by Katy Regan
“Okay, that’s six minutes now,” said Teagan, like she was reading my mind. “That’s one minute more than five minutes and you know what that means, Juliet.” (Teagan gets cheeky when she really wants something. She doesn’t care. She just says it.)
“All right, Teagan, thank you! But yes, you’re right, that’s one fact in the bag.”
I was happy we had a fact but worried it was only one and the running was already really hard. There was no way I was going to be running thirty—or even ten—minutes at this rate.
“Come on, Zac, you’re doing amazing.” Teagan was next to me now, giving me some encouragement. But my legs felt like two tree trunks, and my face was so hot that I reckon if you just touched my cheek it would have burned your finger.
People think running is easy, because the people who are good at it make it look that way. And I’m not just talking about professionals like Mo Farah; I’m talking about people at school. Take Connor, for example. People think he’s weird because he says “mango” all the time and sometimes makes a noise like a horse, but Connor is a brilliant runner and that is an amazing skill. When you watch him, he makes it look so easy. It even tricks you into thinking that when you try it, it will be easy too. But it’s not. I’m telling you, running is rock hard. You feel okay for about two minutes, then you feel like you’re going to be sick.
We got to ten minutes, though—one more fact! But Mum was worried. She kept asking if I wanted to stop.
Mum (peering at me, doing the worried Mum face as I just carried on looking in front): “I think he should stop, Laura. He looks like he’s going to keel over.”
Aunty Laura: “Do you want to stop, Zac? Shall we just have a pause?”
Teagan (whispering): “Do you want to stop? Because it’s fine if you do.”
But I was imagining the facts like stepping-stones leading to my dad; I couldn’t stop now, I only had two. “No.” I hardly opened my mouth, because it wasted energy. “No, I’m fine, I’m going to keep going.”
I’ll tell you a secret: I started to play the dad film—it was my secret plan to help me keep going. The dad film is just in my head; it’s me imagining doing stuff with my dad. I like playing it when I’m trying to get to sleep or to take my mind off tough times—like running. There are a lot of different versions, but this one was the beach one: I was imagining my dad pushing me on a dinghy in the sea, or jumping over the waves or playing Frisbee. My mum’s cool, because she doesn’t mind doing stuff like that, but when I see other kids doing those things with their dads, I can’t help wondering what it would feel like.
“Twelve minutes!” Teagan said. Playing the dad film definitely helped, but I still had three minutes to get to fifteen and another fact and it was getting really hard now. “Come on, Zac, you’re doing amazing. You can definitely make it to fifteen minutes and beyond!”
But I wasn’t sure I believed her anymore. It felt like I might puke.
“I know what he needs!” Teagan said suddenly. “He needs a fact, but a really good one.”
“All right.” Mum was almost walking now and flapping her T-shirt dress to get air in her. “Or we could just stop, you know? It might be easier.”
“No, a fact,” said Teagan. “One you can tell him now. And make it a goodie!”
Mum didn’t say anything—nobody did for a bit. All you could hear were the seagulls crying out and all of us panting our heads off.
Then Teagan called, “Julie-e-et!” (Literally, she does not give up.)
Mum did a great big sigh—you didn’t know whether it was because she was finding it hard to talk and walk or whether she didn’t want to give me any facts. “Okay, he’s got blue eyes. Beautiful light blue eyes like yours, Zac, with gold around the middle,” she said.
I smiled at Teagan—I thought it was a pretty good fact. (And she’d called his eyes beautiful! This was a good sign.) It was epic to think there was someone walking around with the same eyes as me too, but Teagan was pulling a face.
“Mmm, have you got another one? Because I like that, but there are a million people with light blue eyes in the world and I can’t see how …”
I flashed her daggers. I thought she was going to blurt out that we wanted the facts because we were looking for him!
Thankfully, she stopped just in time. “Okay, what’s his middle name then?” she said instead.
