Troublemakers

by Catherine Barter

  Maybe she killed a rabbit and drew images on my face with its blood in a Pagan ritual for long life and well-being.

  All of these things might have happened. Since no one can ever tell me otherwise – since Danny won’t tell me anything – I’m starting to believe that all of them did. Starting to imagine these stories and collect them, and carry them around like stones in my pocket. There was an us once.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It’s Saturday again and I spend the morning on a charity shop pilgrimage. It’s the start of April and they still haven’t found the East End Bomber, so I have promised Danny that I will avoid supermarkets. Instead I go to Cancer Research and the British Heart Foundation and Oxfam and the Salvation Army and the Arthritis Society, and I come home with two bags of t-shirts and skirts and beaten-up paperback books that smell like somebody’s attic. I’m in a good mood when I get back and there’s a note on the fridge saying, Gone food shopping, N+D x, which I interpret as meaning that they’re trying to be nice to each other.

  When they come back I’m in my room, trying on a jumper and looking in the mirror, wearing my mum’s old glasses from the storage locker to complete the vintage thing. I hear the front door open and thwack against the wall the way it does if you kick it open.

  ‘—and don’t even get me started on the strategy for safety or whatever the hell it is, because it’s the most—’

  ‘I know that isn’t what you really want to talk about so why don’t you just say whatever it is that you—’

  ‘I actually do want to talk about it because I think you’ve lost your mind if you can justify to yourself—’

  ‘Just drop it, Nick, just shut up about it, I’m sick of hearing—’

  ‘—and I’m sick of being told to shut up every time I say something that you find difficult to hear, Jesus, Danny, I mean you seriously—’

  The door slams shut again and I hear Danny’s voice. ‘Don’t. Don’t. Don’t even start.’

  ‘You can’t just shut down every time something you don’t want to talk about—’

  ‘Don’t do your ridiculous psychoanalysis whatever-the-hell-it-is you’re going to—’

  ‘—and after everything I’ve done and all the times I have kept my mouth shut when what I really wanted to do—’

  ‘What you really wanted to do was go and hang out with coffee growers in Colombia while I’m left here with Alena trying to track down Lynn fucking Wallace and somebody going around trying to blow us all up, and you know what, if that’s still what you want to do—’

  ‘Oh my god.’

  ‘—then fine, you know, fine, why don’t you just—’

  ‘To try and make it sound like I don’t even—’

  ‘And I’m doing my best, OK. I’m doing my best and there’s no need – I mean nobody ever forced you to stay with us, you’re the one who can leave any time you want, and you know what, go ahead, if it’s such a big problem for you, nobody’s forcing you to be here, you don’t have any duty—’

  ‘Please don’t start this again, god. I can’t have this conversation again, do you have any idea how I feel when you – like I haven’t earned the right by now to tell you when I think you’re making bad decisions, when I think you’re making seriously bad parenting decisions, if you honestly—’

  ‘Don’t you dare—’

  There’s an awful crack in Danny’s voice, then, and a sound like somebody slamming their hands on the kitchen counter. Then there’s silence for a long time, and then Nick says something quiet that I can’t hear. There’s a weird, gasping noise like somebody crying and trying not to, like Danny crying, but I know it can’t be, because in my life I have never seen Danny cry and I never want to and if he ever did I think I would hate him.

  I’m absolutely still and I’m quiet, so quiet, so if they haven’t realised that I’m home then they won’t. I very carefully put my charity shop things into a neat pile and then put it all on the floor under my bed. And then, even though it’s the middle of the day, I get under the duvet and pull it up to my chin, stare at my door, and wait for something.

  After a while, I hear them go into their bedroom, and then I can’t hear anything else. It’s all quiet for a long time, and eventually I’m hungry, and I make myself get out of bed and go into the kitchen and make a lot of noise pouring myself a glass of juice and making toast and a cup of tea, and I even make a pot in case anyone is going to come out of the bedroom, but they don’t. There are shopping bags on the kitchen counter that haven’t been unpacked. From their bedroom I can hear very, very low voices, and the sound of someone moving around. I could knock on their door, say what’s for lunch, but I don’t. I wait.

  And so, later, I’m in my bedroom getting crumbs all over my desk and butter on the keys of my laptop, and I’m playing this old Joni Mitchell album really quiet, and then there’s this gentle, polite knock on my door, and I say come in, and it’s Nick.

  His face is very serious, one of those faces where you can’t even fake a smile because the muscles around your mouth just won’t work right. He closes the door behind himself and looks at me for a long while. ‘I’m sorry if you heard some of that,’ he says. ‘We didn’t know you were home.’

  ‘What’s for lunch?’ I say.

  ‘I need to talk to you for a minute.’

  ‘OK.’

  Then he just stands there, eyes roaming round my room, and I see him looking at my wardrobe which is hanging open with clothes falling out, and my mirror with all the postcards, and my schoolbooks under the bed. Then he comes into the room and sits down on my bed, which for a change I actually remade after I got out of it.

  I have a purple duvet cover with green and pink and orange flowers on it. It was a birthday present.

