In a puff, he was gone.
I looked at the line snaking towards the tills and I knew I hadn’t that kind of time. My fist opened inside my pocket and the coins slid back inside. I was out of the door, back into the traffic before I could think. I weaved across the forecourt towards Camden Road, panicking not about the stolen sweets under my arm, but that I’d lost him. As soon as I turned left my heart surged. Luna walked ahead, hips swaying in her denims, and the boy, on a bike now, freewheeling down the road just metres behind her, dragging the toes of his bright red high-tops along the ground. I galloped to catch up until the same short distance between him and Luna was all that was left between us. Seconds later she went left towards the square and in less time again the wheels of his BMX veered around the corner too.
He pedalled along the footpath in front, bouncing down the kerb and narrowly dodging the huge truck that gusted out from the mews. On he went, slinky and unbothered like one of Old Giles’s cats once more, clattering his empty bottle against the iron railings of the playground, left hand thud, thud, thudding against the bars as he went. I was sure someone famous like Luna would turn left for one of the smart houses overlooking the square but she walked on and the boy and his bike followed, bumping down the kerb in front and soon up another. I walked faster, shadowing him so closely that I could hear his gum bursts: pop, pop, pop. All of a sudden, we’d reached the bottom of my road. My feet stopped by the bank of recycling bins because the spokes of his wheels had finally stopped. He spun around, his short, straight eyebrows sitting far up from his eyes, tilting at me like a cartoon. I counted the little lines cracked into his forehead as he squinted into the evening sun: one, two, three, four.
‘Gonna tell me your name?’ he said, licking the slack gum from his lips and tucking it back into his mouth with his tongue.
I opened my mouth to speak, heart hammering against my ribs like his Mars Milk bottle off the railings. ‘Helvetica.’ I blurted it out and braced myself for the face people usually make. My teeth were clenched and ready, but the face didn’t come. Instead another pale pink balloon erupted and collapsed on to his nose, then he flicked the chewed gum into a nearby bin and bobbed his head kind of slow, like he could see everything I was feeling.
‘Cool,’ he said, that was all, but with this one word I knew we were going to be friends. Then he wheeled in closer. ‘Peregrine.’ He whispered his name slowly, lifting one hand from the handlebar and extending it towards me.
I repeated his name. ‘Pear-eh-grin.’
‘If you ever call me that, we’re done though. Yeah?’ he said, his brown eyes newly serious.
As he reached a sticky hand towards me, I nodded, and unsure what else to do, I began to shake it.
‘Easy!’ he said, whipping his hand back. ‘I was only going in for a sour cherry.’ Then he wiped his hand on his jeans like mine had germs before reaching for my bag of Tangfastics again. ‘D’you pay for these sweets, Helvetica?’ My head moved up and down before I could think, but he sniffed the air the way Dad sniffs Vicks; sort of quick, like he knew the truth.
‘So, what am I supposed to call you?’ I asked.
‘It’s Pez,’ he said, watching me even more carefully as he shoved himself backwards across the street. I stared until he hit the parked cars on the other side, directly outside the blue house almost opposite our flat; the one which until yesterday had a SOLD sign stuck in its garden. ‘See you round,’ he called out, dragging his bike up on to the kerb.
‘Vetty,’ I shouted after him. ‘Everyone calls me Vetty.’
Without turning around, he raised the fingers of his left hand in a peace sign and clambered up the steps towards his new front door. I waved up at Mum, who stood out from the pavement, staring at the same house across the street, watching the door that Luna Boyd had walked through moments earlier.
Those sweets never tasted right but I didn’t mind because from that day onwards having a best friend was no longer a theoretical fantasy I’d read about in books or seen on TV. I had a real-life one right across the street and for the first time ever it felt as though I’d plugged right into life. Things started to fit and some even made sense. With Pez, I was more than the nervous me I was at school, I was the all the fun me’s inside my head too, because, for some reason I never stopped to try to understand, he didn’t seem to care which version turned up outside his door.
