She was hesitant. ‘Do you … Do you really think so?’
‘Definitely. Here …’ I slipped the ring onto her index finger.
I never saw her without the ring after that day.
It kept her safe for a little under eight years.
27
There are no cars in the driveway today. The house looks the same though. Pristine.
Don’t think about Tara. Think about Jack. Think about his smile.
I knock on the door and wait.
The door swings open and there he is. ‘Alice! Hi!’
He wraps me up in a hug and I want to stay there forever. His hair smells so good. I wonder if he’s been using Tara’s shampoo. So much for not thinking about Tara.
‘Come in. Don’t worry – the parents are out, thank God. It’s the first time I’ve had the house to myself since … in ages.’ It’s painfully obvious what he was going to say. When someone dies, everything neatly divides into two categories: since and before. Before is always better. ‘Mum and Dad are starting to loosen the reins a little bit, thank God.’
A black cocker spaniel bounds up to me and Jack introduces me to Rufus. He’s gorgeous.
We sit in the kitchen, on either side of the breakfast bar. Rufus settles down for a snooze at Jack’s feet. The kitchen’s changed since I was last here. It used to be all English country kitchenish, but now it’s all white gloss and black granite. I preferred it before.
Jack pops some crumpets in the toaster and slathers them with butter when they’re done. I could seriously fall for a boy who gives me crumpets.
We talk about the band. He’s worried they won’t be ready for the gig, and I do my best to reassure him. He talks about his parents. They’ve been arguing a lot recently, and even started going to counselling.
‘What have they been arguing about?’
‘Tara, mostly. Dad reckons it’s all Mum’s fault for being so pushy about swimming. She was on at Tara all the time about training. I guess Tara had kind of gone off the whole swimming thing recently, but Mum wouldn’t let her quit. She wouldn’t hear of it. Reckoned Tara was good enough to swim for England one day. I don’t know … maybe that is why she went swimming that morning …’
I need to change the subject. Pronto. ‘Can I see your room?’
Jack’s eyes widen ever so slightly and I can’t tell if he thinks I’m rude for interrupting him or just incredibly forward. ‘Um … yeah, sure.’
He chucks our plates in the sink and leads the way up the stairs. Tara’s room is at the end of the hall. The door is closed. I try not to look at it. There used to be a sign saying ‘KEEP OUT! This means YOU, Jack Chambers!!!’ I wonder when the sign came down.
Jack opens a door on the left and makes a sweeping gesture with his hands. ‘Welcome to my humble abode!’ I’m relieved that he doesn’t say something gross like This is where the magic happens.
The room is perfectly Jack. The walls are a warm grey colour. (Who knew grey could be warm?) There are three guitars hanging on the wall above his bed … his double bed. There’s a huge bookcase stuffed with more books than I’ve ever seen in one place. Obviously the bookcase is not quite huge enough, because there are towering piles of paperbacks on either side of it. There’s even a sofa – big and squishy and orange. Jack flops down on it while I wander over to the bookcase.
‘So I’m guessing you like to read?’ I trail my fingers along the spines of a row of books. I don’t think I’ve heard of any of them. The whole bottom shelf is dedicated to dinosaur books.
‘Yeah, I suppose I do. Mum’s always on at me to chuck out some of my books, but I can’t bear to do it. It just seems wrong, you know? Someone slaved over writing that for months and months – maybe even years. And even if it’s crap, they deserve some respect for making the effort, don’t you think?’
‘Mum was like that. She even hated breaking the spine of a book. And she went mental if I turned over the corners of the pages instead of using a bookmark.’
‘Your mum sounds brilliant.’ Jack’s smile is a heartbreaking mixture of happy and sad.
‘She was.’ Something in me cracks open and tears leak out. Not now. Please not now. I turn to face the bookcase so Jack can’t see. I can’t avoid raising my hand to wipe away the tears though. A total giveaway.
There are hands on my shoulders. Warm, strong hands. ‘Hey, Alice. It’s OK … Don’t cry.’ His honey voice trickles into my ears.
