21

That night, Mel’s heart of pills sticking in my chest, I wake to Jimmy snuffling around my bed. I get up and pull him across my knees where he collapses with a sigh, nuzzling my stomach. I scratch behind his ears and we settle there, sinking into the carpet, and I begin to whisper my fears, and about how things have changed, how my old life is reappearing, how I’ll take him with me, and show him the world I knew. It helps for a while, but my mouth is still dry, and I feel untethered, as though I could fly apart. I need to be weighted down.

On the wall next to the step that creaks there’s a map of England. Richard and Mel brought it back from a car boot sale one Saturday. Dusty glass in a flaking pine frame. In the streetlamp glow I trace a line up from London until I hit the black dot I always look for. The moor is there: a tiny green puddle, spilling out into places I don’t know. My little finger blots it out.

Jimmy clicks around Mel’s paved garden like a smaller creature; quick, nervous steps, sniffing the air. I watch him from the kitchen, where I find a packet of biscuits, oatmeal with chunks of chocolate, and devour them, hardly chewing, coughing when crumbs dust the back of my throat. They sink into my stomach and I lick my teeth, then the wrapper.

Behind the bin, stuffed into an empty laundry-powder box. It’s still there. I’m surprised. A tiny bag of weed and a few rizlas, along with a bottle of vodka. I put it here a long time ago, for emergencies. Since Freya began to tug at me, since the Sunday on the study floor, I’ve taken out the bottle and held it, turning it, watching the liquid slosh and flow, but not opened it. I twist the top in my teeth and it cracks satisfyingly in my mouth.

I sniff the vodka: the hairspray kind. It’s been a while, so I sip a tiny bit and don’t swallow, but bubble it around my teeth and hold it in my mouth. I return to the back step and scratch Jimmy behind the ears.

The rizla paper is greasy and familiar under my fingers, the hash stale and full of rocks, and I’ve got no lighter, but I make a roll up anyway, for the calming motion of the roll and lick and the old smell drifting up along with the night air to calm me. I take it between my teeth and roll it between my lips, then balance it between my fingers. The vodka I ration, imagining each drop from the lip where it sits on the dry skin and across the bubbly plateau of my tongue, to the back of the throat, down into the stomach, where it joins the others in drips.

Jimmy ambles over, edges down to lie on the gravel. In the glow of the garden lamps his eyes have a splash of green in them. I feel his nose, dry. I wet it with some vodka on my fingers, and he licks it clean, making me laugh.

—Let’s get drunk, I say. Me and you.

The whirr and click of a lighter sparking. Richard, in the kitchen, I see him through the glass smoking and dropping ash into the sink. He’s in a silk bathrobe, must be Mel’s. His little belly pokes out. White hair around his navel, a trace of old man coming for him. He can’t see me, where I’m crouched on the back step, but I see the outside lights catch his eye, and Jimmy whines, he must sense him there. I smile into my vodka bottle, giggle like a child, hiding, Blue and me, thrusting our hands over each other’s mouths, breath hot on skin.

I hear him step towards us, and when he jumps it’s even better than I expected, a hand on heart stumble back, a windmill arm reel. I don’t laugh, just watch him, cold. Freya is cackling somewhere.

Richard breathes out a snort, like a horse. —What the fuck?

—Can’t sleep either?

—Are you drinking?

I make a wide-mouthed face. —Are you smoking?

—How long has this been going on? We agreed—

I stick the roll up between my teeth and make a silent snarl at him. Richard makes a weary gesture with his cigarette.

—What’s that?

—A dildo.

—You shouldn’t have that stuff here.

—Do you sneak down here every night to have a crafty fag?

He smiles, so now we’re baring our teeth at each other.

—No, he says. —Only when Mel’s being … She’s so stressed, you know, by all this.

I wonder what I’ve missed, being down here with Jimmy. What hissing angry sounds, what slammed doors. Richard takes a long drag on his cigarette and looks at the thing in his hand, studying it as though it’s interesting.

He holds out his cigarette. —Go on. I won’t tell if you don’t, he adds, with a low, joyless laugh.

I keep the roll up unlit for a moment. Perhaps I shouldn’t smoke it now. That bag was my last.

—It’s my last stash, I say.

He doesn’t answer.

—Could buy more, I say.

—No.

I wonder when Richard’s life became sanitised, like a white rail in a hospital, like a plastic glove. Was it immediately after we left Foxlowe, or did he find Mel and think, That’s it, I can hide in her disinfectant, in her floral curtains. No one and nothing will find me there?

—When did you get so boring?

He smiles into his cigarette. —I was always boring, he says.

I suck on the end of my roll up with Richard’s cigarette against the tip to light it. I wave the smell in his direction, to see if it will drift through his screens unnoticed, if tonight he will dream about soil smells and grass under his bare feet and the cold in the kitchen and where we are going, if a smell could do all that. But he just takes his cigarette back and holds it out like a glass, so I bump it with mine.

—You say Cheers, he says.

—Oh.

—Didn’t we teach you that?

—I think Kai used to say Sally.

He laughs. —It’s Salut. It’s French.

—Oh.

—I saw empty packets in there, he says.

—Yes.

—You don’t have to binge like that, you know. We won’t run out of food. You’ll never be hungry here.

—I know, I say.

—I’m sorry you feel you have to do that.

Richard is expert at I’m sorry you feel.

