The State of Grace

by Rachael Lucas

  Before I go, I sneak into Leah’s room when she’s in the shower. Mum’s cleaned it up so it’s all spotless and new bedcovers and even by Leah’s (much tidier than mine) standards it looks perfect. I leave her my favourite bath bomb that I’ve been saving for a two-hour bath-and-book session, and the two pony books that Grandma gave me from Aunty Lou’s room – the ones I guard with my life and won’t normally let her touch. And I fasten my TARDIS key ring to her keys and write a note on a yellow sticky Post-it that says, ‘Try not to have any disasters while I’m gone,’ and a smiley face.

  And that’s how I end up alone on the train to Euston. I’m packaged up like a parcel, with a bag full of food and two new books I’ve wanted for ages (that’s when I know Mum’s feeling guilty, because normally I beg and beg for her to spend money on them and she tells me to go to the library and put a reservation in, complaining that my reading habit costs her a fortune and moaning on about how important it is to use your library). I’m at the window in a double seat with my bag next to me so nobody will sit there, and at the other end – ‘As soon as you open the door, darling, I’ll be there’ – Grandma will be waiting.

  I could spend forever on trains. I watch the backs of houses in the rain, the gardens stuffed with trampolines and discarded ride-on cars, the neatly cut lawns and scruffy-looking yards full of scrap metal. We slow through towns where identical houses line up neatly back to back, reaching off in pairs into the distance. Through hills and trees and the flat nothingness of the middle of the country and then the never-ending squat grey warehouse buildings that seem to surround every city. I’m lulled to a half-sleeping state by the sound of the train on the tracks and the hum of people talking, but not to me.

  I don’t even read my books. I just stare and stare. When Mum discovered I’d lost my phone – I didn’t tell her what had really happened, because I suspect that if she knew I’d deliberately drowned the expensive phone I’d begged for just a few months ago she’d have gone mad – she insisted on giving me the ancient Nokia brick we call the punishment phone. Normally it’s only handed out when our phones have been confiscated for bad behaviour, and being forced back to a unresponsive grey-black screen is torture. Now, because I don’t want to know what anyone is saying to me or about me, it’s heaven. Because I know that what’s happened will be everywhere and when school goes back tomorrow there’ll be a sea of whispers, and eyes rolling over the crowds searching for me, waiting to land on my face so they can turn to each other.

  Did you hear what Grace did? Can’t believe she’d run off like that and leave her horse. Horse? I can’t believe she left Gabe’s cousin lying there. Gabe Kowalski? Can’t believe she was hanging around with him, anyway.

  ‘It’ll have all blown over by the time you get home,’ Grandma says sagely when she collects me at Euston. I follow her like an obedient puppy as we make our way through the people and the smells and the banging bells and noises and the clatter of announcements and down through the silver metal-smelling escalator and on to the tube to change stations.

  I sleep through the next train journey that takes us down to the seaside where Grandma’s house sits, set back from the road, looking over the pebbles of the beach. It feels so far away from home. The sky is different here, the light brighter somehow. I stand at the window of the sitting room and look out to sea, imagining if I stare hard enough I might catch a glimpse of France in the distance. And I wonder if I could just wade into the sea and swim there, and start walking, and keep walking, and just disappear.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I wake in Aunty Lou’s bedroom and it smells of old books and dusty wallpaper. Grandma doesn’t believe in duvets, and I’m compressed under a pile of thick linen sheets and heavy blankets and there’s a smell of toast coming underneath the door and it feels safe, and familiar, and I half wonder if I could just stay here and go to school round the corner and just pretend my old life didn’t exist.

  I get up, pull on the dressing gown that’s hanging on the back of the glass-panelled bedroom door and make my way downstairs.

  Grandma is reading the paper at the breakfast table. And she’s got everything laid out, just like she always does. There’s toast sitting neatly in a rack, and the marmalade is in a jar with a saucer and a little silver spoon beside it. The butter’s not in the plastic tub with the foil crinkled back and crumbs all around the edges – it’s a neat shape in a white china butter dish. And there’s a crisp, white tablecloth with flowers round the edges. Grandma embroidered them herself when she was first married.

