Wildest of All

by P. K . Lynch

  She would have had more respect for him if he’d had the courage of his convictions.

  ‘You should be at home with your mother at a time like this,’ he’d said, but home with her mother was the last place she wanted to be. Sissy and her dad had exchanged notes almost since she’d learned to write. Her last, final letter to him was more important than she could convey. She couldn’t fathom why her mother would watch her slip it into his inside pocket, only to remove it as soon as Sissy left the room. Jealousy. Her mother had always been jealous. Even as a little girl, Sissy sensed the power she had over her father.

  ‘Marry me, Daddy,’ she’d urged him.

  ‘But I’m married to Mummy.’

  ‘But I want you to marry me, Daddy!’

  His distinctive laugh that made heads turn, as opposed to her mother’s bashful smile and embarrassed eye roll. Floating beneath her rage, Sissy felt something like sympathy, but then she thought again of the letter, and the burning started up again. She welcomed it. She could live like this forever, she thought, taking no shit and getting shit done, but half an hour into her first lesson the flames began to burn low. She squirmed in her chair, trying to resist the heavy settling sensation in her stomach. At break she ran to the shop and bought herself one of those energy drinks the boys liked to drink. She spent the lessons before lunch in a state of anxiety, twisting and turning at her desk, wrapping her ankles around her chair legs in an effort to sit still, the drone of Mr McGonagle’s voice like a dentist’s drill driving through her soul. She pulled her mobile out and texted Cam.

  Whr r u?

  His reply was instant.

  Wrk. U?

  McGonagle is killing me.

  U bck so soon? Wtf?????

  Need out.

  Gotcha see u lunchtime @ b/house.

  The boathouse in the park had hosted several misspent summer evenings between Sissy, Cam and Rik.

  She folded her phone over, packed up her books and left, leaving the class in an uproar because McGonagle didn’t even notice it happen. She should have signed out in the office, but instinct told her she could get away with anything at the moment, and besides, she didn’t care who she pissed off.

  ‘You do know I’m here illegally, don’t you? Like, trying not to get noticed?’ she said, in reference to his luminous yellow safety vest.

  ‘Aye, and you do know I’m meant to be at work, don’t you?’ he replied, mimicking her tone. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one, which she took, leaning in to catch a light from him, an intimate move she’d learned from her parents and which had become normal between them. They began to walk around the pond, the site of many cider-fuelled Friday nights, the worst of which had resulted in them all falling in, then having to run away and hide from the police.

  ‘Won’t you get in trouble from work?’ Sissy asked.

  ‘Nah, doubt they’ll miss me. Not had time to make myself indispensable yet.’

  Cam held his cigarette between his thumb and middle finger, while Sissy took a more classic between two fingers approach. They’d helped each other decide on their style and now they moved quietly alongside each other, the giddy heights of the previous summer a distant memory.

  She searched for something, anything, to say. Yesterday had been fine. The people and the alcohol and the structure of the day had carried them through, but today was different. Suddenly Sissy had a huge and heavy sense of the journey that lay before her. She longed to tell him about the letter. It lay in her bag, which was the entirely wrong place for it. She felt it straining against the confines of the book she’d slipped it into: How to Pass Higher Human Biology. She felt the words all jumbled up in her mouth, pushing against her lips, begging for escape. She clamped her teeth together, frightened of what they might become if she were to let them out. She felt Cam looking at her and had the sensation of shrinking, becoming less than. Her eyes were still puffy from a week’s crying.

  ‘What?’ she snapped.

  ‘You should get out of that,’ he said, nodding at her uniform. ‘You know what folk are like round here.’

  Grateful for something to do, she pulled off her tie and put it in her bag.

  ‘I’ve an empty,’ Cam said. ‘We could go there.’

  Cam’s mum and stepdad dealt in bric-a-brac. They travelled up and down the country to various car boot sales, and when they were gone the teenagers commandeered the place, and smoked the pot Cam’s stepdad kept in his bedroom drawer.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, slipping her bag from one shoulder to the other. ‘Let’s go.’

