Lena shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just seemed so hard for her to know what to say to people. You know – like, to me, or Tom, at the festival.’
I stopped short, a squeezing pressure filling up my chest. Now my own voice was loud, defensive. ‘She was fine with you at the festival! You saw her, playing with Kayla!’
But I had left her alone with them, hadn’t I – Lena and Tom? And hadn’t something gone wrong between them?
Lena stopped too and turned to face me. I couldn’t read her expression. Maybe she wanted to push me – challenge me again like she had at the play park, make me see things the way she saw them. Maybe she also just missed the way we used to be friends. In the end, I saw her shoulders drop.
‘Listen, Jess,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come back to mine? Mum won’t mind, you can have tea with us, we can do our homework, watch TV – whatever.’
I was grateful to her and I wanted to, really I did. But now there was Abigail and I had promised to see her. Now there was Abigail, and it seemed I still had to choose.
Despite the heat outside, it was cool and shady in the Whites’ house. I found Abigail in shorts, cross-legged on her bed, a soft blur of hair on her legs. She didn’t shave, I realized. Or didn’t know how. Another weird sign of difference between us. I turned my gaze to her room instead. ‘But you still haven’t painted it.’
The peeled walls were smooth, Uncle Robert must have sanded them down, but they were still stained and blotched between the posters.
Abigail uncurled herself from the bed and stood up. ‘I don’t really feel like being inside today. I’ve spent days in here. Why don’t we go out?’
Now I thought about it, it did feel kind of stuffy. ‘All right, but where to?’
I should have known her answer would be the railway; I should hardly have needed to ask. Here was something that hadn’t changed in all this time – this strange pull that she’d always had, ever since she had moved into this house. She had tried to explain it to me once – her fascination with the violence of it, the roar. There’s a roaring in me sometimes, she’d said, and it’s like the trains let it out.
I didn’t want us to go there now, but how could I bring myself to argue? She remembered this so clearly from childhood and I didn’t want to spoil that. We left a note: gone for a walk. I took my bag with me and we headed up the path at the end of her road, pushing through the line of scrub and bushes. In the summer heat, the leaves were thick, but someone had cut the branches back, clearing the path and it wasn’t hard to make our way through. We came out onto the rough blanket of grass above the railway tracks – the sloping embankment.
At the sight of it, I hesitated. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just all my aunt’s warnings. It was this weird connection my brain had always made. How the shelf of grass was like a platform. The railway line kind of like the Tube. I’d always thought this had been part of it, that maybe something had come over her in that Tube station, her instinctive fascination snatching her attention, making her disorientated, distracted.
‘This’ll do,’ she said. ‘Here.’ She’d found a space on the grass and was already sitting down. I dropped my bag beside her.
The grass was dry and warm to sit on. From here, we could see the struts of the thick workman’s bridge a little way up the tracks, the one no one was allowed to go on but which everyone knew local teenagers sometimes climbed. We sat looking down over the railway line, with its low, loose fencing, and into the back gardens of the houses on the other side. Someone had put their washing out on a whirligig: big yellow sheets that billowed in the breeze and a line of baby socks, each one held up by a blue clothes peg. In the sun, I could feel the bridge of my nose turning pink.
The dusty grass was speckled with daises, a least a dozen within reach of my hand. I took one of the furry stalks and pulled it from the ground. With my thumbnail, I pinched its stalk then pulled up another to thread through. I held the linked flowers up to Abigail.
She searched for the name. Found it. ‘A daisy chain.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming back to school?’
She shrugged. ‘It isn’t all decided yet. It wouldn’t be till after summer anyway.’
She picked a daisy of her own, snapping its stalk, and drew the slim white petals off one by one. Loves me. Loves me not. Was she thinking that, did she even remember the rhyme? And if she did, then who was hers for?
I pulled up another flower and added it to my weave. ‘Well, do you want to go?’
