What You Become (8 page)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Sent: Saturday, 17 March, 03:55:06

Subject: Re: re: Send Help

Is the gravy story true or did you pull it from my dreams? Rosie, that is the best thing that’s ever happened to anyone. Are you sure nobody recorded it? Ophelia did a little bit of wee when I told her she was laughing so much. She says Will’s version was quite different . . .

Sorry about your mum. I’ll keep my fingers and toes and ears crossed for something useful on Wednesday. Chin up, my lovely.

Mr Whippy! That’s it! Ophelia’s not impressed, but I am. Next time I see him walk past the café, I’m going to call him that. I can’t wait.

You are so dumb. Kiaru likes you! Why else would he have shared his granny roll with you? That’s why they’ve asked you to join their group. It must be. And you like him, don’t you? I can tell. Why don’t you ever just admit the way you feel? There’s nothing wrong with liking someone, you know. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Wouldn’t you want to know if someone liked you? Wouldn’t you be pleased? Dad says English people ruin their own lives hiding their feelings, and reading your emails I think he’s right . . .

LIVE TRUE, ROSIE BLOOM.

Ti x

Sixteen

Kiaru was dressed in baggy grey jogging bottoms and a white T-shirt, doing something weird on the grass outside the summer house when I arrived, and there was no sign of Alisha, though she was the one that had asked me to go over. I watched Kiaru as he took slow steps barefoot, and made winding, smooth hand movements as though I weren’t there. His hair was in a low ponytail.

It had been disconcerting how happy Mum and Dad were when I asked if I could come here, especially when I explained that it was to work.

‘Oh, Rosie, that sounds wonderful!’ Mum said, and though I pretended to sulk because it wasn’t Ti’s, really I was excited, and as she pulled me on to the bed with her, laughing, for a minute she was her old self: in bed with a cold or a hangover or needing a nap.

‘Capoeira,’ Kiaru said, when he finally stopped, and I was surprised to hear he was out of breath. I asked him to spell it. Apparently, sped up, his moves were deadly. Apparently, sped up, it would be quite terrifying. There was no denying he moved nicely, though. Even the way he put on his shoes and threw his shirt over his narrow shoulders was stylish.

‘Alisha’s ill,’ he said. ‘Food poisoning. Whole family.’

My pulse rate shot up. What would we talk about? And why hadn’t he cancelled? Mum had jumped to the same conclusion as Ti about the whole thing: that he liked me.

‘You’re a cool girl, after all, and he sounds like a cool boy,’ she had said, and as soon as I’d stopped cringing I felt sad that she hadn’t called me pretty. Wouldn’t that be the regular thing to say?
You’re a pretty girl . . .
Would anyone in the world ever think that about me? Mum said it was an unenlightened thing to care about, but I’d heard her getting on at Dad when he didn’t compliment her after she’d put on a dress or curled her hair.

Kiaru and me stood on the lawn near the summer house looking at each other, and without Alisha it was awkward. What if he had wanted to cancel but hadn’t known my number? Should I offer to leave? He turned and walked to the back door, then lifted the brush mat under an arch draped in yellow roses, and wiped the key he found there on his jogging bottoms. Unlocking the door like it was no big deal, he held it open for me.

Inside the mystery house was nothing like I expected, and I began to understand his reluctance. Magazines piled against the walls and boxes overflowing with various black pieces of technology and winding cables. A huge kitchen, all chrome like you’d see in a restaurant, but without the accompanying gleam. The sink was full of plates and saucepans and there were plastic wrappers all over the sides. Piles of microwave dinner trays.

It was kind of impressive how he didn’t apologize for the mess. Maybe it wasn’t his mess or he was too proud, or maybe his dad was one of those power parents who drilled their kids with mantras like: Never apologize, never explain.

‘Forgot to put the recycling out again. Does it smell bad?’ Kiaru asked, which was
almost
an apology. ‘We clean, but it’s like there’s this smell underneath everything I can’t get rid of.’

‘I can’t smell anything,’ I lied. ‘Toast, surface spray . . .’

It wasn’t that it stank, but he was right: there was an unidentifiable dankness underneath the more conventional kitchen smells. My house smelt of garlic and onions from Dad’s never-ending supply of pasta, but at least it was recognizable.

