‘Come on,’ I say, pulling her out of the room. ‘We need to get our shit together. We need to be strong.’
I tug Rose and close the door behind us, hugging her tightly.
‘How is she?’ Leo asks. We don’t need to answer.
‘When I find out who did this to her . . .’ Leo clenches his fists at his side.
‘What if she did it to herself?’ Ashira, Nai’s sister seems to have come out of nowhere.
‘Ash!’ Rose lets go of me and flings her arms around Nai’s older half-sister, who stands stock still, letting Rose sob into her sweatshirt for a few seconds. I watch Ash, she is so still, so composed. On the outside, anyway.
‘You don’t think . . . I mean she wouldn’t have tried to hurt herself,’ I say. ‘Nai was happy, really happy. Bouncing off walls happy before she went missing. This isn’t like before, when she used to run from all the bullying. That all changed when the band got together, and she had us. No one picked on her any more. It makes no sense.’
‘No.’ Ash turns her face away from Rose, and it takes me by surprise how much more she looks like Nai than I realised, the same long straight nose and cheekbones, the jet-black hair with a ruby-red sheen that shines like a mirror. Unlike Nai, Ash doesn’t wear make-up, she doesn’t straighten her hair, it’s just the way it is. While Naomi would be finding ever more crazy outfits to wear, Ash always wore the same thing, more or less: combats, T-shirt, baseball cap, no matter what the weather. I always liked that about her, that she just didn’t give a toss about the world outside her head. But now her sister is in intensive care and she’s been forced out into this world with us. It looks like it hurts her. ‘No, I guess it doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense. I need to find Dad and Jackie, do you know there they went?’
‘To call people,’ I say, taking a step towards her. ‘Ash are you OK?’ She takes a step back.
‘I’m . . .’ Ash shrugs. ‘See you later.’
‘This is so fucked up,’ Leo speaks quietly. ‘What happened to her, it’s fucked up. This never should have happened, man. If it was just Nai, pulling one of her stunts it never would have ended like this. Something happened to her, I bet you. She wouldn’t have tried to top herself.’
‘Is that what people are saying?’ I look to Mr Smith to make things clear, to separate the truth from the lies. But he’s looking just as lost as us. ‘Are they saying she meant to kill herself?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs. ‘I wish I did. I haven’t spoken to the police, only Nai’s parents, but I suppose it has to be a possibility that she tried to . . . ’
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Nai was scared of water,’ Rose says. ‘She’d have her period every swimming lesson to get out of it. If she was that messed up, we’d have known about it. We’d have saved her.’
Her voice catches, and she folds herself into Leo’s arms.
‘I thought finding her would make things better,’ I say. ‘But I don’t know what to do.’ Mr Smith puts his hand on my shoulder and I lean into it.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I repeat, searching out his gaze and holding it. I want him to tell me it’s going to be OK. If he says it is, then I’ll believe it.
‘Look, this has been hard on you all, really hard. I think maybe I should take you home now. I think we need to give Naomi’s family sometime to adjust to what’s happened, give them some space and let your parents take care of you.’
‘I’ll walk,’ Leo says at once.
‘Me too.’ I look at Rose, who cocks her head as she turns to Mr Smith.
‘Will you be OK, sir?’
‘Me? Of course I will.’ His tired smile is reassuring. ‘Look, like the doctor said, Naomi is a fighter, everything will turn out all right, you’ll see.’
As we leave he is still there. Looking through the blinds into her room.
The thing about Mr Smith is that he’s more than just a good teacher, he’s the only adult in my life who never let me down. It’s the same for a lot of the kids at Thames Comprehensive. He never lies to us, he never bullshits us, he treats us like people, not cattle. He’s the sort of teacher you can talk to about anything, and he’ll really listen and try to help. He helped me, back when things started going wrong at home. He made me see it’s OK to be who I am, that I am not my parents. He’s a good man, a kind one.
