Paper Airplanes

by Dawn O'Porter

  I go back to when I must have been all of five, still having afternoon naps but old enough to take them on the sofa and not in my room. Was that normal? I’m not sure. I woke up to see her face at the living room door. Her black hair in loose waves sitting just above her shoulders, her nose red from the outside cold, her long eyelashes bold and upright. They surrounded her massive brown eyes like the over-pronounced sun rays I used to put in drawings that Mum would stick on the fridge. As I woke up from my sleep she came over, took off her fur coat, and crawled onto the sofa with me. She scooped me into her arms and put her cheek on top of mine. “How’s my girl?”

  I turned around and buried my face into her neck. We lay there cuddling while I woke up properly. She yawned, and even when I was ready to move I lay there and let her doze. “I love you, Mummy,” I said.

  “I love you too, darling.”

  “OH MY GOOODDD!”

  Mum vanishes as the sound of Nancy’s voice makes us all jump.

  “OH MY GOD, did anyone else see that?” Nancy shouts, out of breath.

  “Keep your voice down,” orders Charlotte. “Miss Trunks is only behind that wall.” A loud whistle sounds as the hockey is called to a close.

  “Seriously. WHO. ELSE. SAW. THAT?” Nancy is standing now. White as a sheet. “Renée, your mum. She died of cancer, right?”

  “YES,” says Margaret.

  “And her ashes are spread on Herm, right?”

  “YES,” repeats Margaret. I would answer the questions myself, but she is getting the answers right, so I guess I don’t need to bother. Mum died after getting breast cancer for the second time, and Nana and Pop spread her ashes on a small island just off Guernsey called Herm because she loved it there so much. I wasn’t allowed to go.

  “Well, I just saw a crab floating over an island,” Nancy says, panting.

  “You saw what?” I ask, thinking she has finally lost the plot.

  “Think about it. Crabs are the symbol for cancer, and your mum is scattered on Herm. Crab over island? She is here, Renée. She is TRYING TO SPEAK TO ME.”

  Nancy is the kind of person who could find something spiritual in a sausage roll. As if Mum would appear to us as a crab flapping its claws over an island. I still find myself unable to ask her to shut up.

  The bell rings.

  The girls get up and leave. There’s a hum of chatter as they walk away.

  “No way, did she come? Did we actually make a dead person come?”

  None of them seems to notice that I have stayed where I am. I know I’ll get an order mark for missing French, but this one will be worth it.

  FLO

  I thought I was OK after Rebecca Stephens, my new hockey partner, thwacked me around the face with her hockey stick. But halfway through French I felt like I was going to pass out from how much my head was spinning. I went to the sickroom, and when I felt better I told Miss Trunks I’d called my dad from the pay phone in the foyer and that he was waiting outside. He wasn’t really.

  It’s all Sally’s fault. Rebecca is rubbish at hockey—she has the coordination of a drunk person. She usually partners with Charlotte Pike, but Charlotte wasn’t at practice because she has period pains, so when Sally said she didn’t want to partner with me anymore Miss Trunks put me with Rebecca and used Sally for all the demonstrations. Charlotte is really good at hockey, probably because she’s big-boned. I realized pretty quickly that part of her talent is dodging Rebecca’s stick—that’s a skill in itself. When Rebecca hit me I thought my brain had exploded. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember hearing someone say she could see my regulation-green knickers when I was lying on the floor.

  As I leave school, Renée Sargent is coming in.

  “What happened to you? Did Sally do that?” she asks, referring to the big red lump on my forehead.

  Do people think Sally beats me up?

  “No, I was partners with Rebecca in hockey. Turns out she isn’t very good at hockey.”

  “It looks really sore. Is someone picking you up?” Renée asks, obviously concerned.

  “No, I lied. I’m going to walk to my dad’s, he isn’t feeling that great.” I notice that Renée’s eyes look red. “Are you OK?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. My eyes just get puffy when it’s cold.”

  We stand awkwardly for a few seconds. Eventually I say, “Cool, well, Miss Trunks will tell me off if she sees me. I’d better go.”