Kiaru made pints of tea and buttered a pile of toast, and then I followed him up the stairs, trying hard not to spill my drink though new stains would have been difficult to pick out. Neither of us said anything, but my mind was so busy I hardly noticed. Why was I here if he didn’t want to talk? Could he actually like me?

Dust stirred as we climbed the stairs and my nose began to itch.

‘Hoover broke,’ he said, and I hoped I wouldn’t sneeze. Imagine if he thought I’d done it on purpose? As a comment on the cleanliness of his home. I peeked in open doors as we passed – unmade beds, strewn-about clothes, black bags of fabric – each was like the box room that ends up filled with everyone’s junk. I’d assumed it would be like Charlie’s house, modern and airy, with fresh flowers in vases around the house.

Two flights of stairs and we arrived at an attic room, like Mum and Dad’s except you could fit ten of theirs in here. Joey could have skated around it, playing British Bulldogs. Or turned it into a cinema. The whole roof area of the house had been transformed into one beautiful room with eight skylights. After that, it had been rammed to the rafters with crap.

Boxes spilled over with fabrics, and dressmaking models perched on top. Balls of wool and rolls of netting. Fishing rods and keepnets and boxes of tackle. A free-standing bath with wooden legs.

Inside a circle of burnt out tealights stood a gold Buddha statue on a silky sheet, and as Kiaru lit a stick of incense and replaced the candles, I wondered if I was about to become his first human sacrifice.

It wouldn’t be the worst place to die. Sunlight shot through the swirling dust in thick lasers, and as Kiaru sat down in a glowing spot I sat with him. It was warm there, the sun dazzling. Lighting the final candle, he looked at me, expectant, and I squinted back.

‘I have something to tell you, but first I want you to relax.’

That sounded like a recipe for unrelaxation. Like the opposite of what someone would say if you were going for a massage or something.

‘Alisha thinks that you’re not a very relaxed person.’

‘Okay.’

Was I
supposed
to feel relaxed?
When?
All the time? I’d had no idea. My nose was itchy, and all I could think was how wonderful it would be to really honk it out into a tissue, but Kiaru’s intense tone prevented me from asking something as ordinary as where the loo was. Also, if he liked me, I didn’t want him thinking about me in relation to the toilet.

‘Have you ever tried meditating?’ he asked, and I froze. Was he doing a move?

His skin looked firm and smooth, and I hoped the light was having the same effect on me.

‘It really helps me think, if I’m stuck or . . .
confused
. . . It clears my mind. Helps me concentrate.’

His expression was endearing as he talked; he seemed really eager to help me.

Did I seem like I needed help?

‘D’you want to try?’

‘Okay,’ I said, and his lips curled in the smallest smile. He took a deep breath in, and then out, and automatically I copied him.

‘I find it helps if I close my eyes,’ he said, before breathing long and slow again through his nose. The dust was swirling in and out, and I regretted not asking for a tissue before we got started, because the toilet wasn’t sexy but neither was blowing mucus across the room at forty miles per hour.

‘Pay attention to your breath. Feel it come into your body, the first moment that it hits. Maybe it’s the edge of your nostrils or maybe it’s higher up. And then out again.’

His voice was deeper than mine, but softer, like he was driving it with his foot only gently on the pedal. I matched my breath to his, trying to ignore the tickle stretching from the deepest darkest part of my nostril to the back of my throat.

‘Try not to think about anything: just focus on the feeling of your breath, the way it fills up your lungs. In and out.’

The backs of my eyes tingled. The air coming into my body was thick with fibres and skin flakes and ancient crumbs of crumbs and there was nothing I could do. Kiaru’s eyes flew open as I full-body sneezed into the golden air around us.

‘Sorry!’ I jumped up, face blazing. What must I have looked like just then? Had he seen the mercury filling in my molar? The lumpy back of my tongue? Was he covered in my spit and phlegm and germs?

‘It’s all right. It’s natural. Just a sneeze. Do you want some tissue?’

I nodded, and he reached into his back pocket to take out a soft bundle of the stuff the way he did when I was covered in gravy, and I decided he was the sweetest boy in the world.

‘I’m sorry, I was really getting into it. I was trying . . . I just . . .’

Blowing my nose was such a relief that I did it right there, then wished I hadn’t.

