The State of Grace

by Rachael Lucas

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  Polly is already in Mabel’s stable, bent down on one knee, a white cotton wound dressing between her teeth. She wraps it round Mabel’s foreleg and holds it in place while she tries to find the end of the bandage.

  ‘Can I help?’

  I feel as if I’m an intruder. Mabel turns to look at me for a moment, her eyes liquid brown and trusting, and I feel sick with guilt and shame.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ says Polly, and she deftly wraps the bandage round and round. It stays in place by some kind of magic.

  Polly straightens up and looks at me.

  ‘Grace, the best help you could give right now is to get some bloody rest. Why aren’t you in bed?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  And she looks at me and shakes her head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I whisper the words.

  ‘Don’t even go there,’ says Polly.

  ‘But I am.’

  ‘I know,’ she says, and she smiles at me as if nothing has happened. ‘Where’s your mum?’

  She doesn’t know. In Polly’s world, all that we’re dealing with is a horse that’s been lucky to get away with superficial cuts and bruises, and an owner that doesn’t deserve her.

  ‘Hospital.’

  ‘You what?’ Polly’s face registers shock and she bends down to pick up the vet kit. ‘Come on, you need to tell me what’s happened. Is everyone OK?’

  I nod.

  We sit in the tack room and I spill out everything that’s happened since I left. Polly makes coffee, with two huge spoonfuls of sugar and she hands it to me, shaking her head.

  ‘You look a mess, Grace. Did you sleep last night?’

  I did, but it was a weird, tangled swirl of nightmares and half-rememberings. And now I’m phoneless, terrified about Leah, terrified about what’s going on with the friends I had – and lost – and terrified about . . . well, everything. Life just feels as if it’s too much to deal with.

  ‘You need a break, Grace.’ I see her watching my hands, which are shaking. The trembling that started last night is back again. ‘Seriously, I can watch Mabes for you. Go and sleep or something.’

  ‘I can’t sleep in the daytime.’

  Polly swigs the last of her coffee and puts the mug down with a thump on the metal draining board. She looks at me sideways, putting her hands in the small of her back and stretching. I think she’s tired from looking after Mabel when she’s already got loads of work to do, and I feel guilty about that too.

  ‘Well, you don’t need me to tell you that you’re not safe around here when you’re in this state. You’re a liability, and we’re already one horse down.’

  Her phone bleeps and she pulls it out and checks the screen.

  ‘It’s your mum. I’ll tell her I’m giving you a lift back once I’ve done morning stables.’

  ‘But my bike –’

  I start to protest but close my mouth when I see the expression on her face. It’s not one I want to argue with.

  Mabel’s stiff this morning. I take her out of her box and lead her across to the tiny paddock where the Shetland ponies – restricted from eating too much grass so they don’t get laminitis – are normally kept. We’ve led them into the outdoor arena where they’re beetling about, hovering up the stray shoots of grass that have grown around the fence posts. I feel shame and guilt washing over me as each of Mabel’s legs move clockwork-slowly towards the field. My face flushes hot red and I feel prickly in my skin, like there’s someone sitting just out of sight, watching me, judging me. She moves as if all her joints are needing to be oiled. When I close the gate, she walks carefully towards the water trough, sniffing it gently. All her spark and fire is gone.

  I did that to her. I turn away, her headcollar in my hand, and walk back towards the yard. Doubt creeps into my mind. I can’t remember if I closed the gate properly – I turn back to check, and I’ve pulled the gate shut but forgotten to slide the bolt across. With trembling hands, I click it into place, the rusted metal stiff and unyielding.

  Polly’s right. I’m no use here, either.

  ‘You gave me a shock,’ says Lisa. She pulls the door open before I’ve even made it up the steps into the front porch. ‘Thanks,’ she calls to Polly, giving her a wave. The little Corsa rolls off in a cloud of faulty exhaust smoke.

