by Rosie Rowell
‘Don’t forget to lock away the outside rubbish! The baboons are watching!’
I lean against them, irritated by the number of exclamation marks.
Louisa has picked up her mother’s biscuit tin and is tracing the large faded pattern of heavy rose blossoms. It is as familiar to me as Louisa. Each time we walked into her kitchen the first thing we’d do was look in that tin. It was never empty. She opens it now and picks out one of her mother’s brownies. ‘My mum says she feels sorry for yours. She doesn’t know what she’d do if I stopped eating.’ She takes a bite of the brownie.
I swallow back my annoyance. ‘I haven’t stopped eating.’
Louisa rolls her eyes. ‘It must be tough on her, dealing with it on her own.’
These comments are straight out of Mrs Cele’s mouth. She is always bemoaning the lot of my mother. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I were a single parent. It must be so lonely.’ Or ‘Your mum works so hard, Grace, you must be a good daughter to her.’
What Louisa really means is that she feels sorry for my mother dealing with me. This conversation needs to end. I’m leaving the kitchen as she says, ‘Why did you go and see Mr Thomas every week? And then what happened?’
I look down at the floor. The painted white boards could do with another coat. ‘Nothing.’
‘So why did you stop seeing him?’
I sigh and look up at the ceiling. The white-painted cross-beam has a nail banged into one side. Do the owners hang Christmas decorations from it? ‘He felt that I didn’t need to see him any more,’ I reply eventually.
‘Are you joking? Do you know how much weight you’ve lost in the last three months?’
Of course I do, you idiot! I want to shout. But I look her straight in the eye. ‘None, actually.’
Louisa laughs in my face. ‘You don’t talk, Grace. Not to me, not to your mother. You just keep getting thinner. Who knows what’s going on? Do you?’
The doorframe is painted blue-grey. Mum’s friend Sophie has a front door painted the same colour. My fingernails have turned purple from gripping onto it.
Louisa takes a breath and turns to me. ‘I think you created a set of parents out of Rory and your mother. Something happened and now you’re grieving for him.’
I laugh. ‘Nice work, Psychology 101.’ A fly is buzzing at the window; throwing itself against the clear glass.
Louisa follows my gaze. She leans across and slides open the window, but the fly stays where it is. ‘Idiot,’ she mutters. She turns back to me and delivers her piece de resistance: ‘But really you’re grieving for the father you never met.’
‘You can’t grieve for someone you’ve never met.’
Louisa puts the other half of the brownie in her mouth. ‘Yes, you can,’ she says with her mouth full.
There is a loud static sound in my ears. I shake my head, but it won’t budge. Leave, Grace. Walk away. But the ringing keeps getting louder. It cuts off my brain from the rest of my body. ‘Anyway, don’t lecture me about mothers.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re so worried about yours finding out about your social work course, but you’re fine with the fact that you’re hiding your relationship with Brett. Do you know what? It’s insulting for him.’
Louisa sighs dramatically. ‘That’s right, Grace, change the subject. But for your information, Brett’s fine with it.’
‘If you say so.’
‘He’s going overseas in less than a month. What is the point?’
‘The point is the message you’re giving him. Are you embarrassed about him? Is it because he’s white?’
‘Grace –’
‘You’re basically saying he’s not good enough for your mother and he’s not important enough to you.’
‘Nobody’s good enough for my mother, least of all me.’
‘But it doesn’t bother you.’
A noise coming from the sitting room makes Louisa look up. The fear in her eyes makes me spin around. Brett walks past me and dumps two bags of beers on the counter. He leaves the kitchen without a word or a glance.
Louisa glares at me and follows him. A few seconds later I hear Brett say, ‘She’s right, Louisa.’
‘She’s not, Brett, she’s full of shit.’
A door bangs.
‘Brett!’ Louisa runs after him but with a squeal and squelch of wheels Brett reverses out of the drive. Louisa reappears, her eyes terrified. ‘You’ve fucked up your life and now you’re trying your hardest to fuck up mine. I love Brett, Grace. I want to be with him forever. And now he’s left.’ She starts crying.
