The Things We Thought We Knew

by Mahsuda Snaith

  ‘I was angry.’

  At first I think that this is the totality of his response. I feel a prickle of irritation.

  He rubs his palms against each other. ‘I thought if I destroyed the hideout it would make everything better. I thought that Uncle Walter would … you know, come back.’ He glances up at me then shakes his head with annoyance. ‘It made sense at the time.’

  I kneel down on the floor. Even though the sun is streaming through the bare window, I feel cold and push my fingers between the warmth of my thighs.

  ‘You wanted him to come back even after what he did?’ I ask.

  His jaw clenches, hands clasping each other. ‘I missed him.’

  His voice is quiet and, as he avoids my gaze, I realize he’s admitted this truth to no one else. I’ve not been the only one without a confidant. All this time, we’ve both been trying to forget.

  But you can’t forget the things that make you. I think of Uncle Walter’s ghost body walking down the Westhill Estate. Getting smaller and smaller, fading into obscurity. The memory makes my throat tighten, my eyes begin to glaze. I have to perform a small cough to shake off the feeling.

  ‘Do you think you’ll find him?’ I ask.

  Jonathan shrugs and suddenly I’m angry again because, even if he never finds Walter, I want to hear him say he will.

  ‘You look different,’ he says. ‘I mean, nice.’

  My heart begins pumping quickly. When I look at Jonathan, his olive eyes are so dark and vivid that I can’t fathom how I’d forgotten their colour.

  ‘I’m wearing a nightie, Jonathan,’ I say.

  He smiles that neat tidy smile of his. ‘I know, but you still look nice.’

  He holds my gaze and I realize your brother has grown up in more ways than one. As he pushes himself to his feet he waves for me to stand.

  ‘Now come to the hall,’ he says. ‘You won’t believe what I found in the airing cupboard.’

  He moves to the doorway but freezes when he realizes I’m not following. I look down at a loose fibre on the hem of my shalwar kameez. I begin pulling at the thread.

  ‘I can’t do it, Jonathan.’

  The fabric starts to unravel, the paisley pattern disappearing before my eyes.

  ‘It’ll only take a minute,’ he says.

  I keep on pulling.

  ‘I’m sorry about Mr Ecc— I mean, Reginald. But it doesn’t change what happened.’

  There is silence. A stream of light shining down on me makes my vision sparkle.

  ‘It was an accident, Ravine.’

  I stop pulling at the thread. ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  The sun slips behind a cloud as it begins to rain outside. When your brother speaks, his voice is strained.

  ‘You think I meant to do it?’ he says.

  I remember the match in his hand as he stood in the hideout; the way he struck it with such venom.

  ‘No.’

  The carpet feels rough beneath my palms as I push myself to my feet. I want to leave but your messy-haired brother is blocking the doorway to the hall. I try not to look at him, because of fear perhaps, but also because I don’t want to say anything I’ll regret. But he reads my mind and opens the floodgates.

  ‘You think it’s my fault she’s dead,’ he says. ‘Don’t you?’

  Dead. The word shocks me more than the mention of your name. I’ve tried not to think of you as dead before. Just vanished, the same as my father. It made it easier to think that one day you might come back. That you’d run into my bedroom, hair springing up and down, and scream, ‘Look, it was just a trick! I’m back in one whole piece!’ But you never did. You never came back.

  I quickly scratch a tear from my cheek as though it’s nothing but an itch. When I look at your brother I lift my chin. I’m still afraid of looking weak in front of him, even after all these years.

  ‘Yes, Jonathan,’ I say. ‘I think it’s your fault.’

  The answer doesn’t break your brother the way I think it will. He doesn’t begin to rage, marching over to his pile of treasures to stamp them into the ground. He doesn’t swear or tell me I’m crazy as he should do. He barely even flinches. It’s as though, all the time we’ve been talking, he’s been delaying this moment and now, like the end of a beautiful holiday, he’s resigned to the fact it’s time to go home.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he says. ‘So do I.’

  He leaves the room and I, like the coward I am, run back to my flat and hide.