It was Vaughan. (Teagan said later it sounded like “porn.” Aidan Turner’s always going on about porn. He says it’s where two lesbians get their bras and knickers off and kiss each other.) It just seemed like a really weird name to me, but it was an extra-good fact because it was so weird, nobody else in the whole of England could be called Liam Vaughan Jones. Plus, Teagan’s plan was working: the more facts I got, the more determined I was to keep running.
I learned that my dad had half his thumb missing, because his dad had accidentally shut it in a door when he was really drunk, and also that his hair was really dark like Teagan’s (not light brown like mine and Mum’s), but Teagan wasn’t satisfied. She wanted more. She wanted “the Dad Fact of the Century.” Everyone, including Laura, laughed at that. And that was when Mum told me that my dad’s dream was to be a chef—just like me. I couldn’t believe it. It was one of the best things I’d ever heard in my life. I’d inherited loving cooking not just from Uncle Jamie but from my own dad, and I wanted to stop running then, I wanted to ask Mum more about everything—more facts about the facts!
I’d run for half an hour. It was more than I’d run in my whole entire life and when I finished, I didn’t even sit down, I just bent over like you see the athletes do on the Olympics. And even though it didn’t seem like I could get enough air in my lungs for ages, and even though my whole body killed and I had a big rash where my legs had rubbed, I’d done it, and it felt brilliant. I didn’t know you could have pain that felt nice, but you definitely can.
*
• • •
AUNTY LAURA TOOK us to a café to celebrate. It was one with a stand with loads of different ice cream flavors at the front (paradise, basically). There was even mint-choc-chip, which is my all-time favorite, but guess what? I didn’t even have an ice cream—I had a sorbet. (Mum didn’t even have that—she just had a coffee!) “Have an ice cream if you want, Zac,” Aunty Laura said as we all stood in front of the stand, our mouths watering like mad. “But I’m just saying that a sorbet has far fewer calories in it and that maybe it would be a shame to undo your good work.”
It took all my willpower. You can’t understand unless you’re me what a big deal it was. But I did it, I resisted the call of the ice cream and got a mango sorbet instead (in honor of Connor). Nobody could believe it, least of all me.
13
Juliet
For reasons I don’t want to think about too much, Zac started, the day after our run, to refer to it as the “Dad Beach Run” or, even more worryingly, “My Dad’s Beach Run.” He first said it just as I was downing a glass of orange juice, and I did that thing that you assume only ever happens in sitcoms: I nearly choked to death on it; spat it out all over the floor.
“Mum!” Zac walloped me on the back, concerned, as I coughed and spluttered.
“It’s all right,” I said, my face puce, when I could finally speak. “It just went down the wrong way.” You could say that again.
I didn’t understand at first why him saying this had alarmed me so much, but when I thought about it, I supposed it was because I was suddenly feeling like his name, that word, that concept—dad (such a beautifully simple and taken-for-granted concept in most people’s lives, but like a bloody loaded gun in ours)—had suddenly shifted from the safe realms of the hypothetical to something living among us, something real and present.
It dawned on me that by me choosing to tell Zac information about his dad, I was uncovering him, excavating truths about him, like one of those dig-your-own-fossil toys Zac loves to buy from Poundstretcher with the pocket money he gets from my parents. You get a plaster-of-P
aris egg and a little hammer and you have to chip away at the egg to reveal the ammonite or dinosaur fossil inside. I think it’s the discovering something that gives him so much satisfaction. All the “fossils” are lined up on his bedroom shelf.
As much as it alarmed me, though, I have to admit that I find it touching that it only took a few facts, a few scraps of information, and Zac is throwing the word “Dad” around like he’s known one all his life. It’s so typically forgiving of him. The stupid git doesn’t want to know his son (more fool him), makes zero effort to be in his life, and yet a few sniffs of him and Zac’s referring to “Dad this” and “Dad that.”
Why did I even agree to tell Zac the facts in the first place? Because I’d already broken his heart, that’s why. The expression on his face when I told him I didn’t love his dad after all—I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was meant to be running a Get Zac Happy campaign and suddenly he was as miserable as sin, so the least I could do was to give him something to go on, to motivate him on the run that was probably the last thing he felt like doing after such a major disappointment. (Let’s face it, running is the last thing he feels like doing when he’s perfectly okay.)
