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

by Lia Louis

  ‘Yeah.’ I give a slight smile. ‘I remember it well.’

  Nathan watches me, as my face flashes with heat, then he smiles and says, ‘How could we forget right?’

  And that is that. But the look – the meeting of our eyes across the pile of old papers, dated way back to when we were just kids at this table – is warm. Because there was a time nobody could mention that period of our lives without it feeling as though the words were catching on something raw – an open wound. You’d see the winces, the swallows, every time Clark, the man Mum left Dad for, was mentioned at a Thursday dinner, or when Mum would mention the mortgage they would’ve been able to pay off early had Dad not gambled away their life savings on the horses, each withdrawal slightly bigger than the last. He’d been out of work, and in true Dad style, he didn’t want a soul to know we’d had to scale back on food shopping or cancel our yearly family holiday. He always wanted the world to think he had the perfect life – that he was Charlie James, scout leader, self-employed extraordinaire, a man without a care, a man with money, and work coming out of his ears. A man who had the life everyone dreamed of. He’d always been the same – so much more concerned about what people we chatted to twice a year at a neighbour’s barbecue thought of him, than us, his flesh and blood – the people who loved him most. He kept up appearances the way people kept up a rigorous gym routine. It was exhausting. All of it was. Mum, Dad, and all their lies. The anxiety and depression that crept in slowly like fog, eventually draining the very colour of who I was. The shattering of our family. Life without Hubble in it. But now, there is none of that. It’s acceptance. Relief. The sort that comes from going through something together and being out the other side, unscathed. It’s over, it’s done, and now, it’s so far behind us, that it’s just something we can look back to from the safety of the world we made despite it all.

  And it flies out of my mouth.

  Falls.

  Straight out and onto the table in front of us.

  ‘So, I’m trying to find Roman.’

  Nathan’s face drops, slowly, with the realisation and the replaying of the words in his head.

  ‘Wh– you’re trying to …’

  ‘Find Roman. I got a letter from him, Nathan. Old. Like, twelve years old. I think it got lost or something but I don’t know.’

  Nathan stares at me, papers still in his hands.

  ‘So, I’m trying to find him. Trace him if you like.’ I give a laugh. I’m nervous. My palms are cold and clammy, I can tell as I reach for my mug, but I don’t take my eyes off my big brother.

  Nathan stares back at me, still, not moving. He exhales, as if being deflated.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says, leaning on the table with his forearms. ‘I haven’t heard that name in god knows how many years.’ Nathan pauses. ‘Have you … got close?’

  I shake my head. ‘Not really, no. But I’m hopeful. I have his number. But I just keep getting his voicemail. His voice …’

  Nathan’s eyes widen. ‘How did that feel? Hearing him.’

  I shrug, but then, despite myself, my face breaks into a grin. Heat spreads across my ears, in the way it used to when Nate quizzed me on boys at school. ‘Weird,’ I say. ‘But sort of … like I have my ear to a time portal, or something. He sounds different, but the same, all at the same time.’

  ‘Like Roman at seventeen, but with extra bass?’

  I laugh. ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  Nathan clears his throat. ‘Can I … see the letter?’ I show him. The letter shakes ever so slightly in his grip, and his hand stays over his mouth as he reads. He stares for ages, then eventually, looks up at me. He hands it back.

  ‘Well.’ Nathan swallows. His face is pale, the colour of dishwater. ‘Didn’t see that coming.’

  I take a sip of tea. ‘Me either.’

  Nathan looks at me across the table, and I know he’s there now, where I have been for weeks. Suddenly rushing backwards, as if on a track, fragments of memories flying together, to make whole scenes.

  ‘Look, shall we call it a day?’ stretches Nathan. ‘There’re hundreds of papers and it’s only nine. We could put a film on, make some popcorn …’

  My heart tingles with warmth. ‘Yeah. Why not?’

  ‘Cool.’ Nathan shoves all the paperwork into a pile, quickly, and I stand and make my way to the kettle. ‘I’m going for a piss,’ he announces. ‘Popcorn’s in the cupboard. Two minutes in the micro on full. I’ll stick on John Wick. Got the blu-ray.’

