He blinks in disbelief at the memory, but he doesn’t stop talking, gripping his knees more tightly.
“They think it’s what we need to hear, but it’s the opposite. Inviting glamorous people to school, asking them to parade their glamorous lives onstage, getting them to inspire us with their message that anything is possible if only we believe. Dream. Reach for the stars. Well, no thanks. That’s not for me. I’m not going to get there, and neither are most people that I know, and that’s fine by me. It is. It really is. When did it stop being fine for everyone else? The normal stuff. Sunday dinners and, I don’t know, taking a walk in the park and listening to music and working in an ordinary job for an ordinary wage that will allow you to maybe go on holiday once a year, and really look forward to it too because you’re not a greedy bastard wanting more, more, more, all the time. That’s who should be doing a talk at school. Seriously. Show me someone happy with a life like that, because it’s enough. It should be enough. All that other stuff is meaningless.” He lies back down and stares up at the ceiling. “I dunno,” he says, sounding tired again. “It just makes me sort of sad.”
I think of Jack working on his script in the study, of his half-empty wall waiting for frames that never seem to come, and I feel sort of sad, too.
“And me,” Mr. Goldfish mutters. “I’m depressed after that, anyway. Jesus. Talk about a downer.”
I think of our neighbor Andrew, and of Uncle Paul and Aunt Susan, and of the lies Jack tells to these people about the life he’s leading, and of the poem he recites about choosing a different path when really he’s on the same road as the rest of us. I think of Captain Hook and Hamlet and Yorick, and of Jedi who adopted the skull after the first show, and of Jack who took it back and placed it on his desk. It’s the battle between settling and not settling, and actually I think Jack finds it hard.
“Was that sympathy?” Mr. Goldfish asks, but I don’t respond because I’m not entirely sure.
It’s overwhelming so I close my eyes. Music fills my brain, soothes my thoughts, and calms me down. Henry chats a bit every now and again but mostly we’re silent, letting the lyrics talk for us because they feel significant, like we are part of everything, or everything is a part of us. Maybe one or two or ten thousand hours later, the front door opens and a soft voice calls, “Hello?”
I sit up, disoriented. My body’s heavy, my head fuzzy. The music has stopped and the room has gone dark, too dark, because too much time has passed. My feet tingle on the carpet, blood rushing back into my toes as I come to my senses. Mr. Richardson has returned home from work, and I need to escape before he realizes I am here.
“Too late for that,” Mr. Goldfish says, because my teacher is peering around Henry’s door.
“Julie said a girl called Tess was up here.” He frowns. “I see you know Henry like the rest of the female population of Manchester. What are you doing? You weren’t at school.”
I flush and panic and flush a bit more.
“Relax, Dad. She’s obviously feeling ill, isn’t she?” Henry says from the carpet where he’s still lying down, wafting an arm in time with some imaginary tune. “Music therapy. Can’t beat it. Good for the soul—and maybe the common cold, as well. Who knows?”
“She should be at home if she’s ill, not up here listening to your nonsense. Julie had no idea you were a pupil at my school, Tess.”
“Close the door on your way out, Dad,” Henry quips, but Mr. Richardson steps into the room. He’s wrapped up from the cold in a black scarf and a pair of thick black gloves. “Oh my God. Get out.”
Mr. Richardson ignores his son’s outrage. “Did you hand in your statistics project?”
“He did,” Julie replies, appearing at the door.
“What is this?” Henry splutters.
His parents grin, putting their arms around each other in a smooth, practiced motion I see twice more in my head—reliving it, rejoicing in it. Their bodies fit together, the grooves of Julie accommodating the bumps of Mr. Richardson, and vice versa, so they touch from their shoulders to their ankles, merging as one.
“Look at that,” I whisper as Mr. Goldfish peeks out of my pocket. “They’re happy, which means—”
“What? It’s even worse that he’s been flirting with Miss Gilbert?”
“Talking to her, you mean.”
“Romancing, I think you’ll find.”
