“That’s enough now, gents,” Derek says, red-faced due to the power of the space heater and the stress of opening night. “It’s time.”
The overture rings out over the dressing room, just one man on a piano playing for me and the goldfish and the start of our adventure. Trying not to think about Isabel waiting in the audience, I move to the seat nearest the fire exit, which is propped open to let in some fresh air. The smell of freedom wafts in on an icy draft that gives me goose bumps, this prickly sense of anticipation that something huge is about to happen. I can almost see it, my destiny crystallizing in the frozen air.
Jack propels his arms in a circle then double-cricks his neck to the left and right, a movement I’ve seen him do a thousand times before, but I pay close attention to it, memorizing the look of his body as he bends over to touch his toes. He pulls his chest to his knees and holds it as he counts to five. His lips move as mine do too, counting down these last seconds together before he stands up with flushed cheeks, gives Yorick the lucky skull a pat, then walks out of the room without looking back. He doesn’t sense my eyes boring into his red waistcoat, urging him to turn around because it is not so easy after all to be separated from the only dad I’ve ever known.
I edge toward the door. It looms bigger and bigger, the sliver of night getting wider and wider as I approach with a pulse that seems unusually conspicuous. I am very aware that I am alive, with a heart and a stomach and a tongue swimming with double the usual amount of saliva. I pause, summoning up courage, then dash outside.
Other people follow.
I curse. This wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was to slip through a crack in the door and disappear without being seen, not throw it wide open to let out five Lost Boys, three pirates, and one Indian desperate to escape the stuffiness of the dressing room. They huddle on the steps, this motley crew tinged with moonlight, watching me watch them as I peer over my shoulder to see if I can sneak off without being seen.
I take one step, then another, then stop with a grimace reflected back at me in a jeep window and the windshield of a BMW. There are three of us, all looking as frustrated as the other as the chance of escape vanishes before our eyes. If I disappear they will alert Jack, who will hunt me down, and can you even imagine it, him in a pirate costume chasing me as a Lost Boy in a weird case of life imitating art.
Let’s Talk, he’ll say, but no thanks, Jack, I don’t want to Talk about what I saw on your computer, not now—or ever for that matter. Talking will make it real and I am not ready for that yet. With his voice full of shame, Jack will have no choice but to deny he meant those six hundred and seventeen words, vowing with his hand over his heart that he really does love me, his non-daughter. I can’t stand the thought of this lie being told right to my face. I am too proud to hear his fibs, and too scared of the prospect that he might not tell them at all if he’s braver than I imagine and willing to stand by that blog.
I wish I’d never seen it. I wish it so hard I actually say the words out loud, my legs trembling in the parking lot that’s too full of cars, this claustrophobic mass of metal surrounding me, blocking any chance of escape.
“Where are you off to?”
I leap out of my skin because I didn’t hear any footsteps, or even sense that someone was standing by my elbow, which they are, with their fingers on it, shaking my arm gently to get my attention. I turn to see Mr. Darling.
“Derek’s looking for you. The others are back inside.” He means the Lost Boys, and sure enough there’s no one on the steps now apart from Daniel, dog helmet on his knees, staring up at the moon, part-man, part-beast. “You’re not running off, are you?”
“No.” Mr. Darling is not convinced, studying my bag with shrewd eyes that look as if they belong beneath a pair of glasses. “Do you wear contact lenses?” I ask because it seems important to know.
“What?”
“I was just wondering,” I say a little embarrassed, acting not like myself at all. I feel odd, sort of strung out and reckless, throbbing with adrenaline in the cold night air. “Your eyes are wise enough to pull off glasses. The type a professor would wear at a university. It’s a compliment,” I reassure him, and he looks pleased.
He studies me again, contemplating my bag and my boots ready to march down to London. “It’s okay to be nervous. It’s all part of it. It’s not a very pleasant feeling, but it won’t kill you. You’re tougher than you think.”
I’m not, but it’s a nice thing to say.
