It’s six weeks after the holiday, and we’re up in his bedroom with the door shut and his latest Manic Street Preachers album blaring out.
I’m lying on the bed watching Jay.
He’s started straightening his hair over the last week or so. He’s trying to make it look more like Richey from the Manics.
‘I think it looked OK curly,’ I offer from where I’m staring up at the old glow stars on his ceiling. Mum stuck them up there when he was a little boy, and despite Jay’s best efforts at scraping them off, they’re still there.
After he disappeared, I spent hours lying in there in the dark looking up at the little moon-shaped lights.
Stupid.
Like a load of stick-on planets could give me any answers.
Jay pulls the irons down over a section of his fringe until it flops against his pale forehead, dead black and straight. He’s started to dye his hair too. The dark-brown curls that turned coppery-red in the sun have been replaced by this dead black gloss, the colour of the old vinyl LPs that he collects at record fairs and sometimes plays on an ancient record player of Dad’s. He’s wearing tight black jeans, grey plimsolls and a black long-sleeved top.
‘Who asked you?’ he says.
The tone of his voice catches me by surprise.
I sit upright and stare at him in the mirror.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I just liked your hair the way it was. But it’s cool now too.’
Jay nods, unsmiling.
‘How’s it going at school, Liles?’ he says, and I blather on in that twelve-year-old way about homework and teachers and two girls who are trying to bully me, and he makes ‘hmm’ noises from time to time, but I get the strangest feeling that he’s just going through the motions. As if deep within him something’s been switched off.
‘Well, let me know if you want me to come in and beat anyone up,’ he says, like he always does. But this time it doesn’t seem like so much of a joke.
I get up and make for the door.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I will. How are things at school with you?’
Jay catches my eye in the mirror and then looks away.
‘Most of them act like idiots,’ is all he says, but I pick up on some hurt in his voice.
As I close the door, he whacks up the volume on his stereo and then starts to apply black eyeliner around the insides of his eyelids ready for band practice later.
I stand outside his bedroom door for a moment, feeling at a loss as to what to do next. I put my hand on the door handle as if to go back in, because I’d rather spend more time with Jay than talk to Dad about big cats for the rest of the evening, but something about the rawness of the music makes me stop.
It’s the first time I feel it.
It’s only a brief flash, but it cuts through all my childish thoughts and touches something deeper inside that throbs with shock, like a tongue running over a tooth that needs a filling.
It’s loss, mixed with pain.
I shake my head to rid myself of the feeling.
I close myself up in my bedroom and write an English essay, but my heart’s not really in it.
Jay’s music stops at eight and he thunders downstairs and off to band rehearsal.
I watch him from behind my curtains.
His lanky, hunched figure walks with purpose down the road. He tosses his hair back every now and then before he becomes a little stick in the distance, but I watch for as long as I can.
Even after he’s gone, I carry on staring down the street for a long time.
The house feels like the warmth’s gone out of it when Jay’s not around.
I go downstairs with a sigh and spend the evening talking to Dad, but I can’t stop looking at the clock.
‘Are you late for something?’ says Dad. ‘Because as far as I can remember, you’re twelve, which means that the only thing left for you to do tonight is take a bath and go to bed. Right?’
In those days I hadn’t yet come up with my Lilah-isms, so I just give him a mock-glare and then slope off upstairs.
Parents think they’re so funny with all the sarcasm stuff. As if they know everything in the world and they’ve got it all sorted out, and there’s nothing that could ever happen that would shock or throw them off course, because they’d just carry on being those wise old parents.
But even they couldn’t stop the bomb from going off in our house.
CHAPTER TEN
Sometimes I hate Jay for making me like this.
I don’t want to go to school today. If I see Adam Carter, I still flush with embarrassment and guilt. He’s always been really nice to me, and what do I do? I come over like some mad psycho-witch from hell. Groo.
I feel really bad about upsetting everyone. But I can’t seem to stop.
School’s a bit of a nightmare.
Bindi seems distracted and not even all that interested in my problems.
Adam gives me a nice smile, but I reckon it’s only a smile of pity, so I blush and turn away.
I get home to find Mum crying in the kitchen. Again.
Dad is in after tending to an injured lion, but he’s got his throat bitten in the process and spends most of the evening disinfecting the wound with a big wad of cotton wool, while Mum tells him for the fifteen-millionth time how working with lions isn’t really ideal if you want to live into happy old age and enjoy your pension.
‘Lazarus is just a big pussy cat, really,’ Dad says. This throws Mum into a state of violent agitation and she starts snapping and roaring and pacing up and down on the kitchen lino, a bit like Lazarus himself.
‘I can’t believe you just said that!’ she yells.
‘Well, at least I’m here for Lilah when she gets home from school,’ Dad fires back. ‘You’re supposed be part-time, but I haven’t noticed much difference. You’re still never around.’
‘Oh right,’ Mum snaps. ‘And I suppose you’ve never thought how difficult it is for me trying to entertain rooms full of kids when I’m so miserable that I’m starting to FRIGHTEN them now!’
They don’t take a lot of notice when I came in all fired up with rage and in a boy-hating mood to beat all boy-hating moods.