I’ve always thought there’s something strange that happens if you’re up late at night, and talking to someone. It might be someone really close, like me and Blue, or Toby, and then it’s like your day conversations, only boiled down to the real things that you want to say, without all the noise surrounding them. Or if it’s someone you don’t talk to a lot, like Richard, it’s like the dark and the strangeness of the air and the silence all around is a blanket you can hide under while you say things you would never say in front of the TV, or in the car. I try for something real, anyway.

—Don’t you think, I said, watching the smoke rise, —don’t you think you’ll get there, and want to stay, want to go back forever? That’s what I think. Start again, see if the others will come.

And I’m right about the night, because Richard doesn’t change the subject or ignore me at all.

—No. I don’t want to go back there. You don’t remember things properly, he said, twisting a loose thread on the silk gown. —If you did, you wouldn’t be pushing to go back, be pushing to say goodbye to her, like she was someone good.

—I know she wasn’t good, I say. —What are you talking about? I know that. Richard looks at me then. —I know, I say again. —What’s that got to do with anything?

The smoke we make curls into the air and over Jimmy.

—Can we take him with us, to Foxlowe? I ask.

Richard flicks ash over the gravel.

—What for?

—Just to have him there.

Richard looks at me. I shrink a little, but inside; outside I keep drawing the woody smoke into my lungs, holding it there, where it burns, and pushing it out again.

—Is it cruel? Are we being unfair to stop you going?

He asks this as though he is simply curious: Would it hurt if I pulled the wings off this fly?

—It means so much to Mel that you stay, he says.

—I’ll come back.

—Maybe, maybe not. It’s more, she likes to keep you close, she worries about you. She just wants to look after you, and you seemed to need that too. I think it’s hard for her that since, you know, the news, you’ve been a bit different with her, he says.

Is this a rehearsed speech? Did they plan this, under the duck feather duvet upstairs, in a tent they made from the sheets? What shall we say? How will we make her? You do it, she won’t suspect, pretend to sneak down for a cigarette.

—No, I say. And it wells up, and I say no, again and again, and when I open my eyes Richard is standing in his ridiculous silk robe and crushing his cigarette against the open door, where it squirms and is crushed, and there’s panic in his face, controlled, quiet panic, so I start smoking again, to show him I’m functioning.

He steps back into the house and ties the dressing gown tighter.

—I won’t drive you, he says.

—I’ll get the train. I’ll meet you there.

—I won’t give you the money.

—You really don’t give a fuck about me at all, do you? I say.

—I’m trying to protect you from—

—Well done, big protector man, excellent job, you did really well.

He’s gone when I turn around. Jimmy rolls onto his back as I draw the smoke into my lungs. Across the garden, the Bad drifts in the trees and the rose arches, skulks across the grass.

A sudden crash of the door, and Richard is back, his face screwed up with rage.

—Yeah, all my fault. Freya’s totally blameless, right? Won’t hear a word against Freya, will you?

—Freya loved me, I say. —She loved me and Blue, she took care of us.

—You have no idea what you’re talking about, Richard spits. —You have absolutely no idea. She loved Blue? How can you say that to me?

—I remember, I say. —You can’t tell me how it was, you weren’t even there when—

—Don’t tell me what you think happened. You have no idea. Don’t you dare try to talk to me about Blue, for fuck’s sake! I’m done listening to you talk about Freya. The woman was fucking sick. Don’t you mention her to me ever again.

He slams the door, making Jimmy jump. When I follow, I see Mel coming down the stairs, pulling a jumper over her nightdress. —What? she says to him, sleep still crusting at the corners of her eyes. Richard pinches the bridge of his nose, speaks softly. —Sorry, he breathes. —Go back to bed.

—You treated Freya like shit, I shout at him. —You broke her heart so many times—

—Shut up.

—Richard, leave her be, Mel says, pushing past him to put her arm around me.

—She was everything, I say, feeling the loss of her open up before me like a cliff edge.

—Get out.

Just tired, that’s how it sounds, at first, so tired that it’s hard to hear the anger underneath.

Mel twists the skin on her wrist.

—It’s not her fault, she says. —She’s had a …

—Don’t talk about me like I’m not here, I say.

It’s not what I mean. I really want to hear. I want to know what they think of me, I want them to forget I’m in the room.

—We’ve tried, Richard says to Mel.

—Can’t just give up on her, she says. —She’s our daughter.

—Except she isn’t, he says. —Ours, I mean. I’ll still give her money, Richard mumbles. —Can’t keep her here any more. Making you ill, he says.

He makes towards her, a look of tenderness on his face, but stops. Mel and I are holding hands, and perhaps he can’t touch her when I am there, the witch, the remnants of Freya in my head.

—Get out, he says again.

—I don’t … have anywhere to go—

—I’ll give you the money.

—But where can I—

—Go back.

Mel lets go of my hand.

—Go back, he says again. —We’re not stopping you.

—But it’s the middle of the night. What am I supposed to do? Where will I go after the funeral?

—Stop asking questions. You’re an adult. You’ll figure it out. We’ve tried, but this is not going to work, you living here.

—But, I say.

—It’s only what you wanted, he says.

—Richard, Mel says, but he holds up a hand, and she is silenced.

As I go for my things I have time to think, You hated it here; this is what you wanted. Apart from Jimmy, what is there to stay for? I answer myself as I walk up the stairs, not even straining to hear the sobbing that’s coming from below, and the low murmurs Richard is making in return. The warmth, the soft sheets, the heavy thud-click of the windows at night, the hot fresh coffee and the walls around me and the key she gave me, on a key ring in the shape of a house with a heart on it. I pass the map and trace my line home, feeling afraid, the cliff drop of Freya widens further, and no one is there to pull me back from the edge.