by Matthew Crow
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We’re a team. I’ll be here as long as you need me.’
In the end, I made the phone call. Mr Fitzpatrick’s phone had a rotary dialler and the apprehension of returning to zero after every digit made even him seem uneasy.
Nancy answered in what sounded like a wind tunnel. Her voice seemed distant and inside out. Somewhere in the background an announcer boomed a train’s delayed arrival time. After I told her my name, she demanded that I explained who I was exactly. When I told her I was the girl who’d sworn at her she said I’d have to be more specific than that. Eventually I reached for the easiest label I could find.
‘I’m the girl who didn’t want to speak to you about Sarah Banks. The crazy girl.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I assumed you were a dead end.’
‘Yeah I get that a lot,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m with someone who’d like to talk to you. It’s important.’
‘Is this about Sarah?’ she asked in a voice that seemed to be chivvying me off the line. ‘That’s old news. Nobody’s covering that. Try one of the local papers.’
‘It’s about more than Sarah,’ I said, frantically. ‘It’s important and it’s huge. I promise it will be worth your while.’
‘Right,’ she said, sounding cautiously interested. ‘Well, I’m covering an X Factor audition over your way on Thursday. I’ve got half an hour to spare, but that’s it.’ She rang off the phone quickly, after giving me a time and a place.
‘And?’ Mr Fitzpatrick asked, looking suddenly older and frailer than I’d ever seen him before.
‘We’re on,’ I said, hoisting my bag over my shoulder. ‘And here,’ I said removing my bracelet, ‘if you see Roseanna tell her I was just keeping it safe.’
‘You and old Fitzpatrick seem to be getting on well,’ Dad said, once I was back home. Paula had taken over the living room with reams of paper; she was preparing a sign for the church hall about her latest venture (a geriatric dance class) and Dad and I were huddled on the small sofa, trying to catch glimpses of the television over her bobbing head.
‘He’s nice really. You just need to take time. Actually, I’m worried about him.’
‘I still haven’t forgiven him for the trouble he caused,’ Dad said, shaking his head. Dad didn’t do grudges or negativity, but when someone questioned his parenting skills – as Mr Fitzpatrick had done frequently – his lip curled, literally and metaphorically.
‘Yeah well, that was ages ago. He’s had a hard time of it. Everyone acts out when they feel like their pain is being ignored. You’ve forgiven me enough times. Besides, he’s my friend and he’s a good man. He’s going to do something brilliant soon, something that should have been done a long time ago.’
‘Really? What masterpiece might that be?’ Dad asked, as Paula swore and jerked her arm at a paper cut.
‘You’ll see,’ I said. ‘Just wait. Everything will be fine.’
‘Hey!’ Dad said, in mock indignation. ‘That’s my line.’
‘Yes it is,’ I said. ‘And as we both know. You are always right about everything.’
I moved onto the floor and began flicking through the magazine cut-outs and scraps of paper that formed Paula’s palette for the evening as she harrumphed and scowled her scissors across a length of pink sugar paper.
‘It’s only the church hall,’ I said as she shook her head and balled up her botched effort, ready to start again. ‘I doubt it’ll even get read, let alone critiqued on its artistic merit.’
Paula looked up and sighed.
‘Help me, Claudette,’ she said before releasing a long groan at the sheer magnitude of her task.
‘I’m no good at this sort of stuff,’ I told her. ‘I can’t draw. I can’t even cut straight.’
‘You made me that Mother’s Day card once,’ she said and I shuddered.
‘I was six. And anyway, didn’t I spell your name wrong?’
‘On purpose,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Just keeping you on your toes.’ I skimmed through some of her paperwork and lesson plans, oblivious to whether or not they may have been confidential.
‘Hmm,’ Paula said as she arranged the letters she’d cut out at the top of the page. ‘Looks rubbish, doesn’t it?’ We both stared down at her efforts. ‘There’s so much competition to get a space at the hall nowadays, I just want it to pop. I want to create a real buzz.’ She looked at me with menace. ‘And really stick it to Sheila Jessop and her stupid tea dance.’
