Troublemakers

by Catherine Barter

  She says, ‘Ah,’ like that explains everything. She says: ‘When I was fifteen I ran away from home to try and meet Van Halen.’

  When we go back upstairs, everyone looks tired and pissed off, and Simon and Louise nod at each other, and Louise says, ‘We’re sorry to have had to have bothered you tonight.’ Nick and Danny have been practising their why can’t all parents be like us routine and they’re all, ‘It’s fine, no problem, just doing your job, we totally understand, have a good night now,’ and when the door closes behind them, we all stand in the brightly lit living room and look at each other.

  ‘This year just keeps getting better and better,’ says Danny. He looks at me. ‘What did she ask you?’

  ‘Danny,’ I say. ‘I didn’t – I would never – Niamh – she’s crazy. I didn’t say anything to her, I literally said, Hello and she goes, You’re in danger, you’re in danger, I’ll call the police.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Danny sits down on the sofa and leans his head back and looks at the ceiling, and Nick sits down next to him and puts a hand on his knee. ‘That sounds about right.’

  There is a car alarm going off somewhere outside.

  ‘Why did you call her?’ says Danny. ‘Why did you want to speak to her?’

  All our voices are scratchy because we’re so tired.

  I don’t answer and he sits up straight and looks at me. ‘You haven’t even asked me about her in years.’

  ‘There’s no point asking you,’ I say. I feel like crying again. ‘You wouldn’t tell me anything even if I did. You’d just say, Yeah, she’s crazy, don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I think I’ve been proved right on that point.’

  Nick snorts.

  ‘I just wanted to speak to her. I just wanted to see what she would say. She’s the only family we have.’

  ‘See what she would say about what?’

  ‘I don’t know. About you. About our mum. About me.’

  ‘What about you?’ The shadows under his eyes are very dark. He looks a bit like he’s going to cry, as well.

  Nick looks like he just wants to sleep forever and pretend he never met us.

  ‘She wanted me to live with her. She wanted to take me. After our mum died. She wanted to take me to Australia.’

  ‘And what?’ Danny says in a shaky voice. ‘Do you think that would have been better?’

  ‘Do you think that would have been better?’

  He opens and closes his mouth but doesn’t say anything, like he can’t form the words or can’t remember how to speak. It feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room, suddenly, like a vacuum where it’s hard to breathe.

  ‘Guys,’ says Nick. ‘Guys. Lena. It’s three in the morning. You’re supposed to be at school tomorrow. This has not been a good night. None of us are in the right state of mind for this conversation. We all need to go to sleep. Seriously.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have called her if I’d known. I didn’t know what she was like. I didn’t know what she would do. I didn’t know this would happen.’

  ‘We know you didn’t,’ says Nick.

  ‘Well, it did happen,’ says Danny.

  ‘Niamh has had some bad things happen to her,’ says Nick. ‘She’s quite a damaged person.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, it was her sister who died, and she—’

  ‘It was my mum,’ I choke out. ‘It was my mother.’

  Then the car alarm has stopped and there is total silence.

  Nick says, quietly, ‘Of course it was. I know it was.’

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Because nobody ever acts like she has anything to do with me.’

  Danny leans forward and rests his forehead on his arms almost as if he’s going to be sick.

  ‘Nobody will talk to me about her. Nobody will talk to me. And you lie to me, you both lie to me, you lied to me about Nick—’

  ‘Alena,’ says Nick.

  ‘If nobody even wants me here—’ I say round the hard lump in my throat, but I can’t finish the sentence. There is no end to this sentence. Nick is already rising up from the chair and saying, ‘No, no, no, no, Alena, come on, no, no, no—’ and Danny is saying, his voice muffled by his sleeve, ‘There is literally nothing that I can do that will ever be—’ and then I start crying for real and Nick is saying, ‘Come on, it’s OK, we’re all just tired,’ and hugging me so I get snot and tears all over his shirt and I think Danny might even be crying too but I don’t want to look – and maybe I’m just tired or maybe it is the worst and loneliest that I have ever felt in my life.

  We do all go to bed. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do.

  Lying in the dark, I have an imaginary conversation with Niamh in my head.

  ‘Maybe I should live with you after all,’ I say.

  ‘Sweetheart, no,’ she says. ‘Nick and your brother love you too much. But I’ll come and visit and tell you all about your mother. I can tell you’re just like her. I heard what you did and it’s exactly what she would have done. I can tell you’re just like her.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  When I wake up the next morning, it’s nearly eleven o’clock.

  I have four messages from Teagan.

  Sorry my phone broke!! the first one says, from early this morning.

  Then: using dad’s old nokia. so so so upset about the coffee shop. what can I do? can I help clean up? Dad says he could help too.

  The next one is from an hour ago. Where are you?? Are you ill now too?? I’m back at school

  Then, finally, ten minutes ago, where are you?????? Xxxxx

  So maybe she isn’t angry with me after all.

  Be there soon I think, I text her. I missed you xxxx

  ‘We thought we’d let you sleep in,’ says Nick, when I go into the living room. He is sitting at the kitchen counter with a bunch of paperwork. ‘I can drop you at school in a bit. I’ll write you a note.’

