‘Mum?’ I yell at her with my arms bent in front of me to hold off the blows. ‘Get off me.’ Her arms get weaker until she is leaning against me, face red, eyes wet and an exhausted groaning cry coming from her mouth. Then she presses her forehead into my shoulder and unclenches her hands so she can hold me in a rough hug, finally sinking down until she is sitting on the bottom stair, exhausted.
‘Where have you been … you … absolute fuck?’ she demands between breaths. ‘The school rang me to say you hadn’t come in. I’ve been worried sick and you didn’t answer my calls. I thought … not again … I thought …’ Then she cries huge howling sobs until her head sinks and her knees are pressed into the sockets of her eyes.
This day that was supposed to be all about me has opened a barely healed wound for my mother. I sit down next to her, squashing us between banister and wall, guiltily knowing that I had not even thought about how she might feel. Wedged side by side on the bottom stair, I put my arm tightly round her shoulders and lean my cheek on the back of her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say through the hair that has stuck to my lips, and my own warm breath comes back at me from her head.
‘Am I losing you too?’ she asks into my shoulder, and I think of Ben and how distant and angry he has been lately. A spike of irritation at Ben pokes me. Next time I see him I’ll tell him to be more considerate about how he acts towards her in future.
I wish I could explain it all to her. But how do you tell someone that you had another chance to come back? That you couldn’t tell anyone about it. That you just wanted to feel the day.
A sound behind me makes me look round. Good old Uncle Roger is standing in the hallway leaning on the banister with a tea towel in his hands. ‘That was a bit selfish and irresponsible.’ He frowns down at me, waving the towel at my face. ‘This has really upset her. We were about to come looking for you, Ben!’
‘It’s going to take more than Captain Tea Towel to find Ben at the moment,’ I mutter, but my cryptic sarcasm is lost on both of them.
It is as if the day is slippery and I can’t keep hold of it.
Ben would normally be lurking in his room, watching YouTube or messaging friends, waiting for dinner, but I am restless with the need to do something before the day dwindles completely like sand through an hourglass.
I play with the idea of going to my own room, but Mum was in there earlier, and I’m not even sure I’m brave enough to cope with it. I feel that if I open the door to my room, I will expose my own heart, and my parents will wonder what’s wrong with me.
I haven’t eaten anything since the sweets I had this morning, and my stomach is rumbling loudly, complaining of its emptiness. Not counting breakfast, this kind of intense hunger is another feeling that I haven’t had since just before sinking my teeth into the sugary doughnut I had with Beth on my last day on Earth. We’d tried to eat it without licking our lips, the sugar building up around our mouths, until Beth had accidently licked her lips, and I’d given in shortly afterwards.
‘Can we have a takeaway? I’m dying for a Chinese,’ I ask Mum, having to make do with only myself to appreciate my pun. ‘And can we have the buffet for six that’s got everything in it?’
‘Six? But there are only fo— three of us,’ she replies, correcting herself quickly so that we can all try to pretend she didn’t almost get it wrong.
‘It’s a great idea, Ben; we’ll have a veritable banquet,’ Dad answers, reaching for the phone, and placing the order for a home delivery. Then he opens a bottle of wine for him and Mum, and a can of cola for me.
This momentary break from the dismal heaviness that has been falling like dust over everything appears like a glint of sun between clouds. When Dad absent-mindedly puts his hand on Mum’s shoulder as he pours her a drink she looks at him with the expression of a lost puppy who is being shown a sliver of affection.
Our veritable banquet, whatever that means, is like nothing I have ever eaten, or have ever really appreciated. Having watched people eat for weeks now, with only the memory of taste to make do with, makes me think of those people on the television adverts, who never eat more than rice, and the flies that invade their mouths, the baby with the huge eyes and swollen stomach, and the mother with the same look in her eyes that my mother has now, as if life has defeated her in some way.
I haven’t exactly been starved of food in the way those people have, but being dead apparently makes you so much more philosophical about life!
Taste … it’s such a luxurious and intensely delightful thing.
