by Beth O'Leary
I look down at the sheet of paper torn from an exercise book, lying on Etienne’s desk.
It’s not bad, to be honest. I can tell right from the off that it’s meant to be me. Well, I can tell by the face. The rest is . . . much less accurate.
‘Wow,’ I say. My cheeks are getting warm. I keep my eyes on the picture. ‘That’s . . .’
‘Yes, quite,’ Etienne says. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that. Teenage boys . . .’ He spreads his hands, as if to say, Don’t you just despair?
In the drawing I’m naked, in the classic comic-book woman pose: facing away, but twisting to look over one shoulder, just to make sure you can see breasts and arse. I’m very . . . buxom. And my waist is about the same width as my wrist.
‘I hope you don’t mind me taking this one off your hands. I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.’
I smile. ‘Thank you. No, I . . . It would have been an awkward one.’ I chew my lip, looking at the drawing.
‘Tyson will be in after-school detention for the rest of the month. He and I had a lengthy chat about the objectification of women, too,’ Etienne says, leaning back in his chair, linking his hands behind his head. ‘I’d say less than one per cent of that went into his skull, but you never know.’
‘At least he apologised.’
‘Mm,’ Etienne says, sounding unimpressed.
‘Well, thanks for trying, anyway. I appreciate that.’
I turn the drawing over idly. Miss Gilbert the Seducter, it says on the back. I laugh, shifting the paper so Etienne can see. He leans forward to read it, and his lips twitch.
‘Oh, Jesus wept,’ he says, suddenly sounding very English.
‘At least it’s gender-neutral,’ I point out. ‘I think I’d prefer to be a “seducter” than a seductress.’
Etienne glances up at me, that smile still playing on his lips. He’s handsome in an obvious, symmetrical kind of way. Brown hair, brown eyes, the sort of white skin that tans easily.
‘It’s a good thing, your sense of humour, Addie,’ he says. ‘And your . . . realism.’
‘Cynicism, you mean?’ I say, before I can stop myself. It feels a bit like answering back to the head teacher, and I stiffen. But Etienne just shrugs, leaning back again.
‘The world’s full of dreamers,’ he says. ‘Practicality is underrated. You take these kids as they are. That’s what’ll make you a great teacher.’
I note the use of the future tense. Mainly because I did a lesson on it yesterday. But still, it’s the first time I’ve had real praise out of Etienne. He’s good at disguising criticism in a feedback sandwich, but I’ve always known the ‘positives’ he’s pulling out are a stretch. This is the first time I’ve felt like he’s seen something in me that I wanted him to see.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
Etienne nods. It’s a clear dismissal, and I head for the door as Etienne folds Tyson’s drawing and tucks it carefully in a drawer.
Dylan
My parents’ house was very grand, once. It still retains some of its magnificence, like an old woman who used to be a Hollywood star. The whole west wing is closed off now – it’s too expensive to heat – and it shows the worst signs of wear from outside: there are several cracked windows, and the paint has peeled off almost entirely on the side that’s exposed to the winds.
Dad resists every money-making enterprise available: he’d never let us host weddings or sell to the National Trust and move somewhere less remote and ramshackle. This is his family home. But no matter how well his business does on the stock exchange, there’s never enough money to keep this place. The problem is a particularly dissolute great uncle – he squandered most of the family fortune playing poker, which makes him a charming romantic hero, but a very irritating ancestor. All he left when he died was the land and the house.
I stand on the doorstep and flinch at the sudden sound of gunshot. Shooting is the one enterprise Dad will allow on our lands, mainly because it’s something his father did before him. Grouse and pheasants are a permanent feature of life at home – I once went into the downstairs bathroom and found a pheasant sitting in the sink. She’d got in the window, which jammed some time ago and still won’t close, letting in a steady arctic draught that always seems to be directed precisely towards the toilet.
If Dad is out shooting, that at least means he’ll come back in a good mood. I push the front door – it needs paring again, it’s harder than ever to lever open – and step into the hall, the most done-up part of the house. There are freshly cut flowers on the pedestal at the bottom of the staircase and the tiled floor has been recently polished.
