To Dare

by Jemma Wayne

  His mother spends all day Sunday cooking Nigerian food that she stores in Tupperware and produces throughout the week. Simone regards the way that together the family sit to eat it. Between bites, they exchange stories, they offer ideas, they try out parts of themselves. Safely. Attentively. For weeks Simone watches it all with fascination, until finally she articulates something first to herself and then to Noah – her longing to be part of a family like that, an insider. Noah welcomes her into their close unit, understanding how much she needs it, putting his questions to one side. He doesn’t drink, but he sees that, for now, she needs that too.

  She wraps his estate around herself. They hang out on the Concourse. Noah steers her away from the guys who try to sell her drugs harder than weed, and the girls who sneer at her Zara jacket. They stay amongst his friends, who are fun and interesting and fiery and ambitious, feeding off each other like lit flames. They all want to change things. They all want to make an impact. They do things like writing spoken word, or training at athletics clubs, or joining political parties. They understand about being seen, being heard. Simone practises talking like they do – straight, blunt. Her parents would be shocked if they saw her. But they do not see her.

  One night, returning from the estate, she trips over the top step to her flat and starts wailing in the street. Wailing as though she is a toddler and needs to be picked up, hands brushed, knee kissed. They leave their beds, come to the door, and this is the first time they pass comment on her behaviour. They didn’t think she’d be so stupid, they tell her. She is seventeen, it’s not even legal for her to be drinking. The next time, they put the chain on the door and lock her out until she can come home sober. Her mother starts slipping into the sacred space of her father’s office and she hears them muttering. They don’t know what’s going on, they say to each other. They don’t know what’s going on, they say to her. They don’t know where this has come from.

  A week later she finds out she is pregnant. By a black guy from the estate, she tells them. And she is locked out until she can sober herself out of that one too.

  It is then that she notices the grime. And the firmness of the walls around her.

  Still, she tells herself, she is free. Free from the oppressive silence. Free from the stranglehold of invisibility. Free from the hypocrisy of a flat with a proudly decreasing mortgage, and balanced meals, and civic engagement, and nothingness.

  Noah is real. He makes her feel part of something.

  She drops out of school. Noah’s mother, Lewa, tries to talk her out of this. It is not necessary, she says. They can help with the baby, studies are important, and her GCSEs were so good. But Simone wants only what they have, not the toxic veneer of letters after her name, false validations of worth. She washes down this decision with wine, beer, schnapps, gin, waiting for her parents to come after her and pull her from the filth.

  Lewa gently suggests that it would be better, for the baby, if she lay off the alcohol, at least those first months. Concern unfolds itself across the room and finds Noah, nodding. Simone sees this, and so she does cut down, but not stop altogether. She can’t now, she realises. She can’t stop. She didn’t know how quickly that could happen. She begins sometimes to drink in secret.

  But Noah loves her. He writes songs about their unborn babe. He cleans the flat and paints it, he looks up on the internet how to tile a bathroom and he makes a good go of it. He takes on a job as a security guard, which they laugh at because of his skinny frame, and joke that with her expanding belly, she will soon be more threatening. He observes her carefully. It is Noah who notices her moods. It is Noah who delves deep to locate her desires. He goes one day, alone, in secret, to her parents’ flat and asks them to reach out to her. They tell him that he has no right to stand there, that he has corrupted their daughter, that they want nothing to do with him, or her, so long as she’s with him.

  Nevertheless, when the baby arrives, they come to the hospital. They tell Simone that she cannot come home, but if she wants, they’ll take Dominic.

  It is Noah who persuades Simone not to cut them off completely.