  ‘C’mere,’ he says, so I go and sit down next to him, on the side of the bed facing the window.

  ‘I know what you’re going to think when I say this,’ says Nick. ‘So I’m going to tell you straight away that you’re wrong.’

  ‘When you say what?’

  ‘I think you know that me and Danny have been fighting a lot recently, and to give us both some time to clear our heads, I’m going to go and stay with my brother for a few nights.’

  He stops, and wipes the palms of his hands on his jeans.

  ‘You’re breaking up,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ says Nick. ‘We’re not. We’re not. That’s not what this is.’

  ‘Is this because of Jacob Carlisle?’

  ‘No, Lena. Of course it’s not.’

  ‘Because he’s like – he’s not even a real person. He’s like a person on the television. You can’t move out because of him. Over something that isn’t even a real thing.’

  ‘It is a real thing,’ Nick says then, short and blunt and like he didn’t really mean to say it. ‘Jesus Christ. What’s wrong with you two? It is a real thing. Jacob Carlisle tried to close down the coffee shop. Do you understand that? He tried to close down my business.’

  ‘Danny says he didn’t.’

  ‘Danny’s lying.’

  I think I might have misheard him for a second. He doesn’t say Danny’s wrong. He says Danny’s lying. Actually lying.

  I have the odd sensation of everything tilting, slightly; skewing sideways.

  ‘So it is about him.’

  He puts his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and for one awful moment I think he’s going to cry too. I get up and go and lean with my back against the window, folding my arms tight. Nick takes this deep, dramatic breath and rubs his face very hard, so that when he looks up there are red marks on his face.

  ‘Lena,’ he says. ‘Lena, Lena, Lena.’

  ‘Nicholas,’ I say, and he smiles a little bit.

  You’re my favourite, I think. Don’t leave. You’re my favourite.

  ‘Are you going today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘I have to go to work this afternoon anyway. I’ll go to Adam’s afterwards.’

>   ‘I’ll come to work with you. I’ll come to the shop.’

  ‘Maybe not, Lena. Maybe you should stay here this afternoon.’

  ‘Nick,’ I say. ‘Please. Please don’t.’

  ‘It’s just for a few nights. Maybe a week. That’s all.’

  ‘How’s that supposed to help? How’s that going to solve anything?’

  ‘Look,’ says Nick. ‘We’ve both been working really hard and we’ve got a lot on our minds, and I don’t – we don’t seem to be able to speak to each other right now without fighting. We’re just taking a little bit of space to clear our heads. And then when we’ve calmed down we’re going to talk and start working it out. You know that I wouldn’t just leave, OK? So, make sure you know that.’

  ‘And I’m staying here.’

  ‘Lena.’

  ‘That’s just been decided for me.’

  ‘This is where you live.’

  ‘This is where you live.’

  I think about Nick and Danny meeting in that bar, Nick being all charming and straightforward the way he knows how to be, getting them both a drink, no idea of the Kennedy family drama he was about to give his life over to.

  Nick’s middle name is Darvill. We make fun of him for this.

  ‘I bet you wish you’d never met Danny,’ I say. ‘Never got stuck with any of this. Then you’d be in Colombia and you’d be free and you’d be doing whatever you wanted.’

  Nick stares over my shoulder out of my window. ‘You know what,’ he says, in a different tone of voice. ‘It’s actually insulting when the two of you say stuff like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He looks at me. ‘Nothing. I’m sorry. None of this is your fault. Everything’s going to be OK.’

  It’s somebody’s fault, though.

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-FIVE

  On Monday lunchtime there’s a hazy, washed-out kind of early April sunshine, just about warm enough to sit out on the benches in the centre of the quad, in our coats. Teagan is wearing fingerless gloves and she has painted her fingernails green. The colour is really beautiful. I keep staring at it.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she’s saying. ‘Just for a few nights?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t know. Not really.’

  ‘When he said a couple of nights did it seem like he meant it or was he just saying it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She thinks about this. ‘Sometimes my dad sleeps in the guestroom when my parents fall out.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have a guestroom, so.’

  ‘So maybe that’s all this is.’

  ‘He’s never done it before.’ My voice comes out shaky in a way that I don’t mean it to, and Teagan’s eyes go wide and she grabs my hand and squeezes it for a second.

  ‘I think that’s what it is. This is just like sleeping in the guestroom except that you don’t have a guestroom.’

  Behind her, I see Ollie come out of the dining hall and stop, looking around the quad and trying to seem like he has something to do.

  He sees us, waves, and then shoves his hand back in his pocket and walks towards us.

  ‘Ladies,’ says Ollie when he gets to our table. Then he stands there like he’s waiting to take our dinner order.

  ‘Hi, Ollie,’ says Teagan. And then, after a pause, ‘Sit down if you want.’

  ‘What’s up, Alena?’ he says as he sits down.

  ‘Nothing. My parents are breaking up.’

  He blinks a few times, looks like he regrets sitting down. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You mean your brother and his—’

  ‘Yes,’ Teagan interrupts. ‘Her parents. And I don’t think they are.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say.

  Teagan gets a Kit-Kat out of her bag and starts unwrapping it.

