Fierce Fragile Hearts

by Sara Barnard

  She’s crying now. The embarrassing, proud kind of crying you get from someone who really loves you. ‘Nursing.’

  ‘Yeah. The nurses who looked after Dilys were amazing. And it made me think about the nurses who looked after me. Not just in hospital, but at Gwillim, too. If I’m going to do something with my life, that’s what I want to do. Be good for people. Help them, like I was helped. If I can.’ I hesitate, worried that she’s so surprised because she thinks it’s a bad idea. ‘Don’t you think I’d be a good nurse?’

  She grabs my hand spontaneously and squeezes, choking out a noise I can’t quite interpret, but it sounds happy. ‘I think you’d make a wonderful nurse.’ She wipes her eyes again. ‘Oh, Suzie, I’m so—’

  ‘There’s one more thing, before we get to that,’ I say. ‘One more serious thing.’

  As if following a command, Sarah releases my hand and nods, straightening her shoulders and looking attentively at me. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think I want to stop seeing Mum.’ I swallow. ‘And Dad, too, obviously. I don’t want them to be a part of my life any more. I need to have actual distance. I don’t want to see them at all, I don’t want to talk to them on the phone, I don’t want them to know what I’m doing. Do you know what I mean? There’s a word for it? It begins with e?’

  ‘Emancipation?’

  ‘No, that’s when you’re underage. I don’t mean legally. Estranged. That’s the E-word. I want that to be what it is. Dad said it in an email once, but he was just being sarky. I want it to be real. I want to be estranged. I don’t want him to be able to email me any more. No calls from Mum. Nothing.’

  She nods slowly. ‘OK. I understand.’

  ‘And Brian as well.’

  At this, her eyes widen, even as I see her try to cover herself. ‘You want to separate yourself from your brother as well?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to, but I feel like I have to. If I can’t trust him not to just tell them things, then he has to be part of it, too.’ I bite down on my lip to stop it quivering. ‘They just … They all just pull me down. That’s what it feels like. Every time I start thinking I can be better, or do more, something happens with one of them that makes me feel worthless again. I shouldn’t have to feel that way, should I?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, you shouldn’t.’

  ‘So you think it’s a good idea?’

  ‘I think if that’s a step you want to take, then I’ll support it. Would you like me to do the same?’

  I hadn’t even thought of that. The suggestion lands directly into my heart. ‘You’d do that?’

  ‘If it’s what you want, yes.’

  ‘But Mum’s your sister.’

  ‘And you –’ she takes a hold of both my hands – ‘are my niece. And my priority.’

  I look at Sarah’s kind, earnest face, and start to cry. Because despite everything, even though we’re talking about me becoming estranged from my parents and brother, even though I’m being evicted, I feel suddenly lucky. Lucky to have an aunt who loves me, who makes me her priority, after everything we’ve been through together. Lucky that she hugs me when I start to cry, quietly and with no fuss.

  When I’m done crying, we both laugh at nothing and then finish our tea. She boils the kettle for another and we decide that, no, she doesn’t need to cut herself off from anyone. She can be the intermediary, talking to my parents on my behalf as necessary, sorting out any problems, making sure they’re respecting my decision.

  ‘What about the money?’ she asks.

  I take a breath in. ‘I’m going to take it, if they agree with all of this. That they have to stay away from me, I mean. And I won’t sue, obviously. It’ll be, like, an exchange. Would you mind talking to them about it?’ It seems like a lot to put on Sarah. ‘Is that OK?’

  She nods. ‘Don’t worry about that side of things.’

  I will anyway. How could anyone not? But at the same time, I trust Sarah, so it’s like a different kind of worry. The safe kind. I know she’ll protect me from it, from them, as best as anyone can. I’ve never wanted anything more than that.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Sarah asks. She’s watching me over the top of her mug, her smile warm and hopeful.

  I think about it, searching myself for the honest answer. I think about Caddy crying down the phone, Rosie offering her own bedroom to me, Matt inviting me to London, the picture Kel sent of his sofa with the message ‘All yours!’. Dilys. Surround yourself with people who love you.

  I look around Sarah’s kitchen and I think, home.

