The bus arrived. It was a ten-minute bus ride back to our nabe and I knew that by the end of the journey I had to break up with her. For the sake of my sanity and, more importantly, my reputation, because the way things were going, Jeane was going to infect me with dork disease. Like, I hadn’t even thought that tonight’s outfit was too awful even though Jeane was wearing a cardie and a jumper made out of scratchy silver material and a clashing red skirt – the more time I spent with her, the more immune I became to the hot mess that she looked. Not even a hot mess, which implied some kind of hotness, just a mess.
I watched resentfully as Jeane marched up the aisle of the bus, then, just as she was about to sit down, she turned and smiled at me. It was a weak, lopsided smile and whatever hell I’d been through tonight, it had been worse for Jeane, but she was still colossally self-involved and she still could have said thank you. Instead, surprise, surprise, she’d pulled out her phone and her fingers were flying over the screen.
I sat down in the seat in front of hers and thought about how to break up with her. It would probably have to be via text message as it was the only way I was sure of getting her attention, and, as I thought it, I was pulling out my knackered old BlackBerry and surrpetitiously checking Jeane’s Twitter timeline.
adork_able Jeane Smith
I’ve seen hell and it looks a lot like the salad bar in Garfunkel’s.
adork_able Jeane Smith
You can never go home again. Fo sho.
adork_able Jeane Smith
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do …
adork_able Jeane Smith
They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you … Way overidentifying with Philip Larkin tonight.
adork_able Jeane Smith
I heart Chinese buns stuffed full of red bean paste and people who buy me Chinese buns stuffed full of red bean paste.
I could feel my anger starting to recede, become fuzzier and indistinct, and then Jeane suddenly leaned forward and softly (and unbelievably) kissed the back of my neck. I almost shot a metre off my seat and was frantically trying to shield my phone from her when she did it again. Kissed the back of my neck again.
‘That meal would have been about eleventy billion times more excruciating if you hadn’t been there,’ she whispered. ‘I’m going to do something AMAZE-ing to make it up to you. Not sure what, but it will knock your socks off.’
Sometimes it was impossible to stay mad at Jeane. ‘My folks drove to Devon today to spend the weekend there before they come back with the little sisters,’ I informed her.
‘Did they? How interesting.’ I could feel her breath warm on my nape. ‘Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, Michael Lee?’
‘Well, I don’t have football practice tomorrow so I could come back to yours, but my house has a fully stocked fridge and I know I won’t end up with congealed Haribo stuck to my socks when I walk across the room.’
Jeane rested her arms on the back of my seat. ‘That only happened the one time, but you kind of had me at fully stocked fridge. Can we go to mine first so I can pick up some stuff?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Her hand fleetingly stroked the side of my face and it made me feel shivery, the good kind of shivery. ‘You know we’re not meant to touch in public. People might see.’
I thought I heard her giggle, though usually Jeane didn’t do giggling. ‘There’s no one on the bus in the right demographic to recognise us, and, even if they did, we can just deny everything.’
She was right. It wasn’t important. What was important, as I pointed out, was that, ‘When you have a meal, even a three-course meal, that you didn’t enjoy, you’re as hungry as if you hadn’t eaten anything.’
‘It’s probably something to do with the brain and its pleasure receptors. You should ask Barney, he loves shit like that.’
‘Are you hungry, too? ’Cause I think Mum made some shepherd’s pie for me before she left.’
Jeane pressed her face right up against mine. ‘I’m bloody starving.’
23
Usually when I have a fit of the sullens, it can be days, even weeks, before they disappear, which is why I try to avoid situations that might make me get my mope on. But, somehow, Michael always managed to head my mope off at the pass.
Like, he seemed to instinctively know that I couldn’t handle being on my own after a parental visit and, after going to mine to pick up pyjamas, toothbrush and a hundred other things that I couldn’t do without in a twenty-four-hour period, I was sitting on his bed eating home-made shepherd’s pie and watching an Inbetweeners repeat. Even though we had the whole house to ourselves, I much preferred Michael’s room.
