by Lia Louis
Rosie pulls her sunglasses down to look at me with big brown eyes. “Well?”
I look over at her. “It isn’t the Frenchman.”
“Okay,” says Rosie. “Wanna talk about it?”
I shake my head, but she watches me, allowing a warm space to expand between us, encouraging me to fill it. “Do you remember when I told you about my dad? That I didn’t know who he was.”
Rosie nods, fiddling with the label on the bottle in her hands. “Yeah,” she says. “French, wasn’t he? A sexy musician.”
“You may have added the sexy bit.”
“Except, all musicians are sexy,” says Rosie. “Even the ugly ones. Anyway, go on.”
“Well, my mum has always told me she doesn’t know anything about him,” I tell Rosie. “Just that he was in a band and she was working at the same festival as him, and they had a couple of days together. His name was Peter and he lived in Brittany, that’s all she’d told me. And that he doesn’t know I exist.”
“I remember.” Rosie nods gently. “You said you never believed her. Not really.”
“Yeah,” I say, and pull my handbag toward me, the brown leather speckled with sand. I hand her the jiffy bag from inside. “She sent me these last Tuesday.”
Rosie pulls the cards out in a pile, taking the first out of its pink envelope. Like the rest of them, they’re scrawled with our old address. She’s silent for a moment, then she looks at me, mouth open.
“Oh my God.” She gawps at me, flinging the sunglasses to the top of her head. “This is… this is huge, Em.” I love the way her face has lit up, the way there are tears in her eyes now, glittering at the edges. The way she holds my arm and says, “He knows about you, Emmie. He cares. He’s always cared. This is proof.”
Rosie pulls her glasses back down, fingers swiping her eyes for stray tears under the dark lenses. “So, she’s had these all along, your mum?”
A swoop of seagulls crow low overhead. A family behind us, from behind a blue-and-pink striped windbreak, throw a scatter of chips in their direction.
“I guess so,” I say. “But I don’t know, Rosie. I can’t get through to her.” I don’t add that I’m not sure I will again.
“Shit.” Rosie’s phone vibrates and she taps a finger hard at the screen. “That’s my alarm, Em. We’ve got to get back to work. Why does it always go so bloody quick. Shall we walk?”
Rosie and I amble along the beach, empty boxes from our chicken wraps in our hands, the sun in our eyes. Rosie walks close to me, looking every so often at me at her side, watchful and careful, as if she wants to speak but doesn’t for fear of pressing me too much. We come to the steps leading up to the pavement, and Rosie sits on the edge of the wall, dusting sand from her bare feet with her hands. I sit beside her and look out to the beach. Children jump over waves at the sea’s edge, parents struggle swiping sun cream on tiny arms and faces, people lay still, facedown, milky legs under the sun.
“So, the cards—that’s the reason for the village,” says Rosie, slipping on a shoe. “The one jammed up your arse.”
I nod and tell her it’s not so much a village but a small hamlet.
“I searched for him so many times,” I tell her. “But I haven’t really tried since that last time. In school.” Words dry in my mouth.
“The teacher. Morgan,” Rosie says carefully, and I nod again. Rosie and Fox, apart from the Moreaus, are the only people who know about Robert Morgan. About the night of the Summer Ball. That he, an IT teaching assistant, was helping me find my dad on the computers in the IT block. The night of the Summer Ball was when he’d told me he found something. And I believed him. Went back to the empty, silent IT room with him, while the rest of year eleven danced, to mark the end of childhood, of school as we knew it. I didn’t even tell Adam, or the colleague or two I grew close to at the photo studio. Every time I tried, it felt so alien, to be saying those words out loud about something that actually happened to me, that I’d stop. For a time, every time I talked about it, it felt like I was exposing too much of myself, that if I told them, they might shrink away, recoil, leave. I’m getting better at that part—saying it out loud—but only very slowly.
“That address,” says Rosie, feet dusted, shoes back on, legs dangling over the wall. “On the back of the cards. Did you see it? You need to go there. Or at least get yourself on Google Maps.”
