Stones

by Polly Johnson

  ‘It’s my brother,’ I said. ‘Sorry – he can’t help himself. We live over there, if you could just help…’

  I was shivering in my dressing gown and one slipper, as they looked from me to Sam and back again.

  ‘Is he violent?’ one asked. ‘If not, bring him in. I don’t think we can move him any further. Don’t worry about disturbing us, we haven’t gone to bed yet.’

  Between them they hoisted Sam up and carried him inside, feet echoing in the empty hallway. They dropped him on an old sofa and covered him with a throw.

  ‘We just moved here,’ the one with fair hair said. ‘Not much unpacked.’

  Sam lay still on the red velvet as if he was dead; I sat with my two neighbours on the floor looking at him and tried to explain. I told them he was an alcoholic. I told them that even Mum and Dad were sometimes scared of him, and I told them I hated him. It poured out of me like water and they just sat there and took it all in. When I said sorry for the rubbish welcome to the neighbourhood, they smiled and one of them got up to offer me his hand, which seemed the thing to do. ‘Matt,’ he said, ‘and that’s Ben. Would you like some hot chocolate?’

  While we drank it, they told me a bit about themselves. They looked as different as cloud and sun. Matt was blonde and trendy with tattoos from shoulder to wrist, and Ben was dark and neatly dressed. Perhaps he saw me looking from one to the other, because he grinned and nodded at Matt. ‘I’m the sensible one,’ he said. ‘I work for a software company while Matt is all creative and arty.’

  ‘Graphic design,’ Matt said. ‘He’s just old and stuffy, take no notice.’

  I laughed. Ben must have been about thirty, but Matt wasn’t that much younger.

  ‘I don’t know why I stay with you, brat,’ Ben sniffed, but he didn’t mean it. They were so obviously happy together, they made me feel calm and safe.

  They brought Sam home the next morning and Mum and Dad were so embarrassed they insisted on cooking breakfast. After that they were often round, especially Matt. I think mum liked to talk to him, and so did I. Things would have been different if he’d been my big brother. It was Ben and Matt who looked after me the night Sam died – my body curled into the same old sofa. They were my first grown-up friends.

  I leave them to it now, fair head behind dark, carrying the weird statue inside – the same way they’d carried Sam that night we first met.

  Once they’ve gone, I scour the street for any sign of the red-haired man. There’s only his dropped can, still leaking orangey stuff into the drain, so I slip indoors and stand in silence while my heart stops thumping, then creep down the hall to spy on Mum. She’s in the shop. I can see her through the glass door, counting cash, brown eyes narrowed in a frown and her fluffy hair caught up in a tortoiseshell clip. She’s got really thin since Sam died. Her hipbones would make a supermodel envious. Sometimes Dad creeps up, puts his arms round her and takes hold of them like he wants to steer her off somewhere, but she mostly pushes him away as if she has something urgent to do elsewhere. Her name is Karen, but one night – just after Sam died – she said that ‘Karen’ was gone and she was someone else now. I think that may be true.

  I slip upstairs and take out the ‘Thought Diary’ I’m supposed to fill in for the psychologist – the ‘Shrink Woman’, as I call her. I open it and read:

  ‘Sam and I were friends once. He was my big brother who looked after me. Once he sat indoors and caught measles from me because he was drawing cartoons to keep me happy…’

  There isn’t any more. It didn’t help to write about that Sam. That Sam began to vanish as he grew up and I didn’t like the one that took his place. It was like a creepy movie where a demon possesses one person in a family and sucks the life out of all of them. He certainly drained me.

  Now, though, after meeting Joe, something is changing. Down inside, where I thought I was sleeping, something stirs. I’m not even sure if I like him yet, but I want him to like me. I write his name in the margin of a new page, then wonder why I did it, so I hide it away and lie in blue dimness on my bed. The curtains are drawn and the faint noise from outside plays a background tune to my thoughts. No one will come looking for me until at least four o’clock. I can just lie here and do nothing at all.

  3.

  Thought Diary: ‘Wakey-wakey eggs ’n’ bakey.’

