Somewhere Close to Happy: The heart-warming, laugh-out-loud debut of the year

by Lia Louis

  ‘Yes.’ Priscilla nods at me. ‘Show him the envelope, Lizzie.’

  I want to ask Priscilla what the point of this is but refusing would be embarrassing now that he’s staring at me, waiting. I dig about in my bag and slip it out of the inside pocket. As I hand it to him, a woman’s voice, posh and raspy, calls through the house. Echoing heels on wooden floor follow.

  ‘Michael? Are you— who is it?’ She calls through the house. ‘Richard Farrand’s just called. He’s cancelled. Says it’s too—’

  She appears in the doorway, stopping mid-sentence as she sees us. Her golden eyes widen but she smiles, closed-mouthed, at us. She’s petite, with short, wavy, dirty-blonde hair which is combed back over her head. She wears a chunky gold and green-stoned necklace, and a cerise pink blouse, with ruffles at the front. Her chest is tanned with old sun and covered in freckles.

  ‘Hello,’ she smiles, tightly. We say hi, but she doesn’t look at us. She is staring down at Michael’s hands where the envelope is.

  ‘These girls are looking for someone, darling.’ Michael doesn’t look up when he speaks – he is still studying the logo.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘They say they received a letter from this old friend of theirs.’

  ‘She did,’ jumps in Priscilla. ‘My friend. Lizzie. She got the letter.’

  The woman looks up at me for a beat, and nods once. She looks back down at Roman’s letter.

  ‘Look at this, Helen,’ continues Michael, his voice dropping in volume, as if just to her. ‘The envelope has a Broxton logo on it.’

  Helen bends to get a closer look at the envelope. She takes it from his hands. ‘Gosh, I … can’t remember the last time I saw an envelope with that stamp on.’ Her eyes are slits as she brings it closer to her face. Then she looks up at me, quickly, as if I called her by name. ‘Who is it you’re looking for?’

  ‘Roman,’ I say. ‘Roman Meyers?’

  Unlike Michael’s, Helen’s face flickers. Her hand flies up to her mouth. ‘Crikey,’ she mutters. ‘Goodness, I … yes. Roman. Gosh.’ Michael is looking at her now, but Priscilla’s eyes are burning into me. I am frozen – feet bolted to the ground.

  ‘That was … well, it was a very long time ago. Before you.’ She gives Michael a quick smile and looks back down at the letter. The thumb and finger of her other hand squeeze her bottom lip. She looks up at me. ‘Roman is my cousin. Second. Twice removed, something like that.’

  Electricity again – a spark, dancing in my tummy.

  ‘Although, I regret to admit that I’ve not seen him in many years. Eleven. Twelve, maybe?’ Helen says years like ‘yuuurs’. ‘He stayed here for a few weeks, couple of months at most. My mother took him in – fostered him, if you like. I was working in Sheffield at the time, at the university, and—’ She stops, dusky-pink lips parted, as if she’s just realised mid-sentence that we are perfect strangers – as if she’s realised she could be saying too much, to the wrong people. ‘So, you said Roman was an old friend of yours?’

  ‘From school,’ chimes in Michael. Helen’s brow crinkles and she folds her arms.

  ‘Actually,’ I cut in. ‘It wasn’t really school. It was … instead of school. It—’ My cheeks and ears pulse with heat. Helen watches me. She nods gently. ‘I met Roman three weeks before my fifteenth birthday. A couple of months before his seventeenth.’

  Helen nods again, just the once, and the corner of her mouth lifts in a gentle smile. It’s a sad smile. The type I haven’t seen in years but was given to me all the time back then and made me feel as small as the tiniest speck in the universe.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘we aren’t an exceptionally close family as it is, but well, Lindsey is totally estranged, sadly.’ Lindsey, Roman’s mum, blinks into my mind, for just a second. Pale. Sad. Shrinking. ‘Nobody sees her. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember. But Mum kept in touch. She tried with her, really tried.’ Michael folds his arms across his chest, and watches Helen. His brow is furrowed. ‘That’s how Roman came to be here. Mum visited, and they’d had the most dreadful argument, she and Lindsey, and she left. But she came home and was so worried about Roman, you know. A young lad, living in such an environment with such people, and with the problems he had.’

  She looks to me, as if hoping it makes some sort of sense. I feel rigid, like you do on a winter’s day, outside in the wind, with no coat on. But I manage to nod.

