Broken Soup

by Jenny Valentine

  They disappeared to the kitchen and we stayed where we were, watching Sonny sleeping like he was TV.

  “He’s lovely,” I said.

  “He’s gorgeous.”

  I felt bad for moaning so much about Stroma, for making her sound like hard work. I thought, I bet Bee helps out loads and does it better than me and never complains about it. I said something about her being such a good person.

  “You’re just making stuff up,” she said. “What makes me better than you? What are you talking about?” She was laughing.

  “Well, you’re nice about everyone. You never complain.”

  “I just don’t do that out loud. You should be inside my head.”

  “Are you a monster in there?” I said.

  Bee looked dead serious. Funny serious. She narrowed her eyes. “You have no idea.”

  It cracked me up.

  “Was Jack a good person?” she said. “Do you mind me asking?”

  “I don’t mind at all. I like talking about him. You know that.”

  “OK, so was he a good person the way you say I am or whatever?”

  “He was the best person,” I said, and I did a really good job of smiling. “Everyone knew that. He was always helping someone out. Friends, that is, not Mum and Dad so much, I suppose, but he’d do anything for his friends.”

  “Who were his friends?” Bee asked.

  “Oh, there was Melly who lived down the road, and Pete and Oscar from your class, except Pete’s left now, hasn’t he? He hung out with them mostly.” Melly and Pete and Oscar, who tried their best but didn’t know what to say to me when Jack was gone. They didn’t have a clue.

  “I like Oscar,” Bee said. “He doesn’t say much, but when he does it’s funny.”

  “I miss him,” I said. “Jack, I mean.”

  “I know you do,” she said, sitting behind me, braiding my hair.

  Stroma and Carl made rice with broccoli and tomatoes and fish sticks, enough for everyone. Sonny woke up and clung to Carl and ate like a horse. After supper, Bee took him for a bath and Carl played the shape game with me and Stroma. You draw a random shape and the next person has to turn it into something with a different-colored felt-tip marker. Bee joined in, too, and Sonny, dripping and shiny from the bath, drew on his own legs and set Stroma off laughing again. Everyone was busy making a six-year-old happy, which made a change from it being just me.

  At seven thirty, Carl took Sonny to bed with a bottle and I read Stroma a story on the sofa. She curled herself up under the quilt, put her thumb in her mouth, and started playing with my hair like she used to do with Mum. After a bit I untangled myself and kissed her on the forehead.

  She said, “Can we stay here tomorrow as well?”

  Later, Bee and Carl and I were washing the dishes. We were humming the same tune and doing a kind of dance around each other just to get things done in the tiny kitchen. I didn’t know where anything went because there weren’t any cupboards. The battered wooden filing cabinet with the radio on top was the last place I expected them to keep plates and cups and saucepans. The cutlery lived in the top left of a chest of drawers, the same sort you put your underwear in. I think jam and honey and stuff went in the right. Whatever was left seemed to live on the table. It was much nicer than those kitchens with plastic cupboards lining the walls and a place for everything. It was much more fun than washing up at home.

  When it was as tidy as it was going to be, Carl said, “Time for some sugar,” and he started rolling a joint. Bee let her head drop back and said something to the ceiling about being the teenage daughter of a teenager.

  “You’re not having any,” Carl said.

  Bee said, “I know,” and I held my hands up in the air to say I wasn’t interested either.

  Jack used to smoke grass. Mum got cross because he’d stop finishing his sentences and eat everything in the house, but really she was relieved he was doing it at home and not in some bus shelter where she couldn’t find him. Dad thought she was way too easy on him. He said Jack’s room might as well be the bus shelter once all his friends found out you could smoke there, but that never really happened. Maybe once or twice when they were out.

  Anyway, Carl smoked and it stank up the kitchen, and then he started making a packed lunch for Stroma.

  I said, “I can do that tomorrow morning.”

  He looked at me. “You know what? It’s your night off. Go and watch a movie upstairs or something.”

  I asked if I could have a bath and Bee went to run me one. When I got there, she’d lit candles and used bubbles and suddenly I felt like Stroma must have done all evening: taken care of. “What would I do without you?” I said, and I really meant it.

  “What you’ve been doing,” Bee told me. “Getting on with it. It’s what we all do.”

  Stroma woke up in the night and forgot where she was. She climbed into my sleeping bag and then went straight back to sleep, leaving me with a few centimeters of space and a chance to watch the dawn.

  Jack used to sleep badly. When we were younger, he’d shake me awake and say, “It’s OK, Rowan, you had a bad dream. I’ll look after you.”

  I always knew it wasn’t me who’d been dreaming. I also knew he didn’t want to lose face, so I never said anything. I used to lie awake with him snoring in my bed too.

  The sky changed from dark to light so slowly I didn’t notice it happening and suddenly it was morning. Stroma stretched her little body out and opened her eyes, and that was it; she was wide awake and moving at the speed of sound, filling the place with her questions and her chitchat and her singing. I moved over into the warm space she’d left behind and closed my eyes, feeling that thing sleep does around the edges when you’re ready to fall back into it. I could hear Sonny burbling away to someone upstairs, the toilet flushing at the end of the hall, Stroma opening the sock drawer in the kitchen. Then I forced myself out of my sleeping bag and into my clothes and the making of breakfast.

