How Hard Can Love Be?

by Holly Bourne

  Oh no…not a lecture. I wanted to have FUN.

  I galloped over to Bryony and Melody.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, jumping madly on the spot.

  “Hey,” Bryony replied.

  Melody looked a little unfriendly. Though, this was like the only time I’d really spoken to her since that first night at the bonfire.

  “Shall we slut drop then?” And, before they could say anything, I was in the dirt, falling over in the dust, cackling madly.

  “Ooooo, I’m so sexy,” I said. “Look at me and how sexy I am. Because being sexy is SO important, isn’t it, Melody?”

  Melody ducked down to pull me up. She wasn’t smiling. “What the hell is your problem?” she asked.

  I fell back down again when she let go too soon.

  “You know what you are…” I said, suddenly angry. I was gonna tell her. Tell her how she was failing the sisterhood…tell her how there were academic books that condemned her behaviour….tell her that ACTUALLY I could see that she had brown roots…because that is a totally feminist thing to say. People were looking. Why was everyone looking? The music was still playing but there was less dancing. I looked about… Mum was heading straight for me, her eyebrows arched together with anger. Kevin was following her. No… No… I couldn’t be told off, not now. I needed to run away. God, my head was spinning. Spinning so fast. Spin spin spin. Hang on? What was I going to say to Melody? I was gonna tell her! My stomach hurt. Mum was almost here.

  “You know what you are…” I tried again. Melody wasn’t even there any more. She’d left me in the dust and was dancing with her back to me. She and Bryony had their arms around each other and were doing deliberate sexy dance moves, all stroking each other… Show-offs…such show-offs… I never showed off… Maybe that’s why Mum didn’t notice me. Why she never talked about me… Maybe that’s why… She didn’t even care…my own mum…didn’t even care.

  A sob escaped, just as I felt a sharp tug under my armpit.

  “Amber, let’s get out of here.” It was Whinnie’s voice. But the grip was too strong to be Whinnie’s.

  “Whinnie?” I slid to my feet, like Bambi on the ice.

  “Quick.” Kyle’s voice. He was the one touching me. God, he was strong. So strong. “Her mum’s almost here. Up you get, Amber, come on.”

  I started crying. Children looked.

  “Amber’s not feeling well,” I heard Whinnie tell someone. My mum? My mum was there now, but Whinnie was blocking her. “Kyle and I can look after her. I’ve got the weekend staff, so they can put my cabin to bed.”

  “You okay, Amber, honey?” Mum didn’t look worried. Well, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t really see much. All a blurry blur. Blur…

  “Can’t go to LA…” I muttered, stumbling on nothing, being righted by Kyle.

  “Yep,” he said, all loudly. “Too ill to go to LA with us, what a shame. Was it the hot dogs we had for dinner, Amber?”

  He steered me away, through the circles of kids. Why were there always kids here? They were everywhere, like oxygen – but more annoying than oxygen. I didn’t want to see another child for a very long time.

  Walking… Walking… Out of the fire circle, into the forest.

  Not going to LA…

  It’s okay… We may spend some time together in two weeks.

  Not seen her for two years.

  Tummy hurt.

  Tummy really hurt.

  I let go of Kyle and Whinnie and ran away from them, into the pitch darkness.

  “AMBER,” they called frantically. Ten metres, twenty metres. Couldn’t see. So dark. Tummy really hurt. Too much whiskey.

  Tummy…

  I doubled over and was violently sick all over the forest floor. Crying and being sick. Sobbing and being sick. Whenever a new sob came out, more sick came out with it.

  “MUM!” I screamed into the darkness. The word that causes me the most pain. The word that, to everyone else, brings the opposite. Brings them warmth, and love, and light and understanding and stability and security…

  More sobbing, more sick. Everything hurt. My throat was on fire. My stomach felt like it had been shredded in a cheese grater.

  Someone was holding my hair back. Someone was rubbing my back.

  It was dark, so dark. In all the different ways – literally, metaphorically…

  “Do you think she’s done?”

  It was Whinnie’s voice. Whinnie’s lovely American voice.

