by Amy Beashel
‘If you’re sure,’ Harry says, his hand still in its kissing position on my jaw and below my chin, same place Daniel would hold Mum when he was sorry, so sorry, and Mum would nod into his fingers, and I crossed mine, as I stood just outside the door of their ‘disagreements’, hoping that maybe this time his apology was true.
I put my hand over Harry’s now and hold it there, absorbing its tenderness, willing him to trust in me, this new Izzy who’s as much a novice in romance as she is in a boat.
‘So, tomorrow’s Saturday,’ he says.
‘That fancy education obviously served you well, Harry.’
‘Ha ha!’ He nudges me with his elbow, pulls me back in. ‘No labouring! We could have a whole day.’
‘On the river?’
‘I was thinking we take our relationship to the next level.’
And despite all the efforts of pushing those experiences of weeks-ago-Izzy into the ground, maybe I stiffen.
‘Land, Izzy! I was thinking we could do something on land. And not that kind of something! What kind of man do you take me for?’
I think of all the other kinds of men and don’t say a word.
‘What do you reckon?’
‘I’ll need to check my diary.’
Harry looks at me, like, really?
I make this whole show of pulling my phone from my pocket and looking at Saturday 24 June. ‘It’s tricky, see, cos I have this very important meeting at nine and a very important lunch at twelve and a very impor—’
But over the calendar comes notification of a WhatsApp from Jacob, and from the way my heart’s lurching, tomorrow might be irrelevant because tomorrow might never come.
‘A very important what, Izzy?’ And Harry, Harry with his beautiful big smile, he’s reaching over, playfully grabbing my phone to check out ‘what could possibly be more important than this’. He kisses me, waving the phone behind his back just of my reach and, thank god, just out of his sight. ‘You’re so incredible, Izzy,’ he mumbles into my lips. ‘It’s untrue.’
Maybe it is. Untrue, I mean. And Harry will know as soon as he stops kissing me and looks at my phone and sees what Jacob has to say.
Tick tock, Fingers. My place. Tomorrow. Go down on me or go down in history. Here’s a little reminder of what’s at stake.
If I hadn’t opened the message, the words and photo would have remained hidden behind the empty calendar I could have filled with hours and hours of Harry. But now, if Harry so much as glances at the screen, he’ll see it in all its glory: the dirty real me.
‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ I say, pulling away from the kiss, snatching the phone before he sees the truth in it.
He looks at me, like, I don’t get it, and I know he never will.
‘I can’t do this,’ I tell him. ‘Not with you.’ And though I mean it like, you’re too good, it comes out like, you’re not good enough.
I hear it, the plummet of his heart when it drops into the river, as I run faster and faster, never outrunning the shame.
THIRTY-SIX
I’m as bad as Mum. With that hope of hers, I mean. That stupid hope that silence was the best tactic. That keeping quiet would push the worst things to arm’s length until better things could push them further and further away.
I’ve tried calling. I need to talk to you, Izzy. About Jacob.
Call me back.
Please.
I don’t want to talk about Jacob. Not to Max. Because what exactly can he tell me that I don’t already know?
I’ve barely thought about it, what Jacob did. What I let him do. How I lay there and gave him everything and nothing in one. Sure, the weight of him has pressed down on me at night sometimes. Shower water has felt like his wet breath on my neck. And all that Intensive Repair used not just as conditioner but kind of desperately as body wash too – even that has failed to rid my skin of his touch. It sounds so gentle, right? Touch. And Jacob wasn’t gentle so maybe he didn’t just touch me. So what is the word then, for what he did?
Yeah, I’ve barely thought about it. But it’s been there, I s’pose, same way an owner’s smell can stick around in their house once they’re gone. I remember how the flat we had stank of nothing specific but everything that wasn’t us. The walls. The carpets. The air even. Months of vacuuming and plug-in air fresheners, but it was still there, weaving into our clothes and our hair until either we got rid of it or maybe we just smelt of it too.
I smell of Jacob. Every second his dirty hands were on me has me stinking of what we did between those Monster Munched sheets of his.