  When Nathan leaves the kitchen, I throw a brown bag of popcorn into the microwave and turn it on. I hear the toilet door close upstairs and attempt to neaten the pile of paperwork in the centre of the table as the kettle rumbles. There are receipts, magazines, pamphlets, letters from lawyers, from gas companies, there are business cards, there are invoices. Years and years of documents; decisions, hobbies, milestones, opportunities. I push everything into as neat a pile as I can manage and slide it to the middle of the table. I dab away crescents of tea left by our mugs and swipe biscuit crumbs from the table into my hand.

  And it’s then that I see something.

  A piece of paper poking out from beneath the flurry of papers.

  A4, like so many of the others in the pile, but it’s unmistakable.

  And my heart is hammering before I even move, before I even edge forward and slide it out. Because I know what it is. I can’t believe it, can’t process it, but still, I know. I know before my mind can even catch up.

  The pile scatters all over the table like the fanning of feathers, as I pull out the page.

  There at the top of the piece of paper in my hand – the piece of headed paper – are three gold-brown letters.

  And then I know.

  Then I remember.

  DDC.

  This is Dad’s. Dad worked for DDC. It’s his headed paper.

  Chapter Nineteen

  4th December 2005

  ‘Are you in pain, P?’

  ‘A little. But it’s normal, the doctors say.’

  I stand at the side of Priscilla’s bed. The room is dark for half past four, but winter’s dark sky is slowly closing in, and the only light in the bedroom is the light from Priscilla’s tiny pink TV. My eyes sting, my cheeks are puffy and sore, and I can hardly breathe. I try to hold it together. For Priscilla, for everything she has been through, because it would be selfish not to. But I can’t. I try. I do. But I burst into tears, the ball in my stomach contracting, bending me double. It hurts. It really does.

  ‘Lizzie?’ Priscilla sits up. ‘Oh, Liz, what? What is it?’

  And I tell her. I tell her Roman is gone. I tell her he’s taken the money we saved for the day we’d leave together, and he’s disappeared. He isn’t picking up his phone, because it’s on his bed. The bed in his empty, echoing bedroom, and his mum, a drunken, sobbing wreck, has no idea where he is. ‘He’s gone, Lizzie,’ she just kept saying, tears at the edges of her eyes, her lip quivering with anger, arms pulling her baggy cardigan tight around her as if it was the only thing keeping her upright. ‘He’s left me. His stuff … it’s all gone. And there’s nothing I can do. He’s really gone.’ Gone. Gone. Roman has gone. And this is not a bad dream. This is my life.

  Priscilla’s eyes fill with tears and she pulls back the duvet. ‘Get in,’ she says, and I do – coat, boots, and all – and she wraps us both in it, her arms around my neck. We cry together, tears soaking hair and shoulders and cheeks. My tears are for everything. For myself, for Mum, for Dad, for how broken we all are. I cry for Priscilla – for having to do this at sixteen. The pain, the heartbreak, the termination itself. I cry for Hubble. I cry so much for him. I have never missed someone so much that it made me ill, sick to my stomach, and I just don’t know how I am meant to stand looking at that coffin with him inside, under the lid, in the deep blue shirt he always wore when we went out to dinner, alone. Without Roman. Because he’s gone. And that’s what most of my tears are for. For him. Angry tears, sad tears, tears of desperation. Becaus
e I know – deep down I know – he isn’t coming back. And lying beside Priscilla, in her bed, beneath the duvet, she holds my face, as if holding me together at the seams, and I melt down. Everything inside me breaks. Something dies. Hope. Light. Something good. It dissolves.

  ‘I’m here,’ she whispers. ‘I am here, and I am not going anywhere, ever. I promise you, I swear, with everything I can.’

  I can’t speak. I can’t even nod. I just sob. That’s all I can do.

  ‘I’ve got you,’ says Priscilla, holding my shaking shoulders, her words hiccupping over her tears. ‘And you can trust me. Even when everyone else lets you down, you’ve got me. I’ve got you. We’ve got us. Always.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Ever since I found that letter on Dad’s kitchen table yesterday – ever since I found that headed paper, with the DDC logo at the top and a scrawled, quick invoice of Dad’s written on it; a page identical to the piece of paper Roman’s letter was written on – I have been thrown here, to this uneasy place. I don’t know where to go, or what to do. I just know I don’t want to be here. I want my home. I want to feel safe. And I may be opposite Priscilla, at lunch, in the autumn sunshine, bundled up in the warmth of my coat by Camden’s cobbled canal, but I can’t shake this constant desire to ‘get out’, to run … but then, where do you go when it’s your own mind that you’re trying to escape from? I could run from here to Fiji, and it would still be right with me.

