by Lizzy Barber
Because today is my eighteenth birthday, and I feel invincible.
Because we’ve made it this far, and nothing bad happened. We are really on our way, and no one has stopped us.
And we aren’t going to Ocala. Or hiking. Or having a picnic. Or going to any other place Mamma would allow.
We’re going to Astroland.
ROSIE
2
I rake through the pile of clean laundry. Cotton socks and T-shirts and pyjama bottoms spill out of the dryer and fan around me, bursting with the powdery smell of synthetic lavender. I rise, frustrated, and pluck a peach-coloured bra bristling with static from my thigh.
‘Mum, have you seen my gym socks?’ My voice ricochets through the house. ‘Mum?’
No reply.
I pull out my phone from my jeans pocket and click the home button. My face, highlighted with purple glitter from last year’s school disco, gurns back at me. Above it, the time flashes in neat, white letters. It’s quarter to eight. The bus leaves in ten minutes. ‘Muuuum!’ I shout again, craning my neck towards the stairs.
We live in one of those stretched-out town houses off a backstreet in Islington: a basement kitchen, permanently at risk of damp; two interconnecting living rooms, one always empty, the other squashed; at least one too many floors. Dad calls it a triangular house, because the rooms get smaller as you go up it, so even though it looks big at the start, by the time you get to my room in the attic you’re breathing in to get past people.
I shove the phone back in my pocket, about to give up and look upstairs, when a piece of paper on the kitchen counter catches my eye. It’s an email to my parents, I notice, looking-but-not-looking. Odd, to have it printed out. And then I see the name of the sender, and edge closer.
Susanne, David,
I am concerned that I have still not received an answer from you regarding my email dated 3 March 2018. As you know, we only have funds to last us until the end of May, and unless anything happens to the contrary before then we will be forced to close the trust.
I in no way wish to burden you further at such a sensitive time, but I would be grateful if you could please let me know how you wish to proceed.
Kind regards,
Sarah Brown
Director
The end of May. That’s six weeks away.
It’s as if someone’s pressed the mute button. Every petty urban chirrup, the beeps of cars outside, the whirr of the washing machine, the indistinct motions of the rest of the family have all been silenced. I reach for the paper, my fingers barely touching the space where the text finishes and the blankness begins. So few words, to say so much.
I hear the hurried bump, bump, bump of feet on the stairs, and Mum’s head appears round the door. I swerve my eyes from the paper, take a step away from it.
‘Are these what you’re looking for, Rosie?’ She dangles a pair of blue and white striped socks between her fingers.
‘Yes, that’s them.’ I snatch them from her. ‘Thanks.’
‘They were in Rob’s room,’ she tells my back, following me up the stairs to the front door.
‘Course they were.’ I shove the socks into my kit bag, not wanting to look at her. Worrying that she’ll read my face, and know instantly that I’ve seen it. Why did she have it out now? Is it because of the interview tomorrow – our last hope, a last-ditch plea, to keep the trust alive?
My backpack is where I left it last night, hanging on one of the hooks by the front door, textbooks on the brink of spilling out. I grab it, trying to ignore the words that feel as if they’ve been taped across the inside of my eyelids, so Mum won’t know anything is amiss.
She watches me, her face wrinkled with concern. She’s dressed in her usual work uniform – flared knee-length skirt, blouse, cardigan – but on her feet are the big fluffy slippers she swaps her heels for as soon as she walks in the door. She works in advertising, a huge corporate company that makes things like that Christmas supermarket ad that went viral last year, but I can’t remember a single day when she hasn’t been there to see me off in the morning, or welcome me home after school.
‘You will be on time tonight, won’t you, Rosie?’ She works a strand of brown hair around her finger, waiting for an answer.
I am seconds from the door. From being able to think. ‘Yes, of course I will.’
‘You know it’s important – to me and your dad. It’s an early start tomorrow, to get to the studio, and we want to spend some time together tonight. To talk about her. As a family.’
