Fierce Fragile Hearts

by Sara Barnard

  ‘Thanks, that helps.’

  ‘You’re aware there’s a stain on the carpet, right?’ she says, pointing with her foot to the watermark left after the plumbing disaster.

  ‘Pretend it’s not there,’ I say.

  ‘It feels weird to see you living like this,’ she says.

  I frown. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Like an actual adult. I’ve spent the last couple of months feeling like I’m being independent, but now I feel like I’ve just been playing at it. You’re doing it for real.’ She looks around. ‘Who would’ve thought you’d be the first one to be responsible, you know? Anyway, listen. I know you don’t have money to spare, but we don’t have to spend money, right? I have this whole plan. I think we should have a cryfest.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A cryfest. It’s this idea Mum came up with a few years back. She says it’s healthy to have a good cry sometimes, so we’d have a film marathon of guaranteed weepies. That’s Mum’s word, by the way, not mine. Weepies.’

  ‘Roz, you never cry.’

  ‘I do, actually. Especially when I’m watching …’ She clears her throat dramatically and pulls up a list on her phone. ‘Titanic. ET. My Girl. The Fox and the Hound.’ Her eyes flick to mine. ‘You in?’

  ‘Sure!’ To be honest, Rosie could have suggested watching paint dry together and I would still have been all in.

  ‘Great! You don’t mind coming to my house, right? You don’t have a DVD player. Or the films. Or a sofa. Or—’

  ‘All right, point made. I’m in. Let’s go.’

  We have the best time. We cook frozen pizzas and eat them on her living-room floor. We drink her mother’s pink gin and Prosecco until the world gets fuzzy. And we talk. Sometimes we pause the films, but mostly we just talk right over them. I tell her about Matt and she smiles a dry, knowing smile, shaking her head at me. And then she says, so casually she could only have been planning it, ‘It’s a shame you couldn’t come to Norwich, because I wanted you to meet Jade.’

  ‘Who’s Jade?’ I ask.

  She smiles, and I sit bolt upright.

  ‘Roz! Roz! Who’s Jade?’

  And that’s how I find out she’s got a girlfriend.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I demand, when I’ve stopped shrieking. I’ve bounced up on to my knees, grabbing the remote and pausing ET.

  ‘Two reasons,’ she says. I can tell she’s enjoying this. ‘One, you kind of never asked. So there’s that. And two, it’s really early days. I don’t want to put pressure on it by making it into a big deal.’

  ‘It is a big deal.’

  She smiles again. ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘Does Caddy know?’

  ‘Nope. She’s never asked, either. The two of you are very self-involved.’ She rolls her eyes at me.

  ‘We shouldn’t have to ask!’ I say. ‘I told you about Matt without you asking.’ Her eyebrows shoot up and I realize my mistake. ‘Not that he’s a boyfriend. Not that that’s the same at all. Never mind. I’m sorry I didn’t ask. Tell me about Jade. I want to know everything.’

  She does, her cheeks burning pink even as she smiles. Jade is in her third year and studying Pharmacy, like Rosie. They met at a Pharmacy Society social in her first week – Jade’s the equality and diversity rep – but didn’t start properly talking until later in the semester. Jade is from Somerset and has ‘a brilliant accent’. At home she has a parakeet called Dave. She works in the on-campus bar three nights a week. Her mother is Spanish; her father is Iranian. She has a twin sister called Jasmine, but Rosie hasn’t met her yet.

  ‘This is all great information,’ I say. ‘But you’re being very coy.’

  She grins. ‘She’s gorgeous, and girl kissing is the best thing in the world. Happy?’

  I grin back. ‘That’ll do for now.’

  We stay up until four. By the time Rosie falls asleep during My Girl, we’ve watched five films and cried a lot. I manage to make it through Titanic with dry eyes – Rosie does not – but lose it during ET. We both fall apart during The Fox and the Hound. So hard, in fact, that at one point Rosie has to pause it and wail, ‘Why did we think it was a good idea to watch this?’ before FaceTiming a bewildered Caddy so we can share our tearful, slightly drunken commitment to lifelong best friendship.