She hesitated, scratching at her cheek where a fleck of pollen had smudged. She wasn’t wearing the pink bangle any more, I noticed. ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell yet what I want.’
Far off, a train hooted. ‘But I mean, it would be good, right? If we could go to school together?’
I’d finished my daisy chain and held it out to her. She looped the flowered bracelet over her hand. The daisies were wide open, limp in the heat.
‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘Well,’ I thought of the teachers welcoming her, my classmates finally getting it, ‘it doesn’t have to be complicated. I mean, if your parents think it would be best. And like, I dunno, if my mum thinks it’s fine.’
She had one petal left on her single daisy. She pulled it off, unsticking it from her fingers, and let it scatter in the wind. ‘Maybe. But how do you know whether to trust them?’
‘What?’ I looked across at her, the bridge in the background. ‘Who?’
‘Your parents … Mine …’
I felt something crawl along the bottom of my stomach. I thought of what I had overheard with my aunt. I thought of my parents behind closed doors.
‘Of course I do, Abigail. They’re our parents.’
She leaned forward, pressing her forehead to her knees, hard enough to make red marks. ‘All I want is to know what’s real. I’m trying to separate it out, Jess, but it’s so hard. All the stuff he said. What actually happened? What he told me, is that how it really is?’ Her hands were fists against the ground. ‘It’s so tangled in my head, Jess, but I need to know so all I can do is keep trying to remember.’
I had no idea how to answer that. I had no idea what I was meant to say. I didn’t recognize my cousin like this. I pinched another daisy stalk, squeezing the flesh against my nail, pulling it from the ground. She was home, we all loved her and that was enough. He was simply a monster but we’d got her away from him. She was sitting here, with me, in the sun. Why couldn’t she let that be enough?
‘You remember us though, don’t you?’ I dropped the flower and reached over for my bag, digging in the side pocket. ‘Look, I brought this to show you.’ The photo I had salvaged from the shoebox. I pulled it out for her. Abigail wiped the pollen from her fingers and took the photograph by its edges. The thumbprint she made on it merged with mine.
‘It’s us,’ I said. ‘From before. The day I lost my sandal in the stream.’ From a distance, I could hear the clatter of the train approaching. It would hoot again as it came under the bridge.
Whole seconds slid past as she looked at the picture. Then she pointed to our bare feet, our naked toes. ‘You fell in the water,’ she said, ‘and skinned your knee.’ It was like it was coming back to her. Like she could see and feel our reality again. She turned the photograph over, as if hunting for some clue on the back. The noise of the train grew louder, the steady rumble.
‘My sandal got washed clean away,’ I said. ‘We searched for hours though and in the end we found it. Then you gave me a piggy back all the way home.’
She looked at the picture again. Her face was softening, her shoulders relaxing. Rounding the corner, the train hooted like I knew it would, and the clattering sound of the wheels rose up.
‘It’s my favourite photo of us,’ I told her, lifting my voice up over the roar.
She laid the picture down in her lap and pressed her hands to her ears. I did the same. She was saying something but the roar of the train blurred her words. ‘What
?’ I shouted as the sound buzzed in my chest, vibrating through the ground. ‘What?’
The train hurtled past with the knock and whoosh of each carriage. She was mouthing something to me, her words lost amidst the roar and rumble, but I could make out something, the shapes on her lips.
The very last carriage swooped by and the heady silence covered everything over again. The impossible words had been sucked away by the train. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to repeat them. They were so impossible, so wrong.
He had pictures of me from before, too.
Chapter 17
Saturday 29th June:
Day 34
ANNE
For days I’d tried to decide what to do and finally I had decided on this: a gesture to show that, no matter how Abigail felt, in my mind she was home, finally where she belonged. It’s just paint, Lillian had said, and how many times in my life had she been right? Why else did I trust her the way I did, taking every piece of advice she gave? So many times, she’d had the answer. Now it seemed Lillian was right again and this would be the one thing to help us move on.
