Outside

by Sarah Ann Juckes

  ‘I didn’t play with Angus after that. Not ever. And Dad and I didn’t talk about it, either. We didn’t talk at all, really. And, I don’t know … Maybe I was angry at him for not trying. And then angry at you for not being all mine, too.’ He sighs.

  I shift about. ‘I’m not Angus.’

  Willow nods. ‘Aye, I know.’

  I tilt my head ’til it rests against his shoulder.

  ‘I wish I was,’ I whisper.

  But Willow shakes his head again. ‘You’re Ele. And that’s the best person to be.’

  We’re still for a while. All the thoughts about what makes me who I am are whirling around inside of me, waiting to come out.

  The Inside.

  The Outside.

  Zeb.

  The Others.

  Jack.

  Him. My dad.

  My mouth is clamped shut, but my chest is awful sick of churning it all around in the dark.

  How to be an Outside Person – number five: Don’t think about the Inside.

  But maybe I want to think about them. And maybe I want to tell Willow. Maybe I want him to see me for who I am, after all. Who I really am. Not as just some name that don’t mean nothing. Not as Ele from that Colt Farm.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ I say, all quiet. ‘About before I met you. About … about where I was. Who I was with.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ he says.

  I lick my lips. ‘Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a Tower.’

  And I tell him. About the Others. I tell him about each one of them, about how they liked me and how they din. I tell him about how Queenie was, and about how sweet Bee could be. I tell him about Cow being greedy, about Jack, my friend, knocking on the walls, and how it felt like everything died when Zeb did.

  I tell him and he holds my hand.

  I try saying about Him – about the bad bits – but my voice goes and runs out then.

  When I break off, Willow don’t say nothing for a while. It takes me a few minutes to realize that he’s asleep.

  It don’t matter none, though. I said it all. And saying it out loud felt even better than hiding away from it. ’Cause it always finds you, don’t it?

  How to be an Outside Person – number five: Don’t think about the Inside.

  How to be an Outside Person – number five: Tell the truth.

  Forty-Six

  I slept Outside last night. The whole night, curled up round Maple and Willow – my very own two trees. And I dreamt about her like she was with us, too.

  She was reading to us. A story. Her voice was soft, like a whisper. Those red lips were smiling as she was speaking the words.

  ‘Hansel pushed the old Witch into the oven and slammed the door closed. The Witch screamed and disappeared into the fire, never to be seen again. Hansel released his sister, and together they found their father, who was wandering in the woods looking for them, having left his evil wife. They all moved into the gingerbread house, never to go hungry again.’

  And my hands were clapping and I was calling for her to read the bit about the sugar windows again, my feet kicking Zeb’s, who was sitting on her other leg. But he was frowning.

  She stroked her hand across his forehead. His hair was so short that it stroked her fingers back.

  ‘Was that a bit too scary?’ she asked him.

  But Zeb just looked at the door. A white door. Closed.

  ‘We could push Him in the oven,’ he said.

  And her fingers stopped playing with his hair. She froze up like wall.

  She had blue eyes. Yellow hair. Just like ours.

  Her voice lost the whisper. Now it was a hiss. ‘Never, ever say that again. Do you hear me?’

  And those blue eyes were full of fear.

  I stopped clapping. She looked from Zeb to the door, her red lips trembling. Then she caught my wide eyes.

  She pulled us both close, that red smile back like it never went away. ‘Now. How about another story?’

  And she opened the book again and started reading. But all the time Zeb was looking at me. Looking like he knew something I din.

  I reckon I know now, though.

  That lady with the red lips, she was our mother. And she was so scared that she was frozen to the spot when she should have been running. With us. Far away from Him.

  ’Cause it was Him she was afraid of, weren’t it? And I know. I know that.

  But I ain’t gonna let no fear stop me running. Never again.

  I’m an Outside Person now. I can feel that as truth, burning bright inside me. But I got to set some things right if I’m gonna really do this.

  I’m gonna have to be as brave as I ever was to do it.

  Seems to me that I need myself a new set of rules.

  How to set things right – number one: Say sorry.

