The Taming of Lilah May (11 page)

The peace in our household doesn't last long.

I'm upstairs surfing Accessorize and deciding which bracelets to order online for Bindi, and then I freeze with my hands over the keys, because my parents have exploded into yet another argument downstairs and I can't concentrate. I creep down the stairs and sit on the bottom step.

‘You don't even talk about Jay any more!' Mum is screaming. She's still got half a clown outfit on, which is kind of bizarre as she's taken off the wig and her normal, sensible, short Princess Di hair looks really odd above the big white ruff, red clown boots and white suit with big red buttons up it.

‘He might as well not exist. All you care about is your bloody lions!'

Dad is sitting at the kitchen table with his arms folded over his head, perhaps to field off the imaginary bullets coming from Mum's direction, but at this, he stares up at her with shock in his tired blue eyes.

‘You're talking rubbish, Rachel,' he says. His voice is low and cracks when he says Mum's name. ‘Of course I think about him. Every day. I just don't go on about it like you do.'

Mum sees me sitting in the hall and lets out a big sigh. I watch her deflate and come towards
me with her frilly arms outstretched.

‘Don't,' I say, dodging the embrace. ‘I'm so not in the mood for being groped by a clown.'

‘Oh, so
you're
going to start on me now, are you?' says Mum, her voice going all wobbly. ‘That's right. I forgot that you always side with your father. Well, just go ahead, both of you. Just lay into me like you always do.'

She stalks back into the kitchen and turns her back to us at the sink, throwing cups and plates into the soapy water.

Dad gets up and rubs his palms over his eyes. He glances at my mum's rigid back and then at my sulky face, and he throws his hands up like he's surrendering, and slams out of the house to go to the pub.

I watch my mother's back for a couple of moments and I think that now would be a good time for her to turn round and calm down, and then maybe, just maybe, I could tell her that I miss Jay too, and that they're not the only ones who feel screwed up and messed about and emotionally wrecked. And that I'm so angry most of the time from bottling all this stuff up that I give myself ice-cream headaches. But she doesn't turn round, even though she knows
I'm still there, and the tension hovers between us like some sort of giant angry dragonfly, so I stomp upstairs and go back online instead.

I crank up Planet Rock on my digital radio and I order Bindi an armful of jangly blue bracelets because she likes that sort of thing, and then I go onto my page on Facebook and look at all the boring, non-important things that my friends have been getting up to. And then I notice that I've got a message in my inbox, so I click on it to see who's invited me to some ridiculous event in Milton Keynes or something, because that's what it usually is, and instead there's a message from somebody who looks a bit familiar. And when I open up the message, the chair seems to buckle underneath me, and I lurch to one side and clutch the desk while my head swims and buzzes.

The message is from one of Jay's band mates.

Don't get your hopes up,
it begins.
But I had a missed call on my phone last night. And, the thing is – it's from Jay's number. I tried to call back, but it just went to voicemail. I left a message anyway.

I'm shaking so much that I have to get up and go and lie on the bed for a moment.

I hug my knees and rock back and forth, and I think about the last two years, and about my parents
screaming at each other, and about all the times we went out looking for Jay, and about the huge police search just after he went missing, and the feature they did on television about missing people.

Then I get up and read the Facebook message again, just in case I've imagined it. But it's still there, so I go downstairs to where my mother is standing at the sink with her shoulders looking sad in the weird clown outfit, and I stand in the middle of the kitchen for a moment because I just don't know how to say what I've just read without making her scream, or faint, or get her hopes up.

Mum turns around with a start.

‘Didn't realise you were there,' she said. ‘Sorry about before. I'm just feeling a bit sad today. Somebody at one of my parties said that I was one of the most miserable children's entertainers they had ever seen, and it kind of upset me. I used to be really good. Never mind. I'll make us a hot chocolate in a moment, if you like. I've even got marshmallows.'

Then she takes a closer look at my ghostly-white face, and she puts down the plate she's holding and grips me by the shoulders.

‘You're frightening me,' she says. ‘Lilah. What is it?'

I can't speak. I knew this would happen, so I've printed out a copy of the email.

I pass it to her. Then I catch my mother by the elbow just before she falls.

Mum rings Dad at the pub on his mobile and we go straight to the police with the email.

All three of us, even though it's now getting on for eleven o'clock at night.

Dad drives. He keeps glancing anxiously at Mum, who's as pale as death and gripping onto the door handle like she's going to break every time Dad takes a sharp corner.

Dad's teeth are gritted and he's muttering to himself as he navigates the large roundabouts.

I'm sitting in the back seat wrapped in a winter
coat, even though it's a mild spring night. I can't seem to stop shivering and my bones feel damp.

None of us speak.

We all want to say the same thing, but it's like if we let the words out it will jinx it, and then we'll be back to square one.

I think it, though, all the way to the station.

He could still be alive.

The first time Jay stays out all night, Mum sits in the kitchen in the dark with a cold cup of tea in front of her, and she waits.

She's still waiting in the early hours of the morning when I stagger downstairs for a drink, because I've woken up all stuck to the sheets in the sunshine streaming through my window.

‘What are you doing?' I say. I'm kind of stupid first thing in the morning. I mean, it's obvious what she's doing. She's sitting at the table chewing her fingernails and staring towards the clock and then at the front door.

‘Lilah, look at the state of you,' says Mum.