“Conversing.”
“Seducing, Tess, and you know it.”
“No!” I say firmly. Mr. Richardson is a good man. An upstanding citizen. A math teacher, for God’s sake, more interested in chess moves than romantic ones.
“Can you get out of my room now, please?” Henry groans.
“Fine, fine, we’re leaving,” Mr. Richardson says. “And you should too, Tess. Do you need a ride home? I’m sure my son will be happy to give you a lift, chivalrous as he is.”
Henry agrees and that’s nice of him, but I can’t help feeling disappointed that Mr. Richardson didn’t offer himself.
We reconvene in the hall, standing in a tight circle not the slightest bit claustrophobic. I belong here, with this family. Mr. Richardson’s black rucksack is sitting on the hall table next to the phone where definitely he rings the HFEA on a regular basis. There’s no quite possibly about it. He wanted to find me, and now he has, and the blood in our veins throbs in our wrists as our feet sink into the red red carpet of our home.
Next to the bag is a white box. Mr. Richardson picks it up, lifting the lid to reveal three pink cakes.
“For you, Jules. Stopped at The Cupcake Kitchen on my way home.”
“Jack!”
I’ve never heard someone say his name before, and I like it, the familiarity of it, the sense that we’re linked in some strange way by this name I’ve been close to my whole life, even if it has been attached to the wrong man.
“Best café in Manchester,” Mr. Richardson tells me.
“Do you know it, Tess? It’s in Didsbury, so I’m extra lucky because it’s out of Jack’s way. You should’ve told me you were going though. I baked a cake.” She kisses him. “Not that I’m ungrateful.”
“You can never have too much cake on a Monday.”
“It’s a motto I live by,” Henry says. “Might get it tattooed on my chest.”
Julie rolls her eyes. “I bet you’ll still eat one.”
“Hell yeah.”
Mr. Richardson laughs, putting down the box and removing the glove from his right hand and then his left, pulling each finger free in turn. Mr. Goldfish stiffens as a thin gold band glimmers in the light of the hall.
“Ring!” he cries, swimming around Mr. Richardson in a frenzy. “Ring! Ring! Where was that ring at school, Tess? Why doesn’t he wear it?”
Mr. Richardson passes me a cupcake.
“Go on. You have mine. I don’t mind forsaking it for my most conscientious pupil.”
“Oh, is she the one?” Julie asks.
“The one?” Mr. Goldfish repeats.
Julie helps herself to a cupcake. “I’m glad you’re getting the help you need, Tess. I don’t find it easy either. Not a numbers person, which is strange, living with these two.” She points at her husband and her son as I try to work out what she means. I’m good at math, really good, so I am quite offended by the suggestion I might be struggling.
“She’s getting there. Anyway, good to see you, Tess.” Mr. Richardson ushers me toward the door. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow, unless you’re still feeling off in the morning.”
“Something tells me you might be,” Julie says, giving me a knowing look as she takes a bite of the cupcake. I must look confused because she says, “Meet the Teacher Night tomorrow.”
“And you call me on my manners, Mother. Talking with your mouth full.”
“Sorry.” It takes an age for her to swallow. I’m watching every muscle of her jaw, and Mr. Richardson is too. “In my day, you didn’t have to go along with your parents. You could sit at home and hide, but that’s not the c
ase at your school, is it? Must be so uncomfortable. I wouldn’t blame you for trying to get out of it.” Her smile fades when no one reacts. She fiddles with the silver chain of her necklace and for the first time I notice something unusual about it—a tiny insect trapped in the amber stone. She glances from me to Mr. Richardson. “It is Meet the Teacher Night tomorrow, isn’t it?”
Mr. Richardson nods, and I see that twice more in my head too—reliving it, but not rejoicing in it, because it’s a lie.
36
A hand with a ring on the fourth finger waves as I charge down the driveway.
“Look at that, Tess!”
