Beautiful Broken Things

by Sara Barnard

  ‘Oh, this is just as fun as I’d expect visiting an abandoned building’s roof would be,’ I said seriously, and she smiled a little. ‘Look – why don’t you tell me why you think it was your fault? Then you can go back to umbrella-dancing if you want to. But we’ve basically got the rest of the night here, and it’s me, so you might as well.’

  Suzanne bit her lip and looked away, considering. When she looked back, apprehension had clouded her face. She looked like a child. ‘If I tell you, I can’t take it back.’

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at her levelly, waiting. I was sure she’d start speaking eventually and, sure enough, she pushed her fingers into her pockets and started.

  ‘You know how I told you that I tried to kill myself? Well, the doctors wanted to get social services involved because they said I was still a suicide risk, but my parents said no, it was fine, they’d handle it. That was when Sarah came to live with us. And it’s true that my dad stopped hitting me, but nothing was better. Nothing was fixed. No one talked about what had happened, no one said sorry. It was just my dad keeping out of my way, basically. And the longer it went on, the worse it felt. It was like the only difference was that everyone was on eggshells around me, like it was my fault.

  ‘Then, one night, it was just too much. I overheard my dad say to my mum, “One day she’ll move out and we can have our lives back.” Like it was all me. Like I was the problem, like I’d ruined his life. And so I went into the kitchen when it was just him, and I . . . I fucked everything up. I could have just stayed away from him, which was what I was supposed to do. But I was so mad. It was so unfair. I wanted to get a rise out of him; I know it was stupid, but it’s the truth. I wanted him to hit me, so they’d all see what the problem really was. I said a bunch of stuff, I can barely remember it now, but I think it was something like that he was weak and pathetic. I can’t really believe it now. I’m probably making it sound like saying that stuff to him was nothing, but I was terrified of him, Caddy. I don’t remember ever not being scared of him. But at that moment I was more angry than scared. And when he lost it and punched me, this is fucked up, but I was pleased. And then he hit me again. And then he wouldn’t stop.’

  Neither of us said anything. All I could think about was how he’d looked when we’d seen him at the marina. So ordinary.

  ‘You’re not saying anything.’ There was a catch in her voice, a note of panic.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said honestly. ‘But nothing you just said makes me think it was your fault.’

  ‘Well, what did it make you think? You can tell me. Just say it.’

  ‘It made me feel really sad for you,’ I said, treading carefully. ‘That you can go through something as awful as that and come out of it blaming yourself.’

  ‘But if I hadn’t goaded him . . .’

  ‘Suze, he hit you. That’s all him. And it wasn’t even like that was the first time, right? How old were you when it started?’

  ‘Seven.’

  God. ‘Well, then. There you go.’

  ‘But he never hit Brian,’ she said. Her voice was soft. ‘It was always me. So it has to have been because of me.’

  ‘No.’ I suddenly felt like I might start crying, but I tried to keep my voice light, so she wouldn’t shut down. ‘Inaccurate. Try again.’

  ‘Sarah says he has problems,’ Suzanne said. ‘With anger, and control, you know? She says he doesn’t mean it. And it’s true – he did used to go into these rages, where it was like he was a different person – but he could be really mean, even on normal days. And only to me.’

  ‘It definitely sounds like he has problems,’ I said.

  ‘But people say that about me.’ Her voice cracked. I could tell she was near tears. ‘That I have “problems”. So what am I going to turn into?’

  ‘You’re going to turn into an older version of my friend Suze,’ I said. ‘A headcase, yeah. But the best kind.’

  She did start crying then. I stepped forward, the closest I’d been to the edge of the roof, and pulled her in for a hug. I looked out over her shaking shoulders to the rest of Brighton, still and quiet, oblivious to us. Was it my imagination, or was it starting to lighten?

  ‘What if I turn out bad?’ she asked, so quietly I almost didn’t hear.

  I squeezed my arms tighter around her, trying to put the weight of our friendship into a single hug.

  ‘You won’t.’

  We stayed like that for a minute or two more, before I deliberately disentangled myself and reached for the umbrella.

