The Taming of Lilah May

by Vanessa Curtis

  I tried to play one once, but it made a noise like a dying cat when I switched it on and strummed a chord.

  Sometimes I come in and give them a good polish, just the way that Jay used to.

  It’s kind of my way of staying in touch with him.

  Wherever he is.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It’s Jay’s birthday. He’d be eighteen today if he was living at home. He might be eighteen somewhere else. If he’s still alive.

  I ask Mum if I can stay off school, because I know I’m not going to be able to concentrate on dull things like Maths and Science.

  ‘I don’t think so, Lilah,’ is all she says, but her voice is low and firm enough to have me sigh and stuff my schoolbooks into my bag.

  She doesn’t have any parties today, so she’s going to use the morning to write a letter to Jay instead.

  She wrote him one last birthday, too, and the one before that.

  She’s keeping them for when he comes home, so that she can show him how much he was missed.

  Dad’s working with the big cats today, but he’s coming home early to have lunch with Mum and support her because it’s the hardest day of the year for her, other than Christmas, which is pretty rubbish without Jay too, and the anniversary of the day he disappeared, which is probably the worst of all.

  When he first went missing, I did that thing you do when you come back from a really cool holiday and it’s a bit crap being back in the usual boring routine, so you think, This time last week, I was still on holiday doing x or y.

  This time two weeks ago I was still on holiday doing x or y.

  Except that I started to do the same thing about Jay.

  The day he went missing I thought, This time yesterday we were talking up in his bedroom.

  Well – arguing, more like. I try to not think about that last conversation too much.

  And even three weeks after he went missing, I was still doing it. This time a month ago he was still living with us, and everything was OK.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Not really.

  So I’m at school and in a foul mood.

  I don’t want to be here, and I can feel the familiar anger burning up in my throat and chest like acid.

  Bindi’s doing her best to cheer me up, but she’s a bit distant this morning and I don’t have the energy to ask her why, and I get told off in Maths for staring out of the window and watching the caretaker sweep the tennis courts and chewing my pen when I should be thinking about percentages.

  Here’s my take on percentages:

  I’m eighty percent angry and twenty percent miserable. And that’s on a good day.

  Dad is sixty percent miserable and forty percent OK.

  And Mum?

  She’s one hundred percent miserable.

  All the time.

  I didn’t get angry straight away.

  For the first year after Jay disappeared, I was so shocked that I crept around not speaking to anybody and lying awake at night.

  At school I stopped joining in with group activities and sat at the back of the class with my head lowered so that the teachers wouldn’t pick on me.

  That never works, right?

  I learned that the hard way.

  Teachers always pick on the people trying to hide at the back.

  I lost count of the number of times I’d flush bright red and not be able to answer a question.

  Bindi’s grades went up and up and mine went down the opposite way, until she was at the top of the class and I was at the very bottom.

  I didn’t mind, though.

  Bindi’s the only person who has really got me through the last two years.

  We’ve been friends forever.

  Well, OK, not forever, but it feels like it.

  I went round to her house the evening of the same day that Jay disappeared.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ she said. ‘He’s probably just gone to get a bit of breathing space.’

  Turns out she was wrong, of course. I mean, nobody needs to breathe away from their family for two years, do they? But I was glad that she said it.

  She’s nudging me right now.

  ‘What?’ I hiss back. The teacher is chalking up a load of complicated-looking symbols and shapes on the board.

  I hate Maths.

  My head doesn’t work that way.

  It doesn’t do neat angles and lines and boxes and worked-out answers.

  My head is a jumble of songs and clothes and animals and big red flashes of rage. All these things spin around in a random order. It can be quite tiring.

  Bindi’s brain works in a different way. She’s tidy and organised and has great powers of concentration, like one cat trying to outstare another. But now she’s not paying attention to the teacher, she’s waving a bit of paper at me.

  I snatch it and read it under my desk.