‘Louisa –’
‘Fuck off!’ she shouts and disappears into her room. Her door bangs shut.
I’m trying to decide what to do when her door opens again and she passes me with a bag slung over her shoulder. It seems stuffed with clothes. The kitchen door slams shut behind her.
Louisa’s words echo through the suddenly empty house. I pick up a chocolate brownie from the tin and hold it between my fingers. It is still fresh enough for my fingers to sink into the spongy base. I bring it millimetres away from my nose and inhale. Mrs Cele uses white, milk and dark chocolate in her recipe. The butter-sugar-cocoa smell travels around my body, all the way back into sun-saturated, full-tummied little-girl memories. I step down on the pedal bin, break off the corner of the brownie, bring it up to my open mouth and drop it into the bin. I continue until it’s all gone. My palms are covered in chocolatey crumbs. I hold them in front of my face, breathe in deeply then scrub them clean in the sink.
‘Enough,’ I tell myself. I have to get out of the kitchen – it is full of our fight. As I pass between the counter and the fridge, my arm knocks against something. I turn around at the crash. A mess of glass and water on the floor. I bend down to pick up the smooth curve of the handle. Splinters and larger chunks lie around me, rippling out from my feet. How can something that solid smash into such tiny pieces? Why go to the trouble of making something that breaks so easily?
I pick up the bag at my feet and leave the glass in the kitchen. Outside the warmth feels as thick as the mist was this morning. For a while it is enough to lean against the sliding door and feel the glare of the sun on my closed lids. But the shock of the car and our fight leaves my legs threatening to buckle and I slide down the glass until I’m sitting on the mattress.
Louisa will come back. She’ll find Brett and calm him down. When they return we’ll throw the bag into a bush somewhere and forget about it. We only have three days left here; Spook and his bag have done enough damage. We’re teenagers for God’s sake, we’re here to have fun.
A car passes, music blaring from its open windows. The silence it leaves behind feels deeper and threatening. I search for the sound of the waves but even they are distant and muted. I feel for my phone in my pocket. For the first time since leaving Cape Town I wish Mum would call.
How can Spook leave fifty thousand rand and a gun behind and not return for it? Unless he stole it and was trying to get rid of it. But that doesn’t make any sense because by leaving it here, he’s implicating himself. It would be far easier to simply chuck the bag in the sea.
I yawn and curl onto my side.
Louisa’s words won’t leave me alone. The only thing more unbelievable than her conspiracy theories is the truth. It wasn’t Rory so much as that horrible broom-cupboard office of his that kept me going back. It was the only place that I felt able to breathe. Until the day Rory basically dumped me, asked me not to come back. ‘I’m not making you any better, Grace. I can’t sit back and watch you die. I don’t know what to do. You need to see somebody else.’ He didn’t even have the balls to look me in the eye.
Now Spook’s gone and so has Louisa. If I could leave too I would. I reach for the bag and shake it until the money inside makes a flat cushion. I smile at the absurdity of resting my head on fifty thousand rand and shut myself off from the awful afternoon.
I wake up shivering, coiled into
a tight ball. For a moment I hover, beyond the reach of the past few hours. It’s the dogged silence that reminds me. It must be approaching evening. The breeze is dry and fractious. My joints ache as though I’ve been sleeping with everything tensed. I pick up my phone to call Louisa but then stop. She’ll be back later, once she’s calmed down.
Despite the wind the beach is busy with walkers and dogs. I have a sudden urge to call out to them for the simple act of them stopping to acknowledge me but even if they heard my voice I’d be invisible from so far away. My stomach reminds me that I haven’t eaten all day. I mentally scan the contents of the fridge and then the kitchen cupboards but the decision of what to have feels exhausting. Besides, the glass is still scattered over the kitchen floor, like a field full of landmines.
Nonetheless, this silence is beginning to gnaw. It needs pushing back with some positive action. A bath will make some noise and fill up the empty evening before Louisa returns.