  Carl said he could take Sonny to the babysitter’s and Stroma to school on his way to work, so I got to go with Bee, on time for once.

  “God, Carl’s cool,” I said while we were waiting for the bus.

  “You can say that again.” Bee smiled at me. “He’s very rare.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He works in a school in Hackney, two or three days a week. He hangs out with all the kids the teachers can’t deal with anymore. He’s their friend. He says he doesn’t like teachers either. The rest of the time he’s with Sonny.”

  We stood there for a bit, looking down the road at where the bus should be. “Where’s your mum?” I said, and I hoped she didn’t mind.

  Bee said, “Oh, she’s not part of it, really. She was young, like my age, when she had me. She’s been back a few times, but never for long. She gave Dad a lot of grief.”

  “What about Sonny?” I said. “He must miss her.”

  She shrugged. “No. He’s better off, I reckon.”

  I felt like I was prying. I said I was sorry.

  “I see my mum now and then,” Bee said. “She’s pretty wild. She’s like an artist’s model and a professional hippie, and right now she’s in Madrid, cooking macrobiotic food for this insane writer. She’s been there two years. I don’t mind.”

  She smiled at me, like she’d said this stuff a thousand times and she was bored of hearing it. “Don’t be sorry, because I’m not. Carl took me to India when I was nine. We lived in this community in Wales for a while. He taught me how to take pictures and grow vegetables, and he’s into homeopathy and he can speak Italian and…”

  “OK,” I said. “Sorry was so the wrong word. I’m not sorry.”

  Except I was, because I felt like never going home again.

  Nine

  Stroma and I were on our way to the little playground after school the next time I saw Harper. We had fish and chips and about forty-five packets of ketchup in a bag. It was a thing we did sometimes on a Friday to celebrate the end of the week. I wan
ted to invite Bee, but she was off somewhere with Sonny and Carl. And besides, I noticed Bee mainly ate tofu and salads and bean sprouts. I didn’t think supper out of greasy paper in a chill wind would be her thing.

  I saw the ambulance parked and I said, “Come on, Stroma, let’s go and see a friend of mine.”

  Harper wasn’t there. I picked Stroma up and we looked through the windows at the way he lived. The cupboards had doors that stayed shut and there were little lips on all the shelves so the cups didn’t fall out when you went around a corner. There was a book box with a clear front on it so you could read the spines without finding them strewn across the floor. There was a map tacked to the wall, and some photos. There was a pantry and a fridge and space to store pillows and blankets and clothes. Stuff had a double life. The backseat was a double bed (and so was the roof). The stove was a desk. The table came apart and slid in behind the driver.

  I know it like the back of my hand now, but I’ll never forget being outside with Stroma that time, looking in. It was as good as another world to both of us.

  When Harper came back, we were still standing there with our noses pressed against the glass. I was scared to get in because I thought I might not want to get out again. That was what Stroma did, climb in and jump out again, climb in and jump out. She picked dandelions and buttercups in the square, and Harper put them in an egg cup on the table. The whole place stank of fish and chips.

  “You moved,” I said.

  “For a couple of days,” he said. “Someone will be on the phone to complain by tomorrow.”

  He said the people around there were used to being so rich and powerful that they thought they could get anything done. He said he met this guy who worked on the council. They got a letter from the local residents complaining about the seagulls flying inland and making too much noise and crapping on their property. The council wrote back telling them to pool money together and buy a falcon.

  I said, “You know what? They probably did.”

  I asked him why he was in London when he could be anywhere. He said he wasn’t sure how far the ambulance would go, he hadn’t tried it out yet. “And anyway, I’m a tourist, remember?” he said. “I love London. Just because I could leave doesn’t mean I want to. I only just got here.”

  I asked him what was so great about it. I only knew my square mile. I only knew our schools, the park, the shops, our house, and the roads between, all dog shit and litter and bookies.

  “There’s so many people from somewhere else, so many languages spoken here every day. It’s exciting, isn’t it? It’s like traveling without going anywhere, the places you can get to in this city.”

  Harper said it wasn’t like New York City, which was drawn up into blocks and separate areas and a pretty tight operation. London was more like one big mass of everything different at once, all swirling together, all chaos.

  I was embarrassed by how uncurious and dull I was. It was ridiculous to live here and not even see it. I felt stupid for even asking.

  Stroma was breathing on the back windows and drawing shapes. Harper asked me if we wanted to go into town with him, see a few things. We could do it tomorrow, all day if we wanted, if we had nothing better to do on the weekend. Stroma squeaked and I looked over at her, and she’d written “yEs” in one of her clouds.

  We half snuck out the next morning, early. It was pretty stupid, if you think about it, asking permission to leave from someone who hardly noticed you were there. I left a note instead and we went outside as soon as we heard the engine. Harper was pulled up on the other side of the road, the curtains in the back of the van still closed, his smile the only visible thing in the gray light. He’d brought breakfast from the café where they sell apple crumble with the peel in. Stroma was going on like she always did about it tasting like fingernails. I sounded like a grown-up, going “Don’t be rude about a present,” or something, just like Dad would. I couldn’t believe this stuff was coming out of my mouth.

