by Amy Beashel
‘It was all that definitely not flirting.’
My skin’s kind of tingling from where his palms have been.
‘You got me a bit Stevie Wonder there for a moment,’ Harry says.
‘Blind?!’
‘No, “Knocks Me Off My Feet”!’
And my back or my still-tingling shoulders must be, like, what?
‘The song?’ Then he only goes and sings it. Terribly, but perfectly terribly if you know what I mean. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s top of my rom list.’
‘Your what?’
‘My rom list.’
‘As I said before, your what?’
‘My rom list, Izzy. You know, romantic playlist?’ And he sounds it out really slowly like I’m some kind of moron who obviously should have assumed a hot rower in Shropshire would have a romantic playlist topped by Stevie Wonder’s ‘Knocks Me Off My Feet’.
‘You have a romantic playlist?’
‘Yeah, what of it? I spend my life on the river – I’m bound to be soppy.’
I grin so hard I swear the glee in it will cause some kind of refraction in the sunlight on the water.
‘Don’t judge me, Izzy. I have playlists for every occasion. There’s the rom list, the rage list, the Monday morning list, the I Can’t Stand My Parents list and, of course, the XXX list.’
There’s a kaleidoscopic flash of Jacob’s laptop, the XXX list of videos he had on there.
‘You all right, Izzy?’
‘Huh? Yeah, I’m good,’ I say, feeling a surge in the embers as I imagine chucking that MacBook in the Severn. ‘Just thinking I might need an I Can’t Stand Mega Dicks list.’
‘Ha! Those mega dicks could rap their rap and we could play our list louder and prouder on the opposite bank.’
‘Our list?’
‘Well, I didn’t mean to be presumptuous but —’
‘Let’s see how well this morning goes before we commit to a joint list, Harry. I mean, that’s serious stuff! Come on, let’s row.’
‘Scull, Izzy! Let’s scull!’
‘Whatever,’ I say, hoping it’s not just the river because I want this feeling everywhere. ‘Go on then.’ I dare to turn around and smile. ‘Tell me what I’ve got to do.’
So he does, and I try, and I’m not totally fall-in-the-water kind of rubbish, just oars-bashing-into-my-knees kind of clumsy.
‘Blades!’ Harry says. ‘You keep calling them oars, but they’re blades.’
‘They’re bloody painful is what they are.’
We keep going. My legs sliding back and forth, back and forth, and my arms pushing and pulling, pushing and pulling, and I know everything will ache, but my body feels good. Almost powerful even.
And I don’t want to, but I wonder what Grace would say if she could see me here on the water. Ignoring for a moment the fact that I’m with a boy – a really, really nice but I-must-not-fancy-him boy – and focusing instead on the fact that I’m moving, properly using my muscles in an exercising sort of way. She might faint, like, literally drop down on the riverbank. Cos I swear she’s been telling me to do it for years. Not row – sorry, scull – exactly. But something.
‘Our bodies are goddamn miracles!’ she told me from a forearm stand a few months back. ‘You need to love your body, Izzy.’
‘I love McVitie’s.’
‘You can love both.’
I didn’t mention how loving my body seemed impossible when I didn’t even like it.
She’d be double thumbs up, I reckon. If she saw me now, I mean. But I can’t do it, carry on thinking of her without bursting into a million tears, and today is a good day so I push all thoughts of her away and focus on my rhythm. Or complete lack of it.
‘You’re not bad!’ Harry says.
I make this snuffly, snorty sound of disbelief, cos his voice is a nine-for-effort, three-for-actual-skill.
‘Honestly,’ he says, ‘you’ve got potential.’
And I wonder if it could be true. Whether this body of mine could actually be OK at something.
‘Let’s hope you’re right, otherwise you’ll have been up at this ridiculous hour for nothing! What time do you have to be at college?’
‘I don’t,’ Harry says, quick and maybe a little defensive. ‘I don’t go to college.’
‘Sorry, I just assu—’
‘What? That I wouldn’t waste my fancy education and while my life away on the river?’
‘Harry!’ I let the blades rest in the water so I can turn to face him.