  Adam’s staring at you! it says, in her neat spider scrawl. Maybe you’ve still got a chance with him. Why don’t you ask him out on another date? Take your mind off things.

  I give my best sardonic snort at that.

  As if going out with Band Boy is going to suddenly take away all my problems.

  It’s not going to bring Mum’s smile back again, is it?

  It’s not going to get Dad to focus on me for a change, instead of worrying about his lions.

  And it’s not going to bring my brother home again.

  I might, I scribble. Cheers.

  But I’m way too embarrassed after what happened last time.

  Bindi gives a self-satisfied smirk and a nod, like she’s running a dating agency or something and has just nabbed a client. Then she turns her cat-eyes back towards the gibberish on the blackboard and picks up her calculator.

  When I get in, I expect to see both my parents in the kitchen, but Dad’s not there.

  Mum’s sitting in a pool of lamplight at the kitchen table, staring at a piece of paper. There’s a plate with two half-eaten cream crackers and a wedge of cheddar next to it and a half-drunk glass of red wine.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I ask. ‘I thought he was supposed to be here today. Because of – you know. . .’

  Mum looks up and gives me a wan smile. Her skin looks dry and tired and her blue eyes are small and watery. She’s still got traces of greasy red make-up around her eyes from yesterday, when she had to be a clown for a group of seven-year-olds.

  ‘Lazarus has injured his paw,’ she says. ‘Dad’ll be a while yet.’

  Lazarus is the biggest lion at Morley Zoo. Of course Dad gave him that weird biblical name. He’s obsessed.

  I sit down at the table with her and there’s an awkward silence, the sort we’ve had a lot of over the last two years.

  I look at Mum’s wrinkled hand on the table and I wonder if I should hold it, but we stopped doing all that sort of thing ages ago, and now the only contact I ever have with my parents is when Dad gives me a brief head-kiss in the mornings before he heads off to the zoo.

  ‘Did you do your letter?’ I ask instead.

  Stupid. I can see it there in front of her, complete with big blurry splodges where her tears have fallen.

  Mum nods. She pushes the piece of paper towards me.

  ‘You can read it if you like, love,’ she says.

  I shake my head in a panic.

  Mum’s written three of these letters since Jay went missing and I’ve not read a single one of them.

  That’s because, if I do, I’ll remember that him not being here is all my fault.

  Mum does her mind-reading thing.

  ‘I’ve told you over and over,’ she says. ‘But I’m going to tell you again. What happened was not your fault. OK? You did the right thing.’

  I give her a small smile because it’s what she wants to see, but deep down I know that it’s a lie.

  The flame of anger starts to lick and flicker at my insides.

  I want to kick something. Hard. Or do what I usually do when some well-meaning but annoying adult asks me how
I am, or tries to tell me that things aren’t my fault – go up to my bedroom, sit on the bed and bang the back of my head as hard as possible against the cold, white Artex wall until the anger just gets numbed away.

  I make an excuse and leave the table to write what I can’t say in my diary. I don’t want to upset Mum.

  Not today.

  I should have done the wrong thing instead. If I’d done the wrong thing, then maybe, just maybe . . . Jay might still be here.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It’s a hot summer’s evening in July a few years ago. I’m lying face down on top of a canal boat with my hands propping up my chin and the toes of my plimsolls drumming on the hot metal roof.

  Jay’s lying next to me on his stomach too. He’s just turned fifteen and discovered his passion for rock music. He’s wearing tiny earphones and nodding his head up and down to the beat.

  I’ve got a book but I’m bored with it.

  Mum and Dad have gone off to one of their millions of canal-side pubs for the evening and left us a picnic and a bottle of lager shandy each as a treat, but Jay’s just produced a bottle of cider from some hidden part of his luggage. So we’re taking turns swigging from the bottle, and the cider is giving me a pleasant muzzy sort of feeling in my head, until the sky seems bluer and more vivid and the air brushing over my cheeks smells gorgeous – newly-cut grass and warm, swampy canal water mixed with the distant smell of scampi and chips from the pub.

