by Amy Beashel
He moves back into the other room, not pulling the door to behind him, despite telling us he’d appreciate not being disturbed. So my mum and I, even though I might want to talk to her about Grace or Jacob or, god forbid, Daniel, we basically sit in silence broken only by Grace and her OMG-you-have-tosee-this photo of her and Nell somewhere totally cool, looking totally happy with ten thousand heart emojis and an afterthought that we should totally all go there together sometime.
Totally, I think, and maybe even my face looks sarcastic because Mum breaks the rules of all this quiet and asks if I’m OK.
‘Isabel, love?’ she says when the only answer I give her is the thump of my phone on the breakfast bar. ‘What is it?’
And where do I start, right? Cos the list is endless and it’s not as if she’s not on it. But here I go, knowing better than to voice it so grabbing a pen and paper to write it instead.
Can we go somewhere? To talk?
Before I’ve even handed it to her, she’s shaking her head, like it’s not a Post-it I’m holding but a bomb.
‘Please.’ It’s a whisper that’s also a beg.
‘Not now.’ Her fingers have already torn it, my last resort, into tiny shreds. ‘Later,’ she says, ripping those tiny shreds into even tinier pieces before separating them and shaking them around in the bin.
And I get that she’s scared, cos me too. But I’ve been here before, watching her literally throw away some problem she can’t handle.
‘You can’t get rid of me that easily,’ I say. I’m right up in her face so she can’t escape the whisper, the hiss. ‘I’m not the cat.’
It’s clear from how her face breaks that she’s remembering how easily she ditched it.
And I’d wait for more Not now, Isabel. Later, Isabel, but another message pings in from Jacob.
No skin this time, just: I shouldn’t have to ask twice. Tonight.
‘Isabel?’
I slide my phone into my pocket so Mum can’t see it, the threat I thought I’d tempered.
It beeps again.
It’s funny how much Jacob wants a piece of me when Mum just threw those dark and broken pieces of me straight into the bin.
ELEVEN
Grace came out when we were, like, seven and she got obsessed with Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess after her older sister gorged on the box set twice over one summer holiday, letting Grace sidle in with her on the sofa while their mum and dad either worked or bawled at them to get outside in the sunshine while they still could.
‘I don’t need uniform. I need leather,’ she screamed at her mother, who was attempting to put an end to our play date so she could take Grace back-to-school shopping in town. ‘Xena would never love Gabrielle if she were stuck in a blue-andwhite pinafore and ankle socks.’
‘And patent shoes.’ I was grinning, but Grace’s mum, usually so un-stormy, shot me this look like she might go a little warrior herself if we didn’t stop with the dramatics.
Even now, Grace pulls the same sulk face as she did back then, her bottom lip pushed out to bare saliva that glistens as it quivers with high-intensity am-dram grief. And god, that pout, it literally pulls the strings on my heart so that whatever she’s feeling, I’m feeling too. And my arms have that involuntary reflex thing, like when a doctor bangs on your knee, so I’ve no choice but to pull her into a hug, not giving a toss about the snot stain she leaves on my top, cos she is Grace Izzy Ashdown and Grace Izzy Ashdown could never do anything to seriously rock our boat.
Our boat is like the most solid unsinkable boat on the water.
Or it was. These days, the air between us is sort of choppy, and my tummy does that lurchy seasick thing when I lie in bed at night wondering what she’s up to with Nell. Because while Grace came out when she was, like, seven, she’s never had a girlfriend until now, not a real one anyway, only me dressed up as Gabrielle and I’m no way near as good an actress as Grace and no way near as hot as Gabrielle, so in Grace’s eyes at least we were a flop. Romantically, I mean. In every other way, Grace and I have been Academy gold. If there were an Oscar for friendship, we’d have been on that stage shedding our tears and giving our thanks for the last twelve years in a row. Seriously. Even the year she knocked out my two front teeth.