‘Sorry.’ Unlike that emoji-ish sad face of yesterday, today’s is the real deal. ‘Long story.’
‘How long’s the river?’
‘It’s actually the longest in the UK. People often make the mistake of thinking the Thames is the —’
‘You know, I don’t really care how long the river is, Harry. I was just suggesting you tell me that long story of yours.’
‘It’s honestly not that interesting.’
‘And the debate around the UK’s longest river is?!’
‘I like you, Izzy,’ he says. ‘You say it how it is.’
I don’t correct him because, if I’m honest, which Harry totally thinks I am, him believing I’m tough and straight-talking feels as good as Harry thinking my body has potential as a sculler.
‘So…’
‘What?’ He manoeuvres the boat towards the bank, where he holds us in place as we bob up and down on the water.
‘Why so touchy?’
‘I’m a dropout.’ Harry’s voice is a week-old balloon someone’s forgotten to untie from a tree after a party.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I quit my A levels last year. Mum’s still not over it. You don’t go to that school –’ he points up the hill to this huge red-brick building with its own clock tower – ‘or your parents don’t send you to that school, don’t spend all that money, Harry, all those thousands of pounds, Harry on that school for you to then tell them there are more important things in life than Greek and the Hunt!’
‘You went hunting? At school? My god, how posh are you exactly?! Did you catch your own dinner – or supper? I bet you called it supper there, right?’
‘We didn’t hunt, not that kind of hunt anyway. But yes, we called the food we ate in the evening supper.’
‘Ha! So pretty posh then.’
‘The Hunt’s actually cross-country running.’
‘Ugh. I might literally prefer to go actual hunting and shoot a fox than go cross-country running through the woods!’
‘It’s not so bad really.’
‘I’m kidding about the fox, right?!’
‘I liked most of it really, but I didn’t love it.’
‘I love foxes.’
‘And I thought, What’s the point, you know, in Mum and Dad spending all that money if I don’t love it?’
‘Some of my best friends are foxes.’
Harry looks at me like, I’m trying to be serious here.
‘Sorry, I am listening. I just didn’t want you thinking I’m some kind of crazy fox killer. I would never kill a fox, not even to get out of cross-country!’
‘OK, fox-lover, thanks for the clarification.’
‘Sorry. Go on.’
‘So after the first term of A levels, I told them I wasn’t going back.’
‘Did they freak out?’
‘Well, if you count throwing my lacrosse stick on the fire freaking out, then yeah, they freaked out.’
‘Hold on a minute? They threw your what on the fire?’
‘My lacrosse stick.’
‘Bloody hell, Harry. Like, seriously, how did you cope? I’m not sure what I’d do without my lacrosse stick.’
‘Funny.’
‘Sorry.’
‘’S all right,’ he says, smiling properly. ‘Dad pulled it out before too much damage was done.’
‘Thank god. You had me worried then. A boy without his lacrosse stick doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘I know,
right!’
‘And what about your mum and dad – are they recovering as well as the lacrosse stick?’
‘Who knows?’ He pushes us away from the bank and nods at the boat like I should crack on with my training. ‘They’re not exactly proud telling their mates I’m gonna be an apprentice, but they’re no longer setting my possessions on fire.’
‘An apprentice?’
‘Painting and decorating.’ He pauses then, like he’s waiting for me to make a joke of it.
‘Cool.’
‘It is actually. Or it will be. I’m labouring at the moment. Got to wait till September for the apprenticeship. Mum’s hoping I’ll change my mind by then, go to uni or something. She doesn’t get it at all, thought her clever little boy was going to grow up saving people’s lives in a hospital, not stocking up on Dulux at B&Q.’
Harry pushes us away from the bank, gives me a nod to turn back into position and get my arms moving.
‘What do you like about it? The painting, I mean.’
‘The change. How in the space of a few days a place can go from looking and feeling a total mess to somewhere that’s the opposite of that. To know I’ve helped make it happen. Stupid, right?’
‘Not at all. Sounds great.’ Sounds familiar.
It occurs to me I haven’t thought about the blades and when to twist them, when to drop them into the water – I’ve just done it. For a few seconds at least, my body didn’t feel awkward – it just worked.
