by Amy Lloyd
‘Sorry,’ they say. ‘I was upstairs.’
I turned and my heart stopped in my chest. It was Luke’s mum. Her face changed when she realised I was not there to deliver or solicit anything.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked. Her voice was uncertain but she didn’t know who I was, that much was obvious.
I shook my head. ‘Wrong house,’ I said. ‘Sorry to bother—’ I lost my footing as I stepped down from the raised porch and fell with force. My phone skidded across the patio. Before I could get up Luke’s mum was standing over me, reaching down and holding my arm.
‘Are you OK? I’m so sorry. Here.’ She bent and helped me up, even though I protested. ‘That looked like a bad fall. Can you walk?’
‘I’m fine,’ I insisted, but my legs weren’t working as they should. My knees ached and my left arm was numb.
‘You don’t look fine,’ she said. She tucked some of her dark hair behind her ear.
‘You’re getting wet,’ I said, limping towards my phone. ‘I’m sorry for bothering you. Please, go back inside.’
‘Will you be OK?’ she asked, tightening her beige cardigan around herself. ‘What house were you after?’
‘I was looking for an old friend,’ I said. ‘I thought this was the right house but maybe not. Sorry.’ As I bent to get my phone I became light-headed and staggered forward. Luke’s mum shrieked as I almost ploughed head first into the garden wall. Then she was upon me again.
‘You can’t wander around like this,’ she says, taking my arm again. ‘Come in, get yourself together and go when you feel a bit better. Come on.’
I hesitated but knew she was right; I didn’t think I could go much further when I felt like that. I let her lead me inside the house, into the warm. I had never been inside Liam’s and Luke’s house before and if I could have forgotten everything that had happened I would have felt as though I was ten and had been invited to one of the parties I was always dying to go to. Parties with Super Soakers and every type of pop, those amazing cakes and games that everyone would talk about in school on the Monday.
‘I feel terrible,’ Luke’s mum said, sitting me down on her sofa.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s my porch you fell off! I’ve missed that step a few times myself,’ she said. ‘And you’re soaked! I’ll get you a towel and a cup of tea with some sugar. You need sugar for a shock.’
Hot tears welled in my eyes.
‘Don’t you have an umbrella?’ she asked.
‘It blew inside out,’ I lied.
‘I’m sure I’ve got a spare brolly. You sit there and I’ll be back in a minute.’
When she left the silence in the house became oppressive. Beneath me I felt the sofa cushion dampen from my wet clothes. I stood and my knees throbbed in pain.
I looked around and realised everything inside the house was so clean and modern. This was good; it meant her life didn’t stop completely after what had happened to Luke. But when I thought about it more I realised something. I understood the truth about what happens after someone is stolen from you. From the outside your world looks just like everyone else’s: normal. But inside it leaves a hole that smoulders at the edges, like a cigarette touched to paper, threatening to burn wider and wider until there’s nothing left of you at all.
There was an alcove which led into a dining room and at the back of the house there were patio doors looking out on to the garden. The blinds were lowered and I couldn’t see outside. I could hear Luke’s mum in the kitchen, the clink of mugs and the boiling kettle. As I walked through the living room my shoes left grey footprints on the beige carpet and I hated the traces I was leaving of myself over her house. I shouldn’t have come here; I knew it then. It was wrong.
The walls of the dining room were lined with photographs. Liam, growing older in each frame. From school uniform to graduation gown to wedding suit. He was still good-looking, still had that air of confidence all popular people have, people I knew I would never understand. They just seemed to exist without having to try. I looked at the pictures of Luke, which kept him frozen in time, always in his school uniform, or sitting in his mother’s lap, their cheeks tinged from the holiday sun.
It hurt to look at him and so I forced myself to. I made myself remember his smile as we stretched out our hands to him and the way he looked back over his shoulder to check if his mum was watching as we helped him through the fence and into the playing fields. ‘I’ll get in trouble,’ he said. We promised it would be OK.
