‘No,’ she says. ‘I can tell you what it’s like to have parents who never listen to you, never even notice if you are home sometimes. And all the attention is focused on the little kids, not on me. Believe me, Lilah – you’re lucky.’
I don’t feel very lucky, what with my parents having gone off to identify a body that may or may not be my brother, but she looks so sad that I don’t have the heart to make that dig, so I don’t.
I play Bindi some Manic Street Preachers instead, even though it kills my heart to hear the familiar songs, and she puts on this sort of fixed smile and taps her foot along, which looks really weird. I can tell she hates it, so I take it off again.
I dig out some of the photographs of Jay’s first gig and we look at them in silence.
There’s Ben, his lead singer, all spiky black hair and screwed-up face, howling some song into the microphone.
There’s Eddie, their drummer, head down, blonde shaggy hair over his face and the sweat shining on his bare chest.
There’s Matt, the keyboard player, standing with his legs apart in a typical rock-star pose, his long fair hair limp and parted in the centre. He’s the one who sent me the Facebook message.
And there’s Jay. My brother. Lead guitar. Not posing, or grimacing. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans and his dark hair wasn’t so straight then, so there’s a wing of curls dipping over one eye. He’s looking down at his fingers on the fretboard of his guitar as if he’s really concentrating on the music, and he’s holding the neck of the guitar with care, like you’d hold an egg in your hand.
It was all about the music for Jay.
That guitar sits alone in the corner of his bedroom now.
I pick it up and run my hands over the strings, stroke the smooth polished surface and feel my way past the little switches and knobs on the front.
‘Can I?’ says Bindi.
I shrug.
‘Why not?’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t mind.’
I pass the heavy instrument over to Bindi and she strikes what she thinks is a Rock God pose with it. She looks so ridiculous in her pink jewelled clothes and nose-stud, holding a red Les Paul guitar, that I find myself laughing until my stomach hurts. Then she starts to laugh as well, and we’re both laughing so loud that for a moment we don’t hear the phone with its shrill, insistent tone cutting into the dark hallway outside, but then Benjie starts to bark and our smiles fade, and we leave the guitar on the bed and bolt downstairs.
I snatch up the receiver and can’t speak for a moment, I’m so out of breath.
Bindi hovers behind me with one light hand on my shoulder.
‘Lilah?’ says Dad’s voice. He sounds heavy, broken. I can hear Mum crying in the background.
‘It’s not him,’ he says. ‘Lilah. It’s OK. It’s not Jay.’
I drop the phone and fall to my knees.
Bindi speaks to my dad and then hangs up.
She puts her arms around me.
We sit in the dark hall on the carpet.
I’m shaking so hard that I head-butt her in the teeth at one point.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, when I apologise.
She’s right.
Nothing else matters.
I’m so relieved. We’ve been lucky. It’s not Jay who’s been found dead. This time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Not sure how much more I can handle. I was getting better because of Benjie, but I’m still angry with Jay for putting us through all this. I miss him. I miss him more than ever. I just want to know that he’s OK.
And despite what Bindi says, I’m angry with Mum and Dad for never being there when Jay needed them. Or when I needed them. I’m angry that Jay’s mates deserted him and he felt the need to try drugs and then run away from home. Most of all, I’m angry with one person for what she did and the mess she made of all this.
And that one person is me.
In the few days after we find out that it wasn’t Jay who was found in the river, we tiptoe around the house in a kind of numb shock.
None of us can say his name, but from time to time we give each other a wan smile of relief mixed up with anguish, because we’re still no nearer to finding him. We still don’t know whether he’s dead or alive.
Adam rings up to see how I am, but I can hardly speak.
‘Groo,’ I manage.
It seems a good time to use a Lilah-ism. I can’t find any normal words that even get close to painting how I feel inside.
‘OK,’ says Adam. ‘Well, I’m glad it wasn’t Jay. That means you can kind of have hope again, yeah?’
I can’t answer. My head is so muddled up that I don’t know what I want any more.
