by Amy Beashel
Until now.
Because surely she must’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last few weeks. However extreme her fury, if they are real, Grace’s inklings should be twitching enough for her to screw the fact she asked me to leave her alone for a bit and to come find me, or at least send another, kinder email, or just a text maybe – a You OK? would do. But there’s been nothing. So maybe, like Mum, Grace has realised a life without me would be so much less stressful, so much more fun.
But I miss her. I miss her so hard my danced-out heart’s totally gutted, and my riotous and fuckin’ perfect limbs sit as pathetic and immobile as the goddamn crisp packet someone’s tossed on the train’s filthy floor.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Next stop Whitstable, and there’s this literal tug at my heart, pulling it back into my chest where it melds into the rest of me, and for a few seconds at least, there’s a physical relief that, no matter the shit fest of my problems, I’m almost home. Thing is, there’s no way it can last, cos it’s not home, is it? Nowhere is, I tell myself, wishing when I get off the train that the air didn’t smell so much like my childhood.
It’s proper hot, and as they leave the station, two commuters stop to roll up their sleeves, that Friday feeling in the smiles they share with each other, how they nod before heading their separate ways to their normal families and their normal weekends by the sea. One heads down the road towards Daniel’s house, so it’s not like I’m actually following him, not really, cos I’d be heading that direction anyway. He’s about the same age as Mum, and I wonder if she had met him instead of Daniel, whether she would have kissed him, gone to Paris with him, moved us in with him, married him, kept her job and her strength and a baby if they’d made one.
When he struggles with his bag and his jacket and the key in the lock, a woman appears, toddler at her knee, kiss on his lips and they’re gone, behind closed doors where no one knows what happens, right? But it has to be better than what happened behind ours. If you’d have peeked through our letterbox, the first thing you’d have seen would have been happiness, but that was just the hallway. I think we all know everywhere else was anything but.
I sit on the low carpark wall, doing my best to avoid looking like some weirdo stalker, long enough for the door to open and the three of them to emerge, the man my mum didn’t meet or kiss or marry now changed into beach clothes, into Dad mode, holding the kid’s hands then lifting her onto his shoulders as his partner looks on, laughing at the dribble snaking its way down her daughter’s chin and onto the hair of the man my mum didn’t meet or kiss or marry. I literally can’t move until they’ve gone.
My dad would have been like that, I think. That smile, remember, when he first saw me, just a few hundred metres from here in the park where he stood up from the bench, which is still there when I abandon the route to Daniel’s house and walk instead towards the memory of my dad, which is tracing paper, too thin and too transparent to make a ghost of him even. Because I didn’t have enough time to grasp the bulk of him, to memorise his walk, his mannerisms, his voice. It’d be sunshine though, right? A big yellow declaration that abortion had never been an option, and unlike Mum’s, it’d be true. But only – says a voice, small but mean, in my head – because he didn’t know, did he? He didn’t know about you until it was too late, until you were already here, holding your mother’s hand, holding your mother back, a five-year-old weight around your mother’s neck.
What if she’d told him when she first found out she was pregnant? Because he was just seventeen then, with his whole life stretching out ahead of him, and – how could I not have realised this before? – that life would have stretched even further if it weren’t for me and his obligation to visit. If I hadn’t been born, he wouldn’t have needed to come to Whitstable. He’d have been far away from that motorway and the lady with her attention on her mobile instead of the road. His car wouldn’t have flipped over into the bank. He wouldn’t have been cut free by firemen, already dead, meaning that the choice he made to have me in his life was the choice that killed him.
So no wonder Mum won’t risk it again, because that first choice she made was a domino and everything that came after fell down.
‘Fingers!’
I hear him before I see him, but there’s no doubt it’s Jacob Mansfield behind me, his voice a whole bunch of entitlement and scorn.
‘Come to give evidence, have you?’
When I turn around, Jacob’s sneering, like all he sees is the photograph of me on his monument bed.
And then he’s on the bench next to me, his hands on my shoulders, no actual force, but my panic’s a coat made of lead, pushing me down, further and further from the sky.
