The Sky is Mine

by Amy Beashel

  The words Daniel speaks are mostly kind, or would seem that way if I repeated them, like I did to Mum’s friend Becky that time in town, or when I mentioned to Grace once that Daniel told Mum over and over how he’d never let her go.

  ‘Sweet,’ Grace had said, because the words alone were a lover’s cliché.

  Daniel’s face though. Daniel’s hands. They were a different story.

  Grace was right then: the physical is greater than the spoken, our bodies have a tale of their own. Only, Mum’s – after Daniel has said all that he’s said and done all that he’s done – well, Mum’s body has become a closed book. Her cover’s made of long sleeves and half-smiles and her title’s something like I’m Fine or He’s Promised He’ll Change or He’s Just Passionate even. But inside, her story is something else. Something like a glass slipper shattered into a hundred pieces on the floor.

  The rower, he’s the opposite of that. He’s so together, so sure of himself. Where does that even come from? That confidence. That knowledge that your body will see you through. I did have it, I reckon, in those days on the grass outside the flat when I’d turn cartwheel after cartwheel, arms and legs mightier than the dizziness determined to topple me. Forward rolls too. Headstands and handstands, dress falling down over my face but no blush-cheeked rush to turn upright, to cover myself, to hide my belly or my thighs or any of those other parts of me which, only a few years later, were so readily blotted with shame. Mum on the bench with a mug of tea she’d brought down from the flat, calling scores out of ten, then lifting me on to the podium wall, where she’d offer up a Garibaldi biscuit to my chest like it was pure Olympic gold.

  Those were the days, right? When I didn’t care if my body was beautiful enough but if it was fierce enough, when the only wobble that worried me was the one before a fall.

  The rower is closer now, and maybe not so much of a man as an almost grown-up like me. But so unlike me it almost hurts to look.

  He owns that boat. It’s under his will. Like I am with Jacob, I think, and I choke at the thought of the photos, of me beneath that body he owned as he took that body I hated. For what? For a chance of not being exposed as what everyone already knows I am. Something dirty and ruined and too buried beneath the shame of things to get even a slither of the sunshine or moon.

  Another boat comes along, with four rowers and someone shouting at them when to pull, where to turn, but they still go wrong, their oars out of sync and their end in the bank. The lone rower seems so much calmer. More powerful. More in control.

  And there’s my answer, I reckon, and it’s stupid that I’ve only just realised, because isn’t the thing that most appeals about Desert Island Discs its isolation? I don’t need to be cast away to an island. I need to be one. A rock. A lone rower making my own way through the water. No one else to bring me down.

  Screw you, I send to Daniel.

  Screw you, I send to Jacob.

  Screw you, I send to Grace.

  And I don’t send it to Mum. But she’ll know exactly how I feel.

  The rower looks up just as he dips under the bridge and, like I’m playing Poohsticks, I run to the other side, where he reappears, face tilted towards me, and I lift my head up, pull my shoulders back and shout, ‘Thank you’, because in his solitude he’s taught me how I might just stand a chance of owning my piece of the sky.

  TWENTY-SIX

  It smells. Not like gross or anything, but if you bottled it, put it in a line-up with bottles of other places, I could pick out the refuge for sure. It smells of bleach and tinned soup and conditioner on damp towels. Dove Intensive Repair. I swear from the shelf in the bathroom, all the women here must use it, like they think everything about them needs fixing, including their hair.

  Mum’s been at it too, towel like a bandage around her skull and her face like a wound when I walk in to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, bare legs poking out of her towel like she’s chilling at some kind of spa.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls, Izzy?’ And I can’t tell if the red of her cheeks is from the fix-up job in the shower or that noiseless anger she has, how it works its way out through her skin.

  ‘I just wanted some space, all right.’ I’ve only been back a few minutes and could already do with some more. The room is tiny; even though Mum brought me barely anything from Daniel’s, we still fill it, with our bags and our bodies and all those unspoken words, those unfulfilled promises. And our shame.

  It’s like being back at home in that sense. At Daniel’s, I mean. That place where shame settled like dust despite his ability back in the beginning to make us shine.