  ‘I feel good,’ I say.

  Summer

  ‘Here Comes the Sun’

  The Beatles

  The party was Sarah’s idea. She’d called it a house-warming.

  ‘One,’ I said, ‘you’ve lived here for over a decade. And two, I’ve lived here before. The house is already warm.’

  ‘Fine, we’ll have it later,’ she said. ‘A house-warming slash summer party. A barbecue!’

  And now here we are. It’s the last Saturday in June and the flat is full of people. Sarah’s in the garden in charge of the barbecue, holding a pair of tongs like a weapon. She’s made way too much food, but no one’s complaining. She promised, when we started planning the party together, that she’d let me help with the food. Now the party’s actually happening, and she still hasn’t let me help with a single food-related thing except ice.

  ‘Control freak,’ I tease.

  ‘Menace,’ she replies. She drops a burger on to the plate I’m holding. ‘Off with you.’ She’s beaming.

  It’s been good, living with Sarah again. I don’t know if it’s because I’m paying rent or just because I’m an adult now, but everything is different from when I lived here before. I don’t have to sneak out when I want to leave, for one thing. I go out the front door, not the window. I spend a lot of my time outside the flat, either at work, the care home where I volunteer once a week, or with my friends, but when our time at home overlaps we usually sit in the living room together, making our way through the box set of this old American hospital show ER, which she bought when I submitted my application to the Access course for Nursing a couple of months ago.

  ‘You can see what the nurses do. It’s research!’ she said.

  ‘Fictional American nurses in the nineties,’ I said. ‘Useful!’

  I sort of love it, though.

  I take my plate of food over to one of the blankets, where Caddy and Rosie are playing with Clarence. When I sit down, he rolls on to his back beside me, paws kicking in the air. ‘All right, you,’ I say. ‘Don’t beg. It’s below you.’ Rosie hands over the glass she’d been holding for me and I take it, pausing to lift it into a toast. ‘To us! Happy summer.’

  ‘Yay summer,’ Caddy says, smiling. They’ve only been back from university for a week, and summer feels like it’s going to be endless, stretching out ahead of us. Next month the three of us are going on holiday together for the first time; nothing fancy, just a package holiday in Greece. I’d paid for my share with some of the money I’d got after selling Dilys’s baby grand piano. The rest went on a digital piano small enough to fit in the living room, and a tattoo. Three different but wonderful things. I think Dilys would be pleased.

  ‘Hey,’ Matt says, kneeling down on to the blanket beside me. ‘I found Henry Gale. He’s hiding under the piano, and he won’t come out.’

  I lift up my sunglasses so he can get the full effect of the look I give him. ‘You tried to drag him out, didn’t you?’

  ‘I just wanted to say hi!’ he says. ‘Is that so wrong?’

  ‘You can say hi later, when it’s quieter,’ I say. ‘He’ll come out when there’s less people around.’

  ‘Fewer,’ Matt says.

  I flick his shoulder. ‘Shut up.’

  I don’t know what was the biggest surprise to everyone else: the fact that Matt and I really are friends, or the fact that that’s all we are. There have been no slip-ups, no mistakes. No benefits. Just him and
me, spending as much time together as we can. I go up to London or he comes down to Brighton and we drive around for a while, listening to music. Last week we went to a gig together, just the two of us, with alcohol and everything. Of course we teased and flirted and held eye contact for longer than you might call strictly platonic – that’s just how we are together – but we didn’t kiss and we didn’t end up in the same bed. How’s that for self-control? I’m pretty proud of myself. I’m pretty proud of us both.

  It was actually Matt who helped me pick out my tattoo and sat with me when I had it done. It hurt, but not as badly as everyone said it would.

  ‘Are you sure you want to get your first one on your spine?’ Kel had asked, face scrunched with second-hand anxiety. ‘Don’t you want to start somewhere … less bony?’

  ‘Needs must,’ I said. ‘That’s where I want it.’

  The arrow, about the size of my index finger, points up near the top of my spine. I spent so long staring at the design that I know it by heart, even though it’s on a piece of my body I can’t see. Sometimes, when I have my low moments – God, I still get my low moments – I think of that arrow, pointing constantly, solidly up. Whatever is going on in my life, however close I get to rock bottom, whatever the situation, there’s a part of me that will always be looking up. It helps, somehow.

