by Lia Louis
I hear the driver’s door close beside me, feel Eliot’s hand softly land on top of mine. I try to speak, to tell Eliot to drive, but tears soak up my words.
“It’s okay,” Eliot says softly. “It’s okay, Emmie.”
But it’s not. It’s not okay. It can never be.
My dad. I’ve found my dad. And my dad is Marv. Marv, who made me laugh so much I cried when he made my Barbie dolls dance along to the adverts on TV. Marv, who took me to the beach on my bike. Marv, who disappeared when Den did. Marv, who only turned up when Mum was out. He isn’t in Brittany. He never was. And every day I dreamed about finding him, about having him to talk to, to tell him things I’d done and achieved, he’s been right here. Fifteen minutes away. Around the corner. And he doesn’t want me. He shut a door in my face. I am half of him, and he shut a door in my face.
Eliot’s hand squeezes mine. I hold it.
After a while the tears stop and we sit in silence, the only sound in the truck was of someone’s lawn mower outside, and the hiccups in my throat as I try to catch my breath.
After a while, Eliot brushes his thumb over my knuckles and draws back.
“Let’s go,” he says. And he starts the engine, and we drive away.
December 7, 2004
I should have stayed in the cubicle. But I thought they’d gone. I had knelt on the toilet seat, my knees under me, my mouth closed, eyes closed, trying so hard to concentrate on my breath, and on not making a sound. I could hear them laughing, swapping lip glosses, Georgia’s voice saying, “She’s fucking pathetic,” and another girl saying, “She’s a joke, mate. Desperate.” I waited, hands sweating, bones shaking beneath my skin. I thought it was best I kept going to school—so nobody would talk, or believe the anonymous letter left in Ms. Spark’s pigeon-hole was mine. They’d suspect the girl who was suddenly off school, she said. But they know anyway. I should have never written that it happened in the IT block, because that’s what did it and gave me away. As soon as the school told Mr. Morgan they’d had a report that something happened there, the night of the ball, Georgia knew it had to be me who wrote the letter. Her mum too. Because they all knew he was helping me find my dad. And that’s why they say I accused him—Georgia’s amazing, strong, loving dad—of those awful things. Because I’m jealous. Because I’m lonely and desperate for attention. But they’re true. As much as they think I’m making it up, that Mr. Morgan is too cool, too funny, to do something like that, it is true. And I wish so much that it wasn’t.
I heard the knock of the bathroom door as it closed, and their voices fade and disappear. That’s why I opened the cubicle door and stopped hiding. But as soon as I did, I regretted it. Georgia was standing there, with Ashley, from the other form. A girl Georgia and I once chatted with in PE, who told us her boyfriend was a drug dealer, and Georgia had said as we walked away, “Her boyfriend probably works in Burger King, Em. She lies. Wouldn’t mess with her, though. I like my teeth too much.” And we’d laughed, arm in arm, through the leafy school grounds. But it’s seemed to have made Georgia more coveted, this whole thing. Students that barely spoke to us before, now flock to Georgia as if she is a celebrity, all of them leaning across dining tables, listening to her, holding her arm, rubbing her back; so many faces staring at me, with hooded eyes and smirks.
“What’re you doing in here?” Georgia says now, lip curled.
“Yeah,” laughs Ashley. “You hiding in here, Emmeline?” She says Emmeline as if it’s amusing.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. I walk, to try and get past them, and Ashley pushes my shoulder.
“You not even washing your hands?” She laughs, looking back at Georgia, who stares at me, nostrils flared, the skin of her cheeks red. “Dirty skank.”
“Please let me past,” I say, voice tiny, and I wish so much that it wasn’t, but I can’t help it. I am shaking from head to toe. I am trying so hard to pull strength from within me, but I can’t stop trembling.
“Nah,” says Ashley.
“Please.” I look at Georgia pleadingly. My best friend of five years. The girl I’d spend every evening on the phone to. The girl whose family I holidayed with in caravans, went to pantomimes with, stayed with, ate breakfast with. “Please, Georgia.”
“My dad has moved away because of you,” she says, voice tight, wobbling. “My mum is ill because of you.”