Aunt Wendy arrived from Somerset wheeling my birthday present out of her van the next weekend. It was a shiny green racing bike and my eyes pricked with tears as I read the card. Go, Vetty, go! it said, and go I did. Term had started again but me and Pez spent every hour not at school tearing around those streets. The nasty twins in my class mattered less and less, and then, when life couldn’t get any better, the weekends came around and our days felt endless. We’d get tired cycling and climb the white willow in Camden Square and drink Mars Milk and suck Tangfastics until our tongues burned. Before we knew it, it was summer again and we carved our names in the bark of our tree and this little den we shared felt like the centre of the universe.
For four years we raced the wind along the canal to the best-ever chip shop up at Tufnell Park, to the tennis courts off York Way, whizzing around the market stalls, over the cobbled bridge at Camden Lock, past the pretty houseboats, back up the canal again and home in time for tea. On days when we felt lazy we’d lie on our backs and sing songs, or rate our favourite sweets out of ten, and if it was wet, we’d move to the couch and watch Super 8 or Kick-Ass and when we got sick of these, we’d stick on one of Mum’s old DVDs: Big, Stand by Me or Raiders of the Lost Ark. We’d watch them over and over again until we could play out our favourite scenes word for word. Clueless had some of our best lines. Pez was better than me. I’d mix up the expressions, but he’d get all the timings and even the American accents just right. At Christmas, we’d play chess and Perudo, and in the summer when it was hot, we’d hike the bikes all the way to the Heath and soothe our steaming skin in the icy cold water at the lido. It was grazed knees and full hearts until one wet April day when the doctors found the grapefruit pushing against Mum’s chest.
Mum had a primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma. I wrote the words down carefully. Stage 4, the doctor said to Dad, so I wrote this down too. He also said it was too late for treatment, but I didn’t write that. I didn’t need to. His voice was like a Sharpie splodging clean paper with its black ink, the permanent kind that soaks through the pages, ruining the next and then the next. Mum started the treatment anyway, but it didn’t work and quickly she became thinner and less able to talk. Pez gripped my hand under the willow tree, pulsing it gently in bursts of three, our silent code, and each of his little squeezes assured me he was there and always would be. Unlike everyone else, he never pretended everything was normal or even remotely OK. My chest got so tight that summer and I’d be so busy breathing, I never thought of words like thank you. Three weeks before my thirteenth birthday they moved Mum into the tall hospital by the Euston Road where she lay in a bed sweating and tied up in tubes. Eight days later she stopped breathing forever.
The night after she died, Dad got drunk, and when he was done shouting at the sky, he came inside and stared at the Banksy print that hung on our living room wall. He let rip at the pink Mona Lisa, roaring at her like it was her fault Mum was gone. The next morning, he sat me and Arial down and told us that in two weeks we’d be moving. Without Mum, he needed help, so we had to be near Aunt Wendy. Without Mum, I needed to be near Pez and the white willow tree and the life I knew, but nobody stopped for long enough to really think about this.
It was the first shop-bought birthday cake I’d ever had. Dad, Aunt Wendy, Arial and Pez stood around our suddenly cold kitchen, trying too hard to look happy. Dad’s trembling hands lit the candles and I looked at their gathered faces, but I couldn’t do it. All the tingling life had left me. I waved my arm over the hot mess, trying to kill the flames, trying to make their tiny lights go out.
‘C’mon, Vetty. M
ake a wish!’ Pez shouted it angrily like I wasn’t trying. I wanted to stab him and Colin the Caterpillar with my spoon. I was thirteen, not three! Besides, I was trying.
I didn’t care much for cycling after that. Not sure I cared much for anything and three days after this unhappy birthday the truck came and drove our life down the motorway to Somerset.