We stay like that for a few moments before he gently turns me around. He’s standing so very close. I look up at him, but he’s all blurry. I try to blink away the next round of tears, but they spill over. Jack’s hands cradle my face, his thumbs wiping away the tears. I think I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
‘I …’ I’ve forgotten how to form words too.
His mouth is achingly close to mine. I have to kiss him. If I don’t kiss him now I never will. If I don’t kiss him now I will never, ever forgive myself.
My eyes meet his, just to check that we’re thinking the same thing. I move closer. Little by little, closer and closer, until my lips are touching his. It’s a tiny little butterfly of a kiss … more fragile than I could ever have imagined.
Jack pulls away to look at me. There’s a question in his eyes. I answer it by kissing him again, harder this time. He’s kissing back just as hard. And I find myself pressing into him, wanting to get closer and closer until I disappear into him. My hands curl round his neck, fingers tugging at his hair. His mouth fits perfectly on mine.
I lose myself completely. There’s no one in the world apart from me and Jack. Nothing else matters. Not even … her. There. Ruined it. I cannot carry on kissing Jack while I’m thinking about his dead sister.
I pull away too quickly, breathing heavily. Jack’s face is flushed and he’s breathing hard too. Tara is not breathing at all.
Jack tries to pull me back towards him, his mouth reaching for mine. I want nothing more than to kiss him again and stay kissing him and stop thinking. But I can’t.
‘What’s wrong?’ There’s hurt in his eyes and I hate that I’m the reason for it.
‘Nothing.’ I run my hands through my hair and turn away from him.
‘Alice, talk to me. Please.’ His hand is on my shoulder again, hesitant this time, as if he expects me to shrug it off.
I want to leave this place. I want to run home and curl up on the sofa next to Mum, where nothing is confusing and everything is good and right and pure. But Mum’s gone too.
I turn to face Jack because there’s nothing else for me to do. ‘Sorry. I … I’m fine. Really.’
‘You don’t look fine. You look like you’ve seen a ghost! Am I … was it that bad?’ He stares at the carpet as if there’s something fascinating there.
I almost laugh. ‘No! Don’t be ridiculous! It was … exactly how I wanted it to be.’
He brightens at this. A sly little grin appears from nowhere. ‘Really?’
My smile mirrors his. ‘Yes, really.’
He moves towards me. ‘Then why don’t we do it some more?’
The way I see it, I have two options. I can concoct some lie about what’s wrong and leave right now. Or I can kiss him again.
Kissing wins.
28
There was a lot more kissing. I thought it might get a bit boring after a while, but it definitely didn’t. After a while we moved to the sofa, and that was good too. Except I started to worry about what would happen next. Turns out I needn’t have worried – Jack was the one who put a stop to things.
In between kisses, he whispered, ‘I … think we should … stop.’
‘Why?’ Except it didn’t sound quite like ‘why’, because I spoke the word directly into Jack’s mouth.
‘Because if we carry on, I really, really won’t want to stop. And I won’t be held responsible for my actions …’ He wiggled his eyebrows, which made me laugh. Then he kissed my neck and it felt so good that I knew he was right. We had to stop. But I didn’t want to
. Yes, I was scared about what might happen, but I was also curious as hell. Somehow I’d gone from barely having kissed a boy to (maybe sort of just a little bit) wanting to get naked with one in the space of a couple of hours.
We straightened out our clothes and headed downstairs. Suddenly everything seemed a bit strange and awkward.
‘So … um … I guess I’ll see you.’ That was Jack. He was biting his lip, which made me think about biting his lip.
‘Yeah …’ That was me, sounding gormless.
‘We should do something soon, maybe?’
‘Yeah. We should.’
It was painful. You wouldn’t have thought we’d had our tongues in each other’s mouths a few minutes ago.
‘Alice, I really like you.’
‘I like you too.’
‘So maybe this could be, y’know, sort of official.’
‘What do you mean?’ I was pulling the cuffs of my jumper down over my hands and twisting them around my thumbs.
