Beautiful Broken Things

by Sara Barnard

  ‘Want me to move?’ Levina asked.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Suzanne replied, already climbing over the back of her seat.

  I watched her walk past the toilets, through the restaurant and straight out the front door. My stomach dropped and for a moment I thought I might be sick.

  ‘Can I have some of your milkshake?’ Maya leaned forward, her hand already reaching for my cup.

  ‘Sure,’ I said distractedly. I stood up. ‘I’ll be back in a sec.’

  Rosie raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Brain freeze,’ I said, pointing at the milkshake. This didn’t really make much sense, but I was away from the booth before any of them could question me further.

  It was so windy my hair flew right into my face the second I walked outside. I tried to claw it back around my ears, looking around for Suzanne. For a few moments I couldn’t see her, and then I realized she was on the other side of the road. Her back was to me, but her blonde head was unmistakable.

  I crossed over the road with the usual crowds, trying as I went to think of the best thing to say. Should I open with an apology? Admit that I’d orchestrated the conversation but hadn’t realized what the outcome would be? I’d never seen her angry or upset. What if she was the confrontational kind? What would I do?

  When I was inches away from her back I still hadn’t thought of what to say. She was leaning stomach-first against the railing, looking out to the sea. Her right hand was clutching her phone to her ear.

  ‘Will you please come and get me?’ she was saying. Her voice was strange, and it took me a moment to realize that that was because she was crying. I’d made her cry. ‘I know, but I can’t.’

  As she said this, she glanced behind her, as if sensing my presence. When she saw me, she did a double take. Into the phone she said, ‘Five minutes? OK, ten. I’ll be there. Thanks.’ She lowered the phone from her ear and slid it into the pocket of her jeans. Her eyes were still on me.

  This was the moment I was supposed to speak, but my mind was still completely blank. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked. The wind ripped the words from between us, taking the intonation of her voice with it. I had no idea whether her question had been confrontational or genuine.

  Tears were coursing down her face. Everything I associated with her – the confidence, the presence, the sparkle – was gone. It was mascara-stained to her cheeks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I managed.

  ‘Why?’ She looked, under the tears, confused.

  ‘I . . .’ I felt the words freeze on my tongue. She clearly had no idea that the orchestrator of her current situation was me, let alone that I’d basically done it on purpose. ‘I didn’t know that would happen. I just wanted to know.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ She sounded frustrated, and it occurred to me that she probably wanted me to leave so she could cry alone. ‘Know what?’

  Too late to back out now, Caddy. Own your mistakes. ‘I saw a message from someone on your wall,’ I said. ‘About . . . um . . . Corrie and trigger warnings? And I didn’t know what it meant. So . . .’

  Suzanne pressed her lips together, her eyes on me, blinking hard. She asked, ‘Ellie?’ When I nodded, she shook her head. ‘I knew I should have just deleted that. I thought I was being paranoid.’ There was a long silence. I wondered if it would make me the worst person in the world if I ran away.

  ‘I don’t get how you saw it,’ she said finally. ‘We’re not even friends on Facebook.’

  My whole body felt hot with shame. It stuck in my throat.

  ‘You looked on Rosie’s,’ she said. When I nodded, she set her jaw, bit down on her tongue and shook her head. ‘You know, when you first brought it up, I thought it must be a coincidence. That I was just being really over-sensitive, because I really am about anything to do with abuse. But clearly not.’

  The word ‘abuse’ had snagged between us. I so desperately wanted to say the right thing, something to make this better, maybe even absolve myself, but all I could muster was, ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘I know you are.’ Suzanne’s whole face was scrunched, partly against the wind, partly with pain. ‘People are always so fucking sorry.’ With these words, practically thrown at me, she turned and started walking away.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, hurrying to catch up with her. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Sarah’s coming to pick me up,’ Suzanne replied without looking at me. ‘You can go back inside.’

  ‘No, I have to . . .’ I trailed off. Had to what?

  ‘Have to what?’ she asked, forced to stop at the traffic lights. ‘You’ve said sorry; what else is there?’ Then her face changed and she turned to me. ‘Oh. You want the story.’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly.

