Black Dog Summer (4 page)

“That's my favorite duvet cover.”

“Oh please, Bry, you haven't used this bedding set since you were about seven.”

“But it's still—”

“Come on, get tidying.”

“Can't Dora just do it tomorrow?”

“Your absurd mess is not something that Dora should have to deal with, Bryony; we've talked about this before. She's employed to keep the house clean, not to be your personal picker-upper.”

“I know, but it's going to take all night. And there's school tomorrow.”

“I am very well aware of that. If it takes you all night then it takes you all night. Perhaps this will teach you to put your stuff away
properly in the future.” Adele marches in, places the pile of linen on Bryony's bed, then goes over to the cupboard and wrenches it open. “Good Lord, Bryony.”

“What?” Bryony glances at the jumbled collection of old toys, puzzle pieces, and books on her cupboard shelves.

“You know very well what.” Adele opens the remaining built-in cupboard doors and then stops, staring. She lifts her hands to her face, and, for a moment, Bryony thinks she's going to burst into tears again, but she doesn't. She just stands, frozen.

“Mom?”

Nothing.

“Mom?” Louder, this time.

“Right,” Adele says, and lowers her hands. “I'm going downstairs to get a couple of bin bags. This pile of endless junk is ridiculous. We need to get half of it out of here and clear up some space for that poor child.”

“You're taking my stuff? But it's my stuff!”

“Good gracious, girl.” Adele lurches towards her daughter, and Bryony steps back until her legs are pressing against her bed. “People are dead, do you understand? My sister is dead, and her daughter is going to need a sodding cupboard to store her goddamn clothes in, all right?” Adele, unlike Tyler, hardly ever swears. She's never hit Bryony either, but it sure looks as though she's going to take a crack at it now. Bryony swallows down a chunk of fright.

“Yes, Mom.” Adele's face is so close that Bryony can see white and pink blotches all over it as if someone has melted up a bag of marshmallows and spread them on her skin.

“I'm going to make it up to Sally.” Adele's voice trembles as she stumbles towards the doorway. “Dear God. Somebody has to do SOMETHING.” The shout stabs right through the sound of the news channel on the TV downstairs and the thump of Tyler's music from next door, which stops mid-clang. The whole house seems to breathe in. Bryony is too scared to move. She hopes that if her mom starts throwing things as she did in her bathroom the other day, she doesn't break the crystal heart bowl on her dressing table that Granny gave her for her ninth birthday; it's about the only thing of Granny's she has.

Adele grips the doorframe and sags her head against it, her fingers yellow and hard-looking, like uncooked pasta.

“Mom?” Bryony whispers.

Adele pulls back her head and lets it fall, crack, against the wood. Bryony's stomach heaves at the sound it makes.

“Mom?” Tyler is suddenly out of his sanctuary and standing beside his mother. “Please don't. Please don't hurt yourself.” He tries to take her hands to unstick her from the doorframe, but she isn't budging. Over the top of her disheveled hair, Bryony notices that her brother's blue eyes look just like their old cat Mingus's did that time she tried to bathe him when she was five.

A sob boils up out of Bryony and she runs out of the bedroom and past them both, hurtling straight into Liam, who has come running up the stairs.

Bryony stares at her father. There are a hundred questions flying up her throat, but her mouth is too dry to move, and they all smash into the back of her teeth, unasked.

“Stop it, Adele,” Liam commands, pushing past his daughter and gripping the sides of his wife's head to stop her slamming it back into the doorframe. His hands on either side of her quivering, blotched cheeks look very strong and brown. “For Christ's sake.”

“She's just upset, Dad.” Tyler hovers close to his mother, his hand still resting on her arm.

“I know she's upset. We're all fucking upset, but we've just got to pull ourselves together and deal with what is.” Liam is breathing hard, eyes shiny like glazed porcelain.

“You're not fooling anyone,” Adele hisses back at her husband through tight white lips. “You put on a nice act, Liam, but
you're
the one who's really losing their grip.” She pulls her head out of Liam's hands, nearly smashing into Tyler, who jumps backwards and out of her way as she whirls around and storms into the master bedroom. The door closes behind her with a deliberate click.

“Dad?”

