by Non Pratt
“We came to London because we need to be seen to be taking more risks. So why are you here if you aren’t even prepared to try?”
The look I pinned her with was fierce, frustrated. This girl had thrown me a rope and now she was threatening to let go of her end at the point when I needed her to pull hardest.
I wouldn’t let her do this to me, wouldn’t let her do it to Kam.
I needed her. He needed her. We needed her.
We got home late that night and for all I teased Claire for being anxious about her parents catching her, I was too. My parents had so much on, they barely seemed to care where I was or what I was doing half the time, but I’d rejected a flurry of calls from my mum when we were on the train home and ignored whatever messages she’d sent, not wanting to get it in the neck for missing tea (and then some).
Slipping carefully into the hall, I pushed my hand through my hair to shake the rain from the ends. My trainers squelched and my jacket was drenched. Everyone on our street parks their car on the road and I always have to leave mine miles away when I get in late. Cheddar came trotting in from the lounge, squeaking a welcome and I picked her up and flipped her over in my arms so I could scritch my fingers through her tummy fur.
“You look happy,” I whispered as she smiled at me with her eyes and her big orange-fur chin.
Only then did I clock how quiet the house was, despite the glow coming from the front room.
Stepping into the lounge was like walking into a horror-film tableau. The telly on mute in the corner, light on over the dining table down the far end, where Mum’s computer was surrounded by printouts of spreadsheets, Dad’s padded lap-tray on the floor by his armchair, beans congealing on the plate, a fork with a bite of lamb still on it. The cat had obviously been at the rest of the chop, dragging it from the plate and halfway across the carpet.
No wonder she looked so pleased with herself.
In the kitchen, I found the oven still on, some indeterminate fruit dish dried and shrivelled on the second shelf, but when I called up the stairs and out of the back door, there was no one there to answer.
All those calls I’d been ignoring from my mum hadn’t been her wanting to know where I was or what I’d been doing.
They’d been about Kam.
CHAPTER 11
Now Amir’s a teenager, his face excretes excess fluid via his spots, but as a kid, it mostly came out of his nose. Comic-book nerd from birth, Amir always wanted to talk about what superpower he’d choose – conversations that would end in tears after I’d wind him up by calling him names like Mucus Man, Goo Goblin and Snot Gobbler.
Until the day his snot turned serious.
He was only five. All three of us shared a room in the old flat and he kept me up for most of the night, coughing and complaining he was hot. By the morning, he had a fever and all the symptoms of pneumonia.
Within the day, he got bad enough that Mum overrode her usual protocol of bedrest, fluids and Calpol, and packed the lot of us into her car to drive him to hospital, messaging Dad, who was away on a job, to let him know what was happening. In the back, I let my little brother slide sideways in his seat belt and rest his head on my knee and, when I knew no one was looking, Amir too delirious to hear it, I told him that I hoped he wouldn’t die.
Hospitals are quieter at night. Not that there aren’t people there, patients, staff – a subdued A & E. But it’s easier to find a parking space.
I spent a long time sitting in the car, waiting for my body to move without me having to tell it why. In the end, I got out of the car because I’d had a drink before I’d left the house and I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
After the toilet, I headed for the ward that felt the most familiar: intensive care.
Stupid, because that wasn’t where he was now.
I got to the doors and stopped.
This time round, Kam had been taken to hospital with a UTI – urinary tract infection – an infection that came with a fever. When your brain has a hard time regulating anything, a spike in temperature is a bigger deal than it would be for anyone else. But by the time I got hold of Mum on her mobile, they were coming home. Kam was being treated for the infection and the pain that came with it. A new catheter fitted.
None of them knew I was here.
The doors in front of me opened and one of the night duty nurses came out.
“You all right?” he asked, a twang to his vowels.
I lifted my glasses to wipe my eyes. “I came… I wanted…” I couldn’t really say, to be honest.
“You know someone in there?”
I shook my head and told him the name of the ward written on the note I’d found on the fridge.
“Well, visiting hours are over for the wards…” It was past midnight, but there must have been something in the way I looked, because “Guy” led me along another corridor, down some stairs to a different set of doors. He talked quietly to the nurse on the desk, leaning round to look at something. “You can’t go in, people are sleeping, but Kamran Malik is in the third bed on the right.”
Being told I couldn’t go in was a relief.
Cupping my hands round my glasses to keep out the light in the corridor, I peered into the darkened ward at the lump Kam’s feet made in the bed.
“Live,” I whispered, knowing no one could hear me.
My family didn’t know I’d been to see Kam in the hospital, the same way they knew nothing of the Saturdays I spent in the caravan and the hours I’d waste driving up to the lookout, where I’d park the car and sit staring out across the valley, rain or sun, day or night. Somewhere to be that wasn’t my home. Somewhere I couldn’t be found. Not by my parents, my friends or my girlfriend.
I’d been cut a length of freedom so long I could wander as far as I liked, but the UTI stretched my father’s patience too far. He’s always had less for me than for my brothers.
