Broken Soup

by Jenny Valentine

  I never knew what she found to talk about. I was right there and she hardly spoke to me.

  Home was quiet like a shrine too. Like the inside of a church, all hushed tones and low lighting and grave faces. There wasn’t any Jack noise anymore. No loud music, no shouting, no playing the drums on the kitchen table at breakfast, no nothing.

  My room had been a landing. When Stroma was born and we needed the space, Dad blocked it off with a new wall and stuck a door in it, but it was too cold for a baby so Stroma got my old room and I moved in. It was tiny, given that it was really just a turning space for somebody using the stairs. There was no radiator and the power came in on an extension from the kitchen, so I was usually cold and I could never lock my door.

  Jack’s room was on the same floor as Mum’s and Stroma’s, next to the bathroom. It had two windows and tall bookshelves and an old wooden desk. The walls were a warm gray color called Elephant’s Breath. It was the saddest place in the house—the living, breathing mother ship of everybody’s grief. If you thought you were getting over Jack and things were nearly back to normal, you’d only have to go in that room and you’d start missing him from the beginning all over again.

  Now and then that was just how I wanted to feel.

  Sometimes I’d put on some of his music. Sometimes I’d pick up his guitar, but I can still only play the first six notes of “Scarborough Fair” so that never lasted long. I don’t even like that song. Usually I’d stretch out on his bed and look at the sky through his windows. That night I sat with my back against the wall and my chin on my knees and I turned the negative over and over between my fingers. I thought about what Bee had said, about what I was going to do next.

  Nothing, I thought, and I aimed it into the garbage bin from where I was sitting and went back to thinking about my brother.

  I wasn’t sure if Stroma missed Jack, not really. She stuck him at the end of her prayers with Grandad Clark and Great-auntie Helen (who she’d met, like, twice), but I reckoned she forgot him almost as soon as he was gone. She hardly ever saw him anyway; maybe at breakfast when he wasn’t really awake, or in the car when he’d have headphones on and act like she wasn’t there. Jack did loads of nice stuff with Stroma, like taking her to the park or teaching her how to make paper airplanes, but I think she was too young to remember. She didn’t know him at all. I wonder how she added it up for herself, this stranger in her family dying and turning her family into strangers.

  It was me that had to tell Stroma because nobody else had done it. It was the morning after they told me. She had no idea Jack was dead. Everything around her was altered and she was trying so hard not to notice.

  She looked up at me and said, “What’s the matter with Mummy?” and I said she was sad.

  She asked me what Mum was sad about and I said, “Jack’s gone,” and Stroma carried on humming this little tune and pouring nothing out of a tiny china teapot.

  Then she said, “Where?” and I said I didn’t know. She picked up a cup and saucer and handed it to me. She said, “Blow on it, it’s really hot.”

  I said, “He’s dead, Stroma. He’s never coming back.”

  I could feel this weight, this downward pressure in my head, and I thought it was possible I could cave in or implode because I had just said that out loud.

  Stroma was quiet for a minute. Then she sighed, looked right at me, and said, “Can I have something to eat now? I’m starving.”

  And that was how it started, how I ended up looking after her.

  I went into the kitchen to make some toast and there wasn’t any bread, not even a crumb. I knocked on the door of Mum’s room and got some money and I took Stroma with me to the shop. And all the time I was putting stuff into the basket and working out what we could afford, and saying no to marshmallows, but yes to chocolate biscuits, and planning what we’d have for supper and then breakfast. I didn’t have time to lose it. I didn’t have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn’t have time to miss Jack. Stroma kept on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me, too.

  Four

  Believe it or not, school was one of my favorite places back then. Everywhere else seemed like hard work, so school was a distraction. I didn’t have to worry about where Stroma was. I didn’t have to handle Mum. I didn’t have to think about the obvious unless I wanted to.

  The gap Jack left at school got filled pretty quickly by someone else clever and good at running and a bit of a flirt. It was like a day off. Because of course that didn’t happen at home. There was no room for anything else. I sometimes thought that if Jack was looking down on us all, he’d be feeling majorly hassled, not free to enjoy the afterlife at all.

  I think Mum and Dad drove each other crazy with it in the end. They stopped talking altogether about three months before Dad moved out. There was this odd, loaded quiet around them. We kept out of their way.

  Maybe they split up because of Jack, because when they looked at each other they only saw him.

  Maybe they blamed one another for stuff.

  Maybe they were headed that way already. Maybe him dying kept them together a bit longer. I have no idea.

  When Dad finally came clean about leaving, he wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. He’d been staying on other people’s sofas for a while, pretending he was at the office, basically avoiding us. He shouldn’t have bothered to pluck up the courage to break old news. Even Stroma had worked that one out, aged five.

  He was gone a long time before he was gone, if you know what I mean. And when he left, things just got worse. Because then we had him to miss too.

  So, anyway, school was like a vacation, if you can imagine that.

  I don’t know how I’d overlooked Bee there before, because after that day she spoke to me she was the first face I saw in any crowd. It didn’t matter who I was with—I’d suddenly be aware that she was around. It was like a special light went on that made her easy to find.

