Anyway, there was a big part of me that was looking forward to being there again, in that little love-filled kitchen. I thought it would be OK, right up until we got to the steps that led to the front door of her modern terraced council house, halfway between my home and Leo’s estate. It was a neat little house, respectable, but nothing like the glamour and swagger of Rose’s place, or even the roses-round-the-door veneer of my middle-class bullshit semi-detached. It was when we were standing right outside and I looked up at her window and saw the light wasn’t on in her bedroom that it hit me so hard.
That broken, battered girl in the hospital, and my friend Naomi were the same person. There was no escaping it any more.
We get out of the car, and no one says anything.
Jackie and Max walk ahead, arms around each other, her head resting on his shoulder, fingers almost digging into his back with desperation. Ash walks a little behind them, slow small steps. My hand reaches out for Rose’s, the need to be anchored to someone that loves me engulfing me in a second. But she doesn’t see it, she just keeps walking and I close my empty fingers, one by one.
‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ Leo says it first, keeping his voice low. ‘This is doing my head in.’
‘We can’t not go in,’ I say. ‘They invited us, they want to see us, they need us.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Rose speaks to Leo, not to me and her voice is soft and gentle. ‘But Red’s right, we’ve got to go. For Nai.’
I watch as Rose puts her hand on Leo’s bicep, and I see how he leans into her, just a little, as if there was an invisible force between them pulling them closer. Just a little, but enough for my gut to contract.
Ash is sitting on the bottom of the stairs as we push open the front door. All the expressions on her face seem to slash downwards, like the gravity of her pain is pulling her slowly to the ground.
‘You coping?’ I ask her as Rose and Leo follow the smell of Turkish spices into the kitchen.
‘No,’ she says, keeping her eyes on me. ‘I’m mad as hell. You?’
‘The same.’ I nod, glancing in the direction of the kitchen. I don’t want anyone else to hear what I’m about to say. ‘I’m starting to think something bad happened to Nai, something really bad. Something she never saw coming.’
Ash stood up, so that we were just a few millimetres apart, her mouth right next to my ear.
‘I think you’re right,’ she whispers, before turning on her heel and heading into the kitchen.
‘Oh kids, what a day.’ Jackie opens her arms to us the moment we enter the small square kitchen, dark pine cupboards on every wall, a tiny round table in the middle. Her eyes fill with tears as we take turns to be hugged by her, engulfed by the sweet perfume she likes to wear, the taste of salty tears still on her cheek when I kiss it. I hug her back, as tightly as I can, wrapping my arms around her. It’s been a long time since anyone hugged me. I feel dumb for admitting it, but sometimes you need a hug and I like the way she grabs my face between her hands and kisses my forehead.
‘Oh it’s good to see you, I miss you being here and the noise and the chatting, and telling Naomi to turn it down!’ Jackie’s smile looks like the kind of smile that takes work to maintain, as she tells us where to sit, pours us tumblers of coke, offering dish after dish of home-cooked food: shish kebab on skewers, marinated chicken, warm pitta, fragrant rice. When I look at it I’m suddenly starving. Not only for good food, but also for the memories that come with it, all of them good ones. As we eat, Jackie walks continuously around the table, touching her hands to our shoulders or cheeks. Max doesn’t talk much, but he smiles, tears in his eyes as he looks from face to face. Ash sits with us, eating nothing, saying nothing. Head down, her hair a midnight curtain shielding her from view, like the moment we just had in the hallway never happened. I want to talk about it to her more, but I’ve no idea how. It seems like you don’t ever approach her, you just wait for her to call on you.
Finally the food is almost gone, and gradually we stop eating and talking. The table falls silent and all the things we haven’t talked about since getting back from the hospital hang over us like shadows.
Leo coughs and pushes his chair back, but before he can get up, Jackie speaks again.
‘What Max said before, about us not really knowing Nai, it seems impossible to me that I didn’t know every little thing about her, but she did change in those last few weeks. She stopped wearing all that make-up and the wigs. She started to look . . . normal. And she seemed so happy, so loving. But you all knew her, probably better than me. Why do you think she ran away? Do you think she was unhappy enough to . . . to . . . ’
I close my eyes for a moment, searching for something useful to say.
