He says, in a weird, stiff voice, ‘What do you know about Greenham Common, Alena?’
‘Nothing, basically,’ I say. ‘But I’d like to. Because I found this video. It’s really amazing, Danny, it’s actually a video on the Internet with her in it, and you’re there too, it must be you—’
‘What video? What are you talking about?’
‘I’ll show you,’ I say, ‘hang on,’ and then I go to my room to get my phone and when I come back out Danny is looking at Nick with an expression I can’t read. Nick is giving him a don’t ask me look.
‘Here,’ I say, handing him the phone, and he holds it in his hand for a minute like I’ve given him a lit firework and he doesn’t know what to do with it.
‘You have to press play,’ I say, but he doesn’t, so Nick leans over and presses it for him.
And then all the women’s voices fill the kitchen, saying all their smart brave things again, and then there’s her voice, and Danny watches with absolutely no expression on his face whatsoever, even though Nick totally grins when my mum comes on and says, ‘Danny, god, that’s you, have you ever seen this?’
He shakes his head, just slightly.
When it’s over, he looks up at me and says, ‘How did you find this?’
‘Someone at school found it by accident,’ I say.
‘Who? Teagan?’
‘No. Someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Ollie.’
‘Who’s Ollie?’
‘Ollie’s the goth kid?’ says Nick.
‘Yeah. No. He’s not goth, really. He’s just like that. He likes art.’
‘He likes art,’ Danny repeats, like this is a sentence that doesn’t mean anything. ‘Ollie who likes art. How did he find something like that by accident?’
‘He’s doing a project on the history of political protest,’ I say, which is sort of true. ‘He was doing research. And he recognised her name from my Greenham Common postcard.’
Danny’s shoulders hunch up a little bit and he glances at Nick again, like, is this your fault? ‘What’s your Greenham Common postcard?’
‘It’s this postcard I found in the storage locker. With her on it. Actually it’s her and Lynn Wallace, that other person I was asking you about. So I suppose they were both—’
‘Fine,’ says Danny. ‘Sounds like you know it all. Good for you.’ He hands the phone back to me.
I take it, glancing at Nick, uncertainly, and say, ‘Do you want me to send you a link to it?’
‘No,’ says Danny.
‘Send me a link to it, Lena,’ says Nick.
Danny narrows his eyes at him. The whole atmosphere in the kitchen has changed. I think broken glass, smoke alarm. I carry on anyway.
‘You must have been really young,’ I say. ‘If it’s 1982 you must have been—’
‘I was one and a half,’ Danny says, flatly. ‘Really responsible parenting. Story of my life. Being dragged all over the country with a bunch of women who think they’re changing the world.’ His face has gone blank. ‘Why have I never heard of this Ollie person? You’ve got some goth friend now that only Nick knows about?’
‘He’s not a goth. Do you even know what a goth is? He’s not anything, he’s just weird. He’s arty.’
‘Whatever. Are we done here?’
‘I think it’s kind of cool,’ I say. ‘I mean, she’s so young. I never knew that she—’
‘It’s not cool,’ Danny says.
‘Or not cool, more like – just, impressive, I guess. She looks like—’
‘It’s not cool, it’s not impressive. None of it was. Ever.’
‘Danny,’ says Nick. ‘She’s only saying—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Talk about what?’ I say.
‘Any of it.’
There’s a silence, and then Nick says, ‘I don’t see why she can’t—’
‘It doesn’t set a very good example, does it?’ says Danny. ‘For starters.’
‘What doesn’t?’
‘It’s a bad example. Her behaviour. I know what you’re like, Lena. You read about things or you hear about things or I’ll tell you about something—’
‘You don’t tell me about anything.’
‘—and you’ll get the wrong idea about it.’
‘So what’s the right idea about it?’ I say, at the same time as I’m thinking, That’s not what I’m like. I don’t know what that even means.
‘It was irresponsible. It was dangerous. She shouldn’t have been there with a baby. You have no idea how much looking after babies need.’