  First thing I got to do is quit being so stupid and pushing people away. I got to cling on to all the best things and keep them safe on a shelf, like my books.

  I’m up before even the sun’s up properly. It’s just stretching its fingers over the horizon, so everything looks kind of dim. I untangle myself from Willow’s hand and leave him sleeping next to Maple. He looks younger somehow, without the frowning or the smiling.

  I walk back to Willow’s house with my books in my hands. The air feels wet and my dress is as cold as walls. I soon warm up, though, and I make it back without needing to stop once, even though my legs are calling out for a rest by the time I let myself in the front door.

  It’s still dark inside. I don’t want to turn on the lights yet, so I keep the shadows on.

  Making porridge in the almost-dark when you ain’t made it on your own before is hard going. I manage to get it in the bowl all right, but I go and forget the milk that’ll make it up, so it burns down black in the microwave.

  We ain’t got no more porridge, and the kitchen’s looking even more dim on account of all the smoke in it, but I ain’t letting that stop me. I got some making-up to do, and breakfast seems as good a way of doing it as any. I keep thinking of Ezra-Dad’s face last night, all covered in hurt.

  They need to know I’m better than all of that.

  I open up the can cupboard and look for stuff that sounds like it might be for breakfast. None of it says it on the cans. It’s all stuff I’m damn sure we’ve had for dinner before. I find three cans at the back, though, all dusty. On the front is a picture of a circle with an egg on top, and once Ezra-Dad gave me an egg for breakfast. When I open the can, it don’t look like the eggs he made, though. The can says ‘SPAM’ on it, and the pink stuff inside is round and flat, nothing like an egg at all.

  I hold the can upside down and it makes a squelch as it plops out. I put the plates on the table and go upstairs – all on my own – and fetch the flowers from out of the toilet. I put them in a jug I find under the kitchen sink, and place it in the middle of the table, just like the flowers in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’.

  My stomach is rumbling up a storm now, so I make plenty of noise getting together the tea. Pretty soon I hear the pipes washing down from upstairs. Ezra-Dad.

  I guess you could say I’m excited. I spill hot water over the worktop and burn my fingers red. But it looks nice – food on the table with the flowers, tea all there in the middle in its own little pot for everyone to just help themselves to. I put the knives and forks down by the plates like Willow showed me. I hear Ezra-Dad plodding down the stairs, so I quickly yank out my chair and sit down at the table.

  I put my hands on my plate. I sit back and put them on my lap. I sit forward and grip the table.

  The front door bangs shut and Willow stumbles in at the same moment as Ezra-Dad. Willow’s clothes are all crumpled and his eyes are squinting out. He swears under his breath when he sees me, then plonks himself down in a chair, breathing from his inhaler again. He looks mighty pleased to see me.

  Ezra-Dad is beaming.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he shouts, and he ain’t saying it to the smoke in the a
ir, or the porridge on the floor, or the water dripping down from the worktop. He’s saying it to me and the stuff I gone and put out for them.

  I feel myself blushing up all hot. ‘I wanted to say sorry. For hurting you and all.’

  Ezra-Dad smiles so wide his beard touches his hair. He sits himself down, too. ‘Well, that’s magic. Will?’

  Willow ain’t listening. He points at his plate, still huffing and puffing. ‘What’s this?’

  I bite my lip. ‘Spam-eggs. Is it not right?’

  He breaks into a big smile, too, putting his inhaler back in his pocket and taking his coat off.

  ‘No, it’s great! I love spam. I didn’t even know we had any.’

  I beam at him, watching him tuck in. Ezra-Dad is raising his eyebrows at the numbers on the top of the can that say 31–10–2016, but when he sees me looking all concerned he picks up his fork and tucks in, too.

  Ezra-Dad and Willow are my favourite Outside People in the world.

  I stab my spam-egg right in the belly with my fork and bite on it whole. It’s kind of like feed, if feed was made into hunks from cans. I spit it out. ‘This is horrible.’

  Willow and Ezra-Dad exchange glances, laughing, but they keep on eating. I raise an eyebrow at both of them and drink my tea to take away the taste.

