Lifesaving for Beginners

by Ciara Geraghty

  ‘I’m not sure if that’s going to placate Mrs Sullivan.’

  ‘She’s a family friend. She’ll understand.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Mr Pilkington doesn’t seem convinced.

  ‘And Milo will apologise, won’t you, Milo?’ Faith looks at me but only briefly. I don’t have time to say anything. ‘He’ll apologise to Damo. Damien. And Miss Williams, of course. He won’t do it again, will you, Milo?’ Again, the flash of her face towards me, then back to Mr Pilkington, lots of smiling, and then she stands up and pulls at my elbow until I am standing up too. ‘I think it’s best if I take him home now.’

  Mr Pilkington says, ‘Well . . .’ He looks at his watch. I put my hand in my pocket and cross my fingers. I won’t have to go to Mrs Appleby’s class. I can’t believe it.

  Faith says, ‘Thank you for being so understanding. I really appreciate it.’ Now she’s giving him one of those smiles she gives Rob when she wants him to do something, like take out the rubbish or dance with her.

  Mr Pilkington goes the colour of the tomatoes Miss Williams is growing in a pot on the windowsill of the classroom. He opens his mouth but no words come out and Faith turns, grabs me again and steers us out through the door.

  She waits until we’re in the car. ‘Jesus, Milo, what the fuck are you at?’ She bangs her fist against the steering wheel. I reckon it hurt because she doesn’t do it a second time.

  ‘You never used to say the F-word in front of me.’

  Faith looks at me. ‘I know. I’m sorry, Milo. I’m making a bloody dog’s dinner of this.’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy bringing up a nine-year-old boy, going to college, being in a band and looking after the café.’ I’m glad I said that because she sort of smiles. It’s a pale kind of smile, like when you don’t mix enough Ribena in the water. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘You said it to Dad. On the phone.’

  She says nothing for a moment. Then she nods. ‘I didn’t mean for you to hear that stuff.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, Milo.’

  ‘’Sall right.’

  ‘I was just . . . I was upset.’

  ‘Because Mam’s not your real mam?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I heard you talking. To Dad. And that man in the office. Jonathon. I’m not stupid, you know.’

  ‘I know you’re not stupid. I just . . . I should have told you all this myself, I’ve been . . . Christ!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help overhearing. I wasn’t spying.’

  ‘No, it’s not . . . I’m sorry, Milo. Shit. I’m sorry. I’m crap at this.’

  ‘You’re not that bad.’

  ‘Then why do you keep hitting people?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘George Pullman last week. And now Damo.’

  ‘That’s only two people.’

  ‘But Damo. He’s your best mate. You never fight, you two. What were you fighting about?’

  I look away. Out of the window. The school looks empty when it’s not home-time. ‘Can I tell you later?’ If she goes to band practice later, I’ll be in bed when she gets back – Mrs Barber always makes me go to bed dead early – and I’ll pretend to be asleep and she’ll forget to ask me in the morning.

  She mightn’t go though. She hasn’t been to band practice for ages.

  Faith nods and turns the key in the ignition. It doesn’t always start first time round. It’s Dad’s old car, the one he taught her to drive in. He says he’ll teach me to drive too, when I’m seventeen, but it’ll be pretty tricky, seeing as he lives in Scotland with Celia and I live in Brighton with Faith.

  Damo is right, I suppose. About Faith not being my sister anymore. I don’t even think she’s my half-sister. Not really. I wish she was still my sister. She says she’s crap but she’s not. Not really. It’s just hard to be good at things when you’re sad a lot of the time.

  Faith lets me sit in the front so I don’t think she’s too mad with me. She even lets me put the car in gear and take the handbrake off. She yells, ‘Clutch!’ and I put the car in second, then third, then fourth, but we never get to fifth. The traffic is too slow for that.

  The great thing about having my bedroom all to myself again is the space. For example, I can use both bedside lockers now, if I want to. For books, say. I could put books on top of the bedside locker that was on Thomas’s side. There’s nothing on it at the moment. But the point is that there could be things on it. If I wanted to put things on it. If, say, I ran out of room on my bedside locker. There’s the extra space now.