‘I’ve got you an old brolly. You can keep it,’ Luke’s mum said as she came back in. She held out the umbrella like a baton. When she saw me standing in front of the photos she paused, confused.
‘I got your sofa all wet,’ I said, pointing to the damp patch. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be daft!’ she said. ‘Sit down for five minutes.’
I sat, obediently, and rolled up my jeans to inspect the grazes on my knees. When Luke’s mum returned again she had two mugs of tea and a bath towel over her arm.
‘Thank you,’ I said, taking the drink and the towel.
‘I’ll just get us some biscuits,’ she said as she disappeared again.
The next time she came back she sat heavily in the chair opposite me and dipped a chocolate digestive into her tea.
‘Thank you for all this,’ I said. Her kindness stuck in my throat like a pill, bitter and painful.
‘It’s no bother,’ she said. ‘I feel awful that you fell like that.’
I squeezed my hair in the towel to dry it and forced myself to smile back at her.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Did you say you were local?’ Her expression had changed.
‘No,’ I said.
‘But you were looking for a friend’s house, weren’t you?’
‘Yeah. Just someone I used to know. They probably don’t even live around here any more, but I was passing through and …’ I trailed off, shrugged.
‘So you used to live locally? It’s just that you seem familiar.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I just knew someone a long time ago who lived here. I think I have one of those faces.’
She laughed. ‘Who is it you used to know?’ she asked. ‘I’ve lived here donkey’s years so I’d know them if they’re still around.’
As I hung the towel over the arm of the chair I knocked my tea off the end table. Luke’s mum jumped up and shushed me as I apologised.
‘It’s not your day, is it?’ she asked, laughing kindly. ‘Sorry, what did you say your name was?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘It’s Emma,’ I added, making up a name.
‘Well, I’m Bernadette.’ She held out her hand to shake mine.
‘I am so, so sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’ll go. I’ve been enough trouble.’
‘You don’t even know where you’re going yet!’ she said. As I stood the rain outside intensified, hitting the windows as hard as hail. I hesitated. I didn’t want to leave the warmth of Bernadette’s house, her company. ‘At least wait for this to ease off,’ she said, looking up at me from the floor as she patted at the spilled tea with the towel.
‘OK,’ I said, selfishly. ‘If it’s not too much of a problem.’
‘I’d better make sure this doesn’t set,’ she said, standing as I sat back down. ‘Here.’ She thrust the plate of biscuits towards me. ‘Get some of these down you.’
I nibbled at the edges of a chocolate biscuit and took in my surroundings. I imagined what life would have been like if I’d lived here, with a mum as sweet and kind as Bernadette. To be allowed to spill things in the living room and have friends over – to have friends at all – and fill the house with noise and mess.
From the hallway I heard her phone ring and Bernadette shouted an apology to me before she answered it. ‘Oh hi, love! No, no, it’s no bother …’ Her voice faded as she took the call somewhere else. I took a custard cream from the plate, split it in half and licked out the middle. Disgusting, I could hear my Auntie Fa
y say, as she always used to when I did this. Eat it properly.
I walked back into the dining room and looked again at the pictures. All of them seemed so happy. All the sadness and the anger had been skipped over, as though it had never happened. People only want to preserve and display the best of themselves. I thought maybe everyone was just creating a new identity, hiding what they really were.
At the patio doors I prised apart the metal slats of the blinds and peered into the garden. That, too, had changed. There was a water feature and a pond surrounded by stone frogs. They were the kinds of things that they probably couldn’t have had with Luke around, all those things that would have got in his way.
‘Right,’ Bernadette said as she came back in with the bottle of carpet cleaner and a sponge. She stopped and looked at me. The blinds clattered as I let them go.
‘Who was it you said you were here to see?’ she said, putting everything down and folding her arms across her chest.
I couldn’t say anything. My face burned and I looked down at my feet.
