What You Become (3 page)

Watching telly in the living room, I couldn’t follow the show. Sometimes Ti could sneak a call, if her parents were busy with washing tablecloths or preparing dishes for the café the next day. If not she had to wait until they had gone to bed, and then Dad got mad about her ringing late and waking Mum, which was completely unfair because what else could she do? A queasy feeling told me she didn’t want to call at all.

Dad got home around ten, out of breath and gasping for a drink of water. He had biro notes scribbled all over his hands, and a smudge of ink on his nose, and he hugged me when I opened the oven and took out a jacket potato for him. His hair was completely grey, but he still wore it long and in a side parting, like his and Mum’s music heroes.

‘I’ve been on the phone all day,’ he said, chugging from the tap before going into one of his speeches about the indignity of begging for money at his age. I wasn’t entirely sure what his current campaign was, something about greedy landlords and second homes, but I hoped he might notice something was the matter with me and ask if I wanted to talk, like he did when Joey was quiet, but he just set about buttering his potato, unloading the dryer between mouthfuls, and then making up Mum’s night-time tray, and I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt.

It had been six months now without a diagnosis. An invisible disease that meant headaches and sleep that didn’t refresh and, for me and Joe, endlessly being told to
shhhhh
. Mum used to teach Psychology at the university and make salsa verde and tuna steak, and go for runs around the castle. Now she rarely got out of bed. Dad and me shared the chores we couldn’t avoid between us, while Joey simply made more for us to do.

Mum had loads of visitors at first, but people stopped coming round when it didn’t seem like she was getting better. She said she didn’t mind, that she was worn out with everybody joking how they could do with a few weeks in bed, or saying how their colleague claimed to have the same thing, except they were just lazy.

‘I bet they say the same about me,’ she would say after they’d gone. ‘Stupid invisible illness!’

She would roll over then, exhausted by the interaction and fall into a deep and sudden sleep, as if to prove she for one wasn’t faking. Her eyes looked bruised with shadow, and I couldn’t imagine her laughing, and I
missed
her. Dad was great, but he didn’t know what being a teenage girl was like. When I finally got my period over Christmas, he sent me in to the Co-op to buy my first box of tampons for myself, even though Charlie’s handsome older brother Will was working the till, and would know for certain I had a
vagina
.

‘There’s absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about,’ Dad had said, his ears bright red, as I jumped in the car with the offending article and ordered him to drive, for god’s sake, drive. Mum didn’t get embarrassed about anything. The flamethrowers were definitely a gift from Dad.

Mum’s illness was the main reason that on Sunday morning, after nightmares about crashing in a police car Ti was driving, I’d woken in a blind panic. The illness fed on effort and stress. It was sinister and unpredictable, and it liked to punish Mum when she tried to defeat it. Like on my birthday, when she’d seemed better, and asked if I wanted to go into town to choose a gift.

It was like old times – walking down the high street together, breathing out mist as we talked about what to get Dad and Joey for Christmas. Her hair was the colour of horse chestnuts, same as mine, and it looked so pretty against her cream woolly hat that I decided to grow my hair super long too. It had just passed my shoulders for the first time since I was a little kid.

We drank mochas at The Jam because the music’s always good there, and everything was fine until Mum fainted at WHSmith while I was choosing a new album. Dad had to come home from university to pick us up, and when she was safely back in bed he told me I should have known better.

‘We can’t be selfish, Rosie; we’ve got to be a team. I need you on my side, because at the moment, I’m afraid your mum doesn’t know what’s best for her.’

The whole fortnight after, she didn’t make it out of bed once. What if
I’d
been brought home by the police? I had to be more careful. No more silly risk-taking. I picked flowers from the garden, then dug out my art box so Joey could make a get-well card. She mustn’t think we’d given up on her too.

At half past ten Dad insisted I go up to bed as usual, because it was a school night, he said, but really it was so he could use the internet uninterrupted. He was addicted to ranting in forums, though he claimed it was an important part of his activism.

‘Can I stay up a bit longer?’ I said. ‘Ti’s going to call.’

‘What can you possibly have left to say to each other? You’ve been together all day.’