  ‘You want to teach me the moves?’ I offered.

  She wiped her eyes, nodding. ‘You’ve really never seen Singin’ in the Rain?’ Her voice was raspy, but regaining its normal strength.

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen it.’ I said, gliding away from her with my poor excuse for grace. The gravel crunched under my feet. ‘How does it go, like, “doo de doo do”?’ I opened up the umbrella and started twirling it above my head like she’d done earlier.

  ‘Yeah, see, you don’t even need me.’ She was grinning now, watching me from the side.

  I grinned back, covering more of the rough surface with each twirl. I tried to pinpoint what I was feeling, the strange giddiness of dancing on a roof in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a simple happiness, because the anxiety I’d been carrying all night was still weighing in my stomach, but in a way that wasn’t exactly bad. It was an odd kind of freedom, something I wanted to be able to remember. A new version of myself.

  ‘This is all thanks to you, you know,’ I called to her, as my foot found a section of roof that felt different.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She was still smiling.

  ‘Me, being here, doing this.’ I moved my feet around on the new surface, wondering where the gravel had gone. ‘I’d never done anything interesting before I met you. And now –’

  There was a cracking noise, so loud we both jumped.

  ‘What was that?’ Suzanne asked, looking worried.

  I had frozen in place, too scared even to look down at my feet. ‘Um.’ My voice was shaking so much I almost couldn’t speak. ‘I think I might be standing on a skylight.’

  The instant look of horror on her face scared me even more. I could hear a faint crackling noise, emanating from below my shoes. My heartrate was ratcheting up, roaring in my ears.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said, and despite the panic on her face her voice was calm. ‘I’m coming to get you, OK?’ She started towards me.

  I knew I was going to fall an instant before it happened. There was a split second when the glass beneath my feet gave way before gravity caught up, and it was in that moment my brain selected an image for me. As I fell in a shower of glass and mud, I couldn’t hear the screaming coming from my own mouth or Suzanne’s. I couldn’t see the rush of the floor below as it rose to meet me.

  I saw Rosie, aged five, breathless and triumphant, holding out a ribbon to me. Her voice, lilting with excitement, before sarcasm dried it out, ‘And now we’re best friends.’

  And then the ground.

  When

  Here’s one good thing about the aftermath of a twenty-foot fall through a glass sheet: memory loss.

  Not total memory loss, of course. But just enough to minimize the trauma. My brain is kind to me that way.

  Even some time after I had the full use of all my limbs back and no longer felt a sickening dizziness when I stood up too quickly, I still couldn’t remember most of what happened in the first twelve hours after the fall. All I had were scraps of memory, flashbacks that could be triggered by a chance phrase or sound or touch.

  The rough scrape of the neck brace wrapped around my throat.

  The sound of someone, a girl, sobbing.

  A light shone into my eye.

  A patient, calm voice. ‘Caddy?’ And me thinking, Who?

  A strip of lights along a ceiling, whizzing by.

  And pain, oh there was pain. Mercifully brief, as I moved in and out of conscious
ness, and then helped by drugs. But the memory of the pain struck me at odd moments, even months later. Like every nerve in my body had sounded an alarm: SOMETHING IS WRONG.

  Which it was, of course. Aside from the severe concussion – which the doctors thought could be brain damage for what my mother says were the worst five hours of her life – I had a leg that was broken in two places, a wrist all but shattered and three broken ribs.

  But I lived, conquering the odds of twenty-foot falls with an innate determination I didn’t know I possessed.

  My parents were by my side in the hospital for most of the morning and afternoon, but I retain no memory of any conversations we had during that time.

  ‘That’s probably for the best,’ Mum said later. ‘You weren’t exactly making much sense. You kept telling me that you’d ruined your shoes.’ She laughed a little tearfully. ‘Like I cared about your silly shoes. But you kept saying it!’

