It smells. Not like gross or anything, but if you bottled it, put it in a line-up with bottles of other places, I could pick out the refuge for sure. It smells of bleach and tinned soup and conditioner on damp towels. Dove Intensive Repair. I swear from the shelf in the bathroom, all the women here must use it, like they think everything about them needs fixing, including their hair.
Mum’s been at it too, towel like a bandage around her skull and her face like a wound when I walk in to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, bare legs poking out of her towel like she’s chilling at some kind of spa.
‘Why didn’t you answer my calls, Izzy?’ And I can’t tell if the red of her cheeks is from the fix-up job in the shower or that noiseless anger she has, how it works its way out through her skin.
‘I just wanted some space, all right.’ I’ve only been back a few minutes and could already do with some more. The room is tiny; even though Mum brought me barely anything from Daniel’s, we still fill it, with our bags and our bodies and all those unspoken words, those unfulfilled promises. And our shame.
It’s like being back at home in that sense. At Daniel’s, I mean. That place where shame settled like dust despite his ability back in the beginning to make us shine.
‘Come on, Stephanie.’ The air above the seat of our secondhand green chair became a galaxy of tiny stars as Daniel gave the cushion a theatrical smack. ‘Do you really want this fusty old thing when we agreed we’d buy everything new?’
We were sorting the flat, packing up our first real home before moving in with Daniel. All but the living room done and he’d written TO TAKE on just three boxes. I knew Mum could feel my plea, I could see it in her fingers, how both thumbs were picking at the nails of both pinkies. After wiping the fusty old dirt from his palms, Daniel slipped his hands into hers and held them steady.
‘Fresh start,’ he said.
Mum looked at me, like, he’s right, Isabel, and it was the first time I wished things had been different. Just a little bit. Just enough for us to take the green chair, which had held us steady on those Desert Island Sunday mornings before Daniel’s hands turned up promising to do a better job.
‘I can’t afford new things,’ Mum said, and Daniel had laughed because hadn’t he told us already, this would be his treat, whatever we wanted, whatever we needed to make it feel like home.
‘You think your mum deserves better than this grubby lump, don’t you, Isabel?’ And when he put it like that…‘You do too,’ he said, ruffling my hair like I’d seen dads do to their kids in the movies. ‘You can pick out some things for your new bedroom if you like.’
So, the green chair went back to the charity shop from which we’d bought it those eight years before and we went with our three boxes into Daniel’s house, where happiness was framed and hung on the wall as confirmation of how he made us feel.
Two days later, Grace and I hung out for, like, an hour in B&Q, where some guy on the paint counter rolled his eyes comically as we squealed over Citrus Tickle, Fiddlehead Fern and Lime Candy. ‘Anyone would think those paint charts were photos of Justin Bieber the way you two are carrying on,’ he said, winking the kind of wink I imagined my grandad would have given me if he hadn’t wanted to give me away.
‘I don’t care about Justin Bieber.’ I knew by the volume of Grace’s voice what was coming. ‘I’m a lesbian, you see.’ Grace liked to drag the word out like it was an elastic band, stretching it wide and then flicking it in the face of whoever she was trying to shock.
But the sales guy just nodded, like, whatever floats your boat, love, and Grace huffed and puffed cos she got off on the drama of it back then when she didn’t have a Nell to get off on it with for real.
We were hooked on the greens, totally convinced Ivy Pasture was the sophisticated look my bedroom needed to give me that je ne sais quoi. Grace, who was in the top set in French, reassured me that was a good thing.
A week or so later, Daniel, who’d asked me to make a note of the paint name, was waiting for me when I arrived home from school, this Tigger bounce in his step when he opened the front door with his George Clooney uniform tie hung over his shoulder. ‘Come, come, come,’ he said, everything turning to black as he wrapped the tie around my eyes and took my hand to guide me up the stairs. ‘I was going to wait for your mum, but it’s just too good.’
I’d never smelt fresh paint, never had that rush of fumes, that annihilation of everything that was there before. I must have held my nose or coughed or something because Daniel was telling me not to be such a baby, it wouldn’t last long, and to think of him all those hours up the ladder, but wasn’t it worth his effort because: ‘ta-da!’ And he tugged at the blindfold to reveal my new room painted an orangey red.
