Someday Find Me

by Nicci Cloke

  ‘I’ll get it, Mum,’ I said, as she was blinking away the dust. I got her cup off the draining-board, remembered which one it was and everything. Han had bought it for her ages before, Best Mum Ever, it said with a big heart on it and stuff. They used to go shopping all the time, girly stuff and that, sit there in those mud things girls put on their faces and the big pink fork things in between their toes up on the coffee-table while we laughed at them. I got a mug out for myself and I didn’t bother looking for mine just in case it wasn’t there. I put tea in the teapot and that was nice, me and Saf didn’t have a teapot, which was a shame actually cos Quin had a tea cosy, one of those ones that’s a lady with a big woolly skirt to cover the teapot. While I waited for it to brew I leant back against the counter and watched her putting the pastry into its silver dish, prodding around the edges and slicing off the extra bits flopping over the side with a knife. When she was done, she stacked up the knife and the rolling pin and the board next to the sink and starting wiping up the flour dust with a soggy J-cloth, putting it all into her little bird hand.

  I poured the tea into the cups and got the milk jug out of the fridge and poured some in. I didn’t sniff it cos it was best not to, Dad was quite bad at forgetting to pick up milk so it was sometimes, well, you know, a bit on the sour side, but Mum’d get upset then so it was best to just dump a bit of extra sugar in, give it a stir and hope for the best. She’d stuck all the extra flour neatly in the bin and was brushing her hands over the sink and looking a bit lost so I steered her over to the table and plonked the tea in front of her. We both sipped at it even though it was too hot, just sipping and smiling at each other while we tried to think of something to say. I was trying to think of things that wouldn’t upset her, you had to be careful you really did because, even if you started off on something quite normal, before you knew it you’d somehow wandered on to bad topics and then it was too late. Don’t get me wrong, she was definitely getting better, it was nothing like in the first few weeks after that day, when I’d come into the kitchen to make tea for the pair of them or to get ice for Han’s face, because the burning carried on for weeks, her face was so hot it melted ice in minutes and so I was always running back and forth with peas and mugs and sympathy and brave faces, and I’d find her sobbing in a little heap of tea-towel on the table. Or when you tried to get her out down the shops or just a little spin around the block, just to get some fresh air, and even the sound of a car starting or a dog barking and she’d curl up on the pavement and you’d have to carry her home wobbling like jelly. She had nightmares about it for months, even though she hadn’t been there; in the dreams it was her not Han and she was trapped. She’d wake up screaming and it would be me who went, because Dad was slowly rocking on the back step in the dark, smoking and thinking about murder and war and grinding his teeth, so it was me who went and cuddled her and told her it was okay, we were all okay, we were safe. No, she was much better by then but it was still definitely a case of being bright and breezy and watching very carefully to make sure her eyes didn’t start blobbing up with tears.

  ‘How’s Saffy, love?’ she said, and I looked at my tea.

  ‘All right,’ I said after a minute. ‘She’s been off visiting her parents as well.’ Which wasn’t a lie, was it?

  ‘That’s nice,’ she goes, with a smile. ‘Lovely girl she is.’

  I nodded. ‘What’s new with Phil and Holly?’ I asked eventually, and this is the thing, you see: when somebody doesn’t leave the house the people in their life are the ones on the telly so I ended up asking after the bloody presenters on This Morning like they were real mates of ours, but I’d obviously hit on a winner because she squeezed my hand excitedly.

  ‘Ooh,’ she goes, ‘ever so well this week. That Holly she’s a lovely girl, she had on the loveliest dress the other day, beautiful curves, reminds me of when we were young. And that Philip, ooh, I’ve got a soft spot for him, William, I don’t mind telling you.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, winking at her and taking the cups to the sink. ‘Well, I’m no Pip I’m afraid, Mum, but you need anything doing in the garden while I’m here?’

  ‘Oh, you are a good boy,’ she said, pinching my cheek. ‘The beds do need doing – do you mind, pet?’ and she started rolling out the pastry for the pie lid.