  It’s Thursday night. I hate Thursday nights. They remind me of Thomas. I hardly think about him at all and then Thursday night comes round again and he advances like floodwater. I suppose you could say that Thursday night was sort of like ‘our night’. I know, I hate couples who have their own special night of the week but it’s not like we ever told anyone. We’d just say, ‘Sorry, I’ve made other plans,’ to anyone who asked us to do anything on a Thursday night. It was never usually a problem for me because Minnie knew about our Thursday-night arrangement and Ed usually worked late in the café on Thursday nights. But Thomas was often invited to book launches and film premieres and what have you but if it happened to be on a Thursday night, he’d say, ‘Sorry, I’ve made other plans,’ and that would be that. We never discussed it, this Thursday-night thing. It just sort of happened that way, I suppose. Not long after he moved into the apartment, as far as I remember.

  In fact it was a Thursday. The day that Thomas moved in. But really, he’d been moving in for a long time. Long before he ever brought up the subject of his moving in. He did it by stealth. He was so good that I hardly noticed myself until it was mostly too late.

  It started off with a toothbrush. I let this pass, being a bit of a stickler for oral hygiene. Soon, other items appeared. A disposable razor, a book of blades, a travel pack of shaving cream, aftershave and shower gel. Citrus-smelling. I opened the little bottles when he was out and inhaled them. Lemons. That bittersweet smell.

  Clothes began to appear in the wardrobe. I found his gym bag in the utility room. Shoes under the bed. When he arrived one night with a towel – a small, frayed scrap of material that would have difficulty covering one cheek of his arse – I began to experience disquiet.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked, stuffing the towel into the drawer in the bathroom that is home to sanitary towels and tampons and painkillers and a hot water bottle and a couple of copies of Now magazine. It is – unofficially, at least – my time-of-the-month drawer. I have never put a towel into this drawer.

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘It’s just that your towels are so soft.’

  ‘Towels are supposed to be soft,’ I told him, grazing my fingers against the thing masquerading as Thomas’s towel.

  ‘Yes, but they’re a bit too soft. It’s taking me ages to dry myself.’

  I said, ‘If, by drying, you mean peeling the top layer of skin off yourself, then this towel is perfect.’

  Thomas smiled. ‘I love it when you’re stern.’

  I said, ‘And that drawer is not for towels.’ If you were to go ahead and describe my tone, you could do worse than call it ‘prim’.

  And then he said, ‘Let’s go to bed,’ as if there were nothing prim about my tone.

  ‘But it’s only –’ I looked at my watch ‘– nine o’clock.’

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘That gives us two hours. Plenty of time for a spot of Grey’s Anatomy. Bagsy being the patient this time.’

  ‘Subtle,’ I told him. But I forgot about the discoloured dishcloth of a towel and followed him into the bedroom.

  When I am writing, I have to be asleep by eleven so I can get up at six, shower, dress and drink a lot of coffee and be at my desk by seven.

  The next morning, he got up at the same time as me, went for a jog, came back, dropped his clothes on the bathroom floor and used up all the hot water in the shower. Then he strolled in
to the kitchen wearing nothing round his waist but the tiny, frayed towel that barely covered one cheek, even though his bottom was of the two-eggs-in-a-hanky type.

  Thomas opened the fridge. ‘There’s never any food in here.’ By food, he meant potatoes and steak and turnips.

  I say nothing.

  ‘I could go shopping.’ There was something about the way he said it that made me stop doing what I was doing – making more coffee – and look up.

  ‘I’ve got everything I need.’

  He stuck his head back inside the fridge. ‘You’ve got two eggs, three low-fat natural yoghurts, a lettuce that is two days past its sell-by date and an empty bag of mini Kit Kats.’ He closed the fridge door. ‘I’ll go shopping,’ he said again.

  ‘No!’ I said. It came out a bit panicky. ‘I mean, there’s no need; it’ll just go to waste.’

  ‘No, it won’t. I’ll eat it.’

  ‘But you don’t live here.’

  ‘I’ve been here every night for the last week.’

