by Sara Barnard
It’s her own fault. She should have called them. Why didn’t she call Velvet and tell her about the signalling faults? If she hadn’t put her phone in her overnight bag in an effort to avoid her father, she might have thought about it. But she thought she had time. When she got to Euston, she had half an hour to get to Westminster. It’s only six stops, but between the escalators and the tourists with their Tube maps and wheely suitcases, it took ages to get down to the platform. Then she had to change at Embankment and do it all again, so when she finally emerged at Westminster, she didn’t even bother to check the time, she just ran. If she had, she would have known that it was too late, but she thought she had time. Actually, she thought they’d wait. That’s the truth of it – what hurts the most: she thought they’d wait. Not all of them. Hugo couldn’t, of course, but she thought that Velvet would have at least. Or Joe. So much for him calling it a date; so much for the bubble of excitement and hope she always felt ahead of seeing her friends; of seeing Joe. Sasha would wait for Joe. Like she always has been.
She read somewhere once that true disappointment lies in the gulf between what you would do for someone and what they will do for you and that’s what she’s thinking about as she sits on the train back to Manchester. She can hear her phone ringing in her overnight bag and doesn’t want to answer it, unsure if it’s them or her father. Curiosity gets the better of her eventually and she unzips it and reaches into the pocket. When she pulls out her phone she sees that it’s Joe and she curses herself for the fizz of excitement she feels in her chest at seeing his name. She considers not answering, but it’s him so she does.
‘Sash, where are you now?’ he asks before she can even say hello. He sounds out of breath and the fizz in her chest becomes a full blown firework as she asks herself if he’s worried.
She has to suck in a breath before she can respond. ‘On the train.’
‘The train? Are you still on your way to London?’
‘No, back to Manchester.’
‘Back to Manchester? Why?’
He sounds genuinely confused and Sasha can’t help but soften.
‘Look, don’t worry about me,’ Sasha says. ‘It was my fault I was late.’
But before she can explain what happened, her phone beeps and he’s gone. The train hasn’t gone through a tunnel so she checks to see if she has signal only to find that the screen is black. She presses Home with her thumb, but nothing happens. She tries again, but when the screen remains black, she closes her eyes and lets go of a tender sigh as she realises that the battery’s dead.
The tears come then – big, fat, meaty tears that burn lines down her cheeks. Mercifully, the first-class carriage is empty, aside from a middle-aged man in a suit at the other end, who was drinking gin and tonic from a can and reading the FT when she got on. So, sure that no one can hear her, Sasha lets it out, heaving and sobbing, her hands balled into fists in her hair. She hasn’t cried like this since she was kid, proper uncontainable, ugly crying, the way you cry when you fall over in the park and wait for your mother to come and pick you up.
Except no one’s coming to pick her up, are they?
By the time the train pulls into Manchester Piccadilly, she’s managed to pull herself together, at least enough to fix her makeup in the tiny bathroom and tie her hair back with the band she always wears around her wrist.
She keeps her head down as she makes her way out of the station. She’s relieved to find that the rain has lightened to a drizzle, so she decides to avoid the inevitable for as long as possible and walk home. It’ll take her an hour – maybe an hour and a half in heels – so if she’s lucky, her father will have passed out in front of the telly by the time she gets in, and she can go straight to bed.
It’s a bad idea though. She’s not even halfway home before she has to stop at a bus shelter, her feet blistered and bleeding from her new shoes. She must look a right state, but she’s so past caring that she doesn’t even look up when a car beeps and the blokes inside cheer.
As the bus pulls up, it’s all she can do to put one foot in front of the other.
Sasha opens the front door carefully. She’s done this enough times to know not to use too much force, but just the right amount, so that the hinges don’t squeak when it opens.
The first thing she hears is the telly. Match of the Day, it sounds like, which is good, because her father hates football, so he’s probably asleep. She should be relieved, but something in her sags, and she wants to cry again at the thought of going inside, of spending another night in her narrow single bed and facing her father in the morning . . . and she realizes then what a terrible thing it is to want to go home and realize that you’re already there.