‘We could be …’ He trailed off into an unconvincing cough. ‘Maybe you could be my girlfriend? God, that sounds really crap, doesn’t it?’ A blush crept up from his neck. It was possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
Suddenly I didn’t feel shy or awkward. I felt a burst of confidence like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I felt invincible. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him to me. Not that he put up much of a fight. I kissed him. ‘It doesn’t sound crap at all. Not even one little bit.’
Jack’s smile was pure magic.
She was waiting when I got back.
‘It’s disgusting. The thought of you and my little brother … urgh.’ She shuddered, and it reminded me of her shivering that night. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re playing at. It’s never going to work. You know that, don’t you? In here.’ She poked my chest hard with one bloody, grubby finger. ‘You’ll never be happy, Alice. Never. You don’t deserve it.’
That was all. She disappeared when my phone rang. Instead of answering, I pulled at the front of my jumper, checking carefully for the mark where Tara touched me.
There was nothing there, no matter how hard I looked.
So now I have a boyfriend. I. Have. A. Boyfriend. I’ve said it out loud a couple of times and it sounds ridiculous. How can it possibly be true? This is me we’re talking about. Me. It’s just plain weird. Girls like me are not supposed to have boyfriends like Jack. It’s not how the world works.
I should be the happiest I’ve ever been. But I am not allowed to be happy. I am allowed to have small, Jack-filled pockets of happiness, but that’s all. Then real life comes crashing back, and the enormity of what’s happened sweeps away the happiness in an avalanche of shame and guilt. I’m left with sadness and anger and a kind of dread about the future. The dread sits in the middle of my chest, always.
There’s a broken-record voice in my head too: There is no way you’ll get away with this. Someone will find out. Somehow.
29
I look through the window of the classroom and Daley’s sitting at her desk, staring out the window. My phone buzzes in my bag, so I nip back round the corner. It’s a text from Jack. We’ve been texting approximately thirty times a day. Not that I’ve been counting. We hung out on Saturday, which somehow cemented everything that had gone before. It convinced me that I was not delusional: Jack DOES like me. God knows why, but let’s not dwell on that.
It was a perfect day. Walking down by the Thames, hand in hand. One of hundreds of couples doing exactly the same thing. I felt something close to smug. There was a slight wobble when Jack told me about a song he’d written for Tara. He wanted to play it for me before the dance; he was worried it might be too cheesy. I said I’d like to hear it (and prayed that he’d forget all about it).
I didn’t want to say goodbye to Jack at the tube station. But he had to go to band practice, and I had Dad’s Extra Special Spaghetti Bolognese Night to attend. Dad’s Extra Special Spaghetti Bolognese Night turned out to be not that special – hardly surprising since it happens almost every Saturday.
Jack’s message is silly and vaguely mushy and makes me smile. Until I remember that I’m about to face some nightmarish Daley pseudo-counselling session. It’ll be over in an hour though. You can put up with anything for an hour.
It doesn’t start off too badly. We talk about the last essay I handed in. I got a 73, which is pretty damn good if you ask me. But Daley keeps on pointing out things I’d missed in the text. Metaphors and symbolism and stuff like that. It seems so obvious when she explains it all. Still, I can’t help imagining some long-dead writer screaming from his grave, ‘THERE’S NO BLOODY SYMBOLISM! IT’S JUST A STORY!’
The work chat takes up a good forty-five minutes and I’m pretty sure I’m in the clear. Daley shuffles the pages of my essay and hands them back to me. Then she clears her throat and takes a deep breath. Uh-oh. This calls for a diversion.
‘Miss Daley, could you possibly explain that last bit again? I’m not sure I quite got it …’ I arrange my features into a vague approximation of confused/willing to learn.
‘We can talk about that next week. Let’s just have a little chat, shall we? We don’t have much time left.’ Fail.
‘Um … OK.’ I stare at the desk in front of me. Someone’s used a permanent marker to scrawl something filthy about Gemma Jones.
‘Is there anything you’d like to talk about?’
I pretend to ponder for a moment. ‘Um … Not that I can think of.’