  The first lucid conversation I had was later that same day, when I woke up to find Rosie sitting in a chair pushed right up to my bed. She had Cosmo magazine open on her lap.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  Rosie’s head jerked up. As soon as our eyes met her face broke out into a grin, and the sight of it almost brought me to tears. It was the smile of a friend who has known you for over ten years, the kind of friend who forgives you for your idiocy, the kind of friend where the word ‘best’ is unnecessary.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, reaching out to squeeze my shoulder. ‘Oh my God.’ She pressed her lips together, then took a deep breath and smiled again, a little shakily this time. ‘Caddy, oh my God.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, because I did.

  She attempted another smile. ‘I’ve never had such a good opportunity to say I told you so.’

  ‘You’re not mad?’

  She shook her head. ‘Too scared to be mad. Maybe later. I’ll save it.’ She put the magazine on my bedside table and leaned forward in her chair. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I said automatically, but even as my mouth formed the words a foggy confusion descended on my head, turning down the volume on her voice for a moment. I blinked, trying to clear it.

  ‘Cads, you broke your leg.’ Rosie was saying sternly. ‘That is not fine. Mum told me that your mum said it’s a really bad break as well. Plus there’s the concussion thing. You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.’

  At her words, the memory swooped into my head, unbidden. The feeling of the world giving way underneath me. The sharp sting of shards of glass on my head. The flash of remembering must have shown on my face, because her expression immediately became anxious again. ‘Are you OK?’

  I tried to nod, which was a mistake. ‘Yeah,’ I said instead. ‘Just . . . whoa. I feel really woozy.’

  ‘That’s probably the drugs. You must be on loads. I bet—’

  ‘Where’s Suzanne?’ I interrupted.

  Rosie’s mouth snapped shut. She glanced towards the door, twisting her lip, as if she thought the answer might come through it. She looked back at me. ‘I don’t know. At home?’ There was an edge in her voice. Something cold.

  ‘Why isn’t she here?’ My heart gave a jump of fear. ‘Is she OK?’

  Rosie’s eyebrows scrunched, then slowly rose. ‘Caddy, come on. You know why she isn’t here.’

  ‘She’s not in trouble, is she?’ The fuzziness in my head was making it hard to think. I tried to gather the snapshots of memory into something complete. The umbrella. Suzanne crying. Me hugging her, telling her she wouldn’t turn out bad.

  ‘Not in trouble?’ Rosie repeated. ‘Caddy, you almost died.’

  ‘That’s not her fault,’ I said. ‘We were both . . .’ More fog. ‘I mean, I was the one who . . .’

  ‘Of course it’s her fault,’ Rosie said, her voice tense. ‘After everything that’s happened, she did it again, she snuck out again, and made you go with her, again, and now look what’s happened.’

  ‘No,’ I said, trying to inject some strength into my voice. ‘That’s not right. Didn’t she tell you? I went to see her, not the other way around.’

  Rosie’s expression faltered slightly and I watched her digest this information for about half a second. Then she regrouped. ‘You would never have snuck out of your house before you met her,’ she pointed out, which was true. ‘You’d never have done something so fucking stupid, Caddy. You were on a roof. In the middle of the night!’

  ‘We were going to watch the sunrise,’ I said, feeling tears begin to gather in the backs of my eyes. ‘How could we know this was going to happen?’

  Her expression softened, but she still looked more exasperated than sympathetic. ‘Don’t cry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have got arsey. But the thing is, you should have known that something like this could happen. Like, that’s pretty much exactly why people don’t do things like this. Because this happens.’

  I felt the tears start making tracks down the sides of my face, prickly against my skin. I bit my tongue and tried to breathe in through my nose. The magnitude of what had happened was starting to hit me. And oh God.

  ‘You have to go and see Suze,’ I said, the tears making my voice shake. ‘You have to check she’s OK.’

  ‘She’s totally fine, Caddy,’ Rosie replied, the edge of impatience sharpening her words. ‘You’re the one with serious injuries. You’re the one who nearly died.’

  ‘But why isn’t she here?’ I was starting to feel panicky. ‘Didn’t she come here with me? Did someone make her leave?’

  ‘How would I know? I only found out when my mum called me at lunchtime. Which was the weirdest conversation of my life, by the way. First no Suzanne at school and then, “Don’t panic, Rosie, but Caddy’s in hospital because she fell through a skylight.” And of course I did panic.’

