It’s nearly Christmas. Sort of. In England, all the shops start playing “Jingle Bells” in November, and the Christmas lights are turned on in towns and cities on December 1. I triple-checked Google and couldn’t find any information about Christmas on Death Row, but I bet the guards refuse to let you hang a stocking in your cell. Even if there is a tree in the prison, it probably doesn’t feel all that festive eating gruel behind bars, and in actual fact I bet this time of year just makes everything more miserable.
That’s what Sandra told me yesterday. She rang again. My heart fell when I saw her name, and honest truth I wasn’t going to answer, but then I thought she might call the home phone and talk to Mum and invite us over. I picked up on pretty much the last ring as I wandered back from school underneath the flashing angels. That makes it sound as if God’s messengers were showing their knickers, which would have been a whole lot more interesting than the feeble lights flickering above the main road by the church.
Sandra said she was having a bad day. Probably I was supposed to offer to visit so we could reminisce about her dead son, but Stuart I just said I had to bake something for a cake competition. It was the only thing I could think of because I was holding a Victoria sponge after my Food Technology lesson.
“A cake competition?” she repeated.
I suddenly panicked that my behavior sounded suspicious.
“It will be plain,” I said quickly. “No icing. And probably very dry.”
“Good luck with it,” she replied, sounding uncertain. “And come and see me again before Christmas, won’t you? This time of year makes everything so much harder to bear. It’s the thought of him, really. Under the ground, when everyone else is… Anyway, I’d love to see you.”
“Yeah, me too,” I mumbled even though I had no intention of going to visit, not today or tomorrow or any day for the rest of my life even if it went on forever and ever amen.
It might sound harsh, but I don’t even know her that well. If you added up all the minutes, I reckon we only spent two hours together before she was holding on to my arm at the funeral, crying silently by the coffin, her fingernails digging into my skin. The first time we came into contact was so brief it hardly counts, and Stuart I will tell you all about it right now so imagine me at school, funnily enough in the cooking classroom, struggling to make a loaf of whole wheat bread.
I lifted my eyes from the weighing scales to see the brown hair at the base of Max’s neck in the classroom next to mine. My stomach flipped over and landed with a thud that shook my brain. All sensible thought sprinkled right out of it like salt, which FYI I’d forgotten to add to my bread mixture. The loaf was a disaster, flat and burned, and there was nothing for it but to chuck it away. The trash can just so happened to be by the door to the graphics classroom, and Max must have sensed my presence. When I scraped the bread off the tray with a knife, he glanced up from his design. I waved my hand, but unfortunately it was the one holding the knife, plus I was too tense to smile. From Max’s point of view, I must have appeared stony-faced in the window, brandishing a sharp weapon, before vanishing a second later.
Lauren was finding it hard to believe.
“Max’s house. Max’s house,” she kept saying, and I loved the admiration in her voice. “You’re actually going to his house tonight?”
“Thought I might as well,” I said airily.
“And your mum agreed to it?” she asked, flour all over her apron.
“Not exactly.” I told her how I’d lied to my parents about going to the library to do some research on rivers for a Geography project. “They’re keeping secrets from me so I don’t feel bad about keeping stuff from them.”
“It’s a slippery slope,” Lauren sang, and Stuart she was so right, but I just shrugged with that word called ignorance, saying, “One little lie won’t hurt anyone.”
When the bell rang, I shoved my books into my bag and dashed to the bike shed where we’d arranged to meet, feeling sick with nerves. Max’s house. Aaron’s house. Honest truth, I almost chickened out, like imagine one of those raw birds from the supermarket in a school uniform with a look of terror on its face. But then Max turned up looking sort of perfect and before I knew it I was following him out of the school gate, hoping all the other girls could see.
But not hear. The conversation was stilted now that Max was sober. Our confidence from the bonfire had vanished like poof into thin air, and we were just two teenagers in school uniforms traipsing through the drizzle, no fireworks to speak of.
“What did you do yesterday?” I said as we stopped by a crosswalk and waited for the little green man.