‘Or maybe you’ve realised you want some after all.’ He slides closer until there’s no space between us. ‘Give us a kiss then, Izzy.’
The lead coat grows a lead hat and lead boots and I’m totally going nowhere as Jacob leans in, face like a catapult about to fling its worst.
‘Thought it’d make me go away, did you?’ His hand’s on the exact same part of my chin as Harry’s was this morning. It’s only the pressure that’s different, but it changes everything. ‘Be a good girl then – tell me why you grassed me up.’ He squeezes and everything changes again.
‘Leave me alone, Jacob.’ And I’d swear the words are only in my head, but the look on his face says otherwise, their volume increasing the tension on that catapult so Jacob’s suddenly right up on me, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, voice as dark and underground as a well.
‘Leave me alone, Jacob,’ he repeats back to me, his impression making me sound squeaky, pathetic, weak.
Rising to his feet, he bends over me, stealing every inch of my sky. One hand grasps at my shoulder, his forehead pushing against mine as his other hand pinches at the fat that folds over my jeans. But it’s all just a different kind of pressure, the tugging and the pulling. No pain. Just drowsiness and surrender. The simplicity of it so familiar I let myself drift. Because this is what happens to girls like me with boys like Jacob. This is what we deserve. And I fall deeper and deeper into the well, away from the sun and the moon, where the embers of that tough, don’t-take-any-shit Izzy are immediately starved of air.
‘Why’d you tell the college about our deal, Izzy?’
Jacob’s voice is a yank into the now, and I stare right at him, no clue what he means but sure at least of what he’ll do to me.
‘Eh?’
‘I didn’t. I don’t know what yo—’
‘You didn’t? Really? Why was I pulled into the head’s office at lunchtime then? Admit it. You told them.’
‘I swear I —’
‘I swear I —’ Jacob mimics. And it’s his copycatting that does it. Something about it is the same old, same old story. Like those boys on the river and how they’re all caught up in this just being the way of things. This assumption that they’ll shut me down.
‘You swear what, Izzy?’
‘I didn’t tell college,’ I say. Hard. Clear. Aloud.
‘No?’ Jacob doesn’t break the eye lock he has on me. ‘Well, who did then?’
‘Steph,’ says a voice from somewhere behind. ‘Steph told them.’
‘Grace?’ Just her name in my mouth is a shot of grit to my gut. I pull myself away from Jacob’s grasp.
‘Steph?’ He’s looking from me to Grace, like, what the actual? ‘Who the fuck is Steph?’
‘My mum knows about this?’
‘I’m sorry, Iz.’ Grace is all out of breath from appearing out of nowhere. ‘But when Max called me this morning and told me what’s been go—’
‘Max? You fucking what?’ Jacob is bigger suddenly, chest puffed not with air but all this raging bad blood.
‘Max told me. I told Izzy’s mum. Izzy’s mum told college. It’s really not that complicated. Even for a Neanderthal brain like yours, Jacob.’
Grace comes over, takes my hand as she sits down next to me, totally not intimidated by the extra height sh
e’s granting Jacob, just giving off this air, like, we’re not playing this game any more.
‘Fuck off, Jacob,’ she says.
And, yeah, maybe there are more eloquent ways to end it but ‘fuck off’ is so fuckin’ perfect for this moment that it’ll do.
THIRTY-NINE
‘I’ve missed you,’ I say, kind of breathless, like we’re in a love scene, which I guess we sort of are.
‘You too.’ She’s pulling me into a hug already.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry.’
And we’re five again.
‘Jinx!’
‘Jinx!’
Pinky-linking our fingers to make a wish.
We watch Jacob skulk off, hands in his pockets, kicking the odd stone, head still not hanging despite everything.
I’d assumed anyone else knowing about the photos would feel worse than this. I’d assumed I’d be mortified but, really, what I feel most is relieved. Like that power has actually shifted. Like it’ll no longer be so easy for Jacob, for anyone, to steal my sky. Oh, but my mum though!