But where else can she go? When she left for London, she had a group of friends she couldn’t wait to see, and in the space of a few short hours all of that had unravelled, and she was back home with her father. The realization brings tears to her eyes as she admits defeat and heads down the hall to her bedroom.
She must have left the door open and light on, which isn’t like her, but she was in such a rush to leave that she doesn’t think anything of it until she walks into the room and stops, her heart suddenly in her throat. The room is a mess, the doors to her wardrobe flung open, and her shoes in a pile on the floor. Everything on top of her chest of drawers has been knocked over, and the drawers are open, clothes spilling out of them like they’re trying to escape a sinking ship. For a second, she thinks they’ve been burgled, and when she sees that one of her bras is on the floor, the horror of it makes her shudder. Someone touched it. What else have they touched? she thinks as she looks around the room . . . And that’s when she sees her father sitting on the floor, his back to the radiator.
‘Dad?’ Her voice sounds tiny, like it’s coming from across the street.
He doesn’t look up, and when she shrugs the strap of her overnight bag off her shoulder and steps closer, she can see her laptop open on the floor in front of him, the light from the screen making his face look almost ghostly. He’s smoking a cigarette, transfixed by whatever he’s reading as he reaches up to flick the ash into the pint of water on her bedside table.
‘Dad?’ she says again, a little louder this time.
If he can hear her, he’s ignoring her, so she takes another step towards him, and that’s when she sees that the drawer to her bedside table is open too, the contents on the floor. It’s nothing, just a few tampons, some loose change and receipts, but the thought of her father going through it makes the back of her neck burn.
‘Dad,’ she says through her teeth. ‘What are you doing?’
He doesn’t flinch. ‘Looking at flights.’ He takes a drag on his cigarette. ‘I was thinking, the Eurostar might be better, because it stops in the centre of Paris, but you’ll have to get to London, which will be a pain in the arse with luggage. But if you fly from Manchester, you won’t have to worry about that.’
Sasha feels lighter for a moment and the corners of her mouth twitch up into a smile as she wonders if she’s read it all wrong. Is he looking into ways he can visit her in France?
Then he chucks something on to the bed between them.
‘Expensive though. This won’t cover it,’ he says without looking at her and her heart starts to beat very, very slowly. It’s her My Little Pony lunchbox that she hides at the bottom of her wardrobe. That’s where she keeps her money, everything she’s saved. It isn’t much – £48.50, last time she checked – but it’s hers. Every spare pound she has, every time Rose gave her a fiver, it all went in there.
She looks at the lunchbox, then at him.
‘I was going to tell you.’ She stops to suck in a breath. ‘Tomorrow. I was going to tell you.’
He shrugs, and it hurts. It actually, physically hurts, because he should be shouting. He should be shouting and screaming and breaking things. This is worse. So much worse.
‘Dad, please.’ She tries to keep her voice steady. ‘Can we just talk about this?’
‘You know what.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about, is there? You’ve already decided.’
‘Yeah. But –’ She stops to suck in a breath. ‘There’s still stuff to talk about.’
‘Like what?’
She suddenly can’t think of a single thing.
‘Like when you’re going?’ he says when she doesn’t say anything.
She looks down at the overnight bag at her feet.
‘Why wait, Sash?’ he says, tossing her laptop on the floor and standing up. ‘Go now.’
She watches in horror as he strides over to her wardrobe and pulls her suitcase from the top, throwing it on to the bed. He unzips it and begins tossing her clothes in, hangers and all.
‘Go! Be with your friends!’ He reaches for one of her boots and chucks it in. ‘They going with you?’
When she doesn’t answer, he looks at her for the first time. ‘Where are they, by the way?’ he asks with a sharp smile. ‘Your precious new friends? Thought you were staying in London tonight?’
She turns her face away so he doesn’t see her crying, and he chuckles bitterly.
‘Well, there you go.’
She feels it like a punch in the stomach.