She didn’t punch me or anything. Grace doesn’t have a violent bone in her body, and believe me, I’d know a violent bone if I saw one. We were running long loops around the playground, chasing girls and boys for kisses, arms in the air like we just didn’t care until Grace suddenly did. Care, I mean. Because I was on the brink of catching Emily Lamb, and Emily Lamb, with that cropped blonde hair and those green eyes with a hint of blue – well, Emily Lamb was the closest thing to Gabrielle Grace had ever seen. And while it wasn’t like the kisses were proper kisses or that Grace was even thinking the full-on lusty thoughts she thinks now, what it was, she says with ten years of hindsight, was her very first prick of gut-blasting jealousy, different to the urge to snatch a toy or whine because her sister had way more custard with her pudding than she did.
She’d only meant to pull me back, not down, and because no one had yet figured out that Grace’s eyesight was about as good as a deep-sea fangtooth fish’s, she wasn’t wearing glasses and didn’t notice that I’d made my catch perilously close to the climbing frame and that if I were to fall, which I did, I could whack my face on the slide, which I did, and never see my two front teeth again, which I didn’t. And because no one had yet figured out that Reuben Johnson’s brain was as dopey as a panda’s, no one thought to stop him when he picked up my two front teeth, gave them an actual kiss and tossed them in the conifers so they were gone for good.
‘I’m really sorry, Iz,’ she said, her fingers assessing the damage as they poked about in my wound. ‘I’m such a…’ Grace wasn’t (and still isn’t) often stuck for words. But back then, as my empty-grave gums coloured her nails the perfect shade of danger, she struggled to define her guilt. ‘I’m a…I’m…I –’
‘Give Izzy some space, please!’ Mrs Taylor, of all people, should have known Grace and I never gave each other space. If we could have been stuck at the hip, literally, I swear we’d have slapped on the glue. Grace had even played thick in maths, faked confusion over a pie chart in an attempt to drop down to my set, but our teacher had had none of it because, as we’d once overheard her reminding her colleaguers in the staffroom, Mrs Taylor was ‘no goddamn fool’.
‘You’re my goddamn best friend.’ Grace and I would try out Mrs Taylor’s American accent and American swears at playtime.
‘You’re my goddamn hero.’
‘You’re my goddamn favourite person in the whole goddamn world.’
‘I’m goddamn Callisto,’ Grace sobbed when Mrs Taylor peeled her away from my gappy mouth and she was under threat of being relegated to bystander like everyone else. Only she was never like everyone else. For a start, everyone else had no idea who or what Callisto was. Grace explained. ‘Callisto is the bloodiest warlord of all time – she’s taken Xena down over and over. She’s so mean.’ No one but me was any the wiser. And Mrs Taylor, who was goddamn tutting and goddamn shaking her head, had quite clearly had e-goddamn-nough.
But I can’t see how anyone could ever have enough of Grace. I mean, look at Nell. She’s with my best friend all the time. Literally always hand in hand with her. Thing is, when Nell reaches out for Grace, it never seems needy. Nell’s too cool for that maybe. Too sexy too, like so sexy you don’t have to be gay to appreciate it. And it’s not that she’s especially pretty – it’s something else. Her smile perhaps, how it comes so easily and so authentically no matter who she’s talking to; how her voice isn’t dampened by stumbles and sheepishness with someone new. You can tell Nell’s listening, and not just listening out for a lull to switch the conversation to her, but really taking it in. It doesn’t bother me so much when it’s me or one of Grace’s other friends she’s speaking with, but when Nell and Grace are in deep communion – ‘chatting’ doesn’t do the way th
ey talk justice – I choke because it’s so obvious, isn’t it, how much more Grace has with Nell now than she’s ever had with me.
I goddamn miss her. So goddamn much.
My phone, when I pick it up to message Jacob, is like the tarantula I held at some zoo as a kid. All threat and venom, and touching it feels all kinds of wrong.
Tonight then. 9?
I watch the screen for an answer, which doesn’t come.
Is that it? Am I off the hook?