  I pull at his earphones.

  ‘Hey, Liles, cut it out,’ he says, but he’s giving me his lazy grin from underneath his dark mop of hair.

  When Mum and Dad go out, it’s as if we enter our own little world. They go out a lot because of their weird jobs that take them out at strange times of the day and night, so often it’s just Jay and me. Sometimes we don’t speak, we do our own thing, but it’s kind of a safe feeling knowing he’s there next to me.

  Tonight I want to chat, though.

  I pull harder at his earphones, until he takes them out himself with a resigned sigh and flips over onto his back, staring up at the clouds.

  ‘I’m knackered,’ he says. ‘All those bloody locks. Why can’t the Old Dudes pick a canal without any?’

  ‘I don’t think there are many without locks,’ I say. ‘We could suggest a river next time.’

  Mum and Dad have us leaping onto the banks of the canal all day, running towards locks with big keys and pumping like fury at the gates until the water goes up or down and we can cruise into the lock for the long boring wait to get out the other side. By which time, we’ve had to leap off the boat yet again to swing open the heavy gates and let the boat through.

  There’s usually some sort of crisis.

  This morning, I held the boat too tight in the lock and forgot to unwind the rope when the water drained down, so that the entire boat was suspended in mid-air like some weird, water-skimming aeroplane, and then when I let go of the rope in a panic, the boat smacked down onto the water and all the china in the kitchen slithered off the shelves and smashed on the floor.

  The day before, a cow put its front legs on the boat and then got in a right state when it couldn’t get them off again.

  The day before that, we woke up to find that the boat had come loose from its moorings in the night and we’d drifted about a mile upstream and into the path of several oncoming boats.

  But it’s kind of fun. Mum screams and Dad tries to calm her down and we leap on and off the boat like demented frogs and eat a lot of chicken sandwiches and all in all, it’s just being a normal mad happy family.

  Except that we don’t usually get this much attention from Mum and Dad.

  Most of the time we’re left to amuse ourselves.

  It takes a holiday on a boat to kind of weld us together again.

  Jay’s flipped back over onto his front now and is observing me over the top of his shades.

  ‘You’re growing up, Liles,’ he says.

  I flush.

  I’m still only twelve and haven’t started wearing make-up and piercings yet. My hair’s scraped back into a ponytail and my skin’s all fresh and freckled and young-looking.

  But I’ve had to go shopping for a first bra which is kind of embarrassing, and I don’t really want to talk about my sore chest with Jay, so I look up at the bridge and point at a couple who are there snogging, oblivious to the world.

  ‘Do you do that?’ I say.

  Jay glances up at the bridge and laughs, but doesn’t answer.

  Sometimes I think that there’s a secret, dark place growing bigger in my brother, where a load of things go on that little sisters don’t understand. Yeah, sure, he tells me things that he doesn’t tell Mum and Dad, but sometimes he seems vague and shy.

  ‘Yuk,’ I say. ‘I am never going to kiss a boy EVER.’

  Jay gives me a sideways look.

  ‘You’ll have them queuing up for you in a few years, Liles,’ he says.

  I make a face, and then whack him over the head with a cushion until he surrenders and goes down into the cabin to get our picnic.

  The next day I have this weird, out-of-body-type experience.

  We’ve been cruising down the canal all day, and now we’ve moored up and decided to eat inside tonight as there’s a cold wind.

  Mum’s laid the tiny table that gets folded away at night to make way for our beds.

  There’s loads of good food – cold hard-boiled eggs, green salad, fresh, soft white rolls and a home-made chicken and ham pie from a shop we found earlier in the day.

  Jay’s already picking at a bowl of crisps, even though Mum’s trying to slap his hands away from it.

  ‘Why do teenage boys get so hungry?’ she says, but she’s smiling.