Dad takes a day off work, which is dead unusual.
‘Somebody else can look after the lions,’ he says. ‘We need some family time.’
He’s probably right. But the thought of having to spend an entire day with the Old Dudes is stressing me out a bit.
‘You can take a day off school, Lilah,’ says Mum. ‘Just this once.’
My heart sinks into my biker boots.
The one good thing about school is that it keeps me getting up in the mornings. That, Planet Rock and Bindi, with her shy smile and her gentle voice. She’s texted me about a million times since she spent the evening here.
Reeta dropped by with a huge dish of homemade Indian food the next night.
When Mum opened the door and took the hot dish full of fragrant, spicy smells, both women burst into tears and there was lots of hugging.
‘Thank God,’ whispered Reeta. ‘Thank God it wasn’t your boy, Rachel.’
So I reckon that I’m going to have to do Family Day, seeing as I’m part of this family and we haven’t exactly been having the best time lately.
‘Where shall we go?’ asks Dad. ‘Park? It’s a nice day out there.’
So we end up in the park, just the three of us, strolling along past the lake and the Chinese Pagoda and the wooden hut where they serve teas, and to anybody sitting on a bench and watching us pass by, we probably look just like a normal family having a lovely day out together.
Except that the May family is anything but normal.
Dad buys us ice creams from the hut and we do a lap of the park, going towards the swings where I messed about with Adam Carter. Even though that was only a few weeks ago, it feels like about a hundred years.
We don’t talk much. I make a great play out of swiping the top of the ice cream off with my tongue.
I see Mum cast a look towards the swings out of the corner of her eye, and then she catches Dad’s, and he puts his arm around her shoulders.
I stare at the empty orange plastic seats tipping slightly in the breeze, and I see myself aged about six sitting on one of them and gripping the greasy chains tight in my hot hands. Jay’s behind me, with his big mop of hair lifting in the breeze. He’s wearing a striped blue and white T-shirt and brown shorts and he’s pushing me up into the air with a shout of effort, and I’m screaming with happiness and feeling the hot sun on my cheeks and the whoosh of the air as I sink down and fly up again, and my stomach’s doing that sinking thing like I’m on a roller coaster. Somewhere in the background Mum and Dad are two little dots sitting on a bench with bags of sandwiches and a rolled-up rug ready for a picnic.
I watch my parents now trying not to look at the swings, and that flicker of anger starts to burn up my insides again. Except this time it doesn’t stop, but boils up into this great big, tense, tight feeling. I just know it’s going to all burst out of my mouth and I can’t stop it, so I open my mouth and let it out, and even I am frightened by the yelling, but my gob’s taken on a mind of its own and I can’t do anything about it.
‘I’m SICK of hiding my feelings because of Jay!’ I yell.
Mum and Dad both jump at the tone of my voice and the unexpected explosion.
Dad takes a step towards me, but no amount of taming is going to stop this one.
‘I’m sick of not bei
ng able to talk about Jay without you getting in a state or having a go at me or getting all upset!’ I scream.
A flock of pigeons that were pecking at a half-eaten sandwich on the tarmac rise up in a big panicky flight of flapping wings.
‘And I’m angry that Jay felt lonely all the time!’ I continue. ‘And I’m fed up not being myself in case I upset anybody. OK? OK?’
I take my denim jacket off and chuck it on the grass. Then I head off to the swing and sit down on the orange plastic seat. The sharp plastic sides cut into my bottom.
Mum puts one hand over her mouth and stops dead in her tracks.
‘It’s OK,’ says Dad. ‘It’s probably a good idea. She needs to let her feelings out.’
He comes over to where I’m sitting and stands behind me. I feel his big, lion-taming hands on my waist and then there’s a gentle push. I just about get my feet off the ground, and then come skittering down again with my feet trailing in the gravel underneath.
‘Pathetic,’ I say. ‘I’m fifteen, not six. You’ll have to push a bit harder than that.’