“I did. It’s my old town. I just don’t recognize the road.”
I didn’t recognize it at all as somewhere we lived, or anybody we knew back then. I’ve listed them over the last fortnight, the people we knew when we lived in Ramsgate for the first time. Mum’s cousin Sheila, but she lived in London. And sometimes we visited Den’s mum, but she lived in a high-rise flat, a train ride away. And Marv, Den’s friend. Kind Marv with the Scottish accent who would pop in when Mum was at work, take me for rides on my bike, buy me an ice cream, balance piles of shells I’d collect, in his large hands. But he was from Aberdeen, I’m sure. The list of people is short. We kept ourselves to ourselves. Mum made sure of it.
“You could go there, then,” says Rosie. “Someone might know something. He might have lived there or maybe he has a sister or relative or anyone who lives over here.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t been back to my old town for a really long time,” I say. “It all feels a bit scary. And I am scared, Rosie.”
“Listen, Emmie,” says Rosie, putting an arm around me. “I get scared. I went to a school full of arseholes who bullied me to the brink. Yet look at me. I was just on my back on a wet beach in nothing but a kaftan, while dudes with their dogs looked at me like I had two fuckin’ heads.”
I laugh, and Rosie squeezes her arm around me tighter as we walk, hip to hip.
“You know what you need to do?” she says.
“What?”
“What I do. I think about the Rosie Kalwar who isn’t afraid, the one that thinks nothing of posing in a bikini on a beach, or doing an Instagram Live with a massive pimple and no makeup, and I just pretend I’m her. Every damn day.”
Rosie swipes her security pass to unlock the side gate of the Clarice, and together we walk through the back entrance to the hotel, down the cracked concrete path, past the hot waft of the recycling bins.
“That Emmie Blue—that’s who you need to find,” she says. “The one who arrives in her old town like Miranda Priestly just fucking landed. Pretend you’re her. What would she do in this situation?”
I smile up at her. “You’re smart,” I say, and she leans in and kisses my cheek at the same time Fox appears in the courtyard through the kitchen door, a cigarette in his hand. He gawps at Rosie in her kaftan and cerise-pink bikini bottoms. “Emmie took about seven hundred photos if you’re interested, Fox.” Rosie grins and makes for the door. “Collect ’em all. I’m gonna go get changed.”
Fox, pale cheeks blotching pink, looks down at his unlit cigarette and then at me. “You two have been lying on the sand again, haven’t you?” he says. “I’ll, er, get you a spare blouse, shall I?”
* * *
Me:
Guess who has just said yes to a job interview at a school next Friday?
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
SERIOUSLY?!
Me:
Yep! Totally terrified but feeling like it might be time to face it. It’s working with the school counselors!
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
EM!!!!!!!! This is fucking incredible.
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
I’m so proud of you.
Me:
Thank you Luke xxx
Me:
Can’t even believe I’ve said yes.
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
I can. You’ll smash it.
Me:
Might need you to come and instill that confidence in me on Friday.
Me:
If I don’t poo myself on the bus there, obv.
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
You won
’t. Even if I have to sit on the phone with you on the bus.
Me:
Ha. Like old times!
WhatsApp from Lucas Moreau:
Yep. Leave it to me. I’ll get you there in one piece.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
“I still don’t think your voice matches your face.”
Lucas laughs down the line. “I still don’t know how to take that comment.”
“It’s nothing bad,” I say. The bus veers a corner, and I shoot a hand out to hold on to the seat in front of me. “I just think you look a tiny bit like Richard Gere.”
“Emmie, I am sixteen.”
“A young Richard Gere.”
“Which is still old, man,” laughs Lucas. “He’s been, like, forty forever, hasn’t he?”
I burst out laughing, a hand instinctively flying up to cover my mouth. I look over my shoulder. The top deck is empty, save for one other student: a girl I recognize from two years below. She’s reading from a Latin book—something they teach at an after-school club that goes on until four thirty—and she looks up at me, our eyes meeting. I sweep around to face the front before I see even a glimmer of anything. I bet she knows too. She might be quiet, mousy, hardworking, but they all know. The whole school knows it was me now, who wrote that anonymous letter about what Mr. Morgan did. The whole school knows I am the reason he moved away, that Georgia doesn’t speak to me now and instead cries in class, kids flocking around her. She’ll tell her, I bet, this mousy girl.
