The Things We Thought We Knew

by Mahsuda Snaith

  ‘You can’t trust anyone, you know?’ he says. ‘They make deals, promise you things, but they never follow through. No morals, that’s the problem with the youth of today.’

  He begins to tut as he gazes out of the window. I shuffle forward on my seat.

  ‘Jonathan said Walter sent you letters,’ I say.

  He snaps his eyes open, lips squeezed tight. ‘I threw them away. I want nothing to do with the man.’

  He gazes back out of the window.

  ‘Why didn’t you give them to the police? Tell them where he was?’

  He lets out a snort. ‘The police couldn’t catch a cold if you sneezed on them. Besides, that man is doing his time. Every day he has to live with the death of my son. Every day he has to listen out for the knock on the door, petrified that they’ve finally got him. They say it was a suicide, but I know the truth.’

  He nods at me knowingly.

  I clench my fists. Uncle Walter was many things but he was not a murderer.

  Reginald leans back in his seat as though this is the end of the matter. In the reflection of his glasses I see the second hand of the grandfather clock moving in stilted steps. We once thought that he had the ability to turn people into clocks but it’s him who’s a machine. Alone in this flat. The days ticking by with nothing but his misery to keep him company. I don’t feel sorry for him. It’s hard to feel pity for someone when you’re so alike.

  ‘I should go,’ I say.

  He takes hold of his walking stick and follows me out to the hall. When I open the front door, I stop and turn back.

  ‘I told Jonathan it was his fault, what happened to Marianne.’

  The old man releases a sardonic laugh, his jaundiced face taking on a new colour. The laugh takes me by surprise. It rattles in his dry throat and echoes down the hall.

  ‘From what I hear, it was.’

  I shake my head, thinking he’s misunderstood. ‘It was an accident.’

  Reginald leans the weight of his body onto his walking stick. His face seems heavy, every muscle pulled down like dripping paint on a wall.

  ‘That doesn’t mean it wasn’t his fault.’

  I look at him bent over like that and remember the way he used to take steps two at a time and scream at us to ‘get gone!’ when he caught us in Bobby’s Hideout. All the energy has seeped out of him. It’s as though he’s been drained of life.

  ‘You know my advice?’ he says as I hover at the door. ‘Don’t trust anyone.’

  I look at him and blink.

  ‘I don’t,’ I say.

  He seems disappointed by this response, as though he’s set up a trap and I’ve skipped right over it. He stands up again, pointing his finger at me.

  ‘Don’t love anyone either.’

  My expression falters and suddenly he’s smiling, a row of black stained teeth on show. But the grin is only short-lived. He looks up at me through thick lenses.

  ‘Close the door behind you.’

  The Constellation of Tree Roots

  When I step out of Tewkesbury House my foot sinks into a puddle. The rain has stopped, leaving the pavement as shiny as fish scales, the grass as soggy as seaweed washed up on a beach. My clothes drip as I shake my foot and make my way back to Bosworth House. By the time I get home, my mind is full of us. Us skipping along the same paths, us finishing off each other’s sentences as we spoke to passers-by, us playing games along the very same steps I’m walking up. When I shut the front door the memories keep coming. Our games in the woods, running from Mr Eccentric, being grabbed by Uncle Walter as he growled like a bear. Italian lessons. Slug races. Marbles and mini dictionaries. As I stand in the hallway, trying to forget all the memories, I see a flashing ‘1’ on the answerphone. I push wet strands of hair behind my ears. When I press ‘play’ a short beep comes out of the machine, followed by the familiar rhythm of Amma’s voice.

  ‘Ravine, come pick up the phone. I know you can pick up the phone! Look, we have missed our train. We will have to get the next one. I know what you think. You think I did this on purpose. Not true! I didn’t mean to leave you this long. I will see you soon, shona … There is dahl in the fridge.’

  I play the message over and over. I wrap Amma’s damp cardigan tight around my body, smell the old scent of rose perfume upon the fabric. I consider going back upstairs. I glance at the banister next to me, think of my friend Shiva on the dresser, the crossword books, my lifebed with a Ravine-shaped groove in the mattress. But the steps seem too steep, the climb too far. That room is something different to me now, a prison cell I’ve only just been released from. The objects within it aren’t my friends, they’re just objects. I look along the hallway and find my feet moving towards the living-room door.

