Broken Soup

by Jenny Valentine

  I guess she didn’t know what to say either.

  I wouldn’t have listened if she had. Every sound was suddenly too loud for my ears and I couldn’t get my breathing right and I had this overwhelming need to be on my own in the dark, seeing and hearing nothing.

  Sonny came into the room with jam all over his hands and his face and his T-shirt. He started to use me like a jungle gym, like I was just more furniture.

  “Sorry,” Bee said, and she picked him up by his waist, twirled him around, and kissed the jam on his nose. “Go and find Papa.”

  I was numb all over.

  I left the negative behind and I took Jack home in an envelope. Mum was in bed, and if she heard us coming in she didn’t show it. I opened a tin of soup for Stroma and skipped the bath and read her the shortest book I could find. I promised I’d ask Mum to go and kiss her if she got up. Then I took my brother to my room, sat against the door so no one could get in, and I looked and I looked and I looked.

  I’ve thought about it a lot, how much Jack changed in the time after he died. Don’t ask me how, but he wasn’t himself anymore.

  So what if there were tons of school photos and team photos and brushed hair and smiling? None of them were the real him. Jack would never have let Mum get those photos out to show people. He’d have burned them if he could. They had fights over it. And his room was the same, but totally different, like a stage set of itself, like a piece in a museum, a fake boy’s room. I don’t think I ever saw his bed made when he was alive. He let plates and cups collect and fester on his desk for weeks. He stashed food under the bed and he smoked out of the window, even when the wind blew it straight back in so everything smelled of weed and old bananas and his socks, not air freshener and dust and the stopping of time.

  When I think of people like Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix or Marilyn Monroe, it seems the most famous thing they ever did was die young. They stopped being real people who took drugs or told lies or went to the bathroom or whatever. They became saints and geniuses overnight. They became whoever anybody wanted them to be.

  It was the same with Jack. He was a saint. We were just the living.

  I pictured Mum lying in her room, all absence and silence and skin and bone. This boy she was grieving for, this perfect boy who made her life worth living, who made her forget she had other kids to love—who was he exactly? She loved him and everything, obviously, but I don’t recall her worshipping him like that when he was alive. I remember her calling him a little shit and grounding him for borrowing out of her purse. I remember her yelling at him to get up in the morning and stop peeing in the houseplants.

  Even Jack would look bad if you compared him to his dead self. It was as if by losing him, Mum got him back, the son she wanted, the one she imagined having, before Jack was born and his personality got in the way.

  Looking at that picture, I realized there was something about it that was different from all the other ones plastered around the house. His hair didn’t look combed or overshiny. It looked thick and dark and messy, like it did every day. His skin looked like you could reach out and touch it. It was so detailed, the chicken pox scar on his brow bone, the flush on his cheeks, the way a smile could change his face completely if he meant it. There was a brightness about him. He was happy, not acting that way in front of a cheesy backdrop.

  It was off duty. It was real. It was the person I was missing.

  It was the Jackest picture of Jack I’d ever seen.

  Six

  There’s no need to go through all the ways I tried to make sense of my own brother’s face showing up like that. None of them worked, anyway. A stranger had given me something I’d never seen before that turned out to be mine. How was I supposed to feel? How could it be mine if I’d never seen it?

  If I had no idea something existed, how could I manage to drop it? I checked the lining of my coat, the insides of my bag, the pockets of everything, and I didn’t find anything else I’d never seen before.

  And this boy who gave it to me—I tried to remember what he looked like. Dark hair, dark eyes—I had a few details, but I couldn’t see him clearly. It was less than a month ago, but I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him again. Did he know what he was doing or was it a coincidence? Which of those was worse?

  I’m not a fan of coincidence and fate and all that. It makes me feel like there’s no point doing anything if you can’t change things, if you can’t be even a tiny bit in charge. Plus I realized that if there was coincidence, there was also anticoincidence, the thing that only just never happens by the skin of its teeth, and because you’re not expecting it you have no idea that it almost did.