‘God, did you really have to tell my mum? My mum! Eugh.’
Grace must assume the roll of my eyes is at her, not at the thought of my mother, who probably thinks those photos are just further evidence of why she should never have had me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’
‘And Mum did, did she?’ Cos Mum’s decision-making isn’t exactly on point right now.
‘Well, yeah. I mean, Jacob’s suspended while they investigate, so that’s something.’
‘S’pose.’
When I’ve imagined my reunion with Grace, it’s always been a bit more upbeat than the flat line I’m currently riding.
‘C’mon,’ she says, ‘give me one of those Izzy Grace Chambers smiles.’
And I can’t help it – no matter all that heartache I’ve left up in Shropshire, being with Grace again is enough to make me grin.
‘There you go! See, Grace to the rescue!’
She’s only joking, I know. And I get it, honestly I do, and I am grateful, totally one hundred percent grateful for her help, but just now, before her perfectly timed arrival, I was on the brink of something. The fluttering in my belly no longer felt so much like fear, but like the embers from the river were growing wings, turning into a phoenix maybe, figuring out its flight.
It’s not that I don’t love how Grace is here, holding me, propping me, because aside from the last few weeks, it’s where she’s always been, how we’ve always worked. Grace: the leader, the decision maker. Izzy: one step behind. But maybe I’m done with being the one at the back, awaiting rescue. Because sure, it’s been fine letting Grace take the helm while I take her tail. But it was a lot less than fine when I trudged along, a similar but different kind of submission when Jacob was the one in charge, doing what he was doing while I said neither yes nor no cos little Izzy was too much at the back to be heard. And Daniel? A lot less than fine doesn’t even begin to cover it; how he made himself the front man, not only pushing Mum and me to the rear but pushing us down too, leaving us sprawled on our backs, barely able to move.
‘You know, I’m gonna try to do a bit of rescuing myself from now on. Girl power and all that!’
‘Goddamn right you are,’ Grace says, and in true love-scene style we fall into each other’s arms, both of us swimming in a goddamn river of tears.
FORTY
‘Hot choc?’
Before I even nod, Grace is already on it: Cadbury’s, milk, spoon, whisk, two mugs and two chairs pulled out from the kitchen table so I can fess up, she says. ‘Jesus, Iz, this is some serious shit.’
‘You first,’ I tell her, because surely it wasn’t actually some sixth sense that had her in the park at the same time as me and Jacob.
‘Find My Friend,’ she says.
I look at her, like, genius, remembering how the first thing we did when we got our phones was set them to see where the other was. And it’d been fun to start off with, checking in on Grace’s whereabouts so I’d know when she was on her way. The novelty wore off pretty quickly though because, back then, there was never much distance between us, not for long anyway, but I’ll admit, when she and Nell got together, I’d use it to get a better idea of what they were up to. Without me. You know, to see exactly how far away Nell was stealing my friend.
‘How long did it take you to cave?’
Grace raises her eyebrows, like, don’t get too cocky, but, sad as it is, I really do want to know.
‘Honestly? About six hours after sending that email,’ she says, and our laughter’s like the sound my Jar of Sunshine makes when I shake it, like thin streams of yellow elbowing their way through a cloud. ‘It just seemed really weird, you know, that you and your mum would go off like that. And seriously, Shropshire? Like, yeah, if it were Vegas, I’d have been, like, I get it, but flippin’ Shrewsbury? I’d never even heard of it. So I asked Daniel —’
‘You did what?’
‘I asked Daniel where you’d gone.’
My eyes must be spinning sirens or something, cos Grace is all ‘No, no, no, I didn’t tell him I’d been tracking you or anything. God, Izzy, I wouldn’t want him thinking I’m some kind of stalker! I just asked him if he knew where you were staying, when you’d be back and all that. I promise I didn’t give anything away.’