‘Neither do you,’ I say, and then, ‘Anyway, obviously nothing bad happened. You’re fine, aren’t you? She didn’t drop you down a well, did she?’
Nick snorts a laugh and Danny glares at him.
I say, ‘Lynn Wallace isn’t in that video but there’s some other Greenham Common ones that she’s in—’
‘Oh, that’s right, Lynn was everywhere,’ Danny snaps. ‘Any fucking place there was trouble.’
‘Danny,’ Nick says.
My brother is not looking at either of us now. He’s looking up at the ceiling like some divine being might come and save him from us both. ‘I can’t talk about this right now. I can’t talk about this right now. I’ve got work to do.’
‘No you don’t,’ I say. ‘You’re just—’
‘Yes. I do. I’m starting a new job tomorrow. I have stuff to do. Talk to Nick about it if you care that much about it. Do what you like.’ He looks at Nick. ‘Are we done here?’ he says again.
It’s not really clear if he’s talking about the washing up or what.
‘I suppose so,’ says Nick, and Danny says, ‘Good,’ and he leaves the room and goes down the corridor into their bedroom and slams the door.
‘He doesn’t have anything to do,’ I say, when he’s gone. ‘He just doesn’t want to talk to me. I can’t even ask one single question about something that happened years ago.’
I think Nick might tell me off for sounding like a brat but he just stares after Danny for a few seconds, and then looks at me. ‘I know,’ he says. We’ve both lowered our voices. ‘You’ve just got to – you know, it’s just hard for him to talk about certain—’
‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to talk about him. I want to talk about her.’
Nick tilts his head to the side, looks at me very seriously. ‘You want to talk about her.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is this suddenly coming from?’
‘Oh god, you’re just like him.’
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I’m not. No, I’m not. I’d like to talk about her too but it’s not that—’
‘I think it’s crazy that I’ve never even heard of Greenham Common when it’s apparently famous and my own mother was there.’
‘Well, I think it’s crazy too, but maybe your school should be—’
‘It’s not my school’s fault. It’s his.’
‘Alena.’
‘What about Lynn? Do you know who Lynn was?’
Because I’m looking closely, I can see him actually flinch, slightly. ‘She was your mum’s friend. Her best friend, probably.’
‘Why have I never met her?’
‘Do you want to meet her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Danny and her – they fell out. Right after the funeral. They had a terrible fight. This was when your aunt was still trying to take you to Australia, he was under a lot of stress—’
‘And they just never spoke again?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Do you know where she is now?’
‘No.’
‘Does Danny know?’
‘I doubt it.’
She is somewhere, I think. People don’t just disappear. Not even people who die.
‘If you really want to know I can try and ask Danny about her,’ says Nick. ‘But not right now. When there’s a better time. OK?’
My throat feels tight and I nod because I don’t feel like talking anymore. We are quiet for a while.
‘Do you want some ice cream?’ Nick says. ‘There’s about three scoops left.’
I wipe my nose with my sleeve. ‘All right,’ I say.
‘Do you want me to slice some banana or something on it?’
‘All right.’
‘Listen.’ His voice goes gentle. ‘You just need to be a bit careful when you want to talk to him about—’
‘I don’t want to talk about anything,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter. I have a physics test tomorrow. I have to revise.’
He pauses, and then turns to get the ice cream out of the freezer. He puts it down on the counter. ‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about gravity.’
‘Do you want me to help?’
‘Not unless you know anything about gravity.’
‘What I don’t know about gravity isn’t worth knowing,’ he says. I sort of believe him.
THIRTEEN
‘Listen,’ Nick said to me when I was twelve and he had just finished sweeping up the glass that I smashed on the kitchen floor. He was sitting on the end of my bed and I was wiping my eyes, still on the verge of tears. ‘You know your mum died very suddenly. Really out-of-nowhere suddenly. And I know you can’t remember it, I know to you it’s a hundred years ago, but to him it may as well have been yesterday. We just both have to try and remember that. Grief is very complicated. It can take a long time.’
