Thanks to the panda, he’d also started to feel increasingly closer to Liz. Dancing had been such a big part of her life and now, unbelievably, it was a big part of his. Even though it was far too late for them to enjoy those lives together—to practice together, to watch Dirty Dancing together, to tear up the town together—doing something his wife loved so much made him feel as if he understood her just that little bit more. Danny felt, in the strangest way, that he knew his wife even better now than he did when she was alive. It was almost as if the panda had ceased being a costume and become like a medium, holding Danny’s hand in one paw and holding his wife’s in the other and connecting them in a way that he never could have imagined.
On top of all this, Will, while still not talking to him at home, was making a genuine effort to close that once cavernous but now almost leapable gap between them. Yesterday he’d woken up earlier than usual to help Danny make breakfast, a small miracle given how averse he was to mornings, and today he’d given his dad an unprompted hug before heading off to school. All in all, Danny had to admit to himself that for the first time in a long time, life felt good. In fact, aside from the ever-present fear of Reg, life felt better than good. Life felt great. Only when he saw Will clapping along with the rest of the crowd did he suddenly remember that his landlord wasn’t the only tricky situation he had to resolve.
“I didn’t know you could dance,” said Will as the rest of the crowd trickled past him.
Danny took a seat on the bench and fished out his notepad and pen.
Pandas can do loads of amazing things.
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
Danny thought for a moment.
We can go invisible.
“No, you can’t.”
Yes, we can.
“I’ve never seen an invisible panda,” said Will.
Exactly! wrote Danny.
Will rolled his eyes and sat on the bench beside him.
“Mo says pandas poop up to fifty times per day. That’s pretty amazing.”
It’s true. We spend a fortune on toilet paper.
Will laughed.
Who’s Mo anyway? wrote Danny.
“My best friend. His name’s Mohammed, but everybody calls him Mo. He’s, like, an animal expert. Did you know that a group of pandas is called an embarrassment? He told me that too, but I don’t know if it’s true.”
It depends how much we’ve had to drink, wrote Danny.
Will smiled. “Who taught you to dance like that?”
A pole dancer called Krystal, wrote Danny, sure that Will wouldn’t believe him anyway.
“Very funny.”
I’m serious. She taught me after I rescued her bathrobe that was stolen by a wizard who can set things on fire with his mind.
“I might only be eleven, but I’m not stupid.”
Eleven? I thought you were at least twenty-four, wrote Danny.
“I wish.” Will laughed.
No, you don’t. Keep being eleven for as long as possible.
“How old are you?”
Eighty-four in panda years.
“Well, you’re a really good dancer for an eighty-four-year-old,” said Will.
Danny put his paws together and gave a little bow of gratitude.
“My mum used to be a dancer. She was really good too.”
What kind of dancer was she? wrote Danny.
“Every kind. She could dance to anything, even if there wasn’t any music.” He pulled out his phone. “Here,” he said, showing the screen to Danny. “This is her.”
Will pressed play and Danny watched as Liz danced alone in a spacious room with wooden floors and high ceilings reminiscent of a school assembly hall. He’d never seen the video, and the fact that he didn’t even know where it was filmed caused the stitches of his soul to unravel slightly.
“She worked at a school,” said Will, as if reading Danny’s mind. “Sometimes she used to practice there, when nobody else was around.”
Danny nodded, his bleary eyes fixed on the video as he took in every detail. What Liz was wearing. How she was moving. The way she brushed her hair from her face. The way she laughed and pretended to be mad when she realized that Will was recording her. The way she covered the camera with her palm before the video came to an end. Danny had plenty of videos of Liz, but seeing one for the very first time—one he didn’t even know existed—momentarily made him feel as if she were still alive somehow, as if she hadn’t died at all but slipped through a crack in space and time and ended up trapped in the video he was now watching. He wanted to replay it, and then replay it again, and keep replaying it until the battery eventually ran out; but suddenly aware that he was staring at the screen despite the video having already ended, and unsure of how long he’d been doing this exactly, he handed back the phone and scribbled something into his notepad.
Most people could live forever and not have that kind of talent, he wrote. Will smiled and nodded. A dog started barking somewhere nearby and they sat in silence for a moment while they watched a rowdy Jack Russell straining on its lead as it tried to pick a fight with an anxious pit bull.
Tell me something about your mum, wrote Danny.
Will shrugged. “Like what?”
Like anything.
Will stared across the park at something only he could see.
“She had these moles on her arm that sort of made a star if you joined them up with a pen. She used to let me do it for fun, but one time I did it with a permanent marker by accident and it took her ages to wash it off. And she was really good at crosswords, especially those cryptic ones with the clues that are super confusing. She was always trying to solve them, even when she wasn’t looking at them. Sometimes we’d be having dinner or we’d be in the supermarket or something and she’d suddenly shout out a random word like the name of a country or the color of a certain type of horse. One time we were on the Tube and she shouted out, ‘Leprechaun!’ and there was this really short woman sitting opposite us and she started yelling at Mum because she thought she was talking about her. It was pretty funny. And she always smelled of oranges because that’s what her favorite hand cream smelled of. I have one of the empty jars and it still sort of smells like she did. I don’t open it much because I don’t want the smell to disappear, but the wardrobe in my bedroom has sliding doors and sometimes I sit in there and open the jar and the smell gets trapped. If I close my eyes, it’s like she’s right there with me.”
