Floored

by Sara Barnard

  He sighs. ‘Because of course you are. What else would you do?’

  On paper, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a positive comment. But Jasper’s tone makes it very clear it isn’t.

  ‘Just . . . answer me this. What time did the boat leave?’ he asks.

  ‘Seven.’ I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Suddenly I know where this is leading.

  ‘And it’s quarter to eight now. Was it supposed to be an hour-long cruise?’

  I don’t reply.

  ‘How much did it cost you? Because you can’t just turn a boat around mid-cruise on the Thames, unless it’s an emergency, and I’m pretty sure the captain wouldn’t have seen Sasha missing the boat as a crisis.’

  I still don’t reply.

  ‘How much, Dawson?’

  ‘Five hundred.’ It was the only way, I tell myself. He wouldn’t have turned around otherwise.

  He’s quiet for a moment. ‘I take it you’re driving to Manchester?’

  ‘It’s the fastest way. Seriously, Jas, what’s with the interrogation? Do you not want me to go?’

  ‘You have a hero complex.’

  ‘What?’ I stare at my phone in disbelief, as though he could see me.

  ‘You have a hero complex,’ he repeats, as I lift the phone back to my ear. ‘You’re always trying to save people.’

  ‘I’m not always trying to save people.’

  ‘No? How about when you drove everyone across the North to see Velvet when she was pregnant?’

  ‘Hang on – we didn’t go because she was pregnant. We didn’t know there was drama until way after . . .’

  ‘All right, fine . . . but what about Hugo, in Ibiza? You told me he was nothing but a shit to you, to you all, and you still scooped him up off the beach and took him back to your dad and Trish’s.’

  ‘Jasper, he could have fucking died. I couldn’t just leave him stoned off his box on Sunset Strip. What was I supposed to do?’

  ‘And then there’s Joe,’ he continues. ‘When you gave up three nights – nights we were already on deadline for – to help him with his application? When you spent another two days emailing everyone you could think of on his behalf, days we were supposed to be on our first holiday together . . .’

  I don’t say anything because I know what – who – is coming next, and if he says it, then I’ll . . . I don’t know what I’ll do.

  ‘And now you’re planning to speed off to Manchester to save Sasha. Never mind that we’ve got a meeting tomorrow.’

  I breathe a sigh of relief that he didn’t go where I thought he was heading, then instantly feel guilty for doubting him. ‘I’ll be back for it,’ I promise.

  ‘That’s not my point . . . Dawson, what have they done for you? Where were they when we first got together and they stopped replying to your messages? Where have they been for the last year, while you’ve been here?’

  ‘Sasha replied to me,’ I say. ‘Every time. And you know why things have been strained. Why are we fighting?’

  ‘We’re not,’ he says. Then again, softer. ‘We’re not. I’m being overprotective, and kind of a dick. I’m sorry . . .’

  He pauses, and I can picture him running a hand through his hair.

  ‘Look, you do what you need to, Dawson. I’ll see you at The Hospital Club tomorrow. Try to get some sleep before you drive back. I hate the idea of you driving on no sleep.’

  ‘Bright side is I’ll still be wearing my tux. So I’ll look smart at least.’

  Jasper groans. ‘Thanks for the reminder that I’m going to miss you coming home in a tux. I had plans, Dawson.’

  I grin. ‘There’s a two-hour dry cleaner on Berwick Street. Bring me some spare clothes, I’ll put the tux in while we’re at lunch, and then I can wear it home.’

  ‘Deal,’ I hear the smile in his voice. ‘Drive safe.’

  ‘Always.’

  I hang up, and find the others are right there, just a few feet away, their faces carefully blank. And I wonder how much of that they heard.

  We get the Tube to East Finchley, and I leave the others at the station while I jog up the road to collect the car from the car park. Kait and Remy end up in the front, the passenger seat pushed all the way back, with Hugo, Velvet and Joe in the back.

  We’re barely out of Greater London before Kait has fallen asleep, and it makes my stomach twist with familiarity. She never could stay awake on the move. Trains, planes, cars, she’s out like a light. Never mind it’s only half eight.

