by Jo Cotterill
Mae glances at me, her eyebrows pulled together as though she doesn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Inner strength is the thing you have to depend on,’ I say, going back to my colouring. ‘When you’re sad or worried or lonely or something, you have to look inside yourself to find your inner strength. And you use it to wipe away the bad feelings and make yourself happy again. That’s what makes you strong, you see.’
Mae still looks baffled. ‘Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever looked for my inner strength. Do you think I have any?’
‘Everyone does,’ I say, nodding.
‘Do you think …’ Mae hesitates. ‘Do you think your dad’s inner strength ran out, or something?’
I stare at my picture. ‘Maybe there’s a limit,’ I say, thinking out loud. ‘Maybe, if you lock away the sadness for too long, it all builds up. Like filling a tank. And one day the tank bursts and you have way more sadness than normal because it’s all been stored away.’
Mae nods. ‘And it wouldn’t matter how much inner strength you have.’
‘Maybe it’s important to let yourself be sad sometimes,’ I say. ‘To stop the tank filling up.’
There’s a small blotch on my picture where the blue and the yellow have run together. I dab at it with my sleeve. ‘It was very quick, her illness, you know. She had hardly any time to do what she wanted before she died. I sometimes think, if they hadn’t found the cancer and told her, would she still be alive? I mean, did telling her make it happen?’
‘Are you okay?’ asks Mae.
‘I’m fine.’
‘It’s just that you’re crying.’
‘Am I?’
She moves my picture out of the way gently. ‘You must miss her a lot.’
Maybe I have a tank of sadness in me too.
Mae shuffles over and puts her arm around me. ‘It’s okay to cry,’ she says in a voice that sounds like a nurse. ‘It’s nothing to do with inner strength. You haven’t got a mum. It’s a good thing to cry about.’
So I do. And Mae gives me a proper hug while I do it.
Dad comes to pick me up and stays for dinner at Mae’s house. We have chicken wings with sticky sauce and rice and peas. It’s delicious. Dad looks a bit disappointed that there isn’t enough for seconds.
Mae’s mum notices. ‘Do you cook at home?’ she asks him.
‘A bit,’ he says. Then he pauses and adds, ‘I should do more. But I get very tired.’
‘This is an easy recipe,’ Mae’s mum says. ‘Ten minutes of chopping things, and then you just put it in the oven. And cook the rice.’
Dad looks down at his empty plate. For a moment I think he’s going to say something else, but he doesn’t.
‘I’ll have the recipe,’ I say. ‘I like cooking.’
Dad gets up abruptly and leaves the room.
We all stare at each other. I feel my cheeks get hot, and my eyes fill with tears. I do like cooking! I’ve cooked for Dad loads of times! Is he angry with me? Why?
No one is quite sure what to do.
‘Are you okay?’ Mae whispers to me.
I nod fiercely, not looking at her.
Mae’s dad starts talking about something that happened to him on the way to work last week. Mae’s mum listens and asks questions and laughs in the right place, collecting the plates and bringing a fruit salad to the table for pudding. Christopher complains that he doesn’t like fruit and starts picking his nose. Mae keeps sneaking sideways looks at me and although I know it’s because she’s worried about me, I wish she wouldn’t. It makes me embarrassed. I accept a bowl of fruit salad and stare at it.
When Dad comes back in, he says, ‘Sorry, everyone,’ and sits down at the table. But he doesn’t explain why he left the room, and he won’t catch my eye, so I wonder if he’s still angry with me for some reason. My throat feels too tight to eat.
There’s another awkward pause, and then Mae’s mum says, ‘Are you looking forward to Christmas, Calypso?’
I’m not, really. It’s just going to be Dad and me, like it always is, and I’ve never minded before. But this year the thought of just him and me, sitting in a cold house, reading books … it frightens me. It’s lonely, and sad, and Christmas should be about family … and we haven’t got any. Mum’s parents are dead, and Dad’s parents emigrated to Australia just after I was born, so I think I’ve only met them twice. And I have no aunts or uncles or cousins – not a single one. Can a family be just two people? Is that normal?
