Grow

by Luke Palmer

  ‘I’ve shut myself off and I know I have.’ Mum starts again after taking a deep breath, as if she’s diving back into something. ‘I thought it was for the best and I knew it wasn’t but I couldn’t stop doing it. And I’m sorry. So, so sorry. You seemed to be doing OK. You looked like you were coping with it, moving on. I should have known it was in there, just waiting to get out.’

  I hold back, again, from saying just how much has gotten out already.

  ‘And then these last months … there it is. The anger. But I’m here, Josh. I know I haven’t been, but I’m back now. I’ll stop seeing Mr Walters if it helps. And I want to help. I need to help.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, you can’t.’ I speak just above a whisper.

  ‘Why not? There’s a poison in you, Josh. And it’s a hateful, evil thing. You need to let someone help you or it’ll take over. Believe me.’

  And I look up then; I look straight into Mum’s tear-brimmed eyes that are staring straight back at me and into me and through me.

  And it all comes tumbling out.

  I tell her about the websites, and the videos, and the drinking, and the pictures of the bombed train and about looking for Dad, and about Ahmed and how I behaved, and about the fight with Jamie and how I broke his leg. And I tell her that I want to stop, and that I want to go back to normal and to un-see all those things and to be me again. I tell her all of it.

  Or nearly all of it.

  I don’t tell her about the hammer.

  And I don’t tell her about Carl.

  And I don’t tell her about the plan.

  Because there’s only so much shame I can live with.

  FIFTY

  ‘How long have you been up there?’ When she recognises that it’s me and not someone else, Dana puts down the garden fork that she’s wielding. Her voice is as sharp as the prongs.

  ‘Not long. Sorry. Can I …?’

  ‘You know where the door is.’ She goes back to turning the soil.

  ‘There’s a special list for people like you,’ she says when I’ve shut the door behind me. ‘People who hide in bushes and look at girls.’ Her eyes are still on the earth.

  ‘Sorry. I wanted to see if you were here.’

  ‘Knock on the door then,’ her blunt answer. She switches the fork for a small spade, which also looks very sharp.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Tidying up. Term’s over, it’s almost Christmas already and this place is still a mess. Might as well fix what we can, eh?’

  I know exactly what she means. Although I know what I need to do about Carl’s plan, I’m still not sure on how to do it.

  ‘Carl told me what you did, by the way. He made me watch the video.’

  I flush red. The story made the local paper – a colour photograph of the smashed window, the old lady from the shop standing outside looking straight down the lens. Luckily she hadn’t been hurt, just shaken up. There was an inset picture of the hammer exactly as it has fallen, a few blood-stains on the handle.

  ‘Did you hurt yourself?’ Dana makes it sounds like I should have, like I deserve to have been hurt.

  I take off my thick glove and show her the bandage, explain where the stitches are.

  ‘Good. Now the Poster-boy’s got some war wounds of his own,’ observes Dana. I’d thought right.

  ‘Grab that fork. Make yourself useful.’

  Even though my hand hurts intensely, I bend to the labour, turning the soil, trying to avoid the slick pink coils of earthworms as I lever the sod into itself.

  We lay sheets of newspaper over the turned earth, weigh it down with stones. ‘Keeps the frost out,’ Dana explains.

  We continue working in silence. I draw a strange warmth and comfort from working next to Dana, side by side. Even if she won’t talk to me. I’m thinking about nothing else, just the work in front of me, the stones in my palms, the fork in my grip. After a while, my hand stops complaining and goes numb. Maybe it’s the cold. My mind kind of goes numb, too. Just a vague foresight of what will grow here in the spring.

  After what could have been five minutes or two hours, Dana speaks again. ‘There are things I don’t understand.’

  ‘Do you want to do some more revision?’

  ‘Not those kinds of things.’ Her look is withering. ‘About you, Josh. I take back what I said about you being able to cope with things. You’re not coping. Are you?’ It sounds like a statement rather than a question.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I know I tend to say the wrong thing a lot and fuck everything up, so I’m really going to try not to this time. But you have to listen to me. OK?’

  I nod.

  ‘You know about Carl. I told you about him. He’s toxic. He’ll get inside your head, under your skin.’

  I know she’s right, but I can’t avoid my anger. ‘If he’s so bad, why are you still—’

  ‘I said listen. No speaking from you. I’m still here because I can’t get away.’

  I shrug, still unable to show the understanding she seems so desperate for.

  ‘You really don’t get it, do you? He’s everywhere. He knows everywhere that I am. Except for here, this place.’ She looks around her, at her garden. ‘I suppose, in a way, he’s always been in here.’ She taps her temple. ‘My mum and his mum go way back. Mum thinks he’s brilliant, so I can’t talk to her about it. She starts crying when I try to talk about what he was like before… And what he does to me now… I tried talking to her once but she just said “there are worse men” and walked off.’

  Dana props her spade against the wall and sits on the grass, hugging her knees. ‘When she was growing up, Mum had lots of run-ins with Social Services. None of them nice, apparently. And she’d do anything to keep them off her back now. Off my back.’

  She’s addressing the walls as much as me. I get the sense that if I sat next to her she’d lose the ability to speak.

