But it’s okay, because I belong as well. I’m trouble times two. At least for the next couple of weeks. I sip my rum, leaning into Thomas’s arm. He’s quiet. I squeeze his knee, and he smiles at me, then peers into his glass, fishing out a leaf.
“What happened, anyway?” asks Jason.
“Did you all go skinny dipping?” asks Meg dreamily. “Everyone’s wet.”
“With my little sister? Gross,” says Ned.
“Yes, we’re wet,” says Sof patiently.
“Did you know Gottie and Jason skinny-dipped?” says Meg, not listening. Too late I see she’s stoned, really stoned. In the glow from Jason’s cigarette, her eyes are tennis balls. “Jason told me they swam together in the canal. Like mermaids…”
Ned is staring at Jason. Sof bites her lip, glancing between me and Thomas—guessing he doesn’t know the half of it. He tight-smiles at me, like he’s not thrilled by this revelation, but he’s not quite allowed to be annoyed either. I can’t find my tongue; I think I left it in the kitchen.
“Mermaids,” Meg giggles, staring at her fingers like they’re brand-new. Then she looks up at us all, wide-eyed and full of wonder, and I know what she’s going to say before she says it. I can’t stop her. Here’s where my tiny white lie, a misunderstanding I could have cleared up days ago, comes back and destroys me. “They had sex.”
“Fuck,” says Jason. He stubs his cigarette out on the grass, then looks at me across the circle. We stare at each other for a long moment, in it together. But not, I suppose, anymore.
“Come on,” he says to Meg, starting to help her up. “Time to go home.”
“Jason.” Ned glowers at him, his hair crackling and huge. “Piss off, would you?”
“Ned,” Sof says softly, putting a hand on his arm.
Jason looks around at us all, staring up at him in a circle. In slow motion, he mouths a “sorry” at me, and ambles off into the darkness. Meg wobbles and Sof scrambles to stand up. We all do. I can’t look at Thomas. My head throbs.
Meg shakes Sof off and stumbles across to me. She leans right in, looking at my face. “You’re pretty,” she says, trailing her finger down my cheek. “Isn’t she so pretty, Thomas?”
“Come on,” says Sof, taking her arm. “Bed.”
She starts leading her away, Ned lumbering after them. Sof glances back over her shoulder at me, concerned. Then Thomas and I are alone under the apple tree. I can’t not look at him any longer.
“You lied to me?” he asks, his face barely visible in the dark.
“You lied too,” I say, and even though it’s true, I immediately want to chop off my tongue. I should be pointing out that me and Jason makes no difference—it doesn’t make me and Thomas a lie. In the grass, clumsy and new. How we were in the tree, when we held elbows. In the attic in the Book Barn, making promises to each other a long time ago. We can have all that, and I can have my summer with Jason too.
“Seriously? It’s hardly the same thing,” Thomas scoffs. “And I suppose everyone knows except me and, I’m guessing, Ned?”
“No one knew, that’s the point—”
“Then what? I don’t get it. You didn’t have to lie to me. It’s fucked up.” He runs his hands through his hair, then finger-quotes at me. “‘First everything.’”
“That’s not even what I meant!”
“Whatever,” Thomas says, not listening to me. “You know, I saw you with him earlier at the party? Before I came and found you, you were whispering together, and I knew—”
“Knew what?” I hurl my hands in the air, an imitation bat grab of frustration. “I’m allowed to talk to him! I’m allowed to keep it a secret, if I want. And you’re right; it’s not the same thing—running off to Manchester without telling me? That’s actually my business. Me and Jason is none of yours.”
I’m picking up steam, ready for a fight—I think I’m in the right here, I think I deserve one—but Thomas interrupts me.
“And when you kissed me earlier—in your grandpa’s room,” he emphasizes, full of scorn. “When you tried to do more, was it my business then?”
“I didn’t lie,” I say calmly, thinking back to the kitchen on Thomas’s first morning, weeks ago. How I’d tried to pick a fight, and he hadn’t let me. “At least, not how you mean. When I said first everything, I meant I’d never been in love before. Except that’s not actually true. And I don’t even think you’re angry I lied. I think you’re jealous that I’ve been in love and you haven’t.”