I didn’t want to tell him anything, though. It felt like breaking the seal on the protective barrier I’d kept around Liam all these years. But in the end, I suppose I needed to see him smile again more than I wanted to keep a lid on all things Liam—only I got carried away. Somehow, Teagan wheedled far more out of me than I intended to give.
Things got worse after the run. I think the lack of oxygen paired with the giddiness of seeing Zac’s whole being light up went to my head, because I was waxing lyrical, telling them about all sorts of things—our first kiss, the first time he told me he loved me—and the unsettling thing was that I enjoyed it. It was like there’d been this locked attic room in my soul for years, and suddenly the door had been opened, only for the fresh spring air to blow right in. We did have good times. We did.
However, in the way life has of giving with one hand and taking away with the other, my act of kindness backfires, when about a week following the run Mum and Dad turn up at my work. I’m outside at the time, writing a new lunchtime deal on the billboard that now stands outside the shop. Sandwich King is struggling. Never one to pass up an opportunity to whip everyone into a frenzy, Gino called a “crisis meeting” yesterday, summoning me, Laura, and Raymond (even the deliveryman is not to shirk responsibility) to the backroom, where he broke the news that Sandwich King has already fallen in rank to “Sandwich Prince” (his words, I point out) and that it could very soon become Sandwich-No-More if we don’t do something, fast. Gino’s dramatics aside, it is a colossal worry. My God, the last thing I need is to be out of a job. The problem, as we all suspected, is a new café across the road, which with its “fancy salad bar plus soup” approach is luring even your die-hard sausage-sarnie-on-white types away from us. Perhaps cosmopolitan café culture has finally reached Grimsby …
Anyway, we all had to have a bright idea for today and mine is a shameless rip-off of the Boots Meal Deal: one sandwich and a pastry plus hot drink for four quid. It’s been given the go-ahead by Gino and I’m therefore writing this in chalk on the board when I spot a familiar twosome striding toward me in the sunshine. I say a striding “twosome”; Mum’s striding—I’d know that bust-first walk anywhere—but Dad is trailing behind, as he always seems to these days, as if he’s an appendage of Mum that has come loose.
It’s unheard of for them to come into town, or even get up, before nine a.m. (a by-product of grief, and of Dad suddenly going teetotal), and my first thought—with a jolt of the heart—is that something has happened to Zac. When you’ve been woken in the small hours to be told your brother is fighting for his life in hospital, your brain never behaves again. You’re always, in some way, on high alert.
I slowly, nervously, stand up from my crouching position as they approach.
“What’s happened?” I say, chalk hovering, pulse already quickening.
“See, you’re worrying her now,” I hear Dad mumble.
“Good, maybe she needs to be worried,” Mum mumbles back, to which I pull a confused-annoyed face. At least it can’t be Zac: “good” would never feature in a worrying situation about her only darling grandchild.
“Yes, sorry to just turn up like this.” Mum sighs, not sounding sorry at all. “We are actually here to do some shopping too, but your dad and I need a word with you.”
“O-kay.” I’m still confused-annoyed. “Well, I can’t just drop everything now, Mum, I’m working. Can’t it wait?”
Mum smooths her hair down, as if she means business; Dad, I notice, is jangling a bit of change in his pocket and watching passersby as if this has nothing to do with him. “Well, what about your break?” she says. “Do you not get a break at all?”
“In an hour,” I say. “But only a short one. I have to be back for the lunchtime rush.”
“Okay,” says Mum. “We’ve got to get a few bits in town anyway, so how about Bobbin’s at ten forty-five?”
Reading my expression, she adds, “We’ll pay, don’t worry.”