Grease dribbles down my chin as I bite into a pancake roll. It is on my fingers mixed with salt and sauce. My pleasure at combining this experience with the precious moment spent with my family is radiating from me. We are sitting round the kitchen table where I’ve managed to shunt my seat along, almost crowding the fourth chair so that the space next to me doesn’t look too empty. Dad even laughs about something that happened at work and we all join in.
After dinner the simple act of joining my own parents in watching a programme on television has suddenly become a precious thing. No tablet, no phone, no earphones, just my family and its faint breath of life, and its pulse beating somewhere within its depths.
They don’t question why Ben is suddenly less snappy and more willing to join in, and they don’t notice me watching them from the corner of my eyes, but this is how it is until the day, inevitably, comes to an end.
Such a wonderful thing … one simple day … and each second that ticks by brings me closer to its end.
I kissed Mum and Dad goodnight and tried my hardest not to make it look like it would be the last time, forcing as much of my love as I could through Ben’s body and into theirs, and, in return, trying to draw the very essence of my mum and dad into my virtual suitcase.
Now, back in Ben’s bed, my thoughts wander along the various cracks across the surface of the ceiling to the enormous uncertainty of where I’m going to go from here. It is 03.21 and I have been fighting off sleep for the last couple of hours unable to actually let go of … life.
I can feel my eyelids growing heavy, making my eyeballs roll around behind them in their effort to keep my brain from slipping into unconsciousness, but they fail.
‘Lily?’
Ben steps from the edges of my sleep towards his bed.
‘Ben?’ I answer, as if we are two nervous acquaintances who have just met after a long break.
‘Lift your head up,’ he says, ‘I can only see your eyes. It’s too creepy talking to myself.’
I raise my head until I am sitting, and instantly I can see my own long dark hair hanging loosely down the sides of my face.
‘You had another day,’ he says quietly. ‘Did it help?’
I think about this for a while. It was sad, beautiful, busy and desperately short.
Did it help?
‘It was good, while it lasted,’ I answer lamely.
‘I saw you at Nathan’s today,’ he continues. ‘I swear you almost made me kiss him!’
‘I nearly did,’ I answer, smiling at the thought.
‘And why did you tell his mum that you know what she did?’ he asks. ‘What did she do?’
I inwardly groan. Should I tell him? Will he dive in and deal with it in the wrong way? ‘I … I just happened to know that she did something. That’s all.’ The pitch of my voice is wrong, and Ben knows it too, especially as it’s actually his voice. His sudden intake of breath is loud in the night as he gasps and slaps his hand over his mouth.
‘Oh my God! She did it, didn’t she? She was the driver.’ He whistles through his teeth as the repercussions of what he has just realised sink in.
‘Yep. Yes, she did,’ I answer.
‘Shit!’ Ben pushes the word slowly out of his mouth.
‘Too right it’s shit. Mum and Dad are going mad with trying to find out who did it and all along it’s Nathan’s mum!’
‘I’m going tell Dad in the morning,’ he announces. ‘He can tell the police.�
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‘What exactly is Dad going to tell the police? That his son met his dead daughter in the night and she told him “who dunnit”?’ We stare at each other for a moment while he tries to think of a better plan.
‘Her car! They can get forensics in to examine her car.’
‘There isn’t a mark on it. I can’t see them confiscating her car just because you asked them to. And, more importantly, it will destroy Nathan.’
‘If it isn’t already,’ Ben mumbles. ‘He looks awful lately. I’m not surprised; his mother looks like she’s ready to go trick or treating. Not the foxy mama she used to be.’
‘Now that is weird, Ben. I don’t care what she looked like before, but I’m glad she looks like shit now. Although Nathan might as well have “son of a killer” tattooed on his face if this gets out. Even if they leave town, social media will make sure his story follows him forever like a big fat label attached to his name.’
‘His mum has to pay for what she did, Lily … People forget sooner than you think.’ But his words are sharp spikes digging into my ego. People forget …
‘I’d hoped for nothing short of a decade before I’m forgotten, to be honest.’
