Lilah May's Manic Days

by Vanessa Curtis

  I don’t explain this, though. Mum’ll only have another go at me about not talking to Bindi.

  ‘I’m famished,’ says Dad. He flicks the oven on and starts unwrapping packages and dumping food onto a metal baking tray.

  ‘Oh, you’re not going to heat it up, are you?’ says Mum. ‘I’m starving. Let’s just eat it.’

  They have this argument every time they get fish and chips. Dad is a stickler for things being perfect. Fish and chips have to be heated up on a tray until they’re all sizzling and crispy. Mum likes it straight from the paper onto the plate. And I’d eat it on the way home from the shop, given half the chance, except I’m not so hungry now I’ve seen Bindi, and also it’s quite hard to eat fish whilst riding a bike.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ says Dad. ‘It has to be piping hot.’

  Mum makes a face at me behind his back and I give her a smile. It’s one of those rare moments where I feel like we’re a real family, kind of complete.

  Except we’re not, of course.

  Not until Jay comes home.

  Mum gets more and more depressed about her clown parties over the next few days.

  Two more mothers cancel and Mum finds out that a new children’s entertainer has set up in business just down the road, so she’s moaning to Dad.

  ‘He’s got digital equipment, Mark,’ she says mournfully. Unusually, all of us are at home for supper at the same time again. ‘All I can offer are juggling balls and rabbits coming out of hats. I’m out of date, like a piece of old dried cod.’

  As she says this, Dad is sniffing a packet of what looks like out-of-date cod. He lifts the lid of the swingbin and plops it inside.

  ‘I’ll pop to the Spar,’ he says.

  I don’t take much notice of any of this.

  My head is muddled with thoughts of Bindi and Adam. I keep seeing the way that Adam bends over Bindi, all protective and concerned, and wishing he’d be like that with me instead. But I’m tall and angry and not very cuddly, whereas Bindi is short and sweet and looks like she needs protection.

  ‘Lilah,’ Mum is saying. ‘Have you done your homework yet? I’ve got enough problems without the school ringing me up about you. Again.’

  The school pretty much have a hotline to this house. I’ve been in trouble so many times that Mum is now on first-name terms with all the school admin staff and even asks about their babies and stuff on the phone.

  Yeah,’ I mutter. Actually I’ve left my homework and my entire bag at school, what with all the confusing and stressful stuff happening there, but I’m not going to tell her that.

  ‘Do you want to watch your jungle programme then?’ she says.

  I roll my eyes and sigh.

  Mum likes to make out that she only watches these programmes because I enjoy them, but actually it’s the other way round. I couldn’t give a toss what’s happening to Jordan in the celebrity jungle at the moment. My real life is turning into one of those celebrity stories that are splashed across the front of the tabloids every day.

  My true love ran off with my only true friend. . .

  I shake my head to dismiss all this and head into the lounge behind Mum. She’s clutching a huge tub of chocolate ice cream and a large spoon. Comfort eating.

  ‘I need all the help I can get to watch this dreadful programme,’ she says, avoiding my eye.

  Yeah, right. I know she’s addicted to it.

  So we’re watching the celebrities swallowing nasty bits of kangaroos and wading through swamps full of crocodiles and I’m almost enjoying it, although ‘a bit of me is still seeing Adam and Bindi together, and Dad comes back with some pasta and tomatoes and starts concocting something very garlicky in the kitchen and then the doorbell goes and Mum makes a face at me.

  ‘I hope it’s not for me,’ she says. ‘I need to see whether the camp is going to get dinner tonight or not.’

  We’re so busy staring at the box that for a minute we think that the shouting noise is something to do with the television and then Mum leaps up and presses the mute button on the remote control and freezes with one hand clutched to her chest.

  The shout came from Dad in the hall.

  Mum stares at me and I stare back. My heart is pounding with fright. It sounds like Dad is crying. Great big choking sobs, as though he’s in pain.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Mum. ‘What’s happened to him?’

  She grabs my hand and pulls me out towards the hallway. We’re both shaking from head to foot.

  It’s dark in the hall and there’s a smell of burning garlic coming in from the kitchen.

  Dad is standing in the hall by the front door in silhouette. At first we can just see him sort of shaking and hear him letting out great barks like a tortured seal or something.

  ‘Mark?’ whispers Mum. She feels her way down the hall and flicks the light switch on.

  Then she’s screaming too and I feel the hair on my arms stand up and my head go dizzy, as if I’m about to pass out.

  The air from the open front door rushes down the hall and whips my hair up around my face but I don’t notice.

  I get there as fast as Mum does and I reach out and do the thing I’ve wanted to do for over two years.

  He says nothing, just lets us.

  We stand there in a huddle.

  I pinch myself. It’s not a dream.

  Jay’s really here.

  When things happen that you’re not expecting, it’s like you’re suddenly outside your own body, watching things moving in slow motion.

  I can’t think of anything at all, but I’m aware of things going on somewhere else in the house – the smell of Dad’s dinner burning, the babble of the television, the hum of the washing machine and the lurch as it changes into a spin cycle – but none of it means anything compared to what’s just happened to us.

  Dad is clearing a path through to the kitchen.