‘Oh good, a gang war,’ I said. ‘Is that what this is? You want to be the biggest and the best do-gooder. I know you want a Pride of Britain Award. I saw you on the website when I had mumps last Christmas and had to sleep on the sofa.’
Paula waved me away with her hand
‘That was for someone else!’ she protested, unconvincingly. ‘Either piss or get off the pot, Claudette. I’m stressed enough. All I ask is you bring your famously chipper positivity in my time of need?’
I sighed. ‘You want to know what I think?’ I said.
‘Well, obviously,’ said Paula.
‘I think that old people don’t want jazzercise, or whatever it is you’re doing. None of them really need to learn a rudimentary rumba. They dread the lesson part of these things.’
‘And you’d know?’ she asked.
‘Actually, I do,’ I said. ‘They want cake. They want hot drinks and sweet treats. And they want gossip. They want to tell stories and to hear them in turn. They want company and to enjoy themselves while they still can.’
Paula nodded. ‘They’re lonely.’
‘Yes. They’re lonely, that’s all, they don’t need to extend their lives through gentle exercise. They need to enjoy whatever life they’ve got left. I bet if you filled that hall with trestle tables and chairs, tea and biscuits, played some chamber music on the lowest setting your ghetto blaster will allow and left them to it, they’d have the time of their lives.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ she asked, though I could tell she was coming to my state of mind.
‘Mr Fitzpatrick, no doubt,’ Dad muttered from behind us.
‘Exactly.’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him, what, half a dozen times in the last three weeks. And do you know? I reckon I’ve found out more about him in that time than anyone else has in the last twenty years. People are just people. We all want the same thing.’
‘Cake and love,’ Paula said as she clapped her hands together.
‘I’d have gone with sugar and gossip, but potato, po-tah-to, I suppose.’
‘We could call it Paula’s Pantry,’ she said. ‘Or Cake and Company.’
‘Call it Choux and Me Makes Two,’ Dad said excitedly, sitting up bolt upright as each sweet treat known to man passed through the rhyming dictionary of his mind. ‘… Cake’s Progress,’ he yelled, suddenly unstoppable. ‘… The Rolling Scones!’
‘… I like Big Bundts And I Cannot Lie?’ I tried as Dad high fived me for my input.
‘Whatever,’ I said, standing up. ‘I just don’t want to have to sit through another eighty-year-old singing “You’re The One That I Want” on the back of a cardboard Cabriolet at your Christmas Extravaganza. It’s unkind to all involved.’
I could tell I’d already lost Paula, as she opened her giant notepad to a fresh sheet and began drafting ideas.
‘This is perfect, Claudette,’ she said as she scrawled away. ‘You really are a good girl,’ she said. ‘So thoughtful.’
I rolled my eyes and stood up just as Dad was putting his phone back in his pocket. Dad checked his phone on the hour every hour. It had been on silent since the day he had bought it, out of courtesy to the world at large, and the only people who ever texted him were Paula and myself. But still he checked. Just in case.
He caught my eye and gave me a proud smile as I made my way to my room.
‘Thank you,’ he mouthed.
‘Anything to get her out of the house,’ I mouthed back.
19
The Haunted
Girl
They say that a good argument is supposed to help a relationship in the long run.
Saying things that have long been unsaid will clear the air.
Venting your emotions will wipe the slate clean.
They have obviously never been a seventeen-year-old girl.
All I seemed to be was things unsaid. It’s all anyone was, as far as I could see. Donna too. Most people I knew seemed to survive on a healthy diet of seething silence. And yet depression made it harder for me to get by that way. I didn’t have the filter that most people had, that allowed them to keep painful things from touching them too deeply. Other people managed to deal with each emotion as it happened, one by one, in time and in turn. I would absorb it all until it was too much to bear and then scream for help.
I don’t know how long Donna and I had been building to a fight. I wasn’t even sure I was aware that we’d been simmering towards rupture. But when we exploded we did it with style.