I’ve been waiting for Harry to spot it when he’s kissed me. Waiting for him to taste it. Whatever sense is strongest, it would have found me out eventually. But I kept kissing him anyway, that genetic false hope of mine willing the bad stuff to sail away down the river so I might get on with the good.
But it doesn’t leave you. Even when your head tries to silence it, it’s still there. Like Jacob and his threats and his photos. It’s all still there.
Maybe I need another jar. The opposite of a Jar of Sunshine. Maybe I need to whisper all these things I can’t say into a jar and put a lid on it. Seal it tight. Pandora’s box in reverse.
I wonder what Daniel’s doing with it now, my Jar of Sunshine, where he puts it when he’s not taking those photos. There’s another one when I double-, triple-, quadruple-check that WhatsApp from Jacob: my jar, perched on the mantelpiece in the sitting room between a picture of Daniel and a picture of my dad.
I need it here. Because listening to danandcharlie95 is nowhere near enough to warm all this cold and sullied blood charging through me as I run to the refuge, to Mum.
She’s at the window when I come up the front path, pressed to it almost, the sadness and seriousness of her face exaggerated by that bald head she’s run over each day with a razor, her eyes as sharp as the blade, and her voice, when she looks up and tra-la-las a good morning, as smooth as her skin when she was first done. The bald made her bold, but this morning, not yet shaved, there’s a fuzziness that extends beyond her scalp, softening the backbone she’s held so rigid in the last few days.
‘We need to talk,’ she says.
My phone beeps with another photo from Daniel: that framed picture of my dad I kept on a shelf inside my wardrobe is now smashed to pieces on the floor.
And Mum’s right: we do need to talk. I need to tell her about Harry and Jacob and how my heart is drowning in the river. I need to tell her about Daniel and all my broken sunshine he’s threatening to destroy, but Mum’s already starting.
‘Izzy,’ she says, as she takes me by the hand towards our bedroom, straight past the kitchen, where Ava, spoon clattering into her Weetabix bowl when she sees me, comes running out in her summer school dress, hands raised and already singing.
But Kate’s straight on the case, scooping Ava up and away, eyeballing Mum, like, you can do this. And I look at Kate, like, what?, but she just smiles, like, everything’s fine, and their glances feel like a conspiracy.
‘That appointment,’ Mum says, when we’re still in the hallway, eyes fixed on our bedroom door, which she closes behind us before sitting me down on the bed, our necks cricked because of the top bunk, which looks like it’s literally pressing this huge weight upon her shoulders.
‘For your hair?’ And I want to yell that her bald head is nothing compared to my broken soul.
‘My hair?’
‘Yeah, your hair appointment!’ I say, like we have all this time to waste. ‘The one you went to with Kate instead of me, probably because you thought I would try to talk you out of this.’ I point at her head.
‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘a hairdresser didn’t do this. Kate did.’
For some reason this adds to all the hurt, not a big gut punch or anything, but a paper-cut kind of hurt, as I imagine the two of them prepping and giggling, gasping as the first strands of hair dropped to the floor. Grace and I would spend hours braiding, on our beds, on the sofa, on the bus even, fingers con
stantly pulling and coaxing, then soothing and smoothing when the pulling and coaxing was too much. Even when it hurt, there was a happiness in our intimacy, in the physicality of our friendship, in how Grace was the only one with whom my body could properly flump down on to a bed, let it all hang out and breathe.
The paper-cut pain spreads into my middle, where Grace runs right through me in name only these days, and I sink into the bed, fighting back the tears I’ve been fighting back since Jacob’s message. Since way before that maybe.
‘The appointment,’ Mum says, the repetition quite clearly a delaying tactic. ‘The appointment,’ she starts over, ‘was at a clinic.’
And she must think I know exactly what that means because her eyes are on me, like, say something, but I just shrug, like, yeah?
And my mum, she takes this breath, and in this voice that sounds like my mother’s but can’t possibly be my mother’s, because my mother wouldn’t be saying these words, she tells me, ‘Izzy, I’m having an abortion.’
