‘You can plant a tree if that’s what you want to do. If you care that much about it, you can plant a tree. Do what you like. Trees take about a hundred years to grow but if that’s what you want then do it. I don’t want a tree.’
I let go of the back of the chair and took a few steps back.
Danny said, ‘If you don’t hold on to this chair I’m going to break my neck.’
If you care that much about it, you can plant a tree. It seemed like such a mean thing to say. It probably doesn’t sound that bad. I am a sheltered child. I felt like I’d had a door slammed in my face when I hadn’t even known there had been a door there.
This was also around the age I quite often burst into tears for no reason, so I don’t suppose either of us was that surprised when my voice shook and I said something like, Oh my god you don’t have to be like that I’m just asking—
‘Alena.’
‘How would you feel if you died and I didn’t do anything, I just forgot about you?’ I said.
He should have probably got down from the chair but he didn’t; he just stood there holding the smoke alarm and not looking at me. ‘Nobody’s forgotten about anybody,’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes, they have: you’ve forgotten about her,’ when what I really meant was that I had forgotten about her without even noticing – but his face went very dark.
‘I was twenty-two,’ he said again, like that mattered. ‘How was I supposed to know – I didn’t know what to do. How was I supposed to – you can’t just turn round now and go, Oh I want a tree, I want a plaque, I want somewhere to go, when you weren’t even – maybe if I hadn’t been so busy worrying about you then I might have had time—’
I remember he was suddenly like some person I didn’t know: some strange, angry person whose voice was rising for no reason – and he was still standing on a chair and in my memory he was actually frightening, with this weird, blank, angry expression – and I was saying, ‘Everybody has something, you’re supposed to remember people—’ and he was saying, ‘I’m the only one who does remember—’ and then, like a psycho child, because I guess I didn’t want to hear what he had to say, I picked up a glass from the kitchen counter and smashed it on the floor. I don’t remember doing this but I know it happened and later on when Nick was sweeping up the glass and I told him I couldn’t remember doing it he said he believed me, which was nice. Honestly, it was like I was possessed for a second. Somebody’s ghost came into the kitchen and ran through me.
Danny said, ‘Jesus Christ, what the hell are you doing?’ and then tried to get down from the chair but he tripped and smacked his knee on the coffee table. And he dropped the smoke alarm and when it hit the floor it went off, and when Nick walked in about a minute later, the smoke alarm was shrieking and Danny was shouting at me and I was crying and the neighbours were in the hallway about to call the police.
So that was the last time I raised the subject with Danny.
Later that day Nick sat me down and had this watershed I’m going to talk to you like an adult conversation with me which after thinking I wanted it, it turned out I hated and I immediately wanted cuddly toys and bedtime stories again. Nick sat me down and told me that after she died there was so much stuff to deal with – with me and my aunt and uncle and everything – that Danny never really got a chance to actually grieve, which, Nick says, is a really important process, and that’s one of the reasons Danny’s basically still walking around all shell-shocked and like he’s mortally wounded all these years later. Because he never had a chance to grieve properly. And I just thought, when Nick said that, and I still just think: well, guess what, neither did I.
I learned my lesson though. Things that are not safe to talk about. Me and Danny were weird and careful with each other for ages, like we were covered in broken glass and kept finding bits of it on our skin. I never wanted it to happen again. I hate fighting. I still cry easily. You have to be careful with me as well, I guess. Or I break things.
TEN
Teagan never cries. Almost never. We’ve been friends nearly six years and the only time I’ve ever seen her cry was once watching Finding Nemo. She used to wear these thick-lensed glasses to school and people used to try and make fun of her and steal them off her and whatever, but within about thirty seconds it would be obvious that she wasn’t going to get upset or even respond in any way; she’d just carry on with whatever she was doing and look bored, and there is just no point trying to pick on someone like that. They are immune. This is a good quality to have in a friend, I think.