  The thing is, once you start looking at Bee you almost have to tell yourself to stop. We aren’t so different on paper: same height, same coloring maybe, at a stretch. But Bee has something I don’t. Her skin and hair are different shades of the same honey. The way she holds herself is so precise and effortless and graceful I still wonder how she does it. And it isn’t just me who thinks that. I see other people watching her all the time, trying to work out how come they aren’t put together the same way Bee is.

  It was after school the next time I bumped into her. She acted all surprised, but I had this quiet feeling she’d been waiting for me. I had to pick up Stroma and Bee asked if we wanted to get an ice cream or something.

  We went to this place at the top of Chalk Farm Road that’s been there forever. They sell cones out of a window on the street or you can go in and have sundaes in tall glasses and scoops in a silver cup. Stroma sat on Bee’s lap, even though there were about thirty-nine free chairs. She was chatting away about some boy in her class called Carl Dean who’d cut a hole in his shirt on purpose, with scissors, because he needed that exact color for his collage. She was making us laugh without even trying.

  I’d been remembering the birthday party we had there, me and Jack, when he was nine and I was seven. I wondered about all the kids who’d come and where they were now, and if any of them remembered Jack or knew he was dead or even minded. I was wondering which chair he had sat on then, and if it was the one I was sitting on now.

  It was cool and quiet and empty in the shop. I saw a crowd from my class go past the window, yelling, dancing, drawing attention to themselves. Another day that would’ve been me, but right then I was glad to be hidden away at a marble table with a girl who said things I hadn’t heard ten times before. We finished off Stroma’s mint chocolate chip when she’d had enough. Bee tried to make an origami swan out of her napkin and failed. W
e looked at the pictures on the wall—signed photos of celebrities nobody’d ever heard of. When the waitress took Stroma off to get more free cookies, Bee asked me if I’d thought any more about the negative.

  I hadn’t, not at all. It took me a second just to work out what she was talking about. She seemed interested, so I said I was going to get it printed, just out of curiosity, to see what it was. I wanted to say the right thing so I could spend more time around her. I knew it would still be in Jack’s bin because I was the only one who did the garbage, Tuesday nights. And that was the only thing in his bin, anyway—we never used it. Still, I was thinking I’d just get another negative if that one had somehow disappeared. It’s not like she would ever know.

  After a bit she said, “If you want to print it I can help you. I know how to do that stuff.”

  It was nice the way she said it, not pushy, and she said I could bring Stroma. So I said OK.

  We went to her house later in the week. Bee lived with her dad and her little brother in a top-floor apartment on the Ferdinand Estate, with a playground out the front and a view across London. The walkway outside her front door was lined with geraniums and daisies. Bee’s dad was called Carl and he had overgrown pale hair and sunken cheeks. You just knew by looking at him that he played the guitar. Her brother was about two. He was wandering around with a Snoopy T-shirt and no pants, which cracked Stroma up straightaway. He had hair the same color as Carl’s, but all matted and curly.

  “I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said.

  “You don’t know much about me at all,” she said, smiling. “We just met.”

  We watched the chubby little back of him padding down the hall, Stroma close behind, fussing over him like a sheepdog.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Sonny.”

  Carl took Stroma and Sonny off to the kitchen to make jam tarts. Stroma couldn’t stop giggling. I thought her knees might buckle with the joy of it.

  Bee was taking things out of cupboards in the bathroom. She said it would be much quicker to scan the negative into Photoshop and get an image straight up on screen, but she didn’t have a scanner and anyway she printed photos in the bathtub because it was how Carl had taught her with all his equipment. She said the old-fashioned way was better because she liked the not knowing, the time things took to happen. The faucets were on and she had her head under the sink. She was talking to me about this thing called the Slow Movement, which seemed to mean baking your own bread instead of running out for it to the nearest shop, and making lunch take all day, and getting a boat and a train and another boat instead of flying because the journey is everything, not just a way of getting from one place to another. She was telling me this stuff I’d never considered and I hadn’t even taken my coat off, but I think I got most of it. Bee’s brain is as precise and quick and extraordinary as the rest of her, the way she has you look at things.

  There were books on the windowsill. While I was waiting around, I picked one up and started leafing through it. One of the photos inside was the first ever photo, Bee said. It was taken more than a hundred and fifty years ago by a Frenchman called Daguerre. She said in those days they had these huge plate cameras and everybody had to sit still for ages if they wanted their picture to come out. They had these special headrests that you clamped yourself into to have your portrait done or else you’d be nothing but a blur.

  The photo she showed me wasn’t a portrait, or not on purpose anyway. Daguerre had aimed his camera out of the window to take a picture of the street where he lived. It was a busy street in Paris, people everywhere, except in the photo nobody’s there, like ghosts in a mirror. The only two people in the picture, the only living things among all the ghosts, are a man having his shoes shined by a boy. Only they had stayed in one place long enough to become real.