When I say that, he turns and disappears into the night.
Ned’s right. I am selfish. That’s what stops me from running after him.
I go to my room to wait. I know what’s coming next. Minus three, minus two, minus one. I strip off my wet clothes, dropping them onto the floor, not bothering with the laundry basket.
Exhaustion sweeps over me as I climb into bed and pull up the covers. I’ve lived ten lifetimes in one summer. But sleep doesn’t come. All the secrets and all the revelations and all the anger—me and Thomas, Ned and Sof—it all crashes over me in waves, smashing me onto the sand again and again. Drowning me.
“Umlaut?” I pat the duvet. Nothing. Even my cat wants nothing to do with me.
When I turn off the lamp, the light of the day, pooled in corners and hiding under the bed, slides out the door. There’s just the glow from the ceiling, the fluorescent stars Thomas sticky-taped there for me, that match no constellation at all.
I stay awake, watching them blink out, one by one.
Until I’m alone with the darkness.
Zero
It’s the last day of summer. Except it isn’t, not really. I’m here and I’m not here. This is the first time I’ve been here, but also it isn’t. Déjà vu. I’m watching myself, inside myself. It’s a memory, it’s a dream, it’s a wormhole.
A wormhole. But it still hurts.
It’s the day Grey died.
And I’m wishing. Not cross-your-fingers lightly, or how six-year-old me wished for my vegetables to magically disappear.
I’m pouring everything I have into wishing to a God I don’t believe in.
How could I be sleeping with Jason in the sunshine three hours ago, and now I’m in the hospital?
Papa was nowhere to be found when I got here, but Ned was in the waiting room, green snakeskin on a grey plastic chair. We’d exchanged information: the note I found on the blackboard. The texts we swapped on that long bus ride. As though by knowing exactly what had happened, we could change the outcome.
“The paramedics say he was all right when they arrived.”
“They think he might have had a stroke after getting to the E.R.”
“He’s in the ICU.”
“He’s in the stroke ward.”
“Didn’t you say?”
“I thought he was…”
Papa eventually showed up. Maybe he’s always been here, invisible. Maybe when Mum died, Papa never left this hospital.
We follow him down the corridor.
Grey has shrunk. He was a giant, a grizzly bear. Now, he’s under some evil wizard’s spell. His face is a landslide.
He blinks at me, mewing, his hands frantically pawing at his flimsy hospital gown over and over again, unwittingly exposing himself, a baby.
And his hands!
There’s a picture of Ned, newborn and wrinkled as a pickled walnut. He’s just a frog in the palm of Grey’s huge hand—a hand that’s now translucent. A tube sticks out of it, covered in tape, surrounded by a bruise. There’s a drop of blood on the sheet underneath.
Papa comes back and the doctors come in, and give us numbers.
Seventy-five percent chance of disability.
Fifty-fifty chance of making it through twenty-four hours.
Ten percent chance of further seizures.
Six months till we’re out of the woods.
His blood pressure is a problem, they say. There are risk factors, underlying conditions. It could go either way, they say. He’s sixty-eight,
they say.
I stop listening, start thinking of Midsummer’s Eve. Jason’s kiss. But before that, Grey lit a fire to ward off the mist that rolled in from the sea. We’d eaten roast chicken and potato salad with our fingers, and wiped the grease onto the grass.
“I want to die like a Viking!” Grey had roared, drunk on heat and red wine, leaping across the flames like an enormous Pan. “Burn me on a pyre; push me out to the waves!”
A brisk nurse, a different one from a couple of hours ago, rattles a plastic curtain around Grey’s bed. Someone else, someone old, is wheeled into the next bay—
The bonfire smelled of smoke and spring.
The hospital smells of antiseptic. He can’t stride into Valhalla from here.
Grey blinks up at me, tiny. The nurses roll him over so they can peel away his shit-stained sheets, and he’s looking right at me and he doesn’t see who I am.