‘It’s all very Desert Island Discs by the way,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Desert Island Discs. It’s a radio programme. You’d love it. It’s like your playlists. The guests have to pick eight songs to soundtrack their life. So you learn about their favourite music but through that you learn about the people too. And the best guests are the mavericks. Like you! You know, quitting your A levels, abandoning what was expected of you and finding something totally different that you love.’
‘You reckon?’
‘God, yeah! Those mavericks are the reason I listen! Even if they’re already set up for massive success, they haven’t been scared to screw it and have a go at something they think will bring them more joy.’
‘So I’m a maverick?’
‘Sounds better than dropout.’
‘I’ll tell my mum.’
‘You totally should. And you should total—’
‘Oh crap. You got something I can tell my boss to get him off my back too? I’m gonna be late. Put some sweat into it, Izzy. I’ve got to go.’
We make it back. Dry. Smiling. Looking forward to tomorrow at six A.M.
THIRTY-FOUR
I’m sure someone told me it takes twenty-one days to form a new habit, but Daniel had his nailed from the start. A photo every day since Mum and I scarpered. Thirteen of them so far. Unlucky for some, right? Thirteen reminders that he has my Jar of Sunshine. Thirteen reminders that he’s stolen my light.
And yet.
There’s enough to keep me from tumbling into his dark, because in the eight days since meeting Harry, other habits have been forming too. We’re on the river each morning – just me, a boy and a boat – edging the meeting time earlier and earlier to stretch our one hour into two. But when we’ve reached the see you laters, the tomorrow thens and the only awkward moment of our mornings together – the will-we, won’t-we, maybe, not-right-now possibility of A Kiss – those two hours still feel too short; I’d happily be here all day.
It’s not just Harry – though believe me, he is pretty awesome – it’s the river too. My body feels different here, as if the lumbering landlubber Izzy Chambers sheds her skin on the jetty and becomes something new, something else, something that’s not just carried along by the river but works with it or against it upstream.
I once heard someone say, on the radio maybe, that there’s an upside of moving far from home, that each time you go somewhere new you can leave something behind and become more of something else. I think about the old Izzy, the one from just two weeks ago, and she feels like one of those memories from when you’re a tiny kid, like when I sat on a beach that was sand not Whitstable stone during a weekend in Norfolk, bucket for a hat, seaweed for knickers, and tipped my full packet of Wotsits upside down, filling the empty bag with sand before shovelling it into my mouth like I’d discovered some kind of delicacy. Mum tells the story and has the photo to prove it. But I can’t feel it, how the grit would have wedged in my teeth, or clumped with Wotsit dust to turn my tongue a cheesy orange rough. So I look at the picture and it’s sort of me but only because Mum tells me it is. I don’t feel like I’m that girl in the photo.
Couple-of-weeks-ago Izzy is like years-and-years-ago Izzy. Like I can imagine everything that’s happened to her, but she’s not quite the Izzy of now. And so when Harry asks about me, what I like, what I’ll study at uni, where in the world I’d most like to be, I’m not really sure. The answers are in there somewhere but they’re groggy, like I’ve literally just woken up. Like I need a bit of time to adjust to the bright lights of the morning.
‘You’re looking stronger already,’ Harry said yesterday, and he meant with the rowing, but when I told him I felt it, that change in my strength, I meant all over and all the way through. My arms, my legs, they seem more a part of me, which sounds stupid, right, but when I think about that bathroom with Jacob, that bedroom with Jacob, those moments all over with Daniel, there’s this numbness to everything, like it’s all been pushed to the back of somewhere, sat on maybe. But all this water and all this rowing, they wash and shake the pins and needles from me, get my blood rushing almost as much as the thought of that first-kiss list Harry’s told me he’s compiling. Thing is, he only ever mentions it when we’re in the boat, when my back’s to him, when logistically there’s little chance of playing music or kissing lips. Not without falling in the river at least, and there wouldn’t be much grace in that. That said, there’s not much Grace in anything these days.
I miss her.
