by Amy Beashel
People say, don’t they, that if they were veggie, the thing they’d miss most would be bacon. But here, in the fat-scented ghost of it, I’d happily eat anything but.
‘You sure he’s not home?’ Harry’s voice is a thumping heart in the quiet, as I push the front door to behind us, wiping my feet on the mat even though we’re not staying, even though I’d love to screw Daniel’s rules and enter the house in a blaze of mess and dirt. The muscle memory’s greater than the rebellion, I guess. He has us set in his ways.
‘We watched him leave,’ I remind Harry for, like, the tenth time, purposefully not copycatting his whispers. And anyway, you can feel it when Daniel’s here, that atmosphering thing he does, the temperature not exactly changing but the air thinning, like a castaway once described how it is at the top of a mountain, how without that oxygen, you can never feel one hundred percent safe because the truth is that your body’s slowly dying. ‘You saw. He left for writing group. We’ve got a couple of hours at least.’
When we pulled up outside, I went totally movie, slumping down in the back of Harry’s car, shoving a cap of his brother’s I’d found in the footwell on my head and peering through the rear window at the front of the house, waiting for Daniel to appear.
Harry pretended to play on his phone. ‘That him?’ he said, when Daniel opened the front door. And I could hear the surprise, the he doesn’t look like someone who…
So, before he could say it: ‘Clooney, right?’
‘Totally,’ Harry said, watching my stepdad in full-on charm offensive as the neighbour, Bob, wrestled with an overstuffed bin bag, Daniel making a show of putting his rucksack on the pavement so he could lift the lid of the bin before catching the yoghurt pot and envelope that had escaped through the split in the sack, clearly not reprimanding Bob for not recycling, not telling him how lazy he is, how selfish, how, Jesus Christ, you’re so stupid sometimes, not taking the recyclables and putting them in Bob’s bed as a reminder of why we have these ways of doing things. None of that. Daniel was all smiles for the neighbour and strokes for the cat.
All the while, Harry was watching him, and I knew what he was thinking: Can this Daniel really be the same Daniel as the one who said all the words and did all the things?
‘He’s a good actor,’ I said. ‘Not just for money, but all the way through.’
I saw the nod of Harry’s head through the gap between the headrest and the front seat, totally subtle so as not to attract Daniel’s attention.
‘I know,’ Harry said.
And I think he does – know how good an actor Daniel is, I mean. Because although Harry’s big, taking up the bulk of this boxy hallway, it’s like in sneaking here into this house, he’s lost the brawn of the river, like even the idea of Daniel is enough to shrink him down.
‘Your mum would kill me for letting you do this.’
What I don’t say is: ‘You know if he finds us, Daniel will kill us first.’
‘Grab that, will you?’ I say instead, pointing at the happiness picture on the wall, which Harry slides from its hook, his eyes all can we go now? But I’m up the stairs before he can try again to persuade me.
‘Izzy.’ His voice is a searchlight, but dimmed, like a candle maybe, as his feet creak on the treads.
He follows me to my bedroom, which is almost but not quite how I left it. Everything is straighter, neater, no dust, and my T-shirts are folded into piles, my shoes stacked in their pairs, my duvet pressed perfectly flat across my bed. I can picture him doing it, casting his eyes over the photos of Grace and me on the wall, as his hands made everything look better.
‘There, there,’ he’d say to Mum sometimes, as if people who aren’t 1950s mothers in films actually say that to each other. And he’d stroke her hair and her back, smoothing out the creases of his anger, willing her skin to yield to his apology as much as it did to his hurt.
‘Come on, Izzy.’ Harry is literally pacing, his trainers leaving specks of dried mud on the carpet. Evidence. I’m on my knees then, pinching the flecks of dirt between my nails, dropping them into my palm, flushing them down the toilet, the rushing water sounding like a roar in the otherwise silent house, turning Harry’s face a colour not far off porcelain, and he’s wiping his hands on his jeans like he wishes he could flush away his fingerprints too.