When I arrived at her house she wasn’t her usual self.
‘Hi,’ she said bluntly.
No benevolent insult. No jokey reference. Just, hello. She let me in and we made our way to her bedroom.
The music filled our silence and highlighted it at the same time.
‘I feel like I never see you any more,’ Donna said, after some excruciating small talk. In the kitchen I heard her mum turn off the radio and bid Adam a farewell before she stomped through the hallway in her high heels, locking the door behind her.
I shrugged and sat up on her bed.
‘I’ve been busy. I don’t know. It’s been a strange summer.’
‘I’ll say,’ she said. ‘You don’t even text me back any more. It’s not just that you don’t get in touch; you don’t even acknowledge it when I do.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But what with Jacob and everything else…’
‘Ah,’ Donna said, with mock understanding. ‘Your great project.’
‘What?’
‘You’re going to solve the mystery of Sarah and cure yourself,’ she said slyly. ‘Watertight plan, Claudette. A sure-fire winner.’
She stood up and changed the track on her phone so that a slower, angrier tune began playing from the speakers that rested on her windowsill.
‘Jacob told me all about your little mission. Sounds like some Famous Five fun.’ She sipped the water beside her bed. ‘We were worried about you,’ she said, and I felt my stomach lurch.
‘We?’ I said. ‘What, you’re like a collective now?’
Donna shrugged. ‘We’ve been seeing each other on and off,’ she said as if it were no big deal.
I felt my face heat in a flash. I was upset, angry, embarrassed, confused. For no good reason whatsoever Jacob felt like mine. After the hospital, all the while Sarah was gone, I needed the space that Jacob had given me. He had taken me as he found me, with none of the silt and mud from the tsunami of the months before we met.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Yeah well if you’d have answered your phone maybe you would have.’
‘And you talk about me, I suppose?’ I said and Donna laughed.
‘You’re a subject ripe for analysis,’ she said. ‘What do you think people do, Claudette? They talk about their friends. They worry. You’re still not well.’
‘How would you know?’ I spat. ‘How would you know anything about what I’m going through.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ she said annoyingly calmly. ‘That’s the problem. You never tell me anything. So I try. And I try. And then…’
I began to cry. She shrugged.
‘I’m doing everything I can at the moment to keep my head above the water. Everything I’m doing I’m doing to survive,’ I sobbed.
Donna scoffed. ‘You really believe that, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re not even trying to get better. You’re just looking for something to blame next time you get ill.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t think you want to get better. I think you’re scared.’
‘Scared of what?’
‘Scared of yourself. Scared that without the crazy, you’d have to accept that maybe you’re just a horrible person.’ She laughed. ‘You spend so long distracting yourself, Claudette. You make Jacob your audience for this fresh new version of yourself, you turn sleuth to try and solve Sarah, you knock about with Daniel Vesper and that old creep…’
‘Fuck you,’ I barked, and she rolled her eyes.
‘I think you’re scared that you don’t know where it ends and you begin. That’s the truth. Sometimes depression comes for you and it’s enormous. Sometimes you can’t move. Sometimes you can’t speak. Sometimes you can’t function. But it’s not some poltergeist; you can’t blame every single thing on it. You’re a human being, Claudette, sometimes you really are just an arsehole. It’s not a disease. It’s you.’
‘Can you imagine what it’s like for me?’ I said.
‘No, Claudette, I honestly can’t.’
‘Everywhere I go, everything I do, I’ve got this Jaws theme tune at the back of my head. This creeping dread and all I can do is try and stave it off for as long as I can. So yeah, sometimes I try to distract myself, but it’s a question of necessity. God, Donna!’ I yelled. ‘Be my friend. I’m so fucking scared right now. I’m in over my head and I need to know someone is there for me. I’ve messed up, fine. And I don’t know what to do and I can’t work out if I’m crazy or in trouble.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time you’d been both,’ Donna said coldly. ‘Sometimes I think you’re exactly where you want to be, Claudette.’ She began to cry herself, gently and reluctantly, the way Donna always did.
