— You wanna try it?
Heather holds out the little eyeliner pencil and smiles. Ameliah smiles back and Heather lowers her hand.
— I’m coming back to yours after school, right?
— Yeah?
— Yeah. We’re gonna make a start on those boxes.
Ameliah looks around at the other girls, all engrossed in talk of makeovers and brush technique.
— We don’t need to.
Heather reaches out for Ameliah’s hand.
— Yes, we do. New summer chapter, Am. It’s time to make it your room.
Ryan shook his head and tried to see straight. The warm pain in the back of his neck was starting to spread round towards his face. The football lay on the floor next to the front door of the house. He could feel grit in the palm of his hand as he sat up on the short front path. He looked up at Nathan standing over him, laughing, and felt a knot forming in his stomach.
— You should’ve ducked. I shouted duck. It’s your own fault, weed, always daydreaming.
Nathan stepped over Ryan’s legs and took out his key to open the door. Ryan got to his feet, the knot in his stomach growing and starting to move up inside his chest. He stared at Nathan’s back and imagined doing some kind of flying karate kick, sending his stepbrother flying through the front door. The knot made its way up along his throat into his mouth, ready to scream.
Nathan pushed open the front door and disappeared inside. Ryan breathed deeply and swallowed the knot, feeling it melt into nothing in his throat.
Inside, Ryan sat down on the sofa in a spot where he could see out of the front window. The pain in the back of his neck had weakened to a dull ache. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and looked round the room.
He tried to remember before Nathan had moved in. Before Dad got together with Sophia. Before Mom.
He stared at the big rectangular mirror above the fireplace, its heavy wooden frame like something from an old castle. It looked completely out of place in the room, but had always been there. Sophia had tried to move it out when she moved in, saying it didn’t belong there. Dad had got serious and said it was going nowhere, anything else could go, but the mirror stayed.
Ryan liked that Dad had said that. He knew the story. Mom had chosen the mirror when she and Dad first bought the house. It was really heavy and, as they carried it into the house, Dad had slipped and dropped his end and the mirror hit the floor but didn’t break, and Mom said it was a sign of good luck. Mom believed in luck.
Ryan stared at the mirror and thought about how she loved old things and, even though he found it harder and harder to picture her face, he knew that the mirror was a connection to her.
A heavy thud hit the ceiling above his head. Ryan imagined Nathan falling off his bed or tripping over his stupid weights and lying flat out on the floor of what used to be Dad’s office. He smiled to himself and waited for the sounds of his stepbrother getting up and stamping around, but nothing came, only quiet. Ryan’s stomach dropped. He jumped to his feet and ran upstairs.
— Nathan! Are you OK?
He burst into the office, panicked. Nathan was on the floor in his pants and vest doing stomach crunches. Against the wall behind him, a Casio keyboard drum machine lay across a small desk next to a small black TV. He stopped and stared up at Ryan.
— What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?
Ryan looked round the room. He saw a poster of the solar system, a couple of footballers torn out of magazines and, on the right, one huge picture of Bruce Lee doing a high kick. On the floor, a plate held a half-eaten doorstop sandwich.
— I thought I heard a—
— A bang? And what? You thought I was hurt? Man, you’re such a girl.
Nathan scoffed and carried on with his crunches. Ryan spotted a small bookcase behind the TV, full of science books. He felt his nose wrinkle up.
— Since when do you read about science?
Nathan sat up, his arms resting on his knees, and frowned.
— What? I can’t be into science?
Ryan shrugged. Nathan shook his head.
— Ryan, I probably know more than you, I just don’t have to be a weed with it.
He lowered his body back to the floor ready for more crunches.
— Now get lost, yeah?
Ryan backed out of the room and pulled the door to. He stood on the landing, listening to Nathan’s grunts, and told himself the science books were just for show.
Ameliah and Heather stare at the machine. It’s faded black, the silver panels battered and worn. The large clunky buttons look like they were designed by a toddler. The plastic of the little windows for the tape decks is cloudy with scratches.
— It looks like it should be in a museum or something.
Heather touches the chipped circular speaker on one side.
— How old is it?
Ameliah shrugs.
— I don’t know. I found it in the spare room.
— Where your nan’s keeping all that stuff?
— Yeah. I’m gonna go through it all.
— Maybe it’s worth something? You see things like this on those TV shows.
Heather fiddles with the large silver tuning dial, making the tiny orange frequency indicator move left and right along the black strip.
— I mean it doesn’t even have a CD thing. It’s prehistoric.
— It’s not for sale.
Ameliah picks up an old shoebox from the many that lie spread across the floor among black bags full of clothes and two old suitcases. The shoebox is packed full of cassette tapes, some with sleeves, some without.
— It plays these. There’s boxes of them.
She pulls out one of the tapes and dusts the cover with her sleeve. James Brown – Greatest Hits. She feels herself smile.
— My mom used to go on about James Brown.
She hands it to Heather. Heather smiles.
— She loved music, right?
— Yeah. They both did. I used to hear them playing stuff and giggling through the wall.
— How cool would it have been if she’d been the music teacher at our school instead of what’s-his-face?