He follows me back across the landing and into my room, hand on my shoulder, like he’s ready to pull me out of here. I mean, it’s obvious, but I don’t point out the smallness of the place, how if Daniel were to come home, he’d only need to stand at the bottom of the stairs, and we’d be trapped.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, but it’s as much for me as for Harry now, and he must pick up on that fault line in my tone because his energy’s ramped up a notch, his eyes flitting from wall to window to door like he’s sure any second it’s gonna blow.
‘Harry, chill!’ But my heart’s like hailstones against my chest as I reach up to the shelf in my wardrobe where my Jar of Sunshine should be but isn’t. ‘We’re not doing anything wrong. This is my room. My stuff.’ Even I’ve dropped to a whisper now.
Harry’s not stupid – he gets the shift, stands guard behind the curtain like some old guy on neighbourhood watch.
‘Can we get out the back?’ he asks.
I look at him, like, what? Now?
He shakes his head. ‘If I see him out the front.’
From where I’m climbing up on my desk chair double-checking the wardrobe, even though it’s obvious the jar isn’t there, I nod, sure, but don’t mention the fences we’d have to climb or the bushes we’d have to push through cos Harry seems freaked out enough already.
There are Mum’s Judy Blumes and the picture of Grace and Sinitta but definitely no jar. ‘It’s not here.’ And maybe I stamp my foot or something because suddenly I’m wobbling and Harry’s catching me as I fall.
‘Bloody hell, Izzy!’ he says, but his voice is a this-is-thelast-thing-we-need-right-now kind of giggle, and he kisses me, proper full on with lips and tongues, the first since he arrived, and for a minute the room is painted yellow instead of that orangey red.
Because I kiss him too. Like, really kiss him. Like, kiss him with my mouth, and my hands and my whole entire body kiss him, feeling it everywhere, not just in my skin and my bones but around them too, like the kiss is everything, not just something we’re doing but what we’re made of and what we’re standing on and what we’re breathing. As if our holding and hoping can wipe away all the words Daniel said and all the things Jacob did. Because I swear I can feel it, Harry’s desire – not a sexual desire, though, yeah, that’s in there too, I guess, but a desire for making things good. For me. It’s about me more than it’s about him and that’s what makes me want to keep kissing Harry more.
And more.
And more.
FORTY-SEVEN
‘Shit.’
It’s not clear who says it first, Harry or me, because we both hear it, the noise from downstairs that meteorites its way into that perfect kiss, catapulting us from our high to high alert, jumping us apart so we’re dead still and listening for another sign.
‘Do you —’
I cover Harry’s mouth with my hand and give him these eyes, like, silence! And that bubble we’d made of hope is suddenly dripping with fear.
Every one of our breaths is a firework.
‘Did you —’ Harry says into my fingers, and I nod because, yeah, I heard it a second time too.
I imagine Daniel planning his next move, or maybe not planning anything, just waiting at the bottom of the stairs for when I appear. Thing is, I’m stuck, like literally cannot lift my feet to edge any closer to the door.
Harry though, Harry slides to the window, shrugs that there’s nothing to see and is back by my side, with his arm against my arm and his hip against my hip and his lips against my ear, whispering, ‘We need to get out of here.’
I know, right, but how and where? And we don’t have the Jar of Sunshine so no. I’m not leaving
without it.
I take the happiness picture from Harry, grasp it so tight my knuckles turn the yellow-red of rhubarb and custard sweets. When I jolt my head towards the door, Harry’s eyebrows are like, really? But we don’t have a choice, and maybe it’s the inevitability of it, of some kind of showdown, or maybe it’s this raging need, like when I was on the riverbank and those boys were rapping about rape like it was all just bants, yeah? Like how my blood got hotter and all I really, really wanted was to burn them down. I raise the picture, the sharp corner of the frame ready to strike, and make my way to the landing.
We stand like this, side by side, hearing only our hearts and the air we take in and blow out, take in and blow out, as we wait.
For a sign.
For a noise.
For a man.
Nothing.
And my grip becomes loose, and my heart becomes slower, and Harry and I give each other this look, like, what idiots! And I take a step down, and then…
Something.