‘Aren’t you breaking the park rules?’ says Mum. ‘You’re a bit old for swings now, aren’t you Lilah?’
Dad and I give her a scathing look of impatience.
‘Purleease,’ I say. ‘What are you, some sort of ruletarian?’
She laughs and wipes her eyes with a handkerchief.
‘Oh Lilah,’ she says. ‘Fair enough.’
Then Mum looks around the park like a naughty child caught bunking off school. She sits down on the swing next to me and grabs the chains and closes her eyes tight while Dad gives her an enormous push into the air, and before we know it, he’s darting between us both and we’re flying up into the air with our legs sticking out in front of us, Mum in her sensible knee-length blue skirt and flat shoes, and me all black-jeaned and booted. We scream out like we’re kids, and for just a moment while I’m up there, I close my eyes in the warmth of the sun and imagine it’s Jay below on the ground, staring up at me and waiting for me to come back down so that he can give me another push, and the feeling is so sweet that I smile a pure smile of happiness.
But then it’s sucked away again almost as soon as it comes, and the chill of what’s real hits me in the stomach like a bag of rusty nails. I come down, snatch my black denim jacket up from the grass, dig my hands deep into the pockets and head off across the park without a word. Mum and Dad have the sense to just let me go, and when I get to the park gates and glance back, they’re standing together by the swings, two tiny, dark stick-figures, and I can tell that Mum is crying again from the way that Dad is bending over her.
I still haven’t cried since the day Jay left, over two years ago.
The tears just won’t come.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Things are getting a bit better. I said sorry for the way I exploded in the park that day, and the Old Dudes were really nice about it. They actually bothered to listen to me say how I am feeling, and they said that they understood and weren’t angry. Shockerola!
It’s summer hols now, and I get to lie in bed late and not do any homework – awesome! Now all we need is for Jay to come home.
Somehow, I don’t really know how, we manage to get through the next three months and fix up some sort of family life again.
It’s like the shell of our old family life, but at least it feels kind of safe and full of routine, and it’s the nearest we ever get to being normal again, so I’m glad.
Mum finally goes back to work full-time, but they have a big talk with me first about how I’m feeling, and she agrees not to do any more Sunday parties. Dad decides to cut down his hours at Morley Zoo so that he can be at home a lot more while I’m on summer holidays, and although I’m still angry a lot of the time, I make a super-human effort to try and be nice, because I can see that they’re doing all this for me. And I love Benjie to pieces and it’s not fair on him if I’m snappy all the time, so we go on loads of walks and runs in the park, and it all helps me feel less angry.
One evening Bindi rings me up in tears and asks if I can come over.
‘Spill,’ I say, sitting cross-legged on her bed, where I’m trying on all her rings and bracelets. ‘You’re scaring me. You never cry.’
It’s true. Bindi hardly ever gets upset about anything. I know it must be something quite rubbish, as I haven’t seen her cry since her cat died three years ago.
She takes a big shuddering breath through her tears and looks down past her elegant narrow nose while she gathers up strength to speak.
It takes another minute, during which I become aware of some gorgeous cooking smells wafting upstairs, and my stomach starts leaping about with hunger because I left home without having any supper.
‘Bind,’ I say. ‘It’s me, Lilah. You can tell me anything. I mean, how bad can it be? It’s not like you’re going to tell me you’re pregnant or anything, is it?’
I fall back on her pink quilt laughing at my own witty joke, and then I become aware of something odd.
Bindi’s not laughing.
I sit bolt upright in fright.
‘You’re not!’ I say. ‘No. You can’t be. You don’t do boys.’
The next silence is really heavy. I didn’t know that a silence could be so loaded full of stuff, like it’s about to vomit it all out over the quilt, and flood the room and the hallway outside.
‘Omigod,’ I say. ‘This is, like, total stresserola.’ Trust me to slip in a Lilah-ism at that point. I always do it when I’m nervous, and Bindi’s making me seriously nervous now.
‘Who?’ I say. ‘Who did you sleep with?’