‘Just like your mother.’ He says it under his breath, but still manages to imbue it with such disdain – such contempt – that it turns Sasha’s stomach inside out. ‘Ungrateful,’ he hisses. ‘Never happy. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. She was never happy. Always dreaming. Always wanting more.’
She can’t watch and turns her face away. She looks out the rain-speckled window at the rooftops and the glow of the city in the distance, and something inside tells her that it doesn’t matter that she has nowhere to go, just run, run, and keep running.
But that’s what her mother did, didn’t she? She ran and she never looked back. And now here is Sasha, putting up with what her mother couldn’t. Twenty-one years and she’s still there, still trying to make up for a decision she didn’t even make. She didn’t break her father’s heart, her mother did and she knows then that it doesn’t matter how good she is, how good and quiet and obedient, she’ll never be able to fix that. Even if she stayed, if she didn’t go to France and spent another twenty-one years eating breakfast with her father every morning and eating dinner with him every night and turning the television off when he falls asleep on the sofa, it wouldn’t be enough because she isn’t the one that he needs to forgive.
Maybe disappointment does lie in the gulf between what you would do for someone and what they will do for you, but she knows then, in that moment, as she’s looking out of the rain-speckled window at the black, black sky, that she needs to stop focusing on what she’s willing to do for other people and start focusing on what she’s willing to do for herself.
‘Dad, I love you,’ she says with such certainty, he finally stops. When he looks at her across the bedroom, his fingers curling into a fist around the T-shirt he’s holding, she pushes her shoulders back and lifts her chin to look him in the eye for the first time since she got home. ‘Dad, I love you,’ she says again, more softly this time, ‘but I have to do this.’
He stares at her for a moment, then throws the T-shirt into the suitcase and turns back to the wardrobe. He closes the doors and strides past her out of the bedroom without looking at her. Then she’s alone – really truly alone – and she doesn’t know if it’s fear or doubt or sheer, giddy relief at finally saying it out loud, but suddenly everything is so blurry that she has to step over to window and reach for the windowsill to steady herself.
Is this it? she wonders as she looks down at the carpark. Should she go now? She has to go now, doesn’t she? She can’t stay, can she? She asks herself where she’s going to go as she waits for the rows of cars to come back into focus. When they eventually do, she sees a car pull up. It looks like Dawson’s Fiesta, but she immediately dismisses it, sure that she’s seeing things because she wishes he was there. But then the door opens, and when she sees Velvet tumble out, she presses her palms to the cold glass, her lips parted . . . It’s her. It’s definitely her. Then Joe jumps out, and Hugo, and Dawson, and finally Remy leaps out, and when Kait emerges, the five of them start running towards the entrance to her building.
Sasha doesn’t think, just runs as well, slamming the buzzer to let them in on her way out the front door. She’s down the corridor in a few steps and when she gets to the lift, she jabs on the button so hard, she’s surprised she doesn’t break her finger. When the doors open, she dives in, her chest heaving as the lift makes its descent . . .
Sixth.
Fifth.
Fourth.
Third.
Second.
First.
Ground.
The doors open, and there they all are: the entrepreneur, the philanthropist, the future TV producer, the activist and the scriptwriter, rushing towards her and pulling her out of the lift.
‘We’ve got you, Sash,’ she hears Velvet say.
And they have.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sara Barnard is the author of Beautiful Broken Things, A Quiet Kind of the Thunder, Goodbye, Perfect and the forthcoming Fierce Fragile Hearts.
Holly Bourne is the author of Soulmates, The Manifesto on How to Be Interesting, The Spinster Club series, It Only Happens in the Movies and Are We All Lemmings and Snowflakes?
Tanya Byrne is the author of Heart-Shaped Bruise, Follow Me Down and For Holly.
Non Pratt is the author of Trouble, Remix, Unboxed, Truth Or Dare, My Second Best Friend and the forthcoming Giant Days.
Melinda Salisbury is the author of The Sin Eater’s Daughter series, and State of Sorrow.