  Renée looks weird. Kind of sad.

  “Can I walk with you?” she asks quietly.

  I look up at the French class window. Sally isn’t watching.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Renée and I walk separately until we get to the end of the school path and totally out of sight. When she catches up with me I feel so conspicuous. Bunking school and cavorting with the enemy? This is the baddest I have ever been.

  “Wanna go get chips?” she says, her eyes still puffy.

  I am about to say no, but I haven’t had chips in ages. “OK,” I say. “Why not.”

  “Come on then.”

  We walk to the Cod’s Wallop and order two portions of chips with loads of salt and vinegar. Renée starts to eat hers as we step outside.

  “What are you doing?” I say. “We can’t eat in public in school uniform. If someone sees us we’ll get in trouble.”

  “That’s stupid. We’re hungry—they can’t stop us from eating,” Renée mumbles with her mouth full.

  “Can’t we just go somewhere out of sight?” Once, I was caught drinking a can of Coke in town, and Miss Grut called my mum to say I had been seen “hanging off the end of a Coke can” in my uniform. Mum was so mad at me for having the headmistress call home.

  Renée sighs but wraps up her chips and says she knows a field nearby. We walk there and sit under a big tree behind a hedge. No one can see us.

  “So what’s up with your dad?” she asks boldly.

  “Oh, it’s really boring. You don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah I do,” she insists.

  “Really?”

  She nods, her mouth completely full.

  “OK, well, he lost his job nearly a year ago and hasn’t found one since. My mum just kicked him out because he’s drinking too much and . . .” I suddenly feel very uncomfortable. “I shouldn’t really be telling you this.”

  “Families are idiots.”

  I don’t know what to say to that.

  “I need to go and talk to him.” I eat a chip and have an unfamiliar impulse to keep talking. “It feels a bit like I’m the only one who says anything at the moment. Mum and I don’t really get on.”

  “Talking in my family doesn’t happen,” says Renée. “The trick for me is to live on the edge and never tip over. It’s a right laugh.”

  “What’s funny about that?”

  “Nothing. That’s why it’s funny. It’s so bad I just think it’s funny,” Renée says, tilting her head back so the chips don’t fall out of her mouth.

  “Do you really?”

  “If I don’t laugh about it, what else will I do?”

  She doesn’t actually laugh, though. She falls back, throws chips into the air, and tries to catch them in her mouth. She misses them all but picks them off the grass and eats them anyway.

  “So what about your brother?” she asks as she chews.

  “What about my brother? You don’t fancy him as well, do you?” I blurt, embarrassed by my defensiveness.

  “What? No way! Why would I fancy him?” Renée replies, obviously offended.

  “Everyone fancies Julian. Sally is obsessed with him. Sometimes I think it’s the only reason she’s friends with me.”

  “Well, Sally is an idiot, and I do not fancy your brother. He’s way too skinny, and beards are gross. I could never kiss someone with a beard.” She stuffs her mouth full of chips again, probably to stop herself slagging off my brother anymore.

  I don’t like it when she calls Sally an idiot. Not because I don’t agree, but becaus
e going behind Sally’s back frightens me. If she finds out I skived school with Renée she’ll make my life hell, and come to think of it, what am I doing bunking school? Sure, I have a lump the size of one of Miss Trunks’s boobs on my forehead, but how am I going to pass my exams if I skip lessons? The rebel inside me is short-lived.

  “I need to go.” I reach down to pick up my bag.

  “OK, well, do you want to meet up after school tomorrow?” Renée asks, as if that would be completely normal.

  I shake my head. “We have clarinet on Thursdays.”

  “Ooo, well, I wouldn’t want to get in the way of you and your boss playing the clarinet,” she says under her breath with a little smirk. It makes me feel so small. I stare at her for a while, half expecting an apology.

  “No offense, but you barely make it to lessons, let alone anything extracurricular. What do you actually do, anyway? Is this it? Chips in fields?” I am surprised at how easy I find it to talk back to her. Building up to speaking to Sally like this takes weeks of preparation, and then I usually chicken out.