‘God, sorry. I’m not usually this disgusting.’

‘You’re not disgusting,’ Kiaru said matter-of-factly. ‘You just worry too much. Do you need more tissue? Do you want to go back outside?’

‘I want to finish the meditation.’

Resuming the position, I listened to Kiaru’s soft voice, and I thought how odd it was to be here, with him, doing this, and then he reminded me to focus on my breathing, and I did, and then I thought about the way he’d said I wasn’t disgusting, and wondered if it meant anything, and I couldn’t resist opening my eyes again. I admired his angular face, and narrow boned nose, and then he brought me back to my breathing, and round and round we went like that.

‘Okay, last breaths,’ he said. ‘You’re meant to have a little bell that you ring, to come out of meditation, but I don’t have one, so you can just open your eyes.’

I blinked, as though I had opened mine at the same time as him.

‘It doesn’t work straight away. You have to build it, like a muscle. If you keep practising, you’ll see. But do you feel more relaxed? I feel more relaxed.’

Kiaru lifted his knees up, looping his arms round them, and his fingers slotted against each other, long and slim, and he was preparing to ask me his question.

‘Rosie?’

I nodded, and my face had that oversensitive feeling, and I knew the slightest thing would send it blooming, when every blood vessel seemed to tingle with anticipation of looming embarrassment.

‘Okay, so . . . the question . . . Alisha hasn’t really got food poisoning . . .’

There was a kind of pressure building in the room, and my stomach dipped like I’d gone over a bump in the car.

‘And this might sound dumb.’ He was looking at me very intensely, and my blood pumped at an alarming rate. Mum and Ti were right!

‘But . . . she really likes you.’

My heart did a double take.

‘I mean, she’s sort of
in love
with you.’

She was sort of
in love
with me.
She
was sort of
in love
with
me
?

Kiaru looked at me, excited to hear what I would say, but I was pre-language.

‘So . . . ?’ he said, in the same tone I’d heard dozens of times in the dinner hall as kids confessed their friends’ feelings to each other.

Disappointment was like gaining a hundred stone. I was heavy enough to fall through the attic floor.

His brown eyes were so pretty.

‘So you and Alisha
aren’t
a couple,’ I said, almost to myself.

‘No. And you aren’t . . . Ti really wasn’t . . . You weren’t . . .’

I wanted to twist down into the earth like a drill, and never be seen again.

‘She was
so
sure you were in the closet.’

‘Is that why you wanted to be friends?
She
wanted to be friends,’ I corrected, and I couldn’t keep the sadness from my voice.

Kiaru said no, but he didn’t meet my eye. Silence yawned around us, and now it was awkward, deeply awkward, because how much had my disappointment shown? It must have been all over my face when he was telling me. I fiddled with a splinter sticking up from the floor for a few seconds, then stood, realizing Kiaru wasn’t going to say anything else. For him, the point of the day, and me being there, was over.

‘Tell her I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t lead her on,’ I said, and then I did what I was best at.

I ran away.

Seventeen

Sunday afternoon Joey begged me to go with him and Dad to the aquarium, but I couldn’t face it. All those creatures in their tanks, what was the point? I went upstairs to lie with Mum instead. She had new music to play me, so we spent hours listening together.

Thinking over the time I’d spent with Kiaru and Alisha, I felt embarrassed. Had I led Alisha on? I tried to think of everything I’d said and done, but it was hard to understand how you came across from inside yourself.

Maybe it was because I blushed when she talked to me. Or because I laughed at her jokes. But I was just trying to be friendly. I laughed at Ti’s jokes too. I was an easy laugher! Really, though, what had she seen in me? Beneath the blushing and the nerves and my puppy fat, had I got . . .
something
?

Mum found a dim-witted new series about Californian rich kids for us to watch, and I ate the latest grapes Dad had bought, ignoring the looks Mum was shooting at me. She knew something was wrong, but it wasn’t her style to push. She’d told me she was feeling down, hoping to draw a confession, but I resisted. My problems were small compared to hers, that’s what I had to remember. Dad didn’t even have to say it any more. I’d seen the headaches come when she got upset.

I popped grapes in my mouth until Mum put them out of reach, worried about my digestion. I was desperate to talk to Ti, but how could I explain my fear of having no friends again when she’d been forced to attend The Bridge?