by Kat Gordon
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know how he feels,” Starr said. She stood up. Even without heels she was three inches taller than me. I switched the kettle on.
“I don’t feel great about lying to Uncle Edward.”
“You lie all the time.”
“Yeah, but he’s a nice guy.”
“He doesn’t really miss me.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong.”
“I know him better than you.”
She gave up, throwing her hands in the air. “So what was it you were asking?”
“Why Uncle Jack left. Do you know?”
“He was on the run, wasn’t he?”
“From what?”
“Drug lords, I heard.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little bit dramatic?”
“What do I know? Why are you so interested, anyway?”
I shrugged. “I guess I see it more from his perspective now, I guess.”
Starr raised her eyebrows. “Your situation is totally different, Tal. You have a dad who wants you around. Uncle Jack was a loner already. You’re an idiot if you think he’s any kind of a role model.”
“Your mum wanted him around.”
Starr screwed her face up like she was remembering something. “She did try to track him down, I think. But she forgets people pretty quickly.”
“I don’t think she’d forget him,” I said. “Do you remember her at my mum’s birthday? The one just before she died. Your mum had a fight with Gillian about him.”
“My mum used to pull hissy fits all the time, Tal.” Starr smeared lipstick onto her forefinger and patted it onto her lips. “I stopped paying them attention when I was, like, seven.”
“Oh.”
She saw the look on my face. “Don’t feel bad for me, doofus. I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m fine, Mum’s fine.”
“So she really never talked about Uncle Jack? Did everyone just pretend he’d never been there, or something?”
She gave a world-weary sigh. “Forget it, chick, that’s my advice. If you start thinking about all the weird shit that goes on in this family you’ll be here all day.” She checked her reflection in a pocket mirror. “You ever see any of the old gang?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I told you, I haven’t spoken to anyone since I left.”
“You know I bumped into Toby the other day?”
My heart gave a thump so hard I felt it in my fingertips. “How would I know that?”
“Well, I did. He’s a lawyer.” She put her lipstick and mirror away. “I asked about everyone – do you wanna hear?”
“Okay,” I said. Now my heart was beating triple-time.
“Edith’s doing some costume design course, can you believe that? The hunky one, Francis, did biology at uni, forget what he’s up to now. That little creepy one… ”
“John?”
“Yeah, him. He’s training as an accountant, go figure.”
“Is Toby still with Edith?”
“Nah. She found herself and broke up with him.” Starr shut the clasp on her handbag. “You should get in touch with him. He’s pretty hot stuff. I’d have a crack if I didn’t have a psychotic cousin to worry about.”
“And a boyfriend.”
“And a boyfriend. Like you could soon.” She blew me a kiss. “I should be going.”
I see Toby straight away. He’s leaning against a bike stand, talking to a leggy blonde girl. She keeps flicking her hair over her shoulder and tipping her head from side to side like a bird. As I get nearer she reaches out and hits him, playfully, saying: “Stop it.”
Oh come on, I think.
Toby looks up and sees me. “Jesus,” he says.
It takes me a moment to hear him through the blood pounding in my ears. “Nope, just me.”
“Tal?”
“Yeah.” Then, because I don’t know what to say, and the blonde is giving me a dirty look: “How are you?”
“How am I? How are you? No one’s seen you for ages.”
“Well, I’ve been around.”
The blonde girl giggles. I can’t help hating her.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was trying to find you.”
“How… ” he starts, then stops. “Sally, this is Tallulah.” He nods at me and the blonde. “Tal, this is Sally.”
“Hi,” Sally says, sniffing.
“Did you wanna go for a drink?” Toby asks.
“Sure.”
“Now?”
“Sure.”
Sally pouts. “Tobbeeeee – you promised you’d take me for a drink,” she says, linking her arm through his.
“Sorry,” Toby says. “Another time. I haven’t seen Tal in ages.” He disengages himself and comes to stand next to me.
I smirk at her.
The pub is packed and Toby sloshes beer all over himself on the way back to our table. He carefully sets the pints and a packet of crisps down in front of me and inspects his shirt. “Fucking shit,” he says, under his breath.
“It’s just a shirt,” I say, ripping open the crisps. I stuff three in my mouth; I haven’t eaten all day and I’m starving.
“Just a shirt that I paid a lot of money for,” Toby says.
“Just a shirt.”
“You’re still annoying, I see,” Toby says.
“You’re still uptight, I see.”
He sits down and gulps his beer. “So, what did you want to see me about?” He gives me a quick once-over. “You look different.”
“It’s been five years.”
“Right, yeah.” He’s almost finished the pint. I can’t tell if he’s nervous. “So where have you been?”
“Here in London. I lived in a hostel for a while, now I’m renting a bedsit. I hear you’re a lawyer these days.”
He shrugs. “I’m still a junior.”
“Were you always this prickly?”