‘I …’ I begin, but then I don’t know what to add to the sentence. So I bite on my lip instead and poke at my fruit salad.
‘Can she come here?’ Mae asks suddenly.
‘What?’
Everyone looks at Mae.
‘They,’ says Mae carefully. ‘Can they come here? Calypso and her dad?’
My eyes dry magically, as though blown by a fairy wind. Christmas at Mae’s house! It is an overwhelming thought. I can’t allow myself to think of it too much. Surely …
I turn to my father. He looks like a hamster does when you reach in to pick it up. Not sure which way to run.
‘Er …’ he says. ‘Well …’
‘Oh, please,’ I say, my mouth forming the words without any air.
‘Well,’ says Mae’s dad, ‘let’s see how things go, shall we?’
After dinner, I go to get my coat and Mae follows me to the hall. ‘You must come for Christmas!’ she whispers. ‘It’d be brilliant! You have to persuade your dad!’
I grab her hands, my heart filled with fire. ‘I will come if it takes every breath in my body.’
Mae squeezes my hands even more tightly. ‘Come first thing in the morning and bring your stocking! We can open them together!’
I glance at Dad, but he’s busy talking to Mae’s dad. ‘My stocking presents are never very good,’ I whisper as quietly as I can.
Mae pulls me close and whispers into my ear, ‘Then you can have some of mine.’
That settles it. I have to be at Mae’s house for Christmas. I have to!
It’s my fourth visit to the young carers’ group and we’re already into December. I still feel like the odd one out. Do Antonia and Sarah expect me to make friends with people just because they have parents who have problems? Is that enough for a friendship? I feel awkward because we don’t seem to have anything else in common. It makes chatting hard. I tried to explain that on the phone to Antonia yesterday. She listened and then said kind things about it being early days. I wanted to ask if we were supposed to have another meeting – her and me and Sarah and Dad – but another phone rang in the background and she had to go.
Today at the group we’re tearing pictures out of Christmas catalogues to make a huge collage to go on the wall. I find a spelling mistake on one of the pages and point it out to Lina. She seems amused, but Lisiella doesn’t see what’s wrong with the word.
‘It says “buidling blocks”, not “building blocks”.’ I show her.
She shrugs. ‘Looks all right to me. But I’m dyslexic.’
I nod in sudden understanding. ‘Is that why you don’t like reading?’
‘Yeah. It’s too hard.’
I hesitate. ‘Maybe you just haven’t found the right sort of book.’
She shakes her head firmly. ‘Nah. I’ve tried everything. My brain is stupid.’
I’m not sure what to say to this. Is her brain stupid? Maybe it is – is that a bad thing? ‘There must be stuff you’re good at. What do you like at school?’
‘Hate school. Don’t go much.’ She smiles at me cheerfully.
‘Oh,’ I say, nonplussed. ‘You mean, you – er – bunk off?’
‘Yeah,’ says Lisiella. ‘It’s better than being taught all that rubbish.’ She doesn’t actually say ‘rubbish’, she says a rude word. I’m trying to get used to the language here. The kids all use swear words easily, though I can’t bring myself to do the same. The words feel odd in my mouth, like sour sweets.
‘Doesn’t your mum ge
t cross if you don’t go to school?’ I ask.
Lisiella blows air out of her mouth in a disgusted way. ‘Mum doesn’t live with us any more. She’s loopy.’
‘She is?’ I am suddenly interested. ‘In what way?’
‘She’s got bipolar disorder.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s when you get really, really, really happy and do crazy things like spend all your money or drink a whole bottle of rum, or try to re-paint the house in the middle of the night. And then you get really, really sad and just sit in a corner and cry and want to kill yourself.’
I stare at her. ‘Wow. That sounds – scary.’
Lisiella shrugs. ‘Yeah. It is. It’s why Dad split up with her. I wanted to live with Mum, but everyone said she wasn’t fit to be left in charge of me and my brothers.’
She has two younger brothers – I know because she’s told me before. They like to wrestle in the living room and are always knocking themselves out on the furniture or breaking their arms falling off the sofa. Lisiella says she knows all the nurses who work in Accident and Emergency because they’ve been there so often.