  I wake with a jolt in the early hours. I’ve slept through the evening and the whole night too. I think for a minute that no one even missed me, but someone must have because I’m covered in a blanket. The worried feeling is there again, but today it only hovers, like an unsure guest. What gets me out of bed is the thought of Joe.

  The house is silent as I creep downstairs, making a little jump past the door to Sam’s room. The kitchen is temptingly warm, but I’m not hungry yet. I shove two croissants into a brown paper bag and let myself out into the cold morning.

  I like this empty time. The air is fresh, the sky streaked with the new morning, and despite what happened yesterday, I head for the beach. It’s my thinking place and no nutcase will keep me away. All the same, I go a different way and walk right along the shoreline, just in case.

  The air is full of seagulls squabbling over the tide’s edge, snatching bits of dead fish and jumping into the wind to escape with them. There’s a family out early with a brown puppy, a little girl screaming and laughing at the dog as it dares the breakers. Usually, I hate happy families, but today I smile. Perhaps this is progress; something to tell the Shrink Woman to shut her up.

  I leave them behind and walk until I’m halfway to The Mansion, then stop to look out across the grey water. It’s because the wind is in my ears and my mind’s far away that I don’t hear the scrunch of feet until they’re right behind me. I whirl round, remembering the red-headed man, slipping on the loose stones in panic. For a moment I think perhaps it’s Joe, but it’s not. I glimpse a dark coat and long hair and recognise him – the tramp with the pale face who saved me from the shouter. I turn back, heart thumping, waiting for him to go past, but he doesn’t. Instead he comes over to me and sits down right at my feet.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, but I don’t answer. I can feel him there and worse – I can smell him. It’s the stink that alcohol makes when people take it like food until it oozes out of their pores. A smell that makes me feel sick and afraid.

  Just down towards the water is a little pyramid of stones someone has left, and the man starts to pick up pebbles and lob them at it: chunk, chunk, chunk.

  ‘I wanted to say sorry,’ he says, ‘for what happened with Alec. He’s a mad bugger, but he shouldn’a done that. I notice people who come around and I see you lots, walking on your own. I told him to lay off.’

  Maybe it’s his voice, which is unexpectedly calm and gentle, but instead of walking away, I answer him as if he’s just a regular person.

  ‘Why do you notice?’ I say. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’

  He throws more pebbles. I can see his hand sticking out of a black coat sleeve – long, knotty fingers, dirty with an oily grime. Across his knuckles is tattooed ‘Lilyn’.

  I already know the answer to my question. Of course he doesn’t have anything better to do, because he’s a tramp; an alky that soaks himself in booze until he can’t stand up. He probably makes someone else’s life a misery too, unless he’s done the decent thing and disappeared. He stays quiet and I feel awkward, as if he can hear my thoughts.

  ‘Why are you always down here then?’ he asks. ‘Don’t you go to school? You gotta get an education.’

  I feel like laughing. ‘An education? Like you I suppose?’

  He doesn’t answer, just sends a big, grey stone crashing into the pyramid, tipping it sideways.

  ‘I do go,’ I find myself saying, ‘but I’m allowed leeway.’ I use that word a lot – leeway. It’s what the headmaster said. It means I’m allowed to do things other people can’t, because I lost my brother in difficult circumstances. Stupid words – like we got separated in a storm
or something – when Sam was the difficult circumstances.

  ‘They don’t want me to freak out,’ I say, ‘or do something weird – like I am right now, talking to some… tramp.’

  I look at him to see whether he minds what I said, but he’s smiling at me. He’s waiting for the answer to a question I didn’t hear him ask.

  ‘I said, do you want what’s in that bag?’ he repeats. ‘’Cos if not, I’ll have it.’

  He grabs the bag when I hold it out and folds a croissant into his mouth in one go, chewing it up while staring out across the grey water. I take the chance to have a good look at him. He’d have an okay face if it wasn’t so tired looking. It’s criss-crossed with little cuts, all bright red on the white skin, as if someone’s cleaned round them. His hair would be a reddish brown if he washed it, but now it’s greasy and hangs in long waves to his collar. His eyes, despite being weary and watery, have green flecks running through them, like gemstones. I guess he’s about thirty – a grown man – and suddenly that worries me. I glance around and see we are alone. I shouldn’t be here.