‘Dylan?’
I smile. ‘Mum?’
‘In here!’ she calls.
I roll my eyes. Mum has never grown accustomed to living in a house so big that ‘in here’ is not sufficient direction. She grew up in a two-up, two-down in Cardiff, and even thirty years of marriage to my father hasn’t quite knocked that out of her. Their marriage was rather scandalous at the time, hard as it is to imagine my father ever having done anything remotely frowned-upon.
‘The kitchen?’ I yell.
‘The front room!’
I follow the sound into the only living room we keep open, the grand front room that would have been intended for receiving guests when this house was built. The view from the tall windows is stunning – breeze-ruffled green fields, the dark thatch of woodland, not a person or building in sight.
Mum cups my face in her cold hands. She’s wearing jodhpurs and a jumper that’s lumpy because of all the layers she has on underneath; her cropped hair looks a little whiter than when I last saw her, but then, it has been almost six months.
‘My darling boy,’ she says, her hands tightening on my cheeks. ‘Have you been trying to give your father a heart attack?’
I shift out of her grip and give her a hug. I can feel the dread creeping in already, slow fingers tiptoeing up my spine, dark fog collecting at my ankles. This house is full of it; here, I’m boy-Dylan, the kid who never took to sports, who could never get his head around numbers, who simply wouldn’t toughen up.
‘I don’t know what Dad’s so upset about,’ I say, as I step away and fling myself down on the other sofa. It creaks ominously. It’s Victorian, stuffed full of spiky horsehair that springs up immediately to pinprick the back of my legs. ‘I’m here with a plan, anyway.’
The relief on Mum’s face makes my gut twist. ‘Wonderful! Have you applied for a job?’
I swallow. ‘Not . . . exactly. But I’ve worked out what I want to do. I’m going to do a Masters in English Literature. I want to be an academic.’
She freezes, hands twisted in her lap as if she’s wringing something out between them.
‘Oh, Dylan . . .’
‘What?’ I almost yell it; I was poised and ready for this, defences up the moment I stepped through that great creaking door. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s not . . . Your father wants you to choose something financially stable, Dylan . . . You know how things are here,’ she says, stretching her hands out helplessly to indicate the ratty, moth-eaten edges of the curtains and the damp quietly seeping down the wall from the bathroom above. ‘When you inherit . . .’
‘Luke inherits,’ I say, turning my face away from my mother and staring up at the ceiling. It sags a little, looming down, as if the house is ready to flatten me.
‘Dylan,’ Mum says quietly.
Dad wrote Luke out of the will when he came out as gay. I was ten, Luke was twelve. Twelve.
I ball my fists. I know I should feel more sympathy for my mother – being married to my father must be unspeakably difficult, even if she does love him. But I can’t forgive her for failing to change Dad’s mind about Luke. Dad acknowledges him, has him to visit, advises him on his business ventures – but he refuses to meet Javier, and he won’t let his gay
son inherit his estate.
‘Just take the job your father’s set aside for you at the firm,’ Mum says gently. ‘Dylan, you have a responsibility.’
‘Elinor?’
My dad’s voice. I stiffen immediately.
‘In the front room! Dylan’s here,’ Mum calls, resettling her hands in her lap and straightening up.
There’s a moment of silence, then Dad comes tramping down the hall, still in his hunting boots, heavy with mud.
He stands in the doorway and looks at me for a while. I hold his gaze and the rage-fear thunders and the dread flexes its claws and here it is, the reason my mother hasn’t seen me for six months.
‘Glad you’ve seen sense and come home,’ my father says, already turning away. ‘Help your mother with dinner. And then we’re going to have a serious chat about your future.’
NOW
Addie
It’s just a sprained wrist at worst. But Felicity, the passing Good Samaritan, insisted on taking me to A&E, so now I’m here instead of looking for Deb.
I’ve had it up to here with passing Good Samaritans, to be honest. Kevin was plenty.