  ‘There’s tea in the pot, dear,’ says Grandma, looking at me over the top of her glasses. ‘And I’ve made some fruit salad if you’d like that first before toast. It’s through the hatch, there, look –’

  She motions to the old-fashioned wooden hatch that opens up above the dining table and into the kitchen. Grandma’s house is like stepping back in time. It’s safe here. Newspaper crosswords and half days working in the charity shop and dead-heading roses and none of that social-media nonsense, darling. I realize with a lurch that it’s the first day back at school.

  ‘You know –’ Grandma folds the paper and watches me as I scoop up fruit salad and put it in my bowl. I’m starving, suddenly, and I feel as if I could eat the whole lot – ‘your dad and your Aunty Lou got into some pretty disastrous scrapes when they were teenagers too.’

  ‘Not like this,’ I say, and I feel the corners of my mouth turning downwards.

  ‘Oh, just like this.’ Grandma nods her head. She takes off her reading glasses and slides them into a case as she continues. ‘And it was always the end of the world, especially for your Aunty Lou. Nothing was ever just a bit of a problem. It was all or nothing with her.’

  I think of Aunty Lou and her amazing white-washed house in Spain and her cats and her horses and her dream life.

  ‘But she’s so –’ I scrabble for the word. Grown up, I think, probably. Together. Cool. Calm. All the things I’m not and I will never be.

  ‘She wasn’t always. I tell you, we had some disasters in our day. When your granddad was alive, he had to drive to Carlisle to rescue her once. She fell out with a friend and sneaked on board the bus to Inverness.’

  The clock above the fireplace chimes the half hour. Grandma’s dog Elsa looks up, still lying flat on the hearth rug. Anticipating her walk, she gives a hopeful beat of her tail. She’s a creature of habit, just like Grandma. Just like me, I think.

  ‘Anyway . . .’ Grandma smiles again, and there’s a far-off look on her face, as if she’s remembering something. ‘I think what I’m trying to tell you, my dear, is that it’s OK to get things wrong. We’re all still learning.’

  ‘Not you,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, even me,’ says Grandma. ‘The day you stop learning, my love, is the day you stop living.’

  I can’t imagine Grandma, who seems to know everything about everything, and is a proper grown-up sort of grown-up, ever being lost and confused and not knowing what to do.

  ‘Look at your mum,’ she carries on. ‘Between you and me, I had no idea what to do about that Eve. I could see she was a bad influence – my goodness, I had enough trouble with your Aunty Lou when she was growing up – but I couldn’t work out how to tell your mum I didn’t like her much.’

  ‘No.’ I swirl my teaspoon round in my cup. ‘She wasn’t exactly – nice.’

  ‘She showed her true colours in the end, though,’ Grandma said. ‘Where was she when your mum needed her?’

  I think back to Lisa turning up on the doorstep when Leah was being tended to by the paramedics. Mum had been out with Eve. She’d left her to come searching for me after Mabel ran off. I didn’t even think about where Eve had gone.

  ‘She wasn’t interested in your mum the way she is now. She just wanted her the way she remembered her – carefree and wanting to have a good time. And I’m not surprised Julia enjoyed that. It’s pretty hard work being a parent, and she’s been doing it all by herself for far too long. Your f
ather needs to realize that.’

  ‘He doesn’t even know what’s happened,’ I realize, thinking out loud.

  ‘Oh, he does. Believe me, he does.’ Grandma shakes her head, and I think she looks disapproving.

  We do Grandma things all day. I put on one of her big old dog-walking coats and we take Elsa along the beach. She canters along at the edges of the path, her legs loping along, covering the ground, a piece of driftwood in her mouth. She’s gentle and beautiful, like a huge wild wolf dog, but I watch as other people skirt around her cautiously, fearful of her German shepherd reputation, though she couldn’t be kinder.

  We stop and have tea – always tea, so much tea – at the little cafe that’s open all year round, and I crunch down along the pebbles of the beach in search of the perfect skimming stone, remembering holidays we’ve spent here when Dad’s been around. When Elsa’s tired out, we take her back home and Grandma settles down in front of the television to watch her favourite programme. I have a bath and stay in it for hours, reading my book. I don’t get out until my fingers and toes are pruned in the water and the edges of the pages are all speckled with damp.