  Cam’s part of town held a fascination for Sissy and Rik that they would never admit to. Rik described it as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’. Rows of three-storey closes, lots of boarded-up windows, empty roads with cars jacked up on bricks, and usually a lone police car patrolling the area. Occasionally, large groups of teenage boys skulked on street corners and whistled as they went past; Cam would shout over a generic greeting while Sissy and Rik followed his lead and picked up their pace. It was always a relief when they made it into the flat.

  It was the last in the block and had been recently refurbished. Laminate flooring throughout, glossy surfaces in the kitchen, purple-framed flower prints on the wall in the living room. Sissy liked to sort through the boxes of seventies junk stacked up in the kitchen: wire pictures, glass swans, ceramic bunny rabbits – the list was endless and unpredictable, but today the flat was empty.

  ‘They took everything. They’ll be away till Sunday night.’

  Sissy’s eyes grew wide. The solution to all her problems – namely how to avoid her mother – had presented itself. They pooled their money. There was enough to get drunk with.

  ‘Party,’ said Cam, rubbing his hands together in glee.

  Later, when they were drunk and Rik had joined them, Sissy’s phone buzzed. She groaned when she saw the message, a stark reminder of reality.

  Where are you? Mum x

  ‘What? What is it?’ said Cam, deep into a two-person shooter game with Rik.

  Cam’s. Staying over.

  A two-minute delay then: Ok. Take Care. Mum x

  Sissy hurled the phone across the room. It bounced off the wall, and startled the boys.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ said Rik.

  Overcome with remorse, she told them, ‘Sorry, sorry, it’s nothing, sorry.’

  She reached for a cushion and pulled it to her, kneading it with her fists. A huge gaping maw had opened inside. It needed to be blocked up.

  ‘Jesus, Sis. What the fuck?’

  She threw the cushion aside, stood up and shook herself like an athlete preparing for a race.

  ‘I need to get out of here,’ she exclaimed. ‘Who’s up for it?’

  They headed into the woods across from Cam’s house, Sissy leading the way to the collection of empty cider bottles that marked their territory. They felt such ownership of this little patch that abandoning the remnants of their evenings here didn’t feel like littering so much as decoration.

  Cam, as usual, darted straight up his regular tree, an ash. The King of Trees, the Vikings used to say. Roots in hell and branches reaching towards the heavens. One of the few anecdotes retained from school, though no one could agree if it was Mr Mann in history, or Miss Leech in science that had passed it on.

  High in the tree, Cam tipped his head back and yowled like a wolf.

  ‘I can’t fucking look at him,’ Rik muttered to Sissy. ‘Tell me when it’s safe.’

  ‘Get up here, ya pair of pussies!’

  Rik flinched as half a can of beer landed close by him, splashing his jeans. Sissy picked it up and gulped it down, the bitter taste a long-accepted necessary evil.

  ‘Get to fuck!’ called Rik, wiping his trousers with his hand and then drying the hand on his chest. ‘These are new.’

  ‘Some view from up here,’ Cam called, and then Sissy was on her way, wordlessly scaling the tree. She wanted to be off the ground. She wanted to be where Cam was, high and
wild and not giving a shit.

  ‘Oh Sissy, don’t,’ moaned Rik, but she was already doing it.

  ‘I can see your knickers, you know,’ called Rik, as her school skirt flapped around her. ‘It’s not decent.’

  Her wet-soled shoes threatened to slip against the damp wood, but she found spaces to dig and cling and she hauled herself up with unusual ease. Soon she was level with Cam, breathless and irritated but unsure of the reason why. She straddled the branch he was on and shuffled her way towards him, raising herself on her hands and bumping along.

  ‘Not bothered about splinters, then, no?’ Cam said with a smirk.

  She grinned. ‘Do I look like I’m bothered?’

  ‘Please be careful up there,’ called Rik. ‘I don’t want to look like the lone survivor of some forest homicide.’

  Another can hurtled through the air and landed beside Rik. He grabbed it and swallowed the white foam spurting out of the top.

  ‘That’s right, just keep chucking all your beer at me. I hate that!’