“Played soccer.”
“What was the score?”
“Three–two to us.”
“Three–two to you,” I repeated as the green man appeared.
“Why are you waving?” Max asked, and sure enough my hand was moving from side to side in the air. It was a habit, a thing I did to make Dot smile, saying hello to the green man like he was an actual person with an actual job and not just a light on a machine.
“Just swatting a mosquito.”
“It’s winter.”
“A robin, then,” I joked, but Max didn’t get it.
When we reached his house and walked up the garden path, I made sure my feet didn’t touch the alligators. Max unlocked the door, and there was absolutely no need for me to put my fingers on the handle, but in Biology we’d just learned about DNA and how it brushes off your body without you even realizing it. I squeezed the cold metal, wondering how many times Aaron had done the same.
“You coming in, then?” Max said, taking off his jacket and hanging it on a peg by the front door. I stepped into the hall as the multicolored swirls of Aaron tingled on my skin.
“So, er, do you want a drink or something? Orange juice?” he asked.
I nodded, straining my ears to see if I could hear anyone else in the house, but it was silent apart from a radiator groaning in the kitchen. We were alone. And the road outside the house was empty.
“Where’s your mum?” I asked, though it wasn’t her car I was thinking about.
“Work,” Max said, pouring two juices in the kitchen. It was small with a table in one corner and two plants dying on the windowsill.
“And your dad?”
“Doesn’t live with us.”
“Oh yeah. You said. Sorry,” I added, because Max’s face had clouded over.
“Whatever. Doesn’t bother me.” He handed me a glass. “He left a couple of years ago so I’m pretty used to it.” I downed my juice in one go. Max did the same. Our glasses clinked as we dropped them in the sink, and a dog barked outside. “Mozart. Stupid name for a dog.”
“They should’ve called it Bach,” I said, grinning. Max didn’t reply so I just asked where the toilet was, despite the fact I didn’t need to go and I already knew the answer from the party.
“I’ll show you,” he said, leading me to the upstairs bathroom. He made an awkward noise, staring at something by the silver flush. I followed his gaze to see a tube of cardboard hanging on the wall where a toilet roll should have been. “Er… I’ll get you some more.”
“No need,” I replied. Max raised his eyebrows. I had no intention of doing anything on the toilet, but he didn’t know that.
“You sure?”
“Yes. I mean no. I need a roll,” I said. Max’s eyebrows lifted even further. “Not a whole roll,” I added. “Just one piece.”
In case Max was listening, I made the pretense of going to the bathroom, flushing the toilet and turning on the tap. The bar of soap had shrunk to the size of a fifty-pence coin, and I imagined Aaron washing his hands so I bent down to smell it. My lungs filled with the scent of him. I picked up the soap and dropped it into my coat pocket. Probably I’m sounding crazy right now, but people do all sorts of weird things, e.g., on this TV program that put hidden cameras in public places, a middle-aged woman in the bathroom of a posh restaurant fox-trotted toward the hand dryer, swooning underneath the heat, saying, “Oh, Johnny,” like she was in that film Dirty Dancing. And once, when Mum took me to London to see a musical just before Dot was born, she dragged me to this place where the Beatles crossed the road, which sounds like a joke but actually happened in real life, on the front of an album cover, to be precise.
There were loads of tourists clicking their cameras and risking death by posing on the crossing, trying to dodge the red buses. The tourists were giddy, but Mum was the giddiest one of all, if you can believe that, posing for a photo with her arm wrapped around a man from Wokingham dressed like John Lennon. I reckon that woman in the restaurant would have picked up Patrick Swayze’s soap, and that man from Wokingham would have picked up John Lennon’s soap so Stuart I don’t think I was all that weird for picking up Aaron’s soap. I bet you did some peculiar things when you fell in love with Alice after your first date at the diner. Perhaps you took a ketchup packet off the table and even when you ran out of tomato sauce at home you could never bring yourself to open it, and maybe it’s still in your cupboard now between the mustard and the Worcestershire sauce.