  ‘Come on, Stephanie.’ The air above the seat of our secondhand green chair became a galaxy of tiny stars as Daniel gave the cushion a theatrical smack. ‘Do you really want this fusty old thing when we agreed we’d buy everything new?’

  We were sorting the flat, packing up our first real home before moving in with Daniel. All but the living room done and he’d written TO TAKE on just three boxes. I knew Mum could feel my plea, I could see it in her fingers, how both thumbs were picking at the nails of both pinkies. After wiping the fusty old dirt from his palms, Daniel slipped his hands into hers and held them steady.

  ‘Fresh start,’ he said.

  Mum looked at me, like, he’s right, Isabel, and it was the first time I wished things had been different. Just a little bit. Just enough for us to take the green chair, which had held us steady on those Desert Island Sunday mornings before Daniel’s hands turned up promising to do a better job.

  ‘I can’t afford new things,’ Mum said, and Daniel had laughed because hadn’t he told us already, this would be his treat, whatever we wanted, whatever we needed to make it feel like home.

  ‘You think your mum deserves better than this grubby lump, don’t you, Isabel?’ And when he put it like that…‘You do too,’ he said, ruffling my hair like I’d seen dads do to their kids in the movies. ‘You can pick out some things for your new bedroom if you like.’

  So, the green chair went back to the charity shop from which we’d bought it those eight years before and we went with our three boxes into Daniel’s house, where happiness was framed and hung on the wall as confirmation of how he made us feel.

  Two days later, Grace and I hung out for, like, an hour in B&Q, where some guy on the paint counter rolled his eyes comically as we squealed over Citrus Tickle, Fiddlehead Fern and Lime Candy. ‘Anyone would think those paint charts were photos of Justin Bieber the way you two are carrying on,’ he said, winking the kind of wink I imagined my grandad would have given me if he hadn’t wanted to give me away.

  ‘I don’t care about Justin Bieber.’ I knew by the volume of Grace’s voice what was coming. ‘I’m a lesbian, you see.’ Grace liked to drag the word out like it was an elastic band, stretching it wide and then flicking it in the face of whoever she was trying to shock.

  But the sales guy just nodded, like, whatever floats your boat, love, and Grace huffed and puffed cos she got off on the drama of it back then when she didn’t have a Nell to get off on it with for real.

  We were hooked on the greens, totally convinced Ivy Pasture was the sophisticated look my bedroom needed to give me that je ne sais quoi. Grace, who was in the top set in French, reassured me that was a good thing.

  A week or so later, Daniel, who’d asked me to make a note of the paint name, was waiting for me when I arrived home from school, this Tigger bounce in his step when he opened the front door with his George Clooney uniform tie hung over his shoulder. ‘Come, come, come,’ he said, everything turning to black as he wrapped the tie around my eyes and took my hand to guide me up the stairs. ‘I was going to wait for your mum, but it’s just too good.’

  I’d never smelt fresh paint, never had that rush of fumes, that annihilation of everything that was there before. I must have held my nose or coughed or something because Daniel was telling me not to be such a baby, it wouldn’t last long, and to think of him all those hours up the ladder,
but wasn’t it worth his effort because: ‘ta-da!’ And he tugged at the blindfold to reveal my new room painted an orangey red.

  ‘But the green,’ I said.

  Daniel looked at me, like, what?

  ‘Ivy Pasture!’ I tried to use the ‘indoor voice’ he’d suggested when Grace had come over for the first time after we’d moved in the weekend just gone, but maybe I was still too loud, cos Daniel flinched as if my words had been hurled like stones.

  ‘There’s no need to shout at me, Isabel.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but this isn’t the colour I wanted.’ I pulled the colour chart from my drawer. ‘Ivy Pasture, see.’

