Somewhere Close to Happy: The heart-warming, laugh-out-loud debut of the year

by Lia Louis

  ‘The wall,’ says the boy, clearing his throat. We’ve reached the other side of the lobby. And it really is just that; a wall, papered with a huge sheet of green, bordered with a white strip of wavy corrugated card. It looks just like a school wall display. ‘So, um, this is where we see where our groups are today, which classes, where to go and all that.’ He pushes a finger onto a piece of paper pinned with red and blue drawing pins. He has a silver ring on. Just a plain thick silver band on his index finger.

  ‘It’s Lizzie yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘J.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He smiles and taps the paper with ‘Group B’ written at the top.

  ‘That’s what’s down here. Lizzie J. I dunno why, but they always put our surname’s initial. As if there’s three hundred of us and seventeen different Lizzies. I quite like it, though. Makes us sound like rappers.’

  I smile. A proper smile, not just out of politeness.

  ‘You’re with me then,’ he says, tapping a name on the paper, right below mine.

  I lean forward to peer closer. ‘Roman M,’ I say, and he pulls his mouth into a tight line and nods once, like a bow.

  ‘Yup. That’s me. Lizzie J and Roman M, with Ramesh in the library.’

  I nod.

  ‘With the lead pipe.’ He ducks his head as if he’s telling me a secret. ‘One I hope he chooses to smack me over the head with if it’s ‘how does this poem make you feel?’ again.’

  I make a sound in my throat. The beginning of a giggle, and he grins at me from under his hair. It’s scruffy. Wild, brown waves that point in all different directions, like he’s just got out of bed. He’s handsome. Weird, Priscilla would say, eyeing his black boots and obscure T-shirt. But handsome.

  ‘It’s pretty simple,’ he says, pulling a hand through his hair. ‘We come in, we get stuck in whichever classroom our group’s in …’ I like the way he says stuck. Stock. ‘And then if you have a meeting with The Mads, it goes on here.’ He taps his finger on another piece of paper that says ‘One-to-Ones’. ‘That’s when you’ll go with one of the counsellors who are more nuts than we are and they do a shitload of nodding.’ Then he stops and studies my face, pink is blushing his cheeks. ‘Not saying that means— I mean, I’m nuts. That doesn’t mean you are—’

  ‘I am,’ I say. ‘I mean, I have to be, to be here, right? Nuts.’

  Roman’s face breaks into a wide smile. ‘Then, great,’ he laughs. ‘We’ve got something in common.’

  Roman shows me to the cloakroom next, and I hang my stuff up on a peg next to his.

  ‘What’re you searching for?’ he asks as I rifle through my bag, my face pulsing with the fluster and shame of trying to find my pencil case. It’s things like this that floor me these days. Tiny, pathetic things that swell and grow bigger in importance than they should ever be.

  ‘Pens,’ I wobble. ‘I … I can’t f-find my—’

  ‘You don’t need one,’ he says calmly. ‘They supply it all. You just need yourself. We’re privileged here, Lizzie, don’t you know.’ I like how he says my name. I like that he makes me feel normal. Warm. Although my veins are still surging with nerves, my hands have stopped shaking and sweating, and I’m breathing a little easier now, walking beside Roman down a long, musty-smelling corridor. The Grove reminds me of a clinic, a school and a youth centre all rolled into one. The floors are carpeted with that horrible thin, scratchy brown carpet you find in classrooms, and the double doors, bookending the corridors, look as though they belong in a hospital. But then there are the huge, proud displays of artwork, and photos, and posters, on every wall. There’s even graffiti and pool tables and drinks machines. But beneath the sombre quietness, are the distant sounds of ringing phones, muffled voices, typing, and printing. It’s not a big place, but large enough to get a bit lost in if you don’t know your way around. I barely remember my way back to the entrance.

  ‘Landscapes. That’s what you need to think about,’ a Scottish, female voice speaks as we pass an open, wooden door. ‘Is there a special place you can think of? A house, a place by the sea you’ve always wanted to be …’

  Roman looks down at me. He really is so tall. ‘Art,’ he says as we pass. ‘It’s pretty cool. You draw whatever you want, paint, sketch, whatever. They’ve got some cool stuff in there. If you like art, anyway.’

  I nod.

  ‘You like it? Or you’re just nodding?’

