by Non Pratt
“What’s that you’ve got there?” he asked, leaning close enough to the webcam that I could see up his nose.
“Profiteroles.”
Uncle D held up some greasy-looking pastry thing and grimaced. “I don’t even like almonds.”
It seemed so unfair that the only other person I felt like I could talk to was a four-hour time difference and over 4,500 miles away. Four hours and the only time we were silent was when either of us had to go to the loo.
“Thank you,” I said after Dad’s van pulled up outside.
“You don’t have to thank me for loving you, Sef. Merry Christmas.”
Christmas last year. We were four of us, sitting under the stars in plastic chairs intended for warmer conditions than approaching freezing on a midwinter’s night. My brothers sitting either side of me, Zahid lounging opposite, feet propped on the table where we’d put our drinks. I studied the soles of his trainers enviously. If he hadn’t been two sizes smaller than me, I’d have tried hiding them when it came time for him to pack up and go home.
“If you could buy one person one thing – anything – in the world, who would it be and what?” Kam tipped his head back and puffed his breath into the air, before adding, “Anyone except the four of us.”
Our street was still soused with the Christmas spirit and I idly counted the number of houses backing onto ours that still had lights in the windows.
“I’d buy my girlfriend something,” Zahid said with a grin, interrupting me at house number eight.
Neither Uncle Ali nor Auntie Iffat knew about the girlfriend, but Zahid had shown us pictures on his phone as evidence. Nothing too racy, but enough to convince even me that Kayleigh existed.
“What would you buy her?” Amir was enjoying being too old to be considered a child, unlike Parveen, who’d been sent to bed in a rage at not being allowed to stay up with the rest of us.
“Money’s no object?” Zahid asked and we all looked to Kam for the ruling.
“None at all.”
“There’s this handbag all the girls at school want,” he said. “Designer. Kayleigh’s got, like, a knock-off from the market or whatever, but I’d buy her the real thing.”
None of us teased him for it, because it was obvious he was serious. That he liked Kayleigh enough to notice her handbag and refrain from showing us the photos he had of her in her bra.
I was almost as jealous of him for that as I was for the trainers. Almost.
“What about you?” Kam asked Amir, who was obviously itching to get his answer out.
“A car for Mum. Nothing too fancy, or she wouldn’t want to drive it anywhere. Just a Mercedes or something.”
I huffed out a laugh as I sipped my drink. Just a Mercedes.
“Good gift,” said Kam. “Leaves me with Mrs B all to myself.”
“Who the fuck is Mrs B?” asked Zahid.
“Our car,” I said, giving Kam a meaningful look. “September the second and she’ll be mine…”
“Half yours.”
“So who are you buying a present for, then?” I asked him.
Kam narrowed his eyes, thinking, although I reckoned he’d already thought of someone since he was the one who’d asked the question.
“I’d buy Dad a really expensive tailored suit.”
I pulled a face. “What for? So he could look like a chauffeur when he’s driving around in his van?”
“For no reason at all. Just because it’s nice, isn’t it? Having one expensive thing.”
“Wouldn’t know…” Although even as I said it, I thought of all the stuff I had – my phone, my watch, even my shoes – all of them more expensive than what Dad would choose for himself.
“What’d you buy?” Zahid flicked something at me that missed.
I glanced back towards the house, to where I could see all the parents with Uncle D playing Trivial Pursuit round the dining table.
“I’d buy Uncle D a house,” I said. “One so nice he’d never want to leave it.”
And I’d buy it as close to ours as I could.
CHAPTER 22
When someone knocked on the bedroom door on Boxing Day, I wasn’t expecting it to be Amir.
“What’s up?” I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I looked out the window, too jittery to stay still. For the first time since we started the channel, I was nervous about doing a dare. Moz’s video had gone live and even with it being Christmas – perhaps because of it being Christmas and people wanting to escape their families – the numbers on our channel had rocketed, and we’d smashed the target.
And the first video we’d be uploading for our new audience would be of me streaking at a football match. (Sort of – I had a jock strap. You can get charged with indecency if you go full monty.) Waiting for my performance, I was starting to get an inkling of how Claire had felt before we took a razor to her head…
“Wanted to see if you were OK,” Amir said.
The night before I’d had a massive row with Dad and the house hadn’t yet recovered. We’d both said some pretty unforgivable things.
“I’m fine.” I puffed a breath onto the glass and drew a little smiley face in the condensation before it faded to nothing.
“Actually, I wondered if you wanted to talk about it…”
“Why do you all think it’s that easy?”
“I don’t!” He laughed then and I turned round in surprise. “It’s not always about you… I meant, did you want me to talk to you about Kam? About yesterday and what it was like?”
I watched him, wary of the offer, wondering if it was a trick to get me to open up about what was wrong with me, but Amir just stood there, not hopeful, not anything. Waiting.
“OK then…” My worries about the dare had faded away, replaced with the swell of fear I felt whenever I thought about Kam, but I sat down on my bed, knees bent, as I watched Amir sit on the floor opposite, mirroring my posture.
How I used to sit in here and talk to Kam.
