‘Do you want me to come round?’ I asked, but I was talking to dead air because she’d rung off, and, without thinking about it, because if I stopped to think about it then I’d be staying where I was and ordering a coffee, I stood up.
‘Got to go. Tinfoil emergency,’ I said, digging out my wallet. ‘Shall we call it twenty quid for my share plus tip?’
‘Don’t go,’ was the general theme. Along with ‘Get the sodding tinfoil from the yellow shop that never closes,’ but it wasn’t as simple as that. It never was with her.
It felt strange to be walking along Jeane’s road again, standing in her doorway, ringing on her bell and shouting, ‘Jeane? It’s me,’ into her intercom. She didn’t reply but buzzed me in, and she was waiting in the darkened hallway, the only light coming from the open door of her flat, when I got out of the lift.
I’d forgotten how small she was. She was wearing purple pyjama bottoms with slinky black cartoon cats on them and a huge fuzzy jumper. Her hair was white, which didn’t suit her face, which was red and swollen like she’d been crying for ages. I hate it when girls cry. It’s so unfair.
‘I didn’t expect you to come round,’ she said in a choked voice, like air wasn’t coming out of her windpipe. ‘You didn’t have to.’
‘Well, you sounded like something awful had happened and you shouldn’t just buzz people in. I could have been a homicidal rapist murderer.’
Jeane sniffed. ‘Aren’t homicidal and murderer kind of the same thing? Like, you can’t have an unhomicidal murderer.’
‘You could if they didn’t mean to commit murder. Like, if it was a crime of passion or something,’ I decided, and Jeane nodded tiredly like she couldn’t be bothered to argue out the details and that’s when I realised that something was really wrong: arguing out the details was as natural to Jeane as breathing oxygen. And also, she looked awful. Not the kind of awful that had anything to do with her lack in the pretty department or because she dyed her hair unflattering colours or because she dressed like a lady clown; it was another kind of awful.
Her face, the bits of it that weren’t red or blotchy, was the colour of putty and she was slumping rather than standing up straight, her arms wrapped tightly round herself. She oozed defeat and I didn’t know why because it sounded as if everything in her life was just fine. She was taking over the world, one dork at a time.
‘I shouldn’t have called you,’ she said. ‘’Cause now that you’re here it’s awkward and you’re going to yell at me for totally overreacting and I really can’t handle being yelled at right now.’
‘Tell me why you called and I’ll decide if you were over-reacting.’
Jeane traced a pattern on her hall carpet with her toe. ‘I probably was overreacting.’
Absence hadn’t made my heart grow fonder. It had made it grow a lot more exasperated. ‘Jeane!’
‘OK, OK,’ she grumbled, and I followed her into the flat with slight trepidation as to what terrible thing had sucked all the ornery out of her. Maybe Roy and Sandra had popped round with a Christmas card and Jeane had bashed in their skulls with a potato masher.
‘Place looks tidy,’ I remarked as I glanced into the lounge. ‘Really tidy. What’s up with that?’
‘I got a cleaner,’ Jeane said. ‘She’s Bulgarian and she shouts at me and she made me buy a new vacuum cleaner and she keeps breaking stuff. She broke my favourite mug and my second-best keyboard because she cleaned it with a wet cloth and today she did something to the shower door and it wouldn’t budge and then it came off.’
‘What came off?’ I asked because I wasn’t really following any of this.
‘The shower door,’ Jeane said, and as she showed me into the bathroom she burst into tears again.
Without wanting to get too tech-y about it, Jeane’s shower cubicle had a split door on runners, so you slid one half of the door behind the other to get in the shower. Or you did when it wasn’t propped up against the other door.
‘It’s not worth crying about,’ I told Jeane, but she shook her head and shrunk back against the sink like I was going to slap her and tell her to stop being so hysterical. I wasn’t but I did think about it for a second.
Instead I peered into the shower cubicle to look at the top and bottom tracks, then I looked at the top and bottom of the forlorn shower door. ‘See this thin bit? It slots into the groove on the track.’
‘No shit, Sherlock.’ Jeane was obviously going to be no help.