I can’t. I focus on the blue car, on ordinary things that make sense, like a side-view mirror and a license plate and a windshield and a door and a seat and a belt that I’m too shaky to click into place. I gaze at the silver buckle, trying to unsee the thin gold band, the symbol of Mr. Richardson’s wedding vows, strong and seemingly true on a finger that looks as if it never takes it off.
“But you know different,” Mr. Goldfish bellows so loudly my teeth clench. “You know he removes it at school.”
“Actually,” I reply in my most rational voice, fighting to stay calm despite the thump, thump, thump of my chest, “people take off their rings all the time. To go to the gym. Wash up. Take it to the jeweler’s to have it cleaned or resized or what have you. He probably just… I think that… Yeah… That will be it.”
“Tess!” Mr. Goldfish bursts through the windshield and swims out into the night. “He’s a cheat!”
The words echo around the garden, around Manchester, around the whole world.
“Shut up!” I roar, and even though it’s in my head, my lips jut forward as if I am saying it out loud. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that at all. I don’t want to hear it!”
“Why are you the one?”
“Shut up!”
“And why did he lie about Meet the Teacher Night? What’s he going to do tomorrow night instead?”
“Please stop!”
“Everything okay?” Henry asks, but his voice is polite, unconcerned, because nothing has changed for him in the last two minutes. He starts the engine and the clock glows red to show that it’s twenty-seven minutes past six, later than I’d even imagined. “Shall we?”
Mr. Goldfish hurtles back through the windshield, skidding to a melodramatic stop by the gearstick. “What are you waiting for? Get her out of here!” I can see him, even though I know full well he’s in my pocket, this outraged fish shaking a fin at the house as we reverse down the driveway. Slowly, too slowly, we trundle back the way I came, passing the grocery store where I threw away the letter from CAMHS. In hindsight, maybe that was a mistake.
I need help.
“Yeah, you do,” Mr. Goldfish says. “You need your head examined if you think Mr. Richardson is faithful to his—”
I turn him off with a jerk of irritation and sit in silence. It feels deeper. More profound. Sealed around me tightly, no longer at risk of cracking. I’m encased in amber like the creature in Julie’s necklace. I can’t tell Henry about his dad, and I can’t tell Julie about Meet the Teacher Night, and I can’t tell anyone what I saw on Jack’s computer.
My heart is crying, my lips are burning, desire going up in smoke…
I choke, on all the things I want to say and do and change, I choke…
“Where have you been?” Jack follows me into my bedroom where I kick off my boots to stand on the carpet with socks odd as Mr. Richardson’s. “How do you know that boy who just dropped you off? Where did you meet him? What were you doing with him for six hours?”
His words can’t reach me. I’m somewhere over here, and he is somewhere over there, and we stare at each other from opposite ends of a chasm growing wider all the time, filling with secrets we can’t share.
“Well, I think that’s pretty obvious,” Mum says, and I don’t even blush.
Jack does though, snorting loudly. “She’s not that kind of girl.”
“Isn’t she? How do you know?”
“I know my daughter, thank you very much.”
Mum raises an eyebrow. “Oh, you do, do you? We don’t know where she’s been. Why she’s silent. What she’s thinking. But you tell me, Jack,” she says, stabbing her finger in the air. “Given that you think you know our daughter so well, you tell me what’s going on in that thick skull of hers because I’m at a loss.”
She turns on me so quickly her hair flies over her shoulder and whips her spine. “Or perhaps you would care to enlighten us, Tess. I’m guessing you’ve not forgotten how to speak. I mean, maybe you even do speak to people outside the house. That boy, whoever he was… I can’t imagine you said nothing the whole time you were together. How did you meet him if you didn’t utter a single word?”
She looks ferocious, like the animal part of her is hurting. I want to put her out of her misery but I don’t know how. Too much has happened and I can’t speak without causing more pain—for Mum and Henry and Julie with her kind, gold-flecked eyes.