  “So what if it is? Where’s honking down a piece of wood going to get you in life?”

  “That’s not the point. You learn things to make life more interesting.”

  “You think playing the clarinet is interesting?” Renée says, annoyingly making me question why I do play the clarinet.

  “I think it gives my brain something to think about, gives me something to focus on. What do you focus on?”

  “I dunno. Fun?”

  I watch her throwing chips into the air and into her mouth again. She won’t look at me now. She’s pretending this conversation isn’t happening.

  I start to walk away but then turn back. “You know there’s more to life than skiving class and being the joker, Renée. Don’t you care about the future?”

  “What’s the point in worrying about the future? Who says there will even be a future? What happens if you die tomorrow and all you ever did was sit in math class and play the clarinet and moan about your family? What good is the future to you then?” She sits up and lights a cigarette. “Have fun at your dad’s.”

  “Fun . . .?” I think better of keeping this conversation going, and leave her alone, sitting in the field smoking and eating chips. I get the impression she’ll be there for a while.

  As I get to Dad’s house I can hear the TV. He’s watching Countdown, a show where you have to make words out of a load of random letters. The house is so small—barely a house really, more a little bungalow surrounded by overgrown weeds with his banged-up old Ford Fiesta in the drive. It’s the car he bought Julian for his seventeenth birthday, but now he uses it because he can’t afford another one. I remember when he gave it to Julian. Julian said he wouldn’t drive it because it was such a “heap of shit.”

  The bungalow is a yellowy color and the windows are filthy. It’s depressing to look at. I hate that this is where he lives now. Our house is big and lovely, and although I know it’s just a matter of time before we have to move out because no one can afford to pay the mortgage, it should be his house too. He bought it. Not her.

  “Dad?” I let myself in with my key. The house smells of burnt food.

  There’s no answer.

  I go into the sitting room and see him asleep in an armchair. There’s an empty pint glass on the table in front of him with white froth stuck to its inside. Microwave macaroni and cheese is half-eaten on the coffee table, still in the plastic.

  I stand in the doorway, staring at my dad. His large belly is flopped to one side, his double chin squashed into his chest. His dark blond hair, which used to be combed neatly, is now unwashed and too long, and his face is badly shaven, covered in cuts. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt with jeans and socks with slippers that he’s obviously been wearing outside. Wearing my slippers outside was one of the only things he ever used to tell me off for. It really upset him. Thinking about that upsets me now. Dad has changed so much in such a short period of time. It feels like only yesterday he was coming into my room every morning, singing stupid songs to wake me up for school. I miss it.

  “Dad.” I shake him gently. “Dad, wake up.”

  He opens his eyes. No other part of him moves for a few seconds. It’s creepy, like he’s waiting for something to happen before he’s willing to look at who woke him up. Then he sees me.

  “Flo. Hello, darling,” he says sleepily, like he’s been drugged or something. He shifts in his chair and tries to get up. “Here, sit in my chair. Do you want a cup of tea?” He starts to clear the table, making all sorts of excuses for not having done it earlier.

  “It’s OK, Dad. Just sit down.” I perch on the arm of the sofa and he slumps down like a child who has been told off. There are a few minutes where we both stare at the TV and pretend to find a word in AHOGWUSPE.

  “Sorry, Flo. I’ll get myself back on track, I promise. And I’m sure your mum and I will work things out.”

  “It’s OK, Dad, honestly.”

  “How’s school? That Sally still acting like she rules the world?” he asks with a small smile.

  My dad knows all about Sally and her ways. He’s the one person I can tell the truth to. He seems to understand it completely. When he lived at home, he came up to my room every day after work and insisted I tell him all the mean things she had done that day. He somehow made it all seem funny. I’d tell him what she’d said and he’d mimic her in a silly voice that was weirdly accurate. It always made me laugh.

  “Yeah, she’s like a flytrap, and I’m a stupid, dopey bluebottle that hovered around so long I got stuck. Makes me feel like such a loser,” I say, crossing my arms and slumping.