  “Mum,” I whimpered, coughing up something else.

  More patting on my back. “Your mum thinks you’ve got food poisoning.” Kyle’s voice. Kyle’s all-American golden boy voice of honey and niceness. “We couldn’t let her smell the whiskey on you. We’d all get fired.”

  “She’d just be jealous,” I wailed. “Because she wants it…all the time she wants it…that’s why she’s such a bitch.”

  I flinched as I said it. But it was true.

  “Amber, why don’t we move over here?” Whinnie asked. “Away from…umm…your puddle. And there’s more light.”

  “What puddle? Oh…”

  I looked down – I’d made such a mess. I wasn’t even embarrassed. They manoeuvred me through the darkness, leaning me gently against a pine tree. I slumped to the floor, the bark scratching up my back as I did.

  “I want to go home,” I sobbed. Then I sobbed harder, because I didn’t know where home was. It certainly wasn’t here. But it wasn’t really with Dad either, with my cow of a stepmum and my devilspawn of a stepbrother, and all of them secretly counting down the days until I left for art college.

  Whinnie kept rubbing my back, and said nice cooing things. I think Kyle just stared at me. I wasn’t sure. I ran back to my puddle to be sick once more, then collapsed again.

  I was sobering up already. The whiskey had spent such a brief time in my body, it hadn’t had the chance to make much of an impact. It was grief keeping me on the floor now more than anything. All my hopes and fantasies for this summer melted inside of me, dripping out of my eyes, and merging into a puddle in the pine needles.

  Whinnie stood up. “I need to find her mum.”

  “Why?” Kyle asked.

  “She needs to see this. She needs to look after her.”

  “NO!” Kyle and I yelled at the same time.

  “Please no.” I tried getting up but my legs collapsed under me. Kyle bent down to steady me and I sort of collapsed sideways onto him, my head resting on his shoulder.

  “Her mum’s the reason she’s so upset,” he said, like I wasn’t there. “I don’t trust her to be helpful right now.”

  Even in my sicky fuggy haze, the truth of Kyle’s words burned into me. He was so right. There was no way Mum would care for me when I was like this. No way she’d have an epiphany about her behaviour and rub my back and say it would all be different now. She’d dodge the blame. She’d bury down the guilt till it was six foot under. She’d yell at me. Tell me I was selfish. Irresponsible. Stupid. All the adjectives you use about teenagers whose parents have let them down and fucked them up and left them screaming inside, trying to get on with the shitty business of growing up when there’s a gaping chasm of a hole where your feeling of solid roots was supposed to be.

  “I’m all right…” I said, hesitantly, as I blatantly wasn’t. “I just need some time…before…seeing her again… It was a shock.”

  Whinnie looked torn – the whites of her eyes were so bright against the rest of her face.

  “She’ll wonder where you are. I can’t get fired, Amber. I really can’t…”

  I made to stand up. The last thing I wanted was for them to get into trouble. But Kyle pushed me back into him again.

  “You go find her,” he told Whinnie. “Say we’ve got her in the rec hall toilets because they’re flushable. Say she’s got food poisoning because she didn’t cook her hot dog properly. Say Melody and Bryony are looking after her, not me. She hates me.”

  Whinnie hovered on one leg. “What if she comes to see he
r?”

  “She won’t,” I said.

  Clutching my stomach, I padded to their bedroom door, and knocked lightly.

  No answer.

  I whimpered, hoping they’d hear and wake up. Too embarrassed to call. I mean, I was fourteen, but I was sick…so sick…I needed them.

  Nothing. I knocked louder.

  “Mum? Dad?”

  The door creaked open. Dad came out in his dressing gown.

  “Dad, I’ve been sick. Like really sick.”

  “Amber, you poor thing! Where?!”

  “All over my bed. I’m sorry. I didn’t get to the bathroom in time. It hurts…”

  It had hit me again, and I vomited all over him, all over myself, all over the corridor carpet.