She wears contact lenses now, anyway. And she has a sheepskin duffel coat that used to be her mum’s that every girl in our school is in love with. And I have my leather bag from Camden Market and no one really talks to us but honestly, we sometimes feel invincible.
Monday night, we are in the coffee shop, the same booth at the back where we always sit.
We spend a lot of time at the coffee shop. Teagan even drinks actual coffee, and her parents will let her stay out late if they know that’s where we are.
A few months ago somebody turned the empty building on the corner of the street into art studios, and suddenly all these skinny, good-looking people are here all the time, having intense conversations over black coffees and then standing outside to smoke. They never notice us so we can just watch, admiringly. Other kids in our class meet outside the Caffè Nero near our school in the evenings, but no one’s got any money to do anything so they just stand around smoking cigarettes they’ve stolen off their older sisters or drinking gin and orange squash or whatever weird combination they’ve smuggled out of their house in a plastic bottle. Me and Teagan joined them once but nobody spoke to us and it was raining and cigarette smoke makes me want to throw up so we left. We came here.
Tonight it’s nearly empty. The radio is playing quietly and Zahra who works here is sitting behind the counter, reading a law textbook and scribbling in the margins with a pencil. Nick is in the back office doing money.
There’s a chalkboard on the wall behind the counter that’s supposed to say that day’s special offers, and Zahra is artistic so she’s supposed to update it. But there never are any special offers, so it always just says stuff like, Today’s Special: Revolution! And then a drawing. Tonight it says, Buy one cup of coffee, get one cup of coffee and then a picture of a rainbow with a coffee cup at the end.
I have aspirations to write on the chalkboard myself, one day.
Outside it’s dark and starting to spit rain against the windows. Teagan has her laptop on the table and is pretending to research our joint history project, but really she’s reading music on the Internet. She likes to do this. Look up the scores for pieces of classical music that she wants to learn on her violin, and then just sit there, reading the screen like it’s a book. Teagan is a big classical music geek. She’s always going round school with her headphones in, listening to Sibelius or Schoenberg or some other dead composer. I know the names of the composers because she emails me their violin concertos sometimes. I hardly ever listen to them but I think it’s nice when people are super enthusiastic about something.
Sometimes I think that I need a weird interest or a hobby or a special skill. Something where people will say, Oh, yeah, that’s Lena Kennedy, she’s really into Caribbean cooking, or Yeah, that’s Alena, she’s amazing at gymnastics.
Instead of what they say now which is, Oh, that’s Lena Kennedy, she lives with her gay brother and his boyfriend. Which is not really about me at all.
‘Are there any pictures of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand?’ I say.
I have written History project! at the top of a blank page in my notebook, and highlighted it in purple.
Teagan turns away from the screen and looks at me. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘I hope not.’
‘Look it up.’
‘In a minute.’ She turns back to the screen, starts twisting a strand of hair round her finger. She got her hair cut right after Christmas, super short with a sideswept fringe that s
he keeps tugging at, like that will make it grow long again. She has two piercings in each ear, which isn’t allowed at our school, and now she’s got no hair to hide them with she knows she’s going to get a letter to her parents any day. She doesn’t care.
‘Because we could do a visual history of the causes of the war,’ I say. ‘With pictures.’
‘Or we could do a cartoon history of the causes of the war,’ Teagan says, turning back to the screen. ‘Like we could draw it all ourselves and make it really funny.’
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny.’
‘All right, we’ll make it really sad, then.’
I doodle a little sad face in my notebook. ‘I don’t think he’s coming.’
She looks at her phone. ‘He is. He’s getting the bus. He’s probably on it now.’
‘I don’t think he leaves his house. I think he just stays at home coding and listening to weird electronic music.’
‘He’s not into coding.’
‘Well, whatever he’s into, he just doesn’t seem as if he’s the most sociable—’
‘And he doesn’t like his house. He’s a home-avoider. Sometimes when I finish violin practice it’s like six o’clock and he’ll still be in the computer lab on his own. The caretaker has to kick him out.’ Teagan puts her phone down. ‘Honestly. He was excited we invited him.’