  ‘You all right, Sis?’ Cam said in a low voice, conscious of the potential eavesdropper below, but Sissy was rendered speechless by the view of Glasgow behind him: cars twinkling north and south over the far-distant Kingston Bridge, little black birds swooping with grace over the Clyde, and darkness slowly encroaching upon all of it. It was the world without Peter Donnelly, and it was carrying on as normal.

  Cam dropped heavily into a sitting position opposite Sissy, jolting her back to the moment. The branch they were on bounced with his weight, his eyes mischievous or malevolent, Sissy couldn’t decide and didn’t care either way. The bark was somehow both rough and soft with dampness beneath her hands.

  ‘You’re going to break that,’ warned Rik from below. ‘Then you’ll be sorry.’

  ‘You scared, Sis?’ said Cam, grinning like a villain in one of his comics. ‘Wooh, we’re going to fall, Sissy, we’re going to fall!’

  He spread his arms like an aeroplane and tilted side to side, her cue to squeal and beg him to stop, but tonight she met him move for move until his laughing stopped and he gripped her arms with real fear in his eyes.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. This wasn’t the Sissy he knew.

  ‘You okay, baby Cam?’ smiled Sissy, and her eyes gleamed brighter than the moon as it sailed above her.

  ‘You’re fucking mental,’ said Cam.

  ‘Have you forgotten my dad just died?’ she slapped back.

  ‘What? No! I – ’

  Keen to push past the moment, Sissy leaned over and called down to Rik.

  ‘You can come up now. We won’t do it any more.’

  ‘Nah, you’re all right.’

  Cam appeared to be still reeling from her harsh words.

  ‘Sissy,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I… what’s that?’

  She’d reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out her dad’s letter.

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘this is something I wrote for my dad. I left in his suit pocket. It should have gone with him.’

  She smoothed the cream envelope across her thigh. Already it looked old. Fit for the bin.

  ‘My fucking mum took it off him. Why would she do that?’

  Hoping against hope that he could give her a real answer, she repeated the question, but she should have known he’d be no use. Still, it wasn’t his fault he was so immature. She wished she were the same. She wished she hadn’t been catapulted into adulthood with no warning. She wished she and her friends were still on the same plane, but it was unavoidable. She’d left them behind on the day Uncle Danny had come to the school. If only she could make it clear to them.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, in a very small, tightly controlled voice that trembled nevertheless. ‘I don’t know how to live with her now. I don’t even know who she is any more. Who is she? I’ve always looked at her as one half of him. Now he’s gone. Who is she? And why would she steal his letter from him? My last letter to him? My letter that rounds everything off. That says goodbye. How am I supposed to say goodbye now? It’s too late.’

  She clambered to her feet and stamped on the branch.

  ‘Jesus, Sissy, stop that!’ Cam stretched a hand towards her, but she continued to bounce up and down. The leaves above them rustled and let loose a mini monsoon of trapped rain. Cam’s panicked expression was so comical it made her laugh. ‘If you’re not going to stop then you need to move so I can get past!’ Cam said, clinging onto the branch.

  ‘Why’s that? You’re okay being a big shot up here as long as you’re in charge?’

  ‘Just move, Sissy.’

  ‘Well, you don’t get to be in charge all the time, all right? I’m in charge too,’ she yelled.

  ‘Sissy, will you move?’

  As Cam manoeuvred his way around her, she shook the overhanging branch so the last of the drips fell over them both, and laughed into the night as she did so.

  ‘It’s not fucking funny, Sissy. No fucking need for that. None at all.’

  But it must have been funny because she continued to laugh as Cam hurriedly fumbled his way to the ground, shaken by the power shift between them. She laughed even more when he and Rik begged her to come back down, and by the time they’d given up on her and were heading home, her peals of laughter were so loud she thought they might bring down the night sky. Neither Rik nor Cam could admit it was a relief when at last they couldn’t hear her any more.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Butterflies Clinging to Plants on a Windy Day

  As the days crept forward on Peter’s housing estate, everything and nothing had changed. His street’s gentle curve of pale modern houses swept beneath a canopy of rustling green; cars continued to bring people back and forth; children occasionally played out; the same postman came by every morning between eleven and eleven thirty, offloading the usual mix of bills and junk.