This was his usual grumble, and I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that we hadn’t been together all day – that was the problem – but I wasn’t keen to let on that Ti was in trouble again if I didn’t have to. Mum and Dad already had their doubts about our friendship.

‘
Bed
,’ he snapped, running out of patience without warning, like he did sometimes lately, but there was no way I would get to sleep if I didn’t know how Ti was, so I lay on the landing instead, looking up at the paper moon lightshade, willing the phone to ring.

‘Swings, midnight,’ Ti’s voice whispered when it finally did, and I was so relieved to hear her and know she wasn’t mad with me that I forgot all about my promise to be more careful, and after setting my alarm for fifty-five minutes’ time, I fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

Six

The Beacon was at the top of a hill precisely between my terrace and Ti’s estate, and we often met there at midnight. Ti’s parents were unconscious then, which meant she had more freedom. Her family were even more demanding than mine, and when she wasn’t at school they had her polishing cutlery or straining tomato sauce or laminating new menus for the café.

Ti was there already, sitting on top of the slide, in her black jeans and dolphin top, looking out at the view. She’d taken her make-up off, and let her hair down from the teddy-bear buns it had been in when I’d seen her briefly at school, and she looked younger without the usual trimmings.

Seeing me, she bowed her head, and my stomach churned. I scrambled up the red climbing net to where she sat, cross-legged, picking at what was left of her nail varnish.

‘Hey,’ she said, but she didn’t smile or hug me as usual, and she seemed to be in her own world more than mine. She shoved a chunk of her thick curly hair behind an ear, and stared at the little black spots of varnish on her fingernails, and I waited.

From the top of the slide at the Beacon, you had the best view in town. You could see where the river met the sea, and the boats swayed in the harbour, as well as the cranes in the docks just round the headland. I had more pictures of this view at sunset than I knew what to do with, but I couldn’t stop taking them.

Mum had made me sign four before she had them framed and hung them on the stairs to their bedroom in the attic. Walking up there I felt proud, like I was already a famous photographer.

‘What happened?’ I managed eventually, and Ti shook her head, and took a breath.

‘I’m out. Chase told Kes that I threatened her.’

‘No!’

‘The police gave me a warning, and Dad’s not talking to me.’

‘Oh, Ti.’

‘I feel so stupid. I was so mad about them getting rid of Ophelia, and now I’ve gone and got myself chucked out too.’

Ti breathed out her nose in a disheartened way, and I held her hand, and picked at the black speck of nail varnish at the centre of her thumbnail because I didn’t know what to say.

‘So what happened?
Exactly
.’

‘Chase was in Kes’s office when I got there, sitting on a seat behind his desk with him – in case I didn’t already know it was two against one – and he started talking about how seriously Fairfields takes the safety of its teachers and students, and how there’s zero tolerance to violence or the threat of violence at this school . . .’

‘And what was Chase doing?’

‘I don’t know. I daren’t look at her. It was so embarrassing. I thought they might have found the poo, and that I was going to have to explain it. I didn’t dare look at anyone, I just stared at my lap the whole time.

‘And then Kes brought up the police, and the seriousness of trespassing on people’s private property, and I felt like a really creepy stalker, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make things worse. I couldn’t think of anything that would explain it, because how could I explain about nightwandering?’

I squeezed her hand, wanting to make her feel better, and like I definitely wasn’t thinking
I told you so
because I’d warned her not to go near the house, and she hadn’t listened to me, and now here we were.

‘The way Kes told it, I was in Chase’s garden to intimidate her. That’s why I went there. But we were just messing around! I was laughing the whole time, wasn’t I?’

‘And she said you threatened her? What did she say you said?’

Ti nodded sadly, watching my hands as I turned hers over, looking for more varnish to pick. ‘I can’t remember. It was like having an out-of-body experience. Like, all this time I’ve been determined to make it through to the end of school, but underneath I’d known really that I wouldn’t, that there’d be
something
, and it was so weird. I felt like I was watching myself on telly.’

I was just holding her hand now, and our palms were sweating, but I didn’t want to let go.