‘I don’t think excited is one of his emotions.’
‘He was slightly less depressed for about half a second.’
We were both kind of reluctant to invite Ollie to hang out here with us, because the coffee shop is our place and is better than most other people’s places, and once you’ve invited someone somewhere they might think they’re always invited and just start turning up. Also Ollie gets a weird look on his face when I mention Nick or my brother and you don’t know with people, sometimes.
But we invited him anyway, because we are good people.
‘So Nick’s like – your stepbrother, or your stepdad, or something?’ Ollie said when we told him about the coffee shop.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really. He’s just Nick.’
‘What do you call him?’
‘I call him Nick.’
‘What did you call him when you were little?’
‘I called him Nick.’
‘Regardless,’ said Teagan, which is a word she likes. ‘If you want to meet up with us there one night—’ she glanced at me, and I nodded. ‘Or whatever. That’s fine.’
Ollie rubbed one of his eyes and smudged black eyeliner into the crease of his eyelid. ‘All right,’ he said. And then, after a while, ‘Thanks.’
By the time he turns up it’s nearly closing time and when he sits down he says, ‘I can’t stay long. I have to go home. There’s something wrong with the dog. I think she ate something. She was sick on the carpet.’
Zahra at the counter is looking at us with her eyebrows raised like she’s never seen me with anybody else but Teagan, which she probably hasn’t. She briefly disappears into the back office, maybe to tell Nick the news.
‘What kind of dog is it?’ says Teagan.
‘I dunno. Some kind of terrier or something. She’s a pain.’ Ollie’s eyes are roaming round the walls of the coffee shop, looking at all the posters.
The way Ollie does his eyeliner is actually beautiful. I have tried wearing eyeliner about four times and even watched a bunch of tutorials on the Internet about how to do it properly, and it just looked wobbly and uneven and stupid and made me look old – not sophisticated old, just old – and so I gave up. But Ollie does it perfect, so he just looks like he has naturally black-rimmed eyes, like some sad exotic bird or lizard or something. It’s really a skill he should get more credit for.
I get up to get him a drink and when I sit back down he is looking at the chaos that me and Teagan have spread out all over the table: textbooks and notebooks and pens and lip balm and empty glasses. He looks slightly stressed by it. I think Ollie likes things to be neat.
The black-and-white postcard from the storage locker is also on the table. He picks it up.
‘See that woman with curly hair, with her fist raised?’ says Teagan. ‘That’s Lena’s mother.’
I always show her the stuff that I find in storage. Her parents are beautifully neat and organised people with photo albums all labelled by date and subject, and her mum did a family history course and produced a family tree with all these black and white photos of Victorian relatives who died of consumption. She has all the documents in a special album with protective archive paper. So the near non-existence of my family history has always been interesting to Teagan.
Ollie is staring down at the picture, hair falling in his face. ‘I thought she died,’ he says.
‘She did,’ I tell him. ‘It’s an old picture.’
‘She died after it was taken,’ adds Teagan, helpfully, which makes it sound like she died later that afternoon instead of twenty years later.
He looks at it more closely, then glances back up at me. ‘Is she protesting Vietnam or something?’
‘Uh, no,’ I say. ‘It’s not that old.’
‘It’s about nuclear weapons,’ says Teagan. We looked it up. ‘They were all camping out at an army base to protest nuclear weapons. They were there for years. Isn’t that a great picture? I love that picture. In a million years my mum would never have—’
‘Anyway, give it back,’ I say, but Ollie has turned the card over and is reading the text.
‘Who’s Sue Dines, Lynn Wallace, all these other women?’
‘Don’t know.’ I reach and snatch it out of his hand, tuck it back inside my notebook. ‘Lynn Wallace was one of my mum’s friends.’
‘Which one’s she?’