‘I know, Mum. I’ll be on time. Early, even.’ I puff my cheeks, jigging from foot to foot as I eye the door.
‘Text me when you’re off the bus, and when you get on this afternoon.’
‘I will. I always do.’
‘And if you need anything, anything at all, you can call me at the office. I’ll always answer.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘OK,’ she sighs, then opens the front door for me, holding on to the frame as I duck past her. She grabs me on the shoulder just before my foot touches the first step, pulling me into a hug I have to fight the urge to struggle out of. ‘I love you. Be safe!’
‘Yes, Mum. Love you too.’
She relinquishes her hold and I hurry down the steps.
When has she ever not ended a farewell like that? Be safe.
I try to do my Spanish homework on the bus next to Keira, but I can’t help but play the words of the email in an endless loop: … only have funds to last us until the end of May … now it’s nearly the end of April.
Keira sticks her feet up against the seat in front of us, balances the book on her knees. I see her watching me, caution in her eyes, but then she rests her iPhone on the wedge between our seats, the magenta sparkly case picking up the specks of the mottled purple and grey upholstery, and wedges one of her earbuds into my left ear, turning the volume up on the Drake song she knows I love.
‘¿Admíras a los famosos?’ she asks, reading from the maroon textbook in front of me.
It’s like I’ve never heard the words in my life.
‘¿Admíras … a … los … famosos?’ she asks again, nudging me. ‘Come on, Rosie, it’s an easy one.’
I see her features crinkle together, and I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands, forcing myself to scrub the email from my mind. Do you admire celebrities? The meaning comes to me at last. ‘Sí, sí, admíro mucho. Liam Hemsworth es muy guapo,’ I joke. That’s what I always do.
She giggles, thumps me on the head with the book, and I know I’ve struck the right note. It’s always so much easier.
… forced to close the trust. That must be what it is. They’ll use tomorrow’s interview as an appeal – to see if the nation’s ghoulish hunger for sympathy will invite a new wave of donations that’ll allow us to keep the trust afloat a little longer. The interview will be the biggest piece of coverage we’ve had this year, and the fifteen-year anniversary is a big one – we’re sure to pluck at the heartstrings of all those stay-at-home mums glued to the television set tomorrow morning, clutching a half-drunk mug of tea to their chest as they comfort themselves with the knowledge that their little Bobby or Jane is safe in bed.
The bus drops us in Highgate Village, where we pass the newsagent Keira got chased away from last week for trying to convince a man outside to buy her a bottle of vodka. I clock her smoothing down her nut-brown curls, turning her head in the opposite direction to avoid detection.
‘Like they remember you, you twat.’ I nudge her in the ribs. ‘Can you imagine how many times someone’s tried that on? You weren’t even in uniform.’
She reaches a hand out as if to give me a shove, but then she stops, grabs hold of my hand and squeezes it hard. Her features whirl into a concerned frown. ‘You’re all right, yeah?’
I go cold. At first I wonder how she can know, replaying the morning’s conversation to see if there’s anything I could have said that betrayed me. Trying to work out if it’s something my mum may have
told Keira’s. But then, why her and not me?
I open my mouth, about to ask how she knows, when it strikes me: she doesn’t mean the email, she means the date. Of course: she knows that. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I feel my shoulders tighten, and force them to unknit themselves from my spine. I’ve been told before I need to stop acting defensive. That my ‘natural inclination to keep people at arm’s length makes it hard to form true and meaningful attachments’.
But Keira’s different. And she knows me too well to press me. Instead, she gives me a forced smile, hikes her bag over her shoulder as she turns to leave me. ‘OK, cool. Save me a seat on the bus.’ She blows me a kiss and weaves off down the hall through the anthill of navy uniforms.
At school I keep my head down, try to avoid the whispers. It’s a big enough place that I can slip down the corridors without bumping into anyone I know, but of course they all know me. Even the younger ones – the ones who weren’t even alive fifteen years ago – regard me with a rich mixture of horror and curious fascination. I see it in their faces – their eyes wide, their shoulders hitched back a little, as if it might be contagious – as they wonder to themselves, What would I be like, if it happened to me?
