“No,” he said, smiling back.
“Smoke signals and surprise sightings it is, then,” I said. “But let me just talk shit to Bee’s dad for Stroma.”
Carl didn’t mind me phoning. He said Bee was out somewhere and Sonny was having a sleep and he’d love to have Stroma.
I asked him if he was sure. I said I felt bad for asking.
“You’ve got to have a life too, right?” he said.
We dropped Stroma off in the van. She jumped out and I watched her little legs running up the stairs to the top floor, the bendy backs of her knees. I remembered Jack telling me there was no official word for that part of the body. I hadn’t ever questioned if he was right.
Eleven
It was different being alone with Harper. I looked at him and I knew when he was looking at me, but we never quite timed it right. It felt awkward for a minute, like we weren’t supposed to be looking. We left the ambulance in Bee’s street and walked down the canal, through and away from the market. The rain had started. It was tiny and fine and more just in the air than falling, like the inside of a cloud.
Harper asked me where I would be if I could be anywhere, right now. I didn’t know what to say. I was very, very happy where I was, thank you.
He said how about a campsite in the south of France. “Wouldn’t that be great?” he said. “Just to park and swim in the sea and feel the sun and have bonfires at night.”
He said he’d been to this one place when he was a kid, when his dad worked in Europe for a while. There were posters everywhere that said LOUP! QUI ES-TU? and everybody was keeping their dogs in at night and talking about this wolf running around the place. He said, “I saw it, in the middle of the night. I had to take a pee. The moon was full and this huge creature ran past me, black, in silhouette. I could hear it breathing. In the morning I told my folks and they didn’t believe me. They said I was dreaming.”
“But you weren’t,” I said.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t think so. As soon as they said it I wasn’t sure.”
I told him about the French campsite we went to when I was about eleven. There were so many birds in the trees crapping on people’s tents that twice a day a man walked through the place with a tape of geese squawking. “It was such a weird idea,” I said. “He played it through a megaphone to scare them all off.”
Harper asked me if it worked. I shook my head, remembering the man in his socks and sandals carrying around the din of geese on cassette. “No,” I said. “Not really. The little birds just shat themselves even harder.
“That was the holiday Jack taught me a load of French swear words,” I said. “But he told me they meant other things, like caravan and hungry. We were both in trouble.”
“Merde,” Harper said in this funny American-French accent.
I could see that holiday so clearly. For a few days we stayed at someone’s house in the mountains, an old narrow house on a steep cobbled street. It had been in their family for generations, last decorated in the 1960s, all linoleum and Formica. I can’t remember what the place was called. I do remember Les Demoiselles Coiffées, “young ladies with hairdos”—nine-meter-high needles of rock with these huge boulders balancing on the top. God knows how they got made. You could walk right up to them, at the top of a steep dry slope. I kept losing my footing on the loose rocks and slithering down. I grazed both my knees. Jack helped me climb up. It was hot. Mum was paranoid the boulders were going to fall, even though they’d managed to stay put for thousands of years. She was carrying Stroma and she kept her hand over her head, like that would help if three tons of rock landed on us.
I said, “I met one of your friends the other day.”
Harper looked at me, “Oh, yeah?”
I nodded. “Rhea.”
“Rhea?” he said. “In the shop?”
I said, “I didn’t like her.”
He smiled. “She’s OK. She’s mostly on the phone. Like it’s an addiction.”
“‘Say only what you need,’” I said, writing on my T-shirt with my finger. He laughed out loud. “She was mean,” I said.
“To you? Why?”
“Because I’m a kid. She made fun of me.”
Harper told me not to take any notice. He said, “You know way more than she does already.”
“But I’m still a kid.”
“Well, we all are,” he said. “We are and we’re not.”
I asked him what that meant.
He said, “Let’s play that game where you describe someone in ten words. I’ll go first.”
“What game?”
“Just listen. OK. You.” He started counting on his fingers. “You’re strong and calm. You’re not vain, even though you’re pretty, or silly, even though you’re young, or selfish, even though you could be. That’s five. You’re funny and smart. You care about people. You think before you speak. You’re amazing. That’s at least twelve. I’d rather be around you than Rhea any day.”
I said, “You forgot self-conscious, awkward, unhappy…”
“No.” Harper stopped me. “You have to say thanks and smile sweetly at the end of each round. That’s the rules. When you’re really good friends, you can do the things you can’t stand about each other.”
I did a little curtsy, and he smiled and said, “Your turn.”
It was hard. I started slowly and I didn’t look at him. I remember looking at the buildings growing straight out of the water, thinking, How far can I go with this?
“One, mysterious…Two, adventurous…Three, generous…”
“All the -ouses,” Harper said. “Keep going.”
“Lonely…?” And then I chickened out and counted on six fingers: “Better-at-this-game-than-me.”
“That’s cheating!” he said. “But thanks,” and he curtsied too.
We walked for a bit. I looked at the ground. “It’s good,” I said. “It’s like the speed-dating way of finding out what your friends think of you.”