  They’re my favourite Outside People, but they’re weird.

  Forty-Seven

  I find Willow staring out of the window upstairs when I knock on the door.

  ‘Oh.’ He spins round. ‘Sorry. I’m in your room.’

  I shrug, sitting down on the bed. ‘It’s your room, really.’

  ‘It’s OK. I kind of like the one next door.’ He stretches his back, grimacing. ‘Much better than sleeping on the bloody pavement, anyway.’

  I smile. ‘Thanks for coming to find me.’

  He sidles up beside me on the bed, with one foot tucked under him so he’s facing me. ‘I’ve been trying to remember what you said last night …’

  My heart kicks. So he was awake, then. I look away from him, trying to hide my face from him with my own shoulder.

  ‘I’m pleased. That you told me, I mean.’ I feel his hand on mine, lightly touching, not quite holding. ‘I was kind of asleep and don’t remember all of it, but, like, it’s nice to know that you have a family, you know?’

  I let my shoulders down. ‘Family?’

  ‘You know, the, er … Others? Bee, Queenie. Cowell, was it? Anyway, they sound nice.’

  ‘Cow,’ I say, turning to face him fully now. Just him saying their names, saying them out loud in the light, is making my belly twang with something that I don’t know if it is missing or guilt, or both of them all mixed up.

  ‘Cow. Right,’ he says, nodding. Then he frowns. ‘What is that, like a nickname or something?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Aye, well. I’d like to meet them someday.’

  I take a deep breath in. ‘That’s actually why I came in.’ My voice sounds all scratched up, but I ain’t scared. I ain’t.

  How to set things right – number two: Be brave.

  Willow frowns slightly. ‘Aye?’

  ‘Aye,’ I say. ‘I mean, yeah.’

  OakWillowBirchSycamore.

  ‘Willow,’ I say. ‘I got to go back.’

  My heart is beating up inside of me like it’s desperate to get out. But I ain’t closing my ears to it no more. I hear those knocks.

  ‘Right,’ Willow says, looking to the door. ‘But Dad said that you lived at the Colt place.’

  Colt. I grip the blanket tighter.

  Willow waits for me to give him some kind of sign that he’s right, but I can’t do that.

  ‘Right … Well, I’m guessing there’s a reason you ran away. And, to be honest, I’ve seen him around and – no offence – but he’s really weird. Like, really.’ He rubs his hand over his chin, like Ezra-Dad does, but he ain’t got no beard to tangle his fingers in. ‘Like, this one time, I took my bike up there to the farm and, you know, started just looking around, whatever. Anyway, he caught me trying to break into a stone barn, and he chased me out of there with a gun.’ His eyes go wide. ‘No joke.’

  My heart is beating so fast now that I can’t even feel it. I’m floating up somewhere on the ceiling, looking down at Willow telling these tales. Not thinking. Not thinking about how he would’ve been on just the other side of my wall. My Prince. No – not thinking about that.

  ChestnutAshPine.

  ‘I got … I got to show you.’ I open my mouth to say more, but I ain’t got nothing.

  Willow licks his lips. ‘Your family, they’re still there, aren’t they? With him?’

  Still I don’t say nothing. I can’t. I ain’t got no words.

  He stares at me. ‘You want to go rescue them?’

  And suddenly his eyes are all fire.

  ‘I can help you! I can go in. You can just, you know, show me where they are. And maybe keep a lookout?’ He stands up and marches to the window. ‘I can rescue them.’

  I’m somewhere up on that ceiling still, floating.

  He turns round and looks at me with those dark eyes of his. Seeing me and not seeing me at all.

  Not yet, anyway.

  I watch myself nod in his eyes. They spark. He starts pacing around.

  ‘We’ll take the car. The farm’s only across the way, but it’ll give us a quicker getaway if he sees us.’

  He won’t see us.

  ‘I’ll get Dad’s crowbar from the shed, and maybe a knife or something. Or do you think that’s too much?’

  I stare at him.

  ‘Aye, too much. We’ll wear black, though, and go later, when it gets dark. Harder to spot us that way, right? Oh, and –’ he squats down in front of me – ‘probably best not to tell Dad, OK? He’ll just … complicate things.’

