strange she’d become, how isolated and angry? ‘Aren’t we lucky, Isabel, that we have each other, that through all this luck and coincidence, you became my girl?’ ‘My girl,’ he’d say, over and over, ‘my girl’, stroking my face and my hair and my shoulder, as I edged down beneath the duvet, imagining the Jar of Sunshine in my wardrobe and counting the yellow beads. Two hundred and twenty-eight minus the one beneath my pillow, which I’d roll between my fingers as soon as he left the room.
And all that ‘my girl, my girl’ could be sweet, right? And there’s nothing but my word to say it wasn’t. But my word seems to count for shit, cos even Grace, my best friend in the whole goddamn world, even she doesn’t seem to hear me.
From: Grace Ashdown Today 00:43
To: Izzy Chambers
Re: us
even if ud pick up i don’t even want 2 try 2 call u right now izzy just the sound of ur voice and i swear id proper flip
seriously wtf is going on?
we agreed
you promised
i don’t ask much. i just wanted some time with Nell and u said ud say i was with u
is that what this is about? cos i have Nell? cos i cant see what else would make you act like this?!?!?! its proper mean izzy
ur supposed to be my best friend
all u had 2 do was say i was with u and mum wd have come home no questions asked
u with jacob? is that it? what kind of idiot are u? i mean jacob mansfield? how long has that been going on? since the party? is that why uv gone quiet on me?
mums gone proper mental. grounded me
daniel says uv gone away 4 a few days well u might want 2 stay there cos every1 knows what uv been up 2 with jacob
u didn’t even say sorry
leave me alone 4 a bit
i mean it
grace
Grace and I never email. We message or we real-life talk and that’s it. Until now.
And there was Mum, when we were talking about who’d have which bed, telling me she’d take the bottom bunk cos ‘I’m probably being silly, Izzy, but I just feel I can protect you better from down here.’
I tried to snuff all that better-late-than-never derision from my nose. Anyway, fat lot of good she’s done. She couldn’t stop the email, could she? No protection from that; no chance of reconciliation either cos Mum and I are on verbal lockdown. Anyway, Grace doesn’t want an explanation even if I were allowed to give it. Leave me alone, she said. I mean it. And those words right there should probably be the most hurtful, but the word I keep going back to is Nell.
Grace upper-cased it. The only time her fury could be paused long enough to press the shift key on her MacBook was when she thought of Nell. And I know, I know, I’m not supposed to be the angry one here, but if it weren’t for Elizabeth’s welcome speech and her multiple pleas to think of the other women and children, I mean it, I’d scream. That kind of wide-mouth-horror-movie scream that shatters windows.
Like it’d do any good. Cos even when I do make noise, like say sorry literally five times over, no one hears it. Not even Grace. So, honestly, there’s no point in my words and no point in my screaming at all.
The house is as quiet as me. Not like Whitstable, gulls blasting from dawn and next door’s cat on our decking, its meow like a baby given its first taste of ice cream, practically squealing this constant beg for more. Daniel goes out to it sometimes, whispers ‘shoo’ just loud enough so we can hear how gentle he’s being. And he might think he’s fooled me, but I know he hates cats, though maybe he just hated Sinitta because she belonged to me.
She didn’t always. Belong to me, I mean. Before Sinitta was mine she was my dad’s. He showed me a picture of her when he came to see me, said maybe I’d like to meet her one day.
The first time I saw her was the day of his funeral, when we went back to his parents’ house and the sitting room was filled with grown-ups dressed in black. I only came up to their hips. Sinitta was under a table in the corner of the room, the exact same spot I’d have liked to have been in, so I crawled around ankles to get to her, leant against the wall with my hand stretched out until she came over and sat on my lap. The vibrations of her purr were just how my heart was feeling. We didn’t move until everyone else had left and my dad’s mum came over and told me there’d been some things in the boot of the car when Dad —
She couldn’t say it. Not yet. But she gave me the necklaces, the record and the photo album, told me Dad had been so happy to know me. ‘If only he’d found out sooner,’ she said, and I didn’t understand the look she gave my mum. Not then. I get it now. ‘Sinitta obviously likes you.’