I glance into the wooden-framed mirror that hangs over the kitchen dresser. Yeah, I do look a bit of a mess. But then, I'm not yet thirteen, so I don't much care that my hair's sticking up on one side and there are yellow crusts of sleep stuck in the corners of my eyes. My feet are bare and my blue stripy pyjama trousers are starting to fall down around my not-yet-developed hips.

I pull two soft white squares of bread from a packet and stick them into the toaster.

‘Do you want any?' I say.

Mum smiles, and shakes her head.

‘Couldn't eat a thing,' she says. She watches as I plunge my knife into a jar of gloopy cherry jam and then smother the toast with it.

‘That's expensive, make it last,' she says, like she's on autopilot, but she's looking towards the front door again.

‘Where's Dad?' I say, stuffing soggy toast into my mouth. It's Saturday morning and he's usually at home doing the garden or compiling some sort of complicated meat dish for dinner later on.

‘Shyama has gone into labour,' says Mum. ‘He could be some time.'

I roll my eyes. Shyama is one of the lionesses at Morley Zoo. Dad's looked after her ever since she was a tiny cub with big floppy paws and a tendency to fall over and have to be nudged back up again by her mother.

‘And where's Jay?' I say, all casual.

I know full well that he didn't come home last night.

I was up listening for him half the night.

Missing the sound of Manic Street Preachers through the wall.

Missing our chats. We never seem to have them any more.

‘I'm losing my big brother,' I say, more to myself than Mum, but she hears and gives me a sharp look.

‘Why would you say that?'

I shrug, and pour hot water into a mug with a teabag in it.

‘Dunno,' I say. ‘Just feels like it sometimes.'

Mum's giving me her full attention now.

‘He's growing up, that's all,' she says. ‘You can't expect him to want to play with you, like when you were both little. He's probably got girls on his mind now that he's nearly sixteen.'

It's my turn to give
her
a sharp look.

Jay's never mentioned girls. I've never seen him hang out with any either. I don't much like the idea of him confiding in other girls.

He's supposed to confide in me.

‘Don't think so,' I say, but Mum's getting up and stretching. She's got dark rings beneath her eyes and her blonde hair is sticking up in short peaks where she's run her hands through it all night.

‘I think I'd better stay at home today and ask Jenny to fill in for me,' she says. Jenny is Mum's one member of staff. She does the children's entertaining when Mum can't make it. ‘I can't concentrate on anything until he comes home.'

She goes upstairs for a shower, and I gulp my tea and flick through a magazine at the kitchen table, like I've taken Mum's place and now it's me who's waiting for Jay to get home.

About two hours later, Mum's outside pruning pots of petunias to try and keep herself from panicking, and I've had a bath and come downstairs to do homework at the kitchen table, when there's a very quiet click at the front door and a key turns in the lock in a way which makes me think that the person turning it doesn't want to be seen or heard. So I get up and go and stand in the hall with
my hands on my hips like an angry parent.

Jay jumps when he sees me standing there.

‘Jeez, Liles, you nearly gave me a heart attack,' he says.

He looks dreadful.

His face is chalk-white and his hair has stopped being shiny and flippy and just lies across his pale forehead in dank, black, greasy strands. His eyes are empty and staring, and his black jeans are stained with something white.

There's that smell coming off him. I can't work out what it is, except that it doesn't smell like Jay.

‘Don't worry, Mum's in the garden,' I say. ‘But she's been up all night waiting for you.'

Jay shakes his head.

‘Christ,' he says. ‘They treat me like a little kid. That's when they can be bothered to actually stay in the house for more than an hour.'

‘Maybe they worry because you don't tell them where you're going,' I suggest, but it's the wrong thing to say.

Jay pushes past me and bolts upstairs like a crazed black antelope or something.

‘Jay!' I call after him. ‘Do you want some breakfast?'

There's no reply.

He looks like he hasn't eaten for a week.

I stand in the kitchen feeling like a stupid little sister, and then Mum comes in and takes one look at my face and rushes upstairs, and there's one hell of a row, which ends with Dad being hauled out of Morley Zoo and summoned home with a face like an angry lion. And there's a ‘family conference', which is dreadful, because Jay won't speak and just sits sunk in his chair with his hair falling over his face, and I feel like a spare part and can't speak either. And Mum and Dad just go on and on firing endless questions at Jay, with their voices getting higher and more hysterical, and he won't answer any of them.

That evening he stays up in his room.

Mum fiddles around with her uneaten spaghetti, winding strings of meaty pasta around her fork and then letting them unravel again in an anti-clockwise direction, until Dad reaches out, takes her fork and puts it on her plate, like she's a little child.

‘Lilah,' he says.

Uh-oh. I know what's coming, and I don't like it.

‘We need to know what Jay's going through,' he says. ‘Obviously something is wrong. But he won't talk to us. Maybe he'll talk to you?'

I'm peeling the lid off a raspberry yoghurt, but I look up at that.

‘He doesn't really talk to me either, any more,' I say. ‘Not about anything important, anyway.'

‘But you used to be so close,' says Mum. Her eyes are wet with tears. ‘Won't you at least try?'

I put my yoghurt down uneaten and scrape back my chair.

‘I'll try,' I say. ‘But he's probably just going to yell at me.'

Jay doesn't yell at me.

He doesn't get the chance.

I go up to his room and this time, for some reason, I decide not to knock.

There's a part of me that's already starting to feel angry.

I'm not an angry child yet, so it's like a baby alien has just set up home in my stomach and started waving his arms and legs about. It feels strange.