  Priscilla stares across the table at me. She holds out the half-empty bottle of ketchup.

  ‘No, thanks. I can’t eat.’

  Priscilla nods once, her mouth twitching nervously at the corner, making a perfect dot in her cheek. ‘Lizzie, there may be an explanation.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I don’t think there is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I don’t say anything. I just look at her across the table and bring my shoulders to my ears. The steam from our sweet potato fries dances between us, wisping into nothing.

  ‘Eat something,’ says Priscilla. ‘Just something little. You said you didn’t eat anything for breakfast.’

  I didn’t tell Nathan. I couldn’t, in the moment. I stood, frozen to the spot, the piece of paper in my hands, the popcorn, popping like gravel pinging against a windscreen behind me. Then Nathan had creaked down the stairs and past the door.

  ‘Don’t even think about opening the Revels and giving me all the coffee ones,’ he’d said, and I’d quickly folded the piece of paper in four and slid it into the back pocket of my jeans. I carried on as normal. I sat beside him with tea and a buttery bowl of popcorn and pretended to watch the film. Pretended to be relaxed, snuggled there on Dad’s old squishy sofa. But inside, I was spiralling. Why? Why did Roman have Dad’s paper? How would he have got it? Roman and Dad barely spoke, barely saw each other, so how did Roman ever come to write this letter to me – this desperate, cryptic letter written twelve years ago – on paper that would sit in my dad’s work rucksack or scattered in his van? How? But then logic keeps pulling me back and sitting me down, making me look at this with a calm, realistic head, and with a mind that isn’t looking for the negative, for the deceit, for secrets. Roman probably grabbed the paper while visiting – maybe he didn’t have any of his own. Maybe he ended up with a scrap of it after I did a doodle for him – he loved my doodles and drawings more than anyone, he marvelled at them as if they were wonderful, as if they were proper art, the way I’d stare at my Mimi’s paintings as they came to life the longer you looked at them. He asked me to draw him things and I drew on anything I could find. Maybe I drew something for him on some headed paper and picked up more than one piece without realising. Maybe he found some at Hubble’s. We were at Hubble’s all the time. It was our haven. He was. Dad sometimes stayed there when he couldn’t bear to be at home, especially after Mum had been to collect her things, so maybe he left some there, along with work clothes and a toothbrush. Maybe that’s where he took it from, because things are never as bad as they seem. That’s what they say, anyway, isn’t it? And so, I’ve tried. I’ve tried to look at the logical reason, the realistic reason. But still, my stomach churns and aches, as if it knows more than I do.

  ‘I think you should try and speak to your dad,’ says Priscilla, fanning away a dozy fly that attempts to settle on my sandwich. ‘Put your mind at rest.’

  ‘I’m not calling the hotel.’

  ‘But you can’t sit and worry yourself sick with this for over a fortnight, Lizzie.’

  ‘I can’t call him, P. I can’t.’

  And a part of me wants to. But he’s just got the new iPhone and treats every foreign country as if it’s a place that crooks go to sharpen their craft – every street and marketplace outside the hotel complex is a danger zone – so he and Linda have left their phones at home, switched off. We have the number for the hotel, for emergencies, should, god forbid, something bad happen within the next fourteen days, and he’s emailed a couple of times from the internet café by the hotel, but I can’t have this conversation with him on a hotel phone, or via email, hundreds of miles away. I want to see him when he tells me he knows nothing. Because now I can’t get his face out of my head – that smile he gave me when he walked in on Katie and me talking about Roman – tight in the corners, his shoulders tense, rigid.

  ‘Liz?’ I look up. Priscilla is staring at me, fingers entwined holding the knee of her crossed legs, her back straight. She releases her grip and puts her hands on the table in front of us. I see her swallow. ‘When I saw Roman’s brother, he – he told me something.’

  My heart immediately speeds up. ‘What?’