  He’s finished the croissant and is rolling a little cigarette with one hand.

  ‘I like it down here,’ he says. ‘It’s quiet – know what I mean?’

  I do, but don’t answer, keeping my eyes instead on a big gull which struts up and down, eager for crumbs, its legs doing a nervous dance closer and closer. I step towards it and it takes off, only to drop down again not far off, waiting. I watch it for a moment then turn back. ‘I have to go,’ I say, and start to walk before stopping again. ‘But thanks for keeping that man off me.’

  He doesn’t answer. He’s lying back now, eyes shut, one arm across his forehead blocking out the light. The cigarette has dropped from his fingers. He’s sleeping.

  4.

  Thought Diary: ‘A whole lot of nothing.’ Me.

  I feel rude for leaving him. He might wake up and wonder where I am, but I can’t just stay and watch him sleep. I walk away and think of him still lying there, long eyelashes on his cheek, snoozing as if he was on cushions. It’s not till I reach the promenade that I remember the other one – his mad mate – and then as if my thoughts have conjured him, he appears, weaving across the path towards me. He comes right up and stands there, nose to nose, almost touching. He stinks, and his lips are outlined with a grey scum which flies out as he speaks. I keep my mouth closed.

  ‘I told you,’ he says. ‘Gotta message for you – stay away! Don’t wanta see you.’

  I’d love to go, really I would, but he doesn’t move. The rank smell from his clothes is disgusting. I can’t hold my breath for ever.

  ‘I know what you want,’ he tells me. ‘But you can’t touch me – I’m telling you.’

  His hands come up close to my face so the black nails are in front of my eyes. I could tell him right now if he’d listen – the last thing I want to do is touch him!

  His mouth curls open again and he spits at me, ‘Get!’

  I don’t need to be told twice. Pushing sideways, I dart away from him and walk fast, refusing to run. When I glance back he’s still there, unmoving. I let my breath out in a long sigh.

  I go to school on Monday. I wasn’t going to, but I do. Maybe it was the idea of seeing Joe – that he might be thinking the same and turn up too – but from the moment I woke up I felt sure I could do it.

  Dad says nothing when he sees me in my uniform. Maybe he doesn’t want to break the spell. He looks crumpled and hopeful, searching for something in my face. ‘You look nice,’ he says. ‘Have a good day.’ His eyes blink rapidly and the side of his thumb is bitten down. I have a sudden vision of him from long ago when his hair was longer and his smile was like a lightning flash. He’d juggle eggs before cracking them into the frying pan, never dropping a single one.

  I nod at him. ‘I’ll try.’

  I missed weeks of school after Sam died, and then there was the summer break. Since then it’s been hard to feel part of things. It’s like a roundabout you jump off when you’re little, that’s spinning too fast for you to get back on. There’s a sense of not knowing what’s changed, what happened while you were away.

  I walk to school on my own, joining the clumps of other students heading the same way, and it doesn’t take me long to wish I hadn’t bothered. Not a single person talks to me and I’m so far behind in lessons it’s embarrassing. The nervous feeling coils in my stomach but I sit still through three lessons, and then it’s lunchtime. I find Joe in the canteen. He’s sitting alone, but when he sees me the expression on his face brightens and he waves me over. I sit and watch him eat chips – dropping them into his mouth so they don’t touch the sides and sipping his Coke soundlessly. Neither of us speaks, but it doesn’t seem to matter, and gradually the scared feeling dies down.

  ‘Not eating lunch?’ he asks me suddenly, and I shake my head.

  ‘You ought to,’ he tells me, and I say I will – next time. He shrugs and nods, chewing as if he has something important to say and the food’s in his way. I wait while he swallows the last chip and gets up, slipping his bag over one shoulder.

  ‘I think,’ says Joe, ‘that we were meant to meet. That you and I will make things happen.’

  I look at him, and a shiver goes through me. ‘Hope so,’ I say.

  Joe smiles. ‘Ready for the afternoon?’ he asks me, and I think I am.