Anyway, time’s ticking so I’d better get my skates on, like imagine my fingers wrapped up warm for winter and this letter all frozen as my hand slides across it. Suffice to say things were getting heavy in Max’s room. His fingers were creeping toward the zip of my school skirt when I heard a car park outside, and BAM, all of a sudden I came to my senses.
“Where are you going?” Max moaned because I’d jumped off the bed, straightening my clothes.
I pretended to look at my phone then put it on his desk. “Places to be.” I pulled on my shoes and ran my fingers through my hair as the front door opened and closed.
“You don’t have to rush off,” Max said. “I’m allowed to have girls around.”
“I really should go,” I replied, imagining Aaron’s face when he saw me with his brother. A bag was dropped at the foot of the stairs and a TV was turned on.
“Come on, Zoe. Stay a bit.” He patted the bed by his side, then faked a shiver. “I’m getting cold without you.”
“Do up your shirt, then,” I snapped, which he did in a sulk, taking an age over it as I hovered in the middle of the room, desperate to leave but trying to hide it.
“You’re no fun,” he muttered, standing up at last.
We made our way downstairs.
“That you, Max?” someone called over the sound of the TV. Someone female. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“No, Mum. It’s a burglar nicking all your stuff,” he deadpanned.
“Oh, ha-ha. Very funny. School okay?”
“Same as always,” Max called back. “Math. Boring. English. Boring. Science. Boring.”
“Easy with the enthusiasm there, sweetheart. Aaron back yet?”
I flinched, then rubbed my nose to disguise it.
“Nah. He’s probably at Anna’s.”
Anna. So that was her name. I opened the door, feeling suddenly flat.
“See you later,” I said as Max kissed my cheek.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me to whoever is lurking in my hall?” his mum called.
“Maybe another time,” Max replied, and that was that, my first contact with Sandra over and done with.
Now, if you were a nosy neighbor on Max’s street, you would have been sorely disappointed because absolutely nothing happened as we said good-bye in the garden. I waved and Max waved and he closed the door quickly, and honest truth the whole thing had been a bit of a damp squib, and if you don’t know what that is then picture a soggy explosive that fails to go off and you’re pretty much on the right lines.
By the time I left the house, the moon was shining in the indigo sky. I would love to say it was one of those full ones to make it seem significant, but it wasn’t particularly twinkling or romantic so I had no clue that something amazing was about to happen. That something amazing turned out to be an old blue car waiting at a traffic light by the church. A pigeon flew out of nowhere so I ducked as it almost hit my head, and when I straightened up, someone beeped a horn. My eyes adjusted to the dazzle of the headlights, and I realized with a great rush of adrenaline that it was Aaron.
“Bird Girl!” he called from the car. “Hanging out with pigeons!”
“Getting attacked by them,” I corrected him.
“Well, I’d better give you a lift, then!”
I don’t think I even gave a reply, just ran into the road as the traffic light turned green and a man in a van yelled angrily through his open window. Holding up my hand to apologize, I dived into DOR1S headfirst. Aaron sped off before I’d closed the door. Caught up in my seat belt, my face somewhere near the hand brake as we screeched forward, my nose banged against Aaron’s thigh. We started to laugh.
“Pull in somewhere,” I said, my sides aching, my foot stuck under my thigh. “I’ve got pins and needles!”
Aaron stopped by the Chinese takeout. “Hi,” he said when I was sitting normally.
“Hi,” I replied, and a dry squib exploded in the darkness between us. Aaron was wearing faded jeans and a baggy blue sweater, and his blond hair wasn’t doing anything special but looked pretty much perfect sitting there on top of his head.
“So, where’re we going?” Aaron asked.
Someplace far away. That’s what I wanted to say, and Timbuktu was the first thing that popped into my head, but of course I just asked for a lift to Fiction Road, because I knew Mum would be waiting. Aaron checked over his shoulder and pulled off as a woman in the Chinese takeout flipped a sign on the door. OPEN. The lights came on and a dragon in the window shone green, making me think of adventures in faraway lands, and I wished harder than I’d wished for most things in my life that the car was magic and could take us all the way to Timbuktu, because at the time I thought it was a mythical place sort of like Narnia rather than an actual town in Africa, blighted by poverty and famine.