The Monday of half-term, while Mum was at work and Amir had gone out with his friends, Dad marched into where I was eating breakfast on the bed.
“This is ridiculous. You’ll see your brother whether you want to or not.”
Barely enough warning for me to put my plate down before he was wrestling me out of the room and down the stairs and into the van, me flailing and yelling and pulling every step of the way, until, in a melee of limbs, the pair of us toppled down the front steps and into the garden. Outside, as I nursed a graze that ran from my elbow to my little finger and Dad a twisted ankle, we stood across the path from each other, panting, not saying a word. Inside, there’d been no one to see us fight, but now, out in the street, I could sense net curtains twitching, the old man out with his dog crossing the road to avoid our house.
Dad might be harder to read than Mum, but even I could see the moment the fight left him.
He didn’t say anything. Just got in his van and left me there, blood beading along my arm as I watched him drive off to see Kam without me.
Shutting the door, I went up to the bathroom to check out my arm, rinsing it, not showing the pain, imagining Kam mocking me for feeling it. Back in the bedroom, leaning against the wall to finish my breakfast, I thought about him sitting there with me, telling me not to get crumbs on his bed, taking my juice from where it was propped between my knees because he didn’t trust me not to spill it.
“I miss you,” I told the room.
Don’t be so soft, he’d say. Then, Seriously, stop getting crumbs on the bed, you fucker.
This was stupid. Kam was alive. He was there. And yet there I was, sitting in an empty room, haunted by a ghost of someone who hadn’t died.
NOVEMBER
CHAPTER 12
“Hey, there,” I said when Claire got into the car two weeks after she’d last got out of it.
“Hey yourself. Miss me?”
I had. More than I’d have thought given all the messaging we’d been doing.
“How was your grandad’s?” I asked, pulling out into the road, wondering whether to risk the traff
ic in town or take the ring road.
“Was my blow-by-blow account not enough information for you?”
“Not enough if you did, in fact, blow someone…”
“SEF!” Claire punched me in the arm.
She’d have handled that perfectly well in a message, but being suggestive IRL overloads Claire’s system.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said with a knowing grin, knowing full well Claire hadn’t done anything of the kind during her half-term. Or ever, maybe.
“You’re so unprofessional,” Claire muttered, sinking down into her seat as we slowed to join the queue of cars edging towards the high street.
“So that’s Devon covered. What about that gig on Sunday?”
“Hell.” I’d guessed as much – crowds aren’t Claire’s thing – but as she chatted more about it, I realized it wasn’t just about that, but about her friend Rich getting with this girl.
“You and Rich close then?” It was the first time I’d ever properly asked about her mates. Not thought about them existing really.
“He’s my best friend.” Her tone emphasized the subtext: nothing romantic. “My only friend at the moment.”
“Don’t I count?” I pretended to be offended, but for once, Claire took me seriously.
“I’ve known you two months, Sef. Rich and Seren and me have been friends for years.”
“Who’s Seren?”
“The friend who isn’t.” Claire angled her gaze firmly out of the window.
“What happened?”
She left it long enough that I thought she might not want to answer, until I saw she was trying not to cry. Trying and succeeding, actually, given how steady her voice was.
“Rich messed up. I took his side. Seren isn’t forgiving us.”
A succinct way to sum up something that obviously felt a lot bigger. I reached over to give her arm a squeezy sort of a stroke. “That sounds shit.”
She laughed, then, “It is.”
We cruised along on the clutch for a few shop-lengths, me searching for something to make the stranger in my car see me as a friend.
“You can talk to me, you know, about this stuff.”
Claire smiled – a different sort of sad this time. “Your problems are bigger than mine.”
“It’s not a competition.”
“Thought everything was a competition with you?”
I resisted her tease, wanting her to take me seriously. Wondering whether my performance as Dare Boy was so convincing that she really believed that’s all I was.
“It doesn’t matter how big someone else’s problems are, doesn’t mean yours don’t count. Or that if that someone wants to be your friend, you have to hide them from him…” We were stopped at the lights and I looked across to Claire, but within a split second her eyes widened and she was slithering awkwardly down her seat until half of her was in the footwell.
“Drive!” she hissed.
I looked at the brake lights of the car in front.
“Where? Off across the market? This isn’t a Bourne film, C.”
“It’s your friend! The nice one.”
I glanced out the car to catch sight of Finn standing at the bus stop, headphones on, attention firmly fixed on his phone. Something like excitement flared up at the thought of him seeing us, but the lights were changing and only a few seconds later Finn was receding in my mirror, my thrill a spent firework.
“You can get up now,” I told Claire, looking down to where she was bundled up and giggling to herself in the footwell. “What’s so funny?”
“The whole, you don’t have to hide from your friends and I’m…” She couldn’t seem to get out. “Literally hiding from your friend … and now –” she gave up wriggling – “I’m stuck.”
Pulling over, I went round to move the seat back, half in hysterics myself as I helped her unwedge until she tumbled out onto the pavement.
Looking at her sprawled and giggling on the floor, I held my hand out to pull her up.
“I’ve missed you,” I said.