  We eat cottage pie for dinner and sit in the evening watching Coronation Street and eating chocolates from a tin Grandma’s probably had sitting there for months. Elsa balances her head on my lap as I read the last of my book and I look up from the story world as it ends, surprised to discover that I’m here in Kent and not back home in my bedroom. I’d forgotten for a time, and the memory of why I’m here settles like a stone in my stomach again. I kiss Grandma goodnight and take myself upstairs to bed.

  Another two days pass. I don’t even know what I’ve done with the ancient brick phone. There’s nobody to call me, and life back home feels like a vague memory. I miss Mabel all the time, though, with an ache that twists inside me. But I shut it off, telling myself that she loves Polly too, and that she’s being cared for and looked after and that I’m better off here, away from everything else. And I miss Leah too, of course, and Anna (will she ever forgive me?) and Gabe (God, I don’t even want to know what he thinks of me now). I don’t want to go home.

  Mum calls and I hear Grandma talking to her about routines and tennis training. In the silences between the words I can hear her asking, but not asking, if Eve has been around. Telling Mum how amazing she thinks she is and what a good job she does. Telling her dad will be back soon and that she needs to book a spa break or something lovely. And then she hands the phone to me.

  ‘Leah,’ she says.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. We don’t really do phone conversations, so this is a new one.

  ‘Hello,’ says Leah. ‘What’s happening in Grandma world?’

  And I breathe a sigh of relief because she sounds normal and Leah-ish and not the wispy echo of herself that she was when I left.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I say. ‘What’s happening in Grounded for All Eternity world?’

  Leah snorts with laughter. ‘Ah, yes, that.’

  ‘I assume you are, right?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I haven’t exactly asked if I can go out.’

  ‘So what’ve you been doing?’ I picture Leah scrubbing the floors on her hands and knees, but decide that she’s probably got off relatively lightly. ‘Seriously, Lee, you gave us a massive fright.’

  ‘I gave me a massive fright.’

  ‘So you’re not planning on going out on the piss with Lily Carmichael and her gang in the near future?’

  ‘Uh . . .’ There’s a pause, and I imagine Leah shaking her head violently. ‘No. Not so much. No. I don’t think we’re destined to be best friends.’

  I don’t say it, but I’m relieved.

  ‘So how did you . . .’

  ‘End up unconscious with cider poisoning?’ Leah finishes my sentence. ‘I dunno. Mum wasn’t in, Lily got a load of it from somewhere, we were drinking in the sitting room when Mum was out with Eve, and . . .’

  She sort of tails off. I think again about Lily and the rest of them walking off and leaving Leah at the house, so drunk she couldn’t even walk or think, and I want to kill them for putting her in danger.

  ‘They’re not your friends.’ I think of Anna and her kind face and I feel a wave of sadness that I’ve messed things up too.

  ‘Er, no,’ says Leah. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve had Anna and all that lot doing the surrogate big sister bit on them.’

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Yeah, she sorted it with – oh, hang on – Meg’s here. Got to go. We’re having a Harry Potter marathon with popcorn and pizza. See you.’

  And she’s gone before I can even say goodbye, so some things really have gone back to normal.

  I wake up on the fourth morning when the sun shines in on my face through a gap in the curtains. It feels late, later than usual.

  ‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ says Grandma. She’s outside the kitchen door in the garage that joins on the side, folding washing as she pulls it out of the machine. She puts the last pillowcase on the top of the pile and picks up a peg bag from the hook on the wall.

  ‘Would you like to help me hang these out, as we’ve got a bit of sun?’

  Only Grandma would fold up washing before she hangs it out. I pick up the basket for her and carry it out on to the patio. The last of the climbing roses are spilling petals on to the lavender bushes below them. The coloured flagstones remind me of games of hopscotch when Leah and I were little. I hand the washing to Grandma, one item at a time. There are birds singing in the big fuchsia bush where we used to collect the flowers, which looked like little ballerinas. It’s so peaceful here, and I want to stay forever.