“Fiction Road it is,” Aaron said, except of course he used my real address, and I loved how he knew where my house was and didn’t have to ask for directions.
Once Dad read this book about the adaptability of humans and how we are remarkable creatures because we can get used to anything, and, Stuart, that is so true if you consider how people fall asleep on planes, not even thinking about how miraculous it is to be high up in the sky, flying above the clouds to South America or somewhere, going to the loo thousands of miles above the earth, peeing all over the ocean. And that’s what it was like driving along with Aaron. At first it was Whoooaaaaa but after a few minutes I got used to it and I had the strangest sense that on that seat was where I belonged. We drove effortlessly down the long road, and the traffic lights turned green at the right moment as if the dragon from the restaurant was breathing emerald fire to illuminate our way home.
Aaron glanced at my uniform.
“Bath High?” he said. “I used to go there. My brother still does.”
“Really?” I said, my face interested but my insides turning cold. Liver. Spleen. Heart. Everything froze.
“Max Morgan. You know him?” Aaron turned right. Sped down a clear road. Slowed down and turned left.
“Max…” I started, but an ambulance roared up behind us, sirens blaring. Aaron swerved out of the way, his foot slamming the brake as something hard hit the glass by my head. A tiny red figure swung from the rearview mirror, tapping against the window. I rested it on the palm of my hand as the ambulance hurtled down the road and disappeared around a bend.
“That was close!” Aaron breathed.
“Is this—”
“The Miss Scarlet player piece from Clue,” Aaron confirmed. “And Clue dice. Everyone at college had those lame fluffy things so I thought I’d hang actual dice from my mirror instead. Besides, Clue rocks.”
“You like Clue?”
“Do you like Clue?”
“I love it,” we replied at the exact same moment, and then we grinned.
“So much better than Monopoly. All that going around in a circle…” Aaron said.
“Passing Go…”
“Stealing money from the bank to buy houses…” Aaron finished. “Everyone steals a little bit,” he protested as I looked horrified.
“I don’t!”
“’Course you do.”
“Honestly I don’t!”
“You’ve never stolen Monopoly money?” Aaron asked. “You haven’t lived. I’ll show you how to do it sometime.”
“Sure.” I shrugged, but inside my heart was thawing, dripping all over my bones.
The sign for Fiction Road came into view, black letters on a white post that had a fat brown cat sitting on top of it, maybe the same one I can hear outside the shed right now, meowing in the darkness. We were getting closer and the cat’s eyes were getting brighter, but I didn’t want to go home, not yet, not ever.
“Stop here a second,” I said.
Aaron pretended to tip a chauffeur’s hat as he pulled up next to the cat. “Let’s say hello!”
“What… No… Wait!” I called, but Aaron had already disappeared, leaving the car door wide open.
“Hello, Mr. Cat,” he said, stroking the speck of white between the cat’s pointy ears.
“Lloyd,” I corrected him. “He lives next door. Along with Webber.”
“Lloyd Webber,” Aaron muttered as the cat jumped off the sign and rubbed his head against my leg with a pebbly sort of purr. “We’ve got a dog next door to us called Mozart.”
I nodded as if this was brand-new information. “They should’ve called it Bach,” I joked, but my heart wasn’t really in it. Aaron laughed, and the sound made me happy and sad, like Stuart imagine those faces from the theater hanging from my ribs in the middle of my stomach.
“Beautiful animals,” Aaron muttered as the cat shot off into the bushes. “Don’t you think?”
I climbed onto the wall, shivering slightly. “I don’t know. I prefer dogs.”
Aaron jumped up next to me. “Cats are definitely better. More free. Like Lloyd, just running off to explore.”
“But they’re always on their own. Dogs are more sociable. Wagging their tails. Running about.”
“Cats can climb trees,” Aaron argued.
“But dogs can swim. And cats kill birds, which I just couldn’t do.”
“You and your birds,” Aaron said, lifting one foot onto the wall and resting his arms on his bent knee.
“I love them. Better than cats and dogs and all the other animals put together.”
“What’s so special about them?” Aaron asked, turning to look at me as if he was extremely interested in the answer.
I thought for a while. “Well, they can fly.”
Aaron gasped. “Really?”
I hit him on the arm. “Don’t be an idiot! I won’t tell you if—”
“No, go on,” he said, his eyes twinkling.
“Well, they can fly”—I glanced at him suspiciously, but he remained silent—“which is unbelievable; I mean, imagine being able to take off and go wherever you wanted. Like swallows. It’s crazy how far they go.”
“They’re the ones that migrate?” Aaron asked.
I sat on my hands and nodded. “They fly away for winter, these tiny little things zooming above the ocean, totally fearless. Twenty thousand miles they travel, or something, and then they fly all the way back again when the world’s a bit warmer. I don’t know. It’s sort of cool,” I finished feebly.
Aaron reached out and squeezed my thigh. “Really cool,” he said. Electricity shot up my leg and buzzzzzed in my body long after he’d let go. “So, what’re you up to this weekend?” he asked, working hard to sound casual.
I worked even harder in my reply. “Stacking shelves in the library where I work. How about you?”
“Writing an essay. Really dull.”
“I’ve got loads of homework, too. My mum’s putting the pressure on, going on about grades and how I need to do well if I want to go into law.”
“Do you want to go into law?” Aaron asked, folding his arms.
I wrinkled my nose. “Not really. But Mum and Dad are both lawyers so…”
“So what?”
“Well, it’s a good job, isn’t it?”
“Depends on your definition of good,” Aaron said. “Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse. Sitting in an office all day. Paperwork. Staring at a computer screen.”
Scared he was starting to think I was boring, I said, “Actually, my dream job is to write children’s books.” I’d never expressed it so boldly before and immediately felt daft. “Not that I’ve got any chance of doing it. Not really.”
“Hey, don’t say that! You’re too young to be cynical.”
“Not cynical. Realistic. Writing doesn’t pay,” I said, echoing Mum.
“According to J.K. Rowling, it does.”
I laughed. “Trust me, my story is not as good as Harry Potter.”
“So you’re writing something? Tell me about it.”
“No chance!”
“Chicken.” He started to quack and flap his elbows like wings.
“Aaron, that’s a duck.”
He cracked a smile. “I might not be a bird expert, but I know a coward when I see one.”
“Fine. It’s called Bizzle the Bazzlebog.…”
“Good title.”
“But it’s for little kids, ten-year-olds or something, so it will probably sound really—”
“Just spit it out!”
After a pause, I took a deep breath and spoke as fast as I could.
“Okay, so Bizzle is this blue furry creature who lives in a tin of baked beans but then one day a boy called Mod fancies beans on toast so he opens the tin and pours them into a bowl but Bizzle plops out and I’ve never said that to anyone so I don’t want you to react in any way.” He did as he was told. Literally. Sat there completely still without breathing. I rolled my eyes. “Okay, maybe you can react a little bit.”
“Phew,” he exhaled. “I was beginning to suffocate.” He shoved me playfully with his shoulder. “It sounds good.”
“What’s your plan, then?” I said to change the subject, turning to face him by straddling the wall.
“My plan? I don’t have one.”
“Everyone’s got a plan,” I said in surprise.
“Not me.”
“So what, you’re just going to leave college and then—”
“And then”—Aaron waved his hand through the air—“see what happens. Think about it for a while. There’s no rush, is there?”
Picking some moss with my finger, I tried to picture Aaron in thirty years’ time. Serious. Weary. Gray hair above his ears like Dad. It was impossible. Especially when he stood up on the wall and pulled me to my feet. I gripped his arm to keep from falling over.
“I like climbing walls,” he announced suddenly.