With a deep breath I took a firm hold of the shower door, tensed my muscles and lifted. Nothing happened. I tried again and maybe managed to lift it a centimetre away from its resting place.
‘How the hell did you even manage to shift this? It weighs a bloody ton.’
Jeane was crying harder now and, yes, she was totes overreacting.
‘I’ll go next door and see if Gustav and Harry are in. There’s no way I can do this by myself.’ Jeane was saying something but it was too distorted by snot to decipher. ‘What? What are you trying to say?’
‘They’re not there! They’ve gone to Australia to see Harry’s family and the caretaker’s gone to Scotland and everybody else who lives here is either away or very old, apart from the woman below me who hates me ’cause she says I slam doors and Ben’s family are in Manchester and Barney’s even weedier than I am and everyone is busy with Christmas crap and Bethan was meant to be here for Christmas but she’s not because she’s pregnant and she’s getting married and her boyfriend’s mum is dying so she had to stay in Chicago.’ Jeane’s face was bright red. It was brighter than red. Someone would have to invent a new shade of red to describe the colour her face was. She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘There was nobody else I could call and everyone has families and places to be and stuff to do except me because I haven’t got anybody. I’m all on my own and it’s Christmas Eve and I can’t even take a sodding shower even though I’ve been working for eight hours straight because the sodding shower door is broken and no one even cares.’
‘Oh, Jeane, I care,’ I said, and it wasn’t just because it was the only thing I could say in the circumstances. In that moment when she was shaking and crying and sounding more desperate than I’d ever heard anyone sound, I did care. How could I not?
‘No, you don’t,’ she said and she cried even harder.
I hated seeing her like this. Jeane was tough and strong and she could blag her way to New York and persuade people to give her TV shows and book deals. She wasn’t defeated by a broken shower door. She was better than that.
Jeane didn’t seem to think so when I tried to give her a rousing pep talk, and when I went to hug her she shied away from me and I didn’t know what to do to make her feel better or get the shower door back on its runner, so I did the only thing I could do.
I phoned home.
When my dad arrived, Jeane was still crying, but just to mix it up a little she was lying in a miserable heap on the bathroom floor.
I’d explained to Mum on the phone that she was having some kind of psychotic break, though Mum had said that still wasn’t a good enough reason to stop me being grounded. Then I’d said that I hadn’t had too much to drink and they’d said nothing about how seeing Jeane would violate the terms of my parole.
Thankfully there’d been a cupcake crisis and she’d put Dad on the phone and now he was here in Jeane’s bathroom and squatting down on the floor in front of her with a damp flannel.
‘You’ll feel much better once you’ve wiped your face,’ he said in the same tone of voice he used when Alice had fallen off her bike or Melly was throwing a wobbly about her spelling homework. It worked on Jeane, too. A small hand came out of the Jeane-shaped ball to take the flannel and the sobs muted down to hiccups. Eventually she sat up and pushed the hair out of her eyes.
She’d have melted the stoniest, steeliest heart. Even Mum would have stopped calling her ‘that girl’ and made her a cup of tea, but Dad just took off his coat, hung it on the towel rail and rolled up his sleeves. ‘OK,
Michael, let battle commence with this shower door.’
It took nearly an hour until we finally admitted to ourselves and to Jeane (who’d been dubious about our chances from the start) that the door was not going to be returned to its rightful resting place.
‘It seems too big to slide into the tracks,’ Dad said with a bemused expression on his face. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘That’s OK,’ Jeane said dully. ‘Thanks for trying though.’
There was an awkward silence because our work here was done, or not done, and now there was no reason to stay.
‘Are you going to be all right, Jeane?’ I asked.
I thought she was going to assure me that she’d be, ‘Just fine, don’t you worry about me,’ but she just swallowed hard.
‘Well, you can’t stay here with the shower door like that,’ Dad said firmly, like the untethered door might attack Jeane while she slept. ‘My parking voucher runs out in ten minutes so run along and pack an overnight bag.’
‘I can’t do that,’ Jeane said. She sounded appalled, which was a lot better than when she’d sounded catatonic. ‘I can’t just rock up uninvited.’