  For the past few days the postman’s bag had been bulkier than normal, thanks to the increase in mail to Ms Jude Corrigan at number twenty-four. It was easy to tell the difference between a birthday and a bereavement. Deaths attracted far more cards than any celebration. The postman felt for the family. Was it a daughter they had? For some reason, he thought so. P. Donnelly had been one of the few faces he saw regularly on this street, someone who always raised a hand in greeting or called hello across the road. He’d never been able to pinpoint his job, exactly. Normally, people who work from home reveal their profession in the mail they receive, but not P. Donnelly. Still, he wasn’t a slacker, you could tell. Carried himself well. People like that made his day a little easier. Yes, he thought, as he reached into his bag for today’s bundle of cards, P. Donnelly would be missed.

  As he approached the letter box, a thought occurred to him. What if, instead of taking the elastic band off and slipping the cards in a few at a time, he just rang the bell and handed them over? He could pass on his condolences. People liked to hear good things about their loved ones, after all, and he’d like to tell them P. Donnelly always had a smile for him, always made delivering in this street a little lift in his day. It was a tiny thing but he was overcome with the urge to share his feelings, and really, who else would understand but the inhabitants of this house? Without thinking about it a second longer, he pressed down on the round brass button and heard the ridiculous sound of the kazoo doorbell carry within. He’d forgotten about that. It made him chuckle, but then it died away and silence fell again, thicker than before. To break it felt wrong. A few houses down, Mrs Conn was heading out with the baby. He caught her eye and nodded. Still no one answered the door. Feeling suddenly foolish, he bowed his head, took the elastic band from the pile and slipped the cards through the letter box, a few at a time. There was always tomorrow.

  By minuscule degrees the bricks of the house creaked their way deeper into the earth, as the cards landed on the mat with a soft shuffling thwump. Sissy waited for the shadowy figure behind the glass to retreat before coming forward. Despite knowing what they were, there was still a small thri
ll to be had in gathering them up, all the tasteful pastel envelopes of various shades, sitting down to see who was thinking of them at this time, if there was any new information to be gleaned from all these strangers, some of whom had known her father longer than she.

  ‘That doesn’t mean they knew him better,’ Jude said, finding Sissy poring over them.

  ‘But don’t you want to see them?’ asked Sissy. ‘I don’t know half these people. Who’s Andrea, John and Kevin, for instance? And this one,’ she said, holding up a different card. ‘Mark, Sandra and kids? Edinburgh postmark. There’s so many.’

  ‘Maybe later,’ Jude replied, no room in her head for memories of these people. She squeezed behind Sissy’s chair and made for the stairs, but before she could climb them Sissy’s sharp voice rang out.

  ‘I forgot you only like letters that aren’t addressed to you.’

  Jude flinched. It had taken over a week to realise Sissy’s anger was more than an understandable reaction to Peter’s death, and by the time Jude finally discovered the true cause, her memory of receiving the letter from Anne was so hazy, Sissy had interpreted her obfuscation as lying. The false reality they had inadvertently created had taken root, and anything Jude had to say about it sounded fake, even to her. After all, why had Anne taken the letter? It really made no sense. ‘You need to know what’s going on with her,’ she’d said. ‘You need to keep her safe.’ But how could Jude hope to keep her daughter safe when Sissy’s default approach was to punish her for something she hadn’t even done?

  Too tired to attempt another explanation, Jude turned her back on Sissy’s rage and climbed the stairs to her bedroom with a heaviness that creaked almost to the very foundations of the house.

  Sissy stood the cards on all available surfaces, giving them their rightful place as memory monuments to her dad. Day after day they came, until shelves, unit tops and tables overflowed and there was nowhere else for them to go. They perched precariously over everything like butterflies clinging to plants on a windy day. She returned to them over and over, finding comfort in the words of people she’d never met, words that weren’t even addressed to her, but she took them anyway because Jude didn’t want them and somehow that made it all the more important to read them: