Two years and two months after the day he went missing, the police reckon that they might have found Jay.
Dad’s holding my hand in the kitchen.
He talks in a very soft and steady voice, not like his usual loud bark. It’s the voice he uses when he has to climb into an enclosure of lions and break up a fight, or rescue a trapped cub, or give an injection.
Except that he doesn’t need to tame me on this particular day.
I’ve lost the power of speech and I’m the quietest I’ve ever been.
Even Benjie’s gone quiet and is huddled under my chair.
Behind the dark bulk of Dad’s head I can see Mum leaning on the banisters in the hall and hiding her face behind her hand. There’s a policewoman standing next to her with one hand on Mum’s elbow and she’s bent towards Mum in concern. I make out the words ‘tea’ and ‘sit down’ and ‘when you’re ready,’ but I can’t make any sense of it, because I feel as if a big part of my side has been ripped off and left all the inside bits of me hanging out.
Jay.
Jay.
I want Jay.
Dad’s stroking my hair, and he has big tears rolling down his face. I’ve almost never seen Dad cry. Even when Jay went missing the first time, he didn’t cry. He just went grey and aged about twenty years in five minutes and ever since then he’s not smiled or laughed in the way that he used to.
Mum’s been the one who cries.
She’s crying again now, like her heart is broken.
The policewoman comes into the kitchen and fills up the kettle, hunts for cups and mugs and gets milk out of the fridge.
‘We will need you to come and make an identification,’ she says to Dad, with an anxious look at me. ‘Your daughter should probably stay at home.’
‘It’s OK, I’m nearly sixteen,’ I say, out of habit. People always think I look younger than I am. They should see Bindi – she still looks about twelve.
At the thought of my best friend, I find a rush of tears coming up from somewhere and I reach in my pocket for my phone.
‘Can I call Bindi?’ I say.
Dad nods.
‘You’re not to come with us, Lilah,’ he says. ‘This is for me and Mum to do on our own.’
I’m too dazed to argue, so I just give him a nod back and then I go into the hallway and dial Bindi’s mobile, but it’s switched off, so I have to dial her landline instead.
‘Hello, love,’ says Reeta. ‘She’s just upstairs. Are you OK, Lilah? You sound very serious.’
I manage to squawk out a ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ and then there’s a pause, during which I can hear the blast of Asian Network getting nearer and nearer as Reeta moves upstairs with the phone, and then it’s turned down and Bindi’s soft voice comes onto the line. She already seems alarmed, because her mum’s obviously told her that I sound weird, and Bindi knows me really well so I don’t have to say all that much.
I just say, ‘They think they’ve found Jay. But it’s not good news. Can you come?’ and she throws the phone down and is already on her way by the time I go back downstairs again, to where the policewoman is leading Mum and Dad towards the front door.
Mum comes back just as they are about to go.
She gives me the fiercest hug she’s ever given me. It squeezes every bone and rib and muscle in my body and snatches my breath away.
‘We’ll ring you,’ she says. ‘Stay here with Bindi. Stay safe, Lilah.’ And they walk down the path behind the policewoman and get into the car in complete silence.
I watch them sitting stiff and upright in the back of the police car, not speaking, and then I listen to the sound of the car pulling away in the rain. The streets are all wet and shiny and there’s a smell of damp grass in the air.
No stars out tonight, and no moon.
Just the clouds, moving in silence across the streetlights.
I turn and walk back inside the house. It already looks and smells different.
With no Jay and now no Mum and Dad, it’s a building sucked clean of family and warmth. A shell.
I sit on the stairs in the hall in the dark and Benjie comes and huddles next to me. I bury my head in his warm fur and wrap my arms over both of us to make a warm, dark burrow of dog and girl.
Five minutes later, Bindi rings the bell.
It feels like the longest night ever.
Mum rings me to say they’ve arrived and that they’re going to be quite a while.
I don’t ask any questions. That’s because I don’t want to know the answers.
Instead, I let Bindi make me a mug of hot chocolate with loads of milk and sugar and we take it up to my room and sit on the bed for a while with the puppy, and she makes me tip all my jewellery out on the duvet and tries to make me laugh by putting it on and making silly comments. I sort of go along with it and even laugh a real laugh at one point, and then I’m tripped up with guilt for laughing when I know what Mum and Dad are going to have to do. I find that I’m shaking like I’ve got the flu, so Bindi just creeps over to my side of the bed and hugs me until I stop, which is about ten minutes later, when I’m exhausted and feel all cold and thin.
‘Don’t be nice to me,’ I growl, in a more Lilah-like way. ‘It might make me cry.’
Fat chance of that, but she knows what I mean.
Bindi switches Planet Rock on and finds some good heavy metal music, and demands that I show her how to head-bang so I do. For a moment it feels good to thrash about to the hard beat of the music, and a little part of me thinks that Jay might actually be watching me from somewhere and grinning at me, like he used to do before it all went wrong.
‘Yeah, Liles – you look so cool doing that, NOT,’ I hear in my head.
There’s a faint whiff of Jay in the bedroom for a moment. Sweat, spliffs, guitars and hair gel. Then it floats away as quickly as it came.
Bindi holds my hand.
I don’t know what makes me want to do this, but I take Bindi into Jay’s room later on.
The last time she came into his room was when he still lived at home, before he started going all weird. He used to be really nice to my mates and chat to them about school and music and silly stuff.
Now Bindi’s creeping about like a non-believer in a church, trying not to touch anything until I give her an exasperated shove.
‘He’s not exactly going to mind if you mess anything up, is he?’ I say, with a hint of my anger coming back.
Bindi is kind enough not to snap back at me. She picks up a pile of tatty old copies of NME magazine and leafs through them with a bemused look on her delicate face.
‘I’ve never heard of any of these bands,’ she says. ‘Why haven’t I?’
I grin.
‘’Cos you only listen to Asian music,’ I say. ‘Jay was really into his indie stuff. His band played loads of it. You know, like the stuff Adam Carter plays now.’
Bindi gives a slight jump when I say this. Or at least, I think she does. My mind’s all over the place. I might have imagined it.
She’s staring at me now with a look I can’t quite work out.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘If I say it,’ she says, ‘you’ll think I’m really mad. Or selfish.’
I smile.
‘You, selfish?’ I say. ‘Go on – just say it.’
‘Well,’ says Bindi. ‘I know this is a terrible time for your family. And I know you really miss Jay. But, the thing is – I’m kind of a bit jealous of you sometimes.’
I’m so surprised at this, that I nearly slide off the side of Jay’s bed.
‘Me?’ I say. ‘My life is totally rubbish. Why would you be jealous of me?’
Bindi sighs and looks around Jay’s bedroom.
‘This,’ she says. ‘Your own bedrooms. One each. I have to share with two of my sisters.’
I glance around at Jay’s posters. I’ve never really thought about it.
‘And,’ Bindi continues. I can feel her gathering pace. ‘And your mum and dad give you loads and loads of attention. There’s always one of them there for you to talk to.’
I give this a bit of thought.
‘It feels like they were never there for us,’ I say. ‘It’s part of why Jay went missing, I reckon. They were caught up in their jobs all the time.’
Bindi is shaking her head.
‘No,’ she says. ‘I can tell you what it’s like to have parents who never listen to you, never even notice if you are home sometimes. And all the attention is focused on the little kids, not on me. Believe me, Lilah – you’re lucky.’
I don’t feel very lucky, what with my parents having gone off to identify a body that may or may not be my brother, but she looks so sad that I don’t have the heart to make that dig, so I don’t.
I play Bindi some Manic Street Preachers instead, even though it kills my heart to hear the familiar songs, and she puts on this sort of fixed smile and taps her foot along, which looks really weird. I can tell she hates it, so I take it off again.
I dig out some of the photographs of Jay’s first gig and we look at them in silence.
There’s Ben, his lead singer, all spiky black hair and screwed-up face, howling some song into the microphone.
There’s Eddie, their drummer, head down, blonde shaggy hair over his face and the sweat shining on his bare chest.
There’s Matt, the keyboard player, standing with his legs apart in a typical rock-star pose, his long fair hair limp and parted in the centre. He’s the one who sent me the Facebook message.
And there’s Jay. My brother. Lead guitar. Not posing, or grimacing. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans and his dark hair wasn’t so straight then, so there’s a wing of curls dipping over one eye. He’s looking down at his fingers on the fretboard of his guitar as if he’s really concentrating on the music, and he’s holding the neck of the guitar with care, like you’d hold an egg in your hand.
It was all about the music for Jay.
That guitar sits alone in the corner of his bedroom now.
I pick it up and run my hands over the strings, stroke the smooth polished surface and feel my way past the little switches and knobs on the front.
‘Can I?’ says Bindi.
I shrug.
‘Why not?’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t mind.’
I pass the heavy instrument over to Bindi and she strikes what she thinks is a Rock God pose with it. She looks so ridiculous in her pink jewelled clothes and nose-stud, holding a red Les Paul guitar, that I find myself laughing until my stomach hurts. Then she starts to laugh as well, and we’re both laughing so loud that for a moment we don’t hear the phone with its shrill, insistent tone cutting into the dark hallway outside, but then Benjie starts to bark and our smiles fade, and we leave the guitar on the bed and bolt downstairs.
I snatch up the receiver and can’t speak for a moment, I’m so out of breath.
Bindi hovers behind me with one light hand on my shoulder.
‘Lilah?’ says Dad’s voice. He sounds heavy, broken. I can hear Mum crying in the background.
‘It’s not him,’ he says. ‘Lilah. It’s OK. It’s not Jay.’
I drop the phone and fall to my knees.
Bindi speaks to my dad and then hangs up.
She puts her arms around me.
We sit in the dark hall on the carpet.
I’m shaking so hard that I head-butt her in the teeth at one point.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, when I apologise.
She’s right.
I’m so relieved. We’ve been lucky. It’s not Jay who’s been found dead. This time.
