Zelah Green (10 page)

‘Nice place Erin’s got here, isn’t it?’ she says. It takes me a moment to remember who Erin is.

‘It’s OK,’ I say. My head is spinning. Heather takes up a lot of air space with her bright colours and heady perfume. I open the window.

‘I hear you’ve settled in well,’ she says. ‘And Erin told me about what you achieved earlier. Well done, you!’

I give a weak smile. I love Heather but I’m getting tired of bright shiny perfect people coming into my room. I want to huddle up in the window seat, like Caro does, and think about Mum before she got ill and Dad before Mum died.

I want Lib and Alice to come back from their shopping expedition and tip out their CDs and charity-shop bargains all over my floor (well away from my feet, of course).

I even want to go and see how Caro is doing. The Manson has been turned off and there’s silence, but I sense that she’s still in there. Listening through the wall. The thought is oddly comforting.

‘Does my stepmother really know I’m here?’ I ask Heather.

To give her credit, Heather refrains from flushing or fiddling, like Fran did.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I could hardly carry on
pretending you were in the local hospital or she’d have turned up there to visit you.’

‘How did she take it?’ I say.

‘Surprisingly well,’ says Heather. ‘But I warn you – she’ll want to come here and see you soon.’

I look back into the room from where I’ve been staring out of the window and it seems different, smaller, not mine. I wonder who will stay in here when I’ve gone.

‘She can’t make me go home, can she?’ I say. My voice has shrunk to a wobbly whisper.

Heather sighs.

‘Your stepmum can do whatever she likes, kiddo,’ she says. ‘She is your only legal guardian, after all, unless your father manages to . . .’

She starts and puts her hand over her mouth.

‘What?’ I say. ‘Manages to what? Do you know where he is?’

Heather zips up her leather jacket and gives me her bright smile.

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘I’m just wittering on as usual.’

I miss Dad so much that I feel sick.

Heather and Fran leave soon after and I wave them off from the front doorstep with the Doc standing behind me, but this time I’m glad to see the red Porsche roar away.

Josh comes up the steps with bundles of steaming paper under his arm.

‘Fish and chips,’ he says. ‘Thought we’d give Caro’s birthday one last shot.’

I run upstairs and wash my face another thirty-one times. I screw on my longest, most expensive dangly bright blue earrings and put on my favourite cut-off jeans and a tight white T-shirt.

It’s one in the eye for Fran. If she saw the length of my earrings she’d know that I was happy to see her walk out of my life once and for all.

I toss my head.

My defiant earrings sparkle and swing against my neck.

The girls come down with their shopping bags as I’m helping Josh divide out the fish and chips on to plates and wishing I could sneak some of the gooey ones stuck on the paper into my mouth but that would be major Germ Alert.

‘That market was awesome,’ says Lib, dumping carrier bags on to the kitchen table. Alice is smiling in her uncertain way and there’s even a small spot of colour on her cheese-slicer cheekbones.

‘Presents,’ says Lib. She’s thought of everyone.

‘For you, you bossy old cow,’ she says to the Doc, passing her a tea towel with ‘I’m the boss’ emblazoned in red on the front.

‘And you, hippy man,’ she says to Josh. His
present is a tiny horn hanging from a black leather cord.

‘Right on,’ says Josh, tying it round his neck and giving her his sweet, sleepy smile.

‘Princess,’ says Lib, handing me a package. She’s bought me a selection pack of cheap cleaning products that say ‘99p’ and a pink sparkly magic wand.

‘Perfect,’ I say, brandishing the wand in her direction.

‘And these are for Silent Sol,’ says Lib, unwrapping a packet of his favourite cigarettes, ‘but I see he hasn’t graced us with his moody presence.’

‘Zelah, run up and give Sol a good hard knock, would you?’ says the Doc.

Her words hang in the air. I blush as I catch Lib and Alice exchange raised suggestive eyebrows.

‘She’d
love
to,’ says Lib.

I pull my elbows in and do my usual stair climb, avoiding the banisters. I stop at the top, do my one hundred and twenty-eight jumps and check my reflection in the mirror.

Whether it’s the jumping, or all the mixed emotions of the afternoon, or the fact that I’ve been given a present, or that the fish and chips smell amazing, my eyes are all watery and sparkly. Even my unruly black hair looks OK, tied back into a pony to show off the long blue earrings.