  The Constellation of Regret

  The millennium came and went as I lay unconscious in my hospital bed. Parades were marched, trumpets blasted, fireworks launched into star-spangled skies. City streets were filled with smiling drunken faces staring up at giant big screens of other drunken faces staring up at giant big screens all over the world. The Millennium Dome was opened, millennium babies were born, millennium dolls were pressed on the belly to squeal ‘Three, two, one, Happy New Millennium!’ before shaking in convulsive glee. Planes did not fall out of the sky, computer systems did not combust and the world did not come to an end. And I, in my bottomless sleep, was oblivious to it all.

  Amma remained glued to my bedside as the year 2000 was welcomed into the world. She’d been praying to various gods she didn’t believe in and ignoring the watchful eyes of her returning husband as he sat on the chair opposite. She allowed this man she once called a fool to sit in this seat because now he was no longer a mere ‘date’, he was a hero.

  This is the great irony of what happened to us. The Soul-drinker – the man I thought took souls – was the one who came running to save us. He’d spotted the first explosion of fireworks in the night sky and had sprinted to the hideout. He’d found me unconscious on the grass, foot propped up on a stone, and ordered Amma, as she ran up behind him, to call the emergency services. She later told me that she’d watched her once cowardly husband scanning the surrounding area and running over to wrestle with Jonathan’s thrashing body. He was trying to tunnel through the rubble of Bobby’s Hideout, tossing broken bricks to the side as smoke clouds quadrupled in size above him.

  ‘She’s inside, you idiot!’ Jonathan cried, kicking and screaming as he was pulled away. ‘My bloody sister’s inside!’

  My father tried to go in for you himself, but there was too much fire and smoke. By the time the sirens came it was too late.

  They recovered your body at 2.45 a.m. on the morning of New Year’s Eve 1999. Your legs and arms had been battered and bruised by falling bricks but the cause of death was smoke inhalation. Mrs Dickerson wasn’t to find this out until an hour later when a police unit smashed down her door. She’d been so intoxicated that she hadn’t heard the bangs and could barely speak when the policemen came charging in.

  ‘What the hell ya talking ’bout?’ she’d said through the fuzzy blur of alcohol.

  It was only when they brought out the ladybird umbrella that she began to scream.

  There was an investigation soon after. Details of Mrs Dickerson’s drinking and recent desertion led to national news coverage and Jonathan was transferred into foster care. Your mother’s favourite picture, eighties hair and pink lipstick, was splashed across tabloids with the headline ‘MOTHER’S PARTY LIFESTYLE LED TO TRAGIC DEATH OF EIGHT-YEAR-OLD GIRL’. After it was all over – years of court cases, television debates and hate campaigns – your mother went into hiding. I found out from Sandy that she now lives in Spain under the name of ‘Trixie’.

  ‘She’s thinking of opening a bar,’ Sandy told me once.

  She seemed baffled when my jaw tightened, hands ripping the crossword book on my lap. She stubbed out her cigarette on the wall outside my window before making a flimsy excuse to leave.

  I’ve been angry for a long time, but more than this I’ve been confused. From the moment I woke up in the hospital and found you weren’t beside me the confusion grew. Why did I survive when you didn’t? You were the one with the potential (so illuminous, so charming). You were the one who had prize-winning racin
g slugs and possessed an ever-growing grasp of the Italian language. You saved worms from being trodden on, followed rules as if they were laws, and even shared your bounty of sweets when you won first prize on the behaviour chart at school. You didn’t light up the room when you entered it, you made it erupt. You never grumbled or griped or allowed yourself a grain of self-pity. Your father was in prison, your mother an alcoholic who abandoned you and your brother alone in a flat without so much as a note of explanation. The uncle you idolized had not only left his best friend to die but had then left you to deal with your alcoholic mother all over again. You should have been angry, you should have been livid. But you were happy, always so happy, and because of that I was too.

  You saved me that night when it was me who was supposed to save you. I had failed in the one job that had given me meaning. The pain stabbing through my body was a punishment for that failure. The imprisonment in my room the penalty for my crimes against friendship.