‘If we’d known anything, we’d have said,’ Rose says before I even come close. ‘If Nai was planning this, she didn’t tell anyone. Not even Red.’
I make myself look Jackie in the eye.
‘Nai hated tattoos,’ I say. ‘She loved being in the band, and she tried hard at school. She wouldn’t have left because she was unhappy, she wasn’t unhappy. Something else happened. I don’t know what, but I know that something happened to her. And when she wakes up she’ll tell us.’
‘Except . . .’ Ash’s voice is sharp and hard. ‘Except we don’t know if she is going to wake up, and if she does, she might be brain damaged, so we might never know. It could be a secret her head always keeps.’
‘We’ve got to keep hoping for the best, Ash,’ Jackie says. ‘We’ve got to keep thinking positive love, and—’
‘As if thinking positive is going to fix the big dent in her head, yeah right,’ Ash almost shouts, slamming her chair back so hard it sways, topples over and clatters on the tiles. We hear her feet on the stairs.
Max reaches for Jackie’s hand and brings it to his cheek, she turns her face from us, and in an instant I feel like an intruder looking in at their pain like it’s a sideshow at the fair.
‘We should get going,’ Leo says, maybe picking up the same vibe. ‘I’ve got to get back, family stuff.’
‘But we’ll be at the hospital again tomorrow, right after school,’ I say.
‘Yeah, well, as soon as we can get there,’ Rose adds, and I glance at her, but she doesn’t meet my eye.
‘And the concert is going ahead, just like we planned,’ I say. ‘So many people want to come and support Naomi and you guys.’
‘Thank you, Red.’ Jackie smiles at me. ‘Will you kids do something for me now?’
‘Yeah, course,’ I say.
‘Go look in her room, see if you can find some photos, posters maybe. Something you think she’ll like to brighten her room up. I know that doctor says she doesn’t know what’s going on around her, and maybe that’s true at the moment, but I do believe she will wake up, and when she does I want her to see her stuff, so she knows she is safe. Go and choose a few bits, maybe take them into the hospital for her tomorrow?’
‘Sure,’ Leo says and we nod, although I’m pretty sure all of us wish the ground would swallow us up and we could be anywhere else in the world than trying to choose things that our comatose friend can’t see.
Naomi’s room was always neat. Small, with barely any room for anything more than her single bed and a wardrobe, anime posters on the wall, a selection of brightly coloured wigs hanging off a hook her dad put up for her over her bed. On her bedside table is a shit-load of make-up, more than I’ve ever seen almost anywhere else, the colours so vivid and so like Nai used to be, that it’s as though she is there, somewhere in all that jumble of mess and false eyelashes, and if we knew how, we could put her back together again.
The three of us sit on her bed, Rose in the middle, our thighs touching.
Rose opens her school bag and pulls out a bottle of wine, twisting the cap off, taking a deep long draught straight from the neck.
‘When the fuck did you score booze?’ I ask her.
‘I’ve got contacts,’ she smirks and passes me the bottl
e. I pass it to Leo.
‘Fuck’s sake, Red, you can be such an arse,’ she says, voice sharp, edged with anger. But that’s Rose, the girl who hides everything she really feels behind blades and thorns. Complicated and difficult as the bulletproof plates that make her armour strong.
‘I don’t like booze,’ I say, looking her in the eyes. ‘It turns people into wankers.’
‘Poor Red, I forgot your gin-soaked mum for a second there.’ Rose grabs the bottle back off of Leo before he’s had any. ‘A swig isn’t going to get you drunk, you know, just one, for Naomi.’
‘Rose,’ Leo takes the bottle out of her hands. ‘We get you’re upset, but don’t be a dick, OK? Red doesn’t drink. Leave it.’
He takes a long, long drink from the bottle, much more than he normally would, and I know why. The more he drinks, the less there is for Rose. A bit like when I pour half a bottle of Mum’s vodka down the sink, and fill it up with water. This is Leo’s way of protecting her, dumb though it is.