She sighs. ‘It’s been such a terrible time. How are you doing? Are you sleeping OK?’
That’s a new one. ‘Yes.’
‘You look tired, Alice.’ She reaches across the desk and puts her hand on my arm. It feels cold and a little clammy.
‘Thanks, miss.’
Daley laughs a little. ‘You know what I mean. You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.’ You’d think an English teacher would be able to avoid a cliché like that.
‘I’m OK, really.’
‘Does it bring back memories about your mum?’ The question slams into me so hard I have to grip the sides of the desks to steady myself. What does she know about Mum? ‘Your dad told me about her. About how hard it was on you.’
I gulp down the lump in my throat.
‘When?’
She’s confused. ‘When what?’
‘When did he tell you about that?’
‘We … We talked on the phone the other day.’ Daley at least has the good grace to look slightly sheepish.
‘Did you call him or did he call you?’ The words are pointed, sharp. I’m staring at her now, daring her to lie to me.
‘I phoned him.’
‘Why?’
She gets up from her chair and starts packing things into her bag. ‘I … needed some advice about my bike. I need to get the gears fixed, and since your father’s such a keen cyclist I thought he might be able to tell me the best bike shop in the area. He said that there’s a really good one on Essex Road …’ She’s talking so fast my ears can’t keep up. She looks up at the clock over the whiteboard. ‘I think that’s enough for today, don’t you? Same time next week? I think this has been useful. Yes, very useful.’
‘We’ve still got ten minutes.’ I smile sweetly.
She looks at her watch – an utterly pointless gesture. ‘Actually, I’ve got a meeting with Mrs Flanagan. I completely forgot – how silly of me! Right, Alice, I’ll see you next week. Same time, same place. And of course I’ll see you in class … Yes. Right. Bye.’ Her spindly legs can’t carry her out of the room fast enough.
Well, that was interesting.
And disconcerting.
My head is full of disgusting Daley/Dad thoughts as I leave the classroom. I don’t see the ambush coming (which is kind of the point of an ambush, I suppose).
‘Why are you avoiding me?’ Cass. Shit.
‘What are you on about?’ I start walking, and Cass has no option but to walk
with me.
‘Um … let me see. You haven’t been round to my house, you never reply to my texts and you’re nowhere to be seen at break and lunch. What the hell is going on?’ I was kidding myself if I thought I could avoid this conversation forever.
I look around to check we’re alone. We are. No one in their right mind would still be roaming the corridors at this time. ‘Look, in case you hadn’t noticed, we did something pretty terrible, and maybe I’m finding it a little hard to deal with, OK?’ I can hardly bear to look at Cass. I want to punch her and slap her and scream in her face, ‘THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!’
Cass shakes her head in disbelief. ‘And you think I couldn’t care less, right? This isn’t affecting me at all. Yeah, I’m totally fine, couldn’t be happier … Thanks, Alice. Thanks a lot for being such a great friend.’ Her voice wobbles slightly, but she holds it together.
I feel nothing. I say nothing.
‘You blame me, don’t you?’ A small voice that doesn’t sound like it belongs to her. Her eyes search mine for an answer.
This is the moment. One of those moments in your life where the words you say could change everything. Lie or tell the truth? Lie. Truth. Lie. Truth.
I say nothing. But it does the job.
She shakes her heads and walks away. And suddenly I feel bad. Suddenly I have to say something to make this right. She’s my best friend.
‘Cass, wait! Please?’
She’s halfway down the corridor before she turns. ‘Don’t talk to me. Just … don’t. Oh, and by the way, I know all about you and Jack. Polly told me.’ What?! No. Not possible. There’s no way. ‘Yeah, that’s right. Clearly you’re not so good at keeping secrets after all. Bodes well, doesn’t it? I hope you know what you’re doing. For all our sakes. Because if you don’t …’
The unsaid words hang in the air long after she’s gone.
30
Jack and I are lying on my bed. Dad’s out on one of his epic bike rides and Bruno has been banished to the kitchen.