  It’s the best night I’ve had in weeks. I wake up smiling, curled on her familiar sofa, even as the hint of a headache presses against my forehead. I go to work for a double-shift and she spends the day with her mum – when I check Instagram on my break, it’s full of beaming pictures of the two of them at the beach in Eastbourne, hair flying around their faces in the wind – but we spend the evening together, eating homemade chilli with her mum in their cosy kitchen, the lights turned down low.

  ‘Why did you come back?’ I ask before I leave to go home at midnight.

  Her nose crinkles as she smiles. ‘I thought you needed a friend. And I figured, just this once, that friend should be me.’

  22

  ‘Up We Go’

  Lights

  I’ve been thinking about the piano ever since my last visit to see Dilys. At first I was focused on the memory itself, how painful it was, how strange it is that I could possibly have forgotten something so horrible. But by now I’ve moved on from that, and all I can think about is the wasted opportunity. All these years I could have been playing the piano. I could be really good by now. But Dad took that chance from me, and yes, I was a child then, but I’m an adult now. Why am I still letting him control so much of my life? He’s not even in it any more. But, no, not even my life. What was the word Dilys had used? Joy. I’m still letting him control my joy.

  These thoughts are why, when I go to see Dilys that week, I tell her about what I’ve remembered, and why I stopped playing the piano. She listens, nodding encouragingly.

  ‘So I think I want to learn,’ I say. ‘The piano, I mean. I know I’m a bit older now than most people are when they start, but that doesn’t matter, does it?’

  She smiles and shakes her head.

  ‘And I thought,’ I add, ‘that you could teach me. Maybe. When you’re stronger? I can wait.’

  Dilys looks at me for a long moment, her expression difficult to read, and I’m suddenly worried I’ve offended her somehow. I thought she’d be pleased, but maybe she doesn’t like that I just keep taking from her?

  ‘I could—’ I begin, meaning to say that I’d pay her back, somehow, but she puts a hand up and I stop.

  She touches her hand to chest and taps. ‘On … on …’

  I smile encouragingly, but I’m nervous, and I’m trying not to be patronizing but I’m probably not pulling it off.

  ‘On board?’ Marcus suggests, from where he’s been writing quietly on a clipboard on the other side of the room. He glances at me and smiles. ‘On one condition?’

  Dilys taps more determinedly, her eyes on mine. ‘Honoured,’ she manages, thickly, her voice a hoarse choke.

  Somehow, I manage not to burst into tears. ‘OK, great! I’ll start saving up for a keyboard. It might take a while. What happened to your piano when you sold your flat?’

  Dilys points to the iPad on the bedside table and I unlock it obediently, open it to the right app and hold it up for her. Storage, she types. Graham.

  ‘That’s good,’ I say. ‘So you can have it back one day?’

  ‘Hope,’ she says.

  ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I hope so, too.’

  I play her the Cyndi Lauper song ‘Time After Time’ on my guitar, which I’ve been teaching myself over the last few weeks. It’s shaky, and I fumble some of the chords, but she smiles all the way through. When I read her a chapter from The Little Prince, I glance up near the end to see that she’s fallen asleep. I draw a smiley face on a Post-it note and stick it on the iPad with a quick ‘See you next week!’ on it before I go, say goodbye to Marcus and head towards the exit.

  Christmas begins when Caddy and Rosie come home.

  They arrive on the same day; R
osie on the coach with her oversized rucksack, and Caddy, later, in her dad’s car. They both take a night in their own homes before staying with me, but when they do they come armed with alcohol, Christmas biscuits and a lot of stories. We stay up for hours, talking. I plait Caddy’s hair. Rosie tries to play my guitar.

  ‘How come you’re not with Kel?’ I ask Caddy when we’re halfway through the second bottle of wine she’d brought.

  ‘Because I’m with you,’ she says.

  We’re well into the next bottle when Rosie, who’s been glancing around my bedsit looking more and more morose, says, ‘I’m so sorry you have to live like this. It’s so unfair. You had all that shit before and it means you have to have this shit now and it’s so unfair. You should have good stuff now because of all the bad.’

  ‘You’re the good stuff,’ I say, and she laughs and tells me to fuck off.