“Thanks.” He smiles a truly lovely smile, and isn’t it a pity that his hair is brown not blond and his eyes are hazel because he would make a wonderful dad. “Do you have children?”
“Three of them.”
“They’re lucky,” I reply, a lump forming in my throat.
“I’m not sure they would always agree with you. Come on. Let’s go back inside.”
I look at the road beyond the trees that leads to Manchester Piccadilly station. I think of the train waiting to go to London, and Finsbury Tower on Bunhill Row, which could contain the answers I’m searching for. I’m sorry, I tell the goldfish because I am a disappointment, no doubt about it, the only runaway never to run away and the only rebel never to rebel and the only storm cloud never to let out a roar of thunder. I should leave, but Mr. Darling is putting his arm around me, and right now that wins.
12
My only line in the play is coming up—Honest, Mr. Hook, I have no idea where Peter is and that’s the truth—fourteen words, easy enough to remember but difficult to get out of my mouth when I am this uncomfortable being onstage.
“Don’t just say it in a monotone though, Tess. Use your voice. Intonation is important. You need to put some emphasis on the key words.” That’s what Jack said earlier today when he made me practice in the living room. “Emphasize no not idea and that’s rather than truth,” he told me, or maybe it was the other way around.
Honest, Mr. Hook, I have NO idea where Peter is and THAT’S the truth I try out in my brain, but that doesn’t sound right. I switch it, but that sounds wrong too. I repeat the line over and over, getting more and more desperate, until the words lose their meaning altogether.
I attempt a bit of acting, tending the fire made out of foil and spray-painted toilet paper. The lights are dimmed, just one on Wendy, illuminating her pale skin as she starts a monologue about missing her mother. Jack paces up and down in the wings, mouthing his lines, acting offstage so he can start with a bang onstage, in about ninety seconds is my alarming estimation, which sets off a bell in my chest where my heart used to be. I lubricate my throat, trying to clear some phlegm with a cough that comes out louder than anticipated. Wendy glares at me, waxing lyrical about her mother’s dainty hands with a face that looks as if she’d rather chop them off.
“Everyone needs a mother, and I miss mine. Oh, how I miss mine.” The audience claps. I use it to disguise one more cough, a proper cough this time with all my lungs behind it, but the phlegm will not be dislodged.
Jack marches onto the stage. There’s a chorus of boos, Isabel louder than anyone in the very front row. Her dad tells her to calm down, but she boos again and he laughs then joins in. They’re identical. Carbon copies. Cut from the same cloth, definitely the same color, all gold I imagine, just like the wrappers of the Werther’s Original sweets they’ve been sharing tonight. I’ve been watching them work their way through the entire bag, family size most probably, and isn’t that just perfect for their perfect relationship I think with a painful pang of jealousy that makes me feel ashamed.
Jack bursts into our hideout searching for Peter.
“He’s not here!” Wendy cries, the fifth line before mine, which, oh God, I suddenly can’t remember at all. I rack my brains as Captain Hook ransacks the hideout, upending chairs and emptying shelves. I take cover beneath a low table, usually a squeeze, but tonight I bolt underneath it like a girl half my size.
“He is!”
“He isn’t, you fool!” shouts Tinkerbell.
“Someone must know where he is… You,” Captain Hook says, grabbing my foot. I am supposed to make it easy for him to drag me out, but I cling on to the table leg. Snarling with rage, he clutches my bare calf and tugs hard, too hard for me to resist, so I scuttle back, giving in to Jack as always.
I face him, expecting to crumble, but something incredible happens, and I don’t.
“Where’s Peter?”
The line comes back to me easily, and that’s a shock to find it waiting patiently behind my lips. Captain Hook grabs me by the scruff of my neck and gives me a shake, demanding my response. I cough again and this time it works. I swallow, giving thanks to God for mucus that behaves itself in the nick of time.
My throat is now gloriously clear, no blockages at all, and the line’s on the tip of my tongue so I can say it no problem, and yet I just—don’t.
“Where’s Peter? Where’s Peter, I say?”