“What did you expect, Tal? You disappeared off the face of the earth one day. You didn’t even say goodbye.”
It’s not nerves then. In a weird way, his anger makes me feel better about tracking him down. He cares enough to be pissed at you, I tell myself.
“I wasn’t really in the mood for a send-off.”
Toby winces. “Sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“No, I know that. I’m just saying I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“I came to the hospital,” he says. “The nurse said you weren’t seeing anyone, but I thought you’d see me. Then I got a phantom phone call from Edith and by the time I got back, you’d vanished.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I couldn’t face you.”
“I thought you hated me.”
“No.”
“I thought that was why you never got in touch.”
We drink our beer in silence. Finally, Toby puts his glass down and sighs. “Seriously, what made you come back now? There must be some reason.”
“Starr found me about six months ago,” I say, sneaking a look at him; he doesn’t blink. “She visits me occasionally. Last week she said she’d run into you.” I shrug. “I dunno. It made me think about you guys. I wanted to see you again.”
Toby looks at his hands. “Well, I’m sorry about being aggro. My feelings were hurt. I thought we were friends.”
“We were.”
“It didn’t feel like it, when you ran off. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Yeah, well. It didn’t feel like it when you secretly got with my best friend.”
“Did you actually care?”
“You’re the genius now. What do you think?”
Toby half-grins. “I’ve always been a genius,” he says.
“And modest.”
“And good-looking.”
“And shy, and retiring.”
“So why didn’t you want me?” His tone’s light, but he keeps his eyes on me as I take another gulp of be
er.
“It wasn’t that easy, Toby.”
“It seemed pretty easy to me.” He takes a sip. “I was crazy about you. You know that, right?”
“I liked you too,” I say. “But it felt like everyone I liked died. So no, not that easy for me. And then Edith… ”
“Yeah,” Toby says. “We don’t really talk anymore.”
“Oh.”
We’re silent for a moment. At the table next to us, two men in business suits are laughing hard about something; one of them has the red face that comes with a lack of oxygen. He leans into the wall, slaps it and takes a deep, juddering breath. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says.
“There’s another reason I wanted to see you,” I say. My mouth feels dry and my tongue seems to be swollen, so I have to stop and swallow a few times before I carry on. “My dad’s in hospital – he had a heart attack.”
“Oh my God,” Toby says; he scrapes his chair around the table until he’s next to me. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah,” I say, “maybe, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was in a coma,” I say. “He kind of woke up the other day, but he kept drifting in and out, and then he had to have an emergency operation. They said they’ll let us know when he’s awake properly.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” I say. “I hadn’t seen him since I left school either.”
Toby draws back to look at me. “What?”
“I told you – I’ve been living in a hostel.”
He looks angry again. “So you went off completely by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“You always shut people out,” he says. “You should have called me. I would’ve looked out for you.”
I scratch at the varnish on the table. “I know,” I say, eventually. “And I know you were the one who trashed the art room by the way.”
“How?”
I put my hands in my lap. “I worked it out,” I say.
“Are you pissed off?”
“No.” I should have fucking killed Mr Hicks.
I want to say thank you. I want to tell him how knowing that someone was standing up for me made me feel grateful and ashamed of my own behaviour at the same time. That I should have looked out for him too, instead of leaving him to deal with his brother’s death alone.
Tell him everything, inner me says. Tell him you feel guilty and glad and resentful and defiant and vulnerable and he’s the only one who can navigate his way around all that.
“I’m really, really sorry,” I say. “For everything.”
“I’m sorry too,” Toby says. “The whole time you were away I was thinking about how I made all those mistakes with you, and how I’d make it up to you if I ever saw you again.” He gives me a half-smile. “I probably should have started with that. And it is really good to see you.”
There’s another silence, then he drains his beer and stands up. “I’ve got an exam coming up – I should go revise.”
“Oh.”
“What’s your number?”
I hesitate.
“I’m not letting you disappear again.”
I write the number down on the back of an old receipt I find in my bag and push it towards him. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket without looking at my scrawl. “See you,” he says. He bends down and kisses me on the lips. It’s a long kiss, forceful. At first I feel nothing, then suddenly my whole body is throbbing and my head is buzzing, and I just want to keep on doing this forever. He pulls back, straightens up and walks out of the pub.
I sit and finish my beer, taking time over each sip.
When I leave it’s dark and surprisingly chilly for a summer evening. The recent heat has broken, and the streets are slick with the sheen of rain. My phone rings and I fumble in my bag for it; it keeps slipping out of my fingers.
“Fuck exams,” he says. “Can I come over and see you?”
“No,” I say. “I have to go to bed.”
“That’s not putting me off.”
I find myself grinning.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. I’m smiling.”
“I can’t tell that over the phone, you know.”
“I know.”
“So, can I come over?”
“Yes.”
