The Sky is Mine

by Amy Beashel

  And when he falls to his knees with his face in his hands, we stand over him, looking back at where we’ve come from, at this ripple we’ve made in the water and at his other, bigger ripples we’ve survived.

  ‘You hear that?’ Mum says, holding my hand steady as the sound of sirens travels hard down the riverbank.

  Daniel looks up, eyes squinting with the hairspray and the glare of the sun.

  ‘That’s the sound of an ending,’ she says, but it feels like a beginning to me.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  We told them, the police. We answered their questions and made our statements and were told it could go to court, and the ‘could’ was a punch as hard as any of Daniel’s. But we know. We know what happened. We know what he did. We know how it both ended and began by the river that cuts up and connects things. And we know too how hard it is to prove. Because the police told us, and Elizabeth told us, and Kate told us, and the internet told us, and the newspapers told us, and so we know.

  But we’ll try.

  Mum was Superwoman in that battle with Daniel, but when she lies down on the bed at the clinic, she looks mortal, like invisible nettles are binding their stems around her skin. Her goosebumped arms run into fidgeting fingers, her eyes determinedly open as the nurse rubs a gel on her belly. And I’m sure she’ll turn away from the screen where a black-and-white cashew nut is tethered to her insides, but she looks at the thing that’s not a cashew nut, that’s something else. And even though nothing hurts yet, not in her body anyway, I wish I could take away her pain.

  ‘Yes, you’re pregnant.’ The nurse’s voice is careful and kind and used to this. ‘Eight weeks.’

  Mum nods.

  I help her get into Kate’s car even though she says, ‘I’m fine, Iz. Nothing will happen until after the second pill.’

  But I have this need to be close to her, to have my hands where she might need them to hold her up.

  We watch a movie when we get back to the refuge. Eat popcorn. And though we’re not not saying anything, Finding Nemo is a distraction from the waiting, and when Nemo is found, so too is Mum’s voice when she wriggles out of the hug I have her in and turns to face me.

  ‘It is a loss, you know.’ Her voice is a flag at half mast. ‘If I’d had it –’ we don’t call it “the baby” now that we know it won’t be – ‘it may have been OK. I may have loved it. But I love you so much already, Izzy. And I’m just beginning to love me again too. That’s what I’m protecting. I’m protecting us.’

  I’m not allowed to go into the second appointment, so I give Mum my Jar of Sunshine to take in her bag.

  She tells me afterwards that she held it as they gave her that second pill, that she squeezed on the glass and pictured my face when she’d put me to bed on those nights before Daniel, those yellow beads still on their strings around my neck as she read me a story, how I’d press my nose up against the glass of my bedroom window and say goodnight to our destination moon. ‘That’s what you taught me, Izzy,’ she says, her voice tired from the disrupted sleep because of the cramping, ‘with your sunshine and your moon: you taught me to always look up for the sky. There’s so much hope up there.’

  For a few days we are both quieter. And it’s not like we wear black or say prayers, but we are mourning. Not just it. We’re mourning the other losses too. We don’t say it, not out loud, but we know. We know there are minutes and hours and days and weeks we can’t get back. We know there are memories as permanent as Mum’s scars. We know there are things we will do because of the things he did, but we know too that we will keep our noses pressed to the window always looking up for the sky.

  A few weeks pass.

  I talk to Grace.

  I talk to Harry and kiss him too – long, slow kisses, which become something more urgent sometimes, but we wait and scull and imagine.

  I talk to Mum about Daniel, about Harry. I even talk to her about Jacob.

  ‘When Grace told me what he did…’ she says.

  I swear this is the moment she’ll tell me about her disappointment but no.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she tells me.

  ‘You’re sorry? Mum, I’m the one who’s sorry.’

  ‘Why?’ she says, and I don’t understand the question, because it’s obvious, isn’t it?

  ‘Because…’

  She looks at me, like, how did you get to be this big? ‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Izzy. That boy on the other hand…That’s why I had to tell the college. I had to stop him from hurting you. Do you see?’