  ‘Oh.’ His voice was like flat lemonade, still sweet but it had lost its fizz. ‘My bad. This is Autumn Ivy. So close. I’ve spent all day on it too. Turned down an advert so I could get it done for you. I even ruined one of my favourite T-shirts.’ The lines didn’t disappear from his forehead when he rubbed it. ‘Never mind. I can probably cancel that Clooney gig I’ve got next week – I could repaint it then. Your mum will be OK going without that sofa she had her heart set on.’ He picked at the flecks of paint on his hands. ‘I was going to use the cash from that job to get it for her, you see.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, even though the new colour was like brick, heavy and porous, soaking up all the good vibes – I mean, that was why Daniel was acting so weird, right?

  ‘No, no.’ He took the colour chart from me, fingered the Ivy Pasture. ‘It’s not at all fine, Isabel. I wanted everything to be perfect – that’s why I spent so long on it. Why I got the best primer and was so careful with the edges. But if you don’t like the colour —’ It was left hanging, that ‘if’, like the happiness in the frame in the hallway depended on it.

  ‘No, really.’ The colour chart tore easily when I pulled it from him, crumpling the pieces into a tight ball. ‘This is much nicer.’

  ‘Attagirl,’ Daniel told me.

  When Mum asked me that evening why the change of heart, he gave me a conspiratorial nudge with his elbow, said we’d both realised, hadn’t we, Isabel, that green wasn’t the colour for me.

  Maybe it was the paint, maybe it was Daniel’s insistence that everything be put away each evening; that if it wasn’t, he reserved the right to go into my room and tidy it himself. He did too.

  ‘You should see it as a lesson, Isabel,’ he said, chirpy as a CBeebies presenter. ‘If you’d just kept it shipshape like I’d asked, I’d never have touched your record player.’

  That didn’t explain why he’d dropped it, why it had broken into too many pieces to play Dad’s ‘You Are My Sunshine’, why Mum turned quiet and pink and said, ‘It’s fine, Isabel.’

  The more I looked at her, the more I thought of how in our old flat the shapes of our bodies would stay bent into the cushions on the sofa; how she would find me sometimes by the trail of biscuit crumbs I’d left from the kitchen to my bed; how when it was just the two of us, things may have been messier, but they’d been so much warmer too.

  So maybe it was the paint, or maybe it was those other things, those things which felt like nothing at the time, but whatever it was, that bedroom in Daniel’s house was never really mine, like this one in the refuge isn’t mine – ours – either.

  ‘It’s fine, Izzy,’ as Mum would say, but even as the room feels full, there’s so much missing. And I don’t even mean my Jar of Sunshine, though that’d help. But walking in, finding Mum looking half relieved, half scared to shit, what hits me is that what we had in the flat, what we hadn’t squeezed into those three boxes, was that quiet calm that comes with honest, uncomplicated love.

  Our love, the honest and uncomplicated love I shared with Mum, was left behind when she was taken in by Daniel’s. Mum let that love go. Mum let love – her love for Daniel – do this to her. She let Daniel’s love take her into darkness while all the time she let her love for me do shit.

  It’s hot, this realisation. Like scorching embers in my belly threatening to erupt into fire, and I must jolt with the blaze of it or something, cos Mum looks up at me, pupils dilating into those familiar pools of fear, but even the whisper that if I screw her fear and blow like I’m sure I’m about to then I’m not so different from Daniel – even that doesn’t stop me. And I can practically feel it then, that power I see in Daniel’s eyes whenever I see that fear in Mum’s.

  ‘Why the fuck did you stay with him?’

  It feels so good to finally scream it. To burn. And though my cheeks are already wet from the shame of scaring her, I stand my ground, towering over my mother, ignoring the fact that she’s weeping because I am an island and her tears will just wash away.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘I’m sorry’ are the only words I can understand. The rest are choked in sobs and smothered by her hands on her face, which she can’t bring herself to lift to me since I asked her the question surely anyone would ask if they knew.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me, Izzy?’

  I buck the hand from my shoulder, turn to see Kate, whose concern is as clear as her bruises.

  ‘We can make your mum a cuppa. One sugar, Steph?’

  And they sound like proper friends already. Bully for you, I think, cos they’re all right, aren’t they, with their new mate bunking up in a room down the corridor while mine’s over two hundred miles away and hates me to hell.

  ‘This isn’t the end of it, Mum.’ If anything, my venom’s more audible now I’ve quit shouting.