There’s another silence.
Somehow the silences are doing all the answering for Bindi. She doesn’t need to actually say a word.
I feel my legs start to tremble and go sweaty, so I stand up by the bed and look down at the shiny black hair on the crown of her head and the neat parting in the middle of her scalp. As I do that, it’s as if everything that there’s ever been between us just sort of slides away into a big bin of no return, and the whole framework of my rubbish teenage life crumbles and shakes with an earthquake that might actually register on some scale somewhere, and then it collapses to the ground around my feet.
‘Lilah, wait,’ whispers Bindi, as I head for the door. ‘It was all a horrid mistake. He just showed some interest in me and I’d been feeling really miserable at home, that’s all. I’m sorry.’
‘But you don’t DO boys!’ I yell. ‘You’re going to have an arranged marriage!’
Bindi dissolves into more tears.
‘But that doesn’t mean I’m happy with the idea, does it?’ she whispers.
For a nano-second I look at my best mate in floods of tears and my heart leaps with pity for her, but then a vision of her and Adam pushes that aside and I realise that if I don’t want to lash out at Bindi, then I’d better leave.
I shut the bedroom door behind me with admirable quietness.
Then I walk home kicking at every wall and every wheel of every car until my foot is throbbing, my eyes are screwed up in pain, my teeth are glued together and I’ve used as many rude words as I can find. Then I go home, slam upstairs, bang my bedroom door, and I sit on the bed and bang the back of my head on the cream-coloured wallpaper again and again until my brain feels dull and fuzzy.
She lied to me! BINDI. She’s been lying to me for ages and ages.
The one person I thought I could rely on.
I close my eyes and continue to thud my brain to pulp on the wall behind me.
After a while my head goes numb, and little fragments of film start running through my mind.
I remember Bindi’s sad face up in her bedroom while her little brother and sisters ran about the house yelling. And how she was quiet and withdrawn at school some days and hid herself away in the library to study.
With a pang, I realise that Bindi’s been really, really lonely.
And that maybe sleeping with Adam meant that she had s
omebody who liked her, and wanted to spend time with her.
And that maybe I could have spent a bit more time with her myself, if I hadn’t been so caught up in Jay all the time.
I bang my head against the wall again, but this time I’m angry with myself as well as with Bindi.
Usually, when I have a mood, my parents ignore me because they’re too busy stressing out about Jay, but tonight I’m in for a surprise.
Dad bounds upstairs to my bedroom and comes in without knocking.
It isn’t actually a Taming Lilah day, but he watches me banging my head for a moment longer, and then he comes over and sits on the bed next to me and places his hands on my shoulders.
Dad pulls me away from the wall.
His hands feel very strong and firm on the tops of my arms.
‘Geroff,’ I mutter, trying not to look at him. ‘You don’t care. You care more about animals than you do about me. Or Jay. He felt lonely. You and Mum were never here for him when it mattered.’
He tips my chin up so that I have to look him in the eye, and then he speaks to me in the voice he keeps for untamed lions and angry tigers, and I know from the way his eyes are full of hurt and sadness that I’ve gone too far this time, and that he doesn’t really love his animals more than me or Jay.
‘Enough, Lilah,’ is all he says, but it works. It’s what I need to hear.
‘Enough.’
I drift through life for a few days. It’s difficult going into town. Sometimes I run into Bindi, and even though I cross the street and walk away, I can feel her anguished eyes boring into the back of my head and carving out the word ‘SORRY’ in my skull. I know full well that she really IS sorry, and that she has her own problems and I should have noticed them like a proper best mate would have done.
One day she catches me out.
My mobile rings while I’m out shopping with Mum, so I answer it without looking to see who’s calling me.
‘Lilah, it’s me,’ she says. ‘Don’t hang up!’
I catch my breath and put my finger over the red button which will cut her off, but somehow I can’t quite press it. I want to hear what she’s got to say, even though another part of me doesn’t want to hear anything at all from her ever again.
The Taming of Lilah May Page 9