by Amy Beashel
You’d think a refuge might be brimming with sadness but, turns out, laughter’s kind of normal in a place like this, especially among the kids, whose stomps on the stairs give away heavy-footed clues in their games of hide-and-seek. The irony of the hunt’s not lost on me, but the children squish themselves into wardrobes and under beds, totally into the idea of somebody chasing them down.
It’s safe when it’s a game. When it’s here in this house that’s not theirs, not ours. No one can touch us.
But Jacob’s tried. In the message he sent on Sunday night, he said he’s waiting. Said I have a fortnight’s grace because when he went round to check on me, Daniel told him I’m away with my gran.
What do you think your gran would say, Fingers, if she saw her precious little Izzy like this? Two weeks, remember. Tick tock.
But time is safe here too. There is no college. There is no timetable. There is no Daniel tapping his watch, reminding Mum she needs to be in bed before ten. There is space between the minutes to breathe. And when they’re not working or figuring out the rest of their lives, Mum and the other women here drink tea and read the papers in the sitting room, where they chat about last night’s telly, the Brexit cock-up and Trump’s most recent crass comment. They make lunch, snacks and dinner and call out to the children that if they hurry, they might just squeeze in a quick trip to the park before bath and bed. Kate is the only one with a bruised face; none of the others – there are three of them – look like they belong here. I wonder if we do.
We’re not exactly getting on – we’re getting by. There are forms to fill. Decisions to make. Money to find. We get further with some things than others. Some, like the baby, aren’t mentioned at all. If it was the death of Daniel’s mother that sent us back to him the last time, maybe its opposite, the birth of his child, might do the same now. So we keep quiet. But Mum suggests we ‘talk to someone together’. She doesn’t specify about who or what, though I’m guessing it’s all the stuff we don’t manage to talk about when it’s just the two of us. My refusal sits in my belly like too much mashed potato. A heavy lump of stodge that gets worked off on my walks to the river so I swear I feel lighter and more willing when I’m there, more like I’m gonna go back to the refuge and be kind to my mum, who’s trying so hard to make things better. And I’ll give her a chance, I think, when my toes are dipped in the water, but then I get near her, and the sunshine slips away.
‘I’ve got this appointment.’ Her voice is a child balancing on a log with a nervously held out hand.
And I’d take it, but I think about all those times when I could have done with some propping.
She pulls at the ends of her hair, which is loose around her shoulders, the only way Daniel likes it.
‘Honestly, Stephanie,’ he’d said, ‘it’s as if you think you’re seventeen with all these ponytails and plaits. I hate to break it to you –’ he kissed the nape of her neck – ‘but the time for those styles was your knocked-up teenager years.’ He was laughing, not scornful but friendly, the soft teasing kind, when he twisted her round so they were head to head. ‘You’re so beautiful though, especially with your hair long. And down,’ he added, before sliding the hairband from her ponytail and tossing it into the bin.
‘So this appointment,’ she says. ‘It’s —’
‘I’m going to the river,’ I tell her.
Even though I’m this rock, it hurts to push her away.
‘Sure,’ she says, already giving up, which further rallies the storm in me, cos if she only persevered a little longer…‘Keep your phone with you.’
‘I love you so much, Izzy,’ she says when I get to the door from our bedroom to the hallway. The crack in her voice trying so hard to be like the split in the meringues we used to bake in the flat. All gooey in the middle, but at the bottom reliably firm.
She bends when she holds me, her back rounding as her arms stretch wide around my middle, hands like she’s gathering in the loose parts of me, my nose caught in her under-repair hair as she says it again and again. ‘I love you, Izzy. I love you, Izzy. I love you.’
I hate it, how my bones soften and begin to yield to the warmth of her, how the anger that runs through my spine starts to topple like those skinny Lego-brick towers I’d build as a kid, big chunks of it crashing down to the floor. But I catch them before it’s too late, stack them back up again, these rigid spites of mine, make them into a shape that can stand on its own two feet. And I go.
