by Amy Beashel
‘Not reall—’ But I come to a standstill. Harry doesn’t even notice because he’s a few feet ahead, already at the car.
Daniel.
Leaning against a lamp post like some romcom hero waiting for his girl. But when I double-take, he’s gone, no trace of him, no back of his head, no flash of the white shirt he was wearing this morning. Nothing. So maybe it’s the panic from seeing Jacob that makes it seem as if Daniel’s still looming, still atmosphering in my head.
I wonder if it will always be like this. If Daniel’s face will forever appear in a crowd, like the opposite of one of those magic drawings you get on the internet – stare hard enough and you see something you totally missed at first glance.
And there’s a nudge of understanding then. Why Mum doesn’t want his baby. Because most likely she’ll see Daniel’s face in strangers like I do and couldn’t cope with seeing it in her own child’s too. Not to mention that cord that would tie them, like mother to baby, but mother to ex, him using it to tug at her, pull at her, and they’d always be bound.
‘Can we just go?’ I say to Harry, as I climb into the car. Not mentioning Daniel. Not mentioning Jacob, just reaching for my Jar of Sunshine, rolling one of the beads between my fingers, feeling its heat.
FIFTY
When he’s not changing gear, Harry keeps a hand on my knee. Even when, half an hour into the drive, I tell him everything. The party. The photo. The blackmail. He keeps his hand on my knee, and I keep my eyes on the road. Because no way I can look at Harry’s face as he hears all that dirty history I have with Jacob, all that proof of me being nothing like that girl he met on the river. More silent. More still. More caught in the current instead of forging a dam.
‘You’re not saying anything,’ I say, and my head actually feels like what brains look like in photos, a mash or maze of minced beef totally incapable of thought.
‘I’m not not saying anything,’ Harry says. ‘I’m just letting you talk.’
And that’s it then – we fall into this gap, where he’s not not saying anything and I’m not not saying anything, but neither of us says anything more.
Until.
‘You know what Jacob is, don’t you, Izzy?’
‘A dick?’
‘Not just any dick though, right?’
‘A mega dick,’ we say in unison.
And for the first time since I told him, I catch Harry’s eye.
Time passes. We drive on, away from Jacob and Daniel and maybe even from shame.
‘Pass me a biscuit,’ he says. ‘I need a Hobnob.’
And my eyebrows must be like, a Hobnob, eh? cos Harry’s laughing then, and I wonder if it’s real, this dismissal of my past like it genuinely counts for shit.
‘Oops, sorry, this one’s broken.’ The crumbs spill over my lap as I try to keep the damaged biscuit in the packet and wiggle out another in a perfect piece.
‘Just pass it over.’ Harry reaches his hand across the gear-stick. ‘I don’t care if it’s broken. I’ll take a Hobnob any way it comes. I love Hobnobs. They’re my thing, you know. Like if I’m stressed, all I wanna do is eat Hobnobs.’
‘You saying you’re stressed?’ And my heart stands still as the car moves onwards. I’d thought this was going quite well.
‘Not being funny but you did just make me break into some psycho’s house and steal a Jar of Sunshine!’
‘Yeah, sorry ’bout that.’
‘It’s all right now. I have you, right?’
‘Yes,’ I say, trying so goddamn hard not to beam.
‘And I have Hobnobs. God, I love them. Like, really, really love them.’
‘I can tell.’
‘Come on then, Izzy. Tell me something you really, really love.’
And in my head I’m like, ‘I know it’s crazy, Harry, but I might just really, really love…’ Don’t even think it, Izzy. Don’t even think it.
‘Desert Island Discs,’ I say.
‘Ah, of course,’ he says. ‘You think your thing for Desert Island Discs is as big as my thing for Hobnobs?’
‘Whatever, Harry. Let’s not get into how big your thing is or isn’t, yeah?’
‘Izzy!’ A spray of biscuit on the dashboard.
‘Seriously, you need to take more control of your Hobnob!’
‘Leave my Hobnob out of this, young lady.’