Will flicked the loose button on his sleeve back and forth. Danny took the silence as his cue to say something, but Will continued before he could write anything.
“She drank, like, ten cups of tea a day, and she always put two tea bags into the cup because she liked it really strong, even though it tasted gross. She used to laugh at my dad because he couldn’t drink it, even though he’s a builder and builders are supposed to drink really strong tea apparently. She couldn’t drink mint tea, though, or eat anything with mint in it, because it made her sneeze, and when she did she sounded like a mouse, or that’s what my dad said, but my mum always said that mice don’t sneeze. Mo says they do, though, but only when they’re ill. She was left-handed too, like me. We have a left-handed pair of scissors at home, and me and Mum always used to laugh when Dad tried to use them because he couldn’t. Oh, and her favorite color was yellow. She had lots of yellow stuff, like shoes and clothes and things. Even the scissors are yellow. She sometimes wore this yellow dress that made her look like sunshine, even when it was raining. I don’t know where it is now though.”
Danny nodded. He knew exactly where it was because he had picked it out for Liz to be buried in. He thought about that day and how surreal it had felt to be going through her wardrobe in search of a suitable outfit for such a horrendous occasion, and he recalled how it had rained so heavily and for so long after the funeral that it seemed as if what Will had said was true, that Liz was the sunshine and that they hadn’t just buried her that day but also any light that was left in the world.
/> What’s your favorite color? wrote Danny, realizing with no small amount of shame that he didn’t know the answer.
“Guess,” said Will, nudging his green schoolbag with his foot. “Mum said I could paint my room green too. And she said I could get a bunk bed, not one of those with two beds but one with a bed on top and a desk and stuff underneath it. I never did though.”
Danny remembered having this conversation with Liz shortly before she’d died, she telling him that Will’s bedroom needed redecorating, and he telling her that they couldn’t afford it and there was no point anyway because they were only going to have to change it all again when Will became a teenager and decided that bunk beds were for kids. They’d argued about it, but knowing now how little time they’d had left together at that stage—he couldn’t remember exactly how long, but it was only a matter of weeks—it made him feel almost painfully empty to think he’d ever wasted a second of that time quarreling.
You don’t like your room? wrote Danny, already knowing the answer.
“It’s got the worst wallpaper ever.”
Don’t tell me. Thomas the Tank Engine?
“How did you guess?” said Will sarcastically.
You should tell your dad. Maybe he can help.
“He already said no when my mum mentioned it.”
Maybe he’s changed his mind.
Will shrugged. He peeled a scab of paint off the bench.
You still not talking to him? wrote Danny.
Will shook his head.
Do you think you ever will?
“I don’t know. He’s being… weird at the moment.”
Weird? wrote Danny, the word stinging after all he’d done recently.
“Yeah,” said Will, “but, you know, in a good way. Like, he made me pancakes for breakfast the other day, and he never does that. I didn’t even know he could do that. And he took me to Brighton at the weekend, and when we were there he played this dancing game with me and at lunch he talked a lot about Mum, and he never does any of those things. So yeah, it was weird, but a good kind of weird.”
Maybe he’s trying to be friends.
“Maybe.”
Does he have any friends?
“Not many.”
Then maybe he needs one, wrote Danny. You don’t make pancakes for somebody you don’t like. Every panda knows that.
“You do know you’re not a real panda, right?” said Will, sliding off the bench and throwing his bag over his shoulder.
Have you ever actually seen a panda in real life?
“No.”
Well then, wrote Danny.
Will smiled. “Whatever you say, panda-man-who-isn’t-actually-a-panda. See you around.”
See you around, not-talking-boy-who-actually-talks, scribbled Danny.
CHAPTER 23
Danny rang the doorbell and took a few steps back. He wasn’t wearing the panda costume this time, but he nevertheless felt safer standing out of range of Ivana’s broom or Ivan’s chokehold. Yuri eventually answered the door. He was wearing a basketball T-shirt and the same combat pants that Danny had borrowed a few weeks earlier, and he was eating a family bag of Doritos that looked deceptively small in his massive hands.
“Oh, hi, Yuri,” said Danny. “Wow, look at you. When are you going to stop growing?”
“Probably when I’m seventeen or eighteen or something. That’s when most people stop growing, I think.”
“Right,” said Danny. He’d forgotten how literal Yuri could be.
“Want a Dorito?”
“What flavor?”
Yuri looked at the packet. “Blue,” he said.
“Go on, then,” said Danny, plucking a Dorito from the packet. “Is your dad home?”