“She doesn’t even care. She was laughing on the bus. Like, proper full-blown laughing.”
And they’ll whisper about it in English class, loud enough for me to hear, like they did today. “Did you hear she and Zack Aylott in the year above shagged last year? They’d been going out like a week.” “She blatantly fancied Morgan. You could tell.” “Georgia said she’s a proper liar. Always has been.”
“Hey. You still there?”
I close my eyes, lean my head against the bus window. “Yeah,” I say. I hate how wobbly my voice always is lately. “Still on the bus. Are you sure about this phone call, Lucas?”
“ ’Course. Dad gets free minutes on his business phone.”
“And he doesn’t mind?”
“He doesn’t know,” laughs Lucas. “But nah, he probably wouldn’t care. Think he’s just happy not to see me moping about or hearing me bang on about missing London and saying I wish I was back in England. Even though I really, really do.”
“I wish you were too.”
“Be cool, wouldn’t it?” says Lucas. I love the way he speaks. He sounds older than the boys at school. Smarter. Cooler. “You could come and help me and my brother eat this weird-as-shit dinner my mum has made. Chicken. With orange things in it. Apricots, I think. Even if we don’t like it, my dad is a total demon headmaster about it and makes us eat it. I could make you eat mine. Then you could show me one of your crap films.”
I can’t help but smile at that. “I wish I could.”
“Same,” Lucas says, and my stomach bubbles with longing, because I want that more than anything. I want dinner made for me. I want to be in a busy family home, with the clink of washing up, and bloated, full, warm tummies, I want to sit under a blanket watching films, chatting during the quiet bits. I want a friend. I miss so much having a friend.
“You all right?” asks Lucas.
“Yeah. Just tired.”
“Another day done, though,” says Lucas.
“And it was a hard day,” I say. “Every class, I had with Georgia.”
“But you did it,” says Lucas. “You did it, and you’re on the bus home to watch EastEnders and eat cheese-and-pickle sandwiches.”
“Lucas, I told you, I hate pickles.”
“You will eat Branston pickles for your poor homesick mate, and like it.” He laughs. Mate. I love that he said he’s my mate.
I push the bell on the bus. “I’ll compromise with you and have Marmite on toast,” I say.
“This is basically phone sex now you’ve mentioned Marmite, Emmie.”
I laugh again, not caring about the girl behind me, or what she might report back. I’m allowed to laugh. I am allowed to live my life, go to school, and learn. Lucas is right. I haven’t done anything wrong. “You’re the weirdest person I have ever met,” I tell him as the bus slows, and I stand up.
“Except we haven’t met,” says Lucas. “Lived an hour from each other our whole lives and only found out each other existed the month I moved countries. Mental, eh?”
“So mental,” I say. “That balloon was a sadist, really.”
“And a genius,” adds Lucas.
Voice mail.
Again, straight to voice mail. Lucas’s phone never goes to voice mail. Ever. Why today? Why now, when I really need him? I stare up at the school gates, the huge square windows looming, the tops of many heads at an upstairs classroom window, the lines and lines of bikes chained up at the entrance, the edges of computer screens through the windows of another room, and I feel my stomach lurch. I can’t. I thought I could, but I can’t do this.
I back away, my legs shaking, feet tripping down the curb. And that is when my phone bursts into song in my hand. Without even glancing at the screen, I rush it to my ear. It’ll be Lucas. It’ll be Lucas full of apologies that he wasn’t there, on the phone, like he said he would be.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
I freeze in the street, the sky darkening with rain clouds above. “Me? W-Who… is this?”
There is a sigh and a familiar warm laugh on the line. “Do you really not have my number saved yet?”
“Um…”
“Jesus. It’s me. Eliot.”