He said a friend of his called Jay went speed dating in New York. “He asked every single girl what their fifth favorite pet was. And most of them took his number, proving humor is the key.”
“You’re funny,” I said.
“Well, good,” Harper shot back. “So it’s working. If I kissed you would you scream?”
“No!” I said, and I was suddenly too nervous. “I’d probably cry.”
“Oh God!” he laughed. “Is that worse?” And he didn’t kiss me.
I watched him for a while, but if he looked at me, I pretended to be watching the water. “I’m not mysterious,” he said. “I’m pretty straightforward.”
“There’s a lot about you I don’t know.”
“That’s not mystery, that’s just lack of time.”
“OK.”
“And I’m not lonely.”
“Good for you.”
“I’ll take adventurous and generous. Those are things I’d like to be.”
“Where are you going next on your Grand Tour?” I said.
Harper shrugged his shoulders. “I think Italy would be good. I always wanted to go to Tuscany. Oh, and Venice, but I can’t take the ambulance, of course.”
“It must be so lovely, just waking up and deciding where to be.”
“I’m lucky. I know that.”
“Tell me about when you left.”
He looked up at the sky. “My mom was watching behind the screen door. She didn’t want me to go, but she was good about it. I got a lift into the city early, before it was light, from one of my dad’s friends. We were driving slowly past people’s houses, watching them wake up. There was a lot of roadkill on the way out of Katonah, but every dead animal I saw just looked asleep, curled up on the road, dreaming, like it was magic hour or something. There wasn’t a drop of blood. I knew I’d remember that.”
“Katonah?” I said.
“Yeah. It’s where I’m from, a little place an hour outside of New York City. It’s named after a Native American chief
. He sold the land to the white man for some blankets and a couple of beads, way back when.”
“What’s it like there?” I asked.
“Green,” he said. “Green and lush because of the sprinklers, and hot, except for in the woods. That’s where the Native American chief is buried. And his wife and his son, who both got struck by the same bolt of lightning.”
“It’s one way to go.”
“I grew up on a private estate in the woods. My dad was the gardener. My mom cleaned house and helped look after the horses. You should see it, Rowan. The place is full of priceless art, just lurking in the forest, balancing by the pool.”
“Sounds incredible,” I said.
He said, “It is. It’s beautiful. It’s paradise. But it’s not real, you know? And it’s not all there is. The town is painted matching colors, everything just so. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. And there’s too much money flying around. A mom will drive one kid around out there in a four-by-four Hummer. Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a fucking tank is what it is, made all glamorous. It’s a different world, Rowan.” Harper looked back the way we’d come, at the cobbled downslope of the bridge, the dull light on the water.
“I wish Jack could’ve met you,” I said.
“Why’d you say that?” he asked, and I shrugged and tried to pretend I hadn’t.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t usually say that stuff out loud.”
“Well, I take it as a compliment. I’m sure we’d be friends.”
“I miss him,” I said.
Harper was watching me and I knew he was going to ask me that question, the “How did Jack die?” question. I’d walked into it. And because he was Harper, I wanted to tell him. Maybe that’s what I’d wanted all along.
Jack planned to be away for a month. Mum and Dad had helped him sort out his route—working in a couple of places, visiting people he hadn’t seen for years and hardly remembered, staying on their floors. It was a big deal. It was a family project.
I remember the postcard he sent. How could I forget it? He’d been away a week or so. It was a Technicolor picture of the lake where he was staying. In a valley like a bowl, high hills all around, a thin circle of coarse orange sand. There was an island in the middle, just a mound, with a church on top. Jack wrote you could swim right around it if you were strong enough. It was water-sport city and he loved it. He skied and wind-surfed and hung out in a dinghy getting sunburned all day.
On the phone he said the lake was man-made in the seventies so people would have a reason to visit there in the summer and not just when it snowed. They flooded a whole village. The church in the middle used to be on a hilltop, looking down on the narrow streets and the school and the shops and the houses. Everyone got forced out and the water poured in.
It made me uncomfortable, the idea of a drowned town, like a place built on an old burial ground, like a house where someone has died. I imagined people still down there, floating through the streets, pale and bloated and marbled, light in their veins instead of blood. I pictured them looking up and seeing the keels of boats and the tracks of water skis in their sky.
Of course, Jack didn’t think twice about it. The lake was there and that was that. And I didn’t say anything. He was leaving soon, anyway, heading through into Switzerland, which he expected to look like the cover of a cookie tin, visiting an old schoolfriend of Mum’s.
And then the lake drowned him, too.
It was getting dark and he wanted one more swim around the island. By the time help arrived, nobody could say exactly where he went down. He spent the whole night in that village underwater. I will never stop thinking of him down there in the dark with the moon falling on him. Pale and marbled and bloated, light in his veins instead of blood.
Harper and I didn’t look at each other while I was talking. We looked at the drinkers lounging on the towpath, the kids in canoes, and the oily sheen on the water. When I was done, I listened to the drip-drip from the underside of a bridge. I heard the flap of a pigeon’s wings as it went past. I thought about what I’d said out loud a minute ago, about the sounds I’d just been making.