Dad finally bought me a phone; this was the extent of the good news that summer. At first, me and Pez spoke all the time. He’d share chess moves and tell bad jokes he’d learned from even worse films, but it wasn’t long before those calls became messages and the days became weeks and weeks became months, until one day during the Christmas holidays we stopped communicating altogether.
Dad and everyone else wanted life to get back to some kind of normal. Pretending everything was fine felt like the easiest way, and I pretended my heart out until things almost were. I started my new school and I made friends with Liv and Freya and Jess and they helped to fill most of the empty space. It was reasonably easy to get by provided I avoided being all of myself. I considered telling Jess about my greedy heart until I realised I wasn’t ready for how different things would be if I did. I was just settling in, already the new girl with the dead mum and the funny name, who lives with her gay aunts. I didn’t need another thing singling me out. I learned quickly to keep some stuff back, but there are times when it’s as though I watched those friends behind glass, observing them from the lens of my iPhone. Times I’ve wanted to explain that what they see isn’t all of me. Times I’ve wondered if they’ll ever know about the rest, the me that could at any point explode or take off like a rocket. Guess I never felt like explaining. I never had to explain anything to Pez. But maybe that was then, and this is now. Soon I’ll be back to London anyway. Soon I’ll be back to me.
3
At first Dad said we’d be gone a year but quickly he stopped talking about going back. Then, last month, his boss told him to be in the office five days a week or be fired, or words to that effect. Having supported his working from home for almost four years, it’s not like the company is being completely heartless. Arial starts her school holidays tomorrow so we’ll set off behind the removal truck in the afternoon, driving our life up the motorway and back to St Agnes Villas. Dad drove to London last week to check the tenants out and he bumped into Pez on the road outside. He said everything was like it had always been; Pez had gotten bigger and his bike had gotten smaller but that was it.
‘What if he’s changed?’ I asked. ‘Or he thinks I have?’
‘People don’t really change, Vetty,’ Dad said. ‘Not really.’
I hope with all my heart that this is true.
Pez was never a boyfriend, he was a best friend and the last person I’ve felt properly close to. I can’t stop imagining how it will be to see him again, or how life will be once I’m back. Every day I think about the stupid fun things we did and how now, I struggle to know where to begin saying all I want to say. As kids, me and Pez wore the same jeans; we even had matching baseball shirts with our names on the back that his dad, Harland, bought for us in America. Everything felt right. I felt right. It was only when we left London that being myself became so complicated. In Somerset I was more girly but I felt less right inside, and it was nothing to do with the make-up I wore or the clothes I cared about. It went deeper; an uncomfortable itch that gnawed at the pit of me, like a buried truth trying to wriggle its way out. Whether this was to do with the move or me, I’m not sure. I just know right now, I’d give anything to be that girl on her bike again, that girl who wasn’t so afraid to be herself.
I’m on the couch, Dad is beside me and Arial is sitting on the floor. It’s our last night at our cottage on Aunt Wendy’s farm, one of two rentals she runs with Fran, her soon-to-be wife. Without these women and this lovely place, none of us would have managed to stay vaguely sane for the last four years. Wendy is too nice to say it but I know she’s relieved we’re leaving. She’s only human. Besides, she and Fran are getting married next month and they’re knee-deep in wedding preparations. It’s all that’s been talked about around here for weeks. Not that anyone is complaining. We’ve tried different cakes and ciders and there was even a tepee trial in the paddock last week. From what I’ve seen, planning a wedding is way more fun than getting married.
Fran’s been making a playlist of their favourite hip-hop and very late one night last week, I was crossing the yard when I saw the two of them dancing in the kitchen. I stood outside the double doors in the dark and watched as they moved around the room to ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ by Lauryn Hill. It’s their first dance song and these things are supposed to be a surprise, so I hid there in the dark and said nothing, but like the words in the song, I couldn’t stop watching as they tumbled in and out of each other’s arms, laughing under the bright lights. Seeing how they moved and how they looked at each other made me so happy, but also kind of sad, for some reason.