Leaving gives me a chance to look at the messages I’ve kept hidden from Mum. None from Grace. Only that one from Jacob. It’s Daniel who’s been busiest. More pictures of my Jar of Sunshine, which he’s positioned round the house like that stupid Elf on the Shelf Grace was so into at Christmas a few years back.
In one, Daniel has my Jar of Sunshine in the biscuit tin, which he’s filled with my favourites. No expense spared – they’re those super-thick milk chocolate rings, those ones in the Tesco Chocolate Biscuit Assortment, four quid a box and there are only two of each type in every pack. There’s got to be, like, thirty of the buggers in the picture, arranged in a perfect circle around the jar, with a yellow Post-it to match the yellow beads: A sweet treat for my sweet girls’ homecoming…
Then there’s the jar held up in front of a screen filled with the Netflix logo, another Post-it stuck to the edge of the TV: All ready for the perfect night in. The only thing missing is…you.
I’d begged Mum for Netflix – everyone at college was talking about Pretty Little Liars and 13 Reasons Why and it hadn’t been so bad before Nell, when I could live, like, seventy percent of my life at Grace’s, where we’d sprawl on her bed, our attempts at nail art inevitably screwed by our heads cricked up to the TV drama and crumbs from our snacks slipping into the wet varnish. Then along came Nell. And my time with Grace was, like, halved and I didn’t want to spend it not talking, even if Grace did talk mostly about Nell’s impression of Ariana Grande – side-splitting, apparently – Nell’s smile – mesmerising – and Nell’s kisses – heaven. Maybe I should have stuck with the TV.
Anyway, I asked Mum for Netflix, but she stopped work three years ago when Daniel said it was taking too much of her time away from me: ‘Don’t you need her now more than ever, Isabel, what with your GCSEs on the horizon? And it’s such an important age, as you well know, Stephanie.’ He’d paused then, this long look from Mum to me. ‘It’s so easy for things to go wrong.’ And she wasn’t to worry financially because Daniel had that inheritance money, and they could sell Mum’s car if she wasn’t working. It would only be for a few years. ‘It’s nothing in the grand scheme of things,’ he’d said. ‘You want to put Isabel’s needs before your own, don’t you?’ Mum nodded, like, sure, even though she loved her new position at the bank and even though without her income, it was no longer up to her if we had Netflix or went to the cinema or bought new clothes, because everything had to be run by Daniel, who rolled his eyes and said hadn’t she thought of all this when she decided to quit her job, hadn’t she realised the burden she’d be placing on him, and wasn’t he doing his best, and sorry, but, no, Netflix wasn’t a priority right now, when times were tough, what with the acting work not going so well and the Clooney bookings being down since the arrival of ‘that bitch Amal’. Of course he’d laughed then, because he’d never really talk that way about a woman – ‘I’m just not that kind of guy.’
Memories, eh.
And Daniel’s full of them. Because along with the daily Jar of Sunshine pictures are the daily ones of the three of us, in Paris or London, or today his house, the time he decorated it with fairy lights and a tepee after he ripped up Mum’s ticket to Glastonbury a couple of years back. I wasn’t sure what to do when he’d asked me to help him; it was as if heaving those monolith rocks he’d had delivered so he could make our very own stone circle would make me complicit in the scenes that had come before. ‘Please, Isabel.’ His head was cocked to one side, that George Clooney grin broad and so damn sure I’d cave in. ‘Your mum will be a nightmare
if you don’t. You know how she gets when she thinks she’s missing out. That temper! I can’t do it on my own.’ And his George Clooney eyes took over from his George Clooney mouth. ‘Please.’
It was actually pretty fun while it lasted. We wore fairy wings and wellies, and Daniel painted butterflies on our faces. ‘You’re both so beautiful,’ he said. ‘My princesses.’ And I wondered if this was better than Glastonbury because, like Daniel kept pointing out, we had all of the music and none of the mud. ‘And you didn’t have to leave me behind,’ he said to Mum as she sipped on her water because Daniel thought she’d probably had enough beer for one day. ‘Who needs a soggy field and their friends,’ he said, ‘when you have your husband and your daughter and this?’ He spread his arms, turning in circles around the garden, where we’d hung lanterns and pitched a tent. ‘Sometimes, Stephanie, you need to be more grateful for what you have in your home with the people who love you most. And, my god, do we love you!’ His voice was like the candyfloss we’d made for the food stall in the kitchen.