It was all odd angles from being up in the rafters and it was so tidy. So neat. So ordered. It wasn’t even like his mum fussed and nagged at him to get it that way. I had seen, with my very own eyes, Michael get me some of the guest towels (guest towels, I mean, what the hell?) and neatly fold them up before he placed them on the bed.
In deference to my emotionally fragile state, he didn’t try to kiss me, when normally we’d have been mucking up the perfect millpond-smoothness of his duvet within five seconds. He was quite happy to eat his shepherd’s pie and pretend that he was riveted by my insightful analysis of The Inbetweeners and where it fitted into the canon of dorks on TV. He even agreed, without too much nagging, to let me use his scanner because I wanted those photographs dealt with right away.
Michael hovered for a while to make sure my hands were clean before they went anywhere near his pristine keyboard but once he was satisfied they were spotless and I wasn’t trying to look at his browsing history to see what porn he was into, he left me to it and started playing LA Noire.
I found that I didn’t really have to look at the photographs if I placed them face-down on the scanner and unfocused my eyes so they appeared on the computer screen as flesh-toned blobs. I was almost done when Michael nudged the back of his desk chair with a foot.
‘The least you can do is show me some pictures of you as a kid.’
‘Dream on, dreamer, never going to happen,’ I said as I clicked away.
‘There is no way that anything your parents made you wear could be worse than what you actually choose to wear now,’ Michael insisted, and when I turned round to give him my most withering glare, I realised he’d snuck up behind me. ‘Come on, Jeane, there has to be at least one photo of you either in a nappy or naked on a fake sheepskin rug. It’s the law.’
‘We weren’t a taking-photos sort of family,’ I said, which was the truth. Or it was the truth by the time I came along. ‘Besides, these photos were all taken before I was even thought of.’
‘You sure you’re not just saying that because when you were a small child you loved nothing more than dressing up in princess outfits?’ Michael said, as he rested his chin on my shoulder, which was very annoying.
‘Do you really think I was that kind of little girl? FYI, I had my own home-made superhero costume for this character I invented called Awesome Girl,’ I admitted. In a cardboard box somewhere in the depths of my flat were the badly drawn comic strips I’d written for Awesome Girl and Bad Dog, her trusty canine companion. Pat and Roy had been vehemently anti-television so I’d had to make my own fun.
My trip down memory lane, and Awesome Girl and Bad Dog’s successful campaign to rid the world of vegetables, abruptly came to an end when Michael poked me in the ribs. ‘You owe me! Your dad actually expected me to tell him how I was going to repay my student loans that don’t even exist yet.’ Michael sounded like he was getting properly annoyed now.
‘God, there’s nothing to see.’ I highlighted all the pictures I’d scanned and with a few more clicks I had a slideshow. ‘That’s Pat and Roy with Bethan in utero, Bethan, Bethan, Bethan, Pat, Roy and Bethan and …’
‘There!’ Michael said triumphantly, pointing to the next slide. ‘Jeane as a baby. I knew there had to be photographic evidence.’ He
shoved his face right against mine. ‘My, what chubby cheeks you’ve got.’
I shoved him away. ‘That’s not me,’ I said shortly. ‘It’s Andrew and, well, I’d call him my older brother but he died long before I was born so it always seems weird to call him my brother.’
Michael opened his mouth but then he didn’t say anything as I showed him the rest of the photos, which consisted of Bethan and Andrew in a series of vile eighties outfits, so vile that even I couldn’t find any redeeming qualities in them. Then there were the pictures that explained why these photos had spent so many years stuffed away in an envelope, unseen: Andrew getting paler and more fragile, mustering up a wan smile for the camera, and then his eleventh birthday, his last, in a hospital bed surrounded by helium balloons and ominouslooking hospital equipment. I think he’d died a week or two later but I was a bit fuzzy on the details.