  I got the tattoo three years to the day since my last suicide attempt. I didn’t tell anyone the significance of the date, and if anyone figured it out, they didn’t say so. As the needle seared against my skin, I closed my eyes and thought of all the days I’d had since then, the days I’d thought I hadn’t wanted or deserved. Southampton and Christie and Don. Ventrella Road and Dilys. Clarence. Kel and his open house. Sarah. Seeing Caddy wearing a University of Warwick hoodie, her bright, coppery hair. Watching Rosie hold hands with Jade, her smile wide. Matt.

  There have been so many times in my life that I’d thought I was starting again, whether I wanted to or not. I thought that was what I had to do to finally get a chance to make things right. But that’s not how it works, I get that now. Recovering isn’t about fresh starts, or new beginnings. It’s about the constant as well as the change. You build a foundation in layers, and that’s what makes it strong. Maybe sometimes it means taking a step back, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Sometimes you have to take a step back to get a better view of where you’re going.

  I will never be better, because better is not a thing. I will always just be me, and maybe that’s OK. Maybe that’s even great. I am sitting in my garden with my dog on my lap, an arrow on my back that will always point up, and I am surrounded by people who love me.

  Yeah. I’m doing just fine.

  About the Author

  Sara Barnard lives in Brighton and does all her best writing on trains. She loves books, book people and book things. She has been writing ever since she was too small to reach the ‘on’ switch on the family’s Amstrad computer. She gets her love of words from her dad, who made sure she always had books to read and introduced her to the wonders of second-hand bookshops at a young age.

  Sara is trying to visit every country in Europe, and has managed to reach thirteen with her best friend. She has also lived in Canada and worked in India.

  Acknowledgements

  My first thanks, as always, to my agent, Claire Wilson, for once again guiding me through with patience, wisdom and enthusiasm. (Sorry for all the panicky emails – you were right. Obvs.)

  Thank you to Rachel Petty, for championing this book from my first tentative pitch and through the early wobbles, and Sarah Hughes, who took up the editing reins with such insight and warmth.

  Thank you as always to the team at Macmillan, without whom I would be just a writer with a Word document and a dream. I am indebted. (Especially to you, Rachel Vale. Pure art.) Special thanks to Kat McKenna, for being Kat McKenna. And former team members Bea Cross and George Lester – thank you for everything.

  Thank you to everyone who read, loved and talked about Beautiful Broken Things. It means the world to be able to bring you Suzanne’s story in her own words. I hope you love her as much as I do.

  To all those who helped me with my research along the way, from the big questions to the small, the long emails to the shortest tweets, particularly Eileen Flavin, Alex Scott, Charlie Wilson and Ceri May – thank you. Special thanks, as always, to Tracy King – I feel so lucky to call you a friend.

  No author would survive authoring were it not for their author friends, and I have the greatest ones. Melinda Salisbury, the most excellent dinobro of all the dinobros. Holly Bourne, sharer of tea and pancakes. Katie Webber, pure sunshine. Thank you.

  Thank you to my family, particularly my wonderful dad, who gave me a love of music and words without boundaries or limitations, who read every word I ever wrote and always flips straight to the acknowledgements when I have a new book. Hi, Dad! I love you.

  Thank you, Lora, who is still my very best; Anna, who I love beyond words; and Tom, my co-pilot in all things. I would be wordless without you.

  And finally. Two weeks after I finished this book, I lost a friend. A friend who, when I was eighteen, was my light in the dark. Thank you, Nick Lloyd, for that, and for so much else. I will miss you.

  Books by Sara Barnard

  Beautiful Broken Things

  A Quiet Kind of Thunder

  Goodbye, Perfect

  Fierce Fragile Hearts

  First published 2019 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2019 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-5289-5

  Copyright © Sara Barnard 2019

  The right of Sara Barnard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ‘There is freedom waiting for you’ by Erin Hanson from Reverie: The Poetic Underground #1 (lulu.com, 2012). Copyright © Erin Hanson.

  Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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