  Inside the house there’s a smell of Dettol and furniture polish. Lisa’s left a bottle of it sitting on the dresser, and I catch sight of an upturned bucket on the draining board in the utility room sink. She’s hoovered too, and the place looks spotless, the way it did when Grandma left. There’s a thin shaft of sunlight coming in through the porch window and the tiny specks of dust she’s scared up from the furniture are suspended there in mid-air, minuscule pieces of the world. I watch them and think about us suspended in the universe, hanging here, waiting to be blown around. Yesterday morning everything was one thing and now it’s another and I don’t like the way things keep changing. I don’t want to be moved about.

  Anna’s mum breaks through the silence: ‘I’ve just spoken to your mum,’ and I realize I’m standing, staring, my mouth hanging half open, my arms dangling uselessly by my sides. It doesn’t feel like home with everyone gone and everything changed. I wish hard that Dad might hear my thoughts and magic himself from the frozen wilderness to be back here. I want him to come and make us pancakes and have Radio Four droning on in the background and Mum yelling at him for leaving bloody coffee cups all over his desk in the study. I want Leah dancing about in tennis shoes and winding me up with Megan, not lying in a hospital bed wired up to machines because she’s almost killed herself with alcohol poisoning. I want –

  ‘You’re away in a dream,’ Lisa continues. And she looks at me, searchingly. ‘What are you thinking? Don’t worry, sweetie, everything’s going to be OK.’

  I look at her and I know my face is set like a stone. I can’t make it into the right shape to keep her happy. I don’t even know what the right shape would be. I just want everything to go away.

  She smiles at me again. I can’t help feeling that she’s not quite sure what to do with me, like she’s worried I might burst into tears or into flames or something. She’s got a strange expression underneath the smiley crinkles in the corner of her eyes.

  And then I realize I know what it is. She knows Anna hates me for what happened, and she doesn’t know how to tell me. And she’s having to be here to be polite and do the right thing because she’s friends with Mum, and – my skin prickles again at the thought and I realize that I’m tapping thumb to finger to thumb again in a rhythm. I catch her watching my fingers moving and I quiet them so they’re still, but the movement just shifts and I tap tap tap inside.

  When I was little and they sent me to the Jigsaw centre, they used to try to get me to stop. Quiet hands, Grace, they’d say, and they’d hold them in my lap, smiling. And I’d want to scream at them that it’s like having a motor ticking over inside me, and if I don’t fidget something in my head wants to explode, but I couldn’t find the words. And right now my head wants to explode. I get a sudden urge to pick up the bottle of furniture polish and throw it against the mirror and watch it smash into a thousand razor shards. I squeeze my hand into a ball so the fingernails dig into my palms.

  I can’t do that, anyway. Withnail would stand in the broken glass and I’m already the worst animal owner in the world. But that’s what people seem to do. It happens on television all the time. They just pick things up and they throw them and they walk away and somehow it works out for them. And I still can’t get the rules. I watch and I try to absorb it, and I try to get it right and hang out at the park and fit in, and somehow I break everything. Not glass, but people. And lives.

  ‘Anyway, the doctor’s happy with Leah’s bloods. They’re on the way back. Shouldn’t be long.’ She picks up the duster that’s lying on the dresser and folds it into a neat square, smoothing it out with her fingers before placing it down carefully on the s
hiny wood. ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I know I’m supposed to want to hug Leah when she walks back in with Mum. But she’s pale and sick and they both smell alien, of hospitals and bleach and smooth metal bed frames and plastic pipes and fear. Leah’s got bruised dark shadows under her eyes and her hair is dull and lifeless, tied back with an unfamiliar purple hair band. She looks at me and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. The expression on her face is strange and it scares me.

  ‘Grace –’ Mum begins, but I step backwards and pick up Withnail as a shield, holding her in my arms. She squirms, but I don’t let her go, rubbing under her ears until she stops protesting and starts purring even though she doesn’t want to.

  ‘Morning,’ says Leah.

  Lisa is standing in the hall and she’s picked up the duster again and is twisting it in her hands, watching. I think she looks like she wants to leave. I think that I’d quite like to leave too. I wonder if I could just walk away from everyone and everything and start again as a new person.