‘All right, love?’ Felicity says, smoothing my hair with a hand. Felicity is a real toucher. Deb would hate her. Wherever Deb is.
Accident and Emergency at Royal Preston Hospital is pretty busy right now. Someone just got rushed by with blood painted down the front of their summer dress like an extra in a horror film, and there’s a man sat across from me who seems to be holding his nose on to his face. I’m trying not to think about what’ll happen if he lets go.
I’ve yet to see a member of staff move at anything less than a run. I’m just another person wasting their time. I make a second attempt to get Felicity to let me discharge myself, but she’s having none of it.
‘Not until your friends get here,’ she says firmly, rubbing my good hand between her own. ‘Ooh, your fingers are like ice! How have you managed to have cold hands in this weather!’
Felicity is in her sixties, I’d say, and she radiates maternal instinct. She’s wearing the sort of beige T-shirt you’d find in a charity shop and a pair of jeans with little flowers embroidered at the pockets. Her shiny black hair is pulled back in a neat plait.
She saw me trip on the motorway verge. I admit, it looked bad. I tumbled down towards the hard shoulder and fell on the tarmac, hands outstretched. But I was still miles from the cars, and the hard shoulder was all fenced off because of the roadworks. And yes, I tore the skin of my knees and got blood on my dungarees, and my wrist hurts like hell when I try to clench my fist or move my hand, but I’m fine.
‘Please, Felicity,’ I say. ‘It’s a mild sprain, I don’t need an X-ray, I don’t need to be here. I’m wasting everybody’s time.’
Felicity pats my knee. ‘Shush, love,’ is all she says, craning her neck to follow the path of a passing nurse. ‘Isn’t it a long wait! Shocking! You’d think they’d keep things moving faster, wouldn’t you?’
I bite my lip and hope no NHS staff are within hearing. I check my phone again: no notifications. Surely they’d message if they’d found Deb, which means she’s still roaming around the fields of Lancashire trying to get back to us. Or hitchhiking to Scotland on her own. Or getting murdered by a trucker.
‘Addie?’
My heart leaps. Dylan trips his way through the bags and kids and people between us and then he’s crouching down in front of me, touching my shoulder, eyes searching my face.
‘You’re OK?’
‘I’m absolutely fine,’ I say. ‘A bit of a sprained wrist, that’s all. Will you please tell Felicity to let me go now? She won’t listen to me.’
‘Dylan,’ he says, stretching a hand out to shake Felicity’s. ‘Thank you so much for looking after Addie.’
‘You’re very welcome,’ Felicity says, smiling. ‘She’s a sweet little thing.’
I catch Dylan’s lip quirk.
‘A common misconception,’ I say, and the quirk grows into a quick smile.
I notice Marcus then. He’s hanging back, hands in pockets, watching us from near the door. For a split second before he clocks I’ve seen him, his expression is strange. Like he’s trying to work out the answer to a puzzle. He meets my eyes and his face softens into something that might actually be concern.
‘You OK?’ he mouths.
I blink, surprised, and give a little nod. He smiles slightly and turns away towards the exit.
‘Are you sure you don’t just want someone to check you out?’ Dylan says, brow furrowing again as he takes in the bloodstains on the knees of my dungarees.
‘I’m sure. I want to go.’
Dylan shrugs helplessly at Felicity. ‘Sounds like we’re off, Felicity. Thank you again.’
Felicity clucks her tongue against her teeth. ‘Come, now! She needs to see a doctor!’
Dylan smiles. ‘If you can’t persuade her of that, Felicity, I don’t think I’ve much chance. When Addie makes her mind up . . . that’s that. She doesn’t change it.’
I pick at the dried blood on my dungarees and wonder what Dylan would think if he saw all the emails to him in my drafts folder. The countless times I almost changed my mind. But that’s the thing about almost: you can be ninety-nine per cent there, you can be an inch away from doing it, but if you stop yourself from stepping over that line, nobody will ever know how close you were.