  Everywhere I went I pictured him just leaving, disappearing around a corner or about to arrive, but only when I’d gone. It wasn’t a good feeling. It tied me up like a ball of string in a cartoon.

  I didn’t show anyone else in my family the picture, not Mum or Dad or Stroma. I kept it to myself, hid it in the dark far corner underneath my bed where I could reach for it at night and where nobody else ever bothered to go. It had found me so it was mine. That’s what I figured.

  Every so often, Mum had to go to the doctor to prove she was taking her medicine and not selling it on the black market. She must have cost the National Health Service a pile of money with all the pills she was on, so they probably needed to make sure she was worth it. I swear she had the wrong prescription because the only thing different about Mum since she’d started taking it was that she’d got thinner. The bones in her hands and face were clearer than they used to be.

  I had a list of questions for the doctors, like whether they knew Mum was bereaved and not overweight, and if she ever actually said a word to them because she was pretty much silent at home. I wanted to ask them what happened next, but they couldn’t talk to me because I was a minor and it was all a big secret.

  They didn’t know that I came with Mum every time because without me she wouldn’t even get there. It flew under their radar that I was the one making sure she arrived in one piece and behaved herself, not the other way around.

  The waiting room was jammed with bored kids and posters about sexually transmitted diseases. There were polite notices everywhere that said if you punched any of the receptionists you were in big trouble. This time Mum was sitting next to me with her eyes closed and her nose and mouth buried in a scarf. It wasn’t even cold. Stroma was doing her best to play with three bits of LEGO and a coverless book.

  When they called Mum’s name over the loudspeakers, she ignored it. I watched her trying to disappear inside her own clothes.

  Stroma said, “Mummy, that’s you,” and started pulling at her. The receptionists were watching.

  The doctor’s voice came on again: “Jane Clark to room five.”

  Stroma managed to pull Mum’s sleeve right over her hand, so her arm stayed somewhere inside her coat, lolling against her body, inert like the rest of her, hiding.

  “Come on, Mum,” I said, pulling her to her feet by her other hand. “You have to get up and see the doctor.”

  We looked ridiculous, we must have done. Two kids trying to force a grown woman to move. In the end, somebody muttered into a phone and a doctor came down to take Mum upstairs.

  “It’s not working,” I said to him. “Whatever you’re doing isn’t working!” And my voice got louder and angrier in the hush of the room. I sat back down and waited for people to stop staring. Stroma climbed onto my lap and put one arm around my neck. Part of me wanted to push her off and walk out. The other part kissed the top of her head and looked around.

  And that’s when I saw him, the boy. He was sitting on a bench opposite and to my left, in the corner, and he was watching us.

  Stroma must have felt me tense every muscle because she looked up at me and said, “What?”

  I shook my head and said, “Nothing,” but I didn’t take my eyes from him because I couldn’t. He was wearing a black top with the hood up. He didn’t move when I saw him. He didn’t flinch or
even blink. He didn’t look surprised. He smiled and I remembered the chip in his tooth. My face felt tight and clumsy, like someone else’s, so I didn’t smile back. I just rested my chin on Stroma’s head and kept on looking.

  I knew I had to ask him about Jack’s picture. I knew this was my chance. I was working out what to say when the woman at the desk called out, “Harper Greene? Harper Greene? Can you fill in this form, please?” And the boy stood up.

  At the same time, Mum came out, empty-faced, eyes dead ahead, and Stroma jumped off my lap. They headed for the door. I couldn’t let either of them cross the road without me.

  “It’s just your address,” the woman with the clipboard was saying to the boy. “You haven’t put one down.”

  He had an accent, American maybe. I hadn’t remembered that. “Market Road,” he said. “Number seventy-one.”

  And he looked straight at me when he said it.