  ‘You want me to spill it all out, right? You want answers? Is that why you looked at my Facebook even though we aren’t friends?’

  I had a horrible feeling I was about to start crying, but before I could speak she made a face and said, sounding frustrated, ‘I mean friends on Facebook. We aren’t friends on Facebook. Obviously we’re friends.’ She suddenly looked a little lost. ‘I mean . . . right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said quickly. The lights changed, and we both stepped forward. ‘You don’t need to tell me anything.’

  She was silent for a while, and neither of us said anything as we crossed the road.

  ‘They’re wrong, you know,’ she said finally. Quietly. ‘Rosie, I mean. And Maya and Levina. What they said.’ She drew to a stop on the roadside and shoved her hands into her pockets.

  ‘The whole thing about Clarise deserving it? And maybe now she’ll shut up?’

  ‘People say that kind of thing all the time. That’s what people think. That you must have done something.’ She kicked the toes of her Vans against the concrete. ‘I wanted to keep it a secret as long as possible. People treat you differently when they know. They even look at you differently.’ She gave me a meaningful look then, and I tried very hard to not look at her differently.

  ‘Can I ask one question?’ I asked carefully.

  ‘One,’ Suzanne said. For a moment I thought she was going to smile, but then she swallowed hard and exhaled, glancing away from me.

  ‘Is that why you live with Sarah?’

  She nodded. ‘She took me away from them. My parents. Well, just my dad really. Stepdad. I call him “Dad”. I mean, I thought he was my . . .’ She stopped abruptly and took a slow breath in. ‘Look, I’m really bad at this. Short version is, my dad – stepdad, whatever – used to hit me, like, a lot. And so my aunt came and took me away. And now I live here.’

  A car appeared around the corner then, and Suzanne craned her neck hopefully. ‘It’s Sarah. Thank God.’ She waved, and the car pulled up alongside us. She took a step forward and opened the car door.

  For a moment I thought she was going to leave without another word, but she turned to me and said, ‘Don’t tell Rosie. I’ll tell her myself, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Um, where shall I tell her you’ve gone?’

  ‘That,’ Suzanne said, folding herself down into the seat, ‘is your problem.’ She closed the door with a decisive clunk.

  I stepped back, feeling heavy with guilt, ready to watch the car drive away. But then the window rolled down and Suzanne’s face appeared.

  ‘Sarah says that was rude,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  Suzanne turned her head back into the car. I heard her say, ‘What?’ She looked back at me. ‘I’m supposed to tell you I know it’s not your fault any of this happened.’

  I put my hand on my chest. ‘Told.’

  A brief, reluctant smile flickered across her face. ‘I’ll see you later, OK?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m—’

  ‘Don’t apologize again. Bye, Cads.’

  Before I could say anything else, she’d raised her window again and was waving through the glass as
the car pulled away. I waved back, a little awkwardly, until it rounded the corner and disappeared.

  When I got home hours later, there was a notification and a message waiting for me on Facebook. I knew what it was before I clicked, and sure enough: Suzanne Watts has sent you a friend request. Before I accepted, I clicked on the message.

  I hereby endorse all stalking under the name of Friendship. The Friend (CADNAM OLIVER) may at any time assert her right to:

  a) View the page of Me (SUZANNE WATTS)

  b) Send messages to Me, including i) life updates ii) article links (only good ones) iii) videos and/or pictures of dogs (no cats)

  c) View the information of my Other Friends, insofar as this information is publically available.

  Confirmation of the Friend Request will be taken as an extremely legally binding agreement to these terms.

  I was grinning like an idiot.

  I, The Friend (CADNAM OLIVER), do hereby accept these terms. The Friend would also like to reaffirm her earlier apology for previous misdeeds.

  Barely a minute later, my laptop pinged.

  These terms are predicated on a clean slate basis.

  I felt light with relief and happiness. I clicked ‘Confirm’ by her name, and then refreshed my news feed to double-check. It was official.