‘I need to leave,’ I said, standing up. ‘I can’t believe you’re being like this.’
‘You brought it on yourself. You’re not immune to being pulled on your bullshit.’
‘Yeah well I certainly feel pulled.’
‘You do know he’s leaving, don’t you?’ she said as I made my way out of her room. ‘And then where will we be? Then who will you be? You’ll be stuck with yourself again, just you, as you are. You’re going to need us, Claudette, but I’m not sure how many times you’re going to be able to hit pause on everybody you know before we give up completely. You’re like this eternal maybe. Sometimes we need a solid yes or a no.’
I stumbled towards the door down the hallway. Adam yelled after me, asking if I was coming or going or how I was; the specifics of his words didn’t quite make it to my brain. My legs were shaking and my breathing quickened as I steeled myself to focus on each step, one foot in front of the other, one at a time, until I made it down the corridor into the piss-sealed tomb of her tower block’s lift.
Donna had been right, I thought, as I sat alone on the promenade, staring out at sea. Everything had been accurate, in a roundabout sort of way, but it still didn’t mean she’d had the right to say it. As I sat there with tears drying in sharp scratches down my face, I wanted to wade out into the water and slip under, never to return.
The argument had settled in my brain like half-eaten trifle, layers and layers piled up and slipped underneath one another, in an ugly, gluey mess. All I knew was that I felt rotten, and nothing would cheer me up.
As if the universe hadn’t thrown enough horror my way that afternoon, Ross was sitting cross-legged on the wall of the block of flats at the bottom of my street by the time I made it home. He looked freezing, with his fists clenched beneath his sweatshirt sleeves, staring at the cracked paving.
‘You all right?’ he asked, as I tried to walk past him as quickly as I could, even though pretending not to have seen him would have been entirely impossible.
‘No. I’m really not in the mood today, Ross,’ I said as he stood up and began to follow me.
‘Have you been crying?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Has something happened?’
‘What do you want?’ I asked, turning to face him.
‘Yes. Sorry. Come in,’ I said with weary resignation. ‘The coast is clear.’
‘Can I make you some tea or something?’ I asked as we settled on the sofa and Ross gave me a quizzical look.
‘Who are you again?’ he said and we both laughed.
‘I honestly don’t know sometimes,’ I said, pulling my knees close to my chest and holding myself as tightly as I could, like a locked seatbelt, until my arms began to ache. ‘Why didn’t you just text me if you wanted to see me?’
‘Lost my mobile,’ he said. ‘Well, haven’t been keeping it on me. More hassle than it’s worth.’
‘That’s a bold move, Ross,’ I said. ‘You can’t be Dan’s favourite errand boy if he can’t pin you down.’
‘That’s the idea.’ He paused. ‘I’m staying back home again.’ He did not elaborate on where exactly home was this month. ‘It’s all getting too much.’
‘What, the life of a small-time drug baron didn’t have the opportunities for internal promotion you’d been hoping for when you joined the company on the ground level? Or was it the staff wellbeing?’
I was too sharp. Ross stood up.
‘If you’re going to be like that…’ he said, and I rolled my eyes.
‘Sorry,’ I said half-heartedly. ‘I didn’t mean to lash out. Not at you, anyway. It’s Dan I hate. You didn’t deserve that.’
Ross hovered for a moment before he settled and sat back down next to me.
‘Is it about Donna and that Jacob lad?’ he asked, staring at the ground. ‘I saw them getting off with one another down the pub.’
It took everything in my power to stop myself from shaking.
‘They can do whatever they like. He’s just a tourist. He doesn’t mean anything to me,’ I said, instantly regretting it, even though I knew Ross would never remember the lie long enough to relay it.
We were quiet and Ross shifted in his seat.
‘Do you know anybody, Ross?’ I asked. ‘I mean really, know them inside out. Know who they are? Know how they think. How they feel. Know what you are to them and what they are to you?’