“You’re playing us for fools, is that it? Your teachers too? Pretending to be some sort of mute when all the time you’re talking to everyone else, saying things to people who don’t even know you when I, your own bloody mum, can’t get you to open your mouth!”
She starts to sob. Jack goes to her at once. They clutch each other, their bond stronger than ever as ours stretches and stretches and almost snaps.
“Okay, Hels. Okay, sweetheart. We’ll get to the bottom of it. We will. I promise you that. The letter’s due any day now.” Guiltily, I picture it lying in the dustbin. “We’ll get some answers.”
“Not if she doesn’t speak at the appointment. We can’t make her, can we? She might never talk again! What then? What will we do? What can we do? I just don’t understand it.” Mum weeps. “What did we do wrong, Jack? Why would she stop speaking? It doesn’t make any sense. She was doing fine. She was happy. What suddenly changed?”
The night of the burned spaghetti comes back to me in a flash. I look at Jack the precise instant he looks at me.
“I don’t know,” he replies eventually, but there is something uneasy about his tone.
37
The following morning, Mum doesn’t bring me any tea and Jack doesn’t make me any porridge, but that’s okay because I don’t have an appetite. I’m not entirely sure I have a stomach.
I go through the bus lot rather than using the route across the fields, but I’m not being brave. It takes no courage because I have no fear. Connor shouts, same stuff as always, but his words bounce off my skin about four times the usual thickness. Nothing can touch me. I have no feelings left.
I don’t break my stride when I reach the courtyard. If I bump into Anna then I bump into Anna is my general uninterested vibe as I move through school. Taking a random left, I go up some stairs and down some others, wandering past classrooms and the library and two bathrooms, making it as far as the cafeteria before doing a U-turn. Still I dawdle, only half-aware of where I am and what I am doing, my brain lagging a couple of seconds behind my vision. The hallway is distorted, the door handle of my homeroom too, swimming in and out of focus as I go to grab it. I push open the door to find that I’m late, which is odd, because I didn’t hear a bell.
“You’re back!” Miss Gilbert cries. I stare at a KitKat wrapper on the floor. A table leg. A sink with a dripping tap. “Good to see you, Tess. Sorry to hear you’ve been ill.”
“And who’s she heard that from?” Mr. Goldfish asks. “Mr. Richardson, when he called late last night to say he’d messed up? Given the game away?”
“Take a seat, Tess.” A bird lands on the skylight, a huge, dark thing with bulbous eyes that pecks at the glass with a sharp, sharp beak. It could be the crow from the bus park. Or it might be any old blackbird. Or a magpie. It’s too much effort to try to work it out. “Tess, a seat, please.”
I move slowly. People laugh. I barely hear it.
Miss Gilbert takes attendan
ce and reads out the announcements then tells everyone they can chat. She joins in as usual, leaning over our desks rather than sitting behind her own. It’s background noise, nondescript and indistinct, but then out of the fog like a car appearing at the very last moment, I am hit by words I don’t expect. The jolt is physical, almost sending me back off my stool and onto the floor.
“You don’t know The Cupcake Kitchen?”
I’m as dizzy as the moons spinning madly at either side of Miss Gilbert’s face.
“No. I’ve never heard of it!” Claudia giggles at Miss Gilbert’s exaggerated look of horror.
“You are missing out, dude! It’s immense.” Her eyes shine in a way that makes me nervous.
“Where is it? I’ve never even heard of it.”
“Didsbury.” I want Miss Gilbert to be quiet now, so I send my silence hurtling through the air to bung up her throat like a cork in a wine bottle. “I went there yesterday afternoon.”
“I knew it!” Mr. Goldfish shouts. “Did you hear that, Tess? She went there yesterday afternoon!”
There’s a name etched into my desk. I’ve never noticed it before. I lean forward to examine the D and the E and the A and the N, touching the letters, digging my nail into the deep grooves, harder and harder, until my finger throbs.
“Tess, dude. Everyone’s gone.” I look up to see an empty classroom. “Are you all right? You seem a bit spaced-out.”