  He is a good father. She watches through blurry eyes as he gets up in the night and mixes bottles. She sees him change nappies and run baths in the sink. She notices the way that a sound or a movement from the baby seems to make a smile spread from its origin in Noah’s mouth, into his eyes, and then all the way through him, dancing later in the notes of a new song, strummed softly on guitar next to the crib. She wonders how he has managed to capture such delight, for she does not feel it. She holds the baby because she has to, but she doesn’t experience the rush of love she had expected. Dominic is a slight, sallow child, with small eyes. To spite her parents further, she had hoped he would be unmistakeable in his darkness, but he bears little resemblance to his father. She cannot see herself in him either. Lewa tries to show her how to breastfeed, but it feels unnatural and repulsive, a foreign creature tugging at her flesh. When Lewa arrives at the end of her nursing shift, Simone pushes the baby gratefully into her hands and sinks onto her bed, unable to comprehend how her body has become so heavy that it feels weighted with iron. Perhaps she is lacking iron, suggests Lewa, noticing her lethargy, bringing her supplements, singing soft gospel to Dominic as she dances him around the room, scattering about her an interminable scent of nutmeg. Dinners arrive in Tupperware. Noah heats them up and while the baby sleeps, she sees him trying to talk to her, trying to recapture that expanse of understanding between them. She sees him doing this, building that same family closeness she had envied; but she cannot join him in it. She no longer feels like an insider to his life. She only wants to sleep, to escape. But in the day there is the baby. And at night her mind will not stop. One afternoon when Noah is on security, she leaves the baby with Lewa and takes herself across the Concourse to the alcohol shop where she buys a bottle of wine. She plans to drink it all before returning to the flat so that Lewa won’t judge her, but on the way back, somebody asks her if she’s after an upper, and of course she is, anything to lift that iron weight from her bones. And after that, wine seems an immature, foolish flirtation.

  It is almost six months after Dominic’s birth that Noah’s father, Robert, is diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, and dies four weeks later. Lewa’s nursing credentials are of no use. Noah’s songs are of no use. And Simone’s baby merely emphasises the great disparity between new life, and the ending of it. Noah’s father spends his final days in a hospice, slipping in and out of morphine-induced oblivion: there, not there, there, not there, not there, not there, not there. The permanence is ultimately what slashes at Noah’s soul. Life had poured through him before, fluid in its promises; but absence, nothingness, these are immobilising realities. The guitar music stops. The bath-times stop. He stops noticing how desperate and detached Simone has become. One evening, the baby crying, both of them hungry, neither moving, she offers him a line she had hidden in her sock drawer. She’d thought by now he must have guessed her habit, but he turns to her with a slow look of disgust, as though observing a ballerina taking off her costume to reveal that beneath the glittered skirts, there is only humanity: bloodied toes, bruised bones. And she watches his face as every last illusion of beauty is shattered.

  That night, Noah leaves Simone alone with the baby who cries so much that she is forced to drag herself from the bed to mix his formula and to change his nappy. Without his father, it is her shoulder that the baby must fall asleep on, and despite the melancholy of the day, inhaling the soft breath of her boy, she feels just the smallest whisper of love sprouting. It is not developed, just a hint, but enough to see her through this first night that Noah is missing. When he returns the following lunchtime, he stinks of alcohol and marijuana. He sleeps through the day.

  Now it is her turn, Lewa tells her.

  Only a year has passed since Robert died, but Lewa is not the kind of woman to let the world crumble around her. Her flat remains immaculate, Sundays still spit out smells of spice
s, Tupperware is filled as ever with jollof rice and deep-fried yams. At the hospital, she does not miss a shift. Bills are paid, bins are taken out, and she turns up as often as before to sing nutmeg infused gospel-turned-lullaby to Dominic. While she is there, she urges Simone to eat, tutting at her skinniness. She tidies their flat, and she looks at her sunken son through eyes that betray sorrow and regret, as though his unravelling is her failure and not Simone’s. But it is Simone’s turn now, she tells her again.

  Dominic has pooed through his nappy and Lewa is showing Simone how to bleach the material of his tracksuit bottoms. Their voices are low under the auspices of Dominic napping, but in truth, Lewa is grabbing the flash of muted air between them to fill it with obligation.

  “Now he needs you,” she is saying. “He is too young to give up on living. You are both far too young. It isn’t too late.”