  Caddy Oliver and Suzanne Watts are now friends.

  The next time I saw Suzanne, four days later, with Rosie in tow, it seemed like nothing had changed. She was just the same as she’d been before the diner, chatty and friendly, peppering the two of us with questions about the days she’d missed. She’d spent the time in Cardiff, visiting her brother, Brian. I had no idea if the timing of the trip was a coincidence, or if she’d panicked after telling Rosie the truth and taken the opportunity to leave.

  Suzanne had chosen to tell Rosie the morning after the diner incident and had done so, in Rosie’s words, ‘like she was talking about someone else’. For her part, Rosie seemed both unsurprised and unbothered. ‘Well,’ she said to me over the phone that same day, ‘I’d guessed it must be something like that. If someone doesn’t want to talk about something, it’s obviously going to be something completely shit. So I wasn’t going to push her to tell me or anything. But I’m glad she has, and off her own back, you know?’ Which made me feel even worse.

  ‘There’s five of them that live there,’ Suzanne was saying, talking about her brother’s student house. She was holding two corners of a blanket in her hands and shaking it out. ‘Can you believe that? Five? Wouldn’t it be so much fun to live with your friends?’

  We’d gone to the beach with the vague, optimistic hope of catching the last remnants of sunshine and had been rewarded with grey clouds and a definite chill in the air. Suzanne and Rosie seemed undeterred by this, and I’d been vehemently vetoed when I’d suggested giving up and going to my house. Even taking shelter in the Palace Pier arcade was out.

  ‘Imagine if you fell out though,’ Rosie said, wrinkling her nose. ‘And what if you ended up with a housemate who pissed you off?’

  ‘By the time you’re twenty, you’re like a grown-up,’ Suzanne said. ‘Maybe you don’t fall out as much.’ She settled the blanket on to the pebbles and then sat on it, pulling over a picnic bag. ‘Sarah made us picnic stuff,’ she announced, waving a Tupperware container at us. ‘And Welsh cakes!’

  ‘What are Welsh cakes?’ Rosie asked, dubious.

  ‘Kind of like scones. Squashed scones.’ Suzanne reached back into the bag and pulled out a wad of paper plates.

  ‘Oh wow, you came prepared,’ I said, unable to keep the smile off my face and out of my voice.

  She hesitated momentarily, her eyes sliding towards me, scanning for sarcasm. Then the smile returned to her face and she gave her hair a slight toss. ‘Always come prepared for a picnic.’

  The picnic had been entirely her idea. She’d messaged both me and Rosie late the previous evening, announcing her return and suggesting a day at the beach. I’d been nervous that she’d act differently around me after what had happened, but she was just herself.

  Rosie had settled herself on to the blanket and started pulling the lids off the containers, peering at the contents.

  ‘So what are your brother’s housemates like?’ I asked, taking what looked like a samosa and biting into it.

  ‘Great,’ Suzanne said. ‘Really friendly. They didn’t seem to mind this random fifteen-year-old turning up. They had a house party while I was there, and it was amazing. It made the ones we have look like children’s parties.’

  She crammed two tortilla chips into her mouth and crunched through them slowly, turning slightly to look out at the waves. The wind had picked up since we’d sat down, causing them to break with a fierce crash against the stones.

  I tried to imagine myself at a student party, surrounded by twenty-year-olds. Drunk twenty-year-olds. Just the thought was enough to make my stomach seize with anxiety. I took another bite of samosa, trying to shake it off.

  We worked our way through the food, which all tasted amazing, talking about not much at all. It felt like the perfect way to spend the last day of half-term, even though the sky threatened rain and the wind was cold.

  ‘The rest of the term’s going to be brutal,’ Rosie was saying dolefully, teasing the layer of chocolate off a Jaffa cake with her tongue. ‘So many deadlines. So much coursework.’

  ‘Same,’ I said, restraining myself from making a self-pitying comment about my private school workload.

  ‘How did you get on with the English essay?’ Rosie asked Suzanne. ‘How long is yours? I went over the word limit by about three hundred words, but she won’t notice, right?’