  It was weird, grabbing my coat off the banister and shouting, ‘BYE!’ loud enough for Mum in the kitchen and Dad at the computer and Han and her guest up in her room to all shout, ‘BYE!’ back. It was just like I was a kid again, going out to play at the end of the cul-de-sac, back in time for my tea. Billy was waiting at the gate for me, just like when we were fourteen, and we did a sort of handshake-shoulder-pat sort of hug.

  ‘Fitz, man, it’s been ages,’ he goes, he was always stoned, Billy.

  ‘Yeah, Bill, good to see you,’ I said, even though I was already getting to that heavy feeling you get on a night out sometimes, when you can’t be bothered to talk to anyone and even smiling feels like a bit of a job and really you just want to sit in a corner and stare at your feet for a while, and I was starting to regret texting Bill to see if anything was going on that night so I could try and take my mind off Saffy. But when we got to the party I tried my best to smile and be happy and go, ‘HIYA, MATE!’ at everybody I hadn’t seen for ages and try not to remember there was a reason for that. And everyone was ruffling my hair and patting me on the back and handing me beers and I kind of shiftied my way through without having to actually talk to anybody too much.

  I got into the conservatory bit where everyone was smoking weed and I saw Petra sitting on the windowsill blowing bubbles. She was the one person I didn’t mind seeing, so I ambled over and sat down next to her. ‘Hello, stranger,’ I said.

  ‘Fitz!’ She threw her arms round me and gave me a massive hug and I thought to myself her hair smelt a bit like Saffy’s, but then I put that thought away.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I said, and as I did I thought she still looked nice, with nice curls in her hair and big curly eyelashes. She was my first girlfriend when we were like thirteen or something. We used to walk down by the river which isn’t a river even though we all call it the river, it’s just a dirty stream kind of thing with crisps packets and empty Coke bottles and sometimes nappies or johnnies floating in it, and hold hands and sometimes maybe a kiss on the cheek. After that she’d been a bit of a slag – at parties she was always taking boys off to the bottom of the garden for naughty fun with the Poddington Peas but I still always got on with her and it was always nice and never a chore chatting to her.

  ‘All right,’ she said, shrugging and drinking some of the blue bottle in her hand. ‘Same old, you know how it is.’ I did so I said yes.

  ‘How’s your family?’ she asked, because she was nice even if she was a bit of a slag and I said, ‘Yeah, they’re okay, you know.’ She did so she said yes. After the incident of Hannah and the fundamentalists I saw Petra in town once. It was on one of my last goes at getting Mum out of the house and I was walking her round to the baker’s, the one with the nice Chelsea-bun-hair lady, holding on tight to her arm even though she was quivering away like a little jelly-person and trying to hide behind me or sit down I couldn’t really tell which so I just dragged her along saying nice bright things like ‘Ooh, I think I might have a cream slice, what about you, Mum? Nice éclair?’ and tra-la-la-ing to myself because I was getting good at that. And then just as we were walking under the old church steeple, the clock went BONG BONG BONG for three o’clock and at the same time a dog that was tied up to a bench on the pavement jumped out from under it and started barking and my mum leapt behind me like she had little springs for legs and hid behind a parked car and cried. I tried for ages and ages to get her out but she wasn’t budging and so I was just standing there like a lemon scratching my head, when Petra came along. ‘C’mon, Mrs Fitzwilliam,’ she’d said, in a lovely voice like angels have, ‘let’s get you home,’ and she put pretty hands on my mum’s arms and lifted her up and she�
�d walked us both all the way home.

  I was thinking about that then and feeling a bit embarrassed about it but also I was remembering how nice she’d been and I felt a good warm feeling about her in my belly. I drank the rest of the beer in my hand and then I started on the one in my other hand.

  ‘How’s Hannah?’ Petra asked, and she smiled at me and her lips looked like sweets or like red jelly.

  ‘She’s all right,’ I said. ‘She’s had another operation on her face and that.’

  ‘She still, you know …?’ she said, and she didn’t say the last bit, which was nice of her because what she meant was is she still going like the clappers. I nodded slowly and drank some of my beer so I didn’t have to answer, because I didn’t know what the right answer was without lying or without being horrible to Han.