“Georgia, I never ever wanted—”
“What, you didn’t want to hurt me? Is that what you were going to say?” Her teeth are gritted, and instincts from so many years of friendship make it so hard to not reach for her, to hold her. Ashley steps back, scowls at me, puts her arm around Georgia. “You fucking lied.”
“Georgia, I didn’t, I—”
“And I feel sorry for you,” she carries on. “Because no wonder you lie about my dad, when your own doesn’t even know you exist. Your mum doesn’t even give a shit about you. Where is she now, then, Em? Where?”
Ashley laughs, a snort in her nose, as if she’s pretending to try and conceal it, and my chest aches. I wish I’d never gone to the Summer Ball. I wish I’d never trusted him to help me find my dad. I wish I’d never written that letter.
“It’s pathetic,” says Georgia, her eyes watery now. “You’re pathetic. And well done. Now you’ve got no one.”
Georgia turns, pushing the bathroom door and whisking out.
Ashley looks me up and down. “Slut,” she says.
My phone wakes me up. A FaceTime call, from Lucas, the beep like a soft alarm clock nudging me gently awake. I open my eyes and it takes me just a second to remember. The sight of my sandals, tossed on the floor next to my bed, and my handbag beside them, on its side, its contents spilled out remind me of when I got home yesterday and crumpled into bed. Marv. My dad. Eliot. God, Eliot. Poor Eliot. I couldn’t speak, and he didn’t pry, didn’t push me for anything. He just drove and drove as I stared out the passenger window, and as he turned into Fishers Way, I said croakily, “I can’t go home. Don’t drop me home.” “Okay,” he said. “Let’s take a drive.” I don’t know where we went, just that we drove for ages, windows down, hot August air lapping in, Eliot’s radio playing Bowie, him drumming his hands softly on the steering wheel. And I’d felt physically sick. I kept replaying his face. Replaying his name. Marv. Not Peter. Not a drummer in France. Scottish Marv.
Eliot had pulled up in a car park after a while, wheels crunching on gravel. I don’t know where we were, but we were surrounded by thick forest and shade. A pay and display machine sat among the wildness of the trees. He killed the engine.
“It’s always quiet here,” he said. “I need to make a phone call, but sit, or if you like, we could walk afterward.”
I sat, staring, my heart still hammering, my stomach nauseated. I could hear Eliot as he spoke on the phone, but not loud enough to hear the words, his hand rubbing the back of his head, squinting up at the sky. Ana, I bet.
When he got back into the car, I looked up at him for the first time.
Silence. Eliot grappling with the words to say to me, and me, scared for any of it to be said out loud. To be made true.
“I’m sorry, Emmie,” he said. “I really am.”
“All along” is all I could say, and Eliot put his hand on mine again, and I held on to it, across the handbrake, and I was grateful that he was there with me. Because the devastation was waging a storm through me, and not because it was Marv who is my dad. But because I was looking for Peter. I was looking on those computers at school, every night for weeks, on Friends Reunited, sending messages to strangers, to Peters in Brittany, going onto Ask Jeeves, searching for the festival where Mum met my dad. This Peter guy that she, what? Made up? To stop me ever discovering that my dad lived around the corner from us? And that is why he, Robert Morgan, Georgia’s dad, sat with me at that computer desk. Helping me. My dad Peter was why I went to the IT room, why I turned to him. He kept finding things—clues, people, not a drummer but a guitarist in a jazz band, who often played th
e festival my mum worked at. But all along I was searching for an imaginary person. If I’d known Marv was my dad… what happened, would have never happened.
I hold the phone in my hand now, Lucas’s name above “accept” and “decline.” I accept the call. Lucas’s smiling, handsome face springs onto the screen, and I could cry at the sight of him. We haven’t spoken much since the bar. I can see he’s in his car now, vest on, hair wet. He’s been to the gym.
“Fuck. Did I wake you?”
“It’s fine,” I say groggily. “I need to get up anyway.”
“Hate to sound like my dad, but I’ve been up half the day. Been to the gym, been for breakfast…”
“What did you eat?” I yawn. “Go on. Tell me. Make me jealous.”
“Ah,” laughs Lucas. “There’s no way you’ll be jealous. Avocado toast. Shitload of eggs. Chili flakes. Pumpernickel bread.”
I screw my face up. “Ugh. Lucas Moreau, what’s happened to you?”