Then Dad storms off to the pub. It’s his once-weekly treat. He says it helps him let off steam about Jay.
Fine.
I don’t need them fussing over me, anyway.
I’m used to being ignored.
‘So, are you going to see him again?’ Bindi’s hissing from behind her hand.
It’s the next day and we’re in Biology.
There’s a diagram of a tapeworm on the whiteboard in front of us, and the teacher’s pointing at various segments of its revolting body with a stick, like she’s some weird white-coated orchestra conductor.
‘No I’m NOT,’ I hiss back. ‘And stop asking me! You’re doing my head in.’
Bindi stares at me with her mouth open. We never have ‘words’.
‘Lilah,’ the teacher is saying. ‘Perhaps, with your expert knowledge of tapeworms, you’d like to tell the class what I’m pointing at?’
The class titters at this.
I failed my last set of Biology exams after I drew a pair of glasses and a goofy grin on my tapeworm. The teachers were speechless when they marked it, apparently.
I got ten percent for that exam.
Big deal.
My brother’s missing. I don’t care that I graffitied all over a tapeworm.
What have tapeworms ever done for me?
‘I don’t give a crap, Miss,’ I say.
The class groans. There are some stares of disbelief.
Adam Carter’s avoiding my eye, but I see him shake his head from side to side, as if in slow motion.
‘I’ve had it with you, May,’ snaps the teacher. ‘You can stay in at break and help me clean up this classroom.’
I sink down in my chair and bury my head in my hands.
I wish I could stop getting in trouble.
I wish I could stop being a
ngry all the time.
It’s cost me my friendship with Adam Carter, and now it even looks like it could threaten my friendship with Bindi, judging by the surly expression on her pretty face.
Why did you have to go, Jay? I scream inside my head. Why?
I’m on a downwards spiral.
Even Dad can’t really control me any more.
‘I find it ironic,’ he says nearly every day. ‘I can tell a twenty-stone lion what to do, no problem. But can I tame my own fifteen-year-old-daughter?’
It’s what he calls a ‘rhetorical question’, so he’s not actually inviting answers, but Mum’s going to give him one, anyway.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Our daughter is out of control.’
And even I can’t argue with that.
Dad’s obviously been thinking a bit more about the issue of me being untameable, because the next morning he announces that we are going to have a weekly Taming Lilah session, and that the issue is not up for discussion.
Great.
He books me in for a session after school tomorrow. God knows what he’s going to do to me, but it’s bound to be something he uses on the lions at Morley Zoo.
I hope he’s not going to blow up my nose or throw me to the ground and leap on top of me.
Or shoot me.
Groo.
So I’m moping around on my own in the playground, watching a bunch of kids trying to kill each other and the dark rain clouds gathering over the high red roof of my school and all the white sheets on the washing lines of the houses that back onto our school fluttering and flipping over in the wind, and then Adam Carter’s there at my elbow, as if he was summoned by a magic lamp or something.
‘I’m busy,’ I say.
Talk about stupid comments. But I don’t want to talk to him right now.
‘No you’re not,’ he says in an even, calm way. He sits on the wall next to me. I get a whiff of his leather jacket and my heart flips in pain. ‘It’s break-time.’
‘It’s possible to be busy in your head, idiot,’ I say.
That’s true, in fact.
If I had an ‘engaged’ red light, like you get on train toilets, on the outside of my head, I’d switch it on right now.
I’ve been thinking about Jay.
Not the Jay who started to change, but the one who used to play with me when we were younger.
It’s like we were both these little paper men cut out of the same sheet or something.
His sense of humour was my sense of humour.
It was all so easy. We lived in this little world of our own making. Same toys, same games, same favourite foods, same words that made us splutter with laughter.
We’d spend hours recording tracks from the Top Forty and discussing them. Sometimes Jay would let me have a go on his guitar. He placed his fingers over mine on the strings, and helped me strum enough chords to be able to play ‘Mull of Kintyre’, an old song that always had us falling about in hysterics.
He smelled familiar. His room did too. Sweat and dirty plates and musty old copies of NME, his favourite music mag.
I can’t go in his bedroom too often now. Most of the smell’s gone, replaced by Mum’s cleaning fluids and the smell of fabric conditioner. She’s put the stack of NMEs inside the sliding yellow wardrobe, underneath his clothes.
When he went missing, Mum put his keys, wallet, passport, watch and iPod in a box, after the police had finished with them.
‘For when he comes back,’ she said.
I don’t look in the box. I don’t touch his stuff. I don’t often go into his room. I only polish the guitars from time to time but I can’t bear to stay in there for more than a few minutes.
The silence in there is unbearable. It grows and threatens to eat me if I stay too long.
I miss our chats.
I thought I’d always have him there to talk to.
I always thought that I’d go right through life with my big brother there to support me.
That’s what’s supposed to happen.
Isn’t it?
‘I’m sorry about the other night, Lilah,’ says Adam, still in an even tone.
I glance sideways.
It’s hard staying cross with him for long.