  I loved that picture. I looked at them, the two blurry figures in the near distance, and I told myself that sometimes people get noticed and remembered and appreciated without doing anything heroic or extraordinary, without knowing anyone’s watching them at all.

  The stuff that Bee hauled out of various cupboards was a big sort of microscope, a red lightbulb, three trays like you’d plant seeds in, a flashlight, a pair of tongs, and a couple of black bottles. She was setting things out the whole time she was talking to me, laying the trays in the bath, pouring out stuff, screwing the shower head off the bath taps so it ran like a hose, swapping the red bulb for the one that hung bare in the ceiling. She pulled down the blind and closed the wooden shutters, dropping the bar down to keep them closed. Then she bolted the bathroom door and turned on the red light, which took all the color out of us and the room, apart from itself. Everything went soft around the edges and the whites of Bee’s eyes became the same colorless red as her hair and her lips and her skin.

  She said, “Where’s the negative?” and while I was getting it from my bag she put her hair up with two pencils. I handed it over and she slid it into the top of the big microscope, which she’d balanced on a piece of plywood over the sink. Then she flicked a switch and my negative, nobody’s negative, shone letter size onto a white board below.

  I should have recognized it then, but I didn’t.

  Bee was sizing it up, blocking bits out and squaring them off. “It’s so damaged,” she said. “We won’t get all the scratches out of it.”

  It was the only source of white light in the room. She was adjusting things, bringing the image in and out of focus so it waved, one minute hazy, the next sharp—like an apparition, like the ghost of a photo, or a photo of a ghost. I couldn’t stop looking at the eyes, like those plasma globes that spark inside with lightning when you touch them. Bee was all business, making noises to herself about the quality of the shot, the aperture, stuff that went straight over my head. She said she was going to do a strip test to work out the best exposure time and she started counting, “One, two, three, four—one, two, three, four,” four times altogether before she poured some of the liquid into the trays and put the paper into the first tray with her special tongs. The room stank, a sharp sour toxic smell my lungs didn’t want to let in.

  “Watch this,” Bee said, and the paper began to darken and cloud. “It’s only a slice of it, maybe a bit of cheek or chin.”

  She picked it up and dipped it in tray two, trailing it through the liquid again. “That’s the fixer,” she said. “That stops the photo from disappearing on you later.”

  I nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me. She unlocked the door and slipped out into the bright hallway for a moment. “Ten seconds,” she said on her way back in. “Ten seconds should do it.”

  The photo of the ghost came back and Bee counted to ten, and then the paper went into the developing tray again. I held my breath. I guess I counted to twenty before something started to appear. Bee was right about the waiting bit, the anticipation. My chest was tight and I was taking these quick shallow breaths because of the stench, and everything was focused on this white paper, about to change in the red light.

  When it happened, it happened way too fast.

  Suddenly there he was, looking straight up at us with his hand on his throat and his eyes shining and his mouth wide open in a laugh.

  Jack.

  The fluid lapped and rippled over his face as it moved in the tray. He looked like he was drowning in it. I was on my knees with my cheek on the cold edge of the bath. I wasn’t sure how I got there. I thought I was going to be sick. I was swallowing and swallowing and my mouth kept flooding with water.

  Bee picked my brother up with the tongs and slid him into the fixer. She didn’t say a word. Jack looked at me and laughed. He laughed until the fixer was done and while she held him under running water to wash the chemicals off. He laughed while she cleaned up around me and switched the lightbulbs back and opened the window.

  He laughed the whole time, pegged up on the clothesline, dripping into the bath.

  Five

  When Stroma was smaller, she used to try to see a
round the corners of things. Every time somebody read her The Story of Babar she’d stop at the page where his mother gets killed and tie herself in knots for a look at the face of the hunter who shot her. I never told her that you can’t see all the way around on a flat piece of paper, but she must have found out somehow because she stopped looking.

  I reminded myself of Stroma, holed up in Bee’s bathroom, searching Jack’s photo for things that weren’t there. His eyes were pale and glassy, the irises ringed with black, the pupils like pinpricks. They looked like mirrors in the gray of the print. I thought I might see something reflected in them, the way you see things in the back of a spoon or in someone else’s sunglasses, but there was nothing there of any use, only the shadow of my own face peering into the shine of the paper.

  Bee’s dad got me out of there in the end because Sonny needed a diaper and he really couldn’t wait any longer or things would get messy. Leaving the picture was like leaving a movie theater on a sunny day. I didn’t know what to do with my eyes because they weren’t looking at Jack anymore.

  Stroma grabbed me in the corridor and talked at a million miles an hour about how she’d rolled out pastry and used special cutters and put only half a spoon of jam in each one and did I want to see them cooking, did I, did I? But I didn’t.

  Bee gave me a glass of water and sat with me in the living room. She looked out of the window, hands in her lap, back dead straight, jaw held tight shut like she was forcing her teeth together. It must have been awkward for her.

  I said, “Do you know who that is?” and she nodded.

  I said, “How come? From pictures at school?” and she nodded again.