Lisa Williamson is the author of The Art of Being Normal, All About Mia and the forthcoming Paper Avalanche.
Eleanor Wood is the author of Becoming Betty and My Secret Rockstar Boyfriend. She is also co-founder of the lo-fi 90s-style fanzine I Am Not Ashamed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Sara Barnard
Thank you firstly and foremostly to my fellow collaborators and friends: WE DID IT?! What a joy it has been to share this creative journey with you all. I’m so proud to have my name on a cover with each of yours. Thanks also to Rachel Petty, George Lester and the team at Macmillan, who made it all happen with their usual brilliance, enthusiasm and unwavering support. And thanks, as ever, to my agent Claire Wilson, for being Claire Wilson.
Tanya Byrne
First of all, I want to thank Ellie, Holly, Lisa, Melinda, Non and Sara. It was a pleasure being stuck in a lift with you. I wish I could write all my books with you guys. Thanks also to Laura Callaghan for the beautiful cover and to Rachel, Sarah, George, Kat, Bea and the rest of the Macmillan team for working so hard to ensure that this book is in your hands right now. Finally, much love and thanks to my agent, Claire Wilson, for putting up with me and my ALLCAPS emails. It has been an honour to work with you all.
Non Pratt
With greatest thanks to Rachel Petty whose publishing nous continues to impress the hell out of me. Thanks, in fact to all the Macmillan bods – the sunshine in human form that is George Lester, super cheerleaders Kat McKenna and Beatrice Cross and Rachel Vale and Laura Callaghan for quite the fabulous cover, also Sarah Hughes, for putting this to bed. And (as always) thanks to those nameless and tireless editorial, production, sales and marketing types who turn stories into books that people can actually read. Thanks to amazing agent Jane Finigan for being her usual badass self and for my family for feeding my face with food and my soul with reassurance. Thank you to everyone who donated to the Authors for Grenfell auction in return for a namecheck. I hope you like the characters you’ve become . . . ?! People always say books are a team effort, but never more than in this case. What a joy to have six of the most kickass writers in UKYA to work with on this – THANK YOU Ellie, Holly, Lisa, Mel, Sara and Tanya for
the WhatsApp lolz, the best writing meetings and most uplifting email chains known to humankind. Can we write another one?
Melinda Salisbury
I would like to thank my agent, Claire Wilson, always and for everything; my amazing co-authors Sara, Holly, Tanya, Non, Lisa, and Ellie for being the best team ever; Bea Cross and Kat McKenna for all their excitement, enthusiasm and ideas; Sarah Hughes for stepping in to guide the book home; George Lester for making everything run like clockwork; and Katie Webber for keeping the secret. Most of all I’d like to thank Rachel Petty, for taking a chance on a fantasy author and letting me have a go at something new. It means the world.
Lisa Williamson
I would like to thank my agent, Catherine Clarke for being continually wise and wondrous; the entire team at David Fickling Books for their on-going support; Dylan Bray for just being there; George Lester for his unending patience and mega organisation skills; Bea Cross and Kat McKenna for making us all feel like rock-stars: Sarah Hughes for being generally brilliant and keeping us in line on the home straight; and Rachel Petty for being such a calm, generous and inspiring pilot. Finally, a huge thank you to the rest of the Secret Seven – Sara, Holly, Tanya, Non, Mel and Ellie – it’s been a pleasure and a privilege from start to finish.
Eleanor Wood
The world’s biggest THANK YOU to Rachel Petty, for having this crazy/brilliant idea and doing me the most awesome favour by letting me be involved. Huge thank you also to George Lester for keeping us (vaguely) under control and bringing cake. Mega thanks to Bea Cross and Kat McKenna, who are clever and wonderful. Thanks to Sarah Hughes for keeping the show on the road.
Thank you to my agent Caroline Hardman, who is staunch AF.
To my friends and comrades – Sara, Holly, Tanya, Non, Mel and Lisa – thank you for making the super-secret project such a joy.