  When I thought about it, I was shocked to discover that it was true.

  He said, ‘I’m starved and I’m tired of eating out.’

  ‘Then why don’t you go home and boil up a pot of those spuds you’re always talking about?’

  ‘The Golden Wonders?’ he asked, a smile spreading like fertiliser across his face.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re not ideally suited for boiling. You’d be better off baking or roasting those ones, Kat.’

  ‘Then you could go home and bake them. Or roast them,’ I said. ‘How about that?’

  ‘Or,’ he said, closing the fridge door and moving to the kitchen table. ‘I could move in.’

  Silence fell like fog. Thomas pulled out a chair and sat down. It creaked under the weight of him. After a while, he said, ‘It makes sense, Kat. I’m here most of the time already.’

  ‘You said nothing would change,’ I said, eventually. ‘You promised.’ I sounded petulant, like a child being pulled from a playground.

  Thomas looked confused. He said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘On St Stephen’s Day that time. When you said that thing . . .’

  ‘When I told you that you loved me?’

  ‘You said nothing would change.’

  ‘That was ages ago. And anyway, nothing is changing, Kat. I just want to move on a bit.’ He reached for my hand across the table. ‘At least think about it, will you?’

  After a while, I nodded my head. I said I would. I said I’d think about it.

  Now it’s Thursday again. I keep meaning to make a Thursday arrangement with Minnie. Take her to see a play or something. She’s cracked about the theatre. But then I forget and – BAM! – it’s Thursday again. I don’t know where the weeks go, I really don’t.

  I take three books from the pile on my bedside locker and put them on Thomas’s bedside locker. There. That’s much better.

  It’s really great having all the extra space again.

  It makes such a difference.

  Me and Damo are at the Funky Banana. I didn’t say sorry for hitting him but Damo got me in a headlock in the playground the next day at school and ran around for a bit and then let me go and laughed, so I knew we were friends again.

  Jack asks about Faith. He says, ‘How’s the lovely Faith these days?’ He always calls her the lovely Faith and wants to know how she’s doing. I don’t know why he doesn’t ask her himself when she’s here.

  I say, ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Has she heard from Jonathon yet?’

  Faith rings Jonathon nearly every day and he never has any news for her. But I don’t tell Jack that. I just shrug as if I don’t know. I’m not mad about talking to people about it, to be honest.

  Jack is great. Damo thinks so too. He has a motorbike and he always gives us the biggest slice of banoffi with ice cream on the side, even though you’re not supposed to have ice cream on the side because of all the cream on the top of the banoffi. It’s hard to pick a very favourite dessert but banoffi is definitely one of my favourites. I’m not allowed to pick up the bowl and lick it in the café so I just use my finger instead. Damo puts a blob of ice cream on the end of his nose with his finger and then licks it off with his tongue.

  Earwigs are the only thing Damo is afraid of, on account of the way they crawl inside your ear and lay eggs and then you have millions of baby earwigs inside your brain. He’s always putting his fingers in his ears, checking. When he takes them out, they’ve got yellow wax on them and then he chases me around the Funky Banana, like he’s going to wipe the wax on my T-shirt with his fingers. Jack doesn’t mind. He is cleaning up. He says this is his favourite time in the café. When there’re no customers. I prefer it when there’re lots of people. I like guessing what they’ll order. That’s easy with the regulars, although it depends on what time they come in at. The banana and peanut-butter muffins are the most popular. Jack says they’re our signature bun. He makes them now. They’re nearly as good as Mam’s.

  Jack says he’ll take me and Damo to the cinema, just as soon as he gets his paperwork done. He does it on the computer. He types in his username and password. His username is Jack2276, because his name is Jack and the last four digits of the café’s telephone number are 2276. His password is cinnamon, which happens to be the name of his cat. He’s had the same password for ages. I’ve told him he should change it regularly but he never bothers.

  We’re going to see The Three Musketeers. We are going to take it in turns to be d’Artagnan. We use the cardboard holders inside the rolls of tinfoil, for swords. We point them at each other and shout, ‘ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL.’