  ‘But I…’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Grace says it was…’ But it can’t be true, can it? What Grace says it was? Because I walked into his room, didn’t I? I lay down on his bed, didn’t I? I stayed quiet, didn’t I? I let it happen, didn’t I?

  Didn’t I?

  ‘Grace is right,’ Mum says. And her voice is this weird mix of dynamite and grief.

  ‘I could have left.’

  ‘So could I,’ she says. ‘In theory.’

  ‘Yeah, but Daniel made it so you couldn’t.’

  ‘Exactly.’ And her eyes are like, you see what I’m getting at, Izzy?

  And I do but…

  ‘Cheese?’ She’s making us a sandwich, and she says this too like it’s the same kind of no big deal: ‘We could go to the police.’

  But the thought of saying everything aloud…

  I write him, Jacob, a letter until my hand aches. I tell him how it felt, what he did to me, what he did to all of us with his phone and his pressure and his take, take, take. Grace will pass it on for me; I don’t imagine she’ll be asked to pass me a reply.

  But you never know.

  When autumn comes, Mum and I listen to Desert Island Discs in our new flat, on two green charity-shop chairs, which we push up opposite each other, so they make an island in the room.

  The castaway is a geologist who says how your senses are dulled in Antarctica. How the mass of blue and white does something to your eyes, and the lack of noise does something to your ears, and all that cold deadens your smell and your taste. It’s only when you go home that your senses reawaken and your awareness of your own body becomes whole again.

  Mum and I sit in our fusty green chairs listening, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching.

  Whole.

  FIFTY-SIX

  No more sneaking out on the water at 6.00 A.M. I’m a legit sculler now. With a coach and lessons and everything. Full access to the club, with a huge room full of things they say are called sweep boats and sculling boats and oars and blades, but to me they’re all just keys. Because when I’m out on the water, it feels like I’ve unlocked another world.

  They’ve even let me out on my own. Just me in charge on the river, this instructor Dean calling from the jetty to remember my wrists, watch my legs, shoulders down, back strong, and I’m doing well, he says, until, along with the rest of life beyond the water, he disappears. Because I have this moment when the pushing and the pulling and the arms and the thighs are connected to the boat with invisible threads of gold, when my body has this rhythm that’s all the music of my desert island and all the power of my broken pieces. This moment when the riverbanks drop away, and I could be anywhere. This moment when I choose to be here, on my own, moving without watching where I’m going, trusting my body to do its thing. Eyes on the water, eyes on the sky.

  ‘She’s amazing,’ Harry says to Grace and Nell when we meet up with them in London. ‘She’s so elegant on the river.’

  And it’s a good job Nell’s so Zen because Grace starts choking and spatters her with wine.

  ‘Elegant? Izzy?’ But her voice is a happy place, and her smile is a bolt of sunshine as we toast to my grace on the water and then again to my Grace in the bar.

  ‘I goddamn miss you,’ she says when it’s time to say goodbye.

  ‘I goddamn miss you too,’ I tell her, and she gives me a thumbs up, stumbling into Nell’s shoulder as they make their way down into the Tube.

>   ‘Ready?’ Harry’s talking about the walk back to the hotel, but I get the sense he’s talking about The Other Thing too.

  When we get to our room, it’s not the penthouse, but it’s the closest to the clouds I’ve ever been.

  ‘Come here.’ And I reach out to Harry, who slips an arm around my shoulder as we take in the view. ‘It’s so huge.’

  ‘Well, thanks, but we haven’t even started yet – you wait till we really get going.’

  ‘Yeah right.’ My elbow’s soft into his side. ‘I’m sure your Hobnob is enormous, Harry, but I was talking about the sky.’

  ‘Both are pretty impressive.’ And his laugh is full of nerves and excitement and this will be OK.

  Which it is and then it isn’t. Because when we lay down, his lips are on my lips and his hands are everywhere I’ve said they can be. And it feels so good, more than good even, but then it begins to feel fast, and I sense it, that shift when I run the risk of drifting, of lying back and letting it happen instead of it being something I’ve said yes to.

  ‘Stop,’ I say, kind of quiet, but I say it. I definitely say it.