As I’m walking down the passage with my towel and toiletry bag, a sound makes me jump. ‘Don’t be a moron, Grace,’ I say out loud, then regret it. My voice sounds weird. The noise returns, like a key scratching against glass. I walk around the house methodically closing the windows and doors. The sound could have been anything, perhaps it didn’t even happen. I could lock the doors to be sure – but what about when Louisa comes back? And what about the bag – do I leave it outside again? If those guys come back they’ll take it and leave. But what if they don’t? If I lock myself in the house and they do break in I’ll have no way of escaping.
‘Chill, Grace,’ I say, trying to sound as confident as Mum. ‘That shit doesn’t happen in real life.’ But it does – there is a real-life gun in a bag on my bed; real-life gangsters came snooping around the house. And what would they do if they found me alone?
I leave the sliding door unlocked but let the blinds down. If anyone tried coming into the kitchen they’d find the floor covered in glass. I feel like a stowaway stuck in this little house on stilts. What about some music? But I’d prefer to hear somebody arriving. Is it better or worse to be surprised by your attackers?
I walk into Louisa’s room and sit down on the spot where I was lying this morning. The room still smells vaguely of her shampoo. Her large stripy toiletry bag is lying open on the bed. There is a full month’s supply of her pill, arranged day by day – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday – I run my finger over them. So many days! So many ordered days, so nondescript that they have to be named to make any differentiation. Please come back now, Lou. But her face cream and toothbrush are missing. What if she doesn’t? How will I survive all night alone?
Next to the bag is the box of Myprodol. For the relief of headaches, muscular pain and period pain. The box feels reassuringly heavy but when I take out the two trays, one is empty. Mum left an article on my bed about the dangers of becoming addicted to Myprodol. It was to back up one of her ‘your body is its best healer’ rants. Somebody died after taking too many. What I find ironic is that it wasn’t the addictive codeine that killed them, it was everyday, ordinary paracetamol.
Back in the bathroom I stand in front of the mirror. My chopped blonde hair looks rumpled, like a dirty mop. The side of my cheek carries the pattern of the bag on it. I exhale on the glass to fog it up, until there’s nothing left of me, then wipe it clean. I come back slightly separated. Two Graces, or one divided? I can’t tell.
I shake my head and try to blink away the double vision. It’s as if I have peeled off my top layer and am watching myself from the other side of the mirror. The me I’ve left behind looks exposed. Her eyes are big and sad. She seems to want something from me. What is it? Don’t look at me like that. Still she stares.
‘You’ll never have cheekbones,’ the separated self says to me. It’s cruel to come out with that now, but it’s true. ‘No matter how thin you get.’ It would make a good farewell note: Sorry, but I couldn’t go on without any cheekbones.
Of course, being dead, cheekbones are one thing that I would have. That’s funny. Don’t laugh, Grace. Death is no laughing matter. Isn’t it? I’d like to die laughing. Who wouldn’t?
Tears. I watch them collecting in the corner of my eyes, making rivulets down my cheeks. Some people look pretty when they cry. I look ugly. Needy. I’m exhausted from pretending to be OK. From being a ‘worry’. I watch myself pick up the tray of pills and start on the top left hand corner. I’ve never been able to start a pack in the middle. It’s too messy.
‘What are you doing?’ says the me on the other side of the mirror.
‘I want to sleep,’ I reply. I have to sleep. I cannot be awake all night, jumping at every tiny noise. I look at myself after taking two. Then I start methodically working my way through the pack.
‘Two might make you sleepy but you’ve had eight … ten … twelve.’
‘Leave me alone, for fuck’s sake,’ I say to myself in the mirror. My voice sounds old. I pick up the toothpaste holder and throw a cup of water at myself, but the watery, scowling me is still there.
‘Go away!’ I shout and swing open the door of the cabinet so that it bangs against the wall. ‘Stay there!’
By the time I’ve reached the end of the tray, my throat feels small and tight. I sip at some water but don’t want to drink too much in case I start feeling full.
The phone rings, so loudly and unexpectedly that I drop the plastic glass into the sink. Is it Spook? The question comes from the very core of me, deep inside the mess of veins and muscle tissue so that it is impossible not to think it and yet I wish I hadn’t. The wish is so strong that my throat constricts. It’s not Spook of course, it’s bloody Mum. I flip it to silent. Spook is gone, idiot. Lou is gone. Everyone’s gone. This empty, hollow house feels graveyard cold.