‘I’m inviting you,’ Dad said calmly. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
I wasn’t too thrilled about this turn of events but the thought of leaving Jeane on her own to lie in a crumpled sobbing heap on her bathroom floor wasn’t too appealing either.
‘There’ll be cupcakes and The Muppet Christmas Carol,’ I said cajolingly. ‘You love the Muppets.’
‘I do,’ she agreed, and she slowly turned to pick up her toothbrush.
35
‘I’m really sorry to turn up like this,’ I said when Michael’s mum opened the door and found me outside, like a parcel that had been dumped there without a ‘Sorry we missed you’ card stuck to it. Michael and his dad had gone to the off-licence and had left me to fend for myself with a cheery, ‘It’s OK, we phoned ahead!’ It really wasn’t OK though. ‘And I’m very sorry about the whole New York thing.’
She gave me a long, hard look. I much preferred Michael’s dad. He was so Zen that I always felt as if a little of his inner chi was rubbing off on me, but his mother made my hackles and the hair on the back of my neck rise.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, and though I didn’t normally care what anyone thought of the way I looked, I wished I wasn’t wearing my cat pyjama bottoms and my faux-fur leopard-print anorak and bunny slippers. I also wished that crying hadn’t left my face so swollen that it felt as if someone had been using it as a punchbag.
I hesitated and she sighed, ‘You’re letting the cold air in,’ and I had no choice but to walk through the door. Well, I did have a choice but I didn’t fancy walking home in my bunny slippers.
‘I really am sorry about everything,’ I said again. I wasn’t sure I was that sorry, but I couldn’t face having to go back to my empty flat. I was sick of my own company. In fact, I hardly knew myself at the moment because myself didn’t usually cry for hours and hours. The last time I’d cried had been on the final day of Rock ’n’ Roll Camp when we’d had an impromptu singalong to ‘Born This Way’ and then it had been mostly happy tears that had lasted the time it took to scrub at my cheeks before anyone could see. I’d certainly never cried for hours before and never over an annoying but not that serious domestic mishap.
But I had to admit that maybe the reason I’d had a meltdown wasn’t just about the shower. I think the shower door was, like, a metaphor. It represented everything that was bad. Yeah, there was good stuff but there was also a lot of bad stuff and it went deep and it hurt, so standing in Michael’s hall on Christmas Eve in my pyjamas and clutching an overnight bag as his mother looked at me like I’d tracked dog shit into her carpets was still better than being at home.
‘Never mind what happened a few weeks ago,’ she said. ‘It’s in the past and in the present is a hot bath and a cup of tea.’
I nodded and followed Mrs Lee into the kitchen where she put the kettle on. I mentally prepared myself for twenty minutes of tea-drinking and stilted conversation and a bit of glaring, but then the lounge door swung open and two little heads peered round it.
‘Oh! It’s you!’ Then both Michael’s little sisters, in matching fairy outfits, were suddenly in the kitchen and clambering all over me.
‘We’re dressed up in case we bump into Father Christmas!’
‘We’ve made him Muppet cupcakes!’
‘Why is your hair white? Did someone give you a nasty shock?’
‘I have bunny slippers just like yours! I’m going to put them on so we can be slipper twins!’
‘’Cause it’s Christmas Eve we’re having sausage, beans and chips for dinner and we’re allowed to eat it in front of the TV.’
‘The Muppet Christmas Carol! It’s our favouritest ever, ever, ever film!’
‘Apart from Toy Story 2! Do you like The Muppet Christmas Carol?’
That was how they talked, with an exclamation mark tacked on to the end of every high-pitched sentence. It was funny and exhausting.
‘Of course I like The Muppet Christmas Carol,’ I said, and unbelievably Michael’s mum caught my eye as she peeled potatoes and smiled at me. ‘It’s a classic.’
We then had a fierce debate about our favourite Muppets because they weren’t happy when I chose Gonzo. I had both of them pleading the case for Miss Piggy when Michael and his dad came back with a crate of bottled lager and a couple of clanking carrier bags.