‘Her parents aren’t back,’ I say. ‘We can’t leave her until they are.’
‘You go,’ he says. ‘I’ll hang around a bit longer until they get back.’
Rose nods and offers me her hand. She hooks her other arm through Leo’s and guides us to the lift.
‘This is fucked up,’ Rose says as the lift doors slide shut. ‘So we should get fucked up, too.’
One year ago . . .
‘Heads up!’ Mr Smith had to shout to make himself heard over the class, our first day back at school after the summer, and most of the kids had a lot to talk about. Who was seeing who, who’d done what to who, who was doing who.
Rose – she was a stranger to me then, this kind of mythical stunning girl that I could only look at from a distance – was holding court in the corner, sitting on her desk. At least half the class were turned to look at her and not Smith, riveted by her stories that she illustrated with wild hand gestures.
The only ones who weren’t were me, sitting in the back corner, arms crossed, slouched low in my chair, Naomi Demir, dressed like an Anime girl in full false-lashed make-up, tapping her pen impatiently against the desk, and Leo, who was on his phone.
‘LISTEN!’ Smith shouted and the room quietened a little. ‘I don’t want to stick you all in detention, but I will if you don’t take your seats right now. Got it?’
There had been moans, eye rolling, sighs. Rose just laughed and stayed sitting on her desk, crossing her legs, and swinging her boots so they knocked against the metal table leg, bang, bang, bang.
But Mr Smith was smart. He didn’t try and control her in the way another teacher would. He just ignored her and that deflated her just enough to let the rest of the class settle down around her. I remember liking that, I remember thinking: see, if you ignore the person you like for long enough eventually they will fall in love with you.
What a loser I was back then.
Smith told us he was putting us into bands and that our assignment was to write and perform three tracks together. He started calling out the names and I sat at the back filling up slowly with total existential angst. You see, back then no one talked to me, and that was how I liked it.
No one bullied me. A year ago I wasn’t the short, toned ginger drummer in a band, I was a short, skinny – too skinny – kid and no one really noticed I existed. I didn’t really care, I wanted to hide inside my own body, make myself as invisible as I could. It was safer that way. I didn’t want to be in a group. I didn’t want to participate. I fucking hated participating. And I knew that I was absolutely on the very bottom of everyone else’s list of who they wanted to participate with. It was a nightmare, the rest of the class being gradually divided up in groups of three and four and sent off to find a place to discuss what kind of music they were going to write, and start jamming.
‘Red, Naomi, Leo and . . . Rose.’ Mr Smith nodded at each of us in turn and I remember closing my eyes for a long moment and wishing that this was a dream, a long convoluted dream that would end up with me just a few seconds away from undoing the buttons on Rose’s shirt and then I’d wake up before anything good happened, like normal.
‘Er, fuck no,’ Leo more or less shouted. The tone of his voice snapped my eyes open.
‘What’s your problem, Leo?’ Mr Smith wasn’t angry, or sarcastic. Leo stood by the window, phone in hand.
‘I’m not fucking doing anything with those losers. Fuck that, this is bullshit.’
‘How is it bullshit?’ Mr Smith had said.
‘I don’t even want to be here.’ Leo strode between the desks right up to Smith. He’s just as tall
as him and he got right in his face, looking him right in the eye. If there was a fight, I don’t know who would have won. ‘I don’t give a fuck about school.’
‘Then leave,’ Smith told him, squaring his shoulders. ‘Walk off. Go truant. Your mum will be visited by the police again, and you’ll probably be excluded for good this time. They’ll try and send you to the educational behavioural unit, as a last attempt to get you back on track, but you’ll ditch that bullshit too, and before you know it you’ll be following your brother inside. Do that. That sounds like a great life plan.’
The whole of the class was quiet at last, glued to the anger that flowed through Leo like a current, so strong you could almost see it halo around him, threatening to strike any time. We’d all seen it in action, we’d seen him marched away by the pigs one time after decking a teacher. But Smith stood his ground, he didn’t flinch.