Rose watches him nearly drain the bottle. For a minute, I think she might totally lose her shit, but she doesn’t. The sadness and anger sort of fades from her face, and she looks different without it. Almost ugly, almost beautiful. I don’t really know which, and it doesn’t matter, because either way I can’t stop looking at her. I keep looking until it hurts.
‘Right, let’s get this over with, I guess.’ Rose wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘These anime posters?’
I nod, looking around the room, as she begins to peel them off the wall over the bed. ‘And her custom-made Lego mini-figure of Link from Zelda.’
‘Yeah.’ Leo picks it up and looks at it, before putting it in his pocket. We all used to tease Nai about her geekery, and she really did not give a fuck what we thought.
‘Her phone dock,’ I say, picking up the charger and speaker. ‘Where’s her phone, it’d have all her playlists on it, we could set it up to play all the time for her.’
‘We can’t find her phone, remember?’ Ash appears in the doorway. At once we stop touching everything, feeling like we’ve been caught breaking and entering. ‘We looked for it, the police looked everywhere for it when she went missing. But it was turned off on the night she left and no one knows where it went.’
‘Oh yeah, I forgot for a sec,’ I say. Now I remember thinking at the time that Nai leaving without her phone was weird. The girl I know would rather go without her right arm than her phone.
‘There’s an old iPod Nano somewhere that should fit that dock. Look in her bedside drawers.’ I kneel on the carpet, pulling the drawer open. Even though I know the police went through them, took everything out and put it back again, it still feels wrong. Intrusive. If anyone, even my friends, looked through my stuff, I’d be wishing myself dead pretty quickly. It’d be like someone sliced the top of my brain off and got a look at all my secret thoughts. Would they still like me if they knew everything about me, everything I think, everything I want? I’m not sure they would.
‘Here.’ I find a slim black iPod, the apple logo turned into a skull with a sharpie, and hand it to Leo. It’s then that I notice the notebook. Crammed with other bits of paper that look like lyrics. I pick up the book and open it, my finger tracing the patterns made by her handwriting. This was everything she wrote after we started to write songs on our own. Some charts too, like she’d been putting them to music.
‘Songs,’ I say holding the book up to Ash. ‘You looked at these?’
Ash shakes her head. ‘You can keep them if you want. Maybe you can do something with them. Finish one of them. That might be something she’d actually give a shit about, if she’s got enough brain left to give a shit about anything.’
‘She’s got a lot of stuff,’ Leo says picking up a pot of plectrums, all the colours, a rainbow of plastic. Naomi collected them from the gigs we went to, went down the front after the set, stayed after everyone had left, and picked up set notes, plectrums, water bottles. I asked her why once. Because she never wanted to get them signed or anything, or put them on eBay. They were just bits of rubbish the second she took them out of the venue.
‘This is where life happens,’ she’d told me. ‘In the stuff that gets left behind.’
‘Nai, that doesn’t mean anything,’ I’d said.
‘But it’s a great lyric, right?’ She’d grinned at me, I can see her now. The way the light would fizz in her eyes, full of laughter even when she was being serious. And the way she’d glow when she was having ideas, when we were writing together, as if the way she thought set sparks off in the air around her.
That afternoon, we’d sat on this single bed, with her acoustic guitar and wrote one of our best ever songs.
Naomi was the only person I knew who still wrote stuff down with a pen and paper; she was always making notes, scribbling ideas on anything she could find, and she’d shove them in this box she had, to look at later.
‘Mate, why are you so analogue?’ I’d ask her.
‘Because no one has ever hacked a piece of paper,’ she told me. ‘That’s why I keep all my deepest darkest secrets either up here,’ she tapped her forehead, ‘or written down in the olden-days way.’
And now it made sense to me more than ever. Somewhere in this room there were little pieces of her, little excerpts and extracts of the girl that she had been, her fingerprints and DNA, caught up in the neat loops and swirls of her handwriting.
That girl can’t be gone, she has to still be somewhere inside her bruised and damaged head.