‘The black woman on the left, in the anorak.’
‘Do you know her?’
‘No. My brother remembered her. I tried looking her up but there’s about a thousand Lynn Wallaces.’
‘Oh.’ He looks over my shoulder and I can see him reading the chalkboard. Then back at me. ‘She’s dead,’ he says. ‘Your mum.’
‘Very tactful, Oliver,’ says Teagan.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘She died.’
‘How old were you when she—’
‘I was three.’
‘Oh. How old was your brother?’
‘Twenty-two.’
I don’t know why this is difficult to process but his eyebrows are knitted together like he’s thinking really hard. ‘Why’s he so much older than you? He’s twenty years older than you.’
‘Yes,’ I say, like I’m talking to a child. ‘It’s because he was born twenty years before me.’
‘But I mean—’
Teagan clears her throat and says, ‘Ollie, when did your dad die?’
Ollie blinks a few times. ‘He didn’t die. He lives in Swansea.’
‘What?’
‘He lives in Swansea. He has another family.’ He picks up his headphones from the table and loops the wire round his fingers. ‘They just had a baby.’
‘I thought he was dead,’ says Teagan.
‘So did I,’ I say.
‘No. My mum wishes he was dead, I think.’
‘I can’t believe this.’ Teagan is looking at Ollie like he’s betrayed her deeply. Honestly, I don’t know why we both thought his dad was dead other than that Ollie never mentions him and goes around school with a sort of tragic air about him.
‘Sorry,’ says Ollie, shrugging.
‘How often do you see him?’ I say.
‘I dunno. Not that much. He’s got all these other kids now.’
Teagan is shaking her head. ‘I really thought he was dead.’
‘No. Swansea.’ Ollie taps his fingers against the table top. He hasn’t opened his drink. I gave him a can of the organic apple cola from the fridge next to the counter. It’s nice. I want him to drink it and acknowledge this.
‘So was she some kind of radical or hippie or something?’ says Ollie. ‘Your mum?’
/> ‘What?’
‘Protesting nuclear weapons.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yeah. I guess. I don’t know.’
‘How did she die?’
‘She had a brain thing,’ I say. ‘An aneurysm.’
‘Like, sudden?’
‘Yes. Sudden.’
‘Oh,’ Ollie says. And then, ‘Sorry.’
‘Ollie, what do you think about Jacob Carlisle?’ says Teagan. She nods her head in my direction. ‘Since you’re so interested in her family. Her brother’s got a job with him.’
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ says Ollie.
‘Yeah. He’s running for mayor but nobody knows. Lena, if he wants to win he should probably tell somebody that he’s running.’
‘Good idea,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell Danny.’
‘Anyway, I looked him up. I think he’s good looking. He’s not even that old. I think he’s going on The List.’
The List is a piece of paper with The List written at the top that she keeps inside her violin case. It’s a list of men she’s in love with. A lot of them are really old. I’m not totally clear on the purpose of The List and neither is Teagan, but it’s been going for a long time. For about five minutes Nick’s name was on it but I made her take it off. ‘Wrong in so many ways,’ I told her.
‘What’s the list?’ says Ollie, and Teagan says, ‘You’re not ready for that information, Oliver.’
Ollie stays for less than half an hour and he never drinks his apple cola – he takes it with him when he leaves, tucked inside the pocket of the grey hoodie he always wears instead of a coat.
It’s nearly nine. The coffee shop usually closes by then. There’s a film on TV and Teagan is supposed to stay over. We’ve been promised the sofa and the remote.
There was a time when we were little she wasn’t allowed to sleep over at my house. Then she used her parents as a case study of intolerance during Celebrating Diversity Week at our school. She had a poster and everything. This is Rachel and David Esler and they are intolerant. This was years ago, but Danny and Nick continue to find it hilarious.
We give up on our history project and I head to the back office to ask to go home, even though I promised to stay out of the way.
Troublemakers Page 4