From the living-room window, I watched them go, towels tucked under their arms and the straps of Abigail’s new black swimming costume peeping out from under her shirt. I had told Robert they should take their time. Go swimming, take the longest session, take them for ice-cream before you come home. It would be good for her, anyway, to spend time with the twins, all of them together as siblings, getting better at playing with them. So I knew I had two hours at least, and if I made no mistakes that would be long enough.
I watched Robert help the twins into the van and waited for Abigail to fasten her seatbelt. I listened for the sliding slam of the door and the growl of the engine fading up the street. I waited out the minutes until I could be sure they wouldn’t turn back. Then I went upstairs, into Abigail’s room, and took down each of her posters from the walls.
The Sellotape came away furred and crumpled and left marks as I had told her it would. I rolled up the posters into a thick heavy bundle and took them into my and Robert’s room. When I came back, the walls were as blank as a stare. I pulled out her bed, her desk, her dresser, then went down to our garage where I knew I’d find dust sheets. They smelled of Robert, of all his work with plaster, paint and wood, and I had to stop a moment, overwhelmed by how much this family meant to me. Overwhelmed by the thought that I could still lose it all.
In her room, I dragged the sheets over the furniture until there was almost no trace of her left.
For a moment I stood in the silent space with my heart thudding; from exertion or anxiety I couldn’t properly tell. Then I closed her bedroom door behind me and went downstairs into the utility room, the tiny space that led off from our kitchen, where there was a sink and the washing machine and dryer. Inside the machine, the clothes were dry. I pulled them out and sorted through them: Robert’s overalls, the boys’ socks. Mixed up amongst them was what I was looking for: the rose-pink T-shirt she had worn day in, day out these last couple of weeks. She’d finally given it up for washing and now it was clean and dry and ready. I ironed it, as though that mattered. Then I folded it up in a plastic bag.
I took my handbag and keys, and the T-shirt. When I stood on the front step locking the door, the day was so still that it felt as though the whole world was watching.
I don’t know what I had been thinking the first time. Lillian had been right: the choice had been overwhelming. We had taken her to the huge warehouse on the outskirts of town, with every colour under the sun. How could we have expected her to choose?
Now, at the mixing stand, I held out the T-shirt. ‘I know she likes this colour,’ I said to the kind man who took it from me. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. You wished for a colour and there it was. Robert had already made the calculations for how much we’d need, written out in pencil. Two standard tins, ten litres each.
The paint cans were heavy to carry back to the car and they banged my legs, bruising my thigh so that in the shower the next morning I found the blue marks. I set them in the well of the passenger seat, along with the brand new tray and roller I’d bought. Back home I carried the paint upstairs and opened the window in Abigail’s room. There was still no breeze but it would let any fumes out.
I prized the lid from the first tin and poured a shallow dribble into the tray, enough to coat the length of the roller. Once I started it would be hard to go back. But wasn’t that what I had done since she came home? Hesitate, shy away? Wasn’t this what she needed instead? I got up and stood face to face with the wall. Lifting the roller and gripping it tight, I made the first mark, right across the wall above her bed: a rose-pink rainbow. A stark, wide, bright streak.
I lowered my arm and stepped back. All right, so now the easy part was done. Now came the rest. I pushed the roller and tray into a corner and went back into our bedroom. In the drawer of the dresser was the notebook I’d so foolishly presented to the therapist, all my efforts to help her, all those scribbled words and phrases, my clumsy attempts to understand her. I lifted out the abandoned notebook with a painful tightness in my chest. Through the window I could hear a bird singing, celebrating summer. To its song, I tore out the used pages, all the ones I had written on, picking out the shreds of paper left in the binding until there was nothing left but unmarked space.
I carried the blank notebook back into Abigail’s room. Then I sat down on her bed, and waited.