  ‘Let him sit down, let him sit down, Rachel!’ he bellows at Mum. ‘He’s hurt his leg!’

  She whimpers but nods.

  They brush past me with their arms on either side of him, helping him to walk.

  I follow them through into the kitchen with Benjie panting at my heels, trying to moisten my lips with my tongue because my whole mouth has dried to wood chippings.

  I hang back, standing by the door and I just stare at him.

  My brother.

  Real, here, in the flesh, back from wherever he’s been for the last two and more years.

  Mum rushes to the kettle and fills it up and then she goes to the telephone and rings our GP emergency service.

  ‘My . . . my . . . son,’ she starts, but she can’t finish the sentence for crying, so Dad takes over.

  ‘No I can’t take him into A & E,’ he shouts. ‘He’s in no fit state! I need you round here now.’

  Mum makes a hot chocolate with an arm that shakes so hard that the teaspoon clangs against the pottery cup.

  ‘Here . . . here,’ she says, putting it in front of him. ‘Drink this.’

  Jay raises the pottery mug to his mouth and gulps down the contents in about ten seconds flat. Then he brushes his hair out of his eyes and looks around the kitchen at all the things that haven’t changed since he last sat in here, and his eyes move right round until finally they fall on me where I’m standing frozen in the doorway.

  I can’t smile. I want to – that’s how I’ve always imagined this moment would be. In my dreams he comes back and gives me that dazzling smile from underneath his dark floppy hair and he says, ‘Hey, Liles,’ in his gruff voice and I kind of just know that I’m still special to him, I’m still his little sister and that everything will be OK.

  The person looking up at me from the kitchen table isn’t my brother.

  He’s a stranger.

  ‘Lilah,’ he manages. ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ I say.

  I wasn’t even thirteen when Jay left us. It’s like a world of difference. Then I was a little girl with long pigtails and a smiley fr
eckled face. Now I’m a whey-faced teenager with dark, shoulder-length hair and a pierced nose and ears. No wonder Jay is looking at me like that.

  I guess I’m a stranger too.

  A whole load of anger is boiling up in me and that takes me by surprise.

  The last thing I thought would happen when my beloved brother finally came home is that I’d be angry. I thought I’d be too busy feeling love and excitement and relief.

  I glance at Mum and Dad. They’re white with shock but Mum is crying huge tears of happiness and she can’t stop staring at Jay and putting her hand over her mouth and then glancing at Dad.

  Benjie has started to bark at Jay now. Of course – he thinks we’re being invaded by a stranger. Jay has never seen Benjie before.

  Dad takes the puppy into the lounge and shuts him in. Then he leaps into practical mode. That’s how he deals with most things. He’s acting as if there is a wounded lion on the premises, checking the First Aid kit and trying to find tablets, all the time muttering under his breath. He refills the kettle and makes another round of hot drinks.

  ‘You should drink it too, Lilah,’ he says. ‘For the shock.’

  I take the mug from him but I can’t think what to say. I mean, I kind of am in shock, even though I hoped and hoped that one day Jay would come home to us. But there’s another feeling riding over the top of the shock, and that’s the anger.

  Questions start to rise up inside me – loads and loads of questions, things that I think we maybe have a right to know, seeing as how we’ve all gone through hell for the last two years.

  I open my mouth to ask one, but Mum has been watching me and she makes a quick despairing gesture with her hands so I close it again.

  ‘Not now,’ she says. ‘Surely it’s enough that he’s come home, Lilah?’

  I nod, slow and unsure, and take a sip of my hot chocolate.

  It should be enough, yeah. But it’s not, is it?

  There’s stuff that needs to be said.

  And somehow I know from the burning feelings in my gut that I’m going to be the one who has to say it.

  Dr Woodsman comes round about an hour later carrying his black bag.

  ‘So this is the young man who’s caused so much trouble, eh?’ he says. Dr Woodsman always speaks exactly like you’d imagine a doctor in a television programme to speak. He looks like one, too, with his grey sideburns, dark eyes and smart suits.

  Dr Woodsman has treated Mum and Dad loads more since Jay went missing – Mum for depression and Dad for anxiety – so he knows a fair bit about what Jay’s disappearance has done to us as a family.

  Jay lets the doctor put his leg up onto a chair and peel back his grimy tracksuit bottoms.

  We all let out a sharp breath when he reveals the wound underneath.

  ‘How did you get this?’ the doctor asks?

  ‘Dunno,’ mutters Jay.

  Dad gives him a sharp look.

  ‘Dr Woodsman can’t treat you unless you tell him,’ he says in his no-nonsense voice.

  I wait to see if this voice has any effect at all upon this new stranger Jay.

  But it must do, because in a sullen voice Jay says, ‘I’ve been sleeping rough. Got into a fight with one of the other guys. He used a bottle.’

  My mother flinches.

  ‘Lilah,’ she says. ‘Could you go upstairs and put fresh sheets on Jay’s bed, please? There are some in the airing cupboard.’

  I’m about to start complaining but Dad whirls around and gives me one of his Looks so I back out of the kitchen doorway and stomp upstairs with my thoughts in a mess.