‘Shit, Jeane, I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have started cracking jokes if I’d known,’ Michael said heavily, and I could feel him looking at me, really staring. ‘Are you OK … I mean, having to go through these photos?’
‘Well, yeah …’ I shrugged. ‘Of course it’s sad that he died. It’s, like, awful, but I wasn’t there. It was something that happened to my family though I don’t think the three of them ever recovered from it. Maybe Bethan did, but then again I don’t think she’d be working seventy hours a week as a paediatric resident if her older brother hadn’t died of a rare form of leukaemia when she was seven.’
‘Your dad, he just seems so sad. Has he always been like that?’
Most anybody else would not want to be asking questions about this because it was awkward and deeply personal but Michael didn’t seem to get it. And I realised that I’d never talked about this, about Andrew, with anyone. Occasionally, Bethan would tell me a story about Andrew, but if I started asking her questions – Did you fight with each other? Was he scared of the dark? Were Pat and Roy different, then, like, were you all happy before he got ill? – we’d never get very far because Bethan would start to cry. Even though it had been over twenty years ago, she’d cry these awful stomach-wrenching sobs like it had happened only yesterday.
So, I’d never talked about Andrew before because I always felt that his death hadn’t anything to do with me. Though really, when you thought about it, I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for him.
‘Yeah,’ I replied at last. ‘He’s always been like that. Pat, my mother, she’s like that too, but more snippy.’
Michael sat down at the foot of his bed and I swung round the chair so we were facing each other, because I had a feeling that we weren’t done talking about this.
I was right.
‘It couldn’t have been much fun growing up in a house where everyone was sad all the time,’ Michael remarked casually, and maybe if he’d been firing questions at me and implying that my mum and dad had fucked me up Philip Larkin-style, I’d have got all defensive and huffed and flounced and maybe even stormed out, but he wasn’t and I didn’t.
‘It wasn’t like they walked around crying and going on about how sad they were,’ I explained. ‘It was more like they weren’t there. Like, they were kinda absent. Which was fine by me. I’m pretty much self-made.’
‘Well, I did half suspect that you were raised by wolves,’ Michael said with a tentative smile. ‘Wolves with a liking for sweets.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots and lots of people who had worse childhoods than mine, but …’ I faltered because some stuff was hard to say, even if you thought about it a lot or tried really hard not to think about it at all.
Michael took my hand and traced circles on my palm. ‘But what?’ Then he lifted my hand so he could kiss the spot where his fingers had been, and I wondered if Scarlett had had rocks in her head because when it came down to who was the better boyfriend, Barney or Michael, then Michael won every time in every category. Except Barney outshone him when it came to playing Guitar Hero (seriously, he was a demon on that thing) and taking my computer apart and putting it back together in the space of a weekend so it ran faster, better and with less of a whirring noise. ‘You can tell me stuff, Jeane. I’m not going to tell anyone.’
I nodded. He did have a point and it wasn’t like he had any secret recording equipment – at least I didn’t think he had.
‘The thing is, right, really they should have got divorced after Andrew died. Apparently it happens a lot when a couple loses a kid. It doesn’t bring them closer together; it tears them apart. There’s been surveys done and everything.’ I didn’t bother to point out that I’d spent hours reading up on the subject. ‘But anyway, Pat and Roy didn’t take that option. They decided that having another child would take the pain away, like when your dog dies and you get a new puppy a month later. Except they didn’t get some cute smiley baby that filled them with a renewed sense of purpose, they got me, and then they were stuck with each other for another eighteen years …’
‘Well, yeah, but it wasn’t eighteen years, was it?’ Michael pointed out. ‘’Cause you’re only seventeen now and you said that you started living here with your sister when you were fifteen so your parents must have split up around then.’