For the next hour, Laura and I try to work out what the pressing issue might be. Mum looked angsty rather than particularly angry—might it be that she and Dad can’t look after Zac on their days anymore? They’re packing up and moving to Spain? Panic briefly grips me—how would I cope without them? What if Sandwich King shut down? I’d be screwed. But then we figure they’d not be too fussed about leaving me, but Dad, in particular, would never leave Zac, the light of his life, and Mum would never leave my brother at his final resting place up at Grimsby’s burial ground. Unless Dad has finally snapped and said they need to move on, start afresh, somewhere without the ghosts of the past whispering in their ears, Jamie’s mates on every corner you turn—with their wives and kids; with their lives.
They’re already there, standing in the queue, when I turn up at Bobbin’s. Dad makes an attempt at small talk, whereas Mum is obviously eager to get going. I order a coffee and a piece of millionaire’s shortbread, which I don’t need, having nibbled earlier on half a dozen cheese straws that came fresh from the oven, in an anxiety-ridden trance.
Mum chooses a table in the corner and pours the tea.
“So what’s up?” I start, looking from Mum to Dad. Mum then looks at Dad, who has his palms pressed together, the tips of his fingers at his lips, staring into the middle distance, and I suddenly think they’re about to tell me they’re getting divorced. I wouldn’t be that surprised, I think; but I would—and this is a surprise—be sad.
It’s not that.
“We’re just a bit concerned,” she says, putting down the teapot. “Well, no, very concerned actually, about things that Zac is saying.” She’s looking straight at me now, with her steely blue eyes that have never suffered fools, and I stop, midbite.
“About what?” I catch a shower of shortbread in my hand as she moves in, lowers her voice.
“About … you know who,” she says. “About Liam.”
She’s barely uttered his name once, in ten years, and now she has, I’m taken aback to note a not unpleasant and totally involuntary flip of the stomach. “Yesterday, when he was at ours and we were baking, he said something about how he knew his dad had always wanted to be a chef … like him.”
“Oh, that.” I freeze. “Right.”
“And when he was in the lounge with your dad, thinking I couldn’t hear, he said something that actually made me gasp—didn’t I, Michael? I actually gasped.”
Dad nods wearily, almost reluctantly.
“Because he said he also knew that his dad’s middle name was Vaughan and that he had light blue eyes like his, with the yellow around the middle. It was a lot of detail to be just a … coincidence.”
“Oh God.”
“Yes, oh God,” Mum says, quite audibly, but my Oh God is more about Zac, my poor baby, innocently, excitably, unable to stop these words from toppling from his m
outh, but having no clue about the weight of them. I feel a pang of motherly guilt at what I’ve expected from him.
“Well, he must have got this information from someone, Juliet,” Mum continues when neither I nor Dad says anything. “And it sure as hell wasn’t us.”
I sigh, feeling suddenly exhausted. “Look, Mum.” I feel torn. I don’t want to upset my parents or Zac. “He’s ten now; he’s only going to get older. You can’t palm him off anymore with one-word answers or expect him not to ask any questions.”
“Yes,” Mum says, almost triumphantly, tapping the saucer with her teaspoon for emphasis, “but I can expect you not to answer them, Juliet.”
I roll my eyes toward the window before I even know I’m doing it because I realize, probably for the first time, how deluded and irrational Mum has become about this, how mad she sounds. I don’t blame her. My brother’s death ruined her, altered her chemistry somehow, so that she is irrational—but she’s been so desperate to keep the truth from Zac, she’s expected the impossible from him.
Mum does a quick scan of the room before she says the next bit. (When Jamie died, it was the talk of Grimsby for months, and even though much of the town has long forgotten Jamie Hutchinson, Mum still behaves as if he were headline news, which sort of breaks my heart.)
“I just thought we’d agreed,” she continues, “that we were sticking to our story: he never wanted to know, he’s not worth knowing.”
“Yes, but Zac’s not going to settle for that forever!” It’s exasperation, mixed in with panic. “Maybe that was fine when he was five, six, seven even, but children get far more curious as they get older. I live with him, you don’t, so you’ve no idea what it’s like.” I stop then, because the fact is, Zac did live with my parents for a while—only for a month, in November. After the Morrisons incident; when I wasn’t coping, when, well … things were really not good …