  It’s as if we’re hanging in the air now, like the dust motes. We’re suspended here in this strange, static atmosphere for a moment that seems to last for ages, and then –

  ‘I could kill for a coffee,’ says Mum. And Lisa steps forward and hugs her, and Leah looks at me over her shoulder and half shrugs and I smile at her and let Withnail drop to the ground. She lands on featherlight feet and dances away to the top of the stairs where she sits licking her front paws and watching.

  ‘Leah, in you come to the kitchen,’ says Lisa, and I step back out of the way and watch them all go through. And again I feel as if I’m not part of this picture and I don’t know how I’m supposed to behave. So I sit down on the stairs and I try not to think. And thoughts sneak into my head. I see Mabel lying on the beach and I feel a raw ache of guilt and panic, and I make that thought go away by opening my eyes and focusing really hard on the pattern on the carpet until my eyes go funny.

  And then I close them again and see everyone in the distance waving their arms and shouting as I’m running. I remember how I turned back just once, and their arms were flailing in the air and the shouts were whipped away from their mouths so all I could see was angry faces, Anna’s angry face, and I knew then that I had to get away.

  And I open my eyes again because I don’t want to see that in my head, either. And then I close them again and I see Leah, ghostly white, lying still on the carpet. And I don’t know how to make any of it disappear, and it frightens me.

  Eventually Lisa leaves. She smiles at me sitting folded up on the stairs and tells me to get some rest and not to worry about anything, which I think means that it doesn’t matter that I’ve lost my best friend and I have to go back to school on Monday and there will be nobody there who’ll speak to me. I nod at her but don’t speak. I think I’ve run out of words.

  ‘I’m putting you in the shower, honey,’ says Mum to Leah, and as she passes me on the stairs she drops a hand on my head for a moment and looks at me and her face looks – quizzical, I think. ‘You all right there, darling?’

  And I give a tiny little upward nod because I can’t make words come out. It’s like they’ve got stuck.

  I don’t speak all afternoon, and nobody notices. Mum comes through and says that Polly has told her she’s looking after Mabel and she’s fine and I nod again.

  And I want her to ask me what’s wrong. And I half want her to hold me in a cuddle and squeeze me tightly and tell me she loves me and that everything’s going to be OK, but she’s busy looking after Leah and I think she hasn’t really noticed that I’m not OK. Or maybe she doesn’t really care. But she doesn’t seem to realize that my words have got stuck like paper gets jammed in a printer and I can’t make a noise. I’ve shut down.

  I sit on the stairs for so long that my legs go numb and ache. And I need to go to the loo, but I let the pain of that sit inside me too until I’m so desperate that my bladder feels as if it might burst. But I feel like I deserve that – to be uncomfortable and sore feels right. I sort of want to stop being. I go to my room once I’ve been to the bathroom and I sit down on the floor with my back to the wall, crunched up really tiny in the corner. My hands are freezing.

  Sometimes I hear Mum taking Leah upstairs and the sound of her throwing up in the toilet. And then flushing and muttered words and kind noises, and then silence again.

  I don’t know how long I sit in my corner.

  ‘Grace, dinner,’ Mum shouts.

  I’m not hungry, I think. I can’t open my mouth to say it because it’s as if my lips have been stapled shut. I tip forward on to my hands and knees, and straighten up to standing. All my bones and muscles feel hard and unyielding. This is how Mabel feels, stiff-legged in her paddock.

  I get halfway down the stairs and sit down.

  ‘Come on, darling.’ Mum comes into the hall. She sounds more like her usual self, by which I mean she’s nagging. ‘What have you been up to all afternoon? I bet you’ve been glued to that phone. Honestly, I tell you, things are going to change around here.’

  I get up and walk into the kitchen.

  Leah’s quiet too, but she wants to know how Mabel is. And Mum tells her how she ran away and how amazing Polly is being and how brave Mabel was for the vet and that she’s got stitches in her leg and I just sit there listening.