  But it is. Too late. Simone is disgusted by the pathetic lump that Noah has become. He is useless, defective, merely a bulging bulk in her periphery, like a tumour sapping them, almost as fast as it sapped Noah’s father. He drinks more than she ever did, and now that she chooses to be up instead of down, she cannot stand to see him lying lifeless. Sometimes he collapses unmoving on the floor of the living room and she has to step over him to reach the sofa. She kicked him once when he was laid horizontal like this, kicked him like a bag of rubbish, or a defective machine, as though with one sharp nudge she might be able to knock back into him the energy he once discharged so keenly. Still, he lays motionless, and her stomach twists with resentment and revulsion. By the end of the year, she has asked him to go.

  A space unfurls itself. A cold, beautiful, serene moment that lasts as long as it is able, though she feels its transience even as it is around her, aware of its fragility. She imagines herself during this time as an ice skater upon a frozen lake, pushing herself effortlessly across the dark, solid liquid beneath, gliding, gliding, walking, impossibly, on water. The wind is in her face. Frost nips with friendly tidings at her fingers and toes, and feel this, says the breeze, feel everything. She does. She feels with an intensity she’s never known. No longer content with walking she spins and leaps and flies through the chilled air, not noticing the cracks opening beneath her sharp, razored feet, snow cut into thin, dangerous lines.

  Into the space, Dominic grows and though the weeks and months are jumbled, there are moments of clear euphoria. Love has arrived now, fierce, boundless, finally imprinting itself into her bones. Even in her sleep she smells Dominic’s infant skin, she can feel his warm, clutching arms wrapped around her neck, and she accepts the stabbing in her heart as the price for such pleasure. The stabbing comes most often when she is in the living room with a friend and a line, and he, her son, is locked asleep, or crying, in his room. It comes in waves that wash over her, lifting her high, dropping her low. It comes and comes. But even this is not strong enough to pull her from her other love, the substances that not only lift her high but stop her from falling. Only they can keep her standing up as she needs to. The ground beneath her is slippery. It is made of ice.

  Even with Noah gone, Lewa comes for Dominic. She takes him to the family home his father has returned to, eyes glazed by booze and life, and she sings to them both at once. When Simone arrives to pick Dominic up, she stands sometimes at the window before knocking, watching, stifling a yearning deep inside her for the warmth she used to feel in this place, for the energy, for the reassuring sense of the insider, of wholeness. Sometimes she catches a glimpse of Noah side-on, and she doesn’t see the vacant glassiness of his stare; instead she remembers how fast and how deeply she fell for him, and loved him, and loves him still. But she hasn’t the strength. Not now. Not yet. She is only just staying standing. She is not strong enough to hold up another.

  All she can do is glide.

  Glide.

  Ignore the splintering ice beneath her, slow in its expansion.

  Hope she doesn’t fall into the cracks.

  And then Noah goes and gets himself killed in a car crash. Drunk at the wheel. And she cannot bear it. She cannot glide. She cannot balance. She cannot breathe. And everything collapses around her.

  Lewa pounds on her door.

  Lewa demands to see Dominic.

  Lewa cries as Simone has never witnessed before.

  Dominic cries too, for Lewa, from the other side of wood.

  But Simone cannot bring herself to answer. If she does, then Lewa will judge her: for the overflowing bins; for Dominic’s unclean clothes; for not taking her turn. She will stand there and judge. As her own parents did. And she will do so with Noah’s dark, dreaded hair, and his dancing eyes, and the determined gaze that, perhaps, if it wasn’t for Simone, could have done anything.

  “He’s not yours,” Simone tells Lewa eventually, calmly, resolutely through the door, many weeks after the funeral she didn’t attend. “He wasn’t Noah’s either. Couldn’t you tell? Never looked a thing like him.”

  A few months later, Simone hears that Lewa has moved to another estate somewhere south of the river.