When I do my journey in reverse, get off the bus at the top of Highbury Corner, I switch on my phone, kept dark all day to avoid the inevitable barrage of alerts. The ones that now flood the screen. The messages of sympathy from people who barely know me, but feel like having me as a friend – even a virtual one – gives them a certain cachet. The running commentary from Mum, telling me about her day, asking me how mine’s going, telling me she’s just checking in. Each ping on the screen is heavy with her desperation to know I’m still at the other end.
At home I dodge past Rob, who’s already in his usual position in the living room playing video games on full volume, and shout down to Mum in the kitchen. ‘Home! Got an essay due for English!’ I can’t deal with it now – all of it, all of them. I crave the closed door of my room, the sanctuary it provides.
Upstairs I change into a pair of red tartan tracksuit bottoms and a grey T-shirt that reads, ‘But First, Coffee’, discarding my uniform on the bedroom floor like a body has melted from it. I tap methodically at my keyboard for an hour, trying to contemplate How Austen’s portrayal of Mr Darcy reflects the attitude towards men in the novel as a whole, but the letters on the screen before me are meaningless.
Is the email still there in the kitchen? Or did she clock it after I left, secrete it away? Does she know that I know? Is tonight when they are planning on telling us? Prepping us for the interview tomorrow, so that we’re primed to make our sob story even more compelling?
At half past six the distant sound of the front door opening and slamming shut, followed by the metallic thunk of a bike, signals Dad’s return from work. He’s a music producer – classical stuff mainly; good enough so that the press always trots out the same, well-rehearsed line, ‘celebrated music producer David Archer’, as if he has no right to complain about what happened because he’s successful.
‘Evening all!’ I picture him unclipping his helmet from under his greying beard, removing his high-vis jacket and seeking out Mum; seeking out the reassurance that everyone is OK. Everyone who can be.
The smell of cooked meat rises up the stairs and curls around my room in fatty, salty tendrils. My stomach rumbles. I couldn’t face lunch.
At ten to seven I scrape my hair into a high ponytail, trying to avoid looking at my reflection. If I do, I’ll be compelled, tonight of all nights, to look for the similarities. Does my mouth curve the same way as hers? Are our eyes like Mum’s, or Dad’s? Is there something in our noses, our ears, our jawline, that I can look at and say, ‘That’s us’?
I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to sit there over dinner, and watch Mum screwing up the corner of her mouth, and Dad ripping his napkin into shreds, as we go over it and over it all again: every shred of every story they have, nothing to be forgotten. The muscles in my legs tense in resistance. I consider calling down, telling them I feel sick, I have to finish an essay, I’m not hungry. But I know no excuse is good enough tonight.
Instead, I ball my fists, take ten deep breaths. A doctor with a German-sounding surname once told me this is ‘an excellent technique for self-reflection and relaxation’. That was after the time I punched the wall in my room so hard I broke a knuckle.
When it doesn’t work, I stop by the bathroom and pop a couple of aspirin, curling my lip at the razor by the sink. Too like The Bell Jar, even for me. I turn towards the stairs, and the smell of cheese and tomato permeates the air – lasagne, I guess – and I place a foot on the topmost step.
I practise a smile, a nod. I’m OK. We all do our best to pretend we’re OK.
And then, with nothing else for it, I make my way downstairs, each step bringing me closer to the moment I’ve spent all day dreading.
To dinner.
To my family.
To the past.
To Emily.
ANNA
3
I’ve never questioned why Mamma won’t allow me to visit Astroland, the amusement park that opened up in the north of Florida nearly twenty years ago. I’d never dare to. It’s one of those things I know instinctively is Off Limits, just like painting my nails, or owning a home computer, or any of the myriad things that others seem to have and do.
For my classmates, special occasions are usually spent on the highway, making the hour’s drive to Astroland. They will compete for weeks beforehand as to who will get to dress up as which character from the wildly popular kids’ movies. When I was really little, I’d come home clutching glittery invitations from children to join their special birthday trip. But the invitations were thrown straight in the trash. Eventually they stopped asking me.