I nodded. I was trying to pretend to Nick that I was mature and that I understood. I didn’t. I was thinking, what about me what about me what about me.
I am fifteen. This is the truth: I don’t miss her. There is nothing to miss. There is nothing gone from my life that I can ever remember being there. Just sometimes there’ll be this trace of her, somewhere unexpected – like Danny will say something accidentally, or I’ll find an old shopping list – and it will feel for a moment like somebody trying to talk to me from very far away. And if I am very quiet—
My brother obviously misses her so much that if he tried to talk about it he would just break apart like glass.
He says the same things, over and over: It was a long time ago, I can’t remember, I don’t have time to talk about this right now, I can’t remember.
Since he’s not ninety-seven years old and doesn’t have amnesia, I can’t see any reason why he can’t remember. If anyone had an excuse to forget things it would be Nick since he’s the one who got hit by a car and cracked his head open.
So sometimes I wonder if Danny just doesn’t want to remember how things used to be. Like how he had a life where he didn’t have to look after somebody all the time. Or sometimes I think he just wants to keep her memory all to himself and he doesn’t want anybody else to touch it, not even me. Maybe especially not me.
If I actually had any memories of her, maybe I’d want to keep them to myself as well.
Or is it this: he’s scared that if he talks about her he’ll say he wishes she was still here, which is the same thing as saying he wishes he didn’t have me.
He’s not just sad. I guess I’ve known this for a while, at least since the smoke alarm incident, maybe since before, maybe I’ve always known, but I see it suddenly again while he’s standing there, snapping at me, talking about responsible parenting. He’s angry. He’s angry with her. Still. And OK, maybe it is a little bit crazy to bring a one-year-old baby to a freezing, muddy campsite, but nobody who’s not totally unhinged would still be angry about it more than thirty years later when the person is dead. He is angry about something else, I think. Really consumingly angry in some low-level way basically all the time.
And maybe it’s that she died and left him stuck with me.
He must think that sometimes. Especially when I annoy him, when I make him angry. He must think, This shouldn’t be my problem.
If she was still here me and him would be like strangers, probably: he’d turn up at Christmas and buy me one of those gifts people get you when they don’t know anything about you other than that you’re a girl, like candles or pink stationery, and he’d say how’s school, then he’d be gone again. Me and my mum would laugh at him for being uptight. I’d be more like her, I think. We’d go camping together and plan revolutions.
And Nick would be some faraway grown-up person who wouldn’t even notice me: I’d be his boyfriend’s little sister – half-sister, in fact – which is like nothing. It’d be like how I feel about Nick’s brother’s wife who I’ve only met a couple of times and who even though she’s kind of in my family, she’s like nobody to me: she’s just a person who knows a person who knows a person I know. Nick would look at me politely and say, Hello, Alena, nice to meet you, and it would be like that. He wouldn’t buy me a Christmas present. If Danny wishes she was still here – and he does, of course he does – then he wishes all of that was true, as well.
Maybe Nick and Danny wouldn’t even be together, because, honestly, they met in some grotty London bar somewhere, and neither of them was really that old, and they weren’t probably expecting to suddenly end up in a relationship that lasted for ever. Except that when they’d been together for hardly any time at all my mum dies and Danny’s like, Oh, I have to take guardianship of my three-year-old sister now, and Nick’s like, Oh, OK, well I’ll stick around, because he’s basically pathologically responsible – that’s what I heard Zahra call him once – but if that hadn’t happened, if she hadn’t died and I hadn’t arrived, wouldn’t they probably have broken up over some little thing years ago? Wouldn’t Nick have gone travelling around the world and wouldn’t Danny have met some guy who loved Bob Dylan as much as he did and wouldn’t they both have totally different lives?
I just think you have to ask yourself these things sometimes.
PART TWO
FOURTEEN
I am not making progress with the guitar.