  I hear them murmuring in the kitchen for quite a while, all the time I’m unfolding linen sheets and tucking in corners and fluffing up duvets.

  When I’ve finished I take a look around Jay’s bedroom.

  I’ve been going in there on my own for two years and wishing more than anything that he was back sitting on that bed playing his guitar and teasing me. I’ve gone in there and missed him so much that I’ve cried and picked up the guitars and flicked through all his old music magazines. But now I know that he’s about to come up and enter the bedroom I feel really weird, as though I don’t want to give up the empty room.

  What I had in my head about him coming back is already so different from what’s happening downstairs.

  I’d kind of forgotten that loads of time apart can make people feel like strangers. And just because you’re related to somebody and you’ve really missed them, doesn’t mean that the moment they come through the door it’s all smiles and hugs and everything back to how it was before.

  I sink down onto the bed and bury my head in my hands.

  I feel like the rest of my life has just been cancelled.

  This is like a major reality check.

  For the first time I realise that Jay being back home might not be all that easy.

  I don’t like it.

  And I don’t want him coming up here while I’m still in the room.

  What would I say to him?

  I leave the room just as he is starting to limp upstairs with Dad supporting him on one side and a brand new bandage pulled tight around his leg.

  ‘Thanks, Lilah,’ says Dad as he half-carries Jay back into his old bedroom.

  Jay says nothing. He doesn’t even look at me.

  I guess I don’t feature on his radar after whatever has happened to him over the last two years.

  Another wave of anger washes over me, sudden, red and hot.

  ‘Bed, Lilah!’ Mum calls up the stairs. Her voice is cracked with weariness and emotion.

  I go into my room without having to be asked twice.

  I stare at the photo of Jay on the white dressing table, next to the old photo of me and Bindi when we were ten.

  Then I bury my face in my oldest teddy-bear and let out a silent scream until I’m choking on fake fur and dust and have to come up for air.

  The next day, the next few days, the next few months, years and the rest of my life lie ahead of me now, alien and strange and without the usual comforting rituals of me, Mum and Dad.

  It’s all going to be different.

  ‘I don’t ever want to get up again,’ I mutter to the bear.

  Then I get into bed and stare at the ceiling for hours.

  When I wake up the next morning after about two hours sleep I lie in bed with Benjie weighing my feet down, listening to the house coming alive, just like I do every morning.

  There’s the dull whoosh and hum of the boiler waking up downstairs and then the steady drone of my bedroom radiator coming on.

  There’s the creak of floorboards in Mum and Dad’s room, the sound of their door opening and Dad going into the bathroom and locking the door.

  There’s the gentle tread of Mum on the stairs as she goes down to make tea for her and Dad and the hiss of water being poured into the kettle, the click of the switch.

  I wait.

  She makes tea and comes upstairs again just as Dad comes out of the bathroom.

  Then there’s silence.

  That makes me sit up, straining my ears.

  Usually they start to laugh about something or have a vague argument. Over the last few months Mum finally got her giggle back again after it having gone on holiday for over two years.

  I try to hear something, anything, but I can only make out the quietest murmur of voices behind their closed door.

  Great.

  Things have changed already. Jay has only been home for about ten hours and already the house feels different – colder, more uncertain.

  It’s Saturday, which means I don’t have the excuse of rushing off to school, either.

  Not that I really want to go there, what with Bindi and Adam and all of that, but at least I could hook up with some of the other girls and have a bit of a gossip about who’s been booted out of the celebrity jungle or who’s reading the latest Twilight novel.

  Normal stuff.

  Something tells me that today isn’t going to be very
normal.

  I turf Benjie off my feet, get out of bed, put on my thick pink dressing gown and run a brush through my tangled black hair.

  I shuffle downstairs in my slippers, coughing. The kettle should still be hot.

  As I pass Jay’s door I try to walk really quietly. I don’t want him to wake up. Ever. If that sounds mean, it’s not supposed to. It’s just that I don’t know what to say.

  I don’t know what to say to my brother after two long years of waiting for him to come home again.

  I make it to the kitchen and drop a teabag into a cup and drink the tea staring out at the yellow leaves scattered all over the muddy lawn. A robin is sitting on top of the handle of Dad’s spade. It looks at me sideways out of one eye, as if it knows my thoughts. Against the fading green of the garden its breast looks really bright red, like lipstick or blood.

  I’m still standing there lost in thought, swaying slightly to keep warm, when Mum creeps downstairs again and comes to join me.

  She looks really pale, as though she hasn’t slept, and there are purple shadows underneath her eyes. And not from clown make-up, either.

  ‘Rough night,’ she offers, making up a cafetière of coffee and pouring herself a steaming cup of hot black liquid. ‘Too much to think about.’

  I nod.

  For some reason neither of us can actually mention Jay. It’s like when he was missing and I didn’t dare mention his name in case it started Mum crying or Dad shouting. But it’s different now. I don’t think Mum would cry if I said his name. I think she’d look at me with big scared eyes and maybe admit that she didn’t know what the hell to do next, just like me.

  I try it out to see if my theory is right.

  ‘Is Jay going to come down for breakfast, do you think?’ I say.