  We were late getting to the café because Faith and Rob were fighting again, in our house, before we got into Rob’s van to drive over to the Funky Banana. Jack said that me and Damo could have a sleepover in his house because Four Men and a Woman are doing a gig in London. A gig is like a concert except you don’t get paid.

  But Faith said no. She said she’d come straight home after the gig and pick us up, which is a pity because that means we won’t get a really long go of Jack’s Xbox. Jack lets us play Batman: Arkham City, even though you’re not supposed to until you’re fifteen.

  That’s when the fight started, because Rob said, ‘Ah come on, Faith. We haven’t been out in ages. We can stay with Kegs. It’ll be a laugh.’ Kegs is Rob’s older brother. He wears a suit and works in an office. I’m pretty sure Kegs isn’t his real name.

  Faith shook her head. ‘I can’t. I want to have a clear head for tomorrow. I’m going into the café to do the books.’ The books aren’t really books at all. It’s just sums. Like the amount of money the customers pay for a Sweet Funky Monkey sandwich (that’s a banana and honey sandwich, which happens to be the most popular one for the customers who are about my age), minus the cost of the bread and bananas and honey you use to make the sandwiches. Ant and Adrian are the best at the books but they are in London. Dad used to like doing the books. He said it relaxed him. Mam said there were better ways to relax. She said it in a funny sort of voice and looked at him weird and then they’d go for a nap, which is when you go to sleep in the middle of the day with no pyjamas on. But that was ages ago. Way before he went to Scotland to live with Celia.

  Faith said, ‘I’m not going to just palm him off on any Tom, Dick or Harry.’

  Rob said, ‘You’re not palming him off. You’re going out. For one night. One measly night. And this gig is important. That scout could be there tonight. He might want to talk to us afterwards. We don’t want to be rushing off.’

  They were standing in the hall, talking in really loud whispers that sounded like Mrs Barber’s cat hissing.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry if his mother dying has inconvenienced you.’ Faith doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds mad. Really mad, like the time her appendix burst and she missed the Raconteurs at the Hammersmith Apollo.

  ‘Faith, stop. You know I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just—’


  ‘Let’s see, what else? Oh yes. And I can see how you’ve overlooked this tiny detail, but let’s not forget that I’ve just found out that my whole life is a lie. Everything I thought was true is in fact the opposite of true.’

  ‘False’ I think, but I don’t say it out loud. Miss Williams loves opposites. She makes us play this game. She calls it ‘Word Buzz’, when she shouts out a word and points at one of us and we have to shout back, except we have to say the exact opposite of the word she has said. It’s better than mathematical patterns, I suppose. And we don’t get in trouble for shouting.

  Rob says, ‘That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?’

  Faith says, ‘No. I don’t.’

  That’s when Faith looks at Rob like she’s about to give him a Chinese burn. She opens the hall door and walks out to the van. Rob shakes his head. He says, ‘Come on, Milo and Damo. It looks like we’re going.’

  Later, at the café, Faith says, ‘I’ll bring you back something from London. What would you like?’

  I say, ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’

  Faith says, ‘I’ll get you some sweets, yeah? And I’ll pick you up from Jack’s house after the gig, yeah? Around midnight, all right? I’ll ring if I’m going to be a bit later, OK?’ She doesn’t kiss me because Damo is here.

  I say, ‘You know, I could have a sleepover at Jack’s. I don’t mind. I want to.’ This is not exactly one hundred per cent true. I mean, Jack’s great and everything. It’s just, when it gets dark, I like being in my own house. Faith doesn’t mind me leaving the landing light on when I go to bed.

  Faith hugs me but I don’t think Damo notices. He’s too busy telling Jack what happens in the movie, even though Jack keeps telling him not to. Jack doesn’t like knowing what’s going to happen next.

  ‘And you have to start thinking about what you want for Christmas, yeah?’ She doesn’t say anything about Santa. That’s one good thing about your sister minding you instead of your mam. Even if she’s not really your sister. You don’t have to pretend to believe in Santa.

  I say, ‘It’s only November.’ But I’m glad she mentioned Christmas, all the same. I was a little bit worried about it this year.