‘So where does your mum live now?’ I ask.
‘In a B&B. I don’t like it there, it smells. And Mum gets really depressed. But they’ve put her on some new medication and they say it should help.’
‘Oh.’ It sounds very different from my dad.
‘Why are you here?’ asks Lina, who has been quietly listening. ‘What’s wrong with your parents?’
I take a breath. I haven’t told anyone about my life yet. ‘My mum died,’ I say. ‘Cancer.’
‘Oh.’ Lina looks sympathetic. ‘Bad luck.’
‘What kind of cancer?’ Lisiella wants to know.
‘Ovarian,’ I say.
She nods. ‘That kind kills you fast, I think. My neighbour had it. They didn’t find out until it was too late.’
I bite my lip. ‘Yes. That’s what happened to my mum too.’
‘So you live with your dad?’ asks Lina.
‘Yes. It’s just me and him. And I suppose … well, he’s kind of loopy too. Only not like your mum, Lisiella. He’s just a bit eccentric.’
She looks blank. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘He’s sort of forgetful. And a bit obsessive about weird things.’
‘Like what?’
I tell them about the lemons. Part of me doesn’t want to because it feels like I’m betraying Dad. But this is the place I’m supposed to talk about it, right?
Lisiella bursts out laughing. ‘He filled the shelves with lemons? Ferr-rreaky!’
Lina says, ‘Lisiella, don’t be horrible,’ but I can see her trying to hold back a smile.
‘At least he isn’t trying to kill himself,’ I snap, and then catch my breath, horrified.
Lisiella’s laugh stops abruptly and she looks down at the table. Her fingers clench into fists.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’
‘My mum sometimes says she would gas herself in her car if she could,’ Lina says very quietly.
I feel awful. ‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. But my dad … the lemon thing. It – it’s scary. I mean, weird and kind of funny, but it was scary. Like there was all this stuff going on in his head that I never knew about.’
The other two nod and Lisiella gives a sigh. ‘Brains are so weird. People are weird.’
‘Is your dad getting help?’ Lina asks me.
‘Yes. Counselling.’
‘Watch that,’ Lisiella says in a warning tone.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They go funny in counselling. How long has he been going?’
‘A couple of weeks?’
She nods. ‘Look out. People get really depressed when they start going for therapy.’
‘What? Why? I thought they were meant to get less depressed!’
‘I dunno.’ Lisiella shrugs. ‘When my mum started going, she went off-the-wall loopy, even worse than usual. The therapist told us it was normal, that most people did this crashing thing to begin with, and then they started to get better.’ She pulls a face. ‘Still waiting for Mum to get better!’
I stare at the torn pieces of paper on the table. Is it true? Is Dad going to get even worse now he’s getting help? What kind of crazy things could he do?
What would I do if he decides he wants to die?
Lisiella’s words make me frightened, and I watch Dad very carefully for the next few days. But he just seems quiet and a bit sad, which is no different from usual. Normal, I guess. The fear stays, though, and I keep wondering if I’m going to come home from school one day and find him huddled in a corner, sobbing.
But instead when I get home one Tuesday I find him in the kitchen. The radio is on, playing something classical and stirring, and Dad is stirring too – rice in a pan on the stove. He turns to me and I feel slightly faint with surprise, because he looks happy. Actually happy, with a smile on his face and colour in his cheeks. The sight makes my jaw drop. And, for some reason, it makes me even more nervous.
‘Isn’t it a grim day out?’ he says cheerfully. ‘I thought I’d make that chicken recipe to brighten things up.’
‘Wow.’ I put my bag down on the floor. It is a grim day out. I’m pretty wet from the constant drizzle and the drive-by splashing from the cars on the road. The bus was full of people, their breath steaming up the windows. The walk from the bus stop to my house was a cold one, and my coat is last year’s and now too short at the wrists, so my hands are freezing. ‘That sounds great. I need warming up.’
Dad says, ‘Why don’t you go and get changed? Put on some more layers. This’ll be ready in about ten minutes.’