Everything besides the TV and the cushions under us is boxed up waiting to go. Dad’s in his tracksuit bottoms, working, and Arial sits between my feet as I methodically rake her hair for nits. I’m combing sections, tying them up with elastics as I go. It’s the worst job ever but as I drag the shiny silver teeth through her conditioner-soaked hair, it helps me think of Mum. I bend over and take in Arial’s features upside down: her turned-up nose and the freckles that are almost too big. I used to photograph her expressions, like her funny grandma face, which is the absolute best. I’d just take shots on my phone but I’ve stopped all that now. Maybe I’ll start again when we get to London. Maybe I’ll get around to printing some from the files on my laptop and I might even hang some of the better ones in my room. It never felt right to knock holes in Wendy’s wall.
Arial doesn’t want to miss a second of Parks and Recreation and she ducks left, out of my eyeline. April is her favourite character and she mouths perfectly in sync with her every word. She’s only ten. I should probably worry about the amount of TV she watches. I check Dad’s face for signs of concern but he’s clearly more captivated by Parks and Rec than by the hundreds of logos dotted all over his screen. He sits with his phone under his ear in that way he does on long conference calls grunting occasionally to let them know he’s still there. I wonder whether the people he’s speaking to have any idea how unprofessional he looks right now.
I’ve got headphones on, as the very last minutes of Stranger Things series two plays on my iPad. Delousing requires focus and I’m determined to savour Eleven and Will’s dance at the Snow Ball, but my mind is in overdrive. I wish I’d had a more convincing comeback for Liv earlier, or even better, I wish I could have been honest, but more than three and a half years after that sleepover I still feel awkward. I’m obviously putting out some vibe for her to have said what she said.
It’s not that I’m opposed to coming out. It’s not as though my family isn’t open-minded. I’m sure that if I told Wendy and Fran that I was gay they’d throw their arms around me, but it’s not that simple. This isn’t about the electrically charged feelings that I sometimes have for girls. It’s that I’ve had those same fizzy feelings for boys too and explaining this out loud seems so challenging. And, since I’ve only ever kissed boys, I don’t know how real-world any of it is, or what I’m entitled to come out as. Does everyone’s love life come with mind-bending levels of complication and bewilderment? Or is that just me?
In the corner of my eye I spy Dad’s laptop closing. This is followed by a draught as he pulls the left headphone away from my ear. ‘Shame those fish fingers won’t cook themselves,’ he says, getting up. I take the last section of Arial’s hair and sweep the comb through it, wiping the sludgy residue against a fresh clump of tissue. ‘Nearly done,’ I say, inspecting it for any lingering scalp squatters. All clear! I give her a celebratory shoulder shove. ‘We’ll wash it after we eat,’ I say, tying her slimy hair up in a bun. She gives me a double thumbs-up without her eyes leaving the screen.
Dad still has tiny whi
te sticks in his ears. A lot of the time I’ve no idea whether he’s talking to me or his phone. I follow him into the kitchen and we start our familiar mealtime dance without a word. We’ve become one of those families who eat the same thing on the same day each week, which, given Mum read Lebanese cookbooks and stored her homemade granola in labelled glass jars, isn’t something I’m proud of. If she saw how we ate now she might die all over again. We eat at Wendy’s as much as we can, so I can still only make six things, and Dad, for all his enthusiasm, is a lame sous chef. So Sunday is roast chicken, Monday is stir-fry, Tuesday is usually sausages, Wednesday is spaghetti bolognaise, and Thursday, today, is fish fingers. Friday is chilli, but nobody likes kidney beans so it’s basically spicy bolognaise with rice. Saturday comes via the Domino’s app. It’s written up on the fridge but sometimes we just eat cereal in front of the TV anyway. I gave Arial Rice Krispies with a side of celery sticks once. I figure as long as I include something green with each meal then she’ll make it to my age with all of her teeth.
All the Invisible Things Page 2