We’re wearing headdresses in the photo he sent this morning. And smiles. We look happy. Really happy. I remember showing it to Grace, who was totally in awe of the efforts Daniel had gone to. ‘God, Iz, my dad is so lame by comparison. So suburban. I swear the best thing he’s done for my mum is, like, mow the lawn into those stripes she likes so much. Daniel’s just so much more thoughtful. Your mum is so lucky.’
‘Why the fuck did you stay with him? ’ I’d screamed.
Well, I guess Mum thought the same as Grace sometimes. We both did.
TWENTY-NINE
Like most days since I’ve been here, I head for the river, which is weird, right, cos the sea’s always been my thing – Grace and I would stand on the groynes with one hand to our forehead like we were some kind of sea captain, in awe at the giant mass of it. A river, pah! A river was merely a thing that might lead you to the ocean. It was never the main event. It was a warm-up.
And lie-ins were my thing too. But mornings, like everything else, are different here. There’s this baby who wakes at, like, 6:17 on the dot, screaming out for her mother like they’re shacked up in different wings of a mansion, not sleeping, like the rest of us, in the ‘family rooms’, a maximum of three foot apart.
So every day I’m up, no point competing for the bathroom cos the kids are all desperate for a wee and the mums are all desperate for a dollop of Intensive Repair so I leave them to it. Meanwhile, my mum, who’s always been up and at ’em early, only quietly obviously so as not to wake Daniel, who needs his beauty sleep, you know, what with being a Clooney lookalike and all – well, here my mum manages to sleep through whatever kind of hell is breaking loose, which seems to happen most mornings when some kid’s Weetabix is too soggy, or one of the mums can’t find her phone. Usually turns out a kid who may or may not be her own is using it to hard-line episodes of Peppa Pig. I don’t stick around for the comedown, walking instead to the river, where I stand on the bridge, all casual, like, not waiting for anyone, definitely not looking for oar-shaped ripples in the water cos that’d be, like, totally lame, and I’m totally not lame any more. I’m a rock, remember.
And even though I’m definitely not waiting, definitely not looking, every morning I see him, that lone rower. And I swear the only reason I get this tingle is absolutely nothing to do with how cute he is and everything to do with him being a reminder of why it’s better to be alone.
But despite my best efforts at being a bit more hermit, in my head there’s all this music careening between Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’, Wrathschild’s ‘Fall into Love’ and Ray LaMontagne’s ‘You Are the Best Thing’. And even though I’m one hundred percent rock, I might sometimes listen to these tracks on my way to the bridge and when I’m on the bridge, so pretty much all that time in the morning when I’m definitely not waiting and definitely not looking, I listen and, goddamn that lone rower because, yeah, yeah, I’ll admit it, I’m close to a literal swoon.
But anyway, it’s lunchtime, so no chance of swooning, and in any case, turns out, as I absolutely already knew, Rower Boy’s not the only thing I like about the river. Maybe it’s the way it cuts up and connects things, or how the ducks are so easily carried along in its flow, or that the kids of the town seem equally drawn to it. There are eight of them, five boys, three girls, sitting on the bank in front of the boathouse, the bare-chested guys flinging themselves and each other into the water while the girls remain dry, watching on.
I sit on the opposite bank with a Starbucks grande hot chocolate even though it’s, like, twenty-seven degrees. Two of the group don’t even bother to sidle off before kissing, totally at ease with each other’s bodies, his hand holding her cheek, her leg crossed over his thigh. Despite the others milling about, the moment seems so gentle, so in tune with the lazy summer and the quiet run of the river. The opposite of everything I’ve known. Everything I’ve felt. I can’t take my eyes off them, my curiosity matched by my envy of how unlike me they are, the effortlessness with which they sink into each other, how she doesn’t suck herself in, shrink herself back, and how their kiss seems as endless as the water, until the rest of the lads start rapping, bringing the kissing boy out of his moment and into this pack of modern-day poets wooing their girls with their words.