“Tidy up your room, Bryony.”

MY DAUGHTER
enters the story at last, but only just.

She's out of the hospital bed, standing and walking from Liam's car towards the yellow glow of the porch light that illuminates the oversized wooden front door, but I still cannot feel her. It must be the tranquilizers making her consciousness dull, like an old bathroom tap covered in calcium scale that could do with a good polishing up.

Gigi.

The first thing that Bryony notices is that her cousin no longer wears her hair in two plaits. In fact, her hair is so thin that there doesn't seem to be enough of it to make even one decent ponytail. It is the exact color of the carpet in the downstairs study, and hangs down on either side of her thin face like overwashed curtains that have gone limp from too much sun. She is wearing jeans and what looks like a pajama top under an old dressing gown. It's way too big for her. Bryony thinks that she looks like a bag lady.

Gigi's eyes flick up once, twice, towards where Bryony and Tyler have been standing and waiting at the front door ever since they heard the car pull up.

Bryony glances at her brother, and, as if on cue, they both step aside like a pair of hotel porters. Tyler's cheeks are red. Bryony wants to say hi, but she doesn't. Tyler clears his throat.

“All right then, Gigi, in we go, darling. I've made up a lovely bed for you in Bryony's room. You remember Bryony?” Adele seems to be trying to fill the silence all by herself. Gigi doesn't say a word. She's stopped moving.

“Up you go, sweetheart,” Adele urges, coming up behind the
stalk-thin girl and putting a hand on her shoulder. Gigi jumps and Adele makes a little gasping “oh” sound and whips her hand away.

“What's the holdup?” Liam's voice, like his wife's, is superchirpy. He walks up the path behind them, carrying Gigi's suitcase. “Let's all go inside, shall we?”

Gigi sort of falls forward into a walk again, and passes between Bryony and Tyler like a solemn ghost. Bryony breathes in the sharp sour smell of hospital disinfectant.

“Hi,” Bryony croaks out at last, but Gigi doesn't look her way. She doesn't seem to be looking at anything but her feet. And then suddenly,
everyone
is looking at Gigi's feet—Bryony and Tyler at their sentry posts on either side of the hallway, Adele with her plastered-on smile and pink eyes at the front door, and Liam, shifting his grip on the handle of the bulging suitcase—one red rubber flip-flop flopping down on the Persian entrance-hall rug, and then the other. Flip flop, flip flop. Stop. The Wildings hold a collective breath. Gigi sways a little in the middle of the hallway.

“Oh darling, sorry!” Adele says, dashing forward like a tour guide. “I didn't tell you where to go. We were just about to have supper in the kitchen. How does that sound?”

Gigi doesn't say anything. She just continues to stare down at the floor from between those lank, dirty hair curtains. The cord of the dressing gown is damp at the end from where it must've trailed on the wet grass during the walk from the garage to the house.

“We're having spaghetti Bolognese,” Bryony says, and then immediately wishes she hadn't. It seems like such a stupid thing to say to someone whom you haven't seen in nine years and whose mom was just murdered. Gigi doesn't seem bothered, though. In fact, she doesn't seem anything. She has not moved or spoken, or even glanced around at the house. She just stands and sways. Adele gives Liam a desperate what-shall-we-do look.

“I bet Gigi isn't really hungry.” Tyler finally speaks. “Are you?”

Gigi shakes her head. Finally, something she seems able to respond to.

“You want to go up to bed?” he asks, and she nods.

“Oh well, I suppose . . .” Adele gives another brittle smile.

“I'll take you up,” Bryony says, and Adele turns her lighthouse beam on her daughter.

“Lovely, Bry. You do that. Up you go, girls.”

“Come, it's this way,” Bryony says to the dressing-gowned ghost as she heads towards the stairs. When Gigi turns to follow, Bryony notices that her cousin's eyes are the same kind of blue as her own, only dead-looking. The skin around them is gray.

The journey from the front hallway up the stairs and to her bedroom seems endless, the sound of their feet on the carpet not quite loud enough to cover the thumping of Bryony's suddenly nervous pulse.

“This is it.” The room has been tidied to within an inch of its life and has never boasted so many unused surfaces, but Gigi is still looking at the floor and doesn't notice.

