Читать книгу Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection - Jenny Valentine - Страница 42

Bee would have been in Jack’s year. I knew her face, but I’d never spoken to her. She came from somewhere else about a year after he died. I knew nothing about her. The only reason I noticed her that day in the lunch hall was that she was looking at me.

At first I thought she was doing it by accident – that staring-into-space thing where you wake up and realise you’ve been looking straight at someone and they’re wondering why. She was watching me and I was waiting for her to snap out of it, but she didn’t. Instead she walked right up to me like I was on my own, and she smiled and looked around and said hello, and then she said, “What was it?” Like that, out of nowhere.

I said, “What was what?” because I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

Bee said, “The thing he gave you. What did he give you?” I said, “Who?”

And she said, “The boy in the shop.”

I asked her how she knew about it and she said she was behind us all in the queue. I tried to picture the people staring at me in the shop that day, but Bee wasn’t one of them.

It was days since then.

“I was there,” she said. “I saw the whole thing. He was cute. What was it – his phone number?”

I laughed a bit louder than everyone else and said, “No way, as if,” and looked at my shoes.

Bee said I’d put up quite a fight and I said, “Well, it wasn’t mine.”

She said, “What wasn’t yours?”

I wasn’t sure if I still had the negative on me. I had to dig around in my bag for a while before I found it. She held it up to the strip lighting, this bedraggled little opposite of a picture.

We were quiet for a minute, then Bee said, “Who is it?” and I said, “I don’t know.”

She said, “Do you think it’s a man or a woman?” but I couldn’t tell.

She said, “What a weird thing to get given.”

I said that was why I’d tried not to take it, because it was obviously a mistake.

“Maybe he saw you drop it,” Bee said. But he didn’t, because I didn’t, and I said so.

She asked me why somebody would make up something like that, what the point would be, and I thought about the boy smiling, about how many people there are out there that you don’t know the first thing about. “Takes all sorts,” I said, and I held out my hand for it back.

Bee gave it to me and I put it inside a book to smooth out some of the creases.

She asked me what I was going to do with it and I said I hadn’t thought. And then the bell went and seven hundred and fifty people started moving for the doors all at once, including Bee, back the way she’d come, without saying goodbye, like our conversation never happened.

Our house was still a shrine then. Jack was everywhere, smiling out of rooms, watching on the stairs, aged nine and eleven and fourteen, his hair combed and parted, his ears sticking out, grown-up teeth in a kid’s mouth. Mum talked to the pictures when she thought she was alone. I heard her. Like one side of an ordinary phone call, like he wasn’t dead at all, just moved out and on the other end of the line. The kind of phone call he’d have probably got from her every week the whole of his life. You’d think death could have spared him that.

I never knew what she found to talk about. I was right there and she hardly spoke to me.

Home was quiet like a shrine too. Like the inside of a church, all hushed tones and low lighting and grave faces. There wasn’t any Jack noise any more. No loud music, no shouting, no playing the drums on the kitchen table at breakfast, no nothing.

My room had been a landing. When Stroma was born and we needed the space, Dad blocked it off with a new wall and stuck a door in it, but it was too cold for a baby so Stroma got my old room and I moved in. It was tiny, given that it was really just a turning space for somebody using the stairs. There was no radiator and the power came in on an extension from the kitchen, so I was usually cold and I could never lock my door.

Jack’s room was on the same floor as Mum’s and Stroma’s, next to the bathroom. It had two windows and tall bookshelves and an old wooden desk. The walls were a warm grey colour called ‘Elephant’s Breath’. It was the saddest place in the house, the living, breathing mother ship of everybody’s grief. If you were thinking you were getting over Jack and things were nearly back to normal, you’d only have to go in that room and you’d start missing him from the beginning all over again.

Now and then that was just how I wanted to feel.

Sometimes I’d put on some of his music. Sometimes I’d pick up his guitar, but I can still only play the first six notes of Scarborough Fair so that never lasted long. I don’t even like that song. Usually I’d stretch out on his bed and look at the sky through his windows. That night I sat with my back against the wall and my chin on my knees and I turned the negative over and over between my fingers. I thought about what Bee had said, about what I was going to do next.

Nothing, I thought, and I aimed it into the bin from where I was sitting and went back to thinking about my brother.

I wasn’t sure if Stroma missed Jack, not really. She stuck him at the end of her prayers with Grandad Clark and Great Auntie Helen (who she’d met, like, twice) and the people on Newsround, but I reckoned she forgot him almost as soon as he was gone. She hardly ever saw him anyway; maybe at breakfast when he wasn’t really awake, or in the car when he’d have headphones on and act like she wasn’t there. Jack did loads of nice stuff with Stroma, like taking her to the park or teaching her how to make paper aeroplanes, but I think she was too young to remember. She didn’t know him at all. I wonder how she added it up for herself, this stranger in her family dying and turning her family into strangers.

It was me that had to tell Stroma because nobody else had done it. It was the morning after they told me. She had no idea Jack was dead. Everything around her was altered and she was trying so hard not to notice.

She looked up at me and said, “What’s the matter with Mummy?” and I said she was sad.

She asked me what Mum was sad about and I said, “Jack’s gone,” and Stroma carried on humming this little tune and pouring nothing out of a tiny china teapot. Then she said, “Where?” and I said I didn’t know. She picked up a cup and saucer and handed it to me. She said, “Blow on it, it’s really hot.”

I said, “He’s dead, Stroma. He’s never coming back.”

I could feel this weight, this downward pressure in my head, and I thought it was possible I could cave in or implode because I just said that out loud.

Stroma was quiet for a minute, and then she sighed and looked right at me and said, “Can I have something to eat now? I’m starving.”

And that was how it started, how I ended up looking after her.

I went into the kitchen to make some toast and there wasn’t any bread, not even a crumb. I knocked on the door of Mum’s room and got some money and I took Stroma with me to the shop. And all the time I was putting stuff into the basket and working out what we could afford, and saying no to marshmallows, but yes to chocolate biscuits, and planning what we’d have for supper and then breakfast. I didn’t have time to lose it. I didn’t have time to lie down in the corner shop and scream and beat the floor until my hands bled. I didn’t have time to miss Jack. Stroma carried on chattering away and getting excited over novelty spaghetti shapes and finding the joy in every little thing, and it occurred to me even then that she was probably looking after me too.