I take another shower. Hotter this time. So hot my skin’s like one of those umbrellas that changes colour when wet. My chest and my belly turning from chalky mass to scarlet mass in the rush of the water, which, no matter how high I turn the dial on the shower, still can’t shift the stickiness of Jacob’s hands and mouth and his tongue that slicked those words: ‘Relax, Izzy. It’ll be so much better if you just fucking relax.’ Cos those words, they’re as wedged as the earplugs I’ve used on the worst kinds of nights when Daniel’s done what he’s done, and he’s left, and Mum’s crying is as quiet as she can make it, but for all her effort, that sinking weep of hers seeps through the walls like blood on toilet paper.
I leave the water running as I fetch the flannel from the sink, grateful for the steam in the mirror, more grateful even for the barrier the cloth puts between my hands and my flesh, which still stinks of Jacob. Which will stink of him again tonight. Which might always stink of him. Might always feel like him. Like some shitty tattoo. Or the needle that draws it. A million pinpricks every time something – a flannel, body wash, underwear – touches me there.
I daren’t put my fingers anywhere close. In the past, Grace has been like: ‘Seriously, Iz, no one’s ever gonna please you if you can’t please yourself ’. And it wasn’t like I didn’t get it, but Daniel never knocks so it wasn’t easy in my room, in my bed, so the shower’s been where I’ve, you know…But this shower, this one right now, is fucking awful, like, really fucking awful, cos it’s not getting rid of anything except that one stupid hope I grew here that maybe there was some good in my body, that maybe it wasn’t such a big fat dirty waste of space after all.
By the time I’m done and standing naked in front of the mirror, the skin on my chest is as pink as my gums. I have to twist my tongue slightly to slip its tip into the gap between my two front teeth. They came in not long after the Callisto incident, Mrs Taylor using their emergence as a reminder to Grace that me and my body could cope on our own and Grace didn’t need to constantly poke her nose (or her finger) into my business. But remembering the photos Jacob has of me on his phone, I’m starting to think Mrs Taylor had no goddamn idea.
TWELVE
It’s not like I want 2 spend the night with u, Izzy. Make it 6.
Thing is, I normally run everything by Grace. And I mean everything. But when I call her, just the sound of her hello is a pair of rolling eyes, like, honestly, Iz, we said tomorrow and you’re really phoning me now?
‘My bad,’ I tell her. ‘I totally forgot you were busy.’
What I really want is for that deep symbiotic connection she swears we live by to kick in so she’ll remember to act like my Grace and do the fussing and the organising and the tending I mock but love her for. But, after checking I’m still all right to cover for her tonight while she and Nell go take two on the jiggy in Margate, all she says is ‘cool’ then she DMs me a blowing-kisses emoji, which I copycat reply with two Xs (‘one for you, one for Nell’), because it’s better to be kind than to be honest, right?
I should know not to wait right outside the bathroom, where the big bulk of me casts looming shadows across the tiles as soon as Mum opens the door.
‘Isabel!’ she says, relief saturating her face when she clocks it’s only me, and I wonder, nothing new in the thought, if there’s pleasure in it for Daniel, in this skill he has of making our hearts snap like twigs with just the idea of him entering a room.
Then he too is on the landing, saying nothing but saying everything, his hand gesturing me first use of the bathroom, his right eye winking as he has enough of my indecision and goes ahead, closing the door behind him, Mum’s exhale perfectly timed with the bolt of the lock on the other side.
It’s weird, the power of his silence, how calm it can be, and then how fierce. His ability to shift the atmosphere so everyone breathes in his fog. It wasn’t always like this. Or maybe it was, maybe Daniel’s always atmosphered, only maybe at the beginning the mood he set for us was golden. What I mean is, those first few years are coated in a sort of happy haze, which made a fact of Daniel’s love for Mum and me as he placed us at the centre of his universe. Daniel was everything; I heard Mum say as much on the phone to Becky after she came home from a date with him one night, this glow to her face I hadn’t seen before, like she’d been showered in glitter and coated in shine.
I’d met Daniel for the first time the following week when he took us to Pizza Express, arriving with a bouquet for Mum and a posy for me, which sounds kind of naff, I guess, but it really wasn’t. It was magic, the way he made the two of us walk on air.