“Er… I like climbing walls, too,” I said, struggling to balance.
“I like winter and I like the dark and I like cats and I like the rain and I like walking up mountains and sitting at the top in the fog. That’s all I need to know about my life right now. It’s pretty simple. And I can experience it all for free.”
“But you need money,” I argued. “Everyone needs money.”
“True. But just enough to survive. And maybe a tiny bit left over to have an adventure. That’s what I’m going to do when I leave college, actually. Go off somewhere. My dad gave me some money on my seventeenth birthday to buy a car with a personalized license plate. I don’t think DOR1S is exactly what he had in mind. But she was cheap, and she works well enough. And I’ve saved the rest to do something fun.”
“This is fun,” I said without thinking about it, wondering if this is how Mum and Dad had felt at the very beginning, when they used to write each other love letters.
“Yeah,” Aaron said, tilting back his head in the drizzle. “It really is.”
Just when I thought the night couldn’t get any more perfect, an image of a parking lot forced itself into my mind. A parking lot with two people walking through it. Stopping by the streetlight. Embracing in the amber glow.
“I should go,” I said suddenly, jumping off the wall, the moment ruined. “Mum said I had to be back by six.”
Aaron stayed where he was, throwing out his arms and balancing on one leg. “Good thing I gave you a lift. You’d have been late. What were you doing over there, anyway?”
“Sorry?” I said, though I’d heard him just fine. I dusted down my school skirt, not meeting his eyes.
“Why were you in that part of town after school? I live around there.”
“Visiting my grandpa,” I murmured, flicking nonexistent dirt off the material.
“What road does he live on?”
I couldn’t think of a single street so I just said, “He’s buried in the graveyard by the traffic lights.”
“Don’t be. He’s at peace,” and Stuart it was sort of true, because sitting in a hospital asking for strawberry jelly wasn’t exactly stressful.
Aaron hopped off the wall. I opened the passenger door. His bicep tensed as he grabbed my bag. Our fingers brushed together as he handed me the strap. Ten seconds later, he was still handing me the strap, my fingers tingling with all his multicolored DNA.
“So, this is the part where you give me your number,” Aaron whispered. “Without me having to ask for it.” My heart leaped, but I hesitated, thinking of the girl with long red hair. “Or you can take mine? You know. Just to arrange the bank robbery.”
I grinned. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t know my number so I shoved my hand into my bag, searching for my phone. Schoolbooks. Pens. An elastic band. I moved my fingers into the very corners. Paper clip. Chewing gum. A lid from a bottle.
“It’s not there,” I said, confused, and then I gasped.
“Where is it?”
“I… I must’ve left it at school.”
Aaron grabbed a pen out of the glove box. He took my hand, writing his number on my palm, the nib tickling my skin as zeros and sevens and sixes and eights spread from my thumb to my little finger across my life line and my love line and all the other creases that gypsies read in caravans. Black ink shone in the moonlight, but all I could see was my phone in Max’s bedroom. On his desk. With a picture of me and Lauren as the screen saver. I pulled my hand away and lifted my bag onto my shoulder. A crease formed between Aaron’s eyebrows, and I wanted to jump right in and fluff it up like a pillow.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, and Stuart this was an impossible question, but for the second time that evening, I was spared the need to answer by an ambulance.
The same ambulance we’d seen just a few minutes before.
It was turning out of Fiction Road—my road—blue lights flashing.
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a hospital waiting room, but if you ask me, it’s the worst place in the entire world. There was a battered sofa and a sticky coffee table and an overflowing trash can and an empty water dispenser and a droopy plant that looked more ill than all the patients in the ward put together. Cigarette butts were squashed into the plant’s dry soil even though there were six NO SMOKING signs and one poster about lung cancer with graphic images of tumors. Next to the poster was a stack of pamphlets about bladder weakness, which could explain why the nurses hadn’t refilled the water.