  I haven’t sat in the living room since the day I received my GCSE results. The living room was my mother and father’s room. It held their secrets and I didn’t want to know their secrets. I didn’t want to know any of it.

  I’ve never considered that Amma might have changed the décor. So when I enter the room to find pale green painted over bird-print wallpaper I release a dramatic gasp. You’d think Amma could have done the same for my room. Wiping out that menagerie of flapping birds and beady eyes with a few tins of paint.

  I glance around, trying to grasp the familiar. The floral netting and clashing curtains, the cross-hatched sketches of Bangladeshi paddy fields with the price labels still stuck on the corners. The coffee table that’s far too fancy for us. On top of the table is the same metal fruit bowl that has always been there, with the same plastic fruit it was sold with. In an attempt to marry up the elegance of the coffee table with the tackiness of the bowl, Amma has placed paper doilies along the edges of it.

  I sit down on the sofa and as I do so, feel something hard against my foot. A handle is protruding from beneath the table. When I tug at it, I find it’s attached to an old leather suitcase. The buckle’s broken on one side and when I lift it out I can feel it’s empty. Placing the case on my knees, I consider a plan.

  Life is suffering. Life is struggle. But, more than this, life is choice.

  I look down at the doilies, put the suitcase to one side and pull out a pen from the coffee-table drawer. I begin writing across the clean sheets, using four of them before getting to the final draft. The first one was too detailed, the second had no conceivable end and the third was so messy I could barely read the words myself. For my final attempt I keep the message brief, writing in my best handwriting.

  Dear Amma,

  I’m better now and have decided to go away. I hope you and your companion my father have a happy life in Bangladesh. Please don’t worry about me.

  Ravine xx

  When I get to the bottom of Bosworth House, I do up the buttons on the raincoat Amma bought me last year. It’s a clear plastic thing and the turquoise ruffles of my dress are visible through it. As I begin to walk down the steps of the hill, I look like I’ve been caught in an earthquake during a debutante ball.

  It doesn’t matter what I look like, I decide, not where I’m going. But then I realize I don’t know where I’m going. I thought that writing the note, packing the suitcase and leaving the flat was all I needed to begin a new life. But I have decisions to make. Where? How? What? I’ve never left Leicester before, have barely left Westhill Estate. I have no qualifications save two paltry GCSEs and there’s only so far £480 will get me.

  It begins to rain again. I put my hood up. Back at the flat I exchanged soaked slippers for a pair of dusty but unused lace-up boots sitting at the back of the wardrobe. Even though they’re so tight they squish my bones, they’re sturdy and warm. Walking boots, I think, imagining myself marching over hills of heather, along jagged cliff faces and up rocky mountains like the ones in Bobby’s postcards. But as the flesh on my legs turns to goose-pimples I look down at my outfit. Boots and a party dress. I’m wearing an almost identical outfit to the one I wore the night of the fireworks. Nothing has changed. I’m as prepared for the world as I
was back then.

  As I get to the bottom of the steps I take one last look at the white-bricked walls of Bosworth House. I think I see a pair of legs sticking out of the railings on the top floor, but the image is only an illusion. I imagine the three of us sitting on the balcony, my brown legs, your tan legs and Jonathan’s pale legs all dangling in a row. I felt a hardness in my throat as my eyes began to tear up.

  We were born with no choice, raised in the middle of other people’s tragedies and swept along in the riptide of life. It’s this that makes me cry; this sadness, this inevitability. We were too young to know how to free ourselves and too weak to fight back. Our lives were a series of crossword clues and none of us knew the answers.

  I turn around, ready to walk down to the bottom of the hill and away from this place. Away from the past. Away from my life.

  Then I see the taxi.