I stick my chest out a bit, assume my best smile and knock on Sol’s door.

No answer.

I try again and there’s still no answer, so I say, ‘Hello?’ and push open the door.

His room smells of boy mixed with man: trainers and the sour whiff of unwashed duvet topped by a stronger odour of shower-gel and just-rolled cigarettes.

On the wall there are posters of Pamela Anderson, Gwen Stefani, Goldfrapp and Sarah Michelle Gellar dressed up as Buffy.

‘So he likes them blonde, sleek and glamorous,’ I say to my dark and frazzled reflection. ‘Oh well.’

Sol is nowhere in sight so I’m just about to go downstairs and satisfy the screaming hunger in my belly by sinking my front teeth into a nice piece of crispy cod, when an envelope catches my eye.

I recognise Sol’s thick, angry scrawl and wrap a tissue round my hand so that I can pick it up.

The really weird thing is what it says on the envelope.

The envelope is addressed to me.

Josh is whacking the gong in an effort to get everyone back at the table.

‘It’s all going cold,’ he complains as I run
downstairs breathless after another series of jumps.

‘Well, where is he?’ says the Doc. ‘Don’t tell me he’s gone out somewhere. He knew we were doing a special supper.’

‘He’ll probably come back when he gets hungry,’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady.

‘Maybe. I give up!’ says the Doc as Josh splashes a large amount of blackcurrant-coloured wine into her glass.

She flaps her hands as if batting away any further problems and cradles the glass with a heavy sigh.

‘He’ll come back when he’s ready,’ says Lib. She’s quieter than usual, fiddling with the strings on her sweatshirt, plaiting them and sucking the ends.

‘Sol’s such an idiot,’ says Caro. She’s drinking Coke from a can and shovelling chips into her face, lounging back in her chair with a
challenging look on her face. It says,
I’ve only come down because I’m hungry and you’re lucky to have me here at all
.

Sol’s letter crackles in the side pocket of my jeans. I’m itching to know what it says, but the mound of steaming golden chips on my plate is making me faint with hunger.

Stomach first, letter later.

When Josh has cleared away the last of the greasy plates and everyone is congratulating Alice for eating five chips and a whole mouthful of fish, I slip away upstairs to my room.

I sit in the window and open Sol’s letter with a clean tissue wrapped round my fingers. In the light from the streetlamp his writing looks sparse and black against the cream-coloured page.

‘Zelah,’ it says as a prefix. No ‘Dear Zelah’ or ‘Gorgeous stunning lovely Zelah’, just plain ‘Zelah’.

I read the note straight through. It’s only a few lines long. This is what it says:

Zelah. I’m telling you this because you’ve lost your mother too and you know what it feels like. I can’t stay here any longer because I don’t fit in. I can’t go home because Dad shouts all the time and I’m scared I’ll lose it and hit him. I’ll be OK. Please don’t tell Josh and the Doc about me going. I need time to get as far away as possible. I might head towards Exeter. Got mates there. Good luck with the OCD thing. You’ll beat it. Sol.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard Sol’s voice, even though it’s in a letter. The voice is scared and angry all at the same time.

I wonder how the rain has got through the window and then I realise I’m crying. Great big silent tears. All the stuff from today is coming out through my eyes and running down my chin.

I see Fran’s face again, in slow motion: the hurt look and how small she seemed when she
turned and walked away. All those years of being best friends at school now seem like a complete sham. Fran thinks I’m a weirdo and she’s only just found the words to tell me.

I hear Caro’s screams of frustration and see Alice’s starved unhappy face.

I see Sol’s empty room with the blue duvet and the posters.

I see Lib as she looked earlier, stripped of her cheerful mask, naked and vulnerable underneath.

I see Dad’s face that last time as he got into the car holding his briefcase as usual, looking as if he was driving to school.

I see myself, waiting at the window for him to come home from work while my stepmother fussed about in the kitchen behind me.

I hear the clock ticking past every hour until it was bedtime and he still hadn’t come.

I catch the roar of Heather’s car and see her glamorous red-lipped grin and swinging hair.

I see, fainter now, Mum’s pretty round face and curly dark hair in the days before the chemo made it all fall out.

She’s fading. Every day that goes by, the image fades a little more. I’m terrified that one day I won’t be able to summon it up at all.

‘Sol,’ I whisper. ‘You’ve got to come back. If you come back, I promise I’ll listen to you. I understand. About your mum, and all that.’