‘Isabel,’ Mum says now, her voice so quiet it’s practically Braille, taking me by my hand to my bedroom, like I’m five and she’s about to tuck me in.
And I wonder if this is it, if the noise of Daniel’s shower is enough cover to let her speak, to tell me something, anything, about that weird shit with the pregnancy test or to ask me about that other weirder shit with Daniel’s hands. I’m sure she must have noticed. How the space between us has got narrower. How whatever makes him raise those hands at Mum is making him place them so differently on me. Not as hard, but just as bruising, right?
And I must look at her, like, ask me and I’ll tell you, cos ‘Not now,’ she says. Then she whispers, like it’s everything, ‘Destination moon?’
It’s what she’d say when I was little, after George Clooney, the real one, was on Desert Island Discs. Mum’s excitement about his upcoming appearance must have been catching; I jumped on the sofa with a joy so solid it carved my very first memory upon my brain.
Obviously I didn’t realise at the time that, at just nineteen, Mum was young to be on her own in a town with no family but her three-year-old daughter, young to be spending her nights watching American hospital dramas and her weekends listening to Desert Island Discs, young to have so much responsibility binding her down. And obviously I didn’t realise at the time that, at just nineteen, when she listened to one of George Clooney’s choices, Hank Williams’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, she may well have felt the song was her perfect fit. It would explain the tears, I guess. And maybe what came later, with Daniel too.
I may have been three, but I fell in love with George Clooney that Sunday when we first heard him. Maybe it was his voice, which had a quiet happiness to it, but, really, I think it was what he gave me with his third record: Dinah Washington’s ‘Destination Moon’. When I listen now, the love in it sounds romantic, but back then, it summed up my relationship with Mum. She made my cares disposable; we could jump in a cardboard-box rocket and leave them far below, because, like space, Mum and her hope seemed endless, and in loving me so fully, she made possibilities seem endless too. After George Clooney Sunday, whenever I panicked about fallen block towers or times tables or some squabble with Grace over which of us could do the best roly-poly, Mum would take me by the hand and suggest we head for ‘destination moon’. ‘It’ll be fine up there,’ she’d say, and I’d believe her.
‘We can’t even see the moon,’ I say to her now, pointing at the window, still framing a bright blue and starless sky.
I may as well have slapped her. Sorry but not sorry enough, I open it for the fresh blast of air which stops us both from melting, as the lava of everything we’re not saying creeps around our feet, pushing me out of my room, out of the house and on to my phone.
Tick tock, Fingers, says the message from Jacob.
On my way, I reply, the insides of me erupting with earthy volcanic rage.
T
HIRTEEN
‘Sorry? What?’ My head’s down, eyes to the pavement, avoiding the sky, when Max stops me on the street one away from Jacob’s, whatever he was saying blocked by the music in my earphones.
‘You’re actually doing it then?’ Max says for the second time, and he can’t be talking about what I think he’s talking about, so I just shrug, like, huh, and he literally puts into words the thing even Jacob was too polite to name. ‘Sleeping with him,’ he says, voice like an awkward laugh at some politically incorrect comedian. ‘With Jacob!’ And he shakes his head then, like Jacob’s only gone and pulled this off. ‘You know he didn’t actually have any photos other than that first Fingers one.’ He doesn’t even stumble over ‘Fingers’, like all this is just a normal part of everyone’s vocabulary now.
‘You what?’
‘He conned you, Izzy.’ Thing is, Max isn’t smug or vicious or mean, he’s just, like, you should have known – we all know what Jacob’s like, yeah.
And I try to say something, but Max’s words have torn into my heart and down into my stomach, my head spinning with the kaleidoscope of pictures Jacob would never have had if I hadn’t been so stupid. So naive. So me. It must be obvious too, cos Max lays a you-all-right hand on my shoulder, sits me down on a garden wall.
‘I can’t believe you fell for it. I mean, I know you were pissed at that party, Izzy, but were you honestly that out of it that you couldn’t remember what you’d done? Maybe ease up on the drink next time, yeah?’