  I turn the music down and hold a finger to my lips, meeting Hugo’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. He nudges the others to let them know, and we all keep our voices down as we talk.

  ‘What’s the plan then?’ Hugo asks softly.

  ‘She’s still not picking up,’ Velvet says.

  ‘Do we know her dad’s address?’ Joe says.

  I nod. ‘Yeah, I’ve got it.’

  I expected everyone to take Kait’s side after we broke up, and they did. I know I deserved it – that’s the fate of the dumper; you’re the bad guy by default – but it still hurt. I got off relatively lightly: they didn’t exactly freeze me out, but for the first few months there was a definite cold front. Less quick to reply to my messages. Less keen to meet up when I went home to visit Mum. On a scale of One-to-Hugo, I was definitely at a low Hugo for a while. But not with Sasha.

  Sasha messaged me pretty much every day to see how I was doing. I wanted to send her some flowers to thank her, but she wouldn’t give me her address.

  Luckily, it’s the twenty-first century, so it was easy enough to find it through her dad’s old company records.

  She never thanked me for the flowers, I realize then. I figured she was just annoyed I’d found her address anyway.

  ‘So . . . I guess we head there?’ Joe leans between the seats.

  ‘I guess so.’

  And do what though?

  By half eleven, we’re well past Birmingham, and everyone is asleep. Hugo is slumped against the window, mouth open, and Velvet is leaning on Joe. I think about reaching back to wake him, because I’m sure he’d want to experience this, but I don’t. Actually, I’m a bit miffed none of them have stayed awake to chat to me, and I can’t help but think about what Jasper said, about them not loving me as much as I love them.

  You did volunteer to drive, I remind myself. No one asked you to.

  But it leaves a sickly feeling in my stomach.

  I try to think of something else, focusing on the music. It takes a few bars before I realize the song my phone is piping softly into the car is ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’. Stevie Wonder. I flash Kaitlyn a guilty glance and reach out to skip it.

  ‘Don’t.’

  My skin heats. I didn’t know she was awake.

  She opens her eyes fully. ‘I’m surprised you still have it on there,’ she says, twisting to face me. At her feet, Remy lifts his head, waiting for an instruction, but when one doesn’t come, he lies back down.

  ‘It’s a good song. I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘No,’ she says honestly. ‘It was too weird, being back here, in your car, with you. I needed some space to deal with it.’

  I nod.

  ‘What was all that about earlier? On the phone?’

  My knuckles tighten on the wheel, but I keep my voice light as I reply. ‘Oh, yeah, that. Jasper was just reminding me we have a meeting tomorrow, and I need to be there for it.’

  ‘Right. And what was all the stuff about Velvet . . . and Ibiza?’

  Shit. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t lie, Dawson. Not to me.’

  ‘How did you even hear that over the engine and the water?’

  ‘Super-enhanced hearing thanks to my terrible eyes,’ she says, and I snort. ‘I heard it because you were yelling over the engine and the water.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Everyone heard. We talked about it when you went to get the car. It was about us, wasn’t it? Jasper thinks we’re using you, or something.’r />
  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ I say automatically.

  It’s a hangover from when we were together. Because Kait couldn’t see me, I started to tell her I’m thinking when I fell silent, so she knew I was still there. I push the words around in my head until I think they make sense. Then I start talking.

  ‘This past year has been the best of my life, so far,’ I say, my stomach cramping when she flinches, but I press on. ‘I feel like I’m finally doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m where I’m supposed to be.’

  ‘With who you’re supposed to be with?’ she says, the words only a little bitter.

  ‘With who I’m supposed to be with right now,’ I say, as kindly as I can. I don’t want to hurt her, of all the people on the planet, but I can’t betray Jasper by playing down our relationship. ‘But it’s also been kind of the worst. Worse than not getting into drama school. Worse than my agent dropping me, or having to work in Chunder Burger, or a surprise sexuality plot twist.’

  ‘Why?’ She sounds suspicious, a bright edge to her voice.