Lucas laughs. “Hey look, if I could eat sausage McMuffins and get all my protein, I would.” Then he fixes his hair in the screen, pouts ever so slightly, the way he always does when checking himself in a mirror, and says, “So I’m going suit shopping again, for Dad and El. Mum’s coming. So’s Eliot, obviously. If he ever gets here. He was meant to come last night, but said he’d leave first thing. Where were you last night, by the way?”
The phone call, by the woods. I bet he canceled because of me. Because of me crying on him twice on the way home. Because he walked me to my room and asked if I needed him to sit with me. It was kind. I almost wanted him to. Tall Eliot with his kind brown eyes. But I just couldn’t shake the thought. I should have never been in that room. That room that made me “that girl.” The girl they said probably deserved it, brought it on herself, his heavy body, the tear he made in my dress as I managed to wriggle away. Then my brain whispered memories of my nineteenth party. And I just wanted to be alone. Without anyone. Without even Eliot, because he had thought the same as all those others, once upon a time. What was said at the party, by his girlfriend, proved it. He had been one of the voices that had almost destroyed me, even if he hadn’t meant to be.
“Hey,” says Lucas now. “Are you all right, Em?”
“Fine. Just tired.” Lucas knows. He knows every time I yank out a stock answer to that question.
“Look.” He swallows. “I’m so sorry about the other night at the bar. Tom said he’d text you—”
Tom. He thinks it’s Tom. He thinks it’s the bar. And I wish now that it was.
“And he’s called,” I say. “He apologized, more than once. It’s fine. Water under the bridge.”
Lucas nods. “Marie said you sent her some photos of some light arrangements for the top table that you found on Pinterest.”
“Yeah, I saw them as I was browsing best woman, stag stuff, you know—”
Lucas smiles, and hesitates. “Thanks, Emmie. I mean that. You are—I dunno, a dream at this. I couldn’t do this without you. I have total imposter syndrome with this whole deal, but you’re this… pillar. As always.”
“Someone’s gotta keep you in check,” I say, and I feel like a fraud, because a pillar I am certainly not. Not today. Not after last night. I think of Louise’s face when we walked in. She’d looked at Eliot quizzically, as if ready to blame him for my tears, yet she asked nothing. Just watched, like a minder, as we trod up the stairs, Eliot lifting a heavy hand to her in a wave. I shook beneath the duvet last night. I used to shake back then, in bed by myself, Mum, miles away, and that feeling of being totally alone enveloping me. Nothing helped stop it. I couldn’t even bear to listen to a CD last night, to help me to sleep. It just reminded me of the rock ballads Lucas would put on there. “Because your dad was probably in Kiss.”
Lucas is waffling about work now, and how a guy who never speaks to him is suddenly all over him now he knows the STEN party is being held in the ballroom, and how Marie’s parents are “shitting checks.”
“Luke?” I cut in.
He stops, eyebrows raised. “Yeah?”
I stare at him, the words in my throat stuck. Why can’t I tell him? Why can’t I bring myself to confide in him as I always have?
“I… last night…”
Then his head turns swiftly, to the passenger window. I hear the knocking too, knuckles against a window. His face breaks into a smile. “Hey!” he laughs, then he looks back at the screen. “Sorry, Marie’s just got here. What were you saying?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. I’m going to go, Luke, okay? I’ve got work. I need to shower and—”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
I nod. “Just tired. I haven’t stopped working. Loads of overtime and double shifts.”
“Well, take it easy. Take some holiday, a break. They’re taking advantage, that hotel.”
I swallow down the urge to say, “Normal people can’t just do that, Lucas,” but he carries on. “See, this is why you need to let Dad have your CV, Em. Nine to five. You’d get your weekends.”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him.
“Promise me, yeah?” he asks. “That everything’s all right?”
“Everything’s all right,” I say, and hearing that out loud is a weird comfort, because I pretend for a second that the words are true.
A moment later Lucas is gone, and I am left in the silence of my hot bedroom.