10
Rose and Leo are already outside, but not me. I go to the bathroom, and let the cold tap run, cupping the water in my hands, sluicing it over the shaved sides of my head, feeling it trickle down between my shoulder blades.
When I come out I see Ash sitting at her desk, where she has three computer monitors arranged around her like a fence, and a laptop open. This is her thing, tech. She’s the kind of girl who codes for a laugh. The kind of girl who scares the shit out of me. This could be my chance to try and talk to her again, to find out how she feels about Nai, if she really thinks the way I do. How though, how do you open a conversation with someone who is so very closed?
Shrugging, I go in with my best shot.
‘What you doing?’ I ask her and she starts, swearing under her breath. My best shot is shit.
‘Fuck, Red. Man!’
‘Sorry, I just wondered what you were doing?’
‘Come in and close the door,’ she snaps, and I obey her because it seems like there isn’t an option not to. Once the door is shut she nods at her central screen. It’s the City of Westminster traffic camera CCTV,’ she says, turning her laptop to face me.
‘Like on YouTube or something?’ I ask. I mean Ash is pretty weird. Maybe watching CCTV is how she relaxes.
‘From the night before Nai was found, right up until the moment the tugboat picked her up. They data-dump it in a cloud, which seriously everyone should know by now is a fucking terrible idea.’
‘Wait . . . what?’ I take a step closer to her, peering over her shoulder at the image.
‘Well, the police theory is that she ran away, got mixed up in something and somehow jumped, right?’ Ash thinks I’m asking about the evidence, not the highly illegal activity she is engaged in in her bedroom.
‘Well, if she jumped, it had to be pretty near to where she was found, and not too long before either, because anywhere else and she would have drowned, any longer in the water and she would have frozen to death. So I thought I’d look for her. I don’t think they’ve even thought of looking for her here.’
‘Ash . . .’ I almost don’t want to know. ‘Did you hack the Borough of Westminster?’
‘Only the CCTV storage part.’ Ash grins at me. ‘And only this bit. Though if you fancy re-setting your parents’ council rent down to zero now’s the time to let me know.’
‘We own our house.’
‘Fancy,’ Ash mocks me absent-mindedly.
‘Shit,’ I say wa
tching her work.
‘I know.’ She returns her attention back to the screen. I see something different in her as she clocks from screen to screen. It’s not happiness exactly but she looks comfortable, at ease. It might be the first time I’ve ever seen her this way. ‘I do rule at this. The thing is,’ she goes on. ‘I’ve been over this footage – hours of it – several times now, and Naomi isn’t there. Not in the six hours before she is found. And there’s no sign of her anywhere within the radius of where she could have survived a fall from. She isn’t there. So that means—’
‘The theory is wrong.’ I sit down next to her, perching on the end of her bed.
‘Yes.’ Ash’s dark eyes search mine. ‘Can I trust you?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I think so.’
‘I looked at the CCTV footage of the last time she was seen, too. Walking down towards Vauxhall tube at three o’ clock in the morning. She walks under the railway bridge and we don’t see her again until she turns up almost dead eight weeks later.’
‘It’s crazy,’ I say. ‘But we know all of this.’
‘The only answer is that she got into a car,’ Ash says. ‘That’s the only thing that makes sense.’
‘But the police vetted all the cars that came in and out of the tunnel both ways. There were only ten, and one of them was a cop car. Between then and the morning rush hour, every single driver was in the clear,’ I remind her.
‘That has to be wrong.’ Ash looks back at the image of her sister that she has frozen on one of her screens. Nai in a summer dress and trainers, nothing else on her, walking completely calmly, totally alone into the dark of the tunnel under the railway. ‘That has to be wrong because there can’t be any other explanation. One of those drivers is lying.’
‘Or she used an access tunnel, one of the doors under the bridge had been vandalised and wasn’t locked, remember? Or she was on the wrong side of the road for the CCTV, in the blind spots, or shadows. There could be a million other reasons why they didn’t see her again after that image. This is the police, Ash. I mean they are wankers, but I kind of think they are good at this investigation shit.’
Mirror, Mirror Page 7