  He didn’t get angry. He didn’t even look grossed-out. He just kept stroking the hair back off my sweaty face and ran me a bath. He scrubbed the carpet while I washed, and he cleaned my sheets, and put new ones on. Then tucked me in when he was sure I’d stopped being sick. He curled up on the carpet next to my bed with a blanket.

  I’d woken up crying. Been sick again. And again. And again.

  “Where’s Mum?”

  That look came over his face. The one he used when he was about to lie.

  “Mum’s sick too,” he said. “She was sick earlier. You must’ve got the same bug.”

  Mum slept through the whole thing.

  I didn’t stop being sick. I vomited for two days straight and ended up in hospital.

  Salmonella. From the half-cooked chicken Mum had given me for dinner. The chicken I’d thought tasted funny but, when I questioned her, she’d flown off the handle and started screaming and ranting and I ate it just to shut her up, to try and calm her down before Dad got home.

  She’d been too drunk to eat hers of course.

  The day they discharged me from hospital was the day Dad took us to Penny’s house.

  Kyle and I didn’t talk for some time.

  There was almost no light, no noise, just us and the forest. Kyle didn’t rush me to talk, but he kept holding me.

  Eventually, I said, “She’s an alcoholic.”

  My head sank on his shoulder as he breathed out heavily.

  “I’d figured out as much.”

  “She’s been sober for over two years, after she went to this rehab place. We’re all so proud of her.” I could hear how hollow it sounded in my own voice.

  He didn’t say anything. I shuffled back so I was supported more by the tree. I wondered why he was here. Why he was always here. Why he was always trying to help me.

  “Why are you always here?” I asked. The leftover whiskey made my thoughts tumble out of my mouth.

  Kyle didn’t reply for a moment. All I could hear was the rustle of the pine needles on the slight breeze.

  “I’m…not sure,” he admitted.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” More words tumbled out with the whiskey. “I’m very far away from home and it’s nice that you’re here.”

  I coughed, my throat hurting. I must stink…

  “You going to come with us to LA tomorrow?” Kyle asked. “A bunch of us have rented a van.”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  I didn’t want to go, not now. But if I stayed, then what? Just wander about the camp watching the weekend staff do my job? Trying not to cry about Mum? Or follow her to San Francisco and wait about in the city, seeing the sights I’d already seen, until she was ready to spend time with me? “I don’t want to. But I don’t know where else to go. I wish I could drive.”

  “Where would you go?”

  I closed my eyes and pictured where I was on a map of the world. “Somewhere beautiful,” I finally said. “Somewhere that isn’t full of maniac children. Somewhere that would make me want to sketch. Somewhere that would put everything in perspective.”

  Kyle laughed. “Well, you’re in the right place. America is full of big views.”

  “But I can’t get to them… Maybe LA will be fun.”

  “Won’t you be too hungover?” he asked, reminding me of what I’d just done. What he’d just seen. I was glad the darkness hid my blushing.

  “I’ll be fine. If I’m sick, I’m always totally fine the next day.”

  Was it bad that I knew that about myself? Was it bad I’d been sick enough times from drinking to figure this out?

  Kyle was, evidently, thinking the same thing.

  “Why do you drink so much? Hasn’t it all…put you off it?”

  I let out a big sigh, and let the remaining alcohol in my blood answer the question honestly.

  “Out of spite, I think,” I admitted. “Because I know she wants to do it, and she can’t. Even if I’m five thousand miles away and she has no idea, I can do it, and she can’t.”

  “You do know how fucked up that sounds, right?”

  “Have you got an alcoholic parent?”

  He didn’t answer for a while. Then, “Nope. I don’t think anything that’s a big deal has ever happened to me.”

  I turned to him, keeping my mouth at a respectable distance so he couldn’t smell the vomit on my breath. “Oh poor Golden Boy, you almost sound wistful.”

  He did one short laugh. “Maybe I am.”

  “Everyone who’s never had drama always wants drama. I think they think it makes them more important, or deep, or something. That they’d write better diary entries or some bullshit like that. You know what? All I want to do is hand back my drama and say ‘A boring life, please. Anything for a boring life’.”