‘I was getting to that part,’ I said, and I was proud of that part because it proved that I had more common sense than the two adults that were meant to be bringing me up and doing a pretty poor job of it. ‘It was a Sunday and Bethan was on nights so she was sleeping all day and Pat was working on her MA in Advanced Tree Hugging and Roy was drinking in his shed at the bottom of the garden and when Sunday dinner was finally ready, vegetarian spaghetti bolognese, because Pat thinks red meat gives you bowel cancer – in fact she thinks everything gives you every type of cancer there is – I realised that it was the first time all weekend that any of us were in the same room at the same time. God, I’m rambling like a rambling thing, aren’t I?’
‘It’s OK,’ Michael said. ‘I’m used to your run-on sentences now. So, right, you’re all eating veggie bolognese, then what happened?’
‘Nothing much, except I said there was no point staying together for my sake when my mental well-being would probably be improved if they just split up.’
Michael looked horrified, especially when I giggled, but it wasn’t a callous giggle, it was more a giggle as I remembered telling them about the audacious plan I’d hatched to become legally emancipated from them.
‘Of course they told me not to be so ridiculous and that everything was fine, but it so obviously wasn’t, and, after three months of hard campaigning, they came round to my way of thinking.’
‘Because in the end it’s easier to give in to you than to keep saying no?’
‘Something like that,’ I agreed, because that was always my MO. If reason didn’t work, I usually found that repetition and volume did the trick. ‘Anyways, they got a divorce, sold the house, bought the flat for me and Bethan to live in and Pat went off to Peru to work on her PhD and Roy buggered off to Spain to open a bar. So by the time Bethan got a fellowship to study in Chicago, it was too late to change things.’
Michael was still looking horrified and a lot like he felt sorry for me, when there was no reason. ‘You poor—’
I clamped my hand over his mouth. ‘Poor nothing.’
Michael swatted my hand away with annoying ease. ‘Sorry, but it sounds like a pretty shit childhood.’
‘Whatever. I doubt I’d be quite as awesome as I am today if I hadn’t learnt from an early age that I was the only person I could rely on. Though maybe I was just born dorky and proud of it. Who knows? Everyone has some trauma growing up, don’t they?’
Michael shook his head. ‘I’m pretty much trauma-free.’ He pursed his lips as he thought hard about any trauma he might have known. ‘Well, apart from being an only child for ten years until Melly rocked up. That was a shock after being top dog for so long.’ His face brightened. ‘I suppose the weirdest thing about our family is that biologically Melly and Alice are twins.’
?
??How can they be, when Melly is seven and Alice is, what, five?’
‘I don’t know all the details but Mum and Dad had problems after they’d had me so they went through IVF, froze some of the spare embryos, had Melly, defrosted the rest of the embryos and then there was Alice.’
‘I still don’t understand how that makes them twins,’ I argued, and if Michael had been trying to distract me from my own woe-is-me-ness then my God it was working.
‘No, neither did Melly when Mum and Dad told her and they got into a whole thing about sperm and eggs, which just confused her even more, and then Alice wanted to know why she’d been stuck in a freezer for two years.’ Michael choked back a laugh. ‘I caught the pair of them standing on a chair rooting in the freezer to see if there were any more tiny babies in test tubes hiding behind the fish fingers.’
I couldn’t help it, I giggled, though I forced myself to stop as soon as was humanly possible. ‘I guess if that is your closest brush with a childhood trauma then at least it was a nice sort of trauma. Well, that and the fact that your mum and dad are kind of hands-on with the whole parenting thing.’ I shuddered. ‘Now that would be something I totes couldn’t deal with. I much prefer Pat and Roy’s benign neglect.’
‘I think we’re about to have another argument,’ Michael announced, sitting up straight. I dreaded what he was going to say next. Normally I loved a good argy bargy but I was too wrung out for any more bickering.
‘Why?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘Because, actually, my mum and her overprotective parenting style is looking bloody good right now.’ He sounded so amazed that he might actually have lucked out in the mum department that I started giggling again. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You are,’ I told him, sliding off the computer chair so I could slide on to his lap and push him down so he was lying on his back and I could pin his arms above his head. ‘Everything shows on your face. I always know exactly what you’re thinking.’