  I make it through to Friday, including a meeting with my History teacher, Mrs Rutland, who’s worried about me. She’s a tall woman with joints as knotty as balls of rope and legs so thin you think they’ll snap if she runs on them. The grapevine says her husband left her for someone else, and her eyes have that look about them that says she’s only holding things together by the fingernails. I know that look from my own mirror.

  Because she seems to care, I talk about coursework and catching up, but it’s a relief when I see Joe waiting outside the window and she lets me go. He comes all the way to the bottom of my road again and then goes off, his flash of blonde hair bobbing up and down like a buoy on the ocean.

  ‘Log on,’ he calls after me. ‘Give me fifteen minutes.’

  I watch until he disappears and then run to the top of the road, not even noticing the slope. The sky is a whiteness that seems to suck me upwards as if a lid’s been taken off the world. I take a huge gulp of it and hurry indoors, skipping past the inner shop door where Mum’s talking to a customer. I dash upstairs, turn on the computer and wait:

  ‘Hey Coo’

  ‘Hey Joe’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘It’s going good, at least since I met you.’

  ‘It’s the same for me. I really like you.’

  ‘Want to go out sometime?’

  ‘Sure yes. That would be great.’

  ‘Why don’t we just get married now?’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  Well, that’s how the conversation goes in my head. Stupid, I know, and sure enough, I wait for half an hour and he doesn’t log on. People never do what they say they will. In the end I shut down and go for dinner – sausages, onion gravy and a chocolate pudding that sticks to my mouth and still tastes afterwards.

  ‘I’m glad you came straight back,’ Mum says. ‘There are some nasty things happening. I don’t think you should wander about alone just now, especially after dark.’

  ‘Why?’ I say. ‘What things?’ But she says nothing, just clears the plates, while Dad finishes the pudding, glancing up after every mouthful to smile at me. I don’t know why it annoys me but it does, so I tell them I’m going upstairs to do my homework. Dad’s face falls. I wish I knew what he wants me to do – smile back? Climb on his lap and ask for a cuddle? Sometimes I wish I could, but tonight’s not one of them. I go up and take out my books, but I can’t face it. Instead I just sit, thinking about ‘nasty things’ as if we haven’t all seen enough of those to last a lifetime. In the end I give up and go to bed, lying awake for what seems like half the night listening to the muffled sounds from downstairs and
outside. It’s always like this.

  In the morning, when I turn the computer on for a quick check before I leave, there’s a message for me after all:

  JoeSteen says:

  Hi. It’s midnight – cdnt get on b4. U there?’

  JoeSteen says:

  Guess not. Sorry

  JoeSteen says:

  See you 2morrow?

  It’s nothing much, but it shows he didn’t forget. I feel a surge of energy and when I reach the kitchen, I’m smiling. ‘See you tomorrow?’ he said, and that meant today.

  5.

  Thought Diary: ‘Clinical Psychologists aim to reduce psychological distress and enhance psychological well-being. They deal with mental and physical health problems including anxiety, depression, addiction and relationship problems.’ From the Cardwell Clinic welcome pack. I think that covers everything!

  Thanks to Joe’s message it’s the first weekend for ages I haven’t wanted to be somewhere else, but after breakfast Dad bursts the bubble. It’s my day to see the psychologist and I’ve forgotten.

  ‘It’s on the wall diary,’ Dad says. ‘I couldn’t make it easier for you.’

  He could make it easier by cancelling the whole thing, but I don’t say so. I send Joe a text saying ‘have 2 go out. Maybe later’ then trail upstairs and get the Thought Diary from under my bed – where the most recent things I’ve written look so completely stupid she’s bound to know I haven’t been keeping it properly. I call her the ‘Shrink Woman’ because that sounds less scary; less like I’m actually crazy. She’s meant to help me deal with how I feel about Sam dying, but it’s a waste of time.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket as I go downstairs. It’s Joe. ‘Let go of the past – the fall is not as far as you think.’

  For a moment I wonder how he knows where I’m going, but he can’t of course. He’s just a bit mad, like me.

  ‘Good to see you smiling,’ Dad says as we drive away, so I wipe the smile off in case he thinks I’m happy.