“You can have that bed.” Bryony points to the spare one, which now looks warm and delicious with the cherry-print duvet on it. The cover still bears a faint crease down the middle from where it has been folded up in the cupboard ever since Bryony discarded it for being too babyish. The one with the red swirls she has on her own bed looks too bright all of a sudden, the red reminding her of an overripe tomato that's gone all mushy.

Gigi shuffles across the floor, steps out of her flip-flops, and climbs into the cherry-duvet bed, hospital-sour, wet-corded dressing gown and all. Her eyes slam closed. Her eyelids twitch and then go still.
If she wants to never wear mascara like Aunty Sally,
Bryony thinks,
she won't have such a problem because her eyelashes are brown.
It would seem that not all of the women in her family are albino lab rats. She stands at the doorway and stares at her cousin. Gigi looks younger than a fourteen-year-old should look, somehow, and too skinny. She also has hardly any boobs, which Bryony thinks must be a pretty big disappointment.
I hope mine get into gear a bit more than that by the time I'm fourteen
. She gives them a tiny squeeze to check if they've started yet, and, although it hurts, there's nothing to pinch but skin.

Suddenly, Bryony is very aware that if those gray eyelids fly open, Gigi will see her staring with her hands on her nonexistent chest. It occurs to Bryony, then, that this will probably never ever be just her
room again. She and Dommie will have to sleep downstairs in the lounge when her friend comes over and Bryony will have to do all her boob checking and toenail picking in the bathroom from now on. It's a horrible realization.

She switches off the light and turns to leave but then pauses, holding her breath, to see if she can hear Gigi breathing. She can't.

Great. I'm going to be sharing my bedroom with a zombie.

Bryony sleeps. In her oversized sleeping shirt that has been washed and faded over time to delicious softness, she turns over and sighs. Bryony dreams of a field of cherries (not regular ones that grow on trees, but small perfect pairs of them suspended on a field of blue, like her old duvet cover). Each time she tries to pick a cherry to taste it, it dissolves into lint between her fingertips. A little distance away she sees Lesedi from next door, dressed in full tribal gear like an extra on that TV show about Shaka Zulu, gathering the fabric cherries and plopping them into a woven basket with no trouble at all. Bryony tries to call out, to ask Lesedi how she does it, but her voice is nothing but breath.

On the other side of the room, Gigi, lying beneath her own blue cherry field, doesn't snore or snuffle or make a single sound. Her dreams, if she has any, are still off-limits to me.

DURING BREAK,
Bryony and Dommie sit on a sunny patch of grass beside the tennis courts to eat their packed lunches. They kick their shoes off, despite it being against the school rules, and push their white-socked toes through the wire diamonds of the chain-link fence.

“She still hadn't moved a single muscle when I finally went to bed last night,” Bryony says, looking out towards the pine trees that block the tennis courts from the road. “Even when I turned on the light.” The dark, prickled arms of the trees move against the blue of the sky.

“She sounds weird,” Dommie says, and takes a bite of her sandwich. She always has lettuce and cheese on seed loaf, and Bryony doesn't know how she can stand to have the same thing every single day. Today, Bryony's got Marmite on hers, which is dull but workable, and she certainly would not complain to Adele about anything sandwich-related at the moment. Her mother is still lower-eyelid-wiping like crazy.

On top of the tears about Aunty Sally, and the strange fury that has gripped her mother since the tragedy, Bryony can tell that Adele is already starting to get stressed out about zombie Gigi. This morning at breakfast Bryony heard Adele ask Liam:
Is it healthy for her to just carry on sleeping like that?
And he said:
It's probably the drugs, Addy.

“It's probably the drugs,” Bryony says, and Dommie's brown eyes go big.

“She's on drugs?”

“Not like grass or anything, just medication ones from the hospital.”

“Oh.”

“When I left this morning she was still sleeping.”

“Doesn't she have to go to school?”

“I don't know. Probably not for a while, what with her mom dying and everything.”

“Shame, hey.”

“Ja,” Bryony agrees, shaking her head, “shame.” She tries to echo her friend's sympathetic tone, but she just keeps imagining Gigi breathing out that horrible chemical smell into her bedroom all day. Ick.