‘I-I didn’t mean that,’ Ben stutters, trying to defend himself.
‘I really will just be the yesterday’s news girl, who was tucked inside the yesterday’s news coffin and … removed. I will be nothing more than a horrific event that happened on King’s Lane and all those guilt-trip flowers will only highlight the unfortunateness that happened there.’
‘That’s not a word,’ he says, urgently trying to deflect my mood, putting his hands on his hips, visibly pleased that he thinks he can correct me for a change.
‘Yes, it is actually, dumb arse,’ I inform him. ‘Anyway, I don’t know what to do about Nathan’s mum at the moment. The police won’t believe us with nothing to back up the story; she needs to confess, but don’t worry, I’ll think of something.’
‘No, I’ll think of something,’ he says and reaches for my hand to pull me off the bed, but my own hands, inside his body’s hands, stay where they are, gripping the duvet, clenching at feather and cloth.
‘C’mon, Lily.’ Ben looks more than faintly cheesed off. ‘It has to be enough. I can’t stay here for the rest of my life while you skip around fields, eating sweets and talking to God. Aren’t you supposed to look for the light or something?’
We both cast our eyes around his bedroom, both aware that there is absolutely no light!
I lift my hand away from its duvet grip, and my fingers become slim and feminine, but as Ben swipes for my hand I quickly yank it away and flop back on the bed inside his body. He grabs mistily through his own body, as if it’s thin air, in the same way that I was unable to touch people when I was in limbo.
He swipes for my hair instead but I press my head back into his and, again, he swipes nothing, his fingers reaching through my face.
He can’t get me.
‘Is this funny?’ he asks when a laugh escapes from me. ‘I’ve just put my hand through my own face! It’s like the bizarrest fight we’ve ever had.’ He doesn’t laugh with me.
‘Now that’s not a word,’ I answer, feeling smug.
‘Whatever. Anyway, you can’t be me Lily. I am me … You are …’
‘Dead?’ My Lily eyes look out at him from his own face. ‘Whatever amusing names we call it, Ben, I am nothing any more … and I … I … don’t think I can go back to that.’ My fingers grip tighter at the duvet and in that moment I know that it’s true. I am too scared of that awful loneliness to go back to it. ‘Can’t we share?’ I suggest, as if his body is a bag of chips.
‘No! Think it through, Lily! It’s … a more than totally weird idea. For a start, you’d never be able to do what I do … football, sport, everything. You’re a girl.’ He always uses the girl thing in his pathetic attempt to get one over on me because I’m the oldest and of superior intellect.
‘Pitiful,’ I sing at him, which is always my response. We have always been like a stuck recording with this argument.
He continues. ‘You know what I mean. You’re useless at sport and you’ll just make me look like an idiot –’
‘You are an idiot,’ I interrupt. ‘You’ve been ignoring Mum for a start.’
‘Have I …? Anyway, what if I have a girlfriend … are you going to share then?’
We both wrinkle our noses at the thought. ‘That’s gross,’ I answer. My eyes, the only things I dare move, stare imploringly up at him and in return he stares back. As he does so, a look gradually comes into his face that I can’t put into one word. Is it pity? Or empathy? Or annoyance? Or just plain old really pissed off that I’m refusing to budge? Knowing Ben, I think it’s probably all of the above.
We continue to stare, like contestants in a thinking competition, until eventually I shut my eyelids and sigh deeply, breaking our silence when I whisper, ‘I can’t let go …’ But Ben doesn’t answer.
When I open my eyes again, he isn’t here.
I briefly lift a hand and it turns into my own. Yes, I’m still in this bizarre night-time sleep-projection thing, but he most definitely isn’t here. ‘Ben?’ I question the area where he was standing. ‘Ben?’ I call out a little louder into the shadows at the corner of the room, but there’s nothing. He has gone. Convinced he will come from left field and rugby-tackle me away from the bed if I move, I stay put, yet he doesn’t appear.
The telephone rings and I can hear Dad talking to someone. It’s 08.40 and the minutes between my night-time crime and now have somehow disappeared in the lost time between waking and sleeping.