And there’s the big gut punch right there.
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m having an abortion,’ she says, not even stumbling over the A word, just putting it out there like she’s having a jacket potato for lunch. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Izzy,’ she says, but there’s nothing I’m doing that I’m doing on purpose – not my silence, not my rolling dollopy tears, not that paper cut that’s split me open from the top of my chest to my pelvis – so all those gut reactions spill out of me, spewing on to my mother, who’s statue still, and the gut reaction scoffs at the irony of it, how she can appear so lifeless when there’s so much life inside her. For now.
And I don’t get it, because she’s always insisted it was never an option. That she never even considered it. ‘You were a keeper,’ she said, those few times I asked her, but then I think of everything I’ve tried to hide from Harry, for my own sake as much as his, and I wonder if Mum was also trying to hide the parts of her she wasn’t so proud of, to build herself up as this better version of herself who would never have thought of getting rid of her child. But she must have done. Thought of it, I mean. If she’s thinking of it now she must have thought of it then. When I was inside her and she had the choice to say yes or no.
‘Is that what you wish you’d had with m—’
‘Izzy,’ she says, but I’m sick of it, my name in her mouth like it doesn’t constantly taste of regret. ‘It was different with you.’
‘It was worse, you mean. You were sixteen. You’re thirty-three now, Mum. More grown-up. More capable. More motherly even? Or not, it seems.’ And, even before the words are fully formed, I’m pretty sure Mum can’t deal with this. ‘Makes sense, I suppose.’ I lean in so close I can see her pulse quickening in her neck. ‘Not exactly mother of the year, are you?’
‘Please,’ she says, but I’m not sure what she’s pleading for. ‘I’d change it all if I could.’
‘I bet you would.’ Because without me she would never have been in Whitstable, she would never have met Daniel, she would never have been sitting with a bald head in a women’s refuge talking about aborting another baby she doesn’t want.
‘Not that, Izzy. Not you. I’d never change you.’
But she’s too slow to catch me as I run from the room, from the refuge, from everything that’s ever happened because I was born.
You should have seen my dad’s face when he first saw me, when Mum and I turned the corner into the park, and he rose from the bench where he’d been sitting with his guitar in a case beside him. I’ve seen reunions on TV, when long-lost relatives appear to move in slow motion, unsure how to greet this person who, if things had been different, could have been a stabiliser during their wobblier moments in life. Dad wasn’t slow mo. He moved so fast I asked Mum later when he popped to the loo if he was related to Dash from The Incredibles. ‘No, love,’ she said, voice like a bunch of balloons sky high with helium. ‘He just couldn’t wait a second longer to meet you.’
He wanted me, no doubt about that. His hug, his song, his necklace. I was his sunshine. My birth may have caused all sorts of darkness for my mother, but in that moment, for my father, I was a pure blast of light.
All of these photos, all of these images – Daniel, Jacob, Dad – thrash with each step, faster and faster like a strobe, until I reach the ticket machine, rummaging through Mum’s purse, which I grabbed from the side as I left, tapping in her PIN number and whispering to Dad how sorry I am for ever letting him go.
I’m getting that Jar of Sunshine back.
I won’t let Daniel have it.
It’s mine.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The train doesn’t feel as good as I expected. When I was running, my feet couldn’t move quickly enough. Same for my thoughts, my plan. Hah! That’s a joke, right? Because when I bolted all I really knew was that I needed to get to my Jar of Sunshine before Daniel did something too permanent. So other than stealing Mum’s purse and getting to Whitstable, there is no plan. There’s just this stupid girl who’s got to take three different trains and wait more than four hours before she even gets within walking distance of a strawberry jam jar filled with yellow beads. And that’s assuming it’s still there, still in one piece. When you put it like that…
Only it’s not like that, is it? Because it’s not just a jam jar and they’re not just beads.