  ‘Which one of them do you live with if they break up?’ Ollie says.

  ‘She says she doesn’t want to talk about it, Ollie.’

  ‘Danny, I suppose.’ I pick at a splinter of wood on the bench until it breaks free. ‘He’s my guardian.’

  ‘So he can’t just leave?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your brother. Is it like – is him looking after you like the law? Or does he just do it? I mean, what’s to stop him just leaving?’

  ‘Oh my god.’ Teagan scowls at him.

  ‘What do you mean, stop him leaving? Leaving to go where?’

  ‘I don’t know, just—’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s the law. He can’t leave. He’s my legal guardian.’

  ‘And that means he can’t just, like, give you to somebody else?’

  ‘No. He can’t just give me to somebody else. There isn’t anybody else.’

  ‘Ollie, her brother loves her,’ says Teagan. ‘He’s her parent. He’s amazing. He’s like the nicest person and him and Nick are like these heroic—’

  ‘Teagan,’ I say. ‘Don’t.’ Because it suddenly sounds a bit like she’s telling him that my brother is nothing like his – that Danny is nothing like Aaron – and I don’t want to think about it like that. It makes me feel awful – sad for Ollie, and pissed off that Danny gets credit for looking after me, like he ever even really had a choice.

  Looking good in comparison to Aaron is not exactly difficult.

  ‘Just, don’t say bad things about Lena’s family,’ Teagan says, firmly.

  She has this way of curling her lip, sometimes, like a snarl. Like when we were in primary school. Her hair in bunches, snarling at people who ever said weird or bad things about who my parents were. She never even thinks about it. It’s frightening. Ollie looks frightened, a little bit, until Teagan snaps her Kit-Kat into two pieces and offers us both half.

  ‘I feel sick,’ I say. ‘I need to go home.’

  The thing about my school is, it’s huge. They have this big thing about how they have small class sizes, but there’s still hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids and the year groups are massive. It’s supposed to be a good school. I don’t know. Nick’s parents tried to get me put on the waiting list for the school in west London that Nick went to, but a) it was miles away, and b) Danny accused them of wanting to send me to an all-white school. This is one of their favourite long-running arguments.

  ‘You know that’s not what they said,’ Nick will say. ‘They never said all-white school! They never said all-white school!’

  Danny: ‘They said Mayfield was too diverse. Too diverse!’

  ‘They said diverse,’ says Nick. ‘They did not say too diverse. They said diverse!’

  Et cetera, et cetera.

  The point is, my school is huge, and there’s only one nurse, and if you go and see her and tell her you feel sick and have to go home, she will tell you to sit in the reception office for half an hour and see if you feel better, and then she’ll forget that you’re there. Except first she’ll give you a stamped card that says you’ve been seen by the nurse and that’s why you’re not in class. At which point if you go home, or go to the cinema, or go out and get hit by a car or abducted, then the next day you can just hold up your nurse’s card and you won’t get into trouble.

  So that’s what I do, but instead of getting hit by a car or abducted, I get the bus to the coffee shop. I think that if Nick isn’t sleeping in our house then he doesn’t really have the right to tell me off and anyway, I have a nurse’s card.

  ‘Skiver!’ Zahra says when I walk in. ‘Skiver! You’re a skiver. You are so guilty. I can see it in your face.’ She’s wearing a yellow and pink tie-dyed t-shirt.

  ‘I felt sick,’ I say. ‘I have a nurse’s card.’

  ‘Liar,’ says Zahra. She grins at me. ‘Nick’s not even here so you might get away with it.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I lean over the counter and take a red hard-boiled sweet from the bowl, sit down on one of the high stools and carefully unwrap it
.

  Her face suddenly goes serious. ‘Actually,’ she says. ‘There’s been a bit of a thing. Nick’s parents turned up here as part of some surprise visit on their way to the theatre or something. And they wanted to have dinner with all you guys, and Nick was like, That’s probably not going to happen.’

  This isn’t surprising to me at all. Nick’s parents love to get involved in drama and I’m pretty sure they can just sense it, somehow, from all the way in Essex.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Nick tried to distract everybody with free coffee but it didn’t work. As I’m sure you can imagine.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And then they all left. I think they went back to yours. I think his parents might have called your brother and asked to speak to him.’

  Like me, Zahra is good at listening in on other people’s conversations.

  ‘That’s really bad,’ I say.

  ‘I agree,’ she says. ‘If I was you, Lena, I would not turn up home with your nurse’s note right now. Stay here for a bit. I’ll make you a chai latte.’

  I have two chai lattes and a slice of cake so by the time I go home, at four o’clock, I feel sick and sugary and like my heart is beating too fast. Nick is there. So are his parents. Nick’s dad, Gerry, is sitting on the sofa pretending to read a book, like he’s not involved in the conversation. Everyone else is standing around in the kitchen while the kettle boils. Nick and Danny both have their arms folded and look identically exasperated. Nick’s mum, Marie, is surreptitiously tidying the kitchen counter and saying, ‘—after all the effort you’ve both put in, and don’t think we don’t recognise that—’