  “That’s me told.”

  “Good.”

  “And now can I tell you that it’s not wise to drink a lot if your parent is an alcoholic?”

  I prickled, my skin actually standing on end. “I know the stats,” I replied. “I know alcoholism can be in your genes.” I stopped. “But I’ll never be like her…I’d rather die than be like her.”

  “You won’t be like her if you stop drinking,” he offered.

  A small patch of moonlight had found its way through the dense overhang of trees and landed right on Kyle’s face, highlighting all the good bits. I wondered once more why he was here, why he was so confusing, what he wanted, why he kept making me think there was…something…and yet, Mum had warned me so clearly that that was just his way.

  “Why does my mum hate you so much?” I asked, and he turned to me with a grim smile on his face.

  “She’s not my biggest fan this summer. I didn’t think she would hire me again – but Kevin loves me.”

  “What happened?”

  He shuffled his weight, reshifting himself against the rough bark of the tree. Already I dreaded what he was going to say. My heart went all fluttery, and my mouth got even dryer.

  “I don’t want to upset you.”

  “I think it’s fair to say that I’m already pretty upset.”

  Another small grin. “Well, we got on really well last summer. I do, did, like your mum. I think she took a liking to me, she called me ‘Golden Boy’, like you do, and did little things like bring our group ice cream sometimes, just our group. Then, one night, a kid in my cabin got really sick – like projectile vomiting sick. I woke up Russ so he could look after him and then I ran to get your mum from her cabin as she’s the main first-aider. I thought she’d be asleep. But when I got there, I saw the light on. Your mum was in the kitchen…” He stopped.

  “Go on,” I said. I was already crying again, silent tears dropping down my face.

  “She was holding a tumbler glass of what looked like whiskey…and she was sobbing…like uncontrollably sobbing. Her hands were shaking, she was hysterical. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood and watched. And then, she screamed and threw the glass against the wall. It smashed everywhere, glass flew all over the kitchen. Even though I was outside, I ducked. Kevin came running in, and she was making this weird noise, like ‘nooooo, nooooo’. He hugged her while she cried on him…and then, she looked out the window and saw me. Just standing there, staring…”
>
  I was holding my breath. Had she drunk any of the whiskey? Had she fallen off the wagon again? Or did she stop herself?

  And Kyle, I was scared for him. Even though it was in the past, and he was right there, next to me in the woods, safe and sound, I was scared for him.

  “What happened?” I almost didn’t want to know.

  “When she saw me, she must’ve stiffened or something because then Kevin turned and saw me. I was like a rabbit caught in headlights. I even waved! Kevin whispered something to her and then he was outside. I was so scared. I mean, I really need this job! I started babbling, saying, ‘One of the kids is sick, I need a first-aider. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I just need someone to come and help.’ The whole time your mum was just looking at me out the window. I could see her so clearly with the kitchen lights on. I’ll never forget the look on her face.” He paused. “The whole thing was dark, Amber, really dark.”

  I stilled. I could picture it now, as if it was playing like a film in the front of my brain. I could see her expression; I’d seen it so many times before. The who-can-I-blame-that-isn’t-me? face. I thought that face had died when she went to the rehab place. When she started her journey of getting better but leaving me behind. But the face had been here all summer. She was sober, yeah, but she still blamed everyone but herself.

  “Anyway,” Kyle continued, “Kevin helped me. He didn’t say anything as we walked back to my cabin. It was the most awkward walk of my life. Just before we arrived he said, ‘You know already it’s not a good idea to tell anyone about this’, and that was it. Your mum…well I wasn’t Golden Boy after that, that’s for sure. Everything I did the rest of the summer was wrong. I kept getting shouted at for the tiniest things. I really didn’t think I’d get the job again. I didn’t tell anyone, I kept my promise. I’ve not told anyone until now… I guess it doesn’t count if it’s you.”

  I hurt. My throat was still raw. The tears did nothing to dull the pain – they only made it worse. My heart was in pieces, bits of it scattered over the campfire, lumps of my flesh left all over the forest floor.