‘Oh,’ she said. I could see she was trying not to cry. ‘You’re just here to nose around, see where it happened.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Where what happened?’ But my voice was wooden and unconvincing.
‘Every time it gets in the news again we get people like you poking their noses in.’
‘No,’ I said. Then I started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, it isn’t like that at all.’
Bernadette was already going for the phone. ‘I’m calling the police. Get out,’ she said.
‘No, please don’t,’ I said. ‘I’m going. I’ll go. I just—’
Suddenly she stopped looking angry and started to look afraid. The phone shook in her hand and she backed against the wall, my backpack behind her. As I approached, trying to get my bag, she screamed, thinking I was reaching for her.
‘I just want my bag,’ I said. I was crying, too.
‘You’re not supposed to be here!’ she said. Then, ‘How could you? Why would you do this?’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I am sorry, I’m so sorry – I’m trying to leave! Please just give me my bag.’
‘No!’ she screamed. She lunged towards me and I blocked myself with my arm, pushing her to the side. She screamed again. I snatched my bag and ran to the door.
‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘Get out get out get out get out get out—’
I slammed the door behind me and ran through the streets and out of the estate. Puddles ankle-deep soaked through my already sodden shoes and the rain whipped my face so hard it stung, cold against the warmth of the tears. I ran until I was at the flyover, at the mouth of the underpass, and though I knew I would have to go through it, exactly as it had happened, I couldn’t. Instead I ran into the traffic and cars swerved and hit their brakes hard, their horns blaring, but I reached the pavement on the other side alive and unhurt. A man leaned out of his car window and shouted something at me that I couldn’t understand.
Then I heard the sirens.
21
Her: Now
Dr Isherwood sighs as she comes back into the room, and I take my hand off the photograph in front of me.
‘I cannot apologise enough,’ she says.
I turn away from her desk, blushing, feeling caught red-handed. But she doesn’t seem to notice as she talks and I am able to sit back down while she puts her phone back into her bag.
‘That’s OK,’ I say. I try to mean it.
‘It really isn’t OK and you’re being very kind and understanding. It’s just been absolute madness lately.’ She puts her fingers into her hair and shakes it loose. ‘But you have my full, undivided attention now, I promise.’
She smiles at me but I see her eyes dart back to her phone in her bag.
‘It’s OK,’ I say again.
‘I don’t want you to think that I’m not completely here for you,’ she says, putting her bag behind her chair. ‘You must call me, now that you have your phone. If things get—’
‘Too much,’ I interrupt, nodding. ‘I know.’
When the police arrested me on that last day, after everything that happened with Luke’s mum, Dr Isherwood had driven the five hours to the station to see me. She was the only one who believed me when I said I wasn’t going to hurt Bernadette. The police had laid out the contents of my bag: the sleeping pills, the rope, the Stanley knife, the pen and the notebook. I tried to tell them I was only trying to remember what happened, so that I could tell the truth before I died.
‘You should get a solicitor,’ the appropriate adult had told me.
‘I want to see Dr Isherwood,’ I said. ‘Please call Dr Isherwood.’
I could hear her from my cell as she came in, shouting my name and telling them I was vulnerable and shouldn’t be on my own. I shouted back, I cried like a child; she was so close but so far away.
Dr Isherwood knew straight away that I would never hurt anybody, not on purpose. She knew I was going to hurt myself.
‘I promise I won’t do anything stupid again,’ I tell her now.
‘It wasn’t stupid,’ she says. ‘I just wish you’d felt you could talk to me – or to anyone! – about how you felt. You will, won’t you? If you ever start to feel that way again.’
‘Yes, I promise.’ I say this to make her feel better but I don’t know if it’s true. When you start to feel like that the last thing you want to do is ask for help. You may as well ask me to climb Mount Everest. The idea that someone could help pull you out of that hole seems impossible and asking the most difficult thing in the world.