* * *
WhatsApp from Eliot Barnes:
Hi closed book. How are things looking this morning? Brighter, I hope. I’m in France for the next fortnight. Ana’s sister’s wedding & I’ve got to press on with Mum and Jean’s bandstand while they’re away. Hopefully see you soon. E, x
Fishers Way is silent. In the eighteen months I have lived here, I have never known to wake up to no sound at all. There is always the rumbling of a kettle, of a distant radio presenter, the clanging of pots, or of Louise, humming a song. It’s 10:30 a.m. Louise is an early riser. I am not. So there hasn’t been a time, I don’t think, that I have woken to no Louise. She doesn’t really go out either. “A bit of a recluse, then,” as Lucas once suggested, and I suppose he is right.
I go down to the kitchen and make a cup of tea, and realize before I switch it on that the kettle is stone cold. The air is silent, unnervingly so. Before the kettle has finished rumbling, I duck my head through to the conservatory and then to Louise’s large, cluttered lounge. Nothing. I tread the stairs, heart pounding a little now with anxiety. I remember waking up to a silent home so many times, and sometimes, I would feel so alone that I would go straight to a window to see a car drive by, or a person stroll past, just so I knew I hadn’t slept through the end of the world and woken as the only human left.
I find Louise in her bedroom, in bed. She is sitting up, the silver, tripod-legged walking stick flat on the floor, out of reach. Her hair, which she always keeps up in a loose teacher’s bun, is long and frizzy, and flowing over the shoulders of her button-down pajama top.
“Sorry,” I say from the doorway, ready to duck back out again. “I just wanted to check you were okay. When I saw you weren’t up, I was worried.”
Louise swallows. “I can’t get up,” she says.
“Do you need me to pass you your stick?”
She shakes her head. “No. No, that won’t be much use. I just…” She stops herself, then sighs. “Some days I just can’t get up. Vertigo.”
“God, I’m sorry, Louise.” I edge into the room a little more. It smells of patchouli and fabric softener. “Can I get you anything?”
She grimaces, as if it is paining her to tell me all this, and says, “I’ve been here five hours, since I got up and just about made it to the en suite. Could you get me something to eat and drink please, Emmie? Toast would be fine.”
“Of course. Tea too?”
She nods, smiling weakly. “Please.”
Downstairs, I set a tray of two slices of buttered toast with marmalade—her own homemade, from a Kilner jar—a banana, a cou
ple of napkins, and a cup of mint tea. She thanks me and, taking in the silent, cluttered bedroom, I offer her my television.
“I don’t care for television,” she says, “but thank you.”
“How about some books?”
“I struggle nowadays,” she says, “to read. My eyesight.”
“Is this to do with the vertigo?” I ask, standing next to her bed, wanting to sit at the bottom of it but feeling that would be way too overfamiliar, especially with someone like Louise.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I have macular degeneration. Common. Eyesight has been slowly worsening since I turned sixty. Partial blindness, but I’m fine. It doesn’t hinder me really. Well, just with the books, which is a shame, I have to admit.”
“Audio books could help? I see them at the library. They do these USB sticks and these machines that play them, like a radio…”
She smiles. “I find with the audiotapes and things that I always lose my place. But thank you. I’m quite all right. When the vertigo stops, I’ll try my crosswords. They’ll keep me company.” The huge, oversized crossword books make sense now, and the way they always seem to take her a while, as she sits there at the kitchen table, glasses on the end of her nose, rollerball pen poised over the page, the clock ticking, the radio mumbling.
“Do you need anything else?” I ask her, and she shakes her head.
“No, no,” she says, smiling, and I get the impression she wants me out of her space.
I lied to Lucas this morning, telling him I had back-to-back shifts all weekend so wouldn’t be able to talk much. But today is a totally free Sunday. I have no plans, no shifts at work, and as I switch on the radio downstairs in the kitchen and make myself some toast, I think about why. Why didn’t I tell him the truth? Why didn’t I feel I could tell Lucas about Marv? About going there with Eliot? I wash up the plates in the sink and take out the rubbish and recycling. I even run the vacuum around the house and put on a load of my washing—putting two of Louise’s dresses in there with it. For an August afternoon, it’s windy, so I hang it out on the rotary line in the garden and watch it through the window in the conservatory with a smug satisfaction of how quick it’ll dry. I dreamed of having a house with a garden and a washing line when I was a kid. Still do, as simple and as sad as that may sound to some. A string of clothes—large trousers, tiny socks—spelling a family, blowing gently in a breeze.