  And he does. Stop, I mean.

  With a comical rearrangement of his boxers, Harry sits up, pours us some water and suggests we eat Hobnobs while listening to Desert Island Discs. ‘My thing plus your thing equals our thing.’

  We scroll through the episodes, and there’s this one that must have aired in the heights of our leaving Daniel because I missed it.

  ‘I’ve heard her talk before,’ Harry says, ‘The COO of Facebook. She’s cool.’

  We turn off the lights, crawl beneath the covers and press play.

  The castaway’s voice is strength and survival and a determination to make light in the dark.

  ‘You seriously reckon that’s true?’ Harry asks, when she suggests girls are told not to take charge from an early age and at the same time boys are told that they must.

  ‘Dunno,’ I say, as he wraps his biscuit-crumbed hand around mine. ‘Probably.’

  All those times I’ve gone with the flow instead of using my voice – how, at some point, it became lost property.

  The castaway’s husband died of a heart attack when he was just forty-seven. Her voice when she describes it sounds like the end of the world. But then, in her friends and her children, and in her realisation that she deserves better than to feel unhappy for the rest of her life, she sounds like hope.

  It’s up there with the best of them, this Desert Island Discs episode, because she’s open and honest. And her music – while looking backwards, it carries her forward too.

  ‘You OK?’ Harry asks when we’re done with the island, turning on a lamp so he can see my face.

  And I realise I am. OK, I mean. Not I’ll-neverthink-about-Daniel-or-Jacob kind of OK. But definitely I-deserve-not-to-be-unhappy OK. Because, for all the listening to castaways and compiling my own playlists, I don’t want to be stranded, not now. I want to be here. With Harry. I want to come out of the cold and not feel guilty or dirty when all the parts of me start coming alive.

  ‘Yes. And everything you’ve organised – the seeing Grace, the hotel, you – it’s all perfect,’ I say. And though it’s not exactly booming, my voice is the beginning of something new. ‘And I really want to have sex with you, Harry, honestly I do. And I will but —’

  ‘So you’re not ready?’ Harry’s voice is like, this is cool, Izzy. All of this is cool.

  ‘Not just yet,’ I say. ‘No.’ And the word is the most positive negative.

  ‘Then we’ll wait,’ Harry says, just like that. His smile no less broad, his hold no less safe. His love no less.

  But more.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  I told Grace she didn’t need to come. But…

  ‘Just try and goddamn stop me,’ she says now, using my headrest to pull herself up from the back seat so she can smother my cheek with a kiss.

  ‘Do I look all right?’

  And I know what she probably wants to say is: ‘It shouldn’t matter what you look like – they shouldn’t be interested in how you dress. All that shit should be irrelevant.’ But all she actually says is: ‘Fuckin’ perfect, Izzy. You’re literally fuckin’ perfect.’

  Mum nods, totally not bothered by the swears because they’re not the words that matter. Not today.

  The click of Grace’s seat belt is the start of a ticking clock.

  The car is filled with Sunday’s Desert Island Discs. And Grace is all ‘Shit, shit’, trying to stop the podcast on her phone when the castaway starts talking about how she found her mum knocked out by her father on the kitchen floor. ‘Shit.’ Grace’s fingers are flustering again, and when I turn around, she looks surprised by my grin.

  ‘Let’s listen.’

  Grace shrugs her shoulders, hits play.

  She sounds happy, the guest. Fulfilled. In wonder at what she’s achieved. And it doesn’t make any of the pain she went through any less significant; it doesn’t mean the screams she heard downstairs or the blood she saw on her mother’s face don’t count. They happened. And although they did, she survived. And right now she’s totally destination moon.

  When we get there, both of them, my mum and my best friend, take me by the hand as we walk in. My stabilisers. And it’s just like I remember: I feel braver, more able to try this out with them here.

  I made a call, see. Not to the police, not yet. But to something Mum found online: Independent Sexual Violence Advisers. And it was easier to read it than to hear it when I phoned them, so I thrust my mobile at Mum and she asked, in this voice that acted like my buffer, absorbing some of the shock that keeps on coming, if there was someone I could speak with.