It’s tiny. Like, so tiny you’d never normally notice it, but that’s how Daniel works, right, with these small things that seem like nothing until, all of a sudden, the shit couldn’t hit the fan any harder.
Harry points at the front door only a few feet from the bottom of the staircase. We could run for it. Then there’s this slither of a shadow on the sitting-room carpet and Harry looks at me, like, move, but I’m back in Jacob’s room, unable to say yes or no, my body just waiting for whatever’s going to happen to happen.
‘Go,’ Harry whispers, but the whisper’s not silence and it turns the shadow into clatter and chaos, and Harry’s not waiting now but reaching for my wrist as he stumbles down the stairs, staying upright, but only just, bringing me down with him, stretching for the latch to the door but it’s too late because there are footsteps and a ‘What the…?’ as a rolling pin comes flying from the sitting room, catching his head and, with the impact and the shock of it, Harry stumbles and falls to the floor.
FORTY-EIGHT
‘Who on earth?’
The voice is a stranger’s. A woman’s. Chocked full of her own shock and fear.
Harry sees her first, and the heave of his chest, the way he sinks into the door, it’s not surrender but relief. We’re fine. For now.
But who the hell is it?
‘Isabel?’ the woman says, lowering the hand mixer with which she was ready to go into battle.
That face, though I can’t place it, isn’t so much of a stranger as I’d thought.
‘I’m sorry –’ the free hand she reaches down to Harry is heavily lined and ringless – ‘for the rolling pin.’ And though her voice is as old as the rest of her, it’s also the uneasy shyness of a child hiding behind her mother’s legs.
‘’S cool,’ Harry says, refusing her offer of a helping hand up. ‘I’m good, thanks. God knows what you might be planning to do with the beater attachment on that mixer!’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says again, not registering his smile, his joke. The repetition has the same familiarity as her face. Only, her face reminds me of Daniel and her sorries remind me of Mum.
‘’S OK, honest.’ Harry’s up on his feet, and the woman, who must be in her seventies, shrinks a little as he moves towards her. ‘I was just gonna take that for you,’ he says, minding his step, filling his voice with no hard feelings, and she hands her weapon over.
‘You are Isabel, aren’t you?’
‘Izzy, actually.’ It’s kind of harsh, the way I correct her, but these things count, right?
‘Of course. Izzy.’ And there’s an understanding in how she says it. And in how she lowers her eyes, kind of awkward, kind of sad – there’s a sort of apology in there too. ‘You’ve grown since…’
‘Since?’
‘Daniel and Stephan—’ She stops herself. ‘Daniel and Steph’s wedding. But I wasn’t there for long.’
And there she is, in this memory played out like one of those Boomerang videos on Instagram, dipping away, turning her cheek from Daniel as he switched from rage to tender when he saw that I was watching.
‘You’re Daniel’s mum?’
She nods, like that same uneasy child admitting something she thinks could get her into trouble.
‘But he said you were —’ And it’s me who stops myself now.
‘We hadn’t seen each other in a long time,’ she says without leaving a gap between my speech and hers, and I can’t tell if she’s making conversation or saving me from telling the truth.
Harry looks at me, like, there’s no time for family reunions, yeah?
But I shake my head as soft as I can – so soft that she might miss it. But, like Mum, she seems fine-tuned to every gesture and agrees that, really, it’s probably best that we go.
‘Daniel says there have been some…’ she tiptoes across the word, ‘issues.’
Harry’s eyes roll in a now-that’s-what-I-call-an-understatement kind of disbelief. ‘Is that what he calls them?’
And I give him this look, like, don’t.
But he shakes his head. ‘You know what he’s done? To Izzy and her mum?’
‘I can imagine.’ Her voice is a flash flood filling the room with regret.
‘But you’re staying here anyway.’ And I know he doesn’t mean it, but Harry’s words are a gentle attack.
‘He’s my son.’
‘He’s my husband,’ Mum had said in the hours after that first time, when I’d held a warm flannel against her arm.
It’s kind of amazing, and kind of scary, the ties, the binds of love.
‘My jar.’