  Market Road is not the sort of road you stroll down lightly if you’re a girl. I said that to Bee as soon as she started her “Go and meet this Harper Greene” campaign on me. I reminded her that most of the girls walking down there were working pretty hard to pay off their drug debts.

  She said, “Don’t walk, then. Go on your bike if it makes you feel better.”

  We were sitting under a tree in Regent’s Park, watching Sonny and Stroma fill a trash bag with chestnuts. Stroma liked being the oldest for once. She was ordering Sonny about like her life depended on it, doing quality control on his offerings, and he didn’t seem to mind one bit.

  I’d been talking about the photo. I’d been telling Bee some stuff about Jack. I said, “I just don’t get how it could show up like that out of nowhere. It’s like he’s trying to tell me something.” And I never thought I’d hear myself talk crap like that.

  “Maybe the boy knows, maybe he doesn’t. I just think you need to ask him.”

  “I’m not going,” I said. Bee shrugged and stared up through the leaves. “I mean it,” I said. “I’m not going.”

  “You’re chicken,” she said quietly, almost like she didn’t want me to hear. “You’re being a coward.”

  I said she was right. I said I was a coward, a sensible one. Isn’t that what you’re told to be when you’re growing up and you’re a girl? Don’t go to chat rooms, don’t go out alone, don’t trust anyone, don’t talk to strangers and don’t meet them, ever. I’d had it drummed into me so hard, safety, safety, supersafety, and I’d soaked it all up like a sponge. I hardly ever crossed a road unless the green man told me to. I didn’t sleep right if the door was unlocked or I knew there was a window open somewhere. I carried my keys, stuck out sharp between my knuckles, if I was out after dark—even if it was still daytime, even if it was just the walk home from school in winter. So why the hell would I send myself to that part of town to look for some strange boy I had no reason to trust?

  I told Bee about the time me and Stroma were walking down the canal. We came around the corner on an empty path and ahead of us was a man fishing. He was dressed like he’d seen too many war films, combat pants and dog tags and mirrored shades. He had a bare, bright white, too-bony chest and instantly I didn’t trust him. I got this picture of him in my head slicing open a fish with a big glinting knife. I grabbed Stroma’s hand and ran back the way we’d come, looking behind me to see if he was chasing us, dragging my poor sister through nettles and dog shit. And he wasn’t, poor guy; he didn’t do anything.

  “He was just fishing,” I said. “But I didn’t think so because I’m paranoid. That’s my point.”

  Bee listened and she said she got it, the whole stranger-danger thing. She said it was good to be careful. She also said there was a big difference between being careful and being shit-scared of everything. She said, “Being afraid all the time is no way to live. What’s it going to be? A bomb? A dark alley? Some boy who picked up a photo off the floor? Do you think you can stop bad things happening to you just by fearing them?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why are you bothering?” she said. We were quiet for a minute, then she said, “He’s not some fifty-year-old bloke pretending to be a teenage girl on the internet, Rowan.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But he still might be an ax-wielding maniac.”

  “Whatever,” Bee said. “He might also be a cool person. If you insist on never trusting all the people you haven’t met before just because you’ve never met them, your world’s going to be a very lonely place.”

  “I’ve got enough friends,” I said. “I’ve got loads.”

  Bee laughed and said that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. She changed the way she was sitting and turned to me. “How would you like to die?”

  I said I wouldn’t like to at all and she laughed and said I had to choose a way, I couldn’t say that.

  “How would you like to die?” I asked her.

  She said, “I want to fall out of an airplane,” and I said, “What? You’re joking! Why?”

  She said that she’d want to really know her time was up and there was no possibility of hope, so she could kind of throw herself at it and dive straight in. “Plus,” she said, “I’d be flying.”

  I stared at her with my mouth open. To be that brave, I thought.

  Bee said, “So, what about you?”

  I didn’t want to say now. I felt like a fool.

  “In my sleep, when I’m old. Nice and peaceful,” I said. “I thought everyone did.”