  It is another few months after that, that Simone’s father turns up on her doorstep, her mother cowering in a parked car nearby. Simone is not so much surprised by their appearance, but relieved, as though the necessary thing has finally happened, and she lets them take Dominic for the weekend. Dominic is four years old then and doesn’t know his grandfather at all, but he’ll be alright, she tells him, he’ll be alright, she tells herself. He has to be, because her parents don’t invite her to go with them. Besides, she needs Dominic gone, if only for a day. She needs space again. She needs to scream and she needs space. But she is walled in tight by concrete.

  The creeping darkness of the stairwell feels colder. The stench of piss smells stronger. The pumping flesh in her mouth tastes rancid. But he gives her a tenner, and that’s almost enough for half a gram.

  “You’re Noah’s bird, aren’t you?” he asks, zipping up his trousers. “Always talked like you was something special, didn’t he? That’s a laugh, innit?”

  She wipes her mouth, but stays crouching.

  Pressing her hands against the concrete of the playground, Simone stands. Air pushes painfully through her lungs, but she forces herself to breathe deeply. She wishes Terry was there, the sheer force of his presence enough to sweep away her memories. He wouldn’t have agreed with the teachers as she did. At home he’d have swiped Dominic about the legs with the metal end of his belt, and it is for this reason that she did not and will not mention the meeting to him; but here, he would have given the teachers what for.

  Simone puts her hands to her face. Her make-up is smudged, but she’ll stop in a café on the way and tidy herself. The staff at the gym won’t notice. It’s an easy part to play. She remembers this one too. She remembers it. All of it, suddenly, with growing colour, free from grey walls. It’s easy. This is nothing.

  Also, it is everything.

  Terry’s seen it. He’s seen it in her, he’s seen her desire for the things he despises, and he’s watching. Watching her.

  Simone longs for him, and she longs to be free of him.

  She has no idea where it’s all come from.

  Sarah

  “Look, it’s not set in stone. At this stage, as I explained to David, it’s just a concern,” smiled Veronica.

  “Do you usually track parents down outside of school?”

  Sarah had appeared, uninvited, after school that Monday, on Veronica’s expensively-tiled doorstep. A last-minute change to a case had prevented her normal Monday pick-up, but she had been seething all weekend, making David repeat again and again exactly what Veronica had said. Veronica’s face looked pale at the intrusion, caught off guard perhaps. This was a meandering, not what she expected of Sarah. But if Veronica was going to snake her way across town to David, insert herself into their personal sphere, then Sarah could do the same. Besides, they were friends, weren’t they?

  “Of course not. Only because of our relationship. I didn’t
want to spring it on you with a formal letter.”

  Sarah nodded with what she hoped Veronica would realise was absolute scepticism.

  Veronica stood up slightly from her leaned stance against the doorframe. “Do you want to come in?”

  “No thanks. I have to get home to my kids.”

  Veronica smiled more broadly, but an unnerving coldness crept now beneath it. She never did like to be refused.

  “Okay. Well, why don’t we set up a formal meeting then? As I mentioned to David, I’m required to give a report of each child before they go up to the Juniors next year. So that their, needs, can be met.”

  “Amelia has no special ‘needs’ if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. That’s what we need to determine.”

  “Veronica, you know she doesn’t.”

  Veronica smiled again. “Sarah, I don’t mean to be rude, but I spend a great deal more time with your daughter than you do really, don’t I?” She looked emphatically at her watch. “So, let’s start with a meeting. You’d do that, wouldn’t you? I mean, what would you do… for your daughter?”

  Sarah felt her breath catch in her chest. “What? What did you say?”

  Veronica continued to beam innocently. “What?”

  Sarah didn’t know how to respond. Should she hit her? Should she berate her? Should she plead with her? What on earth did Veronica want?

  “Dinner sometime?” Veronica said eventually into the blistering air. “When you don’t have to rush away, to your children. We can reminisce properly then. There’s still lots to tell, I’m sure.”

  Sarah didn’t nod, or agree, she couldn’t. But she didn’t say no either. “Goodnight, Veronica,” she made herself utter. And forced herself again not to glance back to see Veronica’s triumph at the open door.