I bend down to switch on the bath taps and sit down on the loo to watch the water. It’s an old enamel bath, with two large rust patches on the bottom. The water splutters and spits as it leaves the two wide-mouthed taps. Once the bath is wrist-deep I lean forward and swirl my hand around to mix up the hot and cold. I blink as I try to follow the course of my hand. It is as though my hand is actually inside my head, mixing up my thoughts each time I try and make sense of any of them.
The plug is connected to the thin metal chain but the chain is not attached to the bath. It has come adrift. An anchor without a boat. You and me both, Mr Plug. No cheekbones and entirely adrift, Rory. The thing is, Rory, your shitty little office was my mooring. You cast me adrift.
Our final Life Skills session: Rory stands in front of our year, with a new hairstyle, dispensing nuggets of wisdom. He allows himself a meaningful pause and looks around the room. ‘If you take anything from today into the rest of your lives, it’s this: be curious.’ I’m curious to know what he’s doing tonight, whether if he knew that I was here, he’d rush in. I can’t sit back and watch you die, Grace. Where are you tonight then? Where is anybody?
I step into the bath. It is deep and warm.
‘For now,’ the water replies. ‘I’m warm for now.’
I lie back and feel the calm I’ve been hoping for. Now is all I need.
I’m on the beach next to Mum. She’s lying on her tummy, her floppy green hat hiding her head and neck. I’ve a handful of sand above her legs and watch it trickle down. It scatters in all directions as it hits her skin. Mum’s legs are always smooth. She uses a man’s Gillette razor. The sand elicits no reaction from the green hat so I start up and down her legs in a method I’d seen on TV.
After a minute the hat laughs. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Swedish massage,’ I reply, increasing the speed and intensity of my chopping hands.
‘Ow! It hurts!’
‘It needs to hurt,’ I reply.
Louisa would get milk up her nose. God, it was funny. It didn’t matter that she did it every day.
I used to make a Father’s Day card each year, put it in an envelope and address it to ‘Dad’. I’d post it, even though it had nowhere to go. Mum caught me d
oing it one year. Her face was like a wild animal, fiery and fearful. But she caught that look and said, ‘Let’s get a milkshake.’ I didn’t make any more after that.
Why am I thinking of these things? I feel as though my brain has short-circuited and it’s throwing out random thoughts. I made Rory blush once. It was at the end of a session. I had opened the door to leave. ‘You’re the best part of my day,’ I said. I was being sarcastic, obviously, but he blushed. And because he blushed, I found myself blushing too. God, it was awful. ‘I’m joking!’ I said in a high voice and shut the door. I still feel embarrassed about that, but lying here in the bath, it’s sort of funny.
Am I talking aloud or in my head? It sounds like stereo – one voice, two outlets.
I push myself forward towards the taps and it feels like moving through a deep, dark pool. As I switch on the hot tap, the water laughs. ‘Told you,’ it says.
‘Not long now,’ I reply, ‘it’s almost bedtime.’
Just when I think I am already asleep, Rory comes into the bathroom and sits on the loo.
‘Well, this is a surprise,’ I say. ‘I thought you wanted nothing to do with me.’ I should sit up – after all I’m naked.
He’s looking grim. ‘This is exactly what I was afraid of,’ he says.
‘Does it feel good to be proven right?’
He shakes his head.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I say, and I mean it, but he’s gone.
It is tiring, being here, but not. When I get out I’ll be very wrinkled. I used to dare myself to stay in until I wrinkled up to the point that I started shrivelling but the cold always got the better of me.
Slowly the room starts to fill with people, some of them teachers and pupils from school. Where is Louisa? They stand around me looking worried, talking, but too softly for me to hear. Suddenly I spot Louisa but she is facing away from me, talking to Simon Cowell. ‘What is the secret to Lace’s phenomenal success?’ Simon asks her in a loud voice. Louisa bats away the compliment. She’s wearing my glove as well as hers. ‘It’s all about the music.’