  I was barely listening. ‘She told me some stuff about her family. It was awful.’

  ‘Hey,’ Rosie said, and the tone of her voice was so unfamiliar I jolted out of my own head and looked at her, ‘I’m right here, you know.’

  Before I could reply, the door opened and we both jumped. Rosie’s mother had come into the room, holding a small bouquet of yellow flowers.

  She smiled at me. ‘Hello, Caddy. You’re awake. How are you?’ She put the flowers on the table and a gentle hand on Rosie’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said, because there’s no answer to that question that doesn’t sound sarcastic when your face is peppered with cuts and your leg’s in pieces.

  ‘We need to be getting going,’ Shell said to Rosie. ‘Caddy needs to spend time with her family.’

  ‘I’m family,’ Rosie said grumpily, but she was already starting to stand up. She turned to me. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow after school. And I’ll see if I can find out about Suze, OK?’

  I felt a grin of relief and affection break out over my face. ‘You’re the best, Roz.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Rosie rolled her eyes, but she was smiling too. ‘And don’t you forget it.’ She folded her hand twice in a wave. ‘See you.’

  For the rest of the evening my family dropped in and out of my room while I drifted in and out of drug-assisted sleep. Tarin painted my nails a hideous shade of luminous green – ‘Because you can’t stop me!’ – and told me stories about when she’d been hospitalized around the time of her diagnosis. Mum flapped and faffed and arranged the flowers she’d brought, talking mainly to herself about the dangers of inadequately protected buildings and teenagers with ‘absolutely no sense’. Dad stood for a while in the corner, studying my chart, glancing at the various machines around me, nodding every now and then to himself.

  When he left, he kissed my forehead for the first time in about ten years. ‘Get some rest. The morphine will help you sleep. I’m on shift tonight, so if you need me, just buzz and one of the nurses will come and get me, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, touched.

  But then he paused in the doorway and looked back at me. ‘Ah, I do mean only if you really need me, you und
erstand? I will be working, after all.’ He smiled at me and then left without waiting for a response.

  The drugs sent me into a strange, uneven sleep, where my dreams were spongy and featured morphine-induced reimaginings of some of my most random memories. I kept falling asleep and waking up with a start, shocking myself each time with the unfamiliar room and how empty it was.

  Until it wasn’t.

  ‘Hey.’

  Suzanne was wearing an old pair of grey jogging bottoms and an oversized black hoodie. Her hair was haphazard around her face, unbrushed and wild. I had no idea how long she’d been there, but there she was, standing so close to the door she was almost pressed against it. Her voice, even on the short word, was shaky.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  She crept closer, her fingers clenched together. Her eyes were scanning my face, and she looked so agonized I wanted to cry.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked finally, still a couple of steps from the bed.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as definitively as I could, waiting to see her face relax into a smile.

  ‘Caddy –’ she took another step and reached for the bedpost, her fingers gripping so hard I could almost feel it myself – ‘I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Her voice broke, and her free hand flew to her mouth. ‘They wouldn’t let me see you last night, they wouldn’t let me stay, I wanted to come. And today, oh God it’s been so awful, today, everyone said no, they said I shouldn’t, that I’d make it worse.’

  ‘Suze—’

  ‘But I couldn’t not come, I had to say sorry, because it’s all my fault, I ruin everything.’

  At this I gave up trying to break into her frantic monologue and reached out my uninjured arm, curving it towards me in a hug gesture. Suzanne hesitated for just a moment and then bolted around the bed. At first she half crouched, half leaned into the hug, but it was so awkward she eventually sat her full weight on the bed, and then climbed on completely.

  It occurred to me as she curled herself carefully between me and the edge of the bed, her limbs a tangle above the covers and mine stretched out clinically straight, that Rosie and I weren’t really huggers. Even when we were very young we hadn’t been the type of twosome who shared changing rooms at the swimming pool or beds at sleepovers. I wasn’t sure which one of us had the greatest influence on this facet of our friendship, but I did know that Rosie would never have even thought to climb up on to my hospital bed beside me.