  ‘Where’s Danny?’ I say.

  ‘He’s gone for a run.’

  ‘Where is he really?’

  ‘He’s gone for a run. Really.’

  My eyes are all swollen and my face is blotchy so I wash my face with cold water and use some of Nick’s really expensive moisturiser that smells nice, where it’s so fancy you only need a tiny bit of it at a time. I brush my teeth twice to make up for never doing it last night and comb my hair, which is getting long, long, long, and get dressed for school.

  In the car, on the way, Nick says, ‘Are you feeling OK, today?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, which is sort of true. I am leaning my forehead on the car window, watching the road rolling by. It’s good to sleep late, and Nick is being really nice to me. He has written me a note saying I had to go to the dentist, which means I’ve missed the first two double lessons.

  Mostly I feel the way you feel when you’ve just got over being ill, where you’re feeling better than you were but still empty and shaky and not like you.

  ‘Are you feeling OK?’ I say.

  ‘Yes. I’m feeling OK.’ He pauses. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is Danny feeling OK?’

  Nick smiles; his eyes crinkle at the corners. ‘Danny’s feeling OK,’ he says. ‘Listen. I think he’s going to talk to you later. After school.’ He glances at me, sees my expression. ‘Not in a bad way. Just, there’s some things I think he’d like to talk to you about.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And look. I’ll be home later. After that. And then you can talk to me, as well, if you want.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  He’s quiet for a minute, and then he says, ‘Talk to Danny first, all right.’

  ‘Am I being sent away?’ I say, and it’s meant to be a joke but it doesn’t really come out right, and Nick doesn’t take it as a joke because he says, ‘Alena, if you ever went anywhere, it would break our hearts.’

  I can’t look at him. I turn on the radio, and we listen to the London traffic report for the rest of the way.

  When I g
et home, Danny is sitting on the sofa in some kind of trance, and he jumps when I close the door behind me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. And then: ‘What are you doing?’

  He gets up. ‘Nothing. I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  It’s turned into another warm day and the windows are open. You can hear someone vacuuming on the floor below us. Danny looks different and I can’t work out why for a moment but then I realise it’s because he’s shaved his stupid beard off.

  We look at each other. ‘My keyring just broke,’ I say. I hold up two bits for him to see. It’s a red plastic picture frame with a little cut-out photo of me and Teagan in it. The plastic bit that attaches to the chain snapped when I took it out of my bag.

  ‘Give it here,’ he says. I put my bag down and go over to him, hand him the broken parts.

  He looks at it in his hands for a while, but doesn’t do anything with it. ‘So, listen,’ he says. ‘Come and sit down with me for a bit.’

  Waiting for this all day has made it awful. I don’t want to sit down. I want to turn and run, go back to school.

  ‘OK,’ I say, carefully. I kick off my shoes and sit down. He sits down next to me and puts the keyring on the coffee table.

  ‘Did you have a good afternoon?’ he says.

  ‘It was all right.’ There’s a silence. ‘I got a really good mark on an English essay I wrote a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘What was the essay about?’

  ‘It was about the theme of power in Lord of the Flies.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘I liked the book.’

  ‘Good. That’s really good.’

  ‘What did you do today?’ I say.

  ‘We’ve been cleaning up the shop. It looks better. It’s looking OK.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I think it’s going to be OK. I think a lot of it we might be able to fix up ourselves.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. In another life I think I could have been a carpenter.’

  I make a face at him. ‘So Nick’s not going to close it down.’

  ‘No,’ says Danny. ‘Of course he’s not.’

  ‘He said he was.’

  ‘This is Nick.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have said it, then, if he wasn’t serious.’

  ‘He was serious at the time,’ Danny says. ‘He was just upset. He was upset and he was tired. We all feel like that sometimes and we say things we don’t mean.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, you’re tougher than us, then.’

  I tug at the hem of my school skirt. ‘Do you want to talk about me calling Niamh?’

  He takes a deep breath. ‘Not really. But I think we should.’

  ‘I’m sorry I called her.’

  ‘Yeah. I wish you hadn’t.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Look. I know that I haven’t. I haven’t been.’ He stops and picks up a pencil from the coffee table, starts twirling it through his fingers. ‘I haven’t been looking after you very well recently. I was angry but I was – I didn’t deal with it properly.’

  I don’t know what to say to this. Even though I think it’s true I don’t want him to admit it.

  ‘We’re actually doing a play of Lord of the Flies in English,’ I say. ‘Like we’re writing it and acting it ourselves. But there’s girls in our version. There aren’t any in the book.’

  ‘OK. That sounds good. Do the girls restore order and harmony to the island?’

  ‘No, they’re just as bad as the boys.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  We go quiet for a minute.

  ‘If you wanted to talk to Niamh,’ Danny says. ‘You should have asked me. You shouldn’t be creeping around in the middle of the night.’

  ‘It had to be the middle of the night because of the time difference,’ I say.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And I thought I wouldn’t be allowed.’