  As soon as I see it, I know Amma is inside. I run back to the entrance of Bosworth House and hide behind the main doors. I crane my neck to look through the gap, searching for dyed black hair tied into a bun, the flash of polished white trainers. The taxi pulls up. Seeing it reminds me of the day we watched Uncle Walter stepping out of a taxi but this time, when the door opens, the pot belly of an Asian man with a suitcase in his hand emerges. My father puts out his hand and I see Amma reaching out to take it as she bows her head and steps out.

  I run up the steps, my boots pounding against the concrete. I’m going in the exact opposite direction I need to go but I can’t let Amma see me. As I glance over the staircase balcony I see her and my father climbing up the steps to the entrance. I carry on running, my chest heaving with the effort. When I reach the flat my hands are shaking so badly that I drop my keys on the floor. It’s as I’m squatting down that I see the postcard sticking out from beneath the WELCOME mat at the front of your door. I stare at the corner where a swirl of purples and greens makes up one part of an image.

  ‘Of course there is reason to worry!’ Amma cries. ‘It has been two days.’

  I pick up the keys and open the door, running up the stairs and into my bedroom. I whip off my coat, pull off my boots, shove my suitcase under the bed then jump straight in with the party dress still on.

  Then I remember the doily.

  I leap out of bed, scramble down the stairs, grab the thin paper sheet and run back up on the balls of my feet. A key turns in the lock. I hold on to the doorframe of my room, swinging my body in, pushing the door shut, then grabbing the handle so it won’t slam. I stand still, body bent low as I continue to hold on. The loudness of Amma’s voice sails up the stairs.

  ‘Fool!’ she cries. ‘You understand nothing!’

  I climb back into the bed, pushing the doily under my pillow. As I hear the thud of Amma’s feet coming up the stairs, I lie flat on the mattress, smoothing the sheets across my body and pushing the wet ends of hair behind my shoulders.

  The bedroom door opens. Amma steps through. I look down at the side of my bed and see the corner of my suitcase sticking out.

  ‘Shona, did I wake you?’ Amma says.

  I look up at her with blinking eyes.

  ‘No, no,’ I say, trying to calm the panting of my breath. ‘How was your trip?’

  She’s visibly surprised at this upbeat reaction and, for a moment, doesn’t know how to respond.

  ‘It was so-so,’ she says, flicking her hand in the air as though shooing off the matter. ‘Have you eaten?’

  I nod, even though it isn’t true. Amma steps forward, pointing her finger at me.

  ‘I shall never leave you again,’ she says. ‘I told your father this. He says you are grown up but you are not, Ravine. You are my baby.’

  I frown when she says this but Amma just sits on the bed, feeling my forehead with the back of her hand. ‘You’re hot.’

  I pull my frown into a wide smile, hoping that the less I say the less I’ll incriminate myself. She nods her head.

  ‘You are still unwell.’

  I blink and begin to open my mouth but Amma quickly seals my lips by pushing her forefinger over them.

  ‘No, no, Ravine. You say nothing. You are not ready and I cannot make you ready. I told your father this too. He has all these plans. Telling me we can fly away together like one big happy family and make everything better. He was always too ambitious, you know? Him and his Roobix Blocks, him and his Bangladesh. He thought he had found someone to cure you. I almost believed it, all this nonsense about healers. I was ready to fly us over there. Such a fool I am!’

  She tuts loudly at herself, finger still pressed over my lips.

  ‘But I realized it yesterday. I told him you are not ready for all these plans. When you are ready you will tell me. I know this now. So you don’t have to say anything. Not a word.’

  I try to compute everything she’s told me. The tickets, the plans; they’d all been for me.

  ‘You go to sleep now,’ she says, patting my cheek. ‘You need your rest.’

  She’s up and gone before I can protest, leaving the door open behind her.

  I listen to Amma’s steps as they fade away and bring myself up to a sitting position. I look around the room. It’s dead to me: the wallpaper birds no longer flapping their wings, Shiva standing perfectly neutral on the dresser.

  A part of me knows that I’ve got away with it and everything can stay the same. Amma will stop forcing me to leave the flat. The ghost in the room next door has left. But still all I can think about is the corner of the postcard I saw beneath the WELCOME mat. All I can think about is Jonathan.