And I’ve thought about calling her. Cos, seriously, if Mum’s bald head taught me anything it’s screw it and try. What’s the worst that can happen? Thing is, Grace is brilliant, amazing, ridiculously cool and that’s why she’s been such a brilliant, amazing, ridiculously cool stabiliser. And I’ve needed that, wanted that – couldn’t have coped without that propping. But, for the first time in god knows how long, I feel like my own two feet can take my weight, like maybe I’m discovering something significant here.
I’m hoping it’s not forever, this silence between us, that sometime soon I can phone Grace and tell her I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not being there when she needed cover, I’m sorry for shrinking not only from Daniel but from her too. For not telling her the truth about Daniel and Mum and me and all those different types of hurt he weaved around us. Sometime soon, I think, but not today, because today is a Jar of Sunshine day, the kind of day I’d like to bottle or bead on a string and wear close to my heart so I might feel its warmth on the days that aren’t so bright.
Today is a day when, by 6.00 A.M., nothing and everything has happened. Because today is the day I’m standing on the bridge, definitely looking and definitely waiting and definitely feeling like the sky is within my reach. Like I have a place in it. Like my no-longer-landlubbery body can make its mark and not the kind of mark Daniel joked about when my ‘planetary-sized bum left a crater in the sofa’.
Today is the day I become more of something else. And it doesn’t matter that I don’t know what that something else is, just that I feel it. I feel something in my bones and my flesh which isn’t dread or revulsion. It’s good.
‘You’re all right, Izzy Grace Chambers,’ I say to my sort-of reflection in the river below, a reflection that’s just a basic shape of me, no defining features. She could be anything, anyone, whatever she wants to be. It’s nice to see her, to tell her she’s doing OK, to not be staring into a mirror whispering how much I hate her, how stupid she is, how ugly, how all of everything that�
��s happened is down to her. ‘You’re more than all right,’ I say, eyes to the water then eyes to the sky. ‘You might look like water but you, Izzy Grace Chambers, are tough!’
‘You’re also a bit bloody mental!’
Harry! His voice is a smile and it’s a spark too.
‘Sorry not sorry,’ I say, turning to face him, to ask him, because I am Izzy Grace Chambers and I am bold, ‘Would you mind if I kiss you, Harry?’
‘No,’ he says, and my heart tumbles into the river. ‘No, I don’t mind, I mean.’
And my heart leaps back up again, like salmon, as we walk closer and closer until everything meets, and he is Harry like Styles and I am Izzy Grace Chambers and together we are strength and sunshine and smiles and salmon hearts somersaulting on the river Severn.
And in this one moment everything is fucking perfect.
The sky is clear and blue above us.
I own it.
The sky is mine.
THIRTY-FIVE
‘Time,’ Harry calls as the alarm on his watch sounds seven thirty, when our limbs are done with the rowing and our mouths should really be but can’t quite be done with the kissing.
I pull him back down to the jetty as he makes to gather his things.
‘I’ve got to go, Iz.’ He holds his calloused hands up as evidence. ‘I’ll walk you back home first though, yeah?’
‘Really? Why the sudden chivalry?’
‘Why the sudden kiss?’
‘Touché, Harry!’ I lean in for another one, then two.
‘I’d do this all day if I could, but work calls.’ He kisses me again. ‘I’ve…’ And again. ‘Got…’ And again. ‘To…’ And again. ‘Go.’
‘Sorry.’ I pull back, and I mean I’m sorry for the kisses delaying him but also for those white lies I’ve told when he’s asked about why I’m in Shropshire. Mum’s been pretty ill, I’ve told him. We’ve come on holiday to celebrate her being well. My dad is dead, and it’s just the two of us. I haven’t mentioned that the illness is Daniel and the hotel’s a safe house for abused women and kids.
‘How about I walk you to work instead?’ I say, wishing I could dive into the water to tame my reddening cheeks, swim all the way back to the refuge, maybe, so there’s no chance of Harry discovering the real reasons I came to this town. ‘Save you being late.’ And though I’m smiling, I wonder if he hears it, how I’m porcelain now, a tall vase brushed by the untruths swirling around me, wobbling, threatening to crack.