  ‘She offered him an option, I suppose. A refuge if you like. She was like that, Mum. Loved to help. She and Dad fostered a lot of children in their time. They only managed to have me, you see.’ Michael reaches down and squeezes her hand. Helen’s golden eyes are shimmering now, and she’s looking right at me, waiting for a reaction and I realise I have been staring at this woman, barely blinking, barely breathing ever since she started talking, the wind knocked from my sails. I’m not sure why. It’s not like I thought Roman disappeared from the bubble in which we lived for a tiny lifetime together and then just ceased to exist. But it was hard to imagine he went on existing – that he was even real at all. But he was. With every word this stranger speaks, that’s what it means: Roman was real. We were. But there is no slotting of the puzzle pieces that I’d hoped for, no settling in the stomach. If anything, I feel even more unease now, and it’s creeping in like night the more I run over her words. ‘In such an environment’, ‘with such people’. Who? Things were hard. They were. And his mum, not a mum at all. But Roman had nobody, not really. Except me. Except Hubble.

  Priscilla lets out a noisy sigh, the way someone does after holding their breath for too long. ‘See,’ she glows, ‘we haven’t just chased a white rabbit across the M25.’

  ‘Well, you’re certainly on the right track,’ says Helen, softly. A phone rings inside the house. Michael excuses himself and goes to answer it. ‘I’m just sorry that I can’t really help you any further,’ Helen carries on. ‘All I know is that he went to London after he left us. Was just after Christmas. It would’ve been 2005. Friend picked him up.’

  ‘Really?’ says Priscilla.

  Helen nods. ‘He was never going to stay long. Not much here for a boy of his age. Well, man.’ She ducks her head to look at me. She’s smiling that smile again – sad, the head a fraction to one side, eyes downturned at the corners. ‘You look rather spellbound, there.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. My palms are cold and clammy at my lap. ‘I suppose this is just a bit weird for me. It’s been years.’

  ‘You were close.’

  It doesn’t sound like a question, but I bow my head in a nod. ‘We were best friends. Him disappearing was sudden so, this is a lot to take in …’ I trail off.

  ‘I’m sure,’ says Helen.

  Then I ask her. It tumbles out of my mouth. ‘Why did he leave?’ I ask. ‘I mean, how did he seem? Did he mention— do you know if there was a reason?’

  A breeze thick with the smell of rapeseed whips my hair into my face, and attempts to slam the door of the gingerbread house. Helen grabs the side of the door and stands in front of it.

  ‘I didn’t see a great deal of him. Just when I’d come up and visit Mum. He was …’ she pauses, as if considering her words, ‘in a bad way. Exhausted. Broken, I suppose is the word. Gosh.’ Helen blows out a breath. ‘I know that’s a bit of a downer, but, well, you learn to spot things when you’re around youngsters in foster care all your life. And Roman, well, he needed a fresh start. All the trouble he was in, a mother like Lindsey …’

  Helen doesn’t finish her sentence. Her last words just hang there, in the air, as thick as the floral heat we stand in, but she’s watching me, eyes misty and narrowed. Hubble used to say my face was a weathervane – that when I was sad, my eyes were black clouds and my face was full of shadows, but when I was happy, I shone ‘from the toes up’. And I obviously look how I feel; like someone whose heart has plummeted – suspended, high with hope, and then dropped, suddenly, to the pit of my stomach. It was ‘broken’ that did it.

  ‘Well,
thank you so much, Helen,’ says Priscilla, clasping her hands together like a door-to-door salesman. ‘You’ve been such a big help.’

  Helen brings her shoulders up. ‘I’m not entirely sure that I have.’

  ‘You have.’ I force a smile. ‘Honestly. Thank you. And your house is beautiful.’

  ‘Stuff of dreams,’ Priscilla adds.

  Helen smiles. ‘That was all Mum.’

  We say goodbye, and Helen watches us walk to Priscilla’s car before she goes inside. We sit in silence for a moment, windows wide open.

  ‘He told me once,’ I say into the silence, ‘that he had a “posh” side of his family somewhere. But I admit if someone had said “Roman’s cousin” to me I would’ve expected, I dunno. Liam Gallagher, Jim Royle …’

  Priscilla laughs. ‘She was lovely, wasn’t she? Very equestrian,’ she says as she starts the engine and we sit for a moment more. Quiet, mumbling radio chatter floats through the speakers, and I watch as a plane passes overhead. My heart rate gradually slows. It reminds me of those times in the beginning, when Priscilla would sit silently beside me on the school field, waiting until the panic passed through me like a wave, not saying a word, not staring at me, not touching me, but there. Strong, calm, accepting; never leaving my side.

