I steal a fag from Dad’s jacket and go upstairs and lean out of Cal’s window. I want to see the street. There’s a view through the trees to the road. A car passes. Another car. A person.
I blow smoke out into the air. Every time I inhale I can hear my lungs crackle. Maybe I’ve got TB. I hope so. All the best poets had TB; it’s a mark of sensibility. Cancer’s just humiliating.
Philippa comes out of the front door and stands by the step. I flick ash on her hair, but she doesn’t notice, just says goodbye in that booming voice of hers and waddles off up the path.
I sit on Cal’s bed. Dad’ll come up in a minute. While I wait, I get a pen and write, Parachutes, cocktails, stones, lollipops, buckets, zebras, sheds, cigarettes, cold tap water, on the wallpaper above Cal’s bed. Then I smell my armpits, the skin on my arm, my fingers. I stroke my hair backwards, forwards, like a rug.
Dad’s taking ages. I go for a walk round the room. At the mirror I pull out a single hair. It’s growing back much darker, and strangely curly, like pubic hair. I examine it, let it fall. I like being able to spare one to the carpet.
There’s a map of the world on Cal’s wall. Oceans and deserts. He’s got the solar system staked out on his ceiling. I lie on his bed to look at it properly. It makes me feel tiny.
It’s literally five minutes later when I open my eyes and go downstairs to see what’s keeping Dad. He’s already scarpered, left some stupid note by his laptop.
I phone him. ‘Where are you?’
‘You were asleep, Tess.’
‘But where are you?’
‘I just came out for a quick coffee. I’m in the park.’
‘The park? Why would you go there? We’ve got coffee at home.’
‘Tess! Come on, I just need a bit of space. Turn the TV on if you’re lonely. I’ll be back soon.’
A woman cooks breaded chicken. Three men press a buzzer as they compete for fifty thousand pounds. Two actors argue about a dead cat. One of them makes a joke about stuffing it. I sit hunched. Mute. Stunned by how crap TV is, how little we all have to say.
I text Zoey. WHERE R U? She texts back that she’s at college, but that’s a lie because she doesn’t have classes on Fridays.
I wish I had a mobile number for Adam. I’d text, DID U DIE?
He should be outside digging in manure, peat and rotting vegetation. I looked up November in Dad’s Reader’s Digest Book of Gardening and it suggests that this is the perfect time for conditioning the soil. He should also be thinking about planting a hazel bush, since they provide an attractive addition to any garden. I thought a filbert might be nice. They have large heart-shaped nuts.
He hasn’t been out there for days though.
And he promised me a motorbike ride.
Sixteen
He’s uglier than I remember. It’s as if he warmed up in my memory. I don’t know why that should be. I think how Zoey would snort with derision if she knew I’d come knocking on his door, and that thought makes me want to never let her know. She says ugly people give her a headache.
‘You’re avoiding me,’ I tell him.
He looks surprised for a second, but covers it up pretty quick. ‘I’ve been busy.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So it’s not because you think I’m contagious? Most people start acting as if they can catch cancer from me in the end, or as if I’ve done something to deserve it.’
He looks alarmed. ‘No, no! I don’t think that.’
‘Good. So when are we going out on your bike then?’
He shuffles his feet on the step and looks embarrassed. ‘I haven’t actually got a full licence. You’re not supposed to take passengers without it.’
I can think of a million reasons why going on the back of Adam’s bike might be a bad idea. Because we might crash. Because it might not be as good as I hope. Because what will I tell Zoey? Because it’s what I really want to do more than anything. But I’m not going to let the lack of a full licence be one of them.
‘Have you got a spare helmet?’ I ask him.
That slow smile again. I love that smile! Did I think he was ugly just now? No, his face is transformed.
‘In the shed. I’ve got a spare jacket too.’
I can’t help smiling back. I feel brave and certain. ‘Come on then. Before it rains.’
He shuts the door behind him. ‘It’s not going to rain.’
We go round the side of the house and get the stuff from the shed. But just as he helps me zip into the jacket, just as he tells me his bike is capable of ninety miles per hour and the wind will be cold, the back door opens and a woman steps into the garden. She’s wearing a dressing gown and slippers.
Adam says, ‘Go back inside, Mum, you’ll get cold.’
But she keeps walking down the path towards us. She has the saddest face I’ve ever seen, like she drowned once and the tide left its mark there.
‘Where are you going?’ she says, and she doesn’t look at me at all. ‘You didn’t say you were going anywhere.’
‘I won’t be long.’
She makes a funny little sound in the back of her throat. Adam looks up sharply. ‘Don’t, Mum,’ he says. ‘Go and have your bath and get dressed. I’ll be back before you know it.’
She nods forlornly, begins to walk up the path, then stops as if she remembered something, and turns and looks at me for the first time, a stranger in her garden.
‘Who are you?’ she says.
‘I live next door. I came to see Adam.’
The sadness in her eyes deepens. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’
Adam goes over to her and grips her gently by the elbows. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You should go back inside.’
She allows herself to be helped up the path and walked to the back door. She goes up the step and then she turns and looks at me again. She doesn’t say anything, and neither do I. We just look at each other, and then she goes through the door and into her kitchen. I wonder what happens then, what they say to each other.
‘Is she OK?’ I ask as Adam walks back out into the garden.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he says.
It’s not what I imagined, not like cycling fast downhill, or even sticking your head out of a car window on the motorway. It’s more elemental, like being on a beach in the winter when the wind howls in off the sea. The helmets have plastic visors. I’ve got mine down, but Adam’s got his up; he did it very deliberately.
He said, ‘I like to feel the wind in my eyes.’
He told me to lean when we go round corners. He told me that since it was my first time he wouldn’t go top speed. But that could mean anything. Even at half speed, we might take off. We might fly.
We leave the streets and lampposts and houses. We leave the shops and the industrial estate and the wood yard, and we go beyond some kind of boundary where things belong to the town and are understood. Trees, fields, space appears. I shelter behind the curve of his back, and I close my eyes and wonder where he’s taking me. I imagine horses in the engine, their manes flying, their breath steaming, their nostrils flaring as they gallop. I heard a story once about some nymph, snatched by a god and taken somewhere dark and dangerous on the back of a chariot.
Where we end up is somewhere I didn’t expect – a muddy car park off the dual carriageway. There are two large trucks parked here, a couple of cars and a hotdog stand.
Adam turns off the ignition, kicks the stand down with his foot and takes off his helmet.
‘You should get off first,’ he says.
I nod, can barely speak, left my breath behind on the road somewhere. My knees are shaking and it takes a lot of effort to swing my leg over the bike and stand up. The earth feels very still. One of the lorry drivers winks at me out of his cab window. He holds a steaming cup of tea in one hand. Over at the hotdog stand, a girl with her hair in a ponytail passes a bag of chips across the counter to a man with a dog. I’m different from them all. It’s as if we flew here and everyone else is completely ordinary.