Only, the harder I listen, the clearer it is that they’re not. Wooing, I mean. What they are doing is chanting, egging each other on with this song that honestly can’t be but literally is about rape. Five boys stand on a riverbank in broad sunlight singing about kicking, licking and raping someone’s little sister. The girls sit back – maybe they’ve heard it before, cos they’re as un-enraged as the dog walker who stops, and I think he’s gonna say something, but he’s only tying his laces before moving on, his expression unchanged by the line about whorish mothers touting for willy in London.
When one of them messes up, they start over, gathering closer like sportsmen hunkering shoulder to shoulder for a pep talk on taking the other team down. The girls chat among themselves, like this is normal, like it’s OK for their mates, their boyfriends even, to talk like this, cos maybe it’s just bants, right? Maybe it doesn’t do any harm to say these things. Maybe sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us.
Thing is, I’m not so sure, because those embers, they’re back and proper flaming, stoked by the words and searing the insides of me with their hate. It’s a full-on human-combustion kind of anger, my blood too hot to quench it, pumping it instead around the whole of me, and I swear if I did like the boys and jumped in the river, that too would be on fire, carrying me and this violent inferno all its hundreds of miles to the sea.
I wonder if they’d even notice. If those boys or the dog walkers would sense the change in current and the rising heat, or whether my boiling rage would be doused as the likes of Jacob Mansfield and Daniel Chambers leered from their sailboats. ‘It’s a laugh, innit. Natural, innit. Seriously, Isabel, you’re just a prude.’
I swear I’m gonna jump in, swim over and scream, but the river seems noisier, fiercer, and is holding so much more beneath its surface than I’d imagined from the bridge, from where it had looked like a harmless flow. It’s not so different from the boys in that sense. It’s too big a battle. Because the boys’ rap is just part of it, right? Daniel and Jacob too. Whatever it is that makes rape a laughing matter, that makes their song palatable for the people passing by, that makes the girls not stand up and tell their mates to fuck off and never talk to or touch them again, it’s just one part of something so much greater than five lads on a grassy bank singing about breaking a woman’s spine. So maybe Grace was on to something when she bothered to go march against Trump. Maybe she was right to tell me I needed to speak up. Cos maybe it’s all the same thing. Whatever it is that gave Jacob the right to do what he did. Whatever it is that gave Daniel the strength to do what he does with his words and his hands and his power that he wraps around Mum and me like a net in his water. Whatever it is, this gr
eater thing they’re part of, it’s like the river, cutting up and connecting things, working its way through our cities and countryside until it reaches the Celtic Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to America, where a man who became president has made pussy-grabbing fair game.
Those embers? They’re not just lit – they’re wildfire. There’s a fervour in them. In me.
I’d thought Grace was playing superhero to the world instead of being a friend to me. And I’d thought Mum was overreacting when she shed actual tears the morning we woke to news of a victorious Trump, when she made me toast and tea and whispered, ‘Don’t ever let any man, even the most powerful man in the world, make you believe you’re anything less than brilliant.’ I’d thought she was a hypocrite, because why slate the president when it’s your husband that beats you? And I’d thought she was melodramatic because he’s over there and we’re over here. It seemed so distant. But I get it now, how it cuts up and connects things.
And yeah, I must look like the mad one here, with the heat risen to my face and to my palms even, which are up in the air waving at those kids across the river. ‘How can you?’ This volume doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. ‘Stop!’ And they look at me, like, what?, chins bucked at the gall of it, of this crazy bitch on the other side of the river calling them out on their fun.
‘We got a touchy one,’ the kisser hollers. ‘On the blob, are you?’
If I was, I swear I’d pull the tampon from my vagina and sling it in his smug little face.
And then: ‘Hey.’
But it’s a calm hey, a friendly hey, a hey that comes from over here instead of over there. I hear that, I sense the difference in tone, and when I turn around, hands still in the air like I just might really, really care, I see it too, I spot the difference in how he sees me.
Trouble is, Rower Boy might be good, but his timing’s bad, and the ‘hey’ I bark back at him is licked with the flames of my rage.