‘But the green,’ I said.
Daniel looked at me, like, what?
‘Ivy Pasture!’ I tried to use the ‘indoor voice’ he’d suggested when Grace had come over for the first time after we’d moved in the weekend just gone, but maybe I was still too loud, cos Daniel flinched as if my words had been hurled like stones.
‘There’s no need to shout at me, Isabel.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but this isn’t the colour I wanted.’ I pulled the colour chart from my drawer. ‘Ivy Pasture, see.’
‘Oh.’ His voice was like flat lemonade, still sweet but it had lost its fizz. ‘My bad. This is Autumn Ivy. So close. I’ve spent all day on it too. Turned down an advert so I could get it done for you. I even ruined one of my favourite T-shirts.’ The lines didn’t disappear from his forehead when he rubbed it. ‘Never mind. I can probably cancel that Clooney gig I’ve got next week – I could repaint it then. Your mum will be OK going without that sofa she had her heart set on.’ He picked at the flecks of paint on his hands. ‘I was going to use the cash from that job to get it for her, you see.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said, even though the new colour was like brick, heavy and porous, soaking up all the good vibes – I mean, that was why Daniel was acting so weird, right?
‘No, no.’ He took the colour chart from me, fingered the Ivy Pasture. ‘It’s not at all fine, Isabel. I wanted everything to be perfect – that’s why I spent so long on it. Why I got the best primer and was so careful with the edges. But if you don’t like the colour —’ It was left hanging, that ‘if’, like the happiness in the frame in the hallway depended on it.
‘No, really.’ The colour chart tore easily when I pulled it from him, crumpling the pieces into a tight ball. ‘This is much nicer.’
‘Attagirl,’ Daniel told me.
When Mum asked me that evening why the change of heart, he gave me a conspiratorial nudge with his elbow, said we’d both realised, hadn’t we, Isabel, that green wasn’t the colour for me.
Maybe it was the paint, maybe it was Daniel’s insistence that everything be put away each evening; that if it wasn’t, he reserved the right to go into my room and tidy it himself. He did too.
‘You should see it as a lesson, Isabel,’ he said, chirpy as a CBeebies presenter. ‘If you’d just kept it shipshape like I’d asked, I’d never have touched your record player.’
That didn’t explain why he’d dropped it, why it had broken into too many pieces to play Dad’s ‘You Are My Sunshine’, why Mum turned quiet and pink and said, ‘It’s fine, Isabel.’
The more I looked at her, the more I thought of how in our old flat the shapes of our bodies would stay bent into the cushions on the sofa; how she would find me sometimes by the trail of biscuit crumbs I’d left from the kitchen to my bed; how when it was just the two of us, things may have been messier, but they’d been so much warmer too.
So maybe it was the paint, or maybe it was those other things, those things which felt like nothing at the time, but whatever it was, that bedroom in Daniel’s house was never really mine, like this one in the refuge isn’t mine – ours – either.
‘It’s fine, Izzy,’ as Mum would say, but even as the room feels full, there’s so much missing. And I don’t even mean my Jar of Sunshine, though that’d help. But walking in, finding Mum looking half relieved, half scared to shit, what hits me is that what we had in the flat, what we hadn’t squeezed into those three boxes, was that quiet calm that comes with honest, uncomplicated love.
Our love, the honest and uncomplicated love I shared with Mum, was left behind when she was taken in by Daniel’s. Mum let that love go. Mum let love – her love for Daniel – do this to her. She let Daniel’s love take her into darkness while all the time she let her love for me do shit.
It’s hot, this realisation. Like scorching embers in my belly threatening to erupt into fire, and I must jolt with the blaze of it or something, cos Mum looks up at me, pupils dilating into those familiar pools of fear, but even the whisper that if I screw her fear and blow like I’m sure I’m about to then I’m not so different from Daniel – even that doesn’t stop me. And I can practically feel it then, that power I see in Daniel’s eyes whenever I see that fear in Mum’s.
‘Why the fuck did you stay with him?’
It feels so good to finally scream it. To burn. And though my cheeks are already wet from the shame of scaring her, I stand my ground, towering over my mother, ignoring the fact that she’s weeping because I am an island and her tears will just wash away.