I love you, I think, holding a hand that can’t squeeze mine back. His skin is slack under my fingers, loose and cold. You are a Viking.
The nurses write numbers on a clipboard. Ned comes back from the canteen with weak, hot coffee that burns our hands through the thin plastic cups, and we don’t drink any of it. Jason texts, a single question mark. Papa sits across from me on a plastic chair, his hand over his mouth. Staring at nothing. Waiting.
There were sparks in the air on Midsummer’s Eve. Sweet wood smoke and a first kiss, a fire collapsing in a shower of light and flame.
The machines beep quietly over and over again. My grandfather lies on the bed, tiny and alone, and far away from me.
I close my eyes.
“Burn me on a pyre; push me out to the waves!” Grey leaps across the flames. “I want to die like a Viking!”
And I wish that for you, with everything I have.
Two hours later you are dead.
{5}
BLACK HOLES
The heart of a black hole, known as its singularity,
has zero size and infinite density. A black hole
is formed when a star collapses in on itself.
Gravity implodes, sucking in everything around it.
And it’s called black hole entropy.
Sunday 17 August
[Minus three hundred and fifty]
I dream I’m in a spaceship, and Thomas is at the controls. He steers us through galaxies. We are all alone in the world, except for the stars. They rush past us as we speed through time and space, heading to the future. And when we get to the very edge of the universe, Thomas stops the spaceship and turns us around.
“You can see Earth from here,” he says. “Everyone’s there, waiting.”
I look where he’s pointing, but I can’t see anything. Just darkness. And when I wake up, he’s gone.
For a second, everything’s fine. This used to happen every day last autumn, until Jason, and then not sleeping altogether. There’d be a brief, delirious moment after I woke when I’d have no memory of what had happened. A garden full of laundry, Hey, Grey’s home. Then it comes roaring back.
Memories flood the room. Papa’s confession. Kissing Thomas. Stomping around the party, drunk and belligerent. Hiding from the wormhole. Trying to have sex with Thomas. Thomas saying no. I cringe under my duvet, but my brain won’t let me hide: Sof yelling. Ned yelling. The tap exploding. Meg telling everyone about me and Jason. Our fight. Thomas running away.
And the last wormhole. This is what this whole year’s been about. That wish, that stupid Viking wish. Who did I think I was, playing God?
Grey is dead and I wished it, I wished it, I wished it. And don’t tell me wishes aren’t real, because I’ve seen the stars go out and watched numbers fall like rain. It’s as real as the square root of minus fifteen. But, oh—it was only for a split second
and
I take it back!
I want to yell. I want to claw through the earth with my bare hands, screaming for him to come home. I want to bury this memory deep and never visit its grave. I want a hundred thousand million things, but mostly, stupidly, hopelessly, I want him not to be dead.
I cry till I’m raw, fat hot tears of self-pity. I cry till I’m forcing it, till my throat hurts, punishing myself. Then I lie in bed, scratchy-eyed, watching the early-morning light deepen and take on the color of the day. As the sun filters through the ivy, guilt slowly washes over me. And it brings me to shore.
The worst is over, and I’ve survived.
I’ll never reconcile myself over Grey’s death. Over the wish I made. But I can get out of bed. I can yank open the window, breaking through the ivy, and throw open the door—the room is hot and stuffy and green, and I want air and light.
When I stumble outside, the garden is all aftermath: empty bottles and beer cans wink from the grass, and there’s a table lamp in the plum tree. I lift it down and tuck it under my arm, heading for the kitchen.
Ned’s already there, mopping. He’s dressed down in black leggings and a giant, moth-eaten jumper. I recognize it as one of Grey’s—Ned said he took the clothes to a charity shop in town, but clearly he kept some. His hair is subdued under a beanie.
I knock on the door frame, unsure whether I can come in. “How bad is it?”
He looks up, green-faced. Too hungover to take a photograph of my dishevelment. “You mean Papa? Or this?”