  ‘You OK, Liz?’ she asks now, letting out a long breath.

  All I can manage is a nod.

  ‘Shall we go for lunch or something?’ Priscilla pulls the sunglasses down from the top of her head. ‘Mull all this over, talk, eat pudding.’

  ‘Haven’t you got to get back for Chris? You have Summer this weekend, don’t you?’

  Priscilla looks at her lap and shrugs.

  Then we hear her.

  ‘Hello! Girls!’ It’s Helen, sprinting on her tiptoes across the driveway. ‘Sorry!’ she calls. ‘I thought I was going to miss you.’ She gets to the car, and crouches, leaning into the driver’s window. She hands Priscilla a piece of paper. It’s torn from an address book, the types that have pages with descending tabs for each letter. The page is ‘M’.

  ‘We’re sorting through Dad’s study at the mo. There’s paper everywhere, it’s a living hell. Anyhoo, Mike thought he’d check when he went inside. Out of curiosity, I suppose … and he found this in the address book. Mum and Dad used the same one for years and years.’ Yuuurs. She sucks in a deep breath and laughs, her hand pressed against her chest. ‘Ran from the upstairs,’ she chuckles. ‘So, look, there’s an old address and a number for Roman on there. I have no idea how old the number is, it might be utterly hopeless. But well, it’s something, isn’t it?’

  ‘Thank you, Helen,’ I say. ‘I really appreciate it.’ Priscilla folds the page into her lap, as Helen smiles across at me. She pauses, and for a moment, I don’t think she’s going to say anything, but then she says, ‘December the nineteenth.’

  I pause. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Dad took Roman home on December the nineteenth,’ she says. ‘For a funeral. I remember because that’s my birthday. I turned up here for celebrations, just family, a few friends, dinner. And they both got caught in the most dreadful traffic and missed it. The dinner, I mean. Dad had taken him, gone to see a friend nearby, and gone back for him a couple of hours later. Then on the way back, an accident on the motorway, a wheel bearing, snow … I can’t remember now. But I do remember that. A funeral. And Roman in a suit.’

  My heart stops.

  ‘I don’t know if that helps you. I hope so, somehow. It always seems so sad to me, estranged friends.’

  Helen stands back on the gravel, arms folded, watching us drive away. As soon as we’re out of sight at the gate, Priscilla stops the car.

  ‘Hubble’s funeral,’ I say quickly, and she nods.

  ‘I know,’ she says.

  ‘He wasn’t there, though, Priscilla. He definitely wasn’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean I— I’d never have missed him. It’s …’ I don’t finish my sentence. Can’t. My arms are rough with goosebumps, my limbs tingling again. Adrenaline rushing in, a nudge to run from danger, from all of this. I waited that day. I waited and waited, believing he would be back to say goodbye to my grandad, the only man who was there for us when everyone else fell away, despite everything, I believed that he would never leave me alone by that coffin. I looked for him everywhere. He wasn’t there. He never showed.

  ‘Well,’ says Priscilla, holding the torn page in between two fingers. ‘Shall we see what the paper says? See if he’s living in a city of yurts?’

  She unfolds it. I can see the first one. It’s in bold blue felt tip. ‘Roman London’ and a scribbly address, but there’s a strike through it, in faded pencil, and then it’s circled, with a line leading down to something else, which is circled, hard, more than once.

  ‘This is the phone number she mentioned, I guess,’ utters Priscilla. ‘There’s a date. As of zero three slash 96. So, as of March, 1996, I suppose. And a name. Frank Matias. Roman is written next to him in pencil and … Cardiff.’

  I sit up. ‘Frank?’

  Priscilla holds up the page. ‘Yeah. Here. Frank Matias.’

  I take the page out of her hands. I want to see it with my own eyes.

  ‘What, Lizzie? What is it?’ asks Priscilla. ‘Who’s Frank Matias?’

  Chapter Seven

  22nd September 2004

  Roman and I stand at the top of Hubble’s driveway. It’s warm today, with dandelion seeds drifting on the breeze. They kept getting caught in my hair and on Roman’s baggy beanie hat as we walked home from The Grove, stopping for Dr Pepper and chips from the Chinese takeaway, and taking the shortcut through the park to Hubble’s. I can’t face going home. Not after this morning with Dad, blaming me yet again, for something Mum should be here to clear up herself. I would rather be anywhere else today – at The Grove, with Roman, as quiet as he’s been since this morning, walking the streets, even school. Anywhere.