Along with their eight pieces of music, the Desert Island castaways are permitted a luxury. No practical items allowed, and that’s fine with me, because if I were stranded, what I’d want most from my luxury is hope. That’s why I ran. Because it was doing something other than accepting my fate. Because it was remembering my dad and how he’d wanted me to keep the sunshine close to my heart. Because it was believing that if I can just get the jar from Daniel then maybe I won’t be quite so lost in the dark.
But the train doesn’t feel as good as I expected.
I always thought I preferred to face the direction of travel, but when I switch seats so I can’t see where I’m going, it feels something like the river with Harry and —
Do not think of Harry.
Harry.
Do not think of Harry.
Harry.
Do not think of Harry.
Harry.
Music. I need music. A distraction from the do-not-thinkof-Harry/thinking-of-Harry rut I’m in. Harry would suggest a runaway playlist, but obviously I’m not thinking of Harry so I can’t do a runaway list because that will just carry me back to him.
Do not think of Harry.
Harry.
Music, Izzy.
Harry.
Goddamn it.
I swipe away two, three, four missed calls from Mum as Spotify suggests I jump back into my Top Listens from the last few months, and right there at the pinnacle of my most-played tracks is a song from Pink’s Greatest Hits…So Far!!! It’s there thanks to Grace. See, it’s not only Harry who has play-lists. Grace has them too, only she’s not so prescriptive. Because it’s not like she said, ‘Here, Izzy, you must listen to Pink, track eighteen. It’s number one on this self-esteem list I’ve made you.’ What Grace did do, on the first day at college after that party, when Jacob used the three-fingers-or-four photo to make me fair game for general abuse, was insist I go back to hers for a Pot Noodle dinner and a bed mosh, which basically means we jumped furiously up and down on her mattress to a load of music I now realise she’d probably preselected to maximise my chances of sweating out the shame.
‘Woah, woah, woah! Here! On the bed! Now! You are not stopping there, babe.’ She pulled me back up with both arms, refusing to let go even when I relented and began to leap as told. ‘This song,’ she said, pausing the jumps so she could clutch my hands to her chest. ‘This song is you, Izzy. This song is us,’ she said, and ‘Fuckin’ Perfect’ blasted hard from her phone. Clearly the song wasn’t a cure. It was a help though. Our hearts pumped not just blood but mutual adoration to our riotous and fuckin’ perfect limbs.
Cos th
at’s the power of music, right? It can wrap itself around you like a big noisy duvet, a thick wad of feathery comfort that protects you from the outside world, muffling all those other words you don’t want to hear. Even when you’re not literally playing it, you can run through the lyrics in your head and the power of them gets into your bloodstream, makes you feel for a moment like you’re as kick-ass as Pink, who has no problem telling the world to do one when it doesn’t play fair.
So yeah, I sit with my back in the direction of travel, ignoring another four, five calls from Mum to play it over and over. Not just the song but that night. How Grace wouldn’t let me leave until she’d styled my hair, painted my nails and made me laugh so hard I nearly peed my pants. And how I’d sulked a bit when I’d come back from the loo to find her curled into her pillow, whispering into her phone and twirling her curls like some cliché who’d rather be with her girlfriend than stuck with the college joke. ‘Gotta go. You too,’ she said to Nell. I knelt down, rummaging through my rucksack so she wouldn’t see how my face crumpled at the sound of their love. And I’d thought then that Grace had only brought me home, fed me dirty noodles and danced my heart out because there’d been nothing better on offer. Second choice. But I wonder now whether she actually put me first. Cancelled her plans with Nell to be with me. And I’m not saying that after the whole Jacob thing Grace was fuckin’ perfect, but maybe she was closer to fuckin’ perfect than I thought.
I read her email over and over as we speed towards Kent, and while the anger’s obvious, it’s the underlying disappointment that gets me most. You’re supposed to be my best friend, she wrote, and I think of all the times she more than lived up to her responsibilities as mine. Cos the thing is, maybe Grace didn’t really understand about Daniel, but she stepped up anyway, like that sixth sense she claimed we had was a literal thing, like even if she didn’t know what pushed me, if she ever saw me wobbling, she sure as hell wasn’t going to stand back and watch me fall.