  I swing my feet over the side of the bed. Light filters through the dark clouds outside, making the leaves of the horse-chestnut tree glow. I’ve been stuck in this room like that tree is stuck in this estate. Even if it were chopped down to a stump, the roots that bind it to the ground would remain, lacing down in an underground network, keeping it fixed where it is. The tree is the same as Mrs Dickerson, always pulled back by her roots. It’s the same as Uncle Walter, trapped by his memories of what happened here. It’s Amma, Mr Eccentric, old Mrs Simmons, Sandy Burke, Mrs Patterson, Bradley Patterson, and all the people with their feet stuck in the concrete.

  When I walk over to the window, the light dances across my face. I place my hand on the glass and feel the coolness of it on my palm. Condensation begins to circle my hand as it lies against the glass. I curl my fingers into a fist.

  ‘I am not a tree,’ I say.

  I look down the long trunk of the horse chestnut to the ground beneath. Children cycling by, people walking their dogs and carrying their shopping. I hit the window so it shakes in the frame.

  ‘I am not a tree!’

  I grit my teeth and collect my boots.

  The Constellation of Life

  I stand across the road from the woods. In one hand I hold my suitcase, in the other the postcard. On the front of the postcard is the thin silhouette of mountains with streaks of colour sailing across a starry sky. On the back of the postcard is a message.

  MEET ME AT THE HIDEOUT.

  J

  It’s been hours since I heard Jonathan leave the flat, so the likelihood of him still waiting for me is slim. But there’s a part of me that needs to go back to the woods whether Jonathan is there or not. Bobby’s Hideout is where everything ended. Not only your life, but the life I’d taken for granted.

  The path to the hideout is a thin trail of stones we laid to signpost the way. They’re covered in moss now, strange plants curling up around the edges. The trees seem smaller; I have to turn sideways to stop myself from getting tangled in the branches. The smell of damp wood, the colour of lime-green leaves, the mud beneath my boots make me feel a rush of nostalgia. When I arrive at the hideout my face is actually smiling.

  The smile is short-lived. As I step out from the trees I see the rubble where Bobby’s Hideout once stood. Breeze blocks are broken in pieces while faded remnants of boxes lie across the ground. The front half of the hideout has collapsed, the back corner standin
g like the remains of a historic building. Black singe marks pepper the grey stone, yellow tape is tied to posts around the wreckage with ‘DO NOT ENTER’ stamped across the plastic. I look at the rubble, half expecting to see a wellington boot sticking out from the debris.

  Instead I see slugs.

  They cover every brick. Big, fat slimy slugs crawling across the damp stone, glistening wet with rain. They’ve formed a colony upon the debris; black slugs, orange slugs, small and giant together in union. So magnificent is this gathering that it feels like they’ve come in pilgrimage for you. It’s as though they know you were one of them and, in the fashion of Reginald Blake, want to pay homage to your memory.

  I watch the slugs wiggling in the rain. Their bodies cover the grey brick like buttons sewn randomly over a cardigan. I think of you. I think of Stanley. I think of all the things we thought we knew.

  ‘Hello, Ravine.’

  The voice is deep and cold. When I look back I see a figure sitting on a log, head hung low with a bin liner by his feet. When he looks up, his eyes are as green as olives, a ladybird umbrella held over his head.

  The Constellation of Us

  When I was younger, I couldn’t decide what to be. A Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian or a dentist, the choices were too many. You always seemed to know what you were. You always seemed to know how to be. Maybe that’s what made you brave.

  I want to run away from him. I want to run away from your brother and back to my room, to my stack of crosswords and Stevie Wonder CDs.

  7 across: To be frightened or in fear (6)

  Scared.

  There, I admit it. I’m scared of the world and that’s why I’ve been hiding from it for so long. This fear is the same fear I felt about the universe as a child; overwhelmed by its enormity and our minuteness within it. Remember that time, in the middle of the night, you dragged me and Jonathan to the top floor of Bosworth House and made us look up at the sky. It was so vast, filled with an abundance of dazzling gems that covered us like a diamond-encrusted sari. Just looking at that sky made us wheezy yet still we continued naming the stars.