  We eat all the food, and then Dad draws the dark-red curtains in the tiny windows and puts on the lamps, and we sit round the table and play a very long and argumentative game of Scrabble. Jay’s laughing his head off at Mum’s pathetic attempts to come up with words that nobody’s ever heard of, and it’s as if one minute I’m there, part of it all, and the next I’ve floated up towards the low ceiling and I’m looking down at the four of us sitting below. I can see the parting in Mum’s hair and the remnants of powdery grey dry shampoo on Dad’s, the dark curls that smother Jay’s head and the smoother, shinier hair on top of my own.

  It’s such a clear vision of a family. A happy family unit.

  Unbreakable. Or so I thought

  ‘I’m going to remember this,’ I say, somewhere inside my head. ‘Some day when I’m not so happy.’

  I thought then that maybe I’d be a grey old lady when I remembered the scene on the boat.

  How wrong can you be?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sometimes I wish I’d been born a boy. Jay got away with just about everything when he was fifteen and still lived at home. He came in when he wanted, stayed out late, drank beer up in his bedroom, had his mates round for parties when Mum and Dad went away, rolled out of bed in the morning and straight into jeans and T-shirt before heading out at the weekend to chill with his band.

  I’m not allowed to do any of that. I’m fifteen now, but the way Mum and Dad go on at me, you’d think I was about twelve. I’m not allowed to go out after dinner unless Mum has phoned the parents of whichever friend I’m visiting and checked that I’m not lying. I’m not allowed to have anybody over for sleepovers because Mum says her nerves are too fragile, and she can’t cope with being deprived of her beauty sleep by our late-night chattering if she’s got to pull bunnies out of hats for a children’s party the next day.

  I’m expected to do all my own washing too. Bindi thinks that is hilarious. Reeta does all the family’s washing, and cooks, cleans and runs about after them, and still seems pretty happy. My mum goes on and on about how she spends too much time in the kitchen. ‘I wasn’t actually born at the kitchen sink, you know,’ she says.

  I don’t answer. I’d only be rude, and I’m fed up of being angry and rude all the time, but the thi
ng is, I can’t seem to stop it. How do you stop being angry deep inside? I reckon I’ll never stop.

  Not until Jay comes home again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It’s after the boat holiday that Jay starts to change.

  It’s only little things at first.

  I don’t even really take much notice of them.

  He’s a bit more distant, like he’s thinking about something he loved and lost. If I say something to him, it takes him a moment to focus on me before he can give me an answer. The old Jay was really quick and snappy and would throw a clever reply straight back.

  He starts wearing more black and throws out all his old blue and white rugby shirts and khaki shorts that he used to wear when he was younger.

  He stops taking showers.

  He spends more and more time up in his bedroom, instead of chatting and strumming his guitar downstairs at the kitchen table like he used to, leaning back on the wooden chair, his curls dropping over his sharp, clever face and his foot tapping up and down on the kitchen lino.

  ‘I never thought I’d say this,’ says Mum, ‘but I quite miss Jay playing his guitar in the kitchen.’

  We laugh about it because it’s all just normal adolescent stuff, we reckon.

  He’s a teenage boy, after all, and loads of girls at my school have brothers who are way weirder than Jay. Bindi’s cousin is sixteen and obsessed with fish. He wants to be a marine biologist when he leaves school. Her aunt doesn’t much care. Her main priority is to get him married off to a nice Indian girl so that she can have some grandchildren to spoil and cook for.

  If I look back now at how Jay was then, I can almost chart the journey towards what happened, but at the time I just went along with whatever he did because I was his Liles, his baby sister, and I kind of adored him . . . when he wasn’t pissing me off, as brothers do.

  Later on, that boat holiday took on a sort of sad orange glow, as if it was the last time any of us were truly happy, as if we had been living in a protective bubble, and some big god with a sharp pin was hovering right above us, about to plunge it in.