“How was it?” My throat felt dry and my heart stuttered over every beat.
“Nice. You’ve been inside, right?” I nodded, one swift, shameful duck of the head. “They’d hung fairy lights along the ceiling so you felt a bit like you were walking into a grotto and one of the nurses and some of the other staff had helped him decorate his room.”
“Helped him?” I asked, confused.
Amir gave a hint of a shrug. “Showed him the decorations they had, let him pick the ones they put up.”
My parents talked about how much better it was once Kam had enough control over his muscles to point. Pointing. A skill so basic babies learn it without anyone teaching them, but for my brother it had taken hours of physio across weeks of his life to learn how to make his muscles obey his brain, to teach his brain to understand what was being asked of it.
“What did it look like, the room?” I asked, my attention focused on a crease in my duvet.
“Would you like to see a picture?” Amir pulled his phone from his pocket. “I took a few.”
“Just of the room?” I said, not sure I was ready to see a picture of the person who lived in it.
“OK.” Amir tapped open one of them and got up to pass me his phone. Through the starburst of his cracked screen I could see Kam’s room, his home, the bed he slept on with its metal mechanisms, the drip stands and other miscellaneous equipment that I couldn’t identify. Beyond that the walls were lined with familiar posters and pictures, the globe on his windowsill masked by a line of Christmas cards. Garlands of silver and green tinsel hung in ungainly loops from the ceiling.
“Our dinner slot was one of the early ones, so we ate first,” Amir said.
“I didn’t think Kam ate solids?”
Amir shrugged. “He doesn’t. But he can eat potatoes mashed up with gravy and there was trifle for pudding.”
“But he can’t…?”
“He needs help getting the food into his mouth.”
I didn’t understand how matter-of-fact Amir was
about all this.
“And that’s not…” I couldn’t really put it into words. “Is that, you know, hard to watch?”
Amir looked across at me as if I was the one who was difficult to understand. “Does it matter if it is? Cutting up turkey with a knife and fork isn’t as important as being able to eat together.”
I looked down at the phone I was still holding, wondering what other pictures were on there.
“What did you do after dinner?”
“Presents.”
He was waiting for me to say it.
“Did you give him mine?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did he open it?”
“No,” Amir said quietly. “He only wanted to open presents with the people who were there.” I closed my eyes, tears leaking out through my lashes. “We put yours with the ones the rest of the family sent over. He might change his mind next time – Kam’s not always consistent about what he wants.”
“Sure.” I blinked away my misery and looked at Amir. “So, did he like what you gave him?”
He grinned then. “I bought him a Lego rocket and we made part of it together – want to see?”
Once I nodded, Amir leaned over and swiped through to a picture of him and Kam leaning over a tray of Lego. My fingers hurt from how tight I was gripping the phone and I leaned into my first sight of Kam in four months. The photo had been taken from over Kam’s shoulder and all I could see was his right ear, the vague hint of a smiling profile and the scar on his head.
“How far did you get?” I asked.
“Not far. But it’s something we can keep working on together every time I visit.”
“Did you—?” I faltered. “Did he have a good Christmas?”
Amir took the phone from me and swiped along a bit, keeping the screen hidden. “I think so. He got tired towards the end, though. Started shouting at us.”
“What was he saying?”
“Wasn’t using the app, so we don’t know.” He looked up and I saw the hand holding the phone was trembling slightly. “Do you want to see a picture of him? A proper one?”
CHAPTER 23
Everyone at West Bridge might have liked Kam, but there were only ever two people that mattered – Danny and Hamish.
He didn’t even like them at first. Danny and Hamish were already tight by the time Kam joined in Year 9 – Danny was sharp and sarcastic, as smart as Kam and twice as cutting with it, and Hamish acted like his bodyguard. But slowly, as they grew older, the three of them grew closer. Hamish stopped caring about throwing his weight around and Danny mellowed to the point where he became one of the funniest people I knew. Even Dad liked him enough that when Kam let slip Danny was bisexual, Dad just muttered, “Some people are, I suppose” and carried on laughing at his jokes.
Late one Saturday, when there was only me and Mum still awake, watching trash TV and eating chocolate buttons on the sofa together – Kam stumbled in through the door, blood all over his best T-shirt and his hand over his nose so that he had to say it twice before we heard: “I might have been in a fight.”
Never one to panic, Mum sent me upstairs to get the first-aid kit and led Kam into the kitchen. When I came back down, she was tilting his head all around under the fluorescent lights, frowning and poking him.
“Ow!”
“It’s just bruising. You’ll be fine. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
As Kam sat on a chair I brought in from the dining table, Mum washed him off with warm water and TCP, tutting every time he winced. He’d been queuing with Hamish in the Chicken Shop on the parade while Danny was on the phone outside. Some drunk bloke started throwing chips at Danny and calling him names.
Mum asked what names and Kam met my eyes where I was standing behind her wrapping the frozen peas in a tea towel. She wouldn’t have asked if Danny wasn’t white, but there are some prejudices Mum doesn’t see.
“Nasty names, Mum. The sort you don’t want me repeating.”