  ‘My daughter was raped,’ she said.

  And I may not have said anything, not then, but I kept my eyes open, my head up, and that’s a start, right?

  So Mum spoke, and we agreed that I’d come in. That there’d be someone I could talk to. Not the police, not yet. But someone who will listen. ‘When you’re able to talk,’ Mum said.

  She’s a counsellor, I guess, this woman who comes to meet me in reception, this woman who smiles at me and Mum and Grace, but at me mostly. This woman who tells them there’s a cafe down the road if they want to grab a coffee, who nods, like, I get it, when Mum says they’ll stay in the waiting room if that’s OK.

  She tells me her name, this woman, and although I nod, I don’t remember it, even though she remembers mine and uses it often, like it’s important, like that’s the word in the room with the most meaning. Like I’m way more Izzy than I am anything else.

  ‘Would you like to talk to me about what happened?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  And the word is an expanding universe.

  And my voice?

  Well, my voice is the goddamn Big Bang.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  If you want to write stories, it helps to be raised on magic. On birthdays when I was a kid, my dad would pull Sindy dolls from hats and make the names of playing cards appear from ash rubbed into his skin. He’s since offered to tell me how it was done but I already know. He, like the five other adults – Mum, Pam, Phil, Mel and Graham – who raised my friends and me on The Green, were of another world. A world in which the twelve of us came together on the perfectly named (albeit imperfectly spelt) Galaxie Road in Portsmouth, where dens, trees, fireworks, pantomimes, picnics, Christmases and New Year’s Eves were imbued with a celestial quality which filled me with a cocky kind of certainty that anything and everything can be magical. And so, if anything and everything can be magical surely anything and everything can be possible too. While Izzy’s experience with Jacob and Daniel is in direct contrast to my own experience on The Green, the writing of it is a direct consequence of all the love I was given there. I am so very lucky. Thank you, you wonderful six.

  If you want to write stories, it helps to be raised on books. Thanks to Mum I read widely and indiscriminately. Summers were a mix of Thomas Hardy’s Tess
of the D’Urbervilles and Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives, though our favourites were never without a woman on a discovery of her own self-worth. So thanks, Mum, for the books, the life lessons and the reading of almost every word I’ve written. And for saying it’s good even when it probably isn’t. My desire to write strong female characters stems, no doubt, from the fact that I was brought up by one. I love you millipons.

  If you want to write stories, it helps to be raised with guts. Thanks, Dad, for showing me it’s worth taking that leap of faith. Emigrating to Canada and training to be a ski instructor in your sixties is no mean feat. Obviously, I miss you, but I’m so proud of, and inspired by, you taking your dream and running with it. #SkiInstructorOfTheYearForever

  If you want to write stories, it helps to be raised with grit. Thanks to Karl for instilling resilience in the way only a brother can. By pinning me down and drooling over my face until your saliva was almost touching my nose. Thanks for sucking it back up again before it did. And for making me laugh, even when it was your spit that almost made me cry. You taught me to see the funny side.

  If you want to write stories, it helps to be raised on fairy tale. Big thanks to my very own fairy godmother Teresa Kwasny for a lifetime of magical experiences to fuel my writerly brain.

  If you want to write stories, magic, books, guts, grit and fairy tale all help, but as the brilliant writer and all-round super woman Stella Duffy repeatedly told me, there is actually only one solution. Write The Fucking Book. Thanks, Stella. The Arvon retreat with you and Shelley got me going but your wise words, now my mantra (#WTFB), got me to the end.

  Writing stories is hard. I often feel not only is what I’m writing rubbish, but that I am pretty useless too. I’m not alone. So huge thanks to all my stoic writer friends, who not only understand this feeling but manage to hoik me and my work out of the doldrums with their edits, their ideas and their cake.

  Sue Bassett, our rope now stretches 243 miles but is, I think, all the stronger for it. You are rope and rock and ally. And – are you ready for this? – for someone who doesn’t believe in fate, I actually think, what with Fun Palaces and book swaps and Nanowrimo, our friendship was genuinely meant to be.