  ‘Probably not. I haven’t finished mine.’

  Rosie’s eyebrows scrunched. ‘You haven’t finished? You do know it’s due tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s fine. I’ll do it tonight.’

  ‘So you’re nearly done?’

  Suzanne shrugged. ‘Halfway, maybe?’

  ‘Suze!’ Rosie looked horrified. ‘This is coursework!’

  ‘I know.’ Suzanne looked completely unbothered by this information.

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Rosie looked at me, as if for help, but I had nothing to add to this conversation. I’d had my own deadlines, of course, and I’d got everything done in the first few days of the holiday. I was far away from being the type of person who could leave half an essay to the day before it was due, let alone be so blasé about it.

  ‘I just think homework is kind of pointless,’ Suzanne elaborated when neither of us spoke.

  ‘But it’s not pointless,’ Rosie said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. ‘You get that, right? Even if you can’t be bothered, it still counts.’

  ‘It’s not that I can’t be bothered. It’s just the pointlessness of it kind of gets to me sometimes. I know it sounds stupid.’ Her casual tone had hardened slightly with defensiveness. ‘You know, when I was younger I used to do all my homework, all the time, right on time. And I’d get good marks, and the teachers said I was good, and it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference at home, where it mattered. So I kind of stopped trying so hard, maybe a couple of years ago now, and you know what? Nothing changed. So homework? Pointless.’

  Her face had reddened as she spoke, and when she finished she looked slightly dazed, as if she wasn’t sure where the outburst had come from. She bit her lip, looking away from us, then let out a shaky, embarrassed laugh. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘We can talk about it more if you want to,’ I said, a little nervously.

  ‘No, no.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘I don’t usually talk about it. And that’s fine – I don’t want to.’

  We all knew what the ‘it’ referred to. Rosie’s eyes were wide and keen; clearly she had the same morbid curiosity I did.

  ‘Maybe it would help?’ Rosie suggested, transparently.

  ‘Sarah says that all
the time, and it doesn’t. Help.’

  ‘What does help?’ I asked.

  Suzanne smiled, but it looked a little forced, and gestured around her with a now-empty container.

  ‘This.’

  There was no magic moment when I started thinking of Suzanne as a real friend. Even accepting the friend request on Facebook had felt more like a relief than any confirmation of a real bond. In those first few weeks after the diner, she was still, in my mind at least, Rosie’s friend.

  That’s not to say that we weren’t both trying. We were. Whenever she made plans, like the beach picnic, she made sure to send us both a message. I did the same, gradually getting into the habit of waiting for two replies to my texts. I assumed at the time that her allowances to my existence as Rosie’s best friend were as perfunctory as mine were of her. It wasn’t until much later, when she’d refer to these early days of our friendship, that I realized I’d been wrong.

  Rosie and I had been friends for so long that we had the luxury of not remembering the time before we knew everything about each other. Most of our best anecdotes were mutual; it had been in my garden that she’d broken her arm; her mum’s wardrobe where we’d pretended to find Narnia.

  Suzanne was brand new in this sense, and in contrast to Rosie’s total familiarity, this was at times exciting and terrifying. It was so easy to say the wrong thing without realizing, particularly bearing in mind her fractured past. She was like a puzzle I was trying to solve, but the surprisingly complicated kind that looks shinier and easier on the box than it really is.

  Not long after half term, she sent me a message on a rainy Wednesday, asking if I wanted to go to her house for dinner with Rosie. It turned out that Rosie hadn’t been to Suzanne’s house before either, and it wasn’t a house, but a basement flat. It was on one of the steep roads that we used to sled down as kids in the winter.

  ‘Careful on the stairs,’ Suzanne said as we started down them, keys already in hand. The rain had been relentless all week and the stone steps leading down to the door were slippery.

  The flat was large on the inside, stretching further back than the outside had suggested and containing a decent-sized living room and gigantic kitchen. We passed Sarah’s room, which was towards the front of the flat, and walked the full length of the hall to Suzanne’s, which was tucked away like an afterthought next to the bathroom.