  I laugh, nervously. ‘I like it. I draw, paint sometimes …’

  ‘That’s cool,’ says Roman. ‘Which school do you go to?’

  ‘Woodlands.’

  ‘I know some kids there. Do you know Deano Williams?’

  My heart sinks at the mention of that name. Deano Williams is a vile bully; the leader of a gang of brash, confident, good-looking wankers in my year. I don’t know why it surprises me that someone like Roman knows him, but it does.

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell him. ‘He’s in my form.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Yeah, he’s a massive twat,’ laughs Roman, shooting a look at me. ‘A massive twat for a tiny little person with tiny little legs, and a tiny little charred soul. Probably.’

  And at that, I burst out laughing. So does Roman, and when we get to the doorway of the library – which is really just a room with books in (but then to quote Roman, ‘that’s literally what all libraries are, right?’) – we are both still laughing, cheeks taut and flushed.

  ‘Ah. Delivered her back to us safely, I see,’ says Ramesh, handing out books to rows of students, chattering amongst themselves.

  ‘Course,’ says Roman.

  ‘Good. Come and take a seat.’

  Roman holds out his arm in front of him. ‘After you, Lizzie J.’

  ‘Thanks … Roman M.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Good evening, The Grove House Day Service, Charlotte speaking, how can I help? Hello? Hello, is anyone there?’

  I can’t do it. I just can’t bring myself to speak. If I ask for him, and she says no, there’s nobody there called Roman, then what? Hopes dashed, another wild goose chase to another number, to another address where he won’t be; my elusive, disappearing, was-he-ever-real friend? Because he’s never there, is he? And surely fate, the universe, Buddha, whoever’s in charge, isn’t going to make it so easy, and so cruel, that he’s been ten minutes away, where we used to be, all along. And if I ask for him, and she says yes, this Charlotte woman who keeps answering The Grove’s phone, what then? ‘Hi Roman, it’s me, Lizzie, after twelve years. How the devil are you? Got your letter that you wrote over a decade ago when I was a mere child. Where did you go? Why did you up and leave? After all those months of saving up, of planning our escape, what happened? PS: are you a dangerous criminal now?’

  No. I don’t want the first time we speak to be on the phone. I want to see him. I want to know it’s really him I’ve found, after all these years, by looking right at him, in his eyes. I’ve contemplated emailing Ramesh – he’s still there. It says so on the website. But then, if Roman is there, at The Grove, working on the next desk or frozen in time, drawing cocks in Art Therapy, like some sort of psychological Benjamin Button, I don’t want the first he knows about me trying to find him coming from an email, and from someone else. And if he is just around the corner, then why hasn’t he tried to find me? I would be so easy to find. Embarrassingly so. I haven’t moved from the same town I was born in. I shop at the same shops. Order food from the same Chinese place. I haven’t moved a muscle in twelve years. Why hasn’t he found me? Because he’s never wanted to? But then, why the letter? These are the sort of circles my brain has been running in; round and round until I’m dizzy. Priscilla says I’m scared. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’ve finally stopped to digest all this, and I am scared, and who can blame me for not wanting to step back in time to a year where everything fell apart?

  The shrill, bleep of my flat buzzer blasts through my thoughts. I freeze under the heavy blanket on the sofa. It’s a Tuesday ev
ening at seven. I don’t ever get guests, certainly not ones that don’t call or text, warning me first, anyway.

  Buzz. Buzz.

  I pad over to the phone by the front door. The blanket draped around my shoulders drags along the carpet. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Lizzie, it’s me. Can I come in?’

  My shoulders sag with relief. I hold down the button to unlock the heavy entrance door below and unlatch and open my front door. I stand and listen as her clip-clopping heels climb the two flights of stairs. She’s grinning as she gets to the top of the steps. Then her face drops.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘You’ve not got another cold virus, have you?’

  ‘Hi, Mum. And no, I haven’t—’

  ‘Did you take those B vits I gave you? I had John-George start taking them … you know, the new instructor I hired at the centre? Well, he reckons his liver has regenerated. All thanks to B vitamins. His doctor was bloody

  flabbergasted.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Mum takes me in her arms. She smells incredible, and her hair is blow-dried to within an inch of its life. ‘Of course you are, darling. Shall we put the kettle on?’