‘You’re the one who started it. But yes, I do think my thing’s as big as your thing. Maybe even bigger. Funnily enough, what with your penchant for broken Hobnobs, if I had to choose eight tracks to sum up my life, one of them would be “Broken Biscuit”.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s a song, Harry! By Sia?’
But he obviously has no clue so I cue it up on Spotify, turn up the volume on my phone and let Sia’s words run into the cracks where I too am broken, willing myself to look at my boyfriend – he did call himself that, didn’t he! – to see if he gets it, how gentle he needs to be with this smashed-up soul of mine.
‘It’s nice,’ he says, when the song’s done and he’s given it a moment’s silence out of respect for it being one of my favourites. ‘But I’m not sure you should have it on the island.’
And seriously, it’s scary how quickly respect can crumble.
‘Erm, you know this is my selection, Harry. This isn’t our mega dicks list – this is one of my actual Desert Island Discs.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I totally get that, Iz, but these are the songs you might have to live with forever.’
And I nod, like, duh, cos I’m the Desert Island Discs expert here, remember.
‘You might feel like a broken biscuit at the moment but isn’t it a bit, I dunno, pessimistic to have it as part of your lifelong theme tune?’
I sit there for a bit, looking at the cat’s eyes disappearing beneath the car. ‘FYI, I’m not not saying anything. I’m just thinking.’ I think. ‘And anyway, it doesn’t have to be forever – you know, some castaways are invited back for a second go. Maybe in twenty years I won’t be broken any more and I’ll change “Broken Biscuit” for something else.’
‘Twenty years? Really? You’re going to take twenty years to not feel like a broken biscuit?’
What can I say to that? Who knows how long it takes to recover from these things?
‘It actually might take you twenty years if you’re listening to this every day. I’m serious,’ Harry says, when I concede with a quiet kind of laugh. ‘Sia might have this amazing voice, but you have to admit that she makes being broken sound a bit, well, a bit of a lost cause.’
‘And it isn’t?’
‘No!’ Harry checks the rear-view mirror then chucks a smile at me as we pull into the service station. ‘You know what my dad gave me for my eighteenth birthday?’
‘A bottle of whisky? A newspaper from the day you were born?’
‘No. A broken bit of pottery.’
‘Jesus, gold star to your dad for that one!’
Harry parks up, puts on the handbrake and unplugs his seat belt so he can turn to face me full on. ‘It had been broken, but someone put it back together with gold.’
‘Gold? On a smashed-up bit of china?’
‘It’s a Japanese art apparently. Kintsugi. And I’m probably saying it wrong, but it’s the philosophy that’s important.’
‘The philosophy?’ And my smile is a tease but, honestly, Harry just gets more attractive by the minute.
‘Yes, Izzy, the philosophy. Because the reason they do it, piece it together with gold, is because they believe that nothing is ever truly broken.’
‘But doesn’t it make the cracks look more obvious?’
‘Nah. It makes them look more beautiful,’ he says, and even though the gearstick and the handbrake and the Hobnobs are in his way, Harry goes right ahead and kisses me right here in the services car park, where I let the broken parts of me begin to glimmer with gold.
FIFTY-ONE
I’m sorry, Sia, but you’re out of here. Sure, I’m an independent woman and all th
at and my discs are my discs, but a girl’s gotta be up for some compromise, and if that compromise comes with one of those heart-searing kisses then who am I to say no?
Because Harry was on to something with that song, like when I’m on my island, when I’m all alone and literally fighting for my life, do I really want something that reinforces Daniel and Jacob’s power, or do I want something that’s going to make me whoop? So fight-talking Katy Perry’s in. Seriously, her track has me nailed.
Almost.
Actually, it has the hope for me nailed. Like, I’m not quite there yet, but make this my anthem and I might well be. From sitting to standing. From quiet to thunder. From biting my tongue to magnificent, fire-dancing ‘Roar’.
