‘Step on it,’ she tells the driver, and we both chuckle.
We drive back the way we came. She’s very talkative, full of plans for spring and Easter. She wants to spend more time at our house, she says. She wants to invite some of her and Dad’s old friends for dinner. She might want a party for my birthday in May.
Perhaps she means it this time.
‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘every night when the market stalls are being packed away, I go out and collect vegetables and fruit off the ground. Sometimes they chuck away whole boxes of mangoes. Last week I got five sea bass just lying there in a plastic bag. If I begin to put things in Dad’s freezer, we’ll have plenty for parties and dinners and it won’t cost your father a penny.’
She gets lost in party games and cocktails. She talks of bands and entertainers; she hires the local community hall and covers it in streamers and balloons. I nudge up next to her and put my head on her shoulder. I’m her daughter after all. I try and keep really still because I don’t want it to change. It’s lovely being lulled by her words and the warmth of her coat.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘That’s strange.’
It’s a struggle to open my eyes. ‘What is?’
‘There on the bridge. That wasn’t there before.’
We’ve stopped at the traffic lights outside the railway station. Even at this early hour it’s busy, with taxis dropping off commuters determined to beat the rush. On the bridge, high above the road, letters have blossomed during the night. Several people are looking. There’s a wobbly T, a jagged E, and four interlinked curves for the double S. At the end, bigger than the other letters, there’s a mountainous A.
Mum says, ‘That’s a coincidence.’
But it’s not.
My phone’s in my pocket. My fingers furl and unfurl.
He would’ve done this last night. It would’ve been dark. He climbed the wall, straddled it, then leaned right over.
My heart hurts. I get out my phone and text: R U ALIVE?
The lights change through amber to green. The cab moves under the bridge and along the High Street.
It’s half past six. Will he even be awake? What if he lost his balance and plummeted onto the road below?
‘Oh my goodness,’ Mum says. ‘You’re everywhere!’
The shops in the High Street still have their metal grilles down, blank-eyed and sleeping. My name is scrawled across them all. I’m outside Ajay’s newsagent’s. I’m on the expensive shutters of the health food store. I’m massive on Handie’s furniture shop, King’s Chicken Joint and the Barbecue Café. I thread the pavement outside the bank and all the way to Mothercare. I’ve possessed the road and am a glistening circle at the roundabout.
‘It’s a miracle!’ Mum whispers.
‘It’s Adam.’
‘From next door?’ She sounds amazed, as if there’s magic afoot.
My phone bleeps. AM ALIVE. U?
I laugh out loud. When I get back, I’m going to knock on his door and tell him I’m sorry. He’s going to smile at me the way he did yesterday when he was carrying garden rubbish down the path and he saw me watching and said, ‘Just can’t keep away, can you?’ It made me laugh, because actually it was true, but saying it out loud made it not so painful.
‘Adam did this for you?’ Mum shivers with excitement. She always did believe in romance.
I text him back. AM ALIVE 2. CMING HME NOW.
Zoey asked me once, ‘What’s the best moment of your life so far?’ And I told her about the time I was practising handstands with my friend Lorraine. I was eight, the school fair was the next day, and Mum had promised to buy me a jewellery box. I lay on the grass holding Lorraine’s hand, dizzy with happiness and absolutely certain that the world was good.
Zoey thought I was nuts. But really, it was the first time I’d ever known I was happy in such a conscious way.
Kissing Adam replaced it. Making love replaced that. And now he’s done this for me. He’s made me famous. He’s put my name on the world. I’ve been in hospital all night, my head’s stuffed with cotton. I’m clutching a paper bag full of antibiotics and painkillers, and my arm aches from two units of platelets delivered through my portacath. And yet, it’s extraordinary how happy I feel.
Thirty
‘I want Adam to move in.’
Dad turns from the sink, his hands dripping soapsuds onto the floor. He looks utterly stunned. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘I mean it.’
‘Where’s he supposed to sleep?’
‘In my bedroom.’
‘There’s no way I’m agreeing to that, Tess!’ He turns back to the sink, clunks bowls and plates about. ‘Is this on your list? Is having a live-in boyfriend on your list?’
‘His name’s Adam.’
He shakes his head. ‘Forget it.’
‘Then I’ll move into his house.’
‘You think his mother will want you there?’
‘We’ll bugger off to Scotland and live in a croft then. Would you prefer that?’
His mouth twitches with anger as he turns back to me. ‘The answer’s no, Tess.’
I hate the way he pulls authority, as if it’s all sorted because he says so. I stomp upstairs to my room and slam the door. He thinks it’s about sex. Can’t he see it’s deeper than that? And can’t he see how difficult it is to ask for?
Three weeks ago, at the end of January, Adam took me out on the bike, faster than before and further – to a place on the borders of Kent where there’s flat marshy land sloping down to a beach. There were four wind turbines out at sea, their ghostly blades spinning.
He skimmed stones at the waves and I sat on the shingle and told him how my list is sprawling away from me.
‘There are so many things I want. Ten isn’t enough any more.’
‘Tell me,’ he said.
It was easy at first. On and on I went. Spring. Daffodils and tulips. Swimming under a calm blue evening sky. A long train journey, a peacock, a kite. Another summer. But I couldn’t tell him the thing I want the most.
That night he went home. Every night he goes home to keep his mother safe. He sleeps just metres away from me, through the wall, on the other side of the wardrobe.
The next day he turned up with tickets for the zoo. We went on the train. We saw wolves and antelopes. A peacock opened its tail for me, emerald and aquamarine. We had lunch in a café and Adam bought me a fruit platter with black grapes and vivid slices of mango.
A few days later he took me to a heated outdoor pool. After swimming, we sat on the edge, wrapped in towels, and dangled our feet in the water. We drank hot chocolate and laughed at the children hollering in the cold air.
One morning he delivered a bowl of crocuses to my room.
‘Spring,’ he said.
He took me to our hill on his bike. He’d bought a pocket kite from the newsagent’s and we flew it together.
Day after day it was as if someone had taken my life apart and polished every bit of it really carefully before putting it all back together.
But we never shared a single night.
Then, on Valentine’s day, I got anaemic only twelve days after a blood transfusion.
‘What does it mean?’ I asked the consultant.
‘You’ve moved nearer the line,’ he said.
It’s getting harder to breathe. The shadows under my eyes have deepened. My lips look like plastic stretched over a gate.
Last night I woke up at two in the morning. My legs were hurting, a dull throbbing, like a toothache. I’d taken paracetamol before going to bed, but I needed codeine. On the way to the bathroom I passed Dad’s open bedroom door and Mum was in there – her hair spilling across the pillow, his arm flung protectively across her. That’s three times she’s stayed over in the last two weeks.
I stood on the landing watching them sleep and I knew for a fact that I couldn’t be alone in the dark any more.
Mum comes upstairs and sits on my bed. I’m standing at the window watching the dusk. The sky is full of something, the clouds low down and expectant.