  Harper had a book called The Fields Beneath about how much London had spread out and filled up and changed since the days when it was a few fields and a signpost or whatever. It was on the passenger seat when I got in. He said you could see pieces of the past here wherever you looked, a past long enough to blow most New Yorkers away.

  “Like that house,” he said as we went past a building side-on to the main road, butted up against a pawn shop that used to be a tube station. “It’s facing the wrong way because that’s the way the train track used to go, when that house was all by itself, a day’s ride from the city, surrounded by land. There’s a shot of it in the book, and a drawing.”

  I turned around to watch it disappear, the house from another time that I’d never even noticed before. I thought, He’s been here five minutes and he knows more about where I live than I do.

  I was worried about what to say in the van. Usually, when it matters, I’m no good at talking. Stuff has to go through Customs before it’s allowed out of my mouth. I imagine saying my thing, and I imagine the response, and the whole conversation happens, locked away in my head, with no one actually saying a word. Harper didn’t have that problem. He didn’t have Customs. That boy asked so many questions and had so much to say, and he was just this wealth of facts and figures and crazy pieces of information. I wondered how the hell he remembered everything. I didn’t need to worry at all.

  We went to Trafalgar Square, St. Martin’s Church, and Chinatown. Places I’d seen so many times before without actually seeing them. Places I’d stared at while I was waiting for a bus, or slouched around at the back of the line on a school trip. Harper was so into everything he saw. He had Stroma on his shoulders and he was chatting with her about the buildings and the statues and the people they passed.

  We went to the National Gallery. We were in there for nearly two hours. Stroma had never been before. She didn’t want to leave.

  I felt like I’d been going around with my eyes closed.

  I got a text from Bee saying, WHERE R U??

  I sent one back that said, GOING ROUND THE WORLD WITH S AND HG.

  Her next one said, ILL MISS U so I answered, BACK BY BEDTIME XX.

  Harper asked me what I was laughing at and I told him. “Who’s Bee again?” he said.

  “My other new friend,” I answered. “You’ll like her.”

  On the way home we drove through a blossom storm near Russell Square. The street was long and gray and I didn’t notice the trees until the wind picked up. Suddenly there were petals everywhere, small, pale pink, and hurtling through the air. Harper had to put the windshield wipers on to see.

  Outside the apartments on Hampstead Road there was a group of kids we knew, all ages. Loads of the kids from Stroma’s school live there. She saw them first and hung out of the little side window, waving and shouting. I joined in and we laughed at the looks on their faces, us in a souped-up ambulance, cruising past.

  “The trouble with a city,” Harper said, pulling into a space outside our house, “is if you leave, it doesn’t miss you. You’re totally dispensable. It doesn’t even notice you’re gone.”

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I said. “Isn’t it better if things go along fine without you?”

  He smiled and said he’d never thought of it like that before.

  We climbed out of the van. Stroma was exhausted. It had started to rain. It didn’t look like anyone was at home, but that didn’t mean anything.

  “Will you be all right?” he said, and I wanted to say exactly how all right I was, thanks to him. But standing there in front of our dark, sad house I couldn’t make myself say much, so I just smiled and nodded.

  Stroma threw herself against his legs and said she had so much news now to write at school on Monday morning. He bent right down and kissed her on the top of the head, and then he looked at me and said, “See you.”

  God, please, yes, I thought, and I walked up the path and put my key in the door.

  We’d been in about ten minutes and Strom
a was playing in her room when Dad rang. “Rowan, where have you been all day?”

  I thought it was rich him putting it like that, like it was suddenly his business. “Out and about. It’s your day tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  He laughed in that way people laugh when something is just incomprehensible to them, like they’re never going to get it. He laughed and then he said, “Mrs. Hardwick phoned me at nine this morning to say she saw you getting in a bloody ambulance.” His voice got louder and louder while he was saying it. I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

  I said, “It’s not an ambulance, Dad, not a real one. It’s a friend’s van.”

  “Well, why didn’t you answer your mobile?” he said. “I called it five times.”

  I hadn’t heard it. I told him so.

  “Did Mum know where you were? Why does that woman never answer a bloody phone?”

  I wanted to say that Mum either slept all day because of her pills or had the TV on so loud she didn’t hear the phone. I wanted to say she hadn’t answered that thing in months however often it was ringing. I wanted to say she’d forgotten she even owned a mobile. I wanted to say she barely registered if we were there or not, but I didn’t want him putting the words unfit and mother together, so I just said, “Yes, she knew. Did you come around?”

  “No,” he said. “I was working. I had meetings.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “So nobody’s hurt, then?” he said.

  “No, Dad, we’re fine. We were just with a friend.”

  “Mrs. Hardwick said it was a man,” Dad said.

  “He’s eighteen, Dad.”

  “Have I met him?”

  “His name is Harper and no, you haven’t.”

  Dad began to let it go, saying he was sure if Mum approved, he’d approve, and then I said she approved, but now I had to go and help her with the dinner.

  “Can I have a word with her?” he said.