I was too busy getting the kitten to chase the necklaces to hear the conversation in which they decided the cat would be added to the box of all this new stuff I had to take home. I swear I thought it was the best party bag ever.
Sinitta never liked Daniel. Not that she’d hiss or anything – she’d simply pretend he wasn’t there. He tried so hard at the beginning too, but for all his George Clooney charm, he couldn’t persuade her to go anywhere near him. ‘Stupid cat,’ he’d say. I saw him kick her once, though obviously he wasn’t really kicking her cos ‘That would be cruel, Isabel, and I’m not cruel, am I? I tripped over her. The dumb animal was in my way.’
And he’d say she was ruining his garden and stinking his house out, but Sinitta wasn’t like all our other things Daniel persuaded us to get rid of when we moved. No matter what he said, she was for keeps.
But then came the vom. And not just a bit of it. Like, a few times a day every day for a week, sending Daniel kind of batshit.
Then, just like that, she was gone.
It wasn’t Daniel who arranged it either. I heard Mum on the phone, giving her name and our address and explaining we really couldn’t keep Sinitta, and yes, she was a great cat and superb with children, so if they could find a new home that would be lovely.
‘Lovely,’ she said. And yeah, her voice was a violin, but she said it anyway. Lovely.
I tried to run away. Just me and Sinitta, who didn’t much like being in my rucksack, her head poking through the open zip, but I carried on down the street in spite of the meows and the smell of that sick and I snapped. ‘Please, Sinitta, that’s what’s got us into this trouble in the first place.’
‘It’s not your mum’s fault, not really, but she can’t cope with that cat.’ It had taken Daniel hardly any time to catch up with me. ‘She’s finding everything very stressful at the moment, Isabel. You’ve got to be a good girl. Don’t make things worse for her, please. Now give me the bag.’
And as her purr got louder and the vibrations got stronger, it felt like I was handing him my heart.
TWENTY-FIVE
It’s 6:30A.M. and I’ve already left the refuge, no clue how I get back in but, whatever, cos it’s not like I’m returning any time soon. Not that I’m running away or anything – history’s proven I’m pretty crap at that! – but I’ve no desire to spend the day in there while Mum makes friendship bracelets and pinkie promises with her new BF Kate.
And seems I’m not the only one up with the crack of dawn. I’m barely even away from the house when there’s a ping that I’m sure is gonna be Grace, cos the most we’ve ever gone without speaking is twelve hours and that was only because she had bird flu and her dad had run out of antibac wipes with which to sanitise her phone.
Please, Izzy. Can we talk?
Right message. Wrong sender. Max.
I delete it, cos what’s the point? Focus instead on remembering
which turns I’ve taken, until I come to this bridge that’s like spending time with Daniel when you first cross it, how it looks like this safe passage over the water but actually it wobbles with every step. It feels steadier now I’m standing still in the middle, looking upriver where, from around the bend, comes this moving shape, a rower, their back to me, pulling themselves closer and closer with no clue even that I’m there. How can they do that? Trust their path without seeing it? Have that faith in themselves that, despite the blindness of the future, they’ll be OK?
From the bulk of the body, it’s a man: broad shoulders, pale arms, muscles bulging with the back and forth of the oars. His movement is so seamless, so clean, it makes it clear what kind of guy he is: fearless, determined, strong.
So maybe Grace was on to something then when, in the wake of all that fingers crap, she told me to stand tall. ‘You know, Izzy, your body says so much about you.’
‘I think we both know what my body says about me.’
‘Nah-ah-ah.’ She raised a waggy finger. ‘That’s what Jacob has told people about your body. You need to take matters into your own hands. I mean, seriously, Iz, it’s not just the party – it’s like in these last few months you’ve literally shrunk or something. Come on, head up.’ That waggy finger lifted my chin. ‘Shoulders back.’ Grace’s palms pulled me straighter from behind. ‘Eighty percent of language is physical, babe. You don’t even have to say anything – just let your goddamn body do the talking. Let your don’t give a shit, stand up, strut it out, walk on by, whole body acting like a middle finger show them you couldn’t care less about the crap Jacob Mansfield and his cronies are spreading. It’s gestures that count. Not words.’