  ‘Listen, I had an idea,’ she says, with the earnest emphasis of someone who’s drunk a lot of wine. ‘A really great idea that you’re going to think is terrible.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ I say.

  ‘Seriously!’ she says, pointing at me. ‘OK, so, listen – are you listening?’

  ‘I’m listening, Roz.’

  ‘You should sue your parents,’ she says.

  My brain, wine-slowed, can’t quite decide in the split second of reaction time whether I should laugh or groan at this, so what I do is choke on my sip instead, doubling over to cough until Caddy pats me uselessly on the back.

  ‘God,’ I manage, wiping at my eyes. ‘Thanks for that.’

  ‘Hear me out,’ Rosie says. ‘So, I have this friend at uni – yes, I have friends now – and she’s studying law—’

  ‘Roz, no, can we not—’

  ‘And so I was talking to her about you – sorry, but I was – because she wants to go into family law, and she was doing some kind of case study on a trial that just happened, some guy who killed his daughter?’

  ‘Stepdaughter,’ I correct, pretty calmly considering my heart has nosedived right into my stomach.

  ‘Oh, you know about it? Kirsty?’

  ‘Kacie. Kacie-Leigh.’

  ‘Right. Her. Anyway, we were talking about it, and I was saying how it’s not right that, like, there are only trials when a kid dies?’

  ‘Roz,’ Caddy says, suddenly sharp.

  ‘What?’ Rosie turns to her, eyes wide.

  ‘Be more sensitive.’

  ‘How was that not sensitive? That’s what happened. And, like, if the kid doesn’t die, they just grow up, like you –’ Caddy puts her hand over her eyes and murmurs something – ‘and there’s no justice. The abuser gets away with it? That’s so wrong. Anyway, Aisha – that’s my friend – said that that’s not really true, there are things you can do. It’s hard to prosecute because of evidence and stuff, but what you can do is sue.’ She looks at me expectantly.

  Slowly, to make sure she actually listens, I say, ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I look at Caddy, hoping for help, but she just shrugs sympathetically at me. ‘I just want to move on with my life, OK?’ This isn’t a lie, but it’s not the real answer, either. The real answer is to do with things that she would never understand, like the fact that I still, despite everything, haven’t given up hope of a relationship with my family, and doing something like this would kill that forever. That just thinking about taking a road like that is painful, let alone actually doing it. That this kind of thing is more complicated than she thinks; in her eyes, I’m a victim who deserves justice. But I’m also a daughter who wants her parents to love her. I can’t make that go away, however much simpler it would make my life.

  ‘OK, but, this is the thing, if you sue, you get money. Money you could really use, right? I should have started with that.’

  ‘I guessed, and it’s still no.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know how much?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Well, the maximum is five grand,’ she says. Her eyes are earnest and hopeful, and I want to be annoyed with her for pushing this, but I can’t quite muster it. She so wants to fix this for me. How can I be angry about that?

  ‘Yeah, I’m going to rip out my own heart for a few grand,’ I say. ‘Put myself through actual hell. Sounds great.’

  ‘We’d be there,’ Caddy says.

  ‘Every step of the way,’ Rosie adds.

  ‘You’ve gone past cheesy, now,’ I say. ‘No more alcohol for you.’

  They’re both home for about three weeks over the holidays; a couple of weeks before New Year and one week after. I see them both almost every day, sometimes one-on-one but usually all three of us together with Kel as an extra bonus. I’m working most days at Madeline’s because I’d booked myself in to work pretty much every day of the Christmas season that we’d be open. Extra money and a distraction from my least favourite time of year. Perfect.

  I spend Christmas Day with Sarah and a bunch of her chef friends. A foodie Christmas is a just-about-bearable alternative to Christmas alone, and even though I feel the usual churn of sadness somewhere inside me all day, thinking about my friends with their families, the whole world with their families, it’s fine. Sarah is clearly, genuinely, happy that I’m there, and her friends are nice. Also, the food is incredible and when I go back to my bedsit that night, I have five Tupperware containers full of leftovers. And that’s one more Christmas survived.