Ameliah pictures Mom, sitting on the sofa covered in sheets of music, trying to plan her lessons.
— Yeah.
She taps her hand on the box of tapes.
— I’m gonna listen to them all.
Heather inspects the cassette in her hand like evidence at a crime scene.
— Why is it so big? Look, this one only has eleven tracks! Is he a rapper?
Ameliah runs her finger over the spines of the other tapes in the box, wiping a clean line on the dusty plastic like a snowplough.
— They’re all jumbled up now. Some of them are blanks, I think. You wanna listen to some?
Heather stands up.
— Nah. It’s all so old, Am, it’s gonna take you weeks to go through it all.
She drops the tape on to the bed and moves to one of the black bags. Ameliah stares at the tapes.
— Yeah, well, I’ve got six, haven’t I?
— You can’t spend the whole six weeks’ holidays digging through dusty old stuff like a mole.
Ameliah smiles at Heather.
— A mole?
Heather nods.
— Yeah. A mole. A little scruffy blind mole scared of the sun.
Ameliah laughs.
— Shut up.
Heather smiles and starts going through a bin bag full of clothes.
— I wonder if any of this would fit you, you should—
— Leave it.
Ameliah’s voice is sharp. Heather stops what she’s doing. Ameliah looks down.
— Sorry, I mean I want to go through it myself, to start with I mean.
She looks up to where the ceiling meets the wall, noticing a thin crack running along the join. Heather walks over to her.
— It’s OK. I get it.
Ameliah nods her head in the way she’s perfected.
> As Heather looks at the box of tapes, Ameliah pictures the spare room, along the landing, stacked ceiling-high with bags and boxes, and wonders how much everything Mom and Dad left behind would weigh.
Ryan felt every muscle in his body shaking from the pressure. He stared at the chocolate-brown carpet. This close up he could make out the individual fibres and it struck him how much they looked like the crop circles he’d read about in his Book of the Unexplained. He could feel his lungs pressing against the inside of his chest. He told himself that he had to do one more. If he could just do a second one, that wasn’t so bad. Two press-ups was twice as many as the one he’d managed.
The one that had felt like it was going to kill him. He thought about Nathan sitting on top of him on the living-room floor. The feeling of knowing that even if he tried his hardest he wouldn’t be able to push him off.
— Come on, weed. Do it!
But the effort of speaking the words seemed to drain the last bit of strength from his arms and Ryan collapsed, face down on the floor.
He lay there on his side. It didn’t matter that he could only do one press-up. It wasn’t like people hung out and just did press-ups, was it? In fact, what use was a press-up anyway? When would anyone ever be in a situation where they were trapped on their front and needed to push themselves up a little bit?
He thought about lying squashed under Nathan’s backside, trying to turn his head so he could at least see the TV, feeling like Nathan weighed as much as a family saloon car. He closed his eyes, bent his elbows, pushed his palms flat into the chocolate crop-circle floor, filled his lungs and, with everything he had, pushed himself up until his arms were straight.
Downstairs, the front door closed and Ryan heard Dad’s familiar footsteps make their way into the living room. He lay back down on the floor with his ear pressed to the carpet. The muffled sounds of Sophia asking Dad about his day reminded Ryan of tuning the FM dial on his boom box and catching partial broadcasts of talk radio covered in static. Dad’s voice was low and monotone. One horizontal line of sound. Sophia’s voice moved up and down like a heart monitor, rising at the end of a sentence like everything was a question.
Ryan thought about how sound travels in a straight line and either bounces off or gets absorbed by anything it hits. How sound travels faster and further in water than in air. How blue whales can hear each other’s calls from thousands of miles away. He thought about stethoscopes and his toy doctor’s kit from when he was a little boy. How he’d gone round the house putting the chest piece on everything he could find, trying to hear what was inside.
He felt the blood rush from his head as he stood up and went over to the window.
Outside, the last of the sunlight cast a shadow of the house on to the narrow strip of back lawn. Ryan stared up to where the thin fence separated the top of their back garden and the bottom of the house’s opposite. The fat smoky-grey cat that nobody owned was sitting motionless on top of the fence like some kind of furry gargoyle looking up at him. Ryan stared at it and imagined it suddenly spreading big bat-like wings and flying straight towards his window.
The living-room door closed downstairs and Ryan heard Dad start up the stairs. He quickly slipped into his desk chair and clicked on the little lamp, opening a dark blue exercise book and grabbing a pen.
The sound of the saxophone comes through the crackly speakers like lines of smoke, snaking their way up and around the walls.
Ameliah lies on her bed, staring at the cassette box in her hands. The blurred photograph on the front has a blueish tint and shows the man playing with his eyes closed, his cheeks puffed out with air. Above his head letters spell his name, John Coltrane.
Ameliah imagines Mom lying on her bed, like she is now, holding the same cassette box, listening to the same notes floating around her walls, closing her eyes like the man on the cover. She looks round the room. The old dark wardrobe almost reaches the ceiling; the door of the left-hand side has a long mirror set into it. Past the wardrobe, underneath the window, boxes and bags sit like they’re outside a charity shop.