He smells so gorgeous. Looks pretty good, too. He’s in uniform, of course, but the tie’s done up loose like Pete Doherty or something, and his hair’s been gelled up at the front. Even in uniform he still looks like a rock star.
‘It was my fault,’ I say. ‘I guess I thought – oh crap, this is embarrassing – I guess I thought that maybe you wanted to be more than a friend. I can’t believe I’m saying this.’
I feel my face going hot, so I twist my head in the other direction and pretend to watch the third years trying to play tennis in a stiff wind. Green Slazenger balls are spinning all over the place.
One of them comes towards me, so I trap it underneath my shoe and make a great play of rolling it back and forth.
‘Oy!’ shouts a small girl with frizzy black hair on the other side of the netting. ‘Can we have our ball back, if it’s not TOO much trouble?’
Adam rescues it from underneath my foot and lobs it back at her.
Then he stands in front of me and glowers down at me with a very old look in his eyes.
‘I used to think about asking you out, yeah?’ he says. ‘But over the last year you’ve got really angry, and it freaks me out.’
I nod, and stare down at my black leather T-bar shoes. We all have to wear revolting girly shoes at this school. I feel about six.
‘Sorry,’ I say in a quiet voice.
‘It’s OK,’ says Adam. ‘I know why you’re angry, of course. It’s not your fault.’
I know he’s right. But I can’t stop the anger rising up. I can even feel bits of it now, even though he’s made me feel small and sad and stupid.
It just won’t go away.
The hideous day gets even worse. I’m just dragging my feet down the school corridor towards double Latin, and I see a nightmare vision coming towards me in the shape of my MOTHER in full clown costume and curly wig. She’s clutching a set of yellow juggling balls and a selection of cricket bats and hoops.
‘Oh, hello, darling!’ she says. ‘You’ll never guess who’s been asked to speak to the fourth years about careers in entertainment.’
‘No,’ I say, darting looks up and down the corridor to make sure none of my class are watching. ‘I couldn’t possibly guess.’
Mum scowls at my sarcasm, but then her face lights up again. Or at least, it tries to, underneath the big, sad, down-turned clown mouth that she’s spent all morning painting on.
‘I’m stepping in at short notice,’ she says. ‘They were supposed to be having a talk from the head of Film Studies at the local college, but he’s got a cold, so the head rang me up instead.’
‘Great,’ I say. ‘And now I must go, before I die of embarrassment.’
Oh, groo. Too late. Here’s Amelie Warner and her bunch of witch-mates all giggling and shoving past us like a big, wriggling monster with six heads.
I’d been feeling kind of guilty about shoving Amelie off her chair and I’d been rehearsing a grudging apology in my head, but when I see her horrible blonde curls bouncing around her pointy chin, and her eyes all lit up with spite, I feel a new surge of anger take hold of me.
‘Just ignore them,’ says Mum. ‘They’re jealous. Their parents probably wear grey suits and work as accountants.’
Sounds like bliss to me. I allow myself a big huffy sigh at this untouchable vision of normality. A vision I can only dream of.
Then I watch my mother the clown open the door into the classroom next to us, and listen to the children erupt in stunned laughter as she begins to flip the yellow balls in the air and shout out of her big, painted red mouth.
Is this hideous day ever going to end?
Adam walks me home after school.
‘So I guess we can stay mates, right?’ I say in a nervous voice.
> I’m trying hard not to upset him or be angry.
‘For now,’ says Adam. ‘See how things go, yeah?’
That’s kind of fair, so I stick out my hand in a businesslike way and he gives a snort of laughter and then shakes it.
‘Seriously, though, Lilah,’ he says. ‘Have you ever thought of seeing somebody?’
‘What – you mean a date?’ I say, confused.
Adam sighs.
‘I mean about your anger,’ he says. ‘There must be people who can help you.’
It’s my turn to sigh. In the weeks and months after Jay disappeared a whole army of do-gooding counsellors and therapists descended on our little house after my mum got it in her head that I was having some sort of breakdown, and despite their best efforts to make me talk and ‘let it all out’, I refused to speak to any of them.
‘No good,’ I say. ‘Been there, bought the T-shirt, worn the T-shirt, ripped it off and sent it to Oxfam.’
Adam gives another snort.
‘You’re mental, May,’ he says. ‘But I think that’s why I like you.’
I smile, but I’m thinking about what he said about getting help.
The thing is, I know that there’s only one thing that will help me stop being angry.
And that one thing just never seems to happen.
I need Jay to come home.
But even if he did . . . would he ever forgive me?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jay’s losing weight.
He says it’s because he’s not been bothering to eat anything much at band practice, and it’s true, when I once went to watch them rehearse, they spent the whole evening existing on cans of lager and a bag of red liquorice.
But Mum’s getting a bit worried about him.
‘He doesn’t talk to me any more,’ she says to me when we’re washing up together at the sink. ‘And when he does, it’s only in words of one syllable.’
I scrunch my tea towel into a glass and squeak it around inside until it’s smudge-free and shiny.
‘Maybe he’s just being a typical teenage boy?’ I offer. ‘And to be fair, Mum, you’re not exactly here very much, are you?’
The Taming of Lilah May Page 5