‘It’s because of Ophelia. They think I’m the same as her. I wish she wasn’t my sister sometimes, I really do. She ruins everything.’

I kept my mouth firmly shut.

Ophelia had been expelled a week ago after a culmination of things, but the first big one was an incident last month at the
Grease
rehearsals when Charlie ended up with a split lip. Ophelia said it was an accident, that she’d lost her footing in the dance they were learning, and that she hadn’t meant to knock anyone off the stage, but Charlie was having none of it, and, in the end, the tension got so bad that Chase told Ophelia she didn’t have the right attitude required to put on a production.

‘Honestly, Rosie, it was so odd. I didn’t realize what was going on. I mean, I still thought I was just being told off. I was waiting for the punishment, but Kes was talking about my general attitude, and lateness. My marks. That I’ve not written a single word in my Geography workbook.

‘He had to really spell it out to me. “So, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Titania.” And I was like,
Okay, phew!
And I jumped out my seat, thinking of coming to find you in English, and he must have known I didn’t understand, because he said it again really slowly: “I’m going to have to ask you to leave school property. We think The Bridge might be a better fit.”

‘And it was really sad because I’d always thought he liked me. He gave me bourbons if I got sent to him, and let me chat about stuff instead of doing whatever boring work I’d been given . . .’

The Bridge was where they sent kids that couldn’t get on with the rules and regulations of normal school. The idea was that once you’d improved a bit you could return to a conventional school, if you could find one that would take you, but all the kids there were such troublemakers that hardly anyone got the chance. Ophelia had lasted three days before she’d begged her mum and dad to let her be ‘home-schooled’, i.e. work full time in the café.

‘Kes actually came with me, you know. He escorted me off the property, like I was dangerous.’

My anxiety was building as it dawned on me that there was something I could do to help, something real, which Ti would do in a blink if this situation was reversed. I could confess that I had been there too.

‘Can they actually do that though?’ I said, stalling. ‘Can they just chuck you off whenever they feel like it? I mean, don’t they have to speak to your parents?’

‘He already had. Mum knew all about it when I got home. She’d refused to come and get me because Monday’s Pensioners’ Special.’

Ti looked so worried fiddling with her silver seahorse necklace. She put it in her mouth then dropped it, then put it in her mouth again. Staring out at the horizon, she didn’t seem to see anything, and I squeezed her hand, but it was limp in mine.

‘Ti?’ I said, moving my face to be near hers, wanting her to come back. ‘Hey.’

Her brown laughing eyes were so blank that I froze.

‘
Hey
,’ I said, again, rubbing her arm.

‘I’m no good, Rosie,’ she said, head sinking.

‘Don’t say that, Ti. Of course you are. Hey, Ti, don’t say that!’ But she wouldn’t lift her head no matter what I did.

‘I’m broken.’

‘You aren’t broken, Ti, Chase lied. Listen to me, you aren’t broken!’

‘I hate myself,’ she said, and I had to strain to hear her.

‘Why do you even want to be friends with me?’ she said, finally, in a quiet voice I wasn’t used to, and I felt my eyes widen with the shock of it. ‘I know I bring this stuff on myself. I could hear you calling me back, but I just went on anyway. And then . . . It’s like I want bad stuff to happen, Rosie. I mean, what’s wrong with me? Is it in my blood?’

Her voice was so small, I couldn’t bear it. ‘It’s not in your blood, Ti, you just made a mistake. We can fix it. Listen to me, we can fix it.’

I thought back to Saturday afternoon when she’d made us go down this slide together though we were much too big. Little kids had laughed while parents tutted, and I wished we could rewind to that moment. I wanted to slide down the metal chute clutching her waist, my hair lifting from the back of my neck, and later, when we walked home to her house for tea, I wanted to tell her
no
, I wouldn’t go to Chase’s garden, because it was a stupid idea, and I needed to be sensible for the sake of my mum, that she couldn’t afford to get into any more trouble.

But I hadn’t done that. I’d gone with her, and laughed along at her tricks, and it wasn’t fair I should get away with it.

‘I’ll tell Kes I was with you,’ I said before I could change my mind.