  Even at this I’m a failure. If it had been you that had survived that night and been left bedridden, you would have done nothing but blazed forward in a cartwheel of undiluted zeal. You would have battled through the illness, run marathons, set up charity events, taken extra GCSEs and excelled in all of them just to spite the damn thing. And even though you would have felt every inch of agony I felt, you wouldn’t have let it show. You, Marianne Dickerson, would have grinned your gap-toothed grin and uttered those illustrious words to the world. C’est la vie, you would have said, c’est la vie.

  You didn’t deserve to die and nothing in the world will convince me otherwise. You should, to this very day, be climbing up trees and speaking so rapidly that your mouth needs to be taped up. You should be travelling the world, leading your trapeze-artist-veterinarian dream and spreading joy to every person that comes across your path. But you left, and not only that, you left me. Even as a child I knew that my life was rooted in yours. How am I meant to carry on when the roots have been pulled out?

  ravine n. a deep, narrow, steep-sided valley

  ravine adj. undistinguished, uninteresting, useless and meaningless

  The Constellation of Goodbyes

  I don’t know how to stop writing to you. Even in death you’re more of a friend to me than I am to myself. Without you I can’t write a single line without striking it out. Words seem futile, self-centred, banal. But I need to write this down, I need to tell you.

  Jonathan has gone.

  When I get back to the flat I pace around my room, unsure of what to do. I listen for noises with a glass pressed against the wall but can’t hear anything. It’s then that I lift the mattress of my lifebed and pull out the small brick-print book I pushed underneath when I tried to get rid of memories of you. It’s a squishy wedge of a book, worn and battered at the corners but the writing across it, painted with correction fluid, is still bright white.

  Marianne + Ravine = Best Friends 4ever

  It looks like chalk scrawled against a wall; a graffiti effect of our friendship. This is The Book of You.

  A scuttling noise comes through the wall, followed by the clanging of objects. I hold the book close to my chest, not quite ready to open it up and see all the memories. As the noises get louder I think Jonathan’s trying to show me he doesn’t care about what I’ve said, but when I hear the slam of the front door and the silence that follows, I realize it hasn’t been a tantrum, it’s an invitation. Through the bang and clatter of his limited possessions Jonathan is telling me he’s leaving. He’s giving me the chance to make amends. When I go downstairs to check if this is true, I open the front door to find a stack of washed-up Tupperware at my feet.

  I pace the hallway. After a good ten minutes I hear a coughing from below and realize my steps are infuriating the people beneath. An MP once said our flats were like ‘rabbit warrens’. I remember seeing this on the news and wondering what everyone was looking so angry about. A rabbit warren seemed like a perfectly nice place to live (this was before I’d watched Watership Down). Now I can see the truth. We live so close to each other that you can hear a sneeze through three floors. We have our systems, our Westhill rules, and sometimes we even think ourselves free. But even though we soar high in our battle-blocks, we are cornered off from the rest of society like patients in a hospital ward for contagious diseases. The only people who want us are each other and sometimes we’re not even wanted then.

  As soon as I hear the cough I stop pacing. I look at the hallway table and see the answerphone flashing a red ‘0’. I don’t know when Amma’s coming back (for all I know she could be walking up the stairs this minute, a bagful of Blackpool rock clutched in hand), but I feel a strange tingling in my feet and know that I need to do something. I run up to my room, making sure to look away from Shiva as I open the wardrobe, blocking out the sound of squawking birds on the walls and the frolicking of My Little Ponies on the curtains. I pull out the first outfit that comes to hand and get dressed.

  When I leave the flat I have no time to panic. Dressed in a turquoise knee-length prom dress, I cover my elaborate clothing with one of Amma’s old cardigans and rush down the stairs. I don’t know where I think I’m going but I know that I have to find Jonathan. I have to say it, to tell him what I can’t tell myself.

  When I reach the bottom of the steps, I smell the mustiness of damp pavement. It’s still raining and there are only a few people scurrying along the paths. They’re too busy covering their own heads to take much notice of me, barely glancing up as they run. I stand at the entrance of Bosworth House and feel my muscles deaden. Instead of pain there’s a numb, weighted feeling, as though my body is full of sand. I know it might happen, that the pain might return, but I also know that I can’t let that hold me back. Not now.