They say pride comes before a fall, but there’s no pride in running away, is there? The channel had become a way out for more than my guilt over Kam – it had become a way out of being me. At night, Sef Malik could be sitting in the room with his folks, living another life as Dare Boy through the computer on his lap.
Over a month from when we’d started and I’d fallen down a rabbit hole of my own making, lost in an online wonderland. The comments I made and the ones that came back harnessed a community spirit that spread right across the world and I discovered you can flirt all you like behind an avatar without worrying about hurting people’s feelings. Made me wonder why anyone bothered trolling when being nice felt so much better…
Until it didn’t.
We’d had a few little back-and-forths where people had copied our dares like we wanted them to. Some stoner students ate cat biscuits out of a cereal bowl and there was a mini domino effect of people filming themselves licking slugs – all newbies with hardly any followers. Not enough momentum to get our dares out into the mainstream.
Then came the two girls. The Merry Cherries, they called themselves, and there they were on my computer screen, trying to catch some pigeons in the park. Everything about it had been ripped off our dare in Trafalgar Square, right down to the music. No credit. No link. Nothing.
I combed the donations records, looking for a way to let them off – to let myself off for being so naive as to think the internet was a Utopia populated by cupcakes and rainbows and altruists. There was no way around it.
Those girls had watched the video, liked the idea, copied the dare.
All for nothing.
So I did one of the many things I’d been too cowardly to face until that point and wrote down all the stuff we’d spent money on. Our outfits, food and props, petrol and train tickets. London was supposed to get us more comments, more likes. More money.
But Kam’s donation fund was well into the red.
“Fuck!”
The pad I’d been scribbling on made a satisfying smack as it hit the bedroom wall and I picked up the calculator to see if it would do the same.
Better.
“Sef?” Kam’s door swings inwards and Mum pushed it open to find me picking up the shattered case from the floor. “What’s all this?”
“Computing’s stressing me out.” I cast a furtive glance to check the laptop had faded to screensaver, taking the pigeon video with it.
“Is this something I need to worry about?” She stood there, dressing gown on over the blouse and skirt she’d worn to work, looking like she could barely support the weight of the worries she already carried.
“I’ll work it out,” I said, my mind already backtracking the steps that had led me down this dead end, hunting for a way out. A way to make it right.
“OK then.” But she didn’t move. “I came to say I’ve made an appointment for you with Dr Garrison.”
“Why?” Before the accident that would have me a reproving, “Tone, Yousef!” But Mum had no energy for fighting battles like that any more.
“I want you to go to the doctor because I’m worried about how you’re coping with what’s happened to Kam.”
My hand closed round the remains of my calculator, the plastic biting into my skin. Everything about the way I was tensed, breathing too hard, was the same as I’d been in the garden after I’d fought with Dad, but Mum’s gentle touch was harder to resist than Dad’s force.
I relaxed my grip. “What’s Dr Garrison going to do?”
“If you can’t talk to your family, maybe you can talk to him. Yes?”
It hurt too much to hear the hope in her voice and I concentrated on one of the stars on the chalkboard, dusty and faded.
“OK,” I said.
“I’ve written the appointment on the calendar – do you need me to come with you?”
“No.”
“But you’ll go?”
“Yes,” I lied.
/> CHAPTER 13
When we were younger, summers were spent at Uncle D’s caravan and Easters at Auntie Iffat’s – where I’d been sent to my room, or rather, Zahid’s. Little Parveen never had to share with anyone, Amir and Kam got the spare room, and because Zahid and I are about the same age, I got a fold-out camp bed on his floor.
I was intent on the perfectly constructed Lego on his shelves and executing my revenge.
At the click of the door, I collapsed onto the camp bed with an ominous creak.
“All right.” Kam shut the door behind him and I flicked him a mutinous look. “Came to find out what happened.”
I redirected my gaze to the Lego. “Nothing.” Having just been royally roasted for fighting with my cousin, I wasn’t in the mood for Kam’s wise older brother act.
We were ten and twelve and the gap between us had stretched the furthest I’d ever felt. Kam had spent two years in a different school to me, his friends strangers, interests narrowing along lines I didn’t want to follow. Amir was too little, too weird for me to feel close to him and Kam was leaving me behind.
“What did Zahid do?” Kam asked.
“Nothing.” But Kam sensed this was a different sort of nothing from the previous one. A nothing that meant everything.
“What did Parveen’s rabbit have to do with it?”
Auntie Iffat had found us wrestling out in the garden by the rabbit hutch at the unfortunate moment that I’d grabbed one of Zahid’s temptingly large ears and given it a good yank.
“Nothing.” But I couldn’t suppress the ripple of amusement.
Kam sighed and shook his head like he was too old for all this, but he plopped down on the beanbag opposite and raised his eyebrows.
“OK. So now I’m curious.”
And I grinned then, in spite of myself.
“Zahid said there was no way I’d eat Bumpkin’s poo.”
Kam’s expression was the reward I was looking for, his whole face wrinkling up in disgusted disbelief. “Oh my God, you didn’t!”