  Roman holds a leafy branch of the rosemary bush at the edge of Hubble’s perfect square lawn, between his fingers. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘that I didn’t say anything in group earlier. When you were upset.’

  I lift a shoulder to my ear. ‘You don’t need to say anything.’

  Roman twists the leaves between his thumb and fingers and brings them to his nose. ‘You know I understand,’ he says, looking at me quickly, then at the ground. ‘That I get it, don’t you? I mean, it’s different, I know. With my mum it’s completely different, but I understand, J.’

  ‘Course,’ I reply. ‘I know you do.’

  Roman smiles gently, a flash of white teeth. His lip is busted and risen slightly on one side. I haven’t asked him why. The last time I did, his cheeks flashed red and he couldn’t look at me, and I don’t want to embarrass him again. But it worries me. ‘It’s just … the stuff about your dad. It’s rubbish. Really rubbish.’ Stoff. ‘And I felt like I didn’t have anything to say to you today, to make you feel better. Because I don’t know mine.’

  I look up at him. His eyes drop to the floor. ‘Have you ever met him?’

  Roman shakes his head. ‘No. I know nothing about him, really. Well, apart from that he’s a total lowlife.’

  ‘A lowlife?’

  Roman nods. ‘Yeah. Knocked my mam about and that. Could’ve killed me,’ he stops and sort of laughs – a scoff, ‘and I even know the bloke’s name, but—’

  ‘Could’ve killed you?’ The words blurt from my mouth, before what he said even registers.

  Roman looks at me, blue eyes flashing, before they drop to the concrete again, and I know he wishes he’d never said anything. ‘Left a tonne of smack next to my cot in reaching distance,’ he says, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘I was eighteen months old. Mam legged it with us, then.’

  I barely speak, just his name and a sharp intake of breath. His words feel like a punch to the gut. My hands are up by my cheeks, fingers pressed into the skin.

  ‘But it’s fine,’ he says, quickly, as if he’s worried he’s upset
me. Like he needs to get to the good part, for my sake. ‘He’s nowhere to be seen. He’s in prison, last Mam heard, and he’s called a couple of times, trying to talk to me but … it’s fine, Lizzie. I don’t remember. Not a single thing. In my mind, it’s like he doesn’t exist, so, it’s fine. Really. It is.’

  I shudder. Shame creeps over my skin and I screw my face up with embarrassment. ‘And then there’s me,’ I say, ‘moaning and crying about my dad and that’s nothing. Nothing compared—’

  ‘Nothing?’ Roman says, his eyes fixed on me now. ‘Lizzie, of course it’s not nothing. What your dad did to you, to your brother, to your mam – it was grim. It hurt people. And I dunno. Pain is pain. You’re allowed to feel what you feel.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and he just shakes his head, and laughs, ‘You say that too much.’

  A breeze sways the shrubs bordering Hubble’s lawn. A neighbour a few doors down turns on a power hose. He looks up at us quickly, double-taking, and I watch when he goes back to spraying the terracotta brick of his driveway. Mostly because I suddenly can’t bring myself to look at Roman. He’s looking at me, though, all the time.

  ‘Well,’ he stretches, ‘as always, it was a pleasure, Lizzie J.’ I glance at him, and he reaches a hand to my hair now. His eyes squint, fixed on mine, and the corner of his mouth twitches a tiny dot of a smile. I freeze, as the tips of his fingers touch my cheek. Neither of us say anything. My skin is jelly.

  ‘Dandelion seed,’ he says, softly, his hand brushing my face as he flicks it into the breeze. He clears his throat. ‘You in tomorrow?’

  I nod stiffly. ‘Yep. Sure am.’

  ‘Cool.’ He straightens and takes a few steps backwards. I hear Hubble’s front door squeak open behind me. Roman lifts a hand in a wave and looks past me. ‘Afternoon, sir.’

  ‘Hello, Roman,’ calls Hubble from the porch. ‘And how are we today?’

  ‘Good, thank you,’ nods Roman with a smile. ‘And how’re your potatoes?’

  I glance over my shoulder to see Hubble, hands in pockets, smile, wide but mouth closed, as if it amused him a lot more than he wants to let on. ‘Coming along,’ he says, with a nod. ‘Should have some ready next week. You’ll have to come for dinner.’