I don’t say that it’s an odd time to have supper – 3.45 p.m. – because when’s the wrong time for supper if you’re hungry? Instead, I go upstairs, throw my uniform on the floor and find the comfiest clothes I can, along with two pairs of socks and the slippers that are so worn out they’re almost dangerous on our smooth flagstones.
Dad is dishing up, and it smells delicious.
‘I forgot to have lunch,’ he says, ‘so this is kind of my lunch-supper. Like brunch, only in the afternoon.’
‘It smells amazing,’ I tell him. ‘Just like Mae’s mum made.’
‘There’s lots too,’ he says. ‘So we can have seconds.’
I laugh. I can’t believe the way he’s behaving. He’s like a different person. He’s not looking at me in that anxious way, in that ‘have I done something wrong?’ way. He looks like he’s having a good time. Not mad, crazy good, just … normal good. He looks relaxed.
The knot of fear inside me relaxes a little too. ‘Are you okay, Dad?’
He nods in between shovelling food into his mouth. ‘I’m all right. I feel quite good today. Must be the drugs kicking in at last.’
The doctor gave him some tablets about a month ago, and they did tell him they’d take a while to work. Is this the answer then? Medicine? Has it fixed him? Will he be all right now?
The dinner tastes just as good as it smells, and I eat and eat, feeling warmth spread right through me.
‘This is great, Dad! You can really cook!’
He looks pleased. ‘I just followed the recipe. It’s not that difficult.’
‘Well, I think it’s even better than Mae’s mum made it.’ This isn’t strictly true. There are some bits of rice that have clumped together, and one side of my chicken piece is a bit burned, but I don’t say that. ‘What are you going to make next?’
‘I was looking through one of Coral’s recipe books,’ he says, and I jump slightly, since I can’t remember the last time he used her first name. ‘There’s a beef casserole that looks nice. I might go shopping tomorrow.’
I beam at him. ‘I can help if you like. Chopping vegetables or something.’
‘Thank you.’ He looks at me. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m good,’ I say. ‘I’m really good.’ Because,
for that moment, I am.
He smiles back. ‘So am I. Chin-chin.’
We clink forks.
My heart is as full as my stomach. I want to freeze this moment in time so that I can find it again when I need it.
And it turns out I need it only two days later, when everything goes wrong again.
I come home from school on Thursday feeling happy. Mae and I are writing a Christmas story for the school newsletter. We told Miss Spotlin we were writing a book together (even though After Armageddon hasn’t really got much further since we had the bad review) and she suggested we should write a Christmas one. And then she got all excited and said they could put it in the school newsletter.
‘Actually,’ said Mae afterwards, ‘if it was long enough, they could print copies and sell them to raise money for the school. Like a fundraiser.’
Mae is always thinking of ways to raise money. I expect she’ll be an entrepreneur when she grows up.
So as I walk down the road from the bus stop, I have a smile on my face and a warm feeling in my tummy. Mae and I have already decided what our story will be about. It’ll be set in the First World War and it’ll be about a boy trying to get his dad home from the Front in time for Christmas. It will be uplifting and heartwarming and will make people cry. The very idea has already made Mae cry, so that’s a good start.
I’m surprised that the light in the kitchen isn’t on when I get in. Dad had been planning to make some kind of pie, but there’s no smell of cooking, and nothing in the oven. In fact, the house seems quite dark and quiet. A small finger of fear pokes me, and suddenly I’m remembering Lisiella’s mother, who gets very happy and then gets very sad and wants to die.
‘Hello?’ I call, my breath filling my chest too much so that it’s hard to breathe out. ‘Dad, are you here?’
There’s no answer. I go into the library. The books we saved are neatly ordered on the shelves. He’s not here. The lamp isn’t on, but blue light spills from the computer screen. I go over to the desk and jog the mouse to clear the screensaver.
The email program is open. I hesitate. I shouldn’t go nosing about in his emails. They’re private. But my eyes can’t help flicking across the screen, and once I’ve seen that there’s an email titled A History of the Lemon – submission response I can’t look away. I click on the subject title, and the email opens.