  “Hey, it’s me you’re talking to. King of the bluebottles. I’m the loser.”

  “Don’t say stuff like that, Dad. You’re not a loser.”

  We look back at the TV screen. One guy has a five-letter word, the other seven.

  “How is she, your mum? When she drops Abi off, she barely looks at me. Can’t blame her, I guess.”

  “She’s angry all the time. She hates having to work, and she hates having to look after Abi when she gets home, so she doesn’t, I do it. I don’t remember the last time I actually had a conversation with her,” I say, flitting my eyes between him and the TV.

  “Nor do I, and we’ve been married for twenty years.”

  We let out little laughs, but they don’t last long.

  “I miss you, Dad. Julian, Mum, and Sally do my head in so badly.”

  “Well, people who acknowledge their faults aren’t so angry about them. Oh to be selfish, eh?”

  “I think life would be easier if I was selfish.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. Not really. Those people aren’t happy. They’ll be on their deathbeds with little more than a lifetime of guilt and regret to think about. People like us die with a clear conscience, Flo. That’s the best way to be. If you admit to where you go wrong, at least you stand a chance of making it better.”

  I still wish I was selfish.

  The guy with seven letters lost. “Pogwash” isn’t a real word.

  RENÉE

  I can’t sleep. Just before bed Nell told me that she hates living with Nana and Pop and that she plans to tell them that soon. She said she doesn’t care if it hurts them, she can’t live like this anymore. When I asked her where she plans to live instead, she said, “With Dad.” If she ever said that to Pop I think he would explode, and Nana would cry, and things would only get worse.

  Dad made his decision to live in Spain. When Mum died, he and Pop had the worst fight. I’ll never forget how loud they shouted at each other. Pop said it was Dad’s fault she got cancer, that the stress he put her under is what made her ill. I don’t think that’s true, I think Pop just needs someone to blame because his daughter died before he did and his brain can’t handle it. He turns everything into a battle and has to make everything somebody else’s fault. Like if a plate gets broken, he will always act like we did it on purpose. He can’t j
ust accept that bad things happen. Sometimes I wonder if he really blames himself. He made Mum, after all. Maybe he feels responsible for her body going wrong. Maybe that’s why he’s so mad all the time, why he shouts and makes everyone else feel so terrible about themselves. He’s trying to make us all feel as guilty as he does. I think it worked on Dad, because soon after Mum died he moved to Spain, and now he has another wife and another child. The only contact I have with him are the birthday and Christmas cards he sends, which his new wife so obviously writes. I’ve never even met her.

  If Nell tells Nana and Pop she doesn’t want to live here anymore, we won’t be allowed to move to Spain anyway. And even if we are, I don’t want to live in another country with someone who doesn’t love me enough to write his own cards. And I don’t want to start all over again with a new school where no one knows me. So Nell will go and it will just be me, Nana, and Pop left here. Pop will be angrier, and he’ll make me feel even more guilty about not being the one who died instead of Mum. And they’ll get older and older, and I’ll have to start taking care of them, and I’ll have to leave school to become a full-time caregiver, and my life will be awful. Why can’t Nell just shut up and deal with it? It doesn’t make sense that I’m the one who always gets called selfish in this house.

  As I lie in bed thinking all of this over, I can’t come up with a single positive outcome of her saying that stuff. I just lie there, my heart jumping around in my chest, desperately trying to think of something, of something shallow and shiny to focus on to distract my thoughts, and then I remember.

  Julian.

  I listen to Nell’s breathing. It’s long and slow. She’s definitely asleep. I slide my hand down slowly. My duvet is suddenly very loud. On my back with my hand in place, I think about him. The curve of his top lip pressing against mine, his breath bitter but sweet. We’re in the living room, where I saw him last. He has me on the sofa. His hand is where mine is now, he’s kissing me and touching me and he feels so good. I’m so totally transfixed by my fantasy, I must unknowingly jolt, make a noise, I don’t know—but Nell is now awake. She’s turned the light on, and she is telling me I am disgusting.