‘Follow me,’ Daniel’s mum says, wincing slightly every time her left foot presses against the floor.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ she says. And I’ve said the same when I’ve obviously been the furthest from OK you can be.
‘Shall I leave you my number?’ I ask her, going to find some paper and a pen in the drawer.
‘Best not.’ And her voice is an acceptance of her position. ‘You know what he’d do if he found it.’
When she comes back from the far end of the garden, where we planted the forget-me-nots after she didn’t actually die, the jar is warm in her hands. And although I know it’s just where it’s been lying in the sun, what I know too is that the heat is its power. That I was my dad’s sunshine and that even if he’s somewhere else, somewhere maybe 149.6 million kilometres away, he still feels me, like I still feel him. That love can carry that distance even if it has to be kept in a jar.
‘Come on,’ I say.
Harry’s eyes are like, are you sure we should leave her?
My shrug won’t say it, but what I mean is: we can’t make her come.
‘Quickly,’ I tell Harry, taking the page Daniel cut from my book from its frame and putting it in the bag, pulling my shoes on to my feet and leaving my key right there. Because I don’t want it. I don’t need it. This house is not my home and I’m not coming back to it. Ever.
I hug her then, this woman whose son changed everything.
‘Good luck,’ Daniel’s mum says, leaning in, holding tight. ‘Be well.’
FORTY-NINE
‘Sweets!’ Harry says, shoving a packet of Starbursts in my face as we trundle around Tesco Express looking for the perfect post-shock sugar top-up. ‘My nan lobbed six sugar cubes in her tea when she heard my cousin Eve had been caught nicking a kilo of chicken wings from KFC. Medicinal, she said!’
So I grab three Freddos cos, seriously, who hasn’t been waiting their entire life for a medical reason to gorge on chocolate frogs?
‘Three? Really? You think that’s wise?’ Says a voice at my side.
And I hadn’t been wrong then, when I thought I spotted Jacob as we got out the car. Now here he is in the sweet aisle, looking anything but.
‘I’ve seen that belly. Felt it too. Eh, Izzy?’
And there it is again, the voice of broken happy-ever-afters because, honestly, I was really starting to believe maybe
Harry and I were heading for some kind of sunset, but then in comes Jacob and all I’m heading for is shame.
‘Who’s this then? He’s why you came over all frigid in the park yesterday, is he?’
And though he’s not biting, Harry’s not exactly blank about Jacob either, his eyes to the floor and his hands preoccupied with the pack of chocolate-covered Hobnobs he’d tossed into the basket just as Jacob was making himself heard.
‘Lost your tongue, have you?’ Jacob says. ‘Maybe it’s for the best, eh! Your boyfriend might not wanna go near it once he knows where it’s been.’
And my chest is a broken lift shaft with my heart plummeting down, down, down.
‘Her boyfriend might be more upset about the way you’re talking to her,’ Harry says, head up now – his and mine – and those rower shoulders broader as he’s eyeballing Jacob, who’s all shrugs and just sayings. ‘Dick,’ Harry mutters as Jacob, clearly not giving a shit, struts away.
‘Mega dick,’ I concur, but the thing is, though we’re smiling, that near-escape adrenaline rush we were buzzing on has nosedived and the heat of that sunset we were destined for has turned from a reddish kind of fire to a palish kind of meek.
‘It’s fine,’ I snap at the man who comes over to help when the stupid self-scanning machine doesn’t recognise the Freddos. ‘I don’t want them anyway. Shit!’
The old woman behind me in the queue tuts when I’m further delayed cos I realise I’ve lost Mum’s purse.
‘Here,’ Harry says, leaning across and pressing his card to the contactless reader while the realisation that the purse may have fallen out my bag at Daniel’s sinks from my head down through the rest of my body.
‘That a friend of yours?’ And I can hear it, how Harry didn’t want to ask but really couldn’t stop the words as we leave the shop, and while he’s normally so easy-going, now he’s all hurried steps, one hand holding the bag and the other shoved hard into his pocket. Difference being, he’d reached for mine on the way in.