“Oh,” she’d said. “And Danny retaliated.”
“He told the guy to perform an impossible sexual act…”
Mum rolled her eyes.
“… and the guy objected. Physically.”
“And you thought the best way to help Danny was to rush face-first into that person’s fist?”
“Danny’s my friend, Mum.”
“Your friends will be the death of you, Kamran Malik.” She held out her hand to me. “Pass me the peas, Sef.”
New Year’s Eve I got a message from Danny.
I don’t know what to do with myself tonight. You?
We had stayed in touch since he went to uni – me drawing comfort from knowing there was someone else who felt responsible for what happened, him needing someone who would tell him about Kam.
No idea, mate. I replied. Hamish not around?
But I knew he wasn’t because I’d seen the postcards that came through the door from all the places Hamish had been travelling, all addressed to Kam. All stacked neatly on the radiator, as if denying Kam access to the postcards was a way to punish Hamish for sending them. Punishing him for being able to go on with his life when Kam couldn’t.
My parents were punishing Danny, too. Whenever anyone (who hadn’t made the mistake of saying the wrong thing) wanted to visit Kam, Mum would arrange for them to come on a Sunday afternoon and escort them to the Rec herself – a trickle of aunties and uncles and cousins, family friends and our next-door neighbour – but not Danny. When he’d emailed me to ask if he could see Kam when he came home for Christmas, I’d forwarded it to Mum.
Her reply had been succinct: Here are the best times for Kamran to receive visitors. I’m sure Daniel will understand that he’ll have to arrange this himself.
Kamran and Daniel. Mum only uses long names when she’s too upset to think informally.
When Danny asked me if I wanted to hang out with him for New Year, I said yes. Claire wasn’t free and I’d pushed my own friends too far to call them back.
University had changed Danny. He looked softer, like he might have been living on the diet of burgers and beans that my mum was so disparaging about. His shirt wasn’t ironed, either – another thing she’d insisted Kam learn how to do. But Danny also seemed older – not cocky, like the students at Cine Obscura, but more mature. Wiser.
Or maybe that was just the accident. This was the first time I’d seen him since I’d run into A & E to find him sitting white and shaking on one of the plastic chairs by the entrance, the phone he’d used to call me still clutched in his hand as Hamish shouted at the people on reception.
Danny was surprised when I asked for a JD and coke at the bar. A double.
“Didn’t think you drank…”
“Not often.” Or ever, as far as my family are concerned, but other people drown their sorrows – thought I might give it a go. New experiences for a new year.
“Thanks for the emails, Sef.” Danny lifted his glass and chinked it against mine. “It meant a lot.”
I shrugged, like it was no big deal and took a swig of my drink. Couldn’t tell him that they meant a lot to me, too.
My drink wasn’t pleasant, but the more I drank, the less it mattered, and for the first couple of rounds we talked about university – Danny’s Psychology course, the halls he was living in, a boy he’d hooked up with who refused to acknowledge anything had happened because he had a girlfriend back home. Kam was always talking about Danny’s doomed crushes, using him as an example of why it was better to avoid relationships altogether.
By number three the alcohol had loosened us enough to talk about the one person we had in common.
“It’s not as bad as I thought it’d be, that place,” Danny said, studying the ice in his gin and tonic.
“Great facilities,” I said. I knew more about the Recreare than the person I supposedly visited there. “Nice staff. They’ve got a pool.”
“Kam seems happy, I guess. Do you think?”
“I do think.” I chucked back the rest of
my drink and shook my glass to make the ice tinkle. “You want another?”
Danny checked his watch. “Not yet. Need to pace myself.”
There was a suggestion in the way he looked at me that I should do likewise, but the girl behind the bar was already taking my money.
“But he is happy, right?” Danny repeated, like my answer mattered.
“Did I tell you they have a pool?”
“You did.” Danny was looking at me funny and I felt like poking him on the nose. Managed to refrain.
“Sef.” He laid a hand on my shoulder.
“Danny.” I laid my hand over his and grinned.
“I’m serious. Do you think Kam’s happy?”
My hand slid away. “I don’t know. Ask Amir.”
“You what? Why?”
“Amir’s the mind-reader, the boy who talks to vegetables.”
Danny’s confusion turned to disgust. “Fucking hell, Sef!” He shoved me away. “What the – how – you can’t talk like that!”
“Is a joke.”
“I don’t care, it’s not fucking funny! It’s—”
“I know.” The stupid smile I’d plastered on fell away. “None of it is. I don’t know why I said it. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not the one you should say it to.”
“Apologies mean nothing.” I banged my glass down to make my point and the guy next to me told me to watch it. “Sorry changes nothing.”
“I know, Sef, all right.” He apologized to the man I’d swayed into before turning his attention back to me. “Nothing can change what happened, I know…” It still seemed like he might be talking to someone else, maybe not the man, though, given how Danny’s eyes seemed small and pink and sad as he stared at the floor.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“Didn’t I what?”
“Change things. If you hadn’t been up there…” But that hadn’t been Danny’s fault… “If I hadn’t gone on at him about it…”