  So I step out in the rain, letting it soak me for the first time in years. A few weeks back, the hard beads would have sent a thousand pain signals along my body, the pound of each drop stinging against my skin like a bolt of electricity. But instead, the rain seems to wake up my deadened nerves as it trickles cold down my face, making my hair flat, dripping down my collar. As I reach the side of the hill my fluffy slippers are so waterlogged they nearly fall off my feet. I scan the paths and road around Westhill but still can’t see him. The tall lanky body, the scruffy hair that would be matted like wet dog fur. The olive eyes. The tidy smile.

  ‘Bradleey!’

  I look up to see Mrs Patterson sticking her head out of the top-floor window of Bosworth House. Her hair is wrapped in a towel, shrewd eyes skimming the landscape in search of prey. At the same time two men are running to the entrance of our building, hands held together. They’re both laughing as they find shelter, sneaking a kiss before the taller man glances around to see if there have been any witnesses. He locks eyes with mine and it’s only when he shifts his shoulders back that I realize who he is.

  ‘Bradley Patterson, get your backside up here now!’ his mother screams.

  Bradley looks up the side of the building then back at me, but I’ve already ducked behind a bush. He gives his boyfriend one last stroke along the arm before marching his way up the stairs. I don’t know what surprises me more: that Bradley Patterson’s gay or that Bradley Patterson has a black boyfriend.

  Things change in the most unexpected ways.

  As the shower grows heavier I try to decide whether I should make my way back home. I glance at the squares of shiny glass towering up into the sky, before looking over at the pebble-dashed walls of the building ahead. I know where I need to go. I run along the criss-crossing paths to Tewkesbury House, repeating the name Reginald in my head. Not because I’ve forgotten it, but because I’ve called him Mr Eccentric for so long I’m afraid I’ll say it by mistake.

  He leads me through the hallway in unsteady steps, taking me to his gallery of clocks. I’m soaked, Amma’s cardigan weighing heavy on my shoulders. Before I sit down, Reginald holds a hand up, placing a tea towel across the crushed-velvet seat. He hobbles over to his oak desk and sits down on the
other side, interlocking his fingers as though conducting an interview. If it wasn’t for the bathrobe tied loosely around his skeletal body I could almost take him seriously.

  As I look at him sitting opposite me, I realize how ill Reginald is. Blue-tinged bags hang beneath his drooping eyes, his hair feathery and white as opposed to the dusty grey it was when we were kids. A yellow tone sits upon his skin. The more I look, the yellower he seems to become.

  Clocks tick as I wrap the sodden folds of my cardigan around my body.

  ‘Have you seen Jonathan?’

  The question seems to stun the old man. His eyes blink behind the lenses of his glasses. He pushes them to the bridge of his nose before readjusting his expression.

  ‘Should I have?’

  His voice is exactly as I remember, each word long and drawn out.

  ‘He came to see you,’ I say, louder than necessary. ‘He’s been squatting in the flat next door to mine.’

  He seems surprised, eyebrows rising above his thick frames. He presses the tips of his fingers together and narrows his eyes.

  ‘Are you his girlfriend?’

  He says this with such disdain, as though asking if I’m his drug dealer. I shake my head quickly. ‘God, no!’

  His shoulders drop with relief, though his eyes remain narrow. The sound of the rain against the window competes with the ticking of clocks. I brace my body against the cacophony.

  ‘I’m Ravine Roy,’ I say. ‘I used to live next to Jonathan and Mari– Marianne.’

  Your name trips from my lips like an unsteady song but he doesn’t twitch. Instead, he leans back in his seat with a nod. On his bathrobe collar, flakes of dried-up cereal are embedded in the fabric.

  ‘I haven’t seen him,’ he says.

  I sigh.

  ‘Don’t be disappointed,’ he says. ‘There’s no point.’

  There’s no comfort in his voice and when I look up at Reginald Blake I see something close to satisfaction in his expression. He folds his hands over his stomach.