  Mum glides around the kitchen as if it’s an ice rink and she’s a gifted skater, and within minutes, she has filled the dishwasher and made two cups of tea – hers, lemon green tea, and mine, strong, with milk, and probably just the one sugar hoping I won’t notice the lack of the second.

  ‘It is OK, me dropping in like this, isn’t it, sweetheart?’ Mum holds the tiny paper square of her teabag in her fingers and lifts and dips a few times. She has carried a small box of lemon green tea bags in her handbag for as long as I can remember – back when green tea had to be ordered from a mail-order catalogue. ‘I was at a training thingy in Ware – a moxibustion course – and I had to drop some bits in to Nate and Katie, and I was sitting in that house, remembering the way you’d toddle about the place, thinking oh, I miss my baby. How is she? Why hasn’t she called me?’ She cocks her head to one side and raises an eyebrow.

  I shrug, bringing my mug to my lips. ‘I did try calling you back on Monday, on the train home.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Clark said you were teaching a yoga class and he’d get you to call me back but—’

  Mum fans her hand and shakes her head. ‘Oh, that’s as good as leaving a message with the toilet brush, Lizzie.’

  ‘I know, but if you’d actually text—’

  ‘It’s bad for you,’ she says, manicured, ringed fingers, enveloping the mug at her lap. ‘I don’t want to read bloody messages from you, I want to hear your voice, and better than that I want to see you.’

  I look down at my lap. ‘Sorry.’

  Mum pauses, her lips lifting into a smile. ‘I just miss you, darling, that’s all.’

  ‘And I miss you.’

  Mum then snuggles back on the sofa – lean legs bent underneath her, the edge of my blanket over her feet – and talks non-stop about the news, her holiday to Sri Lanka in December, how banana facials will ‘reclaim’ my skin as if it’s an old sideboard abandoned in an M&S car park, and how her neighbour’s daughter went to Australia and came back with a man named Garth who is ‘very handsome, despite the dreadlocks and the occasional questionable odour’ and who makes the most ‘darling’ carvings out of scrap wood.

  ‘Australian men are very free-spirited. Generous lovers, too,’ Mum says now, as I try to hook out a fallen custard cream from my mug. ‘Have you ever considered going to Oz, one day, darling? You know, when you eventually do travel.’

  I cough a laugh. ‘Whenever that’ll be.’

  Mum smiles. ‘It can be whenever you want it to be,’ she says. ‘I’ve always said, if it’s the money, I will happily loan you—’

  ‘It’s not the money.’

  Mum watches me, and after a beat, reaches down to her handbag and pulls out a large bulky envelope. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘From Katie.’

  ‘What is it?’ I take the heavy envelope from Mum’s hand. It bows with the weight of it.

  Mum raises her mug to her lips, watching as I pull out a thick wodge of papers. The creamy, clean smell of glossy paper hits me.

  ‘She said she did a bit of research,’ says Mum, excitedly. ‘That one – the blue brochure – they have an open day next week. She’s noted down the times, look. On that Post-it.’

  Three of them. Three thick, shiny college prospectuses – snapshots of young, excited-by-life faces on the covers, each with neon-coloured sticky tags, bookmarking pages inside. I stare down at them in my hands. Eventually, I pick up the first one and flick to the place marked by a pink sticky bookmark. ‘Access to Higher Education, Art and Design’ is highlighted in yellow. There’s a photo of a young woman with glasses and a concentrated, happy gaze on her face, paintbrush to canvas, beside a description of the course. I remember envisaging myself as a girl like that. Getting signed off from The Grove, finishing my GCSEs at school with the rest of the kids, and going to a place where I could draw, paint, make things, bring ideas to life every day, blend in with everyone else. I’d look like that girl, I thought. I’d be immersed and relaxed, my brain full of nothing but ideas and excitement for what was ahead of me. No fear. No crippling sadness. Just hope, and plans of where Roman and I would go when I’d finished; when the plant pot was brimming with money we’d saved from Roman’s dog-walking and the over-generous, guilt-money Mum would chuck me when we saw her. All the places we’d see, when Roman had passed his driving test. Who we’d turn out to be once we were free of everything. Once we were better. Once we were old enough not to be prised apart, like we were sometimes, banned from seeing one another, frowned upon, like defects. The reality, of course, was nothing like that. I had barely drawn a single picture before it all ended, and I had quit. It was as if a curtain fell. Hubble died. I broke in half. Then Roman left. Nothing mattered after that.

