but it is his body that is quite transformed. Although still on the short side, the skinny, concave-chested boy now looks like someone who works out with dedication. A broad chest and arms rounded with muscle are showcased in a tight t-shirt. His hair is cropped short.
The last time Melissa had seen him, his face was covered with snot and tears. He’d looked like the little boy he still was inside: sixteen to her seventeen.
He has a large holdall slung across one shoulder and an expectant tilt to his eyebrows. Surely he can’t think …
‘What the fuck are you doing here, Jamie?’ she says in little more than a whisper. Saying his name makes it all feel worse, just as she’d anticipated. ‘How did you …’, she swallows, ‘find me?’
Jamie shifts position, moving the bag onto the other shoulder, and his expression slackens. He’s always done that puppy dog thing to guilt trip her, but then his eyes and mouth thin and harden and she feels a flash of something else. The back of her neck prickles. This is new.
‘That’s not very welcoming, is it?’ he says, shifting the holdall in a way designed to emphasize how very heavy it is. ‘After all we’ve been through together? Can’t a girl make an effort for her own brother?’
She’s about to speak when she feels a hot, clammy hand on her bare arm.
‘Mum!’
Tilly has materialized at the front door. Her eyes are wide, shining, and she bristles with appalled excitement.
‘You won’t believe what’s happened! Hester has been sick! All over my …’
She stops speaking abruptly, staring openly at Jamie. ‘Did you just say, brother?’ Her mouth drops open and she seems to shed years. She’s once more the tiny girl who has just discovered Father Christmas has ‘been’.
Jamie chuckles easily. His gaze drifts up and down Tilly’s entire length.
Tilly flushes. Melissa wants to lean over and rake her newly done nails across Jamie’s face. Instead she steps in front of her daughter, creating a physical barrier. She wants to erase this moment from history. She wants to make it all un-happen.
‘He’s not my brother.’ She tries to laugh dismissively but her face is too rigid. It’s all she can do to spit words out through tight lips.
‘Well, foster brother, so close enough,’ says Jamie with a twinkle, holding out his arms. ‘I’m Jamie. And who are you? No, hang on … I reckon you should be called something like Aphrodite, or Kate Moss, or something.’
Tilly emits a shrill giggle, still blushing furiously. Melissa’s head feels like it’s going to explode. How could her privately educated, clever daughter lap up such bullshit?
Why is he here? What does he want? She has to clamp her lips together to stop a soft moan from seeping out.
‘What is it, Tilly?’ she snaps. She’s distantly aware of some other issue she must absorb. ‘What did you say about someone being sick?’
Tilly starts at her mother’s tone. ‘Oh … Hester’s puked on my carpet.’
‘What?’
Melissa opens her mouth and closes it again. Her head throbs.
The light is almost sepia now. Bruise-coloured clouds have gathered over the low sky and seem to roil and move too fast. Everything has a sickly, unreal feel. The sticky air presses in all around her and sweat breaks out along her hairline.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ She has to grasp this information, she knows this, yet cannot.
Tilly mimes throwing up, expressively. Jamie hoots with laughter and Tilly beams at the appreciation. ‘She’s totally rat-arsed,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Now she’s flat out in the guest room, snoring her head off.’
‘Wow, it sounds like some party you’ve got going on here, Mel!’ says Jamie.
Tilly, still glowing in the heat of his attention, shoots him an arch smile. It looks all wrong, like a toddler wearing its mother’s shoes. ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you?’ she says.
No. This has to stop right now.
Melissa opens her mouth to tell Jamie he has to go when a clap of thunder as loud as a gunshot cracks the still air. All three flinch in surprise. Fat raindrops plop onto Jamie’s head and confetti the step around him. He cartoon cowers, arms up to fend off the rain. A hot concrete smell wafts upwards.
‘Mum! Let him come in! What’s wrong with you?’
And then somehow Jamie is crossing the threshold and here he is, inside.
He’s in her house and she has lost control of the situation.
‘Jesus,’ says Melissa. ‘All right! Just go and … wait in there.’ She gestures to the sitting room. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can dealing with this. Just don’t … move.’ What she wants to say is, ‘Don’t touch anything. Don’t steal anything. Piss off.’
Jamie walks quickly past her and flumps down onto the plush sofa. He strokes its arm luxuriously, stretching out his legs, before turning to flash a grin that seems to say, ‘I should have all this too.’
The band of pain tightens around Melissa’s head.
***
As hot water thunders into the bucket in the bathroom upstairs, she sits on the edge of the bath and holds her head in her hands. She squeezes her eyes shut and moans softly, a long sibilant hiss. ‘Shit-shit-shit-shit.’
She and Jamie had been separated before her days in Asquith Mansions but it’s too close for comfort. Was that why he was here? And how did he find her? Holding her breath and scrubbing at the foul pink mess, she thinks about doing this before, many times over, back when she was Melanie Ronson. But then it was cheap scratchy carpets pocked with fag burns that rubbed your knees raw, or lino that was cracked and sticky. Not this oatmeal-coloured pure wool, which Tilly’s bare toes scrunch into every day and which is proving to be astonishingly absorbent to vomit.
However hard she scrubs, she can’t stop the pictures that start flicker-booking through her mind:
– Her mother slumped, weeping, at the yellow Formica table, smelling bad. Melissa, then Melanie, hiding behind the sofa and pick-pick-picking at the swirly green and black wallpaper. She’d seen a programme about Narnia on telly. They don’t have any big wardrobes but she is obsessed with hiding places just in case;
– The purplish grey swelling of her mother’s eyes one morning that made her think of lizards and dinosaurs;
– Lying in bed, pulling the sour-smelling Barbie duvet up to her face when her mother flings open the bedroom door. She is silhouetted against the yellowish landing light. Flecks of spit fly from her mouth as she screams that she could have ‘made something’ of herself and that she should have ‘just dealt with it’ when she had the opportunity.
And finally.
– Coming into the dark living room, a little unsteady after too many Bacardi and Cokes and a little sore from pounding against the bonnet of Gary Mottram’s Vauxhall Viva in the Camelot car park, to find her mother dead in the stripy brown and orange chair that always smelled musty.
She had been fifteen then.
No one would believe that she had been looking after herself for years. That she had found money around the house and bought the chips for dinner, spreading margarine on slices of bread and, once, putting some dandelions in a jar in the centre of the table because she had seen something like it on telly. Mum had taken one look and then burst into tears, so Melanie never did it again.
Melissa sits back on her heels now, staring down at the damp carpet. She hopes she won’t have to replace it.
Rain patters against the sash window where Tilly has hung a blue feathery