  ‘Like I said before, Carl was very kind to us when we were kids. Little kids, I mean. Hard to believe it now I guess, but he always made sure Mum had what she needed, for me, so the school wouldn’t know what was going on with Dad. The police neither. After Dad left I acted up quite a bit. I’d run off to town on my own. Got picked up for shoplifting a few times. This was all in primary school. They were useless, just ruffled my hair and told me not to do it again. And Carl was always there, would straighten things out, turn on the charm when the police brought me home. I think they thought he was my brother. Or step-dad. And he’s still doing it – covering our tracks.’

  ‘Covering his own tracks, too.’

  ‘Yeah. So Mum never reports it if I don’t come home for a few nights, and she phones in every day to say I’m ill when Carl tells her to. It’s like she’s working for him. And everyone at school judges me as some kind of slut. All they saw was the jewellery and clothes and stuff that he was giving me, back before… That’s why I don’t really have friends anymore.’

  ‘What about Miss Amber?’

  Dana looks for a second like she’s ready to spill blood. ‘Even Miss Amber. Especially Miss Amber. I kind of told her about him once, even though she’s hated me from the start. I said I had an older boyfriend. She said she’d heard and asked if everything was OK, if there was anything I wanted to tell her. I said no. Maybe she thought I was bragging or something, like my friends did. Maybe she thought it was inevitable. That that’s what girls like me do. And now every time I try to talk to her I just get so angry, and all I can do is swear at her, which just makes things worse. So I can’t tell her. I can’t tell any of them. They’re all against me.’

  ‘What about Mr Walters? He’s alright, isn’t he?’ I don’t know why I say this. I regret it instantly.

  ‘No. Him neither.’ Dana seems to shiver.

  ‘The police?’

  ‘What are they going to do about it? They never did anything when Dad was still around. Or after he left. Maybe they’d care now, about Carl and what he’s doing, but why would they bother with
someone like me, who….’

  I stop turning soil, lean on the fork.

  Dana can tell that I’ve stopped, picks at the grass between her heels, doesn’t turn. ‘But you. For some reason I feel comfortable with you. Talking to you. And you can still get out of this, no matter what he’s said. I know he’s pushed the right buttons with you. He did with me, in the beginning, started talking to me about my dad leaving and how angry I must be and—’

  ‘It’s not the same though, is it?’ I’m sorry for my flash of anger as soon as it’s released. I take it out on the earth, picking up the fork again and ramming it into the ground. My stitched hand starts to sting.

  Dana whirls round to look at me now. ‘For fuck’s sake, Josh. You don’t have some kind of trump card on absent fathers, you know. It’s really shit that your dad died, and how he died is awful. I get it. We all do. But it doesn’t mean that the rest of us without dads can’t feel anything too. You had a funeral for your dad. There’s probably a place you can go where he’s buried or whatever, to remember him. I’ve got none of that. Just a hole cut out of my life that I’m not allowed to speak about. Just an empty space. No one to bury. No one to mourn.’

  ‘But didn’t he put you down a well?’

  ‘I’m not saying he was a good man. Dangling a seven-year-old down a deep hole on a scraggy old rope might sum him up pretty well, and I’m not saying I was as lucky as you were to have loads of memories of him, kindness and love or whatever. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt that he’s gone. And that he’s probably got a new family now and replaced me.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Surely he taught you about this stuff, your dad? About being … it sounds stupid saying it, but about being good. Just by how he was with you? Do you really think he’d be proud of what you’re getting into now?’

  ‘You don’t know anything about my dad.’

  ‘No, you’re right, I don’t. So ask yourself that question. What would he do in your shoes?’

  I look down. I’ve speared a worm on one prong of the fork. Something in me enjoys the way it curls and winds, writhing in a basic kind of agony.

  Dana turns away again. ‘Look. My dad was a bad guy. He was horrible to my mum, and to me. Not just the putting me down the well thing. He used to knock Mum about a bit, and then he’d apologise by being overly nice to me, playing with me, giving me treats, trips out. If he could see Mum wasn’t responding, he’d drop me like a stone. Literally, sometimes. That’s why she likes Carl so much – he’s protective, see? Or that’s what she thinks. He was protective of us after Dad left, especially after he got kicked out of the army.’

  ‘I thought they discharged him; he wanted to go back but they wouldn’t let him back in.’

  ‘Kind of. But that’s not completely true. He got done for some nasty stuff just after he left the hospital. Him and some others waited around outside a mosque until a youth group finished, then they attacked a few of the kids. Teenagers. Our age. With baseball bats. Technically he was just a bystander. That’s what he told the judge. Didn’t hurt anyone, couldn’t hold a bat because of the injuries, just watched the others and couldn’t get away as quickly. The judge believed him. So he only got a caution for it. But after that there was some drugs stuff as well. The army would’ve had him back before all that, not front-line, just support stuff, but the drugs got him kicked out. In disgrace.’

  I scrape the worm off the fork with my toe, suddenly sorry. I cover it with the next turn of earth.