‘Crap.’ And my sirens are louder and brighter this time, not because of Grace, not directly anyway, but because if she’s been able to keep an eye on me, maybe Daniel has too. And I remember that night Mum and I first arrived in the refuge, how Elizabeth had told us to change the settings on our phones, and I’d been so scared of missing something from Grace that I hadn’t even thought about Daniel. ‘I’m so stupid.’
‘Er, Pink alert, Pink alert!’ Grace says, teeing up her phone so she can sing about getting rid of all those negative voices in my head. ‘You are not stupid, Izzy!’ Her palms are pressed against my ears, rattling my skull. ‘Now, repeat after me: I, Izzy Grace Chambers…’ And her voice is a piss-take but her eyes are serious as hell.
‘I, Izzy Grace Chambers…’
‘Am totally, absolutely, undeniably, literally, seriously, fuckin’ perfect.’
‘Am totally? Absolutely?’
‘Undeniably, literally, seriously…’
‘Undeniably? Literally? Seriously?’
‘Fuckin’ perfect.’
‘Fuckin’ perfect.’
‘Good. Now say it like you mean it, Izzy.’
‘I, Izzy Grace Chambers, am totally, absolutely, undeniably, literally, seriously, fuckin’ perfect.’
‘Bravo.’
‘As much as I appreciate the pep talk, Grace, I really am. Stupid, I mean.’
She slaps her hand against her forehead, like, do I have to make you say this shit again?
‘I mean it. If Daniel’s been able to track me…’ And the life and death of things becomes clearer then, even to me, when I tell Grace about that time Daniel followed Mum to Canterbury, trailing the bus in his car and parking on double yellows so he didn’t lose sight of her when she got off.
‘Your deception’s cost me seventy-five pounds in parking penalties, Stephanie. You do know, don’t you, how difficult things have been financially since you decided to give up your job and be a lady of leisure?’ Daniel crouched on the floor in front of her and, yeah, he may have been on his knees, but with his bared teeth, those lines between his eyes, how they made even his nose look like a weapon when he grimaced, you couldn’t get any more opposite of bowing down. ‘Where did you get the money for your bus fare?’
And because her answer was a low mumble, Daniel repeated it, eyes moving from her to me to be sure I was listening.
‘Isabel’s purse?’ he said.
Mum, who even when he hit her usually stayed quiet and calm, was proper weeping then, big chokes in her throat, tears on her hands and staining her top. All that washable hurt no one else would ever see.
‘Why’d you do it, Stephanie? Sneak around behind my back?’
‘I didn’t mean —’
‘You didn’t mean to what? Steal money from your daughter? Tell lies to your husband?’
And that’s what made talking about it so impossible, because those words, Daniel’s accusations, they don’t sound the same when I say them cos, in the black and white of things, everything he was saying was kind of true.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘And then you have the gall to ask why I can’t trust you?’
It was always worse when he stopped shouting. That was when Mum would normally indicate I should leave, just a nod of her head or a twitch of her hand, but that day, she looked more the other way from me than ever, like the shame had been doubled, because of the cash she’d taken from my purse maybe.
But even if she had given me the sign to go, I would’ve stayed.
‘I’m only going to ask you once, Stephanie. Who was he?’
‘Luke,’ Mum said.
Somehow she didn’t even flinch when the tepid tea Daniel was pouring from her cup over her head ran into her eyes and mouth.
‘Luke now, is it?’ And from his voice, it sounded like Luke had predecessors, but I swear Mum hadn’t been out in, like, forever.
‘He’s my cousin.’
‘You’re fucking your cousin?’ Daniel turned to me. ‘You must be so proud, Isabel: it’s not just theft your mother keeps in the family.’
I knew not to say anything. There were rules in these moments, and the three of us each knew them by heart.
‘I’m not sleeping with him.’ Her voice was pure monotone.
‘I saw you kiss him.’
‘On the cheek.’
‘He paid for lunch, Stephanie. He will have wanted something in return.’
‘He was being kind. I have no money, Daniel.’ And though she wouldn’t have meant for it to come through, we all heard it, that shard of accusation, just sharp enough to slice through the thin line between Daniel’s buttoned-up threat and his hands-on fury.