  ‘My God,’ says Leah, looking at me as if she hadn’t spent the night in hospital. ‘Are you OK?’

  And Mum looks across at me as if she’s waiting for me to finish the story. She puts down her glass and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. I push my chair away from the table because I can’t sit through any more of this.

  So Mum continues.

  ‘When Anna rang me to tell me what had happened, I jumped in the car – thank God Eve and I hadn’t actually made it into the cinema or I’d have had no reception.’

  I sit back down on my chair, heavily.

  ‘Where’s Eve now?’ Leah flicks me a conspiratorial look, and it’s the first spark of her old self I’ve seen. She’s been quiet and withdrawn until now – not just because she feels like shit (I assume she’s got the mother of all hangovers) but also because at some point, when Mum finishes being lovely about this, she’s going to be grounded from here to kingdom come.

  Mum gives us an odd look. ‘Oh, we had a bit of a –’

  Leah leans forward slightly. ‘A – what?’

  ‘It was nothing,’ says Mum. ‘Bit of a difference of opinion, that’s all.’

  My jaw unclenches slightly and I move it from side to side. It starts to ache.

  Mum picks up her glass and spins it between her fingers. Normally she’d have red wine, but I notice that it’s sparkling water. I guess after the whole hospital thing she doesn’t want us getting any ideas. After listening to Leah throwing up all afternoon, I don’t think she has anything to worry about.

  ‘So what happened?’ Leah shoves her food around her plate a bit. She hasn’t eaten anything yet, I notice. Nor have I, because my mouth is still superglued shut. Mum’s done her usual stress thing and catered for a family of ten. There are dishes of vegetables and rice lined up right down the middle of the table.

  ‘Oh.’ Mum’s mouth twists sideways. ‘When I got the call from Anna, Eve told me to leave it. Said you’d be fine and you were old enough to sort yourselves out.’

  ‘Huh.’ Leah looks at me.

  I don’t say anything.

  Mum and Leah chat about Eve and they don’t seem to notice I’m not talking. I get up and clear the table after a while, and as I’m heading out of the door Mum says –

  ‘You look exhausted, sweetheart. I’ll be up in a moment. Want me to run you a nice bath?’

  I shake my head.

  When she comes into my room, I’m sitting perched on the end of the bed. I feel as if I’ve got a sour-tasting wave of tears and shouting threatening to break at any moment, but it’s like the switch has been turned off and I can’t
find it. I’m rubbing my finger along the lines that pattern the woollen throw that lies over the end of the bed.

  ‘Grace,’ Mum begins. She puts an arm over my shoulders and it lies there, warm and heavy. ‘I want you to know that I’m not angry. Do you think I’m angry?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Have you spoken to Anna?’

  I shake my head again.

  ‘She’ll be worrying about you, I’m sure.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say, and my voice sounds creaky and rusty, like it’s been left out in the rain.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ Mum says. ‘Have you had a falling out?’

  I look down at the bedspread and run three fingers side by side along the indentations, watching them rise and fall as they follow the bulk of the crumpled duvet that lies underneath.

  I don’t say anything.

  ‘We’ve all been a bit –’ Mum bites at her thumbnail for a moment, looking at me thoughtfully. ‘It’s been a bit all over the place this time, hasn’t it?’

  I look at her.

  Yes.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Grandma today about what’s going on. And I think – she thought – we –’ She pauses, as if she’s nervous to say whatever it is, and she straightens out the pillowcase at the other end of my bed before she carries on talking, pulling out a crushed T-shirt that’s been missing for ages from down the side of the bed.

  ‘We thought as you’ve had a bit of a time of it, and Polly’s happy to look after Mabel, maybe you could go down to Grandma’s for a few days. Just get a change of scene.’

  She doesn’t know what to do with me. I’m not surprised, really, because I don’t know what to do with me.

  ‘I mean of course if you don’t want to that’s OK and I know you’ll miss the first week back to school but we can tell them you’re off sick and –’ She’s talking faster and faster, so I can’t find a gap to respond.

  ‘Fine,’ says my rusty voice.