‘You think I hate you, but I don’t. I’ve heard you play, Leo, and you are better than anyone I’ve ever taught. You’re a natural, you have a gift. Don’t throw that away, because you’re worth more than you think you are. You’re worth more than this attitude.’
‘I don’t need you to tell me that,’ Leo growled. ‘I know who I am.’
‘Good,’ Mr Smith nodded. ‘So are you leaving?’
Leo didn’t move for a second, and then he stalked to door and yanked it open. Turning around, he looked at Rose, Nai and Me.
‘You coming then, or what?’ he said.
Honestly? I was too shit scared not to go.
We followed him down the hall to one of the rehearsal rooms, and Naomi, who had never once spoken to me in three years of school, leaned in close and said, ‘Jesus Christ, when he inevitably instigates a school shooting, we will be the first to go.’
And that’s when I knew I liked her.
That first session we jammed some AC/DC.
‘What we gonna do?’ Leo asked, looking at us. ‘What do we all know?’
He looked right at me, and I nearly shat myself. ‘What do you know?’
It sounded like he thought I might not know anything. For a second I didn’t.
‘Some AC/DC?’ I offered, because I didn’t know what they would know how to play and everyone knew that. ‘“You Shook Me All Night Long?”’
He scowled at Nai, who didn’t talk, instead picking the riff out on her bass, as a yes. Rose shrugged. ‘Not really my thing, but I’ll give it a shot.’
‘All right, how about this?’ Leo kicked in with the riff, dirty and loud, full of fuck you, and I loved it.
‘Nice,’ Rose said nodding, and I noticed how she was careful not to seem too impressed. I looked at Nai, grateful she wasn’t the chatty type, and marked the beat as she lay down the bass line, nodding as she counted us in.
‘Three, four . . . ’
And yeah, it was beautiful that first time. Like your first roller coaster ride, or first kiss; it was perfect, stomach-flipping excellence, just like I always wanted it to be when I was drumming along to tracks at home. Me and Nai, we had never spoken a word to each other and now I was right there with her, underpinning Leo’s guitar until it started to sound like the track we all knew, even if we didn’t know we knew it.
Head down, hair covering her face Rose joined in on the chorus, and we all looked at her, caught out by the first sound of her voice, deep and throaty, raw liked she smoked twenty a day, which she probably did. It grabbed me, punched me hard in the heart. I hadn’t known it was possible to fancy her more, but it was.
She didn’t know the verses so she started to make it up as she went along, laughing and singing at the same time. Lifting her head up, she took the mic off the stand and grinned at Naomi.
‘She was an Anime girl,
Sometimes wore a tail,
Didn’t take no shit from no second-class male.’
Nai grinned at her, and she turned to Leo.
‘He was tall and hot,
Knew just what he got,
Could have been a rock star if he stopped smoking pot.’
Oh God, I really wanted her to make a verse up about me, and I really didn’t at the same time. When she looked at me it took all the strength I had to keep playing.
‘Give it up for Red.
Bit strange in the head,
Wanders round like a zombie, risen from the dead . . . ’
OK, so she didn’t call me tall or hot, but she hadn’t mentioned me being short and ginger either, so as far as I was concerned it was basically a love letter.
Led by Leo we tore it up, every bit of that fury he felt pouring into his guitar, cutting the air around him into ribbons of rhythm, and I fell in, crashing my way into the heart of the track, catching and pulling Nai with me on the way. Rose wailed over the top, so hard, so raw, so good, that when the song came to an end, without exchanging a word we started over again, this time even better and when we’d finished, sweating and exhausted, I looked up and the rehearsal room door was open and there were about twenty kids standing there looking at us. They cheered and whooped and clapped.
‘Fuck off!’ Leo told them, then he turned to me and smiled. ‘Mate, this is going to be good.’