We kiss, we talk. We talk for half the night at each other and over each other. Toby’s brought a bottle of whisky around, and we drink that, neat, from plastic cups. We start out in the kitchen, and somehow we end up in the bedroom, although I’m not too clear on how we get there. I take a pillow off the bed and lie on the floor and he sits next to me, his hand in my hair.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“I’m thinking about something I read earlier,” I say.
“Oh good.”
“Shut up, it’s interesting. There’s this thing in physiology called ‘Dead Space’, where a third or so of every resting breath is exhaled unchanged.”
“Come again?”
“It means the oxygen hasn’t been diffused in the alveoli from the alveolar gas into the blood passing by in the lung capillaries. That’s the Dead Space – the portion of air where no useful transaction has taken place.”
He strokes my face with his free hand. “You sound like a doctor.”
“Maybe a nurse.”
He tells me about his law conversion, and uni, and travelling around Europe for three months. I feel sad that I never did any of this, and he says, “You’re still young”, and then I laugh at him again for looking so serious, like twenty-three is old and he grins and says his family are worried he might turn into a prick, and I think I might have loved him all this time, or maybe it’s the whisky.
Then we’re kissing again, and I’m not scared this time. He takes his clothes off first, and then mine; each time he takes a layer off his hands tremble. When we’re completely naked he lies on top of me, very gently, just skin-on-skin. I finally feel comfortable in mine, maybe it’s being next to his. He’s hard, underneath me, and I want him. I move my hips up and then it’s happening and, this time, it’s right.
Afterwards, he talks some more. I half-see him get up to open the window then come over to me and I feel him gently shaking my shoulder.
“I’m not asleep,” I say, “I’m listening. I heard everything you said.”
“Sure,” he says. “You’ve been snoring for half an hour.”
“I was in a sex coma,” I say. I wrap myself around him, not minding the stickiness from earlier. He bends his head down to kiss my collarbone, then my neck, then my chin, my mouth, and we start again.
Eighteen
Bones are made up of marrow, nerves, blood vessels, epithelium and various tissues. When there is a break in the continuity of the bone, it is called a bone fracture, or more colloquially, a broken bone. Fractures are mostly commonly caused when the bone comes into contact with another body (such as the ground, a wall, even another person) and the force of this contact is too high, but sometimes they can happen after a period of accumulated trauma to a particular area (such as the legs if you run too much); these fractures are known as stress fractures. On average, you will suffer two fractures in your lifetime.
The development of the human skeleton can be said to start at the end of the third month after conception, when your bones begin to calcify inside your mother’s womb. When we are born, we have over two hundred and seventy of them, but as we grow some fuse together, and the tissue hardens.
It takes twenty years to fully grow, one year less than the age I am today. As I dream next to Toby, I have two hundred and six bones, and they’re as strong as they’ll ever be.
Toby leaves early the next morning to pick up clean clothes before work.
“Call me,” he mumbles into my ear, and I roll over and grab his chin.
“Stay,” I say, eyes still closed.
“How about I come round tonight? I get the feeling you’re not a morni
ng person anyway.”
“Less talk, more sleep.”
I vaguely hear the click of the door being closed, then it’s four hours later and I’m sitting up blurrily, not quite sure if what happened really happened.
I shower and stand in front of the mirror, running my fingers through my hair. I should get a cut – a proper one. I’ve been butchering it myself for the last few years and it shows. I crack my joints, knuckles, neck, shoulders, lower back. I text Aunt Gillian, checking in. I read. I go out and buy tea bags and lemons and make myself some iced tea. I do almost anything other than think about my father, and how worried I should be right now.
On the table my phone beeps angrily at me.
Princess – found Jack. Coming round this afternoon about three o’clock. Malkie.
I check my watch. Two fifteen p.m.
I put on a lacy white dress, then take it off; it makes me look like I’m taking my Holy Communion. I put on a white, sleeveless, v-necked shirt instead, and bright green shorts. I tie my hair back and dab the skin under my eyes with concealer – don’t want Malkie to notice how tired I look. And maybe Uncle Jack?
At five to three the buzzer goes; he’s early.
“Oh God,” I whisper to myself. “Oh fuck oh God.” I don’t know if I’m ready to see him now. I still haven’t decided what to ask him, got things straight in my head.
I let him in and he clomps up the stairs. I leave my front door open and put some glasses in the freezer to chill so we can have iced tea.
“Hey.”
I turn around. “Hey yourself.”
He comes in and hugs me.
“Want a drink?”
“No thanks. You sure you want to see him?”
I try to swallow.
“You sounded pretty urgent the other day, doll.”
“I am,” I say. “It is.”
“I don’t know what you want with him,” Malkie says. “But like I said before, you gotta be prepared for him to be changed, okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine.”
Malkie sighs. He looks at the clock on the oven and gestures to the door. “Shall we?”
My heart’s in my mouth. I grab my purse and lead him out of the flat, double-locking the door behind us.