“Yes,” said Yuri. He didn’t move.
“Can I see him?”
“Not from here,” said Yuri, looking around as if to demonstrate how impossible it was to see his dad from their current location. “You should probably come in.”
“Good idea,” said Danny, squeezing past Yuri, who stood aside to let him through.
Finding the living room empty, he followed the noise that was coming from the kitchen. Ivan was standing with his back to the door, hunched over the work surface with an apron tied in a bow around his waist. Danny smiled, thinking his friend was playing some kind of joke on him. Ivan was not an “apron” kind of guy, but nor was he a “joking” kind of guy, which left Danny none the wiser as to what was going on. Only when he saw the open cookbook near Ivan’s elbow did everything start to make slightly more sense. Ivan was baking, something that Danny had never seen him do before. He hadn’t even realized his friend could bake, yet here Ivan was, deep in the middle of making what appeared to be a walnut cake—the same walnut cake that Danny had been eating for the last year or so. The fact that neither Ivan, Ivana, nor Yuri liked walnuts (something Danny had known since the day that Liz had unwittingly made her famous—now infamous—Waldorf salad for them) only confirmed his suspicions that Ivan was making the cake for him, and had been doing so since the very beginning. Danny felt an almost overwhelming desire to hug his friend, but not wanting to embarrass either of them, he slowly backed out of the kitchen and went to find Yuri, who was sitting in his bedroom playing on his Xbox.
“Hi, Yuri,” said Danny, popping his head around the door.
“Hi, Danny,” said Yuri, who appeared to be midway through a carjacking.
“Can you do me a favor and go tell your dad that I’m here?”
“Why?”
“I can’t find him.”
“He’s in the kitchen,” said Yuri, who still hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen.
“I checked. I couldn’t see him.”
Yuri sighed and paused the game. He sat in silence for a moment.
“I can even hear him in the kitchen right now. Listen.”
“I don’t hear anything,” said Danny, ignoring the obvious kitchen noises coming from down the hallway.
“He’s definitely in the kitchen,” said Yuri.
Danny sighed. “Can you just let him know that I’m here?”
Yuri shook his head in that way children do when adults are being weird. Then, rolling off his bed, he went to find his dad while Danny lingered in the hallway and listened to the conversation.
“Danny’s here and he said he couldn’t find you even though I told him you were in the kitchen so he asked me to find you and tell you that he’s here.”
Danny made a mental note never to ask Yuri to do anything ever again.
“He’s in the kitchen,” said Yuri as he shuffled back to his room, although his words sounded distinctly like “I told you so.”
“Thanks,” said Danny, realizing that the situation was now ten times more awkward than before.
“Danny!” said Ivan as he poked his head out of the kitchen. There was a panic in his voice that Danny had never heard before.
“Hi, Ivan. Is this a bad time?”
“No!” he said. “Is fine. Go sit in living room.”
Danny did as he was told. Ivan appeared a minute later, easing his way out of the kitchen and closing the door behind him as if trying to contain an energetic puppy.
“So,” he said, slightly out of breath as he slumped down opposite Danny. “How is life of dancing rat?”
“Complicated,” said Danny, trying not to laugh when Ivan wiped his brow and left a streak of flour across his forehead.
“How is complicated? You dress like embarrassment, you dance, you stop the dance, you dress like normal person again. Simple.”
“Did you know that a group of pandas is actually called an embarrassment? I just learned that today. An embarrassment of pandas.”
“Not group,” said Ivan. He pointed at Danny. “Just one. A group is worse than embarrassment. Is tragedy. Is like Chernobyl of pandas.”
“Thanks for the support. And to answer your question, it’s Will. He won’t stop talking to me.”
“So why you look sad? This is good, n
o?”
“No,” said Danny. “It’s not.”
“Wait,” said Ivan. “First you complain that Will, he never talk. Now you complain he talk too much. I am thinking you like to complain.”
“Like I said, it’s complicated. Look, remember when I told you about that time I saved him from those bullies? Well, now he keeps coming to the park to talk to me, but it’s not me he’s talking to. It’s the panda.”
“But you and panda are same person.”
“Yes, but Will doesn’t know that,” said Danny.
“So tell him.”
“It’s not that simple. He’s been talking about me. And about Liz. Stuff he’d never tell me if he knew that I was, well, me. And on the one hand it’s incredible. I’m learning things about him that I never knew before. And he’s talking, Ivan. He’s finally talking! But if he knows it’s me, then he’ll never talk to me again.” Danny sighed. “I don’t know what to do. What would you do? Actually, don’t answer that. What should I do?”
Ivan narrowed his eyes in the way he sometimes did when he was pretending not to understand English.
“I have an idea,” he said after some clearly strenuous thinking. He leaned forward as if about to impart something highly confidential. “If you make Will want to talk to you—to Danny, I mean, not to panda—then maybe he will stop wanting to talk to panda.”
“Ivan, if I knew how to make Will talk to me, then I wouldn’t be in this mess, would I?” he said.
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