I almost expect to hear him walk up the front path and through the front door.

The only sound is the drip-drip of rain from the gutter above my window.

I tuck the letter under my pillow and head for the sink.

My rituals go on for hours that night.

I
t doesn’t take long for the Doc to get worried about Sol going missing.

When I come down for breakfast the next morning, she’s sitting at the kitchen table with a policeman and a small, thin bloke who looks like Sol only a lot older. The man has leathery brown skin, a gold chain round his neck and a tiny gold stud in one ear. He’s wearing a battered dark-brown suede jacket and a lot of dark stubble.

‘Oh, Zelah,’ says the Doc in a distracted voice. There are violet circles under her eyes and her hair is wilder than usual. ‘This is Sol’s
father, Gino. Sol didn’t come back last night.’

Sol’s father extends a hand in my direction. I smile and shake my head.

‘Zelah doesn’t do handshaking,’ explains the Doc.

The man makes a small nodding head gesture. It says, Oh, right, but his eyes say,
Not another screwed up teenager
.

‘You know where my boy is?’ he says in a weird accent, Cockney with a bit of foreign thrown in. ‘Only he don’t talk an awful lot so it’s kinda hard to know what’s going on in dat head of his.’

I busy myself making toast.

‘Zelah’s only been here for a couple of weeks,’ says the Doc. ‘She’s new.’

At that moment Josh slopes in and the focus of the conversation shifts away from me.

I slip away back upstairs.

*

Sol doesn’t turn up that day. Or the next. Or for another whole four days after that. The policeman comes back twice. The Doc and I have another therapy session, but her eyes have a distant, preoccupied look in them. She tells me to cut my jumps down to half if I can, but her ear is listening out for the sound of the telephone or the ring of the doorbell.

Lib, Alice and I are sitting in my room when Caro pops her head round the door. ‘I reckon he’s jumped off Beachy Head or something,’ is her cheerful conclusion. ‘Oh well. At least we won’t have to put up with all that moody silence any more.’

Lib is looking at Caro as if she is a tiny slug who’s just crawled up out of a festering pile of dung.

She’s stopped smiling for the last couple of days. Without the grin her face looks harder,
less girlish. I can see what she’ll look like when she’s sixty.

‘Sol wasn’t quiet because he was moody,’ she says. ‘If anyone’s moody around here, it’s you, Caro.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Caro. ‘Whatever. You believe what you want, Lib. You just stay in your nice cosy little world of make-believe.’

Alice scuttles out of the room with her head bent and her hands shoved in her pockets.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ says Lib. ‘Was that really necessary?’

Caro gives a short, hard laugh.

‘So I’ve frightened the resident mouse,’ she says. ‘So what? She’ll go and nibble her way through a microgram of cheese or something.’

She bangs out of the room.

Lib sits next to me on the window seat with a shake of her head.

‘You’re quiet, Princess,’ she says. ‘Don’t take
any notice of Caro. She’s pissed off because she’s not the centre of attention at the moment.’

I look into Lib’s grey eyes and feel the crackle of Sol’s letter in my pocket.

‘Why can’t Sol talk?’ I say.

Lib hoists her legs up into the window seat and hugs her knees in their grey combats. I notice for the first time that her hands are trembling, the nails bitten right down, leaving bits of sore red skin visible.

‘Yeah, he can,’ she says. ‘He only talks when he feels completely safe with someone.’

‘Has he ever talked to you, or the Doc?’ I say. I can’t imagine not talking. Words just kind of burst out of my mouth, even when I don’t want them to.

‘No,’ says Lib. ‘We’ve never heard his voice. Ever.’

I think of Sol, hitch-hiking his way down the motorway in total silence. How will he buy a
train ticket in Exeter or get a room in a hostel if he can’t speak? I picture his small dark form curled up on a park bench somewhere, with nothing to eat or drink and my heart begins to ache. I push the window open and take a deep gulp of air.

‘You sure you’re all right?’ says Lib. ‘You’re acting a bit weird.’

‘Fine,’ I say. Then just as she’s leaving the room I blurt it out.

‘Lib,’ I say. My words come out in a great rushing string of babble. ‘I know where Sol has gone only he told me not to tell anyone and now even though I should tell someone I’ve kind of gone past that stage and I know I’m in big trouble but . . .’