Michael nodded at me coolly. ‘You all right then?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. His mum and dad were joking about how much longer they could last before they cracked open the wine and Melly and Alice were having a pointless argument about how many cupcakes they could eat before they vommed and as Michael reached across his mum to start putting lager in the fridge, she stroked his arm, just this brief, fleeting gesture that he didn’t even notice, and though I’d been an outsider all my life, I’d never felt quite so outside as I did at that moment.
‘Is Jeane staying for dinner?’ Melly suddenly asked.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Lee said firmly. ‘She’s staying the night.’
Melly and Alice shared an evil smile. ‘When Katya’s brother’s girlfriend sleeps over they share the same bed,’ Melly announced, accompanied by much nudging and giggling. ‘Is Jeane going to share Mich—’
‘No!’ I burst out. ‘Never in a million years.’
‘Jeane’s not my girlfriend,’ Michael snapped. ‘And it’s rude to ask personal questions.’
‘But you didn’t let me finish asking a personal question so really I haven’t been rude.’
‘Anyways, you were girlfriend and boyfriend,’ Melly said with a glance over at her parents, who were having a tense conversation about goose fat. ‘’Cause Mum said you were after you ran away to New York and then Michael was all punished and he was in a really, really, really bad mood. He said it was his Cambridge interview but that was ages ago and he’s still been in a really, really, really bad mood.’
This was all … interesting. I hadn’t missed Michael at all, or I hadn’t let myself miss him what with being so busy and the fact I’d stopped going to school so I didn’t have to look at his cheekbones and his almond-shaped eyes and that pout of a mouth that was currently a tight slash on his face, or seen his lithe, lanky body loping about. It was very easy not to miss someone when they weren’t in your life, but maybe he’d missed me. A little bit. Or else he was still angry and resentful at all the horrible things I’d said to him in New York. Also I’d told him to fuck off when we landed at Heathrow and he’d tried to help me with my bags. You couldn’t really come back from that.
‘If I was in a really, really, really bad mood, Melly, it was probably because I have two really, really, really annoying little sisters,’ he said, and they both huffed in sheer outrage.
‘You are bad and mean and I’m going to spit on your cupcakes,’ Alice said just as Mrs Lee emerged from the fridge.
‘I kno
w two little girls who may get sent to bed without any dinner or any cupcakes,’ she said sternly, and it was impossible to have a pity party when a five-year-old and a seven-year-old were throwing a strop. If Michael wouldn’t even look at me then that was fine. I could deal with that. I’d have my bath and some dinner and then I’d go home.
The only reason I didn’t go home was because I fell asleep halfway through The Muppet Christmas Carol. I was stuffed full of food and cups of tea and had Melly and Alice wedged on either side of me as we shared a big armchair, and one moment Miss Piggy and Ebenezer Scrooge were throwing down, the next I was being woken up by Mrs Lee who put me to bed in the spare room. She even tucked me in. No one had tucked me in since … well, I couldn’t remember ever being tucked in.
During the night I was joined by Melly and Alice who’d got up because they thought they’d heard reindeer, had eaten all the chocolate coins in their stockings and thought I might like to watch cartoons, but when they realised I didn’t, they got into bed with me and I started to tell them a story about Sammy, the rock ’n’ roll squirrel, and they fell asleep, which was just as well as I had no idea where I was going with Sammy.
And so it came to pass that Mr and Mrs Lee weren’t woken up at five on Christmas morning but got to lie in until 8.30, and if Mrs Lee had been harbouring any lingering ill will to the horrible girl who’d kidnapped her son, it was all gone.
It might have been the thirteen hours of almost-uninterrupted sleep or yesterday’s crying jag or just having a chance to recharge my get-up-and-go but I was anxious to get up and be gone. I didn’t want to intrude on all their family traditions. Besides, Michael couldn’t bring himself to look at me or even talk to me much beyond passing me the sugar bowl without being asked, because he knew that I needed at least three sugars in my coffee.
‘You’re very welcome to stay,’ Shen said. And Kathy – I felt like I should call her Kathy now, instead of Mrs Lee – nodded. ‘We have so much food in the house, we’ll be eating savoury snack selection boxes until Easter.’