For the first time in my life I felt like someone.
4
With the hospital far behind us, early evening stretching its arms over the city, we walk down to the park, the same park we played in when we were little, although not together, of course. Kids on their way home from school have been and gone, and it’s empty. We sit under the slide, and we don’t talk. It’s good, our silence, it’s good we can come here and not need to say anything, just knowing we want to be together. That’s what the last year has done for all of us; it’s given each of us a reason, when we didn’t really have one before. Our reason is each other.
Apart we were chaotic, spinning and lost, waiting for this part of our lives to be done with so we could really live, so we could be free. And then there was Mirror, Mirror, named by Rose because she said that together we were the fucking fairest of them all.
And with Mirror, Mirror there was us; together and stronger. Or at least we thought we were, but there must have been a weak link, something that meant Naomi could be separated out, almost lost to us without us even noticing her falling away. What we can’t talk about, what we’ve never talked about is what it could have been, what could have happened to lead up to this moment.
She’s our best mate, and none of us know why she ran in the first place, or why she might have . . . there’s no reason I can think of that would make her jump off a bridge into the black water she was so scared of.
So we sit and don’t talk, avoiding home. We all have our reasons why. Mine is probably on her third vodka coke by now, Dad is probably tonsils deep in his latest shag.
Leo is the first to break the silence.
‘Fuck it, let’s do something,’ he says.
‘We are doing something.’ Rose leans her head back against the painted metal, etched with names and swearwords, so you could see all of her throat. ‘We’re wasting our youth in a park. Like proper teenagers.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Leo said. ‘Something good? Pills and a club. We should get fucked up like Rose said.’
‘I’m skint,’ Rose yawned. ‘Have you got pills on you? Let’s just get wasted here.’
‘On a Monday?’
Did I just say that out loud? At least I made her laugh.
‘Jesus, Red, you fucking dork,’ she says, smiling more with every word. ‘What would Naomi want us to do? She’s in there fighting for her fucking life and we’re out here, like . . . losers. What would she tell us to do?’
‘Nai would like a movie, or a book club, or some shit,’ Leo says wrinkling his nose. ‘Or some really dark anime, she loves that crap.’
‘Let’s do that.’ I jump on the chance to do something that won’t involve ingesting narcotics or a hangover, and drag them back to mine for a Black Butler marathon. Because it’s not like I wouldn’t ever go near that s
tuff, it’s just that I’ve seen what pills and drink does to people. I don’t want that to happen to me.
Besides, Black Butler is one of mine and Nai’s favourite, full of Victorian Gothic, Japanese darkness and a ton of cross-dressing. Secretly, we had plotted to cosplay the characters at the next Comic Con, but we’d never told Leo and Rose, because although they wouldn’t think any less of us, they would never, ever, stop teasing us about it. We’d designed costumes, I’d even bought a wig in Camden, and then . . . well, the world changed.
My bed. My room.
I painted it black in the summer when Nai was gone. When Mum saw it she rolled her eyes and said, ‘I give up.’
And I replied, ‘You did that a long time ago.’
I like it black, it feels safe and closed in. But the best thing about it is my kit that takes up half the room, it’s the only thing I have that I really care about. It took me two years to save up for it, and Mum only agreed to it because she thought I’d have changed my mind by the time I had enough cash. But I didn’t. I walked dogs and washed cars and stacked shelves until I had enough, and then they couldn’t say no, so now it sits there in the corner, and I love that it’s there. Just ready and waiting to make enough noise to wake up the neighbourhood. When I get to take off the silencing pads anyway.
Right now Leo and Rose are sitting on my bed, Leo’s eyes half closed and sleepy, not really into it, Rose with her arm around my neck, her cheek on my shoulder, her warm breath on my neck. She smells of lemon and smoke, which is weird because despite what I thought when I first heard her sing, Rose doesn’t smoke. Turns out she’s too precious about her voice.
Mirror, Mirror Page 3