It turns out that asking to be discharged is the quickest way to get a doctor over in A&E. The exhausted young woman gets me to sign that I take full responsibility if I keel over now as a result of discharging myself. She even manages a quick smile before she dashes off again.
The sun is still blazing even now, so bright I have to scrunch up my eyes. It makes it harder to read Marcus’s expression as we approach him at the car. By the time we’re close enough, his face is blank.
‘All right?’ he asks me, as if he’d never come in to check on me.
‘Yes, fine, thanks.’
Dylan opens the car door for me and I move to climb into the back seat, careful not to jar my wrist.
‘Hang on,’ I say, pausing, ‘I should drive. You’re not insured.’
‘It’s fine,’ Dylan says. ‘I can just . . .’
But I’m climbing out again. Marcus is already in the front passenger seat. I glance sidelong at him as I settle behind the wheel. He’s slumped down in the seat like a bored kid, but when I wince as I try to let off the handbrake he flinches and his hand is over mine in half a second.
‘Let me,’ he says.
Behind me I hear Dylan shift in his seat.
‘Thanks,’ I say to Marcus, pulling my injured hand back into my lap.
Driving with a sprained wrist proves to be . . . challenging. Tears stand out in my eyes as I change gear. Marcus doesn’t flinch again, just stares out the window.
‘Is that my phone?’ I say suddenly.
We’re speeding down the motorway now. I wince as I feel around behind me on the seat with my good hand, holding the steering wheel carefully with the other. My phone is in the back pocket of my dungarees.
‘Do you . . .’ Marcus begins, seeing the problem, reaching to help me as I try to tug the phone out.
‘I’ve got it,’ Dylan says, leaning forward between the seats. His hand settles over mine and I goosebump. The hairs stand up on my neck as he slides my phone from my back pocket.
‘Hello?’
I wait, tensed.
‘Deb’s fine,’ Dylan says to me, and I flop back in my seat.
‘Thank God,’ I mutter.
Dylan rings off. ‘Unbelievably, Rodney found her,’ he says.
‘Where was she?’
‘Guess,’ Dylan says.
‘Umm . . . at the Budget Travel already?’
‘No.’
‘Walking up the motorway?’
>
‘Nope.’
‘Hitchhiking?’
‘Incorrect again. You’re underestimating your sister’s knack for seeking out the absurd.’
‘I give up,’ I say. ‘Where was she?’
‘She was having a pint with Kevin the lorry driver.’
Kevin had written his number on the back of her hand, apparently. In the lobby of the Budget Travel, Deb tells us cheerfully that it was a damn good job she hadn’t sweated it off. The first person she passed on her trails across Lancashire lent her their phone, and she called him right away to rescue her. The only hold-up was that he was in Lancaster and there was a lot of stationary traffic around the area. Obviously.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask, giving her arm a quick squeeze. ‘I’ve been beside myself.’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she says.
‘How did Kevin get as far as Lancaster?’ is my second question. ‘We left the picnic at the same time as him! And we only got to bloody Preston!’
Deb shrugs placidly. ‘Kevin is a talented man.’
‘And where’s Kevin now?’ I ask, looking between her and Rodney.
They both look terrible. Deb has her other breast pump – the non-battery-powered one – plugged into the wall and chugging away at her chest, but there are milk stains on the front of her dress, plus a long streak of what I hope is mud down the front of her shin. The sole of one of her shoes has come off. Meanwhile Rodney has actual pondweed tangled in his belt. His jeans are sodden. They’re starting to dry from the top down, creating a sort of tie-dye effect. He totally reeks. God knows what everyone thought when he stumbled into the pub where Kevin and Deb were having their pint.
‘Back on his way to Glasgow, with his chairs,’ Deb says. ‘He did offer to take me to the wedding, but I thought I should wait for all of you, really,’ she says graciously.
‘Oh, thanks.’ I check the time on my phone and swear. This is just my standard reaction to checking the time now. ‘It’s eight. How is it already eight? Where is the time going?’