I stare at Captain Hook, seeing past the fake eyebrows to Jack underneath. Something shifts in his expression and he sees me too. Jack’s hand tightens around my neck, the hook pressing into my flesh with a lot more than pretend frustration behind it. Time slows down, the seconds throbbing in the space between us as Jack demands that I speak and I stare into his black pupils and keep my mouth closed.
“Where’s Peter?” The voice of the pirate has disappeared to be replaced by good old Dad in a towering rage. “Where’s Peter? Did you hear me? I asked you where Peter was.”
I heard him all right, but just for once let me stand here and do what I want for a change, which is to categorically not say the words Jack wants to hear. He gives me a shake, trying to stir me into action, and the audience laughs, wanting this awkwardness to be part of the play. It dies quickly, and they shift about, fidgeting as I gaze at Jack and still do not reply.
You’re not my dad, I tell him with eyes that don’t blink and lips that don’t move, my pulse a strange high-pitched hum, buzzing in my ears and my veins so I vibrate with all this power I’ve never felt before. Spit flies from Jack’s mouth as he repeats the line one more time. It takes an age for it to fall, these tiny droplets glowing in the spotlight. They hover in midair and I hover there too, somewhere between before and after as Jack’s shoulders rise but do not fall. He’s holding his breath, waiting to see what I’m going to do next, and in this instant so magnificent and unexpected, I take back control.
Fear flits across Jack’s face like a moth with frantic wings.
He mouths the words at me, all fourteen of them—Honest, Mr. Hook, I have no idea where Peter is and that’s the truth—reminding me of what I have to do, but I haven’t forgotten. I know precisely what’s expected of me, just like I always have.
But I am Pluto and I am cold and I am dark, so I take a step back, moving out of Jack’s reach with a silence that speaks volumes.
Just listen to my noiseless thunder roar.
13
“Jack, come on now. Stage fright can’t be helped,” Mr. Darling says, no doubt thinking of my attempted escape at the start of the play. “You covered it up out there. There were only a few seconds or so when the audience might have noticed something. Not enough to worry about when the rest of the show was such a success. Here. Have a Pringle.”
He holds out a red tube, and how do you get to be like this, just a decent human being I wonder, deciding that when I’m an adult I’ll model myself on his good manners. But right now I am too angry to be anything other than difficult.
“Was that it then, Tess? Stage fright?” I turn my back, feeling the world spin on its axis so Antarctica freezes Jack out, cold and unyielding. “Tess? I’m talking to you.”
He’s quieter now but more audible over the cast holding its breath, waiting to see how I’m going to respond.
I walk to my bag.
That’s it.
Put one foot in front of the other, nothing complicated, but everyone seems surprised and in some cases impressed, definitely Daniel with his long, low whistle.
“Pathetic,” Jack mutters, but I don’t feel pathetic or look it either—in fact, I am quite certain that I have never in my life appeared more powerful.
I dawdle in the dressing room, giving Isabel plenty of time to disappear because Jack’s in no state to meet my friend. I go to the bathroom for ten minutes then spend ages getting changed. I lace up my silver Doc Martens, loving the feel of them on my feet, these boots the color of the stars. I leap into the sky then jump from one star to the next, all the way across the galaxy to my rightful position at the very edge of the solar system.
It’s quiet out here, just how I like it.
The dressing room is deserted now. Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I break into a grin because I’ve done something, haven’t I, something big and brave for once in my decidedly small and timid life. I’m radiant. Beaming. And I can’t let Jack see. Nipping the edges of my smile together, I draw it back into my mouth before stepping out into the night that’s my night, let’s be clear about that. I’m at one with the darkness. The black cloak envelops my skin as I draw curtains on the world with my hair.
I can’t resist carrying on my silence in the parking lot where we meet up with Mum but not the agent because he didn’t turn up, after all.
“He could have been in the audience, though,” Jack says as he opens the car and throws in his stuff. “He could have been in the audience, and she still messed up the damn scene.”