  ‘Whenever he was on leave, right from when he first signed up, Carl was always coming over and looking in on us. This was just after Dad left. Like I said, Mum’s and Carl’s families go way back. I guess he sees my mum as like an older sister. He’d always talk to me too, bring me magazines and stuff. I was ten when he went on his first tour and Mum would make me write to him out there. We sent homemade cards at Christmas, recorded videos for when he could get to his emails. He always sent Mum pictures of the letters and cards when they arrived. I used to feel really proud, my drawings stuck up in a tent in a desert somewhere, helping somehow. He really was a good soldier, you know. He told us about his promotions every time he came home, what they were teaching him to do with computers.’

  Dana stands up, shivers, picks up her spade and leans into the ground again, neatening the lawn’s edges.

  ‘Then, after the bomb happened, his third tour, he came back … I don’t know… different. He started looking at me different too. A couple of years ago this was. And Mum kind of encouraged it in a way. Kept commenting on how nice I looked when he would come over. It was … I don’t know. Weird. His scars were really pink back then, and shiny almost. They made me think of those pink sweets you get, the shrimp ones. And he wore these big bandages under his clothes that smelt of hospitals. I didn’t know how to act around him, this guy who’d been around for so long. Who had been so good to me. All of a sudden he was someone different. And different up here, too.’ She taps her head again.

  I move closer to where Dana is digging, turning the soil for the umpteenth time now, lost in the mechanical motion of it as I listen.

  ‘I felt sorry for him in a way. It was like he’d been chewed up and spat out, unwanted. I wanted to make him happy, I guess. In the way that my cards used to. And, like I said, Mum would always call me down when he came over, tell me to stop with my homework or whatever, make jokes about how all that was pointless if you found the right guy.’

  ‘And you think she meant—’

  ‘Of course she did.’ Dana’s spade slices deep into the wet ground. ‘‘Give Carl a kiss hello then” she’d say when I came down, and then say something about what I was wearing, how nice I looked, how I was turning into a young woman. It made me cringe. But I did it. Paraded myself for him I suppose. It made Mum happier too. A bit. To see him happy. Even though my skin used to crawl whenever he hugged me for a little bit too long.’

  ‘And then…’

  ‘Mum was going out for the night, with Carl’s mum,’ Dana continues, her voice dropping slightly. Her body is on autopilot, the words finding their own rhythm as she works the spade mechanically, unthinking. ‘Carl was at our house. To babysit, Mum said. I was thirteen. Hadn’t had a babysitter for years. Looking back, I know Mum planned it. I didn’t know she was going out until she was gone, and Carl was in the doorway. I stuck some dinner in the microwave and me and Carl ate on the sofa, watching some old film. I remember the noise his fork made on the plate when he put it down. So deliberate. Then he moved himself closer to me, put his arm around my shoulder. The next thing I knew, his tongue was in my mouth and…’

  ‘You don’t have to say this.’

  ‘Yes. I do. It feels … alright, talking to you. Can’t tell anyone else anyway.’ She paused for a while, wiped her hair out of her eyes and went on. ‘And we did it, on my mum’s sofa. He was rough at first. Desperate, but then, he kind of got gentler. It hurt. God it hurt. He pulled out after a bit and put a condom on. Then he stopped and it was over. I felt… numb, I guess. At the end he wouldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t say anything, just lay there underneath him, his head on my chest, stroking the back of his head. I was terrified, waiting for Mum to come home. But when she did, I could smell the booze on her from the front door. She just stuck her head round the door, smiled, then went up to bed.’

  Her eyes are fixed on the end of her shovel, sunk a few inches in the black ground. I walk over. My hand finds hers, squeezes it.

  ‘And that was almost two years ago now. I tried to tell Miss Amber, but I couldn’t, and that’s when it all started going wrong at school, I guess. Though you wouldn’t have known that. You had your own stuff to deal with.’

  The tears in my eyes are hot and sharp. ‘I can’t do it. Carl’s plan… I—’

  ‘I know. Me neither. But not now. I don’t think I can talk anymore.’

  I know what she means. For the last ten minutes, it’s like her words have been slowly filling a balloon. Any more
words today and the balloon would explode.

  ‘But when?’ The desperation is clear in my voice. Maybe exploding the balloon would be a good thing.

  ‘In the new year. When school goes back. We’ll talk then.’ Dana is calm, collected, like she’s got a plan of her own all figured out. ‘We’ve got time. Some, at least.’ I hope she’s right.

  ‘I have to go.’ My hand is on the lever of the lock when Dana calls me back.

  ‘Josh.’ Dana crosses the space between us in a few strides, and throws her arms around my neck. I hug her back. ‘Thanks. For listening. And have a good Christmas, OK?’

  She closes the door behind me.

  FIFTY ONE

  Christmas was Dad’s thing. And now it’s the hardest time of the year.

  As soon as Mum finishes work, three days before Christmas Eve, we pack up the car and get out of the house as fast as we can. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to spend the holidays at home again, remembering where we used to have the tree, where we used to hang the lights around the windows, or the lights that hung from the front of the house to look like icicles. It’s too soon to think about, and Mum is as delicate as a snowflake as we put our cases in the boot in accustomed silence.

  We manage one stilted exchange as we get in the car.