me. How’s it all going? Are you settling in all right?”
“Yeah, fine,” I told her. “Everyone seems dead nice. We had pizza for tea.”
“Pizza? Really?” she huffed. “With all that waffle on their website about the school being committed to ‘creative, healthy nutrition’?”
Wrong thing to say, Doofus! You know what she’s like.
“No, I mean yeah, but it’s all right. There’s no dinner ladies back yet, that’s all. It was nice. It meant we got to chat, kind of mix, you know? You probably can’t do that so well over a…I dunno…bowl of lentil soup or whatever,” I explained.
“Well,” she sniffed, then relented. “That’s great, love, that you’re mixing. But don’t forget how many calories there are in a slice of pizza. Not to mention the fat.”
I’d been on enough diets to know this one. “Two hundred and twenty-seven calories in a slice of Pepperoni Passion. And 11 grams of fat. But you only need to really worry about the five grams of saturated fat, as a rule.”
She sighed down the phone, but I could hear her smile.
Of course, I’d also quit enough diets to know this means bugger all as pizza tastes so good you stop caring after the first slice.
“You know I only worry because I care. I’m so glad you’re settling,” she said. “Didn’t we tell you you’d be fine?”
“Yeah, but you always say that.”
“Well, sometimes we’re right then, aren’t we?”
Silence stretched out for a few seconds, as I childishly refused to concede the point. One out of five wasn’t exactly conclusive.
“Your exams are just around the corner, love. I know it’s difficult, what with your dad and me being sent all over the place, but that’s why we’ve gone with boarding, isn’t it? So you can stay put for once, put down some roots, make some friends you’ll be with for more than six months. We’ve—”
“Yeah, Mum, I know,” I interrupted.
“Well…Good.” She sighed again. “Because it’s not easy for us either, you know.”
The silence stretched out longer this time. I couldn’t say what I was thinking. That if I ever had kids, I wouldn’t join the army. Or that if I was in the army, I wouldn’t have kids. Because it just wasn’t fair on them.
“Abby?”
“Yeah. I’m here. I know. It’s fine.”
“All right then, love,” she said, in her I-don’t-really-believe-you-but-I’m-too-tired-to-argue voice. “Good luck for your first day tomorrow. My plane leaves at five in the morning. I don’t know when we’ll be able to talk next, but I’ll text you as soon as we land. Don’t forget to email your dad. You know he worries too.”
I promised her I would, wished her a safe flight, and fought back the fear that started to crowd in on me the second I ended the call. I wouldn’t see her again until Christmas at the earliest. More likely Easter. Dad’d probably be home long before she was.
I crammed my phone back into my pocket. I should call Beth too, but I’d end up telling her about how I’d lied about Jase, and she’d be mad. I could see the whole sorry conversation we’d have unfolding in my head, and it was too much. I never knew why, but I always told her everything, even when I didn’t want to. I’d text her before bed, to let her know I was OK. She’d understand.
I was heading back across the courtyard when I saw him – just standing there – bold as brass by the open door.
“You again?” I murmured. “You are one freaky bird, Grey, you know that?”
I edged closer to see if he’d fly off, but he held his ground. “You like Grey, right? Way better than Malthus.”
He yawed when I said the second name. I was right – it was rubbish. Sounded too much like Malfoy, and no one likes a Slytherin.
“So what are you, some kind of school pet? Or did you just smell the pizza and fancy your chances?”
I was talking to a bird. Get a grip, Abs.
He cocked his head to the side, eyes dark and shadowed, no hint of the fierce red from before. I took another hesitant step towards him and he launched into the air with a long, loud cry that tore into the hazy quiet of the evening. And I watched as the brick holding the door open started to slip backwards slightly, almost in slow motion, and I knew I should run for it and grab it before it was too late but I couldn’t seem to move. The door gained momentum where I couldn’t, standing rooted to the spot as I watched it slam shut.
What just happened?
I stared at the door, and tried to think.
Grey’s dramatic exit, complete with frenzied flappage, must have caused enough of a draft to shift the brick slightly, and then the weight of the door must have done the rest. Nothing sinister. Nothing weird. Just physics.
Maybe what the boarding house really needed was a big, hungry cat.
When I was finally able to move my feet, I trudged towards the door and hit the buzzer with a sigh. “Sorry, Mr S,” I muttered, as his voice boomed out into the night. “I came out to ring Mum and locked myself out.”
I had to politely endure a friendly but serious lecture on the dangers of wedging communal doors open, which covered everything from fast-moving fires to dangerous paedos and axe-wielding maniacs – Mr S apparently not being one to mince words when the occasion arose. I had to promise not to leave the building after dinner when no one knew where I was, even though I’d been within sight of the front door the whole time and I was fifteen years old for God’s sake, before he let me make my way back up towards the dorm, and my bed. “It’s a big day tomorrow, after all!” he happily reminded me, adding that I’d “Need a good night’s sleep” behind me.
I bit back my prediction that what I’d probably end up with now was one filled with dreams of a flaming, axe-wielding paedo. He meant well, I knew. So I just thanked him, and said goodnight.
‘When did this all start? Can you tell us?’
Not really. It was like saying, ‘When did you start? How did you begin?’
They want a neat, safe little explanation for it all. They want there to be this one point where everything changed. So we can just rewind to there and start over. And there is that one point – it’s staring us all in the face. They just want me to say it.
But I don’t want to talk about it.
I’m not fixable. None of this is.
Everyone’s fixable, they say.
I tell them that she isn’t, is she?
Who? they ask.
I don’t answer them. They already know.
I didn’t dream about anything in the end; at least, nothing that I could remember. Beth sent me a Good Luck on your first day! message, but it felt like I’d already done the hardest bit and I wasn’t too worried any more. I’d get to come ‘home’ to Rae and Lilly at the end of the day. It wasn’t home, of course, but it