It is Saturday.
Has Ben given me another day? Is that why he disappeared? ‘Thanks, little brother,’ I call out from my comfortable pillow, as if I have just won a scuffle for the comfortable chair.
‘Ben? Mathew’s dad’s just rung and he’s going to pick you up a bit early,’ Dad hollers up the stairs.
I suddenly remember with a sinking feeling what Ben does on a Saturday. He plays football. I’ve played a few times in PE at school and not only do I hate it, but I’m crap at it, and, what’s more, if I have another day, I want to enjoy it, not spend it outside in the mud!
‘I’m not going this week,’ I shout back in a voice deep and croaky from not enough sleep. ‘Can you phone them back and tell them?’
‘You are going, Ben! You can’t let your team down, and you can’t pretend things aren’t what they are. You told them you’d be there … and, trust me, you will be there.’ I can hear his ranting voice coming up the stairs, his voice getting louder as he reaches the landing.
I flop back on the bed and pull the duvet over my head, as he puts his head round the door. ‘Get up! They’ll be here in half an hour.’
‘No,’ I call out, my voice muffled by the duvet.
‘Get up!’ he orders again, and I can now detect that certain dangerous edge he has to his voice when he’s getting all authoritative.
The cocoon of the duvet barely contains my panic until Dad grabs my foot and before I know it I’m out of my cocoon and on the carpet. ‘I know you’ve been bunking off football lately for some reason, and God knows where you go. Matthew’s dad said that Matthew thinks you’re hanging around with some unsavouries. So I’m telling you now, you get your arse up and get your life back together.’
I’ve no idea what Dad is talking about, but I can see I’m not going to be able to get out of it.
Ben’s words from the night echo in my head: ‘You’d never be able to do what I do. You’re a girl.’ What a put-down! I can do it. I’ll learn a new skill. Not many people can say they learnt a new skill after they died.
‘It’s probably like netball but with feet,’ I say out loud, hoping he can hear me.
Having never taken much notice of his various sporting outfits, I get up off the floor and hunt for something footbally to wear. He wore stuff, that’s about the extent of my knowledge. I choose some shorts, a football shirt th
at kind of matches, and a tracksuit to keep me warm from the jumble at the bottom of Ben’s wardrobe. It’s cold outside and I’m not hanging around outside shivering all morning. The tracksuit, grey and soft, pulls easily over the sports clothes I have chosen, and I look in the wardrobe mirror to see what I look like.
The shock is intense.
I’m not ready for the mirror; I didn’t mean to do it.
I am Lily, but my reflection tells the truth.
For a second, I don’t move at all … then I take one step towards the full-length mirror, knowing that what I have done is wrong, that taking over Ben’s body isn’t really the same as winning a scuffle for the comfy chair.
I inch my way closer towards my guilty secret until I’m staring right into Ben’s hazel eyes. Our eyes are almost identical except mine are greener. Nathan once described them as being like a forest floor scattered with moss, after we had finished kissing, when our faces were only inches apart. I think I can actually see myself now beneath the surface of Ben’s, if I look very hard, the greener colour shining out through Ben’s hazel.
We look so much alike. I reach a hand out and press it against the glass, then I reach the other hand out and press that in the same way until we are joined. ‘I don’t see why we can’t just share …’ I tell him, a mist cloud forming on the glass between us.
Dad pokes his head round the door again, only to catch my eyes in the reflection of the mirror. ‘What on earth are you doing? he asks with confusion, but doesn’t wait for the answer. ‘Stop loving yourself. You’ve got ten minutes.’
I find Ben’s football boots in a plastic bag at the bottom of his wardrobe and put them on. Fumbling fingers struggle with the laces of boots that are stiff and dirty, and it feels strange to walk in them with all those bobble things on the bottom. I glance at Ben in the mirror again, raise my hand in a kind of wave, then leave to make my way downstairs carefully with the boots on, trying to ignore the fact that I am leaving a trail of dry caked mud and grass on the stairs.
Sunflowers in February Page 11