  ‘Because of us. Because of them.’ I jerk my head towards the back seat. ‘I know how much I hurt you. Breaking up with you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I was grieving too. But I wasn’t allowed to. I wasn’t allowed to be sad, or to say I missed you. No one wanted to hear it. And I know it’s nothing compared to what I put you through, but I was losing stuff too. I lost my best friend – I thought I was losing all of my friends—’

  ‘You weren’t,’ Kait interrupts. ‘No one slagged you off. No one suggested cutting you out. And if they had, I would have stopped them . . .’ She pauses. ‘Eventually.’

  My lips tug with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘Thanks. But that’s the point I’m trying to make. Jasper wanted to know what you’ve all done for me. While I’m being a “hero”, as he called it, what have you done for me? And the answer is, be my friends. That’s what you’ve done for me. Because it’s not about the big gestures. It’s about little, everyday ones. The ones that look like nothing. They’re the ones that really count. Being a friend, every day. The last year has been awkward, for me, and I know that’s my fault, but you all stuck around. It was different, but I know if anything terrible had happened, you would have had my back. So what you’ve done for me is be my friends. I’ve never had friends before.’

  Kaitlyn makes a scoffing noise. ‘Oh please, you know loads of people. Everyone loves you.’

  ‘When I started Dedman, my mum had to take me out of school because I was bullied for it,’ I say, eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘And then I spent the next three years on the Dedman set. No one stayed in touch after that ended. Three years of my life, practically living with each other, and as soon as the show was cancelled, that was it. I had no one. Then I met you lot, and I don’t even know how we ended up friends, but we did. And it stuck. A bunch of total misfits, the only thing we have in common is we watched a guy die . . . and here we are. Six kids from completely different worlds, still hanging out, five years later. Still in the same dorky chat group. Nothing to keep us together except wanting to . . .’

  I pause, checking my mirrors.

  ‘We’ve all changed loads, you know. Everything’s changed loads. Maybe I do have a hero complex. Maybe that’s my job, in our crew: the hero. And Velvet’s our conscience. Sash is our heart. Joe is our rock. You’re our bruiser. And Hugo is . . . Well, Hugo is Hugo.’ I smile. ‘And together, we’re us. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.’

  ‘Ugh, did Hugo’s hippiness rub off on you?’ Kait looks simultaneously disgusted and delighted, and I grin.

  A hand lands on my shoulder, making me jump, and I look in the mirror to see Joe, Velvet and Hugo are all wide awake, listening. It’s Joe’s hand on my shoulder, beside him Hugo’s eyes are glistening. Velvet is smiling, a big beautiful smile.

  ‘Pass me your phone,’ she says, and I do.

  In the silent moment between tracks, Hugo murmurs, ‘I’m not a hippy,’ then the speakers vibrate with the sound of swirling synthesized guitar.

  When David Bowie starts to sing, we all join in.

  I wish Jasper was here. I wish he could see this. He’d get it.

  As the song finishes, we’re all smiling. Joe and Velvet are holding hands, and Kait’s face is soft, her hand on Remy’s head, which rests on her knee. It feels like we’re silently connected.

  So of course Hugo speaks.

  ‘Dawson,’ he says. ‘No offence, but—’

  Everyone groans.

  ‘I mean it!’ Hugo says earnestly. ‘I have a legitimate question.’

  ‘Go ahead, Hugo,’ I say, smiling as Kait rolls her eyes.

  ‘It’s just . . . Why do you only listen to old-people music? Don’t get me wrong, “Heroes” is a classic. But do you listen to anything from this century?’

  ‘Maybe you should send me some stuff.’ I spot our exit coming up and switch lanes. ‘But, more importantly, we’re going to be at Sasha’s house in about twenty minutes, so we need to come up with a plan. Is she answering her phone yet?’

  ‘No,’ Joe says. ‘I think it’s dead. Last time it rang was an hour ago, and then it just cut off. It hasn’t connected since.’

  ‘She must have gone home. We could throw stones at her window?’ Velvet says.

  ‘How do we know which one her window is?’ Kait asks.

  ‘True.’