  He is still concentrating on the pencil. ‘It’s not like she called you every week and I wouldn’t let her talk to you,’ he says. ‘She never called. You never asked me if you could call her.’

  ‘If I’d asked, would you have let me?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  ‘She thinks you’re a paedophile or something,’ I say.

  ‘I know she does.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just sorry.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I felt bad about when I was little, and she met me, and I just screamed at her and tried to hide.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know. I’ve told you. It’s my first memory. Where she’s coming towards me, and you’re there, and I just screamed.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘That.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You shouldn’t worry about that.’

  ‘I’m not any more. Now I know what she’s like.’

  ‘She wasn’t always. She was all right when I was younger, when she was living in London. She used to take me to football practice. She just didn’t think it was right for you to live with two men. And I guess they wanted children. I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to speak to her again.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine too,’ says Danny.

  ‘So why didn’t you let her?’

  ‘Let her what?’

  ‘Take me to live with her and Drew.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Why didn’t I let her? Why would I let her? She hardly knew you. She wanted to take you to Australia. She hadn’t even spoken to Mum in about two years. Mum hated – would have hated the idea. She’d have killed me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There’s another silence. The vacuum cleaner has stopped.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says. He coughs. ‘I have something to say. A few things. I have a few things to say.’

  The next silence is so long I start to think he’s forgotten what he has to say, but eventually he gets it out. ‘I got Nick to phone Lynn Wallace this morning. And if you’d like to have lunch with her or something – if you’d like to talk to her – you can. You can have lunch next weekend or something. If you want to. She’d like to. So if you want to do that then you can.’

  I’m so shocked that for a minute I’m not even sure who Lynn Wallace is and I’m wondering if he means somebody else, somebody I’ve forgotten about.

  ‘OK, close your mouth, Alena, it’s not that amazing.’

  ‘But what about – you said she was a bad influence.’

  ‘She is. I think she is. But you can decide that for yourself.’

  I am still gaping, and he looks half amused, in a tired sort of way. ‘I’m sure she’ll have a lot to say. If there’s things you want to know I’m sure that she’ll tell you when you meet her. If you still want to.’

  ‘Yes. I do want to. Yes, please.’

  ‘OK. Good.’

  I am still trying to get my head round this when, for some reason, Danny says: ‘Look, not to start this again, and I don’t know why it still matters, but I want you to know that Will Rofofsky isn’t as bad as you think. Maybe he deserved what he got or maybe he didn’t, I don’t know. But he grew up on some miserable estate in Tottenham and had to work really hard to get to where he was, and he really loved his job. He was my friend. And for the five minutes he met you he liked you, he thought you were funny. And his career is pretty much dead right now. So. I just want you to try and understand that.’

  I try to think about this but I can’t. I can’t imagine him existing outside of the campaign office.

  ‘Do you understand that?’ Danny says. ‘People say stupid things all the time. Mike said the East End Bomber was good for newspaper sales. We joked about it. That’s how people talk.’

  I remember it: Mike coming in late to the coffee shop, Danny asking about circulation. That is how people talk, sometimes. />
  But Mike never asked anybody to vote for him for anything, and anyway, it was never just about a joke that Will made. Even I know that. It was the way they acted the whole campaign: using people’s fear to make Jacob Carlisle look strong.

  ‘So about Jacob Carlisle?’ I say.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Are you going to say he’s not as bad as I think?’

  Danny sighs and stops twirling the pencil. ‘You know what? I think I met him a total of about five times. And one of those was when he came here.’

  ‘But did you like him?

  He looks like he’s thinking about it for a while. ‘I don’t know. Not really. I had a certain amount of – I guess I felt some sympathy for him. Some of his ideas were OK.’

  ‘He’s a single parent.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That makes him sound like a good guy.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why we went on about it all the time.’

  I pull my legs up on the sofa and tuck them under me, facing him.

  ‘I was raised by a single parent, though,’ he says. ‘And nobody ever acted like it was something to be proud of.’

  ‘People are more impressed by men raising children.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘She didn’t seem like a bad influence,’ I say. ‘Lynn Wallace. When I met her. She kept saying she had to respect you as a parent.’

  Danny doesn’t answer. He is arranging and rearranging the pen and the two broken bits of my keyring on the coffee table, lining them all up and then moving them again.

  ‘She said I looked just like you when you were my age.’

  ‘I hope you weren’t too offended.’

  ‘She wanted to say that I looked like Mum but I know I don’t.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t, really.’ Then he says, in a quiet voice like it’s costing him a lot just to even think about it, he says, ‘You’re like her in other ways, though.’

  I look down at the grey weave of the sofa. We have had this sofa for ever. We should probably get a new one. I don’t even know where it came from, if it came with the flat or what. ‘Nick sometimes says I’m just like you,’ I say.

  ‘Is that when you’ve done something to annoy him?’

  ‘Yeah, usually.’

  Danny grins, and then the grin falters a little bit. ‘You know what, she said from the minute you were born that you were going to be a troublemaker.’ He looks at me, tries to smile again. ‘And so you have proved to be.’