  Priscilla sighs and brings a hand to her temple. Her eyes are closing, her lids settling shut for longer than usual, and I know that face. Priscilla’s regretful face; the face she’d wear when she’d pull me into the school loos to tell me she’d screwed up or done something she wished she hadn’t – like the day she’d nicked her dad’s car keys and reversed it off the drive into the brick wall, or when she’d gone on a date with Joshua in sixth form but he was so shy he didn’t speak to her the entire night so she kissed his older brother as he walked her home and let him feel her boobs. The morning in the P.E. loos when she told me she was pregnant.

  ‘I didn’t tell you,’ Priscilla says now, voice shaking at the edges, ‘because I’m a selfish bitch and I didn’t want to dredge up old memories. Old shit.’ Priscilla squeezes her hands together on the table, her knuckles white. ‘Roman lived with Ethan. At Edgar Fields.’ She reaches forward and grabs her drink, holds it up, and says, ‘God, I’m making a bit of a habit out of this wine at lunch thing, but … fuck it,’ and downs a mouthful. I can see her hand is trembling.

  I stare at her. My palms are tingling, and my pulse is hot and whooshing in my ears. ‘Y-you’re … sure?’

  She nods, lips pressed together. ‘Yeah. Positive. Matt told me.’

  I nod slowly. ‘So, was Ethan the—’

  ‘Ex-con. Yeah,’ she laughs, a burst of sarcastic angry laughter, and swishes the drink around in the glass. ‘Ethan Sykes doing time. Who saw that coming? Apart from … well, everyone.’

  Priscilla’s eyes shine and instinctively, without even thinking, my hand flies across the table and lands on her wrist. ‘Priscilla …’

  ‘I’m OK.’ She sniffs, and puts her other hand on mine and squeezes. ‘Actually, I’m not. Things are …’

  ‘What?’

  Priscilla shakes her head and takes a deep breath. ‘At home. Things are tough, Lizzie. It’s me. All me. I’m picking fights, I’m being a total fucking nightmare to live with.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not, P—’

  Priscilla shakes her head. ‘I am, Liz. I’m completely ruining it.’

  ‘You know you can talk to me. About anything.’

  She smiles, weakly. ‘It’s my stuff,’ she says. ‘I’ll sort it. I will. Honest.’ And I know after sixteen years of knowing this woman, the pleading look in her eye, that she wants me to leav
e it now. A ball of guilt aches in my chest. All of this will be pulling up old weeds for Priscilla, too. I didn’t stop to think about her really, and looking over at her now, I could cry. This is not just my past. This is hers, too.

  ‘I’m just sorry,’ she says, ruefully.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For not telling you.’

  I shake my head. ‘No. Don’t be, Priscilla. I get it. I do. But …’ I lower my voice. ‘You know I wouldn’t have gone looking for him, don’t you? I wouldn’t have dragged you across the country, looking for him, for Ethan Sykes.’

  Priscilla hesitates. ‘I know that, but I want you to find Roman, Lizzie. I know you’re meant to find him. I know you have to.’

  ‘I want to find him too,’ I tell her. ‘But you come first, Priscilla. You always will.’

  Priscilla shakes her head and brings a bent knuckle to her eye. ‘You motherfucker,’ she laughs. ‘Don’t make me cry off this incredible eyeliner, I look bloody good today.’

  Back at work, I struggle to keep my eyes open, and will the hours away until home time. Cal rattles on about Eva, first girlfriends, supermarket curry sauces, and how the work system is as flawed as life itself, and I nod, chat, try to laugh and joke as much as I usually do, but my mind continues to stew and unravel and run, run, run down dark holes that make me surer than ever, that I can’t trust anyone or anything. Everything feels so unknown, as if all things and all the people I have ever known could be that wizard behind the curtain.

  Ethan Sykes. Why the hell would he live with Ethan of all people? He acted disgracefully towards Priscilla. Pretended he barely knew her, that she was some sort of desperate teenager with a crush, and not someone he chased and pursued, someone he spent a night with, someone he created a life with. He intimidated people, created nothing but trouble for the world, and he was why Roman ended up in that bed. He is why Roman got hold of the stuff he took, and why I almost lost my best friend. Him going to Ethan … it feels like a betrayal. He promised me he’d give it all up, that he’d stop seeing him, stop disappearing with him to dark, dodgy corners, to meet dark, dodgy people, and yet he chose to take shelter with him. Him and not me. Why not me? What happened to push him so far away, that he would choose somewhere like Edgar Fields, with someone like Ethan Sykes, instead of me, after everything we navigated, and everything we planned?