Voices sounded outside the room. Soph scrambled to her feet and pushed open the door, but it wasn’t Mum or Dad or Dot, just a couple of doctors marching past with stethoscopes around their necks, white coats swishing. A siren sounded in the distance and a metal trolley clattered onto the pavement and somewhere close by a heart monitor went beeeeeeeeeeep. I prayed and prayed that it wasn’t Dot’s.
I’m sure you’ve heard of something called sixth sense, a feeling that scratches your brain to tell you someone you love is in danger, and Stuart maybe you get it in your cell, like if your brother who I’m guessing you don’t want to talk about has a sore throat then perhaps your tonsils sting, too. Well, as soon as I’d spotted the ambulance, I started to run. Aaron shouted after me, but I didn’t even look back because I just knew that something was wrong. Sure enough, when I sprinted toward the drive, Soph was standing there, crying and muttering something about our sister.
Mum had traveled in the ambulance with Dot, telling Soph to stay behind. Well, I wasn’t having any of that so I called a taxi and we leaped in.
“She fell,” Soph said, tears splashing down her face. “Right from the top to the bottom.”
“Of what?” I asked in a whisper.
“The stairs. She was just lying there on the carpet and she wasn’t moving and…” The sentence hung in the air as we arrived at the hospital, where a nurse with a stern face took us to the waiting room.
After forever, the hinges of the door creaked and there was Mum, standing in the doorway, her top hanging out of her jeans.
“How’s Dot?” I asked.
“Is she okay?” Soph whispered.
Mum collapsed onto a chair. “It’s…”
“It’s what?” I said, gripping Soph’s arm.
Mum sighed heavily. “A broken wrist.”
“A broken wrist?” Soph asked.
“Just a broken wrist?” I said.
We all jumped as the door opened a second time. Dad came in carrying a briefcase, pink-faced and panting in the expensive black suit he only ever used for meetings with important clients or funerals.
“I got your message! What happened? How’s Dot?”
“She’s broken her wrist.”
“Oh, thank God,” Dad said.
“Thank God?”
“Well, I thought from what you said on the message that… Anyway, is she okay?”
Mum stared at her lap. “It’s my fault. I should have been watching her.”
“You can’t watch her all the time,” Dad said gently. “Not all the time.”
“She fell down the stairs. She must’ve tripped on a bit of tinsel. I don’t know why she was wearing it, but she tripped and just… fell. Knocked herself out. I couldn’t wake her, Simon, and she was just lying there like last time, hardly breathing and…”
Dad crouched down in front of her. “It’s not your fault, pet. Accidents happen.”
Mum took a deep, shaky breath and nodded as Dad rubbed her cheek. “How did you get on, anyway?” she asked, taking in Dad’s suit. “Any luck?”
“Down to the last two, but they gave the job to the other guy.”
Before Mum could reply, light from the corridor burst into the waiting room. A nurse held open the door to reveal Dot with a cast on her hand, silver tinsel sparkling around her neck. Soph was the first to reach her, falling to her knees and signing urgently, faster than I knew she could. I missed what she was saying, but Dot nodded and Soph pulled her into a rare hug. Dad picked her up and squeezed her tight and Mum said, “Careful, Simon,” and then we went home, and Stuart I know that’s abrupt, but there’s a cat meowing at the shed door so just a sec because I’m going to let him in.
Sorry, but I better cut this short because it’s impossible to write with Lloyd purring on my lap, getting in the way of the paper. The white speck between his ears is softer than ever before, and I keep touching it and putting my lips there, too. I wanted to say how Mum and Dad had a row about Dot when we got back from the hospital. And I wanted to tell you how I wrapped my palm in a plastic bag to protect Aaron’s number in the shower. And I wanted to describe how I hid under my covers and held my hand to my ear, pretending to dial an imaginary phone and speak to him in the darkness. My words traveled through my veins, which hung in the sky like telephone wires. I explained about the phone in Max’s room and he explained about the girlfriend, and of course we forgave each other, lying there all night whispering love through our wrists in the pale glow of the unremarkable moon.
From,
Zoe x
1 Fiction Road
Bath, UK