I dive onto the backseat because Isabel’s waiting for me, standing outside the church, twisting her head this way and that. I hate seeing her worry, so I turn on my phone to send her a message, spying through the window as I wait for it to wake up. Her dad points at his watch. She checks one more time—out into the parking lot and back inside the church—then nods because it’s time to go. Her dad puts up an umbrella and holds it above her head even though it’s barely raining.
“But he wasn’t there,” Mum says as I shove my phone back into my pocket without writing a word, “so no harm done, right?”
“I don’t know about that. Everyone else witnessed the debacle. Can you imagine if he had been in the audience? Or my dad, for that matter, if he’d said yes to those tickets? It would have been even more humiliating than it already was.”
“It wasn’t that bad, Jack. Not from the audience’s perspective. It just looked like a thirty-second blip.”
“Thirty seconds is a long time, trust me. Thirty seconds is endless when you’re in the middle of a performance and the person you’re relying on lets you down. And why’s that? What was it, Tess? Stage fright? A bad mood? Mind went blank? Come on. Fill us in.” He glares at me in the rearview mirror. “Will you stop ignoring me? It’s rude. At least have the courtesy to speak.”
I don’t, not on the way home or when we get out of the car or when we walk into the living room where Jedi bounds up to me, licking me to death, giving me a hero’s welcome with an extra-fast tail, thumping on the carpet. Jack drops his bag, tossing Yorick on top. Jedi barks with delight then runs off with the skull clamped between his jaws.
“You may as well have it, boy. Fat lot of good it did me.”
Mum ushers me into the kitchen, pushing me into a chair before crouching down with her hands on my knees.
“Talk to me, Tess. What’s going on? Are you ill or something?” she asks in this voice of hope, obviously praying for the flu because that has a predictable prognosis, just a week in bed with my old hot water bottle. I haven’t seen it for years, the heart-shaped one, worn and comforting with a rubbery smell I used to breathe in as Mum stroked my hair whenever I was sick.
She surveys me for signs of fever, her long brown hair brushing my thighs as she fingers the beads around her neck, working them like a rosary. For a second I want nothing more than to answer her prayers, to tell her that I am fine, just a bit out of sorts and not to worry because I will be right as rain in the morning. But she’s lied too, every day of my life and on all those Father’s Days in particular, encouraging
me to make cards for “The World’s Best Dad.”
“What’s going on, Tess?”
I sit in the middle of my silence, protecting myself from the truth I might be able to forget if I never have to hear myself say it out loud.
“Are you crying?” I’m not really sure because, oh look at that, my face has gone numb. I can’t feel my cheeks, let alone any tears trickling down them. “Make her some tea, Jack, for goodness’ sake! And get her some tissues.”
“Where from?”
“A piece of paper towel or something.”
“There isn’t any.”
“Toilet paper then,” Mum snaps, gripping my hand in hers. The dryness of it is so familiar, and also the hardness of her wedding ring that won’t break no matter what I tell her about Jack or how incompetent he is when it comes to finding tissues. They’re totally in love and happily married and maybe even wrote the blog together, for all I know.
Horrible creature? Jack might have asked, looking up at Mum as she hovered over his desk, leaning over his shoulder to peer at the screen. Disgusting creature?
How about peculiar? Gives a sense of strangeness but also conveys how ugly she was as a newborn.
Jack probably grinned. Perfect.
And change sucking to gnawing. I didn’t love the ugly red thing gnawing at her breast. That’s how it felt, like she was eating me alive. It was—oh! The spaghetti!
I mean, really, how else could Mum have set fire to some pasta? I am no chef, but even I know to bend spaghetti into a pot of water just as soon as it’s pliable, so Mum must have been distracted by something to make such an obvious mistake.
“You are crying,” she says because this time there’s no mistaking it. Great waves of grief crash through the chasm that has formed at my core. I cry for my childhood that was a lie and for my future that’s uncertain and for myself, split in two and torn apart and no longer whole, made up of bits I don’t understand anymore. “Come here, Tess. Come on. Oh don’t cry, my poor darling.” With a pained expression she opens her arms, but I don’t lean into the hug. “Will you get me some bloody toilet paper, Jack?”
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