  “You surprise me, Rowan,” Bee said. “The shit you deal with. I think you’re way braver than that.”

  We sat under the tree and I thought about it. Mum and Dad moved us to a school because they thought it was better. They moved house to keep us safer. They gave us swimming lessons and cycle helmets and self-defense classes and a balanced diet. They paid our phone bills so we’d never run out of credit in a crisis. They promised us five grand on our twenty-first birthdays if we never smoked.

  And still one of us died.

  What can I say? Death is just one of those things that you can work out a thousand different ways of avoiding but you’re going to meet head-on regardless.

  I looked at the side of Bee’s beautiful face under the shadow of the leaves. I thought about the things she knew. I thought about how much better I felt just for knowing her. I thought about her and Carl and Sonny and their front door with the flowers outside. I thought it couldn’t hurt to be a little more like her. What was the point of being afraid of things before they happened? Why not wait till they were on top of you and then deal with them?

  “You’re right,” I said. “You’re always right.”

  “So do it,” Bee said. “What have you got to lose?”

  Which is how I found myself at half past four on a gray afternoon, getting rained on and looked at, cycling not too slow and not too quick, counting down doorways on Market Road. Bee was looking after Stroma.

  Seven

  Market Road was long and the buildings were fairly spaced out. There was a massive complex set well back from the road—six huge buildings with cheerful names like Ravenscar and Coldbrooke. I tried to look purposeful (but not businesslike) and I kept going. I was beginning to wonder if 71 even existed. And then I passed it. It was on a corner, a smashed-up, boarded-up, covered-in-bird-shit old pub. The signs had been painted out in black and the number 71 was daubed on the front door in white gloss. It didn’t look like anybody but the pigeons lived there. There was no way I was going in.

  I stopped at the curb a little way past and turned around. I was balancing my bike with one foot on the ground, looking for my mobile to call Bee and tell her it was a big nothing, when I saw the van parked outside the building, around the corner. It was an old ambulance with long double doors at the back and stripy curtains. The driver’s door was open onto the pavement and Harper Greene was sitting there, his seat pushed back, both feet up on the windshield. He was reading a book. For maybe ten seconds I stood quite still. His hair was cut so short you could see
the skin beneath, the shape of his skull. I liked his face. I could break it down and say his nose was straight and his eyes were brown and all that, but it wouldn’t work like his face worked, together all at once. Like Jack used to say when something good happened, you had to be there. I watched the slow movements of his breathing, his quick eyes scanning the page. I breathed in hard and I thought, What would Bee do?

  When I got off my bike and started pushing it toward him, he looked around and smiled like he’d been expecting me. Then he got up and disappeared over the back of his seat and opened the double doors at the back, as if that was the way you received guests in an old ambulance, like everyone knew that was the way you answered the door.

  We said hello at the same time. I wasn’t doing a great job of looking him in the eye.

  “I’m Harper,” he said.

  I nodded and said, “I know,” but I was supposed to say, “I’m Rowan,” so I did, when I finally realized.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and he put his hands in his pockets, I guess instead of shaking mine.

  “Is this where you live?” I said.

  “At the moment,” he said. “I move around.”

  “Market Road?” I said.

  And he laughed and said, “Yeah, very scenic, but the parking is free.”

  I asked him where he was from. He said, “New York. You?”

  “Around here,” I said. I pointed at the pub. “Who lives in there?”

  “Oh, no one,” he said. “I guess they moved out a while ago. It’s wrecked in there.”

  “I like your ambulance.”

  He smiled. “Me too.” He said he got it “from a guy” for hardly anything because the guy was going back to New Zealand and he wanted it to have a good home. It was strange, Harper talking about stuff while the thing I wanted him to talk about just waited.

  “Do you want to come in?” he said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I was still holding on to my handlebars. He asked me if I was worried about my bike. I shook my head. I said, “Why did you give it to me?”