  We slide off the motorway, and the sodium glow of orange lights as we drive into suburbia makes the world feel postnuclear, as though we’re the last people on earth. No one says anything as we drive down the high street, past a solitary kebab shop, and turn into Sasha’s road. I pull into the car park near Sasha’s block of flats, startling a fox that was rummaging in an old carrier bag. As the headlights die, I see it running into a bush with what looks like an old nappy in its jaws.

  ‘Time to go be heroes,’ I say, unclipping my seat belt.

  Time never lies. That’s one of the few things Sasha remembers from Mr Murray’s maths class. Time never lies. A minute is always sixty seconds. It doesn’t matter what is happening. If bombs are falling from the sky, or the ground is splitting beneath your feet, a minute is still sixty seconds. Not fifty-nine or sixty-one. Sixty. With everything else there is room for persuasion, but time never changes. It cannot be bribed or seduced or distracted. When a minute passes, sixty seconds later, another will pass, then another, and another, and another, until . . . Well, there is no until when it comes to time.

  It’s the only thing you can truly rely on.

  Still, as comforting as that is, a minute doesn’t always feel like a minute. Time often slows down, and not always in a nice, anticipatory way either – like excitedly waiting for Christmas morning, or for Joe to text her back – but sometimes in that horrible, sticky kind of way, when it seems to stop altogether. Like Sasha’s experiencing now, as she’s waiting in the rain for the bus, and three minutes is feeling a lot more like forever . . .

  Time hasn’t stopped, of course – she knows that. She knows the bus will come, and she will get on it, and everything will speed up again until she’s on the train, hoping that her new dress doesn’t crease and her curls don’t fall, while she looks out the window, willing it to go faster. Then the minutes until she’s in London will feel impassably far apart again. It’s so cruel, because when she wants time to slow down, it never does, it just goes faster – so fast that she can’t catch her breath. Like when she’s with the others, and it feels like she’s only just said hello, and then it’s time to leave again.

  Time is fickle like that.

  So are boats, apparently. Even party ones. They don’t care that there were signalling faults at Stockport, or that she can’t run in heels, or that she really, really needs to see the others.

  When you’re late, you’re late.

  And boats, much like time, go on without you.

  All Sasha can do is watch the boat
chug away, churning up the water as it does. She looks around, half-expecting to hear the clatter of Velvet’s heels on the cobblestones as she runs towards her, asking where she’s been. But there’s no-one, the dock deserted except for a couple taking a selfie under a streetlight.

  So she heads back to the tube, worried that one of them is waiting for her there but she missed them in her rush to get to the boat. As she approaches the station, she thinks she sees Joe and starts running, her overnight bag bumping against her hip as she does, but then the guy turns and when Sasha realises it isn’t him, the disappointment is enough to knock the air right out of her. Still, she checks inside, getting on her tiptoes to see over the heads of the fierce flow of commuters in and out of the station. She can’t see anyone and goes back outside, looking at the people assembled on the pavement, each of them waiting for someone, but not her, and a familiar heaviness settles into her bones.

  They went without me.

  It’s the same way she felt the morning her mother left as she stood at her bedroom window watching her battered red car disappear down their street towards the main road, like everything she wants has just left without her because she wasn’t enough to stay.

  Sasha is grateful for the signalling faults at Stockport on the way back, willing the train to slow this time because she doesn’t know what she’s going to say to her father. Her stomach lurches so suddenly, she feels light-headed. The mere thought of it – of walking back into her flat to find him still sitting there on the bottom step with a bottle of whisky and the letter from the school in France . . .

  She ran away. She literally ran away and left him there. She took her overnight bag and ran. Chose them – the others, her friends, her future, her only way out – and they weren’t even waiting when she got there and now she has nowhere else to go but home.

  She could have stayed. Now she’s on the train, she doesn’t know why she didn’t. She could have waited at the dock for the boat to come back or checked into the hotel and waited there, pretended not to care that they went without her when they finally rolled back, tipsy and giggling. She could have listened to Hugo and Dawson sparring as she helped Velvet take off her strappy sandals and it would have been better than this, surely? Better than sitting by herself on a train, sick at the thought of going home and seeing her father. But it hadn’t even occurred to her; she just joined the stream of commuters and let them lead her away.