Just as on that first day, I heard them arrive home, though this time it was Abigail who was first up the stairs. She came up alone, just as I’d hoped, and when she pushed open her bedroom door she started.
Her hair was still wet from the swim, dripping onto her collar, and her skin looked dry and flaky from chlorine. She stared at the gaps from the posters, the paint-speckled dust-sheets, the pink streak on her wall.
‘What’s going on?’
I stood up. ‘I thought you’d like this colour. If you really don’t, it’s okay, we’ll change it, but it’s a pretty colour and I think it will work.’
She stayed in the doorway, her chest rising and falling. ‘Where are my posters?’
‘Just next door. I didn’t want them to get splashed. Here.’ I handed her her T-shirt. ‘I took this to get the right colour. I know it’s a beautiful colour on you.’
She was breathing more slowly now. I should have realized that it would give her a fright, at first. ‘And what’s that?’ I knew she would recognize the notebook.
‘Come in. It won’t bite.’ I opened the notebook for her on her bed. Like a wary creature, she sidled closer.
‘Forget about what I wrote in there before,’ I said. ‘I’ve taken all of that out now.’ She came up to stand right next to me. ‘I thought, while we painted … if you have any questions—’ I found myself stumbling and pushed myself to go on. ‘I didn’t give you a chance before. All the questions have been us asking you. If you need to, you can write any answers I give you down in here, so that you know it’s the truth and you won’t be confused.’
As though moving in a dream, she turned over the blank white pages, then looked up again at the arc on the wall. ‘You want to paint right over it?’
In her face I could see so many expressions: anger and hurt and hope and fear. It was a battle with herself, I knew that: whether to let it all go and trust me or whether to break me apart in her pain. I could see the child I had so struggled with and the child I’d so loved, her worst self and her best self and all the selves in between. For a moment I had to close my eyes and lower my head, ready for if it all went wrong. When I opened my eyes again she was kneeling up on the bed, the roller in her hand, touching her fingers to the shining streak of paint.
In the end, she chose not to ask me anything and we put the old blank notebook away. Afterwards, work-tired, we sat out in the garden and upstairs the windows of our house stood open, letting out the rose-pink fumes.
‘It really is,’ she said to me then. ‘My favourite colour. I did
n’t realize it before, but it is.’
Chapter 18
Thursday 25th July:
Day 60
JESS
After summer term ended a few weeks later, I went to stay with Abigail, just for a few days. Then a few days turned into a week, and before we realized, I was practically living there.
My aunt and uncle were happy to have me, they knew that I was always good for Abigail. It was Mum who objected, but she always would, and by then I was sick of the tensions in our house. At my aunt’s, it had always felt easier, not rigid and stuffy and walking on eggshells. So I told Mum and Dad it would only be three days. But once I was there, I stayed much longer.
Like that very first night, I slept in her room, on the fold-out camp bed in a thin sleeping bag. The walls of her room were rose-pink now, finally painted. We woke up lazily to the sunshine each morning. Summer was at last properly here. She was a sleepyhead, slow to come around, and I made sure not to rush or jolt her. I still remembered that first night. Those bruises on my arm. The twins would already be up; sometimes we’d hear their voices in the back garden, the bump of a ball being kicked about, sometimes a shriek. They were warier now of asking her to play. Uncle Robert always left for work early. We’d come down to find his coffee mug on the draining board. If Auntie Anne was out or busy, we got ourselves breakfast. By now Abigail knew where everything was in the kitchen: bowls, teaspoons, the handle for the grill pan. Over cereal, or toast, or bacon and eggs, we sat across from each other, still in our pyjamas, hardly different at all from when we were eight.
We could do anything we liked and Abigail still had so much to catch up on. We bought magazines, binged on soaps, on TV box sets. Piece by piece, I told Abigail all the stories of our family, from those years when she had been away. They were her stories – this was her family. I made her listen, made her remember them, until she could tell them like they were her own. And I talked to her about the photographs. What she’d claimed.
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