  ‘Lie?’ I croak.

  He sighs. ‘No, not lie. Just … don’t tell him the truth. Different things.’

  ‘Different things,’ I whisper. ‘Right.’

  There are so many rules to this Outside that sometimes I can’t keep up.

  He smiles, holding me in his eyes.

  ‘This is going to be good. Really good.’

  Forty-Eight

  Ain’t no use being scared of time. It comes on forward in any case, whether you’re afraid of it or not.

  We got the whole day at the beginning. The sun is shining and it seems like it ain’t never getting dark. But then, soon enough, we’re having our lunch and I’m staring at my food while Willow chats to Ezra-Dad like he’s his bestest friend, and I’m too mixed up to enjoy the look of happy surprise on Ezra-Dad’s face.

  I’m trying to keep everything balled up in my hands, as perfect as it is. The eyes that Willow looks at me with when we’re elbow-deep in washing-up bubbles. The happy humming coming from the living room when Ezra-Dad empties the bins. The feeling of being warm and on soft things and having a full belly. But it’s all trickling on through my fingers.

  It’s time, though. It’s the right thing to do.

  ‘Mind if I go practise?’ Willow says from behind me, drying his hands on the cloth I know to be a tea towel.

  I shake my head. ‘Can I listen in?’

  He smiles. ‘Sure.’

  We go into his old room, my new one. I sit on the bed as he wakes up his music stand and rests a book on top called Violin Exam Pieces: Grade 7.

  ‘What do those letters mean?’ I ask, peering over at the little black blobs all caught up in lines of spiderwebs.

  ‘They’re notes,’ he says, twiddling on the keys sticking out of the violin’s nose. ‘Each one means a different kind of sound.’

  I frown. ‘Ain’t like no notes I ever did see.’

  Willow shrugs. ‘Aye, not everyone uses them. I have to for my exam, but it’s better to learn it by heart anyway.’

  He strokes his bow over the strings on the violin and it starts singing. I lie back, closing my eyes. For a while, he just goes up and down with his sounds, like we’r
e climbing trees made out of music notes. They go up, higher and higher, before coming back down again, one branch at a time. I can almost see that note writing in the sounds he makes, using the lines of the spiderweb to climb from the bottom to the top.

  Then he starts playing proper. Something slow at first. He keeps stopping and muttering to himself, then going back and making the same sounds again. I like to watch him play. When he feels me watching him, he’s all smiley and jokey, but when he forgets I’m there he frowns. Closes his eyes. Sways. It’s like seeing him with my eyes closed.

  I start recognizing the tune a bit, and hum it out as he plays.

  He stops, smiling again – as much as he can, with his chin all smushed into the violin, anyway.

  ‘You’re singing the cello part, did you know?’

  Now, I din know that. But I like the idea of having music inside of me that I din even know I had.

  When he’s done with the slow song, he starts playing something else. Something fast. Something that has him dancing from left to right as his arm swoops from side to side and up and down. The music bounces off the walls and has me sitting up, smiling, my feet bouncing along like they’re running on music.

  ‘Come on!’ Willow shouts, spinning round in a circle and bouncing from foot to foot. I get up and copy him, though it’s difficult without a violin to play myself. I hop from one foot to the other. Spin round. I start slow, but I get caught up in all the music and my feet start working on their own. They tap out from side to side. My arms swing about. I jump up high. Go down low. And spinspinspin.

  It’s like running with Zeb again. I can almost feel him dancing next to me and I reckon it’s the first time I felt him since I left his stain on the floor of the Inside. I close my eyes and I breathe him in.

  Willow dances around me, ducking and weaving. Now and again we catch each other’s eye all in a blur and we smile with our teeth.

  The song ends on a big, long note and I fall down. My face pushes into the bed and catches all my breaths. I feel Willow flop down next to me.

  ‘Phew! Ah, that’s a fun one.’

  I pull my head to the side so I can see him. He’s smiling wide at the ceiling, pulling in breaths from his inhaler.