  There’s the ringing of a bell and clamouring as we turn to go inside. The wind carries the sound of the secondary school across the playing field that backs on to the garden and my knees go liquidy with fear for a moment. I don’t want to go back but I can’t not. And that’s a terrifying feeling.

  I pick up the empty washing basket and follow Grandma back into the house.

  ‘The post gets later every day,’ Grandma says from the hall. I climb in over the step and into the kitchen. My stomach is growling for breakfast and I’m dying for some coffee.

  ‘One for you,’ says Grandma, putting a huge, fat, pale blue envelope on the table where I’m about to sit down.

  ‘Me?’

  I look at the writing on the front and recognize it instantly. It’s Anna’s mad scribble, and there’s a doodle of a horse on one corner, and a little bunch of flowers on the other. The back is covered in rude Shakespeare quotes, and my heart gives a little skip.

  Grandma passes me a silver sword thing.

  ‘It’s a letter opener, darling,’ she says, when I look at her sideways as if she’s gone bonkers. I slide it into the top corner and it tears through the paper.

  A picture slips out on to the table. Anna has cut out a photo of Taylor Swift and one of her girlfriends holding hands from Heat magazine or something, and stuck our heads over the top from the day we were sent to get passport photos and spent the fiver messing around in the booth instead. Her mum went mad at us and marched Anna back to the photographer’s studio in town where she chose the most hideous picture for her passport as revenge.

  ‘You girls,’ says Grandma, laughing. ‘I’ll just pop upstairs.’

  She leaves me at the table then and disappears out of the room, leaving me sitting on the edge of the armchair looking at the envelope. My heart is racing now. If Anna’s sent this, she can’t –

  I pull out the gigantic card that’s inside. There’s a picture of a guinea pig wearing a pair of goggles on the front.

  Dear Gracie of Moo,

  Anna begins, in her mad, spidery, totally untidy handwriting.

  I am slightly unimpressed that you have gone AWOL, leaving me to deal with the twin horrors of a) Holly Carmichael who is almost PURPLE with horror and envy that An Exciting Thing happened in the holidays with Leah and she isn’t the centre of attention because her sister was caught up in it and b) Miss Martin w
ho has redirected her hatred of you in my direction as you missed double Maths on Monday morning.

  I pull a face at this. But my heart is galloping with excitement and I feel the most Grace-ish I’ve felt in what feels like forever.

  Mum and your mum are worried that you’ve gone into a terminal decline like Ophelia in Hamlet and you’re currently making plans to sail off to your doom festooned in flowers (was that The Lady of Shalott? I get confused), but I am assuming (never assume, Dad says helpfully, it makes an Ass of U and Me – which is officially the most hideous bit of Dad-speak in the history of the planet and I apologize profusely) that you are just hibernating and getting better and recovering and stuff. Although it might be nice if you answered your messages. But you’ve been offline since forever, so I am assuming (never assume, etc.) that you are in an internet-free zone or even banned forever. Hence getting your Grandma’s address in a fit of Astonishing Genius and writing you an actual letter like a Victorian chum.

  I have many things to tell you, but I daren’t put them on here in case it’s intercepted (but please note that one of things is very much skateboard related . . .). Please send back an owl or telegram or whatever it is the young people are doing these days.

  I put the card down for a moment and plop from the arm of the chair down on to the cushions.

  The trouble with people is they don’t tell you how they feel in words of one syllable or less, so you always imagine the worst. The trouble with being me is I don’t know how to ask because my words get stuck.

  For the last few days, I’ve been living in a world where I don’t have an Anna any more, and I’m just on my own. And now I’m in a world where there’s definitely an Anna, and she’s definitely not angry with me, and because she’s so nice and easy-going and all the things I like her for, she doesn’t even seem to be angry. I don’t understand.

  I pick up the card again and realize there’s a long PS scribbled on the back.

  PS Also. I know what you’re like because you’re my favourite GMoo. Also I bumped into Leah in the Science corridor (OMG seriously, I can’t believe the whole Cidergate thing . . .) on Monday and she told me your mum was worried you were making secret plans to emigrate or move to your Grandma’s house. Nobody is cross with you. In the interests of disclosure you were the major topic of conversation from first thing on Monday until first break . . .