The idea of Astroland wouldn’t have come up at all if it weren’t for William. His family moved to Alachua County from San Antonio, Texas, and he couldn’t believe it when I told him I’ve never been. His family are all Astroland mad; they’ve seen all the films a bunch of times, and I think they even have a first edition copy of one of the books in their living room. Even William, who was already in college over in Gainesville when they moved, was thrilled at the prospect of a family season pass.
At first he wouldn’t let it go, this fantasy of us going to Astroland together. He was convinced he would be able to win Mamma around. But that was before he really knew her, saw that even his charm couldn’t sway her set mind. Which was why he ended up formulating a way to sneak me in. It started as a joke: ‘I’ll hide you in the trunk of my car; she’ll never know you’re gone. We’ll get you a wig, a moustache.’ But when my birthday started edging closer, it was all he could talk about. As if proving he could do this would demonstrate that we are unshakeable, showing me that Mamma’s power isn’t so absolute.
‘Are you excited?’ he asks me now, stroking the bare skin of my forearm underneath my sleeve.
‘Uh-huh. Sure am.’
‘You don’t sound sure.’
‘I am!’ I look over at him, taking in his profile: his square jaw, with the two tiny puncture marks on it where he got bitten by a dog as a kid; the kink in his nose where it got broken by a badly landing basketball; his autumn-leaf hair blowing backwards from the wind, the exact same shade as his mother’s. I never thought I’d know another person so distinctly. Apart from Mamma, of course. ‘I’m so excited. I just can’t believe we’re really doing this.’
‘It’s going to be great. You trust me, don’t you?’
‘Of course.’
As we chug along to the sound of William’s wheezing engine, the road widens out and becomes more populated with cars and trucks, all bound north, in the direction of Georgia. I see less and less of the grey stripe of asphalt as the cars shunt forward and grapple for space. A silver Mercedes honks loudly at our rear, then swerves to overtake us.
William tuts as the car speeds on ahead, but remains calm. He likes to drive precisely on the
speed limit: not over it, not under it; on it. ‘People hurrying like that never slow down to enjoy what’s around them,’ he says.
Dotted between a row of wide, white condos and brown scrubland, I spy a collection of thick orange trees. It’s April, coming to the end of navel season, and the weather is particularly hot. The ground is thick with the fruit, fallen from the trees and left to rot in the sunshine. It reminds me of a time when I blithely started hand-juicing oranges from our tree, only to look down and realise with horror that they were full of maggots. Their bodies wriggled and writhed in the orange liquid. The juice was alive with them and I screamed, dropping the jug. When Mamma saw what had happened, I had to scrub the entire kitchen with bleach from top to bottom, and then she took my hands and scrubbed them too, up to the elbow. It made the skin around my fingers flake and peel for days, revealing the shiny pinkness underneath.
I turn the volume up on the stereo, now blasting out that eighties heavy guitar rock William loves, to drown out the memory. What will Mamma do if she finds out where we’ve been today?
The suburbs sweep around us, and the billboards that begin popping into our view tell us, in looping, ever-increasing hyperbole, that we’re close. Is it too late to bail on the whole thing? My seat belt digs into my chest. I roll the window down further.
We pull up into the parking lot and jump on a shuttle bus to the park, painted silver and bearing the sign ‘All aboard the Xelon 3000’, the name of the movies’ signature spaceship. The driver has identical white teeth and not a hair out of place, and asks us, with a wide, uncomplicated grin, ‘Are you ready for take-off?’
Two little girls sit next to us, wearing costumes over their jeans and T-shirts, one in an emerald-green tiara and tutu, the other fiddling with a gold cowboy hat on her lap. They chatter excitedly to one another as their parents look on, and I wonder if I will have somehow missed the vital magic of seeing the park at that age.
‘You’re never too old for a gold lasso.’ William nudges me with his shoulder, seeing where I’m looking.