  ‘How’s London?’ she asked brightly, so I didn’t have to answer the other question.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Yeah, it’s pretty sound. What you up to these days?’

  She was swinging her legs and rolling a cigarette. ‘Working at the playgroup,’ she said, licking the Rizla. ‘Looking after the babies.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, and I looked at her big eyes and her curls and her curly lashes and her jelly lips and the squidgy bit of boob showing at the side of her dress and then I leant forward and kissed her. And she kissed me back and it was all warm and jelly and squidgy, and then I got a sniff of Saffy hair smell and my stomach did a flip and a lurch like I was going to be sick. I pulled away from her and I ran out of the house and out of the garden and out of the street and all the way to my front door.

  I got back and fumbled around for the key under the beagle, who was winking at me, which seemed a bit out of order after the night I’d had. I was trying to be quiet and I could hear my dad snoring upstairs, the weird squealy snore he made when he was lying flat on his back. I went to go to the kitchen to make myself a brew but the light was on, sneaking out under the door and into the dark living room. I felt creeped out so I creaked the door open all slow and peeped round it, but it was only Han, sitting at the table with a whisky. ‘Hiya, hun,’ she goes. ‘Good night?’

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ I said, and sat down at the table too, but I never could lie to Han because she looked at me all sympathetic and got up and got me a glass and filled it with whisky from Dad’s not-so-secret stash. ‘Thanks, Han,’ I said, drinking a bit and feeling it burn my throat. ‘Just not in a party kind of mood,’ I said, and gave her a little smile.

  ‘What’s up, love?’ she asked, and her okay eye looked at me kindly.

  There was no point pretending, Hannah’d always known what was what with me since I was mini. ‘It’s Saf,’ I said, all in a big sigh. ‘Her eating’s bad again.’

  ‘Oh, sweetie.’ She held my hand across the table, with her good one I mean. ‘What are you going to do?’

  I wiggled in my seat cos I felt all weird suddenly. ‘I called her mum,’ I said. ‘They took her away.’

  Han swallowed her whisky slowly. ‘Oh,’ she goes. She didn’t let go of my hand, but she stopped stroking it.

  I drank the rest of mine. ‘Was that wrong?’ I said, super-quietly, and I thought she hadn’t heard because she didn’t say anything, just stared at the whisky in her glass.

  ‘Gorge,’ she goes eventually, ‘don’t you think maybe you’re the best person to help her?’

  I felt a bit hot. ‘I don’t know how, Han,’ I said. ‘I tried, I did.’

  ‘I know,’ she goes, taking her hand away to drink the rest of her whisky. ‘But maybe you don’t need to know how. Maybe she just needs you.’

  We both thought about that and then she put her glass down and looked me right in the face. ‘I’m gonna tell you something now, babe, that I’ve never told anyone before, okay?’ I nodded. ‘Okay.’ She sighed. ‘You remember right before the bomb?’ I nodded even though I couldn’t remember what it was like before the bomb, because not long before that was also before Saffy, and those two things had turned the world upside down in all kinds of ways. ‘You know how I was in London a lot of weekends?’ I nodded and I felt my heart start crying because I had never ever been able to say sorry for it, that she’d been there to see me and if it wasn’t for me she’d never have been on the Tube at all, and it was all my fault and I couldn’t make it better, just like I couldn’t make anything better, only worse.

  ‘I had another reason to be there all those times, sweetie. Apart from visiting you.’

  I looked up from the hole on the table top. ‘What?’

  She smiled. ‘I was seeing someone new. Someone I really liked.’

  It felt like the light in the room changed, like it got lighter or darker just like that, except maybe I was just seeing things differently. ‘Who?’

  She took a sip and even though she looked calm her hand was wiggling a bit. ‘A man I knew from work. Well, through work. James.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  She put the glass back down. ‘It was complicated. His situation … It was complicated.’

  She didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask. Some things between brothers and sisters don’t need to be said. Sometimes you need to protect the version of that other person who lives in your head. ‘Well, what happened to him?’ I said, and then I thought, Oh no, right in the middle of my belly, because what if he was one of the ones who died in the bomb and she’d been keeping that in her heart all this time and none of us had known?