  ‘It’s the end of it for now,’ Kate says as she steers me towards the kitchen, and her tone’s like Ms Robinson’s in school, the only female teacher even the boys didn’t dare give shit to. ‘Tea? Coffee?’ She’s suddenly softer, giving a smile when she pulls Elizabeth’s biscuits from the very back of the cupboard. ‘Secret stash,’ she says, putting two on a small plate, sliding it towards me across the table.

  It’s funny, isn’t it, the things that make you cry. How I barely even flinched when Daniel threw the still-burning Yorkshire pudding tray at the back of Mum’s head as she bent down to get the potatoes from the oven. How I stayed dead still and dead silent the time he took a fork and scraped it from her chest to her hips after he discovered she’d lied about what she’d eaten for lunch. ‘This little piggy went to McDonald’s,’ he said. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?’ She’d given up trying to pull her top down, hadn’t even attempted to fend him off.

  ‘Isabel should stay, Stephanie,’ he said when she told me to go to my room. ‘She needs to see how deceitful her mother is. Why it’s so difficult for me to trust you, my wife, when you lie about such silly things as McNuggets.’ He laughed then, not a big laugh, but caught my eye, shook his head and expelled a small puff of can-you-believe-this-woman laughter from his nose. I could believe it though because by then life seemed to have lost its element of surprise.

  But my tears are a surprise now. The tears and the intake of breath at the tinny clatter of the plate’s slight wobble as it slides across the table. The way the refuge kitchen becomes Daniel’s kitchen and Kate becomes Daniel and the biscuits become the start of the trail of the last few days that led us here. It’s a flash of a thing and it all disappears, of course, to the secret stash at the very back of my mind, the bit not even Grace has a key to, so Kate can think again if she reckons a Rich Tea and that smile she’s smiling, that I-know-what-you’ve-been-throughcos-I’ve-been-there-got-the-T-shirt look she’s wearing, has any hope of making me confess my darkest.

  But surprise number two: she doesn’t even try, just sits there as I work on being a rock, dry and deserted, pulling back the tears and filling my mouth with biscuits so it doesn’t accidentally fill with words.

  My phone vibrates in my pocket. And if I weren’t an island, I’d scrabble for it, right? My heart would pump with the hope of Grace Grace Grace. And it might panic too, that if my screw you was a volcanic eruption then this reply is a tsunami wave. But I sit. I eat my second biscuit. I thank Kate for my tea and I leave. As quiet
and calm as the lone rower. In complete control.

  It’s only when I’m outside that I let myself look at the message, and I can’t help it, how my heart crashes when it’s not Grace but Daniel. How I can’t not feel scared of him despite my island guard.

  Screw you? That’s a little unkind, Isabel. I realise I’m not your real dad, but I want your life to be filled with sunshine just as much as he did. Your mother’s too. Let me know where you are and I can drop this over to you x

  Attached is a photo of my Jar of Sunshine. If the picture were of a human, I’d half expect the person to be bound and gagged or clutching a sign with details of the ransom: Tell Daniel everything or the jar gets it.

  ‘Bad news?’ I hadn’t expected Kate to follow me out into the garden.

  I tilt the screen away, stand tall.

  ‘You know Elizabeth can arrange for you to speak with a counsellor.’

  Here she goes – I knew the quiet wouldn’t last long.

  ‘Or maybe chatting with some of the other girls who’ve stayed here with their mums might help.’

  But I don’t want a counsellor or other girls. If I did want to speak with anyone, which obviously I don’t, then there’s only one girl I’d want it to be.

  ‘Izzy, love.’

  Anyone who didn’t know Mum would think she sounded normal, but her voice is a tiptoe. She stands before me on the patio, next to Kate, who puts a hand on the small of her back, becomes her stabiliser, just like that. Nothing to it but a small gesture to show that she’s there.

  I’d like to do the same, honestly I would. I’d like to go to my mum and hold her, tell her I’m OK, she’s OK, being here’s OK and we’ll move on. But sometimes embers don’t grow into fire and beyond the silence and biscuits, we can’t do anything at all.

  TWENTY-EIGHT