“Oh. Sorry. Hi.” I take a breath and start walking now, bag over my shoulder, picking up speed. That’s it, then, I suppose. I’m not going to do it, am I? I’m not going to walk through those gates. I thought I could. I really thought I was going to do this, but I can’t. “I, er, forgot to save your number, after your texts. Sorry.”
“Emmie, are you okay?” Eliot asks. “You sound a bit… weird.”
What is it about someone asking if you’re okay? Even if you think you’re holding it together, all it takes is someone asking if you’re all right to completely melt away your resolve and bring that lump bobbing straight into your throat. “I just—I had a job interview and I couldn’t go in. Just now. When you rang.”
Eliot hesitates on the line. “Okay?” he says slowly. “Is there a reason you couldn’t?”
I get to the bus stop, my chest is tight, my feet—in heels I borrowed from Rosie—are unsteady, scuffing on the pavement as I sit down clumsily. A man looks over his phone at me, eyeing me as if he disapproves of my sitting beside him. “It w-was in a school,” I tell Eliot, my voice wobbly, disjointed. “I really liked the sound of it, and the money was—but you know, I just took one look at it and—I couldn’t go in. I was… overwhelmed or… something.”
I don’t know why I’m telling him, but his voice is warm and it’s so nice to have someone in this moment, listening. Right here, as black clouds swell and hang above my head.
“Right,” says Eliot calmly. “Well, look, it’s no big deal, Emmie. I’m sure people get waylaid and even sick on the day of job interviews, so, you could always reschedule?”
I shake my head, swallow, trying desperately to slow my racing heart. Hina. What will I tell Hina at the agency?
“No,” I say. “No, I don’t think it’s right for me.” I look down at the black court shoes I meticulously picked out of Rosie’s wardrobe yesterday, at the A-line, midi skirt I’d bought specially, at the nails I painted last night, sure I was ready to face it. Finally. And feel my eyes well with tears. I lift my hand to my mouth. A waste of money. A waste of time.
“Well, that’s good,” says Eliot obliviously. “Sometimes we need to be face-to-face with these things before we realize it’s something we don’t want.”
And I nod, pointlessly. Pointl
ess because he can’t see me. Pointless because it simply isn’t true. It’s not that I don’t want it. My excitement of getting the interview, of getting my outfit ready, of thinking far ahead, at all the good I could do in this job, shows me that I do. I am just too scared. Still too scared to step back into a school. I am thirty. I am thirty years old and I still can’t do it. Anger surges through my veins, my skin tingling.
“Emmie? Emmie, are you still there?”
I swallow, dab away roughly at the tears running down my cheeks, with the pads of my fingers. “Yes,” I say. “S-Sorry, I’m here.”
“Look, if you need someone to talk to, I—”
“Why did you call?” I cut in.
Eliot clears his throat. “Oh. About the hotel. The place my brother’s getting married. The drinks we’re having there in a few weeks, so we can all see the venue. You’re going too?”
“Yeah.” I sniff. “Yeah, I am.”
“Yeah, so am I. And I’m driving. Ana’s back from her conference, so I’ll be staying there with her, but I don’t mind driving you to Le Touquet if you want a ride. I have to pass you on the way, pretty much, anyway.”
I pause, using the sleeve of my cardigan to dry my cheeks. “Do you?”
Eliot chuckles. “You have no idea where I live, do you?”
“No,” I say with a grimace, and he laughs again.
“I’m in Hastings.”
“Really? I didn’t realize you were that close.”
“Yup. Neighbors. Anyway, I just thought it saves you the buses, saves you the ferry ticket, the hassle…”
I think of those things. And I wonder what the sense would be in saying no. I might not really want to travel with Eliot, but it would be rude to decline. Awkward. He’s Lucas’s brother. He’s helping with this STEN party that I am supposed to be organizing with “legend” Tom, and Lucille, the maid of honor who speaks only in emojis and lols. And he saved me buying an awful ferry sandwich, with those two gorgeous almond croissants he’d left in my bag, which was sweet, really. It was.