Through my bedroom door I hear the front door open and close, Danny coming home late again, and I wonder how long before the fight picks up. It’s like my record player – another storage locker discovery – when you pick up the needle and drop it down again somewhere else, and the music just starts right up in the middle. Ever since Danny started his job, that’s what this fight is like.
My fingers against the fretboard of the guitar are slack, and my hand won’t form the right shapes; the skin on my fingertips is red and raw, little indentations from the steel strings. I can play a C chord, and if you wait ten minutes, I can change to a G. This is the beginning of ‘Let it Be’. I work out that even if those were the only chords in it, it would take me about half a day to play the whole song.
All Danny has been able to offer in terms of guitar tuition is a battered old copy of The Beatles Songbook from his own failed attempts to be a musician, four hundred years ago. He also suggested I read volume one of Bob Dylan’s autobiography. ‘For research,’ he said. ‘Inspiration. Meditation. Philosophy. Wisdom. You need to discover yourself as an artist.’
Mostly I think he’s trying to be funny but sometimes I think he’s not.
In the kitchen, Nick is making dinner, and already their voices are getting louder. I lay the guitar carefully at the end of my bed and go into the kitchen, trying to think of some story from school or something that I can tell them to change the subject. They don’t even notice me at first.
‘And you know he has a teenage son,’ Danny is saying. ‘His wife died. He’s a single parent. He’s had to bring up his son—’
‘Oh!’ says Nick, slamming the cutlery drawer. ‘I see! So you have a connection. You have so much in common that you—’
‘We do have things in common. I’m just saying that he—’
‘You,’ says Nick, ‘are not a single parent.’
‘I know that,’ Danny says, his jaw set like a steel trap. He’s wearing a tie but it’s not done up properly. He is holding his laptop against his chest, and his bag is still hanging from his shoulder. ‘My point was, you don�
��t know anything about him and in your mind you’ve created this cartoon villain when in reality—’
‘Guess what,’ I say. I have no idea what I’m going to say after this, but they both turn and look at me.
‘What?’ says Danny.
I think wildly for a moment. ‘The library was closed today because the radiator was leaking.’
There’s a short pause. ‘Well,’ says Danny. ‘Thanks for the update.’ He puts down his laptop and bag and starts kicking off his shoes.
‘Were any books damaged?’ Nick says, as if I’ve just told a serious story in which he has to take an actual interest.
‘And I’ll tell you something else—’ says Danny.
‘Don’t,’ says Nick. ‘Don’t tell me anything else.’
‘All right.’ Danny turns to me. ‘I’ll tell you something else, and I’ll do it in a loud voice so Nick can hear.’
‘Don’t drag her into it,’ Nick says.
‘Don’t drag me into it,’ I say, pulling up a stool at the kitchen counter. ‘I’m not going to pretend to like him.’
Danny blinks. ‘Who?’
‘Jacob Carlisle.’
I can see Nick smirk although he tries to hide it.
‘What, now you’ve decided you don’t like him either?’ says Danny. ‘You’ve never met him.’
‘Neither has Nick and he doesn’t like him.’
‘So? Don’t copy Nick!’
‘What if I don’t like what he believes in?’
‘He doesn’t believe in anything,’ says Nick.
‘If he doesn’t believe in anything then I don’t like him.’
‘Actually, scratch that,’ says Nick. ‘He believes in having all of us living in a police state, spending our lives spying on our neighbours, trying desperately never to do anything that might be construed as suspicious—’
‘Nick, shut up,’ says Danny. ‘Seriously.’
‘Are you talking about the Safe Communities Initiative?’ I say, and both of them turn their heads round to look at me. ‘What?’ I say. ‘I read. I know about it.’
The Safe Communities Initiative is all over Jacob Carlisle’s website all of a sudden, like he’s finally thought of an idea. It’s about having more police, and giving people money for reporting suspicious behaviour to the police. It’s one of those things that sounds sensible when you read it but then you think about it later and it’s sort of creepy.
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