  I shut the cover and move the books to the coffee table.

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ Mum says quietly, after a moment, ‘that you were thinking about studying.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I say. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘No? Katie said you talked about—’

  ‘She did,’ I say, swallowing tea. ‘Not me.’

  Mum breathes in. ‘She’s only looking out for you, Lizzie. She loves you. She knows how much you’re wasted in that office job and how talented—’

  ‘Well, it’s none of her business,’ I cut in. ‘It’s none of anyone’s, Mum. It’s my life. I’m not asking anyone else to live it, am I?’ Mum’s eyes narrow sadly, and instantly, I regret saying those words. I don’t mean it, of course I don’t. Katie is one of the most important people in my life. She’s excited, that for the first time in god knows how long, I might be stepping out of my tiny bubble, towards things that have been waiting for me all along. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry, Mum. It’s just … I don’t know where I am right now. Plus, I told her it was too late for me to do anything like that.’

  ‘Oh, Lizzie,’ Mum laughs. ‘You aren’t about to say that to me of all people surely.’ Her hand flies in the air, as if swatting away a fly. ‘Me, your mother, who went to college at forty to learn how to be a personal trainer, and again at forty-two to become a yoga instructor, and then again at forty-five for business studies, and again … well, just now, actually, to study sodding moxibustion of all things. I’m fifty-six, Lizzie. Fifty-fucking-six.’

  I look at her and snort into laughter.

  ‘Bloody twenty-eight, and it’s too late,’ she mutters. ‘If it’s too late for you, then god only knows what it is for the likes of me.’

  I run my finger around the handle of my mug in my lap. ‘But you’ve always known what you wanted to do, Mum,’ I say. ‘You never stopped wanting it. For as long as I can remember, you loved exercise, and helping people, and … avocados.’

  Mum laughs and cocks her head to one side.

  ‘I remember you directing an aerobics class in the lounge once for other mums, and I must
’ve only been about five. You were never going to do anything else.’ I look over at the brochures stacked up on the table. ‘Me? I’ve never really wanted something like that.’

  Mum pulls her mouth into a tight line. ‘Yes, you have,’ she says. ‘Did you forget all those hours you’d sit with Mimi, drawing those fabulous little people you were so good at, telling me how you’d be just like her one day, drawing, and showing people how it was just putting lines in the right places.’ Mum shakes her head. ‘Your dad and I couldn’t even hold a pencil, yet you … you just could. Thank god for your step-nan really, or you’d have never got half the things you got for your birthdays, we were clueless. Mimi sorted that. Bought most of the art shop on Galley Road. And you loved it.’ Mum stops, lips pressing together. ‘Do you remember the blueprint you drew? Of your future art studio.’

  Mum smiles and I feel my cheeks pulse with heat. ‘I was ten.’

  ‘So?’ Mum sniffs and gestures towards the coffee table. ‘I remember you being sixteen, too. The day you got onto that course. You were the happiest I think I’ve ever seen you.’

  I can’t look at Mum now. It’s the mention of Mimi. It’s the mention of being sixteen, and that day I blew open the door to what felt like my future, when I got into college. When I started.

  ‘I remember,’ I say, but the words get caught in my throat and are barely there.

  ‘And I know you still draw. We get the cards every birthday and Christmas and they are just …’ Mum doesn’t finish her sentence, but instead holds her hand at her chest and closes her eyes for a moment. ‘Sometimes, we just get stuck,’ she says, gently. ‘I should know. I was before your dad decided to – well, it gave me a wake-up call, that’s all. Made me realise we get one life, and it’s nobody else’s responsibility but ours, regardless of what we’ve had to deal with.’

  I nod, still looking down at my lap.

  ‘I’m not telling you what to do, darling,’ Mum says, her eyes fixed on the brochures again. ‘But … never be too afraid to live the way you actually want to. In my experience, it’s never as frightening as you think it’ll be, and nobody really gives a toss about what you’re doing as much as you think they do.’ Mum gestures over to the brochures. ‘No harm in taking a look some time, is there? Katie was good enough to get them for you.’