Just listening to it gets me morphing. It’s totally different from listening to Sia, when that’s all we did – listen, I mean. Cos it’s like Harry said: ‘Broken Biscuit’ is nice, kind of beautiful, but it’s also kind of sedentary. When we play ‘Roar’, it’s a whole other story. The music, the words, they do exactly what desert island music needs to do: they time-travel you. And yeah, I’d always thought they should time-travel you back to a place you’ve already been, to a memory you’ve already made, but this is the opposite. It propels me forward.
When it starts, what is it, piano? Whatever, it immediately sounds kind of happy because the past is already the past and Katy Perry’s already become what she wanted to be: a fighter, a champion, a butterfly, a bee. And, yeah, it might all be cliché, but cliché is cliché because it’s true, right? Because it works. Like the muscle memory that made me stick to Daniel’s rules, this is the lyric memory that might just help me break them.
Harry sings too. Like, top-of-his-voice sings. And, like me, he’s awful, but sod it, cos we might be awful but we’re also great. Road-tripping monumental kind of great, roaring our hearts out as the song attaches itself to these few hours in the car, already making it a place for me to draw power from when I need to remind myself of my fire.
‘Do you think we’ll be back in time to go out on the river?’
‘Today?’ Harry says.
And I know what he’s thinking – my mum will be waiting – but this charge I have from singing, it’s too much of a force to just go sit in a refuge for the rest of the day.
‘Half an hour, that’s all. I’ll message Mum now. She won’t mind.’
‘I dunno, Iz,’ Harry says. ‘She seemed super keen to have you there as soon as possible.’
‘Being half an hour late isn’t gonna kill anyone, is it?’
‘S’pose.’ His eyes flit to the time on the display. ‘I’d just rather get you back, Izzy. Your mum…’ he doesn’t seem to know what to say, ‘she wasn’t messing around when she laid down the rules. And rule number one was straight home.’
‘Well, we already broke that.’
‘Yeah, and that didn’t exactly turn out perfectly, did it?’
‘I got the jar, didn’t I? We’re alive!’
‘Ha! Because it’s always a good sign when you’re pleased to come out of something alive.’ He’s laughing, but Harry’s voice is the huge exhale of a near miss. ‘She’s pretty fierce, your mum. Like you.’ And he gives me this smile, like, believe it. ‘Knows what she wants.’
‘And what she doesn’t want.’ He hears it then, the betrayal of my thoughts. And it’s not like I wanted to say it. It’s not even like I wanted to think it. I was happy thinking about being a lion and taking over the world. But it lurks somewhere just beneath every other thought I’m having, this constant reminder of Mum’s choice. And, honestly, I understand the reasons why she doesn’t want this baby. His baby. They make complete sense, and if it was anyone else, I swear I wouldn’t judge. But maybe because it’s my mum, I am. Judging, I mean. Because I know she could pull it off. She could be the kind of mum she was to me before Daniel came along. She could make it work.
‘Izzy?’
‘It’s nothing.’ But the tears I’ve missed with the wipe of my wrist prove otherwise.
‘Whassup?’
‘It’s my mum.’
Harry’s like, uh-huh, as if this conversation is like any other normal conversation.
‘She’s pregnant.’ And before Harry can even think of congratulations, I say, ‘She’s having a termination’, rushing through the word like I used to rush through chocolate biscuits when Daniel wasn’t home in some weird belief that if he wasn’t there to witness it, they wouldn’t count. Their moment on my lips would not be forever on my hips. But this isn’t a biscuit. It is forever though. Either way, this decision is definitely for forever.
‘And you don’t think she should?’ Harry makes a whole load of effort to sound neutral.
‘It’s the woman’s right to choose.’ The opinion was far more convincing when it came from Grace.
‘I’m sure it hasn’t been an easy decision.’
I get what he’s doing, but I say, ‘And you’d know, would you?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, still in that voice like he’s used to this, like this isn’t something that happens to other people, like this is something he’s talked about before. ‘I do.’
I don’t say anything.
‘You know, you’re not the only one with history, Izzy.’
And this time it’s Harry who keeps his eyes forward, as he reveals that his closet has skeletons of its own.