“This” is the puddle of water that covers the floor. It looks worse than I remember from last night: the color of Sof’s mum’s vegan soup, topped with cigarette butt croutons. The chairs are stacked upside down on the table, café-style. I peer through them, stupidly hoping to see a loaf of bread or a pile of pastries.
“You can come in,” says Ned. He sounds amused. “You can’t make it dirtier.”
I put the lamp down and splosh inside, my sneakers instantly soaking. A disgruntled Umlaut sits on top of the woodpile, surveying Waterworld. The sitting room door is closed, which I hope means the destruction is limited to the kitchen. And that Thomas isn’t going to come in and help. My stomach twists as I think about facing him.
I pick up an empty can that floats by, and stand there with it, waiting for Ned to tell me what to do. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Tea. Always start with tea,” the expert advises.
I splash my way to the kettle, which is thankfully full—the tap is swathed in brown parcel tape like an amputated limb. By the time it boils and I’m rummaging for milk, you’d barely know anything had happened here. Only the tap and a garbage bag of bottles are evidence.
“Where is Papa?” I ask Ned, handing him a mug.
He slurps his tea, not answering.
“Are you not speaking to me?”
“Grots,” Ned sighs. “Meet hangovers. Talking’s like red-hot pokers.”
“Are you annoyed at me?” I’m stubbornly stuck on this point, I don’t think I can bear it if Ned’s still angry at me.
“’Course not. Like I said last night, you ignore me all year, all summer—”
“Me?” I’m incredulous. “What about you?”
“What about me? I’ve been here, in case you haven’t noticed. Fixing your bike, making dinner, rehearsing, whatever. I’m always around. But you’re not—you stare into space, or creep around in your room avoiding everyone, you upset Sof on a weekly basis. Then Thomas bats his glasses at you, and you’re all smiles—don’t get me wrong, that’s great, I’m glad you’re happy—except you refuse to get involved with Grey’s party, you won’t even talk about it, then you show up and bellow at us all for no reason … Never mind. ’Course I’m not annoyed at you.”
“Oh.” After last night’s shouting, I’m awash with relief.
“That was sarcasm, you idiot.” He laughs, plonking his mug down on the table. “Look, I know you hate it when I play the three-years-older card, but—”
“Two years and one month,” I correct automatically.
“Same dif,” he snorts. “I think you could be nicer to Sof. I think you should’ve come to me when Jason was sniffing a
round. But I also think it was probably nuts being here this year with just Papa for company. Maybe I should have come home at Easter. I get how hard it is, I do. It was shit, moving to London a week after he died. You’re not the only one who was upset, y’know? Maybe in two years and one month, you’ll see that a bit better.”
“You’re annoyed ’cause of Jason.” I nod wisely.
“Rraaarrrgh.” Ned yanks off his beanie, stuffing it in his pocket. His hair tumbles free and he looks like himself again. “I’m annoyed at Jason, and I’m pretty sure you should be too.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” I say, because I’ve been blaming him for my unhappiness all year, and I need to let him off the hook. “I think he couldn’t handle it, after Grey died. He didn’t know how.”
“He bloody well knew you were two years younger than him, though,” says Ned, snorting. Not listening to what I’m saying. “The prick.”
“Isn’t he your best friend?”
“Can’t he be both? The wanker.”
Stubbornly, I try to explain again. “He loved me.”
“Did he say that? Or did he clench his jaw and swallow so his Adam’s apple jumped, and say—” Ned looks away mournfully, the perfect Jason impression, and I stifle a giggle as he says, “‘Do you love me?’”
I know what me and Jason had, that it was love. But we didn’t have to be a secret. And he didn’t have to make me beg for him to talk to me after he left. So I say: “The dumm Fuhrt.”
“C’mere.” Ned twists me into more of a half nelson than a hug, rubbing his fist on my hair. “Too right. You don’t keep things like love a secret. Christ. You know who I sound like?”
We stand there for a bit, me bent uncomfortably double and breathing through my mouth. Then he rubs my hair again, and releases me. I gulp fresh air while he straps on a fanny pack and, amazingly, makes it look cool. Only Ned.
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