  She smiled but I could see that deep down behind her eyes she wanted to cry. ‘I never heard from him,’ she said. ‘I tried calling after I woke up, you know. Texting. Nothing. He sent flowers to the hospital, but he never came.’

  I remembered then all in a big flash a bunch of flowers in the bin outside the ward, all scrunched up and broken just like she’d been, and I wanted to run outside and run all the way back to the city and hunt him down and kick him in the shins and shout at him and make him cry. ‘I’m sorry, Han,’ I said, and I felt my voice start to wobble in my throat and then her eyes filled up and mine did too and the whole room was full of feelings just bursting to get out.

  And then it was gone, and she cleared her throat and took a big swig of whisky and let out an embarrassed kind of laugh. ‘Anyway,’ she goes, ‘what I wanted to say was that he didn’t know how to help me. But I didn’t need him to, not really. I just wanted him to be there for me, whatever happened.’

  There was a long silence as I looked back over the last weeks and saw everything the way it should’ve been.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she goes, breaking the silence and giving my finger a squeeze. ‘You know what’s best, hun. I’m sure she’s getting the help she needs.’

  I nodded slowly, even though I didn’t feel yes. ‘Your face looks good,’ I said, and it did, in the low light from the lamp on the counter. The scars were going softer, the edges between them and the normal skin fading away.

  She touched her cheek. ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘You can hardly tell in this light.’ You could obviously. But that’s what it’s like to love someone, isn’t it? You write your own truth to make them happy.

  I got back to the city with what Han had said floating about in my brain, all words and bits of sentences repeating themselves over and over even when I was trying not to listen. I couldn’t work out what to do with them, so I did what I could to make them go away and I stopped in on my mate Eddie after my train got in to buy some weed. With an eighth in my pocket and the sun back in the sky I started to be able to put the words away one by one, and as I got on Brixton High Street I found myself wondering if Quin was at home, and if he might fancy a few cans.

  There were a load of schoolgirls milling around the high street at the end of Eddie’s road, wearing short skirts and hoop earrings and shoes they couldn’t walk in, and some Rasta guy with a ghetto-blaster on his shoulder, I didn’t even know they still made ghetto-blasters, and an Iceland carrier bag full of beer in the other hand,
and some horrible bloke with greasy grey hair and his pants way down and piss all over them and one shoe off, and his toes had all white bits over them and black nails and he was sweeping from each side of the pavement to the other as he went along, and a woman with a screaming kid, dragging the kid and his buggy along and knocking into shins all over the shop, even the pissed piss-guy’s. It all felt a bit mental and I could feel myself getting all hot and annoyed, so I slipped into the bookie’s just for a minute.

  Everything was quiet and calm in there, blue carpet, blue stools, little blue biros, all very reassuring. Two blokes sat watching the screens, the footy scores were coming in now and one of them was bent over an accumulator while the other who must have lost already dipped into a packet of crisps, staring at the screen the whole time. Couple of younger lads playing the fruities in the corner. I looked at the scores rolling in on the vidiprinter at the bottom of the screen, and it was just the atmosphere of that place, it did something to me. Just knowing one day it would be you with the ticket clutched in your hand, jumping up and down like a prat, and even if it wasn’t there’s still the nice sadness of losing. I stood and looked at the odds on the horses instead of the footy because that was always more my thing, my favourite.

  And there it was, the five-fifty at Kempton. Fifty-five to one. Saffire not Sapphire. Saffire. I’m not superstitious but that’s a sign: when you get that itchy feeling about something in your belly, when you know if you try and walk away you’ll have to go back, when your eyes keep going to that one line and you feel as though it’s all meant to be, like it’s a proper message from someone in the know, that’s when you have to put that bet on. So I fumbled in my pockets and found a battered tenner and one dirty pound coin and filled out my ticket, got my ID out cos you get ID’ed till you’re at least forty in the bookie’s, you must do, and strolled up to the counter. The kid behind the desk, must have been only just eighteen himself, looked at it a bit funny but he printed off the slip and handed it over.