At the end of the bed on the left, the gloss white door is pushed almost closed, its four rectangular panels raised like Braille.
Ameliah looks at the tape in her hands.
— John Coltrane.
Her words seem to sit on top of the music for a second before melting away.
She looks at the old stereo and imagines its insides to be lots of tiny cogs, like a watch, its little motor working to turn the tapes around in time.
On the floor next to her bed, five shoeboxes full of cassette tapes each lie open, waiting to be heard. Another full box is next to her on the bed.
She hears Nan shutting the living-room door and starting up the stairs.
Ameliah reaches over and pushes the stop button.
The music cuts off and the room feels weirdly empty. The bedroom curtains are still open and the dark outside has turned the window into a dull mirror, reflecting back the room in the lamplight. There’s a tap and the door slowly opens. Nan pokes her head in.
— You all right, love?
Ameliah watches Nan’s eyes take in the newly arranged room, her old eyes moving over the walls and furniture.
— I’m fine, Nan. You going to bed?
Nan stares at the old stereo and smiles.
— I certainly am. These bones need their rest.
She stretches slowly like a cat.
— And you should get some rest too, young lady. Tomorrow’s the start of summer.
Ameliah runs her hand over the tapes in the box next to her. Nan nods at them.
— You’ve got your own personal library there. Your mom loved her music. I’m sure you’ll find all kinds of treasure in that room.
She nods her head towards the back of the house and the spare room. Ameliah watches Nan remember something, some scene from her life with Mom, when Mom was young.
— I won’t stay up too late, Nan.
Nan stares into space for a moment then cracks a smile. She gives the room another once-over then speaks slowly.
— No. Not too late.
She slips out and closes the door.
Ameliah listens to Nan make her way along the landing to her room. Matching the pace of Nan’s feet, she walks her fingertips over the spines of the cassettes in the open box. Nan reaches her room and the footsteps stop. Ameliah stops her fingers.
Nan’s door closes and the house falls quiet. Ameliah pulls out the tape she arrived at. Its clear sleeveless case is foggy with scratches.
She opens the case, letting the old cassette slide out on to her chest. Holding it up to the lamplight, she can just about see through the battered plastic to the tape spools inside. She can see bumps along the dark spools that look like the tape has been stuck back together. The torn remains of a dirty label show the letter M, handwritten in dark blue ink.
She rolls over and opens tape deck two, easing the cassette in until she feels the click.
She pushes the tape deck closed, presses play and rolls on to her back, staring up.
The speakers hiss and a low scratching creeps out. Ameliah looks at the stereo.
The hiss carries on and is now joined by what sounds like wind moving between buildings. Ameliah props herself up with her elbow, looking at the speakers.
There’s the sound of static and something like a short burst of popcorn cooking.
Ameliah screws up her face and reaches for the stop button and then she hears the voice.
Ryan spat white foam into the sink. He watched the stream of cold water carry the old toothpaste in a circle towards the plughole like sewage. He’d read that, on the equator, water just went straight down with no swirls, like there was no time to hang around.
Sophia’s squeak of a laugh came through the floorboards.
Downstairs, her and Dad would be curled up on the sofa with their wine, watching their Friday night film.
Tilting his head, Ryan could hear the TV coming from Nathan
’s room across the landing, even through two closed doors.
He thought about earlier at dinner. All four of them sitting round the circular table like a rubbish version of King Arthur and his knights. Dad would be Arthur, which would make Sophia Guinevere. He would be Lancelot and Nathan would be some other rubbish knight with a short temper and poor sword skills.
Even now, months after they’d moved in, their sit-down dinners felt awkward. When Mom was alive, they’d never done it. With her and Dad working on the other side of town, it meant they didn’t get back till late, so Ryan mostly sorted his own food out. The only time they ate together was on Sunday and that was in front of the TV watching The Cosby Show.
Sophia took dinner very seriously. Laying the table, having things in bowls with big spoons, and even napkins. It almost felt like a restaurant. Dad went along with it. He had sat Ryan down and told him he liked how different things felt. That if things were going to move on they had to feel new and that he knew Ryan understood that.
Sitting at the table watching Sophia and Dad smiling at each other as they passed the broccoli or poured each other more wine would’ve turned Ryan’s stomach if it hadn’t been for the look on Dad’s face. Nathan hated it. He didn’t say anything directly, but the way he spoke to Sophia and the little comments he’d make whenever Dad said something made it obvious to everyone. If Ryan was honest, part of the reason the meals were not completely unbearable was because, however uncomfortable he felt, he could always tell Nathan hated it more.
Ameliah quickly looks round the room. Her mouth open, her eyes narrowed, she strains to hear the words.
She sits up and shuffles herself towards her pillow, getting closer still to the speakers. A low hissing breathes out then:
— It’s just weird, I mean since he showed up, I dunno.
More static. Ameliah stares through the tiny tape-deck window and sees the dark tape moving from one spool to the other.
She rubs her hands down over her face and shakes her head.
— There’s nothing there.
But even as she speaks the words she can make out the voice again, poking through the crackle.
— It’s different now, you know?
Tape Page 2