FIFTY-TWO
‘She wasn’t really my girlfriend.’ And it’s not that he sounds ashamed, but there is something that’s different in Harry’s voice now, a fragility maybe, something that doesn’t quite fit with those muscles in his rower’s arms that look like nothing could possibly hurt him. ‘We’d been out a few times, with other mates and that, just for drinks and to a club and, you know…’
And I know, but I’m not sure I want to. The image of Harry and the girl before, the girl who wasn’t really his girlfriend but who, you know…
‘We weren’t exactly careful.’ And those breaths he takes, how he swallows, and that shake of his head, like he’s been over it so many times, but nothing ever changes that one moment of being not exactly careful. I just want to reach over and hold him. ‘I told her I wouldn’t come inside her,’ he says, daring to look at me then, like, too much information? Which maybe it is, but I want to hear it anyway.
‘It’s OK,’ I tell him, and his shoulder drops under the touch of my palm.
‘She couldn’t stop crying after, and I was convinced she was overreacting, because what are the chances? I mean, my aunt and uncle were trying for ages, IVF and everything, and I told Kiera that, but she was so mad at me by then because, like I said, I’d promised. And she swore if she was, you know… Well, it’d all be my fault, wouldn’t it?’
‘And she was? Pregnant, I mean?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, like he still can’t quite believe it.
And neither can my heart, which sits in my throat like a boiled sweet, kind of small and hard and sticky.
‘Crazy, innit? How easy it can happen. Can you pass me another Hobnob?’ And what’s crazy is how Harry’s talking about a baby and then he’s talking about a biscuit. ‘Sorry,’ he says, clocking my disbelief. ‘I told you, I eat when I’m stressed, that’s all.’ So I pass him two and he goes on. ‘I know how it sounds. Like I was a dick.’
‘Mega dick,’ we say with perfect timing, and my boiled-sweet heart slips back into my chest and begins to beat again.
‘Complete and utter,’ he says. ‘So, a few weeks later, I get a text saying she needs to see me. We met in the park, and she was already crying before she pulled out the test and, god, those two lines. They looked so harmless. That was it then, wasn’t it? The rest of our lives.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Shit.’ And he looks at me, like, honest. ‘I said “shit”. A lot. There were some sorries in there too, but I think for the next week or so pretty much the only word that came out of my mouth was “shit”.’
‘And what about…?’ I remember her name’s Kiera, but
it feels weird to say it, like an intrusion almost. ‘What about your not-really girlfriend? What did she say?’
‘All sorts,’ Harry says now, pausing to listen to the satnav telling him to take the second exit at the roundabout. ‘Mostly she was scared, I reckon. Of telling her mum and dad. At first, she said there was no way she could have an abortion.’ Even though he doesn’t stammer over the word, Harry’s voice does drop a little as he says it. ‘But over the next few days, after she spoke with her parents, she started to think differently.’
‘And what did you want?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know what I wanted. I mean, if you’d have asked me a few weeks before if I wanted a baby, then obviously I’d have been, like, no way. But when it happens, you can’t help wondering what it’d be like.’
‘So, what did you do?’
‘I worked up the balls to tell my mum and dad and then we all had this meeting. Can you imagine? Sitting round a table looking at the faces of the parents of a girl you had sex with after too many Jack Daniels, discussing the pros and cons of having a child. That meeting? Worst. Moment. Of. My. Life. Hands down.’
‘Did anyone take the minutes?’
‘The minutes?’ Harry looks at me, like, you serious?
‘The meeting! Someone always takes minutes at a meeting. Sorry, I make inappropriate jokes when I’m nervous, that’s all.’
‘Touché. No one took the minutes, Izzy.’ But he smiles. ‘It was weird, everyone talking about what would happen to “the baby”. Who would look after “the baby”. What “the baby” would mean for Kiera’s future. Whether I could support “the baby”. Where “the baby” would live. How old we’d be when “the baby” was sixteen. And then suddenly Kiera just said she didn’t want it. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t love me. She barely even knew me. And, yeah, she thought she’d make a good mum one day, but she didn’t want to do it. Not yet.’