Harper didn’t say anything. He took my hand and he kissed it, and then he let it go again. It was just what I’d have wanted him to do.
I didn’t tell him about what had happened next. I didn’t tell him about being out with my friends and my mobile ringing, and me showing off, rolling my eyes because it was only my mum, about turning the thing off. I made them laugh, throwing it into the long grass, complaining about being called. How did I know they needed me home to tell me about Jack? We were lying around in the sun, me and Jazz and Deedee and Sam, and all the girls in my year I didn’t see much anymore, since Jack died and everything changed. We were looking at boys and passing smart comments and talking about empty, easy stuff like music and Friday night and what everyone else was wearing.
I didn’t tell him about going home, expecting nothing but a lecture about phone etiquette, and finding this quiet carnage. Mum and Dad were sitting on the sofa together. They looked like they’d been locked in a freezer overnight—clutching themselves, shivering, gray-lipped, numb. Stroma was at Mrs. Hardwick’s next door, probably enduring a meal of liver and brussels sprouts, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t think about her.
I walked in and said, “What’s wrong?” and because I could see it wasn’t nothing, I half didn’t want to know.
Dad patted the sofa next to him and they moved apart to let me sit between them. I felt hemmed in and overgrown, like Alice in Wonderland. I wanted to shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears.
I didn’t say it was the police who came to the house. That’s how it works if someone you love dies abroad. The British consulate in wherever calls the police and they have to rush around before anyone else finds out, like the local paper or something. I wouldn’t want that job—knocking on someone’s door and then watching their world fall apart. You could never pay me enough money to do that.
Mum and Dad had to go out to Marseilles to meet the Foreign Office people and make funeral arrangements and fly Jack’s body home. I stood at the door and waved good-bye, while Stroma hopped around on the path like some demented rabbit with no sense of occasion. Mum said sorry, as if it was her fault Jack was dead, and she had to go and collect him and work out how to say things like “bereaved” and “cremation” and “travel arrangements” in French. Dad tried to get Mrs. Hardwick to look after us while they were gone, but no one was having that—not me, not Mum, and not Mrs. Hardwick. So Stroma and I were left alone.
To bring someone home in a coffin you have to get permission, and it costs you your savings and a big loan from the bank. The dead person you love has to be embalmed and put in a lead-lined coffin so they don’t spill out all over the plane. Mum and Dad didn’t tell me that. I looked it up on the internet while they were gone.
Twelve
Stroma was the kind of kid you never had to remind to say thank you. You never had to elbow her in the ribs because someone had said hello and she was still deciding whether or not she could be bothered to speak to them. If you even noticed she was there, it was a bonus for Stroma. She expected nothing. Everything she got was extra.
Bee and I took her and Sonny to the library one Friday after school because Carl was smothered in paperwork and it was too wet for the park. Stroma got her first library card. It might have been the key to a magic portal, the way she was acting. She couldn’t believe her luck. She was astonished we didn’t have to pay. There’s no way she’d expected to get all that for free.
Sonny was using the books to make towers and knock them over. I was trying to build one taller than him, but he kept smashing it and saying, “Again.”
“What else is free?” Stroma said.
When I said “School,” she dropped her books on a little red table and plonked down into a white wooden chair, like her legs just wouldn’t hold her.
The sides of the chair were the shape of a swan. Her mouth fell open and she said, “That is not true.”
“It is,” Bee said, laughing. “The government pays for our schools; the council pays.”
“For everyone?” Stroma said. She looked like one of those people on the TV who’ve just been told their teapot’s worth more than their house.
“For everyone,” we said.
You could see this warm glow travel through her, this pleasant surprise. She said, “Isn’t that kind of them? What nice people.” She was leaning back in her swan chair and smiling like all was suddenly right with the world. I guess she suddenly felt looked after.
That was the Friday we went back to Bee’s and things started to unravel.
Carl was still smothered, upstairs in his room, and Bee said she’d make us a smoothie and a sandwich. Stroma wanted to help. Sonny and I were kind of in the way due to lack of space, so we left them in the kitchen stuffing bananas in the blender, buttering bread.
Sonny was into stairs. He climbed them carefully, on his hands and feet with his bum in the air. I followed him up to Bee’s room. He wanted to open and shut her cupboards and make piles of her clothes on the bed. He was having a great time.
I sat down on her bed and picked up a book she’d been reading. I’ve no idea now what it was called, but I remember this dog-eared paperback with a monochrome cover, the colors of the bookmark sticking out of it.
A postcard. Technicolor.
I wasn’t snooping. I just needed to know where it was from. I thought I was seeing things.
I heard Stroma wailing and Bee’s voice in delay, and she crashed into the room before I had the book fully open. She was pale as a ghost and she said I had to come “Right now, now!” because Stroma had cut herself.
She was panicked and so was I. But not just about my sister.
Because even with the book half shut I’d seen Jack’s lake with the island in the middle, the hills all around, the coarse orange sand.
Broken Soup Page 7