The rest of the session we talk about places I can go to find friends: taking an evening class, joining a gym, taking part in work events. I don’t mention the dark cloud that hangs over work, or Jack who now lingers nearby at all times, or else is watching me over the CCTV and, later, telling me what he saw.
I leave Dr Isherwood’s office with a few flyers for classes she found and a list we wrote up together of things I want to achieve and how to achieve them. When I am down the street I stuff the pieces of paper into my bag, knowing that I will probably throw them out once I’m back at the home. On the bus I take out my new phone and look through the sad list of contacts again. I set up my email address and the phone buzzes almost straight away.
The sender’s email is just a string of numbers and I would think it was spam except for the single word in the subject line: Petal.
22
Him: Now
I text: I’m outside. Lean my bike against the wall, take the cig out from behind my ear and light it. She texts back: Come up flat 37 I’ll buzz you in.
I start to text her to get her fucking arse downstairs but delete it, crush the half-smoked fag under my foot and hide the bike in the bushes. I press the button for 37 and she buzzes me in before I’ve had time to take my finger off. The lift is broken so I take the stairs two at a time. There’s light coming from behind her curtains and the door is left part open so that even as I knock it starts to swing wider. Inside, three dirty-looking kids wriggle on the sofa, looking away from the TV only for a second to check who’s walking into their house. They are watching the menu screen for a DVD, playing on a loop.
‘Where’s your mum then?’ I ask. I put my hands in my pockets. I’m always nervous around kids, never know what to say. One holding a sippy cup points to the television. ‘Shall I press play for you?’ I ask. I step carefully over the toys and bits that litter the floor and crouch down to the DVD player and start it to play all episodes again. One of them laughs and claps.
‘Hang on a second!’ comes a voice from the back room. The voice is followed by a skinny woman in black tracksuit bottoms and a white vest. She holds out some crinkled notes to me with a shaking hand. I count them and pass her the Xanax. She pops two and dry swallows them.
I take another look around the flat and at the kids, who stare unblinking at the TV.
‘This isn’t fucking Deliveroo, yeah?’ I say. ‘Next time, meet me outside.’
‘Yeah,’ she says, not listening. ‘Thanks.’
I leave but the flat seems to stay with me, reminding me why I never go inside. My head’s been all over the place lately, thinking about her, thinking about what happened. Even now she has a power over me that no one else has ever had.
At Slimy’s I tuck the bike behind the wheelie bins at the side of the flat and make my way up, looking forward to switching off for a while. I can smell the skunk as soon as I step off the lift. One of the boys lets me in; the air is thick with smoke.
‘What’s happening?’ I say, slumping into my usual seat. No one replies. ‘Yeah, I’m all right, thank you, cheers,’ I say to myself. ‘Thanks for the warm fucking welcome.’
‘All right, Tanker,’ Slimy manages.
‘What’s got everyone so lively, then?’ I ask. Some new guy I don’t recognise passes me a bong. I take a hit that makes my chest feel like it’ll explode and do my best not to cough like a pussy. ‘Fucking hell,’ I say, my eyes streaming.
‘It’s a bit poky,’ the new guy says, grinning.
I let go and cough and cough, my lungs assaulted. The new guy pats my back and I slap him away, unable to speak to tell him to fuck off.
I make my way to the kitchen, still hacking. Each time I try to take a breath a new fit starts up. I swill out a smudged glass and down some water, which I cough straight back up into the sink. Holding my breath, then taking a small sip, I start to get control back. My brain aches from the force of the coughing and my lungs burn behind my ribs.
When I get back into the room no one except the new guy even seems to notice what happened. The new guy gurns at me with his smug face.
‘Yeah, it’s poky, man,’ he says, nodding. ‘Got to take it easy.’
‘Fucking poky,’ I say. ‘If you say poky one more time I swear to fuck—’
‘Poky,’ he says.
I lunge at him and grab his T-shirt in my fist. He turns his head away and screws his eyes shut.
‘Yeah, I didn’t fucking think so,’ I say.