  On Boxing Day, I get a message from Matt, who’s staying in Brighton with his mum and sister for the holidays, asking if I want to meet up. He comes to Madeline’s at the end of my shift to pick me up, and the sight of him makes me smile wider than I’d intended. He’s wearing a long black coat like an undertaker, which would look weird if he wasn’t both cute and cool enough to pull it off. His cheeks are pink, his eyes warm. When he sees me, he smiles.

  We go to the beach together, even though it’s cold, and stand stamping our feet on the pebbles for a while before we give up and go to my flat. I’m nervous about him seeing it, but I’m also trying to tell myself I don’t care what he thinks about it, so it’s all very confusing in my head.

  ‘Small,’ is all he says.

  ‘That’s what everyone says,’ I reply. ‘As if I haven’t noticed, or something?’

  His nose crinkles as he smiles. ‘I just mean it doesn’t really suit you, that’s all.’

  ‘Who would it suit?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he says. I kind of like how easily he bats off the traps I set for him. His face changes as his eyes fall on something behind me and I glance around to see what he’s looking at. ‘Is that my hoodie?’ he asks.

  His Hastings hoodie is still lying on my bed where I’d left it. ‘Er …’ I say, trying to think of a lie, feeling my face start to burn. ‘Maybe?’

  He laughs, reaching for it. ‘God, I wondered where it went.’

  ‘You can have it back,’ I say with a shrug, trying to style this out and failing. ‘I was just … looking after it.’

  He tosses it to me. ‘Put it on, then.’ When I do, pulling up the hood so it falls over my eyes for maximum cute effect, he grins. ‘Nah, it looks better on you. Keep it, I’ve got loads.’

  I drop the hood back and smooth down my fluffed-up hair, smiling as I go to the kitchen to make us tea. When we’re sitting on the bed together, him leaning against the wall and me cross-legged, I take a deep breath and say, ‘Do you know why I live here? Has Kel told you … stuff?’

  Matt nods, cautious. ‘Yeah, some. I said he shouldn’t have, but he can be a bit blabby. Plus, he’s protective.’

  ‘Of you?’ I try not to show how hurt I am. What does Kel think, that I’m the kind of damaged goods with sharp edges, the sort that cut people? He wouldn’t be the first, but it’s Kel.

  Matt half smiles. ‘No, of you. He wanted to make sure I knew I couldn’t “fuck you over”. His words. Not that I would have fucked you o
ver, obviously. But you know how Kel is, he thinks monogamy is the only proper way to have a relationship, and anything else must be bad. I’ve never led a girl on or lied to her or anything. And you and me, we’re both on the same page, right?’

  I nod. ‘One hundred per cent. No labels, no bullshit. And I’m not going to be your manic pixie dream Suze.’

  He cracks up. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Seriously!’

  ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘You know,’ I say. ‘The mysterious sad girl who comes in and teaches you all about life and you think you’re going to save her, but you don’t and you actually end up learning all about yourself – ooooooh.’ I wave my hands around a little, wiggling my fingers, and tea sloshes out from my cup on to my sheets. ‘Whoops.’

  He starts to laugh even harder. ‘You’re not mysterious, for a start.’

  I have to be honest. That is not what I was expecting him to say. ‘Well, I know I’m not,’ I say. ‘But don’t guys always think a pretty girl is mysterious?’

  He grins. ‘You think you’re pretty?’ His voice is warm, teasing but in a sweet way.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ I sock his upper arm. ‘You see? Manic pixie dream Suze. I’m supposed to be all beautiful-but-not-knowing-it and only you see me, blah blah blah bullshit.’

  ‘You’ve given this a lot of thought.’

  ‘You have to promise you won’t do that. That you won’t put a filter on me. A lot of stuff has happened that I don’t always deal with that well, and it’s not, like, a cute kind of breakdown. It’s messy and crap. I want you to know that now so you’re not disappointed when you get to know me.’

  I expect him to make another joke but he’s nodding instead, eyes on me. ‘No manic pixie dreams,’ he says. ‘And no manic pixie dream boy-ing me, either. I’ve had my own shit, you know.’

  ‘The music stuff?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking more my dad being a cheating dickhead. Seeing as we’re sharing.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. Kel didn’t tell me that.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s why you don’t want to get into a relationship?’